“In my experience, most people assume that clinical trials for childhood vaccines review safety for years, involve hundreds of thousands of children, and include a placebo control group so that outcomes in the group receiving the vaccine can be compared against the control group…
[T]he dark cold reality is that each time a childhood vaccine has been unleashed for injection into millions of children, its safety profile was, at best, unknown.”
—Aaron Siri, Vaccines Amen: The Religion of Vaccines

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What’s the Truth about Vaccines?

Part 1 of this article began an examination of statements made by Jefferson County Public Health (JCPH) in their whimsical hand-drawn quarter-page cartoon in the Port Townsend Leader shown at right.

We reviewed the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and the liability shield granted vaccine manufacturers which led to an explosion of the childhood vaccine schedule from a handful of shots to more than 70 doses by age 18.

We looked at Big Pharma’s capture of our regulatory agencies, the fraud and corruption in our medical establishment, and the construction of a mythology so entrenched that — like a religion — its core of zealous believers will not allow any challenges to its “safe and effective” dogma. We showed how the “Vaccines Amen” crowd, both locally and nationally, demand adherence to this gospel, denounce heretics, and impose censorship or worse on those who attempt to open up the conversation about evident dangers of vaccines.

We debunked the narrative — as asserted by public health agencies from the national Centers for Disease Control (CDC) all the way down to our local health department — that multiple injections of highly toxic concoctions are safe for our babies and children.

This article will share JCPH’s response to questions we sent them about their cartoon, including a request for sources/evidence to support their claims.

And we’ll take a look at the rise in vaccine hesitancy that likely provoked the creation of the cartoon, as well as the current battle to rein in the CDC’s bloated and dangerous childhood vaccine schedule.

First, let’s look at the facts in response to two more claims by our health department in their cartoon:

“So far, there have been no credible studies that link vaccination to chronic disease.”

and

“Vaccines are tested more than any other medicine you could give your kid.”

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Do Vaccines Cause Chronic Conditions?

 

THE FACTS:

“I can’t think of an example where the unvaccinated child was not the healthier sibling. They typically did not develop these chronic illnesses that we’re talking about in terms of eczema and asthma and autism.”
—Elizabeth Mumper, M.D.

“What is causing the massive increase in autism and other chronic health conditions in children? ​
It comes down to toxins, toxins, toxins, compounded by limited nutrients that inhibit the body’s ability to detoxify. Where are these toxins coming from?
The number one source is vaccines. By injecting toxins directly into the body, you bypass the natural defense mechanisms that would normally exclude these harmful substances.
There is virtually zero autism in unvaccinated children.”
—Paul Thomas, M.D.

ARE there any credible studies that link vaccination to chronic disease? What about those pesky “rumors” that vaccines can cause autism and ADHD?

As shown in Part 1, in the 1999 CDC study comparing unvaccinated to vaccinated babies given hepatitis B shots, epidemiologist Thomas Verstraeten found increased risk not only for autism, but for sleep disorders, speech disorders, and neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD. More than a “credible study,” it caused such panic that the CDC convened a two-day secret emergency meeting, followed by manipulation of the data to refute the link found.

Just as those findings were covered up, so have other studies been suppressed which demonstrate a link between chronic conditions and vaccines.

One obvious way to determine risk of chronic conditions from vaccines, as Verstraeten did, is to compare vaxxed versus unvaxxed children. Parents have been asking for these studies — which could easily prove or disprove vaccine-related injury and death — for thirty years.

The pat response to that request is that it would be unethical to deprive children of a vaccine in a comparative trial. That argument dissolves if one does a retrospective analysis, looking at health data already on record.

Using existing health data in a retrospective analysis is exactly what Verstraeten did.

For 35 years, the CDC collected a massive database of medical records called the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD). Started in 1990, the closely-guarded VSD was comprised of electronic records from 13 healthcare organizations for nine million Americans. It contained vaccination histories, health outcomes, and subject characteristics for two million children. That is the database Verstraeten was given access to in order to analyze a possible link between vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders like autism.

“Until around 2001, the VSD was maintained at the CDC,” Aaron Siri explains. “Until that time, independent scientists who are not devout vaccine zealots were able to obtain access to the VSD at the request of members of Congress and through other legal means. The issue for the CDC is that those scientists found that vaccines cause various harms. The CDC could not have that. So the CDC moved the VSD to a health industry trade association in 2001 to avoid having the VSD data subject to FOIA [Freedom of Information Act].”

Since then, despite repeated requests, and notwithstanding the enormous database at their disposal, the CDC has refused to do further vaccinated versus unvaccinated analyses.

And in 2025 the CDC dismantled the VSD entirely. That invaluable database no longer exists. By destroying the VSD, it can never be used again for retrospective studies.

Far from our health agencies “researching these claims for decades” as stated in JCPH’s cartoon, every subterfuge available has been used to prevent that research. It has fallen to independent researchers to do the studies.

