Federal Survey Of 21,990 Kids Ties COVID Shots To Autism, ADHD

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

A new analysis of the federal National Health Interview Survey finds children who received a COVID-19 shot had higher odds of autism, ADHD, anxiety, asthma and special-education use than children who did not.

The authors, including epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher and cardiologist Peter McCullough, say the pattern survived a long list of statistical controls and rose with dose count.

Their conclusion is blunt: COVID-19 vaccination of children should cease immediately.

Neurodevelopmental Outcomes in COVID-19-Vaccinated Versus Unvaccinated U.S. Children: Analysis of the National Health Interview Survey, 2022-2024: https://t.co/slUVkwGFqf@McCulloughFund @P_McCulloughMD @NathanMeadPhD @Docjohnc

— Nicolas Hulscher, MPH (@NicHulscher) October 5, 2026

The paper, posted October 5 on the Zenodo repository, pools the 2022-2024 Sample Child files. It covers 21,990 children aged 0-17 with a recorded COVID vaccination status, and 19,882 aged 2-17 for the autism, ADHD and learning-disability items.

“Unvaccinated” in this comparison means no COVID-19 vaccine. It does not mean the child skipped the routine schedule.

Set against children who never received a COVID shot, COVID-vaccinated children had:

• 32 percent higher odds of current autism
• 26 percent higher odds of a lifetime autism diagnosis
• 33 percent higher odds of ADHD
• 23 percent higher odds of any neurodevelopmental diagnosis
• 19 percent higher odds of special-education use
• 24 percent higher odds of asthma
• 27 percent higher odds of daily or weekly anxiety
• 57 percent higher odds of mental-health medication
• 60 percent higher odds of mental-health therapy

The steepest autism estimate landed where parents were told the product was a routine precaution. Among children aged 5 to 7, three or more COVID shots were linked to 154 percent higher odds of current autism. Ages 2 to 7 with three or more doses sat at 137 percent higher odds.

The odds also climbed with the number of shots. Against children who received none, current-autism odds were 3 percent higher after one dose, 25 percent higher after two, and 40 percent higher after three or more.

Hulscher told The Gateway Pundit the association “persisted across numerous adjustment strategies, strengthened with increasing dose count, and reached its largest estimate in some of the youngest multiply vaccinated children.”

He added: “This is a safety signal that must not be ignored. Endangering the developing brain is a red line. COVID-19 ‘vaccination’ of children should cease immediately.”

BREAKING STUDY: “COVID-19 ‘Vaccination’ of Children Should Cease Immediately” https://t.co/PjpwHpxjnB

— The Gateway Pundit (@gatewaypundit) October 5, 2026

The authors say the autism signal held after accounting for age, sex, race, income, parental education, insurance, region, healthcare access, wellness visits, emergency-room use, hospitalization, prescription use and influenza vaccination.

It remained after a balancing method that wiped out measured differences between the groups, and after the analysis was limited to children without asthma, diabetes or fair or poor health.

Influenza and HPV shots were run as comparison exposures. Children who received a COVID shot but not a flu shot had 45 percent higher autism odds than children who received a flu shot but not a COVID shot.

They also state the limit their design cannot escape. The survey is cross-sectional. It cannot put the shot before the diagnosis in calendar time, and it cannot test the full routine childhood schedule.

A linked birth-cohort study is what they say should come next. That is a real constraint. It is not a reason the CDC, FDA or the manufacturers spent four years refusing to run the comparison on their own books.

CDC surveillance now puts autism at 1 in 31 American 8-year-olds. For boys the figure is 1 in 20, and in California, which has the tighter data, about 1 in 12.5 boys. Two years before those numbers landed, the national rate was 1 in 36.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put the denial in plain language in April 2025. “It’s clear that the rates are real. Year by year there is a steady, relentless increase,” he said. “This is a preventable disease. We know it’s an environmental exposure. It has to be. Genes do not cause epidemics.”

He described children who “were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they’re two years old.”

By September 2025 the department had stopped treating the question as forbidden. NIH’s Autism Data Science Initiative set aside more than $50 million for 13 projects on environmental, medical and perinatal influences, and named medications and vaccinations as exposures under study.

Kennedy said the department was “closely examining” vaccines, and noted that “some 40 to 70% of mothers who have children with autism believe that their child was injured by a vaccine.” President Trump’s line at the same moment was shorter: “They pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies, it’s a disgrace.”

The McCullough Foundation review released last October assembled 107 studies tying vaccination to autism, other neurodevelopmental disorders or brain injury, and described a clinical sequence running from multiple shots to fever, seizures, encephalitis, brain injury, regression and an autism diagnosis. Autism prevalence, that review argued, jumped on the order of 32,000 percent as the U.S. schedule swelled toward 72 doses.

Vaccines are not the only exposure officials spent years waving off. Internal Johnson & Johnson documents reported in September 2025 show the company’s U.S. epidemiology director, Rachel Weinstein, writing in 2018 that “the weight of the evidence is starting to feel heavy to me” on prenatal Tylenol and neurodevelopmental disorders. A consumer-safety lead had already called the literature “a safety signal that needs to be evaluated” in 2008. Kenvue, the spun-off maker, still says there is no causal link.

Trump moved on the wider schedule in August. An executive order cut routine childhood recommendations to 11 core shots, ended the blanket push for hepatitis B, COVID-19 and influenza in healthy children, and told the Justice Department to challenge states that block religious or medical exemptions.

“In many cases, we were requiring 72 jabs for our beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children,” Trump said. Kennedy’s assignment was to find the environmental exposure. “Genes don’t cause epidemics.”

The new survey analysis lands while the COVID product itself is still being sold into a thinner and thinner justification. Pediatric trials were never powered for autism, ADHD or special-education placement.

The Zenodo authors note that vaccine-derived spike has been reported in blood, monocytes, cerebral arteries and peripheral tissue months to years later, and that prenatal spike exposure produced autism-like behavior and neuroinflammation in male rats. That is their biological rationale. It is not a settled mechanism. It is also not nothing.

Around it sits a year of findings the agencies have not answered. FDA lot-release testing of Moderna’s Spikevax recovered only 70 to 80 percent of a known endotoxin spike, with lipid nanoparticles capable of hiding most of an incorporated bacterial toxin from the assay.

A 35-year-old man who took three Pfizer shots, two from “E” batches, developed a heart tumor found 170 days after the first dose that doubled every 10 days and, once removed, contained fragments of Pfizer spike DNA.

Hulscher called that case “literally the smoking gun of turbo cancers.”

A Nobel laureate warned Anthony Fauci in February 2021 that shot contents were reaching the placenta and the fetus and provoking an immune response in the amniotic fluid. Fauci told the public there were no red flags.

Myocarditis signals out of Israel were in hand by January 2021 and still described as mild months later.

On August 27 the FDA cleared Moderna’s 2026-2027 formulas 81 days before the human study of those formulas was even scheduled to start.

And remember…

Congress is not done trying to close the exit. A Senate bill now in circulation would make it far harder for a parent or a state to decline a federal vaccine recommendation once the recommendation exists.

The survey paper is not a randomized trial, and its authors say so. What they also say is that no factor they could measure explains the autism gap, that the gap climbs with doses, and that it is largest in the children shot earliest.

Parents were told this product had been studied for the outcomes that wreck a childhood. It had not.

The federal file they were told not to worry about now shows the association in black and white. Stopping the shots in children is the minimum a government owes the families still being offered them.