How Fear, Economics, and Rhetoric Built a Liability-Free Vaccine Empire

Institutional Momentum and the Pre-NCVIA Landscape

     By the early 1980s, the vaccine landscape was no longer defined by isolated scientific breakthroughs—it had become a tightly woven network of mandates, manufacturers, media narratives, and federal agencies. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), through its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), had emerged as a de facto national authority, issuing recommendations that quickly translated into state-level mandates. Compliance was not merely encouraged—it was enforced through school entry requirements. Enforced compliance was justified by public messaging that framed dissent as dangerous.

     At the same time, cracks in the immunization system began to show. The 1976 swine flu campaign—an ambitious federal effort to vaccinate the entire U.S. population—was abruptly halted after reports linked the vaccine to Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological disorder. Public trust faltered, and manufacturers faced mounting liability concerns. Then in 1982, the NBC documentary DPT: Vaccine Roulette aired, spotlighting alleged injuries from the diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus (DPT) vaccine. Lawsuits surged, and vaccine makers warned that they would exit the market unless they were shielded from legal exposure. In response, the government chose to reinforce the existing immunization system, rather than reassessing the system’s vulnerabilities, ultimately passing the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in 1986. 

   Lawyers presented the Act as a necessary compromise—a no-fault compensation system to protect the vaccine-injured, coupled with liability shields to keep manufacturers in the market. But what appeared to be a benevolent bipartisan agreement to protect the health of a nation steadily revealed itself to be a rhetorical maneuver that disguised a lack of oversight and scientific rigor. In effect, this maneuver reframed vaccine injury as a threat to the public health infrastructure itself. Everyone involved in the vaccination enterprise was staunchly committed to preserving the vaccine supply, even if that meant subordinating individual harm to the continuity of a defective system.

     Congressional hearings between 1984 and 1986 featured emotional testimony from parents of vaccine injured children, industry representatives warning of vaccine industry collapse, and public health officials linking vaccination to national security. The message was clear: without legal protection, manufacturers would abandon vaccines, and children would suffer. The government's solution was not to scrutinize the products or the regulatory process, but to build a legal firewall. The NCVIA institutionalized this logic, creating the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) and placing vaccine injury claims under a separate administrative process—one that removed manufacturers from direct accountability.

Crowning Achievement of Vaccination Idealism

     One could argue that the National Childhood Vaccination Injury Act (NCVIA), as it was finally put into practice, is the crowning achievement of vaccination idealism. Vaccination, once a hopeful intervention during a time of high anxiety about disease, had by 1986 crystallized into a cultural necessity. Its emotional appeal—quick, visible, and framed as scientific progress—outpaced the slower, less perceptible benefits of steadily-improving sanitation and infrastructure over the preceding decades. Mandates spread, institutions aligned, and a vast network of cooperating organizations emerged, all preaching compliance. The vaccine industry capitalized on this momentum, and the government, rather than acting as a neutral regulator, became its partner and protector.

Forced Compliance Without Full Accountability

     The NCVIA rests on two foundational assumptions:

1. Vaccination works to effectively control disease.

2. Making vaccination a requirement to participate in society insures public health and safety.

When, however, a legal requirement forces people to get vaccinated without the option of refusal, these assumptions must withstand the highest level of scrutiny. An honest inquiry reveals that the evidence supporting these claims is not uniformly strong. Instead, the evidence is curated, in other words, designed to reinforce a system that preserves tradition rather than proving it serves the common good.

     As early as 1889, Alfred R. Wallace challenged the claim that vaccination was responsible for declining smallpox mortality, citing decades of registration data to argue that improvements in sanitation and living conditions played a larger role. In 1911, John Pitcairn echoed this skepticism in The Fallacy of Vaccination, arguing that compulsory vaccination violated individual liberty and lacked sufficient scientific justification. More than a century later, Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk expanded this critique in Dissolving Illusions, showing that many infectious diseases declined before vaccines were introduced, and that public health improvements—not immunization—were the primary drivers. Tetyana Obukhanych, an immunologist, has argued that several modern vaccines do not prevent transmission and therefore cannot justify mandates. Denis Rancourt has questioned the statistical models used to claim lives saved by vaccines, calling them counterfactual and invalid. More recently, John Leake and Peter McCullough have documented how vaccine policy has been shaped by ideology, commercial interests, and selective storytelling rather than transparent science.

