Dr Nick Coatsworth admits the big vaccine mistake he made as one of the country’s top doctors during the Covid – Daily Mail

By Eliza Mcphee For Daily Mail Australia 01:17 28 Feb 2024, updated 01:17 28 Feb 2024

Dr Nick Coatsworth has said that government officials including himself 'got it wrong' when it came to supporting Covid vaccine mandates - and that future pandemics should prioritise convincing people to get vaccinated.

His comments come afterQueensland's Supreme Courton Tuesday found thatpolice and ambulance workers in the state were given unlawful directions to get vaccines or face potential disciplinary action.

The court found Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll failed to give proper consideration to human rights relevant to the decision to issue the vaccine mandate.

Former Department of Health director-general Dr John Wakefield was unable to prove he issued the vaccine mandate under an implied term of the employment agreements for ambulance service workers.

As a result, both vaccine mandates were found by the court to be 'unlawful' and to have no effect.

Weighing in on the groundbreaking decision, Dr Coatsworth, Australia's former deputy chief health officer during the pandemic, said he had to acknowledge his own role in the system promoting vaccine mandates.

'We didn't get it wrong promoting the vaccines, but the mandates, yes, I think we did get that wrong,' he told The Today Show on Wednesday.

'And I think you can say hindsight is 20/20. But hindsight gives us foresight. And if we have another pandemic, we should think long and hard whether mandates for vaccines are justified.'

The infectious disease physician was the face of the vaccine rollout and was a common appearance on Australian televisions during the Covid outbreak.

He was appointed as one of three new deputy chief medical officers under Brendan Murphy at the start of the pandemic in March 2020.

Dr Coatsworth said CommissionerCarroll 'didn't give any regard to the human rights implications' of the vaccine mandates.

He said the Supreme Court's decision could mean some of the workers sacked for not following the mandates could potentially get their jobs back.

'It could open the way for civil proceedings and damages against the governments with human rights acts, which are Queensland, the ACT and Victoria,' he said.

'But importantly, I think it opens allthe decisions that we as senior health officials, as senior police and ambulance officials made.

'Did we have regard to Australians' human rights when we made those decisions and to what extent did we balance those decisions against human rights?'

The expert said in the event a pandemic was to occur again, authorities should rely on convincing people to get vaccinated rather than enforcing mandates.

'I think what we saw in New South Wales and Victoria was that you could get tohigh levels of vaccine coverage without the mandates, and that was because people were genuinely worried and they were prepared to be informed about these vaccines.

'That's the way to do it for the future.'

The Supreme Court also found the vaccine directions limited the human rights of workers because they were required to undergo a medical procedure without full consent but it was reasonable in all the circumstances.

Senior Judge Administrator Glenn Martin said the police and ambulance services were trying to prevent their employees from suffering infection, serious illness and life-changing health consequences.

'The balance between the importance of the purpose of the limitation, and the importance of preserving the human right... is complicated by the fact that these directions were given in what was, by any measure, an emergency,' he said.

More than 70 frontline workers in Queensland had taken legal action against the state government in three separate lawsuits.

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The Indiana Department of Health reported a single case of measles Friday in Lake County its first instance of the highly contagious virus in five years.

State Health Commissioner Lindsay Weaver wisely used the diagnosis to urge Hoosiers and their families to get their vaccinations on time to protect themselves and, equally important, their communities.

Measles is easily spread and can be serious, especially for young children. About 1 in 5 unvaccinated people in the United States who get measles are hospitalized, and 90% of unvaccinated people who are exposed to measles will become sick, she said in a press release. This case is a good reminder that you are at risk if you havent been vaccinated.

As of Friday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 35 measles cases in 15 states, including Indiana and Ohio, but also in California, New York City and Florida. And the Sunshine State is currently grappling with an elementary school outbreak.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a well-known COVID-19 vaccine skeptic, disrupted efforts to contain the outbreak when he told parents they could ignore CDC advice to keep unvaccinated children home for 21 days. Instead of following the science, Ladapo sent a letter to households saying he is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance, imperiling the health of the unvaccinated.

Measles typically starts with a high fever, cough and runny nose. Within days, a signature rash breaks out that spreads downward from the face. The rash may also bring with it a spike in the fever. In severe cases, it can lead to pneumonia, encephalitis and even death.

In 2000, measles was declared eliminated in the United States, meaning the disease is no longer constantly present. Outbreaks continue to occur around the world, so theres always a risk of measles importations.

The last case of measles in Allen County occurred in May 2016. Allen County Department of Health Administrator Mindy Waldron worries another measles outbreak could occur locally.

We have been concerned for some time that we could begin to see cases of vaccine-preventable diseases, particularly measles, because vaccination rates have declined over the past several years, she told The Journal Gazette on Monday.

Allen Countys current immunization completion rate for the measles, mumps and rubella series of vaccinations is 82.06%, which is just above the state rate of 81.49%. The countys completion rate of the same immunization series for children 19 to 35 months of age is 61.62%, which is 3.37% higher than the prior year and higher than the state rate of 56.4%.

Last year, the Allen County health department increased the countys vaccination rate by searching patient records to determine which children might need vaccinations and attempting to contact each parent to get them scheduled for appointments to get caught up, Waldron said. The department will likely continue this effort, along with funding Super Shot through its Health First Allen County grant program to increase vaccination outreach clinics in schools and other events to reduce any barriers to care.

One dose of the MMR vaccine is considered 93% effective by the CDC, and two doses is 97% effective. People who have had measles are also considered to be protected, as well as those born before 1957, as they are very likely to have had the disease.

But vaccination rates are dropping nationally. A November 2023 report by the CDC found immunization coverage for state-required vaccines decreased from 95% in 2019-2020 to 93% in 2021-2022. It remained flat at 93% in 2022-2023.

Before the U.S. started vaccinating for measles in 1963, approximately 500,000 cases and 500 measles deaths were reported annually, with epidemic cycles every two to three years, according to the CDC. But the actual number of cases was estimated at 3 million to 4 million annually. More than 50% of Americans had measles by age 6, and more than 90% by age 15.

Ignore Floridas laissez-faire attitude toward measles and get your immunizations and boosters. The Allen County community is protected from communicable diseases like measles because of vaccinations.

As the internet's premiere fact-checking site, Snopes is on the frontlines of this era's biggest misinformation battles from fights against war propaganda to false election-fraud claims to dangerous theories on climate change. Also within that category: The U.S. movement to discredit the effectiveness of vaccinations. Even before 2020, when COVID-19 vaccine skepticism enveloped new shades of otherwise science-minded Americans, Snopes prioritized fact-checking efforts to expose the logical flaws behind anti-vaccine activists' arguments. By unpacking one of their major talking points below, we deepen that work all with hopes of arming readers with context to discern undisputed facts from agenda-focused mistruths in their everyday lives. If you'd like to support this type of journalism,we'd love your help.

Jessica Lee,senior assignments editor,snopes.com

This story explores the history of a purportedly scientific study promoted by Robert Kennedy Jr., a 2024 presidential candidate, and his anti-vaccine non-profit Children's Health Defense. The study purports to "prove" that vaccines are the primary cause of chronic illness in America.

The study was completed by Joy Garner, an activist with no relevant scientific or medical training. She later recalled she was inspired to investigate the matter while attending a 2019 rally against California vaccine mandates headlined by Kennedy.

Despite the study's wild and incorrect claims, including that it supposedly demonstrated "the mathematically proven imminent dissolution of America from within," Kennedy and his network of activists gave it wide exposure. In August 2023, he published a book, "Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak," featuring the data she collected.

This story describes the evolution of the claim that the study proved that vaccines are responsible for an "epidemic" of chronic illnesses (like cancer and diabetes), from its birth at a Kennedy rally to its embrace by activists. It is an example of how pseudoscientific health misinformation can mature to reach mainstream audiences with the help of high-profile figures, like Kennedy.

