The Vaccine Disinformation to Descheduling Pipeline
Make America Denmark Never
On Friday night, President Donald Trump celebrated the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP)’s successful recommendation to delay the birth dose of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) vaccine by issuing a memorandum ordering Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to overhaul the entire childhood vaccine schedule. Kennedy is only too happy to oblige.
According to the fact sheet accompanying the Aligning United States Core Childhood Vaccine Recommendations with Best Practices from Peer, Developed Countries memo, the US is a “high outlier” in the number of vaccines recommended for children among “peer nations,” which are countries that are rich and developed. In contrast to his usual enthusiasm for America having more of something, Trump suggests this is a bad thing. As a result, Trump wants to look at other countries that vaccinate less and change US vaccination policy to align with theirs. Copying other countries with no regard for evidence in a non-transparent way is, as usual, Gold Standard Science.
The memo touched a lot of points that seemed awfully familiar, given that I recently heard them laid out in the All-Star Anti-Vax Extravaganza afternoon session of the ACIP meeting. Presentations from Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Drug Research and Evaluation (CDER) Director, ex officio FDA ACIP representative, sports medicine physician, and Denmark superfan Tracy Beth Høeg, vaccine injury lawyer Aaron Siri, and functional medicine obstetrician and gynecologist and ACIP member Evelyn Griffin all strongly signaled the paths that this review of the childhood vaccine schedule is likely to take.
Although the afternoon session of ACIP did not do great things for my sense of peacefulness, it did evidently lay out the strategy for taking out as many vaccines as possible. Like all things associated with the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, it is both completely unsupported by evidence and incredibly stupid from a scientific perspective. Unfortunately, it seems to be working in moving along Kennedy’s MAHA agenda. Despite spectacular incompetence, ACIP managed to pass recommendations that will reduce access to the HBV vaccine and put more people at risk.
Every small success like the HBV vaccine birth dose delay emboldens the MAHA mass casualty preventable disease epidemics movement. As government agencies like FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cease to function and become purely political agencies, our capacity to enforce safeguards against self-interested anti-vax lunatics intent on destroying public health fails as well.
We are rapidly approaching a tipping point. There are increasing precedents for subverting normal government processes for all aspects of managing health, but especially for vaccination. Anti-vaccine propaganda is imbued throughout the information ecosystem. Actions to remove access to a number of vaccines are accelerating. If we’re going to do something to stop this, we better do it really soon. We had better do it now.
Something is rotten in the (peer) state of Denmark
When I read the memo and noted the use of the term “peer nations,” I thought, now where have I heard that before? Oh, that’s right, it was at the ACIP meeting a couple of hours before, and it was used repeatedly by Høeg, focused on one supposed peer nation in particular: Denmark.
Every time she opened her mouth, Høeg talked about Denmark. Høeg used to live in Denmark! Denmark is super healthy! Høeg got a PhD in epidemiology in Denmark! Danmark er veldig god (sorry, that’s Norwegian, but I’m too lazy to look it up in Dansk and it’s close enough)! Høeg speaks Danish and reads Danish health reports in Danish! Denmark is pro-science! Høeg’s children were born in Denmark! Denmark is rich! Denmark, Denmark, Denmark!
Høeg knows Denmark, and she asserts that Denmark is exactly like the US. Denmark is America’s “peer” because the US and Denmark are such similar countries in all ways except one: Denmark doesn’t recommend very many vaccines for kids. The US recommends more and we should get in line to be more like our peer, Denmark. Høeg gave a lengthy presentation about how Denmark is the utopian ideal of vaccine risk assessment and the US needs to catch up to the Danish standard.
The fundamental issue is not drooling all over Denmark’s risk assessment frameworks or immunization policies, but that when implemented as US policy it can cause serious harm. On the basis of Danish policy, Høeg advocated for no birth dose and no routine recommendations for vaccinating children at ACIP in the US. However, in Denmark, the national socialized health care system has eliminated the need for the HBV birth dose. The US does not have the same risk reduction measures in place.
