🧵Autism rates have exploded, becoming a massive financial enterprise and while framed as support, the reality involves billions in profits. Let’s explore who benefits and how.
In 2000, CDC data showed 1 in 150 children diagnosed with autism. By 2023, it’s 1 in 36—an unprecedented 317% increase. Improved diagnostics alone can’t explain this growth.
Autism-related costs in the U.S. reached a staggering $223 billion annually in 2020, projected to be $589 billion by 2030. Expenses include healthcare, special education, therapies, and productivity losses.
Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is the primary therapy for autism, derived from behavior modification theories. Despite controversies and comparisons to coercive methods, ABA dominates due to its profitability, structured around billable therapy hours.
Private Equity Dominance in Autism Care
Private equity firms have aggressively acquired ABA clinics, consolidating them into large, profitable chains. High insurance reimbursements and limited oversight attract investors aiming for significant returns.
“The flood of insurance and taxpayer money pouring into the ‘market for autism services’ has quickly flowed into the pockets of Wall Street financiers. Autism advocates won health insurance and Medicaid coverage for intensive autism services, especially Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), which is the most widely recognized evidence-based approach. The more intensive services, requiring more hours of therapy each week, allow for higher reimbursement opportunities compared to other approaches or to other developmental disorders.”
The ABA Therapy Profit Model
ABA therapy typically involves 20–40 billable hours weekly per child. This model encourages ongoing dependence, creating “lifelong customers” rather than promoting independent coping strategies.
Pharmaceutical companies profit substantially from medications prescribed for autism symptoms, such as irritability and anxiety. For example, Risperdal, an antipsychotic by Johnson & Johnson, is widely prescribed despite severe side effects.
Back in 2013 Johnson & Johnson had to pay $2.2 Billion because of off-label marketing of Risperdal.
“The complaint alleges that J&J and Janssen knew that Risperdal posed certain health risks to children, including the risk of elevated levels of prolactin, a hormone that can stimulate breast development and milk production. Nonetheless, one of Janssen’s Key Base Business Goals was to grow and protect the drug’s market share with child/adolescent patients. Janssen instructed its sales representatives to call on child psychiatrists, as well as mental health facilities that primarily treated children, and to market Risperdal as safe and effective for symptoms of various childhood disorders, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and autism.”
Autism Nonprofits and Corporate Influence
Organizations like Autism Speaks attract large donations but face criticism for high executive pay and limited direct service spending. In 2019, Autism Speaks’ CEO received nearly $1 million in compensation.
The Autism Impact Fund has raised $60 million specifically targeting startups focused on autism and neurodevelopmental disorders, highlighting profit potential beyond traditional healthcare.
Autism diagnoses are based on subjective behavioral observations, not definitive medical tests, increasing potential overdiagnosis. Diagnostic ambiguity benefits industries that thrive on treatment demand.
As previously referenced insurance mandates across all 50 states require coverage for autism therapies, significantly increasing demand and profitability. ABA therapy in particular has seen explosive growth due to these mandates.
Millions in NIH grants fund autism research, creating financial incentives for institutions to continue research cycles that rarely yield breakthroughs in autism causation or prevention. Since 2008 taxpayer funded research has grown from $118 million to an estimated total $330 million a year.
The major beneficiaries of all this money being spent and made isn’t the children caught in the middle of this grotesque profit seeking epidemic, it is the industry that has been built around them by:
•Private equity investors like Blackstone.
•ABA therapy conglomerates like Centria, BlueSprig.
•Pharmaceutical companies like Johnson & Johnson.
•Nonprofits tied to corporate interests like Autism Speaks.
•Academic institutions benefiting from continuous grant funding financed by taxpayers with little if any significant progress made.
Families face heavy financial burdens and stress, taxpayers fund expensive treatments via Medicaid, and autistic individuals risk long-term dependency on services designed more for profit than empowerment.
The Autism Industrial Complex operates on a cycle of diagnosis, treatment dependency, and profit maximization, often sidelining genuine, holistic support and independence for autistic individuals.
When factoring pharmaceutical sales and auxiliary support industries, annual profits likely approach $10–15 billion.
This is what I call Systemic Capture and it is undeniable. All this money for a disease that no one seems to know where it comes from but has a multi-billion dollar industry behind it.
Quite convenient and most of all profitable.
Thanks for reading.
Follow me @joshwalkos for more threads and info in the future.
