Reduced US childhood vaccination schedule was denigrated in the media

Although it was a rational and evidence-based decision

Until 5 January 2026, the United States was a clear outlier in terms of the number of vaccines it had in its childhood programme, 17 versus only 10 in Denmark.¹ Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tries hard to introduce much-needed vaccine reforms but all of them are brutally shut down in the media, no matter how rational and evidence-based they are.

I demonstrated this in an analysis of news stories from 14 major media outlets after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ended the recommendation that all newborns receive a hepatitis B shot at birth.²

A tactic the media always use is to go after the man instead of after the ball. Even major medical journals do this, to an extent I called character assassination in relation to how the BMJ described Kennedy’s vaccine initiatives in 33 articles.³

Why is it that the legacy media always denigrate Kennedy’s reforms by calling him “an anti-vaccine activist” while they don’t call President Trump a fascist even though he has announced repeatedly that he is willing to take Greenland with military force, a NATO ally and part of the Kingdom of Denmark?

When the number of recommended vaccines was reduced earlier this month, the media failed us badly again. In cowboy style, they fired before they asked. The same day, the NBC wrote that Kennedy removed a “a recommendation for the Covid shot” and that the “CDC rolled back a decadeslong recommendation that all newborns get their first doses of the hepatitis B vaccine within 24 hours - a move experts said could lead to a resurgence of infections.”⁴

The NBC did not explain that these changes were evidence-based and rational. Both recommendations were highly justified.² Vaccinating children against Covid-19 was only recommended for those over 12 years of age in Denmark, whereas it was from 6 months of age in the USA. Covid-19 is a mild disease in children, and, despite an extremely high vaccine coverage, the vast majority of adults in Denmark have been infected anyway and have developed good immunity. Moreover, some children have died from myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) caused by the vaccine.^5,6

And what about the so-called experts? According to NBC, “Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious diseases specialist at Stanford Medicine, said the change could have a dramatic effect on vaccine uptake.”⁴ Scott does not have a clue about if this will happen. I think the opposite will happen (see below). As the Americans know they have been lied to for decades by the authorities, e.g. the CDC and the FDA, about vaccines and other drugs,^7,8 to such an extent that our drugs are the leading cause of death,⁹ they will likely regain some of the trust that has been lost when the same authorities start becoming more reasonable and more honest.

I discussed Scott’s “expertise” in November:¹⁰ “Dr. Jake Scott from Stanford University claimed that 153 studies had tested vaccines against placebos. But, as Secretary Kennedy noted, none of these studies included a placebo or was relied upon by the FDA to license a childhood vaccine.”

Another “expert” the NBC and many other news outlets quoted was Anders Hviid from Denmark whose recent study found that aluminium exposure from vaccines isn’t harmful.⁴ I have documented that aluminium in vaccine adjuvants can cause serious neurological harms.^11,12

The NBC quoted Professor Yvonne Maldonado from Stanford for saying that there was an “incredible lack of transparency” behind the new schedule, and that “no data, no papers, no discussions at all” are cited in this “quote-unquote exhaustive search.”

CNN quoted Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician, for writing on X that “Changing the pediatric vaccine schedule based on no scientific input on safety risks and little transparency will cause unnecessary fear for patients and doctors, and will make America sicker.”¹³

CNN described Kennedy as “a longtime anti-vaccine skeptic” who has “questioned vaccine safety for decades” as if to say that what he proposes must be wrong by default. CNN noted that “Several public health experts warned that the changes announced Monday could fuel outbreaks of preventable diseases,” and Anders Hviid was drawn out of the stable as usual.

Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the American Association of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases, said that what was announced was “part of a decades-long effort on the part of the health secretary to spread fear and falsehoods about vaccines, and this is another step in the secretary’s effort to dismantle the US vaccination system.”

No British understatements here. “Public health experts” (there it was again; those who think otherwise do not get this laudatory designation) said that a sudden, broad change to the schedule without public debate won’t instil confidence. One of the “experts,” a former member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), Professor Noel Brewer, said that “We can’t cowboy the nation to good health with a bunch of sudden and poorly considered health policy changes.”

CNN dutifully mentioned that “Health officials said Monday that they consulted with career staff at the CDC and the FDA about the changes to the vaccine schedule,” and that “reducing the number of recommended vaccines would help restore public trust in health agencies - and possibly confidence in vaccines themselves,” but this was drowned in all the negative messaging.

If we take a sober look at the facts, it becomes clear that the media and their “experts” betrayed us once again. Tracy Beth Høeg, Acting Director for the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research and FDA Ex Officio member to ACIP, and Martin Kulldorff, Chief Science and Data Officer for the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, wrote a 33-page report with 179 references, in consultation with experts at CDC, FDA, NIH, and CMS.¹

This report was published on 2 January and therefore available to the journalists who denigrated the vaccine reform but they seem to have been too lazy to read it. In contrast to the evidence-free condemnations by the “experts” in the media, it gives very convincing reasons for the revised US policy and offers other important information.