In early April 2019, a California woman named Joy Garner said she had an epiphany on the steps of the California State Capitol Building. Standing in a crowd, she was protesting legislation that would place tighter restrictions on doctors who issue medical exemptions for vaccinations. The protest was part of an event organized by leaders of America's anti-vaccine movement, including Robert Kennedy Jr. He gave a headlining speech questioning the safety of vaccines.

"Our research and the litigation that we're doing right now," son of the late Bobby Kennedy and current independent presidential candidate said, referencing the work of his anti-vaccine charity, Children's Health Defense (CHD), "[shows] that many of these vaccines are actually causing, in high probability, far more deaths and injuries than they can ever be argued to be prevented."

These deaths, he suggested in a live stream of the event, were in the form of chronic disease. Life-changing illnesses like cancer and diabetes, according to Kennedy and others, were linked to vaccines.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at an anti-Senate Bill 276 rally in Sacramento, California, on April 10, 2019. (Facebook)

Recalling the April 10, 2019, event on a podcast years later, Garner described seeing another protester holding a "clever sign" in the crowd. It referenced, she said, an alleged lack of studies about vaccine safety that include a control group (that is, an unvaccinated group to compare against.) She said she began "howling" to a crowd growing around her.

"They are trying to eliminate the controls because that's where the evidence is," she said to that crowd. Garner believedthe alleged superior health of unvaccinated people was direct evidence of harm from vaccines, and that scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and medical professionals were working to keep that fact secret. "That's where the bodies are buried," she recalled saying, referring to information that could be gleaned by comparing the health of unvaccinated and vaccinated people.

Screengrab from Facebook live video taken at an April 24, 2019, anti-SB 276 rally. Sign advertises "thecontrolgroup.org" (Facebook)

Two weeks later, Garner returned to the Capitol for another protest against the California legislation, Senate Bill 276, with printed copies of a survey and supplies for a makeshift booth to advertise her new effort, recruit for participants, and distribute information. (The setup was visible in a Facebook live feed of the event.) This time, her mission was to collect information on the health of as many unvaccinated Americans she could contact. She named her effort The Control Group (TCG).

"Robert Kennedy Jr, and other good people will be able to make good use of this evidence," Garner wrote to potential participants.

Attorneys Greg Glaser (left) and Ray Flores (informedconsentdefense.org)

The data collected by TCG, Garner explained in online recruitments posted in May 2019, would be used to sue the U.S. president and try to end vaccine mandates nationwide. "Our massive and now expanding study," Garner wrote, "will be the most damning evidence big pharma has ever faced in a court of law."

She brought two lawyers on board to fight the federal case in court Ray Flores and Greg Glaser. Both have deep connections to Kennedy and his anti-vaccine charity, CHD. Kennedy, who, as of this writing, was on leave as chairman and chief legal counsel to the nonprofit to focus on his presidential run, took charge of CHD in 2016.

The CHD advocates for anti-vaccine policies and files lawsuits to advance that goal. Under Kennedy's leadership, the group rode a pre-pandemic wave of anger towards laws mandating vaccines at the state level,such as in California, and became one of the most significant anti-vaccine groups in America. People's objections to mandatory lockdowns and vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic increased the CHD's reach.

Glaser, The Control Group's lead attorney, has served on the legal team of at least one CHD caseand is a regular guest on various shows and podcasts produced by CHD. Flores is presently senior counsel at CHD.

At more than 70 pages, the The Control Group lawsuit repeated the central themes of Kennedy's early April rally and subsequent activism that the legal protections given to vaccine developers supposedly make it impossible to sue them, and that this alleged immunity means the safety of vaccines is never really tested objectively. "What people don't know," Kennedy misleadingly claimed at the April 10 protest, "is that not only are they exempt from liability, but they're also exempt from safety testing." Also, he accused the manufacturers of lacking long-term safety monitoring.

Kennedy and anti-SB 276 demonstrators at the California Capitol Building, Aug. 28, 2019 (Sacramento Bee)

The Control Group set out to change that. The group attempted to survey as many completely unvaccinated people as possible about whether they suffered from any long-term chronic conditions. First, Garnerapproached participants at SB 276 rallies and other anti-vaccine events. Later, she reached out to people online. She finished collecting and tabulating the data by July 2020, after receiving responses from over 1,400 people who said they had never been vaccinated.

In November 2020, the group filed its suit against the president at the time, Donald Trump in the U.S. Circuit Court for California's Eastern District. The judge switched the plaintiff to Joe Biden following his inauguration in January 2021.

The group's complaint asked a judge to declare specific protections for unvaccinated people, force Biden to establish a national informed consent law, and end mandatory vaccinations nationwide. The group further stated that it sought to prevent "the mathematically proven imminent dissolution of America from within." Glaser, on a CHD-hosted podcast, later recalled going "into court with 5,000 pages of fully vetted scientific materials, [and] perfect case presentation."

McGregor Scott, a U.S. attorney representing the presidential office, saw the group's work in a different light. Their complaint, he wrote, was "most accurately described as an unfocused, rambling anti-vaccine screed" culminating with "an implicit threat that, if the Court does not act, a military overthrow of the government might be in the offing."

Snopes reached out to Glaser about the group's legal effort. He responded with a series of false allegations about Snopes' supposed ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Despite multiple attempts, he did not directly answer any questions related to this story, requesting that we first provide him with, among other things, every advertisement displayed on Snopes "since 2020."

(Such a request is impossible because, like most websites, the programmatic ads Snopes displays are unique to each user's visit and largely outside the organization's control. Snopes discloses all financial information here).

Extreme claims that speakers made at SB 276 rallies, such as comparisons between vaccination and racial segregation, or the notion that vaccination was akin to a "mass, ongoing, human medical experiment," also appeared in The Control Group's court filing and oral arguments. The group repeatedly described vaccine requirements for public school children, government workers, and others as a form of unconstitutional discrimination similar to racial segregation.

"It used to be that in our nation we prevented people from going to school based on the color of their skin," Glaser argued in the group's district court appearance before U.S. Circuit Judge William Shubb on Feb. 22, 2021. "Now we're preventing them from going to school based on what's injected underneath their skin."

Shubb dismissed the case that day, agreeing with the presidential office that the president could not plausibly be considered liable for vaccine mandates, which are created and enforced by state governments. Also, Shubb wrote in his ruling, courts could not offer the type of relief the group sought.

The Control Group appealed the case's dismissal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, alleging conflicts of interests with both Shubb and the judge from the 9th Circuit to whom the group was assigned. When the 9th Circuit nonetheless decided not to reconsider the case, the group asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its arguments.

In July 2022, the CHD, the anti-vaccine organization led by Kennedy, supported The Control Group by submitting an amicus brief to the Supreme Court. (Amicus briefs are legal filings made by outside parties with interest in a case.) In the brief, Mary Holland, then CHD's chief legal officer, repeated The Control Group's suggestion that the American populace was being experimented on. "Petitioners seek the Court's intervention to uphold their right to refuse participation in [...] the vast array of government-mandated vaccination requirements."

Ultimately, the Supreme Court declined to reconsider the appeal. That outcome, however, did nothing to stop the group frompublicizing vaccines' alleged link to chronic illnesses. The study the group produced, advocates believed, would shake "the bedrock of medicine" by supposedly proving unvaccinated people are healthier and vaccines are the primary driver of chronic illness in America.

Using the survey responses from people who said they were unvaccinated, The Control Group's study was initially "published" as an exhibit in the group's complaint against the president. That report, titled "Statistical Evaluation of Health Outcomes in the Unvaccinated," is also available on the Children's Health Defense's website, among other places online.

