Disturbing Secrets about Vaccines

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 U.S. 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 censorship clergy.

Censorship is detrimental to science itself and to public health. Hiding data on serious harms, which the HPV vaccines illustrate, should be a criminal offence.

The HPV Vaccines

The HPV vaccines are highly controversial. Women can avoid cervical cancer altogether by attending screening regularly, as it takes a long time before cell changes develop into cancer. Moreover, it has not been documented in reliable research that the vaccines decrease the occurrence of cervical cancer or mortality, whereas we know that the antibody response to the vaccines disappears rather quickly and that the vaccines are only about 70% protective against the targeted HPV strains. Other strains may also cause cancer and could take over, which is why screening is still being recommended.

Whatever their effect, the HPV vaccines are not life-saving, as women may avoid cervical cancer deaths by screening, whereas some people have been killed by an HPV vaccine.

The drug industry’s mantra that a drug or vaccine is effective and safe is a logical impossibility. Nothing that has a benefit can be safe. There will always be people who are harmed. One of the biggest problems in healthcare is that we lack the full data on harms, which is an important reason why our prescription drugs are the leading cause of death.

In my capacity as an expert witness for the Wisner Baum law firm in Los Angeles in their litigation against Merck, the manufacturer of Gardasil and Gardasil 9, I am likely the only person in the world who has read 112,452 pages of Merck’s confidential study reports. This was so revealing that Michael Baum suggested I write a book about it, which I did.

I uncovered systematic scientific misconduct on many levels and outright fraud in Merck’s clinical trials, which included using a myriad of confusing and obfuscating methods to avoid reporting serious neurological harms of Gardasil.

I found many examples of numerical inconsistencies, even for deaths, and of mathematical impossibilities, also in the package inserts, and extreme discrepancies in reported adverse events in trials with the same design. Merck’s trial publications in major medical journals, e.g. New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet, were also seriously misleading.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) was complicit in the scientific misconduct. The EMA knew that Merck had cheated on them earlier by avoiding reporting cases of serious harms of its vaccine, and the Danish Medicines Agency had also documented scientific misconduct. When the EMA asked Merck to look for serious neurological harms in its trial databases and other databases, Merck cheated again by using a ludicrous search strategy that made it virtually certain that nothing of interest would be found. The EMA did not react to this serious and obvious violation of good research practice but accepted Merck’s findings.

The EMA’s key argument, mentioned ten times in its official report, was that, in the manufacturers’ analyses, there was no difference between what was observed and the expected background incidence. But Merck based their estimate of Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) on the background rate of chronic fatigue syndrome. This is like estimating bicycle accidents based on the number of car accidents.

Lucija Tomljenovic, another expert witness for Wisner Baum, provided much more realistic estimates than Merck had done. She found that under many of her assumptions, the observed number of POTS cases following Gardasil vaccination was much greater than the expected number, even though Merck had grossly underestimated the observed number.

The EMA and Merck also colluded in calling active comparators a placebo. I was shocked when I learned in 2016, through my work with the HPV vaccines, that the regulatory requirements are much less stringent for vaccines than for other drugs. Very few vaccines have ever been compared to a placebo. The other HPV vaccine manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), also committed fraud by claiming that its studies were placebo-controlled even though active comparators were used.

This is a smart way of covering up for the harms of vaccines. It makes it impossible to find out what the harms are. The active vaccine comparators might cause similar harms as the studied vaccine, and this could also be the case when the active comparator is the strongly immunogenic adjuvant used in the vaccine.

The EMA claimed that the adjuvant is harmless, which is totally false. Moreover, because the HPV vaccines and their adjuvants had similar harm profiles, the manufacturers and regulators concluded that the vaccines are safe. This is like saying that cigarettes and cigars must be safe because they have similar harm profiles. It is worth noting that GSK found signals of neurological harm already in 2007.

Merck also lied to the patients volunteering for the trials because they were told the control group would receive a placebo. And court documents revealed that, in addition to the aluminium adjuvant, there is an undisclosed adjuvant in Gardasil. In an act of corporate deception, Merck kept this secret from the public, and the additional adjuvant does not have regulatory approval. Gardasil contains billions of fragments of HPV L1 DNA, which originate from the synthetic DNA plasmid used in manufacturing. These fragments make Gardasil far more immunogenic than if they had not been present. Merck was not only aware of this but took deliberate steps to preserve and retain the DNA fragments in the final vaccine formulation.

