After Years of Silence, New CDC Vaccine Panel to Vote on Mercury in Flu Shots
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 18, 2025
The CDC’s vaccine advisory committee will vote next week on the mercury-based flu vaccine, according to an Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meeting agenda draft posted today on the ACIP website
The committee will also vote on RSV vaccines for pregnant mothers, babies and young children.
This will be the first meeting since U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tapped eight new ACIP members — just days after removing all 17 former members in what he called a “clean sweep … needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.”
Before they vote, ACIP members will hear presentations on respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV vaccines, including Merck’s new RSV shot for newborns. Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the new shot, even though clinical trials showed an 11.71% rate of serious adverse events, including death.
Discussions, but no votes, are slated for other vaccines, including COVID-19, Chikungunya, Anthrax and MMRV (Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Varicella).
ACIP decides which vaccines should be recommended to the public, who should take them and how often — recommendations the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) typically rubber stamps and publishes on its immunization schedules.
The committee will meet June 25-26 in Atlanta, Georgia.
ACIP to discuss thimerosal after years of silence
Thimerosal is a mercury-based preservative used in multi-dose vials of the flu vaccine, according to the CDC. Most single-dose vials and pre-filled syringes of the flu shot don’t contain the preservative, as they’re intended for single use.
Over 25 years ago, vaccine industry leaders and public health officials concealed evidence from the CDC’s own database that linked thimerosal to neurodevelopmental disorders in children, including autism, according to transcripts from a meeting in Norcross, Georgia.
The U.S. government has long said thimerosal poses no harm to children. However, in 2001, out of what the agency said was an abundance of caution, the CDC said the ingredient would no longer be used in childhood vaccines.
A recent investigation by journalist Sharyl Attkisson proved both statements untrue.
Thimerosal’s potential to harm kids has been on Kennedy’s radar for over a decade. In 2014, he edited a book on the topic: “Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak: The Evidence Supporting the Immediate Removal of Mercury — a Known Neurotoxin — from Vaccines.”
The CDC webpage for flu shot safety considerations during pregnancy makes no mention of thimerosal, nor does it encourage pregnant women to be sure they get a flu shot from a single-dose vial or prefilled syringe to avoid mercury exposure.
Next week, ACIP members will hear a presentation on thimerosal in vaccines and a presentation on proposed recommendations for flu vaccines that contain thimerosal. The names of the presenters were not listed on the agenda at press time.
The committee will also vote on flu vaccines that don’t contain thimerosal.
Dr. Meryl Nass, who has attended many past ACIP meetings, said, “There is no need for thimerosal, a known neurotoxin, as it is not used in single-dose vials. Its use should be ended.”
Critics weigh in on ACIP agenda
Reactions to the ACIP meeting agenda were mixed. Some said it signaled that the CDC is veering off course, while others called for even more change.
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) chief scientific officer, said that although he was encouraged by Kennedy’s selections for the new ACIP members, he was disappointed in the slate of meeting presenters and moderators.
“It is the same old cast of CDC characters (from the National Center for Infectious and Respiratory Diseases) who present a very biased viewpoint,” Hooker said. “CDC’s culture is vaccinology as a religion, straight up. ACIP committee members desperately need an alternative view that is based on the very stark reality of vaccine ineffectiveness and the extremely high prevalence of vaccine adverse events.”
Dr. Jeremy Faust, editor of Medpage, said in a Substack post critiquing the ACIP meeting agenda that the planned vote on thimerosal “revives and elevates a longstanding anti-vaccine conspiracy theory.”
“Removing the compound will do nothing to improve vaccine safety,” Faust wrote, “but it certainly will undermine confidence in other existing vaccines.”
Faust also criticized the CDC for failing to put a COVID-19 vaccine vote on the meeting agenda, writing that the move will leave “fall policies unclear.”
HHS officials last month removed the COVID-19 shot from the CDC’s recommended list of immunizations for healthy children and pregnant women after the FDA limited its COVID-19 vaccine approvals to high-risk groups and the elderly.
‘This could mark a turning point’
James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D. is president and CEO of the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge, an advocacy group that pushes for accuracy and integrity in science and for biomedical researchers to put people’s health before profits. He said the ACIP meeting agenda suggested that the CDC was making progress in “structure, balance, and transparency.”
“If public comment is taken seriously and if safety data are rigorously and honestly evaluated — then this could mark a turning point,” Lyons-Weiler said.
Lyons-Weiler said it’s also important that the CDC be “fully open” about its Evidence to Recommendations framework.
When ACIP makes a vaccine recommendation, it’s accompanied by what’s called an Evidence to Recommendations framework that describes the information the committee used in making its decision.
In the past, the CDC took shortcuts in showing this evidence, Lyons-Weiler said. He said he hopes the next ACIP meeting shows that the CDC is moving forward “with the full light of science, skepticism, and civic trust.”
ACIP guidelines don’t address full scope of possible vaccine injuries
Historically, states use ACIP recommendations to help shape vaccine policy and doctors use them in making decisions.
Some states consider the ACIP’s “General Best Practice Guidelines for Immunization,” which lists examples of contraindications and precautions for each vaccine, as the only acceptable authority when deciding whether to grant a child’s medical exemption request to a school-required vaccine.
However, ACIP’s list of contraindications isn’t exhaustive, according to attorney Sujata Gibson, who said:
“Right now, states like New York and California are overruling treating physicians and rejecting medical exemptions when they don’t see the condition listed in the ACIP best practices guideline as a contraindication or a precaution.
“But the guideline doesn’t provide an exhaustive list of all the reasons a child may be at risk of serious harm… The way that New York, California and other states are treating these guidelines is reckless and dangerous, and children are being severely harmed as a result.”
In other words, it doesn’t matter how many doctors confirm that a particular child will likely be harmed by a certain vaccine, states like New York and California give medical exemptions only for conditions specified in ACIP’s guidelines.
The Defender reached out to the CDC to ask if the new ACIP committee will clarify that its guidance is not a substitute for clinical decision-making and should not be used as a standard for clinicians or schools in deciding whether to grant medical exemptions. The CDC did not respond by the deadline.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Legacy media has a meltdown after RFK Jr fires the CDC’s vaccine panel
By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | June 10, 2025
Yesterday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired every single member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—the influential group of experts that decides which vaccines are added to the childhood schedule.
Today, he set fire to the media’s hysterical reaction.
Within 24 hours, legacy outlets and public health institutions lost their collective minds. Former CDC directors, industry-funded doctors, and conflicted public health groups lined up to denounce Kennedy’s move as reckless, anti-scientific, even deadly.
“This is a dangerous and unprecedented action that makes our families less safe,” said former CDC director Dr Tom Frieden.
“Unilaterally removing the entire panel of experts is reckless,” said paediatrician Dr Tina Tan to The New York Times.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said it was “deeply troubled and alarmed.” It claimed the move would “stoke distrust in lifesaving vaccines”—this from the same organisation that has spent decades pushing the childhood vaccine schedule while taking money from the very companies that profit from it.
Others framed it as a political purge, a blow to science, or a “coup” that would bring back measles and polio.
But within hours, Kennedy hit back—and this time, he wasn’t the outsider being easily dismissed. He was the Secretary of Health and Human Services. And he came armed with evidence, receipts, and a brutal takedown of the media’s favourite falsehoods.
In a searing post on X, Kennedy explained the decision.
He said the clean sweep was necessary because ACIP had demonstrated its “stubborn unwillingness to demand adequate safety trials before recommending new vaccines for our children.”
And despite the media’s insistence otherwise, Kennedy argued that no routine injected childhood vaccine on the CDC’s schedule had ever been approved based on a placebo-controlled trial using an inert substance.
CNN had tried to prove him wrong last week—claiming it had found “257 placebo-controlled studies” of vaccines on the schedule.
Kennedy dismantled it in forensic detail.
“CNN is wrong,” he wrote. “No routine injected vaccine on CDC’s schedule was licensed for children based on a placebo-controlled trial. That is not conjecture. It is a fact based on FDA’s clinical trial data.”
Then came the body blows.
He pointed out that most of the 257 studies used active substances like aluminium, antibiotics, or other vaccines—not inert placebos.
He linked directly to FDA definitions of “placebo” and to official clinical trial records. Of the few studies that may have used saline controls, none were relied on by the FDA to license a single routine vaccine for American children.
Some studied products that were never approved in the US. Some occurred after licensure. Others involved discontinued vaccines. “CNN’s list ironically proves the lack of adequate safety trials,” Kennedy wrote in a stinging rebuke.
The post was devastating.
It was a clinical takedown of an industry riddled with deception—and it landed—because this time, Kennedy wasn’t being filtered through a hostile press.