Despite its name, the study didn't actually use a control group. TCG sought data only from completely unvaccinated individuals. A study using a control group would have recruited vaccinated people from the same locations and in the same way (online and in-person events) to compare their rate of chronic illness to the unvaccinated group. Instead, The Control Group merely looked to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates of chronic disease prevalence among Americans to see if survey respondents had fewer such illnesses in comparison:

A Control Group-produced chart used in litigation (thecontrolgroup.org)

The group collected data on 1,482 Americans. Within this pool of individuals, 88 (~6%) reported one chronic health condition, and 14 (less than 1%) reported two such conditions. In most (but not all) cases, The Control Group's comparisons considered children under the age of 18 separately from adults. Some 1,272 (86% of the respondents) were under the age of 18, leaving only 210 adults.

(The Control Group also collected data on whether a respondent's mother was vaccinated during her pregnancy and if a respondent had received a vitamin K-shot at birth.)

In legal filings, the group claimed its data provided absolute and unequivocal proof that vaccines cause chronic illness. Among other things, survey data supposedly demonstrated the "probability" that "excess health conditions seen in the vaccinated population under the age of 18 are not due to vaccine exposure is 1 in [84 sexvigintillion]."

This is a misrepresentation of basic statistical theory.

The "1 in 84 sexvigintillion" number and other similarly extreme figures were derived solely from calculations of the statistical significance between the number of chronic diseases in TCG's survey responses and CDC's averages. Such a calculation has no bearing on the validity of The Control Group's hypothesis that vaccines cause harm; it merely demonstrates the observed difference between the two groups (the CDC averages and survey respondents) is real.

In emails with Snopes, Garner demonstrated this misinterpretation of statistical significance on more than one occasion by citing the 1994 buddy comedy "Dumb and Dumber."

"The astronomical odds against the innocence of vaccines as the cause of this disparity," Garner told Snopes in an email, "gives absolute hilarity to the, 'So you're telling me there's a chance' [...] argument from the Dumb & Dumber movie, and all who dare to repeat it."

Erroneously claiming that statistical significance proves a specific hypothesis correct an elementary mistake in the world of statistics is the foundation of The Control Group's most sensational claims about chronic illness. There is, in fact, a clear difference between TCG respondents' incidence of chronic disease compared to America at large, but such a difference could well be a result of The Control Group's sampling of a population that differs from America's in ways unrelated to vaccines.

One potential explanation for the differences observed, for example, is that The Control Group targeted individuals of a higher-than-average, socio-economic class. This is relevant because, as the National Academies wrote in its 2019 report "A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty," for "almost every chronic condition, children from wealthier families experience better health."

Scholars generally recognize two forms of unvaccinated or under-vaccinated Americans,citing socioeconomic data: Those who are poor and lack access to vaccines, and those who are affluent yet under-vaccinated due to political or moral stances.

Speaking to Snopes by Zoom, Yale Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology Donna Speigelman said a study like the one The Control Group attempted to conduct would need to include unvaccinated individuals who are as identical as possible to the American population cited by the CDC, namely in terms of socioeconomic status, and other demographic details.

According to The Control Group, however, CDC research projects that consider such socioeconomic factors aim "to incite class and race wars" and benefit a "communist agenda." As a result, Garner said, her survey omitted questions about race, income, parental status, and other factors epidemiologists typically consider as relevant in such studies. "Only a moron goes looking for a non-biological cause," she told Snopes by email.

Another potential explanation for the better health outcomes in the The Control Group pool is that it targeted individuals who were abnormally healthy. The group's survey sought responses from people who were motivated to validate their choices to avoid vaccination and prove "the good health of their unvaccinated children." In legal filings, the group described ideal study participants for a proposed follow-up study as people who are "completely and extraordinarily healthy."

Yet another possible explanation for why Garner's survey respondents said they suffer from fewer chronic illnesses compared to CDC averages could be related to the fact that, as a whole, the group is far younger. The average survey participant was about 10 years old, based on raw data found on the group's website. The average age of the U.S. population, as of late 2022, was 38.8 years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.Looking at The Control Group's 18-and-under group, children under 5 are overrepresented compared to the U.S. population, per Census estimates.

The likelihood of chronic disease increases with age. Many conditions the group investigated are classified as "age-associated" chronic diseases, including cancer, arthritis, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Diabetes can affect both children and adults, for example, but the disease disproportionately affects older people in the form of Type 2 diabetes. A risk factor for Type 2 diabetes, according to the CDC, is "being 45 or older." Among the 210 adults in The Control Group's survey, 18 were over the age of 45.

As a final defense of its methodologies, the group hid behind another specious statistical argument: It claimed that because it was able to sample such a large fraction of the (exceedingly small) unvaccinated American population, the survey's data must be representative of all unvaccinated people in the country from a mathematical standpoint.

Miguel Hernan, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that claim about sampling ratio was not true. "It isn't reasonable to argue that, because the population is small, any sampling is representative," he wrote via email.

The Control Group sampled far less than 1% of the American unvaccinated population, according to its own calculations. "Even if we could sample, say, 25% of a population, if the sampling is not random," Hernan said, "there is no guarantee that the 25% is expected to be representative in any sense."

Speigelmen, the Yale professor, agreed. "[The] idea that a large sample size makes bias go away? [...] That's completely wrong."

Under Kennedy's leadership, the Children's Health Defense enabled dissemination of The Control Group's misconstrued findings across a wide range of conspiracy and anti-vaccine media outlets. In other words, the Kennedy-run organization helped spread the misguided claim about vaccines being a primary driver of chronic illness in America to people who may not have heard it otherwise.

The Control Group's purported results have been shared by prolific anti-vaccine social media accounts, like Vigilant Fox, and anti-vax and conspiracy media outlets, like Natural News, The Expos, and Age of Autism. Also, Garner has been interviewed at length by several anti-vaccine figures.

That virality followed promotion by the CHD, which publishes dubious vaccine information through its online publication, "The Defender." With this publication, Kennedy said in an October 2020 video announcing its launch, CHD would "weaponize information" by republishing "all the information that is censored everywhere else." Fittingly, The Defender's stories are often reposted in full on Alex Jones' conspiracy website, Infowars.

"The Defender" first published The Control Group's findings in a January 2021 story authored by TCG attorney Glaser. The report claimed, in part, "America is dying from the current trajectory of chronic illness" and that "our Control Group pilot survey proved it is the vaccines causing our nation's demise." People in CHD's orbit of influencers ran with that finding.

Paul Thomas, a former pediatrician, was among that group. He had made a name for himself by alleging that the CDC's recommended childhood vaccination schedule was harmful. In October 2022, the state of Oregon forced him to surrender his medical license, in part, because the state said he was discouraging parents from vaccinating their children. He hosts a weekly podcast produced by CHD.

Thomas used that CHD podcast to promote the The Control Group's effort on several occasions. On a January 2022 appearance on Thomas' podcast, for instance, Glaser explained the purported benefits of the group's scientific work. "If you want to show that vaccines are the healthiest thing on the planet, you need a control group. If you want to show they're harming society, you need a control group," he said. "There's no substitute for this."

Thomas was impressed. A few months later, Thomas used The Control Group's data as a key reveal in atalkdistributed to onlineparticipants of a so-called"health freedom conference" that is, a collection of videospromoting, among other things, unsubstantiated claims about supplements and vaccines."I'm going to blow your socks off," he said before diving into the group's data.

A clip of that talk went viral online both at the time of the conference and at subsequent times pushing its information beyond CHD circles. Believers of the data regularly share a portion of the talk with copy-and-pasted text, beginning, "Dr. Paul Thomas Blows Up The Conventional Vaccine Narrative With Stunning Data":

"Wouldn't it be nice if you had known that, [by] not vaccinating, you wouldn't have had to deal with [diabetes]?" Thomas asked in the clip. He did not say that assertion was based on survey responses from a group of individuals including only 18 people over the age of 45, the age at which the CDC says the risk for Type 2 diabetes really takes effect.

