My wife and I have worked and worried for the past twenty-five years to help our children grow into strong, flourishing adults. The process is, to be sure, ongoing, but healthy habits of spirit, mind, and body have all been part of their upbringing.
Beyond the usual, sometimes annoying, resistance you expect from youngsters (the “But I did the dishes last week!” kind of thing), a sense of aloneness burdened my wife and me as we raised our children. We both came from broken homes and received little to no help from our parents with our kids.
Looking back on those years I realize that there was a silver lining, however hazy, to the sense of isolation that came from our disengaged families: My wife and I were free from the pressures many new parents feel to do things the way their parents had done.
From cooking with whole foods instead of canned (or in the case of my wife’s family, ring bologna) to days spent in art museums and weeks in European countries, we raised our children very differently from our upbringing.
The same was true when it came to their health. While our parents tended to drag us off for every evaluation and vaccine the doctor ordered, my wife and I have been more selective.
Where vaccines were concerned, we agreed that any vaccination produced from human fetal tissue was a no-go. Killing someone for medical.., well, anything, is so nightmarishly wrong that it strains my mind and hurts my heart to wonder how anyone thought of it.
But surveying the present medical, social, and political landscape concerning vaccines, I worry about new parents. They must plow head-long through a blizzard of marketing campaigns by drug companies and medical industries, all pushing them to vaccinate and medicate their children in ways that my wife and I never experienced. This pressure makes the already fraught decisions about what is best to do for their children even more difficult.
Let me state clearly that neither my wife nor I are “anti-vaccination.” When done properly, a vaccine helps the body do what it is designed to do: Build a defense against a virus or bacteria before encountering either in the form of a fully, virulent strain. And yes, while natural immunity is best, there are some viruses, like rabies or polio, that can quickly overwhelm the body’s defense with such devastating consequences that vaccination against them is the best thing to do.
Let me also state that by way of credentials, I hold a bachelor of science degree in human biology (anatomy and physiology) and a Ph.D. in which I teach quantitative research methods and data analysis. My wife holds a master’s of science degree in human biology, and a bachelor’s of science in nursing, and has practiced as a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA) for nearly twenty years. Between the two of us, we know our way around medical research, data jargon, and how to make sense of the conflicting claims of vaccine necessity and vaccine safety.
The questions that many parents have are these: “Are these vaccines needed, and are they safe?” The response to those questions is complicated: It is “yes,” “it depends,” and “no,” all at the same time. To make sense of these tangled answers, you first need to know a little about how words like “safe” are defined concerning any vaccine, as well as a little about the current state of our medical system.
I teach quantitative, empirical research methods to Ph.D. candidates at a prestigious, Christian university. Empirical research, which (in principle) drives medical research, assumes that the world we live in is organized and predictable. So predictable, the average non-human phenomenon operates within an anticipated average range of 95% predictability. That means, for example, that if you were to flip a coin in multiples of 100 flips, say five times for a total of 500 flips, the average, predictable outcome would be that 95% of the time (or more) a near-even amount of heads and tails.
In quantitative research, predictability is called the confidence interval. In vaccine distribution, the most important confidence interval (beyond, “Does it work?”) is set relative to the average ratio of harm (either from receiving or not receiving the vaccine) to the average benefit to the population who receives the vaccine. In short, those who administer vaccines are confident that any harm from the vaccine will be much, much less than an anticipated benefit.
For example, each year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) authorizes the release of flu vaccines that, in most years, have a confidence interval of efficacy somewhere between 40% and 50%. This means that, on average, less than 50% of the time the vaccine is administered it will inoculate the person from flu. While an average efficacy rate of less than 50% is low, the CDC authorizes these vaccines since they have a very low, average rate of serious harm, usually less than 1%.
True, the flu vaccine may have a high average rate of non-serious harmful side effects, such as redness and swelling at the injection site, or flu-like symptoms, but since the average, known rate of harm from the flu is high for certain members of the entire population, the CDC green-lights the distribution of the vaccines.
In this calculation of harm versus benefits, the words “average” and “known” deserve special attention.
In determining the potential harm from receiving or not receiving a vaccine, organizations like the CDC calculate the average, across the whole population, of the known harm from receiving a vaccine (and incurring a vaccine injury) versus not receiving a vaccine and contracting the disease. This method of “everyone is included in the calculation” for the ratio of harm v. benefits suffers from two major, statistical flaws. I will use the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate both.