He was speaking directly to the public, as a government official, with all the links to back it up. And the media couldn’t handle it.
Predictably, the media rolled out the same tired “experts” to recycle the same tired script—Paul Offit quotes, panic about “undermining trust,” warnings that children would die.
But Kennedy turned the whole thing inside out.
“We’ve gone from three routine injections by age one in 1986 to 25 in 2025,” he wrote. “And not one of them was licensed using a placebo-controlled trial.”
He said it plainly for the cameras: “That is just malpractice. So the people who are in charge of that are now gone.”
For years, the press had written Kennedy off as an anti-vaxxer and moved on. Now, they’ve thrown everything at him—and he threw it right back. Only now, he has the authority, data, and reach.
Kennedy told his followers he’d be announcing replacements in the coming days—no “ideological anti-vaxxers” just “highly credentialed physicians and scientists” committed to evidence, objectivity, and common sense.
Legacy media may still control the headlines, but they can no longer suppress the debate.
And perhaps that’s what really has them rattled.
They’re not defending science. They’re defending a regime of experts who signed off on decades of vaccine approvals without ever insisting on rigorous, inert-placebo safety trials.
When Kennedy calls them out, their only defence is to scream “danger!”—and hope no one checks the fine print.
Yesterday, he fired the gatekeepers. Today, he exposed the game.
Hep B Vaccines Come With High Risk, Little Benefit — Why Does CDC Recommend Them for Every Newborn?
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 13, 2025
As public concern grows over the large and growing number of shots on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) childhood immunization schedule, several critics are sounding the alarm about one shot in particular — the hepatitis B (Hep B) vaccine.
Among the 76 vaccine doses on the schedule, the CDC recommends that every infant born in the U.S. get their first dose of the Hep B vaccine on the day they are born. Studies show that more than 90% of infants typically do so.
By age 24 months, most of those infants have received the recommended three doses of the vaccine.
Hepatitis B is a liver disease caused by the hepatitis B virus (HBV), which can range from a mild, short-term, acute illness lasting a few weeks to a serious, long-term, chronic infection.
The virus is transmitted through bodily fluids, most often via intimate contact such as sex or sharing intravenous (IV) drug equipment. Being an IV drug user is the most common risk factor for the disease.
Infected pregnant mothers can also pass the disease to their infants, but relatively few do — about 25,000 pregnant women per year, or 0.69%, have Hep B, and about 1,000 of them pass it to their babies, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The CDC says, “almost all children and older adults infected with acute HBV recover completely with no lasting liver damage.”
Women can be tested for the disease to see if their babies would benefit from vaccination, but that’s not what the CDC recommends.
Instead, today the Hep B vaccine is required for children to attend either childcare, school, or both, in every state except Alabama.
School-age children don’t fit the profile of those at risk for contracting Hepatitis B. Also, the CDC has no evidence that Hepatitis B has ever been transmitted in a school setting, according to a records search posted on Substack by attorney Aaron Siri, who made the request.
Siri argues the Hep B mandate is about profit, not about protecting children from a contagious disease.
“The Hepatitis B vaccine is a case study in agency capture,” Siri wrote. All children would not be required to take the shot, he said “if pharma didn’t stand to earn billions through a wider mandate of this product.”
The Hep B vaccine market, valued at more than $8 billion in 2023, is projected to grow to over $13 billion by 2032, with the U.S. making up the largest market for the vaccine, Fortune Business Insights reported.
Why did the Hep B vaccine get added to the childhood schedule?
In a Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law and Ethics article, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland questioned the constitutionality of mandating the Hep B vaccine for children to access education, especially given that CDC data show that transmission is unlikely through routine contact among children.
She said the CDC’s position on mass vaccination for children changed after the pharmaceutical companies got legal protection from liability.
When the CDC vaccine advisory committee made its first Hep B vaccine recommendation in 1982, the agency observed that the U.S. was a place of “low HBV prevalence.” CDC officials recommended the shot only for people at higher risk, including healthcare workers, people likely to be in sexual or “needle stick” contact with an infected person and infants born to mothers infected with the virus.
In 1988, the committee called for all pregnant mothers to be screened to determine if vaccination would be necessary. At that time, it was estimated that 16,500 mothers per year were infected and that without vaccination, an estimated 3,500 infants would become chronic carriers.
Later that year, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), created by the 1986 Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, was established. The law protects vaccine makers from liability for injuries related to vaccines on the CDC’s childhood schedule, and the VICP is meant to provide an alternative means of compensating people who suffer “accidental injury or death” from taking those vaccines.
By 1991, the CDC had begun describing HBV risks differently, stating that the consequences of infection were “major health problems” in the U.S. — even though rates had not changed and the number of children infected with HBV was just a few hundred.
The CDC’s advisory committee concluded that because it was challenging to vaccinate those at risk for HBV, mass immunization against the virus was “the most effective means of preventing HBV infection and its consequences.”
The committee recommended all infants be vaccinated, regardless of their mothers’ hepatitis B status, and the Hep B vaccine was added to the childhood immunization schedule.
Dangers of the Hep B vaccine
Then and now, there are two Hep B vaccines licensed for infants at birth: Merck’s Recombivax HB and GSK’s Engerix-B. Both are made using a genetic engineering technology that was new when the vaccines were developed.
The clinical trials for both brands included only a small number of children, and researchers followed up on safety monitoring with infants for only four or five days in the different trials.
No medium or long-term studies were done, no comparisons were made between vaccinated and unvaccinated subjects, and the vaccines were administered only to healthy babies.
According to the Recombivax HB label, during clinical trials, 434 doses of the drug were administered to 147 healthy infants and children up to age 10, who were each monitored for five days after each dose. During those five days, 10% of infants experienced systemic reactions, including “irritability, fever (≥101°F oral equivalent), diarrhea, fatigue/weakness, diminished appetite, and rhinitis.”
Among the much larger group of 1,252 healthy adults, reactions were wide-ranging and sometimes serious. They included injection site issues and fevers, upper respiratory infections, influenza, body pain, insomnia and hypotension.
The Engerix-B package insert doesn’t specify how many babies were included in its clinical trials. However, it does indicate the trial subjects were monitored for only four days. The insert lists similar adverse events to those of Recombivax HB.
Post-marketing studies, which collect voluntary reports of adverse effects registered in places like the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), the Vaccine Safety Datalink, or with the vaccine makers, showed many more serious side effects reported for both versions of the Hep B vaccine.
Examples include immune system disorders like systemic lupus erythematosus, thrombocytopenia, Guillain-barré syndrome, multiple sclerosis, transverse myelitis, febrile seizure, Bell’s Palsy, herpes zoster, encephalitis, and many more.
Premature infants who take either Hep B vaccine have also experienced sleep apnea, which the labels warn about.
The inserts indicate it is impossible to determine whether the vaccine caused any of the reported events. Heritage Foundation Policy Analyst Catherine Pakaluk, Ph.D., criticized this approach to identifying adverse effects.
She wrote:
“To the extent that clinical trial data are insufficient to draw robust safety conclusions, patients are effectively used as test subjects post-licensure, but without knowledge that they are part of the test and without hope that their own adverse experiences will be scientifically useful as they would be in the case of a controlled trial. Voluntary adverse event data are suitable for identifying safety signals, but not for drawing conclusions about real risks.
The available data comes mostly from clinical trials that had small sample sizes, no control groups, and only a few days of follow-up, she added. The only other data source is post-licensure data, “which suffer from a lack of statistical usefulness.”
Peer-reviewed research also links the Engerix B vaccine to CNS inflammatory demyelination — a group of diseases in which the immune system attacks and damages the myelin sheath that protects the brain and spinal cord — namely multiple sclerosis in children.
Studies of children in the U.S. also linked the Hep B vaccine to arthritis, acute ear infections and sore throats. And a 2008 study associated Hep B vaccination of male newborns with autism diagnoses at three times the normal rate.
In a recent presentation about the Hep B vaccine, CHD science team member Heather Ray highlighted other safety concerns. For example, Ray noted that vaccine dosage is the same for newborn infants as it is for adults. Vaccine dosage doesn’t vary for a 7-pound infant or a 210-pound linebacker, she said.
The dose exposes babies to both the genetically engineered antigen and the aluminum adjuvant.
“Aluminum is a heavy metal that’s a proven neurotoxin and can cross the blood-brain barrier,” Ray said. “It has scientifically been shown to cause autism, asthma, autoimmune diseases and other horrendous neurological diseases and chronic illnesses.”
Infants’ organ membrane barriers are more permeable than those of adults, making them more susceptible to aluminum.
Until 2001, the Hep B vaccines also contained 25 micrograms of the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal.
