The more vaccines an infant receives at once, the greater the chance the infant will develop an infection, a respiratory illness or developmental delays following their shots, according to a peer-reviewed study published Wednesday in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research.
“If safety signals sounded alarms, the results would be deafening,” lead author Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist at Children’s Health Defense (CHD), told The Defender. “The sheer number of diseases increases exponentially with every added vaccine.”
Jablonowski and CHD’s Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker, Ph.D., analyzed 20 years’ worth of data from 1,542,076 vaccine combinations administered to infants under age 1.
The data, collected from July 1, 1991, to May 31, 2011, came from the publicly available Florida Medicaid Database, which contains more than 460 million billing claims from over 10 million people.
The researchers examined the medical diagnoses given to vaccinated infants within 30 days after vaccination. They excluded diagnoses made on the day the babies received the shots, to eliminate any possible preexisting conditions.
The study compared babies who received three “base vaccines” to babies who received those same vaccines plus others in a single pediatrician visit.
The control group consisted of 227,231 cases of infants who in one visit only received the DTP, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) and the inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV).
They compared medical outcomes among that group to outcomes for cohorts of infants who also received either the hepatitis B (HepB) vaccine, the pneumococcal vaccine (PCV), or the rotavirus vaccine, or different combinations of two or three of those vaccines administered together.
The researchers found seven cohorts of infants in the database who received different vaccine combinations — ranging, for example, from base vaccines plus HepB to base vaccines plus HepB, PCV and rotavirus — and compared those to the control group.
They used the Fisher’s Exact Test statistical model to compare the frequency of a particular disease following the shots in one cohort with the frequency of the same disease in another cohort.
They also used Bonferroni correction, a powerful statistical tool, to eliminate any random results and implemented a high bar for identifying statistical significance.
“With any statistical test you can never be 100% confident of your results,” Jablonowski said. “However, we set our bar so high that we are 99.99% confident the diseases we report are associated with vaccine combinations.”
They identified 45 different statistically significant diagnoses for respiratory, developmental and suspected infectious diseases following the different vaccine combinations.
They summarized the illnesses and their relative risk, or the likelihood they would occur in the group exposed to excess vaccines, for the various cohorts.
Overall they found that as the number of shots given to infants in a single doctor’s visit increased, the number of developmental respiratory or infectious disease diagnoses within 30 days of the shots increased exponentially.
Each additional shot more than doubled the number of those different diseases diagnosed.
For example, one additional vaccine resulted in an average of seven additional illnesses occurring at statistically significant rates in a given cohort of babies.
Two additional vaccines resulted in an average of 15 diseases, and three vaccines administered resulted in an additional 35 diseases.
Respiratory diseases — including cough, asthma, obstructive bronchitis and many others — were the most common recurring conditions following any different combinations of vaccines.
Jablonowski and Hooker said respiratory illnesses likely occurred due to vaccine-induced “maladapted immune response and a poor adaptation to environmental factors.”
Developmental conditions like “failure to thrive” — where a child’s physical, mental or social development is delayed, abnormal or ceases — occurred in four cohorts. The researchers suggested it was a result of the vaccines causing dysregulation in the respiratory and immune systems.
One common infection was leukocytosis, a high white blood cell count that can indicate a range of infections, inflammations or immune system disorders. Another serious example included sepsis, which occurred in the cohort that received the most shots at once — the base shots plus HepB, PCV and rotavirus.
‘Shockingly reckless’ that studies on effects of multiple vaccines not done until now
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 2024 childhood vaccination schedule includes 77 total vaccine doses for children ages 0-18.
The 2024 schedule was expanded to include the pneumococcal and COVID-19 vaccines and monoclonal antibodies nirsevimab, which are not technically vaccines but are included on the schedule.
By comparison, the CDC in 1986 recommended 11 doses of 7 vaccines by age 16, including the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella), DTP, and polio vaccines.
With the exception of the HepB vaccine, recommended for infants in their first 24 hours of life, infants rarely receive a single vaccine at a time.
Many vaccines, like the DTP, combine different vaccines for multiple illnesses into a single shot. Also, to adhere to the CDC schedule, pediatricians commonly administer five or six vaccines and vaccine combinations to babies at each 2-month, 4-month and 6-month visit.
Yet, the authors said, no appropriate studies have been conducted to assess the effects of combining vaccines.
“Unfortunately, there is a paucity of research completed on the administration of multiple vaccines as recommended by the CDC schedule,” Hooker told The Defender. “Vaccines are ‘magic’ so no one questions adding more to the schedule.”
The result is that, though health safety agencies may claim individual vaccines are safe, any claims about the safety of vaccine combinations are unfounded, the authors wrote.
“Within a matter of seconds a 2-month-old infant seen by a CDC-compliant pediatrician can expect to be injected with vaccines for HepB, rotavirus, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, HIB, 15 or 20 different pneumococcal variants, polio and maybe RSV,” Jablonowski said.
“It is shockingly reckless that harms of combinations have not been studied,“ he added.
Hooker said it was notable that neither the U.S. Food and Drug Administration nor the CDC, which makes the schedule recommendations, has ever done these studies.
“We plan on continuing to complete this type of research, given the huge void of accurate and relevant vaccine safety science,” he said.