In the first peer-reviewed, published study looking at the health effects of the entire childhood vaccination schedule, in 2017 Dr. Anthony Mawson, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, surveyed over 600 parents of homeschooled 6- to 12-year olds. This small pilot study, including 261 completely unvaccinated children, offered a taste of other studies to come.

Mawson’s survey found that vaccinated children had 4.2 times the amount of autism and ADHD, 5.2 times greater odds for learning disabilities, nearly 20 times the rate of ear infections, and 30 times greater odds of allergic rhinitis. Unsurprisingly, pressure was put on the journal Frontiers in Public Health to retract publication of the study after it received over 80,000 online views the weekend it was released.

In 2021, Neil Z. Miller and Dr. Brian Hooker, chief science officer at Children’s Health Defense, co-authored the study “Health effects in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children, with covariates for breastfeeding status and type of birth.” Examining medical records of 1,565 children from three pediatric practices, they found vaccinated kids were:

• 5 times more likely to have autism

• 4 times more likely to have allergies

• 13.8 times more likely to have gastrointestinal issues

• 17.6 times more likely to have asthma

• 20.8 times more likely to have ADHD

• 27.8 times more likely to have chronic ear infections

An even larger study, published in 2020, looked at records from Dr. Paul Thomas’ pediatric practice in Portland, Oregon. Thomas had observed over more than three decades that the higher the vaccination rates among children he cared for, the more office visits they had for illnesses and chronic conditions. In his 2016 book The Vaccine Friendly Plan Thomas wrote that of the 15,000 children then under his care, fully unvaccinated kids were “by far, hands down, by any measure, the healthiest kids in my practice.”

He stressed that for parents who chose not to vaccinate at all, their children had the least need for medical care: “These are healthy kids. They have a robust immune system.”

The publication of his book and his outspoken stance on parents’ right to exercise informed consent on vaccination choices provoked repeated attacks on Thomas and his practice. The Oregon Medical Board demanded that he scientifically demonstrate that his alternative vaccination schedule was “as safe” as the CDC’s.

“I literally laughed,” Thomas said. “They’ve never proven anything they’ve done as safer than anything else.”

Records over a ten-year period were examined for 2,230 children who had been born into his practice, providing full health histories since birth. Working with research scientist James Lyons-Weiler in an independently verified analysis, a wide range of health outcomes were reviewed and tabulated.

As with previous studies, the results shown below confirm higher rates of chronic issues in vaccinated as compared to unvaccinated children. In all fifteen categories analyzed, the vaxxed children had significantly higher rates of conditions like asthma, eczema, and allergies; behavioral and developmental issues; and infections of all types.

In 2020, five days after publishing this robust, peer-reviewed analysis providing unequivocal proof that his unvaccinated patients were far healthier than the vaccinated children in his practice, the Oregon Medical Board issued an “emergency order” to suspend Thomas’ medical license. The pretext — he was a “threat to public health.”

After over 250,000 views online, publication of the Lyons-Weiler and Thomas paper was also retracted in a haze of vague excuses. A 2021 book The War on Informed Consent: The Persecution of Dr. Paul Thomas by the Oregon Medical Board is yet another exposé of the vaccine industry’s influence suppressing unfavorable medical research and the efforts to destroy heretics who pose a threat not to public health, but to public vaccine policy.

These and many other studies are detailed in the New York Times bestseller Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Brian Hooker compiled all the research that our health department says doesn’t exist — over one hundred studies in the peer-reviewed literature that consider vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations.

Their 2023 book, however, preceded a motherlode of vast proportions: Vax-Unvax data from the prestigious Henry Ford Health Foundation (HFHF).

In 2018, the lead researcher and head of Infectious Disease for HFHF, Dr. Marcus Zervos, took up the challenge to do a Vax-Unvax study after meeting with ICAN’s Del Bigtree and attorney Aaron Siri. A staunchly pro-vaccine doctor and proponent of mandatory vaccination, Zervos was certain that the results would demonstrate the superior health outcomes of vaccinated children.

So certain was he of what the data would reveal, he promised to publish the study regardless of the results.

HFHF’s sizable database yielded 18,468 subjects who met eligibility criteria for the study, the largest subject group yet in a Vax-Unvax analysis. Children were tracked over ten years.

Years went by before the study was finished. When all the data was analyzed, the results were not what Zervos expected. Impact of Childhood Vaccination and Long-Term Chronic Health Outcomes in Children: A Birth Cohort Study concludes:

“[I]n contrast to our expectations, we found that exposure to vaccination was independently associated with an overall 2.5-fold increase in the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition, when compared to children unexposed to vaccination.”

With results demolishing claims of vaccine safety, Zervos — who had pledged to publish them “no matter what” — reneged on his promise.

Zervos revealed on hidden camera that while the methodology and conclusions were solid, he could not face the likely repercussions if he disclosed the results:

“I think it’s a good study… but publishing something like that, I might as well retire. I’d be finished.”

He understood that challenging the medical orthodoxy would mean the end of his long and illustrious career.

