Scientific Data Show Unvaccinated Children Are Healthier
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An Inconvenient Study
On September 9, 2025, Senator Ron Johnson, Chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, held a hearing titled “How the Corruption of Science Has Impacted Public Perception and Policies Regarding Vaccines”.
Among those testifying was attorney Aaron Siri, whose firm has worked closely with the organization Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), which has been at the forefront of legal efforts to compel government disclosures about vaccines via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
For instance, in 2020, ICAN filed a request with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to release all documents in its possession “which compare the health outcomes of children that have received vaccines with children that have never received any vaccines.”
The background context is that back in 2013, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued a review titled “The Childhood Immunization Schedule and Safety”, which acknowledged the widespread parental concern that no studies had ever been designed to test the safety of the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule as a whole.
The IOM advised the CDC to allay these concerns by using patient data from its Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), a collaboration with several major health care providers, to compare long-term health outcomes between fully vaccinated and completely unvaccinated children—or a “vaxxed vs. unvaxxed” study, for colloquial shorthand.
Instead, the CDC produced a White Paper suggesting that such a study wouldn’t be feasible—because any control group would already have been vaccinated away—and proposing to carry on with only more vaxxed vs. vaxxed studies.
ICAN’s 2020 FOIA request sought to confirm that the CDC never did the type of study that so many parents have long been demanding and that the IOM advised it to do.
The result was an admission that “The CDC has not conducted a study of health outcomes in vaccinated vs unvaccinated populations.”
This leads independently thinking parents to believe that the real reason for the CDC’s refusal to do such a study is the fear that it would produce the wrong results.
During his testimony at the congressional hearing chaired by Senator Ron Johnson, Siri introduced into the Congressional record a vaxxed vs. unvaxxed study out of Henry Ford Health, a health care company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan.
The study had been headed up by the company’s division head of infectious diseases, Dr. Marcus Zervos, whom ICAN had approached in 2017 about doing such a study.
Dr. Zervos was receptive to the idea because, from his perspective, it could finally put to rest widespread parental concerns about vaccine safety and boost confidence in public vaccine policies.
The study was completed in 2020 but never published because it did not produce the results that Dr. Zervos was anticipating—and he feared that to publish it would be career suicide.
This is not speculative. Dr. Zervos plainly explained his reason for not wanting to publish the study to ICAN founder Del Bigtree, who secretly recorded their conversations.
These exchanges are documented in the film An Inconvenient Study, which was released on October 12 at the Malibu Film Festival.
(Watch the YouTube video at the top of this article. It’s also available on Rumble, and you can watch and download the full film at AnInconvenientStudy.com.)
During his Senate testimony, Siri summarized the study’s key findings as follows (bold emphasis added):
The Henry Ford study found that vaccinated children had a statistically significant increased rate of various serious chronic diseases. For example, vaccinated children had 3.03 times the rate of atopic disease (a group of allergic conditions); 4.29 times the rate of asthma; 5.53 times the rate of neurodevelopmental disorder, which included 3.28 times the rate of developmental delay and 4.47 times the rate of speech disorder; and 5.96 times the rate of autoimmune disease. All of these findings were statistically significant.
There were other conditions for which a rate could not be calculated because, while many cases existed among the vaccinated children, there were no cases among the unvaccinated children. For example, while there were many cases of ADHD, learning disability, and tics in the vaccinated group, there were none in the unvaccinated group.
The foregoing is obviously extremely troubling, especially because almost all these chronic diseases that showed an increased risk result from some form of immune system dysregulation.
The study, which is available to download on the Senate’s website, is titled “Impact of Vaccination on Short and Long-Term Chronic Health Outcomes in Children: A Birth Cohort Study”. The lead author is Lois Lamerato, with Zervos listed as senior author (whose name is typically listed last on scientific papers).
Here is the conclusion drawn by Lamerato et al. (bold emphasis added):
This study found that exposure to vaccination was independently associated with an overall 2.5-fold increase in the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition, when compared to children unexposed to vaccination. This association was primarily driven by asthma, atopic disease, eczema, autoimmune disease and neurodevelopmental disorders. This suggests that in certain children, exposure to vaccination may increase the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition, particularly for one of these conditions.
The findings are most starkly illustrated by the following graph comparing the probability of children remaining free of chronic disease by vaccination status.
As Siri explained during his testimony, the study found that “after 10 years, 57% of the vaccinated children had been diagnosed with one or more chronic health conditions, whereas only 17% of the unvaccinated children were diagnosed with one or more chronic health conditions.”
If the study had found that vaccinated children were healthier, Siri reasonably supposed, it surely would have been published.
