Yves here. Articles like this drive me crazy. The efforts to shore up a discredited medical orthodoxy, here with vaccines, demonstrates in a pet peeve cognitive bias, that of black and white thinking.
It is undeniable that RFK, Jr. getting a much bigger platform thanks to his Presidential campaign and now his role as head of HHS, has played a big role in the dangerous decline in vaccination, particularly among the young. However, the fact that RFK, Jr. is dangerously wrong with his measles vaccine alarmism and his doubling down on the bogus claim that it causes autism does not mean that all the vaccines being pushed onto patients are warranted….as this article tacitly assumes.
In general, American medicine has a strong, money-driven propensity to overtesting and overtreatment. Vaccines are one example. And that’s before getting to the ginormous controversy about Covid vaccine injuries, which are a legitimate cause for outrage, not merely for the harm done but the lack of adequate disclosure plus many being coerced into taking them as a condition of employment. That is the elephant in the room that has greatly increased distrust of what passes for medical authority.
Exhibit A is the childhood vaccine schedule. Have a gander (or visit the CDC site):
You will see the Hep B vaccine starts immediately…when pray tell how will babies or toddlers contract Hep B? By stepping on a needle with live virus on it? That is literally the sort of scenario used to justify it.
Confirming that view, from the Mayo Clinic:
Common ways that HBV can spread are:
Sexual contact. You may get hepatitis B if you have sex with someone who is infected and you don’t use a condom. The virus can pass to you if the person’s blood, saliva, semen or vaginal fluids enter your body.
Sharing of needles. HBV easily spreads through needles and syringes that are tainted with infected blood. Sharing equipment used to inject illicit drugs puts you at high risk of hepatitis B.
Accidental needlesticks. Hepatitis B is a concern for healthcare workers and anyone else who comes in contact with human blood.
Pregnant person to newborn. Pregnant people infected with HBV can pass the virus to their babies during childbirth. But the newborn can be vaccinated to prevent getting infected in almost all cases. Talk with your healthcare professional about being tested for hepatitis B if you are pregnant or want to become pregnant.
From IM Doc:
When the boys were born – and they came with the shots the 1st day of life, I thought my wife was going to bust a gut.
She yelled at the pediatrician – her ne (milk) is comprised of her chi – and she is donating her very life stream to her kids to protect them – until the breast milk stops there will be no shots – and I will fire you if you bring it up again. It is a Buddhist thing.
All the kids vaccines were delayed until they were about 11 months when the breast feeding stopped – if I am remembering correctly. There was no negotiation. Any attempt to force COVID vaccines – and she will be home-schooling the kids. She is a very very bright person – she is a graduate of [XYZ University] – their version of MIT – but there is no way on earth that will be done with our kids. What I think does not matter, trust me. If we do vaccinate the kids – she will be taking them home to China and get their vaccine. “I will not dream of letting these scum companies inject my kids – they lie every day – what if they are lying about the vaccine.”
And later:
It is absolutely true – my wife and I were literal human shields in the nursery with the twins –
They were not out of our sight –
Here is the thing – EVERY SINGLE NURSE VISIT to the room – EVERY TIME – we were always questioned about the Hep B Vaxx. The same cannot be said for poo pee food mom’s health sleep burp whatever – those all got short shrift – when they found out that we were not interested – the Hep B pressure came on.
Mind you, I do get vaccines and even asked for my tetanus booster. But I refuse low efficacy ones like the flu shot and ones like Hep B where I do not engage in behaviors that put me at risk of contagion. The fact that I feel the need to be discriminating speaks volumes about our system.
By Elisabeth Rosenthal, senior contributing editor who joined KFF Health News in 2016 as editor-in-chief after 22 years as a correspondent with The New York Times. Originally published at KFF Health News
President Donald Trump’s administrations have been notorious for an array of “alternative facts” — ranging from the relatively minor (the size of inaugural crowds) to threats to U.S. democracy, such as who really won the 2020 election.
And over the past six months, the stakes have been life or death: Trump’s health officials have been endorsing alternative facts in science to impose policies that contradict modern medical knowledge.