Unable to convince Zervos to publish the study, Del Bigtree/ICAN tells the story in a powerful documentary, An Inconvenient Study. Released in October 2025, and winner of Best Film at the Malibu Film Festival, it is as much a tale of a medical system that demands adherence to its orthodoxy as it is a film shattering the myth that vaccines make kids healthier. Watch it here.

The Henry Ford data reinforces the consistent outcomes seen in smaller vax-unvax studies. Vaccinated children had:

• 5.6 times higher risk for neurodevelopmental disorders,

• 4.29 times more likelihood to have asthma,

• Three times higher risk for atopic diseases (like eczema),

• Nearly six times higher risk for autoimmune disorders — a category that includes over 80 different diseases,

• 2.9 times more motor disabilities,

• 4.7 times more speech disorders.

• Nearly four times more developmental delays,

• 6.6 times more acute and chronic ear infections.

Statistical comparatives were not even possible for some chronic conditions because there were zero cases in the unvaxxed cohort.

While over 600 vaccinated children in Henry Ford’s database had ADHD, diabetes, behavioral problems, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, tics, or other psychological disorders, out of nearly 2,000 unvaccinated children, over ten years, there wasn’t a single case of any of these chronic conditions in HFHF’s system.

And at ten years of follow-up, 57% of the vaccinated cohort had at least one chronic disorder, compared with 17% in the unvaccinated.

These studies all looked only at chronic conditions. Even more disturbing is the statistical risk of death from childhood shots. In his 2024 book Vax Facts: What to Consider Before Vaccinating at All Ages & Stages of Life, Dr. Paul Thomas compares the risk of death between vaccinated and unvaccinated children.

Government data was used to calculate the risk on each side. A summary of the methodology can be seen here.

Infants given the hepatitis B vaccine at birth were found to be three times more likely to die than those who did not get the shot. As we will see below, for 99.9% of American infants the risk of actually contracting hepatitis B is zero.

Chicken pox was considered so mild a childhood illness that when I was a kid in the 1950s parents literally held parties to spread the infection and “get it over with.” The varicella (chicken pox) vaccine was introduced in 1995 not because chicken pox was devastating children’s health — unlike vaccines, it confers lifelong immunity and helps protect against cancer later in life — but for convenience. Vaccination saved working parents the hassle of their kids being out of school for a week. The Vax Facts graphic shows children are 160 times more likely to die if given the varicella (chicken pox) vaccine than if they are unvaccinated.

And so it goes with all other routine childhood shots. Most shockingly — in sharp contrast to the conventional rhetoric about polio saving lives — the risk of death from the polio vaccine was calculated at 4,600,000 times that of not getting vaccinated against polio. Risk of death from the disease is less than one in a trillion, while risk of death from the polio vaccine is greater than 1 in 214,973.

“This is hard to believe if you haven’t heard this before,” says Thomas. “For every single vaccine on the childhood schedule, your risk of death… just looking at death because that is what parents fear the most: I don’t want my child to die of this disease for which we have a vaccine, how could I live with myself?… your risk of dying from the vaccine far exceeds your risk of dying from the disease.”

———————————————

Rigorously Tested?

 

THE FACTS:

“[Vaccine] testing is not long-term, not double blind, not done with proper placebos. Our children are being experimented on.”
—Brandy Vaughan, former Merck rep and founder of the Council for Vaccine Safety

“I challenge every physician and scientist to read Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth and make your best effort to shoot holes in the arguments it makes. I suspect that for the vast majority it will be an eye-opening experience.”
—Mary Holland, Esq., CEO of Children’s Health Defense

Is it true that vaccines are “rigorously tested to ensure their safety”?… that “in fact – vaccines are tested more than any other medicine you could give your kid”?

The myth that vaccines are the best tested of all drugs has been repeated for so many years, it is taken for granted by the medical establishment. Anyone researching this claim soon learns, however, that like so much of the official vaccine gospel, it has no basis in reality. Just the opposite is true.

A stark comparison of vaccine testing to the testing of other pharmaceuticals can be seen at a glance in this chart from the book Vaccines, Amen:

Like the risk of death comparisons, it seems unbelievable.

Vaccine manufacturers, by law, are required to describe their clinical trials on the package insert. Far from “rigorous”, the dearth of testing for many vaccines beggars belief. While other drugs have years of testing before licensure is granted, some vaccines have been approved after safety reviews of only days.

Vaccines have the worst — not the best — safety testing protocols of any pharmaceutical product. As we reported in our 2017 study guide, “gold standard” drug testing is not applied to vaccines.

It is instructive to look once again at the package insert of the HepB vaccine Recombivax HB as an example.

Pharmaceutical drugs are required to monitor subjects for years to prove safety. Not only was the duration of the Recombivax HB trial just five days, there were only 147 infants and children who took part.

And of the 147 subjects, most were healthy babies and children up to 10 years old — not newborns, who the first shot of this vaccine is foisted upon.

