“[Autism] has gone in the 1970s from a prevalence of one in 10,000, a rare disorder… Now to, following an exponential increase, according the CDCs data, such that the risk for autism in a child born today, based up these data, is one in 25. One in 25 children. And there is absolutely nothing to suggest that this curve is going to be attenuated in any way whatsoever. It is going to continue into the future if nothing changes.
… I recently interviewed a senior scientist at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, and she is an expert artificial intelligence and computer science, and she gave to us this observation… that if you log that exponential trend you can look into the future and predict when this disorder is going to affect one in two children. And that is in 2032.
She believes it will happen even sooner because the shape of this curve is changing and the environmental factors that she believes and I believe are conspiring to produce this syndrome are actually on the increase. So we are looking at a vertical acceleration of this new disorder. One in two children.
What does a country look like with one in two children? You are either affected or you care for someone who is affected. There is no standing army. There is no police force. There is no school. There are no teachers. There is nothing. And this sort of apocalyptic view of the world is almost too much for people to imagine, and so in this sort of dissonant way, we dismiss it.”
— Andrew Wakefield