It is an undeniable fact — true science — that vaccines have been miraculous in preventing terrible diseases from polio to tetanus to measles. Numerous studies have shown they do not cause autism. That is accepted by the scientific community.
Yet Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has no medical background or scientific training, doesn’t believe all that. The consequences of such misinformation have already been deadly.
For decades, the vast majority Americans willingly got their shots — even if a significant slice of parents had misgivings. A 2015 survey found that 25% of parents believed that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine could cause autism. (A 1998 study that suggested the connection has been thoroughly discredited.) Despite that concern, just 2% of children entering kindergarten were exempted from vaccinations for religious or philosophical objections. Kids got their shots.
But more recently, poor government science communication and online purveyors of misinformation have tilled the soil for alternative facts to grow like weeds. In the 2024-25 school year, rates of full vaccination for those entering kindergarten dropped to just over 92%. In more than a dozen states, the rate was under 90%, and in Idaho it was under 80%. And now we have a stream of measles cases, more than 1,300 from a disease declared extinct in the U.S. a quarter-century ago.
It’s easy to see how both push and pull factors led to the acceptance of bad science on vaccines.
The number of recommended vaccines has ballooned this century, overwhelming patients and parents. That is, in large part, because the clinical science of vaccinology has boomed (that’s good). And in part because vaccines, which historically sold for pennies, now often sell for hundreds of dollars, becoming a source of big profits for drugmakers.
In 1986, a typical child was recommended to receive 11 vaccine doses — seven injections and four oral. Today, that number has risen to between 50 and 54 doses by age 18.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which renders judgments on vaccines, makes a scientific risk-benefit assessment: that the harm of getting the disease is greater than the risk of side effects. That does not mean that all vaccines are equally effective, and health officials have done a lackluster job of fostering public understanding of that fact.
Older vaccines — think polio and measles — are essentially 100% effective; diseases that parents dreaded were wiped off the map. Many newer vaccines, though recommended and useful (and often heavily advertised), don’t carry the same emotional or medical punch.
Parents of the current generation haven’t experienced how sick a child could be with measles or whooping cough, also called pertussis. Mothers didn’t really worry about hepatitis B, a virus generally transmitted through sex or intravenous drug use, infecting their child.
That lack of understanding spawned skeptics. For example, since 2010, the vaccine for influenza, which had been around for decades, has been recommended annually for all Americans at least 6 months old. In the 2024-25 season, the rate of flu vaccination was only between 36% and 54% in adults; in other years, it has been lower than that. “I got the flu vaccine, and I still got the flu” has been a common refrain of skeptics.
“Pre-covid, there were people who took everything but flu,” said Rupali Limaye, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, who studies vaccine demand and acceptance. “Then it became everything but covid. Now it’s everything — including MMR and polio.”
Even as the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed helped develop covid vaccines, conservative media outlets created doubts that the shots were needed: doubts that mRNA technology had been sufficiently tested; doubts that covid-19 was bad enough to merit a shot; concerns that the vaccines could cause infertility or autism.
Trump did little to correct these dangerous misperceptions and got booed by supporters when he said that he’d been vaccinated. Once vaccine mandates came into play, Trump strongly opposed them, reframing belief in the vaccine as a question of personal liberty. And if the government couldn’t mandate the covid shot for school, it followed that officials shouldn’t — couldn’t — mandate others.
Thus 100 years of research proving the virtues of vaccination got dropped into a stew of alternative facts. You were either pro- or anti-vaccine, and that signaled your politics. Suddenly, the anti-vax crowd was not a small fringe of liberal parents, but a much larger group of conservative stalwarts who believed that being forced to vaccinate their kids to enter school violated their individual rights.
Even within the Trump administration, there have been some who (at least partly) decried the trend. While Marty Makary, the Food and Drug Administration commissioner, defended Kennedy’s decision to roll back the recommendation that all Americans get annual covid boosters — saying the benefits were unproven — he noted it should not be a signal to stop taking other shots.
