“Voices of the Vaccine-injured”: Old school antivax nonsense on steroids

On Monday, I wrote a post about a US Senate hearing called by Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), Chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is under the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. The purpose of the hearing is evident in what Sen. Johnson decided to call it, Voices of the Vaccine-Injured. Part of the reason that I decided to write about the hearing before it even happened was because all but one of the antivaxxers asked to testify were what I would call “old school” antivaxxers; in other words, they were antivax before the COVID-19 pandemic—in most cases, long before the pandemic—and would be expected to spew really old antivax claims. For example, two of the witnesses, Brian Hooker and Polly Tommey, included old schoolers whose antivax activism stemmed from their mistaken belief that vaccines caused their child’s autism and, in fact, were tightly associated with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s antivax organization Children’s Health Defense, with Hooker being the “Chief Scientific Officer” (if you can call it that” and Tommey being the director of programming for CHD-TV, the arm of CHD that produces antivax propaganda video content for CHD. Capping the “old school” nature of these two is the observation that Tommey has long been best buds and worked with the godfather of the 21st century antivax movement, Andrew Wakefield, and Hooker was intimately involved in the genesis of the “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory in 2014 that ultimately resulted in Andrew Wakefield and Del Bigtree’s 2016 antivax conspiracy-fest of a “documentary,” VAXXED.

As reported by NBC reporter Brandy Zadrozny:

The hearing was punctuated by misinformation, conspiracy theories and genuine grief, as witnesses shared personal tragedies and an understandable search for causality — an emotional series of statements that drew expressions of compassion from both Democrats and Republicans on the subcommittee.

Led by Covid vaccine misinformer Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., the “Voices of the Vaccine Injured” hearing featured a witness list pulled straight from the anti-vaccine movement’s leadership roster: two senior employees of the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-founded nonprofit Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and parents featured in “Vaxxed,” the documentary-style film that helped launch the current anti-vaccine era.

Mary Holland, president of CHD, sat with members of her staff in the front row, in a section cordoned off for witnesses’ guests. Anti-vaccine attorney Aaron Siri took photos with supporters in the audience. As Johnson entered, a portion of the room — a little over half-full at that point — applauded.

Mary Holland? Holy crap, where the heck was Barbara Loe Fisher? We need antivaxxers who got their start over 40 years ago!

Let’s recap the five antivaxxers scheduled to testify:

1. Robert Sullivan, MD. Anesthesiologist, vaccine injured.
2. Brian Hooker, PhD. Father of Steven Hooker. Witness’ son is vaccine-injured. (Hooker has been featured on this blog enough times to have his own tag.)
3. Polley Tommey. Mother of Billy Tommey. Witness’ son is vaccine-injured. (Polley Tommey is closely associated with Andrew Wakefield and has been featured enough times on this blog to have her own tag too.)
4. Emily Tarsell. Mother of Christina Tarsell. Witness’ Daughter Died Following Gardasil Vaccination. I’ve written about her before.
5. Krystle Cordingley. Mother of Corbyn Cordingley. Witness’ Son Died Following Quadrivalent Flu Vaccination.

As you can see, Dr. Sullivan is the only COVID-19 era antivaxxer to be called to testify. So, beforehand, I was very familiar with Hooker, Tommey, and Tarsell, had heard of Dr. Sullivan, and had never heard of Cordingley. That’s why I’ll focus on the witnesses with whom I was less familiar before going on to look at what Hooker, Tommey, and Tarsell said. The video can be found at the hearing webpage on the subcommittee website, although I found it easier to follow on YouTube, hosted by Broken Truth. True, you have to put up with quack ads and the host’s conspiracy-mongering before the video commences, but YouTube includes an AI-generated transcript that I find helpful whenever I want to quote people, even though the text invariably requires significant cleaning up.

