This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website, October 30, 2026.

The number of U.S. death certificates listing Y59.0, the code for a death caused by a viral vaccine, rose from fewer than 10 per year through 2020, to 198 in 2021, the year COVID-19 vaccines rolled out, according to a new analysis of CDC data by the research group CORRELATION.

Researchers said the significant increase in certified vaccine deaths starting in 2021 is “unprecedented,” at least since 1968, and constitutes “a robust safety signal for COVID-19 vaccines.”

“Our results show that exceptional and brave attending physicians reported COVID-19 vaccine-caused deaths on the death certificates that they were legally mandated to complete, despite the large professional, institutional and political bias against doing so.

And that these deathcertificate results constitute a significant safety signal unprecedented since at least 1968,” Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., lead author of the analysis, told The Defender.

He added: “There is no justification for a claim that the COVID-19 vaccines are ‘safe,’ since they caused certified deaths, beyond any previous levels for any vaccine type. The side effect of death must be mentioned when informing patients. There is a definite low-er-bound risk of death that cannot be argued away by health agencies.”

Death certificate codes suggest COVID vaccines killed elderly

The authors of the analysis examined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s WONDER public health information data, which track mortality and other statistics. They focused on codes used on death certificates to identify a cause, or causes of death.

Standardized medical codes are used globally by healthcare professionals to classify patient diseases and medical conditions. The codes can be used to track and monitor illnesses and causes of death, and for research.

The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th Revision (ICD-10) contains the most up-to-date codes.

The authors of the analysis specifically searched for how often the Y59.0 code—the code for death from a viral vaccine—appeared on death certificates.

There is no specific code for the COVID-19 vaccine—or yet for COVID-19 vaccine injuries. Distinct codes do exist for some bacterial vaccines, including plague, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, among others, but viral vaccines, including flu, all share Y59.0 code.

As the researchers sifted through the data for death certificates that list the Y59.0 code, they found that Y59.0 deaths were near zero from 1999 through 2020—fewer than 10 per year and zero reported in most months.

Deaths from all vaccine types never exceeded 10 reported per year from 1968 through 2020.

However, in 2021, use of the Y59.0 code peaked. For that year, the researchers identified 66 deaths where a viral vaccine was designated as the underlying cause of death, and 198 reports listing a viral vaccine as one of the causes of death on the death certificate.

Roughly half of the people assigned the code were 75 years old or older, and essentially all of them were 65 or over.

The authors suggested that given the massive rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine starting in January 2021, their interpretation of the ICD-10 Y59.0 deaths as being related to COVID-19 vaccines is justified.

The authors also compared the number of deaths on death certificates with the roughly 4,400 deaths from the CO- VID-19 vaccine reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) in January-May 2021. They argue that the gap is likely due to underreporting of death reports and to institutional bias that likely drives that underreporting.

They also suggested that a rapid surveillance system focused on death codes would have immediately identified a robust safety signal for death among elderly people who got the COVID-19 vaccines.

They recommended developing such a system for all “institutionally imposed new medical interventions” that haven’t undergone rigorous safety testing.

This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BYNCND 4.0.

The post CDC Death Certificate Codes Show ‘Robust Safety Signal’ for COVID Vaccines appeared first on Final Call News.

Are there data showing whether routine childhood vaccines pose less risk than the diseases they target? A review of some childhood vaccines suggests those data don’t exist. What the available data do show is this: The risk of serious adverse events caused by vaccines often outweighs the risk of contracting the disease if not vaccinated.

This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website, September 22, 2026.

Recent measles outbreaks attributed to the unvaccinated, and President Donald Trump’s executive order last month recommending fewer childhood vaccines have fired up the debate over childhood vaccines—and whether “anti-vaxers” are putting public health at risk.

But according to some physicians and medical experts, evidence supporting the safety and benefits of vaccines is inconclusive. And in fact, many routine childhood vaccines may pose a greater risk to children than the diseases those immunizations are said to protect against.

A peer-reviewed study published in July in Medical Research Archives, the journal of the European Society of Medicine, supports that argument. The study, based on official data from the German Children’s Health Survey, found that “vaccinated children are not healthier than unvaccinated children.”

On his blog, German researcher Harald Walach, Ph.D., who co-authored the study, wrote that vaccinated children “are less likely to contract measles, mumps, whooping cough, and rubella. But they are more likely to contract chickenpox, scarlet fever, Epstein-Barr, herpes, salmonella, and hepatitis.”

The German Children’s Health Survey data initially led Germany’s public health agency, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), to claim in 2011 that there were no health differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated children.

But after researchers reexamined the same dataset, the authors of the new study determined that RKI’s conclusion was incorrect.

“The RKI had every incentive to find that vaccines made kids healthier,” said Dr. Michelle Perro, a pediatrician. “They didn’t. And when independent researchers dug deeper, the signal went the other direction.”

Walach told The Defender that his team’s findings are significant, especially given that “the effect of cumulation of vaccines has not been studied.”

Other physicians and public health experts agreed. Retired pediatrician Dr. Paul Thomas told The Defender: “For every vaccine on the childhood schedule, not one used a full saline control group. They tend to use other vaccines or vaccine ingredients as the control group.

None had adequate follow-up times. None looked at all health outcomes, thus missing the serious side effects and deaths that were directly vaccinerelated. None had an unvaccinated control group, so they could not detect vaccine effects and side effects.”

Dr. Ben Edwards, an integrative medicine and family practitioner, said vaccines that focus on one strain of a disease may lower the odds of being infected by that strain—but they “very well may dysregulate, damage, imbalance or manipulate the immune system to such a degree that it misses other germs and increases the likelihood of getting and succumbing to other germs that you would not have otherwise.”

Are there data showing whether routine childhood vaccines pose less risk than the diseases they target? A review of some childhood vaccines—including those for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR); diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTaP); hepatitis B (Hep B); polio; and flu vaccines, suggests those data don’t exist.

What the available data do show is this: The risk of serious adverse events caused by vaccines often outweighs the risk of contracting the disease if not vaccinated. Data also indicate that many once-common childhood diseases were declining long before vaccines became available, due to improvements in nutrition and sanitation.

Yet, those same common childhood vaccines are frequently promoted to the public as treatments that are safe, effective and fully tested.

Lack of safety data ‘an indictment of the entire vaccine safety enterprise’

Perro told The Defender that for many common childhood vaccines, we “don’t have the data” to determine whether they are deadlier than the diseases they target— but we also lack the data to definitively conclude they are safer and pose less risk.

“That is itself an indictment of the entire vaccine safety enterprise,” Perro said.

Dr. Elizabeth Mumper, a pediatrician and CEO of Advocates for Families, said several factors play a role in determining the risk a disease—or the vaccine targeting that disease—may pose to kids.

“Case fatality rates vary by age, nutrition, comorbidities, access to care and location,” Mumper said. “Mortality rates for measles and pertussis decreased significantly prior to the development of vaccines against those diseases, probably due to public sanitation measures.”

The development of antibiotics and other non-vaccine treatments, such as vitamin A treatments for measles, “have made those diseases very manageable with very low risks for children living in developed countries,” Mumper said.

‘Vaccines and the Diseases They Target’—what the book says and doesn’t say

Mumper’s analysis mirrors that of a 2025 book, “Vaccines and the Diseases They Target: An Analysis of Vaccine Safety and Epidemiology,” published by Physicians for Informed Consent.

The book analyzes data from multiple studies and public health authorities on common childhood vaccines and the diseases they target—and identifies several key trends.

