The mainstream media refuse to do journalism on vaccines and instead engage in public policy advocacy in service to the state and pharmaceutical industry. A New York Times article from April 17, 2023, provides a useful case study in how the media help deceive the public about vaccine safety and effectiveness.
The aluminum-containing Hepatitis B (HepB) vaccine is routinely administered to newborn babies as a three-dose series starting on the first day of their lives despite the negligible risk to infants whose mothers are not carriers of the virus.
In April 2019, I wrote a lengthy, highly detailed article for Children’s Health Defense (CHD)—briefly summarized here—exposing how the 1991 universal HepB vaccine recommendation by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was not based on science or any kind of medical necessity but strictly to advance the policy goal of achieving high vaccine uptake.
In other words, this insane one-size-fits-all policy was implemented in service to the financial interests of Big Pharma, not public health.
That stark reality is illustrated by the fact that the recommendation was made despite the absence of randomized, placebo-controlled trials demonstrating the safety and effectiveness of injecting infants with this aluminum-adjuvanted vaccine.
Yet the media go on lying that all vaccines undergo such studies before being added to the CDC’s routine childhood schedule.
The New York Times, for instance, criticized then presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his organization CHD—which he left to serve as President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services—for saying that the HepB vaccine was not tested in placebo-controlled trials.
The Times insisted that this claim is “misinformation”.
But it is the Times and the rest of the servile mainstream media who are provably deceiving the public.
I thoroughly debunked the Times‘ pro-pharma propaganda in my freely downloadable e-book The New York Times vs. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: How the Mainstream Media Spread Vaccine Misinformation.
To get the full book, a detailed and meticulously documented case study in how vaccine propaganda works, sign up for my newsletters here.
The following is an excerpted chapter showing how the Times brazenly deceives about HepB vaccine safety.
Deceiving about the Use of Placebos in Vaccine Clinical Trials
Further attempting to characterize RFK, Jr. and CHD as having spread “misinformation” about vaccines, The New York Times’ shameless hit piece continues with the following paragraph (emphasis added):
The Children’s Health Defense website also states that certain vaccines are not tested against placebos in clinical trials, citing polio, hepatitis and meningitis vaccines as examples. That is misleading. Brand-new vaccines — from polio to measles to Covid-19 — are tested in large clinical trials that include placebo groups. But scientists agree it would be unethical to withhold lifesaving vaccines from study participants. For that reason, when older vaccines are reformulated or updated, studies do not include a placebo group.
The trick here is to understand what the Times means by “brand-new” as opposed to “older” vaccines that have been “reformulated or updated”.
If by “brand” we take the Times to mean a mark to attest manufacturer or ownership, like a trademark or tradename, then, for example, Merck’s Heptatitis B (HepB) vaccine “RECOMBIVAX HB” was literally “brand-new” when it was first licensed.
Therefore, one possible interpretation of the Times’ argument is that every vaccine currently on the CDC’s routine childhood schedule was licensed for use only after having undergone large, randomized, placebo-controlled trials; and it is only “reformulated or updated” versions of those same brands of vaccines—like influenza vaccines updated annually to target different variants—for which the manufacturers forego placebo-controlled trials.
If that’s what the Times means, though, then it is lying.
The other possible interpretation is that the Times is acknowledging that at least some brands of vaccines currently on the market—including the heptatitis B, inactivated poliovirus, and measles vaccines—were never tested in placebo-controlled trials. In other words, the Times is merely saying that at some point in the past, large placebo-controlled trials were conducted for some other brand of vaccine that is no longer used and that was a different product from those currently licensed.
Notice that if this is what the Times means, it amounts to a tacit acknowledgment that the information from Kennedy’s organization Children’s Health Defense is factually correct.
To determine which interpretation of the Times’ argument is correct, let’s examine the HepB vaccine, which I happen to have researched and written an article about for CHD titled “Why Does the CDC Recommend Hepatitis B Vaccination for Infants?” (published in April 2019).