Introduction: Dueling narratives

Sen. Johnson, who’s gone from just liking fringe treatments and promoting right-to-try to full-on antivax COVID-19 conspiracy theorist, made it very clear that this was an antivax hearing, beginning with his opening remarks:

In our first hearing of this Congress titled the corruption of science and federal health agencies, how health officials downplayed and hid myase and other adverse events associated with the co 19 injections. I asked Dr. Joel Walscock an orthopedic surgeon injured by the co injections to describe how those suffering from co injection injuries felt. His one-word answer, abandoned.

The purpose of today’s hearing titled “Voices of the Vaccine Injured” is very simple. To give a platform to those individuals and families who have been abandoned, their injuries and suffering dismissed and forgotten. In addition, we will also hear from witnesses whose lives were devastated by fatal cases of severe influenza.

We all fear death and disease. The appeal of a simple shot that can prevent bo both both is obvious and powerful. Unfortunately, this strong appeal has overridden critical thinking and prevented rigorous costbenefit analysis from being done. The faith in vaccines and vaccination policy is protected with religious-like zeal. And those questioning them are viewed as apostates, dangerous apostates, more than deserving of the scorn, vilification, and ret retribution heaped upon them. An open-minded review of the history of vaccination dating back to Edward Jenner, the creator of the smallox vaccine, is both interesting and enlightening. reading books like Dissolving Illusions, Turtles All the Way Down, and Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality, or a May 21st, 2025 Substack by Toby Rogers titled Mapping the Entire Field of Autism Causation Studies in one article certainly opened my eyes and I sincerely hope will open millions more. And while I haven’t mentioned it, I’d like to enter Toby Rogers article Substack into the record without objection. You’ll be entered.

Toby Rogers? Holy hell! Why not enter “evidence” from people who claimed that COVID-19 vaccines turned them magnetic, leading to metal objects sticking to them? Curious, I looked up Rogers’ Mapping the Entire Field of Autism Causation Studies in One Article, and all I can say is: Wow. I have to hand it to Rogers for such a concentrated retelling of every antivax autism conspiracy theory and psesudoscience in one package. To address his Substack would require a whole other post rivaling the longest of Orac-ian posts that I’ve ever written. You’ll just have to take my word for it for the moment, unless I decide that it might be worth addressing at a future date. (I also know that a lot of you can recognize a lot of the misinformation in it.). I’ll just give you a taste, so that you see what I mean:

The people who actually study genetics know that, at least when it comes to autism, genetic determinism is dead. But there is a fortune to be made from pretending otherwise. So the story that is sold to government and private foundations is that the “genes for autism” are out there somewhere just waiting to be found if only they will keep the research money flowing. 

Government plays along with this ruse because funding genetics research keeps scientists away from studying toxicants which might threaten powerful interests. The result is an entire multibillion dollar research industry that produces hundreds and hundreds of peer-reviewed articles that never get us any closer to understanding autism causation or providing a cure.

That’s right. To Rogers, the known genetic nature of autism, even though it’s polygenic and genetics isn’t 100% of the cause, is fake, and “They” are covering it up to keep that sweet, sweet research money flowing. Never mind the sweet, sweet cash “autism biomed” quacks are raking in, hand over fist, for treating autism as “vaccine injury” or “vaccine toxicity.” As for the rest of the books chosen by Sen. Johnson, they’re all well-known antivax screeds by antivax activists. For instance, Dissolving Illusions is by longtime antivax quack physician Suzanne Humphries, and accines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality is coauthored by another antivax quack, Peter McCullough, whose company sells supplements to “cure” COVID-19 vaccine “toxicity.” You get the idea.

Also note the obvious false balance. The witness list includes two people whose relatives died of influenza, to be pitted against the four who passionately believe that vaccines either killed their children or rendered them autistic and one who believes that a COVID-19 vaccine gave him pulmonary hypertension, as if dueling anecdotes will provide any enlightenment. Just by the 5-to-2 preponderance of antivaxxers, you know how this panel is stacked and what its purpose is.It’s a purpose served by Sen. Johnson’s continued remarks, in which he trots out a number of common antivax claims and conspiracy theories, such as “too many too soon,” claims of a “coverup” of the supposed harms vaccines are causing, and the like. Moreover, as I noted before, by bringing in witnesses who have lost children, Sen. Johnson has basically made them bullet-proof. Senators who want to push back with the antivax nonsense with a more science-based viewpoint can’t push back too hard without appearing to be attacking or haranguing grieving mothers.