Indeed, Siri’s conclusion is supported not only by Dr. Zervos’s admission that the study was suppressed because of its findings but also by hysterical reactions to it by public vaccine policy apologists.
The Henry Ford Study’s ‘Fatal Flaws’
According to the damage-control narrative, the idea that the study was suppressed is a conspiratorial fantasy invented by Aaron Siri and ICAN, and the real reason it was never published is because it is so fatally flawed that its findings are completely worthless.
We can see how absurd this counter-narrative is by simply examining the methodological limitations that we are supposed to consider fatal flaws making the study unpublishable.
What this exercise reveals is the sheer intellectual dishonesty of those defending public vaccine policies that result in the systematic violation of the right to informed consent.
The claimed reasons why we ought to dismiss the study outright cannot withstand scrutiny.
Instead, what these efforts illuminate is the institutionalized bias in favor of the CDC’s aggressive childhood vaccine schedule—and the sheer hypocrisy of the propagandists attempting vainly to defend it.
Indeed, parents are routinely gaslighted into believing that every study finding an association between vaccines and harms is so fatally “flawed” that it must be dismissed and scoffed at, whereas every study finding no association is uncritically trumpeted as yet more conclusive proof that vaccines are “safe and effective”.
Studies producing the right results somehow manage to avoid the same intense scrutiny as those that don’t align with official dogma.
This phenomenon is clearly illustrated by the characterizations of the Henry Ford study as junk science that’s completely unworthy of our consideration.
Exhibit A: Dr. Jake Scott’s Senate Testimony
Testifying alongside Siri at the Senate hearing on September 9 was Brownstone Institute fellow Toby Rogers, Ph.D., who provided an overview of studies into the causes of autism, including twenty-two studies claiming that vaccines don’t cause autism—none of which had a completely unvaccinated control group.
Maintaining the establishment view in opposition to such questioning of vaccine orthodoxy was Jake Scott, MD, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University School of Medicine.
During his testimony, Scott hailed a recent Danish study by Niklas Worm Andersson et al. as an example of how studies with “robust designs” consistently find no association between vaccines—in this case those containing aluminum—and chronic diseases in children.
Scott contrasted Andersson et al. with the Henry Ford study, which he characterized as fatally flawed—“an example of why vaccinated versus unvaccinated studies are especially prone to bias.”
This usefully illustrates my point about the double standard.
In fact, the argument can be made that the study by Andersson et al. was designed to find no association. This conclusion is supported by the way it was systematically biased in favor of the null hypothesis.
This bias explains the study’s biologically implausible finding of statistically significant negative associations between aluminum-containing vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders.
In other words, if the study’s findings are to be believed, injecting children with neurotoxic aluminum protects them from developmental disorders, including autism.
Scott is naturally silent about the implausibility of Andersson et al.’s findings, a parsimonious explanation for which is that the study produced the desired result and consequently is beyond his reproach.
I’ve detailed the systematic bias of that study already in the following two articles and won’t repeat the arguments here:
- “How the Danish Study on Aluminum in Vaccines Was Designed to Find No Harm”
- “HHS Sec. Kennedy Calls for Retraction of Bogus Study on Aluminum in Vaccines”
Scott’s testimony perfectly illustrates how seriously flawed studies biased in favor of finding no association are simply not met with the same level of scrutiny as studies that arrive at the wrong conclusions.
Exhibit B: Dr. Jake Scott’s STAT Article
In an article published by STAT the same day as the hearing, Dr. Jake Scott characterized the idea that the Henry Ford study was suppressed because of its findings as an unfounded allegation of Aaron Siri’s.
Naturally, Scott omitted how Siri had testified that this was not his own supposition but the admission of Dr. Zervos himself.
Scott further described the study as “riddled with the exact flaws that peer review is designed to catch.”
He focused particularly on a claimed “detection bias” whereby vaccinated children received more diagnoses of chronic conditions just because they utilized health care more.
The unvaccinated children actually suffered from chronic illness at the same rate, Scott maintained, but they just don’t get diagnosed as much because their parents don’t take them in to see the doctor as often.
Of course, the other obvious explanation for the lesser utilization of health care by unvaccinated children is that they really are healthier and so don’t need to visit the doctor as frequently.
Effectively claiming omniscience, Scott proclaimed matter-of-factly that what the study had really measured was “exposure to medical observation, not the effect of vaccines.”
But this is the petitio principii fallacy, otherwise known as “begging the question”. Scott is presuming the very proposition to be proven—but he simply cannot know what he is claiming to know.
He is guessing and masquerading his unfounded belief as fact.
His STAT article is, in other words, an expression of faith in the safety of vaccines.
