Thomas Sowell’s 1995 book The Vision of the Anointed documented a pattern he had watched play out across welfare, education, and criminal justice: a self-conceived elite adopts a vision, imposes a policy, ignores the results, and attacks those who point them out. He worked through several case studies. He did not work through the vaccination case. This essay is that case, presented through his framework.
A note on vocabulary. Where the essay engages the medical establishment’s terminology, that language appears in quotation, attribution, or reference titles. Words such as “immunization,” “immunity,” “immune system,” “antibody response,” and “autoimmune” carry the establishment’s paradigm inside them; they appear here to describe what the establishment claims, not to endorse the framework those claims rest on. In the author’s analytical voice, the essay uses “vaccination,” “vaccine,” and “the schedule.”
A note on Sowell’s own position. Sowell wrote approvingly of vaccination in The Vision of the Anointed and elsewhere. He used the whooping cough vaccine as an example of unavoidable trade-offs, treating rare vaccine injuries as the necessary price of larger benefits, and he described lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers as a case of tort law overreaching. He accepted the establishment’s framing on vaccine safety and efficacy without examining it closely. This essay applies his analytical framework, the four-stage pattern of the anointed vision, to the case he did not investigate. The framework catches what Sowell himself missed. That is what makes it worth using.
The Curve That Was Already Flat
Measles mortality in the United States fell by more than 98 percent before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963.¹ The figure comes from the country’s own vital statistics. It is not disputed. It is simply not shown to parents. Maurice Hilleman brought his vaccine to market when the curve had already flattened, after a collapse that had run continuously for six decades.
Whooping cough followed the same course. Deaths fell by more than 90 percent before the DTP vaccine arrived in the mid-1940s.² Scarlet fever, once a graver killer than measles, whooping cough, and diphtheria combined, disappeared as a mass killer without any vaccine ever being developed for it.³ Across every disease for which childhood vaccination is now credited with the achievement, the same picture appears in the mortality data: the decline was largely complete when the intervention arrived.
Thomas Sowell wrote a book in 1995 called The Vision of the Anointed. It examined a pattern he had watched play out across welfare policy, sex education, criminal justice, and other domains where a self-conceived elite had taken hold of a policy question and refused to let empirical evidence reach the argument. His four-stage template was simple. A crisis is announced, often when the underlying trend is already improving. A solution is imposed, often over objections that will later be borne out. The results arrive, often the opposite of what was promised. The response is denial and demands for more of the same solution.
Sowell, now 96, has not worked through the vaccination case. Nothing in his catalog of examples fits his framework more precisely.
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The Pattern
Sowell’s book examined a specific formation: the intellectual and political elite whose sense of moral standing is bound up with holding a particular vision of social causation, and whose vision does not permit contradictory evidence to reach the argument. He called them the anointed. He called their opponents, in the anointed’s own vocabulary, the benighted. The mechanism that interested him was not that they were wrong. It was that they had built structures around their positions to prevent the wrongness from being registered.
The four-stage pattern he documented across many cases ran as follows.
Stage one: a crisis. “Some situation exists, whose negative aspects the anointed propose to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely characterized as a ‘crisis,’ even though all human situations have negative aspects, and even though evidence is seldom asked or given to show how the situation at hand is either uniquely bad or threatening to get worse. Sometimes the situation described as a ‘crisis’ has in fact already been getting better for years.”⁴
Stage two: a solution. “Policies to end the ‘crisis’ are advocated by the anointed, who say that these policies will lead to beneficial result A. Critics say that these policies will lead to detrimental result Z. The anointed dismiss these latter claims as absurd and ‘simplistic,’ if not dishonest.”⁵
Stage three: the results. “The policies are instituted and lead to detrimental result Z.”⁶
Stage four: the response. “Those who attribute detrimental result Z to the policies instituted are dismissed as ‘simplistic’ for ignoring the ‘complexities’ involved, as ‘many factors’ went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is put on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that occurred. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had so confidently predicted improvement. Indeed, it is often asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for the wonderful programs that mitigated the inevitable damage from other factors.”⁷
The template did not apply only to welfare or to schools. It applied wherever a vision achieved enough institutional capture to be shielded from correction. Sowell wrote of visions “hermetically sealed off from the contaminating influence of facts.”⁸ The seal was ordinarily cultural: institutional norms, media protection, professional consequences for dissenters. It was rarely legal. In one case it became legal, and this essay closes on that case.