This rests entirely on the assumption that Denmark and the US are peers that are comparable in most ways. This is not remotely true. The US and Denmark are very different, especially in ways that matter when deciding who should be vaccinated. They have radically different geography, population sizes and demographics, forms of government, economies, laws, health care systems, regulatory structures, policy-making frameworks, culture, politics, trust in experts and government officials, and, importantly, disease prevalence. Denmark has a national health system and a much smaller population. They have different diseases in the Danish population, circulating at different levels than in the US. Because Denmark and the US are very different in all these areas, their populations have different risk-benefit profiles. It makes sense for policy makers to implement a policy specific to their own country. Nothing supports the idea that policies developed for Denmark would improve health in the US.
Høeg’s claims about Danish immunization superiority were so baseless and subjective that CDC National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention Acting Principal Deputy Director Adam Langer delivered an epic and extremely professional takedown of Høeg’s peer nation nonsense and the uselessness of the US emulating Denmark’s HBV vaccination policies because Høeg thinks we should.
Unfortunately, despite thoroughly incinerating Høeg’s Danish exceptionalism with hard facts about Denmark, Greatest Acting Director of all Clapbacks Langer did not persuade ACIP as to the folly of delaying the HBV birth dose. They went ahead with it anyway, because their goal is to ensure that more babies get incurable lifelong cancer-causing infections.
Høeg says there is a loss of trust in vaccines because of mandates, which she claims only exist in the US, but not in Japan. She neglects to mention that Japan is one of the most vaccine hesitant countries in the world. In my opinion, that does not indicate a high degree of trust in vaccines. I don’t claim to be an expert on Japanese policy, but it does seem to me that Høeg’s lack of depth when discussing other countries demonstrates an inability to examine the full breadth of the data.
Høeg’s rapid ascent at FDA puts her in a position to actually impose Danish vaccine policy on the US, due to both her power as a center director and the lack of experienced regulators to stand in her way. Personnel changes have depleted FDA of expertise and competence. Last Tuesday, the nation’s top drug regulator, CDER Director Richard Pazdur, filed retirement paperwork three weeks into the job. His replacement was announced the next day: Høeg, who is the fifth CDER Director this year as of less than a week ago. Her appointment was described as “dropping an atom bomb” on drug regulation due to her gross lack of qualifications.
Høeg has no known history of or experience with drug or vaccine development, testing, or regulation. However, she was recently in the news for conjuring data about children dying from COVID-19 vaccine injuries, which inspired her former collaborator and now counterpart at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) Vinay Prasad. As the nation’s top regulators of all vaccines, drugs, and biologic products, Høeg and Prasad are capable of annihilating access to much of the vaccine schedule simply by suspending licenses on the basis of these vaccines not meeting an impossible standard.
Høeg’s Danish hypothesis is dangerous because most people don’t appreciate how inept she is. A PhD in epidemiology studying the epidemiology of eye diseases in rural Denmark does not qualify a person to make vaccination policy in the US. However, a greater danger looms beyond the pastel pink shoulder pads of this profoundly stupid woman who should never have a job in health care, science, or policy again for what she has done already and what she and Prasad will do next. To be clear, Høeg supports policies that will injure and kill children.
What started as clout chasing via contrarian Danish fangirling is now the norm in terms of American public health policy. This breathtakingly unqualified woman—who is also actively opposed to vaccines—is now in a supremely powerful regulatory position. She is going to use it to kill people by depriving them of essential health care. Raise your hand if you are okay with being taken out by a preventable disease thanks to an illogical profession-climbing wannabe named Tracy Beth.
Siri, how do I kill kids through intentional negligence?
Aaron Siri, one of Kennedy’s fellow anti-vax litigators, also gave a very long presentation. His relentless anti-vax extravaganza was so long, I actually started questioning whether it was a Sixth Sense situation and I had died while watching the first hour and failed to realize it. Do I really have to listen to this anti-vax ambulance chaser chatter for more than an hour about his burning desire to profit from policies that kill children, or can my soul just move along to whatever is next?
Siri kicked off the presentation by promoting his book, Vaccines, Amen, in which he argues that the field of vaccinology is actually a religion because it is a faith-based belief system rather than an actual scientific discipline. As always, this follows the rule that every accusation is a confession. Approved, recommended vaccines are tested extensively in both preclinical and clinical trials. Contrary to Siri’s claims, vaccine safety and effectiveness can be evaluated thoroughly without placebo-controlled randomized trials in many cases. The truth is opposite from what Siri claims: it is his assertions that approved vaccines are unsafe and haven’t been sufficiently tested that lack a basis in evidence. This probably has something to do with the fact that Siri is a partner in a law firm that makes millions litigating vaccine injury claims.