Exhibit C: Dr. Jake Scott’s Substack Article
Just a few days later, on September 12, Scott published a Substack article repeating his characterization of the Henry Ford study as “Fundamentally Flawed” and proclaiming that its findings “collapse under scrutiny”.
The two groups under study were “fundamentally incomparable”, he argued, with the study failing to control for a wide variety of confounding factors that might otherwise explain the results.
But according to his own Senate testimony, the same would hold true for any observational study comparing health outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
Moreover, differing characteristics between comparison groups is not a weakness unique to the Henry Ford study but is applicable to observational studies in general. This is precisely why randomized controlled trials are considered the gold standard for determining causation.
Scott argued that the study suffered from an “age-related ascertainment bias” because the follow-up period for the unvaccinated children was generally shorter and ended before the average age of diagnosis.
It was thus “not measuring disease prevalence”, he concluded, but “who’s old enough to be diagnosed.”
The shorter duration of follow-up among unvaccinated children is certainly a valid concern, but, as Aaron Siri had emphasized at the Senate hearing, the authors acknowledged this limitation and conducted sensitivity analyses to address it.
Scott acknowledged this but argued that it only made things worse by increasing the disparity in relative numbers of children in each group, with “only about 270 unvaccinated children remained versus about 5,400 vaccinated, exaggerating age bias rather than correcting it.”
But that argument makes no logical sense.
An imbalance in sample size is not a “bias”, and it’s not the sheer number of diagnoses that were compared but the rates.
The concern about ascertainment bias relates to different durations of follow-up, not a disparity in the numbers of children in each group—and limiting the analysis to children enrolled for at least five years was an appropriate way to address that concern.
The sensitivity analysis reduced the precision of the findings, resulting in wider confidence intervals, but it nevertheless supports that the association was not driven by unvaccinated children being generally too young to receive a diagnosis before end of follow-up.
On the contrary, the association with chronic disease persisted and grew under this sensitivity analysis—“from 2.5-fold to 4.1-fold” greater risk among the vaccinated, as Scott noted, when restricted to children who were enrolled for at least five years.
That’s the opposite of what we would expect if the association was a statistical artifact of the unvaccinated group being generally too young to receive a diagnosis.
Continuing, Scott repeated his argument that the Henry Ford study suffered from “detection bias” where the unvaccinated children were just as sick but never diagnosed.
A “sophisticated counterargument”, he wrote, would be that they had fewer medical visits because they were healthier, but this “falls apart” because the difference in visits “exists from the start, before chronic conditions develop.”
But his own argument falls apart because the study didn’t identify when chronic diseases began to develop—only when they were diagnosed. So, what Scott is really saying is that more frequent medical visits would only start occurring after the diagnosis, which is an absurd presumption.
On the contrary, well before receiving a diagnosis, children might start showing early symptoms that raise parental concerns and result in more doctor visits. There is no reason to assume, as Scott does, that this wouldn’t be the case.
(And more doctor visits could also result in more vaccinations, increasing symptoms, and driving more doctor visits; whereas avoidance of vaccines might result in symptoms stabilizing or disappearing and hence fewer doctor visits.)
Illustrating the selectiveness with which he applies his own logic, Scott goes on to contrast the Henry Ford study with a 2019 Danish study by Anders Hviid et al. finding no association between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.
Scott characterized the Hviid et al. study as “methodologically rigorous”.
Yet the proportion of children in that study who did not receive the MMR vaccine was a mere 4.8%—and Scott has nothing to say about it suffering from a disparity in the numbers of exposed versus unexposed children.
Moreover, Scott described it as a “massive” study of 657,461 children specifically designed to determine whether the MMR vaccine is associated with autism in genetically susceptible children, who were defined as having an autistic sibling.
Never mind that 49% of the study population was thus defined as having no genetic susceptibility by virtue of being an only child.
Never mind how Hviid et al. failed to control for a known “healthy user bias” whereby children who have an older sibling with autism or who show early symptoms of developmental abnormalities are less likely to get the MMR vaccine—thus resulting in children at higher risk being pooled into the “unvaccinated” cohort.
Never mind that this “massive” study included only 838 children—a mere fraction of a percent of the total study population—who met the definition of “genetically susceptible”.
Never mind how Hviid et al. included birth cohorts who by the end of the follow-up period were—guess what!—generally too young to have received a diagnosis.
In a paper published on May 7 in the Journal of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Dr. Brian Hooker, Dr. Jeet Varia, and I detailed how the 2019 Danish study by Hviid et al.—like the study this year by Andersson et al. (for which Hviid was senior author)—was effectively designed to find no association.
