Do babies receive too many vaccines at once?

Let’s first take a look at the journal itself. The editors of the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research include a linguistics Ph.D., a professor of ophthalmology, and several figures known for promoting vaccine misinformation, such as anti-vaccine doctor Russell Blaylock, rhetoric professor Daniel Broudy, attorney Robert J. Krakow, and Brian Hooker, a bioengineer. This journal isn’t taken seriously because the people accepting and reviewing papers do not have the background needed to make good decisions about them.

It’s troubling that Brian Hooker, author, is published in a journal where he is on the editorial board. The editorial board also provides the peer review for this journal.

The study evaluates 1,542,076 vaccine combinations administered to infants under one year old between 1991 and 2011, using data from the Florida Medicaid Database. The study claims that increasing the number of vaccines administered at once leads to higher rates of adverse outcomes, particularly respiratory, developmental, and suspected infectious diseases.

In fact, the study misinterprets findings through selection and temporal bias and just plain suspected errors in calculation. The reported risk ratios are extraordinarily high, which suggests possible methodological flaws or mistakes in their research methods. For example, the paper claims that where infants who received HepB, Rotavirus, and Pneumococcal vaccines along with DTaP+IPV+HIB were 3,041% more likely to be diagnosed with “other diseases of trachea and bronchus” within 30 days post-vaccination than an infant who only received DTaP+IPV+HIB.

This risk ratio is so high that it is difficult to take seriously. They also found that vaccines were associated with ailments with a ridiculous level of significance for every single one of the nearly 100 conditions listed.

Scientists don’t take high risk ratios such as those at face value because they can often signal problems in the study, like mistakes in the research methods, biased data, or other factors that could skew the results, making the findings less reliable.

One thing Hooker fails to take into consideration is that infants receiving multiple vaccines might already be at higher risk for medical conditions due to underlying health issues, something he has done in the past. In 2014 Brian Hooker reanalyzed a 2004 case-control dataset as a cohort study, which skewed results. His paper was eventually retracted, citing undeclared competing interests on the part of the author. So instead of taking a randomized group of children and looking for a correlation between vaccines and autism, he took a study of children that purposely included vaccinated autistic children and concluded that autistic children were more likely to be vaccinated, not that the vaccinated children were more likely to be autistic, given the population the study was looking at.

This paper is less likely to be retracted, as Hooker is on the editorial board, but it really should be.