Vaccine Amnesia — How the Media Made Us Forget

This may be the most important chapter in the whole book. "Vaccine amnesia" is the deliberately induced forgetting of the great vaccine disasters — disasters that, in their day, were covered in the newspapers and on television in full detail. The same disasters repeat over and over, for two reasons: because those responsible are never punished, and because the press — bought by the pharmaceutical industry — erases the memory of what happened. This chapter is based on the work of A Midwestern Doctor, who gathered more than fifty old news reports that almost no one remembers.

The pattern that always repeats

Every new vaccine follows the same script, in four acts. First, the promise: it is sold to us as "safe and effective," the solution to wipe out a disease. Second, the reality: the injuries appear, documented both in the medical journals and in the press. Third, the cover-up: the government and industry hide the evidence, with the excuse that if people find out, they will stop vaccinating. And fourth, the amnesia: the press stops covering the topic under advertising pressure, and the new generation grows up not knowing any of it happened — so the same mistake can be made again, with a new vaccine.

Here is the key that explains everything: a mass-vaccination system can only be sustained by censoring all evidence of harm, and then using that absence of evidence as proof the vaccines are safe. It is a perfect trick: first they erase the evidence, then they say "see? there is no evidence."

How the industry bought the media

The turning point was 1997, when the FDA first allowed pharmaceutical companies to advertise medicines directly to the public. Only two countries in the world allow it: the United States and New Zealand. Since then, the industry pays the media about a billion dollars a year in advertising: ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and hundreds of newspapers and local stations. With that money at stake, no major outlet dares air anything that harms vaccines.

You do not have to take it on faith; the journalists themselves tell it. Megyn Kelly, when she was at Fox, said the bosses "would run out to the set" to tell her to shut the topic down the moment vaccine injuries came up. Sharyl Attkisson, an award-winning CBS investigative journalist, documented it in her books "Slanted" (2020) and "Follow the Science" (2025): since the early 2000s, advertising pressure made the critical reports disappear. And Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox right after a critical segment, in April 2023. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sums it up: Fox could not criticize vaccines because 70% to 75% of its advertising money came from the pharmaceutical companies.

The disasters they made us forget

Polio and the Cutter disaster (1955). The vaccine was approved and released in a hurry in April 1955. Two weeks later there were paralyzed children — in the very arm of the injection — all across the United States. It was found that only two of the five manufacturers had made the vaccine identical to the trial version, and that all the paralyzing ones came from a single lab: Cutter. A government researcher, Bernice Eddy, had warned immediately that the vaccine paralyzed monkeys; she was silenced. In 1960 she found something worse: the polio vaccines were contaminated with a cancer-causing virus, SV-40. For saying so, she was demoted and lost her laboratory. Between 40 and 98 million Americans received that virus. In 1963 they were forced to stop using the contaminated monkey kidneys, but the harm was done: an increase in cancer without precedent… until the COVID vaccines. The FDA itself wrote that any doubt about safety "could not be allowed to exist," because it would lower vaccination. And a huge detail: before all this, the government was the independent referee; after the lawsuits, it became an interested party, with reasons to cover up.

Swine flu (1976). Dr. Joseph Anthony Morris, the FDA’s chief vaccine control officer, found that the flu vaccines were ineffective and dangerous; he was ignored and persecuted. In fact, at a 1972 Senate hearing, 32 vaccines were pulled from the market as unsafe. In 1976, over a single dead soldier, the government decided to vaccinate the whole country with a rushed vaccine. Morris warned on the Donahue show — one of the most-watched in the country — that it was "unsafe, ineffective and unnecessary." The result was Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralysis: officially 1 in 100,000, but some doctors saw that harm in 6% of their patients. Hundreds paralyzed, dozens dead, thousands of lawsuits. And what "lesson" did the government draw? Not "stop pushing unsafe vaccines," but "communicate better" so people would not lose confidence in the health authorities.

DPT (whooping cough). It was extremely dangerous from the start: seizures, permanent brain damage, and crib death in babies. Pediatricians did not recognize the reactions and swore it was "100% safe." Safer versions existed, but cost more to make; it was like the famous Ford Pinto memo, where it was cheaper for the company to pay the lawsuits than to make a safe product. In 1982, an NBC program shook the country and the lawsuits began. Parents founded "Dissatisfied Parents Together," today the National Vaccine Information Center (nvic.org), led by Barbara Loe Fisher. In 1986 the law passed that gave manufacturers legal immunity and created the compensation system and the injury registry called VAERS. Between 1982 and 1997 there were many critical reports on NBC, ABC, CNN, Donahue and others. Then, silence.

And so with almost all of them. Hepatitis B is given to every newborn, though it only benefits high-risk groups (like those who share needles); it causes autoimmune and neurological problems. The pneumococcal one causes seizures and sometimes death, and was not even tested against a placebo; the CDC members who approved it had conflicts of interest. The anthrax vaccine, in the Gulf War, injured more soldiers than the entire war: about 250,000 of 697,000 developed "Gulf War Syndrome." The smallpox one, in the Iraq War, caused myocarditis, and was halted over the harm to soldiers before reaching the public. And the flu (influenza) vaccine gives minimal benefit, almost never matches the strain going around, and often makes the flu worse; many healthcare workers got Guillain-Barré from it. Even the journalist Piers Morgan caught the flu ten days after Dr. Oz vaccinated him on camera.

