Vaccinations
now browsing by category
Vaccinations are supposed to prevent disease, but instead they increase allergies, reduce immunity, destroy our brains, give us bad hearts by filling us with toxins. Before any vaccination, ask for one without Mercury, Aluminium, Formaldehyde, Polysorbate 80, Yeast, Egg, Viruses, etc. Vaccines without these ingredients do not exist. And yes, vaccinations DO cause AUTISM.
mRNA influenza vaccine in Australia has been accepted by the TGA but is still under evaluation.
Reproduced from original article:
https://ianbrighthope.substack.com/p/mrna-influenza-vaccine-in-australia
Ian Brighthope Sep 08, 2026

My Question: Please advise on the mRNA flu vaccine given approval to Moderna
CHATS response:
Short answer: Moderna’s new vaccine, MFLUSIVA, is a legitimate FDA-approved seasonal flu vaccine—not an emergency-use product. It is a reasonable option for some adults, but the best choice depends mainly on age.
- Under 50: It is not approved; use another age-appropriate flu vaccine.
- Age 50–64: MFLUSIVA is a reasonable option. In a roughly 40,000-person trial, laboratory-confirmed flu occurred in 2.0% with MFLUSIVA versus 2.8% with a standard-dose flu vaccine—a 26.6% relative improvement, not 26.6% absolute protection.
- Age 65+: I would currently lean toward one of CDC’s established preferred vaccines—Fluzone High-Dose, Flublok, or Fluad—unless unavailable or your clinician recommends MFLUSIVA. Its approval in this age group was accelerated based primarily on stronger antibody responses versus high-dose vaccine; whether it prevents more actual illness than high-dose vaccine remains under study through 2029–2030. FDA approval letter CDC guidance
Expect more short-term reactions than with conventional flu shots: injection-site pain occurred in approximately 63–69%, fatigue in 42–48%, and headache in 34–42%; reactions generally lasted about two days. Serious adverse-event rates were similar to comparator vaccines. FDA identified no myocarditis/pericarditis cases within 42 days in the clinical safety database, although monitoring for rare events continues. FDA prescribing information FDA clinical review
It contains no influenza virus, egg protein, antibiotics, or preservatives and cannot cause influenza. Avoid it following a severe allergy to one of its components—particularly discuss previous PEG or mRNA-vaccine anaphylaxis—and seek individualized advice if you developed Guillain–Barré syndrome within six weeks of a previous flu vaccine or are immunocompromised.
For most adults, September or October is preferable to August because protection can wane. If the choice is MFLUSIVA versus missing flu vaccination entirely, an eligible person without a contraindication should generally take the available vaccine.
My second question: is it mRNA?
Yes. MFLUSIVA (mRNA‑1010) is an mRNA flu vaccine made by Moderna—the first FDA-approved mRNA influenza vaccine.
It delivers temporary mRNA instructions for cells to produce influenza hemagglutinin proteins from three flu strains. The immune system then learns to recognize them. It contains no influenza virus, cannot cause flu, and the mRNA does not enter the cell nucleus or alter DNA. This latter claim is BS.
Haemagglutinin proteins will probably be more damaging than the spike protein of the covid vaccine.
My Opinion.
As of 7 September 2026, there is no mRNA influenza vaccine registered for general use in Australia.
Moderna has submitted two products to the TGA:
- mFLUSIVA (mRNA-1010) — a standalone mRNA influenza vaccine proposed for people aged 50 years and over. The TGA accepted the application in February 2026, but it remains under evaluation, not registered or approved. TGA: mFLUSIVA
- mCOMBRIAX — a combined mRNA influenza–COVID-19 vaccine for people aged 50 years and over. Its application was accepted in March 2026 and also remains under evaluation. TGA: mCOMBRIAX
The TGA’s list of seven influenza vaccines available in Australia for the 2026 season contains conventional egg-based, cell-culture or live-attenuated products—none is an mRNA influenza vaccine. TGA: 2026 seasonal influenza vaccines
Therefore, an mRNA influenza vaccine may be used in Australia only within an authorised clinical trial or exceptional access pathway—not as a routinely registered influenza vaccine. Moderna’s mFLUSIVA was approved in the United States in August 2026, but that approval does not apply in Australia.
But wait, mFLUSIVA and mCOMBRIAX are still under evaluation by the TGA. I believe they will be approved for use in Australia before the next ‘flu season’. If so, the side effects mentioned above will mean more vaccine caused deaths, turbo cancers and auto immune diseases will his our Australian population even harder than the Covid poisons. A reminder, expect more short-term reactions than with conventional flu shots: injection-site pain occurred in approximately 63–69%, fatigue in 42–48%, and headache in 34–42%. These are all critical symptoms pointing in a negative biological direction.
The Shaw Twins Case: A Mother, a Murder Charge, and Eighty Years of Evidence No One Wants to See
© GreenMedInfo LLC. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of GreenMedInfo LLC.
Want to learn more from GreenMedInfo? Sign up for the newsletter here:
www.greenmedinfo.com/greenmed/newsletter
Reproduced from original article:
https://sayerji.substack.com/p/the-shaw-twins-didnt-suffocate-they
Sayer Ji July 18, 2026

How five vaccines and a bottle of Tylenol converge on the infant brainstem — and why the medical examiner’s “smothering” verdict is the last stage of a century-long classification laundry
On the night of April 30, 2025, Andrea Shaw put her 18-month-old twins to bed in a small house in Payette, Idaho. She had watched them collapse eight days earlier — blue-lipped, eyes rolled back, unable to walk — hours after their pediatrician injected them with five vaccines during a single well-baby visit. The emergency room that night wrote “post-immunization reaction” in the chart, handed her a bottle of children’s Tylenol, and sent her home. For seven more days the twins were listless, feverish, refusing food, passing green diarrhea. On the morning of May 1, she found Dallas and Tyson cold and still in their shared crib.

In July 2026, prosecutors indicted her for their murder — alleging she smothered both children in a single night. She is being held without bail and faces the death penalty.[^1] What the state of Idaho refuses to see is that the etiology of these deaths is not obscure, not speculative, and not novel. It is, in fact, the most extensively documented — and most systematically suppressed — pediatric toxicology pattern of the past eighty years. Two exposures, biochemically synergistic, converging on the same fragile brainstem structures at precisely the moment when the medical literature predicts fatal apnea. This is not a whodunit. It is a why-won’t-we-look. And it is the inevitable, engineered consequence of a public-health apparatus that has spent forty years insisting — against a mountain of its own peer-reviewed evidence — that all childhood vaccines are “safe and effective” for all children. When the medicine kills, the mother must have.

Figure 1. The combined etiological pathway. Two “independently safe” exposures — a multi-antigen vaccine cocktail and acetaminophen given for post-vaccine fever — converge on glutathione depletion, sulfation pathway failure, and brainstem/cardiac injury. The final classification stage on the bottom row shows how the same physiological outcome has been rerouted through three institutional categories over the past four decades.
What the Chart Actually Says
The publicly available record of the Shaw twins’ final week is, on its face, sufficient to raise the diagnostic possibility of vaccine-plus-acetaminophen–induced central apnea in any pediatrician trained before 1986.[2] Consider the timeline:
- April 23, 2025: Dallas and Tyson Shaw, 18-month-old fraternal twins, received five vaccines at a routine well-baby visit — DTaP, influenza (with prior paternal reaction history), and hepatitis A.[1] Both Andrea Shaw and the twins’ paternal grandmother reportedly warned the pediatrician of the father’s adverse reaction to influenza vaccine. The vaccines were administered anyway.[3]
- April 24: Within twenty-four hours, both twins collapsed. Symptoms included cyanosis (blue lips), rolled-back eyes, inability to walk, and green watery diarrhea. Emergency department documentation records “post-immunization reaction.” The children were sent home with acetaminophen (Tylenol) and popsicles.[1][3]
- April 25 – April 30: Seven days of continued lethargy, severe diarrhea, food refusal, and low-grade illness. Standard pediatric guidance — including the guidance the ER discharge instructions almost certainly reflected — is repeat acetaminophen dosing for post-vaccination symptoms.[4]
- April 30 (evening): The twins were put to bed early.
- May 1 (morning): Both children were found dead, cold, in their shared crib. Autopsy findings included pulmonary vascular congestion.[3]
Dr. Pierre Kory, who reviewed the full medical record, concluded the deaths were consistent with severe apnea induced by the vaccines administered eight days earlier.[2] The state of Idaho, three doctors it declines to identify, and the Payette County prosecutor concluded instead that Andrea Shaw suffocated both of her children in a single night. They cite the pulmonary vascular congestion as consistent with smothering, and note that both twins were found dead simultaneously as evidence against natural causes: “It is also the only reasonable explanation,” prosecutor Michael Duke argued, “for why both would die at the same time, on the same night, in the same room, in the same bed.”[5]
This argument is exactly backwards. The literature on simultaneous twin deaths after vaccination is neither sparse nor recent. It stretches from 1946 to 2025. The Shaw twins are at least the ninth documented pair.
Eighty Years of Simultaneous Twin Deaths After Vaccination
The baseline mathematics is unambiguous. Malloy and Freeman’s 1999 analysis of 172,029 U.S. twin pregnancies over five years identified only seven cases in which both twins died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), and only one in which both died on the same day — a rate of 0.58 per 100,000 twin pregnancies.[6] The forensic pathologist Millard Bass, cited in the same literature, put the matter plainly: “The likelihood of twin infants dying suddenly and simultaneously of SIDS, a natural disorder, defies credibility.”[7]
And yet the medical literature — peer-reviewed, publicly indexed, largely ignored — contains at least eight sets of twins who died together in tight temporal proximity to vaccination before the Shaw twins made nine. Every one of these cases involved the same pattern: healthy children, routine vaccination, silent death within days:
![YearAgesInterval post-vaccineVaccinesCitation1946Identical twin boys16–20 hoursDiphtheria toxoid + pertussis (2nd dose)Werne & Garrow, JAMA[^8]1985Twin boys2–3 hoursDPTRoberts, Arch Dis Child[^9]1987Twin boys, 5 mo3 hoursDPTCoulter & Fisher[^10]2007Identical twin girls, 15 wk2 daysDPT + Hep B + oral polio (+ acetaminophen for post-vaccine fever)Balci et al., Forensic Sci Int[^11]2010Identical twin boys, 12 wk5 daysDTaP + OPV + Hep B + HibMitchell et al., Int J Legal Med[^12]2013Twin boys, 10 wk10 daysDPT + OPV (1st dose)Huang et al.[^13]2025Boy/girl, 18 mo8 daysDTaP + influenza + hepatitis A (+ acetaminophen at ER Day 1)Shaw twins (case in litigation)[^1] YearAgesInterval post-vaccineVaccinesCitation1946Identical twin boys16–20 hoursDiphtheria toxoid + pertussis (2nd dose)Werne & Garrow, JAMA[^8]1985Twin boys2–3 hoursDPTRoberts, Arch Dis Child[^9]1987Twin boys, 5 mo3 hoursDPTCoulter & Fisher[^10]2007Identical twin girls, 15 wk2 daysDPT + Hep B + oral polio (+ acetaminophen for post-vaccine fever)Balci et al., Forensic Sci Int[^11]2010Identical twin boys, 12 wk5 daysDTaP + OPV + Hep B + HibMitchell et al., Int J Legal Med[^12]2013Twin boys, 10 wk10 daysDPT + OPV (1st dose)Huang et al.[^13]2025Boy/girl, 18 mo8 daysDTaP + influenza + hepatitis A (+ acetaminophen at ER Day 1)Shaw twins (case in litigation)[^1]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!z426!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb04f5647-e45b-482a-8aa2-09d0743b3abe_1520x838.png)
The 1946 Werne and Garrow case is particularly important because the U.S. Institute of Medicine — an institution not known for its skepticism of vaccination — concluded in its 2003 Immunization Safety Review that “the evidence favors acceptance of a causal relationship between diphtheria toxoid- and whole cell pertussis vaccine and death due to anaphylaxis in infants,” basing this conclusion primarily on the twin case.[14] The IOM has, in other words, already conceded the mechanism at the level of individual case reports. What it has never accepted is the population-level extrapolation.
The 2007 Balci case is even more directly relevant to the Shaw twins. Fifteen-week-old identical girls in Istanbul received a second dose of DPT, first dose of hepatitis B, and second dose of oral polio. They developed fever on Day 1. Their mother administered acetaminophen per pediatric guidance. Two days later, both were dead in their crib, supine, no signs of struggle.[11] The Turkish Institute of Forensic Medicine ruled the deaths “consistent with SIDS.” The parallel to Payette is exact: vaccines + post-vaccine acetaminophen + simultaneous death of twins within days.
The Cytokine Storm and the Vulnerable Brainstem
The mechanistic evidence for vaccine involvement in infant death does not depend on twin cases. It has been reconstructed in molecular detail from three converging bodies of evidence: cytokine physiology, brainstem neuropathology, and cardiac conduction pathology.
The cytokine cascade. Foreign antigens introduced via vaccination activate the innate immune system within hours, producing interleukin-1β, interleukin-6, tumor necrosis factor-α, and interleukin-2. In infants, these cytokines cross the immature blood-brain barrier and act directly on the medullary serotonergic (5-HT) neurons that regulate respiratory chemosensitivity and auto-resuscitation from apnea. Kinney and Thach’s 2009 New England Journal of Medicine review of the neuropathology of SIDS documents that impaired 5-HT signaling in the medulla is the single most consistent postmortem finding across SIDS cohorts.[^15] Vege and Rognum showed as early as 1999 that SIDS infants exhibit elevated IL-6 in cerebrospinal fluid, with the identical topographic distribution — solitary nucleus tractus, spinal trigeminal nucleus, arcuate nucleus — in both SIDS cases and non-SIDS infants dying of acute infectious illness.[16] The physiological effect: prolonged central apnea, inhibited arousal from hypoxia, failure to auto-resuscitate.
The brainstem lesion. Ottaviani, Lavezzi, and Matturri, working at the University of Milan, published in Virchows Archiv in 2006 a detailed neuropathological analysis of a three-month-old female infant who died within hours of hexavalent vaccination. Serial-section examination of the brainstem revealed bilateral hypoplasia of the arcuate nucleus. The cardiac conduction system showed persistent fetal dispersion and resorptive degeneration. The authors concluded that the case “offers a unique insight into the possible role of hexavalent vaccine in triggering a lethal outcome in a vulnerable baby.”[17] They subsequently expanded their series to 110 SIDS cases, finding that 13 (11.8%) had died within 1–7 days of hexavalent vaccination, and in one case identified acute encephalitis of the tractus solitarii nucleus in the brainstem — a finding, they noted, that cannot be explained by developmental abnormality alone.[18] Zinka et al. in Munich independently reported six additional cases of unexplained sudden infant death within 48 hours of hexavalent vaccination the same year.[19]
The regulatory signal. Von Kries et al., analyzing German pharmacovigilance data, found that in the second year of life — precisely the Shaw twins’ age range — the standardized mortality ratio for sudden unexpected death within one day of hexavalent vaccination reached 31.3 (95% CI 3.8–113.1) and within two days 23.5 (95% CI 4.8–68.6). The authors, writing in the European Journal of Pediatrics, described these findings as “a signal for one of the two hexavalent vaccines which should prompt intensified surveillance.”[20] The European Medicines Agency’s response was to withdraw one of the two hexavalent formulations (Hexavac) from the market — while simultaneously insisting there was no evidence of a causal relationship. The Italian PLoS One case series subsequently found a 2.0-fold risk ratio (95% CI 1.2–3.5) for sudden unexpected death in the seven days following first-dose hexavalent vaccination.[21] Kuhnert et al. reported a 16-fold risk elevation following the fourth dose of penta/hexavalent vaccine.[22]
The population signal. Goldman and Miller’s 2011 analysis of 34 developed nations found a Pearson correlation of r = 0.992 (p = 0.0009) between the number of scheduled infant vaccine doses and the infant mortality rate.[23] Nations requiring more doses have higher infant mortality. Their 2012 VAERS analysis showed that infants receiving five to eight vaccines simultaneously — precisely the Shaw twins’ exposure — had a hospitalization rate ratio of 1.5 (95% CI 1.4–1.7) and a mortality rate 50% higher than infants receiving fewer.[24] Hooker and Miller’s 2021 Toxicology Reports analysis of 2,605 VAERS infant death reports over three decades found that 58% occurred within three days of vaccination and 78% within one week — a temporal clustering the authors described as “highly suggestive of a causal relationship.”[25]
The picture that emerges is not ambiguous. It is a coherent, cross-decade, cross-methodology body of work spanning pathology, epidemiology, VAERS analysis, ecological correlation, and pharmacovigilance signal detection.
The Second Poisoning: Acetaminophen as Etiological Amplifier