Stage One: The Crisis That Wasn’t
The story of childhood vaccination that American parents receive begins with disease. Their child’s grandparents grew up in the last era of significant childhood mortality from these conditions, when measles killed thousands of American children each year and iron lungs stood in hospital wards. Then came the vaccines, and the diseases receded. This is the story. Every element of it is arranged to obscure the mortality data.
The mortality data show that most of the receding had already happened. In the United States, measles mortality had fallen throughout the twentieth century on a continuous curve, so that by the mid-1950s the disease rarely killed. Hilleman’s vaccine reached the market in 1963.⁹ In England and Wales, where records go back further, the same collapse began earlier and was equally dramatic.¹⁰ Whooping cough deaths in the United States fell by more than 90 percent before the DTP vaccine of the mid-1940s.¹¹ Diphtheria mortality had already declined by more than half before antitoxin therapy became widespread and continued its decline on the same trajectory afterward.¹² Scarlet fever, which had killed more American children than measles, whooping cough, and diphtheria combined in the mid-nineteenth century, faded to insignificance without any vaccine at all.¹³
A 1977 analysis in the Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly by medical researchers John and Sonja McKinlay examined the entire twentieth-century decline in what mainstream medicine categorizes as infectious mortality in the United States and concluded that “at most 3.5 percent of the total decline in mortality since 1900 could be ascribed to medical measures introduced for the diseases considered here.”¹⁴ The diseases they examined included influenza, pneumonia, diphtheria, whooping cough, and poliomyelitis. Their conclusion has never been meaningfully rebutted. It has been ignored.
What actually drove the decline is well understood by historians of public health. The improvements were in the conditions of life. Clean water and sewage systems reached American cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Refrigeration entered the home in the early twentieth. Diets diversified. Housing became less crowded. The industrial-era living conditions that had made cities into disease incubators receded, and the mortality curves followed. The Swiss epidemiologist E. Guberan, examining Swiss mortality data across the same period, concluded that mortality from tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough, measles, typhoid, puerperal fever, and infant gastroenteritis “started to fall long before the introduction of immunization and/or antibiotics” and was “probably due to a great extent to various factors linked to the steady rise in the standard of living.”¹⁵ These findings sit in the peer-reviewed literature. They are not fringe.
The absence of this material from the standard vaccination narrative is not accidental. If parents were shown the mortality curves and asked whether it made sense to attribute a 98 percent decline to an intervention that arrived after the decline was over, most would ask the obvious question. The narrative is arranged to prevent the question from arising. Parents are shown case counts that fell after vaccine introduction, not the mortality curves that had fallen before. They are told that vaccines saved us from these diseases, when what the evidence shows is that Western societies had already saved themselves through improvements in the conditions of life.
Sowell described Stage One this way: “Sometimes the situation described as a ‘crisis’ has in fact already been getting better for years.”¹⁶ The application is exact. The crisis that justified a national vaccination program was a mortality profile that the country had already left behind. The specific fear that the parents of 1963 were asked to feel about measles, or that the parents of 1946 were asked to feel about whooping cough, was a fear detached from the actual death rates their own children faced. The vaccination program was sold on the mortality experience of a century that had ended.
Stage Two: The Solution and Its Expansion
In 1986 the American childhood vaccination schedule consisted of three vaccines: DTP, polio, and MMR. Coverage rates hovered between 50 and 60 percent.¹⁷ Congressman Henry Waxman of California had spent four years working on legislation to remove product liability from the manufacturers of these vaccines. The legislation was called the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. It was folded into an omnibus health bill, S. 1744, in the final days of the 99th Congress. The Reagan White House opposed it. The president called it an “unprecedented arrangement” inconsistent with the constitutional separation of powers.¹⁸ Reagan signed it anyway on November 15, 1986, describing his own act in a signing statement as one of “mixed feelings” and “serious reservations.”¹⁹
The bill did what its critics predicted. It removed the primary market mechanism that would have constrained the schedule’s expansion. Vaccine manufacturers, no longer liable in ordinary civil court for injuries caused by their products, faced radically improved economics for adding new vaccines to the schedule. The critics had said this would happen. They were dismissed.