The book’s analysis of the MMR, DTaP, Hep B, polio and flu vaccines finds these diseases have a low incidence rate in the U.S. and developed countries, even among the unvaccinated:

• Measles: only 1 in 10,000 measles cases in the U.S. are fatal, 7 in 1,000 result in hospitalization, and 3 to 3.5 in 10,000 result in seizure.

• Rubella: Up to half of infections are asymptomatic and most are not reported to public health authorities.

• Diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis: The total annual risk of infection for children from any of the three diseases covered by the DTaP vaccine is 1 in 200,000.

• Polio: 95% of infections are asymptomatic, and 84% of cases that cause paralysis result in recovery without disability.

• Flu: Only 1 in 1.26 million children die from the flu, with or without other high-risk conditions.

The analysis also showed that infection rates of formerly common childhood diseases had sharply declined even before the introduction of vaccines targeting those conditions:

• Measles: Between 1900 and 1963, before the introduction of the measles vaccine and its subsequent inclusion as part of the combination MMR vaccine, the measles mortality rate declined from 13.3 per 100,000 to 0.2 per 100,000.

• Diphtheria: Between 1900 and 1945, before the introduction of a vaccine targeting diphtheria, the mortality rate dropped from 40.3 per 100,000 to 1.2 per 100,000.

• Tetanus: Between 1900 and 1945, before the introduction of a vaccine targeting tetanus, the mortality rate decreased from 2.4 per 100,000 to 0.5 per 100,000.

• Pertussis: Between 1900 and 1945, mortality declined from 16.1 per 100,000 to 1.3 per 100,000.

• Hep B: Before the vaccine was widely introduced, fewer than 1 in 7,000,000 children under age 10 at normal risk of exposure contracted chronic hepatitis B that led to fatal liver cirrhosis or to cancer later in life.

• Polio: Before the introduction of the polio vaccine, and among children who had not had their tonsils removed or did not rest after illness, 1 in 190,000 died or developed permanent disability.

The authors of the book couldn’t rule out a higher risk of severe adverse events — or deaths — from the vaccines listed above, compared to the risk posed by those diseases if a child remains unvaccinated. This includes:

• MMR: The 1 in 640 risk of seizure associated with the MMR vaccine is about five times higher than the risk of seizure from measles infection.

• Flu: Populations that receive the flu vaccine have shown a 65% higher risk of non-flu respiratory illness, and the vaccine has been shown to prevent the flu in approximately 65% of cases.

• Polio: The vaccine is associated with a 1 in 829 risk of seizure. A Journal of the American Medical Association study of nearly 379,000 children seeking an association between the polio vaccine and epilepsy found no association, but it also did not draw a specific conclusion when compared to the epilepsy risk posed by natural polio infection. The study did not rule out the possibility of the risk of an adverse event leading to permanent disability increasing by up to 56%, “which is greater than the risk of permanent disability from polio for children at normal risk.”

In an analysis posted on Substack, epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher identified at least three U.S. deaths likely linked to the MMR vaccine this year—compared to no U.S. deaths definitively linked to measles cases.

Several other studies also could not confirm a link between childhood vaccines and adverse events—but could not rule out an association. For example: A 2002 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) study looked for an association between the MMR vaccine and autism. According to the Physicians for Informed Consent book, “the results were inconclusive when compared to the risk of measles, mumps and rubella.”

An Institute of Medicine (IOM) study found that “the evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between MMR vaccine” and severe adverse events potentially linked to the vaccine, including multiple sclerosis and Guillain- Barré syndrome.

The IOM study also could not accept or reject a causal relationship between the polio vaccine and severe adverse events like Guillain-Barré and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The book notes that the package inserts for the MMR, DTaP, Hep B and polio vaccines indicate that those vaccines have not been evaluated for their carcinogenic or mutagenic potential or possible adverse effects on fertility.

The NEJM study “did not rule out the possibility that the MMR vaccine increases the risk of an adverse event that leads to permanent disability by up to 95% … greater than the risk of death or permanent disability from measles, mumps and rubella for children at normal risk: 1 in 1,900 instead of 1 in 50,000,” the book states.

The book also cites a 1999 study finding no association between Hep B and adverse events, “but results were inconclusive when compared to the risk of Hep B. The study did not rule out the possibility that the Hep B vaccine increases the risk of an adverse event that leads to permanent disability by up to 110%.”

This figure is “greater than the risk of Hepatitis B for children at normal risk of exposure, 1 in 3,000 compared to 1 in 700,000,” the book states.

What doctors say they’ve observed

Mumper said that while studies have not drawn definitive conclusions, she’s made key observations involving patients at her practice. “My clinical experience suggests there are links. Forty-seven percent of the parents of patients with autism in my clinic cited MMR vaccine or multiple vaccines given when the child was ill as a trigger for their child’s regression into autism,” she said.

According to the Physicians for Informed Consent book, vaccine-induced immunity has reduced infection rates for diseases like measles—but this immunity is not lifelong and tends to wane by adolescence or early adulthood, whereas natural immunity has been shown to confer lifelong protection.

For instance, for the MMR vaccine, “by age 15, about 60% of vaccinated children are susceptible to subclinical infection with measles virus, and by age 24-26, 33% susceptible to clinical infection.” For the Hep B vaccine, “around 50% of children lose their immunity by age 5,” according to the book.

Edwards said that as people with naturally acquired immunity to measles age out of the population, measles incidence rates will increase because the measles vaccine does not provide lifelong protection.

“Everyone acquired measles naturally prior to the 1960s, and almost all survived—99+% range —and then had robust natural immunity for life. This generation is dying and will soon all be gone. Once this happens, we will see many more outbreaks,” Edwards said.

Aluminum adjuvants may account for worse outcomes in vaccinated kids

Walach told The Defender it’s “difficult to say” why vaccinated children may be more likely to contract at least some of the childhood diseases they receive shots for.

It’s his “educated guess” that these children are “able to go through some of these childhood diseases in a stable environment, where they are tedious, but not dangerous, allows the immune system to learn and ripen, such that other diseases are more easily curbed, even before they become symptomatic.”

On the contrary, “vaccine adjuvants — often aluminum oxide — are problematic and place a strain on children, particularly when they accumulate through multiple vaccinations,” Walach said.

The Physicians for Informed Consent book addressed aluminum adjuvants, which are used to “enhance the immune response to an antigen (foreign substance).”

The Hep B, DTaP (and Tdap) vaccines contain aluminum, which the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has classified as a neurotoxin.

In 2008, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) determined that no more than 1 milligram (mg) of aluminum per kilogram (kg) of body weight should be taken orally per day to avoid aluminum’s harmful effects—including nervous system damage.

However, several vaccines sharply exceed this limit.

For instance, the Hep B vaccine contains 250 micrograms (mcg) of aluminum per dose, while the DTaP vaccine contains between 330 and 625 mcg per dose.

When combined with other childhood vaccines that contain aluminum, including the Haemophilus influenzae type B and pneumococcal conjugate vaccines, cumulative exposure during the first year of life exceeds the ATSDR limit.

The ATSDR study noted that while the human digestive system is able to process almost all aluminum that is ingested, aluminum that is introduced intramuscularly by injection enters the bloodstream directly — even though the “rate at which aluminum from vaccines migrates from human muscle to the bloodstream is not known.”