Here is where the Shaw twins case departs from any prior public discussion of their deaths — and where the mechanistic evidence becomes most damning.
Acetaminophen (paracetamol; Tylenol) is not a neutral fever reducer. It is a xenobiotic that, in infants, is preferentially metabolized through cytochrome P450 2E1 into N-acetyl-p-benzoquinone imine (NAPQI) — a reactive metabolite that immunologist William Parker, formerly of Duke University and author of nearly 200 peer-reviewed papers, has described as a “free radical bomb.”[26] NAPQI’s primary detoxification pathway requires glutathione, the cell’s central antioxidant reserve. When glutathione is intact, NAPQI is neutralized. When glutathione is depleted, NAPQI attacks membrane lipids, mitochondrial proteins, and — critically for the Shaw twins — the same brainstem structures already sensitized by vaccine-induced cytokines.
For a far deeper dive, I’ve written extensively on the topic of Tylenol’s wide-ranging and underreported toxicity in my Tylenol Investigation series here on Substack.
The infant biochemical vulnerability is well-established:
- Immature glucuronidation. Newborns and toddlers clear acetaminophen inefficiently through the mature glucuronidation pathway, shunting a higher proportion into the NAPQI-producing CYP450 2E1 pathway. The metabolic profile in early infancy resembles that of cats — an animal famously fatal-to-Tylenol.[26]
- Impaired sulfation. Waring and Klovrza documented in 1999 that children with autism — and, by extension, an unknown fraction of neurotypical children with subclinical sulfation deficits — exhibit impaired sulfation, a critical secondary detoxification pathway for acetaminophen.[27] The Shaw twins’ baseline sulfation capacity was never measured. It never is.
- Glutathione baseline in acute illness. Infants who are already ill, febrile, inflamed, or under oxidative stress — for instance, infants in the immediate post-vaccination cytokine surge window — have depleted glutathione reserves before the first dose of acetaminophen enters the system.[26][28]
The Schultz et al. 2008 study in Autism is the single most important epidemiological finding for understanding the Shaw case, and it has been almost totally ignored in mainstream medical discourse. Using a parent-survey design covering post-MMR vaccination exposures, Schultz’s team found that children given acetaminophen after MMR had approximately 8-fold higher odds of developing autism (OR ~8.2) compared to children given ibuprofen or no analgesic. Children given ibuprofen showed no elevated risk. Among children who experienced post-vaccination fever specifically, the acetaminophen-associated regressive autism incidence was twenty-fold higher.[29] The vaccine alone did not produce the effect. The vaccine plus acetaminophen did.
The Boston Birth Cohort — an NIH-funded prospective study measuring acetaminophen biomarkers directly in umbilical cord blood — found that infants in the highest cord-blood acetaminophen quartile had 3.6 times the risk of subsequent autism diagnosis compared to those in the lowest, with clear dose-response.[30] The 2021 international consensus statement in Nature Reviews Endocrinology, co-authored by 91 scientists, formally called for precautionary restriction of acetaminophen use during pregnancy on the basis of accumulating neurodevelopmental evidence.[31]
The convergence with vaccination is not coincidental. Standard American pediatric practice, throughout the 1980s and 1990s and continuing into the present, has been to preemptively or reactively administer acetaminophen for post-vaccination fever.[^4] The result is that virtually every American child born in the past four decades has been exposed to combined vaccine + acetaminophen at the exact developmental windows — 2, 4, 6, 12, 15, and 18 months — when the medullary serotonergic system is most vulnerable. The Shaw twins were poisoned twice: once by five simultaneous vaccine antigens depleting their glutathione reserves and priming their brainstems for apnea, and again by the acetaminophen given by an emergency department to manage the recognized “post-immunization reaction” — the very drug most likely to finish what the vaccines started.

Figure 2. Biochemical and physiological overlay of the Shaw twins’ final eight days. The upper panel plots relative magnitude of vaccine-induced cytokines, acetaminophen-derived NAPQI, and depleting glutathione reserve. The lower panel shows the two well-documented apnea event peaks — one Day 1–2 (per Scheibner’s 1991 Cotwatch data) and a second, larger peak Day 5–7 — against the clinical timeline. All three biochemical curves converge fatally in the Day 5–8 window when both twins died.
The Angela Cannings Precedent — When “Statistical Impossibility” Convicts the Innocent

