For many parents, there’s something deeply satisfying about taking a baby, especially a firstborn, to the doctor.

After all, so-called well baby visits give parents the opportunity to talk to an expert about a child’s development, ask burning questions about when the baby will be able to sit up without assistance, what to do about teething, how the baby’s height and weight compare with others, and to get the baby life-saving vaccines.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), childhood vaccinations prevent at least 4 million deaths worldwide every year. This is why the CDC recommends such a large number of vaccines for American children, starting with a vaccine against hepatitis B, a sexually transmitted disease, that’s recommended for all newborns during the first hours of life.

Current Childhood Vaccine Guidelines

Every year, the nation’s top disease experts come together to decide what vaccines should be included on the CDC’s Recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule for young people aged 18 years old and younger.

This schedule is recommended by the CDC and then “mandated” by each state as a requirement for children to attend school.

It’s approved by the CDC, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and other health organizations.

Parents are told that the current recommendations are based on a review of the most recent scientific information available for each vaccine.

Currently, the following fourteen vaccinations are on the schedule:

• Hepatitis B: 3 doses.
• Rotavirus: 3 to 4 doses (depending on the brand).
• DTaP (diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus): 5 doses; then another dose of Tdap at age 11.
• Hib (haemophilus influenzae type b): 3 to 4 doses (depending on the brand).
• PCV (pneumococcal disease): 4 doses.
• Polio: 4 doses.
• COVID-19: number of doses depends on the child’s age and type of vaccine given.
• Flu: 1 to 2 doses every year.
• MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella): 2 doses.
• Chickenpox: 2 doses.
• Hepatitis A: 2 doses.
• HPV (human papillomavirus): 2 to 3 doses.
• MenACWY (meningococcal disease): 1 to 2 doses.
• MenB (meningococcal disease): 2 to 3 doses.

Although school administrators tell parents that vaccines are “mandatory” for school inclusion, different states require different vaccines for children to attend school, and every state allows for medical exemptions.

In addition, most states allow for religious exemptions, and some states also allow for philosophical exemptions.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Since the late 1980s, the CDC has continued to add vaccines to the recommended schedule without taking any vaccines off the schedule.

The number of vaccinations currently recommended has more than quadrupled since the 1970s.

At the same time, children’s health in the United States has seen a marked decline. While these trends may or may not be related, many parents have started to question whether their children really need this many vaccinations this early in their lives in order to stay healthy and whether over-vaccination is contributing to some of the health problems they’re seeing in their children.

These parents and the thousands of medical doctors and research scientists who now openly support them point out that while vaccines undergo safety testing on a vaccine-by-vaccine basis, childhood vaccines aren’t tested in combination with other vaccines before they’re approved.

“I think it’s legitimate for parents to have questions and concerns,” said Collin Lynn, a family physician based in Redding, California. “It’s definitely possible that we’re at a tipping point where we’re giving too many vaccines. Sometimes I wonder if, in the future, we’ll look back at the 2000s and say, ‘What were we thinking? Why were we giving so many vaccines?’”

In addition to concerns about the cumulative effect of giving so many vaccines to such young children, experts are questioning whether certain vaccine ingredients (pdf)—including aluminum and polysorbate 80—are safe.

At the same time, chronic disease in the United States is on the rise (pdf), so much so that nearly half the population now suffers from a chronic illness. And these conditions account for 86 percent of our current health care costs.

Autoimmune Disease

Autoimmune conditions cause the body to turn on itself, producing antibodies that attack its own body tissues.

Type 1 juvenile diabetes, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, scleroderma, Raynaud’s syndrome, and lupus are all autoimmune diseases.

Recent research suggests that asthma, which now affects more than 10 percent of young people aged 20 to 24, is also an autoimmune condition.

Over-vaccination may be a primary cause of autoimmune problems, including diabetes in both children and adults.

In 2022, a team of nine researchers in Japan reported that a 51-year-old woman developed acute-onset Type 1 diabetes six weeks after receiving just one dose of an mRNA vaccine.

Chinese scientists reported a similar case. In Turkey, clinicians have also seen four cases of Type 1 diabetes in patients directly following mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

A Medical Doctor Investigates

Dr. John Barthelow Classen, whose medical degree is from the University of Maryland, began studying autoimmune disorders in the 1990s.

In 1996, Classen published a paper in the journal Autoimmunity reporting the results of experiments on immune modulation in rodents. He looked at the effects of administering vaccines in doses intended to mimic those given to human children.

He found that vaccines given at birth or within the first two weeks of life seemed to offer some protection against developing diabetes, but vaccines given after two months of life did the opposite: They increased the risk of diabetes compared with the control group.

“Animal studies have demonstrated the timing and content of human vaccines can affect the development of diabetes,” Classen wrote. “Clinical trials of new human vaccines are not designed and generally not powered to detect an effect of immunization on the development of IDDM [insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus]. These animal toxicology studies indicate that the effect of vaccines on human insulin dependent diabetes needs to be examined.”

Immunization practices, Classen suggested, may be putting some children at higher risk for diabetes.

Predisposing Children to Diabetes?

Classen’s brother, David C. Classen, is an infectious disease specialist at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City. The Classen brothers decided to look for data that could indicate whether vaccine practices predisposed someone to or protected them against Type 1 diabetes.

In 1997, they published their results in the journal Infectious Diseases in Clinical Practice. They found statistically significant correlations between vaccination changes and subsequent rates of diabetes.

The Classens suggested that vaccination at birth may be protective by affecting the immune system in such a way that the body is better able to combat coxsackievirus infections (transmitted from mothers during birth), which had been previously thought to account for about 27 percent of diabetes cases.