Walach said it is wrong to exclusively blame the unvaccinated for outbreaks of diseases like measles, noting that “the highest load of measles cases in Europe is in Poland, which has had compulsory measles vaccination much longer than other countries.”

A peer-reviewed study published last year in Expert Review of Vaccines and co-authored by scientists from entities including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, Public Health Agency of Canada, and the Pan American Health Organization found that it is possible for the vaccinated to transmit measles.

Such cases “must be considered in public health investigations, as such transmissions can contribute to outbreaks,” the study stated.

Thomas suggested that vaccine-strain measles might be contributing to outbreaks, noting that “it is quite possible that much of the measles we are seeing is driven by shedding by the vaccinated.”

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense, said measles “may be evolving to evade the vaccine.”

Perro drew parallels with what she called the “polio narrative.” She said, “Wild poliovirus has been eliminated from the Western Hemisphere since 1991. The only polio cases in the U.S. in recent decades have been vaccine-derived.”

“The real question shouldn’t be ‘do unvaccinated cause or drive or make up most of these outbreaks,’ which is kind of a nobrainer, but which kids come out the other side healthier — less death and disease of any kind,” Edwards said.

This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BYNCND 4.0.

The post Are routine childhood vaccines deadlier than the diseases they target? appeared first on Final Call News.

by Center for Biological Diversity
Published on The Defender

This article was originally published by the Defender—Children’s Health Defense News & Views website, October 15, 2026.

Conservation and public health groups filed a lawsuit on Oct. 14 to force the Trump administration to develop required water quality standards for atrazine, a cancer-linked pesticide found at dangerous levels in thousands of U.S. waterways and in drinking-water supplies.

“We’re taking the Trump administration to court because it’s refusing to protect Americans from the well-documented dangers of the cancer-linked, hormone-disrupting pesticide atrazine,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

“The rest of the world is banning this incredibly dangerous pesticide. Why is Trump’s EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] continuing to push this poison on people?”

Atrazine is the nation’s most widespread pesticide water pollutant. According to a new Center for Biological Diversity report, the pesticide contaminates 25% of all river miles in the continental U.S. at levels the EPA recognizes as harmful to aquatic life.

Atrazine pollution is caused by industrial agricultural operations using tens of millions of pounds of the pesticide each year.

The lawsuit challenges the lack of water quality protections in American waterways as required under the Clean Water Act. The Act requires the EPA to develop water quality standards for pollutants like atrazine. The agency initiated but failed to complete that step in 1999.

The EPA is moving toward reapprov-ing the hormone-disrupting pesticide for another two decades.

A recently published study found that the EPA’s proposal to continue atrazine use would leave 99% of the nation’s most contaminated watersheds polluted with the pesticide at levels that the agency itself considers unsafe.

“Protecting the environment from pesticides benefits farmworkers and farming communities suffering from these poisons polluting their water,” said Margaret Reeves, a senior scientist focused on agro-ecology and workers’ rights at the Pesticide Action and Agroecology Network.

“Building healthy soils and sustainable food systems will help us break our reliance on toxic pesticides like atrazine.”

Atrazine is banned as too dangerous in more than 60 countries but is the second most widely used pesticide in the U.S., behind glyphosate.

It is linked to birth defects, multiple cancers and fertility problems like low sperm quality and irregular menstrual cycles.

California health officials proposed to list atrazine as known to cause cancer earlier this month following the 2025 decision by the World Health Organization’s

International Agency for Research on Cancer finding that atrazine is probably carcinogenic.

Scientific research has found it chemically castrates male frogs at extremely low concentrations, including those allowed in drinking water.

“Pesticides like atrazine that are clearly linked to reproductive harms and cancer don’t belong in our water supplies,” said Tom Fox, senior legislative counsel at the Center for Environmental Health. “EPA needs to take action now as required by the Clean Water Act.”

ealthdefense.org/defender/groups-sue-

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by the Center for Biological Diversity, Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network, and the Center for Environmental Health.

Background The troubling health harms of atrazine, as well as glyphosate, were spotlighted in the Trump administration’s first Make America Healthy Again report. Atrazine has been a priority pesticide for public health advocates for decades because of the extreme threats it poses to human health and the environment.

During the first Trump administration, the EPA discarded safety precautions mandated under the Food Quality Protection Act that protect young children from pesticide exposures. In doing so, the agency ignored multiple independent epidemiological studies finding that developing embryos and young children are at a high risk of harm from this pesticide.

The EPA also reduced the protection factor it used to convert toxicity levels observed in rat and mouse studies to levels considered safe for humans. The more permissive benchmark relied on a model developed by the primary manufacturer of epa-pesticide-pollution-u-s-waterways atrazine, Syngenta.

Had the science-based, more-protective standards been used, atrazine use on lawns and turf would likely have been banned because of unacceptable harms to children. But the agency only proposed a modest reduction in application rates for turf.

The Trump administration also weakened environmental safeguards put in place in 2006 to protect aquatic life from harmful atrazine exposure, a move that increased the amount of atrazine allowed in waterways across the United States.

The change came in response to requests from the pesticide’s maker, Syngenta and the National Corn Growers Association.

Atrazine has saturated much of the country at levels that the EPA recognizes will harm wildlife.

Atrazine is primarily used on corn grown for animal feed and ethanol. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that ethanol production accounts for nearly 45% of total corn use; 40% of domestic corn use is for livestock feed; and some portion of the remainder is processed into ingredients used in ultrapro-cessed foods, like high fructose corn syrup, glucose, dextrose and corn oil.

This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BYNCND 4.0.

Originally published by the Center for Biological Diversity.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/groups-sue-epa-pesticide-pollution-u-s-waterways-drinking-water

The post Groups sue EPA over pesticide pollution in U.S. waterways, drinking water appeared first on Final Call News.

This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website, October 2, 2026.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier on Oct. 1 sued Pfizer and its CEO, Albert Bourla, alleging that the drugmaker misled the public by marketing its COVID-19 vaccine as safe and effective while not disclosing the vaccine’s potential risks to pregnant women, children and teenagers.

The 49-page lawsuit alleges Pfizer violated Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act by deceptively marketing its vaccine to the public in turn for making billions of dollars in profit.

According to the complaint, Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine marketing campaign focused on two principal themes: that the shot “posed no material safety risks” and that “mass vaccination was necessary to stop the transmission of COVID-19”— even though Pfizer never tested the vaccine’s ability to stop the virus from spreading.

Pfizer possessed extensive evidence that its vaccine caused serious adverse events— including 1,223 reported deaths following vaccination as of February 2021 and 52 miscarriages among vaccinated pregnant women. However, the company assured the public the vaccine was safe.

“Today we sued Pfizer for deceptively marketing the products as safe—making billions—while pregnant women were miscarrying their babies and teenagers were having heart attacks,” Uthmeier said in a statement.

Florida AG says state has track record of success with similar lawsuits

In a statement, Pfizer said the allegations are baseless, and that the “representations made by Pfizer about its COVID-19 vaccine have been accurate and science-based” and that it “stands behind the safety and efficacy” of the product.

But Forrest B. Saunders, communications director for Uthmeier’s office, told The Defender “the complaint and comments by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier speak for themselves.”

Saunders said Florida has a track record of success with such lawsuits, having “recovered millions for Floridians through consumer protection efforts.”

Naomi Wolf, CEO of Daily Clout and  author of “The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity,” helped release documents in 2023 and 2024 revealing serious adverse events among pregnant women and irreversible harms to reproductive health. She called the lawsuit “a glimmer of potential justice long overdue.”