The drug regulators helped Merck cover this up, and there is nothing in Gardasil’s package inserts about the fragments. Dr. Sin Hang Lee, a pathologist, expert in molecular diagnostics, and an expert witness in the court case, noted that for some individuals, particularly those with genetic predispositions, this additional adjuvant can lead to autoimmune conditions such as POTS and, in rare cases, sudden death. Furthermore, there is a possibility that such external DNA can integrate into the human genome and cause cancer, which has been raised as a concern with the Covid-19 vaccines.

In my book, I describe verbatim, based on the court transcript, how I was harassed by Merck’s lawyer, Emma C. Ross, for a whole day. It was the most absurd day in my whole life. Ross had set up many traps and became very annoyed when I didn’t fall into them. She interrupted me on numerous occasions and demonstrated her disdain repeatedly by saying, “Are you finished?” even though it was obvious that I had finished my explanations, which neutralised her attacks.

Alan Cassels writes in his review of my book that he laughed out loud in places, imagining me staring down this lawyer who was going out of her way to make me squirm. “The grilling was rife with arrogance and condescension, frequently hilarious, and often sliding into childish and outlandish sniping, so theatrical you’d think it was cooked up by a team of drunk Hollywood scriptwriters.”

Ross referred to many observational studies as “proof” that Gardasil is safe, but I explain in my book why the studies she mentioned are not reliable. Most importantly, people who choose to get vaccinated are healthier than those who don’t, which we call the “healthy vaccinee bias.”

The best and most convincing observational study was based on data from the WHO’s pharmacovigilance database. It showed that POTS was reported 82 times more often for HPV vaccines than for other vaccines and that reports of adverse events after HPV vaccination were of a serious and often incapacitating nature. Ross did, of course, not mention this study, but I did.

The EMA did not find the study important either. It trusted the drug companies, distrusted independent research, and violated their own Good Pharmacovigilance Practices guidelines. The EMA also violated its conflict-of-interest policy when it hired the experts who proclaimed that Gardasil is safe. The similarities to how the FDA operates are striking.

Merck tried to convince the judge—with even more absurd arguments than Ross had used—that I was so unreliable and so dumb that my testimony should be dismissed. The facts I had presented during my deposition were called unsubstantiated, speculative “opinions.” I had expected the world’s fourth biggest drug company to do better than this, but they were too arrogant to see through their own faulty arguments. Merck’s motion was pathetic, extremely misleading, and contained outright lies. If anyone is in any doubt about whether Merck can be trusted, they should read my comments to this motion. Merck scored a tremendous own goal, and the judge did not agree that my testimony should be dismissed.

What is most important to me is that people who are convinced that a vaccine harmed them seriously but were ridiculed by their doctors and authorities and were told they suffered from a psychiatric disorder may find comfort and useful arguments in my book. This is not to say that they are always right. But vaccines do harm some people, and the HPV vaccines seem to cause serious neurological harm via an autoimmune mechanism.

The Cochrane review of the HPV vaccines is an embarrassing illustration of Cochrane’s scientific and moral decline. The review is flawed, missed nearly half of the eligible trials,

was influenced by reporting bias and biased trial designs, used the term placebo to describe the active comparators, and failed to declare the lead author’s financial ties to the vaccine manufacturers. The Cochrane authors did not find serious neurological harms, which we did in our systematic review, which, in contrast to the Cochrane review, was based on clinical study reports we had obtained from the EMA, which are much more reliable than published research.

My research group had warned Cochrane several times before they published their review that it would be misleading. However, the authors and Cochrane’s editor-in-chief did not heed our warnings but cowardly attacked the messengers instead on Cochrane’s website that we did not have access to, after we had published our criticism of the Cochrane review in a scientific journal. We responded to Cochrane’s unjustified attack in the same journal.

Conclusions

For the benefit of mankind, we must fight fiercely the taboos that we are not allowed to raise critical questions about vaccines, or to tell people about politically inconvenient results, or to study vaccine harms.

Retsef Levi will lead the CDC’s work group that will study the harms of the Covid-19 vaccines. Astonishingly, lawyers in the Department of Health had objected to granting him permission to look at harms, but he objected to this horrific censorship.

This article was originally published by the Brownstone Institute. Dr. Peter Gøtzsche co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration, once considered the world’s preeminent independent medical research organization. In 2010 Gøtzsche was named Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen. Gøtzsche has published more than 97 over 100 papers in the “big five” medical journals (JAMA, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine).