In an old video, RFK Jr. claims that none of the 72 required childhood vaccines were properly safety tested, that drug companies push unnecessary vaccines to make money, and that vaccines caused a big rise in autism and other chronic diseases in children.

RFK Jr. says that not one of childhood vaccines are not tested in a pre-licensing placebo-controlled trial (in which the only placebo is saline) But in real life, many vaccines have been tested using saline placebos to check safety and how well they work, including:

• Rubella vaccine
• Pneumococcal vaccine
• Hib vaccines
• HPV vaccine
• The Salk Polio vaccine
• Measles vaccine
• Tdap vaccine
• COVID vaccine

Sometimes a new vaccine is tested against an older vaccine. In some studies, the placebo may have tiny amounts of ingredients, like adjuvants or stabilizers, that scientists already know are safe. The World Health Organization has rules about when it is fair and safe to use a placebo. It is okay if there is no good vaccine yet, and the study could help protect people. But if a country already has a safe and effective vaccine, it is not right to give people a placebo instead, because that would leave them unprotected and at risk.

He also claims vaccines cause autism; however, many peer-reviewed studies show no association between vaccines and autism. Autism diagnoses went up from 2000 to 2020, even though most childhood vaccines were first given in the 1980s and 1990s. Since the 1980s, the vaccine schedule has grown by only 1 or 2 new vaccines each decade. This slow and careful process is based on science. It is very different from the idea that vaccines are quickly and randomly added to the schedule.

Today, about 1 out of every 36 children in the United States has autism. In other countries, autism rates are about the same or even higher, even though their vaccine schedules are different and often include fewer shots for young children.

Large studies have compared vaccinated and unvaccinated children, and they keep finding the same result: vaccines do not cause autism or other long-term health problems. A study in Denmark followed more than 650,000 children for 10 years and found that the MMR vaccine did not increase autism, even in children with an autistic sibling. Studies from Germany, the Philippines, and multiple U.S. health-care systems show that the only clear difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated children is that vaccinated children are protected from the diseases the vaccines prevent.

In a 2021 committee hearing, Texas State Senator Bob Hall claims that the COVID vaccine skipped normal animal and human testing, that animals died during early tests, and that the public is being used as test subjects while the vaccine is still experimental and linked to rising deaths. The video from this hearing is making the rounds again.

We don’t know where this claim started, but it does not make sense. If someone says animal tests were skipped, how can they also say all the animals died in a test? That is not true.

In fact, animal studies were done at the same time as human trials to test the safety of the COVID vaccines and how well they worked. The vaccines went through full testing before the FDA allowed them to be used under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). Since then, billions of people have safely received COVID vaccines. Hospital data shows these vaccines lower the risk of severe illness and death.

A recently released preprint written by Brian Hooker claims that babies who get their recommended vaccines at 2 months old are more likely to die in the next month, especially girls and Black infants, and that vaccines may be linked to higher infant death rates.

This preprint says it found that babies who got their 2-month shots were more likely to die in the next month, but its study design has big problems that can fool people.

The biggest issue is that it only looked at children who had already died and then compared groups inside that “only deaths” set, so it cannot tell whether vaccines raise the chance of death in the real world, where most babies live; this kind of picking your study group based on the outcome can create a false link. This is called selection bias.

Another major problem is that their “unvaccinated” group is not truly unvaccinated: the paper says a child had to have an immunization record match and “minimally have been immunized at least once,” and “unvaccinated” just means “not vaccinated in days 60–90,” so the comparison is not “vaccinated vs. unvaccinated,” but “vaccinated in this window vs. vaccinated at some other time or not recorded in this window.”

Timing also matters a lot: babies who are sick, premature, or have health problems may get vaccines later, may miss visits, or may have different care, and those same health problems also change the risk of death, so the groups can be different from the start. This is called a confounding variable.

The study also does not clearly fix these differences with strong, detailed adjustments (like prematurity, birth weight, NICU stay, major diagnoses, and access to care), so it can mix up “who got vaccinated on time” with “who was healthy enough to come in on time.”

On top of that, vaccine safety is normally judged with much stronger methods: careful trials before approval and large safety monitoring systems after approval that follow vaccinated and unvaccinated people over time using proper denominators, instead of studying only people who died.