The Arrow #266 - AAP on the hot seat

Good morning and good news! The overcast sky has cleared, and though it’s still chilly, the sun is out. My apologies that I haven’t been able to get to all the emails, but this week has been chaotic. So I’ll skip the mailbag for now and get right to the good news.

As The Worm Turns

Ever wonder where such a curious phrase comes from? We understand a ‘worm turning’ conveys a reversal of fortunes or an underdog fighting back or gaining the upper hand. The weak shall confound the mighty, and all that.

The earliest recorded version of it appears in John Heywood's 1546 collection of proverbs thus:

"Treade a worme on the tayle, and it must turne agayne,"

But as is so often the case, the phrase became cemented in popular vernacular by William Shakespeare, who included a close variant of it a half century or so later in Henry VI, Part 3 (circa 1591), with his Lord Clifford stating:

"The smallest worm will turn being trodden on."

And it was the phrase—the worm has turned—that popped into the Bride’s head (and out her mouth) this morning when I read her the news of the January 20th filing by the Children’s Health Defense against the American Academy of Pediatrics. On RICO grounds, no less, alleging that they basically ran a racketeering scheme by repeatedly making false claims of the absolute safety of childhood vaccines and the ever-expanding vaccine schedule all while receiving funding from vaccine manufacturers for recommending and administering them. And beyond that grievance alleging they formed alliances with some of the same companies and others who had developed treatments for various health conditions (asthma, psoriasis, autoimmune disorders, and other adverse events) the vaccines themselves are shown to sometimes cause. A real closed loop of incestuous market-making: cause (and charge for creating) the problem; sell the cure.

Looks like the very definition of a racket to me.

It wouldn’t exactly be fair to call the Children’s Health Defense (originally The Mercury Project, rebranded after RFK, Jr joined its board and boosted its visibility and funding sources) the smallest of worms, but it’s no Goliath either. And it’s always gratifying to see a worm of any size rise up and fight Big Pharma and the white coated ‘authority’ minions who do its bidding without regard for the actual health and wellbeing of the patients they’d sworn on faith not to harm.

What does the suit allege?

The complaint describes an unholy alliance between vaccine manufacturers, the ‘authoritative’ bodies such as AAP who issue blanket vaccine guidelines, and hospitals and large group medical practices who administer the jabs. These behemoth medical conglomerates (usually run by well-paid, non-medical administrators whose job, to be fair, is to tend to the company’s bottom line) insist, coerce, or tempt -- take your pick -- their docs to follow the guidelines. Some may be wholly on board with the schedule, and others may feel compelled. The corporations use the carrot of practice performance bonuses based on how good a job the docs do at pushing the uptake of vaccines, measured by the percentage of their patients taking the vaccines as recommended. Which, until HHS’s recent reduction (one rejected by AAP) numbered as many as 72 doses for kids between 0 and 18. And the stick, of course, is the threat of losing their pay, their position, or even their medical license if they buck the system and refuse.

This legal complaint accuses the AAP of lying to parents and front line doctors for over 20 years about how safe the full US childhood vaccine schedule is, alleging that the AAP claims the whole schedule—meaning all the shots kids get together—is totally tested and safe. You hear and see that ‘nothing to see here, folks’ safety claim constantly parroted in the news. And yet the truth is that no one in authority has ever checked whether it is or isn’t safe by comparing the health outcomes of kids who got all the vaccines to those who got none. This behavior, the lawsuit says, breaks a big federal law called RICO, as modified to go after Big Tobacco, which fights organized crime tactics such as rackets or scams.

The complaint starts by alleging the AAP teams up with drug companies and other groups to push vaccines hard by telling everyone the schedule is totally safe, while hiding any facts that point to risks. AAP spreads these messages everywhere: in its journal called Pediatrics, in a publication called the Red Book, on its website HealthyChildren.org, in newspapers, and in the talking points doctors use to persuade families to vaccinate. And more pervasively in ads on television. Take a look at the ads that appear on the news programs – they’re all from the pharmaceutical giants, which makes bucking their vaccine narrative akin to biting the hand that feeds you. So what you get are glowing positive reports about vaccine safety and nothing running counter to that. With all this and 67,000 pediatricians following AAP guidelines, these messages reach almost every kid’s parent at some point.

A huge part of this fight is uncovering proof that the full schedule was never safety-tested as a whole. (And it hasn’t been, as I’ve discussed at length in these pages previously. Neither have there been any real placebo-controlled tests on most all the individual vaccines on the schedule.)