Siri gave a ghastly presentation that made baseless claims about the safety and effectiveness of virtually every vaccine on the childhood schedule. Kids get more vaccines now than they did in the 1980s (because more vaccines have been developed and approved in the last 40 years) and this is bad for undisclosed reasons. He claimed that vaccines are unsafe because he doesn’t like any of the CDC’s databases used for detecting and evaluating safety signals, so he thinks we just aren’t detecting an epidemic of vaccine injuries. Vaccines don’t work to prevent infection or transmission, even when they completely end disease. Big Pharma reaps exorbitant profits from unsafe vaccines, so they are colluding with the government to hide their dangers. He selectively quoted his archnemesis, the legendary developer of rabies and rubella vaccines Stanley Plotkin, to underscore his points. Siri interchangeably quoted from his foundational textbook, Plotkin’s Vaccines, and from when he deposed Plotkin in a vaccine injury trial.
This slide was exemplary of Siri’s dishonesty. He presents being able to protect infants against more diseases during the most vulnerable stage of their lives as an injection-based assault on innocent babies. He floats many reasons for this without presenting any data to support his assertions: vaccine ingredients, damage to developing immune systems and brains, aluminum salt adjuvants, unknown safety risks caused by failure to do constant randomized placebo-controlled trials, non-specific effects, Big Pharma and “corporate capture,” the professional integrity of public servants at CDC, NIH, and FDA, and so on.
One of three ACIP members who actually engages with the evidence, Cody Meissner, took issue with Siri’s fact-free presentation. He questioned why a vaccine injury lawyer was even presenting data to a supposedly expert advisory committee and delivered a blistering critique of Siri’s claims. Having more vaccines means protecting more children against more diseases. Vaccines undergo extensive evaluation in clinical trials before approval and recommendation. Vaccines are subject to continuous safety monitoring after approval, and until recently, safety signals were exhaustively investigated by vaccine safety experts both within and external to the government. Prior to Kennedy overhauling processes at CDC and FDA, licensing and recommendation advisory boards engaged in transparent, evidence-based decision-making. And critically, the childhood vaccine schedule prevented millions of cases of disease and saved millions of lives.
Siri responded by feigning humility about his presentation, smugly talking trash about some of the world’s most accomplished living vaccinologists (Plotkin, Walter Orenstein, Paul Offit, and Peter Hotez), denied that he has ever told people to stop vaccinating, declared his love for medical freedom, pretended his multi-million dollar vaccine injury legal practice was “not a lucrative endeavor,” and generally lied his ass off about his conflicts, biases, and intentions. He then claimed that, as an attorney who makes a living finding legal loopholes to secure large financial settlements for his clients, he is as qualified if not moreso to assess scientific evidence about immunization. In his considered legal opinion, vaccines are dangerous and bad, although I would expect someone who has gotten very wealthy as a result of making that repeated claim to reach that conclusion.
As infuriating, inaccurate, and interminable as Siri’s presentation was, I viewed it as informative nonetheless. He laid out the broad strategy that Kennedy will use to attack vaccines beyond HBV: invent or exaggerate safety concerns and/or claim that vaccines don’t work, then shut down critics by accusing them of conflicts, zealotry, or corruption. Even worse, Siri and Kennedy will likely use this as an angle of attack on the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), also known as “vaccine court.” This is a no-fault, government subsidized injury compensation program that protects vaccine manufacturers from liability. This is necessary to ensure that vaccine manufacturers continue to make the notoriously unprofitable vaccines on the childhood schedule without being bankrupted by lawsuits brought by attorneys like Siri and Kennedy. If the VICP is eliminated, vaccine manufacturers may pull out of the US market altogether. That will mean no vaccines will be available, since the manufacturers will not be able to make them sustainably. Being able to sue companies like Merck, GSK, and Sanofi for vaccine injuries would be a massive windfall for Siri and Kennedy. They will gain obscene wealth at the expense of our children’s health.
