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Take a genetically susceptible child, expose that child to mold, and then add an immune trigger — like a vaccine — that “tips an already-strained system over the edge,” and you may create a “three-way collision” that can lead to autism, according to Dr. Christian Bogner.
Bogner, a physician and researcher, and other experts told The Defender that environmental triggers have become more prevalent in recent decades, with the expansion of the childhood immunization schedule and the widespread use of toxic pesticides, including glyphosate, to produce food.
Many blame toxic exposures for the drastic increase in autism diagnoses among U.S. children, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention measured at 1 in 31 children in 2022 — up from 1 in 10,000 in the 1970s.
Physician and author Dr. Neil Nathan believes there is “clearly a relationship” between one of those toxic exposures — mold toxicity — and autism, though studies attempting to identify a link have so far been few and inconclusive.
“It’s hard enough to get any studies done on toxic mold that get into the mainstream narrative — to say nothing of the vaccine issue,” said Dr. Margaret Christensen, a trained gynecologist, clinical educator and co-founder of the Carpathia Collaborative.
According to Christensen, exposure to toxic mold “affects everybody … as it is such a common environmental toxin.” She noted that at least half of homes and 60% of commercial buildings “have had sufficient water damage to have a toxic mold issue as a component to common environmental exposures, creating illnesses.”
Bogner said that each child has different levels of susceptibility when exposed to toxins. Even within the same household, two children exposed to the same toxins may have different outcomes — one may become very ill or develop autism while the other may remain healthy.
But there’s at least one common denominator among the sick children he’s treated: an imbalance in the gut.
“Triggers vary — some children were pushed by vaccines, some by mold, some by antibiotics, some by none of those — but every autistic child I have evaluated has dysbiosis,” Bogner said. These children “carry specific bacterial overgrowths” that lead to toxicity in the gut and the potential onset of neurological disorders.
‘Mold already depletes glutathione. Acetaminophen depletes it further’
There may not be a direct connection between vaccines and mold toxicity, Nathan said. However, it’s possible that the “inflammation and weakened immune system triggered by mold might make a child more likely to have a vaccine injury,” even if this connection is not yet backed by solid research.
Bogner said he believes vaccines can trigger autism, although not necessarily as the sole cause for the condition’s onset. Instead, it can act as a trigger for a child who is already susceptible to the onset of autism.
He said the “clustering and timing of vaccines,” exposure to adjuvants, the preservatives commonly used in vaccines, and other toxins, such as acetaminophen, may all contribute to autism’s onset in susceptible children.
Bogner highlighted the potential role of aluminum adjuvants in this process.
“Adjuvants work by deliberately amplifying immune activation, and aluminum is itself a detox burden,” Bogner said. “In a child who cannot clear metals, the adjuvant adds to total load.”
He said that in a child whose immune system is already dysregulated by mold, “the response to a live antigen may itself be abnormal,” Bogner said.
Add acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, and the risk increases, he said.
“Mold already depletes glutathione. Acetaminophen depletes it further. Giving Tylenol around vaccination stacks two glutathione hits at once — at precisely the wrong moment,” Bogner said. Glutathione is an antioxidant naturally found in the body that helps reduce damage to cells.
Mold exposure ‘the most commonly missed trigger’ for autism
For Bogner, mold exposure “is the most commonly missed trigger” for autism — one that is often left out of the autism conversation.
Christensen agreed. She said that exposure to the mycotoxins in toxic mold can lead to the onset of several conditions, including disruptions of the immune system, inflammation of the gastrointestinal lining, neuroinflammation, stress on the body’s detoxification pathways and increased susceptibility to chronic infections.
This mimics — and potentially amplifies — the effects that vaccines would have on vulnerable children, according to Christensen, who said:
“Vaccines do all of these same things. A vaccinated child is at increased risk for not being able to clear mycotoxins and for exacerbating the inflammatory effects of these mycotoxins. A child exposed to mycotoxins is more likely to have a vaccine reaction because they are already inflamed.
“Mycotoxins are direct mitochondrial toxicants — no different than the heavy metals and many adjuvant substances found in vaccines. Damage to them leads to loss of energy production as well as autoimmunity.
“Toxic mold exposures cause increased levels of asthma, allergies, anxiety, upper respiratory infections, food sensitivities, sleep disruptions — any of those things can worsen after a vaccine that just adds fuel to the inflammation fire.”
Some studies have found that mold and mycotoxin levels are elevated in autistic children. A 2025 study published in the journal Mycotoxin Research found significant levels of Ochratoxin A, a mycotoxin, in autistic people.
A 2019 study published in Scientific Reports found an elevated presence of immunoglobulins — or antibodies — against a common mold, Aspergillus, in people with autism, noting that “silent aspergillosis” may strongly influence immune and nervous system development.
Christensen said toxic mold mycotoxins negatively affect the immune and nervous systems in several ways, including inflammation of the sinuses, which could lead to inflammation in the brain and limbic system. Such exposure could also lead to inflammation of the lungs — and conditions such as asthma and bronchitis.
Children who are vulnerable to mold toxicity and who take antibiotics are at particular risk, Christensen said, noting that antibiotics are themselves “mycotoxins originally derived from mold.” The antibiotics would “disrupt the gut microflora.”
At the same time, mycotoxin exposure damages the immune system. Christensen said:
“We know that mycotoxins suppress the innate immune system — the side that goes after bacterial and viral infections and cancer cells — and overactivates the adaptive immune system — the side that creates antibodies and cytokines.
