Gavin de Becker is an expert in the world of security and threat assessment, and has advised many famous figures over the past decades. He felt the need to assess vaccines through this lens because he wanted to contribute to the debate on their weaknesses, but this book again falls short when scrutinized through the eyes of someone who understands science well. While I can applaud his work in the security/ terrorism space, and even agree with some of his points, his efforts to criticize vaccines fall short in a failure to understand what has been done in prior scientific literature. While I cannot fault him for not being a physician, when discussing the weaknesses of vaccines the expectation is to spend time thinking about prior medical literature and the results it has produced. While I can wholeheartedly agree that the government coverups of Agent Orange/ burn pit health consequences was absolutely inexcusable, the analogy fails when it is applied to vaccines. As this is intended to be an essay debunking the entire book, a table of contents is provided for the reader to browse this document in sections.

1. Allegation – when talking about the vaccines-autism link, it is important to discuss who debunked it and How was it debunked.
2. Where did the idea that vaccines might be among the contributors to the increase in autism come from in the first place, such that it needed to be debunked?
3. Quote: A study of 47,155 nine-year-old children found the vaccinated children had far higher rates of autism than the unvaccinated (2.8 percent vs 1.1 percent), and that “vaccination was associated with significantly increased odds for all measured neurodevelopmental disorders,” and that “vaccination is strongly associated with increased odds of neurodevelopmental disorders.”
4. Allegation: Thiomersal exposure causes autism
5. Quote: “Though FDA described that vaccine’s manufacturing conditions as “deficient,” Dr. Burrows explained that deviations in product lines would not impact the quality or integrity of the vaccines. (Apparently, vaccine formulas don’t have to be all that precise.) He based his confident proclamation that vaccines were safe upon the results of a study that wasn’t yet completed, a study he promised “should be available in the near future.”
6. Another IOM committee was convened to debunk the notion that vaccines might be linked to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). And debunk it they did. SIDS is defined as “the sudden death of an infant under 1-year of age, which remains unexplained after a thorough case investigation, including performance of a complete autopsy, examination of the death scene, and review of the clinical history.”
7. Allegation: Debate/ questioning is prohibited
8. Allegation: all neurologic complications are labeled as autism in an effort to make these not subject to compensation under the law
9. Allegation – because vaccines are meant to create reactogenicity, they intentionally create encephalopathy
10. Why does US government pay the least in vaccine compensation
11. Allegation – because several vaccine labels contain the words ““Not for medicinal use,” the same one known to be “toxic if swallowed, fatal in contact with skin, fatal if inhaled””, they are actually toxic.
12. Quote: “After a lifetime of being widely praised for his environmental activism, RFK Jr became a media-created pariah, the target of a massive, well-funded publicity campaign to sell one idea: Robert Kennedy Jr is not just wrong — he’s crazy. When you can’t knock down the facts, you knock down the people who repeat those facts. If someone’s credibility and reputation can be destroyed, then few people will consider the questions he asks, or the answers he finds.”
13. Allegation: According to OpenVAERS, there were 40 000 deaths per billion doses
14. Allegation: Caution when vaccinating people with weakened immune systems seems like smart guidance, except for one thing: All children have weakened immune systems at times in their lives. Infants receive the majority of vaccines in the first 18-months of life when their immune systems are not yet fully developed, and when the blood-brain barrier, critical to protecting the brain from toxins, is also not fully developed.
15. Allegation – vaccine ingredients are dangerous because of the way they are manufactured
16. Allegation – no autism in Amish
17. Allegation – federal authorities never quantify vaccine risk in comparison to their corresponding diseases
18. Allegation: The risk of MMRV/MMR associated febrile seizures generalize to all vaccines (1/1150-3000), and this rate is unacceptable
19. Allegation – Hannah Poling’s mitochondrial disorder was triggered by vaccines/ vaccines made things worse
20. Quote: You are a crazy conspiracy-spouting anti-vaxxer whose skepticism is placing everyone at great risk of disease and death
21. The comparison between heavy metal contamination with milk powder and the comparison to vaccines
22. Mistake with relying on BBB studies for thiomersal
23. Why can antivaxxers always get off the hook for perjury?
24. Death is not the only bad outcome for vaccine preventable disease
25. Lack of understanding of base rate fallacy in mumps
26. Allegation – true science is up for debate
27. A misunderstanding of vaccine derived poliovirus
28. Allegation – The TB vaccine should be given because of its beneficial nonspecific effects
29. Using older vaccine labels for Pfizer branded vaccines to pretend they have not been studied
30. Dissecting the assertion that vaccines saved 154 million lives
31. The British Imperial college modelers made too many mistakes in their modeling of COVID
32. Quoting the side effects of DTP vaccine when it has been retired
33. Quote: I suggest that making good parental decisions derives from common sense, not science.
34. Vaccine companies can’t be sued
35. Did the Institute of Medicine improve
36. Vaccines don’t cause cardiac disease outside of myocarditis

Allegation – when talking about the vaccines-autism link, it is important to discuss who debunked it and How was it debunked.