Beyond being underpowered (not enough subjects), the trial had no control group. None of the subjects were given a placebo to compare outcomes with. That, too, is not permissible in drug trials. But it is the norm for vaccines.

For a clinical trial to provide meaningful safety data, several thousand subjects are needed, sometimes even tens of thousands. No pharmaceutical drug could possibly be approved with only 147 subjects after five days of monitoring and no control group.

Was there any SIDS on day 6 or 7 or 8? What about autism developing over weeks or months from a toxic load of aluminum crossing the blood-brain barrier (see Part 1)? What other long-term adverse affects might there be?

The post-marketing reports for Recombivax HB offer a glimpse of issues not seen in the 5-day clinical trial that the vaccine’s approval was based on: seizures, lupus, Guillain-Barré Syndrome (paralysis), neuropathy, multiple sclerosis, and encephalitis (brain inflammation), among many others.

The hepatitis B shot, with its 500 mcg of aluminum and residual formaldehyde, is recommended to be given within 12-24 hours of birth.

How at risk for hepatitis B is that newborn?

Requiring babies to receive three HepB shots is not only insupportable given the inadequate safety testing and post-marketing adverse reactions reported, it is especially egregious because most babies are not at ANY risk for contracting the hepatitis B virus in the first place. The virus is transmitted through sexual intercourse, dirty needles among intravenous drug users, and infection during childbirth by mothers who test positive for HepB.

Assuming a newborn isn’t having sex or sharing needles, the only possible risk is transmission from the exceedingly rare mother who tests positive for hepatitis B.

But pregnant women in the U.S. are routinely screened for hepatitis B at their first prenatal visit. Only one-tenth of one percent of pregnant women test positive for the virus: 0.1%. If a mother is not HepB positive, and the baby isn’t sexually active or a drug user, there is zero risk for that baby to contract hepatitis B.

For 99.9% of American babies, receiving a HepB injection is all risk, no benefit. And for that minuscule 0.1% who are at risk, less than 5% of those who do get infected experience permanent damage.

So why are all birthing women told their newborns need a HepB shot on the day they are born when nearly all are not at any risk? And then another shot at two months? And six months? Stories abound of hospitals threatening to call Child Protective Services (CPS) when parents refuse this day-one HepB shot.

That is the power of Pharma’s capture of the regulatory system, and of believers convinced that vaccines are always safe and effective, along with the equally pervasive mantra, “Vaccines Save Lives.”

The reality is that vaccines can take lives.

Just one example is of a family’s newborn son who died after being injected with RSV and HepB vaccines. “His parents did not want to get them but they were threatened with CPS so they complied.”

SIDS deaths reported to the CDC following vaccination is shown below for four common childhood vaccines, including hepatitis B. What was the benefit for those 410 mothers whose infants died after receiving HepB shots? How many of those babies were likely to die from the virus?

The HepB shot’s lack of safety testing is far from an outlier. Not a single vaccine on the childhood schedule has undergone the “gold standard” randomized control trial required of other drugs. None have been tested against a true placebo, which means that an accurate safety profile was never established.

Vaccine safety advocates have petitioned the CDC for proof of true placebo-based trials.

None exists.

In Vaccines, Amen, Aaron Siri shows the lack of proper controls and absence of placebo testing for every vaccine given through the first six months of life:

Much has been written about this lack of safety testing. In 2022 a group of Israeli researchers published the deepest dive yet. Along with other vaccine myths, Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth, “examines in detail the institutional claims that vaccines are extremely safe and that their safety has been established by rock-solid science.”

With over 1200 references and 500+ pages, Turtles All the Way Down distills hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers, mainstream textbooks, the official publications of relevant government agencies, and manufacturers’ documents into an easy-to-read resource. The first part of the book is a systematic and thorough review of safety testing for every childhood vaccine.

The book’s final chapter, “The Vaccine Hoax,” summarizes their comprehensive investigation:

• Each and every one of the vaccines on the US CDC-recommended childhood schedule has been tested in clinical trials against another vaccine (or vaccine-like compound) that has a similar scope of side effects. Not a single one was tested against a true placebo, a neutral compound with no significant side effects.

• The clinical trials’ designers use this technique to cover up the high rate of adverse events expected with each new vaccine. Thus, the new vaccine can be declared “safe” and its side effects proclaimed “normal”, as the recorded side effects do not substantially exceed those of the other vaccine.

• When every new childhood vaccine is tested for safety against another vaccine, which itself was tested against another vaccine, which was tested against another vaccine, — well, you get the picture — it’s turtles all the way down.

• The use of this intentionally flawed trial methodology means that every vaccine on the US childhood schedule received FDA approval without a true measure of the actual magnitude of its adverse events.

“Current vaccine clinical trial methodology completely invalidates the claims that vaccines are safe and that they are thoroughly and rigorously tested,” they assert. “And pulling out that bogus card completely topples the childhood vaccine program’s house of cards.”

Again, the bigger question is risk-benefit.

People can accept that there may be risk from a vaccine — IF that risk is less than the risk from the disease it is targeting.