Since the VAERS was established in 1990, there have been 18,950 adverse events reported in children under age 2 following Hep B vaccination, and 31,082 reports in children under age 17.
VAERS has been estimated to contain approximately 1% of adverse events, according to David Kessler, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Critics say Hep B vaccine poses many risks and no benefits for most babies
In terms of efficacy, the Hep B vaccine package inserts say the vaccine has been shown to produce antibodies to hepatitis B, and “appears to have protected infants whose mothers tested positive for hepatitis B antigens.”
Pakaluk wrote, “Therefore, we can conclude that the vaccine provides a robust antibody response to a disease to which they are not regularly exposed, and how long that antibody response lasts is unknown. In other words, for children not exposed to hepatitis B, there is no known benefit.”
Substack writer J.B. Handley, who has called for the elimination of the vaccine from the childhood schedule, wrote, “It’s a nearly useless vaccine, unless you are in the tiny minority of babies who have a mother with Hepatitis B.”
The Informed Consent Action Network, in 2020, filed a petition with the FDA demanding that the licensure of the Hep B vaccines be revoked or suspended until their safety was determined in a properly designed clinical trial.
CHD Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski said,
“The CDC immunization schedule was simply not written for most people. The childhood Hep B recommendation is a prominent example. It is a pathogen that is primarily transmitted between humans through dirty needles and unprotected sex.
“In rare circumstances, it may be transmitted between people who live together — if one of them has an active infection — by things like shaving razors. Most children have zero risk factors and zero exposure. Most children should not be vaccinated against hepatitis B.”
Watch Heather Ray’s Hep B presentation here.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
NEW STUDY LINKS COVID VACCINE TO FERTILITY DECLINE, MISCARRIAGE RISKS
By Jefferey Jaxen | May 9, 2025
If you trust the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) website which states there is “no Evidence That COVID-19 Vaccines Affect Fertility,” you may be missing the bigger story.
A new study using data for the number of live births for women aged 18-39 years taken from the Institute of Health Information and Statistics in the Czech Republic found from January 2021–March 2023 the following:
“During the entire study period, SCs [successful conceptions] per 1,000 women were considerably lower for women who were vaccinated, compared to those that were unvaccinated, before SC. Furthermore, SC rates for the vaccinated group were generally much lower than expected based on their proportion of the total population.”
The table below taken from the study shows that the fertility, meaning one’s ability to have a child, of unvaccinated women (clear bar) during the study period was well above vaccinated women (shaded bar) at every single time interval.
Shockingly, this is the first study to look at the relationship between COVID-19 vaccination status and rates of successful conceptions on a population level using real-world data.
Attention CDC!
This recent Czech Republic study serves to drive home previous data points.
Confidential documents obtained via FOIA from early Pfizer clinical trials showed the lipid nanoparticles, used as the mRNA delivery system in the Covid shots, bioaccumulated primarily in the female ovaries – second only to the spleen.
Meanwhile, in 2021 as the experimental Covid shot rolled out, University of Illinois researchers decided to conduct their own survey after critical masses of women noticed an alteration in their menstrual cycle. Absent any interest from U.S. health agencies and the vaccine manufactures at the time, the grassroots research did find cycle alterations were happening.
Meanwhile, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), which has been known to capture less than 1% of actual vaccine harms, told the real story of the Covid shot.
The world is in the later innings of a fertility crisis with the US fertility rate reaching an all-time low in 2023. While fertility rates have been declining for several decades for multifactorial reasons, adding an additional layer of a Covid shot that shows evidence of further fertility reduction does little to keep society above replacement population.
Last week, news broke of a U.S. baby bonus aimed at addressing the fertility issue as ABC New reported:
“The White House has been fielding proposals aimed at persuading people to marry and have children, an effort being pushed by outside groups focused on increasing the nation’s birth rate after years of decline.
One such proposal that has been pitched to White House advisers is a $5,000 “baby bonus” to every American mother after she gives birth.”
The Trump presidency has passed the 100 day mark while RFK Jr. leads HHS with an array of dream picks at health agency point positions. Addressing and removing the root health and toxicity causes for the reduction in fertility rates is key to the future of America.
According to reports, the CDC advisory committee looks to be removing the childhood Covid shot recommendation. Will this new administration’s CDC be bold enough to publicly address the science and evidence surrounding the Covid shot’s impact on fertility?
CHD Funds Lawsuit Against CDC Over Program That Forces Pediatricians to Give COVID Vaccines to Kids on Medicaid
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 28, 2025
A California pediatrician is suing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) over a federal program that requires doctors in her state who treat children enrolled in Medicaid to give those children all of the vaccines recommended by the CDC.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) is supporting the lawsuit, filed April 25 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Santa Ana Division.
Dr. Samara Cardenas lost her medical practice after the CDC Vaccines for Children Program kicked her out of the program because she wouldn’t give COVID-19 vaccines to healthy kids.
California, like most states, requires pediatricians who treat Medicaid patients to be enrolled in the Vaccines for Children Program. The program, in turn, requires doctors to strictly follow the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule.
In late 2023, the Vaccines for Children Program informed Cardenas that her vaccine orders “were being scrutinized” for not including COVID-19 shots. She was later expelled from the program. As a result, she lost her Medicaid contract, forcing her to close her practice.
The Vaccines for Children Program primarily serves low-income populations by providing free vaccines to uninsured or underinsured children and children who are eligible for or enrolled in Medicaid. Medicaid compensates pediatricians for the costs associated with administering the vaccines.
In her first-of-its-kind lawsuit, Cardenas alleges the CDC’s Vaccines for Children Program violates the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection and due process provisions by subjecting children enrolled in Medicaid to different treatment standards and compelling doctors to act against their professional judgment.
The lawsuit also questions the safety and necessity of administering COVID-19 vaccines to children, the inclusion of COVID-19 shots on the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule and the impartiality of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which makes vaccine-related recommendations.
In California, 3 in 7 — or about 5 million children — are enrolled in Medicaid. Nationally, about 40% of all kids — or about 29.2 million children ages 0-17 — are covered by Medicaid.
The suit names CDC Acting Director Susan P. Monarez, as the defendant. Monarez is also President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the agency.
Cardenas ‘followed her conscience and the science’
Attorney Rick Jaffe, who represents Cardenas, said this is “the first federal lawsuit challenging the CDC’s coercive use of the VFC [Vaccines for Children] program to enforce experimental, emergency-authorized COVID-19 vaccination as a condition of Medicaid access.”
Cardenas “followed her conscience and the science,” Jaffe said. “The VFC framework gave her no choice: vaccinate all kids or lose access.”
Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD general counsel, said the lawsuit places policies that disproportionately affect Medicaid recipients under scrutiny, as the Vaccines for Children Program’s policy “essentially mandates these experimental shots for a population historically vulnerable to medical experimentation.”
Cardenas is not seeking compensatory damages. Instead, the lawsuit “seeks to compel the CDC to abandon its misguided and scientifically untethered policy, and stop the unnecessary mass vaccination of the nation’s poorest children.”
“We’re asking the court to say the government can’t make scientific compliance a prerequisite to serving poor patients,” Jaffe said.
Pediatrician Dr. Michelle Perro said that by requiring physicians to administer all vaccines on the childhood vaccination schedule, “medical autonomy is abolished” while “low-income children are left with fewer options and less continuity of care.”
Perro said many doctors are reluctant to oppose these policies. “The threat of speaking out is financial ruin and the potential loss of their ability to practice,” Perro said. “This is coercion and harassment.”
‘The unknowns are enough to never let these products anywhere near children’
In October 2022, ACIP, the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, unanimously recommended adding COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months old to the CDC childhood schedule.
The complaint alleges that before making that recommendation, the CDC failed “to compile and analyze vaccine injury data.” It also alleges that ACIP is “compromised by conflicts of interest,” as many of its members “have financial or professional ties to vaccine manufacturers or related interests” — for which the CDC has granted conflict-of-interest waivers.
According to the complaint, by not presenting evidence of the vaccine’s clinical benefit, ACIP violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law banning government agency actions that are “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”
The lawsuit cites data from the U.S. government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) showing reports of “hundreds of thousands of adverse events” related to the COVID-19 vaccines, including “serious adverse events and deaths.”
As of March 28, VAERS listed 72,924 reports of adverse events in people 18 and younger, including 6,122 serious adverse events and 201 deaths.
Albert Benavides, a VAERS expert and founder of VAERSAware.com, said the true figures are higher, as many VAERS report summaries indicate the victim’s age even if the report officially lists the age as “unknown.” His analysis of reports shows that “there is more than double the amount of dead children” — 556 in total.
