Overview
- Monday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sent a letter to Toxicology Reports’ editor asking for a detailed account of who reviewed the 2021 paper, what standards were used, and why it was removed.
- The removed paper was authored by Neil Z. Miller and analyzed VAERS reports from 1990–2019, reporting a statistical signal for sudden infant deaths after vaccination while explicitly saying it did not prove causation.
- Elsevier and Toxicology Reports say they removed the article after finding serious methodological flaws, specifically that VAERS is a passive reporting system unsuited to establish causal links from the data.
- The study re-entered public debate when attorney Aaron Siri cited it to the CDC advisory committee that approved changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, a move that a federal judge has since halted.
- Medical and policy experts publicly condemned the paper’s methods and questioned Kennedy’s intervention, while the publisher defended the removal and the author disputes the decision.