We’ve already seen the Vax Facts “Risk of Death” graph. In 2025 Physicians for Informed Consent published another analysis: Comparing 10 Disease Risks to Vaccine Risks.

It considers not just risk of death, but also risk of permanent disability. These combined risks from childhood vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), polio, haemophilus influenza type B, varicella (chicken pox), hepatitis B, measles, mumps and rubella are compared to the risk of death or permanent disability from the disease itself.

Again, in every case the vaccine has caused more death and permanent disabilities than the disease it is designed to protect against.

While JCPH’s cartoon assures us that “children have been successfully vaccinated for generations,” the truth is that chronic disease, injury and even death outweigh any benefit received through vaccination. By every metric, most children have been damaged by vaccines far more than they have benefited by avoiding the disease.

Turtles All the Way Down final chapter, “Institutionalized Fraud,” closes its exhaustive investigation into the fictitious vaccine narrative with this chilling summation:

“The magnitude of these crimes is enormous — these entities are in way too deep to ever be able to admit any wrongdoing. They will do whatever is necessary to protect the great vaccine hoax. For them it is a matter of life and death — literally.

And so it is for us.”

——————————————

Our Health Department Responds to My Inquiry

Following the publication of the health department’s cartoon, I wrote to JCPH, requesting resources for the five statements explored in these two articles:

“Can you provide sources/evidence to support these claims in the cartoon/ad (links and/or attachments)?”:

1. “Our kids face more challenges to their immune system while playing outside than they do from vaccines.”

2. “We are exposed to more aluminum by eating a tomato than from getting vaccines!” (What information can you provide comparing the danger of ingesting aluminum to that of injecting it?)

3. “The type of mercury in vaccines – ethyl mercury – is NOT harmful to us.”

4. “So far, there have been no credible studies that link vaccination to chronic disease.”

5. “Vaccines are tested more than any other medicine you could give your kid.”

I also asked:

• Who developed the content for this cartoon/ad? JCPH or an outside agency?

• Has there been a reduction in childhood vaccine uptake in the county?

I received this friendly response from Public Health Communications Specialist Alyssa Zawawi:

Hi Ana,

Thanks for reaching out to JCPH! The ad you referenced was developed by JCPH. Here are some resources that support the claims you are asking about:

1. The American Academy of Pediatrics published this article about if vaccines can overwhelm a child’s immune system and includes data about how many antigens we are exposed to in our daily lives: https://www.aap.org/en/news-room/fact-checked/fact-checked-receiving-multiple-vaccines-does-not-overwhelm-a-childs-immune-system/?srsltid=AfmBOoom-T8q459schs1FxNVIcjzDGxznf9XzLFPYMy6MmCCDAHtrR62

2. This article from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Vaccine Education Center has information on the use of aluminum salts in vaccines and includes a section on ingesting vs injecting aluminum: https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety/vaccine-ingredients/aluminum

3. The American Academy of Pediatrics writes about thimerosal (ethyl-mercury) in this article: https://www.aap.org/en/news-room/fact-checked/fact-checked-extensive-research-shows-thimerosal-is-safe/?srsltid=AfmBOoqCbGxbKslDV6IfEvk3RBKjgfvN_MgXKF4U6XIujSQyI6Is7O_X

4. Here are a few resources from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia that talk about vaccines and chronic disease: https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety/vaccines-and-other-conditions ; https://www.chop.edu/parents-pack/parents-pack-newsletter/feature-article-do-vaccines-cause-chronic-diseases

5. This article from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health outlines the vaccine testing and approval process: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/how-the-us-ensures-vaccine-safety

You can also check out Washington State Department of Health’s Immunization Dashboard (https://doh.wa.gov/data-and-statistical-reports/washington-tracking-network-wtn/immunization-data/county-public-health-measures-dashboard). This resource has a lot of information on immunization trends over time by county. For more information on vaccination rates in Jefferson County, you can also reach out to our Health Officer, Dr. Allison Berry at aberry@co.jefferson.wa.us.

Best,

Alyssa Zawawi
Public Health Communications Specialist
Jefferson County Public Health

Not surprisingly, the cartoon developed in-house by JCPH is a compilation of talking points from pharma-funded pillars of vaccine gospel.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Vaccine Education Center and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health are powerful mouthpieces for the established narrative. Their ability to deny, obfuscate and manipulate information is formidable.

We’ve already addressed numbers 4 and 5 earlier in this article. But let’s look again at the issues raised by numbers 1-3 (already touched upon in Part 1) and how the health department’s trusted sources are misleading the public.

1. “Our kids face more challenges to their immune system while playing outside than they do from vaccines.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics explains that we’re exposed in our daily lives to far more antigens (small molecules found on bacteria and viruses that elicit an immune response) than are injected through vaccination.

But the number of antigens we are exposed to is not the primary concern. The vaccines’ highly toxic formulations injected directly into the bloodstream and bypassing complex natural defenses is what is at issue (see Part 1).

