The more vaccines an infant receives at once, the greater the likelihood that the child will develop an infection, respiratory illness or developmental delays after the immunizations, according to a peer-reviewed study published Wednesday in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research.

"If safety alerts were sounding the alarm, the results would be deafening," lead author Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior scientist at Children's Health Defense (CHD), told The Defender.

"The sheer number of diseases increases exponentially with each additional vaccine." Jablonowski and CHD chief scientific officer Brian Hooker, Ph.D., analyzed 20 years of data from 1,542,076 vaccine combinations administered to infants under 1 year old.

The data, collected from July 1, 1991 to May 31, 2011, came from the publicly available Florida Medicaid database, which contains more than 460 million billing claims from more than 10 million people. The researchers examined the medical diagnoses given to vaccinated infants within 30 days of vaccination. They excluded diagnoses made on the day of vaccinations to rule out possible pre-existing conditions. The study compared babies who received three "basic" vaccines with babies who received the same vaccines plus others in a single pediatrician visit. The control group consisted of 227,231 cases of babies who received only the DTP vaccine, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) vaccine and inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) in one visit. They compared the medical outcomes of this group with the outcomes of cohorts of infants who also received the hepatitis B (HepB) vaccine, the pneumococcal vaccine (PCV) or the rotavirus vaccine, or various combinations of two or three of these vaccines together. The researchers found seven cohorts of infants in the database who received different vaccine combinations - for example, from basic vaccines plus HepB to basic vaccines plus HepB, PCV and rotavirus - and compared them with the control group. They used the Fisher's Exact Test statistical model to compare the incidence of a particular disease after vaccination in one cohort with the incidence of the same disease in another cohort. They also used the Bonferroni correction, a powerful statistical tool, to rule out chance results and set a high threshold for finding statistical significance.

"With any statistical test, you can never be 100% sure that the results are correct," said Jablonowski. "However, we set our threshold so high that we are 99.99% sure that the diseases we reported are associated with vaccine combinations."

They identified 45 different statistically significant diagnoses of respiratory, developmental and suspected infectious diseases according to the different vaccine combinations. They summarized the diseases and their relative risk, i.e. the likelihood of them occurring in the group exposed to additional vaccines, for the different cohorts.

Overall, they found that as the number of vaccines administered in a single doctor's visit increased, the number of developmental, respiratory or infectious disease diagnoses within 30 days of the vaccinations also increased exponentially. Each additional vaccine more than doubled the number of these different diseases diagnosed. For example, one additional vaccine resulted in an average of seven additional diseases that were statistically significant in a given cohort of babies. Two additional vaccines resulted in an average of 15 illnesses, and three vaccines administered resulted in 35 additional illnesses. Respiratory illnesses - including cough, asthma, obstructive bronchitis and many others - were the most common recurring conditions after each different combination of vaccines. Jablonowski and Hooker said that respiratory illnesses likely occurred due to a "maladaptive immune response and poor adaptation to environmental factors" from vaccinations. Developmental disorders such as "failure to thrive" - in which a child's physical, mental or social development is delayed, abnormal or arrested - occurred in four cohorts. The researchers suspected that this was due to dysregulation of the respiratory and immune systems by the vaccines. One common infection was leukocytosis, a high white blood cell count that can indicate a range of infections, inflammation or immune system dysfunction. Another serious example was sepsis, which occurred in the cohort that received most of the vaccinations at once - the basic vaccinations plus HepB, PCV and rotavirus.

"Frighteningly reckless" that studies on the effects of multiple vaccines have only now been conducted The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) 2024 childhood immunization schedule includes 77 doses of vaccines for children ages 0-18. The 2024 schedule has been expanded to include the pneumococcal and COVID-19 vaccines, as well as the monoclonal antibody nirsevimab, which are not technically vaccines but have been added to the schedule.

For comparison, the CDC recommended 11 doses of 7 vaccines by age 16 in 1986, including the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella), DTP and polio vaccines. With the exception of the HepB vaccine, which is recommended for infants in the first 24 hours after birth, infants rarely receive a single vaccine at a time. Many vaccines, such as the DTP vaccine, combine different vaccines for multiple diseases in a single injection. In addition, to comply with the CDC schedule, pediatricians often administer five or six vaccines and vaccine combinations to infants at each visit at 2 months, 4 months, and 6 months of age.

However, the authors said that adequate studies have not been conducted to evaluate the effects of combining vaccines. "Unfortunately, there is little completed research on the administration of multiple vaccines as recommended in the CDC schedule," Hooker told The Defender. "Vaccines are 'magic,' so no one questions that more and more vaccines are being added to the schedule." The bottom line is that although health officials may claim that individual vaccines are safe, any claim about the safety of vaccine combinations is unfounded, the authors wrote. "Within a few seconds, a 2-month-old infant seen by a CDC-compliant pediatrician can expect to be vaccinated with vaccines against HepB, rotavirus, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, HIB, 15 or 20 different pneumococcal variants, polio, and possibly RSV," Jablonowski said. "It is appallingly reckless that the harms of combinations have not been studied," he added. Hooker said it's notable that neither the U.S. Food and Drug Administration nor the CDC, which make the recommendations for the plan, ever conducted these studies. "We plan to continue to conduct this type of research, given the tremendous lack of accurate and relevant vaccine safety science," he said.

This article originally appeared on The Defender and was reprinted with permission in https://vigilantnews.com/post/alarming-news-for-infants-who-receive-multiple-vaccines-at-once/

Guest post by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.