The Control Group's work also caught the attention of entrepreneur Steve Kirsch a frequent speaker alongside Kennedy at rallies and podcasts on issues surrounding vaccines and online censorship. An inventor of the optical mouse in the 1990s, Kirsch became one of the U.S.'s loudest and most persistent anti-vaccine voices during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In June 2023, Kirsch testified before the Pennsylvania State Senate as part of a panel that discussed "medical freedom" a term often embraced by anti-vaccine advocates to describe their movement. His presentation cited The Control Group's study.

"[The study has] over a thousand people who are unvaccinated," Kirsch told the committee in a video that regularly goes viral, repeating The Control Group's talking point alleging that virtually no unvaccinated people have chronic disease compared to 60% of vaccinated individuals. Like Thomas, Kirsch did not elaborate on evidence supporting the former figure that it was derived from a pool of 210 adults with an average age of 30.

Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, wrote in a profile of Kirsch that his "answer to his opponents is straight out of the quack handbook: debate me, bro!" He often uses Control Group data in such debates. Kirsch did not respond to a list of questions for this Snopes report, after he previously challenged this reporter to a debate against a panel of "autism experts," including Garner, The Control Group's leader.

In August 2023, four months after launching his campaign for president, Kennedy explicitly gave The Control Group's work a seal of approval by including it in his book, "Vax-Unvax: Let The Science Speak."Co-authored by CHD scientific officer Brian Hooker, the book purports to be an exhaustive collection of scientific evidence demonstrating that vaccinated children are more likely to be diagnosed with a wide range of chronic health conditions.

"The Control Group study [...] demonstrates that vaccinated children have a much higher incidence of specific chronic disorders than unvaccinated children," Kennedy and Hooker wrote. "Most notably," they claimed, referring to specific comparisons found in The Control Group study, "the vaccinated have a twenty times higher incidence of ADHD than the unvaccinated and over a ten times higher incidence of autism than the unvaccinated."

(Gab/ Children's Health Defense)

In adversarial interviews with people who challenge his views on vaccines, Kennedy has repeatedly asserted there "are hundreds and hundreds'' of studies demonstrating harm from vaccines, without going into details. "Vax-Unvax" which,accordingto its publisher, is a collection of just over 100 such studies, provides a look not only at the quality of scientific work underlying such platitudes but also provides context for statements by Kennedy about his scientific literacy. For instance, on Joe Rogan's podcast in June 2023, he claimed he is "comfortable with reading science" and knows "how to read it critically."

Hooker responded to some of Snopes' questions about "Vax-Unvax" on Kennedy's behalf. Hooker said Snopes' argument about the age of Control Group respondents (that their youth compared to the actual American population could drive the difference in health outcomes) was "obviated" because he and Kennedy only looked at data concerning children. "We are not affirming the entirety of Garner's study," he told Snopes, "but featuring the information we feel is most scientifically valid."

Notably, Hooker falsely argued The Control Group's methodology that is, that it did not correct for the overrepresentation of young peopleand ignoredsocioeconomic factors was in line with CDC-authored studies.Hooker provided Snopes with three studies as purported examples, but, contrary to Hooker's assertions, each of those studies used control groups, corrected for age, and/or accounted for socioeconomic factors. Hooker did not respond to a follow-up email asking for clarification.

The Control Group's inclusion in "Vax-Unvax" was far from the only example of Kennedy's flawed interpretation of statistics to justify his rhetoric. The same chapter featuring the group "Health Outcomes Associated With The Vaccine Schedule" included two infamously poor studies covered by Snopes in the past. Three of the eight studies in the chapter were authored by Hooker or ex-pediatrician Paul Thomas.

In September 2023, after an aggressive push by the Children's Health Defense and Kennedy to promote the book, it hit the New York Times' bestseller list.

Despitetellingnumerouspunditshe is "not leading" on the issue of vaccinesduring his presidential bid, Kennedy's history of activism haspromptedsomepundits and journaliststoquestionif that's true,considering the fact he's brought up vaccines, bothimplicitly and explicitly, while campaigning.For instance, when Kennedy initially announced his presidential campaign in April 2023, running as a Democrat, he vowed to reduce chronic disease in children if elected president.

"If I haven't significantly dropped the level of chronic disease in our children by the end of my first term," he said, "I do not want you to reelect me." He did not say how he would accomplish such a goal. In other settings, however, he explicitly blamedchronic illnesses on vaccines. In June 2023, for example, Kennedy told Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker, "[The] science is overwhelming and very clear that, yes, the vaccines are producing a tsunami of chronic disease in our country."

Numerous CHD staff members or anti-vaccine activists presently work for Kennedy's campaign, further evidence that anti-vaccine advocacy is part of his presidential bid. They include Mary Holland, the former chief legal officer and president of CHD who authored the amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of The Control Group; Stefanie Spear, who edited CHD's online content, including "The Defender"; and Del Bigtree, an activist who organized the April 10, 2019, rally that apparently inspired Garner's work.

Also, some notable supporters of his campaign have ties to the anti-vaccine movement and the promotion of The Control Group's work. For instance, the pro-Kennedy super PAC American Values 2024, which paid $7 million for a Kennedy campaign ad during the 2024 Super Bowl, was co-founded by Tony Lyons the head of a publishing company that prints most books authored by Kennedy and CHD staff, including "Vax-Unvax." Kirsch, who provided funds to American Values early on, according to FEC filings, was until recently listed on the PAC's websitefor the group as a "surrogate" presumably someone who advanced its talking points to the media.

In sum, Kennedy's embrace of The Control Group's data data potentially inspired by his own words highlights the ability of misinformation to be a self-sustaining phenomenon. Public-health advocates worryKennedy's presidential campaign could lend new exposure and credibility to his claims regardless of their factualness, resulting in greater public misconceptions about vaccines.

#1999 - Robert Kennedy, Jr. 15 June 2023. open.spotify.com, https://open.spotify.com/episode/3DQfcTY4viyXsIXQ89NXvg.

"About." Informed Consent Defense, 26 Jan. 2019, https://informedconsentdefense.org/about/.

"About Us." Skyhorse Publishing, https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/about/. Accessed 20 Feb. 2024.

Acker, Lizzy. "Anti-Vaccine Portland Pediatrician's License Suspended; Cases Include Boy Hospitalized with Tetanus." Oregonlive, 7 Dec. 2020, https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/12/anti-vaccine-portland-pediatricians-license-suspended-cases-include-boy-hospitalized-with-tetanus.html.

Alex Jones: Five Things to Know. https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/alex-jones-five-things-know. Accessed 20 Feb. 2024.

AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION RELEASES STATEMENT ON STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE AND P-VALUES . American Statistical Association, 7 Mar. 2016, https://www.amstat.org/asa/files/pdfs/p-valuestatement.pdf.

"An International Message of Hope for Humanity From RFK Jr." Children's Health Defense, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/message-of-hope-for-humanity/. Accessed 20 Feb. 2024.

Anti-Vaccine Activism in 2018 and 2019. Sept. 2020. direct.mit.edu, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12242.003.0020.

Attorney Greg Glaser Discusses Lawsuit to Protect the Rights of All Americans to Live Natural Lives. https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/chd-tv/shows/an-informed-life-radio-with-bernadette-pajer/attorney-greg-glaser-discusses-lawsuit-to-protect-the-rights-of-all-americans-to-live-natural-lives/. Accessed 20 Feb. 2024.

Three years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have acquired ample evidence showing that COVID-19 vaccines are safe. While COVID-19 vaccines are associated with some serious effects like myocarditis, such cases are rare and much less likely to occur after vaccination than after SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Nevertheless, anecdotes and stories of ill health after COVID-19 vaccination posted on social media, such as the case of Maddie de Garay, continue to be used to promote the claim that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe.

While illness can occur shortly after vaccination, it doesnt mean that the vaccine must be the cause. Illness can also occur simply by coincidence, since diseases have existed long before vaccines arrived. Part of evaluating whether a vaccine is the cause of an illness requires determining if vaccinated people are at a higher risk of the illness compared to unvaccinated peoplesomething that anecdotes alone cannot provide.