This will be as much an administrative and political battle as a scientific one. Scientists, clinicians, and public health professionals need to be prepared to fight in these battlefields without sacrificing the central principle that underlies our entire field: the truth.
Inject that aluminum foil hat straight into my bloodstream
Although former ACIP Chair/crypt keeper and newly appointed HHS thought leader Martin Kulldorff bailed on the meeting, Griffin finished the afternoon with an “educational” presentation on the many supposed dangers of aluminum salt adjuvants. These are ingredients added to vaccines that improve their immunogenicity (ability to induce immune responses) and durability (time that those responses last). Aluminum salt adjuvants are not elemental aluminum (aluminum metal)—they are salts, similar to what we put on our food (which is also a “metal” salt, sodium chloride or NaCl). They dissolve in water and are already dissolved in vaccines. They are not hard chunks of aluminum metal that accumulate in bodily organs. Aluminum salt adjuvants are usually aluminum phosphate (AlPO4) and aluminum hydroxide (Al(OH)3). Aluminum salts occur naturally and are everywhere. We ingest them regularly in food and drinking water. Our lifetime aluminum salt exposure is massive compared to the tiny amount that is injected intramuscularly as part of the childhood vaccine schedule.
However, Griffin thinks they haven’t been confirmed to be safe and are not well-studied, despite having been used for nearly a century in inactivated vaccines. In this presentation, Griffin taught a master class in cherry-picking the literature to selectively present evidence suggesting that vaccines are basically filling kids with elemental aluminum, which accumulates throughout the body in vital organ systems and causes a variety of problems from autism to asthma to allergies.
This followed claims made by both Høeg and Siri that aluminum exposure is out of control because of the large number of vaccinations in the childhood schedule, particularly combination vaccines, that use aluminum salt adjuvants. None of them mentioned the many studies that demonstrate no association to harm or injury, including the massive study of more than 2 million children over decades showing no link between aluminum salt adjuvants and autism. It does make me question why Høeg didn’t mention it, given it was carried out by Denmark’s national health research institute. She either doesn’t know Danish epidemiological research as well as she purports, or she just ignores data from Denmark that doesn’t support the false claims she makes about vaccine safety.
Griffin ended her presentation by presenting a policy question: how should ACIP regulate adjuvants going forward? Currently ACIP’s charge is to make evidence-based recommendations for FDA-licensed vaccines in their final formulation. Adjuvants are not approved separately from vaccines by the FDA, but as an ingredient in a vaccine under review. That means assessing evidence for the adjuvants as part of the vaccine, not as a separate component. Griffin is essentially asking ACIP to recommend adjuvants separately from vaccines with no mandate or justification for doing so, despite this being completely incompatible with how vaccines are approved at FDA and vastly outside the scope of ACIP’s charter.
Unfortunately, given Høeg and Prasad’s reign of safety terror at FDA, standards for evaluating and licensing vaccines are likely to change. If adjuvants are approved separately from vaccines, then it will create yet another separate and potentially impossible standard for vaccines to meet. Without adjuvants, many inactivated vaccines will be substantially less effective, particularly at inducing protective responses in the short term and durable immune memory in the long run.
If ACIP or FDA successfully separate evaluating aluminum salt adjuvants from the vaccines they have been used in for decades, then we risk continued access to more than a dozen vaccines on the schedule: hepatitis A virus (HAV), hepatitis B virus (HBV), human papillomavirus (HPV), diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP, DTaP/polio/Hib/HBV combination, Td, Tdap), Haemophilus influenzae B (Hib), Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), meningococcal meningitis, and pneumococcal pneumonia vaccines.
In addition, if autism, asthma, and/or allergies are added to the VICP schedule of eligible vaccine injuries, it will bankrupt the VICP overnight. That will effectively end the VICP, possibly causing manufacturers to abandon the US or North American vaccine markets. Aluminum salt adjuvanted vaccines will not be available at all, because manufacturers won’t make them.
Changing how aluminum salts are regulated in vaccines will potentially strip access to all of these vaccinations and prevent future approvals of effective alternatives. It will make children vulnerable to multiple types of viral hepatitis, cancer, fatal brain infections, fatal pneumonia, whooping cough, tetanus, and polio.