According to the complaint, the CDC failed to “reevaluate or rescind its blanket recommendation for COVID-19 vaccination,” and that ACIP is instead doubling down on its COVID-19 vaccine recommendations.
The complaint cites this month’s ACIP meeting, during which the committee considered revising its blanket COVID-19 vaccine recommendation and switching to risk-based recommendations.
ACIP member Dr. Denise Jamieson opposed the proposal, claiming that the “U.S. has a history of not being able to implement such variable recommendations,” which would confuse the public.
“This is not merely arrogance,” the lawsuit states. “It is government-by-committee at its most dangerous — where unelected public health advisors retain extraordinary power to shape national policy.”
Attorney Ray Flores, senior outside counsel for CHD, questioned why the CDC added COVID-19 vaccines to the childhood vaccination schedule even though they were not licensed, but only issued under emergency use authorization (EUA).
“It shocks the conscience,” Flores said. “Physicians in California must be free to exercise their best judgment, especially when it comes to administering experimental injections.”
Releasing the vaccines under EUA meant they were subject to less testing than a licensed vaccine, said Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for CHD. “The unknowns are enough to never let these products anywhere near children. There are heavy compromises made when you skip the already insufficient regulatory steps with an emergency use authorization.”
‘Can the government tell a doctor what she must inject in order to treat the poor?’
In 2022, Sweden and Denmark stopped recommending COVID-19 shots for children. In 2023, the U.K. ended its COVID-19 booster program for healthy people ages 50 and younger. That year, the World Health Organization said healthy children and teens should be considered low priority for COVID-19 vaccines.
Several recent studies have also called the practice of vaccinating healthy children for COVID-19 into question.
A December 2024 study published in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society found that children under 5 who received the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines were more likely to become infected with COVID-19 than unvaccinated children with natural immunity.
A May 2024 preprint observational study of 1.7 million U.K. children and teenagers found myopericarditis only in the group that received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine and that the vaccine provided only 14 to 15 weeks of protection against infection.
Pfizer documents publicized last year showed that the company quietly studied myocarditis in children a month before its COVID-19 vaccine received an EUA for children ages 5-11.
A peer-reviewed study published earlier this month in Immunity, Inflammation and Disease, found that young adults who received a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine exhibited spike protein production a year or more after vaccination — significantly longer than the spike protein was expected to remain in the body.
Jaffe said the lawsuit “isn’t about vaccine skepticism. It’s about professional freedom, patient-level nuance, and constitutional limits on administrative coercion.”
“Can the government tell a doctor what she must inject in order to treat the poor? That’s what this case asks. And the answer should be ‘no.’”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Profanity-ridden Emails, Misuse of CDC Funds: How Big Fluoride Tries to Prevent Towns From Cleaning Up Their Water
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 15, 2025
When Washburn, North Dakota’s town commissioners decided in January to take up the issue of whether or not to continue fluoridating the water supply for the town’s 1,300 residents, they anticipated researching the risks versus benefits and putting the matter to a vote.
What they didn’t anticipate — but soon encountered — was evidence of a coordinated effort by state actors and a national fluoride lobby group, using federal money, to crush local efforts by small towns like Washburn to stop fluoridating their water supplies.
On Monday night, town commissioners voted 4-1 to stop adding fluoride to Washburn’s water supply — making Washburn the latest in a growing list of communities across the country to end the practice in light of mounting scientific evidence that the chemical harms children’s health and provides little or no dental benefit.
At the meeting, Commissioner Keith Hapip shared what he said was evidence of astroturfing by Dr. Johnny Johnson, president of the American Fluoridation Society; Jim Kershaw, Bismarck, North Dakota’s water plant superintendent and others.
“Astroturfing is when a group with money and power pretends to be regular folks supporting something, but it’s really a planned push from the top,” Hapip said. “Real grassroots come from the community naturally. And here, the oral health program used CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] cash to manufacture support for fluoridation in Washburn.”
Johnson phoned into the meeting to advocate for water fluoridation. In response, the commission also hosted a presentation by Michael Connett — the attorney who represented the plaintiffs who won a landmark ruling in a lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the agency’s failure to appropriately regulate fluoride use in water supplies.
Dr. Griffin Cole, conference chairman of the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, who has expertise on fluoride’s toxic effects, also made a presentation.
Interviews by The Defender with grassroots actors across the country revealed that for years, Johnson, one of the country’s foremost advocates of water fluoridation, has been intervening in grassroots efforts to end fluoridation in their communities.
He and colleagues — in this case, Kershaw — travel physically or virtually to meetings in towns across the country.
Johnson himself, along with the American Dental Association (ADA), openly celebrates this work lobbying local governments. The ADA frequently reports on Johnson’s appearances and his “success” blocking community efforts to end fluoridation on its website.
As recently as last week, Johnson reportedly bussed in dentists to a meeting in Seminole County, Florida.
North Dakota officials misused CDC funding to lobby in Washburn
On Jan. 13, Hapip brought the issue of fluoridation to the commission. He kicked off the discussion by asking some basic questions: “Is there an ethical question to medicating people without explicit consent? And, does fluoride work systemically or topically?”
Kershaw, a staunch water fluoridation advocate, traveled the 35 miles from Bismarck, a much larger city, to present information about water fluoridation.
Kershaw so adamantly pushed fluoride that one of the commissioners asked him if he was there representing “big fluoride” or some other interest. Kershaw said he was there on his own money and his own time because he simply had learned a lot and was “excited about sharing it with other people.”
“I do this on my own time, and to help colleagues like this,” he said. “I do this on my own. I do this out of my own expense for gas money and stuff.”
Hapip said he was surprised by the response. “There were people writing us letters from out-of-state regional dentist associations, people traveling from Bismarck to come to our meeting. It was like, there’s something going on here,” he said. And the letters were all strikingly similar. “They seemed very copy and paste.”
Hapip found the disproportionate response to the small-town question and Kershaw’s comments to be so strange that he submitted a public records request for communications between Kershaw and the top officials at the North Dakota Oral Health Program (OHP), including Director Cheri Kiefer and OHP Public Health Hygienist Vanessa Bopp, about Washburn.
A Jan. 6 email from Kiefer informed Kershaw — who is not an OHP employee — that the agency would fund his trip to Washburn, and a Jan. 21 email confirmed the reimbursement.
They also included an email from Kiefer wishing Kershaw success, “You’re going to be amazing Jim!! Flatten them like a pancake,” she wrote.
When Hapip read the emails, he was outraged. “OHP Director Kiefer urged Kershaw to crush us hours before the meeting. This isn’t technical assistance or education — it’s a funded intent to dominate,” he told The Defender.
Hapip said the funding for OHS comes from a $380,800 annual grant from the CDC and a $400,000 annual grant from the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA)
Both grants explicitly prohibit the use of funds for publicity or propaganda purposes or for lobbying or influencing legislation at any level, such as that being proposed in Washburn.
“These emails suggest that they’re violating their grant funding,” Hapip told The Defender. “They are directly reaching out to public health officials to come speak at our meetings. They’re providing dentists with letters — I’m not even kidding — giving them a full template.”
The template was first shared with Hapip by a city counselor, Rebecca Osowski, in Grand Forks, which is also considering ending fluoridation. Hapip and Osowski noticed they were receiving multiple letters that were strikingly similar. The records request showed the letter template, along with emails from OHP staff approving the template.
The letters from the template constituted “90% of the pushback” the council received, Hapip reported at Monday night’s meeting.
Hapip said the dentists who sent in the letters from the templates didn’t include their contact information. He looked them up and reached out to them, asking them to comment on multiple recent major studies linking fluoride to neurotoxicity in children.
Record request responses show that at least two of the dentists forwarded Hapip’s letter to Kershaw, who told them not to respond.
Hapip was outraged. “Their grant is to provide education. So that was an education opportunity. They are denying the education opportunities and only doing the activism. It’s ridiculous.”
After Hapip’s records request, Kershaw began using his personal email rather than his professional one for communications.
Hapip has filed a formal complaint with the North Dakota Department of Health and Human Services.
Johnson and Kershaw use abusive and degrading language to mock and demean opponents of fluoridation
After Kershaw’s appearance at Washburn’s meeting, Hapip reached out to ask him about several points he made at the meeting. Hapip provided evidence that Kershaw’s statements were false and asked him to respond.
For example, Hapip said he called poison control to ask if there was a safety concern if children swallowed toothpaste and was told that if a child consumes more than two ounces of toothpaste, there would be a serious medical concern, requiring treatment with calcium.
This contradicted information Kershaw had provided — via Johnson — that poison control says a child would have to swallow an entire tube of toothpaste to get sick, and that the foaming agent in toothpaste would compel them to vomit first.