The prosecution’s central theory in the Shaw case — voiced by Payette County prosecutor Michael Duke as “the only reasonable explanation for why both would die at the same time, on the same night, in the same room, in the same bed”[5] — is not a novel argument. It is a nearly verbatim recapitulation of the theory that sent Angela Cannings, Sally Clark, and Donna Anthony to prison in Britain in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and that the England and Wales Court of Appeal ultimately declared unsafe as a matter of law.[40a]
Angela Cannings lost three infants — Gemma (13 weeks, 1989), Jason (7 weeks, 1991), and Matthew (18 weeks, 1999). Doctors initially diagnosed the first as SIDS. When the second and third died, prosecutors argued that multiple unexplained infant deaths in a single family were so statistically improbable that homicide was the more likely explanation. Their star witness was pediatrician Sir Roy Meadow, then president of the British Paediatric Association, whose “Meadow’s Law” declared: one infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious, three is murder unless proven otherwise. In 2002 Cannings was convicted of murdering Jason and Matthew and sentenced to life in prison. There was no confession, no eyewitnesses, no physical evidence of smothering, no injuries — only the statistical argument.[^40a]
On December 10, 2003, after Cannings had served twenty months, the Court of Appeal overturned her convictions. The court’s holding is directly applicable to the Shaw prosecution: where a case depends “exclusively, or almost exclusively, on a serious disagreement between distinguished and reputable experts,” it is “unwise, and therefore, unsafe” to permit a conviction to stand.[^40a] Within weeks, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith announced a systematic review of hundreds of similar cases. Sally Clark’s conviction was overturned the same year. Donna Anthony was freed in 2005. In every one of those cases, subsequent scientific investigation revealed genetic, metabolic, or environmental causes for infant deaths that had been declared “statistically impossible” and therefore homicidal.[40a]
The parallels to the Shaw case are exact:
- Statistical-impossibility theory of guilt. Duke’s “only reasonable explanation” argument is Meadow’s Law transposed to Idaho. Both rest on the premise that unusual clusters of infant death in one family cannot be natural. Both ignore that vaccine-associated twin death is a documented, recurring pattern in the peer-reviewed literature since 1946.
- No physical evidence of homicide. As in Cannings, there is no confession, no eyewitness, no injury, no forensic marker consistent with smothering — only pulmonary vascular congestion, a finding equally consistent with the vaccine-plus-acetaminophen etiology described above.
- Reliance on disputed expert opinion. Idaho prosecutors cite three unnamed physicians who “ruled out vaccines” without producing their credentials, methodology, or reports. Dr. Pierre Kory, who has reviewed the full medical record, has publicly stated the deaths are consistent with vaccine-induced apnea.[^2] This is precisely the “serious disagreement between distinguished and reputable experts” that the Cannings court held renders prosecution unsafe.
- Genetic/metabolic susceptibility ignored. In the post-Cannings British reviews, cases repeatedly turned on inherited disorders — Long QT syndrome, medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency, and other channelopathies that produce apparent “SIDS” clusters in siblings. The Shaw twins’ documented paternal history of adverse vaccine reaction points to precisely such a susceptibility, and Ottaviani’s neuropathological literature identifies at least a dozen predisposing factors that would explain simultaneous death after simultaneous exposure.[17][25]
As attorney Chad Davenport told The Defender in July 2026: “The Angela Cannings case taught us a hard lesson: Even top medical experts can be wrong, and guesswork should never replace hard evidence. When dealing with sudden, unexplained tragedies like the Andrea Shaw case, the justice system cannot afford to rush to judgment. If police and medical examiners ignore a family’s medical history or dismiss other possible causes right out of the gate, we risk putting another innocent mother behind bars.”[40a]
The Cannings precedent is not binding on an Idaho court. But it is directly persuasive authority on the fundamental due-process question at the heart of the Shaw case: whether a prosecution may proceed to conviction on nothing more than the statistical improbability of a natural explanation, when a documented natural explanation exists in the peer-reviewed literature and reputable experts disagree with the state’s theory. Under the Cannings standard, this prosecution should not go forward.
The Classification Laundry
If the etiology is so well-established, why is Andrea Shaw in a jail cell? Why did three unnamed physicians “rule out” vaccines as a cause of death? Why did the Payette County coroner refuse to release the autopsy? The answer requires understanding the institutional architecture that has, over the past half-century, systematically absorbed vaccine-related infant deaths into administrative categories that make them statistically invisible.
The mechanism operates in three layers:
Layer 1 — Eliminated ICD codes. The International Classification of Diseases contains 130 official categories for infant cause of death. Prior to 1979, one of those categories was “death from prophylactic vaccination.” That code was eliminated. There is now no ICD code under which a medical examiner can classify a vaccine-attributable infant death.[32] The category was replaced, functionally, by the diagnosis of exclusion known as SIDS — a category that did not exist before 1973, invented in that year to accommodate an epidemic of unexplained infant deaths that had emerged in the 1960s alongside the mass rollout of DPT, oral polio, and measles vaccines.[32]
Layer 2 — Reclassification. After the 1992 American Academy of Pediatrics “Back to Sleep” campaign was credited with an 8.6% annual decline in SIDS between 1992 and 2001, Malloy and MacDorman’s Pediatrics analysis demonstrated that deaths coded as “accidental suffocation in bed” had risen 11.2% annually over the same period. The reclassification accounted for approximately 90% of the apparent SIDS decline.[33] The deaths did not decrease. Their names did.
Layer 3 — Prosecutorial classification. The Shaw case represents the newest layer of this laundry: when the vaccine + acetaminophen exposure produces simultaneous twin death — a pattern that cannot plausibly be classified as SIDS given the extreme statistical improbability — the deaths are reassigned to homicide. The mother is prosecuted. The vaccines and the acetaminophen never appear in the courtroom except as items her defense attorney must struggle to introduce over prosecutorial objection. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has paid out over $5.4 billion in compensation for vaccine injuries and deaths since 1988,[34] many of the settled infant-death cases having originally carried a SIDS or suffocation diagnosis. This is public knowledge. It plays no role in Idaho’s case against Andrea Shaw.
The institutional pattern is not accidental. It is the same governance-by-classification that has characterized every major pharmaceutical harm suppression of the past century — from thalidomide to Vioxx to opioids. The specific stakeholders in the vaccine + acetaminophen dyad are not obscure: Johnson & Johnson has been simultaneously one of the largest global manufacturers of both pediatric vaccines and Tylenol (until the 2023 spinoff of Kenvue), and William Parker’s Duke University laboratory was shuttered in 2021 — with the department deeming further acetaminophen-autism research “not in the strategic best interest” of Duke — while two Duke administrators, including the Chancellor for Health Affairs, simultaneously served on Johnson & Johnson’s Board of Directors.[35] An anonymous donor’s offer to fully fund Parker’s salary and experiments was declined.
What the Autopsy Should Have Looked For — and Almost Certainly Did Not
The Ottaviani protocol, published in Virchows Archiv in 2006 and refined in the 2014 expanded series, is explicit about what a competent post-mortem examination in a suspected vaccine-associated infant death must include:[17][18]
- Serial sectioning of the brainstem, with specific examination of the arcuate nucleus, the tractus solitarii nucleus, the spinal trigeminal nucleus, and the dorsal vagal nucleus.
- Immunohistochemistry for cytokine expression (IL-1β, IL-2, IL-6, TNF-α) in medullary respiratory control centers.
- Cardiac conduction system examination for persistent fetal dispersion, resorptive degeneration, and sinoatrial/atrioventricular node abnormalities.
- Hepatic and cerebral glutathione measurement, with quantitation of NAPQI-protein adducts as evidence of acetaminophen-induced oxidative stress.
- Beta-tryptase quantitation to evaluate for anaphylactoid mast-cell activation — the mechanism identified in the 2008 Forensic Science International case of an infant dying 24 hours post-hexavalent vaccination.[36]
Payette County coroner Ethan Mittelstadt has stated that the Shaw twins’ autopsy records will remain confidential until the criminal proceedings conclude.[1] There is no public evidence any of the Ottaviani-protocol examinations were performed. The finding of “pulmonary vascular congestion” cited by prosecutors is consistent with mechanical suffocation — but it is equally consistent with central respiratory arrest from any cause, including vaccine + acetaminophen–induced brainstem failure. The prosecutorial argument treats this pathological finding as though it were pathognomonic for smothering. It is not. It is nonspecific. And the standard forensic literature has known this since Werne and Garrow published in 1946.
The Japanese Natural Experiment
The single most persuasive population-level evidence that the vaccine + acetaminophen etiology is not merely temporal correlation comes from Japan. In 1975, following two infant deaths within 24 hours of DPT vaccination, the Japanese government raised the minimum vaccination age from 3 months to 2 years. In the five years preceding the change, Japan had paid 37 compensation claims for infant sudden death within seven days of DPT vaccination. In the 6.5 years following the change, that number dropped to 3.[37] The sudden-death rate per million doses fell from 1.47 to 0.15 — a 90% reduction. Japanese infant mortality overall dropped from 12.4 to 5.0 per 1,000 births over the following decade, moving Japan from an unremarkable position to the lowest infant mortality rate in the world.[^37]
If DPT vaccination in early infancy is causally unrelated to sudden death, this natural experiment should have shown no effect. It showed a 90% effect.
When “Safe and Effective” Becomes a Prison Sentence
The mother of the Shaw twins is in a jail cell today because of a slogan.
“Safe and effective.” “The science is settled.” “Vaccines do not cause SIDS.” “There is no evidence of harm.” These are not scientific statements. They are marketing directives issued by a pharmaceutical-regulatory-media complex that has systematically refused, for more than four decades, to acknowledge what its own peer-reviewed literature — much of it cited in this article — has been documenting since 1946. The refusal is not incidental. It is structural. It is protected by the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which stripped vaccine manufacturers of liability for pediatric vaccine deaths and injuries and rerouted claims into a no-fault administrative program that has quietly paid out more than $5.4 billion — while the manufacturers whose products caused those injuries assert publicly that no such injuries exist.[34] It is protected by the elimination of the ICD code for vaccine-related death in 1979.[32] It is protected by the SIDS category invented in 1973 to absorb the very deaths this article documents. It is protected by editorial gatekeepers who fast-track rejection of manuscripts challenging the safety consensus,[40] by university administrators who close laboratories rather than publish inconvenient findings,[35] and by media outlets that cover the criminal indictment of Andrea Shaw without mentioning that eight prior sets of twins in the peer-reviewed literature died the same way.
The blanket claim that all childhood vaccines are safe and effective for all children is not merely wrong. It is a category error. No pharmaceutical intervention in the history of medicine has ever been universally safe across all recipients. Aspirin causes Reye’s syndrome. Penicillin causes anaphylaxis. Every drug has a susceptible subpopulation. The peer-reviewed literature identifies at least a dozen susceptibility factors for vaccine-associated infant death: CYP450 polymorphisms, impaired sulfation, arcuate nucleus hypoplasia, MTHFR variants, mitochondrial dysfunction, prior family history of adverse vaccine reaction, prematurity, low birth weight, concurrent illness, multiple simultaneous doses, hot vaccine lots, and post-vaccination acetaminophen exposure.[25][26][28] Every one of these was present or plausibly present in the Shaw twins. The father had a documented prior adverse reaction to influenza vaccine. The mother and grandmother warned the pediatrician. Five vaccines were administered anyway. Acetaminophen was administered on top of them. Both children died.
What follows from a safety claim that admits no subpopulations, no susceptibilities, no bad lots, and no adverse events? Only one thing can follow: when the medicine kills, someone else must be blamed. This is not a hypothetical. It is a mechanical prediction. If the drug cannot fail, the patient must have failed — or the patient’s caretaker. The public-health machine has known this for at least three generations, and it has structured its institutions accordingly:
- When a vaccinated infant dies in the crib, the death becomes “SIDS” — a diagnostic category that literally means we do not know what killed the child, but we assure the parents it was not the shots.[15][32]
- When SIDS statistics become embarrassing, the deaths are reclassified as “accidental suffocation in bed,” and the parents are counseled about safe-sleep practices they did not violate.[33]
- When “accidental suffocation” cannot explain a case — because, for example, both twins died in the same night in the same crib, a statistical near-impossibility — the death is escalated to homicide. The parent is arrested. The vaccine record is sealed as “irrelevant” to the criminal proceeding. The autopsy is withheld from the public until after the criminal trial. The pediatrician who administered five simultaneous injections over the parents’ warning is never questioned. The manufacturer whose adjuvants and antigens circulated through the infant brainstem is never named in the indictment. The ER physician who documented the “post-immunization reaction” is not called as a witness against the vaccine — only, if at all, against the mother.
This is what every parent of a vaccine-injured child has understood for decades. When Barbara Loe Fisher and Harris Coulter published DPT: A Shot in the Dark in 1985 — documenting infant deaths within forty-eight hours of DPT vaccination — the response of the pediatric establishment was not to investigate the deaths but to accuse Fisher of endangering public health. When William Parker published evidence that acetaminophen-vaccine interaction was a probable trigger of regressive autism, his Duke laboratory was closed on the recommendation of a department chaired by administrators who sat on Johnson & Johnson’s board.[35] When investigators raise safety concerns about combination pediatric vaccines, their careers are systematically ended in a manner unprecedented in modern medical history. The message to every subsequent investigator has been unmistakable: publish the wrong finding and your career ends. Report the wrong death and your child was smothered.
Andrea Shaw is not an isolated case. She is the predictable output of a public-health information architecture that requires — as a matter of institutional survival — that vaccine deaths not exist. Because if they exist, the entire edifice of universal childhood vaccination as a moral imperative collapses into what it actually is: a risk-benefit calculation that must be made, honestly and case by case, by informed parents and their physicians, with full disclosure of susceptibility factors, lot data, and combination-exposure risks. The blanket safety claim exists to prevent that calculation from happening. And the cost of preventing that calculation, for the past fifty years, has been paid by the children who die and, increasingly, by the parents who are then charged with their murder.
The machinery that produced Andrea Shaw’s indictment did not begin in Payette, Idaho, in July 2026. It began in 1979, when the ICD code was eliminated. It continued in 1986, when manufacturer liability was stripped. It hardened in the 1990s, when “Back to Sleep” reclassification laundered the SIDS numbers. It calcified in the 2000s, when CDC and AAP messaging converged on the phrase “safe and effective” as an incantation to be repeated without qualification. It reached its logical terminus the moment a prosecutor in Idaho looked at a case of simultaneous twin death within a week of five vaccinations plus emergency-room acetaminophen and concluded that the only reasonable explanation was that the mother did it.
The victims of this system are not only the dead children. They are also their parents. And they will continue to be their parents — criminalized, incarcerated, driven to suicide, separated from their surviving children — until the public-health establishment is forced to acknowledge what its own literature has documented for eighty years: that vaccines, like every other pharmaceutical, can and do kill some children some of the time, and that the pretense otherwise is not science but sacrament.
What Justice Would Look Like
The evidence base assembled above is not new. Substantially all of it was available in 2007. Most of it was available in 1985. The Werne and Garrow case has been in the literature for eighty years. What is new is that we now have two additional lines of evidence that were not available even in 2015: (a) the direct biochemical documentation of NAPQI generation and glutathione depletion as the acetaminophen mechanism of neurotoxicity (Parker et al. 2024[26]), and (b) the Boston Birth Cohort’s cord-blood biomarker confirmation of the acetaminophen-autism dose-response.[30] The synergy between these two exposures is no longer speculative. It is the most parsimonious explanation of the pattern.
The state of Idaho is prosecuting Andrea Shaw for homicide on the theory that she smothered both of her toddlers in the same night, in the same bed, without a witness, without a motive, without any forensic evidence beyond a nonspecific finding of pulmonary vascular congestion that is entirely consistent with the alternative etiology. It is doing so at the same time that:
- Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is preparing to formally acknowledge the acetaminophen-autism link,[38]
- The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program continues to pay families whose vaccinated children died of “SIDS,”[34]
- The IOM has already conceded that vaccines can cause fatal anaphylaxis in infants on the basis of the identical fact pattern in the Werne and Garrow case,[14]
- And the peer-reviewed medical literature contains at least eight prior sets of twins who died together after vaccination, none of whose mothers were charged with murder.[25]
Justice would require, at minimum:
- Immediate exhumation-quality re-examination of the Shaw twins’ brainstems and cardiac conduction systems under the Ottaviani protocol, by a pathologist with expertise in vaccine-associated infant death rather than routine forensic pathology.
- Formal quantitation of NAPQI-protein adducts in hepatic and cerebral tissue, and of beta-tryptase in serum, to evaluate the acetaminophen contribution to the terminal event.
- Full disclosure of the vaccine lot numbers administered on April 23, 2025, with cross-referencing against VAERS reports for those lots — the FDA has known since 1979 that “hot lots” cluster infant deaths, and confidential manufacturer memos have historically instructed distributors to disperse suspect lots geographically to avoid detectable clusters.[39]
- Dismissal of the murder indictment and re-classification of the deaths as vaccine-associated sudden death pending independent forensic review.
Whether Andrea Shaw ever holds her surviving newborn outside of a prison visiting room depends on whether her defense team is permitted to introduce this evidence, and whether the presiding judge is willing to consider that a pattern documented in the peer-reviewed medical literature since 1946 might be more parsimonious than the alternative theory that a twenty-three-year-old mother suffocated both of her children on the same night without leaving forensic traces.
The Shaw twins did not die from smothering. They died from a poisoning that our medical infrastructure is institutionally incapable of naming. Their mother did not kill them. A regulatory-industrial complex that will not permit its products to fail killed them, and is now preparing to have their mother killed — or caged for life — for the crime of trusting it. This is what happens, always and inevitably, when a government-pharmaceutical alliance declares that its interventions are universally safe: the victims of those interventions become the criminals. It has happened to Andrea Shaw. It will happen to the next mother, and the next, until enough of us refuse the slogan and demand the science.
Until we are willing to name what killed Dallas and Tyson Shaw, we will continue to bury the children and prosecute the parents.
Author’s note
This piece is one in a series examining the intersection of pediatric vaccination policy, acetaminophen exposure, and infant mortality. A prior installment (“Broken Trust: The Tylenol Cover-Up That May Have Damaged Millions of Children”) documented the William Parker–Duke University–Johnson & Johnson conflict-of-interest architecture. A forthcoming installment will address the Ottaviani neuropathological protocol and the international pharmacovigilance signal for hexavalent vaccines in detail. A subsequent installment will address the Andrea Shaw defense strategy.
If you are a pediatrician, forensic pathologist, or medical examiner with knowledge or documentation relevant to the Shaw case, please contact the author through Children’s Health Defense or through the comments below.
Notes and citations
[^1]: Sara Regensberg, “The Shaw Twins Didn’t Die From SIDS,” Substack, 2025, https://open.substack.com/pub/sararegensberg/p/the-shaw-twins-didnt-die-from-sids; Isabelle Taft, “Plaintiff for Anti-Vaccine Group’s Suit Is Charged With Murder of Her Twins,” New York Times, July 7, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/07/us/idaho-twins-death-shaw-vaccines-murder.html.
[^2]: Pierre Kory, “Medical Record Review of the Twins Who Died After Vaccination and a Review of the Literature Proving SIDS Is Caused by Vaccines,” Pierre Kory’s Medical Musings, June 23, 2025, https://pierrekorymedicalmusings.com/p/medical-record-review-of-the-twins.
[^3]: Zachary Stieber, “Experts Ruled Out Vaccines in Deaths of Twins, Prosecutors Say,” The Epoch Times, July 15, 2026, https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/experts-ruled-out-vaccines-in-deaths-of-twins-prosecutors-say-6062060.
[^4]: American Academy of Pediatrics, Red Book: Report of the Committee on Infectious Diseases, 32nd ed. (Itasca, IL: AAP, 2021), routine recommendation for acetaminophen management of post-vaccination fever.
[^5]: Michael Duke, “Objection to Motion to Reduce Bond, State of Idaho v. Andrea Renee Shaw,” Payette County District Court, July 13, 2026, cited in The Epoch Times, July 15, 2026.
[^6]: Michael H. Malloy and Howard Freeman, “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Among Twins,” Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 153, no. 7 (July 1999): 736–740, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10401808/.
[^7]: Millard Bass, cited in Neil Z. Miller, “Vaccines and Sudden Infant Death: An Analysis of the VAERS Database 1990–2019 and Review of the Medical Literature,” Toxicology Reports 8 (2021): 1324–1335, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8255173/.
[^8]: J. Werne and I. Garrow, “Fatal Anaphylactic Shock: Occurrence in Identical Twins Following Second Injection of Diphtheria Toxoid and Pertussis Antigen,” Journal of the American Medical Association 131, no. 9 (1946): 730–735.
[^9]: S. C. Roberts, “Vaccination and Cot Deaths in Perspective,” Archives of Disease in Childhood 62, no. 7 (1987): 754–759, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1779219/.
[^10]: Harris L. Coulter and Barbara Loe Fisher, DPT: A Shot in the Dark (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 88–92.
[^11]: Yasemin Balci et al., “Simultaneous Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,” Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine 14, no. 2 (February 2007): 87–91, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1353113106000071.
[^12]: E. A. Mitchell et al., “Simultaneous Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy of Twins: Case Report,” International Journal of Legal Medicine 125, no. 1 (January 2011): 143–146, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20082088/.
[^13]: Huang et al., cited in Neil Z. Miller and Brian S. Hooker, “Vaccines and Sudden Infant Death: An Analysis of the VAERS Database 1990–2019 and Review of the Medical Literature,” Toxicology Reports 8 (2021): 1324–1335.
[^14]: Institute of Medicine, Immunization Safety Review: Vaccinations and Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2003), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK221473/.
[^15]: Hannah C. Kinney and Bradley T. Thach, “The Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,” New England Journal of Medicine 361, no. 8 (August 20, 2009): 795–805.
[^16]: A. Vege and T. O. Rognum, “Inflammatory Responses in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome — Past and Present Views,” FEMS Immunology and Medical Microbiology 25, no. 1–2 (1999): 67–78.
[^17]: Giulia Ottaviani, Anna Maria Lavezzi, and Luigi Matturri, “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) Shortly After Hexavalent Vaccination: Another Pathology in Suspected SIDS?” Virchows Archiv 448, no. 1 (January 2006): 100–104, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16231176/.
[^18]: Anna Maria Lavezzi et al., “Sudden Infant Death Following Hexavalent Vaccination: A Neuropathologic Study,” Current Medicinal Chemistry 21, no. 32 (2014): 3697–3705, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24083600/.
[^19]: B. Zinka et al., “Unexplained Cases of Sudden Infant Death Shortly After Hexavalent Vaccination,” Vaccine 24, no. 31–32 (July 26, 2006): 5779–5780, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15908063/.
[^20]: R. von Kries et al., “Sudden and Unexpected Deaths After the Administration of Hexavalent Vaccines (Diphtheria, Tetanus, Pertussis, Poliomyelitis, Hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae Type B): Is There a Signal?” European Journal of Pediatrics 164, no. 2 (February 2005): 61–69, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15602672/.
[^21]: Giuseppe Traversa et al., “Sudden Unexpected Deaths and Vaccinations During the First Two Years of Life in Italy: A Case Series Study,” PLoS ONE 6, no. 1 (January 26, 2011): e16363, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3027668/.
[^22]: Ronny Kuhnert et al., “Reanalyses of Case-Control Studies Examining the Temporal Association Between Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and Vaccination,” Vaccine 30, no. 13 (March 16, 2012): 2349–2356.
[^23]: Neil Z. Miller and Gary S. Goldman, “Infant Mortality Rates Regressed Against Number of Vaccine Doses Routinely Given: Is There a Biochemical or Synergistic Toxicity?” Human and Experimental Toxicology 30, no. 9 (September 2011): 1420–1428, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0960327111407644.
[^24]: Gary S. Goldman and Neil Z. Miller, “Relative Trends in Hospitalizations and Mortality Among Infants by the Number of Vaccine Doses and Age, Based on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), 1990–2010,” Human and Experimental Toxicology 31, no. 10 (October 2012): 1012–1021, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0960327112440111.
[^25]: Neil Z. Miller and Brian S. Hooker, “Vaccines and Sudden Infant Death: An Analysis of the VAERS Database 1990–2019 and Review of the Medical Literature,” Toxicology Reports 8 (2021): 1324–1335, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8255173/.
[^26]: William Parker et al., “The Dangers of Acetaminophen for Neurodevelopment Outweigh Scant Evidence for Long-Term Benefits,” Children 11, no. 1 (2024): 44, https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9067/11/1/44.
[^27]: Rosemary H. Waring and L. V. Klovrza, “Sulphur Metabolism in Autism,” Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine 10, no. 1 (2000): 25–32.
[^28]: John P. Jones III et al., “Evaluating the Role of Susceptibility Inducing Cofactors and of Acetaminophen in the Etiology of Autism Spectrum Disorder,” Life 14, no. 8 (2024): 918.
[^29]: Stephen T. Schultz et al., “Acetaminophen (Paracetamol) Use, Measles-Mumps-Rubella Vaccination, and Autistic Disorder: The Results of a Parent Survey,” Autism 12, no. 3 (May 2008): 293–307.
[^30]: Yuelong Ji et al., “Association of Cord Plasma Biomarkers of In Utero Acetaminophen Exposure With Risk of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder in Childhood,” JAMA Psychiatry 77, no. 2 (February 2020): 180–189.
[^31]: Ann Z. Bauer et al., “Paracetamol Use During Pregnancy — A Call for Precautionary Action,” Nature Reviews Endocrinology 17, no. 12 (December 2021): 757–766.
[^32]: Sayer Ji, “131 Ways for an Infant to Die: How SIDS Camouflages Vaccine Injury,” GreenMedInfo, https://greenmedinfo.com/blog/131-ways-infant-die.
[^33]: Michael H. Malloy and Marian F. MacDorman, “Changes in the Classification of Sudden Unexpected Infant Deaths: United States, 1992–2001,” Pediatrics 115, no. 5 (May 2005): 1247–1253.
[^34]: U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, monthly statistics reports, https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation.
[^35]: Jennifer Margulis, “Top Professor Ousted as His Research on Tylenol Became Too Much of a Headache for His University and Big Pharma,” The Epoch Times, 2023.
[^36]: Sayer Ji, “Epidemic of Sudden Infant Deaths a Medically-Induced Syndrome,” GreenMedInfo, https://greenmedinfo.com/blog/epidemic-sudden-infant-deaths-medically-induced-syndrome-1, citing beta-tryptase elevation in a 2008 Forensic Science International case report.
[^37]: Cited in Sayer Ji, “131 Ways for an Infant to Die”; source data: Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare compensation statistics 1970–1990.
[^38]: “RFK Jr., HHS to Link Autism to Tylenol Use in Pregnancy and Folate Deficiencies,” Wall Street Journal, September 2025, reported by Kenvue interim CEO lobbying meetings, September 2025.
[^39]: See discussion of Tennessee 1978 DPT lot-clustering incident in “Please Help Prevent a Medical Miscarriage of Justice,” The Midwestern Doctor, https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/please-help-prevent-a-medical-miscarriage.
[^40]: William Parker, personal communication regarding manuscript rejections on procedural rather than scientific grounds, cited in Jennifer Margulis, “Top Professor Ousted as His Research on Tylenol Became Too Much of a Headache for His University and Big Pharma,” The Epoch Times, 2023, https://www.theepochtimes.com.
[^40a]: Lisa P., “What a Landmark Case in Britain Could Mean for Mother Charged in Idaho Twins’ Deaths,” The Defender (Children’s Health Defense), July 15, 2026, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/angela-cannings-england-landmark-case-meaning-idaho-mother-charged-twins-deaths/. The Court of Appeal decision is R v Cannings EWCA Crim 01. See also R v Clark EWCA Crim 1020.
© 2026. This work is licensed for full or partial republication for educational, journalistic, and legal purposes. Please cite as: Ji, Sayer. “The Shaw Twins Didn’t Suffocate. They Were Poisoned Twice.” Substack, July 2026.
WHO’s Latest Prescription for Failure
© GreenMedInfo LLC. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of GreenMedInfo LLC.
Want to learn more from GreenMedInfo? Sign up for the newsletter here:
www.greenmedinfo.com/greenmed/newsletter
Reproduced from original article:
https://greenmedinfo.com/content/whos-latest-prescription-failure
Posted on: Tuesday, March 3rd 2026
This article is copyrighted by GreenMedInfo LLC, 2026

How Three Strains, 200 Viruses, and a Collapsing Paradigm Expose the Flu Vaccine’s Broken Promise
On February 27, 2026, the World Health Organization selected three influenza strains and told the world to build a vaccine around them. Three strains, chosen by committee months in advance, for a landscape of over 200 respiratory viruses — manufactured in chicken eggs and injected into hundreds of millions of arms at a cost approaching $18 billion annually. It is perhaps the most expensive act of faith in modern medicine. And the evidence has shattered every pillar it stands on.
Read and share the X post dedicated to this article here.
Article-at-a-glance
- WHO’s three-strain selection is a structural impossibility. In February 2026, WHO again selected three influenza strains for the coming season’s vaccine — while the Cochrane Collaboration has documented that over 200 viruses cause clinically indistinguishable influenza-like illness, influenza A and B represent only ~10% of circulating respiratory pathogens, and even the targeted strains drift unpredictably during the months between selection and deployment. The 2025-2026 season proved the point: H3N2 “subclade K” emerged and spread globally after vaccine compositions were already locked.11
- Cochrane’s evidence base is empty — across every demographic. Fifty-two trials and 80,000+ adults showed a numbered needed to vaccinate (NNV) of 71 for confirmed influenza, with little or no effect on hospitalizations or working days lost. For the elderly, 40 years of data from 75 studies could not produce clinical guidance. For children under two, only one safety study exists. The gold standard of evidence-based medicine has weighed the flu vaccine and found it wanting.1, 2, 3
- The vaccine doesn’t just fail — it may cause active harm. A 2025 Cleveland Clinic prospective cohort of 53,402 employees found vaccinated workers had a statistically significant 27% higher risk of contracting influenza (HR 1.27, p=0.007), while a natural alternative — bovine colostrum — demonstrated threefold superiority in published peer-reviewed research, with zero hospitalizations in high-risk patients and 70% lower costs, yet has received no large-scale follow-up in 19 years.4, 5, 6, 7
- The paradigm beneath it all is collapsing. Revolutionary virome research reveals that viruses are not monolithic external pathogens but host-dependent entities sharing core architecture with the body’s own exosomes — and that chronic viral infections confer symbiotic immune benefits including bacterial resistance and compensation for genetic immunodeficiency. The germ theory framework upon which WHO’s annual ritual depends is being dismantled by the very sciences it claims to represent.8, 9, 10

The Cochrane Verdict: Four Decades of Unproven Claims
The Cochrane Collaboration occupies a singular position in evidence-based medicine. Its systematic reviews are widely regarded as the most authoritative assessments of medical interventions available. On the subject of influenza vaccination, what it says should have ended the debate years ago.