As “public trust in vaccination in general has declined,” he wrote, the reluctance to vaccinate had harmed “vital immunization programs such as that for measles–mumps–rubella (MMR) vaccination, which has been clearly established as safe and highly effective.”
Nonetheless, Makary’s boss, Kennedy, continued to promote bad science about vaccines broadly, even as he sometimes grudgingly acknowledged their utility in cases like a measles outbreak. He has funded new research on the already disproven link between MMR shots and autism. He has halted $500 million in grants for developing vaccines using mRNA technology, the novel production method used for the first covid vaccines and a technique scientists believe holds great promise for preventing deaths from other infectious diseases.
In my 10 years practicing as a physician, I never saw a case of measles. Now there are cases in 40 states. More than 150 people have been hospitalized, and three, all unvaccinated, have died.
Alternative facts have formed what David Scales, a physician and sociologist at Weill Cornell Medical College who studies misinformation, calls “an unhealthy information system.” It is an alternative scientific universe in which too many Americans live. And some die.
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My attitude is quite like yours, Yves, and unfortunately it gave “openings” for anti-vaxxers on other platforms. Thus I simply do automatic moderation on everything. It hasn’t stopped one idiot from continuing to post: I just laugh and took screenshots of the worst and (According to UK Law) illegal stuff said against me. Ironically I in 30 seconds identified the main perpetrator and was both amused and somewhat let down that the person is a 20 something obviously living in Mum’s basement. The fact he keeps focussing on me suggests he may have a crush on me….which makes it funny in a “not funny at all” way.
But it’s a pity I had to resort to this. But with brain fog coming and going I simply don’t have the mental strength to deal with the abuse. I post when I’m more “with it” and go quiet when I’m not. It’s a pity I could say more on certain NC topics that are posted on a day when the fog is bad but that’s life. I just am thankful for the “symptom management” stuff I’ve got from you/here.In conjunction with the NHS Long COVID service I feel I’m in the best hands I can be. I’m in for the long-haul and donated to NC for first time in years.
Long live the COVID brain-trust!
Alternative facts have formed what David Scales, a physician and sociologist at Weill Cornell Medical College who studies misinformation, calls “an unhealthy information system.” It is an alternative scientific universe in which too many Americans live.
Author Rosenthal, above, thinks that she is summing up, but she is in fact repeating the flawed view that causes so many of these problems. The well-meaning scientist insisting that there is “misinformation” is one step away from the monotheist insisting that there are “misbelievers.”
As I M Doc points out above, for a Buddhist (and for an Epicurean and for the followers of Diogenes the Cynic), judgment matters more.
One cannot blabber about “believing” in the theory of evolution. One either accepts the data and observations or not. One cannot “believe” in salvation by faith alone. One either accepts the lack of evidence or not. So the information / belief / Calvinist religious system in the U S of A spills over into vaccines.
There is never going to be uniformity of belief. The best that we can do is to discourage people from harming themselves and those around them.
The eightfold noble path of Buddhism. Note that belief and misinformation don’t enter:
Right View (Sammā Diṭṭhi)
Right Intention (Sammā Saṅkappa)
Right Speech (Sammā Vācā)
Right Action (Sammā Kammanta)
Right Livelihood (Sammā Ājīva)
Right Effort (Sammā Vāyāma)
Right Mindfulness (Sammā Sati)
Right Concentration (Sammā Samādhi)
I don’t seen anything about undeniable true science. I don’t see anything about predestination.
There are a number of major theories developed in science that do hold up: Germ theory, the theory of evolution, plate tectonics, the theory of gravity, color theory in optics. Yet much of the rest is reliable hypotheses.
And life is also an experiment. When the ASL of the Undisclosed Region scheduled me for my two appointments for the shingles vaccine, and my appointment for the pneumonia vaccine, I queried my doctor. His response: I heartily endorse vaccination. I went.
Aside from Buddhism, it makes practical sense to let a new baby get his immune system goodies first from mother’s milk, and when that is done and the baby is also a smidge more developed, then consider administering vaccines.
