Dr. Brian Hooker is the Senior Director of Science and Research at Children's Health Defense
Children’s Health Defense is a nonprofit organization based in the United States.
Its mission is to protect the health of children worldwide, to identify the causes of health problems
among children, and hold those responsible to account.
On April 29, 2026, Brian Hooker gave a lecture in Switzerland, presented by AUF1 host Thomas Eglinski.
A personal experience led Brian Hooker to begin exploring the topic of vaccinations in
relation to chronic childhood illnesses 28 years ago.
Even back then, he saw that the number of chronically ill children worldwide had risen significantly.
Today, one in five children in the United States has a developmental disorder.
His scientific studies—in which he compares vaccinated and unvaccinated children with regard to chronic
diseases—as well as similar studies by his colleagues, are dismissed out of hand for publication by medical journals.
This raises the question:
Why are these very elaborate vaccine studies being categorically suppressed by highly professional experts in their
field, and why are the dramatic connections being kept secret?
Who has an interest that the medical community at large and the world's population never find out about this?
Learn more about Brian Hooker's scientific work and the overwhelming findings of
his scientific studies in this presentation.
So, let's get started. So, I am the Chief Scientific Officer of Children's Health Defense.
And I started as an associate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in about 2015.
And ended up working directly as an employee of Children's Health Defense in 2021.
So, my background is that I have a vaccine-injured child.
He was injured at 15 months, and had three vaccines with an active ear infection.
And then he regressed very, very quickly into neuro developmental disabilities. He was diagnosed with autism.
So, what I found, that is 28 years ago, what I found is that the number of sick children in the United
States and really in the world has increased significantly.
So, within one in six children, now it's one in five children, in the United States has a developmental disability.
At least one in 31 children have autism, have an autism diagnosis.
And in my home state, California, it's one in 19.
And in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, it is now one in ten boys.
And if you saw the movie Vaxxed, predictably, three in ten African-American boys.
So, 30% of African-American boys in L. A. County have an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis.
So, all of these have increased since the late 1980s, early 1990s.
And we also know that many times mainstream practitioners, pharmaceutical representatives, government representatives
tell us that vaccine injury is rare, that it's one in a million.
Only one in a million people have a vaccine reaction. But that's not true.
We know that the CDC commissioned a study. This study was commissioned in 2010.
And in this study, they looked at 1.4 million vaccines given over a three-year time period.
And out of that, they had 35,000 potentially serious adverse events.
So, to me, that's not one in a million, that's 35,000 in a million, which is a very
different number. Or it worked out to about 2.6%.
And then, when you count the fact that individuals get more than one vaccine, see, this original number was for one
vaccine. But if you get more than one vaccine, then your chances of having a vaccine injury go up to 10%.
So, this is potentially serious.
And, in their own fashion, the CDC refused to move forward with this grant and did not renew the grant.
And this would have automated our adverse events reporting system.
But they, rather than move into the future and really understand vaccine injury, they took a pass.
So, what happens, when we look at vaccinated versus unvaccinated children?
Well, we know already that the CDC simply did not want to know the information.
They cut off all contact with these researchers. They would not return their emails, would not return their phone calls.
But I started looking at the outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children in 2017.
When a child receives a single vaccine, that makes them vaccinated. If a child receives no
vaccines, then that makes them unvaccinated.
So that's how in the following slides we differentiate between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
So these aren't necessarily fully vaccinated children, but just one or more makes them vaccinated children.
But when we look at this, this was a study that was done in 2017 by a good colleague of mine, Anthony Mawson.
And the red bars are the vaccinated children. The blue bars are the unvaccinated children.
And you can see consistently allergic rhinitis, that's nasal allergies, 30 times greater in the vaccinated group.
And by and large, these were partially vaccinated children.
These happened to be home school children in this sample.
And then when you look at the rest of the conditions that were studied, these were by and large autoimmune disorders or
developmental disorders, that they were anywhere between 3.9 to about 5 times higher in the vaccinated children.
I'm encouraged to see more people come.
