I know you’ve all heard it before, maybe more than once: “Vaccines are safe and effective.” It’s said with such integrity; such confidence. Your brain almost refuses to question such a bold statement. But…is it really true?

So how would one prove this? Does just saying it over and over make it so? When I hear the statement that they are safe and effective, that there are “thousands of studies” proving their safety, that “they are thoroughly tested,” that “the science is settled,” I assume the following:

Vaccines go through clinical trials at least as rigorous as drugs. Every single ingredient in vaccines has been tested to see how our bodies react to them. (Here’s a list, just in case you haven’t read my first blog post yet. They’ve been studied together, to see how our bodies react to multiple vaccines at one time. The CDC schedule itself has been tested thoroughly to make sure that giving different adjuvants (like aluminum and polysorbate 80, for example) at the same time does not cause harm. There has been at least one (if not multiple) safety study on each ingredient and each vaccine as a whole using the scientific method (the gold standard of safety: a saline placebo group against a group receiving the vaccine).

What if I told you none of the above has ever happened?

Nope, not a single one.

Not only is there mounting evidence that vaccines are very unsafe, there is a glaring hole of evidence supporting the mantra that they are. I’m going to try and keep this brief, but this is important, so please bare with me.

When Reagan signed the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, I believe he did so with great reluctance because he saw where this could potentially lead, and removing all liability from the pharmaceutical companies was removing all incentive to making vaccines safer, or improving them in any way. So he placed HHS (Health and Human Services) in charge of creating safer vaccines, among other things. This is what was required of HHS (emphasis added by me):

“(a) General rule

In the administration of this part and other pertinent laws under the jurisdiction of the Secretary, the Secretary shall—

(1) promote the development of childhood vaccines that result in fewer and less serious adverse reactions than those vaccines on the market on December 22, 1987, and promote the refinement of such vaccines, and

(2) make or assure improvements in, and otherwise use the authorities of the Secretary with respect to, the licensing, manufacturing, processing, testing, labeling, warning, use instructions, distribution, storage, administration,

field surveillance, adverse reaction reporting, and recall of reactogenic lots or batches, of vaccines, and research on vaccines, in order to reduce the risks of adverse reactions to vaccines.

(b) Task force

(1) The Secretary shall establish a task force on safer childhood vaccines which shall consist of the Director of the National Institutes of Health, the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and the Director of the Centers for Disease Control.

(2) The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall serve as chairman of the task force.

(3) In consultation with the Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines, the task force shall prepare recommendations to the Secretary concerning implementation of the requirements of subsection (a).

(c) Report

Within 2 years after December 22, 1987, and periodically thereafter, the Secretary shall prepare and transmit to the Committee on Energy and Commerce of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Labor and Human Resources of the Senate a report describing the actions taken pursuant to subsection (a) during the preceding 2-year period.” [1]

ICAN (Informed Consent Action Network), a small nonprofit organization concerned about these topics, submitted a FOIA (freedom of information act) request to see these reports. They’re supposed to respond to a request within 20 days, but ICAN waited a year and finally ended up filing a law suit. They requested one of the following:

1) documents or records proving that the work was completed as mandated (above), 2) a credible response detailing why the documents cannot be released, or 3) a statement confirming that the work was never completed.

The lawsuit went to court and they settled with a court ordered stipulation confirming that HHS had not completed its duties regarding vaccine safety. They have failed to submit biennial reports for the last 30 years.

Read that again. HHS has failed in its duties when it comes to vaccine safety. The one agency whose duty it was to have monitored the pharmaceutical companies and protected our children, did not do so.

ICAN also submitted a 20+ page document questioning how the HHS can establish safety without doing proper safety studies, and HHS did take them seriously and responded with an 11 page document listing over 1,000 studies on vaccine safety. So ICAN did the right thing, and took a year to actually read every single study and sent back an 88 page response. [2] I highly encourage you to at least look through that document. It takes days to read, but just taking people’s word for it and trusting that our government health agencies will do their job is where America has gone so wrong. We can do better.

After reading through those 1,000 studies, signed off by all of the major authorities, the proof was beyond refute. So let’s compare drugs to vaccines. Here is an example of how a drug is tested.

One group gets the drug, one group gets a sugar pill or a saline injection. No one knows which group they’re in, you monitor them for a few years (most of the time, it’s 4-5 years), and then you see what the health outcomes were. Who had more heart attacks? Who had what weird symptom that ends up being listed as a side effect if enough of them complained of the same thing? And you also get to see the efficacy.