Since the COVID-19 vaccines became available for adolescents and children in the U.S. and the European Union in 2021, there have been many instances of online content casting doubt on the vaccines safety in these age groups. Such content took many forms, including disturbing images and stories of children allegedly injured by COVID-19 vaccination.

The tactic of using distressing images and videos as evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe hasnt been limited to children. Similar videos have been used before to imply a link between COVID-19 vaccination in adults and a variety of serious reactions, including convulsions, blood clotting, paralysis, and sudden death.

A March 2021 report by the Virality Projecta research consortium led by the Stanford Internet Observatory to study misinformation dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemicexplained that such formats proliferate because they have strong emotional appeal, which makes them effective anti-vaccine campaigns. However, the report said, these narratives usually distort facts by omitting important context and reframing isolated incidents as evidence of widespread harm.

These narratives are contradicted by scientific evidence showing that COVID-19 vaccines are generally safe and most side effects from vaccination are mild and resolve within a few days.

In this article, we will explain why not all medical events that happen after vaccination are caused by the vaccine and how experts identify those that are. We will also discuss examples of conditions and individual cases that have been misrepresented as vaccine injuries without sufficient evidence supporting such an association.

Unexpected deaths and health problems already existed before COVID-19 vaccines. When such events happen shortly after vaccination, it is easy to draw premature conclusions and attribute these events to the vaccine. This idea is rooted in the fact that any effect is necessarily preceded by its cause. But while a temporal association is indeed required to establish causality, this association alone is insufficient to determine whether a vaccine caused an adverse event.

Any vaccine carries a certain risk of side effects and COVID-19 vaccines are no exception. However, we have to keep in mind that an adverse event is any health problem that occurs after vaccination, regardless of its cause. Therefore, while some of these adverse events might be actual side effects (that is, caused by the vaccine), many others may manifest after vaccination simply by chance. Distinguishing between adverse events and actual side effects of a vaccine is essential for making informed vaccine recommendations.

Clinical trials are designed to identify common side effects. However, due to the limited number of people, they are often unable to detect rare side effects that occur at a very low rate in the population. Generally, such effects can only be detected post-authorization, when a high number of people get vaccinated. This is the reason why public health authorities continue to monitor adverse events even after a vaccine receives authorization.

Monitoring adverse events is essential for detecting any unusual patterns that may suggest a safety problem, and many countries have specific surveillance systems for doing so. Among those best known are the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), EudraVigilance in Europe, and the Yellow Card Scheme in the U.K.

These systems have helped identify, for example, the link between viral vector COVID-19 vaccines (Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson) and the increased risk of a rare blood clotting condition in women under 60 years of age. As a result, many countries changed their vaccination guidelines, favoring alternative vaccines in that population.

Adverse event reports have also provided essential hints to establish the association between mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and a slight increase in the risk of myocarditis (heart inflammation), particularly in young males and after the second dose[1]. Awareness of this side effect has been fundamental for early detection and treatment of these cases.

However, adverse event reports alone dont demonstrate that the vaccine caused the adverse event. Therefore, despite how anti-vaccine groups have tried to portray them, these reports arent a reliable catalog of vaccine side effects.

Establishing a link between an adverse event and a vaccine requires further investigations. These include evaluating whether the adverse event occurs more frequently among vaccinated people than in the general population and whether there is a plausible mechanism by which the vaccine might cause the adverse event.

As we explained above, rare cases of heart inflammation, Guillain-Barr syndrome (GBS), paralysis, clotting, and other conditions have occurred in people even before COVID-19 vaccines existed. For context, each day, about two new cases of childhood myocarditis and 8 to 16 cases of GBS are diagnosed in the U.S.

While these conditions are rare, the large number of vaccinations administered globally compared to other vaccines makes it more likely that some cases occur after vaccination simply by coincidence. Some groups and media outlets have weaponized these cases to promote anti-vaccine narratives that offer an inaccurate and misleading impression of COVID-19 vaccine safety.

For example, the recognition of myocarditis as a rare side effect of COVID-19 vaccines fueled misinformation exaggerating this risk and falsely linking COVID-19 vaccination with sudden deaths, particularly among young athletes.

However, the risk of developing myocarditis following vaccination is very small. In fact, it is lower than the chance of being struck by lightning, as the U.S. National Institutes of Health pointed out.

Moreover, research shows that cases of post-COVID-19 vaccination myocarditis are typically mild and unlikely to be fatal as mRNA COVID-19 vaccines arent associated with an increased risk of cardiac mortality or overall mortality[2].

Even before COVID-19 vaccines were available, experts in public health warned in a STAT News article that anecdotal reports could be misinterpreted by many as side effects of the vaccines, even without evidence of a causal link. Indeed, that has happened with several conditions, including Bells palsy and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP).

CIDP is a neurological disorder caused by an autoimmune reaction against myelin, a fat and protein protective sheath that covers the nerves. Symptoms of CIDP include progressive weakness and reduced senses in the arms and legs, fatigue, and tingling or no feeling in fingers and toes.

CIDP is closely related to GBS. But while GBS causes acute symptoms from which most people recover, CIDP progresses slowly and is considered a chronic illness, even though remission is also possible. In rare cases, GBS can lead to CIDP.

Researchers arent sure what exactly triggers CIDP, as no apparent genetic or environmental risk factors have been identified so far. Some research suggests that previous infections and dietary habits might play some role[3].

Rare cases of GBS and CIDP have also been reported following COVID-19 vaccination[4,5], and an increased risk of GBS has been observed following vaccination with the viral vector COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson and Johnson[6,7].

However, between 7 and 80 new cases of CIDP (0.8 to 8.9 cases per 100,000 people each year) occur each day in the U.S. even in the absence of COVID-19 vaccination, according to estimates. Epidemiological studies found no evidence that these rates are higher among people who received an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine or that GBS and CIDP symptoms worsen or are more recurrent following COVID-19 vaccination[7,8-11].

Accordingly, the GBS CIDP Foundation International states that, based on current evidence, the likelihood that vaccination can trigger autoimmune neurological conditions such as GBS and CIDP is exceptionally low at best.

One aspect often overlooked when discussing vaccine side effects is that this risk always needs to be considered in the context of the benefits of vaccination.

Over three years of studies and safety surveillance show that side effects from COVID-19 vaccines are typically mild and short-lived. While serious side effects such as myocarditis and blood clotting are possible, they are raremuch rarer than after SARS-CoV-2 infection[12].

Bacterial and viral infections are also common risk factors for developing GBS. One study published in Neurology in October 2023 showed that the risk of developing GBS is six times higher in people with a recent SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to uninfected people. In contrast, vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines was associated with a 59% reduced GBS risk compared to unvaccinated people[13].

Besides these risks, COVID-19 carries a risk of other serious complications associated with the disease, including heart problems, damage in other organs such as the lungs, the kidneys, and the brain, and long COVID.

By reducing the risk of infection and serious COVID-19 in people, the vaccines also help reduce the risk of these potential complications. For this reason, the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, and the GBS CIDP Foundation International consider that even if the COVID-19 vaccines slightly increase the risk of some of these conditions, the benefits of vaccination still outweigh the risks.

Soon after the COVID-19 vaccine rollout began, videos of alleged neurological problems in people who had received a COVID-19 vaccine went viral on social media.

This prompted the U.S. Functional Neurological Disorder Society to issue a press release in January 2021 stating that many of the clinical features reported and observed on video in some cases are those of functional neurological disorder (FND), a condition that can be diagnosed with good accuracy from videos on social media. Indeed, at least one of the cases had been diagnosed with FND.