“This creates immune suppression of one branch while overactivating the other branch, leading not only to inflammation in the nervous system, but also, susceptibility to infections and gut issues, triggering an ongoing cycle of disruption.”
Disruptions to gut health a ‘hallmark of autism’
According to Christensen, gut-associated microbiome and immune cell disruption is a “hallmark of autism.” Bogner agreed. He said that while not all of his patients who have autism were exposed to high levels of toxic mold or were vaccinated, all had gut disruptions.
“I have roughly 10 patients with autism who never received a vaccine — not prenatally, not postnatally. I also have autistic children whose mold panels came back negative. So neither vaccines nor mold are universal,” Bogner said.
Instead, the common factor among those patients was dysbiosis — an imbalance in the gut created when harmful bacteria outnumber and overpower beneficial bacteria.
“Mold and vaccines are, in my view, among the most important triggers and accelerants — especially in the genetically susceptible child — but the common denominator, the thing present in every case I have seen, is a dysregulated gut producing neuroactive metabolites,” which influence brain function and behavior.
Bogner said the harmful bacterial overgrowths in the gut diminish the amount of tryptophan — an essential amino acid vital for building proteins that aids in sleep, mood and relaxation — and contribute to the overproduction of tryptamine, which the body converts to dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a natural hallucinogen.
Bogner described DMT as “the most powerful psychedelic substance known to man.”
The body uses a category of enzymes known as monoamine oxidase (MAO) to break down DMT — but Bogner said the autistic children he’s treated lack this enzyme. Boys only have one copy of the gene that encodes for MAO, which could help explain the higher incidence of autism among boys.
Bogner is working on a study examining this process with researchers from Stanford, the University of California, Davis, and Louisiana State University. “If it holds up, the biology of autism gets redefined around this model.”
Autism exploded in parallel with glyphosate’s rollout
What accounts for gut dysbiosis in the first place? For Bogner, a likely culprit is exposure to glyphosate — and the wider environmental burden of potentially toxic pesticides and herbicides in the environment and in the diet.
“We started to see autism explode in the mid-1990s,” Bogner said. “It’s the same time when glyphosate started to hit the markets, hit our food supply.”
Exposure to glyphosate “primes the genetically susceptible child” because it induces dysbiosis by targeting beneficial bacteria in the gut, including bifidobacteria and lactobacillus, while “sparing pathogens like clostridium and salmonella,” Bogner said,
“Those are the very genera found depleted in autistic children, even in infancy,” Bogner said. “Losing them drives leaky gut — the entry point for mycotoxins and to the overgrowths that generate neuroactive indole tryptamines.”
Bogner said glyphosate forms the first step in a sequence that subsequently may include exposure to acetaminophen, vaccines and mold exposure. He said:
“Mold silently fills the bucket in a genetically susceptible child. The vaccine — plus the Tylenol often given with it — can be what makes it overflow into regression.
“Eighty-plus percent of the immune system is directly correlated to the microbiome of the gut. That’s probably because it’s the first contact that the human body has with anything that we ingest. So, it makes sense that the majority of our defenses are right there in the gut.”
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Kids under 3 most susceptible to exposures that can lead to autism
According to Christensen, while many molds exist in the outdoor environment, the molds that grow indoors pose the greatest risk.
“Common outdoor molds that cause seasonal allergies are an entirely different species than indoor molds growing on wet sheetrock. Many different mold species can end up making mycotoxins when stressed. These include Aspergillus, Penicillium, Stachbotrtys, Chaetomium and Wallemia,” Christensen said.
Christensen described how mold exposure affected her son:
“We had been remodeling a house that unbeknownst to us had mold issues. Following his MMR [measles-mumps-rubella] vaccine, my 3-year-old son began having febrile seizures, ear infections and asthma.
“He then was sick all of the time and had a massive personality change at age 4, leading to subsequent diagnosis of ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder], asthma, allergies and Asperger’s, leading to severe depression and then schizophrenia as an adult.”
Bogner said this matches the pattern he’s “consistently” seen with his patients.
“The recurring picture in my practice: a child from a home with unrecognized water damage, with gut dysbiosis and often a history of early antibiotics, who was developing typically or with only subtle signs — and then regressed or plateaued after an immune event — an illness, a vaccination or anesthesia,” he said.
According to Bogner, children up to age 3 — especially children between 12 and 24 months — are most susceptible to potential exposure to toxins. At that age, the immune system “is being programmed,” the body’s ability to detoxify “is immature,” and the vaccine schedule “is densest.”
At that age, infants and small children “are more susceptible because they have a larger exposure relative to their size,” Christensen said.
Yet, these potential risk factors have been understudied, Bogner said. He noted that large population-level vaccine-autism studies are not designed to detect anomalies in what he said is the approximately 25% of children who are most susceptible to toxins. He added that those studies haven’t looked at mold burden as a variable.
Related articles in The Defender
- Could Exposure to Mold Play a Role in Autism? More Research Needed, Experts Say
- 6 Children in 1 Town Developed Rare Cancer. After Teen Dies, Families Demand Answers About Routine Use of Pesticides
- What’s Behind Skyrocketing Autism Rates — Better Diagnostics? Or an Avalanche of Toxins?
- 1 in 31 Kids Had Autism in 2022 — Up From 1 in 36 in 2020
- ‘Deceptively Toxic’: How Regulators, Chemical Companies Get Away With Calling Glyphosate ‘Safe’
- Tylenol, FDA Knew About Autism Risk For Years, Newly Surfaced Emails Show
