(Children’s Health Defense)—Early childhood vaccination is associated with significantly higher odds of multiple acute and chronic health conditions in children, according to a new study comparing the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
The study, published last week on the preprint server Zenodo, is co-authored by members of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Science Department.
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD’s chief scientific officer and co-author, said the study — which involved the “largest collection of unvaccinated children studied in this context” — found the health outcomes of unvaccinated kids surpassed those of vaccinated children across multiple measures.
“Children were 60% more likely to suffer recurrent respiratory disease with at least double the risk of recurrent ear and strep infections,” Hooker said. “In general, the risk increased in the vaccinated group based on increasing number of vaccines.”
The study’s key findings include:
- Vaccination before 13 months was linked to “significantly elevated odds” of strep throat (130% higher odds), ear infection (100%), rhinitis (80%) and respiratory disease (60%) compared to unvaccinated children.
- Strep infection showed “a clear dose-response gradient” — with odds of contracting the condition rising by as much as 240% as the number of vaccine doses the children received increased.
- Developmental delay did not increase significantly in the overall cohort, but “was significantly elevated in the highest vaccine quartile,” which received over 10 vaccine doses. Members of this group had 40% higher odds of experiencing developmental delay.
Medical researcher Neil Z. Miller, who was not involved with the study, said its findings contribute to growing evidence suggesting that “unvaccinated children may experience better health outcomes than vaccinated children. He said the study’s findings also “provide important signals that warrant further investigation.”
Study examined over 6,000 children — including 3,825 unvaccinated kids
The study examined the records of 6,239 children — including 3,825 who were unvaccinated — from eight pediatric practices.
The researchers examined the children’s health outcomes based on the vaccines they received during their first year of life.
They looked at nine clinical conditions, tracking one-time diagnoses for developmental delay, rhinitis, abnormal breathing, nausea and vomiting, and recurring diagnoses — defined as three separate diagnoses over a 12-month period — for respiratory disease, strep throat, ear infection, skin rash and fever.
The children were divided into two groups: unvaccinated and vaccinated, defined as having received “at least one vaccine before 13 months” — a period during which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends at least 18 vaccine doses.
The study also recorded the number of shots each child received.
Higher vaccination linked to higher odds of onset of multiple conditions
According to the researchers, several of the study’s findings are significant — and provide evidence that vaccination may lead to risk factors for future chronic illnesses.
For example, vaccinated kids had more than double the odds of developing recurrent strep throat, “a finding with clinical significance given the need for repeated antibiotic treatment and the associated risks of antibiotic resistance, microbiome disruption, and rare but serious post-streptococcal sequelae” — a secondary condition or complication from a prior disease.”
The higher risk of ear infection faced by vaccinated children is also “a leading indication for antibiotic use, tympanostomy tube placement, and specialist referral in early childhood.”
The higher risk of respiratory disease for vaccinated kids “suggests that vaccinated children experience substantially greater respiratory morbidity than their unvaccinated peers.”
However, the findings of the study’s dose-response analysis — which looked at the onset of adverse health conditions in relation to the number of vaccine doses the children received — provided “compelling evidence” about potential vaccine risks.
The odds of recurrent strep infections were 50% higher in vaccinated children compared with kids who received between one and three vaccine doses, and 240% higher for kids who received between six and nine doses.
For children who received 10 or more vaccine doses, the odds of experiencing recurrent strep throat decreased somewhat compared to kids who received between six and nine doses, dropping to 170%.
According to the study’s authors, this “may reflect survivor bias — where conclusions are drawn from people who survived or remained in a study, while overlooking those participants who may have died or dropped out due to poor health.
Rhinitis showed a similar pattern, with odds of onset ranging from 30% for children who received between one and three doses, to 130% for kids who received between six and nine doses.
Vaccinated girls had 160% higher odds of strep throat compared with unvaccinated girls
The study found that girls were particularly susceptible to some of the conditions studied, including strep throat, which vaccinated girls had 160% higher odds of developing compared to their unvaccinated peers — representing “the strongest association observed in any sex-stratified analysis” in the study.
