Infant vaccination mortality paper censored by platform that welcomes pre-peer review research

Twelve years after a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted through his lawyers to withholding a "statistically significant finding" on black babies from his peer-reviewed study finding no link between autism and vaccination, a preprint server that hosts research before peer review erased a study that also found a racial vaccination link.

Preprints.org, operated by the Swiss open-access publisher MDPI, took down the study, "Increased Mortality Associated with 2-Month Old Infant Vaccinations," three weeks after it was posted by Brian Hooker and Karl Jablonowski, who are scientists with Children's Health Defense, founded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The Jan. 14 withdrawal statement on the preprint even disappeared between Thursday morning, when Just the News viewed it and asked Preprints.org and MDPI for an explanation, and the afternoon, when the entire manuscript page displayed a 404 error message. It was restored without changes sometime late Thursday.

It says Preprints.org's advisory board, which has more than 300 identified members, requested its removal under the withdrawal policy, without specifying what grounds within the policy the board invoked. Only the title, author information and withdrawal statement remain.

The editors and advisory board can withdraw approved manuscripts for author misconduct such as plagiarism and data fabrication, "serious scientific errors that cannot be corrected by updating the paper" and "serious concerns to which the readers should be alerted."

But another part of the policy gives Preprints.org boundless discretion to remove manuscripts: "in very exceptional circumstances, such as" – meaning not limited to – court or government request or to prevent "an illegal act, including copyright violation," threat to personal privacy, unlawful publishing or "risks to the general public."

The publishing policy says Preprints.org staff screen every submitted manuscript, which includes "checks for basic scientific content, author background, and compliance with ethical standards," in consultation with "active researchers" and the advisory board, before posting. This usually takes less than 24 hours.

That suggests no one saw a problem with the infant vaccination paper until well after the holidays. It was received Dec. 22, posted Dec. 23 and withdrawn Jan. 14.

MDPI gave Just the News the specific reasoning behind the paper's withdrawal on Friday.

"Following the posting of the preprint, concerns were brought to our attention regarding aspects of the methodology and the potential for misinterpretation of the findings by a general audience," and after "careful evaluation" by the advisory board, "it was determined that the content could pose a risk of public misunderstanding," public affairs manager Jisuk Kang wrote in an email.

While the public generally understands that preprints are not peer-reviewed and "may contain flaws," in this case the potential for misinterpretation was so great it "could pose a potential risk to the public" if the original version remained posted, as opposed to retracted but left intact, Kang said.

"We would like to emphasize that withdrawal is not a judgment on the authors’ intentions but reflects the preliminary nature of preprints and our responsibility to prevent public misinterpretation," Kang wrote. "We encourage the authors to submit their work to a peer-reviewed journal, where the findings can be appropriately assessed and contextualized."

'Much worse for females than for males'

CHD's Hooker is known for prompting William Thompson, the CDC scientist, to come clean about the connection he found between measles, mumps and rubella vaccination and autism – specifically in African-American males under 3 years – a decade after Thompson's study in Pediatrics, by secretly recording their conversations. 

The paper was never updated. The corresponding author's CDC email bounced back when Just the News tried it Thursday, and the CDC didn't answer subsequent queries about whether its researchers tried to update the paper after Thompson's admission through counsel.

Thompson's mea culpa, featured in the 2016 documentary Vaxxed, came up again last year when President Trump yanked Dave Weldon's nomination as CDC director, which Weldon traced in part to his interest as a Republican congressman 20 years earlier in research on MMR vaccine side effects by the pediatrician who made Vaxxed.

CHD filed a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act lawsuit Thursday against the American Academy of Pediatrics, which publishes Pediatrics, for financially incentivizing pediatricians to vaccinate heavily and receiving money from vaccine makers while making "false and fraudulent” claims about the CDC childhood immunization schedule's safety.

The infant vaccination paper "had an amazingly large reception" on social media when the duo posted it shortly before Christmas, Jablonowski told CHD on Tuesday, six days after its withdrawal. (Preprints.org statistics show more than 3,000 downloads and 15,000 views.) 

The preprint server then notified the authors "they are going to retract the paper with no explanation as to why, and that's really befuddling" given the paper's reach and "implications," he said. It's "poor practice to say the least."

Jablonowski and Hooker have since posted the preprint on Zenodo, a platform commissioned by the European Commission and operated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It has about 1,000 views and 700 downloads as of Thursday night.

Analyzing Louisiana Department of Health data on children who died before 3, matched with their immunization record, the authors showed a statistically significant connection between vaccination in the second month since birth and death in the third month.

"It was worse for black children than for white children, and it was much worse for females than it was for males," Jablonowski told CHD, explaining the "biological plausibility" for the latter. 

Female immune systems at that age are "ready to fight against everything," which could "lead to a much stronger immune response" than in males, whose immune systems are more selective, he said.

74% increased risk following rotavirus vaccine: statistical significance

The Louisiana data specifically cover 1,775 children from 2013 to 2024 who died before age 3. They were mostly male (57%), black (59%) and non-Hispanic (94%).

Vaccination is only counted in the second month of life (60-90 days old), with children inoculated earlier counted as unvaccinated. Dying in the third month refers to 90-120 days.

Depending on the vaccine, children were 28-74% more likely to die in the third month when vaccinated in the prior month than those who weren't. It was nearly identical for black children specifically (29-74%) and startlingly higher for females (52-98%).

Unvaccinated children had the lowest mortality rate, at 15.16%. The only rates over 22% were for combination vaccines: the five first given at two months (DTaP, rotavirus, HIB, polio, pneumococcal, 22.24%), those five plus hepatitis B (23.12%) and the 6-in-1 Vaxelis (30.65%).

"The hazard for the vaccinated translated to an increase in mortality by: 42% for DTaP; 29% for HepB; 35% for HIB; 32% for polio; 41% for pneumococcal" and 74% for rotavirus, the last of which the authors note reached statistical significance.

"For every vaccine inspected, children who were not vaccinated in their 2nd month of life had a lower mortality rate than those who were vaccinated in that same time window," they wrote. 

Collectively, children who received all six recommended vaccines at two months were 68% more likely to die the next month — blacks 68%, females 112%, the paper says. 

The causes of death also "present differently based on vaccination." Females following CDC recommendations were "more likely to die of non-leading causes of death," which in their analysis included three infectious-disease and four nervous system-related deaths, while unvaccinated children had zero of either.

Jablonowski told CHD's The Defender the data set is "really small" epidemiologically but far larger than others on the subject, such as a 1988 study on the risk of sudden infant death syndrome following DTaP immunization by CDC and Vanderbilt University researchers, published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

"If vaccine safety were as heavily researched as vaccine proponents would like us to believe, this would have been a well-trodden exercise and we would have found nothing," he said. "But there is nothing subtle about the measured safety signals."