The lawsuit points to reports from a group called the Institute of Medicine, now known as the National Academy of Medicine, a group I admit I wasn’t aware of until I read the 55 page complaint myself. Here’s a footnote from the document:

The IOM in 2002 and again in 2013 said there are no studies comparing the health of fully vaccinated kids versus unvaccinated ones, and they recommended doing those studies using big health databases already in existence. But nothing happened. AAP kept saying the schedule is "fully tested" or “backed by experts”, without telling the public about that big missing piece of the truth—i.e., they really have no idea if it is or not because they’ve never actually looked at it.

One prime example of how the ‘alliance’ scripts the narrative appeared in a 2002 article in Pediatrics by Dr. Paul Offit and others in response to parents who questioned the safety of giving a child a whole bevy of vaccines—and all their adjuvants and other BS they contain—at once. The Offit response was to smugly say that theoretically babies could handle up to 10,000 vaccines at once because their immune systems are strong.

(And he knows this how? Because I recall being taught in medical school that a baby’s own immune system is utterly incompetent at birth, relying on maternal antibodies it received through the placenta before birth for the first 3 months of life, when they will have dissipated. Breast feeding will prolong that protection. And that its immune system slowly becomes competent over then next several years as it meets new antigens, viruses, etc. I looked this up just now to be sure nothing had changed since the olden days when I was in medical school, and it hasn’t.)

The lawsuit calls out this verbal sleight of hand, saying Offit et al answered a different theoretical question to dodge answering the one about the lack of safety evidence to allay concerns about giving multiple vaccines at once. AAP then uses the Offit article’s statement—a baby’s immune system is strong and can withstand 10,000 antigens—as validation that more vaccines are no big deal, shutting down calls for real tests.

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The AAP also controls more than the narrative. It determines what pediatricians do in practice through its Red Book, the de facto ‘Bible’ of vaccine rules. Hospitals, insurance companies, and medical boards treat it like the law. If doctors skip shots, delay them, or give exemptions for any but the AAP’s very narrow categories of accepted reasons, they can lose their jobs, hospital rights, or pay.

Play or Pay

The complaint details the saga of two doctors who got in trouble for going their own way. Dr. Paul Thomas in Oregon audited his own patient charts over his years in practice looking at health outcomes in vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids and found the unvaccinated kids fared better, and he let parents choose schedules. (He wrote a book about it called Vax Facts that I have but have not yet read.) He lost his license.

Dr. Kenneth Stoller gave vax exemptions based on a patient’s genetic profile and other risks. He got punished too. The suit says this scares all doctors into sticking to the plan.

Three parent stories provided the human tragedy side of it. Andrea Shaw's twins got shots at 18 months, had a bad reaction noted in the ER, and died eight days later. Police investigated her for murder, as if vaccines couldn't possibly be the cause. Shanticia Nelson's sick daughter got 12 antigens in six shots, had seizures, and died in 12 hours. The coroner hinted at vaccine brain swelling, but the death certificate said something vague about sudden death syndrome. Jane Doe's teen had past reactions to vaccines and an exemption, but her school forced shots anyway. Later, she needed surgery for joint issues linked to vaccines. These cases blame AAP's narrow rules on when it’s permissible to skip or delay shots that ignore family history or even being sick.

AAP also fights so-called vaccine hesitancy by calling doubters spreaders of lies and pushing tech companies to block them online. The suit says AAP lumps real scientific studies questioning vaccine testing and safety with fake news. Legitimate studies link vaccines to chronic illnesses or higher death rates, but they get pulled from publication or attacked (and sometime their authors get attacked and censured as well), a tactic that smothers dissent and makes it seem that everyone agrees, and The Science is settled. (We saw this writ large during Covid, but the playbook was already in place.)

In December 2025 when the CDC made hepatitis B shots optional for low-risk babies (hurrah!) and HHS shifted some vaccines from mandatory to doctor-parent choice in January 2026, the AAP called the changes deadly, predicting disease outbreaks, even though other countries do the same or recommend even less without untoward health effects on their populations. The Academy of Pediatrics sued to stop the changes, which looks like protecting vaccine sales over kids.

The suit points out how AAP talks out of both sides of its mouth on safety trackers like VAERS and Vaccine Safety Datalink. On the one hand they claim VAERS misses reports and can't prove cause (which everyone understands), but on the other claim the absence of VAERS data proves safety (which it distinctly does not). On autism, AAP categorically says vaccines don't cause it, and The Science is settled. But experts have said existing evidence can't fully rule it out, some court cases paid for brain injuries in children with signs of autism, and based on these things the CDC softened its wording about the connection in 2025. The AAP didn't. The AAP guards the system.

Legally, the way this behavior qualifies as RICO is that AAP's lies in emails, wires, and mail form a crime pattern. It has hurt parents with funeral bills, medical costs, lost work (not to mention lost children on which you can put no price) and wrecked the careers of doctors who called it out or used their own medical judgement in administering vaccines. The suit wants money, truth-telling, and rules put in place to stop AAP from claiming the schedule is fully safe without the facts to back that claim up.