Ranking Member Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) tried his best to shift the framing to more reasonable territory by expressing empathy towards anyone who has lost a loved one, but then pivoting to note:

The loss of a loved one, as we all know, leaves an indelible imprint on our lives. It creates an unfillable gap that is almost impossible to overcome at the time it happens. And time sometimes heals, sometimes not. I feel a very deep empathy for the pain and heartache experienced by everyone on this panel and I thank you for your courage. Whatever your testimony is going to be, your courage and conviction coming forth today. Parents and loved ones should never have to know the type of heartache that comes with the loss of a child. And it’s a loss that was common, all too common before vaccines were developed.

Small pox killed approximately 500 million people in the hundred years before it was declared eradicated in 1980. 90% of deaths are believed to have occurred in children under 10 years old. But that risk was eliminated thanks to vaccines that led to smallpox becoming the only disease to have been completely wiped out on the globe. parents, I will tell you, including my own with my brother and me, used to live in fear of their children contracting polio. I will never forget one summer when my brother had a very high fever. All of the symptoms of polio, the anxiety level in our house was incomparable. I was barely old enough to understand what might happen. In bad years, 15,000 United States children were permanently paralyzed. Permanently paralyzed. But again, thanks to vaccination, those fears no longer permeate our society.

Despite enormous advances made over the last century, still far too many people, many of them children, die of vaccinereventable illnesses every year. I’m reading a book right now called Everything is Tuberculosis. It’s by John Green. It’s on the New York Times bestseller list, so I don’t need to give you all the details of information. It is about tuberculosis and about how treatments and medicine is available for tuberculosis which could eradicate it but for many of the deep suspicions and anxieties in developing countries. One of the characters in this book, one, it’s a it’s non-fiction, is a young boy who at five year years old was stopped from treatment by his father because of his distrust for medicine and his reliance on other kinds of cures. I am uh deeply grateful to Eric Stein who lost his four-year-old sister and to Sice Marada who suffered the tragic death of her 5-year-old son for their courage in coming forward to share their stories with us today. Stories like theirs were once the norm. At the beginning of the last century, infant mortality in the United States was more than 100 times higher than it is today. and over 60% of those dead children succumb to infectious disease. A century later, thanks to in large part widespread vaccination, that figure has dropped to 2%. But as you will hear today, the fact that these deaths are now rare doesn’t make them any less tragic.

Sen. Blumenthal then played a video of Kathryn Alcaide, whose baby son Brady died of pertussis in 2012 and has since become a vaccine advocate with Vaccinate Your Family, after which he noted:

Someoneelse’s decision not to get vaccinated likelycause her child to be taken away from her, devastating her family. I fear storieslike Catherine’s will become more and more common in the years ahead. This year, the United States is on track torecord more cases of whooping cough than it has in seven decades. Already at least three children have died and this disease is just the beginning. Rates of vaccination against a range of debilitating and deadly diseases have fallen rapidly in the last few years driven by unfounded claims from opportunistic actors. We’re already paying a price. Twenty-five years ago, measles was declared eliminated in the United States of America, but barely halfway through this year, our country has more cases of measles than it has had for more than three decades. Three people, two of them children are dead.

Nicely done, Sen. Blumenthal, who also entered six scientific papers showing that there is no evidence of increased risk of autism associated with vaccines. Unfortunately, Sen. Johnson responded with a video clip from the VAXXED bus, which has been rolling around the country since 2016 promoting misleading stories of “vaccine injury.”