First, this “everyone’s included” approach fails to recognize that while most in a population are likely to contract a virus, not everyone has the same susceptibility to severe outcomes from getting sick from the virus, and as such, not everyone needs vaccination. In the case of COVID-19, the difference in severe outcomes for certain persons was dramatic and driven significantly by the health of the individual before he or she contracted the virus.
In a massive study headed by data researcher J.C. Cegan titled, “Can Comorbidity Data Explain Cross-State and Cross-National Difference in COVID-19 Death Rates?,” Cegan and his team analyzed the records from 1.4 million reported COVID-19 cases in the United States, looking for patterns as to why some people became very ill from the virus and some did not. Across all age groups, from newborns to 80-plus years old, Cegan’s data revealed that those who had two or more of the following conditions (called “comorbidities”) before contracting COVID-19 were dramatically more likely to have a severe outcome from the virus: Diabetes, Cardiovascular disease, Chronic lung disease, and Renal (kidney) disease.
The underlying cause and/or aggravating factor for each of these comorbidities is obesity, and this data supports the growing consensus that those who had a severe outcome from COVID-19, including death, did so because they were in a pre-existing, poor state of health and not primarily the virus.
For example, if we look at the data from Cegan’s study for Americans ages 50-59 (that was my age range during the pandemic), the average rate of death among those who contracted COVID-19 but did not have any of the four listed comorbidities was statistically insignificant, at 1.47%. For those in the same age group with two or more comorbidities, death jumped to a significant rate of 16.47%, a 1,000% increase. If an increase of 1,000% is not dramatic enough, consider that during the COVID-19 pandemic, a healthy adult American was 124% more likely to die in an auto accident while driving in the least populated state, Wyoming, than from contracting COVID-19.
The point here is not to criticize those who are overweight or have chronic health conditions, but rather to illustrate that when the official deaths from COVID-19 were reported to the public, no mention was made of the observable factors that sharply divided those who died, and those who did not. This lack of sample stratification, the breaking of the total population into like groups to get a better understanding of who is most affected by what, is a big no-no in quantitative research. Failure to distinguish between significant differences in the reaction of different strata in the whole data set (in this case, the US population) to the same thing (the COVID-19 virus) gives the false impression that everyone in the total data set is at the same risk as everyone else.
Consequently, a parent trying to decide if their child should receive the COVID-19 vaccination might assume, from looking at the non-stratified data, that their children were at greater risk of death from the virus than they were.
But healthy children, overall, were not at risk of any serious outcome from COVID-19. When we look at Cegan’s data for healthy American children, ages 17 years and under with none of the four listed comorbidities, we find that group had a death rate from COVID-19 of 0.04%. This number is so small that, statistically speaking, it is “0.” There are many, and as a quantitative researcher, I would include myself among them, who say there was no need, or justification, for any healthy American child to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
The second major statistical flaw that impacts a parent’s ability to evaluate the ratio of harm versus benefits for a given vaccine is how the data is collected. The data that suggests disease prevention from a vaccine is much more richly and consistently collected than the data that suggests vaccine injuries. I will again use the COVID-19 vaccine to explain how and why.
Let’s imagine an average, healthy, 10-year-old boy who, statistically speaking, has a zero percent chance of any serious harm from contracting COVID-19. However, because of a school mandate, he was forced to receive the vaccine. Three months after receiving the shot, he shows no signs of a COVID-19 infection and does not return to the clinic that jabbed him. His vaccination will be reported to the CDC as safe and effective: Score another “win” for the vaccine, right? Well, not so fast.
Statically speaking, was it truly a case of vaccine-prevented COVID-19, or did it just appear that way? Why the doubt? Well, nationally, all Americans (not just the young and healthy) who had COVID-19 and yet exhibited no symptoms (and thus did not see a clinician) were estimated at around 44%. Additionally, the rate of those who were vaccinated but became infected with COVID-19 anyway, termed “breakthrough infections,” was around 42%.
Was our 10-year-old successfully vaccinated, or was he among the four out of ten who got vaccinated, got COVID-19, and did not know it? There is no way to tell, but his outcome was counted as a vaccine success.
The other side of the ledger, the harm side, consists of reported problems caused by the COVID-19 vaccination collected in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, overseen by the CDC. The collection of data by VAERS has some serious problems.
