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Those who’ve been reading SBM since at least 2024 know that, ever since Donald Trump was elected President again, with respect to federal science policy I’ve been referring to his second term as “Lysenkoism 2.0,” based on the administrations immediate and aggressive efforts to alter federal science policy to become dependent on ideology and politics, rather than rigorous science peer-reviewed by more-or-less nonpartisan scientists. Trofim Lysenko, recall, was the Soviet-era agricultural scientist whose ideas—which included the denial of Mendelian genetics in favor of a version of Lamarckism—Stalin liked because they aligned with Soviet ideology. When put into practice, though, Lysenko’s ideas were utterly disastrous for Soviet agriculture, worsening crop yields and turbocharging famines from the 1930s through the early 1960s. Yet, because his ideas were ideologically in sync with the regime, particularly under Josef Stalin, Lysenko yielded ruthless power over Soviet agricultural science for decades, and scientists who dissented in favor of good science risked being ostracized, fired, imprisoned, and in some cases even executed. This history is why the term “Lysenkoism” is now commonly used to refer the domination of science by a pseudoscientific ideology, rather than evidence, experimentation, and data.

Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976).
Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976).

Despite being the product of politics, most federal science has escaped the stain of Lysenkoism, particularly since World War II, when institutes such as the National Institutes of Health (which I tend to discuss the most because I’m most familiar with it) rose to prominence. True, politicians decided funding levels and would dictate priorities (e.g., Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot), but in general this was done in consultation with scientists, and it was career scientists, not political operatives, making final funding decisions for individual research grants. Most recently, earlier this month I described proposed rules from Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought that, if allowed to take effect, would basically codify what the administration has been doing already, specifically putting political operatives in charge of granular decision-making over individual grants, with specific policies enabling political appointees to decide on which grants to fund based on whether they “align with administration priorities” or not, all while banning swaths of research that have anything to do with the dreaded DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) or “gender ideology.” Of course, the difference between the original Lysenkoism and Lysenkoism 2.0 is that the original Lysenkoism was (mostly) confined to agriculture and genetics, whereas Lysenkoism 2.0 has metastasized to all federal medicine and science, with our current NIH Director “Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya exulting that the NIH would become the “research arm of MAHA” (make America healthy again), RFK Jr.’s pseudoscience- and quackery-laden “health” movement.

Even all of that, however, is apparently not enough. You might recall recently how the American Diabetes Association cravenly complied in advance by kicking scientists critical of this administration’s NIH policy out of their yearly scientific meeting. Witness our Secretary of Health and Human Services, longtime antivax activist and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on X one week ago:

I’ve been paying attention to federal health policy for literally decades now, and I do not recall any HHS Secretary in my adult lifetime (or at least since I’ve been paying close attention to federal health policy) ever having used the power of his office in this way with a clear intention to intimidate journal editors over a retracted/removed study—or any study, for that matter. Prior to this administration, it just wasn’t done. (If anyone remembers an example that I might have missed, let me know, but I doubt that anyone will be able to.) Unsurprisingly, as friend of the blog, UCSF law professor Dorit Reiss, pointed out, he doesn’t have any regulatory power to do this:

Not that any such niceties seem ever to stop this administration. I also note that RFK Jr.’s demand to know which experts were consulted as part of the journal’s investigation is clearly designed to frighten experts from agreeing to participate in post-publication reviews of dodgy antivax papers for fear that their identities will be revealed and they will be subject to harassment by RFK Jr. and his minions. Similarly, this concluding statement is obviously intended to intimidate the scientific publishing industry:

The public deserves to know how and if the scientific publishing industry is taking its duty to ensure research integrity seriously and ethically.

I have my problems with the scientific publishing industry (and have written about them periodically over the years), but what RFK Jr. is doing is not intended to address any of those issues. He’s doing this because he doesn’t like journal editors investigating, retracting, and removing pseudoscientific “studies” that he uses to support his antivax crusade.

