Dan Olmsted

About

Dan Olmsted was an extraordinary investigative journalist. He left behind a remarkable body of work, much of it readily available at www.ageofautism.com and in his published books, notably Age of Autism (2010) and Denial (2017). Dan wrote about many topics over the course of his distinguished career, but his work in autism was both his most controversial and most memorable. He often said that he was inspired to write about autism because it was “the story of a lifetime.”

Dan embarked on his journey into that story during his time at United Press International (UPI), where he launched his signature column “Age of Autism”, a phrase that would define Dan’s brand long after his tenure at UPI. From April 18, 2005 to July 18, 2007, Dan wrote 113 articles for UPI under the Age of Autism umbrella, after which he launched the eponymous blog in November 2007. The blog continues under the guidance of the indomitable Kim Rossi, who joined Dan at the start as editorial leaders of “the daily newspaper of the autism epidemic.” But the original UPI columns have long been difficult to find or inaccessible entirely. Until now. Ginger Taylor worked together with Kim Rossi to host Dan’s original work here at www.danolmsted.com.

Dan’s work on autism at UPI was wide-ranging, groundbreaking and deeply influential. His most memorable investigations included the following.

  • The Amish Anomaly. Dan gave this title to his very first UPI column, and continued pursuing the story with numerous follow up pieces. As autism rates were surging in the decade preceding his investigation and conventional claims of genetic causation lost credence, many parents had begun questioning environmental factors that were rooted in modern life. Things like the expanding childhood vaccination schedule, unhealthy, pesticide-laden foods and other subtle yet pervasive toxins. Dan posed a simple, but powerful question: how common was autism in societies that had chosen to avoid these environmental factors? Like the Amish. Dan traveled to Amish settlements like Lancaster County and found that autism was rare there, and where it was found, it was entirely in populations that had been reached by modern practices like vaccination.
  • The vaccinated vs. unvaccinated comparison. The Amish weren’t the only group opting out of modern medical practices. By the mid-1990s a number of previously mainstream pediatricians had begun noticing a change for the worse in the overall health of the children they were seeing and started questioning the role of the expanding childhood vaccine schedule. Several began offering alternative vaccination schedules, with slower or fewer vaccines and in some cases none at all. These practices became the first control groups that allowed comparisons of total health outcomes in vaccinated vs unvaccinated children, otherwise known as “vax/unvax studies.” Dan interviewed doctors like Elizabeth Mumper and Meyer Eisenstein and learned that they saw far lower rates of autism and other chronic disease in their unvaxxed or partially vaxxed patients. Since then, subsequent research has found similar results in unvaccinated children. Dan’s pioneering work led the way.
  • The original Kanner cases. His investigations into autism’s first principles led Dan to Leo Kanner’s 1943 paper that first defined the disorder, “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact.” Kanner’s expansive descriptions of 11 cases began with the following sentence; “Since 1938, there have come to our attention a number of children whose condition differs so markedly and uniquely from anything reported so far that each case merits—and, I hope will eventually receive—a detailed consideration of its fascinating peculiarities.” Dan took Kanner’s declaration to heart, and studied the descriptions of Kanner’s original 11 children and their families, taking facts and clues from Kanner’s text in order to discover their real identities, three during his time at UPI: Frederick Creighton Wellman III (case #2, Frederick W), William Ritchey Miller (Richard M, case #3) and Donald Triplett (Donald T, case #1). Frederick and Ritchey’s fathers were plant and forest pathologists, respectively–both of whom dealt directly with novel, mercury-based fungicides, while Donald was born in Forest, Mississippi in close proximity to lumber mills that were experimenting with these fungicides. We called these families the “fungicide cluster.” Ethyl mercury, the active ingredient in these newly invented fungicides, was also the key constituent in the vaccine-preservative thimerosal. We observed that the launch of these ethyl mercury-based products immediately preceded the birth dates of Kanner’s 11 cases, all of whom were born in the 1930s.