Yves Smith: Agreed. As I read the article originally, I clicked through to the bigger version of the vaccines chart, and I discovered that the proposal is for two doses of six vaccines by the age of four months. It gave me pause, especially considering that breast milk is naturally able to enhance a baby’s immune system.
I wonder if the vaccine schedule is front-loaded because of something to do with insurance payments. Is that possible? It’s all financial? Get the vaccines in while insurance companies are willing / obligated to pay for “well baby” care?
Agreed to both of you. One good thing about the decidedly patchy NHS online system is that I found I could look up ALL my vaccination history as a kid.
Back in the 1970s (pre-MMR etc) mothers were called in frequently for vaccines once stopping breast feeding. The “matrix” has literally 36 cells (different vaccines vs boosters). I was impressed that mum got 35 out of 36 for me.
Unfortunately she (like many) got freaked by the first pertussis vaccine scare in mid 1970s. My younger sister’s matrix looks like a chess board. She subsequently got whooping cough, pneumonia (twice) and now has other things a clinician could quite easily link to those lack of vaccinations. I got a bunch of exta vaccines later in life: for things like typhoid, cholera etc in early teens in preparation for a school trip, then all the HEP ones once I became sexually active. Pity there’s no EBV one because it is increasingly being suspected to be problematic in conditions like Long COVID, ME, etc. I got glandular fever in my 20s but didn’t learn til Sydney identified it via the antibody/antigen test.
From AAP:
This is a desperate and frankly dishonest defense.
If a mother is giving birth at a hospital, there is plenty of time to give her a Hep B test. Babies do not pop out instantly.
Hep B among pregnant mothers is estimated at 0.5%
The CDC schedule is in contraction to official recommendations, which are that the vaccine be administered only to newborns of infected women:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6505332/
There is NO justification for mass administration of Hep B to newborns. None.
The recommendation for vaccination at birth of children born to any mother, not just those seropositive for hepatitis B, comes from a 2018 recommendation by the CDC advisory committee on immunization practices.
This is based on the fact that the consequences of hepatitis B infection in infancy can be devastating, resulting in a very high rate (80-90%) of chronic hepatitis B infection, as opposed to much lower rate (<1-12%) of chronic infection later in life. Hepatitis B infection, if untreated, will lead to dire consequences.
The recommendation to vaccinate at birth acknowledges that mistakes may occur in reality: that there may be "situations where the mother was not tested or when testing, interpretation, or transcription errors [occur]." Further, some women are not tested (12-16%).
Certainly, modern medicine is very conservative, and prioritizes minimizing risk of things that could potentially be catastrophic. People aren't good at evaluating such risks, especially if they are potentially far in the future and particularly when weighed against something which seems negative in the here and now. If a mother absolutely is not positive for hepatitis B, there is no need for vaccination of the infant until such a time as they would become at risk from other behaviours, but if there is a shadow of a doubt, why take the chance?
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/rr/rr6701a1.htm
Every mother admitted to hospital to give birth is tested for hep b (and syphilis, eg). If they test positive for hep b, that is the ONLY justification for vaccination of their newborn against hep b. Vaccination of any other baby is medical malpractice.
Went for a measles vaccine last month as my parents weren’t sure I’d had it as a child (mom’s 87 and dad’s 94, so because both are still going strong, I had someone to ask). And still NOVID after six years . . . and just back from the first of two shingle vaccines an hour ago.
Note; no word yet on when the latest and greatest COVID vaccine will become available (this, straight from the pharmacist’s mouth). Got Novavax last two times, want theirs again, if possible.
Anyway, nobody will love you like you’ll love yourself, so be careful out there.
—
John, still masking ‘and’ horking saline/PVP after every excursion in public
Hey John: On reddit, this seems useful. It’s not clear, but it’s hoped that late August will see at least an announcement. I think it will be the same formulation as last year, targeting JN.1; there is some discussion of that choice. I think I’ll get it again. Hope this helps you.