Sources:

• Alfred R. Wallace (1889) – Vaccination Proved Useless and Dangerous.

• John Pitcairn (1911) – The Fallacy of Vaccination, in Both Sides of the Vaccination Question, published by The Anti-Vaccination League of America. 

• Suzanne Humphries & Roman Bystrianyk (2013) – Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History. [Book]

• Tetyana Obukhanych (2015) – Open Letter to Legislators Regarding Vaccine Mandates.

• John Leake & Peter McCullough (2022) – The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex. [Book]

• Denis Rancourt (2025) – Opinion: Invalidity of Counterfactual Models of Mortality Averted by Childhood Vaccination, CORRELATION Research in the Public Interest, 29 January 2025. 

As these sources clearly demonstrate, coercive vaccine policy has always faced principled, evidence-based opposition.

Evidence Supporting Forced Compliance Doesn't Add Up

     While mainstream public health discourse frequently cites studies affirming the benefits of vaccination, a parallel body of research contests these claims with rigor and nuance. The following studies, for example—often marginalized or dismissed—raise substantive concerns about long-term health outcomes, data integrity, and the ethical foundation of coercive mandates:

• Mawson et al. (2017): Found statistically significant differences in health outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated children, including higher rates of neurodevelopmental disorders and chronic illness in the vaccinated group.

• Hooker & Miller (2020): Analyzed medical records from a pediatric practice, reporting increased risks of developmental delays, asthma, and gastrointestinal disorders among vaccinated children.

• Garner (2021): Conducted a large-scale survey of unvaccinated Americans, suggesting lower rates of chronic illness and questioning the representativeness of mainstream health data. While Garner’s survey reveals a legitimate trend of concern regarding health outcomes among the unvaccinated, her framing overstates the role of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) in institutional safety claims. The characterization of adverse events as ‘rare’ is not based on VAERS, but on large-scale studies using structured health data. 

• Mawson & Jacob (2025): Focused on Medicaid-enrolled children, identifying correlations between vaccination and neurodevelopmental disorders, with implications for vulnerable populations.

Sources:

• Anthony R. Mawson, Brian D. Ray, Azad R. Bhuiyan, and Binu Jacob (2017). Pilot Comparative Study on Health of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated 6- to 12-Year-Old U. S. Children, Journal of Translational Science, Volume 3(3): 1–12.

• Brian S. Hooker and Neil Z. Miller (2020). Analysis of Health Outcomes in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children: Developmental Delays, Asthma, Ear Infections, and Gastrointestinal Disorders, SAGE Open Medicine, Vol. 8: 1–11.

• Joy Garner (2021). The Control Group: Pilot Survey of Unvaccinated Americans.

• Anthony R. Mawson and Binu Jacob (2025). Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Study of Nine-Year-Old Children Enrolled in Medicaid, Science, Public Health Policy, and the Law, Volume: v6.2019–2025.

     All the studies cited so far fail to support the National Childhood Vaccination Injury Act’s two foundational assumptions: that vaccination effectively controls disease, and that mandating it ensures public health and safety. These assumptions are not independent—the second presupposes the first, and the first depends on demonstrable differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. If those differences are unclear or contested, then the very means of validating vaccine efficacy collapses. The assumptions, thus, merge into a single, unproven premise.

     How did legalizing vaccination without the option of refusal continue to gain favor, when a mounting collection of authoritative and convincing studies clearly cast doubt on such a practice? How did those forced to comply lose their voice in conveying the harms of such a practice and holding the commanding agencies accountable?

Fear Outpaced Perception and Faith Silenced Science

Fear Outpaced Perception

     In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, public health decisions were made in the absence of detailed health data. There were no standardized national systems for tracking disease incidence, no consistent use of metrics like deaths per 100,000, and no longitudinal datasets to guide policy. Instead, decisions were shaped by visible outbreaks, anecdotal reports, and political pressure—reactive measures rooted in immediacy rather than sustained analysis.