Again, I won’t detail our arguments here and refer you to our paper:
Point being that there is a clearly institutionalized double standard, with any studies supporting vaccine orthodoxy hailed a priori as methodologically robust and conclusive while studies contradicting vaccine orthodoxy are selectively scrutinized and dismissed as “flawed”.
Exhibit D: Henry Ford Health’s Press Release
On September 26, Henry Ford Health issued a press statement responding to Aaron Siri’s testimony at the Senate hearing and ICAN’s forthcoming release of the documentary film An Inconvenient Study.
The company had issued a “cease-and-desist letter” to ICAN to stop “falsely and dangerously” claiming that the study was suppressed “because of its results.”
This was “dangerous” “disinformation” that was “being weaponized” to “sow doubt” about legitimate scientific research into vaccines.
The real reason the study wasn’t published is “because of serious issues with its data and methodology.”
Henry Ford Health’s dismissal of the study as unworthy of publication was based on the following criticisms of its methodology:
- “The unvaccinated patient sample was vastly different than the vaccinated sample, with more males, more white children, less prematurity and less respiratory distress at birth.”
- “The unvaccinated sample was very small in comparison to the vaccinated sample.”
- “The amount of time measuring occurrence of disease was much shorter for the unvaccinated children. One quarter were observed only through six months of age, and 75% were only observed up until age 3, which is before doctors can confidently diagnose chronic pediatric diseases.”
- “The draft compared multiple vaccines vs. no vaccines, instead of a specific vaccine vs. no vaccines. No consideration was given to the number of vaccines or the duration of time between vaccines and the occurrence of disease.”
- “Vaccine guidance has changed over time, but that was not taken into consideration.”
Notably, ICAN did not desist and proceeded undeterred to release the film documenting Dr. Zervos’s admission that the study was buried for producing the wrong results.
We’ll examine each of those supposed fatal flaws more closely below.
Exhibit E: Jeffrey Morris in The Conversation
The same day as Henry Ford Health’s press release, The Conversation published an article echoing its criticisms by Jeffrey S. Morris, a professor of public health and preventive medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Morris noted that during his Senate testimony, Aaron Siri “said the study was never published because the authors feared being fired for finding evidence supporting the health risks of vaccines.”
Morris likewise denied this on the grounds that the study was never published because it is so fatally flawed:
- It suffered “surveillance bias” because of the shorter follow-up observation for unvaccinated children.
- It suffered “detection bias” because unvaccinated children sought health care less frequently.
- It suffered “confounding” from the group of unvaccinated children being characteristically different from the vaccinated cohort.
Naturally, Morris also omitted Siri’s testimony about Dr. Zervos’s admission that the study wasn’t published because it produced the wrong results.
You begin to see the pattern: we are supposed to regard this idea as conspiratorial nonsense despite the source being not ICAN or Aaron Siri but the researcher at Henry Ford who headed up the study.
Exhibit F: The Detroit Free Press
In early October, the Detroit Free Press ran an article amplifying the narrative of Henry Ford’s “cease and desist letter”.
The study was never published because it was so poorly designed, the article parroted, not because of “a conspiracy to cover up the data.”
Following the pattern, the Free Press declined to inform readers about Siri’s testimony that it was Dr. Zervos himself who said that he didn’t want the study published because to release data calling into question the official dogma that vaccines are “safe and effective” could cost him his career.
The Free Press paraphrased Dr. Adnan Munkarah, president of clinical enterprise and chief physician executive at Henry Ford Health, saying that “the way the research project was designed was ‘fatally flawed,’ and it doesn’t even qualify as a study because the data didn’t survive even the earliest internal review process.”
“We did not bury information”, Munkarah was quoted as saying. “We buried flawed data and a draft of a paper that has no science in it.”
The Free Press also quoted Dr. Christine Cole Johnson, chair of public health science at Henry Ford Health, who dismissed it one of the “worst studies I’ve ever seen.”
“If this had been submitted to a journal of any credibility,” she proclaimed, “they would have laughed it off.”
The gentleman and the lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Instead of offering its own critical analysis of the study, the Free Press simply parroted the claim that its methodological limitations were “fatal” to the validity of its findings.
Specifically mentioned among these supposedly fatal flaws were the smaller sample size, differing population characteristics, and shorter observation time for the unvaccinated children.
We’ll examine each of those study limitations more closely below, but the fact that the Detroit Free Press didn’t do so and instead simply parroted the position of Henry Ford Health illustrates how, when it comes to the topic of vaccines, the media do public policy advocacy, not journalism.
Exhibit G: Henry Ford Health’s ‘Fact Check’
On October 13, the day after the premier of An Inconvenient Study, Henry Ford Health published a “fact check” article characterizing the film as spreading “dangerous disinformation” that “poses a direct public threat.”