The conflation of “vaccines “ to include every single vaccine, even the ineffective and dangerous and unnecessary ones (hep B for newborns!?!) is classic propaganda, or, if you prefer, pharmaceutical cartel salesmanship. Not surprising that the author is a 22 yr veteran of the NYTIMES. WMD’s, Vaccines- we lie for money….
When they realized that the Covid “vaccine” didn’t actually prevent us from getting and transmitting Covid, they simply redefined the meaning of the word. The word “vaccine” had the meaning of a treatment which conferred immunity ever since Edward Jenner coined the term in 1796. The fact that the medical profession had to change the definition in order to justify forcing these jabs on us should tell us everything we need to know. We’re being gaslight. If it doesn’t confer immunity I’m not sure what it is but it most definitely is not a vaccine.
It’s bio warfare against us. I’m just not sure whether the COVID disease or the “vaccines “ were the main vector- probably both.
…medical profession…
I think it should be called the medical industry
That is false.
We have had flu vaccines for decades and they do not confer immunity.
You need a booster every 10 years for tetanus.
Which one was Governor / Presidential Candidate Rick “Good Hair” Perry pushing? He made Dubya look like Einstein.
No vaccine achieves total population seroconversion (including mainstays like the measles vaccine). It is herd immunity that does the rest.
I thought that vaccines were a tool that helps your body fight-off the disease. One still might get it but it would be less severe.
Low confidence, and mistrust, color discussions of pharmaceuticals. I am not alone in wanting transparency about vaccines, and would like to start with the following:
Standard, verifiable testing regimens that survive replication, for all meds.
No manufacturer certifications in place of testing, as those cents are by definition suspect.
Dissemination of VAERS data and thorough periodic review of anomalous results.
Bring back manufacturer liability.
Disclosure of all financial funding sources and related conflicts of interest.
Elimination of apparent regulatory capture as part of a wholesale restructuring of the FDA.
No revolving door personnel games. And pass that along to Wall Street, SEC and others.
This hepatitis B thing must be new, my now 36 and 40 year olds weren’t harassed about it. Guess it took a while to get ginned up. I got the vax as a sexually active gay man.
On the covid vax, seems like the whole thing is a distraction from the real solution: clean the damn air, starting with schools. But all the arguing about a second rate vaccine gives no room to talk about a real solution. We did it with water – dysentery, typhoid, cholera, and many others aren’t a concern where clean water is available.
Easy to think this situation is entirely accidental.
I’m of way more than two minds on Covid vaccine injuries. I wish there would be a long, hard, thorough and dispassionate study of such possible injuries, or perhaps many such studies.
The public health establishment would likely oppose it (“Covid is so over,” and “We did a great job,” and “Why are you all trying to make us look bad?” etc.) Big pharma would also—I think they would oppose it even if they knew the results would be favorable, because they just don’t want to be looked at (“Will they stumble upon something else we’ve done wrong?”). Finally, I imagine it would be scientifically difficult as well, so much data to go through (and probably so much lost or never collected), of variable quality, so many factors to consider. I’d very much like to be contradicted by someone who knows what they are talking about.
I don’t think it can happen. I’ll just go on wondering. Am I reading a conspiracy theory? Is the public health official reassuring me dishonestly, hopefully, or stupidly, or should I stop worrying and “believe?” (People who won’t believe are just BAD. It’s a shame we let them vote, or talk, or breathe… or whatever they think they’re doing…)
Sorry, I’ll try to make more sense next time.
Due to Covid19 vaccine hesitancy, it is not difficult scientifically to develop a sufficiently high-powered epi study, if the funds were made available. It is also possible to design the study so that it gets whatever answer one wants, specifically, on the criteria used to select participants, which is key when reading the paper.
For example, when I read in the initial Covid19 vax report that any participant with co-morbidities (who would most need a vaccine) was removed from the initial vaccine efficacy and safety tests (hidden, if I recall correctly, on page 42 and then deep in supplemental), my suspicions were raised, as that should have been mentioned in the study design section up front.
Thank you. The clever study design part is what would worry me.
I think I did read something about the participant selection (certainly I did NOT read the report itself) in a discussion of one of the mRNA vaccine trials.