In the years that followed, the schedule expanded rapidly. Hepatitis B was added in 1991, with the first dose given on the day of birth. Hib was added. Varicella. Rotavirus. Hepatitis A. Pneumococcal conjugate vaccine. HPV. Meningococcal. In 1962, a child following the CDC’s recommended schedule received three vaccine doses by age five. In 1983, ten doses. By 2017 the same figure had reached thirty-eight, nearly a fourfold increase in three decades and a twelvefold increase since 1962.²⁰ Vaccination rates rose to over 90 percent nationally. The cost to fully vaccinate a child through age eighteen, according to CDC data cited in the New York Times, rose from about $100 in the early 1980s to $2,192 by 2014.²¹ The vaccine market itself grew from $170 million in the early 1980s to more than $60 billion by 2020.²²
The vaccine court created by the 1986 Act, formally the Office of Special Masters within the United States Court of Federal Claims, has paid out more than $3.7 billion in compensation for vaccine injuries.²³ The compensation is funded not by manufacturers but by a surtax on every vaccine purchased, which is to say by American parents. There is no jury. Ordinary rules of civil procedure do not apply, and claimants cannot obtain discovery of manufacturer documents. A single “special master” hears each case and decides it. The claimant is not suing the manufacturer. The claimant is suing the federal government, defended by lawyers from the Department of Justice.
The mandates arrived alongside the schedule. Every American state now requires proof of vaccination for school entry. Medical exemptions have been progressively narrowed. Religious and philosophical exemptions have been eliminated in California, New York, Maine, Mississippi, and West Virginia. Doctors who write medical exemptions on grounds the state medical board finds insufficient face professional discipline. In 2019, California enacted SB 276, which subjected all medical exemptions to state review and public health department override. The pattern across the country has been consistent: each new vaccine added to the schedule has been followed by mandates for its administration, and the exit routes available to parents have progressively narrowed.
The critics of the 1986 Act predicted every element of this progression. Reagan himself flagged the constitutional problem. Consumer advocates warned that removing liability would remove the discipline that liability provides, and independent pediatricians predicted that the schedule would expand rapidly once the economics tilted toward expansion. All of these predictions were dismissed in 1986 as absurd. All of them were borne out. Sowell’s Stage Two ran its course as he had described it: the anointed advocated a policy, the critics predicted the specific harms it would produce, the critics were called simplistic, and the harms were produced.
Stage Three: The Results
The condition of American children today is not what a program aimed at their health would be expected to produce. It is what the critics of the program predicted, in some cases decades before the data would confirm them.
A national survey published in 2010, based on a sample of more than 90,000 American children, found that 43 percent had at least one chronic health condition, with roughly half of those cases classified as moderate or severe. About 19 percent of American children, nearly one in five, were classified as having “special health care needs” and were routine consumers of health care services.²⁴ The rate of American children limited in their major activity due to chronic conditions rose from 1.8 percent in 1960 to 8 percent by 2010, more than a fourfold increase.²⁵ Roughly one in four American children takes at least one medication for a chronic condition. One in fourteen takes two or more.²⁶
The specific conditions have moved in lockstep. Asthma rose from 12.5 percent to 14.6 percent of American children between 2003 and 2012. ADHD rose from 6.9 percent to 9.9 percent in the same window. Autism rose from 0.5 percent to 2.3 percent, an increase of nearly 400 percent in nine years.²⁷ In April 2025, the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network published its most recent surveillance figure: one in 31 American children carries an autism diagnosis, up from one in 36 two years earlier and one in 150 in 2000.²⁸ For boys, the figure is one in 20. In California, one in 12.5.²⁹ In 1987, a peer-reviewed prevalence study in North Dakota by Larry Burd and colleagues found autism at a rate of 3.3 per 10,000, or roughly one in 3,000.³⁰ The rate today is eighty-three times higher.
Food allergies rose. Type 1 diabetes in young children rose, sharply in populations where new vaccines had been added to the schedule. In Finland, cases of type 1 diabetes in children aged 0-4 increased by 147 percent after three new vaccines were added to the pediatric schedule.³¹ Rates of childhood cancers, seizure disorders, learning disabilities, and neurodevelopmental delays all rose in parallel.