As I explained in that article, the HepB vaccine is an aluminum-containing vaccine recommended by the CDC for all infants with a three-dose regimen starting on the very first day of their lives despite the fact that the group of individuals at high risk for this sexually transmitted disease is comprised of people who are sexually promiscuous, intravenous drug users, and infants born to carrier mothers—with prenatal screening done routinely for pregnant women to determine the risk to their developing babies.
The first licensed HepB vaccine was Merck’s Heptavax B, which received FDA approval in 1981. In addition to neurotoxic aluminum, it contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal. The viral antigen component was noninfectious Hepatitis B Surface Antigen (HBsAg) protein purified from the plasma of chronic carriers of the hepatitis B virus.
According to a paper published in 2011 in the Journal of Medical Humanities, the prelicensure clinical trials conducted for that vaccine in the 1970s “included only gay men”. A review of clinical data for the HepB vaccine published in 1985 provides additional details, referencing “four double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical studies”.
The first study was a randomized, placebo-controlled trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine in October 1980. The trial population consisted of 1,083 gay men. Follow-up data from that trial were also published in Hepatology in the fall of 1981. The second was a CDC study published in Annals of Internal Medicine in September 1982 (after licensure), for which the trial population was 1,402 gay men attending venereal disease clinics. Participants in the so-called “placebo” group were not given a true placebo; instead, they were given “all vaccine constituents” minus the antibody protein; hence, the “placebo” was an injection containing aluminum and mercury. The third was a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in December 1982. That trial evaluated efficacy of Heptavax B using a study population of 865 adult medical staff workers from various hemodialysis centers. Once again, no true placebo was used; instead, the “placebo” group was given an injection of aluminum. The fourth and final was a clinical trial published in Annals of Internal Medicine in July 1984, for which the study population consisted of 1,330 high-risk health care personnel.
That HepB vaccine is no longer used in the US.
In 1986, Merck received licensure for its Recombivax HB vaccine, which, like the older vaccine, initially contained both aluminum and mercury (the use of thimerosal in this vaccine was phased out around the turn of the century). Apart from that similarity, the new vaccine was described by the authors of the Journal of Medical Humanities paper as “a vastly different product”. Rather than containing viral proteins harvested from chronically infected patients, Merck’s new “recombinant” product contained genetically engineered proteins manufactured by cloning the virus’s genetic coding for HBsAg in yeast.
Recombivax HB wasn’t merely an “updated” version of the same vaccine; in every meaningful sense of the term, it was a “brand-new” vaccine.
In 1989, a second recombinant HepB vaccine received FDA approval, GlaxoSmithKline’s Engerix-B, which also contained both aluminum and mercury when it was first licensed. (Thimerosal, as mentioned, was phased out of most childhood vaccines but continues to be used in multi-dose vials of influenza vaccines.)
In 1991, the CDC updated its HepB vaccine recommendation to include universal vaccination of infants with a three-dose regimen starting on the day of birth. State laws mandating the HepB vaccine as a condition for school attendance followed. The rationale for recommending universal HepB vaccination at birth was not medical but political: the CDC was failing in its policy goal of achieving high vaccine uptake among high-risk groups, so it sought to overcome that obstacle by vaccinating everyone at birth regardless of individual risk.
This policy thus places infants born to non-carrier mothers at an unnecessary risk of harm from the aluminum-containing vaccine.
So, the question is whether the New York Times considers the recombinant HepB vaccines currently administered routinely to infants as being “brand-new” when they were first licensed or as being “updated” products. If the Times means the former, we should be able to check the package inserts for these products on the FDA’s website and find evidence that large and placebo-controlled trials were conducted prior to licensure to ensure the safety of administering these vaccines to infants.
Except, if you do so, you will find no indication that there were any such clinical trials.
Merck’s package insert indicates instead that its new product was tested for safety in just 147 healthy infants and children up to 10 years of age. Clearly, this is not a “large” population of children, much less of infants, specifically. Since, for the purposes of legal disclosure in the package insert, the infants were grouped with older children and their numbers are unspecified, this information is uninterpretable with respect to the safety of vaccinating newborn babies still in the earliest stages of childhood development. Additionally, there was no placebo control group, and the children were monitored for adverse events for a mere five days.
