The
Age of Autism website was created by a so-called "autism mom", which is a generic term for the mother of an autistic child, but which has in the meantime come to mean "the mother of an autistic child who cannot accept her child's autism and is angrily seeking a culprit she can blame and sue."
I have personally been confronted with such people and their denial-driven agendas for several years. It was one of the reasons ─ not the only reason but one of the reasons nevertheless ─ why I left Facebook behind me in 2010. They are
all in denial, they are
all vicious and full of rage, and they are
all looking for someone to blame. You cannot even reason with these people, because you will be insulted and falsely accused right away.
I for one was accused of being a shill for Big Pharma, simply for trying to point out the science to these people. It's not that they couldn't accept my explanation ─ they didn't even want to hear me out. Rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth knee-jerking is all it was. One of them even rebutted my explanation with
"You lost me at 'hi'." These people are just about as fanatic and as intransigent as the Flat Earth believers, if not more so.
Anyway, here's
a pertinent Wikipedia snippet about the website...:
The Age of Autism
From 2005 to July 2007, Olmsted wrote about his investigative findings concerning the apparent global epidemic of autism in a series of columns titled The Age of Autism. Though some scientific research suggests that autism is a primarily genetic disorder and that reported increases are mainly due to changes in diagnostic practices, Olmsted, claimed that the increases are due to mercury poisoning, particularly from vaccines, and that the genetics is mostly secondary. Though Olmsted continued to make this claim, thimerosal, the mercury-containing preservative blamed by Olmsted, was removed from most vaccines as a precaution beginning in the late 1990s, with no effect on autism diagnosis rates.
I will also add that this Wikipedia article carefully uses the words
"Though some scientific research suggests that autism is a primarily genetic disorder", but it must once again be said that this is the Anglo-Saxon interpretation of things ─ this particular Wikipedia article was written by a US American contributor, and articles in other languages are (commonly) written by people who natively speak those languages, and completely independently from any other articles on the same subject in other languages. In the rest of the world, it is
a known and indisputable fact that autism is an
exclusively genetic condition.
Another thing I will point out is that
Age of Autism is not the only such website/organization. There are several more, among which
Autism Speaks, which ─ contrary to what its name suggests ─ does not allow autistic individuals to speak up, but instead focuses on feeding into the "vaccines cause autism" myth. Furthermore, the managing director of
Autism Speaks is earning himself a very royal six-figure annual income. So much for an alleged non-profit organization.
Either way,
Age of Autism is not a neutral source of information. It has an agenda.