We get more bodies in this small room, it gets hotter, but the families that sweat together, stick together.
So when you look at then the same study, they looked at actual infections in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children.
And they saw about five times as much pneumonia.
This was pneumonia that generally required hospitalization.
And then about 20% of all the children that were vaccinated experienced chronic ear
infections and only less than 6% of the unvaccinated.
Now we know that not all babies are born equal. Okay, sometimes babies are born less healthy than others.
And in this case, the researchers looked at pre-term birth. So these were premature children.
And looking at vaccinated versus unvaccinated,
so if they were vaccinated and preterm, their chances of having a neurodevelopmental disorder, this would be like autism, tics,
ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, Asperger's syndrome - their chances of having that diagnosis if they were
preterm and vaccinated were 14.5 times higher than if they were regular term and unvaccinated.
So in this same group of individuals, if they were regular term and vaccinated, then they had a chance of having
that diagnosis 2.7 times greater than the unvaccinated group.
Okay, then, to get this type of research published in mainstream scientific or medical literature is, we should get contact...
It's a very, very difficult process. It is what we call contact sport.
And this paper was first published and, well, was accepted for publication in a journal called Frontiers in Public Health.
Once it was accepted, and the abstract, just the abstract of the paper was posted, it made a big splash.
There were 80,000 downloads of just the abstract in the first weekend in which this
paper was featured on the journal's website.
Ultimately, well, actually that afternoon, Monday afternoon after the weekend, the paper
was pulled down from Frontiers in Pediatrics.
And they said, oh, we didn't retract the paper. We weren't finished with the review.
- Yeah, that's right. - We weren't finished with the review.
And we re -reviewed it, and this time, we decided to reject the paper.
So fortunately, this paper was republished.
It was republished in a more independent journal.
But the whole process then ended up with the lead author, Anthony Mawson, at that point
in time being suspended by his university.
So at least the research was published.
Now I came along with a medical journalist, Neil Miller, in 2020 and we actually started this research early in 2018.
We were looking at children who are vaccinated in their first year of life versus children who
were not vaccinated in their first year of life.
So we were only looking at infant vaccinations, at the time that constituted about 24 shots. Difference between the two.
But like the Mawson study, the majority of our vaccinated children did not follow the entire schedule.
So maybe on average they got eight to nine vaccines over that first year.
Well, even looking at that first year of life where vaccination is intense, children are getting as many as six to seven vaccines
at a time, developmental delays were doubled. And so they actually doubled, asthma was up at 4. 5 times
greater in the vaccinated group than the unvaccinated group,
remember these red bars are just partially vaccinated.
And then ear infections were double the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated group.
And then when we looked at gastrointestinal disorders we saw something very close to developmental delays too,
so to me that was very interesting.
So children that were vaccinated had 2.5 times as many gastrointestinal disorders as unvaccinated children.
But boy did we have a hard time getting this paper published.
Okay, so we submitted this paper to five different peer-reviewed reputable medical journals.
So you would think that one of the journals would at least review it, okay, not just dismiss it summarily.
But typically, they would reject the paper within 24 hours of us submitting the paper.
In fact, one reviewer wrote, Brian Hooker is an anti-vaxxer, end of sentence, I reject this paper.
So it was an attack on me, it was not an attack on the work.
We finally found the journal SAGE Open Medicine,
and it's typical that scientific journals review a paper once and then they accept or reject.
Okay, in this case, they had four different peer reviewers and they reviewed the paper three
separate times with comments each time over 11 months.
So it was longer than a pregnancy, birthing this paper.
Okay, the paper was finally accepted by SAGE and it was published in May 2020, just in time for the pandemic.
And it's been viewed, or downloaded about 300,000 times. It's a very, very popular paper.
About every five to six months, I will receive an email from the journal of somebody complaining
about the paper that it needs to be taken down.
So far, six years later, they're still sticking with us.
So this was an important stake in the ground, because not only is this an important paper, an important journal, but the journal
was indexed in the US National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, okay. So it is a target
that Pro-vax, scientists, executives, doctors, whomever, try to take down periodically.
