Corruption of science, or return to scientific inquiry?

News Analysis

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s shift in vaccine guidance has renewed a national debate over the degradation of scientific integrity, but the core charge itself — that science has been corrupted by special interests — has been made for years by vaccine skeptics and other opponents of the scientific establishment, albeit with far less media attention.

Almost no media attention, as a matter of fact.

That is to say, while the media has given a lot of ink and headlines to charges that the Trump administration has cooked the scientific books, previous claims that the scientific establishment did the same thing for decades — and that the administration’s changes are a course correction — have gone largely unreported.

For example, the corruption of science was the focal point, and the name, of a September 9 hearing held by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin). The hearing probed epidemiological and regulatory science practices during the Covid-19 pandemic, in addition to the potential connections between vaccines and autism and chronic childhood diseases.

It received far less media attention — and that’s an understatement — than the CDC’s shift in vaccine guidance. Why that would be is anybody’s claim to make, though Johnson opened the hearing with a broadside against the credibility of prevailing science prior to Trump’s second term, saying official narratives had long been questioned but ignored. 

He quoted Dr. Marcia Angell, who served for years as an editor of a major science publication, from 2009 to make his point:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines,” Angell wrote in her 2009 article titled “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption,” as quoted by Johnson. “I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

Johnson also pointed to a May 2016 survey in the journal Nature, which found that “more than 70 percent of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments.”

“And in May 2024, Wiley, a major academic publisher, closed 19 journals primarily due to issues with fraudulent papers, largely attributed to ‘paper mills’ producing fake or compromised studies,” Johnson said at the hearing. “In the two years leading up to May 2024, Wiley had retracted more than 11,300 papers that were deemed compromised, often due to manipulated peer review processes or fabricated content.”

Johnson said the hearing’s witnesses would demonstrate how research can be doctored or withheld in order to support a predetermined narrative and the powerful interests that benefit from that narrative.

The senator observed that his committee had already released a report showing that federal health agencies were aware that a safety signal did exist for myocarditis associated with the Covid mRNA injections and hid that fact from the public, while his committee had also taken steps to give voice to those impacted by vaccine injuries and fatal infectious diseases.

Johnson said the media routinely reinforced establishment narratives and suppressed counter-narratives.

“The news media is all too willing to highlight a new outbreak of infectious disease, but is loath to broadcast what they generally describe as ‘rare and mild’ vaccine injuries,” he said. “As a result, the vaccine-injured have been ignored and abandoned.”

Johnson said the purpose of the hearing was to force people to acknowledge reality. 

“Exactly what all the realities and truths are, I cannot say,” he said. “What I can say for sure is that we have been lied to repeatedly and that in order to restore public faith in federal health agencies, integrity must return to science.”

For the most part, Johnson said, the legacy media has largely ignored the hearings and the evidence.

Systemic critique

In his testimony, Dr. Toby Rogers recounted the diagnosis of his then-partner’s son with autism.

Rogers told the subcommittee that, at the time, he was pursuing doctoral research in political economy at the University of Sydney, with access to major medical and scientific journals, so he plunged into research on autism.

“To my surprise, I quickly discovered that the CDC’s (Centers for Disease Control) narrative did not add up,” Rogers testified. “Claims that autism is genetic don’t make sense because autism prevalence was rising too fast — there’s no such thing as a genetic epidemic.”

Then, Rogers testified, the CDC blamed valproic acid, a treatment for epilepsy that is contraindicated in pregnancy, and thalidomide, which was never approved for use in the U.S., meaning those factors could only explain a handful of cases through inadvertent use or intentional abuse.

“Finally, the CDC pointed to advanced parental age,” he testified. “However, the effect sizes were modest, and the increase in the proportion of older parents is insufficient to explain the surge in autism prevalence.”

What’s more, Rogers said, the cost of autism was already in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the U.S. and yet government was not responding with a sense of urgency.

Rogers said he changed his doctoral thesis to focus on autism. That thesis was peer-reviewed and is now among the top 10 most downloaded doctoral research papers in the history of the University of Sydney.

Rogers’s critique then lowered anchor into a sea of epidemiological evidence. 

“In 1970, the first autism prevalence study in the U.S. found an autism rate of less than 1 in 10,000 children,” he said. “… The most recent report from the CDC showed that 1 in 31 eight-year-old children in the U.S. in 2022 were on the autism spectrum. That’s a 32,158-percent increase in the last 52 years.”

Two massive studies from the best epidemiologists in California show that changes in diagnostic criteria only explain a small fraction of the rise in autism prevalence, Rogers contended. He also acknowledged that 22 studies claim that vaccines don’t cause autism, but he said those studies came with a caveat.

“None of these studies have a completely unvaccinated control group,” he testified. “So unfortunately, if you want to understand what’s causing the autism epidemic, these studies are of no use.”

Likewise, Rogers said, five massive genetic research programs that collectively produced more than 500 papers and spent more than $2.3 billion gave researchers little to show for all that cash. In contrast, Rogers testified, a small set of studies does help to understand autism causation, which he says points to environmental toxins.

