CDC Hit With Lawsuit Over Failure to Test Cumulative Effect of 72-Dose Childhood Vaccine Schedule

Drs. Paul Thomas and Kenneth P. Stoller and Stand for Health Freedom are suing the CDC, alleging the agency’s failure to test the cumulative effect of its vaccine recommendations for children viol...

by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. The Defender

Two doctors who lost their medical licenses because they questioned the CDC’s vaccine recommendations for children are suing the agency for failing to test the cumulative effect of the 72-dose schedule on children’s health.

Drs. Paul Thomas and Kenneth P. Stoller and Stand for Health Freedom filed the lawsuit last week in federal court, alleging the lack of safety testing violates federal law and children’s constitutional rights.

The lawsuit names Susan Monarez, Ph.D., in her official capacity as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Attorney Rick Jaffe, who represents the plaintiffs, said the lawsuit “goes to the heart of the CDC’s childhood immunization program — a 72-plus dose medical intervention schedule that has never been tested.”

According to the complaint, the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule “is only based on an evaluation of short-term individual vaccine risks,” as the CDC “has never studied the combined effects and the accumulating dangers of administering all of the vaccines.”

The lawsuit states:

“The facts establish a continuing public health outrage hiding in plain sight: America administers more vaccines than any nation on earth while producing the sickest children in the developed world. Yet CDC demands proof of harm while refusing to conduct the studies that could provide it.”

According to the complaint, the CDC violated the First Amendment free speech and Fifth Amendment due process clauses of the U.S. Constitution, and the Administrative Procedure Act, under which agency actions are considered “arbitrary and capricious” if they have “failed to consider an important aspect of the problem.”

Lawsuit asks court to force CDC to study childhood vaccine schedule

Kim Mack Rosenberg, general counsel for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said the lawsuit is “bringing to light critical facts about the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule about which most parents are unaware.”

She said: “The schedule is essentially an experiment on our children, and one that becomes increasingly concerning as more shots are added and combination vaccines introduced.”

The lawsuit also argues that the CDC violated the law by not convening its Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines since 1998. On Friday last week — the same day Thomas and Stoller sued the CDC — the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it is reinstating the Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines. The lawsuit describes this as “an encouraging small first step,” but still doesn’t address “the lack of safety testing of the entire vaccine schedule.”

According to the complaint, while the schedule is officially a recommendation, most states use it as the basis for imposing vaccination requirements on children — and disciplinary actions against physicians who raise questions about the schedule.

The plaintiffs “seek judicial intervention to restore scientific integrity and medical freedom,” including a declaration that the CDC’s framework is unconstitutional and arbitrary and capricious, and an order obliging the CDC to “conduct scientifically rigorous studies of the cumulative safety of the full childhood vaccination schedule.”

Jaffe said he also hopes the lawsuit will raise public awareness of the fact that the childhood immunization schedule has not been tested in its entirety.

“This case exposes that structural failure,” Jaffe said. “I am hoping that the revelations in this lawsuit will create some public outrage or at least serious concern and make the entire schedule shared decision-making until the schedule is conclusively proven to be safe and the program does more good than harm.”

Jaffe said the lawsuit will be “100% funded by the community” through an online crowdfunding campaign. CHD is not a party to the lawsuit.

Lawsuit accuses CDC of ‘deliberate ignorance’ for not studying vaccine safety

According to the lawsuit, the CDC’s policies are a product of a vaccine framework developed by the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The framework “is only based on an evaluation of short-term individual vaccine risks” and has never included a study of the combined effects of the childhood immunization schedule.

“Individual vaccines undergo limited FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] clinical trials before approval, typically monitoring adverse events for days or weeks. … Neither the FDA nor the CDC has ever required or conducted safety testing of the cumulative childhood schedule, now at least 72 doses,” the lawsuit states.

This is the case even though the Institute of Medicine — now known as the National Academy of Medicine and a part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine — “has urged the CDC to study the cumulative effects of the pediatric vaccine schedule” for over two decades, in 2002, 2005 and 2013.

Describing it as “deliberate ignorance,” the lawsuit states, “CDC has implemented none of these recommendations” and “offers no explanation for ignoring its most prestigious scientific advisor for over two decades.”

Jaffe said the CDC has not tested the cumulative childhood immunization schedule because it views such testing as a “political liability rather than a legal obligation” that poses an obstacle to its “policy decision to promote uptake at all costs.”