We, undeterred, we started a new paper, and that was published in 2021,
and we grew our cohort, or our group of children that we studied, to double of the original paper.
Now, at this point, we are comparing fully vaccinated patients, following the schedule, versus fully
unvaccinated patients, and when we do that, our red bars grow.
So you look at allergies, gastrointestinal disorders, asthma, autism, ADHD, and chronic ear infections,
and some of these differences, okay, so chronic ear infections almost 28 times higher in the vaccinated group,
fully vaccinated group, versus the unvaccinated group.
ADHD, one in ten children in the United States has an ADHD diagnosis, 20 times higher in
the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated group.
We also found out some interesting things about autism.
So, when we looked at those children who were breastfed or not, and vaccinated or not, we saw something very, very interesting.
The least risk was if you had an unvaccinated child.
This was all vaccines regardless of where they were before or after their first birthday.
So, they didn't receive any vaccines.
If they were breastfed, then their risk was the lowest.
If you go to unvaxxed but they were bottle-fed or formula-fed, they were 2.5 times more likely to get an autism diagnosis.
If they're vaxxed, and breastfed, so the opposite, then they're 6.7 times more likely to get an autism diagnosis.
And then finally, those that fared the worst at 12.5 times greater were vaccinated.
These are fully vaccinated children and they were not breastfed.
And we qualified breastfed, for a child to be considered breastfed, they had to get breast milk consistently over
at least a six -month period before their second birthday.
And so, you know, I know there are situations that are difficult for having a new baby.
And I want to have compassion for that regarding the ability to consistently breastfeed.
Also, we want to look at vaccinated versus unvaccinated and type of birth, whether it was
a normal birth or it was a C-section birth.
And again, I realize that there are certain emergency situations where it's very, very difficult.
It's a very difficult choice for a family to decide to have a cesarean section birth.
The utmost of health is having a healthy living child.
So, you know, I completely understand that.
But when we look at the least risk, again, it was unvaccinated, but it was a normal birth,
the chances of having an autism diagnosis if you had a C-section, that went up to 4.6 times greater.
And that's really the hygiene hypothesis.
There's a lot of inoculation of vital microbes associated with vaginal birth.
And in a C-section, those are not replenished.
So that has been shown to be very, very vital.
There are alternatives for C-section to be able to inoculate an unborn child.
But then if we flip-flop, if they're vaccinated with a normal birth, then we saw a 9.2 times higher.
And then the worst, one of the worst outcomes we saw in the study - my son - vaccinated
and C-section birth at 18.7 times greater risk.
And this particular paper was published in 2021 in the Journal of Translational Science.
I want to feature a couple of other papers before I go back to my own research.
This is the results of a study by James Lyons-Weiler and Dr. Paul Thomas.
It was published in 2020.
And you can see something very, very similar.
They looked at actual office visits.
How many office visits did these children have in Dr. Thomas's practice when they were vaccinated red versus unvaccinated blue?
And in those office visits, did they receive these particular diagnoses?
And again, we saw something very, very similar.
But you notice autism is absent.
And in fact, in Dr. Thomas's practice, because these red bars, they were typically partially vaccinated,
there were not enough autistic kids to do statistics.
In fact, the rate of autism in his practice was about 1 in 250.
So, again, publishing this research is dangerous. It's very, very difficult.
And what happened in this particular case was that the paper was published in a very reputable journal, international
journal of environmental research and public health in 2020.
Almost immediately after the paper hit the press and was published, Dr. Paul Thomas's medical license was revoked.
And so he could no longer - in fact, it was an emergency suspension - he could no longer practice
medicine, period. In the state of Oregon. Okay.
Then this was then followed by an alone anonymous complaint to the journal.
The paper was retracted in 2021.
The journal called me,
I was one of the original reviewers in the paper and said, oh, we were considering retracting the paper.
We're afraid that it came from a single practitioner's practice.
And we think that unvaccinated children are too different than vaccinated children in order to do a valid study.