It wasn’t long before the usual sycophants, toadies, and lackeys joined in the chorus, starting with evidence-based medicine (EBM) guru turned antivax crank Peter Gøtzsche, who took to his Substack to declare Serious editorial misconduct: unwarranted removal of an important vaccine study, even claiming that the study “showed that infant deaths after vaccination are clustered in the first three days.” (Given his tendency towards methodolatry, defined as the profane worship of the randomized controlled trial as the only valid means of clinical investigation, I’m surprised he so easily accepted this conclusion based on anything other than a randomized controlled clinical trial. Actually, no, I’m not.) Unsurprisingly, RFK Jr.’s buddy and sometimes legal collaborator, antivax attorney Aaron Siri joined in by complaining about this study’s removal and other investigations and retractions of typically awful antivax “studies in a post, The Targeted Assassination of Studies Showing Vaccines Cause Injury, in which, with a total lack of self-awareness and/or intentional projection, stated, “Since they can’t win on the merits, they’ve resorted to other tactics.” (I know, I know. I laughed out loud reading that blurb, given RFK Jr.’s use of the considerable power of HHS to attack a journal.) Siri was also unhappy that journal editors were investigating other antivax papers that never should have been published, such as Hooker and Miller’s “vaxxed/unvaxxed” study from 2020 (deconstructed here).

The paper that was removed was a 2021 “study” (I hesitate to dignify this bilge by using that word, hence the quotes) by Neil Z. Miller. Who is Neil Miller? He’s been featured in this blog a few times over the years—and even more often at my not-so-super-secret other blog—because of his generally awful scientific “studies” that always—and I do mean always—find horrible complications due to vaccines. I first noticed him 15 years ago, when he and his frequent partner in crime against science, Gary S. Goldman, published a truly risible bit of scientific dreck falsely claiming to have found a link between a larger number of vaccines in a nation’s vaccine schedule with higher childhood mortality rates, a study that they were flogging and defending 12 years later. I could go on, but recounting Miller’s list of antivax studies isn’t the point here. Instead, one specific study of his, published in 2021, is, particularly given that somehow I never wrote about it when it was first published, likely because that was the height of the pandemic and yet another study by a known antivax crank “scientist” claiming to find a link between vaccines and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) just didn’t rise high enough on my radar to trigger me to write about it, given the tsunami of COVID-19 misinformation we were drowning in back then.

So let’s take a brief look at the study.

Neil Z. Miller: A hack dumpster dives into the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS)

Whenever I’ve encountered an antivax study by Neil Z. Miller, I’ve always looked to see if I could find what sort of credentials that he might have, and I never find any. He is always listed as an “independent researcher,” while his “collaborator” Gary S. Goldman lists himself as an “independent computer scientist,” whatever that means. In the case of the removed study, the entry on Toxicology Reports, the journal in which the paper was originally published, lists him as being affiliated with something called the Institute of Medical and Scientific Inquiry in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Multiple searches failed to provide me with an answer as to what, exactly, the “Institute of Medical and Scientific Inquiry” is, but I do note that Miller is described as a “medical research journalist” and director of the antivax ThinkTwice Global Vaccine Institute, also based in Santa Fe. (The ThinkTwice website reminds me of web design aesthetics from the 1990s/early 2000s.)

But what about the study itself? Although it’s been removed from the journal’s website, it can still be found on PubMed Central, at least for now. As mentioned above, it’s yet another antivax dumpster dive into VAERS, and that’s why I need to briefly discuss VAERS yet again, as misusing VAERS to claim causation of adverse events by vaccines has been a favorite tactic of antivax “research” dating back to before I first started blogging in 2004. I’ve discussed several times dating back to at least 2006 why the idea that VAERS is the be-all and end-all of vaccine safety monitoring is wrong on a number of occasions, but I always like to preface such remarks by simply noting something about discussions of VAERS by antivaxxers. Notice how antivaxxers always cite VAERS and only rarely, if ever, cite other, much better and more reliable, vaccine safety monitoring databases, such as the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) project, or FDA’s Post-licensure Rapid Immunization Safety Monitoring System (PRISM) Antivaxxers also seem to like to represent VAERS simultaneously as the best system to find adverse events (AEs) from vaccines, even while also claiming it’s awful due to underreporting (as above), which means (to them) that all the horrible things in VAERS are really a lot more common than “they” want you to think.