The article purported to correct five “myths” with “facts”.
The first alleged “MYTH” was that “The study proves vaccinated children are 2.5x more likely to develop chronic health conditions than unvaccinated children.”
But that is a strawman fallacy. As ICAN noted in response, “The film does not portray the unpublished study as conclusive proof of anything.”
On the contrary, the film “raises questions about the reasons the study was not submitted for publication, acknowledges and addresses the limitations, and highlights the need for further studies to be done”.
The second “MYTH” was that “The study wasn’t published due to political reasons – or because of its results.”
But Henry Ford’s alternative explanation is not a verifiable fact but a mere counterclaim that could very well be politically or financially motivated and aimed at concealing the truth.
The third “MYTH” was that “The study was hidden from the public.”
But that’s just a reiteration of the second “myth” demanding again that we simply place our faith in Henry Ford Health instead of taking Dr. Zervos at his word.
The fourth “MYTH” was that “This is the ‘most important vaccine study ever.’”
Here, Henry Ford was citing Dr. Scott’s Substack article, where he claimed Aaron Siri had said that during his Senate testimony. This ostensible opinion of Siri’s was countered with the “FACT” that the paper didn’t pass internal peer review because it “wasn’t scientifically sound”.
So, again, the fourth “MYTH”, like the third, was merely a reiteration of the second—and the counterpoint we are supposed to accept as “FACT” is merely a counter-assertion that is directly contradicted by the admission of the division head of infectious diseases at Henry Ford Health who headed up the study.
The fifth “MYTH” was that “The ‘documentary’ proves the health system is withholding the study.”
This is countered with the supposed “FACT” that “The film proved nothing except that we have rigorous scientific standards in place for a reason: to ensure the only studies we submit for publication come from research rooted in sound, infallible data that have passed our stringent review processes.”
The first observation to make here is that imposing a standard of infallibility is never done for studies finding no association between vaccines and harms.
Far from suggesting the study wasn’t published because of its flaws, this once again illuminates the institutionalized double standard under which studies are heavily criticized for methodological limitations only if they produce the wrong results.
The second key observation is that anyone who’s watched An Inconvenient Study can reasonably refute Henry Ford’s assertion about what it proves. Once again, the proclaimed “FACT” is merely a dubious counter-assertion.
Naturally, Henry Ford Health refused to acknowledge, much less address, the on-camera admissions of Dr. Zervos that he didn’t want the study published because of its findings.
Exhibit H: Lead Stories’ ‘Fact Check’
On October 31, the self-described “fact check” publication Lead Stories also ran an article under the category of “Hoax Alert” to push the narrative that the reason the study was not published was because it was too fundamentally flawed to take seriously.
The angle Lead Stories focused on in its headline was that the study “Compared Apples to Oranges”—a regurgitation of the criticism that the comparison groups differed fundamentally in more ways than just vaccination status.
It was “not true”, the article proclaimed, that the study was censored; instead, it was deemed “invalid” from the start after Henry Ford Health conducted an internal review of the draft paper and identified “fatal flaws” that rendered its findings “meaningless.”
The “fact check” also cited the criticisms of Dr. Jake Scott as supporting evidence for its conclusion.
The logic thus employed by Lead Stories was that since Henry Ford Health and Dr. Jake Scott had said that the study wasn’t published because it was fatally flawed, therefore the reason it wasn’t published is because it was fatally flawed.
This, of course, is a non sequitur fallacy because the possibility remains that it was suppressed because of its findings.
This alternative explanation, however, was easily enough dealt with by Lead Stories by simply omitting the fact that Dr. Zervos himself had said the reason it wasn’t published was because it arrived at the wrong conclusions.
Interestingly, Lead Stories asked Henry Ford Health to provide documentation of its alleged internal review, saying that its story would be updated if the “expert internal reviewers’ critiques of the study” were provided.
At the time I’m writing this, no such update has been provided.
We thus have no evidence to support Henry Ford Health’s counterclaim, whereas we do have the evidence of Dr. Zervos’s documented admission.
The Hypocrisy of the Henry Ford Study’s Critics
The double standard employed by public vaccine policy apologists to dismiss any studies finding vaccines to be associated with harms is easily demonstrated.
This is institutionalized confirmation bias, where the findings of studies that uphold vaccine orthodoxy are hailed as determinative while findings of studies indicating harms are scoffed at and dismissed for being “flawed”.
A few illuminating examples have already been provided, but a closer look at the criticisms of the Henry Ford study is warranted.
Sample Size
One argument is that the study was fatally flawed because there were far fewer children in the unvaccinated group.