However, they also found that in Finland, three separate times, increases in vaccines administered were followed by increases in Type 1 diabetes.

In Christchurch, New Zealand, incidence of diabetes also rose sharply (to 18.1 in 100,000 from 11.2 in 100,00) after the introduction of hepatitis B vaccination.

“These studies suggest that the timing of pediatric immunizations may alter the development of IDDM in humans,” the Classens concluded. “The results also indicated that previous vaccine trials are flawed because they are not designed to detect associations between vaccination and autoimmune diseases.”

High-Quality Scientific Evidence

In 1999, the Classens wrote a letter to the editor of the BMJ about another study they did.

“We initiated and funded a collaborative study with Tuomilehto on the effect of the Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccine on type 1 diabetes and found that the data support a causal relation,” they wrote.

“Furthermore, the potential risk of the vaccine exceeds the potential benefit.”

The researchers compared a group that wasn’t vaccinated with a group that received one dose of the vaccine and a group that received four doses.

By the time the study group was 7 years old, cumulative incidence of diabetes per 100,000 was 261 for those who got four doses, 237 for those who got one dose, and 207 for those who didn’t get the vaccine.

That relative difference stayed the same as the children aged. By 10 years old, 398 of the four-dose group had developed diabetes compared with 376 of the one-dose group and 340 of the no-dose group.

In other words, there were 58 more cases of Type 1 juvenile diabetes in children who had received four doses of the Hib vaccine than in those who hadn’t received the vaccine at all. There were 22 more cases of diabetes in those who had received four doses than in those who had received only one dose.

Timing of Diabetes Onset Consistent With Biological Mechanism

The Classens’s 2002 study shows that vaccine-induced Type 1 diabetes usually takes three to four years to develop.

Then the brothers decided to look for clusters of diabetes cases occurring after the introduction of other vaccines.

In 2003, they published a review article titled “Clustering of Cases of Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus Occurring 2-4 years after Vaccination Is Consistent with Clustering after Infections and Progression to Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus in Autoantibody Positive Individuals.”

They found that clusters occurred 2 to 4 years after vaccination with MMR, pertussis, and BCG vaccines.

They also found declines in the incidence of diabetes following the discontinuation of pertussis and BCG vaccines, a particularly noteworthy finding, as diabetes incidence is generally increasing all over the world.

The 2-to-4-year lag time is consistent with studies demonstrating that it takes at least two years for anti-pancreatic antibodies to destroy enough islet cells in the pancreas to cause diabetes.

Studies have also demonstrated that autoimmune disease onset often occurs approximately three years after multiple autoantibodies can be detected in the blood. 

Bradford Hill Criteria for Determining Causation

Causation is notoriously difficult to prove in medical science.

As we’ve written about before, Sir Austin Bradford Hill of the University of London tackled this problem and laid out nine viewpoints to consider in 1965: strength of association, consistency, specificity, temporality, biological gradient (also known as dose–response relationship), plausibility, coherence, experiment, and analogy.

Classen’s research touches on various Bradford Hill viewpoints.

Although the associations he found between each individual vaccine and the development of Type 1 diabetes weren’t particularly strong, Classen demonstrated consistency, specificity, temporality, a dose–response relationship, biological plausibility, and coherence.

In addition, he has confirmed his statistical calculations with prospective animal and human studies.

In short, Classen soberly and methodically set out to explore causation from every angle.

His work demonstrates that the more we vaccinate our children, at least after the age of two months, the more likely they are to develop Type 1 diabetes. 

More Evidence Linking Juvenile Diabetes to Vaccines

In a 2008 paper (pdf), Bart Classen analyzed Danish data from children born between Jan. 1, 1990, and Dec. 31, 2000.

He again found statistically significant increases in diabetes risk for vaccination with Hib, DTiP (“iP” is inactivated polio), whole-cell pertussis, MMR, and oral polio vaccines.

In reviewing Classen’s research and hundreds of other vaccine studies, independent researcher Neil Z. Miller, author of the 2016 book “Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies: 400 Important Scientific Papers Summarized for Parents and Researchers,” also found confirmation of a causal link between over-vaccination and diabetes.

“The scientific papers … provide strong evidence that childhood vaccines significantly increase the risk of developing Type 1 diabetes,” Miller wrote, pointing in particular to the Hib vaccine. “Other papers show an increased risk of developing Type 1 diabetes after hepatitis B, MMR and pertussis vaccines. Epidemics of Type 2 diabetes, obesity, and metabolic syndrome have also been linked to vaccines.”

However, instead of reevaluating current immunization practices, the conventional medical community either ignores the science done by medical researchers such as Classen and Miller or paints them as wild-eyed anti-vaccine extremists.

Scientists who prove that popular and profitable pharmaceutical products can cause harm risk losing their livelihood and their standing in the scientific community.

But Lynn, who has a sign on the wall of his office that reads, “In science all questions are valid and all answers are tentative,” said he feels it’s important for parents to ask questions, especially if their children are having chronic health problems, such as eczema, allergies, or juvenile diabetes.

In fact, Lynn encourages parents to become medical sleuths and supports them in taking the approach to vaccinating that they feel most comfortable with.

“I encourage my parents to ask questions and investigate,” Lynn said.

If our current vaccination program is in any way responsible for the rising incidence of Type 1 juvenile diabetes and other chronic diseases, parents need to know.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Epoch Health welcomes professional discussion and friendly debate. To submit an opinion piece, please follow these guidelines and submit through our form here.