On to the witnesses

I’m going to focus primarily on the witnesses with whose story I was not that familiar, as I wanted to see if there was anything to be learned. After all, I’ve heard and discussed Hooker’s and Tommey’s stories so many times over the years that I really didn’t expect anything new or different here, and I’ve looked at Tarsell’s story more than once. So let’s look at what Krystle Cordingly said about her son Corbyn, as I had known nothing about this case before learning about Sen Johnson’s hearing. Once again, it’s impossible not to feel empathy with a grieving mother who unexpectedly lost her child at age 13 months. As you would expect, her story is harrowing, particularly the parts about her finding her baby unresponsive, trying to do CPR, waiting at the hospital, only to be told that her son had died. Then there were little details, such as Cordingley describing her son’s tongue being stiff with rigor mortis already when she tried to revive him and her describing holding her son’s foot until it turned cold. Not unexpectedly, she treated any denial that the flu vaccine had caused her son’s death as “gaslighting.” Overall, it’s hard not to tear up listening to Cordingley’s tear-filled testimony.

In my last post, I expressed curiosity about the outside testing by a neuropathologist that Cordingley had claimed to have submitted her son’s autopsy slides to. The reason, as I discussed was that she claimed that this neuropathologist had been shocked at all the scarring in Corbyn’s hippocampus, something she associated with sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). So the part of Cordingley’s testimony that most interested me before the hearing was how she would describe this part of her story. I remained disappointed:

Still searching for answers, we did every genetic test available. Myself, my husband, and our daughter. All clear. Two years later, I submitted Corbyn to a research study. They tested his brain stem and hippocampus. The lead researcher called me personally shocked. She said the damage and scarring she saw was typical in SIDS cases, but Corbin wasn’t an infant. He was 13 months old and he was perfectly healthy. damage, not defects, not abnormalities, damage to his brain. Despite the pediatrician denying the vaccine’s role to my face, I found a note in Corbyn’s records that she had filed a VAERS report just days after his death. She never told me. The report said, “The parents will not be contacted.” She also suggested I continue vaccinating my other children and offered hospital observation after each dose. Why offer observation if vaccines are safe?

I was never given informed consent. I was never told about the lack of long-term safety studies. I was never told about the ingredients like polysorbate-80 and the or the fact that true placeos were never used in many vaccine trials. I was given a simple sheet saying to expect a fever and use Tylenol. I wish someone had warned me. I wish I had been told to research the vaccine inserts, to look deeper, to look at the history, the true history. I wish I had the chance to fight for his life in the hospital or given any kind of chance. I speak today not only to honor Corbyn’s memory, but to urge you to ask the hard questions. Parents deserve the truth. We deserve real informed consent because no parent should have to live the nightmare I do. To all the parents listening, you can never unvaccinate, but you can wait. Wait until it’s truly proven safe. One shot, one decision, one moment. That’s all it takes to shatter a family forever. Thank you.

First of all, filing a report to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) does not mean that the vaccine caused the death or that the doctor even thought that it did. Whatever the cause, a death so soon after a vaccination needs to be reported. Second, unfortunately but not unexpectedly, Cordingley appears to have imbibed a lot of other antivax misinformation, in particular the “toxins” gambit (polysorbate-80 at the amounts used in some vaccines is not dangerous) and the “no saline placebo” misdirection, both tropes promoted by attorney Aaron Siri and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. himself. Second, again, Cordingley does not identify the neuropathologist who supposedly found scarring in Corbyn’s hippocampus. While it is true that hippocampal abnormalities associated with SIDS have been reported, what has been reported does not resemble what Cordingley has reported in the past as having been found by her outside neuropathologist, such as “scarred over” and “severe damage to Corbyn’s brainstem and hippocampus.” Finally, in her original video, she just described what she did as having an outside pathologist looking at the slides of her son’s brain. Here, she says she submitted it to a “research study” two years after Corbyn’s death. There’s a bit of a discrepancy there that should be explained.