The implicit message in this part of the book is that the people finding no link between vaccines and autism are not to be trusted because they have some relationship with the government. First off, in a truly impartial debate, the same standards of integrity must apply to the people you like AND to the people you don’t like. The discussion of the people supporting a link between vaccines and autism generally centers around Andrew Wakefield and those who think like him. While Andrew Wakefield was once upon a time a physician, journalist Brian Deer reveals that the fraud behind the MMR scare was so serious that Wakefield truly deserved to lose his job over what he did. The scientific method is standardized, and was standardized the same way in the 1990s – so failing to conduct an experiment according to standardized guidelines of ethics and reproducibility (putting it kindly) means the evidence produced cannot hold up to peer review. The people who have actually professionally debunked the relationship between autism and vaccines have a wide variety of professional backgrounds, ranging from epidemiologists, to statisticians, to physicians, to other types of basic science researchers. To believe that all these people were paid by governments to hide the relationship would require a massive amount of money, coordination, and effort, which would be much better spent on actually DOING the science necessary to debunk the relationship, which thankfully has been done many times over. Furthermore, Gavin fails to even start to acknowledge the neuroscience that has already discovered some of the causes of autism. While some readers of this blog may protest the use of government funding to set up the sorts of studies being cited, it is also important to remember that these types of population level studies typically require a lot of funding not easily obtainable from private sources. Like other provaccine physicians, I am open to finding more nonconflicted funding sources, but, the people who are antivaccine and continue to push the point have never “walked the walk” and funded a well designed autism study to fit their requirements. If they never agree that a vaccine is safe, they weren’t sincere in wanting to improve vaccines in the first place. This brings me back to my first argument – people who are antivaccine absolve themselves of all responsibility after they have created the doubt. Doubt is their product. Once people doubt vaccines, vaccine preventable diseases inevitably spread, and real humans become ill. Antivaccine advocates like Andrew Wakefield can still live in their expensive Texas mansions and don’t have to worry about children becoming seriously ill. They have profited and that’s all they care about. The actual consequences of disease are just words and theater to them, but to me as a pediatric subspecialist, the consequences of disease are real. The techniques used to debunk the link run the gamut from basic science studies all the way to epidemiological studies, which are the strongest available evidence in all of medicine.

Where did the idea that vaccines might be among the contributors to the increase in autism come from in the first place, such that it needed to be debunked?

There are many reasons why this is the case. The simplest reason is that peer review sometimes does not catch every possible error in a published paper, and sometimes papers need to be retracted because later, other readers find severe statistical errors that affect the validity of a conclusion. This is exactly what happened with Wakefield’s autism paper that was first published then retracted. The more serious reason is that creating a false link between a vaccine and autism would then cook up considerable vaccine hesitancy and decrease coverage against measles, mumps, and rubella. This is not a theoretical concern, it has already happened in the United States. Some children paid for the antiscience aggression with their lives. Children dying is again, just a theoretical number to antivaccine advocates. As long as they have profited, they are absolved of responsibility. While they claim to want safer vaccines, no antivaccine advocate has every come out and actually produced a safer vaccine. Never. They claim victory when a vaccine is removed and then walk away. Pediatricians cannot live with such a low bar of integrity.

Quote: A study of 47,155 nine-year-old children found the vaccinated children had far higher rates of autism than the unvaccinated (2.8 percent vs 1.1 percent), and that “vaccination was associated with significantly increased odds for all measured neurodevelopmental disorders,” and that “vaccination is strongly associated with increased odds of neurodevelopmental disorders.”

This illustrates the point of believing bad studies. Since Gavin comes from a security background, he does not have the medical training to understand that certain studies do not have as much validity as other types of studies. Population level studies, clinical trials, and meta-analyses are the best kinds of medical evidence as long as they control for certain statistical biases and sampling errors. An analogy can be used in what we would all recognize as a spurious correlation. Everybody realizes that the amount of ice cream consumption increases during the summer. Everybody may also know that the amount of drownings typically is worse during times when people are swimming. However, it would be false to even imply that ice creams cause drownings. The same kind of problem is created when one implies that vaccines cause neurodevelopmental disorders (many of which have known causes). If one dives into the many discussions of the study, the reader will find all the problems that render the study useless.

Allegation: Thiomersal exposure causes autism

Thiomersal has been removed from most vaccines for a very long time. Despite removing the vaccines, and allowing patients to freely choose preservative free influenza vaccines (the kind without thiomersal), the total diagnoses of autism increased. This is by itself pretty strong statistical evidence they are not related. In addition, population level studies refute this claim. We all want people to be exposed to less mercury, but the focus should remain on the largest sources of mercury pollution which are industrial activities and dietary contamination. When choosing vaccines, we can already take vaccines without thiomersal, and have been able to do so for many decades.