Why would the AAP create this misdirect to deny vaccine damage?

Children’s Health Defense details “The Real Agenda Behind American Academy of Pediatrics: Weaponizing Children’s Mental Health and Vaccines for Profit”:

“With a budget of more than $127 million and a staff of 475, the American Academy of Pediatrics functions as a corporate and government mouthpiece that touts the wares of drug, vaccine and formula manufacturers.”

The AAP’s funding from vaccine manufacturers includes Pfizer, Moderna, Merck and Sanofi. In contrast to pediatric practices primarily helping parents navigate routine childhood illnesses as they did when I was growing up, administering vaccines is pediatricians’ bread and butter today.

Every routine “well baby” or “well child visit” from infancy throughout childhood is focused on vaccination, with more than 70 doses on the CDC schedule. Pediatric offices are dependent on this vaccine-focused approach to sustain their practices.

As disclosed by Dr. Paul Thomas, pediatricians get paid not just for the vaccine itself — financial incentives for administering vaccines include kickbacks of up to $240 per visit. Thomas estimated that by honoring informed consent and offering patients in his practice a choice, “We were losing … over a million dollars in vaccines that were refused.”

In a 2020 paper Thomas co-authored with James Lyons-Weiler, “Vaccine Practice Payment Schedules Create Perverse Incentives for Unnecessary Medical Procedures – at What Cost to Patients?”, they write it is “clear that the financial incentives to vaccinate are now a matter of survival for pediatric practices.”

“With the financial incentive to vaccinate, and to give as many as possible, it is unsurprising that many pediatric practices discharge or refuse to accept new patients who do not agree to follow the CDC recommended vaccine schedule.”

The number of pediatricians refusing to care for children who do not adhere to the full CDC schedule is considerable. A 2020 survey of AAP members published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) revealed that half of pediatric offices report “a policy to dismiss families if they refused vaccines.”

Previous to 2018 the AAP had advised practitioners to “endeavor not to discharge” patients based on parental refusal to allow their child to be vaccinated. In 2018 that changed.

An AAP clinical report that year shifted policy guidance to support the practice of refusing care to families unless they vaccinate.

A JAMA Pediatrics opinion piece noted, “Clinicians who dismiss vaccine-refusing families seem to focus excessively on the interests of their own practice at the expense of their responsibilities to contribute to collective public health efforts.”

Despite those who argued that dismissal is ethically problematic — depriving children of pediatric care and undermining public health — the policy was rationalized as expressing “tolerance for diverse professional approaches.”

Refusing patient care supports diversity!

The AAP is so compromised that when the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recently recommended revising the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule in line with other developed nations — changing the status of hepatitis B, rotavirus, influenza, meningococcal ACWF, hepatitis A, meningococcal B and COVID-19 vaccines from mandatory shots to a choice made jointly by parents and providers through shared clinical decision-making — the AAP sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to reverse that decision.

Despite, for example, there being no justification for a HepB shot at birth for more than 99.9% of newborns, the AAP insists that the vaccine be required for all.

“Shared clinical decision-making,” says HHS, “strengthens the doctor-patient relationship, respects informed consent, and allows recommendations to reflect individual risk — while preserving access to every vaccine.”

That shared clinical decision-making, intended to rebuild trust in public health, is anathema, however, to the AAP. Any policy that might create vaccine hesitancy cannot be tolerated. The more shots, the more the organization and its members financially benefit.

——————————————

2. “We are exposed to more aluminum by eating a tomato than from getting vaccines!”

The article from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia supporting this statement tells us that “we are exposed to more aluminum from food than from vaccines because the exposure from food occurs daily.” It compares the amount of aluminum in foods to that in vaccines, relying on the assumption that ingested aluminum and injected aluminum are equivalent.

Concealing critical information is a typical ploy of these institutional players. Nowhere does the article reveal, as Physicians for Informed Consent explain in Part 1, that (emphasis added):

“The ATSDR [Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry] oral aluminum limit is based on 0.1% of oral aluminum being absorbed into the bloodstream, as the digestive tract blocks nearly all oral aluminum (Fig. 2a). In contrast, aluminum injected intramuscularly bypasses the digestive tract, and 100% of aluminum may be absorbed into the bloodstream over time (i.e.,the proportion of absorbed aluminum is 1,000 times greater).

This Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia article was “reviewed by Paul A. Offit, MD.”

That helps explain the article’s deception by omission. Offit is the industry’s top “medical expert” propagandist, popularizing such lies as vaccines are the best tested of all products, far better than pharmaceuticals. The inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, with a $1.5 million research chair funded by Merck at Children’s Hospital, he is one of pharma’s most aggressive proponents for mandatory vaccination.

Among Offit’s many outrageous assertions is that vaccines are safer than vitamins. He is infamous for his statement that healthy infants could safely get up to 10,000 vaccines at once. He later upped that figure: “I would say you probably could get 100,000 vaccines every day.”