FND, formerly called conversion disorder, is a condition of the nervous system that affects how different brain areas communicate with one another, altering the way the brain functions and processes emotions. This disruption can lead to various symptoms of variable severity, such as paralysis, difficulty in swallowing, problems with hearing and vision, and problems with memory and concentration.

The term functional means that the symptoms are due to changes in the brains functioning, not structural damage. The U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke puts it this way: [s]omeone with FND can function normally; they just cant at that moment.

It is important to stress that functional doesnt equal malingered. People with FND arent pretending to be ill or faking their symptoms, which they perceive as involuntary. Regardless of their origin, FND symptoms are real and can impair quality of life as much as other neurological conditions do.

Although the exact cause of FND is unknown, several biological, psychological, and social risk factors can make a person more likely to develop the condition. These include emotional and physical trauma early in life, other neurological diseases such as epilepsy, and mental health conditions such as depression or anxiety. However, not all people who develop FND have such risk factors.

Research shows that recent acute physical or emotionally charged events can trigger FND symptoms in people who have a predisposition to it. Vaccination can be one of those triggers, and cases of FND following COVID-19 vaccination have been documented[14,15].

However, claiming that the vaccine causes FND is misleading because it is the circumstances surrounding vaccination that can trigger the condition, not the vaccine itself. In fact, saline injections, which dont contain active ingredients, have been used to induce seizures in these patients for diagnostic purposes[16].

In April 2021, neurologists and psychiatrists at Harvard Medical School and the University of Toronto published a viewpoint in JAMA Neurology pointing out that FND symptoms are indeed unrelated to the vaccine ingredients:

FND can be triggered by physical and/or emotionally valenced events, including head injury, medical/surgical procedures, and vaccinations. These precipitating factors, while proximal to the development of the symptoms, are not directly caused by the substances in the vaccine in the same manner that, for example, Neisseria meningitidis is the cause of meningitis. Instead, factors such as expectations, beliefs, heightened bodily attention, arousal, and threat/emotional processing play important mechanistic roles in the pathophysiology of FND.

One popular example of a story that has been shared to support misinformation about the alleged harms of COVID-19 vaccines is the case of Maddie de Garay.

On 21 January 2024, host Sharyl Attkisson interviewed Maddies mother, Stephanie de Garay, for the TV show Full Measure. Attkisson is a writer who has promoted anti-vaccine messages falsely linking childhood vaccination with autism in the past.

During the interview, de Garay explained that at the age of 12 Maddie had participated in the clinical trial for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine conducted at Cincinnati Childrens Hospital in June 2020. According to De Garay, her daughter had developed a severely debilitating illness during the trial that led to her needing a wheelchair and feeding tube. Amid interspersed distressing images of Maddie at the hospital, de Garay expressed her belief that the vaccine had been the cause of her daughters illness.

At the time of writing, the interview accumulated almost 400,000 views on YouTube. In addition, fragments of it spread widely on Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter).

Many posts pointed to Maddies case as evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are harmful, with captions talking about millions injured or dead and the fatal consequences of becoming experimental rats. Some promoted products to detox from vaccination, something that is unnecessary because COVID-19 vaccines dont contain toxins.

Maddie and her mother became known to the public in June 2021 after participating in a press conference held by Senator Ron Johnson. The event gathered five families who shared their stories of alleged adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines. Johnson had used this format before to spread unsubstantiated claims about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in adults.

With Maddie in a wheelchair by her side, de Garay explained that her daughter started having severe abdominal and chest pain after her second vaccine dose. These symptoms later developed into paralysis of the stomach muscles, heart rate problems, memory loss, and difficulty walking.

De Garay repeated her story in a July 2021 interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who also has a record of spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine.

The interview went immediately viral, and Maddie became a rallying point for anti-vaccine groups, some of which used images of Maddies condition to produce anti-vaccine ads. The case was also publicized by individuals well-known in the COVID-19 misinformation scene, including entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, scientist Robert Malone, and podcaster Daniel Horowitz. The latter referred to the COVID-19 vaccine as Pfizers poison.

But as Stephanie de Garay herself acknowledged in her public appearances, no diagnosis suggested a link between the COVID-19 vaccine and Maddies illness. Several doctors who evaluated the girls symptoms at that time diagnosed her with FND.

In her interview with Attkisson, de Garay claimed that Maddie had been diagnosed with basically a stomachache that you cant explain and suggested that the diagnosis was a cover-up for vaccine injuries. Similarly, Carlson claimed that Maddie had been diagnosed with hysteria or emotional problems.

But these statements misrepresent the true nature of FND, which is a clinically recognized condition that can cause severe disability, as we noted above. The framing of Maddies FND diagnosis as diagnoses of hysteria, emotional problems or stomachache is therefore inaccurate. And as we explained earlier, the vaccine ingredients dont cause this condition.

Towards the end of the interview, de Garay added a new piece of information; apparently, Maddie was diagnosed with CIDP in July 2022. The interview conveyed the message that this change in diagnosis confirmed that Maddies condition was indeed a vaccine injury.

But we explained earlier that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines havent been associated with an increased risk of developing this condition. Therefore, contrary to what the interview might suggest, this change in Maddies diagnosis also doesnt provide evidence that the COVID-19 vaccine caused Maddies illness or that the vaccine is overall harmful to children, as social media posts claimed.

Simply because an adverse event occurred shortly after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine doesnt necessarily mean that the vaccine caused it. Nevertheless, many have used this overly simplistic correlation to imply without evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe. But isolated cases or anecdotes dont provide sufficient evidence to support such narratives, which often lack essential context and sometimes rely on unverified images of dubious origin.

When billions of people receive a vaccine within a short period of time, some of them will develop health issues such as myocarditis, GBS, and CIDP shortly after vaccination. Some cases may be related to the vaccine, while others might coincide with vaccination simply by chance. Determining whether there is a causal link between both events requires further investigations.

But even when an adverse event is indeed causally associated with a vaccine, this risk needs to be viewed in light of the benefits of vaccination. Cases of myocarditis and other heart problems are much less likely to occur after vaccination than after SARS-CoV-2 infection, which also carries other health risks.

By reducing the risk of infection and serious illness, COVID-19 vaccines can help prevent these risks. Therefore, public health authorities and medical associations agree that the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the potential risks.

(SACRAMENTO)

With measles outbreaks occurring now throughout the U.S., UC Davis Health experts advise parents to be aware of the symptoms and call a health care provider if they suspect that their child has measles.Dean Blumberg, chief of pediatric infectious diseases atUC Davis Childrens Hospital, also answers some frequently asked questions about measles.

Symptoms usually begin 10-14 days after exposure to the virus. Measles starts with a fever, which can be very high. Cough, runny nose and red eyes are common. One of the most distinctive features of measles is a red, spotty rash that starts at the head and then spreads downward over the rest of the body. Complications can include diarrhea, dehydration, ear infections, pneumonia, blindness and inflammation of the brain.

Measles is highly contagious. The virus particles are very small and can be suspended in the air up to two hours. So, a person with measles who enters and then leaves a room can infect others who enter that same room for up to two hours, without direct person-to-person contact. Measles can also live on infected surfaces for up to two hours. If one person has measles, up to 90% of the people close to that person who are not immune will also become infected.

Out of every 1,000 cases, about one to two people, die from measles. Before widespread measles vaccinations in the U.S., 500 children died from measles every year. The World Health Organization reported 136,000 deaths globally from measles in 2022, mostly among children.

The MMR vaccine protects children from measles, mumps and rubella (also known as German measles) by exposing them to live, weakened forms of the viruses that cause these diseases. Most children do not experience any side effects from the shot. Side effects that do occur are usually very mild and include low-grade fever, transient rash and mild, temporary soreness or swelling where the shot was given.

The first dose of the measles vaccination is typically given between 12 and 15 months of age. The second dose is routinely given between 4 and 6 years of age. The first dose protects children 95 to 97 percent of the time. The second dose increases a childs protection from measles to about 99 percent. By the time children enter school, they should have the two doses.