First, reporting vaccine problems to VAERS is completely voluntary, meaning VAERS doesn’t get data about vaccine harm unless someone, be that the individual who was vaccinated or a clinician who gave the vaccine, associates a health problem with a vaccine, and then fills out a VAERS report. Some serious vaccine side effects don’t show up for weeks or months and can be very difficult to connect to a vaccine, and thus they are never reported to VAERS.
Secondly, it is well known that VAERS is failing, badly, when it comes to processing and registering reported data. A 2023 British Medical Journal (BMJ) article titled “Is the US’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System Broken?” revealed that before the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccination, VAERS was receiving about 60,00 adverse event (AE) reports (meaning someone may have been harmed by a vaccine) annually, but only had enough staff to process about 3,000 of those reports. Within the first year of the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, the number of AE reports to VAERS jumped to 1.7 million.
To date, the CDC has refused to reveal the amount of backlogged data, except to acknowledge that it was investigating some 20,000 preliminary reports of COVID-19 vaccine-related deaths, but, as of 2023, had not formally acknowledged that a single death could be linked to a COVID-19 vaccination.
So, if our healthy 10-year-old developed a serious health issue after his COVID-19 vaccination, and if he or his parents did take him back to the clinic where he was vaccinated, and if the clinic did decide that his symptoms were related to the vaccine, and if the clinic did report it to VAERS, chances are that VAERS would not process that data in any meaningful timeframe (or, practically speaking, ever) to give an accurate picture of his, and overall, vaccine harm.
You don’t need to be a researcher to see how this system of data collection distorts the picture of what parents see concerning the relationship between the benefits and harm of a given vaccine. When you push up the numbers for “vaccination successes” and push down the numbers for “vaccination harm” you will get lopsided, inaccurate results. As we say in statistical research, when it comes to the results of any data analysis, “garbage in, garbage out.”
Along with data problems, the current state of healthcare in the United States likewise makes it difficult for parents to discern a clear picture of the benefits, harms, or even the necessity of some vaccines for their children. Two features, in particular, stand out: The movement away from preaching preventative behaviors, replaced with an emphasis on medicated interventions, and the corporatizing of healthcare in America.
Over the past 40 years or so, there has been an intentional shift in healthcare away from lifestyle-oriented preventative health to a more pharmacologically-oriented interventionist approach. This is well documented, but happily, is being revisited and reconsidered, mostly because the cost of not preaching the vital role of healthy behaviors for several decades has led to an overweight, chronically sick population which is financially breaking taxpayer-funded healthcare programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
A meta-study (which means a study of several studies) in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine revealed that from the year 2000 to 2016, 86% of all federal healthcare spending was for patients with at least one, largely obesity-driven, chronic condition, such as heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, or cancer. Quite literally, too much weight and too little movement on the part of the average American is crushing our healthcare system.
The response to this crisis has been driven largely by pharmaceutical companies and their related investment groups. For example, where adults and heart disease are concerned, the go-to pharmaceutical solution has been the prescribing of a class of drugs called statins which are thought to lower “bad” cholesterol (LDL) and risk of heart attack. However, dogged investigation by researchers like Dr. Aseem Malhotra has made it clear that the prevention of heart attacks for those on statins is only about 1%, while at the same time, about 20% of those taking statins experience serious side effects such as muscle fatigue and, in men, erectile dysfunction.
In addition to the lopsided harm/benefits ratio of these drugs, a growing body of evidence strongly suggests that LDL cholesterol is not the primary causal factor in cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance is.
These statistics and growing evidence notwithstanding, presently, over one in three American adults, some 92 million, are currently taking statins, and the estimated, global profits from the sale of stains in north of $19 billion annually. There are powerful incentives to keep the flow of statins going, and not all of them are evidence-based efficacy.
The same “pharmacy-first, behavior second” attitudes are pushing certain vaccinations in our children.
For example, in 2014 the FDA approved a vaccine against Human Papillomavirus, or HPV, marketed under the name Gardasil. HPV is a sexually transmitted disease responsible for nearly all cases of cervical cancer, and, as a preventative measure, Gardasil is presently marketed to girls as young as 11 years old. The vaccine has stirred controversy, with some claiming that it initiates a host of serious, neurological side effects and harm.