Florida resident Haley Schwartz, who was seriously injured following her COVID-19 vaccination in 2021, also welcomed the suit. She said injuries caused by the vaccine “have received inadequate attention” for years.

“Finally seeing these issues examined through a formal legal process feels significant and creates an important opportunity for greater scrutiny, transparency, and accountability regarding what was communicated to the public,” Schwartz said.

The lawsuit seeks civil penalties of $10,000 for each violation of the state’s consumer protection law—and $15,000 for each violation involving an elderly or disabled person.

Florida seeks to force Pfizer to return some of its profits and is asking for a permanent injunction against further deceptive practices.

Pfizer’s deceptive marketing sought to ‘ensure windfall profits’

According to the complaint, Pfizer engaged in a deceptive and “wide-ranging marketing campaign” to “drive consumer demand” for its COVID-19 vaccine, overcome widespread public skepticism and “ensure windfall profits.”

“This emphasis on the purported safety of the vaccine directly responded to widespread public concerns about a pharmaceutical product that had been developed on an unusually accelerated timeline, with uniquely limited testing and oversight, and employing novel mRNA technology,” the complaint states.

Pfizer’s campaign included public statements by Bourla claiming the COVID-19 vaccine was safe. The complaint cites a January 2023 interview in which Bourla claimed that Pfizer had not detected “a single [safety] signal” linked to the vaccine.

The complaint suggests public skepticism was warranted: “Pfizer knew that data showed its COVID-19 vaccine was connected to myocarditis and pericarditis among minors; had reason to believe its COVID-19 vaccine would cause adverse events for pregnant women and their unborn babies in the first trimester, including miscarriage [and] thousands of reports of other adverse events including stroke and even death, especially among the elderly.”

By Feb. 28, 2021, Pfizer’s internal adverse event database already contained 158,893 adverse event reports and reports of 1,223 deaths linked to its COVID-19 shot, according to the complaint.

Pfizer by then also “possessed reports for 458 pregnant women exposed to its COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy”—over half of whom sustained at least one adverse event. Of 52 miscarriages, most occurred during the first trimester, “many within days of vaccination.”

Pfizer ended its COVID-19 vaccine trial involving pregnant women early, due to low participation, particularly among women in the early stages of pregnancy. But the drugmaker didn’t disclose “material facts already in its possession showing the risks associated with its COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy.”

Pfizer official admitted vaccine not tested for stopping transmission

Pfizer promoted its COVID-19 vaccine as a means of “protecting … loved ones” through a “wide-ranging marketing campaign” which suggested that the vaccine would stop the spread of COVID-19, the suit alleges.

But Janine Small, Pfizer’s president of international developed markets, said the vaccine was not tested on stopping the virus, according to a 2021 statement cited in the lawsuit.

Karl Jablonowski, Ph. D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said the “assurances of safety the company gave required knowledge Pfizer simply did not have.”

He cited a February 2021 Pfizer “nonclinical overview” document listing an extensive range of safety studies Pfizer did not conduct.

“Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine may actually have been the least-studied approved product it has made this century,” Jablonowski said. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/florida-ag-james-uthmeier-lawsuit-pfizer-albert-bourla-deceptive-marketing-covid-vaccines/ The lawsuit alleges that Pfizer’s misleading marketing claims translated into a financial windfall for Pfizer and Bourla. Between 2020 and 2023, Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine revenue exceeded $80 billion, and Bourla received nearly $102 million in compensation.

Legal liability shield may not protect Pfizer in Florida lawsuit

COVID-19 countermeasures, including vaccines, are protected by a legal liability shield under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act) of 2005.

Attorney Ray Flores, CHD’s senior outside counsel, said these protections may not extend to state-level consumer protection cases.

“All states have consumer protection statutes that normally would allow individual consumers to bring suit for fraudulent practices. Under the PREP Act, however, only states have the potential for successful suits,” Flores said.

Kansas and Texas have active lawsuits against Pfizer in the 10th and 5th U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals, respectively. The suits make similar claims to Florida’s— namely, that Pfizer violated state consumer protection laws by marketing its COVID-19 vaccine as safe and effective.

“All three cases are remarkably similar, as they are brought under parens patriae,” a legal principle that allows states to file lawsuits to protect state residents, Flores said.

However, he said Florida’s lawsuit may face obstacles, as Pfizer may seek to move the case from state to federal court “to invoke PREP Act protection”—similar to what the company did in the Kansas and Texas lawsuits.

Flores said other states may be waiting on the sidelines for the outcomes of the Texas and Kansas cases. “I wish more attorneys general would take such legal action,” Flores said. “There was a rumor back in 2024 that Utah, Mississippi and Louisiana were also suing Pfizer. It sounded good, and got lots of press, but it was never true.”

Flores also said he would like to see state attorneys general pressure U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “flex his muscles” by ending the PREP Act’s liability shield for COVID-19 vaccines. Bourla defended the liability shield for vaccine makers in an interview last year.

This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BYNCND 4.0.

The post Florida AG Sues Pfizer, Bourla Over Deceptive Marketing of COVID Vaccines appeared first on Final Call News.

by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. The Defender

This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website September 14, 2026

Pfizer and Israel’s Ministry of Health (MOH) knew in early 2021 about a significant “cardiac event” safety signal associated with Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine—but withheld the information from physicians and the public for several months, a new peer-reviewed study has found.

The authors of the study, published last week in EXCLI Journal, reviewed an MOH dataset containing 531 hospitalization records dating from March 2021—just months after the rollout of the mRNA Pfizer-BioNTech shot—to May 2022.

The records included 67 deaths, including nine in patients under age 50. Two of the nine deaths were attributed to myocarditis, which can lead to cardiac arrhythmia and death.

Myocarditis was recorded in 71.6% of the hospitalization records involving patients under 30. Nearly two-thirds of those patients “had no meaningful medical history” before their diagnosis.

The deaths and injuries were reported to Israel’s MOH and to Pfizer. Yet, public health authorities in Israel, the U.S. and elsewhere downplayed the safety signal, reporting it “only after a delay of approximately three to four months.” Even then, health authorities described most cases as “rare” or “mild”—and of less concern than the risk COVID-19 posed.

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said none of the myocarditis deaths are found in the U.S. government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), even though Pfizer was obligated to report the deaths to VAERS.

“The bereaved and the injured are owed an answer,” Jablonowski said.

Steve Kirsch, founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, said the study’s findings are significant because they are based on “internal government data” instead of data from vaccine makers or from publicly available databases.

Kirsch said the data show that Israel’s MOH “was clearly more interested in protecting the manufacturers than the public.”

Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, said the findings reflect a trend across multiple countries, in which public health authorities and Big Pharma hid the risks of the COVID-19 shots.

“I don’t think Israel is an outlier. Pharmaceutical companies, public health authorities, organized medicine, and academics worldwide have performed shamefully and betrayed our trust,” Orient said.

‘Generally short intervals’ between vaccination and injuries, deaths

The study presents a breakdown of the 531 hospitalization records and 67 death records in the Israeli MOH data, noting that these cases involved a significant number of younger patients. These cases were reported to Pfizer in 2021 and 2022.

“Reported events spanned cardiac, neurological, inflammatory, and other serious clinical categories and involved a substantial proportion of younger individuals, with 211 of 530 hospitalization records with valid age data (39.8 %) involving patients under 30 years of age,” the study states.

Other key findings from the study include:

The two myocarditis-related deaths in people under 50 involved a 22-year-old woman and a 47-year-old man.