Again, because I try to remain open-minded regarding claims like Cordingley’s, I’d really like to see the pathology report and slides and know who the outside neuropathologist was who examined them. Seriously, I mean it. If Corbyn’s brainstem and hippocampus showed evidence of this injury, and scarring (and being “eaten away,” as she said in videos), wouldn’t Cordingley (and Sen. Johnson) want the slides examined by a panel of neuropathologists and the exact injuries described? I know I would (and do), and I’d want to know because I feel so much empathy for a grieving mother

Let’s move on now to the other case with which I was not very familiar, Dr. Robert Sullivan. Again, I discussed what little I knew about his case yesterday. In brief, Dr. Sullivan reported being diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension three weeks after his second COVID-19 booster and even co-authored a case report of two patients reporting this condition after vaccination, one of them himself. Let’s see what he said in front of the committee yesterday. One thing I failed to note on Monday was that Dr. Sullivan had asthma and was on an albuterol inhaler. I only note that because there is an increased risk of pulmonary hypertension associated with asthma, but in fairness I also have to note that Dr. Sullivan’s asthma was described as mild and exercise-induced. Moreover, it must be pointed out that it always sucks to go from being athletic and seemingly much healthier than average to having a chronic debilitating condition like pulmonary hypertension and that, naturally, when someone like Dr. Sullivan does develop such a condition he will want to look for a cause.

What Dr. Sullivan said yesterday is not much different from what I had found out, although he did emphasize what a perfect picture of health he was:

The same month I received my first COVID mRNA shot, I was featured in the Wall Street Journal’s What’s Your Workout column for aerial circus arts. I was strong, healthy, and thriving. Just three weeks after my second dose, I couldn’t go up a flight of stairs without gasping for air. I became short of breath doing even simple things, walking, standing, even speaking. I had constant chest pressure, arrhythmias, and overwhelming fatigue. I cannot overstate the misery. It felt like my body was failing me. I was experiencing right heart failure. Still, I questioned myself. Was this real or in my head? Then an echocardiogram confirmed the damage. I was relieved that it wasn’t imagined and stunned to realize. And I was stunned to realize this is how I likely die. The diagnosis was pulmonary hypertension. I had damage and narrowing of the blood vessels in my lungs, restricting blood flow and straining the heart. This isn’t like regular high blood pressure. Pony hypertension is usually progressive and fatal even with treatment. There is no cure. It felt like a death sentence. I reported my case to VAERS, the vaccine adverse event reporting system. Most doctors I know had never heard of it. Fewer understood that it carries mandatory reporting requirements. I was never taught about VAERS in medical school. I’m told it still isn’t. Eventually, VAERS collected my medical records. I expected to hear from the FDA or CDC. I never did.

I have to note that I received my first COVID-19 dose in December 2020, just like Dr. Sullivan. For the first time ever, the CDC made sure that a card describing how to file reports to VAERS, was given to people receiving the new vaccine. I also note that a new system was set up, V-Safe, that sent text messages at defined times after vaccination asking how the vaccinee was doing and if he was having any new concerning symptoms. Second, I note that Dr. Sullivan was anecdote #1 for a crappy BMJ “investigative report” by Jennifer Block about how VAERS was supposedly failing. (I discussed it in detail when it was published.)

Dr. Sullivan continues:

In researching my condition, I found the Georgetown scientist who predicted my specific problem. The very same month of the vaccine roll out, he warned that spike protein exposure, whether from the virus or from the shot, could harm the blood vessels in the lungs and placenta. Spike protein itself from the SARS one virus, SARS 1, also caused vascular damage in animals.

Funny, but I wrote about the very Georgetown scientist and paper that he published in 2021 not long after the paper was published. It comes from two investigators, Yuichiro J. Suzuki from Georgetown University and Sergiy G. Gychka from Bogomolets National Medical University in Ukraine and is entitled SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Elicits Cell Signaling in Human Host Cells: Implications for Possible Consequences of COVID-19 Vaccines. You can read my full deconstruction if you are interested, but let me just repeat here my overall impression of the paper from April 2021: Rarely in my many years of reading scientific papers have I seen so few experiments cited in a review article do such heavy lifting to provide such weak evidence for a conclusion like the claim that the spike protein can cause pulmonary hypertension. Let’s just say that the conclusions were highly speculative and based mainly on cell culture and on the observation that patients with full blown COVID-19 can develop pulmonary hypertension.

