If you were in a car accident and suffered brain swelling, no one would call the swelling itself a disease. They'd call it an injury. I think autism works the same way. It isn't a disease in itself. It's a symptom of a brain injury.

A vaccine works by triggering an inflammatory response in the immune system, because that inflammation produces the antibody response the vaccine is designed to elicit. For some children, the body absorbs that event without consequence. But what if the inflammation is severe, or what if a child has an underlying mitochondrial disorder, a weakness in the cellular energy needed to stop that inflammatory event before it reaches the brain?

I think that's where autism comes from, when the inflammatory event makes it to the brain and causes swelling there. Most vaccine inserts list encephalitis and encephalopathy as a side effect, which is exactly that, a brain swelling event. Once that swelling goes down, the outcome depends on how severe it was. Tourette's, which is also a symptom of brain injury. Autism. Or something like ADD or ADHD.

@delbigtree