     Sanitation improvements—sewage infrastructure, clean water access, and waste removal—were unfolding in parallel, but their effects were gradual and uneven. The decline in disease that followed was real, but imperceptible to the public. There were no data dashboards, no infographics, no daily case counts, in other words, no centralized reporting or visual confirmation of progress. The public could not track the slow transformation of infrastructure or the statistical decline of disease. What they could track—what they could see and feel—was the persistence of fear.

     Vaccination, by contrast, offered immediate symbolic relief. It was visible, quick, and framed as scientific progress. Unlike sanitation, which required collective investment and infrastructural overhaul, vaccination could be administered in a moment and mandated en masse. It became the emotional centerpiece of public-health reassurance—a ritual of control that could be measured, repeated, and mythologized.

     We now know that major infectious diseases were already trending downward before widespread vaccination campaigns began. These declines coincided with rising standards of living which, in addition to sanitation improvements discussed earlier, included better nutrition and broader access to clean water. We do not know—and cannot know—with any degree of certainty whether further reductions in disease were caused by vaccination or whether they would have occurred anyway, in parallel with those improving conditions. That uncertainty is compounded by the absence of rigorous long-term studies during that earlier period and by persistent flaws in the way vaccine research has been conducted since. 

    Even today’s data, shaped by methodological compromises and institutional bias, has not provided a stable reference for comparing the effects of vaccines on diseases of the past to their effects on those same diseases in the present. In fact, a counterintuitive pattern has emerged—data showing that the overall health of U. S. children has worsened over the 17-year period from 2007 to 2023, during which the number of recommended childhood vaccines increased dramatically (see Appendix C). The assumption that more vaccination leads to better health has not been borne out by the trend. And yet, that assumption has continued to shape policy, shield institutions, and silence dissent.

Source:

• Christopher B. Forrest, MD, PhD; Lauren J. Koenigsberg, BA; Francis Eddy Harvey, BA; et al. (2025). Trends in US Children’s Mortality, Chronic Conditions, Obesity, Functional Status, and Symptoms, JAMA, Vol. 334, No. 6.

Faith Silenced Science

     Because fear demanded visible solutions, institutions of the past treated vaccination as a symbol of settled truth instead of as a subject of inquiry. Scientific investigation gave way to rhetorical reassurance, allowing a less disciplined appearance of science to dictate policy. Agencies framed vaccination as inherently effective, not because the data confirmed it, but because the narrative required it. The act of vaccinating became synonymous with safety, and the assumption of efficacy was embedded into policy without detailed evidence of effectiveness.

     Faith in progress replaced the kind of analytical scrutiny that allows room for doubt. The public was told that lives were being saved, that disease was being controlled, that mandates were necessary. These claims were rarely examined over time or compared across different groups. Instead, they were repeated until they became axiomatic. The language of science was retained, but the process of questioning and verifying claims was quietly replaced—hard evidence became secondary to sustained belief.

     Mandates were justified by the assumption that institutions were serving the greater good, not by rigorously demonstrable outcomes. The agencies issuing them were presumed to act in the public’s best interest, and that presumption shielded them from accountability. Those harmed by the practice—those coerced into compliance and silenced in its aftermath—were not studied. They were omitted. Their testimony was reframed as anecdotal, their dissent as dangerous. And a sanctified system was deaf to the voices of danger. This same old mindset still operates today—only now with new tools to strengthen and amplify its reach.

From Public Health to Potential for Profit

     The vaccine enterprise, once framed as a public health mission, gradually evolved into a system sustained by economic opportunity.  Such a gradual reorientation—from safeguarding human health to advancing an economic system built around vaccination—indicates a form of cultural erosion. More troubling than a priority shift, it is an insidious priority drift that silently favors personal gain at the cost of devaluing others' well-being. The potential for substantial financial returns is now a quiet incentive for sustaining a lucrative enterprise, along with its accompanying system of mandates—an incentive embedded in procurement contracts, indemnification clauses, and patent royalties. Mandates guarantee demand, shield manufacturers from liability, and preserve a ritualized framework that rewards production over scrutiny. The system doesn't need to declare its profit motive; it simply operates in ways that make profit inevitable.

