Correcting this week’s misinformation: week of July 2 2026

Now, when many people are worried about money and who is getting rich from healthcare, HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. claims that vaccines are made on purpose to hurt people. He says the medical industry wants to keep people sick so it can make more money from treating them.

It is fair to ask questions about money in health care. It is also fair to note that RFK Jr. has had financial ties to vaccine-related lawsuits and to Children’s Health Defense, the organization he led for many years. That does not automatically mean his claims are wrong. But it does mean that money can be part of the conversation on more than one side.

When thinking about insurance companies, it helps to look at how they make money. Insurance companies usually make money when people pay for coverage but do not need expensive medical care. Vaccines help prevent serious illness, hospital stays, and other costly health problems. One study showed that every dollars spent on vaccines for children saves almost $11 later. Because of this, insurance companies may encourage vaccination because it can help keep people healthier and lower medical costs.

If vaccines caused more harm than good, insurance companies would likely lose money. They would have to help pay for more doctor visits, hospital care, or other treatment. If vaccines caused many deaths, fewer people would be paying into the insurance system.

For that reason, it makes sense that insurance companies would support vaccines when the evidence shows vaccines prevent serious illness and death. Some companies have even offered vaccine incentives to their own employees. That would be an unusual choice for a business if it believed vaccines were likely to harm people.

Chemical engineer Brian Hooker claims that the HPV vaccine causes five times more menstrual, ovarian, and other reproductive health problems.

Hooker seems to be using an analysis of Florida Medicaid records. Medicaid is a health insurance program for people with lower incomes. These records can show what health problems doctors wrote down after a patient visit.

But this analysis does not seem to be clearly published or available for other experts to check. We could not find a peer-reviewed paper by Hooker that proves the “five times” claim or the claim that vaccinated girls had more HPV diagnoses. Nothing that other experts checked before the study was published seems to exist.

Health insurance records can show patterns, but they cannot prove that one thing caused another. As one article explains, “association and causation are not the same.” For example, they can show that a person got a vaccine and later had a diagnosis. But that does not prove the vaccine caused the diagnosis. This claim needs stronger evidence before it can be treated as reliable.

Large studies have looked at HPV vaccines and fertility, or the ability to get pregnant. These studies do not show that HPV vaccines cause the ovaries to stop working normally or as expected. Some research has even found that HPV vaccination may be linked to better fertility for some women.

A writer called “A Midwestern Doctor,” who has connections to Mercola, claims in a Substack article that vaccines can cause the same diseases they are supposed to prevent.

Vaccines do not cause the diseases they are made to prevent. There are different kinds of vaccines, and they work in different ways. None of them causes the diseases they are supposed to prevent.

Some vaccines use a live but weakened germ. “Weakened” means the germ has been changed so it cannot cause the disease in people with healthy immune systems. These are called live attenuated vaccines.

Other vaccines use killed germs or only small pieces of a germ. Most flu shots use inactivated flu viruses. “Inactivated” means the virus has been killed. It cannot grow, spread, or cause the flu.

Vaccines like these cannot grow or spread inside the body. You need a whole germ to grow and spread in order to get sick. A killed germ or a small piece of a germ cannot cause infection because it is not the whole germ. It is only enough to help the immune system learn what the outside part of the real germ looks like. In the future, if the immune system sees these outside parts on the whole germ, it knows what to do next.

The COVID mRNA vaccine is another kind of vaccine. The COVID vaccine does not contain the whole coronavirus. It teaches the body to recognize one piece of the virus, called the spike protein. It does not contain the whole virus, so it cannot give someone COVID.

Some people think one vaccine might cause a different disease. The article talks about cases of polio that happened after people got DTaP vaccines. But those vaccines do not contain poliovirus. A vaccine that does not contain poliovirus cannot cause polio. A person can only get polio if they are exposed to poliovirus.

The author may be mixing up a few different ideas.

One is a breakthrough infection. This is when someone gets sick even though they were vaccinated. That can happen if the vaccine did not fully protect them, or if they were exposed to the germ before their body had enough time to build protection.

Another possibility is coincidence. Sometimes a person is exposed to a disease around the same time they get a vaccine. That does not mean the vaccine caused the illness.

A person can also get sick from a totally different germ around the same time they were vaccinated. For example, if someone gets a pertussis vaccine and later gets polio, the pertussis vaccine did not cause polio. They would have had to be exposed to poliovirus separately.

Vaccines help the immune system learn how to fight certain germs. They do not create diseases out of nowhere, and they cannot cause diseases that are not even in the vaccine.