Quote: “Though FDA described that vaccine’s manufacturing conditions as “deficient,” Dr. Burrows explained that deviations in product lines would not impact the quality or integrity of the vaccines. (Apparently, vaccine formulas don’t have to be all that precise.) He based his confident proclamation that vaccines were safe upon the results of a study that wasn’t yet completed, a study he promised “should be available in the near future.”

You wouldn’t know it from this book, but most provaccine physicians agree that the factories that produce vaccines should be held to high standards of reliability, cleanliness, and quality of their end product. The factories should be held accountable when failing to produce vaccines according to standardized protocols. There are many different kinds of documentation in many countries showing how factories are held accountable by their respective national health agencies.

Another IOM committee was convened to debunk the notion that vaccines might be linked to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). And debunk it they did. SIDS is defined as “the sudden death of an infant under 1-year of age, which remains unexplained after a thorough case investigation, including performance of a complete autopsy, examination of the death scene, and review of the clinical history.”

The author is quite hostile to the IOM and some of his reasons are valid, however it is no longer acceptable to not attempt to understand the biology behind many explainable cases of sudden infant death syndrome, such as inappropriate bedding material and inborn errors of metabolism. This assertion fails to take into account the report that vaccinating on time reduces the amount of SIDS. The author does not take into account that antivaccine stars are capable of falsifying infant cause of death to manufacture doubt about vaccines when there is no justification. Everyone would love to get the amount of SIDS down to zero, but we’ll do it by standardized scientific research, not by misrepresenting what the prior research has done.

Allegation: Debate/ questioning is prohibited

Debate is not prohibited about vaccine science and never has been prohibited. The price of admission to a scientific debate is consistent application of the scientific method, not creating clickbait content on social media. Everyone, including myself, deserve to be corrected when we make incorrect inferences about scientific concepts relevant to vaccines. However, this is distorted into “correction = censorship” in the modern antivaccine ecosystem. We would never have claimed our schoolteachers were censoring us, as children, if we were corrected in school – that should still apply now. The issue with debate as it currently stands on social media, is that scientists actually proficient in vaccines are not invited with intent to engage in respectful conversation – typical talk show hosts are looking for a takedown using the strategies of rhetoric, which few scientists are proficient at. This only creates followers and monetization for the host, not sincere efforts to advance the science. Would you, the reader, shout that your airplane instructor was censoring you if he corrected your understanding of Cessnas?

Allegation: all neurologic complications are labeled as autism in an effort to make these not subject to compensation under the law

As has always been true, even the most provaccine physicians want people experiencing severe side effects after vaccination to get the help they need to recover as much as possible. However, this book allegation is refuted by the US National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program’s own data that report compensation for neurological problems. Other countries have different ways they go about it but still compensate neurological complications. The provaccine physician camp can also even see deficiencies in the US NVICP that should trigger a move to better compensation. With this background, lets directly address Gavin’s claim that neurological injuries could be getting misclassified as autism in order to avoid compensation.

The allegation is based upon a mixture of legal precedent and rhetorical analysis – in Gavin’s view, neurological complications are similar to descriptions of autism, and prior legal precedent indicates that autism will not be compensated by vaccine injury courts because it is not linked to vaccines. When the reader “sets aside” the word autism, Gavin alleges that neurological complications can be discussed more freely and comprehensively (and therefore be more eligible for compensation). This analysis results from a misunderstanding of neurology that boils down to autism and encephalopathy being two entirely different diseases (and having very clear diagnostic criteria). Gavin expresses multiple times in the book that the definition of autism is fairly nebulous, but this is in large part because autism is caused by so many different things (none of which are vaccines). The diagnosis of autism is typically established by a specialist pediatrician who may work in concert with a geneticist and perhaps other specialists. The diagnosis of encephalopathy is a very specific entity that is a global brain dysfunction showing up as a problem in the total level of consciousness (or content of consciousness). These medical problems look very different to the neurologist. The most serious refutation to Gavin’s allegation is that mislabeling encephalopathy as autism would potentially result in a life-threatening outcome. Neurologists have zero incentive to miss neurological emergencies. Secondarily, mislabeling other neurologic complications as autism would result in selecting the wrong treatment, which would make the patient worse. Gavin does not have the medical background to recognize this.