“The key study that helps us to understand the relative impact of the different toxicants that contribute to causing autism is Ozonoff et al. 2018,” he testified. “Using a brilliant study design they showed that up to 88 percent of autism cases are characterized by autistic regression — the child was developing normally and then suddenly the child lost eye contact, speech, and the ability to socialize with others.”

That suggests an acute toxic exposure, Rogers said, and there exists eyewitness testimony from thousands of parents that the acute toxic exposure that preceded the autistic regression was a “well baby” vaccine appointment. Fortunately, he asserted, there are also at least six good studies comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.

“Unfortunately, these studies have been systematically suppressed and ignored by the mainstream media and the medical establishment,” he testified. 

Two studies by Gallagher and Goodman, in 2008 and 2010, respectively, show that the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine significantly increases autism rates, Rogers stated, while three studies by Anthony Mawson (2017, 2017, and 2025) confirm that vaccination increases the odds of developing autism by at least 4.2-fold.

“Preterm birth coupled with vaccination increases the odds of neurodevelopmental disability by more than 12-fold compared to preterm birth without vaccination,” he testified, citing those studies. “And finally, a study by Hooker & Miller, published in 2021, found that vaccination increases autism risk 5-fold. Vaccination in the absence of breastfeeding increases autism risk 12.5-fold. Vaccination in addition to C-section birth increases autism risk 18.7-fold.”

Rogers’s assessment was blunt.

“After conducting my systematic review of 1,000 studies my belief is that the autism and chronic disease epidemics are primarily caused by toxicants — mostly from vaccines and about a dozen additional toxicants,” he said. “If we stop exposing children to these hazards in the first place, that would stop the epidemics of chronic illness in children. Now we must summon the political will to act.”

The architecture of the evidence

Dr. Jake Scott, a clinical associate professor of infectious diseases at Stanford University School of Medicine, attempted to rebut Rogers and offered support for the institutional scientific consensus, which he said was built on a massive scale of evidence.

“The scientific evidence supporting vaccine safety and efficacy represents one of the most extensive and transparent bodies of medical research ever assembled,” Scott told the committee. “Vaccines have saved an estimated 154 million lives globally over 50 years, eliminated smallpox from the planet, and reduced diseases like polio and measles by over 99 percent in the United States.”

Scott described an ongoing effort to make vaccine research broadly accessible. 

“Since April 2025, I have co-led the development of a comprehensive public database cataloging 1,704 randomized controlled trials of vaccines spanning from 1941 to 2025, involving more than 10.5 million participants,” he said. “This includes 661 trials using inert placebo controls — all with direct links to published papers through PubMed. Multiple independent U.S. surveillance systems continuously monitor vaccine safety in real-time, detecting adverse events as rare as 1 per million doses.”

A large Danish cohort study following 1.2 million children found no safety signal across diverse populations, Scott added.

“The CDC estimates that vaccines given to children born between 1994 and 2018 will prevent approximately 419 million illnesses and 936,000 deaths over their lifetimes, averting nearly $1.9 trillion in societal costs,” he testified. “This vast evidence base is publicly accessible, peer-reviewed, and continuously updated. If vaccines caused a wave of chronic disease, our safety systems — which can detect 1-in-a-million events — would have seen it. They haven’t.”

Manufactured Consensus

Of course, Rogers and other skeptics of the medical establishment argue that they have seen it, and reported it, and that much of the statistics and evidence was presented at the very hearing at which Scott testified, not to mention at similar hearings and in publications in diverse forums.

The skeptics contend that medical establishment consensus is an artificially manufactured one that routinely suppresses real science and embraces flawed science, and for a very human reason: career survival. 

That theory of institutional conflict was best articulated by climatologist Judith Curry in a 2023 essay, “A Bad Recipe for Science.” In the paper, Curry argues that the politically motivated manufacture of scientific consensus corrupts the scientific process and leads to poor policy decisions.

“There is pressure on scientists to support consensus positions, moral objectives and the relevant policies,” Curry wrote. “This pressure comes from universities and professional societies, scientists themselves who are activists, journalists and from federal funding agencies in terms of research funding priorities. Because evaluations by one’s colleagues are so central to success in academia, it is easy to induce fear of social sanctions for expressing the ideas that, though not necessarily shown to be factually or scientifically wrong, are widely unpopular.”

That leads to institutionalized consensus, Curry argued, which she says promotes groupthink that reinforces the consensus in a self-reinforcing way.

“The most pernicious manifestation of the politicization of science is when politicians, advocacy groups, journalists, and activist scientists intimidate or otherwise attempt to silence scientists whose research is judged to interfere with their moral and political agendas,” she wrote.

A critical strategy in the politicization of science is to manufacture a scientific consensus on politically important topics, such as climate change and Covid-19, Curry wrote.

“The UN climate consensus is used as an appeal to authority in the representation of scientific results as the basis for urgent policy making,” she wrote. “In effect, the UN has adopted a ‘speaking consensus to power’ approach that sees uncertainty and dissent as problematic and attempts to mediate these into a consensus. The consensus-to-power strategy reflects a specific vision of how politics deals with scientific uncertainties.”

