Part 1 of this article was published in HSNW, 19 January 2026.
In the first part of this article, we explored four key myths and why they don’t stand up to scrutiny:
• ‘Vaccines were never properly tested’
In consulting rooms across America, physicians face a challenge that no medical school prepared them for. A parent arrives with a list of concerns gathered from social media, podcasts, and well-meaning friends. The questions sound scientific. The language borrows from immunology. The citations reference real studies. And yet the conclusions are wrong.
New federal guidance to reduce the number of vaccines recommended for all children from 17 vaccines down to 11 comes as states already are charting their own courses on vaccine policy.
The US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, believes that aluminum in vaccines can cause health issues, such as neurological disorders, allergies and autoimmune diseases. This contradicts scientific evidence from many studies that have confirmed the safety of vaccines and aluminum “adjuvants” – substances that boost vaccines’ effectiveness.
On Friday morning, after contentious discussion, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted 8-3 to drop the recommendation for a universal birth hepatitis B vaccine dose and 6-4 to suggest that parents use serologic testing—which detects antibodies in the blood—to determine whether more than one dose of the three-dose series are needed.
Under the first recommendation, only infants born to mothers who test positive for hepatitis B would receive a birth dose, while parents of other babies would be advised to postpone the first dose for at least two months.
Ralph Abraham, MD, the former Louisiana surgeon general, has been quietly named the deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a controversial pick to help lead the nation’s top infectious disease organization as the second highest-ranking CDC official.
Near the back corner of the local library’s parking lot, largely out of view from the main road, the South Carolina Department of Public Health opened a pop-up clinic in early November, offering free measles vaccines to adults and children.
Spartanburg County, in South Carolina’s Upstate region, has been fighting a measles outbreak since early October, with more than 50 cases identified. Health officials have encouraged people who are unvaccinated to get a shot by visiting its mobile vaccine clinic at any of its several stops throughout the county.
For nearly 80 years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was respected around the world for its authoritative, evidence-based leadership in public health.
But the CDC’s stunning reversal Wednesday—stating on its website that “studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism”—shows the agency can no longer be trusted, multiple doctors and public health advocates told CIDRAP News.
Today, the Washington Post reports that career scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are quite upset to learn that the agency has updated the CDC website to resurrect the long-debunked link between vaccines and autism.
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