VAERS is, of course, what is known as a passive reporting system in that it relies on doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, and, yes, people receiving vaccines (or their families) to report AEs after vaccines. As a system, it was never intended to provide an accurate estimate of the frequency of AEs related to vaccines, but rather to serve as an early warning system, a “canary in the coal mine” if you will, for possible new vaccine-related AEs. In other words, VAERS is a hypothesis-generating, not a hypothesis testing, system, and its hypotheses are tested using better systems, like VSD, CISA, and PRISM. In contrast to VAERS, these systems are active reporting systems in that electronic health records are actively monitored for AEs after vaccination in order to identify potential signals; there is a lot less bias that way and a lot less potential for misreporting. I do note, however, that, now that RFK Jr. is HHS Secretary and controls the government arm of the VSD, I am now very concerned over antivaxxers misusing VSD to generate false studies claiming vaccine harm. So far, the private health systems holding the data have resisted giving his lackeys full access to VSD data, but can they hold out two and a half more years?

But back to VAERS. The main problem with using VAERS to estimate the frequency of AEs after vaccination is that, in essence, anyone with access to the Internet, mail, or the telephone can report anything to VAERS, as was demonstrated by bloggers years and years ago when one autism advocate filed a report claiming that the flu vaccine had turned him into The Incredible Hulk and another claimed a vaccine had turned his daughter into Wonder Woman. Both reports were accepted. In fairness, ultimately someone from VAERS did contact these people to ask about the reports, and the reports were removed. However, had they refused, reports that vaccines might turn one into the Hulk or Wonder Woman might still be in the database. Moreover, antivax lawyers have a long history of contaminating VAERS with, for example, reports that vaccines cause autism, something I’ve been pointing for 20 years after the first time I pointed it out. All of these design features of VAERS make it at once useful for hypothesis-generation but also, unfortunately, very useful to antivaxxers for falsely claiming harms due to vaccines.

So what did Miller do in his study? He claims to have analyzed 2.605 infant deaths reported to VAERS between 1999 and 2019, examining reports of infants (defined as children < 1 year of age) who died within 60 days post-vaccination. He then claims to have analyzed the data thusly:

In the first analysis (All Mortality), VAERS was filtered to include all reports of infant mortality regardless of whether “sudden death” or SIDS was listed in the report. In the second analysis (SIDS), the VAERS search was further restricted to only include reports that mentioned “sudden death” or “sudden infant death syndrome.” In both analyses, deaths were stratified by the onset interval post-vaccination, that is, by the number of days that transpired between vaccination and death (range = 1–60 days, with Day 1 = Day of Vaccination). Pearson’s chi-squared test was utilized to determine whether there was a statistically significant difference between the expected frequencies of infant mortality and the actual frequencies reported.

Of course, one notes that the peak incidence of SIDS is between 2-4 months of age, with 95% of SIDS deaths occurring between those ages and the median age of an infant suffering SIDS being 11 weeks. This is a time when infants are receiving a number of vaccines, such as at the 2, 4, and 6 month visits to the pediatrician, a simple fact that explains why, even if you know nothing about SIDS, it might appear that vaccines cause it. Unsurprisingly, Miller falls into this fallacy quickly with his two key “findings”:

Of the 2605 infant deaths, 58 % clustered within 3 days post-vaccination and 78.3 % within 7 days post-vaccination. The remaining deaths occurred between 8 days and 60 days post-vaccination, an average of 11 per day (564/53 days) as compared to 760 infant deaths that occurred on Day 2 post-vaccination—a 69-fold increase (Table 2). If the 2605 deaths which occurred within 60 days of vaccination were randomly distributed throughout this interval, one would expect 43.42 deaths per day or 304 per week. The excess of deaths on the day of vaccination (43 were expected/440 occurred), within 3 days post-vaccination (130 were expected/1512 occurred), and in the first week post-vaccination (304 were expected/2041 occurred) were all statistically significant (p < 0.00001).