Poison control told Hapip that no agent in toothpaste would induce a child to throw up on their own.
Records show that Kersaw consulted with Johnson on his response, calling Hapip a “dink.”
Johnson responded, calling Hapip a series of expletives and asked Kershaw if he could respond to him directly. Kershaw replied, “Don’t reply to him now, I have a plan.”
Commenting on the email, Hapip said he was shocked. “It’s a kind of rough start to a relationship, I guess you could say.”
At Monday’s meeting, Hapip confronted Johnson about his comments. Johnson said he was simply “blowing off steam” and that he gets “a bit disturbed” because he is constantly having his integrity and professionalism called into question.
Johnson also complained that public records requests seeking information about fluoride communications are made to “stop people from being able to have their free speech about helping public health folks.”
Johnson was referring to the many Freedom of Information Act requests that have revealed, among other things, collusion among the ADA and other lobbying groups and top public health officials to prevent scientific evidence of fluoride’s dangers from reaching the public.
Cole, who listened to the meeting, told The Defender it was clear that Johnson was tipped off in advance that Hapip planned to confront him. He said Johnson’s response was disingenuous.
“He acted like such a victim,” Cole said. “He has no idea what people like me and other people who have been doing research on fluoride’s toxic effects for years have gone through.”
”For years and years, people were being just denigrated and their careers ruined because they were simply telling the truth. They were doing the science, and saying here are the results. For that, they were blacklisted.”
Cole said that unlike Johnson, researchers concerned with fluoride’s negative effects don’t badmouth those who promote fluoridation; they simply present the facts.
Cole and Connett’s presentations followed. They presented data from research published by government agencies and in top journals showing that fluoride exposure is linked to lowered IQ in children and other negative neurocognitive effects — even at fluoridation levels currently recommended by the public health agencies, as well as recent research showing that water fluoridation has little benefit for dental health.
A few public comments were made supporting both sides of the debate. Then, the commission voted.
After the vote, the commission asked the water plant operator what would be necessary to implement the decision to stop fluoridating Washburn’s water supply. He said the fluoridation could be stopped as soon as five minutes after the meeting concluded.
Grand Forks is the next battlefield
Grand Forks, the third largest city in North Dakota, is set to discuss water fluoridation next week. The issue first came up earlier in the year as part of a broader discussion about the city’s annual bids for treatment chemicals at water and wastewater treatment plants, according to the Grand Forks Herald.
In January, the council voted 4-3 to maintain fluoridation after Osowski made a motion to remove it, but they are revisiting that decision.
Johnson and Kershaw are preparing their commentaries, according to emails released to Hapip through records requests. They continue their use of profanity to characterize public officials opposed to their position, referring to Osowski in the email below.
Emails show that since January, Bopp and Kiefer have been working behind the scenes to mobilize dentists, dental associations and others to intervene to influence the legislation in Washburn and Grand Forks.
At least one other town in North Dakota, McVille, voted to remove fluoride from its water in 2023. However, after Johnson, Kershaw, OPH employees Bopp and Kiefer, and dentists from the ADA pressured the town of 417 inhabitants — Johnson flew in for their meeting — the town reversed the decision.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Did Head of CDC Vaccine Safety Office Delete COVID Vaccine Injury Records?
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 11, 2025
A key official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) responsible for monitoring vaccine safety and reports of vaccine injuries may have mishandled or deleted official records subpoenaed by Congress, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) alleged earlier this week. The New York Post first reported the story on Thursday.
Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, director of the CDC Immunization Safety Office, maintained the records in question. Shimabukuro previously authored a key paper and participated in public messaging claiming the COVID-19 vaccines were safe and effective for pregnant women.
Johnson, chairman of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, requested the records in a subpoena sent in January to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The subpoena pertained to an investigation into internal COVID-19 vaccine safety communications.
According to the New York Post, the subpoena led HHS to discover “potential discrepancies” in the emails maintained by Shimabukuro.
“HHS officials recently informed me that Dr. Shimabukuro’s records remain lost and, potentially, removed from HHS’s email system altogether,” Johnson wrote in a letter he sent earlier this week to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and HHS Principal Deputy Inspector General Juliet Hodgkins.
Johnson called Shimabukuro’s possible mishandling of his official records “highly concerning.”
Journalist Paul D. Thacker, a former U.S. Senate investigator, said, “Every American should be concerned about government scientists deleting or hiding federal information to shape a political agenda. That information belongs to the taxpayers.”
Nebraska chiropractor Ben Tapper, whose questioning of the COVID-19 vaccines led the Center for Countering Digital Hate to add him in 2021 to its “Disinformation Dozen” list of the “leading online anti-vaxxers,” said he was “not surprised” by Johnson’s allegations.
“For years, I’ve seen patterns like this before regarding vaccine safety data. The public health establishment often prioritizes profits over people and continuously seems to protect the lies over the truth. The idea that critical records might vanish — whether through negligence or intent — fits a familiar playbook,” Tapper said.
California attorney Rick Jaffe said Johnson’s allegations are “troubling, but not surprising, given longstanding concerns about transparency at the CDC.”
In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request last year, the CDC told Children’s Health Defense the agency has no records of certain internal email communications relating to the agency’s follow-up investigation of safety signals associated with COVID-19 vaccines.
HHS, CDC and Johnson’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Missing records ‘could contain unfiltered insights’ into vaccine adverse events
Citing an unnamed aide from Johnson’s office, the New York Post said it is unclear which specific records are missing. But according to Johnson’s letter, Shimabukuro’s role included “monitoring adverse events relating to the COVID-19 vaccines.”
Tapper said Shimabukuro may have been “handling sensitive data on adverse events linked to the COVID-19 vaccines,” including data from the U.S. government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and the V-safe database, as well as studies, raw data and internal communications on vaccine-related safety signals.
Tapper said:
“These records could contain unfiltered insights into side effects that were downplayed or unresolved during the pandemic. For example, I’ve seen cases in my practice where patients developed symptoms like persistent fatigue or heart palpitations post-vaccination, yet struggled to get clear answers from authorities.
“Missing records could hide similar signals, undermining efforts to validate patient experiences or refine vaccine protocols.”
Internal medicine physician Dr. Clayton J. Baker said, “Such records would likely be very damning to all CDC officials who perpetuated the false ‘safe and effective’ narrative about the COVID-19 vaccines from 2021 until the present.”
“Given how damning any evidence of ignored or falsified safety signals would be, I think it is highly likely that Biden-era officials might try to destroy such records if they could. Better to be accused of destruction of federal records than to be charged as an accessory to mass negligent homicide,” Baker said.
In an April 2023 presentation to the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, Shimabukuro claimed that surveillance conducted by international regulatory and public health partners “has not detected a safety concern for ischemic stroke following bivalent COVID-19 mRNA booster vaccination.”
Yet, a peer-reviewed study published in November 2024 found that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines pose a 112,000% greater risk of brain clots and strokes than flu vaccines, and a 20,700% greater risk of those symptoms than all other vaccines combined. The study called for a global moratorium on mRNA vaccines.
In 2021, Shimabukuro was the lead author of a study in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant women. The study concluded that “preliminary findings did not show obvious safety signals among pregnant persons who received mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.”
However, a peer-reviewed study published in 2022 showed that the authors of the NEJM study performed a “statistical sleight-of-hand” that substantially lowered the miscarriage rate in pregnant women, presenting it as 12.6% instead of 82%.
In a Substack post, epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher said Shimabukuro’s “potential involvement in the deliberate manipulation of critical safety data on COVID-19 mRNA injections during pregnancy carries grave implications — resulting in immeasurable harm to mothers and their unborn children worldwide.”
Shimabukuro ‘may have violated multiple federal laws’
According to a press release from Johnson’s office, Shimabukuro’s actions, if proven to have occurred, “may have violated multiple federal laws.”
Those laws include the Federal Records Act, which requires federal employees to preserve materials “made or received by a Federal agency under Federal law or in connection with the transaction of public business,” the New York Post reported.
Johnson wrote that the destruction of records subpoenaed by Congress may also be “grounds for contempt of Congress,” which, according to the New York Post, is punishable by up to a six-figure fine and 12 months in prison.
Jaffe said Shimabukuro may also face other penalties. He said:
“Under federal law, he could be charged with obstruction of justice or destruction of official records — risking fines, restitution and up to 20 years in prison. His federal pension could also be garnished to satisfy any judgment against him.
“Beyond criminal penalties, he faces permanent disqualification from federal service and career-ending reputational harm.”