Allegation – because vaccines are meant to create reactogenicity, they intentionally create encephalopathy

The first part of the allegation is correct in the sense that you want the immune system to do a reaction to a vaccine. Before the advent of a solid knowledge base about vaccine adjuvants, scientists had to learn that just placing active vaccine ingredients into a patient can result in the immune system destroying what you injected and not generating any immune memory. The current formulation of vaccines is meant to both start an immune reaction and generate immune memory. Even the most provaccine physicians cannot deny that some cases of encephalopathy have occurred after vaccination, but this is an extraordinarily rare outcome and limited to very special medical scenarios such as undiagnosed immunodeficiency. Viruses create much more encephalopathy than their corresponding vaccines, which sets the risk benefit calculation firmly in the camp of getting the vaccine. This section of the book also fails to mention the vaccines that were retired due to concerns for encephalopathy, which speaks to the vaccine establishment’s interest in reducing side effects, not hiding them.

Why does US government pay the least in vaccine compensation

As the author correctly assessed, the US NVICP does pay the lowest amount in terms of compensation for serious adverse events. This is because of stricter eligibility criteria and higher standards of evidence. Even the most provaccine lawyers agree that more people can be compensated.

Allegation – because several vaccine labels contain the words ““Not for medicinal use,” the same one known to be “toxic if swallowed, fatal in contact with skin, fatal if inhaled””, they are actually toxic.

There are several reasons why vaccine ingredients in their bulk industrial form contain different labeling compared to their vaccine equivalent counterparts. The most important and most relevant reason is that the dose makes the poison. All of us require air and water, but we never deny the existence of drowning or the need to protect against it. We also all agree that we need to breathe air, but none of us try to plaster our faces on industrial oxygen canisters. The dose makes the poison.

Quote: “After a lifetime of being widely praised for his environmental activism, RFK Jr became a media-created pariah, the target of a massive, well-funded publicity campaign to sell one idea: Robert Kennedy Jr is not just wrong — he’s crazy. When you can’t knock down the facts, you knock down the people who repeat those facts. If someone’s credibility and reputation can be destroyed, then few people will consider the questions he asks, or the answers he finds.”

Hundreds of pages and hours of information could be provided to prove that RFK Jr deserves all the criticism he is getting, but I will focus on just a few. We don’t need to allege RFK Jr is racist, he actually said “Covid -19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese“. We don’t need to claim he is insincere about actually improving vaccines, because he has never helped ANY vaccine get to market with his own funding/ clout/ scientific research. There has never been a single RFK Jr approved, funded, and distributed vaccine. All he has done is to manufacture doubt, and once the doubt is manufactured, his responsibility ends. He is one of the world’s biggest examples of the sunk cost fallacy – once he is antivaccine he needs to go all out to retain the support of his followers.

Allegation: According to OpenVAERS, there were 40 000 deaths per billion doses

The entire premise of OpenVAERS is to reorganize the data on the United States Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting system to illustrate vaccine side effects. The issue is that while VAERS is frequently touted as a tool that shows vaccines cause harm, the issue is that anybody can file anything, meaning VAERS can underreport and overreport problems. VAERS intrinsically makes no effort to determine if a vaccine caused a side effect right from the beginning (other types of research studies are intended for that and in fact mandatory). Deaths from various things are still going to occur, and because playing up the deaths on OpenVAERS reinforces the antivaccine argument, they still do it. The reader needs to consult actual scientific studies to make or refute links observed on OpenVAERS. In addition – the VAERS website EXPLICITLY INSTRUCTS the reader to not use data in the way that OpenVAERS is doing.

Allegation: Caution when vaccinating people with weakened immune systems seems like smart guidance, except for one thing: All children have weakened immune systems at times in their lives. Infants receive the majority of vaccines in the first 18-months of life when their immune systems are not yet fully developed, and when the blood-brain barrier, critical to protecting the brain from toxins, is also not fully developed.

Vaccines are already designed with a clear understanding of what the human immune system can do at what age. Using the expression “weakened immune system” has a very specific meaning to the pediatric subspecialist who actually studies this problem. This means they have diseases like X-linked SCID, selective IgA deficiency, Chediak-Higashi syndrome, or some disease that genuinely impairs function of one or more parts of the immune system. Gavin makes no effort to do even the simplest level of reading to see that vaccines have clear usage guidelines for those who are genuinely immunocompromised. For example, MMR vaccines must never be given to certain types of cancer patients. Temporary mild immune dysfunction from things like lack of sleep are going to be fairly randomly distributed throughout the population, and therefore are going to be equally applied to everyone during vaccination. No national health agency has ever said a vaccine should be withheld from a patient due to lack of sleep (although side effects are better when sleep is sufficient). The second part of this allegation is that the infant blood brain barrier is more permeable, so vaccines are potentially damaging that barrier. First off, the human blood brain barrier function reaches approximately the same as that of an adult at around the age of 1, but even before that the major mechanisms that seal off the brain from the rest of the body are already active. When brain tissue was available to be analyzed after death, alternative explanations were found in those suspected to have died after a vaccine. One of the most commonly spread allegations in the antivaccine community is that vaccines damage the part of the brain responsible for breathing, which then causes SIDS. The issue is that the epidemiology soundly refutes these claims, and not just from Gavin’s arch nemesis, the IOM. It is not sufficient to rely on speculation when actual scientific data refute your claim.