Vaccine injury as an extremist recruiting tool
I thought I would finish with an illustration of where these lies lead. Over the weekend, a very popular anti-vax Substacker claimed to have identified one of the ten dead children allegedly killed by COVID vaccination. This child’s father, Ernest Ramirez, was devastated by his son’s death, which occurred five days after receiving the Pfizer vaccine in 2021. Although this is horribly tragic, that proximity in time is not enough to establish that COVID vaccination caused this child’s death.
Ramirez’s grief drove him to search for the cause of his son’s death. He was connected with wealthy anti-vax ivermectin profiteer Peter McCullough, who told him that his son died from vaccine-induced myocarditis. Ramirez suddenly had a new mission: opposing vaccination. He wrapped his trucks with pictures of his son, Bible verses, and accusations of murder against Pfizer. He worked with Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vax organization founded by Kennedy, to put up billboards advertising his son’s death from a vaccine injury. He established an activist organization dedicated to his son and works with established anti-vaccine activist groups like React-19, Children’s Health Defense, and the McCullough Foundation. Ramirez has spent the last several years attending various far-right political and “medical freedom” events opposing public health policies and democratic norms deemed by MAHA to be ideological anathema.
He eventually met with Høeg at FDA, where she validated his beliefs by noting that the vaccine lot his son received was “one of the worst lot numbers that was put out.” Ramirez showed up in full anti-vax regalia, complete with a faux biker vest emblazoned with the aforementioned terrible lot number, Scripture verses devoted to triumph over apostates and heathens, and Punisher and MAGA/MAHA iconography.
Ramirez has been keeping busy apart from his visit to the FDA. He was fully transformed from a grieving parent into an activist promoting radical, anti-government views on public health. Beginning with McCullough, Ramirez is fully integrated into the exploitation-to-extremism pipeline, and has been diligently spreading propaganda on the movement’s behalf for years. He has appeared repeatedly with luminaries of anti-vax thought like Steve Kirsch, McCullough, and Kennedy himself. He has appeared in interviews on media where MAHA medical freedom and pro-fascist MAGA beliefs co-mingle like InfoWars and The HighWire. For example, his foundation’s website presents it as a support network for vaccine-injured people. Apparently that includes meetings with a sympathy-feigning Simone Gold, who cashed in selling ivermectin through America’s Frontline Doctors, the right-wing political organization she founded until she was convicted for storming the Capitol on January 6th.
We have already seen how anti-vax rhetoric leads to violence. In the US, Kennedy’s constant disparagement of public health and the CDC inspired a domestic terror attack on a federal agency and killed a police officer from someone who believed they had suffered a COVID-19 vaccine injury. The MAHA movement hooks people with stories that evoke emotion (vaccines kill children) and draws them into an extremist political movement.
In the language of extremists, “medical freedom” means “ignore laws and public health guidance.” It means “don’t trust the government,” which becomes “oppose the government,” which becomes “disassemble democratic norms to cement authoritarian power.” That is why the MAHA movement has found such a welcoming home within the Trump administration: it grooms, recruits, and converts people by normalizing extremism, causing them to reject democracy and embracing authoritarian dictatorship.
The MAHA plan to undermine vaccination is not solely Kennedy’s extremist scientific belief system; it is a plan to undermine American democracy. It has been deeply painful to effectively watch as our former health and science agencies intentionally put millions of Americans at risk of death and injury. Living with the knowledge of what will happen—millions of cases of measles, rubella, pertussis, flu, and all the other preventable diseases we currently protect our children against—and not being able to stop it is a terrible burden to bear. I know most of my colleagues feel this way, as well.
But it’s even worse knowing the true purpose of MAHA—to replace American democracy with a fascist dictatorship that will enrich itself while millions suffer and die. Apart from the consequences to public health of ending vaccination, the consequences for America’s continued existence as a democracy are severe.
We should all worry about that. And we should do something about it. Starting with speaking up and demanding that our elected representatives take action. If they won’t, then we must elect those who will.
Would adore affordable universal healthcare and support for post secondary education. Denmark has good sandwiches too.
Here are accurate depictions of the 1983 vs 2025 vaccine schedules, unlike the Siri abomination…
https://ibb.co/G4MrkV8s