Here’s some examples of vaccine safety studies:

In fact, not a single vaccine has been tested against a true saline placebo except for the Gardasil vaccine, and that they did with three groups. One got the vaccine, one got a dose of AAHS (amorphous aluminum hydroxyphosphate sodium), and the third group got a saline placebo. And then when they didn’t like the numbers of adverse events compared to the saline, they combine the two groups (AAHS group and saline group). You can see that on the package insert. [3]

There’s three groups in each table for the mild reactions, and then you scroll down to severe reactions and suddenly, there’s only two groups. One can assume the reaction rate of the saline group was zero and they wanted to even out the numbers a little more. If you want to read more about how all of this went down, the very pro-vaccine journal Slate has done a wonderful job of documenting the fraud and unscientific methods used in those clinical trials. [4]

When I’ve talked to people so far, there are two responses to the fact that there are no true placebos in the childhood vaccine world. Some people say that of course there are, anti-vaxxers are just lying. To that, my response is, court cases are not won against the government based on lies.

When they do admit that the safety studies haven’t been properly done, the response becomes that it is unethical to leave children unprotected against the disease the vaccine covers for the amount of time needed to do a trial. To that I say, “Are you actually going to do a trial that lasts a few years? Because that would be great! Otherwise, I’m pretty sure 4-5 days is survivable.” Or, “Unprotected from chicken pox? Or Hepatitis B? (I’m pretty sure my newborn isn’t at risk for an STD.) If most of these vaccines were rushed onto the market because children were literally dying in the streets, that can’t be said for all of them, and the ones where this doesn’t apply, should have been properly tested. At the very least.

In the end, no matter the excuse, the fact is this: vaccines haven’t been properly tested. The only study that could truly establish safety has never been done. The study taking the health outcomes of a group of unvaccinated children and comparing them to a group of fully vaccinated children has never been done in a randomized clinical trial.

Since that is apparently unethical to do with any vaccine, even before we know it’s efficacy profile, we are left with retrospective studies. Epidemiological studies that look at populations and compare groups. These can only ever prove correlation. Their highest aim is to provide a possible link that would always require studies with better scientific methods to ever come close to answering questions about causality. Most of them still compare vaccinated children with slightly less vaccinated children which to me makes them completely meaningless. We would never compare a pack a day smokers to those who smoke a pack a month and say we could draw any sort of conclusion from a study designed that way.

Side note: we actually did do that. Big tobacco proved cigarettes didn’t cause cancer with studies like that. *wink* [5]

We do, however, have a few studies looking retrospectively at vaccinated children and completely unvaccinated children:

The first one is from Africa, done by the same scientists who vaccinated the children (so you can assume where their bias would lean). They controlled for all of the variables. Healthy user bias is not a concern because the children left unvaccinated were actually not vaccinated because they were too sick to get vaccinated at that time. I think this study is extremely well powered and reading the entire thing is quite an experience. It showed that vaccinated children were 10 times more likely to die (from other causes) than unvaccinated children when given just DPT. If given DPT and the oral polio vaccine at the same time, they were 5 times more likely to die than the unvaccinated.

“All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis. Though a vaccine protects children against the target disease it may simultaneously increase susceptibility to unrelated infections.” [6]

This one was in America with homeschool children. The vaccinated had less measles and pertussis…but were much more likely to have neurodevelopmental disorders, asthma, eczema, chronic illnesses, ADHD, and other issues. [7]

**edited in 2020 to add this new study by Dr Thomas in Oregon who got his medical license removed (hopefully temporarily) as a result of publishing it. He studied his own practice, comparing the results of unvaccinated, partially vaccinated (or those following a more delayed schedule) and fully vaccinated.

Across the board, the less vaccines a child received, the healthier they were overall. When measuring autism, the unvaccinated group had one child with a diagnosis. That was 1 in 715 children. Those following Dr Thomas’s delayed schedule had a rate of 1 in 440. Compare that to the National rate which is 1 in 45. [8]

But despite studies like the above that show obvious problems, the powers that be have so far refused to do a large scale, legitimate study of this kind. The data are already there. It isn’t unethical to look at data that already exist. All they’d have to do is look, but they’ve actually moved all of this data to the VSD which is privately owned so it cannot even be accessed by FOIA requests. Instead, most of their energy is expended in trying to eliminate their last control group.

It’s the one thing that would shut anti-vaxxers up for good, though. Doing a Vaxxed versus completely unvaxxed study could answer all of our questions. If vaccines are as safe as they claim, a study like this would be undeniable proof that vaccines are free and clear of all these accusations, plus the added benefit of no vaccine-preventable illness. It would exonerate them once and for all!

Or would it?

Why do YOU think no one has done this study?

1. https://www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress/house-bill/5546
2. https://www.icandecide.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ICAN-Reply-1.pdf
3. https://www.fda.gov/media/74350/download
4. https://slate.com/health-and-science/2017/12/flaws-in-the-clinical-trials-for-gardasil-made-it-harder-to-properly-assess-safety.html
5. https://www.shortform.com/blog/tobacco-industry/
6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28188123
7. https://www.rescuepost.com/files/mawson-et-al-2017-vax-unvax-jnl-translational-science.pdf
8. https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/22/8674/htm