In addition to these investigations, Dan had other irons in the fire when he left UPI. In the years before we published Age of Autism, we discovered the identities of four more of the Kanner 11, a group we called the “medical cluster.” These included John Trevett (case #7, Herbert B), Bridget Muncie (case #5, Barbara K), David Speck (case #8, Alfred L) and Lee Rosenberg (case #10, John F). All were born to parents in the medical field—doctors, nurses, psychiatrists and a psychologist. One mother, a pediatrician named Elizabeth Peabody, was part of a pioneering project at Harvard that developed the “well-baby visit”; She gave lectures arguing that infant vaccinations should be given early and often.

Other highlights of Dan’s investigations included

  • The Age of Hysteria, the discovery that Sigmund Freud’s signature “hysteria” cases were in reality undiagnosed cases of mercury poisoning. Dan was an avid reader—and critic-of Freud’s works and noted a phrase in footnote 6 of a 1905 paper in which Freud observed that “a strikingly high percentage of patients I have treated psychoanalytically come of fathers who have suffered from” neurosyphilis. Typically, these were daughters who would have administered mercury creams to their ill fathers. Freud misdiagnosed such mercury exposure cases as repressed sexual feelings.
  • The Age of Polio, the insight that poliomyelitis might require not just an infection from the polio virus but also exposure to pesticides such as lead arsenate or DDT. Dan was fascinated by polio, the iconic epidemic used to justify widespread vaccination campaigns of all kinds. We wrote in 2011, “the virus itself was just half the epidemic equation — necessary but not sufficient to create The Age of Polio. Outbreaks were not caused solely by poliovirus – the microbe was an ancient and heretofore harmless intestinal bug — but by its interaction with a new toxin, most often innovative pesticides used to treat fruits and vegetables.” Dan investigated the 1916 New York City “explosion” in poliomyelitis cases and theorized it was connected to the heavy arsenic content of sugar imported from Hawaii.
  • An Elaborate Fraud, the dissection of Brian Deer’s years long and largely successful campaign against Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Deer’s 2011 British Medical Journal article effectively ended Wakefield’s career in autism research and was accompanied by an editorial claiming Wakefield was “an elaborate fraud.” Dan authored an eight-part critique of Deer’s work; notably, Dan falsified Deer’s most provocative claim. Dan wrote, “As the strongest case in point, author Brian Deer described how Child 11’s symptoms appeared “too soon” — a full two months before the measles-mumps-rubella shot. Deer said the father himself spotted the “anomaly” and was deeply upset about Wakefield’s deception…But none of that is true.” Dan tracked down the father of Child 11, whose story stood in opposition to Deer’s account. Again, Dan wrote, “His son had been completely healthy and developing normally, he said, until the MMR shot at 15 months triggered a downhill progression…“I very much believe it,” he said about the relationship of the shot to the symptoms: The measles component of the vaccine triggered an immune deficiency that produced the cascade of devastating physical and mental problems. This, in fact, was Wakefield’s provisional hypothesis…When I showed Father 11 what Deer had written about the shot-and-symptoms sequence, he said, emphatically, “That’s not correct.”

Dan’s legacy deserves to be preserved, especially these early columns from UPI. Many thanks to Ginger Taylor for doing the work to build and host this archive. I think of him often and hope others do too. I wrote a tribute to his life after he died (see https://www.ageofautism.com/2017/01/the-final-wrap.html ). Let this new UPI repository stand as a tribute to his work.

Mark Blaxill, July 2025

Mark first met Dan in Washington DC, on October 7, 2003, when Dan was working with UPI. They struck up a collaboration and friendship that would last over 13 years.Mark became a trusted source for Dan during his time at UPI and continued to work with Dan when he moved to “the daily newspaper of the autism epidemic. Dan and Mark wrote three books-The Age of Autism (2010), Vaccines 2.0 (2015) and Denial (2017)—and numerous investigative pieces together.