The study population included 16,511 vaccinated children and 1,957 with no documented vaccine exposures. Hence, only 11.9% of the study population were unvaccinated.
However, the study did not simply compare the numbers of diagnoses between these two groups, which would be absurd. Instead, it appropriately compared the rates of diagnoses.
The fact that the unexposed group is much smaller is no reason at all to dismiss the study’s findings.
In a response to criticisms at the website for An Inconvenient Study, ICAN appropriately remarks, “Rejecting this study because group sizes were different would mean throwing out most studies in the medical literature.”
The example of the vast majority of children in the Hviid et al. study being MMR-vaccinated has already been provided.
For another, take again Dr. Scott’s STAT article, where he compared the Henry Ford study with what he called “[p]roperly conducted vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated comparisons”.
As supposed examples of such studies, Scott cited Madsen et al. 2002, Schmitz et al. 2011, DeStefano et al. 2013, and Taylor et al. 2014.
However, the Madsen, DeStefano, and Taylor studies did not compare vaccinated versus unvaccinated children—so Scott is outright lying.
The 2011 study, conducted in Germany, did include a cohort of unvaccinated children—which comprised a mere 0.7% of the study population.
So, we can see that a small sample size of unvaccinated children is no reason whatsoever to reject a study’s findings—as long as the study produces the right results.
In this case, the “right” result was a finding of no association between vaccines and allergic disease or non-vaccine-preventable infections.
This is a finding we are supposed to accept as determinative even though the lack of statistically significant differences in health outcomes could be due to the small sample size.
In the authors’ own words,
Because of the low proportion of unvaccinated persons in the population, the numbers even in the large KiGGS study are small, so that statistical evaluation—especially subgroup analyses—is hindered by small case numbers.
And let’s not forget the CDC’s own excuse for refusing to use the VSD to do a vaxxed vs. unvaxxed study: that any control group of completely unvaccinated children would be so small that no statistically meaningful insights could be gleaned by doing it.
The fact that the Henry Ford study found statistically significant lower rates of chronic disease among unvaccinated children despite the small sample size could be a strong indicator of a real health benefit of vaccine avoidance.
Confounding Factors
Another criticism used to dismiss the study is that the two comparison groups differed not only in terms of vaccination status but also numerous other characteristics.
The risks of confounding and selection biases, however, are not limitations unique to the Henry Ford study but are inherent to virtually any observational study.
The question is whether the authors made a reasonable effort to control for confounders, and in this case, they did.
The critics noted fundamental differences between comparison groups in gender, race, birth weight, and premature births. But these are all confounders that the authors accounted for with adjustments to their data that are routine and standard for studies of this type.
It’s true, of course, that the study didn’t control for every possible factor that might otherwise explain their findings—but neither have the study’s critics identified any that clearly do.
Instead, the alternative explanation offered is that unvaccinated children are really just as sick as the general population of highly vaccinated children, but they just aren’t diagnosed.
We’ll come back to that argument shortly.
The Henry Ford researchers explicitly acknowledged “the possibility of unidentified confounders” that were not accounted for.
And as they further explained, there is a standard approach for dealing with that challenge, which is to also compare rates for outcomes not expected to differ based on the exposure under study.
In this case, they assumed the risk of cancer would be unrelated to vaccination status so used that as a control outcome. As they explained:
To detect the potential for uncontrolled confounding, the literature suggests evaluating disorders with no expected causal association, a control outcome, such as injuries or cancer. Importantly in this regard we found no association between vaccine exposure and cancer.
In response to the criticism that there are confounding factors that could otherwise explain the study’s results, ICAN rightly notes that differences in population characteristics between comparison groups is an inherent limitation of virtually all observational studies, and therefore adjusting the data to account for confounding variables “is common practice in medical studies”, and “having confounders is not a basis on which to withhold publication of a study.”
Surveillance Bias
Another argument is that the study suffered from surveillance bias because the unvaccinated children were generally followed for a shorter duration than those in the vaccinated group.
Unvaccinated children, therefore, were less likely to even reach the average age of diagnosis for numerous of the study’s measured outcomes.
This is a valid observation about an inherent limitation of the study. The median follow-up time was 904 days for the whole study population, 970 days for the vaccinated group, and 461 days for the unvaccinated.
That raises the possibility that unvaccinated children deemed healthy at the end of follow-up went on to receive diagnoses for chronic diseases at the same rate as children in the vaccinated group.
However, this is also not a limitation of the study warranting outright dismissal of its findings.
In response to criticisms, ICAN observes,
Additionally, the CDC white paper on how to conduct a vaccinated versus unvaccinated study, which the study’s lead author agreed was followed in conducting the unpublished study, states that many more children are diagnosed with numerous relevant health outcomes from birth through the age of 2 than from ages 3-8 years old.