In short, the big issues boil down to AAP hiding that the whole vaccine schedule lacks full safety proof, scaring doctors into line, pushing parents to comply despite risks, fighting change, and maybe in the worst light running a profit scheme.

I’ll admit that when we were practicing in our primary care clinics back in the 1980s and 90s we did offer vaccinations to our patients, but never once do I recall suggesting a child needed to get a vaccine (let alone bullying or frightening their parents into doing it). Usually, it was the parent coming in before school started with the child’s vaccine record and requesting whatever vaccines were necessary for admission. And I can promise you we never got any sort of bonus remuneration for giving one beyond whatever the insurance schedule paid for that vaccination dose that our clinic had purchased.

In Arkansas, where we were in practice at the time, Governor Dale Bumpers’ wife, Betty Bumpers, instituted an ‘Every Child by 5’ initiative to get all kids vaccinated by the time they entered school. Back then, of course, the vaccine schedule was nothing remotely like it is nowadays. By 1989 there were only about 10 to 12 vaccine doses from birth to age 18. Not the 72 it grew to after the vaccine manufacturers were indemnified against all responsibility for damages from injury and the perverse incentives of the unholy alliance kicked in.

So, the vaccine safety ball is now in play in the courts, and how the game turns out will depend on which judge gets the case. The AAP will have to answer the complaint, even if simply by denying each allegation, and they’ll ask for the case to be dismissed. That’s routine. Then the judge will usually ask for briefs from each side on why the case should move forward or be dismissed. If the judge dismisses it, that’s that. For now, because the CHD will likely appeal.

But if the judge doesn’t agree to dismiss, the critical point comes next: discovery – all phone calls, texts, emails, research documents, any and all records must be divulged. Everything the other side has kept carefully hidden away. If that happens, the AAP will be on the hot seat. They will fight this tooth and nail and likely for a long time. Or they’ll figure a way to settle it out of court as was the case with Alex Berenson v Twitter. Twitter fought long and hard but once it came to ‘now it’s discovery time’ they settled so fast it made your head spin. They wanted no part of discovery, and it’s easy to see why. Once Elon Musk bought Twitter and released the ‘Twitter files’ the truth was out, showing massive government influence (meddling) in social media.

For the sake of America’s children, I hope what comes out of it is a dismantling of this unholy alliance. And a requirement to prove not just that a vaccine raises antibody levels, but that it actually prevents the acquisition and spread of a specific disease. And further that vaccines are tested against real placebos (not previous incarnations of this or some other vaccine) to determine basic safety profiles, and that there’s serious ongoing evaluation to assure long term safety. America’s children deserve no less.

Odds and Ends

• Move over, 'learn to code'. Here's the new wide-open hot career. And they'll even pay you to learn it!

• Having ducked and squeezed our way up the steep, slippery, narrow steps inside the pyramid at Chichen Itza to get to the Jaguar's chamber (worth the trip once) I'd have a moment's pause about doing it again in the Great Pyramid of Giza, but I think I'd still belly up. Here’s what it looks like.

• Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars... Astrotourism takes off with people traveling to dark sky locations and observatories all over the globe to achieve calm and relieve stress. Here's one such place the Bride says she’d like to go.

• I recall seeing a funny single panel cartoon years ago of a cowboy coming out of the theater from a Shakespeare play lamenting 'I don't see why everybody thinks it's so great. Wasn't nothin' but a bunch of quotes all strung together!' It seems the lion's share of common idiomatic phrases in English come from Shakespeare. Here are a few that don't.

• Frozen sand sculpts art on Lake Michigan beach. And now we know why the surface of Mars looks like it does: sandy soil and Martian winds.

• What causes those 'aha' moments? Now they know. Or do they?

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

This week’s video features the intersection of one of my favorite pieces of classical music with one of my favorite childhood westerns — you know where I’m going. The Lone Ranger! Like most kids of my vintage, this theme song (the William Tell Overture) and Saturday cartoons provided my introduction (and lifelong love) of great music. And apparently it’s the same for one of the best guitarists to ever strum the strings, Glen Campbell.

Glen came from the tiny town of Delight, Arkansas. A one-street spot in the road not far from Caddo Gap where MD spent summer vacations on her family’s farmland. Since she began writing her Caddo Bend romance novels (set in a fictional town on the Caddo River) and she wanted to return to her childhood roots to soak up local color for the books, we’ve had occasion to travel through Delight multiple times and see the big wooden sign proclaiming it Hometown of Glen Campbell. And I never fail to think of this performance.

Time for the poll, so you can grade my performance this week.

That’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back soon.

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This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice.

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