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The GATT, WTO, and NAFTA were not just bad policies, they were acts of economic treason. They sit at the core of nearly everything that has hollowed out America from the inside.
GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), forged in the post-WWII glow of globalism, was marketed as a peacekeeping tool through trade. In practice, it laid the foundation for mass offshoring and the evisceration of American industry.
It later mutated into the WTO (World Trade Organization) in 1995, a supranational bureaucracy that imposed a so-called “rules-based order” favoring multinational corporations while undermining U.S. sovereignty. It gave unelected global panels the power to overrule American laws, all in the name of “free trade.”
Then came NAFTA, Bill Clinton’s crown jewel of betrayal in 1993. Touted as a job-creating miracle, it instead created a wasteland. The “giant sucking sound” Ross Perot warned of wasn’t hyperbole, it was prophecy. Entire manufacturing towns were gutted, wages collapsed, and the American middle class began its long descent into serfdom.
These weren’t just trade deals, they were coordinated demolitions. They prioritized Wall Street, global banks, and corporate monopolies over workers, families, and the very idea of national self-determination.
And both parties were in on it. Republicans and Democrats alike, greased by lobbyists and think tanks, rammed these treaties through with no serious public debate. No referendum. No real choice.
The final nail in the coffin came in May 2000 when the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 4444, a bill to grant China Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR).
If you look at the graph you will see a steep decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs that begins around June 2000, a full year and a half before China formally joined the WTO. That wasn’t an accident, it was the market reacting to what was already a done deal behind closed doors.
U.S. corporations began ramping up plans to offshore production, banking on the fact that China’s entry into the WTO was now inevitable. Executives started shifting supply chains in mid-2000, leading to immediate job loss in American factories, especially in textiles, electronics, and consumer goods. This all coincided with capital investment flooding into China from U.S. firms eager to exploit dirt-cheap labor and totalitarian efficiency. An exploit they did.
The job destruction that followed wasn’t just predictable it was planned, applauded, and executed by a bipartisan alliance of globalist technocrats and corporate raiders.
The fallout? A destroyed industrial base. The rise of the fentanyl-fueled opioid genocide in the jobless void. Open borders to replace laid-off Americans with cheap labor and serve up a permanent underclass to the same corporations that offshored their jobs in the first place.
What came through those borders? Drugs. Human trafficking. Criminal syndicates. A tidal wave of social destabilization all traceable to the same traitorous policies that sold out the American people decades ago.
So as the talking heads lie, spin, and deflect, just remember how we got here, and what we’re actually fighting for.
Until these policies and the traitors who engineered them are torn out root and branch, the American republic will keep bleeding out. Our destiny, betrayed by men without principles.
THREAD: Peter Marks—the FDA’s top vaxx czar just resigned. His letter? A sanctimonious screed praising Operation Warp Speed, mRNA shots, and the holy church of “settled science.”
Let’s break it down using his own words.
Marks was Director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). Again this man oversaw the entire vaccine portfolio, including the warp-speed rollout of experimental mRNA shots.
He’s now “retiring.” But not before writing a bizarre love letter to Pharma.
Marks opens by calling the FDA staff the “most devoted to protecting and promoting public health.”
This is the same FDA that tried to seal Pfizer’s trial data for 75 years.
🧵 Another contractor who’ve made their money from taxpayers that’s little known to the public is International Relief and Development, now Blumont.
By 2011 over 80% of its $500 million annual budget was sourced from USAID, becoming one of their largest “nonprofit” contractors.
However, beneath its philanthropic facade lies a history of financial mismanagement and exorbitant executive compensation.
A WaPo investigation found that between 2008 and 21012 Dr. Arthur B. Keys Jr., IRD’s founder and CEO, along with his wife, Jasna Basaric-Keys, who served as COO, reportedly pocketed a combined $4.4 million in salary and bonuses.
🧵 The truth about USAID and their number one contractor Chemonics International
Chemonics International is one of the biggest U.S. government contractors in “global development” raking in billions from USAID.
But behind the glossy reports are fraud allegations, mismanagement, and ties to shady dealings.
What is Chemonics?
A Washington, D.C.-based development firm operating in 100+ countries. Its focus? Health, agriculture, governance, economic development. But its real business? Winning USAID contracts. In 2019 alone, it received $1.5 billion in USAID funding aka taxpayer’s money. chemonics.com