The landmark 2018 review, Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults (Demicheli et al.), synthesized data from 52 clinical trials involving over 80,000 adults. Its findings were unambiguous in their modesty: inactivated flu vaccines reduced laboratory-confirmed influenza from roughly 2.3% to 0.9%, yielding a number needed to vaccinate (NNV) of 71–meaning 71 people must be vaccinated to prevent a single confirmed case.1 The review found little or no appreciable effect on hospitalizations or working days lost, both assessed at low certainty of evidence. Protection in pregnant women was uncertain or very limited. Seventy percent of included studies had insufficient reporting to assess bias.
For the elderly–the population most aggressively targeted by vaccination campaigns–the picture is starker. The Cochrane review for people 65 and older examined 40 years of evidence, comprising 75 studies, and concluded that available evidence is of poor quality and provides no guidance regarding safety, efficacy, or effectiveness. The reviewers called for an adequately powered, publicly funded, placebo-controlled trial.2 That trial has never been conducted.
Only one validated safety study on inactivated flu vaccines has been performed in children under two–the population most susceptible to adverse reactions–despite current guidelines recommending vaccination from six months of age.3
The Strain Selection Lottery: WHO’s Six-Month Gamble
Twice annually, the World Health Organization convenes its Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System to select three viral strains for the coming season’s vaccine. For 2026–2027: A/Missouri/11/2025 (H1N1), A/Darwin/1454/2025 (H3N2), and B/Tokyo/EIS13-175/2025 (B/Victoria).11 Three strains. Selected months in advance. Manufactured in chicken eggs or insect cells. Distributed to a population that will encounter a pathogen landscape of staggering complexity.

The Cochrane Collaboration quantified the core mathematical absurdity: over 200 viruses cause influenza and influenza-like illness producing identical symptoms. Without laboratory testing, physicians cannot distinguish between them. At best, vaccines target influenza A and B, representing approximately 10% of all circulating respiratory viruses.1,3 The remaining 90%–rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, RSV, parainfluenza, adenoviruses, human metapneumovirus–produce the same clinical picture and are entirely unaffected by influenza vaccination.
WHO’s own February 2026 report documented H3N2 “subclade K” emerging in August 2025 and spreading rapidly worldwide, driving earlier-than-usual flu seasons with higher activity levels.11 This variant emerged after vaccine compositions had been finalized–a recurring pattern that vaccine proponents treat as an engineering problem rather than the structural impossibility it represents.

Negative Efficacy: When the Cure Becomes the Disease
The Cleveland Clinic’s 2024–2025 prospective cohort study represents perhaps the most consequential finding in recent influenza vaccine research. Tracking 53,402 employees over 25 weeks, with 82.1% vaccination coverage, the study used Cox proportional hazards regression with vaccination as a time-dependent variable–a more accurate approach than test-negative designs.4

The result: a hazard ratio of 1.27 (95% CI: 1.07–1.51, p=0.007), indicating vaccinated employees had a statistically significant 27% higher risk of contracting influenza. Vaccine effectiveness was −26.9%. Cumulative incidence curves showed infection rates increasing more rapidly among the vaccinated throughout the observation period.4
The study’s authors discussed plausible mechanisms: original antigenic sin and immune imprinting from repeated annual vaccination may progressively narrow the antibody repertoire, reducing immune flexibility. Canadian data from the 2009 pandemic corroborate the pattern: seasonal flu vaccination was associated with increased susceptibility to pandemic H1N1.5 The intervention may be actively compromising the immune function it purports to support.
Beyond diminished effectiveness, safety cannot be treated as a peripheral concern. A survey of the biomedical and clinical literature documents more than 100 potential adverse effects associated with influenza vaccination, spanning neurologic, autoimmune, hematologic, and inflammatory outcomes — a signal profile that warrants far more transparent risk–benefit accounting than current policy frameworks provide.

The Buried Alternative: Colostrum and the Economics of Suppression
In 2007, Cesarone and colleagues published in Clinical and Applied Thrombosis/Hemostasis that bovine colostrum was approximately three times more effective than vaccination at preventing flu episodes. Among high-risk cardiovascular patients, the colostrum group experienced zero hospitalizations, while the vaccinated group suffered multiple hospitalizations and one death. Total flu-related costs in the colostrum group were 30% of the vaccinated group–a 70% cost reduction. No significant side effects.6

Belcaro et al. (2010) confirmed and extended these findings.7 The mechanism is fundamentally different from vaccination: broad-spectrum immune enhancement through secretory IgA, lactoferrin, cytokine modulation, and gut-immune axis support. It is pathogen-agnostic–it doesn’t require predicting which strains will circulate.

Bovine colostrum cannot be patented. Without patent protection, no pharmaceutical company will invest the $50–100 million required for Phase III trials. The influenza vaccine market was valued at $7.97 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $17.77 billion by 2032.12 The same structural logic explains why vitamin D–shown to reduce influenza A risk by 59% in children at 1,200 IUs daily13–and elderberry, echinacea, ginseng, green tea, and probiotics remain absent from policy conversations despite published peer-reviewed evidence.3
The Virome Revolution: Viruses as Symbiotic Partners

The policy failures documented above are symptoms of a deeper crisis: the conceptual framework upon which the vaccination enterprise rests–classical germ theory–is being dismantled by the very sciences it claims to represent.
The human body harbors approximately 38 trillion bacteria and a staggering virome, with fecal matter containing upwards of one billion viral particles per gram. Over 90% of humans carry multiple herpes viruses, co-evolved with mammals over millions of years.8
In 2007, Barton et al. published in Nature that mice harboring latent herpesvirus infections were resistant to bacterial infection by Listeria monocytogenes and Yersinia pestis. The mechanism: virally stimulated upregulation of interferon-gamma (IFNγ) producing systemic macrophage activation. Rather than parasitism, latent infection was a symbiotic relationship conferring immune benefits.8
MacDuff et al. (2015) in eLife showed that immunodeficient mice–fatally vulnerable to bacterial infections–were rescued from lethality by chronic herpesvirus infection, which compensated for genetic defects by inducing IFNγ production.8 Chronic viral infection could compensate for genetic immunodeficiency. The therapeutic implications are extraordinary.
Latent gammaherpesvirus 68 produced differential expression of genes in the spleen, brain, and liver–particularly immune-related genes conferring risk for celiac disease, Crohn’s disease, and multiple sclerosis.8 Early life viral infections change genes related to vaccine responses in mice and humans, potentially explaining differential susceptibility to vaccine injury. And critically: vaccinations may deprive the body of favorable immune-modulating effects of some viral infections.8
The Exosome Problem: Why Influenza Is Not What We Were Told
The 2015 virion architecture study–the first comprehensive characterization of influenza virion composition–revealed that influenza viral particles are substantially composed of host-derived proteins. The virus is, in a fundamental sense, as much “self” as “other.”9
Researchers identified hundreds of viral and host-encoded proteins in influenza virions. The conserved architecture includes substantial quantities of host proteins. Influenza virions from different host species–mammalian versus avian–have distinct protein compositions, meaning transmissibility and immunogenicity are fundamentally determined by the host.9
Current vaccines produced in chicken eggs or insect cells yield virions containing foreign proteins that produce different immunological responses than human influenza particles. These non-human proteins could theoretically produce cross-reactive antigens contributing to autoimmunity–a possibility current safety testing does not evaluate.9
Most remarkably, influenza virions share underlying protein composition with exosomes–naturally occurring microvesicles all cells produce for intercellular communication. Both are membrane-enclosed, 50–100 nanometers, carrying proteins, lipids, and RNAs. Influenza appears to form by co-opting normal exosome production.9 Viruses may be pieces of information in search of chromosomes–essential mediators of the genotype-phenotype relationship, facilitating real-time adaptation where DNA evolution takes millennia.9,10
The Transkingdom Web: The End of Simple Narratives
Dr. Herbert W. “Skip” Virgin IV developed the hypothesis that viral immunity is governed by “transkingdom metagenomic interactions”–the interplay between all genetic sequences in or on the host dictating the course of viral encounters.8
Helminths promote viral replication by inhibiting antiviral IFNγ and inducing interleukin-4, reactivating latent herpesvirus. Bacterial microbiota foster viral persistence–antibiotic-decimated gut bacteria prevent persistent norovirus infection, while fecal transplant restoration reverses this suppression.8 These are evolutionarily conserved interactions between organisms of divergent kingdoms that fundamentally determine what we simplistically call “infection.”
For a mind-blowing journey through these revolutionary new concepts, and the centrality of the virome in human health and disease, watch Dr. Virgin’s lecture below:
Immune Status, Not Vaccination Status, Determines Susceptibility
The convergence points to a principle both ancient in wisdom and revolutionary for modern medicine: it is the terrain, not the germ, that determines the outcome. “The microbe is nothing; the terrain is everything”–often attributed to Pasteur’s deathbed–finds rigorous confirmation in contemporary virome science.8
If the immune system is compromised by toxicants, nutritional deficiency, chronic stress, and pharmaceutical suppression, respiratory illness of all kinds–whether from influenza A or any of the 200+ other circulating pathogens–is far more likely. It is not the absence of a vaccine that causes infection; it is the inability of the immune system to function effectively.3
The relevant question is not “Which three strains should we target six months from now?” but “How do we support the innate, mucosal, and adaptive immune systems so they can respond to whatever challenges arise?” Colostrum, vitamin D, elderberry, echinacea, green tea, ginseng, and probiotics work precisely because they are pathogen-agnostic: enhancing immune capacity rather than pre-programming it against predicted targets.
Conclusion: The Structural Absurdity
A multi-billion dollar annual intervention–built on Cochrane-documented evidentiary gaps, now showing negative efficacy in rigorous cohort analysis–continues to be universally recommended while a natural substance with dramatically superior published outcomes sits unstudied for two decades, and virome science reveals the foundational paradigm is biologically untenable.
The illusion is not merely scientific. It is epistemological. When the full complexity of respiratory illness — hundreds of viral species, transkingdom interactions, host-dependent virion composition, the overlooked role of exosomes, and the immunomodulatory virome — is answered with a three-strain, egg-derived pharmaceutical product selected by committee six months in advance, we are not witnessing evidence-based medicine. We are witnessing market-based medicine, sustained by institutional inertia, regulatory capture, and a paradigm the biology has outgrown.
The question is whether institutions governing public health possess the intellectual courage to follow the evidence–away from mass vaccination and toward a genuinely ecological, terrain-based, immune-supportive paradigm honoring the complexity of the human superorganism and the billions of viral partners with which it has co-evolved.
The only thing the flu may be capable of killing, in the end, is germ theory itself.9
Beyond the Antipodes: How “Poisoned, Not Infected” Resolves the Germ–Terrain Divide
For over a century, the discourse on infectious disease has been trapped between two seemingly irreconcilable poles: germ theory, which locates the cause of disease in external pathogens invading a passive host, and terrain theory, which holds that the internal milieu of the organism–its nutritional status, toxic burden, and immunological integrity–determines whether illness manifests. These positions have hardened into ideological antipodes, each claiming exclusive explanatory power, each dismissing the other as naive or dangerous. The result has been an intellectual stalemate that has impoverished both clinical practice and public health policy.
The Poisoned, Not Infected series, published on this Substack in November 2025, offers what neither pole alone could provide: a mechanistic synthesis grounded in peer-reviewed molecular biology that renders the germ–terrain binary obsolete. The key is the extracellular vesicle (EV)–nature’s nano-scale communication system, through which the terrain produces the very signals we have mistaken for invading germs.
Here is the core insight: when cells are chemically stressed–by acetaminophen, pesticides, heavy metals, or inhaled toxicants like the vitamin E acetate behind the EVALI crisis–they release exosomes carrying the molecular fingerprints of that injury: oxidative stress markers, inflammatory cytokines, apoptotic enzymes, regulatory microRNAs. These nano-sized vesicles are 30–150 nanometers in diameter–physically indistinguishable from viruses under electron microscopy, pelletable in the same density gradient fractions, and bearing overlapping molecular markers including the tetraspanin CD63 found on both exosomes and HIV particles. They propagate injury signals to distant cells that have never encountered the original toxin, triggering the same death cascades, the same inflammatory responses, the same constellation of symptoms we reflexively label “infection.”
This is not terrain theory in the classical Béchampian sense–a vague assertion that the “soil” matters more than the “seed.” It is a concrete, experimentally demonstrated mechanism by which the terrain’s condition generates virus-like particles that carry adaptive or pathological information depending on the nature and severity of the stressor. The 2018 Scientific Reports acetaminophen study demonstrated this with devastating clarity: exosomes from drug-injured mice transferred liver damage to naïve animals that had never been exposed to the toxin. The “germ” was the body’s own distress signal. The “terrain” was the chemical insult that provoked it.
.jpg)
Nor is this germ theory in the classical Pasteurian sense–the notion that specific external microbes invade a passive host and are the sole cause of specific diseases. The Xenogen Hypothesis, introduced in the series, proposes that what we have classified as “viruses” may often function as adaptive information vectors–exosome-like particles carrying stress-response programs that trigger beneficial physiological processes such as fever-mediated detoxification, mucus-mediated debris clearance, and inflammatory mobilization of immune resources. The 2015 virion architecture study discussed earlier in this article confirms the biological plausibility: influenza particles are substantially composed of host-derived proteins, sharing core structural features with exosomes, and varying in composition depending on the species from which they originate. Viruses, from this vantage, are not foreign invaders so much as hybrid entities generated at the interface between organism and environment.
The synthesis, then, is this: the germ theorists were right that nano-scale particles transmit biological information capable of producing illness in recipient organisms. The terrain theorists were right that the internal environment–its toxic burden, nutritional status, and immunological coherence–determines whether those signals are generated, how they are interpreted, and whether the organism recovers or deteriorates. What neither camp possessed was the molecular vocabulary to describe the mechanism connecting these truths. Extracellular vesicle biology, and the Xenogen Hypothesis and Poisoned Not Infected paradigm built upon it, provides that vocabulary.
Poisoned, Not Infected: Why Your Body’s Healing Response Looks Like Disease
Sayer Ji · November 23, 2025
Read and share the X post dedicated to this article: https://x.com/sayerjigmi/status/1992577130874450058?s=20
Read full story The implications are profound. If what we detect as “influenza” via PCR may include exosomal RNA released as part of the body’s own immune signaling–as the 2024 study on PCR non-specificity concluded–then the denominator is not merely inflated by the 200+ respiratory viruses Cochrane identified. It is inflated by the body’s own healing response being misread as pathogenic presence. We are not just vaccinating against the wrong strains; we may be vaccinating against the body’s own adaptive communication system.
This convergence–the Cochrane evidentiary vacuum, the Cleveland Clinic’s negative efficacy findings, the colostrum data demonstrating pathogen-agnostic immune support, the virome science revealing viral symbiosis, and now the EV-mediated mechanism by which chemical terrain damage produces virus-like contagion signals–points toward a unified paradigm. Not “germ or terrain” but terrain generating what we have called germs–and those “germs” functioning, in many cases, as the organism’s attempt to restore homeostasis through intercellular communication, detoxification, and adaptive reprogramming.
The ancient debate is not resolved by one side winning. It is resolved by discovering the molecular bridge between them–and that bridge is the exosome: the body’s own virus-like particle, generated from within, carrying the intelligence of the terrain into the language previously monopolized by germ theory. Once this is understood, the entire vaccination paradigm–predicated on targeting specific external pathogens with strain-specific antibodies–reveals itself as not merely ineffective but categorically misaligned with the biology it purports to address.
A Final Thought