And as already mentioned, the authors in fact conducted sensitivity analyses limiting observation for both groups to at least one year, three years, and five years of follow-up, which “demonstrated consistent results” of a significantly lower rate of chronic illness among unvaccinated children.
Testing a Forbidden Hypothesis
Another of the criticisms offered by Henry Ford Health itself was that the study compared children who’d received any vaccines with those who’d received none.
An accompanying criticism is that changes to the vaccine schedule were not considered.
These, too, are absurd grounds for outright dismissal of the study’s findings—and contrary to the intent, they bolster the conclusion that the real reason the study was never published is because of its findings.
No explanation is offered by Henry Ford Health for why increasing exposures over time for the vaccinated group would invalidate the finding that children receiving zero vaccines are healthier.
And while it is true that the study design does not enable any conclusions to be drawn about which vaccines might be associated with chronic disease, that limitation does not negate the usefulness of testing the hypothesis that completely unvaccinated children are healthier than the general population of highly vaccinated children.
There is also no scientific basis for Henry Ford’s insistence that we consider only individual vaccines, rather than the cumulative effects of the CDC’s schedule as a whole, as a possible factor in the alarming rates of chronic diseases among the US childhood population.
In essence, the health care company is arguing that we should not be testing this hypothesis, which just supports the conclusion that the real reason the study was never published is that it produced the wrong results.
In the vaccine religion, you see, to get the right answers, scientists must ask the wrong questions.
Just like Hviid et al. and Andersson et al.
Differences in Healthcare-Seeking Behavior
Finally, there is the claim that the superior health of unvaccinated children in the Henry Ford study is merely an illusion.
It’s just a statistical artifact, we’re told, of unvaccinated children who are really just as sick but not diagnosed.
The reason for this, we’re told, is that parents who don’t vaccinate their kids also don’t take them in to see a doctor as frequently.
It’s the lack of medical visits, we’re told, that causes the shortage of diagnoses.
The problem with this argument is that it presumes that the general population of highly vaccinated children is not generally less healthy than the population of unvaccinated children.
It’s the logical fallacy of begging the question.
No evidence to support that argument has been identified in the Henry Ford study.
On the contrary, the authors considered the theoretical selection bias of underutilization of health care and accounted for it.
What they found was that that “the association between vaccination and developing a chronic health condition” was “independent” of both the shorter follow-up duration and the lesser healthcare utilization of unvaccinated children.
Contrary to the assumption that fewer doctor visits caused underdiagnosis of chronic illnesses, the study found it more likely that “when a child had a medical condition, parents sought healthcare.”
Dr. Paul Thomas’s Censored Vaxxed vs. Unvaxxed Study
The conclusion that the Henry Ford study was suppressed for producing the wrong results is also supported the story of Dr. Paul Thomas, the author of The Vaccine-Friendly Plan and more recently Vax Facts.
Dr. Thomas came under scrutiny by the Oregon medical board for respecting parents’ right to make their own informed choices about childhood vaccinations instead of pushing the CDC’s schedule.
After publishing The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, which proposed an alternative schedule aimed primarily at reducing the cumulative exposure to neurotoxic aluminum, the medical board demanded that he produce peer-reviewed evidence to support the safety and effectiveness of his alternative approach.
The irony—and another clear instance of the institutionalized double standard—is that the CDC itself could not meet that same demand since no studies had ever examined the safety and effectiveness of its routine childhood schedule.
The medical board evidently assumed that was a hoop Dr. Thomas could never jump through—but he did.
In collaboration with research scientist and data analyst Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, Thomas published a study using his de-identified patient data to conduct a vaxxed vs. unvaxxed study comparing a wide range of long-term health outcomes.
It was a well-designed study.
And what it found was that Dr. Thomas’s completely unvaccinated patients were by far the healthiest children in his practice.
It was mere days after that study was published that the Oregon Medical Board held an “emergency” meeting to suspend Dr. Thomas’s license on the demonstrably manufactured grounds that he posed a threat to “public health”.
I told the whole story in my book The War on Informed Consent: The Persecution of Dr. Paul Thomas by the Oregon Medical Board.
The study was also later retracted by the journal editors based on an anonymously written letter complaining that the study was fundamentally flawed.
And guess what excuse was used to justify that retraction!
It ought to be familiar to you now.
The claim was that Dr. Thomas’s study measured “exposure to medical observation, not the effect of vaccines”—to quote Dr. Jake Scott’s equivalent reason for dismissing the findings of the Henry Ford study.