The majority of adults are immune because they typically either had measles as children or received a measles vaccination. I encourage adults to talk with their health care providers about getting the MMR vaccine if they are unsure of their immunity status. There is no danger in getting the vaccine, even if youve already had the measles or the vaccine.

It is a good idea to vaccinate previously unvaccinated children who are potentially exposed to measles. It doesn't guarantee that they wont get the disease, however it can lessen the severity if they do.

There were a lot of concerns about this because of a now discredited publication. Since then, many scientific studies in the U.S. and other countries involving millions of children have reached the same conclusion: The MMR vaccine does not cause autism. Read the UC Davis MIND Institutes statement on vaccines and autism.

There is no specific antiviral treatment for measles. Treatment is generally supportive such as IV fluids if patients are dehydrated, or respiratory support such as supplemental oxygen if they are having difficulty breathing. Children with measles should stay home from school and activities, rest and drink plenty of liquids to avoid dehydration.

If you suspect your child may have measles, contact your health care provider and ask if your child can be seen in an isolation room.

Measles cases soared in Europe in 2023 to 58,114, a nearly 62-fold increase over the previous year, the World Health Organization said last month, calling for urgent vaccination efforts to halt the spread.

Some 41 countries out of 53 the UNs health agency includes in its Europe region reported the infectious disease, WHO said. In 2022, 941 cases were registered.

Vaccination rates against the disease slipped during the Covid-19 pandemic, and urgent vaccination efforts are needed to halt transmission and prevent further spread.

Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan fared the worst, with well over 10,000 cases each last year. In western Europe, Britain had the most cases, with 231.

The WHO also said there were nearly 21,000 hospitalisations and five measles-related deaths in the January to October period.

This is concerning, WHO said.

Over 4 years after Covid-19 began, WHO warns virus is still a threat

Some 1.8 million infants in the WHOs Europe region were not vaccinated against measles between 2020 and 2022. It is vital that all countries are prepared to rapidly detect and timely respond to measles outbreaks, which could endanger progress towards measles elimination.

It is most common in children but can affect anyone. Symptoms often include a rash, runny nose, cough and watery eyes. Complications can be severe.

Measles is caused by a virus and spreads easily when people breathe, cough or sneeze.

Measles vaccinations consist of two shots, usually one at nine months of age and the second at 15 to 18 months. The vaccine is often given along with one for mumps and rubella, known as MMR.

At least 95 per cent of children need to be fully vaccinated against the disease in a locality to prevent outbreaks.

Hong Kong experts advocate Covid XBB variant shot for non-high-risk groups

Vaccination rates against measles have been dropping across the globe.

In 2022, 83 per cent of children received a first measles vaccine during their first year of life, up from 81 per cent coverage in 2021, but down from 86 per cent before the pandemic and the lowest level since 2008, WHO has said previously.

In 2022, only 92 per cent of children in Europe received a second dose of the vaccine, according to WHO.

In Britain, in some areas around the major city of Birmingham, the level of full vaccination has dropped to 81 per cent. In 2021, there were an estimated 128,000 measles deaths worldwide, mostly among undervaccinated or unvaccinated children under five, it said.

WHO estimates that measles vaccines have helped prevent 56 million deaths between 2000 and 2021.

Agence France-Presse

The measles virus lives in an infected persons nose and throat mucus. It can spread to others through coughing and sneezing. The virus remains active and contagious in the air or on infected surfaces for up to two hours.

If someone breathes the contaminated air or comes in contact with the infected surface and then touches their eyes, nose, or mouth, they can become infected, too.

Measles is one of the worlds most contagious diseases. If one person has it, up to 90 per cent of the people close to that person who are not immune can also become infected. However, animals do not get or spread the disease.

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Given the extra scrutiny and large number of doses, reports of possible side effects to a vaccine safety monitoring system increased with the COVID-19 vaccines. The high number of reports does not mean the vaccines are unsafe, contrary to suggestions made by posts sharing a clip of a Food and Drug Administration official acknowledging the surge.

How do we know vaccines are safe?

No vaccine or medical product is 100% safe, but the safety of vaccines is ensured via rigorous testing in clinical trials prior to authorization or approval, followed by continued safety monitoring once the vaccine is rolled out to the public to detect potential rare side effects. In addition, the Food and Drug Administration inspects vaccine production facilities and reviews manufacturing protocols to make sure vaccine doses are of high-quality and free of contaminants.

One key vaccine safety surveillance program is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, which is an early warning system run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FDA. As its website explains, VAERS is not designed to detect if a vaccine caused an adverse event, but it can identify unusual or unexpected patterns of reporting that might indicate possible safety problems requiring a closer look.

Anyone can submit a report to VAERS for any health problem that occurs after an immunization. There is no screening or vetting of the report and no attempt to determine if the vaccine was responsible for the problem. The information is still valuable because its a way of being quickly alerted to a potential safety issue with a vaccine, which can then be followed-up by government scientists.

Another monitoring system is the CDCs Vaccine Safety Datalink, which uses electronic health data from nine health care organizations in the U.S. to identify adverse events related to vaccination in near real time.

In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, randomized controlled trials involving tens of thousands of people, which were reviewed by multiple groups of experts, revealed no serious safety issues and showed that the benefits outweigh the risks.

The CDC and FDA vaccine safety monitoring systems, which were expanded for the COVID-19 vaccines and also include a new smartphone-based reporting tool called v-safe, have subsequently identified only a few, very rare adverse events.

For more, see How safe are the vaccines?

Link to this

The COVID-19 vaccines are remarkably safe and only rarely cause serious side effects. Despite the good safety record, many people opposed to vaccination continue to point to the governmentsVaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS,to incorrectly suggest the COVID-19 shots are unsafe.

As weve explainedbefore, VAERS is one of several vaccine safety monitoring systems the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention use to identify safety problems with vaccines.

VAERS collects reports of health problems that occur after but not necessarily because of vaccination, with the goal of being able to quickly detect a safety signal, which can then be further investigated. The reports can be submitted by anyone and are not verified. The number of reports isknown to increasewith new vaccines, and the COVID-19 vaccines in particular had augmented reporting requirements.

Yet, the sheer number of unvetted reports to VAERS for the COVID-19 vaccines is once again being spun as something concerning by vaccine opponents. Posts on social media are sharing a clip of Dr.Peter Marks, the head of the FDA division that oversees vaccines, testifying before Congress on Feb. 15.

In the clip, Rep.Brad Wenstrupof Ohio, who is a podiatric physician, notes that as of mid-February, total reports to VAERS for the COVID-19 vaccines were significantly higher than all other vaccines combined since 1990. He then asks Marks if the government was prepared for such an avalanche of reports to VAERS.

Reusing Wenstrups avalanche language, Marks responds, We tried to be prepared for that, but the avalanche of reports was tremendous. He briefly refers to the staffing challenges the government experienced in trying to find enough people to review the VAERS reports, when the clip being shared on social media ends.

Later in his testimony, Marks said the staffing challenge was related to the review of the reports, since that is part of the evaluation of whether an adverse eventmight actually be causedby a vaccine. He alsoexplainedthat the deluge of reports was partly due to the incredibly rapid rollout of millions of doses in a short period of time, and that reporting to VAERS after COVID-19 vaccination was highly encouraged.

We were encouraging safety reporting because we felt we needed to know any potential adverse events so we could try to investigate and find out if there was something we were missing, said Marks, who also noted in his opening remarks that vaccines save the lives of millions of children and adults every year, and that Americans can rest assured that vaccines that are authorized or approved are safe and effective.

But the clip doesnt include those comments, and the posts dont explain that.

Instead,theposts, which incorrectly refer to Marks as the FDA director,quotethe avalanche statement or misleadingly imply the official had made some kind of compromising revelation about vaccine safety.