Something changed in the health of American children beginning in the late 1980s. The change happened at the exact moment the vaccine schedule began its expansion. The change accelerated as the schedule accelerated. The mortality profile of the childhood conditions the establishment classifies as infectious had already collapsed. The morbidity profile of chronic disease in children exploded on a timeline that mapped precisely onto the timeline of schedule expansion.
The mechanism is not mysterious. Most vaccines on the American schedule contain aluminum adjuvants, added specifically because aluminum provokes the inflammatory response the vaccine requires to work. In 1901, Charles Richet demonstrated that injecting foreign proteins into an animal produces sensitization to those proteins, with subsequent exposures generating progressively more severe reactions. He received the 1913 Nobel Prize for the discovery. A fully vaccinated American child in the mid-1980s received approximately 1,250 micrograms of injected aluminum by eighteen months of age. A fully vaccinated child today receives 4,925 micrograms by the same age, a near fourfold increase.³² Injection is not the body’s ordinary route of exposure to foreign proteins. By 2017, the American schedule was delivering thirty-eight vaccine doses by age five. The critics of the 1986 Act were reasoning from established biology, not from mysticism.
The one study that would settle whether the vaccination schedule is a cause of the chronic disease explosion has never been done. The design would be straightforward. Take a cohort of fully vaccinated children and a matched cohort of completely unvaccinated children, follow both from birth, and compare their health outcomes across the range of chronic conditions. This is what medicine calls a vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated study, or VU study. It is what pharmaceutical safety monitoring calls a controlled comparison. It has been demanded by parents for nearly thirty years. It has been refused.
The refusal is documented. In 2013, the Institute of Medicine, at the request of the Department of Health and Human Services, published a report titled The Childhood Immunization Schedule and Safety: Stakeholder Concerns, Scientific Evidence, and Future Studies. The report acknowledged, in its own text, that “no studies have compared the differences in health outcomes ... between entirely unimmunized populations of children and fully immunized children.”³³ It acknowledged that “key elements of the entire schedule, the number, frequency, timing, order, and age at administration of vaccines, have not been systematically examined in research studies.”³⁴ It declined to recommend that such studies be done. The report proposed instead a series of preliminary studies to determine whether the safety of the schedule could, in principle, one day be studied. The preliminary studies would first need to be prioritized. The prioritization process, the committee noted, would be “a challenge.”³⁵
The IOM report is the establishment’s own document. It concedes that the safety of the schedule as a whole has never been established through controlled comparison. It then declines to recommend that the safety of the schedule as a whole be established through controlled comparison. The report goes on to affirm the safety of the schedule on the basis of the absence of evidence to the contrary.³⁶ This is the perfected form of Sowell’s Stage Three. The results have arrived. The results confirm what the critics predicted. The study that would rule out the connection is refused. And the vision persists.
Stage Four: The Response
The response to the chronic disease explosion has taken every form Sowell documented across the other cases he examined, and several that show his framework working with unusual clarity.
The first response is denial that there is an epidemic at all. The CDC does not use the words “epidemic” or “crisis” in describing the rise in autism, ADHD, asthma, or the other chronic conditions in American children. As the epidemiologist Brian Hooker has observed, “You will never ever hear CDC characterizing the autism explosion as a crisis or an epidemic. So long as there is no epidemic, no one needs to look for the environmental trigger.”³⁷ When 84 measles cases occurred in California in early 2015, the CDC held an immediate press conference urging the entire American public to be vaccinated.³⁸ When roughly one in 31 American children carries an autism diagnosis, the CDC releases periodic updates and calls for further study of genetic factors.
The results are then attributed to anything other than the intervention. The rise in autism is attributed to “better diagnosis” and “expanded criteria,” despite the fact that the 1987 North Dakota study used the same diagnostic criteria and found the rate to be eighty-three times lower.³⁹ Burd’s team followed up their original cohort twelve years later and reported that they had missed exactly one case out of two hundred thousand children.⁴⁰ The rise in chronic disease generally is attributed to “environmental toxins,” never specified in a way that would permit intervention, and to “genetic factors,” which cannot explain a population-wide shift over three decades.
The goal is then redefined. The original justification for the vaccination program was reduction of mortality from the conditions the establishment classifies as infectious. The mortality had already fallen, and the program’s contribution to that fall was marginal. The stated goal shifted to the reduction of morbidity. When chronic morbidity exploded, the goal shifted again to the maintenance of the vaccination program itself, which was now defended as an unquestionable good regardless of outcomes.