The WHO’s influenza vaccine recommendations, then, are not merely a clinical policy failure–they are the visible edge of a global governance architecture predicated on a nineteenth-century metaphor: the body as a besieged fortress, the microbe as foreign invader, and the state as the entity authorized to marshal pharmaceutical countermeasures on behalf of a passive, immunologically incompetent population. This biosecurity model–from the International Health Regulations to pandemic preparedness treaties to the annual strain-selection ritual itself–derives its legitimacy not from evidence of efficacy, which as we have seen does not exist in any Cochrane-defensible form, but from the unexamined assumption that germ theory accurately describes the relationship between humans and their microbial environment. That assumption is now crumbling under the weight of the sciences it claimed to represent. The virome reveals that viral genomes are not invaders but co-evolved partners integral to immune regulation, gene expression, and protection against bacterial pathogenesis. The holobiont framework reconceives the human organism not as an individual besieged by pathogens but as a superorganism–a dynamic ecological consortium of human cells, bacteria, fungi, archaea, and viruses whose collective genomic intelligence dwarfs the narrow antibody targeting of any vaccine. And the terrain-based paradigm, now grounded in the molecular biology of extracellular vesicles rather than the philosophical intuitions of Béchamp, demonstrates that what we detect as “viral infection” may often represent the body’s own sophisticated healing intelligence–an intelligence that mass vaccination campaigns, by design, seek to override. When the foundational biology no longer supports the foundational policy, what remains is not medicine but institutional momentum–and the multi-billion-dollar economic interests that momentum protects. The question before us is whether public health will follow the evidence into a post-germ-theory paradigm that honors the complexity of the human superorganism, or whether it will continue to administer a collapsing orthodoxy by bureaucratic force. The biology has already rendered its verdict. The institutions have yet to receive the memo.
This epistemic rigidity is not occurring in a vacuum. The same institution now urging universal compliance with its influenza strain selections is facing a historic contraction of political and financial authority. The formal withdrawal of the United States — and the accompanying budget shock — marked more than a diplomatic event; it signaled a measurable erosion of institutional legitimacy. I examined that rupture in detail in “When the WHO Lost the Plot–and the Funding,”which traces how narrative control collapsed into fiscal consequence
Learn more about alternative, evidence-based approaches to influenza here.
Share the X post dedicated to this article:
https://x.com/sayerjigmi/status/2028511179782381766?s=20
References
1. Demicheli, Vittorio, et al. “Vaccines for Preventing Influenza in Healthy Adults.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, no. 2 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD001269.pub6
2. Demicheli, Vittorio, et al. “Vaccines for Preventing Influenza in the Elderly.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (2018). https://www.cochrane.org/CD004876/ARI_vaccines-for-preventing-seasonal-influenza-and-its-complications-in-people-aged-65-or-older
3. Ji, Sayer. “The Shocking Lack of Evidence Supporting Flu Vaccines.” GreenMedInfo, January 26, 2018. https://greenmedinfo.com/blog/shocking-lack-evidence-supporting-flu-vaccines
4. Shrestha, Nabin K., et al. “Effectiveness of the Influenza Vaccine During the 2024–2025 Respiratory Viral Season.” Preprint, Cleveland Clinic, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.20.25324343
5. Skowronski, Danuta M., et al. “Association Between the 2008–09 Seasonal Influenza Vaccine and Pandemic H1N1 Illness.” PLoS Medicine 7, no. 4 (2010): e1000258. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000258
6. Cesarone, M. R., et al. “Prevention of Influenza Episodes with Colostrum Compared with Vaccination.” Clinical and Applied Thrombosis/Hemostasis 13, no. 2 (2007): 130–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1076029606295957
7. Belcaro, G., et al. “Prevention of Flu Episodes with Colostrum and Bifivir Compared with Vaccination.” Panminerva Medica 52, no. 4 (2010): 269–75.
8. Le Vere, Ali. “Profound Implications of the Virome for Human Health and Autoimmunity.” GreenMedInfo, October 3, 2019. Citing: Barton et al., Nature 447 (2007): 326–29; MacDuff et al., eLife 4 (2015): e4494; Virgin, Cell 157 (2014): 142–50; Cadwell et al., Immunity 42 (2015): 805–13. https://greenmedinfo.com/blog/profound-implications-virome-human-health-and-autoimmunity
9. Ji, Sayer. “Why Everything You Learned About Viruses Is WRONG.” GreenMedInfo, August 24, 2020. Citing: Hutchinson et al., Nature Communications 5 (2014): 4816. https://greenmedinfo.com/blog/why-only-thing-influenza-may-kill-germ-theory
10. Virgin, Herbert W. “The Virome in Mammalian Physiology and Disease.” Cell 157 (2014): 142–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2014.02.032
11. World Health Organization. “Recommended Composition of Influenza Virus Vaccines for Use in the 2026–2027 Northern Hemisphere Influenza Season.” WHO, February 27, 2026. https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/recommended-composition-of-influenza-virus-vaccines-for-use-in-the-2026-2027-northern-hemisphere-influenza-season
12. Fortune Business Insights. “Influenza Vaccine Market Size, Share & Industry Analysis.” 2024. https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/influenza-vaccine-market-101945
13. Urashima, Mitsuyoshi, et al. “Randomized Trial of Vitamin D Supplementation to Prevent Seasonal Influenza A in Schoolchildren.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 91, no. 5 (2010): 1255–60. https://doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.2009.29094
This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. It provides an evidence-based analysis of published scientific literature for educational and journalistic purposes.
Statins, Cholesterol, and the Real Cause of Heart Disease
Reproduced from original article:
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2026/02/13/statin-cholesterol-heart-disease.aspx
Analysis by A Midwestern Doctor February 13, 2026
![]()
Story at-a-glance
- Despite decades of statin use costing approximately $25 billion annually in America alone, heart disease remains the leading cause of death, suggesting the cholesterol hypothesis that drives statin prescriptions is fundamentally flawed
- Studies show that lowering cholesterol with statins does not reduce heart disease, and yet these findings are ignored while statin guidelines are created by experts paid by pharmaceutical manufacturers
- Malcolm Kendrick’s clotting model provides a superior explanation for heart disease: atherosclerotic plaques result from repeated damage to blood vessel linings which the body repairs with layers of clots
- The medical establishment dismisses widespread reports of statin injuries as “nocebo effects,” paralleling how COVID-19 vaccine injuries were dismissed as “anxiety,” despite extensive evidence corroborating the injuries
- The actual causes of heart disease — fine particulate matter from pollution and cigarettes, lead exposure, chronic stress, and endothelial damage — receive minimal research funding because effective interventions cannot be patented and sold as expensive pharmaceuticals like statins
Frequently in science, fundamental facts are altered to create a profitable industry. Recently, I showed how this occurs with blood pressure: rather than causing arterial damage, high blood pressure is a response to arterial damage that ensures damaged arteries can still deliver blood to the tissues.
In turn, rather than helping patients, aggressively lowering blood pressure can be quite harmful. In this article, I will look at the other half of the coin, statins, cholesterol, and heart disease — something that harms so many Americans, it was poignantly discussed by Comedian Jimmy Dore.
Cholesterol and Heart Disease
Frequently, when an industry harms many people, it will create a scapegoat to deflect blame. Once this happens, a variety of other sectors will jump on the bandwagon and create an unshakable societal dogma.
For example, the health of a population (or if they are being poisoned by environmental toxins) determines how easily an infectious disease can sweep through a population and who is susceptible to it, but reframing infectious diseases as a “deficiency of vaccines” it both takes the (costly) onus off the industries to clean up the society and simultaneously allows them to get rich promoting the pharmaceutical products that “manage” each epidemic and the even larger epidemic of chronic diseases caused by those vaccines (discussed in detail here).
Note: The major decline in infectious illness credited to vaccines was actually the result of improved public sanitation; when the data are examined (e.g., for smallpox) those early vaccination campaigns made outcomes worse, not better.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a debate emerged over the causes of heart disease. On one side, John Yudkin effectively argued that the sugar being added to our food by the processed food industry was the chief culprit.1 On the other side, Ancel Keys (who attacked Yudkin’s work) argued that it was due to saturated fat and cholesterol.2
Note: Leaders in the field of natural medicine have made a strong case that this spike came from the mass adoption of seed oils3 (which thanks to our unprecedented political climate is at last being discussed on the mainstream news4). Likewise, some attribute this increase to the advent of water chlorination.5
Ancel Keys won, Yudkin’s work was largely dismissed, and Keys became nutritional dogma. A large part of Key’s victory was based on his study of seven countries (Italy, Greece, Former Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Finland, America, and Japan), which showed that as saturated fat consumption increased, heart disease increased in a linear fashion.
However, this result was simply a product of the countries Keys chose (e.g., if Finland, Israel, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Sweden had been chosen, the opposite correlation would have been found).
Fortunately, it’s gradually become recognized that Keys did not accurately report his data. For example, recently an unpublished 56-month randomized study of 9,423 adults living in state mental hospitals or a nursing home (which made it possible to rigidly control their diets) that Keys directed was unearthed.6
It found that replacing half of one’s animal (saturated) fats with seed oil (e.g., corn oil) lowered their cholesterol, but for every 30 points it dropped, their risk of death increased by 22% (which roughly translates to each 1% drop in cholesterol raising the risk of death by 1%).
Note: Another (unpublished) study from the 1970s (of 458 Australians), found that partially replacing dietary saturated fat with seed oils increased the risk of dying by 17.6%.7
Likewise, recently, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world published internal sugar industry documents.8 They showed the sugar industry had used bribes to make scientists place the blame for heart disease on fat so Yudkin’s work would not threaten the sugar industry.9 Remarkably, it is now generally accepted that Yudkin was right, but nonetheless, our medical guidelines are still largely based on Key’s work.
Likewise, the need to lower cholesterol to prevent heart disease is still a dogma within cardiology,10,11,12,13,14,15 despite things like this Lancet study16 which in 1986 showed:
“During 10 years of follow-up from Dec 1, 1986 to Oct 1, 1996, a total of 642 participants died. Each 1 mmol/L increase in total cholesterol corresponded to a 15% decrease in mortality (risk ratio 0—85 [95% Cl 0·79—0·91]).”
Statins Marketing
Once a drug is identified that can “beneficially” change a number, medical practice guidelines will inevitably shift to prioritizing treating that number in more and more people. For example, this is what happened with blood pressure:

Prior to statins, it was difficult to reliably lower cholesterol, but once they were introduced, research rapidly emerged arguing for a greater and greater need to lower cholesterol (and put more people on statins).

Note: In 2008 to 2009, 12% of Americans over 40 reported taking a statin, whereas in 2018 to 2019, that figure increased to 35%,17 and Americans now spend approximately 25 billion annually on statins.18
In tandem, a cancel culture (reminiscent of what we saw with the COVID vaccines) has been created where anyone who challenges the use of Statins is immediately labeled as a “statin denier” accused of being a mass murderer, and effectively canceled. Here, dissident cardiologist Aseem Malhotra discusses the dirty parallels between these two industries with Joe Rogan:
As such, beyond doctors being forced to follow these guidelines, patients often are too. Ideological doctors will retaliate against patients who do not take statins (similar to how unvaccinated patients were reprehensibly denied essential medical care during COVID-19), employers sometimes require cholesterol numbers to meet a certain threshold for employment, and life insurance policies often penalize those with “unsafe” cholesterol numbers.

Save This Article for Later – Get the PDF Now
Statin Injuries
This status quo is inexcusable as statins have a very high rate of injury. For example, the existing studies find between a 5% to 30% rate of injuries,19 and Dr. Malhotra, having gone through all the existing evidence estimates that 20% of statin users are injured by them.
Likewise, statins are well known for having a high percentage of patients discontinue the drugs due to their side effects (e.g., one large study found 44.7% of older adults discontinue the drugs within a year of starting them,20 while another large study of adults of all ages found 47% discontinued within a year).21
Statins in turn, are linked to a large number of complications that have been well-characterized (e.g., mechanistically) and described throughout the medical literature.22,23,24,25,26,27,28 One group of side effects are those perceived by the patient (which often make them want to stop using the medications). These include:
• A high incidence of muscle pain29,30,31,32,33,34,35
• Fatigue36,37 especially with exertion and exercise38
• Muscle inflammation (whose cause remains “unknown”)39,40
• Autoimmune muscle damage41,42,43,44
• Psychiatric and neurologic issues such as depression, confusion, aggression, and memory loss45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53
• Severe irritability54
• Sleep issues55
• Musculoskeletal disorders and injuries56,57
• Sudden (sensorineural) hearing loss58
• Gastrointestinal distress59
The other group are those not overtly noticed by the patient. These include:
• Type 2 diabetes60,61,62,63,64 particularly in women65,66,67
• Cancer68,69,70,71
• Liver dysfunction and failure72,73
• Cataracts74,75
• ALS-like conditions and other central motor disorders (e.g., Parkinson’s disease and cerebellar ataxia)76,77,78,79,80
• Lupus-like syndrome81
• Susceptibility to herpes zoster (shingles)82,83,84
• Interstitial cystitis85
• Polymyalgia rheumatica86
• Kidney injury87,88
• Renal failure89
From the start, I noticed statin patients often reported numbness, muscle pain, or cognitive issues after starting these drugs, which resolved once they stopped. When this was brought up with their doctors, the response was often hostile, with doctors insisting statins couldn’t be the cause, (citing their own experience of never having seen this happen to a patient) or claiming the patient needed to continue the medication regardless to avoid a heart attack.
In turn, as the years went by, I saw increasingly elaborate excuses being created to protect the statins from an ever-increasing awareness of their dangers. A common one was the “nocebo effect” — the idea that negative expectations caused the reported symptoms. For example, I lost count of how many doctors I knew who cited this 2016 study90 when patients stated they had been injured.
The nocebo effect is the opposite of the placebo effect. While the placebo effect occurs when a person experiences positive outcomes from a treatment because they believe it will help, the nocebo effect happens when negative outcomes arise simply because a person expects harm from a treatment, even if the treatment itself is harmless or ineffective.
This theory was used to dismiss patients’ experiences despite the fact that many were unaware of possible side effects until they occurred and then looked them up.
If you take this story and replace “statin” with COVID-19 vaccines, you will see it is essentially what everyone has experienced over the last four years (e.g., I lost count of how many times vaccine myocarditis was diagnosed as “anxiety”).
Note: Two adverse event reporting systems exist for adverse reactions to pharmaceuticals, MedWatch91 and FAERS.92 Like VAERS, they suffer from severe underreporting (it is estimated only 1% to 10% of adverse events are reported to them), but nonetheless, thousands of (ignored) reports can be found there of the common injuries which result from statins.93
‘Cholesterol’ Plaques
Many medical beliefs emerge from the pharmaceutical marketing departments. For example, the widespread belief that depression is due to a “chemical imbalance” is actually false and never had any evidence supporting it.
Likewise, they made us believe heart disease results from fat clogging the arteries, much like it does for a drain pipe, as this metaphor is easy for everyone to visualize and immediately elicits a sense of disgust.

However, given that there is no link between cholesterol and heart disease, is it necessarily true? Malcolm Kendrick MD, in turn, discovered that the well-known risk factors for heart disease do not corroborate the standard model.94 For example, to calculate the risk of heart disease, England combines the adjustable risks for heart disease (e.g., age) with the conditions commonly associated with causing heart disease.95

Likewise, in a 2017 study, the records of 378,256 English patients were analyzed by an AI system to identify which characteristics were associated with the highest risk of a cardiovascular event over the next 10 years. The ten greatest risk factors (in order) were:96

From this, Kendrick concluded that the common thread was that many of these (e.g., lupus or cortisol) are associated with damage to blood vessels and impaired microcirculation (a consequence of such damage) rather than with cholesterol.97
Presently, cardiology believes cholesterol somehow gets into a blood vessel and then damages it (leaving an atherosclerotic plaque). Kendrick saw that a forgotten model (that the medical profession largely buried) provides a much better explanation of the causes of heart disease:
1.Blood vessels get damaged.
2.The body repairs the damage with cholesterol containing clots.
3.As clots heal, they are pulled inside the blood vessel wall, and a new layer of endothelium (blood vessel lining) grows over them.
4.As this occurs multiple times in the same area, the damage (plaques) under the blood vessel becomes more abnormal.

Some of the key points of evidence he uses to support this argument are:98
• Most of the risk factors for heart disease overlap with things that would be expected to damage the blood vessel lining (endothelium).
• Plaques tend to form at arterial branch (junction) points, which are the parts of the artery that are subjected to the greatest shear stress.99
• When you examine the components of a plaque, they are found to contain the same debris found in blood clots.100,101,102
• There is no established mechanism for how cholesterol from the bloodstream can get under the endothelium. However, red blood cells (which play a key role in forming clots103) contain a large amount of cholesterol (50% of the total amount in the bloodstream104), and hence will bring it into clots that form.
• Plaques contain cholesterol crystals. These crystals can form only from free cholesterol,105 which is present in red blood cells, but not from the “bad” cholesterol that circulates in the bloodstream (contained within lipoproteins). Likewise, much of the cholesterol found in atherosclerotic plaques is free cholesterol.106
• The remnants of lipoproteins that are found in plaques are not cholesterol lipoproteins, but rather lipoprotein A, something the body uses to repair damage to the arterial walls.107 This is supported by the fact elevated blood lipoprotein A levels are associated with increased lipoprotein remnants in plaques108 and that the specific marker of lipoprotein A is found to concentrate in atherosclerotic plaques.109
Lipoprotein A in turn is problematic because while it can patch and repair arterial damage, it also makes clots resistant to subsequent degradation, guaranteeing that they will eventually be pulled under the endothelium and transformed into an atherosclerotic plaque (which may in turn explain why elevated lipoprotein A levels are associated with a three-fold increase in the risk of a heart attack or stroke110).
In short, a strong case can be made that our entire heart disease model rests on a variety of correlations that were erroneously assumed to demonstrate causation. Sadly, while the “correlation is not causation” mantra is frequently used to dismiss anything that challenges the orthodoxy, you will frequently find overtly false correlations that support the medical industry’s bottom line being treated as unquestionable dogmas.
Note: One of the best examples is the widespread belief vaccines eliminated infectious disease, even though no correlation exists (whereas public sanitation directly correlates with the elimination of infectious diseases).

The Causes and Treatments of Heart Disease
Kendrick’s model essentially argues the following:
• Most cardiovascular disease results from the blood vessel lining becoming damaged (due to the atherosclerotic lesions) and losing the ability to perform the normal functions (e.g., nitric oxide secretion) that allow it to protect the circulation.
• Inflammation and periods of prolonged and severe stress (e.g., from mental illness, cigarettes, or extreme social oppression) frequently damage the endothelium and hence contribute to heart disease.
• Heart attacks are due to blood clots (which frequently are a result of damaged endothelium) interrupting a critical blood supply to the heart.
Remarkably, most of Kendrick’s model is in complete agreement with the conventional cardiovascular disease paradigm, he just emphasizes stress and inflammation rather than cholesterol and prioritizes treating the functional impairments of the blood vessels (e.g., reduced nitric oxide synthesis).
Note: Kendrick argues the small benefits experienced from statins are likely due to the drugs also having anti-inflammatory effects111 and increasing endothelial nitric oxide.112
Similarly, smoking is well recognized to cause heart disease because it damages the blood vessels (e.g., by creating plaques and impairing their ability to make nitric oxide113), but we rarely ask why or note that similar damage has been repeatedly demonstrated with fine particulates from coal mines,114 breathing air in crowded cities,115 cooking with a wood burning stove116 or being exposed to wildfire smoke.117
Likewise, lead is quite damaging to the endothelium,118,119 rapidly enters the bloodstream once inhaled,120 and a strong correlation exists between lead use in gasoline and heart disease in America.121
Note: It’s estimated that around 400,000 deaths each year in America are due to lead exposure122 and in a study of 868 men, it was observed that high levels of lead exposure (assessed by its presence in the bones) increased their risk of dying by over 700%,123 particularly since lead returns to the bloodstream as aging bones break down.
Sadly, as you cannot sell drugs for any of these causes of heart disease, they rarely get mentioned, and instead almost all of the research and discussions on heart disease are directed at cholesterol.
Conclusion
Kendrick presciently argued that because of how much money has been invested in establishing the cholesterol hypothesis, the industry will never let it go. This, in short, accounts for why we continue to spend billions each on these drugs despite their benefit being almost nonexistent (e.g., unbiased research shows taking statins for five years, on average, only extends life by 3 to 4 days124 — and only in men)125 and their harms being common and immense.
Fortunately, we have at last reached a point where real progress is being made. For example, despite immense institutional pushback, MAHA recently updated the Federal Dietary Guidelines to at last correct the 50-year-mistake created by Key’s doctored data and acknowledge the importance of consuming healthy animal fats.