An additional death of a younger adult—a 35-year-old man—was also identified. His record indicated “worsening heart failure” but did not mention myocarditis.

Μyocarditis or pericarditis was identified in 250 of 531 hospitalization records (47.1%) and in 151 of 211 records (71.6%) of patients under 30.

48 patients under 18 were diagnosed with myocarditis or pericarditis.

134 of the 211 patients under 30 had “no meaningful medical history,” of which 99 of 134 were diagnosed with myocarditis and pericarditis — most of whom were male (90 out of the 99, or 90.9%).

According to the study, a significant number of records involving younger patients recorded the onset of “acute cardiac inflammation” that developed “within days to weeks of vaccination.”

Though the study focused on myocarditis and pericarditis, the researchers’ review of the records also identified a “broad spectrum” of other “serious clinical events.” These injuries included:

• Other cardiac events, including arrhythmias, syncope and heart failure.

Neurological disorders, including seizures, stroke, encephalitis, Guillain-Barré syndrome and cranial nerve palsies.

Allergic reactions, including “suspected anaphylaxis.”

Inflammatory and hematological conditions, including multisystem inflammatory syndrome and immune thrombocytopenic purpura.

Other serious conditions, including acute kidney injury and sudden hearing loss.

The combination of detailed case-level clinical documentation, the “generally short intervals” between vaccination and injury, the formal reporting to Pfizer and the fact that the data were sourced from a government health authority support the study’s credibility, the authors said.

Pfizer was kept in loop about deaths in 2021-2022

Israel MOH records also showed Pfizer was kept in the loop about the deaths and hospitalizations, receiving nine such reports between March 2021 and May 2022.

The first report, dated March 25, 2021, included information on 157 hospitalizations and 46 deaths.

“Reports to Pfizer, which began no later than March 25, 2021, included a notable proportion of young individuals, including many for whom no meaningful medical history was identified,” the study states.

Yet, Pfizer—and public health authorities worldwide—sat on this information for weeks or months before revealing it to the public.

The study cited documentary evidence of these delays—and the subsequent downplaying of the severity of the serious adverse events related to the vaccine. For instance, an October 2021 New England Journal of Medicine study found that early myocarditis cases were detected in Israel as early as January 2021—only a month after the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was released to the public.

On Feb. 28, 2021, Israel alerted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public health authorities about approximately 40 myocarditis cases.

But this information didn’t become public until February 2023, following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that CHD submitted to the CDC. In early March 2021, the CDC was warned about “large numbers” of myocarditis and pericarditis cases among young people in Israel.

A week later, officials from the CDC and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) circulated an internal response about the myocarditis cases reported in Israel, stating that no additional details about those cases were available.

Yet on April 26, 2021, the CDC and FDA denied that “safety signals” existed for myocarditis. It wasn’t until May 28, 2021, that the CDC issued a recommendation to all clinicians to report “all cases” of myocarditis or pericarditis.

The authors of the EXCLI Journal study suggested that the decision by public health authorities and Pfizer to sit on this information “may have had implications for clinical awareness and informed decision-making.”

Epidemiologist M. Nathaniel Mead, Ph.D., a McCullough Foundation scholar, agreed. “Informed consent should have included an age-and-sex-specific warning in time for them to say no, delay a second dose, or choose differently. Many men never got that chance.”

Were more vaccine-related deaths concealed?

The study found that the dataset provided by Israel’s MOH appeared to have been revised several times, noting that later versions “added clinical information to existing records, revised diagnoses and reporting dates, and omitted some records.”

The omissions included a death report contained in an October 2021 version of the MOH’s dataset that was “no longer present in the December or any subsequent version.”

According to the study, the dataset contains no “methodological documentation” and “no formal audit trail identifying who made these changes or the reasons for them,” making it impossible to tell why these revisions were made based on the available data.

Later revelations show Israeli authorities continued to downplay the risks of the COVID-19 shot well into 2022. A leaked video from June 2022 revealed that researchers shared data with Israel’s MOH showing serious and long-term side effects linked to the Pfizer-BioNTech shot.

The video suggested that Israel’s MOH did not reveal this information to the expert committee that met later that month to decide on recommending the vaccine for children under age 5, or to leaders of Israel’s COVID-19 vaccine booster program.

Kirsch said the delayed public release of the data and the open questions that remain about how the data were entered and updated raise accountability concerns that span beyond Israel’s MOH and Pfizer to include the broader medical community.

“Nobody was fired. More importantly, no pro-vaccine doctor in the U.S. has expressed any outrage in the suppression of the Israeli safety data,” Kirsch said. Orient said the study adds to evidence supporting the suspension and withdrawal of mRNA vaccines from the marketplace.

“There is no justification for the continued use of these vaccines. There should be no further iterations unless and until all questions are answered and benefit is shown to exceed risk—if ever. We should instead be concentrating on treatment.”

This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BYNCND 4.0.

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by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. The Defender

This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website August 31, 2026

Researchers from the University of Illinois are proposing to turn plastic into edible vanilla-flavored protein cookies using genetically engineered (GE) yeast.

They say their product, nutritionally enhanced 3D-printed “µBites,” could address two major global issues: food scarcity and plastic pollution. The research started as part of the NASA Deep Space Food Challenge—but now the researchers argue it could have broader implications than just creating food in deep space.

To make the cookies, they take used plastic bottles sourced from a supermarket and discarded sweetcorn plant stalks and leaves and use heat, water, pressure and oxygen in a 32-part process to break them down into components digestible by microbes, the American Chemical Society reported.

Then they feed that product into a bioreactor, where yeast—produced using CRISPR gene-editing technology—turns it into the fats, proteins and other components they need to make the cookies.

They engineered the microbes to produce vanillin, which gives the cookies their vanilla flavor and scent. They also engineered a yeast to produce beta-carotene to give the cookies a golden color and some vitamin A.

They mix the ingredients into a dough and put it into a 3D printer, which prints the cookies. They microwave them, and the final cookie should be ready to eat, according to the researchers.

The researchers haven’t been able to taste the cookies yet—they’re waiting for university approval, according to NewScientist.

“I think it has a pleasant, appealing aroma,” Lahiru Jayakody, Ph.D., a microbiologist who led the research, told NewScientist. “And it will taste good, too. We’ve not tasted it, but it smells good—that’s for sure—like a real cookie.”

They are waiting on university approval to taste their cookies.

GE yeast and bacteria can ‘unexpectedly produce toxins or allergens’

Jayakody and several other researchers have a patent application pending for their µBites production system.

The researchers also said that realistically, it will take many more years of research before plastic can be removed from landfills and turned into food, but they hope their research will inspire others to develop similar solutions. Food and environmental safety experts are more skeptical.

“This is just the latest in a long line of bad ideas that industry and their allied scientists have come up with to turn lab-produced goop into ‘edible food-like substances’ that the unsuspecting public are meant to eat,” according to Claire Robinson, GMO food expert and founder of GMWatch.

She said that when evaluating the safety of GE food, she looks for in-depth data and molecular profiling, followed by long-term animal feeding studies.

“Such tests are especially important for ‘food-like substances’ made from genetically engineered GE yeast and bacteria, because these microorganisms can unexpectedly produce toxins or allergens,” Robinson said.

For example, in 1989, 37 Americans were killed, and over 1,500 were sickened when they consumed GE tryptophan made by Showa Denko, a Japanese company.