In addition, if records relating to vaccine-injured people are missing or destroyed, impairing their legal cases, “courts could impose evidentiary sanctions or presume the destroyed records were unfavorable to the government,” Jaffe said.
Johnson’s letter also referred to Dr. David Morens, an employee of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was a close aide of the agency’s former director, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Morens allegedly deleted emails and instructed colleagues to contact him at a personal email account to sidestep FOIA rules.
In his letter, Johnson accused HHS of a “lack of transparency” and failure to investigate the allegations against Morens.
“I had always suspected that Dr. Morens was not the sole evader of federal record-keeping requirements at HHS,” Johnson wrote. “The extent to which HHS officials systemically mishandled, deleted, or destroyed their communications, data, and other information relating to the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccines must be thoroughly investigated.”
Johnson’s letter asks the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice and the HHS Inspector General’s Office to investigate the matter, including whether records were intentionally destroyed to “avoid or subvert Congressional oversight or the Freedom of Information Act.”
The letter builds on Johnson’s efforts to investigate COVID-19 vaccine safety.
Earlier this week, Johnson sent letters to the heads of four COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, requesting they turn over records related to the development and safety of the COVID-19 vaccines and their communications with Big Tech platforms about vaccine-related adverse events.
In November 2024, Johnson wrote a letter to HHS, CDC and FDA, asking the agencies to “preserve all records referring or relating to the development, safety, and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines.”
In an October 2023 letter to the then-heads of CDC and FDA, Johnson accused the agencies of an “appalling” lack of transparency regarding COVID-19 vaccine safety signals, depriving Americans of “the benefit of informed consent.”
During the Biden administration, Johnson wrote over 70 letters to HHS officials and its health agencies requesting information on COVID-19 vaccine adverse events and related communications, according to a Jan. 29 press release.
Last year, Johnson hosted a congressional roundtable to discuss the risks of COVID-19 vaccines. Medical experts, political figures, journalists and whistleblowers were among the participants.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
CDC Will Study Possible Link Between Vaccines and Autism, Pledges to ‘Leave No Stone Unturned’
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | March 10, 2025
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed it plans to study the possible link between vaccines and autism, after Reuters reported on the plan late Friday, citing two sources inside the agency.
In response to the Reuters story, the CDC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) provided an identical statement:
“As President Trump said in his Joint Address to Congress, the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. CDC will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening. The American people expect high quality research and transparency and that is what CDC is delivering.”
The revelation came days after President Donald Trump, in an address to Congress, referred to the rising rate of autism in the U.S. Trump, citing CDC data showing that 1 in 36 U.S. children have autism, said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is well suited to lead efforts to study the increase.
“There’s something wrong,” Trump said. “So, we’re going to find out what it is, and there’s nobody better than Bobby [Kennedy] and all of the people that are working with you.”
According to The Washington Post, Trump administration officials asked the CDC to perform the study. Newsweek reported that it is “unclear” whether Kennedy is involved in the new study. However, HHS oversees federal health agencies, including the CDC.
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., Children’s Health Defense (CHD) senior research scientist, applauded “the CDC’s newfound curiosity in vaccines and autism.” He said the U.S. “passed an inflection point” in the 1990s, where autism “went from being a rare disease to a more common one” that has been “increasing exponentially ever since.”
“When is an appropriate time to conduct a large study on vaccines and autism? Apparently, two generations later,” Jablonowski said.
Sayer Ji, chairman and co-founder of the Global Wellness Forum, called the news a “pivotal moment, not just in the scientific exploration of vaccine safety, but in the broader issue of public trust in our institutions.”
Ji said the CDC’s plan for a large-scale study “is an implicit admission that prior investigations may have been insufficient, biased or incomplete.” He said the new study “could represent a breakthrough moment” in “resolving this critical health question” and “restoring faith in the integrity of scientific inquiry itself.”
‘A seismic shift toward accountability’
According to the Post, the CDC will conduct the study using data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a database of patient health records. The Vaccine Safety Datalink draws on data from 13 U.S. healthcare organizations, CNN reported.
Biologist Christina Parks, Ph.D., said the study should examine the CDC’s childhood vaccination schedule.
“The cumulative effect of giving multiple vaccines at once as well as over a short period of months has not been studied as a potential contributing factor to autism,” Parks said. “Vaccines have the potential to alter a child’s immune system in ways that are unexpected.”
Parks referred to studies performed in 1970 and 1987 that found autism rates of 0.7 and 3.3 children per 10,000, respectively. “If autism were as prevalent then as it is now, we should have a large number of older autistic adults, which we do not,” Parks said.
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for CHD, suggested the CDC study should use an unvaccinated control group. Hooker cited his experience performing research using data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink, noting that the database already contains data on unvaccinated children.
A 2021 study co-authored by Hooker found that vaccinated children were significantly more likely than unvaccinated children to be diagnosed with autism.
Ji said any CDC study examining a possible vaccine-autism link should reflect Kennedy’s recent calls for “gold-standard science.”
He said:
“It must be a true gold-standard study. The methodology must be rigorous, transparent and independent, with no industry or government interference. It should be a prospective, controlled, long-term study comparing fully unvaccinated and vaccinated populations.”
Hooker said the CDC has previously not made data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink available to the public, even though it is taxpayer-funded.
“We’ve never had access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink. We’ve never had access to such a gold-standard database, and that thing takes $50 million worth of tax dollars to maintain every year. It should be open to the public,” Hooker said.
Ji said many past vaccine safety studies were flawed due to a lack of transparency.
“Historically, vaccine safety studies have been marred by selective reporting, data manipulation and redacted findings. Kennedy has long advocated for open access to government data, and if this study follows through on that promise, it would be a seismic shift toward accountability,” Ji said.
Rise in autism cannot simply be attributed to ‘better diagnosis’
Reuters attributed the rise in autism rates to “more widespread screening and the inclusion of a broader range of behaviors to describe the condition.”
Research scientist and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., said such claims are “pure disinformation.”
“No rigorous study has shown that these factors are responsible,” Lyons-Weiler said.
“These criteria cannot explain the 7% increase in autism following the removal of vaccine exemptions from California, which has 1 in 22, the highest rate among all states,” Lyons-Weiler said.
Ji said that prior studies claiming to debunk the vaccine-autism link should be called into question, noting that many such studies “suffer from conflicts of interest, flawed methodologies and a lack of truly unvaccinated control groups.”
According to Hooker, many previous studies were flawed because they focused only on a limited number of vaccines and vaccine components.
“The CDC and most of the open peer-reviewed literature focuses on one vaccine and one vaccine component, the MMR [measles-mumps-rubella] vaccine and thimerosal” — a mercury-based preservative used in some vaccines. A 2013 study found a link between thimerosal exposure and the risk of an autism diagnosis.
Recent independently performed studies have indicated a connection between vaccines and autism.
A peer-reviewed study published in Science, Public Health Policy and the Law in January found that vaccinated children have a 170% higher chance of being diagnosed with autism compared to unvaccinated children. The study also found that the autism risk increases in children with a higher number of vaccinations.
A ‘new era of openness’
Reuters quoted Dr. Wilbur Chen, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and former member of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, who suggested the CDC’s new study could fuel vaccine hesitancy.
“It sends the signal that there is something there that is worth investigating, so that means there must be something going on between vaccines and autism,” Chen said.
But other experts suggest that such statements conceal concerns that vaccines may not be as safe as frequently claimed.
“Americans and those who receive our vaccines overseas should be able to have confidence that American products, especially biologics that are injected into children, meet the highest safety standards,” Parks said. “By addressing parent concerns, the CDC can help to reestablish trust in its guidelines.”
“If the vaccines are safe, transparency should increase confidence, not the opposite,” Ji said. “If vaccines are as safe as claimed, then the data should confirm that and bolster confidence. The fear of ‘hesitancy’ suggests a deeper concern that the results may contradict the official narrative.”
Hooker said the new CDC study is representative of a “new era of openness” and will “encourage greater faith in our institutions and their recommendations regardless of where they fall.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Makary, Bhattacharya Nominations Move to Full Senate Vote, But Trump Pulls Weldon Nomination to Lead CDC
The Defender | March 13, 2025
The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions this morning canceled a scheduled hearing on the nomination of Dr. David Weldon, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Axios was the first to break the news, stating that Weldon’s “views questioning certain vaccines have garnered attention since he was nominated months ago and were sure to play a prominent role in questioning.”
The New York Times reached Weldon by phone. The former Florida congressman said he learned of the decision last night when a White House official told him that “they didn’t have the votes to confirm” his nomination.
In a statement to media, posted on X, Weldon said, “The concern of many people is that Big Pharma was behind this, which is probably true. They are probably the most powerful lobbying organization in Washington DC giving millions of dollars to politicians on both sides of the aisle.”