The insatiable greed which birthed the unconscionable COVID vaccines and their mandates has at last opened the public’s eyes to the marketing myths the pharmaceutical industry has bombarded us from birth with so we perpetually consume their products. Because of that, we at last have a once in a lifetime opportunity to correct many of these disastrous policies, and as MAHA’s recent revision of the food pyramid shows (which I never imagined would occur), change is actually happening.
Unfortunately, decades of other disastrous health policies also need to be fixed, and for that to happen, it is essential we bring awareness to each of them. I sincerely thank each of you for allowing me to share the truth about statins with you; so many people I know have been hurt by them, and with your help, we can at last end this.
Author’s Note: This is an abridged version of a longer article about the great cholesterol scam which goes into greater detail on the dangers of statins, the actual causes of heart disease, and the natural ways to safely heal the arterial system and prevent heart disease. That article and its additional references can be read here.
A Note from Dr. Mercola About the Author
A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician from the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate their exceptional insight on a wide range of topics and I’m grateful to share them. I also respect AMD’s desire to remain anonymous since AMD is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD’s work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.
What Makes All Vaccines So Dangerous?
Reproduced from original article:
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2026/01/09/zeta-potential-vaccine-injuries-blood-sludging.aspx
Analysis by A Midwestern Doctor January 09, 2026

Story at-a-glance
- Vaccines often cause various side effects, making it hard to identify common causes — many of which overlap with other mysterious and “incurable” ailments
- Neurologist Andrew Moulden discovered that vaccines frequently trigger microstrokes, which can lead to a myriad of acute and chronic diseases
- Forgotten research from the 1960s shows that blood cell clumping is a root cause of many diseases — a belief also shared by Chinese Medicine
- Colloidal chemistry and zeta potential science reveal that positive charges around blood cells cause clumping. Agents with concentrated positive charges, such as aluminum and the COVID spike protein, are especially problematic
- Improving the physiologic zeta potential benefits a wide range of acute and chronic illnesses. A strong case can also be made that many conventional and holistic therapies work in part by enhancing zeta potential
Many medical problems stem from the diagnostic approach of physicians, especially with complex illnesses, which are often misdiagnosed and lead to ongoing patient struggles.
Complex conditions can present with varied symptoms across patients and resemble other illnesses (e.g., fibromyalgia vs. chronic fatigue syndrome). In turn, poorly trained physicians often default to psychiatric explanations, overlooking the actual causes.
As vaccine injuries have a wide range of symptoms, they have hence confused doctors for over 200 years (with many doctors in the past labeling them as “encephalitis”). Presently, I believe three main mechanisms underlie the myriad of chronic illnesses including vaccine injury:
• Immune dysfunction — Vaccines frequently cause chronic autoimmune disorders and varying degrees of immune suppression.
• Impaired circulation — Vaccines can impair fluid circulation by affecting the body’s zeta potential. This causes fluid clumping (i.e., micro blood clots and blood thickening) and obstructs blood flow in capillaries. Likewise, other factors can as well, and I believe one of the primary issues with COVID-19 and vaccine spike protein is that it carries a strong positive charge density, which triggers clumping in fluids throughout the body (hence why the vaccine became known as the “clot shot”).
• Cell danger response — When shocked, such as from a toxin or loss of blood flow, cells can enter a primitive state under threat, stopping normal mitochondrial function and creating inflammation. This temporary state can become chronic, underlying many severe conditions (particularly those which worsen rather than improve with treatment).
Treating this response has resolved conditions linked to vaccination, like autism, and, in complex illnesses, restoring health often requires first addressing the underlying cause of a patient’s illness and then resolving the cell danger response it triggers.
Note: While not the most potent tool for addressing each of these root cause illnesses, DMSO stands out for its broad therapeutic activity, which allows it to address all three.
This, I believe, accounts for why thousands of readers here have reported it was able to cure a myriad of seeming unrelated illnesses which did not respond to other therapies, but likewise why a fraction of people with those illnesses which typically responded to DMSO did not have a disease resolution from DMSO alone (as they required a stronger therapy to target the root cause of their illness).
While I always consider all three of these factors, I’ve long placed particular weight on circulatory obstructions, and I’ve long believed that patient outcomes would significantly improve if the medical system recognized and prioritized the zeta potential.
Andrew Moulden
Andrew Moulden was a Canadian neuroscientist and doctor specializing in neuropsychiatry. During his clinical training, he noticed that young children exhibited subtle neurological signs of stroke that his colleagues missed. Over time, he found these strokes often occurred soon after vaccination and could lead to severe neurological disorders like autism.
Note: Vaccine injury reports dating back to the early 1800s contain the same signs Moulden observed.
Moulden realized that the subtle stroke signs doctors look for in adults should also be assessed in children. Because these strokes in infants are often missed, many conditions are misdiagnosed or attributed to unknown causes. A major scientific challenge is making invisible issues visible. However, in neurology, disruptions in brain function, often due to impaired blood flow, can reveal stroke locations through careful physical examination.
Moulden found that cranial nerves in the brainstem, particularly in watershed areas with less redundant blood supply, were vulnerable to these strokes. Those strokes, caused by impaired blood flow, often due to increased blood thickness, were missed in infants, leading to conditions misdiagnosed or attributed to “unknown” causes. Key cranial nerves indicating vaccine-caused microstrokes (due to their blood supply) include:
• Cranial Nerve VI — Controls eye movement; damage causes inward eye resting or jerky side-to-side movement.1

Note: We’ve found CN VI is the nerve most frequently affected by COVID-19 injuries and I’ve lost count of how many people I know who developed subtle abnormalities in it after vaccinating.
• Cranial Nerve VII2 — Controls facial muscles; damage causes Bell’s Palsy,3 facial drooping, or asymmetry (e.g., this appeared to have happened to Justin Bieber during the COVID-19 vaccine campaign).

• Cranial Nerve IV — Levels eyes; damage causes head tilting to compensate for uneven eye height.4

Note: Often, you will see multiple cranial nerve issues on the same face (which suggests more parts of the brain lost their blood supply and hence that deeper neurological damage is also present). For example, cranial nerve deficits have long been observed after vaccine injuries and in autistic children.
Consider the case below of triplets who all received a hot pneumococcal vaccine,5,6 and in a few hours all had their cranial nerves stop functioning after which they rapidly became severely and permanently autistic — making it nearly irrefutable that this process caused their autism.
Once you know how to look for these symptoms (e.g., a loss of smooth eye motion), they are very easy to spot, and you will gradually become aware of how far-reaching the neurological damage resulting from vaccination can be (since any part of the brain can be affected). For example, these were two similar pictures readers sent in of their children who became severely disabled after vaccination.


Note: While cranial nerve issues are easiest to detect through observed motion, as the above pictures show, some of them can also be seen in static images. Remarkably, if you look at much older photos, facial asymmetries were much rarer. These pictures, for example, were collected by Forest Maready and mirror what I’ve seen (e.g., by looking at the walls of medical school class portraits and noticing how faces changed over the decades).7



Note: Decades of suppressed evidence link vaccines to sudden infant deaths. Moulden observed inward eye deviation before death and proposed vaccine-induced microstrokes affecting the CN VI nucleus disrupt the brain’s nearby respiratory center. Subsequent ICU studies show vulnerable infants can experience post-vaccination breathing cessation — survivable if monitored, fatal if unnoticed.”
Moulden’s work also suggested strokes were occurring in other watershed areas of the body, such as internal organs and speech centers. Evidence included:
• Autopsy studies show strokes in the internal organs of children with congenital rubella.
• Similar disease processes in teenagers and adults after HPV or anthrax vaccination (two particularly harmful vaccines).
• One of the most striking examples was the children of soldiers who received the anthrax vaccine and were born without limbs8 (thalidomide was also notorious for doing this by blocking the formation of new blood vessels9).

• Neurodegenerative processes in the elderly and psychiatric disorders being linked to detectable cranial nerve damage (something many of us also tragically witnessed after COVID vaccination).
Note: A major issue in conventional medicine is the failure to recognize that neurological damage can lead to psychiatric issues. Consequently, emotional changes in patients with nervous system injuries are often misattributed as the cause rather than a symptom of their illness.
Moulden thus began exploring which universal response was causing these microstrokes and how they could be treated. From this, he produced three videos describing the problem (which can be viewed here). Unfortunately, shortly before releasing a second series on the solutions for these injuries, he died under suspicious circumstances. However, we now have many clues as to what Moulden discovered.
Blood Sludging
In the medical world, a long-standing puzzle revolves around how small insults to the body can lead to widespread illness or even death. One key factor in this equation is blood sludging, a phenomenon observed for centuries where the blood clumps together and thickens under certain disease conditions. Melvin Knisely, Ph.D., in the mid-20th century made critical discoveries about this phenomenon.10
Knisely’s research, particularly with malaria-infected monkeys, revealed that certain severe illnesses could trigger significant blood sludging, starting in small vessels and eventually spreading to larger ones, which was typically fatal (unless prevented with the anticoagulant heparin).11 This thickening of blood can be likened to traffic jams, disrupting the body’s natural blood flow, and eventually leading to gridlock (death).
Additionally, he discovered that this systemic sludging could be seen externally through the eyes, providing a noninvasive way to assess this process throughout the body.

From this, Knisely discovered the greatest blood sludging was seen in critically ill hospital patients — something Pierre Kory, MD, also observed with point-of-care ultrasound, as once micro clots within the IVC became echogenic (visible), patients died shortly after.12 Likewise, multiple ultrasound researchers’ results showed blood sludging within patients.13,14
After learning of this, we attempted to replicate Knisely’s microscope and have been able to see the same sludging he observed 80 years ago in his patients. This video, for example, was taken from the eyes of a COVID-19 vaccine-injured patient:
Video Link
Likewise, this concept exists in other medical systems. Chinese Medicine, for example, ever since the (zeta potential-obstructing) smallpox vaccine was released, has come to view blood stasis as a primary cause of illness, and much of their blood stasis framework directly overlaps with the blood sludging model.
Note: Blood sludging was frequently observed in burns (which I believe explains why zeta potential restoring therapies and DMSO are so helpful for burns).

Save This Article for Later – Get the PDF Now
Zeta Potential
When particles are placed in water, one of three things can happen:
• They don’t mix (e.g., oil floats to the top, sand sinks to the bottom).
• They dissolve (e.g., salt).
• They form a colloidal suspension (e.g., milk) in which each particle is repelled from the other and evenly distributed.
In the case of colloidal suspensions, their stability is determined by what causes their particles to come together (gravity separating things by weight, the inherent molecular attraction between objects), and what pushes them apart.15

The first method (zeta potential alteration) refers to the difference in charge between the water ions (which coat the colloidal particles) and the surrounding water.

Because electrical repulsion due to zeta potential is easier to adjust externally, it is typically the factor focused on when trying to improve colloidal dispersion (e.g., to eliminate blood sludging).
One of the most effective agents for collapsing zeta potential is aluminum (which explains why it’s frequently used to separate organic matter from water in sewage plants or to clot bleeding wounds). Moulden thus concluded that aluminum’s widespread use in vaccines likely accounted for many of their side effects. Similarly, consider the effect the COVID-19 vaccine’s spike protein has on the blood.16

The key thing to understand about zeta potential is that when its repulsion no longer suffices to overcome the attractive forces in a colloidal system, it will clump together, initially in small clumps (termed agglomerations), and then as the zeta potential worsens, form larger clumps.
Note: The normal zeta potential of a red blood cell is around -15.7 millivolts.17 Additionally, as red blood cells age, they lose their negatively charged sialic acid, which worsens their zeta potential.18

Thomas Riddick, a pioneer in this field, discovered that the body maintains blood zeta potential near the agglomeration threshold so it can clot in case of bleeding.19 With further study, Riddick found the degree of blood sludging or loss of physiologic zeta potential significantly varied from person to person (due to modern life disrupting it), and Knisely’s grading scale for blood flow in the eyes could be used to accurately predict who was at risk of an arrhythmia, a stroke, or a fatal heart attack.20
Most importantly, Riddick discovered that once the colloidal dispersion of the blood was fixed, heart arrhythmias normalized, and circulatory problems greatly improved.
Note: Many readers have shared with me that restoring their zeta potential improved their atrial fibrillation.
Riddick gradually discovered blood sludging was widespread in America and eventually concluded our food and water supply were contaminated with positive ions that were destructive to zeta potential. He attributed this to:
• Potassium is being replaced by sodium in processed foods
• Aluminum is being used in municipal water systems
• Aluminum kitchenware
• Aluminum is being added to many foods (e.g., most salt has aluminum added to keep it from caking)
• Many medications (e.g., antacids) are full of aluminum and other problematic metals
• Many foods are stored in metal cans (acidic foods leach these metals)
Note: The first head of the FDA fought to stop aluminum from entering general use but was muscled out by industry.21
Riddick also performed experiments that showed consuming water stored in metallic aluminum significantly impaired microcirculation. Sadly, we are now witnessing an increasing trend of storing water in aluminum cans (but fortunately, a few zeta-potential restoring bottled water brands still exist — which a few readers have shared dramatically improved their health, illustrating how sensitive some individuals can be to minor improvements in zeta potential).
Lastly, in addition to these, I believe EMFs, certain chronic infections, and humanity’s lack of electrical grounding to the Earth are significantly impairing humanity’s zeta potential.22 Likewise, I believe Riddick’s model (like many preliminary ones) was incomplete as he never accounted for the effect mass vaccination was having on zeta potential.
Note: I believe Knisely’s observations of profound blood sludging in the eyes of severely ill hospital patients account for why IV saline (which improves zeta potential) so frequently benefits people who are sick enough to require hospitalization. Likewise, Knisely also observed that certain agents, such as hydroxychloroquine, reversed blood sludging.
This led him to suspect a significant degree of the anti-malarial benefit of hydroxychloroquine actually arose from it reducing blood sludging; I also suspect this property may account for hydroxychloroquine’s value in treating autoimmune conditions and COVID-19 (both conditions linked to poor zeta potential).
Vaccines, Microbes, and Zeta Potential
Riddick also concluded that bacterial metabolism of proteins lowers their zeta potential by decarboxylating them.
Many sewage treatment systems (e.g., septic tanks) work under this principle, as over time, decarboxylation (which removes negative charges) destroys the colloidal stability of the organic matter suspended in wastewater, causing it to sludge at the bottom where it can later be removed and disposed of (in many cases unfortunately ending up in our soil as a “fertilizer” — which creates a host of subsequent issues).
Riddick next assessed how zeta potential changed in humans during acute infections. Much like Knisely had observed in the eyes of his acutely ill patients, Riddick consistently observed a decrease in physiologic zeta potential there during an infectious condition.
These observations were important because they provided a means to explain why the elderly (who cannot tolerate a further drop in their zeta potential without passing into the agglomeration threshold) are so much more vulnerable to infections like influenza (rather than simply feeling crummy from an unpleasant but manageable increase in fluid stagnation).
Sadly, it also likely explains their greater susceptibility to vaccine injuries (e.g., I’ve admitted a few patients to the hospital who suffered a classic zeta-potential collapse from a pneumococcal vaccine and readers here have shared a few similar examples).
Lastly, many microbes carry positive charges, which allow them to adhere to the negatively charged surfaces of the body. These hence cause them to disrupt zeta potential once they’ve sufficiently reproduced in the body.
This is a major problem in Lyme disease and chronic mold toxicity, which in part explains why therapies for those diseases often fail unless something (e.g., treating zeta potential) is also done to address the fluid stagnation they create (particularly within the lymphatics, which is required to drain the released toxins so herxheimer reactions do not occur). Fortunately, there are many ways to address this.
Ozone, for instance, oxidizes those charges, and I believe this accounts for the dramatic improvements sometimes observed after one receives an oxidative therapy.
Similarly, a 2022 paper that showed the spike protein directly impaired blood cell zeta potential also found that ivermectin dispersed blood cells, in which the spike protein had clumped together (which may explain the instantaneous normalization of vital signs sometimes seen after ivermectin is given to severely ill hospital patients).23
Protein Misfolding
Since folded proteins are essentially colloidal suspensions, ions that disrupt zeta potential can also cause protein misfolding and denaturing (something that also happens to egg whites when they are heated in a pan). I believe this is a key reason why the plaques found in Alzheimer’s disease (which are misfolded proteins) are found to contain aluminum.24
Likewise, the COVID spike protein (produced by the vaccines) has been linked to protein misfolding diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, amyloidosis, and unusual fibrous (amyloid) clots embalmers have found within the vaccinated, which appear to result from misfolded clotting proteins the body can’t break down.25
Note: I have now received reports of those conditions (including CJD) responding to DMSO.
Lastly, it is critical to recognize that this zeta potential applies to many fluids besides blood, and I believe its ability to alter lymphatic and cerebrospinal fluid circulation plays a major role in why:
• Zeta potential regimens can eliminate toxins such as neurodegenerative protein deposits and improve cognition.
• Chinese medicine attributes blood stasis to autoimmunity, as congested lymph fluid creates inflammation.
Likewise, other critical properties for health (e.g., sufficient water within the body existing in a negatively-charged liquid crystalline state) also go hand-in-hand with the existing physiologic zeta potential.
Conclusion
Healthy fluid circulation is essential for health, and the zeta potential concept begins to explain why so many different conditions can lead to similar symptomatology. In the case of vaccines, this model explains why:
• Vaccines consistently cause harm.
• There is so much variability in vaccine injuries.
• Vaccine damage is cumulative, as existing impairment of the microcirculation (and other fluid circulations) will progressively worsen with each successive vaccine.
• Many infectious diseases can sometimes cause similar (but not as severe) injuries as vaccines.
Likewise, it’s critical to recognize that less severe impairments of zeta potential can also have significant physiologic consequences, and that a strong argument exists many of the consequences of aging (e.g., cognitive impairment and increased frailty) ultimately result from increasing disruption to the physiologic zeta potential as aging kidneys lose the ability to selectively excrete problematic ions (which is why longevity doctors had so much success averting cognitive decline with simple zeta potential regimens).
The zeta potential concept profoundly changed my medical practice, and I now believe that many effective holistic therapies work in part because they can restore physiologic zeta potential.
Once you know to look for it, it is truly eye opening how many different illnesses result from fluid stagnation within the body and how much hospital care could be improved by monitoring for zeta potential shifts.
Author’s Note: This is an abridged version of a longer article that discusses the topics mentioned here in more detail. That article, along with additional links and references, can be read here. Additionally, a companion article on how to restore the physiologic zeta potential can be read here. Finally, a companion article discussing how DMSO can be used to treat a wide range of neurological disorders, including brain injuries, paralysis and dementia can be read here.
A Note from Dr. Mercola About the Author
A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician from the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate AMD’s exceptional insight on a wide range of topics and am grateful to share it. I also respect AMD’s desire to remain anonymous since AMD is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD’s work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.
- 1 Wikipedia, Abducens nerve, Accessed December 2025
- 2 Wikipedia, Facial nerve, Accessed December 2025
- 3 Wikipedia, Bell’s palsy, Accessed December 2025
- 4 Wikipedia, Trochlear nerve, Accessed December 2025
- 5 A Midwestern Doctor, July 12, 2024
- 6 @cmccaff542, x.com, October 13, 2025
- 7 Forrest Maready, January 18, 2017
- 8 Children’s Health Defense, November 9, 2020
- 9 Wikipedia, Thalidomide, Accessed December 2025
- 10 Wikipedia, Melvin Henry Knisely, Accessed December 2025
- 11 Angiology. 1964 Sep:15:411-6
- 12 Wikipedia, Inferior vena cava, Accessed December 2025
- 13 Science, 24 Dec 1982,Vol. 218, Issue 4579, pp. 1321-1323
- 14 Am Heart J. 1992 Oct;124(4):961-5
- 15 Wikipedia, Van der Waals force, Accessed December 2025
- 16 IJVTPR, Vol. 2 No. 2 (2022): COVID Aftermath
- 17 Exp Parasitol. 2012 Mar 21;131(2):245-251
- 18 Biologia 68, 762-765 (2013)
- 19, 21 American Water Works Association, 53(8), 1007-1030
- 20 A Midwestern Doctor, May 16, 2023
- 22 Earthing.com, Accessed December 2025
- 23 Int J Mol Sci. 2022 Dec 7;23(24):15480
- 24 J Alzheimers Dis. 2011;23(4):567-98
- 25 Biosci Rep. 2021 Aug 27;41(8):BSR20210611
The American Academy of Pediatrics — Mining Children for Profit
Reproduced from original article:
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2025/09/30/aap-mining-children-for-profit.aspx
Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola September 30, 2025