“To expose the data on harm caused by vaccines would destroy confidence in the program,” Thomas said. “The program is more important than whether or not it actually helps children.”

Leah Wilson, co-founder and executive director of Stand for Health Freedom, said research into the cumulative harms of childhood vaccines has also been deemed “unethical” based on the view that “every child should be vaccinated and not withheld the lifesaving interventions.”

Wilson cited a U.S. Federal Register entry from 1984, which states that “any possible doubts, whether or not well founded, about the safety of the vaccine cannot be allowed to exist in view of the need to assure that the vaccine will continue to be used to the maximum extent consistent with the nation’s public health objectives.”

Childhood schedule gives states ammunition to discipline dissenting doctors

The lawsuit argues that the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule and contraindications framework, which limits valid contraindications to severe allergic reactions, severe combined immunodeficiency and a few other rare conditions, has enabled state medical boards to “silence physicians” and researchers.

According to the complaint, most states “incorporate ACIP’s recommended vaccines directly into statute or regulation and uniformly adopt ACIP’s narrow contraindications and precautions list for medical exemptions, thereby enforcing adherence to the recommended schedule as a practical matter.”

Although the CDC schedule divides vaccines into two groups — categories A and B — most vaccines are placed in Category A — recommendations that apply universally to all children in an age group — rather than the less stringent Category B, which “involves shared clinical decision-making between physician and family based on individual circumstances.”

Only the COVID-19 vaccines and Meningitis B vaccines for adolescents are included in Category B.

This framework “excludes many documented risk factors and prevents physicians from exercising individualized medical judgment,” the lawsuit states. It also acts as “a tool of censorship” by targeting physicians who “dare to question the agency’s untested assumptions about vaccine safety.”

According to the complaint, state governments and medical boards rely on the CDC recommendations to adopt school vaccine policies and professional guidelines for physicians in those states.

“Medical boards use ACIP guidelines as the exclusive standard of care when evaluating physician conduct,” the lawsuit states, arguing that physicians who question the CDC’s policies face professional repercussions.

“Our plaintiffs live the reality of this unproven vaccine recommended schedule,” Jaffe wrote, noting that Thomas “lost his pediatric practice after publishing data comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated children” and Stoller “had his license revoked for writing medical exemptions based on genetic risk factors.”

“Doctors who do such research and dare publish it will have the research ultimately retracted — even after being published through a rigorous peer review process,” Thomas said. “In my case, a few days after this [study] was available online, the Oregon Medical Board had an emergency meeting and immediately suspended my license, claiming I was ‘a threat to public health.’”

Stand for Health Freedom has been “forced to deal every day with the consequences of an untested childhood vaccine program,” Jaffe said.

Wilson said Stand for Health Freedom receives “more and more calls for help from parents who can’t find a physician to write a medical exemption for their vaccine-injured child and from parents who obtained a medical exemption but the state they live in is not honoring it” due to the CDC’s “narrow definition of medical contraindications to vaccines.”

The lawsuit also argues that parents are deprived of their First Amendment right to freely receive information, stripping parents “of the informed consent that is the cornerstone of medical ethics and constitutional liberty.”

Lawsuit: Vaccine schedule violates parents’, children’s constitutional rights

According to the complaint, the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule also violates the Fifth Amendment by depriving parents and children of “life, liberty or property” and by denying parents their “fundamental liberty interest in directing their children’s medical care” and children’s “fundamental right to bodily integrity.”

This framework “denies the existence of medically vulnerable children,” while the CDC “refuses to recognize any category of ‘vaccine-vulnerable’ children despite mounting evidence they exist,” the lawsuit states.

The lack of testing of the full childhood immunization schedule and these statutory violations have likely contributed to the chronic disease epidemic among U.S. children, the lawsuit argues, citing the White House’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Report.

“During this decades-long silence, the schedule ballooned from 24 to 72+ doses, autism rates exploded from 1 in 150 to 1 in 31, and chronic disease now affects over half of American children,” Jaffe wrote. No other developed nation approaches these rates, according to the suit.

The lawsuit comes as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) called for an end to religious and philosophical vaccine exemptions for U.S. children and sued U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other public health officials and agencies over their new vaccine recommendations for children and pregnant women.

The AAP represents 67,000 pediatricians in the U.S. and receives significant government and Big Pharma funding. According to Jaffe, “The AAP has become one of the strongest defenders of the CDC’s rigid framework.” Thomas said, “AAP has made it crystal clear that they represent industry and not our children.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

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