By Natalya Murakhver at Brownstone dot org.

There is a question that has haunted me since the moment I watched institutions fail children during the pandemic: Who will ask the hard questions if the agencies charged with asking them refuse to?

I have spent the past six years trying to answer that question through film, through advocacy, through lawsuits, through grassroots organizing. Now, Restore Childhood is trying to answer it through science.

Restore Childhood is a small 501(c)(3) nonprofit with no pharmaceutical backers, no government grants, and no institutional patrons with interests to protect. We were founded in the crucible of America's pandemic school closures by parents who watched decisions get made behind closed doors, decisions that cost children years of their lives, while the institutions entrusted with protecting them looked the other way. We documented those failures in 15 DAYS: The Real Story of America's Pandemic School Closures, a feature documentary examining how and why American schools remained shuttered long after the evidence demanded they reopen. It has now been viewed over 1,000,000 times in its brief run on X.

Recently, we did something else. We funded independent, peer-reviewed scientific research. What that research found should trouble every parent in America.

What the FDA Got Wrong — And What Our Team Got Right

Prior to granting full approval of Moderna's mRNA-1273 Covid vaccine on January 31, 2022, the FDA conducted a benefit–risk assessment of the vaccine. That assessment concluded that vaccine benefits outweighed the risks of vaccine-attributable myocarditis/pericarditis — even for 18–25-year-old males, the demographic at highest known risk of cardiac injury from the shot.

A team of independent researchers — mathematician Paul S. Bourdon, PhD, our own board member Ram Duriseti, MD, PhD, mathematician H. Christian Gromoll, PhD, immunologist Dyana K. Dalton, PhD, epidemiologist Allison E. Krug, MPH, and bioethicist Kevin Bardosh, PhD — set out to reanalyze that assessment. Their peer-reviewed study, published February 10, 2026 in the journal Vaccines, reaches a starkly different conclusion.

When you account for what the FDA failed to account for, the math changes. Vaccine risks outweighed benefits for the general population of 18–25-year-old males relative to hospitalizations: those caused by vaccine-attributable myocarditis/pericarditis exceeded the hospitalizations prevented via vaccination — by between 8% and 52%, with the team's most likely scenario showing a 38% excess.

Three Things the FDA Ignored

First, prior Covid infection. By October 1, 2022, the CDC estimated that more than half of 18–49-year-olds had already been infected. The author team estimated (using CDC data) that by January 1, 2022 that approximately 70% of 18–25-year-old males had experienced a Covid infection. Prior infection confers meaningful protection — protection that substantially reduces the benefit of vaccination. The FDA's model treated the entire population as if every unvaccinated young man were encountering the virus for the first time, dramatically inflating the hospitalizations that vaccination could prevent.

Second, age and sex stratification. The FDA assumed Covid hospitalization rates were uniform across all males aged 18 to 45 — contradicting the CDC's own modeling, which shows men 30–49 are hospitalized at roughly twice the rate of men 18–29. Lumping these groups together overstated the hospitalization risk facing young men, inflating the apparent benefit of vaccination for precisely the group most endangered by cardiac risks.

Third, incidental hospitalizations. By January 2022, the CDC director had publicly acknowledged that up to 40% of patients hospitalized with a Covid-positive test were there for something else entirely. The FDA's hospitalization counts did not meaningfully account for this.

On the risk side, multiple independent data sources — from Ontario, England, and the United States — sugge...