Why is healthcare journalism often misleading?

In relation to vaccines, it is particularly bad in the United States

Journalists should inform their readers objectively and help them distinguish fact from faith and wishful thinking. It is a major failure of journalism to give equal prominence to people presenting scientific facts and people talking about their feelings or beliefs who have no evidence in their support or even contradict unchallenged the science.

However, virtually every time I know something about a healthcare issue considered controversial, this is what I see in the news. Particularly when the issue is vaccines.

The recent hepatitis B vaccine controversy in the United States illustrates this abundantly. On 5 December 2025, with a vote of 8 versus 3, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ended the recommendation that all newborns receive a hepatitis B shot at birth. The birth dose was recommended only if the mother had tested positive for the virus or if her infection status was unknown.

The change was rational. In Western Europe, only Portugal recommends a universal birth dose, but the news stories from 14 major media outlets I collected two days after the vote were all very negative.

The tactics the journalists used to support their beliefs were to denigrate the Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the members of ACIP he had selected, and some of the presenters at the meeting. Conversely, the media gave undue prominence and praise to the 3 dissenting ACIP voices and outsiders, who were depicted as experts or scientists, as if to say that they must be right. They were widely quoted for their remarks, which were rarely rational or evidence-based and sometimes totally false, but the journalists never checked if what the critics of the policy change claimed was correct. Not a single time.

This total disaster for journalism is not an outlier. It is the norm that journalists, even from major scientific journals, work like this. When I studied how the narratives about Kennedy’s initiatives to improve vaccine safety in the United States were framed in a cohort of 33 articles in the BMJ, of which 30 were written by journalists or the editor, I found that the reactions were almost uniformly negative and that the coverage of Kennedy’s reforms amounted to character assassination.

It is reasonable to ask why the legacy media always denigrate Kennedy’s reforms by calling him “an anti-vaccine activist.” BMJ’s journalists failed miserably to discuss the merits of Kennedy’s much-needed reforms for a country that overvaccinate its citizens hugely, and we saw this again when the number of recommended vaccines was reduced on 5 January 2026.

Vaccine webinar held by the US Association of Healthcare Journalists

The US Association of Healthcare Journalists held a webinar on 9 January 2026, “Big changes to the CDC’s childhood vaccine schedule: What you need to know,” which one of my colleagues attended.

Participants were told that “This week, the CDC changed the agency’s recommended childhood vaccine schedule to nearly match that of Denmark, a country that bears little similarity to the U.S. in population, health care system, and public health approach. The move shifts six vaccines from ‘recommended’ to ‘shared clinical decision-making.’”

A sober observer would say that the old CDC was financially conflicted in relation to the vaccine industry, rubber-stamped whatever proposal came forward, and touted colossal and erroneous effects of vaccination without any hint that the claims came from unreliable case-control studies, which is what we call “torture your data till they confess.”

The new CDC’s new recommendations were a very reasonable step in the right direction, but this is certainly not how the Association sees it.

The webinar was hosted by science journalist Tara Haelle, author of “Vaccination Investigation,” which “recounts the fascinating history of vaccines, their important role in protecting community health, and the excitement of cutting-edge research … Some parents refuse to have their children vaccinated because they don’t believe the evidence proving that vaccines are safe.” According to AI, Haelle’s book “generally describes the rigorous, multi-phase process of researching, developing, testing (lab, animal, human trials), and monitoring vaccine safety and effectiveness.”

There is nothing rigorous about the testing of vaccines (see below) or the monitoring of safety, which are both highly wanting.

The webinar gave participants “access to quotable experts on vaccine law, the history of the childhood vaccine schedule, and the science supporting the longtime CDC schedule to help journalists report on this significant change.”

These experts were (text extracted from the webinar homepage):

· Dr. Jesse L. Goodman, a previous member of GlaxoSmithKline’s board, chairing its science committee;

· PhD John D. Gräbenstein, President, Vaccine Dynamics, a consulting service on vaccinology who served for 13 years as Global Executive Director of Medical Affairs for Merck Vaccines;

· Professor of pediatrics and infectious diseases, Sean O’Leary, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Council on School Health and chair of the Committee on Infectious Diseases, who served for many years as AAP liaison to CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and on many ACIP work groups;

· Professor of law, PhD Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, who writes about vaccines mandates, policy responses to non-vaccinating, tort issues and administrative issues related to vaccines, and the anti-vaccine movement.

This was not a setup that was likely to provide a balanced view of vaccines. Reiss favours vaccine mandates and has argued that the risk of Covid-19 transmission to adults through children would help support a potential school vaccine mandate. Scientifically, this is wrong because the Covid vaccines cannot prevent transmission as they do not activate the local immune system in the respiratory tract. I have argued why I find vaccine mandates unacceptable, both from an ethical and a scientific viewpoint.

The webinar was offered in conjunction with the Expert Vaccine Analysis Team (E-VAT), which includes Dr Paul Offit, the most high-profile vaccinologist in the world, after vaccine “Godfather” Stanley Plotkin. He provided massive disinformation on CNN about the hepatitis B birth dose and other crucial issues, e.g. by saying that before universal infant vaccination, “30,000 children under the age of 10” contracted hepatitis B each year. CDC data showed the true number is around 400, an error of 75 times. And the media forgot to mention the many millions he has earned from his vaccine activities and his close alignment with the views of the vaccine industry.