And:

Of the 1048 SIDS cases, 51 % clustered within 3 days post-vaccination and 75.5 % within 7 days post-vaccination. The remaining SIDS cases occurred between 8 days and 60 days post-vaccination, an average of 4.8 per day (257/53 days) as compared to 277 SIDS cases that occurred on Day 2 post-vaccination—a 57-fold increase (Table 3). If the 1048 SIDS cases which occurred within 60 days of vaccination were randomly distributed throughout this interval, one would expect 17.47 SIDS cases per day or 122 per week. The excess of SIDS cases on the day of vaccination (17 were expected/131 occurred), within 3 days post-vaccination (52 were expected/534 occurred), and in the first week post-vaccination (122 were expected/791 occurred) were all statistically significant (p < 0.00001).

Sounds damning, right? Wrong. As Prof. Jeffery Morris pointed out:

Specifically:

The editor-in-chief already clearly explained the reason for the removal in his notice (https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214750026000521?via%3Dihub), which was that there were methodological flaws in the paper so serious that the conclusions were unsubstantiated.

I mention the specific methodological flaw here, which involves inferring causality from the fact that VAERs reports clustered close in time to the day of the shot, an inherent characteristic of passive reporting systems and not even close to sufficient to conclude causality or even an association: https://x.com/jsm2334/status/2057919431519694866

Given this fatal flaw that was not detected by peer review, the entire argument in the paper falls apart, and the conclusion unsubstantiated.

Think about it. If something bad happens in close temporal proximity to vaccination, of course it’s far more likely to be reported to a passive reporting system like VAERS. The greater the time between vaccination and the event, the less likely the event is to be reported. It makes intuitive sense that this should be so, and, in this case, it just so happens that this is so. Moreover, despite RFK Jr.’s insinuation that the editors never said why they retracted and removed the paper, they most definitely did in the notice of removal:

Following post-publication concerns raised by readers regarding potential research errors and methodological flaws in this article, the journal initiated an investigation and contacted the author for clarification.

The Editor-in-Chief determined that the author’s response did not satisfactorily address the concerns raised about this article. In particular, serious methodological flaws were identified in the use of VAERS data to infer a correlation between vaccination and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Given the inherent limitations of passive reporting systems, including the expected temporal clustering of events independent of causality, the conclusions presented in the article are not supported by the methodology employed. In light of these concerns, and given the potential implications for medical practice, the Editor-in-Chief has decided that the article should be removed. The author disagrees with this decision and disputes the grounds for removal.

Apologies are offered to the readers of the journal.

As well apologies should be offered. This is an obvious example of a manuscript that should have been rejected with extreme prejudice. The flaws in this study go far beyond just a flaw in methodology. It’s far worse than just that and extends to a flaw in the conceptual design of the study, which ignores the inherent characteristics of the database that is being analyzed and, in particular, what must be done in order to try to account for the issue inherent in such an analysis that will produce clustering of events close to vaccination regardless of whether the events are caused by specific vaccines or not. Or, as Prof. Morris put it:

As a Biostatistics professor, it is obvious to me that this is not just a case of suboptimal methods being used or the study being imperfect and having some weaknesses and limitations. The methodology used completely depends upon false assumptions, so is fatally flawed, and without this analysis the paper does not have any standing for publication.

Indeed, Prof. Morris includes a page from his recent white paper on vaccine safety monitoring that illustrates this point well:

A page from an academic report shows four bar graphs labeled Sunburn, Toothache, X-Ray of Limb, and Abnormal Dreams, each plotting days since vaccination versus reported cases, alongside explanatory text.

Nicely chosen examples, although I’m wondering wy anyone is reporting abnormal dreams or sunburn to VAERS. There are, of course, a number of papers with superior design that have failed to find a link between vaccines and increased risk of SIDS, some of which I’ve mentioned in past posts on the topic, others of which were helpfully summarized by Prof. Morris.

Prof. Morris also noted another obvious problem with the paper that I didn’t notice myself (but should have):

Notably, the handling editor was Aristidis Tsatasakis, who has had other dubious papers he’s handled retracted, including most notably one of his own in which he was senior author and initially listed as the handling editor on his own paper.

So, yes, Toxicology Reports appears to have an antivax problem, which now seems to have gotten glaring enough that its editor, Lawrence Lash, decided that he needed to do something about it, although one wonders whether he will ever actually do what really should be done and get rid of Tsatasakis.

