Top Researcher into ‘Non-Specific Effects’ of Vaccines: RFK Jr. Is Right about DTP Vaccine

In 1984, a study by Dr. Peter Aaby et al. published in the Journal of Infection reported the finding of a lower rate of mortality among children who received the measles vaccine in the African country of Guinea-Bissau than could be explained by prevention of measles deaths. “The difference in mortality between the vaccinated and unvaccinated”, the researchers concluded, “was not a result of more measles deaths in the unvaccinated group in any of the periods studied.”

Dr. Aaby and his colleagues suggested that this might be due to measles vaccination having the beneficial effect of reducing the risk of dying from causes other than measles infection.

One hypothesis that has since been proposed to explain this observation is that measles infection results in an “immune amnesia”, essentially wiping out the immune system’s ability to fight off other infections so that children who survive measles end up dying from other causes because of having had the measles infection.

That hypothesis, however, is challenged by the repeated finding from other studies that surviving acute measles infection is also associated with of a lower rate of childhood mortality, which suggests that measles infection rather strengthens the immune system against other diseases.

Since Dr. Aaby first presented his groundbreaking findings about the measles vaccine, he and his colleagues have produced a large body of scientific literature on what are termed the “non-specific effects” (NSEs) of vaccines.

This refers to either a beneficial or detrimental effect of a vaccine that is unanticipated.

A specific effect of the measles vaccine is prevention of measles infection. The non-specific effect identified is an impact on non-measles infections.

A detrimental non-specific effect is distinct from an “adverse event” because the latter term is used to describe negative outcomes that are temporally associated with vaccination, whereas other harms from vaccines might not appear in the data until much later, so that the relationship between the vaccine and the negative outcome is no longer obvious.

In time, the research done by Dr. Aaby and his colleagues into the non-specific effects of vaccines revealed a pattern: “live” vaccines, which stimulate immune responses more closely mimicking those observed with natural immunity, are associated with beneficial non-specific effects, whereas “non-live” vaccines like the diphtheria, tetanus, and whole-cell pertussis (DTP) vaccine are associated with detrimental effects.

Most specifically, the DTP vaccine is associated with an increased rate of childhood mortality—a non-specific effect of vaccination that is particularly pronounced among girls.

As Dr. Aaby and colleagues noted in January 2017 in a study published in the Lancet journal eBioMedicine:

It should be of concern that the effect of routine vaccinations on all-cause mortality was not tested in randomized trials. All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis. Though a vaccine protects children against the target disease it may simultaneously increase susceptibility to unrelated infections.

This body of research has often been cited by presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in furtherance of his message that government policies resulting in coerced vaccination are uncivilized. Kennedy and his organization Children’s Health Defense staunchly advocate the right to informed consent—which advocacy is instructively labelled “anti-vaccine” by the mainstream media.

The offhand dismissal of Kennedy as an “anti-vaxxer” serves to obfuscate his core message while implicitly if not explicitly defending policies that systematically violate this fundamental human right.

Kennedy is incessantly accused of spreading “vaccine misinformation” by hypocritical media organizations that are themselves guilty of spreading misinformation about vaccines. The fact that the major media serve the government and pharmaceutical industry rather than the general public is easily enough demonstrated by their persistent refusal to correct the official disinformation about vaccines propagated by the US government, including brazen lies told by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Breathing some fresh air into the public discourse, Dr. Christine Stabell Benn, a colleague of Dr. Peter Aaby’s who has prominently researched vaccines’ non-specific effects, published an article on LinkedIn on July 18, 2023, acknowledging that Mr. Kennedy is correct on a fundamental point.

In an article titled “On Robert F Kennedy Jr’s comments on our studies of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine”, Benn writes that, while RFK Jr. has gotten a few details wrong, his “overall message—that we discovered a serious safety signal in relation to DTP vaccines for females—is correct.”

While she doesn’t provide a source or specify an instance in which Kennedy made the claims, she attributes to him two statements that she says are incorrect. To clarify, she wrote that their research was not done under the direction of the Danish government, and neither was Bill Gates involved in it.

She notes that RFK Jr. is correct, however, about the DTP vaccine being associated with a detrimental effect on mortality.

In her article, Benn provides a brief historical overview of the scientific research into this area, including the role of the World Health Organization (WHO).

As she explains, after presenting their findings about the DTP vaccine to the WHO, the WHO commissioned several of its own studies that came to an opposite conclusion. However, in 2006, the WHO acknowledged that the contrary findings of its own studies were unreliable due to flawed methodology.

As a result of researchers pointing out the fatal flaws in the WHO studies, the WHO in June 2008 promised to “keep a watch on the evidence of non-specific effects of vaccination”.

In 2013, the WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) established a working group and conducted a review of the evidence on non-specific effects of two “live” virus vaccines, the measles and Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccines, and the “non-live” DTP vaccine. The systematic review, published in The BMJ in October 2016, affirmed that the DTP vaccine was associated with increased all cause mortality and that this effect was most pronounced in girls.

The review authors curiously maintained that this finding did not indicate a need to change existing vaccination recommendations.

However, the review also affirmed that receipt of a “live” vaccine after DTP vaccine appeared to mitigate the detrimental non-specific effect of the DTP vaccination, and they therefore allowed that “randomized trials are needed to compare the effects of different sequences.”

Thus, it remained a predetermined conclusion that children in developing countries should continue to receive the DTP vaccine despite the absence of evidence for a beneficial effect of the shot on childhood mortality.

As Benn points out, although the WHO’s SAGE group in 2014 tasked its subcommittee to define the questions to be answered with future research, “no studies in relation to DTP have apparently been planned, now almost 10 years after the meeting.”