The dissenters are punished. When the British physician Andrew Wakefield published a case series in The Lancet in 1998 raising questions about the MMR vaccine, the response was not scientific engagement. Wakefield was stripped of his medical license. His paper was retracted twelve years after publication, on the basis of allegations that his coauthors did not support. When the CDC epidemiologist William Thompson came forward in 2014 to state that his own agency had suppressed data showing an increased autism risk in African American boys who received MMR before 36 months, the media response was near-total silence. The Congressional hearing that Congressman Bill Posey called for was never held.⁴¹ Doctors who deviate from the schedule in their practices face medical board complaints that can end in delicensing. Journalists who investigate the topic seriously are removed from mainstream platforms. Dissent from the vision is not treated as an argument to be answered. It is treated as a moral deficiency to be punished.
The vocabulary does the argumentative work before the argument begins. Sowell devoted a chapter of his book to what he called the vocabulary of the anointed, the way certain words preempt debate rather than opening it. The vaccination case is dense with these words. “Immunization” is not a synonym for vaccination. Vaccination is the injection. Immunization is the biological state the injection is supposed to produce. Naming the injection by its intended effect preempts the empirical question of whether the effect actually occurs. “Vaccine-preventable disease” performs the same move: it names a disease by the intervention that supposedly prevents it, and by naming it thus, forecloses the question of whether the intervention is actually what prevents it. “Anti-vaxxer” applies Sowell’s disdaining of the benighted: the interlocutor is not mistaken, the interlocutor is a category to be dismissed. “Misinformation” preempts the question of what is true. “Vaccine hesitancy” describes a psychological condition to be overcome, not a rational position to be engaged. Every one of these terms does work that would be difficult to defend if the terms were unpacked. This is why they are used and why they are not unpacked.
The mascots and targets follow the vision. Sowell observed that the anointed elevate certain figures as mascots and identify others as targets, with both choices flowing from the vision. The vaccination case elevates the child dying of measles, the iron-lung polio child of 1954, the newborn threatened by pertussis. These are the mascots. The targets are the parents of vaccine-injured children, whose accounts are dismissed as anecdotal; the doctors who observe the pattern in their practices, who are delicensed; the journalists who investigate, who are censored; the researchers who publish contrary findings, whose careers are destroyed. Mascots receive sympathy and legal accommodation. Targets receive the full weight of institutional discipline.
The pattern operates in real time. In January 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services revised the childhood schedule downward, moving six vaccines from universal recommendation to shared clinical decision-making. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and more than two hundred other health organizations refused the revision and continued to recommend all vaccines at the recommended ages. More than twenty states continued following the prior schedule regardless of the federal change.⁴³ The vision was challenged from within HHS itself, and the establishment simply reasserted the vision outside of federal channels. This is Sowell’s Stage Four, running in the year this essay is being written.
Public Law 99-660
Sowell described visions “hermetically sealed off from the contaminating influence of facts.”⁴² In every other domain he examined, the seal was cultural rather than legal. Elite opinion in welfare policy, in education, and across the criminal justice system maintained itself through institutional norms and the professional consequences of dissent, with media deference reinforcing both. The underlying feedback mechanisms of democratic society and empirical challenge remained legally intact. Bad policies could, in principle, be corrected by evidence when the political will emerged.
The vaccination case is the one in which the seal was made statute. On November 15, 1986, Ronald Reagan signed into law the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which removed from vaccine manufacturers the ordinary product liability that every other manufacturer of every other product in the American economy carries. The Act created a vaccine court to replace the ordinary civil justice system, funded not by manufacturers but by American parents through a surtax on every vaccine. It eliminated the discovery process and the right to a jury trial. It cut off the chain by which harm from a defective product becomes documented, then publicized, then priced into the manufacturer’s incentives.
Sowell wrote about visions that succeed at avoiding correction. The 1986 Act is the vision made statute. It is Sowell’s chapter ten.
That seal has a name. It is Public Law 99-660. It has been in force for forty years. The generation of American children born under it carries the health profile the critics of the Act predicted.
