Vaccination has become something of a religion. Question it, challenge it, or ask uncomfortable questions about its safety, and you risk being treated as a heretic. Even scientific findings suggesting better health outcomes among unvaccinated children can provoke an extraordinary backlash, but it should be evidence, rather than ideology, that determines the debate.
Last month, I began promoting my book, Emperor’s New Clothes: How the Covid Jab Exposed 70 Years of Vaccine Injury, on social media. I shared several facts, but one post sent X into uproar. It referred to a study conducted by Henry Ford Health, a respected American teaching hospital, which compared the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
The study was conducted by conventional medics at Henry Ford who believe vaccines are the holy grail, and was intended to silence people who oppose them. For four years, they followed two groups of children — a total of 18,468 — but were confounded by the results. The unvaccinated children defied orthodoxy and were healthier.
There was no close call, either. The vaccinated children were four times more likely to develop asthma, three times more likely to suffer atopic disease (such as food allergies, eczema, and hay fever), and they had six times the risk of developing autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and lupus. Vaccinated children also had three times more motor disability, four times as much speech disorder, four times as much developmental delay, and six times more chronic ear infections.
The unvaccinated had no recorded cases of diabetes, ADHD, tics, learning difficulties, or behavioural disorders. There was just one autistic child in the unvaccinated group, compared with 23 in the vaccinated group. These figures are considered statistically insignificant in scientific terms. However, the result that the vaccinated had five and a half times the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders compared with the unvaccinated children is considered a statistically significant finding.
The study has not been published in a medical journal or externally peer reviewed because it was instantly squashed by the hospital’s big bosses. An internal peer review concluded that it was “flawed”. Henry Ford Health’s solicitors issued a cease-and-desist letter to the producers of an award-winning film about the paper, called . The film was made and they have not sued.
External experts did not think the study was flawed. Dr Sylvia Fogel, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, reviewed it and described it as “robust”. She said she was moved to tears at the results and added: “This is a devastating commentary on our health intervention. We are systematically making kids sick and not just a little bit sick, very sick.”
Vaccine advocate Professor Marcus Zervos, division head of infectious diseases at Henry Ford and the study’s principal investigator, was so confident that vaccines made children healthier that in 2016, he agreed to conduct it after conversations with journalist Del Bigtree, a campaigner exposing vaccine injury. Bigtree asked him to silence people who oppose vaccinations by analysing the millions of childhood records from birth kept at Henry Ford. Professor Zervos rose to the challenge, reviewing the health records of 1,957 unvaccinated children and 16,511 children who had received at least one vaccine.
He promised Bigtree he would publish at all costs, but reneged after seeing the results in 2020, choosing to protect his career rather than the health of children. In 2022, Bigtree secretly recorded a conversation they had over dinner. Professor Zervos explained why the study languished.
He said: “Our study did show a difference between the groups. If we weren’t in a world of censorship, I’d put out this study. Nothing is going to come out of [publishing] it other than me losing my job. I might as well retire. I’d be finished.”
I shared the study’s stark statistics on X, which brought the trolls out in force. They applied some extraordinary logic to the findings. They said the unvaccinated children were healthier because they had fewer visits to the paediatrician. If those children had spent more time with their doctor, their asthma, diabetes, tics, and ADHD would have been picked up. So, in the end, feckless parents failing to get treatment for their sick children is why the results showed the unvaccinated kids did better.
It is a ludicrous conclusion. Asthma and diabetes can kill, so, of course, conscientious parents take their children for diagnosis and treatment. Tics, ADHD, learning, and behavioural difficulties create a stigma that families want to avoid at all costs, not to mention extra challenges when children reach adulthood.
Parents who choose not to vaccinate do not ignore their children’s health. They usually boycott vaccines full of fear, so are more sensitive if their children become unwell. However, avoiding conventional paediatrics means they tend to reject conventional medicine in favour of homeopaths, naturopaths, or integrative practitioners. Parents who raise their children that way — and I have known many — find cures for conditions like asthma and eczema, and for behavioural issues. They do not ignore them.
The trolls’ arguments did include some apparently convincing information. One shared a brutal study, published August 2026 in the journal , with the title ‘Vaccines, Bias, and the Perils of Non-peer-reviewed Studies: Fueling Misinformation and Vaccine Hesitancy’. This is not a scientific study. It is an opinion piece, a critique, based on the authors’ analysis of the available data.