Story at-a-glance
- The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is heavily funded by pharmaceutical companies, influencing policies that promote more medical interventions for children while reducing parental control
- The AAP’s top priority is to eliminate parental authority over childhood vaccination decisions, replacing it with state or provider control
- Major child health issues like rising obesity, increasing autism rates, and chronic illness prevention are absent from the AAP’s top 10 priorities
- The AAP uses rare measles outbreaks to justify removing personal and religious vaccine exemptions, despite measles mortality already being near zero before mass vaccination began
- Ignoring preventive strategies, the AAP’s approach sets children up for lifelong dependence on pharmaceutical products rather than building lasting health
In North America, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) holds enormous influence over how children’s medical care is shaped. Its public positions and policy priorities steer the direction of pediatric practice, often setting the tone for what’s considered standard care. What’s less visible is how those priorities are formed, and how the balance between child health, industry interests, and parental authority is struck.
Over the past several decades, the health landscape for children has shifted dramatically, with chronic illness becoming far more common. Yet the way the AAP addresses these changes reveals as much about its focus as it does about what it leaves out. By examining what the organization elevates — and what it avoids — it becomes clear how policy direction affects the day-to-day decisions parents face.
This isn’t just about medical recommendations; it’s about the framework that decides whether prevention, treatment, or industry-driven measures take center stage. The details of the AAP’s own published priorities show where the balance tips, and why the very first item on their list directly impacts your ability to make informed choices for your child.
AAP’s Priorities Reveal a Profound Shift Away from Parental Rights
The AAP is structured to prioritize its members’ income over children’s well-being, according to David Bell, senior scholar at Brownstone Institute and a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO).1 The published article by the Brownstone Institute outlines how the AAP’s top priority is to remove parents from decision-making about whether their children receive certain medical procedures, especially vaccinations.
With 67,000 members in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, the AAP’s influence is enormous. Its funding from pharmaceutical companies like Moderna, Merck, Sanofi, and GlaxoSmithKline creates a direct financial link between the organization’s policy positions and industry profit.
• The organization’s published priorities reveal striking omissions that directly affect children’s health outcomes — Among its top 10 goals, the AAP does not address three of the most urgent and widely discussed issues affecting children today: increasing obesity, the autism epidemic, and the overall rise in chronic illness.
While these problems are acknowledged elsewhere by the AAP, the focus is on managing — not preventing — them. This means that as a parent, you’re unlikely to see the organization push for real, root-cause solutions that would improve your child’s long-term health.
• Its strategy aligns with creating lifelong pharmaceutical customers rather than fostering lifelong health — The article points out that promoting chronic illness in children nearly guarantees those conditions will persist into adulthood, ensuring ongoing revenue for drug manufacturers. This isn’t simply a byproduct of flawed policy — it’s an outcome that benefits the same corporations funding the AAP.
• The AAP’s stance on bodily autonomy erodes long-standing human rights norms — The group operates on the view that personal medical decisions should be subordinate to state requirements or a doctor’s orders, even when those orders involve products the doctor is financially incentivized to promote.
This approach mirrors early 20th-century technocracy and medical authoritarianism, where “experts” made health care decisions without patient consent. For you, this translates into diminished control over your child’s body and health choices.
• Their vaccine policies ignore the reality of already low measles mortality before mass vaccination began — In the U.S. and other wealthy nations, nearly all measles-related deaths had already ended before the introduction of mass vaccination programs. Improved nutrition, especially in micronutrients, was likely the key factor. This is important context, because it challenges the AAP’s justification for overriding parental choice based on rare outbreaks.
Financial Influence Drives Pediatric Policy Choices
When an organization receives funding from companies whose business model depends on high product use, the policies it produces will often reflect those companies’ commercial priorities. In this case, it means promoting more pharmaceutical interventions for children, removing parental veto power, and ignoring preventive health strategies that would reduce dependency on medical products.
• AAP uses selective statistics to justify eliminating exemptions — Dr. Jesse Hackell, chair of the AAP’s Committee on Pediatric Workforce, cited the deaths of two children in recent years from measles to argue for removing personal choice.
The article stresses that claiming vaccines are “safe” without acknowledging that they carry risks and cause adverse effects is “a stupid claim in medicine and biology.” For you as a parent, this means policy decisions are being made using emotionally charged but statistically rare events, rather than a balanced risk-benefit analysis.
• Religious and cultural objections to certain vaccines are dismissed outright — Many parents have concerns about vaccines developed using cells from induced abortions, yet the AAP officially supports overriding these objections. This disregard for moral or cultural beliefs signals that your deeply held values could be deemed irrelevant in decisions about your child’s care.
• The broader impact is a public health model that treats children as a market, not individuals — The AAP’s actions align less with science-based health care and more with marketing strategies for an expanding pediatric pharmaceutical market. If these priorities succeed, future generations of children will grow up in an environment where medical compliance is enforced, personal choice is diminished, and preventive care is sidelined.
• AAP’s published priorities are a direct signal of where pediatric care is headed — Unless challenged, these policies could mean fewer rights for parents, greater exposure of children to medical interventions without your consent, and an ongoing neglect of prevention-focused health care. Understanding this shift is the first step in protecting your ability to make informed decisions for your child’s long-term well-being.

Save This Article for Later – Get the PDF Now
Practical Steps to Protect Your Child’s Health and Your Right to Decide
When an influential organization pushes policies that remove your voice from your child’s health care, the most effective way to respond is by addressing the root of the problem — both the health risks to your child and the erosion of your authority as a parent. Your goal is twofold: keep your child healthy so they’re less likely to need chronic medical interventions, and take deliberate steps to protect your ability to make informed decisions about their care.
1. Build your child’s health from the inside out — Focus on a diet and lifestyle that supports strong immunity and balanced development. Limit ultraprocessed foods, eliminate vegetable oils, and replace them with nutrient-rich fats like tallow, ghee, or grass fed butter.
Prioritize whole fruits, root vegetables, and quality proteins such as grass fed beef and pastured eggs. A strong nutritional foundation, along with regular daily movement, sound sleep, and stress management, reduces the likelihood your child will need long-term pharmaceutical treatments.
2. Stay informed about medical products and policies — Read the actual policy statements from organizations like the AAP rather than relying on summaries in the media. If you’re a parent who wants full knowledge of what’s being recommended for your child, you need to know exactly what is on the priority list — and what’s missing. Understanding the gaps, such as ignoring obesity or autism prevention, helps you spot when an agenda is driven by profit instead of health.
3. Document your decisions and communicate them clearly — Keep written records of your preferences regarding your child’s care, including your stance on specific medical interventions. If you’re enrolling your child in school or a new activity, provide those documents in advance. This ensures there is no confusion about your expectations and puts your position on record before issues arise.
4. Address chronic illness risks early and naturally — If your child is showing signs of early health problems — such as excess weight gain, fatigue, or developmental concerns — intervene now with lifestyle changes. Increase daily activity, ensure regular outdoor time for sun exposure, and create a consistent sleep routine. By preventing or reversing early issues without medicalizing them, you reduce the likelihood of your child becoming dependent on ongoing drug-based treatments.
5. Engage in local and state-level advocacy — Join parent groups or community organizations that support medical freedom and parental rights. If you’re concerned about policies being pushed at the legislative level, showing up at school board meetings or contacting lawmakers directly is one of the most effective ways to make your voice heard. Organized, informed parents are far more difficult for institutions to ignore.
FAQs About the AAP
Q: What is the main concern with the AAP?
A: The AAP has shifted its focus away from prevention and root-cause solutions for children’s health, prioritizing policies that remove parental authority over medical decisions — especially vaccinations — while receiving funding from major pharmaceutical companies.
Q: Why does the AAP’s funding matter for parents?
A: When an organization is funded by companies that profit from more medical interventions, its policy positions often align with increasing the use of those products. This means parents are more likely to face pressure to comply with recommendations that benefit industry rather than focusing on long-term health outcomes for their children.
Q: What important child health issues are missing from the AAP’s top priorities?
A: The AAP’s published priority list leaves out major public health concerns like rising childhood obesity, increasing autism rates, and the broader epidemic of chronic illness. These omissions suggest a lack of interest in prevention-focused health care strategies.
Q: How does the AAP justify removing parental choice on vaccines?
A: The AAP cites rare measles outbreaks and isolated cases of death to argue for eliminating personal, cultural, or religious exemptions, despite the fact that measles mortality in the U.S. had already dropped to near zero before mass vaccination programs began.
Q: What can parents do to protect their rights and their children’s health?
A: Parents can strengthen their child’s health through nutrition and lifestyle choices, stay informed on medical policies, document care preferences, address health risks early with natural approaches, and participate in local or state advocacy to protect medical decision-making authority.
Simply Removing Vaccine Mandates Without Optimal Nutritional Immunity May Do More Harm to the MAHA Movement
| Reproduced from original OMNS article (OrthoMolecular News Service): http://orthomolecular.org/ Subscribe to the free Orthomolecular Newsletter: http://orthomolecular.org/subscribe.html Go to the OMNS Archive: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/index.shtml Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, September 22, 2025 By Richard Z. Cheng, M.D., Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief Florida’s recent elimination of school vaccine mandates has polarized the nation. For some, this is a long-awaited victory for personal freedom. For others, it is a reckless gamble that will unleash epidemics of preventable diseases. From the perspective of Orthomolecular Medicine (OM), canceling mandates is the right step forward for freedom and medical choice. But freedom without foundation is fragility. To truly succeed, removing mandates must be paired with building strong nutritional immunity. Otherwise, we risk not only health setbacks but also undermining the credibility and momentum of the MAHA movement (Make America Healthy Again). MAHA’s Promise – and Its ResponsibilityMAHA represents a historic opportunity: to reclaim health from the pharmaceutical establishment and restore it to the people. Rejecting coercive mandates affirms that health decisions belong to individuals and families, not bureaucracies. But if the movement is perceived only as “anti-vaccine,”it risks public backlash. Outbreaks of measles, pertussis, or other diseases in poorly nourished, immune-fragile populations would hand the media and medical establishment their favorite headline: “MAHA endangers lives.“This would discredit reform and stall momentum for decades. Nutritional Immunity: The Stronger ShieldOrthomolecular medicine has long emphasized the true foundation of health: biochemical sufficiency.
Without this “nutritional immunity,”America is like an army without armor – vulnerable, regardless of vaccine policy. Freedom + Nutritional Immunity = ResilienceCanceling vaccine mandates is a necessary step to restore freedom. But true freedom is not only the absence of coercion – it is the presence of resilience.
The Orthomolecular Path ForwardFor MAHA to succeed, it must champion freedom plus resilience:
ConclusionThe real choice is not mandates versus no mandates. The real choice is fragility versus resilience. Canceling mandates is a victory for freedom – but to secure health and credibility, MAHA must also lead a revolution in nutritional immunity. With optimal nutrition, metabolic health, and true prevention, MAHA can become a transformative force in American healthcare. Make America Healthy Again must mean more than rejecting coercion. It must mean building strength from within. To truly succeed, MAHA must also mean: Make America Nutritious Again. About the AuthorRichard Z. Cheng, M.D., Ph.D. – Editor-in-Chief, Orthomolecular Medicine News Service Dr. Cheng is a U.S.-based, NIH-trained, board-certified physician specializing in integrative cancer therapy, orthomolecular medicine, functional & anti-aging medicine. He maintains active practices in both the United States and China. A Fellow of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine and a Hall of Fame inductee of the International Society for Orthomolecular Medicine, Dr. Cheng is a leading advocate for nutrition-based, root-cause health strategies. He also serves as an expert reviewer for the South Carolina Board of Medical Examiners, and co-founded both the China Low Carb Medicine Alliance and the Society of International Metabolic Oncology. Dr. Cheng offers online Integrative Orthomolecular Medicine consultation services. Orthomolecular MedicineOrthomolecular medicine uses safe, effective nutritional therapy to fight illness. For more information: http://www.orthomolecular.org Find a DoctorTo locate an orthomolecular physician near you: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v06n09.shtml The peer-reviewed Orthomolecular Medicine News Service is a non-profit and non-commercial informational resource. Editorial Review Board:Jennifer L. Aliano, M.S., L.Ac., C.C.N. (USA) Andrew W. Saul, Ph.D. (USA), Founding & Former Editor Comments and media contact: editor@orthomolecular.org OMNS welcomes but is unable to respond to individual reader emails. Reader comments become the property of OMNS and may or may not be used for publication. |
|
| This article may be reprinted free of charge provided 1) that there is clear attribution to the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, and 2) that both the OMNS free subscription link http://orthomolecular.org/subscribe.html and also the OMNS archive link http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/index.shtml are included.
Riordan Clinic | Orthomolecular.org |
FDA Approves Merck RSV Shot for Infants — Despite High Rates of Serious Reactions
Reproduced from original article:
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2025/07/17/merck-rsv-shot-risks-for-babies.aspx
Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola July 17, 2025
Story at-a-glance
- Merck’s respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) shot clesrovimab (Enflonsia) was approved even though 11.71% of babies in the trial experienced serious adverse events, including seizures, brain injury, and death
- Infants who got clesrovimab had a 350% higher risk of upper respiratory infections — exactly the type of illness this shot claims to prevent
- The injection is given in a single, fixed dose regardless of infant weight, putting smaller, younger babies at greater risk due to disproportionately high exposure
- Babies who received the shot had a threefold increase in severe neurological reactions compared to those given a placebo
- Only about 25 babies in the U.S. succumb to RSV each year, making the known risks of clesrovimab far outweigh the threat the virus poses to most children
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has recently approved clesrovimab, Merck’s new shot touted to “protect” infants against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).1 This approval comes despite clinical trials showing adverse reactions associated with the shot.
What’s more, clesrovimab is designed to be given in a single dose, unlike previously approved RSV shots, which are given as a two-dose series. The shot is only available in a standard, 105-milligram (mg) dose — so whether your child is 12 months old or 12 weeks old, they will receive 105 mg of the drug. In medicine, one-size-fits-all dosing rarely ends well, and in this case, the data shows that it causes real harm.
Clinical Trials Reveal Alarming Side Effects Linked to Clesrovimab
Marketed as Enflonsia, clesrovimab is said to protect against RSV, a common respiratory virus that nearly every child in the U.S. contracts by age 2. It will be launched during this year’s RSV season, to compete with Beyfortus (nirsevimab), the “blockbuster” RSV shot from Sanofi and AstraZeneca.2
In a press release, Merck said that clesrovimab’s safety profile is “generally comparable” to placebo;3 however, if you look more closely at the clinical trial results,4 you’ll find severe side effects buried in the data.
• The research paints a different picture regarding clesrovimab’s effects — The trials involved 2,409 babies who received the injection and 1,202 who were given a placebo. These were healthy infants, ranging from early and moderate preterm to full-term.
The results were sobering. Among the babies given clesrovimab, there was a 50% higher risk of death compared to those in the placebo group. That’s three deaths in the shot group versus one in the placebo.
• Serious neurological adverse reactions were reported — According to a report from the Children’s Health Defense (CHD), “These included febrile convulsions, seizures, facial paralysis and brain injury at about three times the rate in the vaccine group (25 of 2,409) as the placebo group (4 of 1,202).”5
• The risk of respiratory tract infections (RTIs) also soared — According to the data, infants who received the shot had a 350% higher risk of getting an upper RTI and a 63% higher risk of lower RTIs. This is particularly ironic, considering this shot is supposed to prevent exactly these types of infections.
• Overall, the serious adverse event rate is 11.71% — Dr. Peter Selley, a general practitioner from the U.K. who has closely followed this drug’s development, notes that these effects are “concerning.” He also warns against the standardized dosing of this drug and its implications on very young children.
More Is Not Always Better — Especially with Infant Shots
It’s clear that Merck is eager to break into the RSV drug market, and for an obvious reason — Beyfortus, being the lone RSV antibody shot approved for children, raked in a whopping $1.8 billion in 2024 alone, following its approval in 2023.6
• Merck proudly notes that Enflonsia has about the same efficacy rate as Beyfortus — “In clinical trials, the shot reduced RSV-related hospitalization by 84.3% compared to placebo, and the incidence of RSV that needed to be medically attended by 60.5% versus placebo, through age 5 months in the clinical trials,” the CHD reports.
• These two shots have certain differences — Both clesrovimab and nirsevimab are monoclonal antibody shots; however, they bind to different antigenic sites — this complicates any comparison between the two. Another, as mentioned above, is the dosage per shot.
• One-time, uniform-dose shots carry risks — Unlike Beyfortus, which is given in a two-dose series in amounts that vary depending on the infant’s weight, Enflonsia is administered as a one-time, fixed-dose injection.7 Selley cautions against this standardized dosing, saying:
“The implications of this are that with only one dose of clesrovimab, tiny preterm babies under 5 kilograms are going to be injected with a relatively much bigger dose of the monoclonal antibody, leading to massive levels of the drug in their circulation. In most other fields of medicine, the aim is to find the lowest dose of a drug that is effective, as most side effects are dose-related.”8

