Letter from America: Dr Allan Cunningham: May 28th: Too Many Vaccines
TOO MANY VACCINES? RFK Jr IS RIGHT TO ASK THE QUESTION. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/WH-The-MAHA-Report-Assessment.pdf
Personal background. I am retired after a career in pediatrics, public health, and vaccine advocacy that began in 1962. Except for tetanus, I have taken care of children and adults with every disease targeted by the current US immunization schedule. Some of their illnesses ended with death or permanent disability. I administered many vaccinations and witnessed firsthand the decline in frequency of a number of serious diseases because of our immunization programs. I have five healthy children and six healthy grandchildren, all of whom have been well immunized…I have also witnessed some terrible side effects of vaccines which have increased with the expansion of the immunization schedule. Public health authorities (CDC, FDA, NIH) tell us that vaccines are safe, and broadly speaking that is true. However, the adverse effects of vaccines—individually and in the aggregate—have not been fully studied, and our knowledge of vaccine safety is still quite limited.
It is very important to appreciate the limitations in our knowledge of vaccine harms, and to know some of the facts that do not appear in official news releases to media outlets. Vaccines are generally licensed after what are known as Phase 3 trials. These are randomized trials which show that vaccine recipients develop antibodies against the target disease, and that recipients are subject to an acceptable number of temporary side effects. These trials are too small to reveal rare but serious adverse effects, and the trials are too short to reveal adverse effects that appear months or years later. In theory, these adverse effects are supposed to be discovered during “post-marketing surveillance” by the manufacturers, the CDC and the FDA. However, the systems now in place depend mostly on passive reporting and only small numbers of adverse events are actually reported. In some instances the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) managed by the CDC and the FDA records less than 1% of adverse events following vaccinations.
Our ability to discern vaccine harms has been complicated by the progressive expansion of the immunization schedule and the absence of unvaccinated control groups in clinical trials. When a new vaccine is now tested in children it is not given alone and compared with a control group given only a placebo. Instead, both the vaccine and the control groups consist of children who are also receiving or have already received a number of other vaccines. This obscures our ability to show a statistical increase in adverse effects from the new vaccine.
Vaccine authorities indulge in a certain amount of doubletalk when reporting adverse effects in Phase 3 trials. An excess of adverse effects may be observed in vaccine recipients, but if the study is too small to achieve statistical significance authors typically report “no significant differences” even though the health impact of the adverse effects is potentially highly significant. This subterfuge is well known to professionals with training in epidemiology and statistics. Most health professionals lack such training and fail to appreciate how they are being misled. The end result is the licensing, promotion and the sales of a new vaccine which may do major harm in the population at large. This subterfuge is at the root of a number of vaccine controversies, including the role of vaccinations in the causation of autism.
The foregoing highlights the weakness of official pronouncements about vaccine safety. As the immunization schedule has expanded so has our ignorance of vaccine harms. This is true of individual vaccines as well as the harms resulting from the aggregate effects of all vaccines on the schedule. This has prompted some experts outside of officialdom to call for randomized trials of the immunization schedule as a whole, with the inclusion of unvaccinated control groups. That is the direction RFK Jr, the FDA and the NIH seem to be moving in, if I understand their public statements and the MAHA Report.
Autism and vaccines. The frequency of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has massively increased in the last 40 or 50 years, compelling us to ask what biological or environmental factors account for the increase. One of many potential factors is the massive increase in vaccinations during the same period. The proportion of ASD attributable to vaccinations is unknown, but official statements dismissing any role for vaccines are demonstrably false. These statements, endlessly published in news releases, are based on a host of observational studies, all of which are biased and poorly controlled. This is not an isolated opinion; it is also held by some first-class epidemiologists. Furthermore, I agree with experts who believe that too much attention has been focused on the Wakefield/MMR controversy. We need to look at all vaccines, not just MMR. This was done in a recent observational study which found a dose-response increase in the risk of ASD and five other neurodevelopmental disorders according to the number of healthcare visits recorded for vaccinations in a Medicaid database. https://www.bmj.com/content/388/bmj.r325/rr The study was angrily criticized in the New York Times, who quoted a number of experts and who personally vilified the authors…The fact is, we need unbiased, randomized and properly controlled trials to statistically prove or dismiss a causal role for vaccines. Until the appointment of RFK Jr as Secretary of HHS the likelihood of initiating such trials was nil.
“Kennedy and Trump Paint Bleak Picture of Chronic Disease in U.S. Children” (Stolberg and Blum. New York Times, May 22, 2025) “A White House report blames a crisis of chronic illness on ultraprocessed foods, chemical exposures, lifestyle factors and excessive use of prescription drugs, including antidepressants.” The MAHA Report “implies that the increase in routine immunizations given to children may be harmful to them, which many scientists say is based on an incorrect understanding of immunology. It calls for further scientific inquiry ‘into the links between vaccines and chronic disease,’ despite dozens of studies that have failed to find a link.” Like officialdom, the Times article fails to acknowledge that the negative results are based on biased observational studies and not on all-important randomized trials.