“However, in the case of these plastic cookies, I wouldn’t dignify the product by expecting lab animals to eat it, let alone humans,” Robinson said.

The scientists haven’t even done the taste testing, she added, “That’s quite apart from the ‘yuck factor’ of eating plastic-derived food and the profound cultural inappropriateness of assuming that food is just an amalgamation of ‘useful ingredients’ such as proteins and fats.”

She added that the environmental claims the researchers made were highly questionable. The environmental footprint of lab-grown bioreactor food is massive—it’s extremely energy- and resource-hungry and difficult to scale up to commercially useful levels.

“Certainly plastic cookies couldn’t make more than a minor dent in the plastic pollution problem,” Robinson said. She conceded that plastic pollution is a “serious problem,” but said the solution is to phase out plastic production worldwide and recycle what we can’t avoid using, with the help of money-back deposits on all plastic containers.

“The plastic cookie venture makes me wonder why scientists aren’t put to work on something genuinely useful for humanity,” Robinson said.

This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BYNCND 4.0.

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by Sentient Media Published on The Defender Written by Natasha Gilbert

This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website August 18, 2026

Intensive farming, where animals are kept in close quarters, creates environments that encourage the evolution of harmful bacteria and other pathogens so that they gain traits making it easier to infect people and more difficult to cure, a new study suggests.

Hygiene and welfare standards are often low on industrial farms, also called factory farms, and the rising widespread use of antimicrobials has led to concerns that overuse in animal farming is playing a key role in driving antimicrobial-resistant infections in people.

To gain insights into how intensive animal farming influences the evolution of harmful bacteria, a new study investigated how modern densely populated chicken farms have shaped the evolution of strains of Campylobacter jejuni bacteria, which are the leading cause of gut illness and diarrhea from bacterial food poisoning in people, typically after eating contaminated chicken.

Chickens are of particular interest because populations have shot up sevenfold since the 1960s due to agricultural growth and increasing demand for poultry. Today, roughly 31 billion chickens inhabit the globe. Together, poultry accounts for around 70% of all bird biomass on Earth.

The results showed that C. jejuni evolved rapidly in chickens, developing genetic strains resistant to antimicrobials and more likely to adapt to other species, which makes it easier for them to infect people.

Published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the universities of Oxford and Sheffield in the United Kingdom analyzed the genetic information of 2,747 C. jejuni samples from wild birds and chickens.

They found that since 1900, the transmission between chickens and wild birds has increased by more than 100-fold.

Farming intensification has changed how pathogens interact between populations of wild birds and domesticated chickens, says Oakem Kyne, a lead researcher on the study at the University of Oxford.

There is a much wider variety of chicken-adapted C. jejuni strains now than before they were domesticated, with a large jump since 1900 when modern poultry farming intensified, says Kyne.

The transmission across species, or spillover, can occur in this case when there is direct contact between the wild birds and chickens or contact with the other species’ poop.

The chickens act like “sponges,” their modeling showed, absorbing different bacterial strains from the environment, says Kyne.

“Having a lot of different strains of pathogens within these chickens means that there’s a lot more potential for human disease,” explains Kyne.

The researchers also found that chicken-adapted strains developed genetic traits that help C. jejuni survive and become more antimicrobial-resistant. For example, some strains are resistant to the common antibiotic tetracycline, which is used in intensive poultry farming and to treat infections in people.

There was also evidence that some strains gained a better tolerance for environments with oxygen, and the researchers suggested this could potentially enable them to survive on food more easily and then be more likely to infect people.

Andrew deCoriolis, executive director of Farm Forward, an advocacy group campaigning to end factory farming, says that industrial poultry production is a breeding ground for bacteria and viruses that pose risks to public health.

In a report published earlier this month, Farm Forward shows that modern poultry farming is also supercharging strains of salmonella that are becoming easier to spread and increasingly resistant to certain antibiotics.

Compared with 48% a decade earlier, in 2025 around 73% of poultry samples that tested positive for salmonella were resistant to at least one antibiotic that the World Health Organization considers highly important for human medicine.

Protecting the health of wild and farmed animals requires better biosecurity to prevent spillover, or transmission from animal to human, says Kyne. Farmed populations must be better isolated so that diseases aren’t entering the food system or escaping into wild populations, he says.

“When poultry companies cram tens of billions of birds into industrial facilities and dose them with routine antibiotics, they’re not just risking outbreaks,” says deCoriolis.

“They’re running an evolution experiment on a massive scale and the bacteria are winning.”

This article was published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BYNCND 4.0. Originally published by Sentient Media. Sentient Media is a nonprofit news outlet investigating factory farms and their effect on climate, animals, health, politics and more.

Natasha Gilbert is a freelance journalist reporting on the environment, science and health. 

The post ‘The bacteria are winning’: How factory farms cause human sickness appeared first on Final Call News.

by Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D. The Defender

This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website July 29, 2026

It was only last year that Nobel laureate Drew Weissman spoke with complete confidence about the mRNA technology he helped create.

When asked whether the genetic material or lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) used in COVID-19 vaccines could persist in the body or spread far beyond the injection site, his answer was unequivocal. “It is absolutely impossible. … The RNA is gone in days,” said Weissman, who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine for co-inventing the technology.

But four years earlier, behind closed doors, his message was very different.

Newly released documents made public by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) reveal that Weissman privately alerted Dr. Anthony Fauci to some concerning findings from his own laboratory.

Those findings triggered discussions among some of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) most senior vaccine scientists before eventually finding their way into Fauci’s personal diary.

Still emerging technology

When the pandemic hit, mRNA vaccines were still an emerging technology. Just two years prior, Weissman and his colleagues published a review in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

While praising the technology’s potential, they highlighted unresolved hurdles—including RNA instability, unwanted immune reactions and the challenge of getting genetic material into the right cells.

Though initial animal studies showed promise, early human trials yielded modest results, leading the authors to urge “cautious expectations.”

Significant questions also remained around the safety of mRNA vaccines during pregnancy, as pregnant women were excluded from the pivotal Pfizer and Moderna trials.

Regulators had to rely on animal reproductive data while human data accumulated post-rollout.

It was against this backdrop that Weissman reached out directly to Fauci.

Fauci alerted to new data

On Feb. 8, 2021, Weissman emailed Fauci.

“I wanted to alert you to some new data we generated.”

Weissman reported that when injected into pregnant mice, mRNA-LNPs crossed the placenta and entered the fetus, generating viral proteins and triggering an immune response in the amniotic fluid.

In non-pregnant mice, the LNPs accumulated in the uterus and ovaries.

While these initial experiments used intravenous (IV) delivery at doses roughly 100 times higher than a standard vaccine, they aligned with broader research.

As early as 2013, French scientists had shown that LNPs could accumulate in organs such as the ovaries, highlighting the need to understand how different delivery methods behave inside the body.

This was also reflected in regulatory documents for COVID-19 vaccine pre-clinical studies, which showed that mRNA LNPs accumulated in organs, including the ovaries.

Weissman wanted to test a more clinically relevant scenario, so he planned to repeat the study using intramuscular (IM) injections, matching standard vaccination practices.

“We are waiting to release the findings until these studies are completed,” Weissman told Fauci, noting he had already alerted the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Moderna, BioNTech/Pfizer and DARPA.

Fauci replied that evening.

“It would be interesting to see what human dose levels given IM do.”

Three weeks later, on March 1, 2021, Weissman emailed back with a confidential report attached. “Here is the human dose IM studies in pregnant mice. We still have some concern over the data,” he wrote.

