Definitely a well written piece that presents a plausible and relatively compelling story that isn’t addressed by the goto vaccines-don’t-cause-autism research.

That said, because it’s so interesting I dove into the primary sources cited and came out unimpressed.

The immune response-autism link is well supported as is the IL-6 mechanism. The aluminum IL-6 connection isn’t quite as sturdy but is definitely plausible.

The French studies give me pause having been published exclusively in pay-to-publish and low to middling reputation open-access journals but it’s the Chinese article named in the title where the whole thing falls apart for me.

Reading the study its statistics are unconvincing with low sample and effect sizes and few statistically significant results even then. I’m skeptical of the conclusions the authors draw let alone the weight this article wants to put on it as the lynchpin of its argument.

I can understand where Mr. Handley is coming from and he’s right that his concerns don’t seem to be addressed by mainstream pro-vaccine research but without further, higher-quality results and/or replication his argument doesn’t have the weight necessary to be convincing.