MAHA Report. Pages 9 to 15 provide graphs and data showing the steadily increasing frequency of obesity, diabetes, autism, ADHD, depression and anxiety, cancer, allergies, celiac disease and inflammatory bowel disease in American children. (They make no mention of Kawasaki Disease, sudden unexpected infant deaths (SIDS/SUID), or acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), whose links to vaccines I have written about elsewhere. https://www.bmj.com/content/366/bmj.l5576/rr-3 and https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3976/rr-12 ) Pages 63 to 65 discuss the growth of vaccine schedules and provides 24 references, including articles on important non-specific immunologic effects of vaccines, which public health authorities have yet to acknowledge...The report discusses “Corporate Capture” of public health regulators (FDA, CDC, NIH) by vaccine manufacturers, and conflicts of interest in medical research, regulation and practice. It discusses industry’s massive influence on mainstream media, on the medical journals, and on the basic education of physicians and other health professionals. These are discussed particularly on pages 18-19 and pages 66 to 71. The 73-page MAHA Report includes 522 references.
The MAHA Report makes plain that vaccine policies need to be reconsidered. This is not a new suggestion. Ten years ago Natasha Crowcroft and her public health colleagues in Toronto voiced their concern about vaccine safety and about the effectiveness and cost of some of the newer vaccines. (“Do we need a new approach to making vaccine recommendations” Crowcroft et al. BMJ 2015;350:h308) They worried that expanding vaccine schedules threatened children’s uptake of truly lifesaving and cost-effective vaccines such as measles vaccines. Furthermore, they perceived serious ethical problems in the vaccine approval process, and they suggested that public trust had been undermined by allowing manufacturers and professionals with close links to industry to be involved in lobbying and decision making. https://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h308/rapid-responses Crowcroft and her colleagues, among others, prefigured RFK Jr and some aspects of the MAHA Report.
One legal scholar has already called for overhaul of US vaccination laws. Efthimios Parasidis said this about the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986: Just as health benefits of vaccines cannot be seriously questioned, the shortcomings of the legal framework governing immunizations cannot be ignored. The Vaccine Act was established when there were fewer vaccine doses, when health information technology was in its infancy, and when lawmakers heavily favored corporate welfare and deregulation over consumer protection. The result is that manufacturers have enjoyed robust immunity from tort claims for vaccine-related injuries. Furthermore, once a vaccine is approved and marketed, a manufacturer does not have a statutory obligation to actively collect and analyze safety and efficacy data, and is under no obligation to update vaccine formulas in light of new scientific advancements. Requirements for adverse event reporting and post-market analysis of vaccine safety and efficacy should be toughened, and the Act should be recalibrated to remove the nearly insurmountable barriers in Vaccine Court to fair compensation for vaccine injuries. (“Recalibrating Vaccination Laws” Parasidis. Boston University Law Review 2017;97:2153)…Once again, RFK Jr and aspects of the MAHA Report were anticipated by this legal scholar.
Vaccine hesitancy. The MAHA Report makes little mention of vaccine hesitancy, but the report’s outline of the growth of the vaccine schedule and the discussion of the corporate capture of vaccine regulators certainly helps explain why parents are increasingly hesitant to comply with official recommendations. Parents are legitimately concerned about vaccine safety, a concern that is shared increasingly by frontline health professionals. This concern has been exacerbated by public health and pediatric officials who have pushed immunization programs too hard. For example, there has been a great deal of rhetoric about “herd immunity.” Herd immunity is an important concept, but it has been distorted and used to bully parents into rigid adherence to the entire immunization schedule. It is one thing to mandate the vaccine for measles, a disease of major public health importance, but it is overreach to mandate the vaccine for hepatitis B, a trivial problem for American children from the public health standpoint. Such reservations also apply to other vaccines on the immunization schedule. (“Vaccine mandates in the US are doing more harm than good” Cunningham. BMJ 2015;351:h4576) Pediatric and public health officials have been intoxicated by the success of the MMR and a few other vaccines. Sadly, this has led these officals to arrogance about vaccines in general and to their bullying and patronizing of the public at large.
The current immunization schedule is intense, notwithstanding disclaimers by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the CDC. It is especially intense during the first 6 months of an infant’s life. Most side effects are temporary, but some of the temporary side effects are not trivial (e.g. high fever, seizures, extreme irritability), and they are well known to parents and pediatricians. Serious side effects belie official reassurance that infants can tolerate any number of vaccinations…We hear stories about the terrible illnesses that might have been prevented by immunizations, and some of them are true. We also hear stories about terrible side effects that followed vaccinations, also true. Officialdom has made a concerted effort to publicize the first kind of story, while routinely dismissing the second kind of story as “coincidence.” Public health and pediatric officials systematically exaggerate vaccine benefits while ignoring—even suppressing—information about vaccine adverse effects.
The current measles outbreak is, in part, the result of dictatorial public health policies. US officials, for example, have tried to force parents and children into a procrustean bed of rigid mandates for every vaccine on the immunization schedule. This has fostered mistrust, vaccine hesitancy and declining uptake of the MMR vaccine...The MAHA Report has already provoked opposition and debate, some of it quite venomous. I’m sure the report is not perfect, but it is a major step in the right direction. I hope the discussions that follow will help correct draconian policies, official arrogance, conflicts of interest, and arbitrary diktats from authorities.
ALLAN S. CUNNINGHAM 28 May 2025 Cooperstown NY 13326 USA