Allegation – vaccine ingredients are dangerous because of the way they are manufactured

The author spends quite a bit of time using flowery language to describe the manufacture of some vaccine components, such as mentioning that gelatin is generated from boiled pigs skin. This is added intentionally to derive the desired emotional reaction, however what is omitted from the book is that products like gelatin are derived from animals not just for fun, rather, they contain chemical properties that are essential to stabilizing the vaccine ingredients. Secondarily, a product like gelatin is chosen because it has consistent quality and is widely available. Fetal bovine serum is a secondary ingredient typically used to make vaccines that require live attenuated viruses, because the cells necessary to grow those viruses eat fetal bovine serum. While biochemists around the world would love to use a synthetic alternative, and stop extracting this substance from cows, the available alternatives currently do not allow the same chemical properties as FBS. The ingredients in FBS are also pretty much duplicated in steak, so there is no reason to fear it as a substance the body has never encountered before. Could we band together and make a synthetic ingredient just as good as FBS without the need to kill cows? Sure, l fully support that. Antivaxxers are absolutely not sincere in improving vaccines though otherwise they would have helped this effort already.

Allegation – no autism in Amish

This is refuted by every attempt to conduct epidemiological studies on this question, although due to the nature of Amish customs the project is harder to do well.

Allegation – federal authorities never quantify vaccine risk in comparison to their corresponding diseases

There are so many different examples of various national health agencies and other physicians speaking about the relative risks of vaccines and their corresponding diseases. An AI generated summary (on my website AI generated summaries are always delineated):

COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2)

1. CDC (USA): “The risk of severe illness, hospitalization, and death from COVID-19 infection far outweighs the rare risk of myocarditis following mRNA vaccination, which is typically mild and resolves quickly.”
2. NHS (UK): “In unvaccinated people, the risk of serious complications from COVID-19, particularly in older adults and those with underlying health conditions, is substantially higher than the extremely rare risk of any vaccine-related adverse event.”
3. WHO (Global): “Data consistently show that COVID-19 vaccines prevent the overwhelming majority of severe illness and death. The benefit-risk ratio for authorized vaccines remains highly favorable for all eligible age groups.”
4. CDC (USA, Specific Data): “Studies show that getting a COVID-19 vaccine is much safer than getting COVID-19. For adults, the risk of death from COVID-19 infection is several hundred times higher than the risk of a vaccine-related death.”
5. National Agency X (Focus on Children): “While children have a low risk of severe COVID-19, they are at risk of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C). The vaccine provides protection against MIS-C, making the overall risk profile of vaccination much lower than infection.”

Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR)

6. NHS (UK): “Measles can lead to serious problems like pneumonia, brain swelling (encephalitis), and deafness. The risk of these complications from the disease is vastly greater than the risk of a mild, temporary rash or fever from the vaccine.”
7. CDC (USA): “The MMR vaccine is not linked to autism. The risk of developing Congenital Rubella Syndrome (CRS) from natural rubella infection in pregnancy is high and devastating, while the vaccine has no comparable risk for serious, long-term harm.”
8. National Agency Y (Focus on Mumps): “Mumps infection can cause inflammation of the testicles, ovaries, or pancreas, and meningitis. The vaccine is highly effective and any mild side effects, like temporary swollen glands, are minor compared to these potential complications.”
9. WHO (Global): “A measles outbreak carries a high risk of death, especially for malnourished children. The global strategy emphasizes the irreplaceable benefit of the two-dose MMR series to save millions of lives.”
10. NHS (UK): “The possible complications of infectious conditions like measles, mumps, and rubella are much more serious than the very mild and short-lived side effects of the MMR vaccine.”

Influenza (Flu)

11. CDC (USA): “The flu shot can cause a sore arm or mild ache, but it significantly reduces the risk of flu-related hospitalization, which can lead to life-threatening conditions like heart attack, stroke, and pneumonia.”
12. National Agency Z (Focus on High Risk): “For individuals over 65, the risk of death from influenza is high. The high-dose flu vaccine offers 40% greater protection against hospitalization than the standard dose, representing a clear benefit over the minor risk of injection site soreness.”
13. NHS (UK): “Catching the flu carries a risk of serious secondary bacterial infections. The vaccine is your safest and most effective way to avoid this cascade of potentially fatal complications.”
14. CDC (USA): “Even in seasons where the vaccine is not perfectly matched to the circulating strain, vaccination still reduces the severity of illness, a benefit that far outweighs the risk of temporary, mild side effects.”