Covid-19 provided a very interesting example of a manufactured consensus, Curry wrote.  

“The consensus that Covid-19 had an entirely natural origin was established by two op-eds in early 2020 — The Lancet in February and Nature Medicine in March,” she wrote. “The Lancet op-ed stated, ‘We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.’ The pronouncements in these op-eds effectively shut down inquiry into a possible origin as a laboratory leak in Wuhan. Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab escape to be out of the question or extremely unlikely.”

The consensus was finally overturned in May 2021, Curry observed, after a lengthy article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists identified conflicts of interest among the scientists who wrote the Lancet letter.

“What is concerning about this episode is not so much that a consensus was overturned, but that a fake consensus was so easily enforced for more than a year,” she wrote. “A few scientists spoke up, but they were aggressively cancelled from social media. The vast majority of scientists who understood that there was a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the origins of the virus did not speak up.”

The consequences, in her view, go beyond bad policy. 

“Climate change has become a secular religion, rife with dogma, heretics and moral-tribal communities,” she wrote. “The secular religion of climate change raises concerns that are far more fundamental than the risks of bad policy. At risk is the fundamental virtues of the Scientific Revolution and the freedom to question authority.”

The Henry Ford study

At Johnson’s September hearing, attorney Aaron Siri’s testimony offered up an example of the same manufactured consensus and scientists’ fear of challenging it within the realm of vaccines and chronic disease.

Siri’s law firm focuses on vaccine-related work, including hundreds of lawsuits related to vaccine injury, as well as frequent lawsuits against health agencies.

In his testimony, Siri maintained that none of the clinical trials relied upon to license routine childhood vaccines confirmed that the products were safe prior to licensure, largely due to design limitations, and that safety monitoring remains inadequate post-licensure. 

The common thread is the a priori belief that vaccines are safe, Siri testified.

“This belief corrupts the ‘science’ around vaccines, which either results in the failure to properly study these vaccines before or after licensure or, when a study is conducted, the publishing of spurious results that serve only to confirm the policy message that vaccines are safe,” he testified.

Siri then pointed to what he called a robust study conducted at a major institution in the United States that compared the health outcomes of vaccinated (those who received one or more vaccines) and unvaccinated (those who received no vaccines) children.

That study, by Henry Ford Health, was never published, Siri said, for only one reason: its results showed that the vaccinated children in the study suffered from numerous chronic health issues that did not afflict the unvaccinated children.

In early 2017, Siri said, his client organization encouraged Henry Ford’s infectious-disease leadership to conduct such a study. The project was led by Dr. Marcus Zervos, the head of infectious diseases at Henry Ford, co-director of the Center for Emerging and Infectious Diseases at Wayne State University, and a principal investigator for pharmaceutical companies in vaccine trials.

Another study principal was Dr. Lois Lamerato, an epidemiologist with more than 250 published works. The project used existing patient data and was completed in early 2020. 

The findings, Siri said, were dramatic. 

“The Henry Ford study found that vaccinated children had a statistically significant increased rate of various serious chronic diseases,” he testified. “For example, vaccinated children had 3.03 times the rate of atopic disease (a group of allergic conditions); 4.29 times the rate of asthma; 5.53 times the rate of neurodevelopmental disorder, which included 3.28 times the rate of developmental delay and 4.47 times the rate of speech disorder; and 5.96 times the rate of autoimmune disease. All of these findings were statistically significant.”

Some conditions, Siri observed, appeared only in the vaccinated group.

“While there were many cases of ADHD, learning disability, and tics in the vaccinated group, there were none in the unvaccinated group,” he testified. “The foregoing is obviously extremely troubling, especially because almost all these chronic diseases that showed an increased risk result from some form of immune system dysregulation.”

Many of them also already have some basis in the existing scientific literature linking them to vaccination, Siri said, but the studies necessary to ascertain the rate and frequency of those harms had not been conducted. 

“This study at Henry Ford finally provided hard figures on the rates at which childhood vaccines may be causing these harms,” he testified.

Despite that, Siri said, the study was not submitted for publication, precisely because of the process Curry had identified.

“Unfortunately, while Dr. Zervos and Dr. Lamerato affirmed the study was well designed, executed, and worthy of publication, they would not submit it for publication because, among other reasons, Dr. Lamerato said she did not want to make doctors uncomfortable, and Dr. Zervos said he did not want to lose his job at Henry Ford,” Siri testified. “Had this study showed that vaccinated children were healthier, I have no doubt it would have quickly and easily been published.”

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin last week, the Evers administration led the pushback against the Trump administration’s push to reopen inquiries into the safety of vaccines and the agency’s previous proclamations that vaccines do not cause autism.

On X, Evers accused federal health officials of lying: “Unbelievable, and frankly, dangerous. Safe, effective vaccines save lives, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.”

Richard Moore is the author of “Dark State” and may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com.