Correcting this week’s misinformation: week of June 11 2026

MAHA and RFK Jr’s former organization are planning an action day and film screening at the U.S. Capitol featuring Senator Ron Johnson, Rob Schneider, and Lt. Col. Theresa Long. Lt. Col. Long has claimed that after vaccination, many service members suddenly got sick, everyone’s heart or blood vessels were harmed, tiny blood clots were common, and that the military hid the truth.

The Lieutenant Colonel was right that, in very rare cases, COVID shots can cause myocarditis. Myocarditis is swelling in or near the heart. This has mostly been seen in young men. But COVID infection itself also raises the risk of myocarditis and other heart problems, and the risk after infection is often higher than the risk after vaccination. This is also true in the military.

Her other claims about side effects were based on numbers from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database, or DMED. DMED tracks broad health trends in the military, including hospital visits, clinic visits, reportable diseases, and other medical events. It can help the military watch for injuries, sickness, and health problems that affect their ability to defend the country at home or in other countries.

But DMED puts everyone’s health information together, so it is not a good tool by itself for proving that a vaccine caused one specific person’s medical problem. The database only shows part of the military’s health data, and even the Department of Defense said some built-in searches in DMED are not strong enough to prove that one thing directly caused another.

The Department of Defense later reviewed the data. It found that myocarditis and pericarditis went up a little after vaccination. But it also found that six health problems went down after vaccination, while 14 health problems went up after COVID infection. For most of those problems, the highest rates were in people who had COVID but were not vaccinated.

An old, unsettled lawsuit has everyone talking again about how many vaccines children receive. Is it 72 vaccines? Should the CDC be sued?

Former pediatrician Paul Thomas named former CDC director Susan Monarez in a lawsuit about the childhood vaccine schedule. They claim the schedule includes 72 vaccines.

That number is misleading. Even when you count boosters and combination vaccines, children get far fewer than 72 vaccinations from birth to age 18. For example, by age 2, a child usually gets about 27 vaccinations. Many of those vaccines protect against more than one disease at the same time.

Boosters are not totally new vaccines. They remind the immune system how to fight germs it has already learned about. Counting every booster as a new vaccine can make the schedule sound bigger than it really is.

The vaccine schedule has grown because science has helped us prevent more diseases. And i has not grown all at once. Since the 1980s, only about one or two vaccines have been added each decade. Some people say the vaccine schedule is exploding, but that is not accurate. The schedule has grown slowly and carefully as doctors and scientists have learned how to protect children from more illnesses.

A baby’s immune system handles many germs every day, starting at birth. The vaccine schedule gives only a small challenge compared with what babies face every day from eating, breathing, and living in the world. The ingredients in vaccines are also used in very tiny amounts.

In an interview with Brian Hooker, Steve Kirsch, inventor of the optical mouse, claims that the flu shot kills older people on the same day they get it.

This is another example of picking through data to find numbers that seem to support a claim. The database that anti-vaccine groups often use for this is VAERS.

VAERS lets doctors, patients, and family members report health problems that happen after vaccination. But a VAERS report does not prove that the vaccine caused the problem. It only means the problem happened sometime after the vaccine.

We also need to look at what happens to older people who get vaccinated. One study found that older people who got a flu vaccine were less likely to die. In that study, 20.9% of vaccinated people died, compared with 23.9% of unvaccinated people.

It is very important to remember that anyone can report something to VAERS, even if the vaccine did not cause it. The VAERS website explains this. One doctor even reported that the flu vaccine turned him into the Incredible Hulk.

VAERS is useful because it helps experts watch for possible vaccine safety problems. But just because something is reported to VAERS does not mean the vaccine caused it. Doctors are still encouraged to report serious health problems after vaccination, even when they are not sure what caused them.

The most important warning on the VAERS website helps explain why these claims can be misleading: “VAERS reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. Reports to VAERS can also be biased. As a result, there are limitations on how the data can be used scientifically. Data from VAERS reports should always be interpreted with these limitations in mind.”