As Dr. Sullivan notes:

I learned many hospitalized COVID patients developed pulmonary hypertension. Autopsy showed the same kind of lung vessel damage I had. Longcoid patients with persistent breathlessness have the same findings. As in my case, their symptoms improve, but the damage remains. We now know the SARS-CoV2 spike protein can damage the lungs, heart, and brain in animals. It is toxic, irrefutably so. I know that’s uncomfortable to hear.

What, pray tell, is the difference between COVID-19 vaccination and a COVID-19 infection? It’s a matter of dose and infection. The spike protein generated by the vaccine is generally restricted mainly to the muscle into which it is injected and its concentration in the blood is exceedingly low. Full blown infection means virus everywhere and a lot more local concentration of spike protein. These are not comparable situations. Finally, as I related yesterday, evidence linking pulmonary hypertension to COVID-19 vaccines is really sparse and hard to find. If there were a link, I would expect to be able to find a lot more evidence by now.

None of this stops Dr. Sullivan from adding:

Until we study this systematically, we won’t know how many have been injured by COVID or by the spike protein itself.

Except that we’ve spent the last five years studying just these questions. I also note that the current administration has been slashing funding for research into COVID-19 and COVID vaccines. If Dr. Sullivan really thinks that spike protein, be it from COVID or from the vaccine, is such a dire health threat and has damaged the lungs of so many people, one wonders what he thinks of our government’s wholesale abandonment of funding COVID research. One wonders what Sen. Johnson thinks of this abandonment of science. Oh wait. I get it. Nothing about this hearing has anything to do with real science. Rather, it’s all about stoking fears of vaccines.

Nothing new from other old school antivaxxers

The rest of the antivax contingent consisted of people whose stories I either know well or know fairly well, all of which I discussed yesterday. As a result I don’t see much reason to discuss their testimony in depth because none of them said anything particularly new or surprising. In brief, I listened to the testimony from Emily Tarsell, Polly Tommey, and Brian Hooker, all of it a lot of the same ol’, same ol’. That’s why I’ll be fairly selective about what I discuss.

Tarsell’s testimony was first. Because she had received compensation from the Vaccine Court, that allowed her to portray her daughter Emily’s death as definitely having been due to Gardasil. As I discussed yesterday and Dorit Reiss concluded in her analysis of the case in 2018, the award was more due to legal errors than any real evidence that Gardasil had been the cause of Christina Tarsell’s death.

As for Brian Hooker, I discussed his case in detail yesterday, and he said nothing in his testimony that casts any new light on it. As I pointed out yesterday (and as Matt Carey explains) Hooker’s hasst always been full of holes, likely due to fallible and fallible and malleable human memory and parental recollection that can be, when compared to objective records, shown to be incorrect. Again, I urge you to read Carey’s post and Dorit Reiss’ analysis of Hooker’s case, as well as my discussion of it in my original review of VAXXED.

As with Hooker and Tarsell, Tommey’s testimony offered nothing new, but it did offer misinformation about measles deaths:

And then you shout out about measles to us. Those two girls in Gaines County, they did not die of measles. Children’s Health Defense have seen the medical records. We have had experts break down. Yet still, I sit here and I hear over and over again that those two girls died of measles. They did not die of measles. And yet the press and others consistently shout out that vaccines are safe and effective.

Spoiler alert: These two girls did die of measles, and Tommey is just repeating the same tropes that she did on CHD-TV in April. It’s also rather telling that the families of those unvaccinated girls have apparently only allowed CHD to have access to their medical records. If the evidence is so slam-dunk that the girls didn’t die of measles, why not release it to real experts? I think you know the answer to that question.

