Correcting this week’s misinformation: week of July 30 2026

Anti-vaxxers at Peter McCullough’s organization claim that vaccinated children had more health problems than unvaccinated children in all 22 disease categories studied. They say these problems include autism, asthma, cancer, allergies, seizures, and learning or behavior disorders.

Nick Hulscher appears to be referring to an unpublished paper from the Henry Ford Health System. The paper did not complete the health system’s internal review and was not submitted to a medical journal. Henry Ford Health said the paper had serious problems with how the research was designed and analyzed.

One concern was that the vaccinated and unvaccinated children were not followed for the same amount of time. Many unvaccinated children were observed only during early childhood. One-fourth were followed only until six months of age, and 75% were followed only until age three. Some long-term health conditions are not diagnosed until children are older. Because the vaccinated children were followed longer, doctors had more time to find and record health problems in that group.

Hulscher describes a later article as a “peer-reviewed reanalysis.” However, the authors did not have the original patient data. Instead, they used summary tables from the unfinished paper. This limits how carefully the results can be checked. It is also different from a full review of the original study and its data.

RFK Jr. claims that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin could prevent or treat COVID-19 better and more safely than vaccines. He says health leaders like Anthony Fauci blocked these drugs so vaccines could be approved and sold. He also claims that places with fewer vaccinations and more use of these drugs had fewer COVID deaths, though he admits this does not prove vaccines caused more deaths.

Vaccines help prevent people from getting sick. Medicines such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are meant to treat people after they become ill. The FDA can allow emergency use of a product when there are no good, approved, and available options. Even if these medicines had been approved for treating COVID-19, they would not have replaced vaccines because treatment and prevention serve different purposes.

This claim also assumes that ivermectin is a proven treatment for COVID-19. Studies have not found that either medicine works well for treating the disease.

RFK Jr.’s argument is an example of an ecological comparison. He compares COVID-19 death rates in different countries and suggests vaccines explain the differences. But countries differ in many other ways. These include the age and health of the population, access to testing and hospitals, how deaths are counted, which virus variants were spreading, and what treatments were available. Because of these differences, country death rates alone cannot show whether vaccines caused the results.

Two large studies found that COVID vaccines saved millions of lives around the world. They also found that many lower-income countries could have prevented even more deaths if vaccines had arrived sooner and reached people faster.

In an online video, Dr. Carrie Madej repeats an old false claim. She says public health agencies around the world put pregnancy hormones in tetanus vaccines to make low-income women unable to have children.

This rumor began with a tiny amount of real history. In the early 1990s, researchers in India tested an experimental birth control vaccine. It used hCG, a hormone needed during early pregnancy, along with a protein related to tetanus toxin. The goal was to prevent pregnancy for a short time. The vaccine did not cause permanent infertility, and it did not work well enough to be offered to the public.

Years later, the World Health Organization and UNICEF worked to protect women in Kenya from tetanus. Vaccinating women also protects newborn babies from a deadly form of the disease called neonatal tetanus.

Because old rumors were still spreading, some vaccine samples were tested for hCG. Early tests reported a very small amount of “hCG-like activity.” This led some people to claim that hCG had been secretly added to the vaccines to make women infertile.

However, the tests did not meet the quality standards normally required by health regulators. Even if the early results had been correct, the amount reported would have been far too small to affect fertility.

The vaccines were tested again using better methods. No hCG was found. Kenya later succeeded in eliminating neonatal tetanus as a major public health problem.