How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old
Imagine a company that sells a special oil for your parents’ car. The company says the oil will protect the engine forever, and that without the oil the engine could break down. Your parents ask, “But what if the oil actually breaks the engine?” The company thinks about this. Then the company goes to the government and says, “If the oil breaks an engine, we don’t want to have to pay for the broken engine.” The government agrees. Now the company can sell as much oil as it wants. If an engine breaks, the company does not have to pay for it.
The company starts adding new kinds of oil to what cars need. At every age from birth onward, another kind of oil is added. The government makes families buy them all. Some families say they don’t want to use so much oil. The government tells them they have no choice. Mechanics who tell families they might not need all the oil lose their licenses.
The company tells everyone the oils are what keep cars running. But most engines were running fine before the company showed up. Engines had been running better and better for many years already, because the roads and the fuel had been steadily improving. The company does not mention this. The company shows everyone pictures of very old cars that had broken down long ago and says that without the oil this could happen to their cars.
When people ask the company to compare cars that use the oil to cars that don’t, the company refuses to do the comparison. As more and more engines break each year, the company says the answer is more oil. Anyone who keeps asking questions is told they are trying to hurt other people’s cars.
The car is your body. The oil is what they inject into it. The company is the vaccine industry. The government is the American Congress in 1986.
In Print
Thirteen of my books are now available as paperbacks, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The Unvaccinated lays out the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices — as far as I know, the only book of its kind. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit argues that cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth are a dietary problem the dental profession treats surgically. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets — food, vaccines, and a profession trained by the industries whose products cause the harm. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM, the collapse of the serotonin hypothesis, and the specific damage done by every major psychiatric drug class.
Two go to the paradigm underneath the whole shelf. No Contagion, co-authored with Jamie Andrews, catalogues 258 failed contagion experiments and the case against germ theory itself. No Virus takes the examination one layer deeper — the isolation problem, the collapse of virology’s foundational claims, and a disease-by-disease reappraisal of the entities the framework is built on.
Four take on the remedies and paradigm questions mainstream medicine actively suppresses. The DMSO Book covers 100,000 studies, zero deaths, and one approval — the suppressed science of medicine’s most versatile compound. Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy collects the interviews, protocols, and evidence from the doctors and researchers they tried to silence. The Iodine Book recovers an essential mineral driven out of easy reach by bromide, fluoride, and perchlorate — and the pharmacological tradition that kept its therapeutic use alive across the decades mainstream medicine set it aside. The Hydrogen Peroxide Book recovers a century of practice with a compound the body already makes — mitochondrial, phagocytic, part of thyroid hormone synthesis — suppressed precisely because its clinical utility threatened the pharmaceutical direction that captured twentieth-century medicine.
Two more take on the remedies already in your kitchen. Baking Soda locates sodium bicarbonate inside the terrain framework industrial medicine buried — the compound already in your cupboard, and what it does at the level of the blood, kidneys, lungs, digestion, and skin. The Castor Oil Book recovers four thousand years of documented practice on the medicine mainstream healthcare quietly stopped talking about — the kitchen bottle that doesn’t sit well in a system built on prescriptions and procedures.
A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the sceptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. The full shelf is at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.
References
Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History (CreateSpace, 2013), Chapter 11: “Deaths from measles had declined by more than 98 percent before the introduction of a vaccine in 1963.”
Humphries and Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions, Chapter 11: “deaths from whooping cough had declined by more than 90 percent prior to the introduction of a vaccine in the mid-1940s.”
Humphries and Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions, Chapter 11: “Throughout the 1800s, scarlet fever was a significant killer.... It was a far bigger killer than smallpox, whooping cough, measles, and diphtheria.”
Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (Basic Books, 1995), Chapter 2, “Patterns of Failure.”
Sowell, Vision of the Anointed, Chapter 2, “Patterns of Failure.”
Sowell, Vision of the Anointed, Chapter 2, “Patterns of Failure.”
Sowell, Vision of the Anointed, Chapter 2, “Patterns of Failure.”
Sowell, Vision of the Anointed, Chapter 2, “The War on Poverty.”
CDC historical mortality statistics for measles, 1900-1963, reproduced in Humphries and Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions, Chapter 11, Graph 11.6.
Humphries and Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions, Chapter 11, Graph 11.4 (England and Wales measles mortality rate from 1838 to 1978).
Humphries and Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions, Chapter 11, Graph 11.5 (United States whooping cough mortality rate from 1900 to 1967).
