Breaking: Claims That Childhood Vaccines ‘Saved Millions of Lives’ Based on Flawed Models

In a paper published today, all-cause mortality expert Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., said claims by public health agencies and top medical journals that childhood vaccination prevents millions of deaths annually are based on “tentative and untethered models of epidemiological forecasting” that produce “unlikely results.

The Defender
Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.
January 29, 2025

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A CALL TO ACTION

NOTE: Your Children belong to You … NOT the WV Legislature
Call your WV Legislator and tell them to VOTE to Remove the Vaccine Mandates in WV

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Claims by public health agencies and in top medical journals that childhood vaccination prevents millions of deaths annually are based on flawed epidemiological models, according to a paper published today by Correlation, a Canadian nonprofit research organization.

The author, all-cause mortality expert Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., argues these claims are based on “tentative and untethered models of epidemiological forecasting” that produce “unlikely results.”

The models depend entirely on invalid estimates of vaccine efficacy and disease prevalence and virulence, none of which are based on real-world data concerning actual deaths, according to Rancourt.

They also fail to account for other complex factors contributing to child mortality — particularly in low-income countries, where most of these millions of infant lives are purportedly saved. These factors include nutritional deficiency, toxic exposures and poverty.

Rancourt also found that, contrary to public health claims, there are no examples in all-cause mortality data of a drop in infant or child mortality temporally associated with the rollout of a childhood vaccination program.

On the contrary, he wrote, independent observational studies have tied vaccine rollouts to increased infant or child mortality and morbidity.

In the paper, Rancourt develops an alternative model using yearly all-cause infant mortality. He estimates that childhood vaccination campaigns since 1974 may have been associated with approximately 100 million vaccine-related deaths.

However, he emphasizes that any true estimate of mortality would also have to account for other factors, such as the shifting political and economic dynamics that drive poverty and its associated health problems.

Children’s Health Defense Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski said, ”Rancourt points out serious flaws in mainstream debates over childhood vaccination that are premised on errors in generalization and lead to childlike black-and-white thinking when it comes to vaccine safety.”

Jablonowski said the paper clearly demonstrates that claims vaccines have saved millions of lives globally, “hang on a few impossible assumptions.” Those include:

• That no human can die from a vaccine (directly or indirectly).
• That children who die from a “vaccine-preventable” pathogen were otherwise perfectly healthy.
• That we understand how diseases spread in all contexts.
• That all children have the same health, diet, exercise habits, access to clean water, toxin and environmental exposures, genetic disposition, etc., as the clinical trial participants.
• That clinical trials accurately represent the risks and benefits of the vaccine.
• That once a vaccine is developed, all other medical interventions suddenly stop working.

Rancourt said he began writing the paper to demonstrate the “ludicrous theoretical modelling exercises” behind the spectacular claims of reduced infant mortality from mass vaccination programs.

“But what I discovered is that the longstanding industry of administering vaccination programmes to save infants in low-income countries from death is scientifically baseless and a fraudulent enterprise that removes resources and attention away from urgently needed development to correct ongoing mass neocolonial exploitation,” he said.

‘Garbage in, garbage out’

Many top researchers have raised public concerns about epidemic modeling, particularly in research that serves the pharmaceutical industry.

Dr. John Ioannidis has pointed out that “epidemic forecasting has a dubious track record,” which became particularly evident during the COVID-19 period. Models can easily be compromised or skewed if they use poor data, incorrect assumptions, lack epidemiological information or fail to consider all dimensions of a given problem.

This, combined with the fact — highlighted by former editors of both The Lancet and The BMJ — that medical journals have become “an extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies” has led to the proliferation of forecasting models that don’t meet even the most basic standards for modeling, Rancourt said.

In recent years, epidemiologic modelers have published many papers claiming to estimate mortality averted through childhood vaccination.

Rancourt argued these models share two fatal flaws: They are based on unreliable assumptions of vaccine efficacy and they “guesstimate” deaths avoided using disease models not anchored in real-world data.

The safety and efficacy numbers for these models always come from clinical trials, which he says are “systemically unreliable” in assessing efficacy and fail to evaluate safety.

The trials are, “overwhelmingly controlled by an industry making large profits from the vaccines, and this industry has amply, historically, consistently and repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to act fraudulently at the expense of endangering the public,” Rancourt wrote.

Also, the trials themselves introduce several biases. For example, trials are conducted with healthy children, but vaccines are administered to children with multiple vulnerabilities, particularly in low-income countries.

The trials also don’t test the vaccines against true placebos, don’t monitor children long-term for safety issues, and don’t test against disease prevention or safety in the real world.

Second, they rely on “guesstimates” of deaths averted — estimating how many children didn’t die because they got the vaccine — based on isolated models for disease contagion that aren’t validated by real-world research.

Most importantly, they fail to account for the fact that childhood mortality rates are affected by a wide range of factors — including underlying health conditions, poor nutrition and access to care — beyond simply whether a child is vaccinated or not.

“I argue that the proverbial computing term ‘garbage in, garbage out’ pre-eminently applies in these circumstances,” Rancourt said.