FDA director admits to historic number of adverse event reports about COVID vaccines,readsone popular post. It is suggestively captioned, We warned everyone. Never forget that.

Although the posts do not explicitly say the number of reports means the vaccines are unsafe, the implication is clear. Numerous responses to the posts show people misinterpreting the avalanche of reports as indicative of a safety problem. Absolutely unacceptable, one comment reads. Why are they still pushing it the thing!!!!! They should be arrested immediately.

Dr. Marks was making clear that VAERS reports were not necessarily caused by the vaccine, Cherie Duvall-Jones, aspokesperson for the FDA, told us in an email. Additional analyses are required to determine causality, and the mere fact that an adverse event is reported does not indicate it was caused by the COVID-19 vaccine or that it was related.

As weve explainedbefore, there are several reasons why reporting to VAERS following COVID-19 vaccination has been so high compared with other vaccines. This includes the large number of doses as of last May, more than 676 million doses in the U.S. over a relatively short period of time, including a rollout that was initially prioritized to older and higher-risk individuals, who would be more likely to have health problems anyway.

Health care providers are alsorequiredby law to report far more adverse events following vaccination with a COVID-19 vaccine than with other vaccines.

Itswell establishedthat reporting to VAERS surges for any new vaccine a phenomenon known as the Weber effect and this has almost certainly been supercharged in the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, given the intense interest in these vaccines.

One clue that this increased reporting to VAERS is not concerning is that reporting is high across the board, regardless of the plausibility of an event being vaccine-caused.

Every event, even those clearly unrelated to vaccines including for example animal bites, broken arms, and sunburn, is reported about an order of magnitude more for these vaccines in the pandemic than any time before,Jeffrey S. Morris, director of the division of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvanias Perelman School of Medicine,explainedon X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, in response to a post sharing the Marks clip.

High reporting in and of itself, then, is not a real safety signal. This is why VAERS data is analyzed and reviewed in particular ways, and used in conjunction with other safety monitoring systems, including those that are active rather than passive, as VAERS is, to identify true side effects.

Active surveillance involves proactively obtaining and rapidly analyzing information occurring in millions of individuals recorded in large healthcare data systems to verify safety signals identified through passive surveillance or to detect additional safety signals that may not have been reported as adverse events to passive surveillance systems, Duvall-Jones explained.

Indeed, VAERS was useful in helping to identifying myocarditis and pericarditis as the main serious side effects of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. These rare conditions, which refer to inflammation of the heart and its surrounding tissue, are most common in adolescent and young adult males after a second dose.

Editors note: SciChecks articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.orgs editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.

VAERS. HHS. Accessed 23 Feb 2024.

McDonald, Jessica. What VAERS Can and Cant Do, and How Anti-Vaccination Groups Habitually Misuse Its Data. FactCheck.org. 6 Jun 2023.

McDonald, Jessica. Increase in COVID-19 VAERS Reports Due To Reporting Requirements, Intense Scrutiny of Widely Given Vaccines. FactCheck.org. 22 Dec 2021.

Assessing Americas Vaccine Safety Systems, Part 1. Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. U.S. House of Representatives. 15 Feb 2024.

Duvall-Jones, Cherie. FDA press officer. Email sent to FactCheck.org. 23 Feb 2024.

COVID Data Tracker. CDC. Last updated 10 May 2023

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). VAERS. HHS. Accessed 23 Feb 2024.

Morris, Jeffrey S. (@jsm2334). Yes the avalanche of reports was amazing as we can see in the publicly available data from the website X. 16 Feb 2024.

Selected Adverse Events Reported after COVID-19 Vaccination. CDC. Accessed 23 Feb 2024.

Clinical Considerations: Myocarditis and Pericarditis after Receipt of COVID-19 Vaccines Among Adolescents and Young Adults. CDC. Accessed 23 Feb 2024.

The World Health Organization (WHO) today announced the recommendations for the viral composition of influenza vaccines for the 2024-2025 influenza season in the northern hemisphere. The announcement was made at an information session after a4-day meeting on the Composition of Influenza Virus Vaccines. The meeting is held twice annually, once for the southern and once for the northern hemisphere.

WHO organizes these consultations with an advisory group of experts gathered from WHO Collaborating Centres and WHO Essential Regulatory Laboratories to analyse influenza virus surveillance data generated by the WHO Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS). The recommendations issued are used by the national vaccine regulatory agencies and pharmaceutical companies to develop, produce, and license influenza vaccines for the following influenza season.

The periodic update of viruses contained in influenza vaccines is necessary for the vaccines to be effective due to the constant evolving nature of influenza viruses, including those circulating and infecting humans.

The WHO recommends thattrivalentvaccines for use in the 2024-2025 northern hemisphere influenza season contain the following:

Egg-based vaccines

Cell culture- or recombinant-based vaccines

Forquadrivalentegg- or cell culture-based or recombinant vaccines for use in the 2024-2025 northern hemisphere influenza season, the WHO recommends inclusion of the following as the B/Yamagata lineage component:

A second spike in March 2022, coupled with consistently higher than average rates over an eight month period from March to October 2021, reinforced suspicion.

The logic was simple: this was something that had not been seen before, and it had coincided with a period when something else was new - that is, expectant mothers being vaccinated against Covid.

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Anxiety had already been fostered by mixed messages over its safety, with pregnant women initially advised against vaccination early in the rollout due to a lack of clinical trial data (expectant mothers were, understandably, not recruited onto vaccine studies).

By the time official guidance was updated in April 2021, on the basis of mounting real-world evidence for its safety, mothers found themselves coming up against contradictory statements from healthcare professionals (some reported their midwives urging them not to be "guinea pigs") and social media was quickly awash with fake news and misinformation.

Uptake rates among expectant mothers lagged far behind those of women in the same age group, sometimes with tragic consequences as the increased risk of Covid complications in pregnancy became clear.

Today's report covers 135 neonatal deaths in Scotland from April 2021 to March 2022, of which 30 are considered to have been "excess" - in other words, above what would be normal based on previous years' trends.

However, as it makes clear, the review has "intentionally" avoided any specific analyses into Covid links because this sample size is "too small to make such comparisons statistically valid".

The same would be true of vaccination status, but - as the review notes - "maternal Covid vaccination status was not detailed in any of the local reviews analysed".

The question mark will linger on then - unhelpfully, and unfairly.

Maternal vaccination status was not recorded, but large-scale population studies show it is safe during pregnancy (Image: Getty)

In Scottish terms, the most meaningful evidence in relation to Covid and vaccination in pregnancy comes fromEdinburgh University's COPS database, which has tracked more than 81,000 pregnancies including 12,800 in which the mothers were vaccinated.

It found that a baby was 35% more likely to be born pre-term if a mother had Covid, but there was "no evidence of increased risk of any adverse maternal or neonatal outcome following vaccination either shortly before or during pregnancy".

This is consistent with other studies worldwide.

A higher than expected number of babies were born before 28 weeks and there was also a "significant increase" in deaths among those bornpre-term at 32-36 weeks, but what role - if any - was played by Covid infections during pregnancy remains unclear.

The review noted that Covid was mentioned in relation to only seven of the cases it examined, forstaff absences, one case of long Covid, and four mothers who tested positive around the time of delivery.

The registered causes of neonatal deaths during 2021/22 "were broadly similar to those in previous years, with no new or unusual causes of death identified".

While there is possible evidence of "higher rate of labour and delivery problems" - in some cases including delays to performing caesarean sections, or an undiagnosed breech birth - this "does not explain in full the increase in neonatal mortality" during the year, and no "systemic" problems with maternity or neonatal care were found.

More worrying - particularly for parents who have experienced baby loss - is that local reviews into the deaths, carried out by health boards, are described as "poor quality, inconsistent and incomplete".

This, rather than vaccine misinformation, should be the key takeaway, because it means we are missing opportunities to learn lessons and prevent avoidable tragedies being repeated.