A new study finds developed countries requiring the most vaccine doses for infants have higher childhood mortality rates, contradicting assumptions that more vaccines equate to lower deaths. The data suggest unintended consequences may increase all-cause mortality.
Developed nations requiring the most neonatal vaccine doses tend to have the worst childhood mortality rates, according to a peer-reviewed study published July 20 in Cureus Journal of Medical Science.
“Health authorities emphasize that vaccines save lives,” lead author Neil Miller told The Defender. “Yet our data suggests that when developed nations require two versus zero neonatal vaccine doses, or many versus fewer vaccines during infancy, there may be unintended consequences that increase all-cause mortality.”
Miller, director of the Institute of Medical and Scientific Inquiry in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has been researching this topic since the early 2000s. In a 2011 paper with the same co-author — Gary S. Goldman, Ph.D., an independent computer scientist — they showed that developed countries requiring the most vaccine doses for infants had the least favorable infant mortality rates.
Earlier this year, they replicated those results using updated data and responded to critics of their findings.
In their latest study, Miller and Goldman expanded the scope of their earlier analyses to consider the effects of two vaccines — hepatitis B and tuberculosis — both typically given soon after birth.
The study calculated the effect of these shots on mortality rates for neonates (up to 28 days post-birth), infants (up to 1 year old), and children under 5. Analyses were all based on separate data from 2019 and 2021.
Mortality data and vaccine schedules were collected from UNICEF, the World Health Organization and national governments.
Nations were categorized by the number of neonatal vaccine doses (zero, one or two) mandated for newborns to determine if statistically significant differences existed in mortality rates for the three age groups.
After applying standard statistical analyses to the data, the study found a strong association between vaccinations and rates of neonatal, infant and under-5 mortality for both years studied.
“Our findings would be considered moderate correlations which are statistically significant,” Miller said. The correlations are positive, meaning that the more vaccine doses given, the higher the mortality.
“In these circumstances health authorities expect to see negative correlations, that is, a decline in mortality with more vaccine doses. So, any statistically significant positive correlation is a genuine concern,” Miller said.
Miller calculated a highly significant difference of 1.28 deaths per 1,000 live births in the mean infant mortality rates between nations not giving their neonates any vaccine doses, and those requiring vaccination against both hepatitis B and tuberculosis.
For each reduction of six vaccine doses administered during infancy, the infant mortality rate improved by approximately one death per 1,000 live births.
A hallmark of good science is the good-faith openness to test one’s conclusions, a practice Miller and Goldman followed here. To validate their conclusions, the researchers applied 18 different statistical analyses to the data. This is like using several different camera angles to confirm whether a tennis ball hit the line or was out.
Seventeen of 18 statistical treatments confirmed the original conclusion that the more vaccines given, the higher the infant and early childhood mortality rates.
Neonatal deaths and all-cause mortality
In most nations, more than half of all infant deaths (within the first year) occur during the neonatal period (the first 28 days of life), and about 75% of those deaths occur within one week after birth when hepatitis and tuberculosis vaccines are administered.
Deaths occurring during the neonatal period have a disproportionately high impact on the reporting of infant and under-5 mortality rates, but the longer after vaccination the deaths occur, the less likely physicians are to associate them with vaccines given right after birth.
“Hepatitis B and tuberculosis vaccines given shortly after birth, when the immune system is immature and the newborn’s weight is low, may increase vulnerability to serious adverse reactions and deaths that ultimately contribute to higher mortality rates moving forward,” Miller said.
Globally, the top causes of premature death in the under-5 population are premature birth complications, trauma during birth, pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria. These statistics are heavily skewed by developing countries, where hygiene, nutrition, medical care and record-keeping are not up to best-in-class standards.
In the U.S., accidents and homicides are the main causes of infant and early childhood mortality. The leading medical causes for death in infants and children under 5 are developmental and genetic conditions and the consequences of premature birth.
According to Miller:
“Premature birth and low birth weight are common causes of neonatal death, but since vaccines are administered within 24 hours of birth, when these factors are most relevant, it is possible that some of these deaths were precipitated by birth-dose vaccines.
“However, since cause-of-death classifications associated with infant vaccination do not exist, doctors and coroners are compelled to misclassify and conceal vaccine-related fatalities under alternate cause-of-death classifications.”
Relying on all-cause mortality instead of “vaccine-induced injury” — or some other subjective assessment of the cause of death — greatly reduces what is termed “diagnostic bias.”
While considerable uncertainty may exist regarding why someone died, the death itself is not in question.
Miller discussed some of these potentially confounding factors in an earlier paper on vaccines and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), published in 2021 in Toxicology Reports. That study identified SIDS and “suffocation in bed” as common misclassifications: of all reported SIDS cases post-vaccination, 75% occurred within 7 days after the shots.
What does it all mean?
Although using all-cause mortality data reduces many sources of bias, it considers only inputs and outputs, in this case, vaccine doses and death. It ignores everything that happens before the dose and between the shots and death.
This means some unknown factor may be at work causing vaccinated children to expire.
But the positive correlation between vaccine doses and mortality is most easily explained by the conclusion that the number of lives saved by preventing deadly infections is fewer than the lives lost from increased susceptibility to other serious health threats.
Miller’s study also found that vaccines administered shortly after birth correlate more strongly to infant mortality than to neonatal mortality.
This suggests that the negative effects of early vaccinations may be delayed, perhaps by predisposing children to adverse reactions to shots given later, or to other health threats.
Studies have shown that vaccinated low-weight infants have an increased risk of developing life-threatening apnea — sudden, unexplained breathing cessation, especially during sleep. In an earlier investigation of 30 SIDS incidents, the authors found that apnea preceded death by an average of eight weeks.
“This might explain why vaccines administered during the neonatal period are more highly correlated with deaths that occur in the post-neonatal period,” Miller said.
Miller concluded his study with a plea to health authorities worldwide to reconsider mandatory childhood vaccination schedules:
“Vaccine policymakers have an obligation to determine the full impact of their current vaccination schedules on deaths from any cause. More safety research is needed on the number of childhood vaccines that are administered concurrently, cumulatively, and the sequence in which they are given, to confirm they are providing the intended effects on child survival.”