In July 2020, Benn, Aaby, and coauthors published a major review of non-specific effects titled “Vaccinology: time to change the paradigm?” Published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, the paper made this transformational observation:

The existing vaccine paradigm assumes that vaccines only protect against the target infection, that effective vaccines reduce mortality corresponding to the target infection’s share of total mortality, and that the effects of vaccines are similar for males and females. However, epidemiological vaccine research has generated observations that contradict these assumptions and suggest that vaccines have important non-specific effects on overall health in populations.

As the team also astutely observed in a paper published in the journal Drug Safety on April 19, 2023:

The current framework for testing and regulating vaccines was established before the realization that vaccines, in addition to their effect against the vaccine-specific disease, may also have ‘non-specific effects’ affecting the risk of unrelated diseases.

Dr. Benn also importantly notes in her LinkedIn article that “DTP is not the only vaccine that is associated with increased overall female mortality.”

This effect has been observed also with the malaria vaccine, as I reported in my March 2020 article “WHO Experimenting on African Children without Informed Consent” (which Mr. Kennedy incidentally cites in his book The Real Anthony Fauci.)

Additionally, an association with increased mortality has been observed for the inactivated poliovirus (IPV) vaccine, the Hepatitis B (HepB) vaccine, the H1N1 influenza vaccine, and the pentavalent combination vaccine for DTP, HepB, and Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib).

As Dr. Benn concludes (with my bold emphasis):

The conclusion is very clear: The whole-cell DTP vaccine used in low-income countries is associated with increased mortality for females. The observation has not been contradicted by good prospective studies. What remains unclear is why WHO does not act. Therefore, we welcome that Robert F Kennedy Jr shares the story about DTP vaccine, even though he got some details wrong.

As a propaganda tactic, the media often will rely on strawman argumentation, falsely attributing to intellectual opponents claims that they did not make. Alternatively, the media will latch on to some minor detail that health freedom advocates get wrong to deflect attention from the main points that they get right about vaccines.

A recent example is an article by CNN’s Jake Tapper, who cited Salon’s retraction of Kennedy’s 2005 article “Deadly Immunity” as though this act in itself constituted proof that the thesis of that article was false. This conclusion in turn served as the basis for Tapper’s claim that Kennedy habitually spreads “misinformation” about vaccines.

In fact, the errors that Salon’s editors cited as the reason for the retraction, several of which were introduced by the editors themselves, did not substantively affect Kennedy’s thesis. Indeed, the Salon editors did not dispute his main points.

I detail those corrections in my freely available e-book The New York Times vs. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: How the Mainstream Media Spread Vaccine Misinformation, which provides other illuminating examples of how the media employ propaganda devices to deflect attention from inconvenient truths that Kennedy tells about vaccines.

For a dissection of Jake Tapper’s attempt to demonize him, see also my June 28 article “The Mainstream Media’s Reign of Error: Correcting the Record about RFK Jr.’s ‘Deadly Immunity’”.

Following are several key points that were not disputed by the Salon editors and were completely ignored by Jake Tapper:

• From the late 1980s through the 1990s, the CDC substantially increased the number of mercury-containing vaccinations on its recommended childhood schedule.
• Throughout this time, nobody in the CDC or FDA had ever bothered to consider the potential harms from this increased exposure to a known neurotoxin, and when the FDA finally got around to doing the simple calculations as a result of a Congressional directive in 1997, government officials realized that the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule was exposing infants to cumulative levels of mercury that exceeded the government’s own safety guidelines.
• Once “public health” officials realized this, with the understanding that it was only a matter of time before this damning realization became public, they panicked and scrambled to resolve the impossible dilemma of how to disclose the FDA’s finding without causing irreparable damage to their own credibility.
• An initial analysis of Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) data carried out by Tom Verstraeten in the wake of the FDA’s realization of how the CDC had been recklessly placing children’s health at risk found a statistically significant association between mercury-containing vaccines and an increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism.
• The documentary record indicated that the CDC sought to make the statistical significance of that association go away through subsequent revisions of Verstraeten’s analysis that strayed from the original study protocol.
• Attendees at the CDC’s July 2000 Simpsonwood conference—the transcripts for which are a key source cited by Kennedy from which Tapper deflects attention—expressed concerns about the potential health impacts of exposing children to harmful levels of mercury and the potential legal liability resulting from the government’s malfeasance.

Instructively, you never see the major corporate media acknowledging how the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule in the 1990s was exposing infants to cumulative levels of mercury exceeding the government’s own safety guidelines.

Similarly, you never see the mainstream media acknowledging the body of scientific research consistently finding an association between “non-live” vaccines, including the DTP vaccine, and an increased risk of children dying.

A parsimonious explanation for such omissions of fact is that, when it comes to the topic of vaccines, what the mainstream media do is policy advocacy, not journalism.

The point that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. makes about the DTP vaccine is central to the public debate about vaccines—or absence thereof.

As Dr. Benn has elsewhere remarked, no vaccines have been studied in randomized controlled trials for their non-specific effects on overall health, “and before we have examined these, we cannot actually determine that the vaccines are safe.”

“I think it’s important to recognize that no routine vaccine was tested for all the effect on mortality in randomized trials before being introduced”, Dr. Aaby has similarly stated. “I guess most of you think that we know what all our vaccines are doing. We don’t.”

When RFK Jr. makes that exact same point, the media dismiss it as “vaccine misinformation”. This offhanded rejection of scientific data simply illustrates the complete lack of seriousness with which the media approach the subject of vaccines.

As ever, what the government and media say science says about vaccines and what we actually know from scientific research are two completely different things.