Meanwhile, the Senate Health committee today voted 14-9 to endorse Dr. Marty Makary to lead the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and 12-11 to endorse Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Both Makary and Bhattacharya “largely breezed through” their Senate confirmation hearings and are now set to be confirmed by a full Senate vote, according to STAT News.
Given the Republican control of the Senate, it is expected that Makary and Bhattacharya will be confirmed.
Weldon nomination pulled amid Texas measles outbreak, CDC plan to study vaccines
Weldon, 71, is a practicing internal medicine doctor and Army veteran. He represented Florida in Congress from 1995 to 2009.
The CDC has a $9 billion budget and staff of around 13,000, according to NBC.
According to the Times, Weldon said he had been excited about the opportunity to help restore the public’s confidence in the CDC and serve his country again.
Weldon had also been looking forward to working on the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) agenda to address the proliferation of chronic diseases among U.S. Americans, particularly children.
In the days leading up to Weldon’s planned hearing, numerous media outlets ran a slew of articles highlighting Weldon’s history of questioning vaccine safety.
Reuters on March 7 broke the news that the CDC was planning a study on the possible link between vaccines and autism. Some senators “have expressed concerns over Weldon’s views on vaccines,” Reuters said.
The Washington Post confirmed that the CDC planned to “leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out” why autism rates are soaring, including using the agency’s Vaccine Safety Datalink database to study any possible links between vaccines and autism.
The last-minute plan to pull Weldon’s nomination came against the backdrop of news reports about the CDC’s planned study and the West Texas measles outbreak. On March 10, Forbes reported, “Vaccine Skeptic Dave Weldon Is Up To Lead CDC As Measles And Flu Rage.”
According to Forbes, Weldon was a friend of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who “holds similar and, in some cases, seemingly more extreme views on some health matters.”
On March 12, STAT News reported, under the headline, “How CDC nominee Dave Weldon’s support for anti-vaccine theories runs long and deep” that Weldon in 2004 asked the U.S. House Appropriations Committee chair to fund an autism research center that would be led by Dr. Andrew Wakefield.
Wakefield was the first author of the 1998 study, published and later retracted in The Lancet, that linked the MMR vaccine to autism in certain children.
According to STAT News, Weldon requested $1.9 million in the 2005 budget for the center to study “the biological origins” of childhood developmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, Congress chose not to fund it.
In 2007, Weldon introduced a bill “to improve vaccine safety research” that would have transferred the responsibility of tracking vaccine safety from the CDC to an independent agency within HHS.
The bill stipulated that the independent agency would:
- Conduct or support safety research and monitor licensed vaccines.
- Develop a vaccine safety research agenda.
- Evaluate means to promote compliance with federal adverse reaction reporting requirements.
- Provide a clearinghouse for vaccine studies.
- Ensure that functions relating to vaccine monitoring or research on adverse reactions are not carried out by anyone with a conflict of interest.
- Oversee the Vaccine Safety Datalink Project.
- Resolve U.S. conflicts of interest related to international agreements, partnerships, and activities.
However, the bill never made it to the House floor for a vote.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
FDA Calls Off Meeting to Select Flu Strains for Next Season’s Flu Vaccine
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | February 27, 2025
The committee that advises the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on which flu strains to target for the upcoming flu season will not meet as scheduled next month, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.
In a statement provided to CNN, the FDA said:
“A planned March 13 meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee [VRBPAC] on the influenza vaccine strains for the 2025-2026 influenza season in the northern hemisphere has been cancelled. …
“The FDA will make public its recommendations to manufacturers in time for updated vaccines to be available for the 2025-2026 influenza season.”
The FDA sent VRBPAC members an email on Monday informing them of the cancellation, the Times reported. No reason was given for its cancellation.
According to CNBC, the VRBPAC meets each March to select the strains for the upcoming season’s flu shots.
Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and member of the committee, told CNBC he wasn’t sure why the meeting was cancelled.
“Who canceled this meeting? Why did they cancel the meeting? Will manufacturers now turn to the World Health Organization to determine strains for this year’s influenza vaccines?” Offit asked.
According to the FDA, VRBPAC “reviews and evaluates data concerning the safety, effectiveness, and appropriate use of vaccines and related biological products which are intended for use in the prevention, treatment, or diagnosis of human diseases.” The committee is composed of 15 voting members.
The Times tied the meeting’s cancellation to the recent confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former chairman of Children’s Health Defense, as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). HHS oversees federal health agencies, including the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“The cancellation plays into fears among scientists who worry that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will use his position as health secretary to sow doubts about vaccines,” the Times reported.
Offit, in an interview with Inside Medicine, also connected the meeting’s cancellation to Kennedy’s recent confirmation.
“Is it part of RFK Jr.’s cleansing project of removing anyone whom he presumes to have a conflict of interest related to vaccines? I don’t know. But I feel like the world is upside down. We aren’t doing the things we need to do to protect ourselves,” Offit said.
On Monday, Offit told MedPage Today that VRBPAC members were asked to fill out conflict-of-interest forms in advance — a routine process before every meeting — “and we weren’t told the meeting was canceled.” He said members were told to set time aside for the meeting.
But late Wednesday, Offit phoned Medpage and said, “If we are not going to have the meeting, I guess it means we will be looking to the WHO [World Health Organization] for a flu shot formulation.”
Last week, a meeting of another key public health committee — the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — was postponed. The meeting was supposed to take place Feb. 26-28.
Valerie Borek, associate director and policy analyst for Stand for Health Freedom, said, “it’s not unreasonable” for an incoming HHS secretary to place advisory meetings on hold.
“We have a new HHS Secretary who has promised to expose and eliminate conflicts of interest that tend to lurk in groups like these,” Borek said. FDA and CDC advisory committees do not have final decision-making power; however, the agencies typically rubber-stamp their recommendations.
‘Time to stop pretending the flu vaccine is effective’
Offit said cancellation of the meeting could delay production of next season’s flu vaccines.
“It’s a six-month production cycle,” Offit told the Times. “So one can only assume that we’re not picking flu strains this year.”
Another VRBPAC member, Dr. Stanley Perlman, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, told Reuters that “we don’t have much time” to produce the next season’s flu vaccines.
Perlman said a separate meeting of a VRBPAC subcommittee scheduled for March was also canceled.
Door to Freedom founder Dr. Meryl Nass, who follows FDA and CDC vaccine advisory meetings and often blogs about them, welcomed the meeting’s cancellation and expressed skepticism about flu vaccines.
“The purpose for the U.S. flu vaccine program is shrouded in mystery,” Nass said. “The CDC creates models of influenza mortality and then tells us how many deaths occur from flu each year by citing its own models.”
Nass described the VRBPAC’s annual meetings to select strains for the following season’s flu vaccines as “a crapshoot.”
“The VRBPAC are there to give cover to U.S. government officials who do not want to pick the wrong strains,” Nass said.
Nass referred to a 2005 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine that could “not correlate increasing [flu] vaccination coverage after 1980 with declining mortality rates in any age group” and that “observational studies substantially overestimate vaccination benefit.”
A CDC report issued today found the flu shot less effective for some children this year. According to CBS News, “Effectiveness was 32% for children and adolescents, from the CDC’s U.S. Flu VE network of health care systems. That’s down from 67% in last year’s estimates.”
Biologist Christina Parks, Ph.D., said it is “time to stop pretending the flu vaccine is effective.” She added:
“The extremely low efficacy of flu vaccines call into question whether they should keep being offered at all. Studies have shown that receipt of flu vaccines over multiple years actually increases your risk of contracting a severe case of the flu and ending up in [an intensive care unit].
“The cancellation of the VRBPAC meeting suggests to me that the new Secretary for Health and Human Services understands that flu vaccines exist to line the pockets of vaccine manufacturers, not to actually protect people from getting the flu.”
According to CNBC, the cancellation comes during a “particularly brutal flu season in the U.S.” that, according to CDC data, has resulted in up to 910,000 hospitalizations since October 2024.
But Nass said those claims are overstated. She said that contrary to CDC claims of up to 52,000 flu deaths annually in the U.S., data from death certificates indicate “only about 2,000 Americans per year die from influenza.”
“I worked for many years as a hospitalist and yet it is hard for me to think of anyone who died of influenza in the hospital. They may have died of a secondary bacterial infection,” Nass said.
Discussion of flu vaccine-related deaths missing from mainstream narrative
Albert Benavides, founder of VAERSAware.com and an expert on the U.S. government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), said a discussion of deaths caused by the flu vaccines has been missing from the mainstream narrative.