     The habit of realizing profit, which emerged from an ecosystem built around vaccine production, resulted in an economic system that requires a sustained flow of income to remain viable. Nowhere is this more evident than in the childhood vaccine market, which offers a uniquely renewable source of revenue. As recent market analyses confirm, the childhood vaccine segment is among the most promising and fastest-growing areas of the global vaccine industry, with projections showing a near tripling of market size by 2035. Unlike adult immunization, which depends on shifting risk profiles and voluntary uptake, childhood vaccination is structurally perpetual—each new birth cohort resets the market. This demographic renewal ensures a constant influx of consumers, many of whom are subject to mandates that guarantee participation. The result is a system in which economic viability depends both on public health policy and on the reliable appearance of new bodies to vaccinate, where the former is at risk of being driven by the latter. As the number of recommended doses expands, so too does the opportunity for product development, procurement, and profit. The child becomes both the subject of care and the substrate of economic continuity. 

     In this sense, the priority drift and silencing of science mentioned earlier reveals a shift in institutional focus—from the lives of vaccine consumers to the life of an economic system those consumers now sustain. Within such a system, those who benefit financially tend to treat concerns about safety and effectiveness as disruptions to a revenue stream that they must preserve. Indemnification clauses in procurement agreements, for example, shield manufacturers from liability, protecting them from court costs and potential settlements that could erode profit margins. This structural insulation diffuses accountability and discourages scrutiny to avoid that risk. Safety and effectiveness simply are not in the picture at that point—these are presumed.  

     The words, "safety" and "effectiveness", persist in contracts and public statements, but their function has shifted from empirical standard to institutional credential. Once the FDA signs off, downstream actors—whether military, governmental, or commercial—treat that approval as sufficient. The question is no longer “Is this safe and effective?” but “Has it passed the test of government approval?” And once it has passed, the transaction proceeds. The rhetoric of safety and effectiveness remains, but the actions behind the rhetoric are governed by compliance, not by dedicated scientific scrutiny.

Source:

• Market Research Future (2025). Pediatric Vaccines Market Summary.

Passing the Liability Buck

     This brings us to a strong fallback argument used by pharmaceutical companies to justify their claim for liability protection: “We passed every test.” The logic is simple and recursive—if a vaccine clears FDA approval, earns CDC recommendation, and becomes a condition for school or workplace entry, then manufacturers claim they’ve fulfilled every institutional requirement. Responsibility, they argue, shifts upstream: to the agencies that approved the product, to the institutions that mandated it, and to the public health framework that endorsed it.

     The past-every-test defense reframes liability as a matter of regulatory compliance, not a matter of observable outcomes related to actual product use. The phrase "safe and effective” no longer functions as communication about scientific standards, but as a redefined catch phrase that functions as a seal of approval—not validated through scrutiny but granted through the established protocols of institutional ritual.

     Such logic depends on a deeper assumption: that regulatory agencies apply rigorous, independent standards. If regulators sign off on study designs that are flawed, selectively interpreted, or shaped by industry influence, then the regulators become suspect for granting approval through a ritual of validation rather than through a dedicated process of analytical interrogation. The FDA’s certification, thus, serves as a shield—not just for manufacturers, but for the government itself.

     This recursive structure creates a liability loop: manufacturers, together with public institutions whose mandates require their products, shift responsibility to regulators; regulators shift responsibility back to manufacturers. Meanwhile, individuals subject to the mandates of those institutions are forced to face this closed loop where both manufacturers and regulators are legally protected—the former by indemnity clauses, the latter by deference to their authority. Legal insulation becomes a form of institutional self-preservation that evades public accountability.  The system does not deny that harm occurs—it redirects awareness of this fact away from litigation and onto compensation programs that create greater hardship than solutions for those harmed.

The Revolving Door Between Regulators and Those They Regulate

     What enables liability to circulate without landing? What allows “no fault” to become law? It is an unspoken allegiance between regulators and those they regulate, dictated by shared incentives and future employment opportunities. Laura Karas, in a 2023 edition of the Stanford Law & Policy Review, presents a compelling revelation of this allegiance, as she discusses a pattern of exchanging roles between FDA employees and the drug companies whose products they oversee. Her analysis exposes how the position of a government regulator becomes a credential for career advancement, and how regulatory oversight is silently influenced by anticipation of future alignment with regulated industries.

