“The Telepathy Tapes” Has Close Ties to Vaccine Skeptic Movement
Host Ky Dickens relies on experts and witnesses who sincerely believe that vaccination is helping increase the prevalence of autism, something that has no scientific basis.
The new podcast The Telepathy Tapes offers audiences a ten-episode whirlwind journey through the lives of nonverbal autistic children who host Ky Dickens claims to prove actually have telepathic powers.
But along the way, she endorses autism communications methods that have been mired in controversy for decades — with the scientific consensus being that methods like facilitated communication which she seems to endorse may actually just be a way for adults to subconsciously speak on behalf of disabled children.
My previous article on the topic, which was published last week, went viral. I heard from parents of autistic children and specialists around America who commended me for diving into the podcast, which included an interview with its chief scientific expert Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell.
Many people believed that I had provided context that Dickens herself failed to provide — about why facilitated communication was discredited, for instance (it didn’t have anything to do with poor training, as she suggests.)
That’s why I decided to stay on the topic. As a journalist of fifteen years who has investigated everything from foreign governments to my own county commission, I always want to know the backstory behind everything. Who exactly are the people who Dickens calls as witnesses and experts in this story? Looking into them more closely, I found a link between their beliefs and that of another movement on the periphery of autism spaces — vaccine skeptics.
Holding a “Revolution for Truth”
2017 was a year that many vaccine skeptics — people who think that the use of certain vaccines has led to increase in autism and other impairments — thought would be their big breaking point.
President Donald Trump even took a meeting with RFK Jr., the Kennedy scion who made his name drawing a link between autism and vaccines, and promised him that he could lead efforts looking into vaccine safety.
Unlike this year, where Trump chose to elevate RFK Jr. to leading the Department Health and Human Services — where he will have real power — Trump did not fulfill his promise to him back in 2017.
But RFK Jr. and other vaccine skeptics still tried their best to win his attention. In March of 2017, they held a rally in Washington, D.C., where they demanded the creation of the vaccine safety committee that Trump had flirted with.
Speaker after speaker at the rally drew an unfounded link between autism and various disorders, advocating for a much less vaccinated America. One speakers says the “biggest public health threat” in the United States is “vaccines.” Other speakers strenuously argued that autism rates are spiking thanks to vaccination.
One of those speakers who joined them was Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell — the lapsed medical doctor who Dickens relies on as her chief scientific expert and a key source of mine for my previous article on the podcast.
You can see her 2017 speech by clicking this link, which takes you to a video on the rally’s Facebook page. I can’t post the video directly here because I don’t have permission from the organizers, but you can see Powell’s speak at 1:35:52.
“My rally cry is stop the insanity,” Dr. Powell told the audience to applause.
She went on to denounce the way the United States approaches vaccination, blaming a conspiracy of silence for the avoidance of the topic of vaccine harm.
“We live in a schizophrenic society with lots of cognitive dissonance. When you have doctors doing things and they are doing harm they cannot face it. So I go to these medical meetings, I just got back from one,” she said. “And these are medical meetings where I’m getting continuing education. And there are doctors saying that vaccines are often times the final straw that tips a kid over the edge. And yet they all say this, you know, quietly.”
In her anger at vaccines, Powell even invoked one of the worst horrors of the 20th century.
“A woman who is a neonatal nurse, she said to me — and she’s Jewish, her parents escaped the Holocaust — she said to me I pray every day that I go to work that I don’t go to Hell for what I do,” she said. “But she has no choice, because she has a family to support. I’m here not only for the mothers and the children but for the doctors and the nurses who are being forced to do harm to the Hippocratic oath.”
The speech was shocking to me. In my interview with Powell for my first piece on The Telepathy Tapes, Powell came across as humble and pragmatic. She, after all, acknowledged weaknesses in the experiments that the podcast series does to supposedly prove telepathy. Although she believed in all kinds of paranormal phenomena that have little to no evidence behind them, she at least seemed open-minded to skepticism.
In the 2017 speech, however, Powell lacks any humility whatsoever. Her strident denunciation of vaccination came across as strictly ideological or activist, not scientific. She had made up her mind, and she was there to raise hell against everyone who didn’t agree.