GSK’s package insert indicates that its product was tested for safety in 5,071 healthy adults, children, and newborn infants. It is certainly arguable whether that could be fairly characterized as a “large” sample size, and, once again, including the unspecified number of infants with older children and adults renders this information uninterpretable with respect to the risks of vaccinating infants, specifically. Once again, there was no placebo control group, and subjects were monitored for only four days.
Now, given these facts, let’s go back to the New York Times’ claim that RFK, Jr. and CHD are the ones misleading people by saying that some vaccines on the CDC’s routine childhood schedule were never tested in placebo-controlled trials, which accusation is based on the Times’ counterclaim that such trials are done for every “brand-new” vaccine.
What the Times is really arguing, then, is that it isn’t true that no HepB vaccine was ever tested in large placebo-controlled trials because there was a prelicensure trial in the late 1970s for an older and now unused blood-derived HepB vaccine that included a placebo-control group in a trial population of 1,083 gay men.
Clearly, the one deceiving the public about vaccine safety in this instance is the New York Times.
The Times’ counterargument, we can now see, is a strawman fallacy: when Kennedy and CHD say that the HepB vaccine never underwent placebo-controlled trials, they are talking about the recombinant vaccines currently in use, not the older product that they replaced; and we can understand Kennedy and CHD to mean that relying on trial data from that older product is an insufficient basis for recommending universal administration of the currently licensed vaccines to newborn babies.
Consequently, when Kennedy and CHD say that the currently licensed vaccines never underwent placebo-controlled trials, they are telling the truth, and there is nothing misinformative about that observation.
The colossal significance of the Times’ deception becomes even more apparent when you consider how Stolberg’s counterargument is premised on the assumption that the small trial of adult men in the 1970s for a totally different vaccine is sufficient scientific data to uphold the CDC’s recommendation for indiscriminate administration of aluminum-containing HepB vaccines to newborn babies regardless of individual risk.
Thus, we can see that the fundamental disagreement that the Times has with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is not that he said something untrue about vaccine safety but that he dared to voice a legitimate criticism of public vaccine policy.
Hence the Times’ attempt to obfuscate the fact that what Kennedy says is true. Clearly, his true offense is making statements deemed heretical by the thought-controllers, whereas it is the New York Times spreading dangerous misinformation about the FDA’s vaccine-approval process.
Incidentally, both Merck and GSK also disagree with the Times about the sufficiency of evidence from the clinical trial in the 1970s for that older HepB vaccine, as we can also learn from their respective package inserts. Both manufacturers explicitly acknowledge that “adverse reaction rates observed in the clinical trials of a vaccine cannot be directly compared to rates in the clinical trials of another vaccine”. (Emphasis added.)
Obviously, it is also profoundly unscientific and horrifically unethical to generalize the findings of a study of adult subjects in a high-risk group to the entire population of infants in the US.
So, we come to the question of which of these two arguments can reasonably be judged misinformative:
- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s observation that the prelicensure trials for the HepB currently administered routinely to infants did not include a placebo-control group; or
- the New York Times’ counterargument that Kennedy’s assertion constitutes “misinformation” because, while no longer used, there once was a totally different HepB vaccine that was tested in a “large” placebo-controlled trial of 1,083 adult men.
The conclusion is once again inescapable that the mainstream media refuse to take the subject of vaccines seriously, and the Times’ whole purpose is to do policy advocacy, not journalism.
The example of the HepB vaccine is sufficient to demonstrate the New York Times’ extraordinary deceitfulness and hypocrisy, but since the article also specifically mentions the polio and measles vaccines currently used in the US as being among those for which initial licensure was based on “large clinical trials that include placebo groups”, let’s quickly look at those products’ package inserts, too.
