The Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) plan avoids the elephant in the room

I read through their entire 336-page strategic plan and the word "vaccine" was never mentioned. Not even once. They are avoiding the elephant in the room. That is not how science should work.

Executive summary

On July 20, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) released a working draft of its 2026–2028 strategic plan which provides recommendations to the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding autism research, services, support, policies, and more.

It’s 336 pages long.

Here is a link to the post by IACC committee member Tracy Slepcevic explaining the plan.

Nowhere does she explain why, in a 336-page document that explicitly discusses environmental contributors, prenatal exposures, the exposome, immune activation, and neurodevelopmental regression — the single most investigated, most litigated, most parent-reported environmental trigger in autism history gets zero named mention.

Not a budget line. Not a research priority. Not even a footnote acknowledging the controversy.

She says “environmental factors are not being ignored.” Good!

Her argument boils to: we can't do everything, the committee has limited power, please don't attack us, submit your comments by August 20th.

What’s left unsaid is this: “If we add the word vaccine to the IACC plan, they will shut down the entire committee and then we’ll have nothing.”

Comments on the 2026-2028 IACC Strategic Plan working draft are due August 20, 2026, to IACCPublicInquiries@mail.nih.gov.

My issue: there is not a single mention of the word “vaccine.” They are avoiding confronting the elephant in the room.

But vaccines are the elephant specifically because they’ve been actively excluded from environmental research for decades, not because they’re one random exposure among many. You can’t claim to take regression seriously while refusing to name the exposure that tens of thousands of parents have placed at the center of their child’s regression story.

They should prioritize doing a study where they ask autism diagnostic facilities to add questions to their intake form that would extract dates of parent first noticing regression and the date of the last vaccination.

That’s all it takes. Add a few questions to the intake form. Then combine the results from the clinic and show how they are all the same.

This is cheap and fast to do to see if there is a signal or not. It could be done in a month for less than $25,000 dollars at a few clinics. The data should be made public for all to analyze.

It was already established by the CDC that vaccines cause autism. They had to order destruction of the data to cover it up.

The CDC already did the study in Atlanta in 1999 and published it, minus the subgroup analysis, in 2004.

After doing the subgroup analysis showing vaccines caused autism in black boys, they ordered all the members of the study team to DESTROY the data so that they could publish a clean study exonerating vaccines as a cause of autism.

We know that because one of the study team members admitted it.

So the CDC knew vaccines cause autism. Deleting the data doesn’t make the association go away.

So why is there no mention in the plan?

Where they plan to spend $305M per year

Per the plan’s own internal analysis of FY2025 grants:

• 0% goes to determine, once and for all, whether vaccines cause autism. After all, even though 50% of parents of autistic kids think this is the cause, and every study comparing the uvaxxed vs. vaxxed with sufficient number of autism cases shows the correlation, iwe should assume that it’s impossible for vaccines to cause autism so no need to look because science is never wrong.

• 0% goes to educating the public that vaccines are the major cause of autism in the US… 75% to 80% can be attributed to vaccines (which panel member Toby Rogers knows is true because he wrote about it)

• 38.5% goes to genetics and genomics — call it $117 million looking for genes

• 14.5% to basic neuroscience — $44 million on mouse models

• 1.3% to epidemiology — $4 million to figure out why 1 in 31 kids have this

• 5.8% to environmental factors — $18 million to look at everything except the vaccine schedule

• 6.4% to services and supports — $20 million to help people actually living with autism

• Suicidality, aggression, self-injury, wandering, and elopement: a handful of projects combined

Their silence is not science

The IACC silence on vaccines is a surrender.

By not flagging the complete omission of the vaccine question, they have effectively signaled to the federal agencies that the vaccine question is off-limits, even under a new administration.

If they won’t even mention the word “vaccine” in a 336-page plan, they are not there to change the paradigm. They are there to provide cover for it. The bureaucracy doesn’t need to silence them; it just needs to make them part of the machine. They are now, for all intents and purposes, the machine’s new front office.

My proposed speech at the IACC meeting

I doubt I’ll be allowed to speak. Here is what I would say:

There is an elephant in the room, and the strategic plan avoids confronting it: Do vaccines cause autism?

Whatever any of us believes the answer to be, the question is not going away by being avoided. Millions of parents are asking it.

I am asking the Committee to fund a study that would answer it, and to put that study in the plan.

The design is simple. Enlist autism diagnostic clinics across the United States and add two questions to the intake form parents already complete: did the child rapidly regress, such that a date can be assigned to the onset — and if so, what was that date?

Everything else is already in the chart. The clinic has the child’s date of birth and the date of the last well-child visit before onset — a proxy for vaccination, not a record of it, but one already written in every file. From those, the clinic computes and releases two numbers: age in months at onset, and days between that visit and onset. No dates leave the clinic. The release is de-identified and does not require patient authorization.

Age at onset is what makes the test possible. The well-child schedule is fixed, so a child’s age tells you how visits are spaced at that age, and therefore what intervals chance alone would produce. Regression is typically noticed between twelve and twenty-four months, when visits are densest. Clustering near well-child visits doesn't prove causation — but a significant departure from uniformity demands an explanation.

That test can come out either way. If there is no signal, this is the cleanest null result anyone has produced. If there is a signal, we need to know.

The resulting dataset must be made publicly available, de-identified, for independent analysis. A result the public cannot check will not end this debate. A result anyone can verify will.

I am asking the Committee to put this in the plan.

Thank you.

Summary

The #1 priority of the committee should be to address the elephant in the room: do a study PROPERLY DESIGNED to find an association if there is one, not to hide a signal that is there. You do this with a temporal analysis between time of shot and onset. The scientific community has refused for decades to do such a study.

If you are an academic researcher and interested in doing the study that would end the debate, let me know in the comments. I have the money to fund the research that governments worldwide all refuse to do.