“The fact that kids who received at least one vaccine before 13 months were more often coded for several common infectious and respiratory diagnoses suggests an effect on the immune system,” said epidemiologist M. Nathaniel Mead, Ph.D., a McCullough Foundation scholar, who was not involved with this study.
Developmental delay wasn’t significantly linked with vaccination in the overall study, the analysis identified “significantly elevated odds” (40%) of developing such a condition among children who received between six and nine vaccine doses, compared to unvaccinated kids.
Hooker said these results may indicate the “healthy vaccinee” effect, “where parents of children developing more slowly, especially at younger ages, avoid vaccinations.”
The result for the most heavily vaccinated children “appears to be more in line” with past research showing that “higher risk was associated with increasing numbers of vaccines received.”
Recurring conditions may be sign of ‘innate immune suppression’
Hooker said the study provides several significant findings that expand existing knowledge of vaccine risks and can help inform future research.
A key feature of the study is that it directly compared health outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated children, rather than comparing differentially vaccinated groups of kids to each other — which Hooker said is “a methodological choice that systematically masks vaccine-associated morbidity.”
Few studies have previously examined recurring disease in children, or the link between such recurring conditions and vaccination.
“The primary thrust of the study: recurring disease in children has been studied only peripherally in the past, despite strong evidence that vaccines and vaccine components can negatively impact the immune system,” Hooker said.
According to Hooker, such recurring conditions may be a sign of “innate immune suppression.” He said the study’s findings “affirm this evidence as well as the need for additional study to understand the role of vaccines in recurrent infections and the extent that this is harming our population in the U.S.”
“The number of vaccine doses administered to infants and young children has increased dramatically since the early 1990s,” the study states. Yet, “rigorous long-term safety studies comparing fully vaccinated children to genuine unvaccinated controls remain exceedingly rare.”
Hooker said the study “affirms a significant body of literature” regarding the risks of vaccination even for “partially vaccinated children,” including a 2011 Institute of Medicine publication finding that there was not enough evidence to accept — or reject — a link between vaccines and a range of potential adverse events.
Hooker acknowledged certain methodological limitations of the study — including the convenience sample based on eight pediatric officers who were “willing to share deidentified medical data” and an inability to consider the timing of the onset of the conditions measured in relation to the administration of vaccine doses.
The study also does not indicate whether any specific childhood vaccines are linked to a higher risk of any of the conditions measured. Hooker said the current vaccination schedule broadly exposes children to “toxic levels of aluminum,” which the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has classified as a neurotoxin.
“The current schedule includes significant exposure to toxic levels of aluminum, which we know can travel to multiple organs in the body, including the brain. In addition, live virus exposure via rotavirus, measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) and varicella vaccines occurs throughout the first year of life,” Hooker said.
‘We need to better understand total health impacts of the current vaccine schedule’
Miller said that the study has some limitations, such as not being able to account for possible confounding variables, such as gestational age and birth weight but that overall, “the findings provide important signals that warrant further investigation.”
“Additional studies with larger populations and more robust methodology are needed before firm conclusions can be drawn,” Miller said.
Mead said the study is “timely,” because the National Institutes of Health (NIH) “recently announced plans for intensifying research on autism’s possible causes, without including vaccines as part of that focus.”
“Clearly we need to better understand the total health impacts of the current vaccine schedule,” Mead said.
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD’s senior research scientist and one of the study’s co-authors, noted that a small group of scientists was able to conduct research that larger institutions, including the federal government, have neglected — namely, directly comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated children’s health outcomes.
“The largest such study was not conducted with millions of taxpayer dollars, HMO data and by decree from the NIH. It was done by a small, unyielding non-profit that had to stitch together medical databases,” he said, referring to CHD.
“Something is very wrong with our national priorities, and our children are suffering because of it.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