Specifically, the anonymous critic insisted that Dr. Thomas’s unvaccinated patients were just as unhealthy as those who were vaccinated, but their parents just didn’t care enough about their kids’ health to take them in to see the doctor, and so they just never received a diagnosis for their chronic illnesses.
In other words, the study was retracted based on a hypothesized selection bias—even though Lyons-Weiler and Thomas controlled for this and found no evidence for it.
Specifically, they compared incidence of office visits for fever, an expected outcome of vaccination, and well-child visits.
As expected, the unvaccinated children had a lower incidence of office visits for fever—but not for routine annual checkups.
This strongly suggested that the study’s findings were not explainable by differences in healthcare-seeking behaviors between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups.
Moreover, subsequent analyses of Dr. Thomas’s patient data confirmed that his unvaccinated patients attended routine well-child visits just as frequently if not more than their vaccinated counterparts.
I detailed the preposterously anti-science arguments defending the baseless and cowardly retraction of the study in my follow-up article “Breakthrough Study Shows Unvaccinated Children Are Healthier”.
If the mere theoretical possibility of selection bias were sufficient reason for studies not to be published, virtually every observational study in the medical literature would need to be retracted.
The brazenly hypocritical standard is similarly demonstrated by the reaction to the release of the Henry Ford study as part of Senator Ron Johnson’s public hearing on the corruption of science.
Conclusion
The damage-control propaganda campaign following the Senate hearing and the release of the film An Inconvenient Study is intended to convince us that the idea that the Henry Ford study was suppressed because of its findings is conspiratorial nonsense.
That narrative is tellingly dependent on the omission of the fact that the Henry Ford researcher who headed the study admitted that he didn’t want it published because dissenting from vaccine orthodoxy could end his career.
We are told that the true reason it wasn’t published is because it was so fatally flawed as to be deemed unworthy or consideration.
But that claim doesn’t withstand scrutiny.
None of its methodological limitations constitute a legitimate reason to withhold its publication.
Moreover, there is an obvious double standard in the scrutiny applied to studies depending entirely upon whether they find vaccines to be associated with harms or not.
The truth is that scientific data do strongly indicate that children who’ve received zero vaccines are far healthier than the general population of highly vaccinated children.
Whatever other factors may help account for this, the parental decision to avoid vaccine exposures is inextricably associated with lower rates of diagnoses for chronic diseases.
As Lyons-Weiler and Thomas remarked in their wrongfully retracted study (emphasis added):
Lifestyle differences between the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups in this practice cannot explain the large difference in outcomes, and if they do, then it would be objective to conclude that everyone should adopt the lifestyle followed by the unvaccinated if they want healthier children. That lifestyle choice includes, for many families, avoiding some or all vaccines, and thus, the lifestyle choice concern is inextricably linked to vaccine exposure.
It is the very nature of observational studies that there are methodological limitations that might call findings into question.
The risk of uncontrolled confounders is a characteristic of such studies that distinguishes them from the “gold standard” of randomized controlled trials.
Yet what we see from the apologists for public vaccine policy is a clear double standard in interpreting the results of observational studies.
It’s not that studies finding vaccines to be associated with health harms are fatally flawed.
We know that’s not the case since studies hailed as conclusive proof of vaccine safety suffer from similar flaws.
The defining criterion as to whether a study should be considered valid or not is instead whether its findings support current vaccination policies or call them into question.
As astutely observed by Dr. Maryanne Demasi in a report on the controversy surrounding the Henry Ford Study:
The problem isn’t that the critics raised potential biases; it’s that they applied their scrutiny unevenly. When observational studies favour vaccination, those same flaws are quietly overlooked.
That is the key takeaway from the establishment’s reaction to the scientific research headed up by Dr. Zervos out of Henry Ford Health and featured in the film An Inconvenient Study.
What is revealed by that reaction is institutionalized confirmation bias, as well as the cognitive dissonance and sheer hypocrisy of those still vainly attempting to defend existing vaccine policies and the resulting systematic violation of the right to informed consent.
[Correction appended, December 8, 2025: As originally published, this article stated, “The study population included 156,511 vaccinated children and 1,957 with no documented vaccine exposures. Hence, only 1.2% of the study population were unvaccinated.” That was a typo leading to a miscalculation. The study population included 16,511 vaccinated children and 1,957 with no documented vaccine exposures, so 11.9% were unvaccinated. Thanks to Guy for pointing out the error in the comments.]
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About Jeremy R. Hammond
I am an independent researcher, journalist, and author dedicated to exposing mainstream propaganda that serves to manufacture consent for criminal government policies.
I write about a broad range of critically important issues including US foreign policy, economic policy, and so-called "public health" policies.
My books include Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and The War on Informed Consent.
To learn more about my mission and core values, visit my About page.
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