I think the bigger point is how much the knowledge industry has been coopted by profit interests, including gatekeeping of scientific journals.
I don’t have a biology background but have a math degree and over the years my faith in mainstream science has been effectively destroyed. You link to “proof” that vaccines don’t cause autism, but it is not a mathematical proof. It is a persuasive essay, not proof. Not that I’m saying vaccines do cause autism – I’m agnostic on the subject, but also thoroughly disgusted how the topic has been made a virtue signal instead of a subject of research. Note that correlation and causality are of course different things, and all or nothing thinking should be avoided in all science.
Personally I think RFK Jr is a good shakeup, even if I disagree with some of his views. There is just so much corruption and we need a shakeup.
I agree with your main point, but re autism, you don’t seem to be up on the research..
The Wakefiled study that created the scare has been utterly discredited.
The supposed rise in autism is largely due to moving the diagnostic goalpost (picks up way more what would have been called Aspgergers cases and includes them as autistic; there have been no/very little increase in the more severe type) and women being much older when they have babies.
The anti-vaxxers did a study, small scale, that they claimed proved the connection. They raised $ to do a bigger study on primates. Total backfire. Strongly disproved their contention.
Today’s turning into a brain fog day so apologies if I have misremembered, but did NC once draw attention to a study showing the roughly halving of microbiome stuff in gut in each generation and some exploratory work suggesting it might help explain (in addition to new diagnostic criteria you mention) increases in autism?
IIRC this leaned more on correlation rather than proof of causation but I’ve noticed the recent articles on gut and brain links, especially as I’m on the ultimate antidepressant that affects both. (Tell me to shut up if this is a make work request).
I would agree with the generally crapulent state of the knowledge industry especially as it pertains to scientific publishing (KLG has written a lot of great stuff here about this). However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of great people doing great research, which often (but not always) ends up in “high impact-factor” journals.
One such article you might appreciate is the following, which shows that between 1980-1994 no association between vaccination rates (up 14%) and autism (up 373%) in thousands of (Californian) children. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11231748/)
Now, mathematically speaking, an “association” is a mealy-mouthed way of saying “we think this but cannot prove it,” but it is important to note that the original vaccines cause autism study relied on case studies of only 12 children, a vanishingly small sample size.
There are many other such studies that do not support a link between vaccines and autism. What researcher in their right mind is going to go after investigating a link if there is a preponderance of research showing that there most likely is not?
it is important to note that the original vaccines cause autism study relied on case studies of only 12 children, a vanishingly small sample size.
That study was also a major reason for the first author, Andrew Wakefield, to be struck off.
The book Science Mart will sort that for you mate.
You were complicit too a small degree IMO.
A question for Yves Smith:
Do you have any medical accreditations? If not, what is the level of your formal scientific training? Do you have a degree?
I trained as a medical student (I dropped out just before Finals) and this post reads like it was written by someone suffering from Dunning-Krugar syndrome. No offence intended.
Well, the Dunning-Kruger effect is all over the place (although not everyone accepts it fully (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruger-effect-isnt-what-you-think-it-is). Sorry, couldn’t get the link tag to work—overestimated my skills again. Edit: damn, it worked, what happened?
I’m also having a little trouble finding the syndrome (obviously a serious mental health condition). Perhaps I’m not up on the latest research. Not the least bit of offense intended.
The Hep B vaccine in newborns has prevented many an infection and liver cancer.
Public Health is not about individuals but populations. The kind of privileged thinking on display in this text gets kids dead. And the opinion shared from IM Doc about vaccines is very similar to Kennedy’s.
Women can test negative to Hep B and be infected and infectious. A Hep B infection is more likely to become chronic the younger the age at infection. Poorer people do not get proper prenatal screenings. Vaccines aren’t about individuals, they are population wide interventions.
Vaccinating all infants against Hep B is a good policy that saves lives. Please check your privilege at the door.
“IM Doc Jr,” eh? Is that someone piggy-backing on IM Doc’s reputation?