Tommey finished with one of her patented antivax rants:

They are vaccinate your family We all vaccinated our families. Everybody sitting here, bar two, vaccinated their families with catastrophic results. Over 12,000 signatures on those two buses of death, death, death. When will enough be enough? How many more buses? How many more children killed? How many more injured adults? And here’s a question for you, the senators. Who is going to look after our children when we the parents are no longer around? That can’t use a toilet that will never date all those things Dr. Hooker said. Our children are trapped at 29, 30 years old. They will never pay taxes. They need 24-hour care because of one vaccine, one moment in time. This is a national crisis that must be addressed. And I want to thank Senator Johnson and his team for giving us this day that we thought would never come. That the world could hear really and truly what happened to the people of America who are broken. And and this doesn’t just affect the person with the injury. By the way, it affects the siblings. It affects the extended family. One of us has to be a carer for life. So this has to stop. And we implore you please to follow us at children’s health events. at least break down the truth and get to the truth behind the science of what is really happening. No more FISA sponsored science. We need independent science and we need our pediatricians to stop getting bonuses for vaccinating our children. So, thank you to Senator Johnson and his team.

One can’t help but wonder if Hooker’s and Tommey’s repeition of how their children will “never pay taxes” is just a parroting RFK Jr.’s soft eugenics in which he used exactly the same phrase as the first problem with autistic people. As for the rest, there is no evidence that any of the 12,000 deaths attributed to vaccines by the parents signing the VAXXED bus were actually due to vaccines. Also, one can’t help but note the tasteless dig clearly aimed at Vaccinate Your Family, the provaccine group for which one of the other witnesses, Serese Marotta, serves as deputy chief executive officer. Marotta’s son Joseph died at age 5 of influenza in 2009. Because of Tommey’s dis, I am going to quote Marotta’s testimony in full without comment, as the testimony stands on its own:

Hello, my name is Serese Marotta and I am a mother who lost my child to a vaccinereventable disease. Thank you for allowing me to be here today and share my story. In 2009, my 5-year-old son Joseph was a healthy kindergartener. He was a typical little boy who loved Star Wars and Spider-Man. As a family, we enjoyed playing board games and building puzzles. Joseph was smart, funny, and inquisitive. Simply put, he was one of the joys of my life.

I was a protective mother and like other parents, I always tried my best to keep my children safe. To be honest, the thought of losing a child to a vaccinereventable disease never occurred to me. At the time, I incorrectly thought that these diseases were a thing of the past until I lost my son, Joseph, to flu during the H1N1 pandemic in October 2009. This is a picture of Joseph. The H1N1 flu vaccine that could have saved his life was not available in our community until two weeks after he died. Joseph was one of 288 children who died during the 2009-2010 flu season and one of over 2,700 children who have died from flu since 2004. Just this past flu season, 260 children have died from flu. the highest number of pediatric flu deaths we have on record for a non-pandemic year. And that’s just flu. Right now, because of declining immunization rates, we have outbreaks of measles and pertussis. Due to myths and disinformation, lack of access, anti-science sentiment, and other factors, Americans are continuing to die from diseases we have the tools to prevent. Parents continue to bury their children. We know from history what will happen if these trends continue. There is no acceptable loss when it comes to a child.

Let me briefly share how my life has changed since losing Joseph. It was incredibly devastating to watch my child die in front of me in an ICU room. It was incredibly hard to go home that morning and tell his seven-year-old sister that her little brother wasn’t ever coming home. Let me share what it felt like to walk into the funeral home holding my daughter’s hand and preparing her to see Joseph laying in a small coffin. Let me share how unbearable it was to stand in line at the county clinic to get my daughter her H1N1 vaccine, a vaccine that could possibly have saved Joseph’s life. Let me share how incredibly painful it has been for my family each and every day to remember that Joseph will never graduate college, get married, or have a chance to contribute to society. Let me share how my heart breaks over and over and over again because he is no longer here. Now, multiply that by thousands of other parents who have lost a child to a vaccine-preventable disease over the years. and the thousands more that are at risk if people don’t have access to science-based factual information about vaccines, vaccine safety, and vaccination services.