Save This Article for Later – Get the PDF Now
The Problem with Monoclonal Antibody Shots
Unlike conventional vaccines, monoclonal antibody injections work by providing passive immunity as they directly supply antibodies to fight a specific pathogen. In contrast, a vaccine stimulates your body’s immune system to produce its own antibodies, creating active immunity that develops over time. This means that monoclonal antibodies fall into a different category for safety monitoring.
• Adverse reports could be underreported — The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) doesn’t directly monitor injuries from medications that are not vaccines; Instead, they rely on the FDA’s MedWatch system.9 This discrepancy not only leads to confusion among health care providers and the public about where and how to report side effects, but could also lead to adverse events being underreported, making it more difficult to accurately assess the injection’s safety profile.
• The rush to implement widespread use of these injections raises questions about long-term safety and economic feasibility — When Beyfortus was first released, internist and biological warfare epidemiologist, Dr. Meryl Nass expressed her concerns about the unknowns of the drug. On her Substack, Nass points out that no monoclonal antibody product has ever been given on a mass scale to children before.10
• The safety profile of nirsevimab is questionable — Nass points out that monoclonal antibodies are associated with numerous side effects, from changes in blood pressure and increased heart rate to cytokine release syndrome — yet the product label mentions only rashes and anaphylaxis as potential side effects of this drug.11
• Deaths during clinical trials may have been underreported — Nass points out that there was an “imbalance” in deaths between the treatment and placebo groups during clinical trials. The FDA reportedly “judged” that these excess deaths were not due to the monoclonal antibody, but it’s unclear how they reached this conclusion without more comprehensive safety data.12
Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) Is Another Possible Risk
ADE is a condition that was noted in a preprint study by French scientist Hélène Banoun, Ph.D.,13 and it occurs when antibodies actually help a virus infect cells more easily instead of neutralizing it. ADE has been observed with other respiratory viruses and vaccines, and it’s a theoretical risk with nirsevimab and clesrovimab as well.
•Antibodies in these shots could be engineered in a way that makes them more ineffective — Monoclonal antibody shots target the RSV fusion protein, but, here’s the catch — they are engineered to last longer in your baby’s body, with a half-life of 80 to 120 days.14 This unnatural modification could increase the risk of ADE as antibody levels gradually decline over time.
This is because the antibodies, at low concentrations, might not be able to fully neutralize the virus, instead facilitating its entry into cells. This could lead to more severe disease in some infants who receive the shot. Studies have shown that ADE can occur with RSV antibodies, particularly when they’re present at sub-neutralizing levels.15
• RSV antibodies can weaken your immunity by making your immune cells more prone to infections — Laboratory experiments have demonstrated that these antibodies enhance infection of certain cell types, such as macrophages, which are important immune cells in the lungs. This raises concerns about whether monoclonal antibody shots could make RSV infections worse in some babies as the antibody levels wane over time.
•Clinical trials conducted on nirsevimab have limitations that do not clearly assess its safety — Banoun’s study points out that many of the trials done on nirsevimab were conducted during periods of low RSV circulation — this means there weren’t many cases of severe RSV to compare between the treatment and placebo groups.16 This raises doubts about the shot’s reported accuracy, especially its effectiveness and safety.
For more about the research findings about nirsevimab and monoclonal antibody shots, read “Is the RSV Shot Worth the Risk to Your Baby?”
RSV Season Is Coming Soon — Should You Be Alarmed?
According to the CHD report, even though CDC’s vaccine advisory committee has yet to give its recommendation regarding clesrovimab, Merck is gearing up to take orders, so supplies can be shipped out in time for the 2025 to 2026 RSV season — from October to April.17 But just how lethal is this virus, and do the risks of these antibody shots truly outweigh the dangers of this illness?
• RSV symptoms are similar to a mild cold — These include runny nose, coughing, sneezing, wheezing, and fever. Most children recuperate from RSV without any issues.
• In fact, 97% of all babies become infected with RSV by the time they turn 2 years old — This gives them partial immunity, so that when they become reinfected, the symptoms are less severe.
• However, in some infants, RSV can be dangerous — Babies that are born prematurely or with weakened immune systems are at risk of bronchiolitis or pneumonia when they acquire RSV and may need to be hospitalized. In U.S. babies younger than 1, RSV is the leading cause of hospitalization.18
• The mortality rate is significantly lower than expected — According to a 2021 study from the CDC,19 only a small percentage of children — 25 or fewer babies per year — succumb to the virus.
What to Do to Avoid RSV Shots and Protect Your Baby Naturally
The good news is there are safer, smarter ways to protect your baby from RSV without exposing them to the risks of these injections. It goes beyond eliminating every germ — it’s about creating a foundation of resilience. Here are some key strategies:
• During RSV season, avoid crowds and indoor daycares if you can — If you have a newborn — especially if your baby is a preemie or has any underlying health issues — avoid crowded indoor settings. This includes daycare centers, waiting rooms, and busy stores. The fewer RSV exposures your baby gets during the early months, the more time their immune system has to mature naturally.
• Breastmilk is best — Breastfeeding gives your baby passive immunity without the risks of injections. Your breast milk contains antibodies that help fight off RSV and many other infections. Many of breastfeeding’s benefits actually stretch out until adulthood. For more information, read “The Power of Breastfeeding.”
• Prioritize your own health during pregnancy to boost natural protection — The state of your health during pregnancy plays a central role in shaping your baby’s early immunity. Make sure to optimize your nutrient status (focusing on getting key nutrients like folate), avoid exposure to toxins, and improve your gut health — these all directly affect your baby’s development. Get sufficient high-quality sleep and reduce your stress as well.
• Get regular safe sun exposure for both you and your baby — Sunlight helps your body create vitamin D, which is foundational for immune strength and respiratory health. Aim for short, gentle sun exposure daily — especially morning sun. If your baby is old enough, allow them short periods of direct sun on their skin.
For you, daily morning walks outside without sunglasses or sunscreen support both vitamin D and melatonin production, which regulate your baby’s sleep cycles and immune rhythm.
• Keep your home environment clean, warm, and hydrated — Dry indoor air increases the chance that RSV will infect your baby’s respiratory tract. Use a clean humidifier to keep indoor humidity between 40% to 60% during the colder months. Keep your baby’s nose clear with saline drops and a suction bulb if needed. Wipe down commonly touched surfaces often — but skip harsh chemical cleaners.
Stick to natural disinfectants like vinegar or hydrogen peroxide to reduce toxin exposure while keeping your environment safe.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About Clesrovimab (Enflonsia)
Q: What is clesrovimab, and why is it controversial?
A: Clesrovimab, marketed as Enflonsia, is Merck’s newly approved monoclonal antibody shot for preventing RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) in infants. It’s controversial because clinical trial data revealed a serious adverse event rate of 11.71%, including seizures, brain injuries, and even death. Despite these findings, the FDA approved it for use in all infants, regardless of weight or health status.
Q: How does clesrovimab compare to other RSV shots like nirsevimab (Beyfortus)?
A: While clesrovimab and nirsevimab are both monoclonal antibodies aimed at preventing RSV, clesrovimab is administered as a single fixed 105 mg dose for all infants. Nirsevimab, on the other hand, is dosed based on weight. Experts have warned that standardized dosing with clesrovimab, without taking into account the infant’s weight or size, could lead to overdosing in smaller or premature babies, increasing the risk of serious side effects.
Q: What types of side effects were seen in babies who received clesrovimab?
A: The trial reported a wide range of serious reactions: a 50% higher death rate, a 350% increased risk of upper respiratory infections, a 63% increase in lower respiratory infections, and three times the rate of severe neurological effects — such as seizures, febrile convulsions, facial paralysis, and brain injury — compared to the placebo group.
Q: How serious is RSV in most infants, and do these risks outweigh the benefits?
A: RSV is a common virus that nearly all children contract by age 2. It usually causes mild, cold-like symptoms. While it can be serious in a small number of cases — particularly in premature or immune-compromised babies — CDC data shows that only about 25 infants die from RSV each year in the U.S. For most families, the documented risks of clesrovimab far exceed the danger posed by RSV itself.
Q: What are safer alternatives to protect babies from RSV?
A: You can reduce RSV risk without resorting to injections by focusing on natural immunity: avoid crowded indoor spaces during RSV season, support infant immunity with breastfeeding, prioritize your own health during pregnancy, ensure regular gentle sun exposure for both you and your baby, and maintain a clean, well-humidified indoor environment. These steps help build true resilience without the documented risks of monoclonal antibody shots.
- 1, 3 Merck, June 9, 2025
- 2, 5, 8, 17 Children’s Health Defense, June 10, 2025
- 4 ClinicalTrials.gov, Efficacy and Safety of Clesrovimab (MK-1654) in Infants (MK-1654-004) (CLEVER) June 5, 2025
- 6 Fierce Pharma, June 9, 2025
- 7 Pharmacy Times, June 10, 2025
- 9 Children’s Health Defense, July 8, 2024
- 10, 11, 12 Substack, Meryl’s CHAOS Newsletter August 4, 2023
- 13, 14, 15, 16 Preprints 2024, 2024060714 doi: 10.20944/preprints202406.0714.v1
- 18 J Infect Dis. 2022 Aug 15;226(Suppl 2):S154-S163
- 19 Health Sci Rep. 2021 Nov 2;4(4):e428
New sprayable COVID shot shows viral shedding in human trial
Reproduced from original article:
https://www.naturalhealth365.com/new-sprayable-covid-shot-shows-viral-shedding-in-human-trial.html
by: Patrick Tims, staff writer | July 11 2025
(NaturalHealth365)
A new sprayable COVID shot that enters your body through your nose has cleared its first human trial, but independent scientists are sounding urgent alarms about a terrifying risk the researchers completely ignored: the shot can spread from vaxxed to unvaxed people without their knowledge or consent.
The CVXGA1 intranasal shot, published in Science Advances, uses a live virus that replicates in your nasal passages and can be “shed” to others through normal breathing and talking. Critics warn this could expose unvaxxed individuals — including pregnant women, children, and immunocompromised people — to genetically modified viral particles against their will.
But perhaps the most disturbing question is: why is this experimental shot even being developed? Multiple studies have already documented massive harm from previous COVID shots, including heart damage, blood clots, sudden deaths, and immune system dysfunction.
With questionable efficacy and problematic safety profiles already established, why are researchers now pushing an intranasal version that could spread to others?
The shedding risk they didn’t want you to know about
The study’s own data proves the shot causes viral shedding. Researchers detected the shot virus in nasal swabs of participants one day after administration, with levels reaching up to 3.9 log10 PFU/ml — meaning thousands of viral particles being shed from each person’s nose.
“The study didn’t examine if shed materials can be spread to others. This raises significant safety concerns about replication and shedding risks,” warned investigative journalist Sonia Elijah.
Dr. Karl Jablonowski, senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense, explained the platform uses parainfluenza virus type 5, a “communicable respiratory virus between humans and non-human animals.” Since this shot is “self-spreading,” he noted, “there is no informed consent or medical precautions as the ‘shot’ may infect infants, children, pregnant women, immunocompromised or medically frail.”
Dr. Karina Acevedo Whitehouse, professor of microbiology at the Autonomous University of Querétaro, agreed there are “high chances” this shot will result in “persistent shedding,” citing a 2023 study of a similar intranasal shot that detected virus shedding in 17% of participants.
Why create more dangerous shots when previous ones failed?
The rush to develop yet another COVID shot becomes even more questionable, considering documented failures of previous versions. Government databases worldwide show unprecedented adverse events following COVID shots, including myocarditis in young people, sudden cardiac deaths in athletes, blood clotting disorders, immune suppression, and neurological damage.
Studies show shot efficacy wanes rapidly, often within months, while the spike protein these shots produce has been linked to cellular damage throughout the body. With mounting evidence of harm and questionable benefit, developing an intranasal version that could potentially spread to non-consenting individuals raises serious ethical concerns.
The study’s fatal flaws
No control group: The study included zero unvaxxed participants for comparison. “There is absolutely no way that this paper can be considered evidence that this intranasal gene-therapy based product is safe or effective,” Dr. Whitehouse stated.
Tiny sample size: Only 72 people participated — far too small to detect serious adverse events.
Limited safety monitoring: Researchers only tracked adverse events for weeks, not months or years.
No shedding studies: Despite detecting viral shedding, researchers performed no studies to determine if shed particles could infect others.
The spike protein is delivered directly to your lungs
The shot produces the same spike protein found in Pfizer and Moderna shots, linked to blood clots, heart damage, and immune dysfunction. Unlike injected shots that stay in your arm muscle, this intranasal shot delivers spike protein directly to your respiratory system, potentially causing more severe reactions.
“Genetically modifying an infectious respiratory virus to express a spike protein is a familiar and really bad idea,” Dr. Jablonowski warned.
Natural immune system support that works
Instead of relying on experimental shots that spread without consent, focus on proven strategies:
Optimize vitamin D: Maintain blood levels between 50-80 ng/ml. Deficiency dramatically increases infection risk.
Strengthen your gut: 70% of your immune system lives in your digestive tract. Support it with fermented foods and probiotics while avoiding processed foods.
Power up with nutrients: Vitamin C, zinc, quercetin, and elderberry have strong scientific backing for immune support.
Reduce toxic load: Choose organic foods, filter water, and limit chemical exposure that suppresses immune function.
Manage stress: Chronic stress floods your body with cortisol, which suppresses your immunity.
The self-spreading agenda
Dr. Jessica Rose warns that if successful, “this could be used to push gene-based products on us via intranasal breathing routes.” Shots that spread person-to-person without individual consent could eliminate medical freedom entirely.
With researchers planning to enroll 10,000 participants in the next phase, we’re moving toward involuntary exposure to this new gene-based therapy.
Your immune system has evolved over millions of years to protect you naturally when properly supported. While pharmaceutical companies rush to develop self-spreading shots with unknown consequences, you have the power to strengthen your defenses safely and effectively.
For those serious about building a robust immune system without experimental interventions, Jonathan Landsman’s Immune Defense Summit offers comprehensive strategies from 34 leading doctors, scientists, and researchers who reveal natural protocols that help your immune system thrive.
Sources for this article include:
Science.org
Childrenshealthdefense.org










.jpg)