Pertussis (Whooping Cough)

15. CDC (USA): “Pertussis infection in infants is potentially deadly, requiring intensive care and leading to severe coughing fits and possible brain damage. The DTaP or Tdap vaccine’s benefit of preventing these outcomes is non-negotiable, despite the rare possibility of fever or injection site swelling.”
16. National Agency A (Focus on Pregnant People): “Vaccinating against pertussis during pregnancy protects the newborn, who is too young for their own shot. The overwhelming benefit of transferring protective antibodies to the baby far surpasses the minimal risk to the expectant mother.”

Polio

17. WHO (Global): “Polio infection carries the risk of irreversible paralysis. The inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) is 100% safe in that it cannot cause the disease, and its benefit of preventing permanent disability is one of the greatest public health victories.”

Human Papillomavirus (HPV)

18. CDC (USA): “The HPV vaccine protects against several types of cancer (cervical, anal, oral, etc.). The vaccine is a safe, life-saving intervention and the risk of developing a serious long-term illness from not being vaccinated is a certainty for a significant portion of the population.”

Hepatitis B

19. NHS (UK): “Hepatitis B infection often becomes chronic and can lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer. The vaccine is extremely safe and the lifetime protection it offers against a potentially fatal, life-long disease clearly justifies vaccination.”

General Statement

WHO (Global): “Vaccines are rigorously tested and continually monitored for safety. Layers of safety testing and oversight ensure that the benefits of vaccines far outweigh any risk of adverse events, which are almost universally mild and temporary.”

Allegation: The risk of MMRV/MMR associated febrile seizures generalize to all vaccines (1/1150-3000), and this rate is unacceptable

At this point in the book the author cherrypicked the highest possible febrile seizure risk statistic he could find and walked away, without thinking what that number means. Remember that Gavin De Becker specifically referred to himself as an antivaxxer, and after the antivaxxer has manufactured sufficient doubt, his responsibility ends. The study actually being referenced is shown here, and what the authors were trying to do was to measure the risk of febrile seizures in a specific interval, 6-11 days after an MMR vaccine. The strongest refutation to Gavin’s assertion is that the CDC recognized this a long time ago when Gavin was not dabbling in vaccine science, and broke up the MMR and varicella vaccines so that the febrile seizure risk would be lower. Even if the febrile seizure statistic were generalizable, these types of seizures do not lead to adverse neurological outcomes. Lastly, Gavin misreads the difference between an excess and an absolute risk; the number he quotes is an excess risk, which means, an additional risk on top of a baseline risk (kids have always been getting febrile seizures since the beginning of time due to certain infections). If vaccines were actually resulting in hundreds of thousands of febrile seizures, this would be an easily observed phenomenon in other national epidemiological studies. Denmark specifically looked at this, and in a group of > 80 000 kids, in the vaccine with the highest febrile seizure risk (MMRV), only 8.5 per 10 000 patients actually experienced febrile seizures. A more real life analogy to this is to compare the risk of an engine problem during an Indy Cup between two racing teams. You can say Team A has a risk of 2%, and Team B has a risk of 5%, and you would say the difference in risk is 3%. This does not mean that in 3 of every 100 races, Team A will have an engine problem, it means that the difference between the two teams risks is 3/ 100. No study in the world has observed hundreds of thousands of febrile seizures after vaccines. Gavin could have taken the time to test his hypothesis but he did not. He didn’t even take the time to test if he was correct because, this would weaken his argument.

Allegation – Hannah Poling’s mitochondrial disorder was triggered by vaccines/ vaccines made things worse

For any readers that are not familiar with mitochondria, these are the parts of our cells that are the power stations that supply us with the energy needed to do all our daily activities. The food we eat most directly fuels these little engines which then generate power for us.

Mitochondria do have unusual diseases that cause a variety of strange symptoms such as weakness, muscle damage, neurological symptoms, and much more, as these engines live in all areas of our body. The most direct allegation is that vaccines made the disease worse because of the fever. We need to unpack this allegation several different ways. First off, there is no vaccine on the planet that can change our genes – this is not debatable. There are injectable gene therapies, which are an entirely different type of medical product with their own risks and benefits, but these are not to be mixed up with vaccines. Next up, the fever part is a rational concern because mitochondrial diseases like Leigh syndrome do indeed run the risk of a “power failure” if a fever occurs with mitochondria being unable to keep up with energy demand. Rational concerns though must be linked up with clinical data, because we have decades of research available to show that what we think up theoretically doesn’t necessarily line up with the real world. Fevers from vaccine preventable diseases are routinely worse than the corresponding fever from vaccines (citation Plotkin’s Vaccines), and so a patient with a legitimate mitochondrial syndrome is going to run into more danger with the full on illness. Vaccines are both more routinely recommended and require more monitoring due to the additional possibility of such patients not responding to vaccines. Vaccines can be done safely with close physician monitoring with medical assessment to help reduce fever should it occur. Lastly, it would be exceedingly disingenuous to generalize a very rare metabolic disorder to the entire population and use the example of Hannah Poling to cook up fear about vaccines for people who aren’t even dealing with the same medical problem.