There is one monovalent inactivated poliovirus (IPV) vaccine currently licensed by the FDA, which is Sanofi Pasteur’s IPOL vaccine, the clinical trials for which did not include a placebo control group. All the other brands of inactivated poliovirus vaccine are combination vaccines also including diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis components (DTaP). There’s GlaxoSmithKline’s Pediarix, which additionally includes a recombinant HepB component; the clinical trials for this vaccine included no safety studies using a placebo control group. Ditto for GSK’s KINRIX product, which is the DTaP plus IPV, without the HepB component. Then there’s Sanofi’s Quadracel, which includes DTaP plus IPV; once again, there were no placebo-controlled trials. There’s also the MSP Vaccine Company’s VAXELIS, another combination shot containing DTaP, HepB, and IPV as well as a Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) component; as with the other IPV vaccines, the “control” group was given other vaccines rather than an inert placebo. Finally, there’s Sanofi’s Pentacel, a combination shot including DTaP, IPV, and HiB components; no placebo control group was used in any of the clinical trials for that product, either.
As for measles vaccine, which is only available in combination with mumps and rubella vaccines, there is GSK’s PRIORIX. The insert indicates that in clinical trials the “control” group was administered Merck’s M‑M‑R II vaccine. The only other two MMR products are Merck’s M‑M‑R II and Merck’s ProQuad, the latter of which is a combination shot also including varicella virus (chicken pox) vaccine (MMRV). For Merck’s measles vaccine, the “Adverse Reactions” section of the package insert mentions no prelicensure studies, only a trial started in 2005 in which 752 children were randomized to receive either M‑M‑R II or Merck’s varicella virus vaccine, VARIVAX. The “Clinical Studies” section of the insert mentions only studies relevant for efficacy and immunogenicity, not safety.
We can reasonably conclude from the package inserts that the currently used measles vaccines were never tested for safety prior to licensure in large placebo-controlled trials. Just to be sure, though, the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) sent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the FDA asking the agency to produce all clinical trial reports that it relied upon as the basis for its decision to license Merck’s MMR vaccine.
That FOIA request revealed that, indeed, “MMR‑II was licensed by the FDA based on clinical trials which had a total of 834 children, had no placebo control, and only reviewed safety for 42 days after injection”. (Emphasis added.)
It seems that vaccines currently licensed for use by the FDA and recommended for routine use in children by the CDC were not all tested in large and placebo-controlled trials when they were brand-new, after all. Perhaps, if we are feeling generous, we could describe the New York Times’ counterargument as containing “a grain of truth”.
This brings us to the Times’ additional argument that it would be “unethical” to conduct placebo-controlled trials prior to licensure of brand-new vaccines like Merck’s Recombivax B. That argument is an example of the fallacy of begging the question because it presumes the proposition to be proven, which is that if large placebo-controlled trials were conducted with a relevant trial population, they would demonstrate that the products are “safe and effective” to administer routinely and indiscriminately to infants and young children in the absence of an individualized risk-benefit analysis.
It is not the “anti-vaxxers” who are wrong in this regard. Rather, what is both unscientific and unethical is the routine administration of these shots to newborns in the absence of large placebo-controlled trials demonstrating both the safety and effectiveness of this practice.
The reality is that policymakers at the CDC make such determinations on the basis of their own prejudiced assumptions and on the basis of trials where the control group, if any, received an active comparator, like an aluminum-containing injection or another vaccine. Since the rate of vaccine-related adverse events in such trials is not being compared to a normal and expected background rate, the outcome is to conceal the true rate of adverse events caused by vaccination.
The current regulatory framework for vaccines is designed to conceal the true safety and efficacy profiles for these pharmaceutical products. The logical corollary is that the government serves the pharmaceutical industry, not public health.That is the point that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is making when he tells the truth that HepB and other vaccines routinely administered to children never underwent placebo-controlled trials prior to licensure by the FDA. That is the reality that the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media do not wish for you to perceive.
? To download the full propaganda-busting e-book for free, subscribe to my newsletters here.