     This revolving door extends beyond the FDA. A 2023 study published in Health Affairs found that 54% of CDC appointees who left the agency between 2004 and 2020 transitioned directly into industry roles, including pharmaceutical companies, health insurers, and consulting firms. While only 8% of CDC appointees originally came from industry, the post-service flow reveals a powerful incentive structure: regulatory and advisory roles become steppingstones to private sector advancement. This personnel migration blurs the boundary between public health guidance and commercial interest, reshaping the meaning of recommendation itself. Government regulatory officials who grant product approvals and later transition into industry roles bring with them insider knowledge—and a lingering familiarity that echoes back into the agencies they once served. Their names, reputations, and former authority remain known to those who now occupy their seats, fostering a quiet camaraderie that can discourage strict oversight.

     When regulatory decisions are made by individuals who anticipate future employment within the industries they oversee, the incentive structure shifts—from scrutiny rooted in dedication to public health to approval shaped by that very anticipation. The regulators and the regulated maintain an appearance of independence, yet they act on an underlying logic of aligned interests. In such a relationship, too much scrutiny becomes a liability—an obstacle to future collaboration or career mobility. Deference, on the other hand, becomes the strategy that sustains a viable market, by smoothing regulatory pathways and preserving earning potential on both sides.

     The revolving door is more than an employment pathway—it is a mechanism that insures the flow of dollars between two entities. An FDA regulator may transition into a high-paying industry role, but in doing so, joins a company that must pay substantial user fees to submit products for FDA approval. These fees are not incidental; they form a critical pillar of the FDA’s operating budget. In this arrangement, regulatory expertise becomes a commodity—FDA officials reappear as pharmaceutical executives whose insider knowledge and institutional familiarity now serve the companies they once oversaw. In this sense, user fees indirectly finance the production of regulatory expertise that later becomes a strategic asset for the companies paying them. The regulator’s institutional experience, cultivated within the FDA, becomes valuable to pharmaceutical firms seeking successful approvals. When those firms pay user fees to enter the review process, they are—indirectly—funding the very expertise they later hire. According to the FDA's own literature, these user fees account for the majority of its funding in both the Human Drugs and Biologics programs.

     The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), widely regarded as the authoritative voice on vaccination policy, is similarly entangled in financial relationships that complicate its institutional independence. While the CDC receives Congressional appropriations, it also benefits from private-sector contributions funneled through the CDC Foundation—a nonprofit created by Congress to support CDC initiatives. Among its donors are major pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a leading global advocate for vaccination. In this arrangement, the CDC’s public health messaging and programmatic priorities are shaped, in part, by entities with direct financial stakes in vaccine development and distribution. The result is a structural dependency that mirrors the FDA’s reliance on user fees, where public health expertise is cultivated within institutions sustained by the very industries they are tasked with regulating.

Sources:

• Laura Karas (2023). FDA's Revolving Door: Reckoning and Reform, Stanford Law & Policy Review, Volume 34, No.1.

• Genevieve P. Kanter and Daniel Carpenter (2023). The Revolving Door in Health Care Regulation, Health Affairs, 42(9):1298-1303.

• U. S. Food and Drug Administration (October 2024). FDA Regulated Products and Facilities, FDA at a Glance.

Conflicts of Interest

     Revolving-door favoritism further operates in a regulatory culture where conflicts of interest appear to abound. As reported in the 2000 Majority Staff Report from the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform, institutional safeguards failed to prevent financial entanglements in vaccine policy-making. The report documents how members of key advisory committees—FDA’s VRBPAC and CDC’s ACIP—were routinely granted waivers despite direct financial ties to vaccine manufacturers. These waivers, often justified under the guise of “expertise,” created a regulatory atmosphere where objectivity was compromised and public trust eroded.

     The report’s case study on the Rotavirus vaccine (Rotashield) is representative of a pattern where committee members with financial stakes in competing vaccine products participated in approval decisions, while adverse events like intussusception emerged following those decisions post-licensure. This case epitomizes a lapse in ethics that echoes through the NCVIA’s implementation, where regulatory capture and industry influence undermine the very mechanisms meant to protect the public.

Source:

• Committee on Government Reform, U.S. House of Representatives (15 June 2000). Conflicts of Interest in Vaccine Policy Making Majority Staff Report.