Humphries and Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions, Chapter 11, discussion of diphtheria mortality decline.
Humphries and Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions, Chapter 11, discussion of scarlet fever mortality.
John B. McKinlay and Sonja M. McKinlay, “The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century,” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly / Health and Society 55, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 405-428. Quoted in Humphries and Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions.
E. Guberan, “Tendances de la mortalité en Suisse,” Schweizerische Medizinische Wochenschrift, vol. 110, 1980, p. 574. Quoted in Humphries and Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions, Chapter 11.
Sowell, Vision of the Anointed, Chapter 2, Stage 1 formulation.
J.B. Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018), Chapter 6: “When the vaccine court was established in 1986, there were only three vaccines given in the United States, DTP, polio, and MMR, and vaccination rates hovered between 50 and 60 percent nationally.”
Robert Pear, “Reagan Signs Bill on Drug Exports and Payment for Vaccine Injuries,” New York Times, November 15, 1986, cited in Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, Chapter 6.
Ronald Reagan, signing statement on the Omnibus Health Bill (S. 1744), November 15, 1986, cited in Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, Chapter 6.
Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, Chapters 2 and 6: the recommended schedule counts by age five in 1962, 1983, and 2017.
New York Times, 2014, cited in Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, Chapter 6.
Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, Chapter 6, on the growth of the vaccine market from $170 million in the early 1980s to more than $60 billion.
Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, Chapter 6: “the vaccine court created in 1986 has paid out more than $3.7 billion for vaccine injury claims.”
Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth (Independent, 2019), Chapter 8: “43% reported at least one chronic condition, and in about half of those (roughly one-fifth of all children surveyed) the condition was categorized as ‘moderate’ or ‘severe.’”
Turtles All The Way Down, Chapter 8, on the rise of chronic disease prevalence from 1.8% in 1960 to 8% in 2010.
Turtles All The Way Down, Chapter 8, citing Medco 2009 data on chronic medication use in American children.
Turtles All The Way Down, Chapter 8, citing national surveillance data 2003-2012.
CDC Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, “Prevalence and Characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorder Among Children Aged 8 Years, United States, 2022,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, April 17, 2025.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services press release, “Autism Epidemic Runs Rampant, New Data Shows 1 in 31 Children Diagnosed,” April 15, 2025.
Larry Burd, Richard Fisher, and Jacob Kerbeshian, “A Prevalence Study of Pervasive Developmental Disorders in North Dakota,” Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 26, no. 5 (1987): 700-703. Discussed in Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, Chapter 1.
Neil Z. Miller, Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies (New Atlantean Press, 2016), summary of J.B. Classen studies on vaccination and type 1 diabetes.
J.B. Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018), Chapter 5, on aluminum burden increase: “A fully vaccinated child in the mid-1980s would have been injected with 1,250 micrograms of aluminum by his eighteen-month birthday. A fully vaccinated child today is injected with 4,925 micrograms of aluminum, a near quadrupling.”
Institute of Medicine, The Childhood Immunization Schedule and Safety: Stakeholder Concerns, Scientific Evidence, and Future Studies (National Academies Press, 2013). Discussed in Turtles All The Way Down, Chapter 8.
IOM 2013, discussed in Turtles All The Way Down, Chapter 8.
IOM 2013, discussed in Turtles All The Way Down, Chapter 8.
IOM 2013, discussed in Turtles All The Way Down, Chapter 8.
Brian Hooker, quoted in Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, Chapter 1.
Turtles All The Way Down, Chapter 8, on CDC responses to the 2015 California measles cluster.
Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, Chapter 1, on the diagnostic substitution argument and its refutation.
Burd et al., “A Prevalence Methodology for Mental Illness and Developmental Disorders in Rural and Frontier Settings,” January 2000; discussed in Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, Chapter 1.
Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, Chapter 4, on the William Thompson disclosures and the failed Congressional hearing.
Sowell, Vision of the Anointed, Chapter 2, “The War on Poverty.”
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, January 5, 2026 announcement of revisions to the U.S. childhood immunization schedule, reducing universal recommendations from 18 to 11 diseases and moving Rotavirus, COVID-19, Influenza, Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, and Meningococcal vaccines to Shared Clinical Decision-Making status. See also Congressional Research Service, “The 2026 Childhood Immunization Schedule” (R48982, June 11, 2026); American Academy of Pediatrics statement, January 2026.