Offit also said that newborns were at risk of getting hepatitis B via contact with nannies, daycare workers and family because of sharing toothbrushes, towels, or simply being held by an infected adult, which the CDC has denied could happen.

Offit has claimed that all vaccines are tested in placebo-controlled trials before licensure but the truth is that no childhood vaccine on CDC’s schedule was studied in placebo-controlled trials or relied upon before licensure. We therefore don’t know what the harms are of these vaccines.

My colleague considered the webinar a total waste of time, with an incurious group who had not only swallowed the Kool-Aid but saw their mission as promoting any and all flavours of the sweet sticky stuff to everyone: “So much for journalistic independence, asking hard questions, or, for that matter, following the money.”

My colleague noted that most countries don’t recommend their kids get Covid or flu shots because the risks of those conditions in kids are miniscule and that the US has realised how drunk it is on childhood vaccines and is starting to pull back. However, he was likely the only one on the webinar that thought that way and the assembled panel “were literally lighting their hair on fire saying these changes were going to lead to more sickness, hospitalization and deaths in the US … a sign of the apocalypse.”

He also explained it was a total vaccine love-in, and that Kennedy was characterised as evil incarnate, although he kicked out “the industry-funded parasites” from the ACIP, “which is what most of us would agree was the right thing to do.” The biggest cheerleader was Dr. Sean O’Leary from the American Academy of Pediatrics, a group that’s never seen a childhood vaccine it didn’t want to bless as being lifesaving and essential.

I called it advice based on money when National Public Radio urged people to look to “independent recommendations,” e.g. from the American Academy of Pediatrics, for “science-based advice” in relation to the controversy about the hepatitis B birth dose for all newborns. All journalists from major media outlets forgot to say that the Academy receives many millions of dollars from vaccine manufacturers and other drug companies.

A week before the webinar, Tara Haelle published a seriously misleading report on the website of the Association of Healthcare Journalists. She wrote that perinatal transmission has been nearly eliminated since the birth dose recommendation was introduced and that the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases estimates that the universal hepatitis B vaccine dose has prevented over a half million childhood infections and prevented 90,100 childhood deaths.

Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who is a doctor, also propagated disinformation in the extreme. He wrote on X that “Before the birth dose was recommended, 20,000 newborns a year were infected with hepatitis B. Now, it’s fewer than 20.” This was an error of 133 times.

Let’s turn to the truth for a change. The universal birth dose was introduced in 1991, and CDC data show that in 1990, only around 150 children below one year of age became infected. Like Offit, Taelle also propagated the falsehood that infants are at risk of contracting hepatitis B at daycare and from family members or friends who don’t know they’re infected.

The bottom of journalism

The bottom of journalism was reached when former First Lady, Rosalynn Carter established

the US Carter Center’s Guide for Mental Health Journalism, the first of its kind. The Carter

Center educates journalists to write flawed articles, uncritically repeating the misleading

narratives created by the drug industry and psychiatrists, and to never question psychiatric

diagnoses.

Some of the “facts” journalists are urged to include are: “Substance use disorders are

diseases of the brain,” and the guide explains that “Although science has not found a specific

cause for many mental health conditions, a complex interplay of genetic, neurobiological,

behavioral, and environmental factors often contribute to these conditions.” This mumbo

jumbo is misleading. We know that people’s living conditions are more important than

anything else; that genetics play a role very close to zero; and that psychiatric issues are not due to some underlying chemical imbalance in the brain, a lie propagated by the drug industry and the psychiatrists they have corrupted for over 60 years to keep patients on drugs they don’t want to take.

When the Carter Center tells journalists to ignore patients and listen only to psychiatrists, it is like telling journalists that if they want to know what it is like to live under the Chinese dictatorship, they should not ask the people but the Chinese leaders.

Why is health journalism such a failure?

In healthcare, “follow the money” never fails to bring some clarity. Many media, particularly US TV stations, would collapse if they didn’t accept drug ads, and drug industry money comes in numerous other ways, e.g. in “collaboration” agreements, a euphemism for corruption, and as personal incomes that are not always declared.

What surprises me the most is how amazingly uncritical journalists are in relation to healthcare. They fail to ask the obvious questions, fail to investigate if the “experts” they interview tell the truth or lie to them, and fail to inform their readers about the conflicts of interest the “experts” have. Journalists often just dial a quote, which means that they contact people whom they know will confirm their prejudices.

The reasons why journalists have betrayed us and seem to have forgotten what publication ethics is about are broader than just the money. During the Covid pandemic, major scientific journals, including The Lancet, Science and Nature Medicine, failed their academic responsibility totally by praising those researchers who caused an estimated 25 million deaths; by ignoring the obvious, that the virus highly likely escaped from a lab in Wuhan where it was manufactured; and by allowing something unheard of in science, to call people conspiracy theorists if they could think for themselves and see the obvious. This was an all-time low in scientific reporting that I never thought would be possible.

I think you will understand why I cannot see much hope for legacy journalists or for our most prestigious medical journals. They are making themselves increasingly redundant.