Congressional and Judicial Dilution

     The entire state of affairs described so far is both preconditioning for and a continuing effect of the National Childhood Vaccination Injury Act (NCVAI), as it has been put into practice. Originally conceived as an optional pathway around—rather than a closed door to—suing a vaccine manufacturer directly, it ultimately became the latter. A 2024 article by Barbara Loe Fisher traces the NCVIA’s philosophical drift from its original intent to its current legal entrenchment. The Act was meant to offer a no-fault compensation alternative—not a blockade to foreclose civil litigation entirely. But over time, judicial interpretations, intense lobbying pressure, and legislative inertia have calcified the NCVIA into a liability firewall, shielding manufacturers from accountability even in cases of alleged negligence or harm.

     This dilution is the direct result of congressional amendments, judicial rulings, and administrative practices that have narrowed the scope of permissible lawsuits and raised procedural barriers for claimants. A Supreme Court 2011 decision—in the case of Bruesewitz v. Wyeth—further entrenched this firewall, ruling that vaccine manufacturers cannot be sued for design defects in vaccines covered by the NCVIA.  The Vaccine Court, once envisioned as a humane and accessible venue, now functions more like a gatekeeper, filtering claims through rigid evidentiary standards and limited appeal rights, while maintaining closed records of proceedings that foreclose the legal lineage needed to establish precedent for future cases.

Source:

• Barbara Loe Fisher (4 January 2024). 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act: MYTH vs. FACT. National Vaccine Information Center. 

The Deeper Problem

     Financial incentives and career-advancement incentives appear to have fueled an even deeper problem—possibly the most fundamental problem of all that has been eroding public health for quite some time. This problem is the erosion of medical research itself, manifesting specifically in the corruption of vaccine research.  A broader analysis of this erosion—spanning conflicts of interest, publication bias, and the institutional capture of peer review—has been documented elsewhere, using primary-source references that trace the decay of biomedical integrity across multiple domains. 

Source:

• RGK Research (25 May 2025), Rampant Fraud and Misconduct Reinforced COVID-19 Fear.

     In vaccine research, decay of biomedical integrity is compounded by regulatory negligence. A 2025 public comment submitted to the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) outlines persistent failures in oversight, including the agency’s reliance on industry-submitted data and its reluctance to demand long-term safety studies. These failures are not isolated—they are symptomatic of a deeper institutional alignment with commercial interests, where the appearance of scientific rigor masks a hollowed-out evidentiary core.

     David B. Ross, a former FDA reviewer, paints a disturbing picture in his 2023 British Medical Journal expose, The Decline of Science at the FDA Has Become Unmanageable, in which he writes:

Much of the blame must go to the FDA’s reliance on industry paid user fees. Over the past three decades the proportion of the FDA’s annual drug budget made up of such fees has risen from less than 10% (fiscal year 1994) to more than two thirds (fiscal year 2023). 

In addition, the alluring “regulatory flexibilities” provided by the FDA Modernization Act of 1997 and the 21st Century Cures Act have become habit forming, enabling the FDA’s leadership and managers to deny scientific reality by defining effectiveness downward.

In its quest to avoid difficult choices and hard decisions the FDA has increasingly embraced non-inferiority trials (or vice versa), ignoring the serious regulatory, clinical, and ethical problems caused by their misuse.

However, the corruption of the FDA’s scientific culture remains the primary culprit driving the deterioration of safety and effectiveness standards. During my tenure at FDA, managers would admiringly speak of “crafting an approval,” as if it were a skillful demonstration of regulatory legerdemain rather than an act of scientific fabrication. 

FDA leadership’s continued hostility towards meaningful peer review, transparency, and accountability dims the prospect for institutional self-renewal.

     It's revealing to consider these observations in light of the CDC's 60+ dose childhood immunization schedule, keeping in mind that the FDA signed off on all of these. And it's not enough to question the quality of research that established approval for each of them. The greater question is why the CDC has never diligently studied, nor has the FDA ever shown sustained interest in, the combined effects and possible accumulating dangers of administering them all. As alleged in Ross et al. v. CDC, the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP):

... propagates an unscientific, one-size-fits-all model that denies individualized risk assessment while refusing to acknowledge that some children suffer serious harm from continued vaccination. The lawsuit further points out that doctors who attempt to protect vulnerable patients from possible cumulative harms face career destruction.