——————————————

3. The type of mercury in vaccines – ethyl mercury – is NOT harmful to us.”

The AAP article linked by JCPH to make this assertion is riddled with misinformation about the dangerous neurotoxin ethylmercury (thimerosal) in vaccines.

“AAP’s assessment of the best available evidence has always been, and continues to be, that thimerosal is a safe additive in appropriate amounts.”

A blatant rewriting of history, this has not “always been” AAP’s assessment. Prior to being completely subsumed by Big Pharma, in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics recognized the risk from and called for the immediate removal of thimerosal from infant vaccines.

Now the AAP is claiming they only called for thimerosal’s removal because the public mistakenly believed mercury in vaccines was dangerous and they wanted to make parents feel better about vaccinating their kids.

The AAP knew then and surely knows today that contents of unused thimerosal-containing vaccine vials are required to be disposed of as federally hazardous waste. What they are now calling “appropriate amounts” in thimerosal-preserved vaccines is literally 250 times the level classified as a toxic hazardous waste by the EPA. (See Part 1)

Proof that thimerosal is safe, they tell us, is that “autism rates actually rose after thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccines.” As we detailed in Part 1, toxic aluminum replaced the toxic mercury when thimerosal was removed from most (not all) childhood vaccines. Additionally, the number of doses on the childhood vaccine schedule nearly tripled. Of course autism rates rose.

In addition to the AAP lying about it’s past position on thimerosal in vaccines, again we see misinformation by omission.

No doubt the well-meaning folks at our health department believe and rely on this institutional fiction. But as more people are becoming informed, the vaccine religion’s foundations are wobbling.

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Vaccine Hesitancy On the Rise
and the Battle to Maintain Control of the Narrative

“I think we’re finding that a lot of the parents are informing themselves, and are less malleable in the office setting, because with the information age that we’re in, this information is available that wasn’t available before the doctor was the only source of information. You didn’t have any way to look it up. And now, people do. So, this may be a problem that extends into the future.”
—Dr. Joe Wiley, Lewis County Health Director

The young boy in JCPH’s cartoon has heard “rumors” that vaccines can cause chronic conditions like autism and asks, “What if that happens to me?”

The girl in the cartoon wonders if getting vaccines is “worth the risk.”

Despite the relentless barrage of safe and effective messaging, public health is now faced with the problem of parents accessing information beyond their doctors’ offices. Now capable of “informing themselves,” they are “less malleable” (manipulable).

As suspected, in line with the national trend, childhood vaccine uptake has been dropping in Jefferson County.

Looking at the Washington Department of Health Immunization Dashboard, a steady reduction in childhood vaccination rates following the not-so “safe and effective” COVID-19 injection fiasco is evident. For example, the HepB vaccine dose given at birth shows 72.8% uptake in 2022, declining to 53% in 2025.

Every county in the state shows the same trend.

Similarly, the dashboard shows drops in vaccine uptake for 19- to 35-month-olds in Jefferson County between 2021 and 2025 for these shots:

In Informed Choice Washington‘s March 18 newsletter, Gerald Braude covered a presentation given by former pediatrician and current Lewis County Health Director Dr. Joe Wiley to their Board of Health. The quote above describing the problem of parents being less “malleable” because they can now access their own information is from that presentation.

Wiley linked the precipitous drop in vaccination rates in Lewis County to multiple factors in this slide:

In his follow-up comments, he expanded:

“Not mentioned here, but some have noted that the pharmaceutical companies provide lots of funding… Lots of funding for medical journals and medical organizations make consumers suspicious. Some have also found that the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 as suspicious because it exempts the pharmaceutical companies that make the vaccines exempt from liability should anyone be injured from the vaccine. And they fear that the pharmaceutical companies that are making the vaccines may take shortcuts because they don’t have to worry about liability.”

Much of his additional commentary focused on the COVID-19 debacle eroding public trust in vaccines.

“There’s a lot of lost trust among the population,” Wiley said. “The medical offices see it, I hear it from them, and you’ve probably seen it in your family, even, if not within yourself. And it seems like the available data that we’ve looked at here supports that vaccine hesitancy.”

While acknowledging that the available data supports vaccine hesitancy, public health agencies nonetheless see that as a problem. They persist in gaslighting us with assurances that mercury and aluminum in vaccines is perfectly safe, that vaccines are more rigorously tested than any other drugs, and that they do not cause chronic health conditions — all patently false assertions.

In Jefferson County, we continue to face censorship and dismissal when challenging that gaslighting.

Right after JCPH’s cartoon was published, the Port Townsend Leader rejected a letter to the editor directly responding to its claim about safety testing. The writer who submitted it described failure of government oversight in which a 1986 law mandating reports from a vaccine safety task force had been been ignored for forty years. The task force had never fulfilled its mandate and Congress never received a single biennial report on vaccine safety improvements that the law required. The Leader censored that information.