Quote: You are a crazy conspiracy-spouting anti-vaxxer whose skepticism is placing everyone at great risk of disease and death

The list of times antivaccine families got other people ill is very long, ranging from the Disney measles outbreak of 2014-2015, the Texas measles outbreak in 2025, and the California whooping cough outbreak of 2010 amongst many others. It is very easy to be detached from the risk of vaccine preventable disease when you haven’t seen it (this author of this debunk has personally witnessed several). I hope one day that Gavin has the humility to see that most people understandably don’t comprehend how to be a proficient bodyguard – but Gavin doesn’t have the medical proficiency to understand vaccine preventable disease risk either. Medical professionals have the right to call him out when he makes mistakes for clicks and engagement because we are the ones who have the pick up the consequences of patients getting ill, not him.

The comparison between heavy metal contamination with milk powder and the comparison to vaccines

It is no longer valid to complain about vaccines containing thiomersal when comparable products without thiomersal have been available for many decades. Even mainstream pediatricians can get behind figuring out how to decrease heavy metal contamination in dried milk powder – and this requires sustained policy change with external regulation of these companies by professionals knowledgeable in how to actually effect the change. The US administration in 2025 is actually making it easier for companies to pollute, not less.

Mistake with relying on BBB studies for thiomersal

This section of the book is invalid mostly because people have been able to use thiomersal free vaccines for quite a while now. Gavin de Becker uses a few blood brain barrier studies to allege that people should not be handling any thiomersal via vaccines. His first mistake was to cite a study about methylmercury rather than thiomersal (thiomersal breaks down into ethylmercury in the body); while ethylmercury and methylmercury differ by only the letter “m”, they have vastly different chemical properties in the body and physicians uniformly agree that humans should avoid environmental mercury toxicity as much as possible. His next mistake was to cite antivaxxers with methodological issues to try and back up his case. When you use good methodology there is no link between autism and thiomersal containing vaccines. Gavin de Becker just has no training or no interest in learning how to tell between a well done study and a poorly done one.

Why can antivaxxers always get off the hook for perjury?

The accusation discussed here is that the CDC lied under oath about mercury in vaccines. Multiple websites from many different sources have said that thiomersal has been removed from all childhood vaccines except for the multi-dose flu vaccine which already can be refused in place of a single dose flu vaccine. The website has been misleadingly quoted – I invite the reader to consult the primary source. I will then ask – when will Gavin de Becker and all who think like him face financial penalties for saying wrong information about vaccines? Realistically not anytime soon.

Death is not the only bad outcome for vaccine preventable disease

If a vaccine preventable disease deletes your entire immune memory (measles), makes you infertile (mumps), makes you deaf your whole life (rubella), or causes paralysis (tetanus), you would rather take the preventative option than tangle with the disease.

Lack of understanding of base rate fallacy in mumps

The complaint here is that we need to pay attention to why most people with actual mumps disease these days are the ones getting vaccinated. This illustrates something called the base rate fallacy. If there is a population starting out unvaccinated, people who get sick before being vaccinated will get ill from the disease. As the population further shifts towards being vaccinated, less people will fall seriously ill, but every now and then a vaccinated patient will still fall ill due to factors unique to the patient, such as a particularly high load of disease, waning immunity, or that patient never formed an immune response in the first place. It would be false to generalize to the whole population and say that vaccines don’t work – its just that vaccines aren’t a steel shield against every level of disease and have always been like that. We are seeing people get sick from mumps because mumps is slowly coming back and will start to affect more unvaccinated people if given the opportunity.

Allegation – true science is up for debate

An example of a genuine scientific debate is what is conducted at the World Science Festival. The organizer (who is a physicist), who invites people outside of his specialty, actually studied these other specialties well enough to conduct professional debate with people not in his field. The leaders of the antivaccine community, by their public actions and words, clearly are not starting in the same reality as we are. If someone insists that the proper way to walk into a house is by trying to morph through the brick wall, Harry Potter style, it is really difficult, if not impossible to argue with that person. If someone who espouses the beliefs expressed in the book, wishes to argue with myself or Dr Peter Hotez, the way to do it is clearly spelled out – it requires a good command of the scientific method and the previous literature (or at least a sincere attempt). Gavin has repeatedly failed in his attempt to use scientific logic consistently. True scientists have no interest in debating people who already have no interest in sincerely hearing the response.

