In September, a U.S. Senate committee heard a shocking claim: that a study from Detroit’s Henry Ford Health System had found a significant connection between routine childhood vaccines and chronic health conditions.
That study was never published, and witnesses at the committee hearing said that was because Henry Ford hid it. That’s a claim the health system fiercely disputes. It says the study was deeply flawed, and never advanced to publication because it didn’t meet basic standards for scientific research.
But that hasn’t stopped anti-vaccine advocates from holding it up as definitive proof that vaccines do cause harm. It’s even the subject of a new documentary film that presents the study as evidence of an ongoing conspiracy to suppress any scientific findings showing that. It’s a claim that, again, Henry Ford and a number of other experts say is not only untrue, but part of a dangerous trend of bringing once-fringe beliefs about vaccines into the mainstream.
Here’s a breakdown of how this controversy exploded, and the claims and counterclaims that have put it at the center of the ongoing fight over vaccine safety – and trust in the medical research process.
The (unpublished) study, and how it came to light
The study, completed in 2020 by researchers at Henry Ford Health and the Wayne State University School of Medicine, was titled “Impact of Childhood Vaccination on Short and Long-Term Chronic Health Outcomes in Children: A Birth Cohort Study.” It looked at more than 18,000 children born at Henry Ford hospital from 2000-2016, and divided them into two groups: a group that had received one or more vaccines, and another (much smaller) group that had received no vaccines at all.
After reviewing the data, the researchers came to this overall conclusion:
This study found that exposure to vaccination was independently associated with an overall 2.5-fold increase in the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition, when compared to children unexposed to vaccination. This association was primarily driven by asthma, atopic disease, eczema, autoimmune disease and neurodevelopmental disorders. This suggests that in certain children, exposure to vaccination may increase the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition, particularly for one of these conditions.
Then – for reasons that we’ll get into in more detail a bit later – Henry Ford senior scientists reviewed the study and declined to publish it. So it remained out of the public eye until September of this year, when it popped up at a U.S. Senate committee hearing as “evidence” of the untrustworthiness of the medical research establishment.
The premise of that hearing was skeptical at best: it was titled “How the corruption of science has impacted public perception and policies regarding vaccines.” One of the people who testified at the hearing was an attorney named Aaron Siri. He has been U.S. Health and Human Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign lawyer and general ally.
Siri explained the Henry Ford study’s conclusions, and deemed it an example of corruption in science when it comes to vaccine research. He said the researchers stood by their methodology, but the health system didn’t like the results and “buried” the study for political reasons.
“The only real problem with this study, and why it didn't get submitted for publication, is that its findings did not fit the belief and the policy that vaccines are safe,” Siri told the committee. “Had it found vaccinated children were healthier, it no doubt would have been published immediately.
“This is a real world example of how the science around vaccines gets corrupted,” Siri continued. “How only studies that confirm the beliefs and policies that vaccines are safe get published. Everything else gets shoved in a drawer.”
Henry Ford’s side: “There are fatal flaws in that study”
According to Henry Ford officials, this whole event came as a shock to nearly everyone at the health system. Not because anyone had “buried” the study, but they had certainly never shared it – it was leaked by someone within the health system, they said.
Dr. Adnan Munkarah, Henry Ford’s chief of clinical enterprise, wasn’t involved in the vaccine study; in fact, he said he’d never heard about it until it emerged at the Senate hearing. But after reviewing it, Munkarah said the reason it was never published is simple: It just wasn’t a very well-designed or executed piece of research.
“The data that has been used is not complete data,” Munkarah said. “There is a significant discrepancy between the groups in that study. The analysis that was done was not the correct analysis. And accordingly, the conclusions that were made out of the study are flawed conclusions, because the data and the method of the study all do not support those conclusions.”
Munkarah said that, as is typical in the health system’s research process, senior scientists reviewed the study and simply decided it wasn’t worth pursuing any further. “They said there are fatal flaws in that study. And accordingly, this is not going to move forward,” he said.
Munkarah said that instead of a big conspiracy, this is actually an example of the medical research process working well. “We have hundreds of papers like that, thousands probably, sitting in drawers at the present time,” he said. “And we don't publicize and send these things out because we do not feel that this represents anything that's worth publicizing.”
What are the study’s alleged flaws?
By now, Henry Ford researchers aren’t the only ones who have reviewed the vaccine study and found fault with its methodology and conclusions. One critic is Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious diseases physician at Stanford University who also testified at the Senate hearing, which he called a platform for “some really extreme, really fringe views on vaccines and Covid.”
Scott said there were a number of flaws with how the study was conducted, including:
- The two cohorts the researchers compared – the vaccinated and unvaccinated children – were vastly different “from the start,” Scott said. Not only was the vaccinated group much larger, but the children in that group were a much more diverse group racially and in other ways than the unvaccinated group. And it contained many more children who were born pre-term or suffered respiratory distress at birth, making them more vulnerable to developing certain chronic conditions later on.
- The study followed the vaccinated children much longer than the unvaccinated – about twice as long on average. Scott said that’s a critical flaw, particularly when it comes to certain diagnoses. “Most of these conditions, including ADHD and learning disabilities, are diagnosed after age four,” he said. “So you can't find what you're not looking for yet.”
- The vaccinated children saw a doctor much more often than the unvaccinated children, even before the onset of any chronic conditions. “When you combine these problems, you're not measuring vaccine effects,” Scott said. “You're measuring who had more opportunity to be diagnosed.”
Scott isn’t the only scientist unaffiliated with Henry Ford who found the study faulty. Dr. Jeffrey Morris, a professor of public health and biostatistician at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a piece for The Conversation that “The Henry Ford data could be helpful if the study followed both groups of kids to the same ages and took into account differences in health care use and background risks.”
“But as written,” Morris continued, “the study’s main comparisons are tilted. The follow-up time was short and uneven, kids had unequal chances for diagnosis, and the two groups were very different in ways that matter. The methods used did not adequately fix these problems. Because of this, the differences reported in the study do not show that vaccines cause chronic disease.”
Scott said he was “flabbergasted” that the study was presented as evidence at the hearing because it was so fraught with issues. “It’s pretty obvious to me that it wasn't suppressed truth, it was just rejected science,” he said.
Michigan Public reached out to two of the study’s primary authors, Lois Lamerato and Dr. Marcus Zervos, to see if they had a response to these critiques; neither replied.
Some “inconvenient” extra drama
There’s a final dramatic twist here, and it ties back to attorney Aaron Siri, who testified at the Senate committee hearing. He’s connected to a group called the Informed Consent Action Network, which crusades against vaccine mandates and vaccines in general. And they recently put out a documentary called “An Inconvenient Study,” based on the idea that the Henry Ford study was deliberately suppressed because it showed that vaccines do cause harm.
Henry Ford, of course, vehemently denies this. The health system has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the makers of the documentary, saying that it “condemns the purposeful twisting of information and the spread of disinformation happening on the topic, which poses a direct threat to public health.”
“The film proved nothing except that we have rigorous scientific standards in place for a reason: to ensure the only studies we submit for publication come from research rooted in sound, infallible data that have passed our stringent review processes,” the health system said in a statement. “We do not bend to pressure from those with special interests, and will never compromise the standards that have helped make us a world-renowned academic medical research institution.”