NextDoor also censored a conversation about our previous article, Part 1. A Free Press reader posted a link to the article. That elicited several comments of appreciation, agreeing with its content… but those were quickly overshadowed by a few people who then dominated the comments proclaiming that the information presented was false. No supposed inaccuracies were ever cited; the commenters just attacked the Free Press and its writers. The post was deleted soon after as “misinformation”.

At the monthly County Public Health Report broadcast on KPTZ on May 4, a listener asked Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry for a response to our article. Rather than address any of the substance, she, too, just used the convenient, dismissive “misinformation” label. No rebuttal of a single inaccuracy, just a long generalized diatribe about identifying misinformation online. That will be addressed in a separate follow-up article.

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On a national level, the stakes are far higher. The struggle to maintain control of the vaccine narrative has expanded from the kind of censorship and dismissal we are subject to locally to an intense legal battle in federal court.

As previously discussed, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and other organizations have sued HHS to prevent “shared clinical decision-making” on any of the childhood vaccines. For doctors and other health advisors to have honest conversations that acknowledge potential risks would increase vaccine hesitancy.

They have also targeted the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) which makes recommendations for vaccines on the childhood schedule.

Historically, ACIP had been comprised entirely of members with financial ties to pharma. All committee members had conflicts of interest, rubber-stamping every vaccine that came to them for approval.

A 2000 Committee on Government Reform report concluded:

“The CDC routinely grants waivers from conflict of interest rules to every member of its advisory committee… Four out of eight CDC advisory committee members who voted to approve guidelines for the rotavirus vaccine in June 1998 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.”

Dr. Paul Offit from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, for example, was an ACIP member cited for conflict of interest in a hearing held by the Committee on Government Reform. As one of the rotavirus vaccine developers funded by pharmaceutical companies, he “voted on three rotavirus issues, including making the recommendation of adding the rotavirus vaccine to the Vaccines for Children program.” Getting that vaccine on the schedule earned Offit millions of dollars.

One of Robert Kennedy Jr’s first acts as new HHS Secretary was to replace the pharma-centric ACIP members with a balanced group of medical experts without conflicts of interest. It is that independent group which made the recommendation for shared decision-making that the AAP is opposing.

The new ACIP panel also recommended removing mercury from flu vaccines. And they voted to end the universal recommendation that all newborns receive the hepatitis B vaccine within 12-24 hours of birth. All those long-overdue recommendations were designed to restore trust in public health.

The AAP and other pharma-funded organizations have sued to reverse all those decisions.

And within hours of ACIP voting to discontinue the hepatitis B shot requirement for babies born to HepB-negative mothers, the West Coast Health Alliance (California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii) announced they, too, would reject the recommendation and continue promoting the automatic hepatitis B birth-dose.

In a final attack, the AAP’s lawsuit sought disbandment of ACIP.

In March, a U.S. District Judge issued a stay on all counts, which put a pause on all new ACIP recommendations and prevented the committee from continuing to meet. The judge did not issue the injunctions AAP sought to permanently block ACIP’s efforts, but that is still possible.

The ruling has been appealed, both by HHS and separately by the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense (CHD). Those appeals are pending.

In a counter-measure in January, CHD and five other plaintiffs sued the AAP, accusing it of running a decades-long racketeering scheme to defraud the public about the safety of the CDC’s childhood vaccination schedule.

The lawsuit alleges that the AAP:

• Promotes vaccine safety claims without comprehensive safety testing, including the absence of studies comparing health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children

• Suppresses and misrepresents scientific uncertainty, creating a “false certainty”

• Relies on a foundational fraud, a theoretical claim that infants could safely receive thousands of vaccines at once, despite no clinical evidence of the safety of that claim

• Uses its influence to punish dissenting physicians, damaging the careers of pediatricians who questioned vaccine safety claims

• Fails to disclose financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies that manufacture childhood vaccines

Among the plaintiffs are physicians whose professional reputations were harmed for opposing AAP’s guidelines, and the parents of four children who died or were injured after receiving routine childhood vaccinations. Dr. Kenneth Stoller, who lost his medical license in California and New Mexico after he granted medical exemptions to vaccine mandates, said “AAP turned pediatricians into vaccine delivery systems and destroyed the ones who asked questions.”

On April 3, AAP filed a motion to dismiss the RICO case; plaintiffs’ response is due on or before June 9.

This is the legal battle in play.

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Meanwhile, in the court of public opinion, increasing vaccine hesitancy shows that the pharma-medical complex is losing its stranglehold.

As public trust erodes, the AAP and other pharma-funded groups reveal their desperation — suing to continue HepB vaccination of newborns who have zero risk, trying to block shared clinical decision-making between parents and providers, fighting to keep neurotoxic mercury in the flu shot.

These are the institutions and organizations Jefferson County Public Health relies on for its messaging to our community. Given their denial of vaccine dangers in this recent cartoon, does our health department agree with the AAP’s efforts to prevent shared clinical decision-making, remove mercury from vaccines and force HepB shots on all newborns?

What is their position on pediatricians who refuse care to children whose parents decline vaccinations?

Those might be good questions for Health Officer Berry at her next public health update.

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