The bottom line is that, RFK Jr.’s transparent attempt to use his power to bully the journal editors notwithstanding, this is not even a close call as to whether this paper should have been retracted. It is obvious dreck so fatally flawed that the real investigation that the journal should have carried out is how such garbage could have passed its peer review system and been published. Indeed, one is tempted to suggest to RFK Jr. that he should be as interested in the identities of the original peer reviewers who let this paper pass as he is in the identities of the experts consulted to help with the investigation of this paper who concluded that it should be retracted and then removed, as well as to harass another friend of the blog who deconstructed all the antivax talking points in the introduction to the paper and called for the paper’s retraction.

Enter RFK Jr.’s minions and apologists

I’ve written about how over several years Peter Gøtzsche, an EBM guru and former head of Nordic Cochrane, has taken a heel turn from science to an antivax apologist, first about HPV vaccines and then more generally. Indeed, a year before the pandemic, he accepted an invitation to speak at the antivax Physicians for Informed Consent and then was shamed into backing out of the conference, afterwards whining about how badly treated he thought he had been. More recently, Gøtzsche teamed up with Mary Demasi, an antivax influencer, to exaggerate the claimed harms of COVID-19 vaccines. These days, Gøtzsche has been reduced to writing a Substack and publishing articles for Jeffrey Tucker‘s antivax Brownstone Institute.

First of all, Gøtzsche tries to refute Prof. Morris without mentioning him, and fails miserably:

Miller’s research design was appropriate. Looking for clusters of potential drug harms in databases is a well-established method, which provided support to the suspicion that the HPV vaccines in rare cases cause serious neurological harms.3 And he concluded carefully that his findings did not prove that the vaccines caused the deaths but were “highly suggestive of a causal relationship.”

So, basically, Gøtzsche wasn’t troubled by the methodology because it had been used in the pass to suggest a causal relationship between neurological harms and HPV vaccination. He also seems to be missing the point. No one said that looking for clusters of potential drug harms in databases is inappropriate, simply that the way this particular search for clusters of drug harms in a database ignored a key conceptual issue that invalidated the study. The database matters. If this were an active reporting system, like the VSD for instance, that actively scans electronic health records for adverse outcomes related to vaccines, Gøtzsche might have a point, but this is a passive reporting system. Prof. Morris explained why the clustering observed occurs for adverse events unrelated to vaccination.

The rest of Gøtzsche’s complaints are, quite frankly, embarrassing, and, rather than go through them one by one, I am simply going to cut to the chase and cite this paragraph, perhaps the most embarrassingly cringey defense of Miller that I’ve seen:

Miller’s discussion section is very long, 8 pages, and I have several reservations. It seems to me that he cherry-picked the references, which include an unpublished lecture and book chapter I could not retrieve. Others are unconvincing. Miller also left out some large studies that did not find an association between vaccination and infant mortality. However, his methods and his result, a clustering of deaths, are convincing.

So let me get this straight. After admitting that he thought that Miller had cherry-picked the references used in his discussion of his results and that Miller had also included unconvincing references and failed to cite and address large studies failing to find an association between vaccination and infant mortality, Gøtzsche nonetheless has the temerity to conclude that Miller’s methods and result are “convincing”? There is only one reaction appropriate to this sort of a brain dead argument:

Godzilla facepalm
When Godzilla gives you the facepalm, you know the failure is monstrous. (Someone needs to do a new Godzilla facepalm meme, with a newer version of Godzilla. Speaking of Godzilla, I can’t wait for Godzilla Minus Zero to come out this November.)

Gøtzsche then opines:

To put Miller’s findings in proper perspective, we need systematic reviews of the randomised trials, including those that have compared early with late vaccination, because his own research has shown that the death risk is smaller in older children.5 Such trials exist.

Moreover, we need a systematic review of observational studies, with the various biases in such research being addressed in the protocol and carefully assessed in the review.