HPV (Gardasil): one of the worst

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil, is — according to A Midwestern Doctor — one of the worst vaccines in history, made for pure profit. Its own trials showed that between 2.5% and 50% of the girls developed autoimmune and neurological problems, though the maker, Merck, was deliberately vague in reporting it. They covered up the injuries just as they later would with COVID. In Europe, where the industry cannot buy the press the same way, it was discussed: a 2015 Danish report made many injured girls realize, at last, that they were not alone.

COVID: the same, but worse

With the COVID vaccines everything repeated, but on a larger scale. As with polio, they used a different manufacturing process than the trials, more dangerous, and many believe that is one reason for so much harm. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine uses a modified adenovirus, and it turns out Bernice Eddy had discovered, decades earlier, that adenovirus vaccines caused cancer.

The data that came out are chilling. A study from South Korea’s national health insurance, using the records of half of Seoul, found a huge increase in very many diseases. In mental health: depression rose 68%, anxiety 44%, and sleep disorders 93%. And in cancer, one year after the vaccine: thyroid +35%, stomach +34%, colon +28%, lung +53%, breast +20%, prostate +69%. With the booster doses it was even worse: pancreas +125% and Hodgkin’s lymphoma +201%. Hiding this data from the public "to avoid creating vaccine hesitancy" was one of the greatest crimes of the whole pandemic.

To achieve that silence, the media were offered million-dollar advertising contracts in exchange for positive coverage. Almost the only one who dared to speak was Tucker Carlson, because his show did not depend on pharmaceutical money… and that is why he was fired.

Autism: the doubts are from long before Wakefield

People were made to believe the fear that vaccines cause autism began with a single "fraudulent" study, that of Dr. Andrew Wakefield. That is false. The doubts about vaccine brain damage are from long before. Between 1999 and 2015 there were dozens of reports on Fox, CNN, ABC and CBS — several of them by the journalist Sharyl Attkisson — about the link between vaccines and autism. In one, even a former NIH director admitted that "some children may develop autism from vaccines," and that it should stop being dismissed and be researched. Larry King had Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey on his show discussing it. The last report linking vaccines and autism aired in 2015; after that, nothing, until RFK’s arrival in government put the topic back on the table.

The firms that manufacture opinion

None of this is chance; there are companies dedicated to manufacturing what you think. The same public-relations firm (Hill & Knowlton) that invented the fake "Nayirah testimony" to drag the United States into the Gulf War has long worked for the pharmaceutical industry, and was hired to promote the COVID narrative and erase doubts about the vaccines. It is the same trick as with war: after Vietnam, the Pentagon learned to "sanitize" the image of the conflict, with "embedded" journalists who only showed the approved footage. With vaccines they do the same: they show us only the clean picture.

VAERS and the hope

The system for reporting vaccine injuries, VAERS, was created in 1986 precisely because doctors and manufacturers never reported the injuries. Today, the media, the government and the industry themselves disparage it, so you will not believe it. But there is hope. For the first time, the independent press — people like Attkisson, Kelly and Carlson, now outside the major outlets — has more influence than before. RFK is trying to restrict pharmaceutical advertising, something needed for decades. And there are now more independent productions on the harms of COVID than on all the previous vaccines combined. The amnesia can be broken.

When people stop vaccinating, what does the press propose?

In August 2026 the BBC published a report on falling childhood vaccination rates in Britain. What is revealing is not the figures, but the explanation the report itself offers and the solutions it proposes.

First, the explanation. The article quotes a senior fellow at a think tank who says that, despite the headlines about “anti-vaxxers”, most parents who turn down vaccination are not ideologically opposed: convenience plays a big role, and vaccination rates are highest when parents interact with medics regularly, because the doctor reminds them and tells them exactly where to go.

Read that again, because it is all there. The diagnosis is not “parents have doubts that ought to be answered.” The diagnosis is “parents are not having enough contact with the system.”

And from that diagnosis come the solutions. One is to put vaccination clinics in shopping centres and car parks, so a parent can pop in and have the child vaccinated while out shopping. The other, towards the end of the article, is to make vaccination mandatory.

That is this chapter's pattern once more, and it is worth naming: when consent falls, what is offered first is convenience and then compulsion. What is never offered is an answer to the questions. A system sure of itself would answer the doubts; one that cannot answer them looks for ways to avoid having to.

The same report credits vaccines with the enormous fall in child mortality since the 1800s, saying that “scientists broadly agree” they were key. It is worth noticing the shape of that argument: scientists agreeing is not the same as something being proven, and this whole chapter is about what happens when the two are confused.

This reading of the report is Dawn Lester's, in her article “How the Mainstream Continues to Mislead” of 8 August 2026. She goes further than this book: she holds that vaccines have never been proven to prevent disease because germs are not the cause of disease. That position is hers; what is above stands on its own without accepting it. See also Chapter 4.

In short

History repeats because they make us forget. If you know these disasters — Cutter, the swine flu, DPT, anthrax, Gardasil, COVID — they can no longer fool you with the same old trick. Before believing that something is "safe and effective," ask yourself two questions: who is paying the person telling me this?, and where is the data? Find it yourself. The best vaccine against the lie is memory.

To learn more (sources in English)

Vaccine amnesia: how the media used it to make us forget: https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/vaccine-amnesia-how-the-media-used

The National Vaccine Information Center: https://www.nvic.org

What makes all vaccines so dangerous?: https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/what-makes-all-vaccines-so-dangerous

The forgotten science of vaccine disease provocation: https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-forgotten-science-of-vaccine