“There are currently 2,652 deaths associated with flu vaccines in VAERS back to 1990,” Benavides said. He noted that 697 of these deaths have been received and published in the VAERS database since January 2021, calling this development “concerning.”
Benavides said the data showed that “many elderly flu deaths are comingled with COVID-19, Pneumovax, Shingrix, Zostavax and now even some RSV and Monkeypox vaccines and in every combination,” suggesting that interactions between the vaccines may be deadly for some people.
A study published in October 2024 in the journal Scientific Reports found that 17 vaccines, including flu vaccines, were associated with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare condition that attacks the peripheral nervous system.
Nass questioned the U.S. spending of “billions of dollars” yearly. “Other countries don’t do this,” she said.
VRBPAC members ‘often team up with industry’
According to the Times, Kennedy has “repeatedly warned of ‘regulatory capture’ — the idea that federal regulators are captive to industry.”
In an interview with Fox News earlier this month, Kennedy said several public health agency panels that develop policies such as vaccine guidelines are composed of “outside experts,” almost all of whom “have severe … conflicts of interest.”
The Times acknowledged that the members of committees like VRBPAC “often team up with industry,” citing the example of Offit, “an inventor of a rotavirus vaccine that was later developed by the pharmaceutical giant Merck.”
Parks said she thinks it’s “good that VRBPAC meetings have been put on ice until the members of these advisory committees are actually properly vetted and determined not to have conflicts of interest. Currently, it appears that many members are there to rubber-stamp the agenda of vaccine manufacturers.”
The cancellation of the VRBPAC meeting came just days after HHS announced the end of the CDC’s “Wild to Mild” advertising campaign promoting flu vaccines. HHS called on the CDC to instead develop “advertisements that promote the idea of ‘informed consent’ in vaccine decision-making.”
“I am hopeful that better data on the flu and flu vaccines will help Americans make truly informed choices about whether to get flu vaccines,” Nass said.
Related articles in The Defender
- HHS Tells CDC to Yank ‘Wild to Mild’ Flu Vaccine Ad Campaign, Shift Focus to ‘Informed Consent’
- Is Kennedy’s HHS Preparing to Shake Up CDC’s Vaccine Advisory Committee?
- RFK Jr. Pushes Back on Chronic Disease, Autism and Agency Corruption
- Guillain-Barré Syndrome Associated With 17 Vaccines, Including COVID and Flu Shots
- Breaking: RFK Jr. Sworn in as HHS Secretary
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
‘Operation Outbreak’: CDC Grooming Teens, Kids to Fear Pandemics, Critics Say
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | February 6, 2025
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) educational resources for K-12 students on disease outbreaks, the transmission of pathogens and how to trace their spread, on the surface, appear well-intended.
However, critics said the materials — which include lesson plans and classroom activities titled “Operation Outbreak” and a graphic novel targeting teens — also could be interpreted as propaganda designed to encourage compliance with public health policies and initiatives.
The materials present hypothetical scenarios necessitating a public health response to the outbreak and spread of a disease with a zoonotic — or animal — origin. Students are asked to employ a “One Health” approach and methods such as contact tracing to respond to these hypothetical outbreaks.
According to the materials, “One Health recognizes that human health, animal health, and the environment are connected.”
The One Health approach “requires human, animal, and environmental health professionals to work together at the local, state, federal, and global levels to improve the health of people, animals, and their shared environment.”
Dr. Michelle Perro, a pediatrician, said the CDC’s educational initiatives “appear to be a well-intentioned educational effort under the One Health framework.” But instead, “a closer examination suggests it may also serve to acclimate students to compliance during future public health crises.”
Perro said:
“By emphasizing the inevitability of ‘the next pandemic’ and reinforcing a specific perspective on zoonotic transmission, these materials can condition naive minds to accept certain public health policies without room for opposing discussions. … This initiative prioritizes messaging over genuine scientific inquiry.”
Dr. Margaret Christensen, a clinical educator called the materials “propaganda,” that “groom the younger generation early to believe our biggest threat is from some disease jumping out of an animal, whether birds or cows or pigs, and attacking us without defense, unless we’ve been vaccinated.”
According to attorney Sheri Snow Powers, the educational resources are intended to foster an uncritical attitude toward public health authorities.
“These materials are inappropriate for teenagers and children because they promote and idolize public health authorities as heroes and saviors,” Powers said. “This is detrimental to young developing minds and conditions children to be future compliant citizens.”
CDC educational resources use ‘a fear-based narrative’
The CDC’s educational resources include material meant to teach students “about the roots of American public health,” including the history and role of the CDC in domestic and global disease outbreaks.
The materials include modules on “lessons learned” during the 1976 swine flu outbreak, the CDC’s role in food and water safety, and in responding to the “21st century public health challenge” of chronic diseases.
However, the main focus of the materials for high school students is the “Operation Outbreak” series of classroom activities, centered around a graphic novel targeting teenagers.
Featuring a cover page reminiscent of the popular series “Stranger Things,” “The Junior Disease Detectives: Operation Outbreak a novel produced in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, presents a fictional disease outbreak scenario involving teenagers and animals. It’s connected to three in-class activities focusing on “zoonotic disease prevention and response.”
The first activity, “The Outbreak Team,” focuses on the “various roles and responsibilities of the professionals involved in an outbreak response. The next two activities, “Eddie’s Story” and “Hamlet’s Story,” focus on investigating a disease outbreak and its subsequent spread from a pig (Hamlet) to a teenager (Eddie).
According to the CDC, upon completion of the activities, students should be able to “identify steps in an influenza outbreak investigation,” “identify roles and responsibilities of public health, animal health, environmental health, and other relevant professionals” and “describe why using a One Health approach … is best when investigating or preventing zoonotic diseases.”
Students are also expected to learn how to define a series of terms, including “zoonotic influenza virus,” “novel influenza virus,” and “case” — including the differences between “suspected,” “probable” and “confirmed” cases.
“Most human infections with novel influenza A viruses have occurred after close contact with infected animals,” the materials state, noting that “global surveillance” is necessary “to detect the emergence of novel influenza A viruses that could trigger a pandemic.”
The materials also state, “There are associations between zoonotic influenza viruses and pandemics.”
But according to Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, the graphic novel and activities use a “fear-based” narrative. She said the materials lack “a balanced and factual approach that pathogens, viruses and bacteria are a natural part of life that can be mostly handled by each person’s immune system.”
Vaccination also is prominently featured in the educational materials. According to the graphic novel:
“As we learned during Disease Detective Camp, our bodies’ immune system produces antibodies to fight against infection, and the safest way to get antibodies is through vaccination.
“Although the flu vaccine isn’t designed to protect against variant flu, it is still important to get, because it can help protect us from getting the flu and spreading it to others.”
One Health approach ‘subtly promotes compliance over critical thinking’
Perro questioned the CDC’s focus on the One Health approach, “due to its biased, one-sided narrative.”
“By focusing solely on zoonotic transmission, it ignores key factors like environmental toxicants, industrial farming and genetic engineering risks,” Perro said. This promotes “compliance over critical thinking” and serves as “institutional propaganda,” she said.
The materials ultimately “shape narratives about the origins of pandemics — particularly regarding COVID-19 having emerged ‘naturally’ rather than from a lab-related incident,” Perro said.
Powers said the materials “condition” children to fear specific pathogens and “to be ignorant of their own bodies’ amazing immune system, by not mentioning it.”
“Teaching children how to take care of themselves with healthy food, exercise, and sunshine is a much more valuable lesson,” Powers said.
The CDC’s focus on the flu and children is not new. Documents Children’s Health Defense obtained in 2023 through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed that the agency hired an advertising firm to write “news” articles promoting flu shots for kids and the elderly.
The CDC’s “Operation Outbreak” materials appear to be unrelated to an online simulation activity by the same name, developed by the Broad Institute, UMass Chan Medical School and The Inspire Project — funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
This simulation, introduced in 2017 and described as an “infectious way to learn,” operates through a mobile app and “unleashes a virtual pathogen through Bluetooth across participant devices, prompting a contagious outbreak that participants strive to contain.”
Related articles in The Defender
- U.S. Launches ‘One Health’ Plan Prompting Concerns About Global Power Play
- One Health: A Plan to ‘Surveil and Control Every Aspect of Life on Earth’?
- CDC Hired Ad Firm to Write ‘News’ Articles Promoting Flu Shots for Kids, Elderly, Documents Reveal
- Rockefeller Foundation, Nonprofits Spending Millions on Behavioral Psychology Research to ‘Nudge’ More People to Get COVID Vaccines
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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From the Archives
A short history of British torture
ICC | December 2005
When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails… In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques. … continue
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