By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

The vaccine area is much more complicated than I knew when I worked at a department of infectious diseases as a young doctor. I didn't perceive vaccines could be a problem and had taken all the recommended ones.

My 2013 book, Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime, hardly mentions vaccines at all because none of the major scandals in healthcare where drugs had killed thousands of patients because of drug company fraud had involved vaccines.

In 2015, the former head of Cabinet in the Danish Ministry of Health asked me to attend a meeting about an ongoing dispute about the safety of the HPV vaccines. He was hoping I would agree that there was no reason to worry about the alleged serious neurological harms of the vaccines.

There surely was, and my 2021 book, Vaccines: Truth, Lies, and Controversy, has a long chapter about the HPV vaccines. It also documents how the influenza vaccines have been hyped beyond belief and the evidence, both by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). I never had a flu shot, and after having studied the data and considering that influenza is a rare disease, I decided I would never get one.

My work with the vaccine book made me realise that it is very difficult to get honest information about vaccines. The vaccine area is fraught with censorship, retaliations, and intolerance. I was called an anti-vaxxer even when I only asked questions and when I argued why mandatory vaccinations are unethical.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Harvard professor Martin Kulldorff was fired for debating official policies. One of the things Martin had said was that those with prior natural infection and children did not need the vaccine. Children are at very low risk of becoming seriously ill after a Covid-19 infection whereas the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines have killed about 1-2 per 200 children who got myocarditis. But it did not matter that Martin was right. What mattered was that he had broken the omertá.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is determined to get rid of the corruption at the CDC. He fired the whole Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices (ACIP) and installed a new, much better one. There have also been changes at the top, and his Deputy Secretary Jim O'Neill, Acting Director of the CDC, announced on X:

"During the previous administration, CDC lost public trust by manipulating health data to support a political narrative…We have…ended the misuse of the childhood immunization schedule for Covid vaccine mandates."

Most disturbingly, vaccine programmes have not taken the important results by Danish researchers Peter Aaby and his wife, Christine Stabell Benn, into account. They have shown that live attenuated vaccines decrease total mortality more than what can be predicted from their specific effect, while non-live vaccines increase total mortality.

They have also shown that the sequence of vaccinations is important; that it is best to end with a live vaccine; and that the harms of non-live vaccines predominantly affect girls. These results are so groundbreaking that they are on the list of milestones in Nature that starts with the discovery of the smallpox vaccine, which, like the measles vaccine, has saved millions of lives.

Just as for other drugs, we need to look at each vaccine separately to find out if it is worth taking. It is meaningless to divide people into being for or against vaccines. We don't divide people into being for or against humans. It depends on the person.

When Peter gave a talk at an international meeting I had arranged in 2019 about vaccines, YouTube removed the video and disregarded our protests. When I interviewed Christine about vaccines for our Broken Medical Science channel and we uploaded it on YouTube, the video was removed. The videos can be seen here and here. Everything Peter and Christine said was correct, but this is immaterial for the censorsh...