Again, Prof. Morris discussed the evidence from much higher quality sources that failed to find an association between vaccination and SIDS. Seriously, in the scientific community it isn’t even controversial that vaccines are not a risk factor for SIDS; the question has been studied many times. In any event, here, Gøtzsche is just engaging in some methodolatry (demanding systematic reviews of RCTs, which actually exist and, if anything, suggest that vaccination might actually be protective against SIDS) and ignorance about the actual observational and epidemiological data already published addressing this question. Again, Prof. Morris discussed these studies in his long X post, concluding:

Bottom line: we don’t need VAERS for this. We have numerous population-level studies, including multiple SCCS [self-controlled case series] built to detect exactly this kind of short-term risk, and the evidence consistently shows no increase in SIDS following vaccination.

The Miller retraction simply removes an erroneous result: one that was already irrelevant next to the larger, more rigorous population-level studies, which consistently show no increased SIDS risk after vaccination.

Seriously, after the passages I cited above from Gøtzsche, I started to check out, as Gøtzsche continued to embarrass himself by primarily going after what he likely viewed as an easy target, the pseudonymous Rosewind, another friend of SBM, and complaining about PubPeer comments on the article, referring to it as “PubSmear” and whining that such concerns should have been brought up in a letter to the editor, which is rich given that he published his rant on Substack. Dude, why didn’t you just write a letter to the editor of Toxicology Reports?

Meanwhile, Aaron Siri claims that Miller has addressed all the criticisms:

Elsevier says it found “serious methodological flaws” and that the paper “may pose potential risks to public health.” Author Neil Miller explains their concerns were “either insignificant or plainly incorrect.” He has shared his emails with Elsevier publicly, so you can be the judge. A copy of the study can still be found here.

Amusingly, the email exchange is being hosted on the website of Steve Kirsch, the tech bro turned antivaxxer who is a master of challenging vaccine advocates to “debate me, bro” wagers, using LLM chatbots to make his antivax arguments, and of mangling science beyond belief, as long as it serves an antivax agenda. Also amusingly, nowhere in his email exchange does Miller directly address the fatal flaw in his paper, that in a passive vaccine safety reporting system adverse events will cluster closer to the time of vaccination irrespective of whether there is a causal relationship between vaccination and the adverse event, repeatedly retreating to stating variations of:

The article reports statistically significant temporal clustering of reported events within defined post-vaccination windows. This is a recognized and appropriate method for identifying safety signals. The manuscript does not claim causation.

Yes, we know that, but the temporal clustering doesn’t imply causation, and, even though technically he didn’t claim causation, the manuscript sure as hell did its best to imply causation, even going so far as to speculate about potential immunological mechanisms to explain the clustering, while citing pretty much every dodgy study used to claim that vaccination causes SIDS, both in his introduction and his discussion, and includes this gem of a passage in the conclusion:

There are 130 official ways for an infant to die, as categorized in the ICD, and one unofficial way for an infant to expire: from a fatal reaction to vaccines. When vaccine-related deaths are hidden within the death tables, it is difficult to monitor and prevent these deaths. In addition, parents are denied the ability to ascertain honest vaccine risk-to-benefit ratios and true informed consent to vaccination is not possible. This is why increased effort and transparency toward achieving an accurate account of vaccine-related infant mortality is a desirable goal.

The findings in this paper must be weighed against the strengths and limitations of the available data and study design. While this paper does not prove an association between infant vaccines and sudden infant deaths, it reveals unusual patterns and safety signals highly suggestive of a causal relationship. Additional investigation is warranted. Finding ways to increase vaccine safety, reduce inaccurate or inconsistent cause- of-death certification practices, and support families in their quest to make genuinely informed healthcare decisions, must be top priorities.

So, yes, Miller concedes—very grudgingly—that his results do not “prove an association between infant vaccines and sudden infant deaths” but then claims that they are “highly suggestive of a causal relationship.” It’s a game that antivax “investigators” frequently play, basically conceding (barely) the scientifically accurate assessment of their finding (no association between vaccination and the adverse outcome examined) but nonetheless insisting that their shoddy science is “highly suggestive of a causal relationship.” They know that the public will remember the “highly suggestive” and forget the “do not prove.” Miller knows that. Siri knows that. Likely, so does Gøtzsche. They’re not stupid people (well, maybe with the exception of Miller). It’s one reason why the Miller study has been a favorite one among antivaxxers, often cited by RFK Jr. and his sycophants, toadies, and lackeys to justify their antivax stances.