Within the hour, Fauci forwarded the report to Dr. John Mascola, director of the NIH Vaccine Research Center, writing, “Let us discuss.”

Mascola quickly circulated the report to his senior leadership team for review.

Dismissed by officials

Despite Weissman’s status as a leading mRNA pioneer, NIH officials swiftly dismissed his concerns. Karin Bok, senior adviser for vaccine development at the NIH, dismissed the study almost immediately.

“I have no comments or concerns,” she wrote, claiming the results were standard for mouse studies and that it made sense for mRNA to travel beyond the injection site, “including placenta.”

This private assessment sharply contradicted public messaging at the time, which assured the public that vaccine material remained largely at the injection site (arm).

Bok added that obstetric experts involved in developing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) pregnancy recommendations were already “aware that mRNA might reach the foetus.”

Dr. Emily Erbelding, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, was similarly dismissive of Weissman’s concerns. “I don’t know what Drew Weissman is trying to accomplish with this,” she wrote, noting that regulatory oversight rested with the FDA.

The divide was striking. One of the inventors of mRNA technology believed the findings warranted further investigation, but senior health officials saw no cause for concern.

Weissman wanted a press conference

Despite his staff’s dismissal of the data, Fauci remained uneasy—largely because Weissman was planning to hold a press conference.

In his private diary, Fauci noted that the FDA and both vaccine manufacturers considered Weissman’s findings “invalid.”

Ordinarily, that might have ended the matter. But Fauci recognized the public relations nightmare if Weissman went public with his findings.

“We cannot blow them off for obvious reasons,” Fauci wrote. “The fact that they are holding a press conference is going to create a huge mess.”

Instead, he hoped repeat studies could be performed “to counter this finding.”

The issue quickly reached the highest levels of government. That same evening, White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients called Fauci to discuss the situation. Fauci noted that the FDA needed to publicly clarify its safety data.

After that point, the paper trail goes cold. Fauci’s diary records contain no further mention of Weissman’s findings or whether subsequent studies resolved the concerns.

What changed?

Between 2021 and 2025, Weissman’s public stance shifted dramatically.

In March 2021, after completing follow-up intramuscular studies, he explicitly told Fauci that he and his colleagues “still have some concerns over the data.”

That confidential report has never been made public, nor has any peer-reviewed paper detailing those specific follow-up results been published to my knowledge.

By September 2025, however, Weissman was expressing no such reservations.

The CDC COVID-19 vaccine workgroup chaired by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Retsef Levi had raised concerns about the “wide biodistribution and prolonged persistence of spike, mRNA and nano-lipid particles.”

Asked by STAT to respond, Weissman dismissed those concerns as poor science.

“It is absolutely impossible,” he said. “The RNA is gone in days. … If you put a vaccine-equivalent dose, you see it in the muscle, you see it in the draining lymph node, and that’s about it.”

So, what evidence transformed Weissman’s private concerns into public certainty?

The documents released by Paul do not answer that question. But over that same period, Weissman was awarded the Nobel Prize, and financial disclosures show BioNTech provided roughly $2.48 million to support research in his lab.

What the newly released documents do show is that during a critical juncture in the global vaccine rollout, one of mRNA’s key creators privately raised troubling laboratory findings about COVID-19 vaccines in pregnant animals.

Then, behind closed doors, senior health officials quickly brushed those concerns aside, and the public was never told.

Originally published on Maryanne Demasi’s MD Reports Substack page. This article was published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BYNCND 4.0.

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by Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. The Defender

This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website May 27, 2026

Residents living near artificial intelligence (AI) data centers are reporting symptoms—including dizziness, nausea, vertigo, insomnia, headaches and anxiety—that they believe are directly related to the centers’ noise pollution.

According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, the noise emitted by data centers can be heard and felt hundreds of feet away, and noise levels can reach up to 96 decibels—for 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Sound levels exceeding 85 decibels are considered dangerous and potentially damaging to human hearing, depending on the duration of the exposure.

Data centers also emit infrasound, a low-frequency (below 20 Hertz) rumble that the human ear can’t hear, but the body feels as pressure or vibration.

Infrasound generated by data centers is “the new enemy,” Futurism reported earlier this month. The centers’ cooling systems, power generators and server racks are suspected infrasound culprits.

‘Infrasound’ may negatively affect heart functioning

Some data centers have been built as close as 50 feet from people’s homes.

Residents exposed to infrasound from data centers are reporting symptoms similar to EMR Syndrome, which is linked to the electromagnetic radiation (EMR) emitted by cell towers, cellphones and Wi-Fi networks.

This symptom overlap comes as no surprise to Paul Héroux, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and a medical scientist in the McGill University Health Center surgery department.

“Sound, electric and magnetic fields of the same frequency have some overlap in their biological effects because they are similarly disruptive energy injections,” Héroux said.

Héroux is also vice chair of the International Commission on the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields, a “consortium of scientists, doctors and researchers” who study wireless radiation and make recommendations for wireless radiation exposure, “based on the best peer-reviewed research publications.”

According to Héroux, infrasound at high volumes can directly affect the human central nervous system, causing disorientation, anxiety, panic, bowel spasms, nausea, vomiting, eventual organ rupture and even death.

He pointed out that in 1957, French scientist Vladimir Gavreau began experimenting with low-frequency acoustics to create an audio weapon for the French military.

Just five years ago, German researchers published results from an in-vitro study showing that after just one hour of exposure, high levels of infrasound interfered with the heart muscle’s ability to contract properly.

Based on those findings, it’s possible that chronic exposure to infrasound from data centers could negatively affect heart function, Héroux said.

W. Scott McCollough, lead attorney for Children’s Health Defense (CHD) EMR & Wireless cases, also wasn’t surprised that exposure to infrasound emitted by data centers and radiofrequency (RF) radiation from cell towers and other devices can trigger similar symptoms. He said:

“Infrasound waves come from periodic pressure fluctuations, very akin to how modern radio systems modulate RF energy to carry information. The modulation leads to asymmetric bursts of energy with sharp peaks and valleys. Both lead to resonance and amplification, leading to stronger peaks in energy or sound pressure.”

‘Not in my backyard’: Most U.S. adults don’t want a data center near them

The average data center is roughly 100,000 square feet—large enough to fit nearly two football fields. Proponents of the gigantic infrastructures argue they are necessary for the U.S. to keep its competitive edge over China in the AI revolution.

But local residents—especially women—are sounding the alarm. Critics warn that the center will likely harm nearby residents, including children, and the surrounding environment.

Last month, Maine was poised to become the first state to enact a moratorium on new data centers. However, Gov. Janet Mills vetoed the bill. She wrote in a letter explaining her decision:

“A moratorium is appropriate given the impacts of massive data centers in other states on the environment and on electricity rates. But the final version of this bill fails to allow for a specific project in the Town of Jay that enjoys strong local support from its host community and region.”

Maine is one of at least 11 states that have proposed legislation to restrict or ban data center development since late 2025.

A Gallup poll conducted in March found that 7 in 10 U.S. adults oppose having a data center in their area. Only 7% said they were strongly in favor. Fifty-five percent of women said they strongly opposed data centers, compared to 43% of men.

‘These decisions must be made at the local level’

AI data centers have already drawn fierce, bipartisan criticism for their water and electricity consumption and environmental impact.

Miriam Eckenfels, director of CHD’s EMR & Wireless Program, said she sees similarities in the U.S. situation between data centers and new cell towers, which are also known to cause harm to human health and the environment.