I reached out to Powell and asked her what she thinks about vaccines today — after all, seven years is a long time.
Here’s what she told me:
The majority of people diagnosed as autistic do not have vaccines as the cause. The problem is that several of the children being diagnosed as autistic actually have sensorimotor issues that are related to toxic overload and brain inflammation that was often triggered by a vaccine.
She also sent me an article detailing the case of a doctor who suspected that vaccines can cause autism in some cases.
In drawing the autism-vaccine link, Powell is not alone among those featured in The Telepathy Tapes.
Dickens never tells us, for instance, that Katie Asher, whose son Houston is prominently featured in the series, blames vaccines for her son’s autism.
“27 years ago my son had an immune reaction to the DTP-HIB that destroyed his life with toxic levels of aluminum in his cells. Now there’s proof we were lied to,” she wrote in a September 2024 Tweet.
That Tweet linked to an article by JB Handley, a businessman who has spent more than a decade blaming vaccination for his son’s nonverbal autism. (It remains a frequent theme of his Substack postings.)
Handley also happens to be the co-producer and one of the stars of the documentary Spellers, which Dickens uses her series to suggest that viewers watch.
If vaccines can cause autism, and autism can cause telepathy, then…
Dickens spends much of The Telepathy Tapes arguing that her discoveries will herald in a paradigm shift in thinking about the world.
For too long, Dickens argues, we’ve been trapped in the paradigm of materialism — the belief that what we can see and measure is all there is to the world.
The revelations Dickens believes she has stumbled upon in The Telepathy Tapes overturn that apple cart. According to Dickens, nonverbal autistic children who use spelling methods to communicate are capable of everything from telepathy to precognition to speaking to the death to telekinesis. It’s time to give up on materialism and embrace our spiritual side.
But that’s not what the vaccine skeptic movement by and large believes. They believe, contrary to the scientific consensus, that autism has environmental roots that include exposure to childhood vaccines. And their zealousness in campaigning against these vaccines is due to the fact that they believe autism is a terrible illness, not a spiritual gift or even the next step in human evolution (something fans of The Telepathy Tapes have hinted at).
Which makes me wonder what the success of the podcast could do to the vaccine skeptics. If Dickens convinces them that nonverbal autism allows children to tap into deep spiritual gifts, will they drop their opposition to vaccines? Or will be there be a clash between vaccines skeptics and telepathy believers? Or will some just hold both beliefs in their mind at the same time, like Dr. Powell?
the current conversations around Autism has grown incredibly complex over the last decade. some of this make sense in light of the fact that we have seen an incredible increase in diagnosis over the last two decades. some say as much as 2000%. that can’t all be explained away by better diagnostic criteria and the loosening of definitions.
the fundamental problem is thus: we don’t really know exactly what Autism is. secondly: we really don’t know what causes Autism.
in light of this fact I don’t think we can rule anything out from first principles. some have suggested that Autism is a genetic condition but that wouldn’t explain the massive increase in cases since most genetic conditions remain steady over time. it seems reasonable to conclude there is an environmental factor here.
we need cool heads on this issue at a time where cool heads don’t exist. personally, I think it’s ridiculous to assume that non-verbal autistic children are actually telepathic. such claims would require an enormous amount of scientific validation.
at the same time, I don’t think it’s crazy to propose that the adjuvants in vaccines may be causing an inflammation/immune response in small children. one of the most accepted facts in western medicine is that inflammation is the foundation of countless diseases.
it’s also true that vaccine manufacturers enjoy an incredible level of legal protection from liability that most other drug manufacturers don’t possess. this skewers their incentives to make a safe product, as well as increasing the quantity and quality of the vaccines we give to our kids nowadays (72 before 18 years old by my count).
keep up the good work Zaid.
Thanks again for covering this. Useful information. I heard Huberman last year positing that autism rates increased because of the increase in sonograms. I’m really kind of fed up with people trying to explain the increase, when what we need to do collectively is for everyone to be educated on how to be kinder and more open and understanding towards autistic people and their families. How to support them, not fringe theories on why they exist. Thanks again for writing on this topic.