RFK Jr.: Feeling the heat?

The Miller paper is not the only bad antivax paper beloved of RFK Jr. and his antivax minions undergoing investigation, retraction, and removal. As The Guardian reported earlier this month there are at least three, and we know from Siri’s Substack that there are, in reality, four. The papers include:

As The Guardian notes, RFK Jr. has relied on these studies (all of the above minus Speicher et al), among others, to make his Lysenkoist arguments about the dangers of vaccines:

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary who has been a leader in the anti-vaccine movement for decades, relied on two of the studies that are now facing scrutiny for a 2023 book he co-wrote that argued unvaccinated children were healthier than children who had been vaccinated. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cited one of the papers when it changed its long-held position that vaccines do not cause autism, cutting against the scientific consensus. And all three papers were cited by a lawyer, Aaron Siri, who called for changes to the childhood immunization schedule before an influential federal vaccine advisory panel. Siri is the managing partner of Siri & Glimstad and has served as a lawyer for a prominent anti-vaccine group.

Remember how I laughed when Siri wrote, “Since they can’t win on the merits, they’ve resorted to other tactics”? As I said, that is massive projection. So is this quote from Siri

Behind each of these attacks is a plain desire to wipe from the record any evidence of vaccine harm and to chill the publication of any future studies that report vaccine harm.

Every scientist who values scientific integrity should publicly denounce these tactics. Anything less is not science. It is ideology.

Again, projection, thy name is antivaxxer. In actuality, what is happening is that science, for all its flaws, is in this case engaging in the self correction that RFK Jr. says he wants to champion with his “gold standard science.” It is not the journal editors investigating bad studies and correcting the record by retracting and even removing them who are moved by ideology. It is RFK Jr. and his minions, like Siri. Indeed, as vaccine scientist Dr. Paul Offit notes:

Kennedy’s efforts to get rid of studies he doesn’t like, or reinstate those he does, are a function of his belief system, Offit said. He “has these fixed and immutable beliefs — mostly anti-science beliefs — so he believes, for example, that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines cause harm.”

Offit pointed to a “paper published not too long ago out of Denmark in the Annals of Internal Medicine — it was an excellent study, a 23-year study involving more than 1 million children — showing children could receive anywhere from 0 mg to 4.5 mg of aluminum in vaccines, and it basically showed vaccines didn’t cause any harm.”

Kennedy then wrote a letter to that journal, “asking them to withdraw that paper because it went against his bias. That’s who he is,” Offit noted.

Indeed it is. There’s a reason why RFK Jr. is the perfect person to implement Lysenkoism 2.0 at HHS. He is an antivax ideologue, his claims to be “not antivax” notwithstanding. He is most definitely coming for your vaccines, his endgame being the elimination of all vaccines in the US, and he will let nothing stop him. If a study finds vaccines to be safe and effective, he will use the power of his office to try to get that paper retracted or withdrawn. If a bad antivax study is retracted, he will use the power of his office to try to intimidate and punish the editors into reversing their decision. If you are a scientist at the CDC or other HHS agency and speak out for vaccines and against antivaccine pseudoscience, you risk losing your job, as the administration tries to change the rules so that career civil servants can be fired for not sufficiently aligning with the ideological goals of the administration.

This latest kerfuffle over Neil Z. Miller’s crappy antivax study would normally not be a big story, but in the age of Lysenkoism 2.0, it is a reflection of where we are as a nation in 2026. Sadly, Lysenkoism isn’t just for government science programs anymore. It’s now metastasizing to enforce ideology on privately owned companies that do science and scientific publishing.

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Posted by David Gorski

Dr. Gorski's full information can be found here, along with information for patients.David H. Gorski, MD, PhD, FACS is a surgical oncologist at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute specializing in breast cancer surgery, as well as a Professor of Surgery and Oncology and member of the faculty of the Graduate Program in Cancer Biology at Wayne State University. If you are a potential patient and found this page through a Google search, please check out Dr. Gorski's biographical information, disclaimers regarding his writings, and notice to patients here.

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