In a hearing before the Senate HELP committee, RFK Jr. claimed that most childhood vaccines were not tested for safety using placebo trials before being approved and that the government only recently started using evidence-based medicine for vaccines.

In the clip above, Kennedy claims 1) vaccine experts at the CDC and FDA haven’t used “evidence-based medicine” until recently 2) vaccines are exempt from pre-licensing safety testing, 3) the only vaccine tested in a placebo-controlled trial was the COVID vaccine and 4) that children receive 76 of these “untested” shots.

Evidence-based medicine means using the best available data and research to make medical decisions. This has been part of vaccine development for decades. The committees at the CDC and FDA are made up of doctors, scientists, and public health experts who look at all the scientific data before making decisions about vaccines. These groups don’t just guess—they follow strict rules and look at all the evidence before recommending a vaccine for use.

Vaccines are tested very carefully before they are approved; the process is clearly laid out by the CDC and FDA.  First, they go through lab and animal testing. Then, they go through three stages of human clinical trials and those results are thoroughly reviewed before the vaccines are considered for approvals.

In these trials, thousands of volunteers are given either the vaccine or something else, like a placebo or a different vaccine, so researchers can compare the results. Even if the placebo is not always just saline (an “inert” placebo), the comparison is still valid. Scientists compare rates of illness and side effects between the two groups to see how well the vaccine works and whether it causes any problems.

A common misconception is that a placebo must be an inert substance, but that’s not always the case. If there is an adjuvant that has been tested for safety in the past, the placebo might include the adjuvant to keep the trial arms as identical as possible between the vaccine and the placebo. Additionally, in the cases of new vaccines, if there is a vaccine that already exists, that can be used as a placebo against a new, possibly improved vaccine, since you’re testing whether the new treatment works better than the old one.

Saline-placebo-controlled trials are conducted for many vaccines to assess both safety and efficacy:

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

There are currently 22 diseases on the childhood vaccine schedule that children are protected against. Some of them have multiple doses of vaccine, but protection against some of the diseases are combined together so that you are getting protection against 4 or even 6 diseases in one shot.  For example, Vaxelis is a vaccine that protects against 6 diseases over a course of 3 doses, yet opponents would count that as having received 24 shots.

In short, vaccines are among the most carefully tested medical products we have. They undergo long, detailed studies before being used in people, and scientists continue to monitor their safety even after they are approved.

In an interview with Charlie Kirk, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary claims that there is no solid evidence supporting COVID boosters for healthy children and suggests that it was only recommended to bring hidden protections for vaccine makers.

The video claims that there is no good evidence showing that giving another COVID booster to young, healthy children is helpful. This is misleading.

Studies have shown that COVID vaccines help prevent severe illness in children, including reducing the risk of hospitalization and severe outcomes like multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). While hospitalization rates for COVID-19 are generally lower in children than adults, they are still significant, particularly among young children and infants who have not yet developed robust immune defenses. Clinical trials and real-world data support the vaccine’s efficacy in reducing severe outcomes.

Stories like Ethan’s remind us why it’s worth protecting children against the worst effects of COVID.

But do other countries already recommend against giving the COVID vaccine to healthy children? This is partially true. Countries like Germany and Greece recommend COVID vaccines for children six months and older, and many countries in Europe recommend the vaccine for children over 5 years old. But when thinking about European recommendations, we have to remember that healthcare is free and easy to access for many people in Europe, and the U.S. is considering adding work requirements to Medicaid.

Finally, the video suggests that if the COVID vaccine is added to the U.S. childhood vaccination schedule, it automatically gives vaccine makers immunity from lawsuits, and this is somehow sinister. This is misleading.

In the U.S., a special program called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) helps people who vaccines may have harmed. This program exists because vaccines protect public health, and very rare adverse reactions can occur. However, vaccine makers are not free from responsibility—this system ensures claims can be handled fairly without discouraging companies from developing vaccines that save lives.

In summary, the video makes several claims that leave out key information. COVID vaccines have been shown to help protect children, though the benefits vary depending on age and health. Some countries made different choices based on their situations, and legal protections for vaccines are in place to keep people safe and the public protected.

In an episode of the MAHA podcast, pediatrician Joel Warsh claims that vaccine safety research is weak because it hasn’t compared vaccinated to unvaccinated children or studied all vaccines together.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2908388/

Anti-vaxxers exploit how exact science can be when talking about autism. Science cannot prove that something doesn’t happen. We can’t prove that unicorns don’t exist; we can only point out that no credible sighting of a unicorn has ever taken place and that we do not have evidence like unicorn scat or unicorn fossils to support the hypothesis that unicorns exist.

So science cannot say that vaccines absolutely do not cause autism, only that no credible evidence exists to show that it does cause autism. But this isn’t a scientific paper, and we all know that vaccines do not cause autism.

In 1998, when Wakefield held the press conference about his fraudulent and now retracted paper, we didn’t know as much about autism as we do today.  Studies show that autism is mostly genetic and often starts before birth, during early brain development in the womb. The brain differences seen in autism are usually there before birth and don’t appear suddenly because of things like vaccines. This supports research suggesting that autism’s main causes happen well before a baby is born.

Large-scale studies from global health authorities, including the CDC, WHO, and various peer-reviewed sources, have repeatedly shown no causal link between vaccines and autism. One notable study from Denmark looked at more than 650,000 children born between 1999 and 2010 to see if the measles‑mumps‑rubella (MMR) shot could be linked to autism. They followed each child for years and counted about 6,500 autism diagnoses, but kids who got the MMR shot were no more likely to develop autism than kids who skipped it. There’s your vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated study.

Why don’t anti-vaxxers accept these studies? The reasons are many, but mostly because they aren’t ready to do so. And so they simply move away from “The MMR causes autism” to “Too many vaccines cause autism” or “This other vaccine causes autism.” The cycle is never-ending, and we could use those research dollars instead to find ways to make the lives of autistic people better.