The authors, led by Dr Daniel Munblit, concocted the explanation later seized upon by the trolls: vaccinated children had more medical appointments, giving doctors more opportunities to diagnose illnesses. They did spend more time with paediatricians, averaging seven healthcare visits a year compared with just two for unvaccinated children. Munblit et al. also argued that differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated families had not been adequately accounted for. They pointed out that the study examined the total number of vaccines received rather than the effects of individual vaccines, and that vaccinated children were followed for twice as long, making the comparison imbalanced.
What they did not share were the serious professional and financial conflicts of interest that four of the 21 authors were obliged to declare. For example, Dr Daniel Munblit is a Reader in Paediatrics at King’s College London. His professional focus is the primary prevention of allergic disease in childhood. Dr Munblit has previously received funding from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Both organisations are notorious vaccine pushers.
Another is Professor Calum Semple, a specialist in paediatric respiratory medicine at the University of Liverpool. He was a senior adviser on the UK Government’s Covid pandemic taskforce: the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). He has also served on Pfizer’s external mRNA vaccine data monitoring committee and GSK’s RSV advisory board. Additionally, Professor Gregory A. Poland of the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota is the editor-in-chief of the medical journal . Professor Poland’s pet project is ‘vaccinomics’: developing personalised vaccines. They are all advocates for immunisation who have built their reputations supporting vaccines. So are the Henry Ford authors, but their bias could not hide the numbers.
Drill down into Munblit et al.’s criticisms, and you find that they did not investigate whether the long-term health outcomes of vaccinated children were better or worse than those of unvaccinated children. Nor did they investigate whether vaccines could cause autoimmune or neurodevelopmental conditions. They also failed to disclose whether they had access to the data underpinning the study’s conclusions.
They did not take into account that the Henry Ford study is not an isolated one. For example, see the 2023 book Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr Brian Hooker, who both vaccinated their children. They dissected over 100 peer-reviewed, vaccinated versus unvaccinated studies, and found the same result. Vaccinated kids had more asthma and allergies, eczema, ADHD, behavioural disorders, autism, neurodevelopmental conditions, gastrointestinal disorders, ear infections, respiratory infections, and learning and developmental difficulties.
Couple that with the fact that disability benefits for neurodevelopmental conditions are paid to thousands of British children annually and that the number of child disability claims across the board has almost doubled since 2018. It is clear that something is affecting our kids’ health.
So, why is it so difficult to get governments to take this issue seriously? Around 18 per cent of Britain's 14 million children suffer from a chronic illness. The National Autistic Society estimates that at least 700,000 people in the UK have autism; that is 1 in 100. Many chronic conditions are likely to be caused by adverse reactions to vaccines, but without independent studies, we have no way of knowing the extent of the problem.
Consider the financial implications if the government did accept the study results and acknowledged that vaccine injuries impacted children in large numbers. Say the parents of around 500,000 children — just 3.6 per cent of the child population — put in a claim. At the current fixed payment of £120,000 under the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS), the compensation bill would total £60 billion. If one million children, or 7.1 per cent, qualified for compensation, the cost to the taxpayer would rise to £120 billion.
Studies and newspaper reports exposing vaccines are relentlessly squashed. I remember writing a negative story about the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine in 2003 for the Mail on Sunday; my first for the appeared in 1999. A pattern developed. Every story highlighting the downside of vaccination was quickly counteracted by two pro-vaccine stories from other sources. The machine moved to dismiss vaccine fears and criticisms. Newspapers are obliged to report both sides of the debate until the law decides who is right and who is wrong. Only then can they pick a side.
And as for Henry Ford Health, it “immediately shelved” the study “upon the first internal peer review because of serious issues with its data and methodology”, essentially throwing one of their top scientists under the bus. This is also a pattern. Think about what happened to gastroenterologist Dr Andrew Wakefield. He had an unblemished career at the Royal Free Hospital in North London until he raised concerns about the MMR jab. He was prevented from conducting more research, pursued relentlessly, and eventually struck off.
Why does this happen? Consider this. Henry Ford receives around £85 million ($114 million) annually in research funding from Big Pharma. The pharmaceutical corporations receive around £49.33 billion ($66.5 billion) annually from global vaccine sales, revenue they are not about to forfeit. As they say, follow the money, and you arrive at the inevitable conclusion. No one is willing to destroy their cash cow.
Emperor’s New Clothes: How the Covid Jab Exposed 70 Years of Vaccine Injury by Sally Beck is a short book that Free Speech Press published on 30 October 2026. It is available in paperback for £9.99 and on Kindle for £3.99.