A misunderstanding of vaccine derived poliovirus

The overall allegation in this segment of the book is that polio vaccine is dangerous because sometimes, people get vaccine derived poliovirus and themselves become paralyzed. First off, physicians are pretty unified in their belief that polio vaccine associated paralysis is a terrible outcome and we all wish there were zero cases. Secondarily, it takes some thought to understand why this occurs. There are two main formats of vaccine for polio – the OPV, which is a weakened form of the poliovirus, and the IPV, which is a chemically inactivated poliovirus. The simplest reason not all countries have adopted the IPV is because of cost; secondarily the IPV generates less mucosal immunity in the GI tract which is the strongest shield against polio infection. The OPV is the vaccine that is occasionally mutating in the wild and turning back into infectious poliovirus, and it will take a sustained effort on the part of multiple public health agencies to eradicate vaccine derived poliovirus. The frequency of vaccine derived poliovirus is far, far lower than paralysis from real polio in the wild.

Secondarily, paralysis from other viruses is a well recognized phenomenon. It takes systematic testing to find out the cause, not just a blanket assertion that polio vaccine must be responsible.

Allegation – The TB vaccine should be given because of its beneficial nonspecific effects

The author spends a segment of chapter 11 praising the tuberculosis vaccine because of its nonspecific effects. However, the specific reasons the TB vaccine is not routinely given in the US relate to its ability to interfere with TB screening (a blood test will be needed instead of a skin test), and its variable efficacy, with best protection against childhood TB but not adult TB (which is the predominant form in the United States). A vaccine is generally not licensed for its nonspecific effects. Citation: Plotkin’s Vaccines.

Using older vaccine labels for Pfizer branded vaccines to pretend they have not been studied

This is really an inexcusable degree of willful misinterpretation. Just because a vaccine label does not have the latest studies, does not mean they have not been done. Vaccines periodically get new studies or updates and require searching literature outside of the vaccine label to find updated information. Would you be OK with trying to tell someone National Geographic stopped in 1995 and holding up a magazine dated from that year to “prove it”?

Dissecting the assertion that vaccines saved 154 million lives

The author spends a lot of time criticizing how there are many different news sources reporting a Lancet study using modeling techniques to assert that vaccines saved 154 million lives. The superfical message is reasonable in that critical thinkers should not just repeat what they hear. However, we can reach for direct epidemiological data showing a decrease in child mortality linked to increased vaccine coverage. It isn’t a mathematical pipe dream if we can reach for actual measured decreases in child mortality because these kids aren’t dying from vaccine preventable diseases.

The British Imperial college modelers made too many mistakes in their modeling of COVID

The modelers are correctly assessed to have made mistakes in their predictions of COVID seriousness. However, this is not because they were just playing around at their jobs. Several issues made their jobs more difficult, such as challenging initial assumptions, uncertainty about long term immunity, reporting lags, and difficulty in predicting long term human behavior. This type of epidemiology is an entire degree program.

Quoting the side effects of DTP vaccine when it has been retired

Most countries now use the newer DTaP or combination vaccines for pertussis; one of the motivations to retire the DTP vaccine was in fact due to its side effects. It is inherently dishonest to warn people in the United States about DTP vaccine side effects when it is no longer the vaccine in use (it would have been better to clearly label that these side effects are for historical interest).

Quote: I suggest that making good parental decisions derives from common sense, not science.

Pediatricians are pretty unified in their belief that taking parental information seriously is generally a good thing. However, even the best parents may not necessarily see certain symptoms. Common sense could not possibly reveal the presence of placenta previa, a serious placental condition that may mandate a careful C-section instead of a normal delivery of a baby. Common sense could not necessarily reveal the presence of baby heart failure. The best decision making is shared decision making.

Vaccine companies can’t be sued

One of the author’s best friends, RFK Jr, is by trade a lawyer who makes quite a lot of money suing vaccine companies! It just needs to be done according to the laws of the country where the lawsuit is to take place.

Did the Institute of Medicine improve

The Institute of Medicine has clearly made mistakes in many of the examples listed in the book. The now National Academy of Medicine has tried to make many improvements since the events described in Gavin de Becker’s book, one of which is shown here. The interested reader should also be aware that many other sources do work similar to the IOM and can also be referenced to reduce bias.

Vaccines don’t cause cardiac disease outside of myocarditis

In this part of the book Gavin de Becker is upset to have seen so many different kinds of cardiac disease after receipt of COVID vaccines. The issue is that he conflates all cardiac diseases with each other. The most severe and perhaps most publicly visible heart problem is cardiac arrest, when your heart stops working. A cardiologist tries to solve this by systematically figuring things out. Vaccine myocarditis is quite well known now and has its highest risk group in young men. However, vaccines most definitely do not cause the most common adult heart problem, which is heart artery blockages. Instead, COVID vaccination causes less overall heart complications than just catching the disease. He also laments the “huge number” of young adults and children having cardiac arrest when the epidemiology explicitly shows that this is false. The person who makes this mistake makes the mistake of trusting catchy news headlines that don’t accurately reflect epidemiology.