For more than a decade, the anti-vaccine movement in America has not relied solely on belief or emotion — it has relied on paper. Specifically, scientific articles published in reputable academic journals, complete with citations, data, and tables. Three of these are now being pulled from academic shelves — retracted, removed, or under investigation — precisely as the Trump administration has used them to justify some of the most contentious public health policy changes in generations.
According to The Guardian, within two months through early June 2026, three studies previously cited by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies have been subject to formal action by their publishing journals. Notably, in many cases, the scientific community had warned about the quality of these studies years earlier — but the relevant journals did not act.
From Advocacy Books to Federal Policy Rooms
The three papers The Guardian investigated share a clear commonality: all attempt to argue that vaccinated children have higher rates of health problems compared to unvaccinated children. This is the central thesis of the modern anti-vaccine movement — and these three studies served to provide a "scientific" veneer for that argument.
The first, by author Neil Z. Miller, was published in 2021 in the journal Toxicology Reports, arguing for a link between vaccines and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). The second, co-authored by Miller and Brian S. Hooker, published in 2020 in Sage Open Medicine, claimed that vaccinated children have higher rates of developmental delays and asthma compared to unvaccinated children. The third, by Carolyn M. Gallagher and Melody S. Goodman, published in 2010 in Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A, concluded that boys vaccinated against hepatitis B in the first four weeks of life have higher risk of autism diagnosis.
All three papers had been criticized by the research community for methodology and analysis well before this point. But more concerning is the path they took from academic journals into policy rooms.
Kennedy co-authored the book Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak with Hooker — the first author on the Sage Open Medicine paper now under investigation. Chapter 2 of that book uses Hooker's research as a cornerstone argument, attempting to demonstrate that vaccinated children have higher rates of asthma, developmental delays, and digestive disorders. When Kennedy became U.S. Health Secretary, that book — and its references — carried policy weight.
Next, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cited one of these three papers when the agency reversed its longstanding position that vaccines do not cause autism — a dramatic reversal that broke with broad scientific consensus. And all three papers were cited by Aaron Siri — an anti-vaccine lawyer who was once Kennedy's personal attorney — in a presentation to the Federal Vaccine Advisory Committee last December, as he advocated for changes to childhood vaccination schedules.
Poor Science Is Not New — But the Consequences Are
It must be understood that the appearance of poor-quality studies in scientific literature is not a rare phenomenon. The peer review process — where independent experts evaluate a study before publication — has known gaps, and many papers containing methodological errors are published and later corrected or retracted.
What is unusual here is the timing. The Gallagher and Goodman paper has existed on academic shelves since 2010 — over 15 years — while scientists criticized it for years. The Hooker and Miller paper published in 2020 was also criticized early on. The question to ask is not just why they were published, but why journals only acted in 2026 — when they had already become policy weapons.
The Guardian quotes Dr. Karina Top, a pediatrics professor at the University of Alberta, saying that those with the intention to spread vaccine misinformation have been skillful in misusing scientific terminology and publishing flawed research to create a facade of credibility and confuse the public. According to Top, these papers are poor science, in which the authors appear to be adjusting data to fit a hypothesis that vaccines cause harm.
Reactions from the authors have been mixed. Some of the four researchers involved have spoken out against the journals' decisions. For its part, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) did not respond to The Guardian's request for comment. Aaron Siri, in a statement to The Guardian, compared the journals' reconsideration of these papers to a "deliberate assassination" — and asserted that his assessment is based on hundreds of other articles, reviews, and trial documents, so he maintains his argument that there is no "available evidence" showing vaccines are "safe and effective.
The Real Cost: Measles, Whooping Cough, and Eroding Trust
Academic disputes over methodology usually affect only a small number of people. But this case is different, because the consequences exist in real life.
According to The Guardian, public health officials and doctors across the United States are noting an increase in vaccine-preventable diseases, including whooping cough and measles. Scientists criticizing the three papers argue that they have been used by the anti-vaccine movement to sow doubt in parents' minds, eroding trust in the safety of vaccines — drugs that have saved millions of lives.
This is where this story touches the Vietnamese American community directly. The Vietnamese community in America — particularly in major centers like Little Saigon in Orange County, California, the Houston area, and communities in Northern Virginia — has traditionally had relatively high childhood vaccination rates, in part due to collective memory of devastating epidemics in Vietnam and refugee experiences in Southeast Asian refugee camps, where disease spread uncontrollably due to lack of vaccines.
But that does not mean the community is immune to waves of misinformation. Vietnamese-language Facebook groups — where parents share information about children's health — have long been environments for anti-vaccine content distribution. When those arguments are endorsed by the name of a federal Health Secretary and papers published in reputable journals, their persuasiveness increases significantly within a community that traditionally respects credentials and professional authority.
The fact that these three papers are now being retracted or investigated is an important counterargument — but corrections rarely spread as quickly and powerfully as initial claims.
Why Act Now — And What That Says
The question of timing should not be overlooked. The Guardian notes that in some cases, journals acted years after scientists first raised quality concerns about these studies. This may reflect institutional pressure: once papers become tools for changing federal policy, continuing silence becomes harder to justify to the scientific community.
But this is also a double-edged sword. Kennedy and Siri supporters can — and are — arguing that political pressure drove the journals to act, not pure science. Siri calls this "deliberate assassination" — not by accident does he use that language. It repositions the story from "poor science discovered" to "political persecution of courageous research" — a far more effective narrative frame for this movement's voters.
This is a fundamental dynamic we need to look squarely at: scientific institutions acted slowly, and that slowness created a vacuum for misinformation to flourish. When those institutions finally act — though scientifically correct — they have handed their opponent a narrative weapon.
Precedent and the Way Forward
It bears repeating that this is not the first time the anti-vaccine movement has built a policy edifice on the foundation of problematic research. Andrew Wakefield's 1998 paper in The Lancet — the paper that birthed the myth of vaccine-caused autism — was retracted in 2010, twelve years after publication, after being discovered to contain serious data fraud and conflicts of interest. Wakefield was stripped of his medical license in Britain. But the wave of doubt he created continues to spread to this day.
That history shows that retracting papers does not automatically erase their influence. The mechanism of harm remains: papers have been shared, cited in books, presented before federal committees, and imprinted on the minds of millions of anxious parents.
What truly changes at this moment is the scale of political power standing behind these arguments. Wakefield was a doctor who lost his license. Kennedy is America's Health Secretary. When scientific institutions withdraw their evidence, he still has the machinery of government to continue shaping policy.
According to The Guardian, scientists who previously criticized these papers view recent retraction and investigation actions as positive steps. But "positive step" and "enough to reverse the damage" are two different things.
Most likely, what we are witnessing is the beginning of a protracted battle: on one side, the scientific community attempting to restore credibility to the academic literature on vaccines; on the other, a political movement with state power behind it, under no real pressure to stop because three papers were retracted. If Wakefield's history is any lesson, these papers will continue to be cited in English and Vietnamese-language social media groups, on podcasts, in parent meetings — with a small note that "biased science has tried to cover up the truth.
For the Vietnamese American community — people who typically trust professional authority but also have a history of government skepticism rooted in lived experience — the corrective message needs to be conveyed in languages and channels the community trusts: family doctors, local pharmacies, and community organizations — not just statements from the CDC or HHS, two agencies now under deeper political scrutiny than ever before.
Read The Guardian's full original report at the source link below.