Høeg and Kulldorff mention that, between 2020 and 2024, trust in health care declined steeply from 71.5% to 40.1%, coinciding with school closures, other lockdowns, mandatory face masks, Covid-19 vaccination mandates with their de facto denial of infection-acquired immunity, and other public health recommendations that lacked scientific rationale and went against basic principles of public health.

They note that, instead of implementing vaccination mandates, most peer nations maintain high childhood vaccination rates through public trust and education, and, with reference to my vaccine book,¹⁴ they say that regulatory bodies, including the FDA and the CDC, have sometimes been slow to identify adverse effects in post-market studies and have misrepresented the effect of flu shots by relying on highly unreliable case-control studies.

I very much agree with their statement that “Bringing the U.S. pediatric immunization schedule in line with the consensus of peer nations while keeping non-consensus vaccines available for high-risk groups and populations and/or through shared clinical decision-making is a balanced approach to reform and restore trust in public health.”

They note that for the public to trust public health agencies, those agencies must trust the public, which includes providing accurate information and being honest when the scientific knowledge is incomplete. This particularly fell apart during the Covid-19 pandemic. With Covid-19 vaccine mandates and false CDC claims that vaccine-acquired immunity was superior to infection-acquired immunity and that the vaccine would prevent infection and transmission, the public lost trust in the vaccine. While the CDC still recommended the Covid-19 booster for all children in 2023, the uptake was less than 10%.

They note that, when deciding not to recommend the hepatitis B vaccine for all children, the Danish public health authority stated that “if one includes a vaccine which some consider less important, it could negatively affect the view of vaccines in general.”

About the key aspect of medicine, the mutual trust between patients and physicians, Høeg and Kulldorff say that this is partly broken in the US where health insurers incentivise physicians with financial bonuses tied to vaccination rates of their patient population. Some children from families who do not consent to certain vaccines have difficulty obtaining medical care because many paediatricians dismiss children from their practice if the parents refuse to have their children vaccinated.

Høeg and Kulldorff document that the pandemic lockdowns generated a drop in childhood vaccine uptake across all age groups. I interviewed Kulldorff in 2023 about what went wrong during Covid, which was almost everything on our Broken Medical Science film and interview channel.¹⁵ His native country, Sweden, was the only country that respected its experts and did not lock down, and they had the lowest excess mortality during the pandemic in the Western world.¹⁶

My grandfather was a doctor. He hated journalists. I understand him more than ever.

References

1 Høeg TB, Kulldorff M. Assessment of the U.S. childhood and adolescent immunization schedule compared to other countries. Report 2026;Jan 2.

2 Gøtzsche PC. Hepatitis B Vaccination of Newborns: Seriously Misleading Media Reports. Brownstone Journal 2025;Dec 19.

3 Gøtzsche PC. BMJ’s Coverage of Kennedy’s Vaccine Reforms Amounts to Character Assassination. J Acad Publ Health 2025;Nov 10.

4 Lovelace B Jr., Edwards E, Fattah M, Bendix A. RFK Jr. overhauls childhood vaccine schedule to resemble Denmark’s in unprecedented move. NBC 2026;Jan5.

5 Gøtzsche PC, Demasi M. Serious harms of the COVID-19 vaccines: a systematic review. Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom 2023; March 22.

6 Demasi M. First child identified in the FDA’s vaccine-death investigation. Substack 2025;Dec 2.

7 Gøtzsche PC. Deadly medicines and organised crime: How big pharma has corrupted health care. London: Radcliffe Publishing; 2013.

8 Gøtzsche PC. Deadly psychiatry and organised denial. Copenhagen: People’s Press; 2015.

9 Gøtzsche PC. Prescription drugs are the leading cause of death. And psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death. Brownstone Journal 2024;April 16.

10 Gøtzsche PC. How CDC and FDA Defrauded the American Public about Serious Vaccine Harms. Brownstone Journal 2025;Nov 21.

11 Gøtzsche PC. How Merck and drug regulators hid serious harms of the HPV vaccines. New York: Skyhorse 2025.

12 Gøtzsche PC. Aluminium in vaccines is harmful. Brownstone Journal 2025;Oct 6.

13 Owermohle S. US overhauls childhood vaccine schedule to recommend fewer shots. CNN 2026;Jan 6.

14 Gøtzsche PC. Vaccines: truth, lies, and controversy. New York: Skyhorse; 2021.

15 Interview with Martin Kulldorff. The harmful effects of lockdowns, facemask mandates, censorship, and scientific dishonesty. Broken Medical Science 2023;Sept 25.

16 Gøtzsche PC. Sweden did exceptionally well during the COVID-19 pandemic with its open society. Brownstone Journal 2023;March 28.

17 Gøtzsche PC. Whistleblower in healthcare (autobiography). Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2025 (freely available).