In both cases, companies that stand to profit try to put up infrastructure close to where people live, learn and play. “People don’t want them, so they oppose them,” Eckenfels said.

Local communities should have the right to say no to such developments. “These decisions must be made at the local level and not in Washington D.C., where folks are far removed from the reality on the ground and the negative consequences.”

This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BYNCND 4.0.

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This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website June 3, 2026.

A new publication marks the entry into the peer-reviewed literature of some remarkable lab findings on synbio milk.

Synbio is short for synthetic biology, an extreme form of genetic modification (GM). The synbio fake milk that was analyzed in the lab tests was produced from genetically engineered yeast in a process known as “precision fermentation.”

The testing showed that, contrary to the manufacturer’s claims, the synbio milk is nothing like cow’s milk and the production process is anything but precise.

In the study, published in Scientific Reports, multi-omics profiling (in-depth molecular analysis) found that synbio milk differs nutritionally from cow’s milk and contains 93 uncharacterized fungal metabolites and 236 fungal proteins.

The authors, based at the Health Research Institute (HRI) in the U.S., write: “By three independent methods synbio milk was found to contain predominantly fungal protein, not the 90–99% β-LG [recombinant bovine β-lactoglobulin], claimed by the product developer.”

Bovine β-lactoglobulin (β-LG) is the most abundant whey protein in cow’s milk.

In addition, the scientists found that the synbio milk was nutritionally deficient: there were “substantial levels of 69 nutrients in bovine milk, of which only 7 were present in small amounts in synbio milk.”

Their analysis also revealed: “93 compounds in synbio milk, byproducts/waste products of fungal fermentation, whose chemical identities could not be established searching large mass spectral databases, suggesting they are novel compounds.

“Neither these nor the fungal proteins found in the synbio milk have been tested for safety or allergenicity at exposure levels relevant for synbio milk consumption. Therefore, comprehensive toxicity and allergenicity testing are needed to assess the safety of synbio milk for human consumption.”

The companies

The brand name and manufacturer of the synbio milk product in question are not mentioned in the published article. However, it appears to be the same product as that featured in media reports about the lab findings back in 2024 and 2025.

In these reports, the product was named as Bored Cow, a brand of Tomorrow Farms. The manufacturer of the GM yeast-derived protein, known as ProFerm, was given as the biotech startup Perfect Day.

Dr. John Fagan, chief science officer at HRI and corresponding author on the new publication, was reported at the time as saying that there were 92 small molecules in the product that are unknown to science: “They’re completely novel to our food. They are things that we haven’t consumed as human beings.”

This was in spite of reported claims by Perfect Day and Bored Cow that the synbio protein is identical to the protein in cow’s milk. While the lab findings themselves are not new, the current development is that they have been assessed as scientifically and methodologically sound, having passed peer review and been published in the scientific literature.

Lawsuit

Perfect Day was hit in 2025 with a lawsuit alleging it is misleading consumers about ProFerm.

In the lawsuit, filed in the District of Columbia, plaintiffs the Organic Consumers Association and GMO/Toxin Free USA argue that: “Perfect Day markets ProFerm as safe, environmentally friendly, identical to cow-derived whey protein, capable of creating milk identical to cow’s milk— ncluding its nutritional profile—and free from genetically modified organisms. The reality is markedly different.”

As part of their legal action, GMO/Toxin Free USA and the Organic Consumers Association commissioned HRI to analyze the synbio product. The results appear to be those that were recently published in Scientific Reports.

It is astonishing that any claim could be made that the synbio milk was “identical to cow’s milk” when the product in question only contains a single whey protein (β-LG) and so lacks the several other casein and whey proteins that are normally present in cow’s milk.

It is all the more astonishing that the lobby group WePlanet, with the endorsement of George Monbiot, among others, is encouraging European Union (EU) and British governments to pour vast sums of public money into “precision fermentation” as a solution to the climate and biodiversity crises, on the basis that this technology can produce “proteins that are biologically identical to those found in animal products.”

In other words, it’s not just a company making the biologically identical claim to help sell its “milk” product, but a whole lobby claiming that this is the future of food, and, in George Monbiot’s words, “the beginning of the end of most agriculture.”

Synbio milk brand vanishes

What do the findings mean for the future of the synbio milk? Bored Cow’s website is no longer functioning, and the product seems to have quietly disappeared from shelves, although what may be surplus stock is currently still available to order online via a few outlets, like Walmart. Another product made with Perfect Day’s ProFerm—an animal-free “ice cream” known as Brave Robot—has also been discontinued.

Perfect Day still seems to exist, although it has downsized its workforce and shuttered its consumer-facing brands. At the end of 2025, the company said it expected manufacturing operations to begin at its new production facility in Gujarat, India, in the second half of 2026.

Its business plan appears to consist of selling its genetically engineered yeast products as ingredients for inclusion in other brands. In the past, these have included the food giants Mars and Nestlé, though the resulting products never hit the mainstream and proved short-lived.

Synbio milk findings raise questions about other GM-derived foods

HRI’s findings build on safety questions about other foods derived from GM micro-organisms, such as Impossible Foods’ soy leghemoglobin, which is added to fake meat burgers in the U.S. to give a “bleeding” appearance, like undercooked meat.

A particular concern regarding the food safety of the soy leghemoglobin product (called LegH Prep) is that it is only 65% soy leghemoglobin. The other 35% is made up of contaminant proteins and (potentially) metabolites derived from the GM yeast production strain.

This high level of contaminants—effectively the “dark matter” of LegH Prep—includes an unknown number of proteins that remain unidentified and unanalyzed for safety, as revealed by the company’s submission to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) for EU food approval.

Nevertheless, EFSA gave a favorable opinion on the safety of the product for food use, though the EU institutions and Member States have not yet approved it for commercialization.

The soy leghemoglobin product has been used in the Impossible Burger in the U.S. for several years. That doesn’t prove it’s safe, as there is no widely understood and popularly used procedure for systematically tracking any reactions that consumers may have to the product.

Highly likely synbio products will contain contaminants

The 35% contaminants in LegH Prep are especially concerning in light of a tragic episode in the 1980s, in which more than 1,500 people were sickened and some died after consuming a GM bacteria-produced version of the food supplement L-tryptophan.

The toxicity turned out to be due to unexpected contaminants resulting from the unpredictably disturbed biochemistry of the GM bacteria.

Even though the L-tryptophan purification process used by the manufacturer was of a high standard, the company was unaware of these contaminating toxins. Therefore, the purification process proved to be inadequate.

Commenting, professor Michael Antoniou said: “The synbio milk and LegH Prep molecular composition profile findings, as well as the L-tryptophan episode, show that with current technologies it is difficult.

If not impossible to purify GM micro-organism-produced proteins or small biochemicals intended for food use to an extent that the final product only consists of what the manufacturer intends. It’s therefore highly likely that such products will contain contaminants, which could prove to be toxic or allergenic.

“These examples should teach manufacturers and regulators alike that rigorous multi-omics (molecular analyses) must be performed on these products to look for potential toxins and allergens as a foundation for follow-up animal toxicity studies before they are released into the food supply.”

Meanwhile, consumers should be wary of any synbio or GM food ingredient that lacks a history of safe use in food. For the same reason, Fagan previously recommended that the synbio milk product his team studied should either carry a risk warning on its packaging or be taken off the market altogether.

This article was originally published by the Defender—Childrens Health Defense News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BYNCND 4.0.

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