Whether or not Gardasil does more harm than good needs more research, but what is clear and well-known, however, is how straightforward it is to avoid contracting HPV (no vaccine needed) and thus the potential for developing cervical cancer.
HPV is a sexually transmitted virus that, in most cases, the body defends itself against naturally. However, if the body is repeatedly exposed to HPV through multiple sexual encounters, the chances increase of, a) the body failing to fight off the virus, or b) contracting one of the many, virulent, strains of HPV that can, if not detected, develop into cervical cancer. The best defense against HPV and the possibility of cervical cancer is, then, behavioral, that is, not engaging in intimate behavior with multiple partners.
Unfortunately, where young girls are concerned, most healthcare providers do not emphasize absence as the best defense against HPV, and some don’t even mention it. Instead, girls, it is assumed, will naturally become sexually promiscuous and are often encouraged to take hormonal birth control to avoid pregnancy. However, organizations like the CDC know full well that girls who are given hormonal birth control tend towards increased sexual activity, which, in turn, increases their exposure to HPV and raises the possibility of developing cervical cancer.
If this sounds like a contradiction in what is best for children, it is. Unfortunately, our medical system is presently shot through with contradictions of the most absurd kind about what’s best for children.
For example, without a hint of irony, one can read the following two statements by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). The first lays out ACOG’s position on abortion, and the second is ACOG’s stance on smoking during pregnancy:
Concerning abortion, ACOG states: “All people should have access to the full spectrum of comprehensive, evidence-based health care. Abortion is an essential component of comprehensive, evidence-based health care. As the leading medical organization dedicated to the health of individuals in need of gynecologic and obstetric care, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) supports the availability of high-quality reproductive health services for all people and is committed to protecting and increasing access to abortion. ACOG strongly opposes any effort that impedes access to abortion care and interferes in the relationship between a person and their healthcare professional.”
Concerning smoking during pregnancy, ACOG states: “The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) strongly advises against smoking during pregnancy. Smoking during pregnancy is dangerous for you and your fetus.”
ACOG is about the business of helping parents give birth to healthy children. Given that, what, we might ask, is more harmful to babies? Nicotine exposure or, and I am sorry for the need to be blunt, chopping the little ones into even smaller pieces? Strange days indeed.
Aggravating, or some would argue driving the medicated intervention approach to healthcare is the dramatic increase in the corporatizing of the American healthcare system.
Organizations like the American Medical Association (AMA) have reported that since 2012 a significant number of physicians have moved away from self-own, private practices, opting instead for employment at hospitals or even corporate entities run by investor groups. In 2023, over 75% of physicians were employed by hospitals or corporate-run healthcare systems.
The reasons for this mass migration are primarily financial. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, many doctors were overwhelmed with regulatory paperwork and constant fights with insurance companies over covered and non-covered procedures. Their best, and on many levels, least frustrating option was to go to work for a hospital or large medical group. The tradeoff, however, has been what they can and can not discuss with their patients, and a slat of required “clinical performance measures” that control what they can and can not discuss with their patients. For nearly a decade, a variety of surveys have found that many doctors admit to prescribing medical interventions that they know a patient does not need in order, in part, to adhere to clinical performance measures put in place by their employer. Yes, most doctors are good people who want all of us, children included, to be well. Unfortunately, on any given day with any given patient, any given doctor may or may not be able to discuss all of the harms and benefits of a particular medication, vaccination, or intervention.
Where, then, can a parent go to get unbiased information about what’s best concerning their children and vaccinations?
I wish the answer to this question was straightforward, but unfortunately, it is not. At present, there is not an equal and unbiased information source that is comparable to the massive, medical-industrial complex dominating our healthcare landscape and its aggressive, vaccination push. Organizations like Children’s Health Defense are a good starting place, but they are still tremendously outmatched and monied by the rest of the medical system.
Until this imbalance finds a more equitable equilibrium, what is to be done? Well, as a parent and husband married to a brilliant woman who has a significantly better-than-most understanding of most things medical, I recommend the following approach for all parents: Unless the situation for your child is dire, such as in the case of a rapidly progressing disease or condition, don’t let yourself be pressured into giving your child any medical intervention that you do not understand. Ask questions, find and learn all the facts, and do your homework as a parent. And most of all, slow down and seek out other medical opinions and perspectives before letting anyone jab your children with anything.