WASHINGTON D.C. — U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is compiling state medical records to conduct vaccine safety studies. This initiative follows the removal, retraction, or investigation of three scientific papers questioning vaccine safety by their publishing journals over a two-month period.
Kennedy Jr. stated, "We need a good health record system, and one of the things that really surprised me most when I came into office is that there is — that the systems are broken." He added, "We've had to go to the states and, luckily, we've got a lot of cooperation from the states, but we now have databases together that we can actually do the studies on." Kennedy Jr. said, "We have a whole pipeline of studies that will be done over the next year." The HHS is requesting access to medical records from state hospital and clinic data exchange systems for this effort. John Kansky, chief executive officer of the Indiana Health Information Exchange, confirmed, "Vaccine safety, or whatever words you want to use, has come up pretty consistently in those conversations."
Attorney Aaron Siri cited three papers in advocacy for modifications to the childhood immunization schedule before a federal vaccine advisory committee. Kennedy Jr. co-authored the 2023 book, Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak, with Brian S. Hooker, which argued that unvaccinated children have better health outcomes than vaccinated children. Kennedy Jr. relied on two of the scrutinized studies as evidence in this book.
One of the scrutinized papers, a 2010 study by Carolyn M. Gallagher and Melody S. Goodman, found that boys vaccinated for Hepatitis B within their first four weeks of life were more likely to receive an autism diagnosis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revised its public guidance on a potential link between vaccines and autism by citing one of the scrutinized papers. A 2021 paper by Neil Z. Miller in Toxicology Reports suggested a statistical link between vaccines and sudden infant death syndrome. Another paper, co-authored by Miller and Hooker in 2020 and published in Sage Open Medicine, suggested vaccinated children experienced higher rates of developmental delays and asthma than unvaccinated children. This paper, which underwent an 11-month peer review process, was rejected by five medical journals before its acceptance by Sage Open Medicine, which attached an expression of concern to it on May 18.
Dr. Karina Top, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Alberta, stated, "People and organizations intent on spreading vaccine misinformation have been very savvy in their misuse of scientific terms, such as 'gold-standard science', and publishing flawed studies to give their claims the appearance of credibility and confuse the public." Top said, "These papers are poor science, it appears the authors are making the data fit their hypothesis that vaccines are harmful." Neil Z. Miller said that the investigation of his paper relates to allegations about data sourcing rather than its methodology or findings.