No, it’s not just in your head, and it never was. Vaccinated children have more chronic diseases than unvaccinated children, and a new, previously suppressed study proves it.
For years, the rate of chronic illnesses among children has been rising. Yet, the medical community has never directly tested whether vaccines play a role despite widespread calls for a controlled comparison between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. With 72 doses now recommended by age two, it is no longer an abstract concern. It is a public health emergency of epic proportions.
The previously unpublished study by researchers at Henry Ford Health System found that children who received routine childhood vaccinations were more than twice as likely to develop chronic health conditions compared to their unvaccinated peers. The 10-year birth cohort study, later exposed by Congress, showed that vaccinated children had markedly higher rates of asthma, autoimmune disease, atopic disorders, and neurodevelopmental problems—findings that Henry Ford Health never made public.
The researchers followed 18,468 children born between 2000 and 2016 for up to 18 years. The study, titled “Impact of Childhood Vaccination on Short- and Long-Term Chronic Health Outcomes in Children: A Birth Cohort Study,” compared health outcomes among children who received routine vaccines with those who remained entirely unvaccinated. Using electronic medical records, state vaccination registries, and insurance data, the researchers tracked the development of chronic illnesses in both groups and controlled for confounding factors such as race, birthweight, prematurity, and sex.
What they found challenges decades of assumptions about vaccine safety. After multivariate adjustment, vaccination exposure was independently associated with a 2.5-fold increase in the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition compared with unvaccinated children. The researchers wrote that an increased risk for asthma, atopic disease, eczema, autoimmune disease, and neurodevelopmental disorders primarily drove this association. The probability of being free of chronic illness after 10 years was 83 percent among unvaccinated children but only 43 percent among those who had received vaccines.
In plain terms, 57 percent of vaccinated children in the Henry Ford cohort developed some form of chronic disease by age ten, compared to just 17 percent of those who were unvaccinated. The differences were not subtle. The study found a 4.3-fold higher risk of asthma, a 3-fold higher risk of atopic disease, nearly a 6-fold higher risk of autoimmune disease, and a 5.5-fold higher risk of neurodevelopmental disorders, including developmental delays, speech problems, tics, and behavioral disabilities. In fact, there were no cases of ADHD, tics, behavioral or learning disabilities, or brain dysfunction among unvaccinated children in the cohort.
The researchers also found that vaccinated children were far more likely to experience other conditions often dismissed as “minor.” They were seven times more likely to develop chronic ear infections, nearly nine times more likely to experience anaphylaxis, and more than five times as likely to suffer an asthma attack or bronchospasm. The authors found no significant difference between the groups for cancer or food allergy, conditions not plausibly linked to vaccination. That distinction mattered. By showing that the cancer rates were statistically identical, the researchers demonstrated that their methods could distinguish true signals from random variation.
The study’s authors anticipated one of the most common criticisms levied against unvaccinated-versus-vaccinated research—that vaccinated children visit doctors more often and therefore have more opportunities to be diagnosed. To test whether that could explain the higher rates of chronic illness, the researchers ran several sensitivity analyses. First, they removed all children who never sought medical care to ensure the results were not skewed by exceptionally healthy families who avoided the doctor altogether. The elevated risk for vaccinated children remained.
Second, they limited the analysis to children who had been continuously enrolled in the health system for at least five years. In that subset, the risk of developing chronic illness in the vaccinated group actually increased, rising from 2.5 to more than 4 times the risk of unvaccinated peers. Third, they examined only children who had at least one medical encounter during the study period, further controlling for care-seeking behavior. Again, the association persisted.
The data also showed that unvaccinated children were not simply avoiding medical care. Vaccinated children averaged seven medical visits per year, while unvaccinated children averaged two. However, among the 17 percent of unvaccinated children who did develop a chronic condition, the average number of visits rose to five per year, suggesting that when unvaccinated children became ill, their parents sought care at nearly the same rate as everyone else. Taken together, these analyses strongly suggest that the findings cannot be explained away by differences in healthcare utilization.
Researchers at Henry Ford Health framed their results cautiously. They acknowledged that while vaccines have reduced certain infectious diseases, their analysis revealed an unexpected pattern of chronic illness that warrants further investigation. They speculated that vaccines may trigger adverse immune responses or epigenetic changes in genetically susceptible individuals, citing the growing field of “adversomics,” which studies how immune responses to vaccines vary across genetic profiles. The paper emphasized that the findings do not establish causation but do highlight the urgent need for follow-up research—something the public never had a chance to demand, because Henry Ford Health buried the study.
Although the study was reviewed and approved by Henry Ford’s Institutional Review Board and met accepted standards for retrospective cohort research, it was never published in a medical journal. It remained unseen for years until it was entered into the congressional record during a 2025 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Only then did the public learn that one of the largest health systems in the United States had conducted and completed a comprehensive vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated analysis that pointed to increased long-term health risks from vaccination.
The reasons for the study’s suppression remain unclear. Henry Ford Health has publicly condemned the study as “dangerous disinformation” and claims it “did not prove anything.”
“The purposeful twisting of information in the ‘documentary’ poses a direct public threat. We implore anyone who comes across these myths to read the facts below,” the hospital system said in a statement.
What is clear is that the results were politically inconvenient. The study contradicted the narrative long promoted by federal agencies, academic institutions, and pharmaceutical companies that vaccines are uniformly safe and that no credible evidence links vaccination to chronic illness. By demonstrating that the vaccinated group experienced significantly more autoimmune disease, asthma, atopy, and neurodevelopmental disorders, the Henry Ford study opened a door that public health authorities have spent decades trying to keep closed.
The suppression itself has become a scandal. Critics have argued that withholding a study of this scale and quality constitutes scientific misconduct and violates the principles of transparency in publicly funded health research. The study’s authors, senior scientists within Henry Ford Health System, noted in their own discussion section that their findings contrasted sharply with expectations. They wrote that “despite this and in contrast to our expectations, we found that exposure to vaccination was independently associated with an overall 2.5-fold increase in the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition.” The acknowledgment suggests that the researchers began the project expecting to find reassurance for parents and physicians, only to uncover something far more troubling.
For decades, vaccine safety debates have been stifled with the argument that no credible data exist comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated children. The Henry Ford analysis invalidates that talking point. It was designed precisely to fill that gap and did so using rigorous methods, real-world data, and a large enough cohort to detect meaningful differences. Its findings were consistent, statistically significant, and internally validated. Yet rather than publish the results, the institution buried them.
The emergence of this study exposes a fault line between science and politics. Science seeks truth through data, even when that truth is uncomfortable. Politics seeks control over narratives. When data threatens the latter, it is suppressed.
In the end, the most critical vaccine safety study ever conducted was not published in a journal, not discussed in a medical conference, and not shared with the parents whose children were part of it. It was hidden, labeled “fatally flawed,” and forgotten until Congress forced it into the light. Yet its conclusions are in black and white, written by Henry Ford’s own researchers: exposure to vaccination was independently associated with a 2.5-fold increase in the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition compared to children unexposed to vaccination.
More than 54% of children in America have a chronic disease, and more than 57% of vaccinated children in this study had a chronic disease. The data speaks for itself.