Sources:

• David B. Ross (2023). The Decline of Science at the FDA Has Become Unmanageable. BMJ: British Medical Journal (Online), 381.

• National Vaccine Information Center (23 May 2025). Public Comment to FDA VRBPAC.

• United States District Court for the District of Columbia (15 August 2025). Paul Thomas, M. D. et al. v. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Market Expansion Without Ethical Reckoning

     The pediatric vaccine market is expanding rapidly. Forecasts project growth from $69.2 billion in 2025 to $223.8 billion by 2035, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.4%. This expansion is concentrated in childhood vaccines, driven by government immunization programs, combination vaccine technologies, and routine schedule updates. The CDC’s 2025 immunization schedule reflects this momentum, adding new formulations and expanding recommendations for infants and adolescents.

Sources:

• Future Market Insights (2025).  Paediatric Vaccine Market Size and Share Forecast Outlook 2025 to 2035.

• Richelle Witt and Donte Valdez (2025). CDC Adolescents, Children, & Adult Immunization Schedule: 2025 Update, Pharmacy Times.

• Data Insights Market (2025). Key Drivers for Childhood Vaccines Market Growth: Projections 2025–2033.

• DataHorizzon Research (2025). Childhood Vaccines Market Size, Outlook, Growth Statistics & Forecast 2033.

     While positive in an economic sense for stakeholders in the vaccine business, this growth is deeply problematic for health consumers. It reflects a troubling asymmetry: what counts as success from one perspective—market expansion, shareholder return, schedule saturation—can simultaneously represent risk, neglect, and harm from another. At some point, a judgment must be made about which perspective deserves higher consideration. And that judgment cannot be left to market logic alone.

     When institutional comfort with profit displaces the intent to protect, the ethical terrain shifts decisively towards disregard for human life. When regulators refuse to study the combined effects of 72+ vaccine doses, advisory committees refuse individualized risk assessment, and dissenting physicians face career destruction for challenging this refusal, negligence becomes an intentional feature of the industry. This is a failure of self-evaluation, the very kind that should guide science away from causing harm.

     Conspiring to cause harm is not the only path to causing it. Harm can also result because institutions fail to evaluate the consequences of their actions within a chosen business plan. A vaccine schedule tethered to a business plan ceases to be a clinical tool, if the scientific reasoning that establishes and promotes it remains unexamined in a rigorous scientific manner. 

     Physicist Richard Feynman warned against the pitfalls of nonrigorous science—what he called cargo cult science, a practice that mimics the forms of scientific inquiry while abandoning its true structure and principles. In his words:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

Source:

• Richard P. Feynman (1974). Cargo Cult Science, Caltech Engineering & Science (inferred from website domain name).

     When regulators perform safety rituals without studying cumulative effects, when advisory panels cite consensus without examining dissent, and when the vaccine schedule expands without rigorous reevaluation, the result is not science—it is the performance of a science-like play. The form is similar, but the actual discipline is gone. The CDC and FDA, in their refusal to confront the long-term consequences of their own recommendations, exemplify this drift. They do not need to align with falsified data to cause harm. They need only continue as usual without reflection, sustaining a system that rewards expansion while punishing scrutiny. This is not scientific progress—it is institutional theater.

A Final Word

     If one sentence could sum up what amounts to an epic convoluted cultural mess, then it might be this:

Currently, a vaccination enterprise exists where the policy of forced compliance lacks high-quality evidence,
where profit and career-advancement motives overpower public-health priorities, where a liability loop
shields manufacturers and regulators from injury claims, where a revolving door between regulators and
manufacturers sustains conflicts of interest, where congressional and judicial dilution of consumer-protection
laws disable legal recourse, and where a general decay of biomedical integrity in research prevails.

# # #

Appendix A: Timeline of Key Events Leading to and Resulting from the NCVIA

Appendix B: Financial Relationships and Linkages Surrounding the CDC

Appendix C: CDC Vaccine Schedule Expansion (1986–2025)

END

[Written with assistance from Microsoft Copilot AI]

.pdf copy of this article

<< BACK TO MAIN PAGE