Sadly, Joseph’s story is not unique. I personally know many other parents who have lost their children. Moren lost her 2-year-old son, JJ, to flu. Katie lost her infant Callie to whipping cough. Nicole lost her 10-year-old daughter Teresa to COVID-19. There are survivors, too, like Tamika, who had cervical cancer before the HPV vaccine was available. The list goes on. These families are just a few examples of the real impacts of these diseases. According to the CDC, about four million deaths worldwide are prevented by childhood vaccinations every year. Vaccines undergo extensive safety testing in clinical trials before they are approved for use and the US has robust safety monitoring systems to make sure these vaccines continue to be safe and effective following approval. I want to close today by acknowledging that my story and experiences do not in any way minimize those of my fellow witnesses. We are all doing the best we can with the information we have. But I would be remiss if I did not remind the committee that the science is clear. Vaccines are safe and effective. Without these life-saving tools, our families and communities are at risk. Thank you.

I don’t think it was a coincidence that Krystle Cordingley’s testimony immediately followed Serese Marotta’s, either, in order to counter her story of a death due to a vaccine-preventable disease with a story attributing death to a vaccine against the disease that killed Serese Marotta’s son Joseph and that of Eric Stein, whose sister Jessica died as a toddler of influenza. In fact, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Cordingley was the last witness who testified.

Nor was it a coincidence that Sen. Johnson asked Brian Hooker what he thought about the testimony, following up with softball questions that allowed Hooker to spend several minutes regurgitating his “greatest hits” of old antivax canards about William Thompson, a.k.a. the “CDC whistleblower,” and Hooker’s own incompetent “reanalysis” of the Destafano et al study, a “reanalysis” in which he managed to ignore confounders in order to “prove” a link between vaccines and autism. The sad thing is, Sen. Blumenthal totally fell for the conspiracy theory narrative promulgated by Thompson that the investigators had destroyed all the documents associated with the study, saying:

Destruction of documents is absolutely abhorrent. It should be investigated and pursued condemned if there has been destruction of any documents. I think we can all agree on that point.

Hint to Sen. Blumenthal: There’s no evidence that any government document retention policies were violated. You should have asked Hooker this question: If the documents were destroyed, how is it that you were so easily able to get a hold of the raw data from the study to “reanalyze”? There are a whole bunch of people who were writing about Hooker‘s bullshit claims as he was making them (and resurrecting them after his papers were retracted) for the first time. Maybe you should contact some of us?

Not that the discussion section was all bad. It did allow Serese Marotta an opportunity to remind the committee that VAERS is not the only vaccine safety monitoring system and to mention V-safe and CISA (Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment).

Antivax narratives: Same as they ever were, except now they’re US policy

That Sen. Johnson has gone full bore antivax is now undeniable, and, like another Republican antivax legislator before him, Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), he’s abusing his committee chairmanship in order to promote an antivax narrative. What I still can’t figure out is why he resurrected such old antivax narratives. I mean, seriously. Brian Hooker and Polly Tommey? Why not exhume the corpse of Alfred Russell Wallace to have his zombie corpse read his 1898 antivax pamphlet Vaccination a Delusion; Its Penal Enforcement a Crime? After all, a lot of the claims made by Tommey and Hooker are little different than Wallace’s hoary antivax screed. These days, unfortunately, Dan Burton’s penchant in the 1990s and early 2000s for dragging CDC employees and directors before his committee to harangue them about what they were doing to study the supposed link between vaccines and autism seems almost quaint now. Back then, even his own party viewed him as a crank on vaccines and autism, and he had no real power to do anything to foward his antivax agenda. Right here, right now, in 2025, unfortunately, Sen. Johnson’s antivax conspiracy mongering is, more or less, mainstream in the Republican Party, and we have one of the all-time looniest antivax activists of all running the Department of Health and Human Services. I could laugh and shake my head at Dan Burton. I can’t so easily do that in response to Sen. Johnson.

We are in for dark times in public health.