And they always paint these children - adults, people that question the safety and
efficacy of vaccines - they paint you into a corner
where they say you're different, you're weird, you go to the doctor less, you stay at home if you have a cerebral hemorrhage.
You know, any preposterous thing to disqualify this type of study.
That's what they did.
So the journal calls me and I say, hello,
you know, I reviewed the paper,
I stand by my review and I happen to know that Dr. Thomas's patients are very, very satisfied with him.
And so this again was differences in healthcare seeking behavior, which means that vaccinated children
don't go to the doctor, which was definitely not the case.
So Dr. Thomas's license was reinstated with very onerous conditions.
He could not talk about vaccines.
They took away his First Amendment rights.
He could only see certain patients and he could not be involved in major decision making.
He has filed a federal lawsuit against the Oregon Medical Board.
I wish him all the best for that.
So at that point, I was very, very proud that Dr. Lyons-Weiler, the researcher, the first author on this paper, fires back.
And he actually did an analysis with another medical doctor, same data, and showed that parents who were getting informed
consent and getting straight answers from their pediatrician, Dr. Thomas, actually liked going to the doctor.
Imagine that, you get straight answers, you go back.
And so they split the practice in three groups: high healthcare utilization, medium, and low.
So high healthcare, they go to the doctor a lot. Low, they go to the doctor not as much.
And then somewhere in the middle.
And so the vaccinated group is actually the line in blue, or the curve in blue.
And the unvaccinated group is the line in yellow.
I do apologize for the clarity of the slide.
And what they found was that consistently the unvaccinated children were visiting their practitioner more, regardless
of whether they were high or medium healthcare utilization.
And then the lowest healthcare utilization, it was the same.
So in other words, unvaccinated children, when they are seeing their practitioner and they're getting
straight answers, they're not going to the doctor less.
They want to get their baby checked up. They trust their doctor. They have a good relationship.
And therefore, they go at least the same normal way.
And then I want to go to a study that came out in 2022 by the Centers for Disease Control, okay,
and what they found was actually a relationship between the aluminum salt adjuvant that is in vaccines and persistent asthma.
So they looked at vaccines before 24 months of age and then they were looking at asthma
diagnosed between 24 months and five years of age.
And what they found was if the child had eczema, eczema is a marker or an indication of autoimmune disorder,
so if the child had eczema and they got the highest level of aluminum that they could in
vaccines there were 63 percent higher levels of asthma.
And this is what's called early infantile or childhood asthma.
It‘s diagnosed very very early and not in a typical time period.
So this is another marker of an autoimmune disorder.
So if they had eczema, their risk was higher especially if they got the highest vaccine level.
But the CDC will never do a zero exposure control. So it turns out that the sort of bluish bar here is a high
level of aluminum and then the orange bar is just a little less aluminum, okay, that's cheating.
That's called a cheat. They should have a zero exposure group - we would see a much more profound
difference there if they actually did a controlled study.
Now if they, had they looked at children that had not been diagnosed with eczema then they still had a higher asthma risk.
If you have a child who is presenting something like eczema, something that is obviously autoimmune, it
makes sense to forego or delay the vaccination schedule.
These children were vaccinated before 24 months and the outcomes caused more asthma.
If you break down the study - again the first two years of life ... but it was a monumental concession, CDC never
comes down on the side of saying that vaccines cause anything except for happiness and sunshine.
But they conceded that persistent asthma, this was defined as three severe asthma diagnoses
within the period from two years to five years of age.
So they did concede
and oddly enough Dr. Frank DeStefano, he's an interesting researcher. He had actually participated in
the cover-up of the relationship between vaccines and autism that led to the movie Vaxxed.
He also had participated in the cover up regarding Vietnam veterans and the compound patient warrant.
So he had a history of maybe being a little looser with the truth but he published his paper and then he subsequently retired.
So this was his last word.
So you're ready for some more bar graphs?
This is the straight stuff, this is the … we're mainlining the heroine of vaccinated versus unvaccinated studies.
I want to show a very very stark contrast and I do that for a reason.
I want people to really understand that by doing this type of analysis, the analysis that only happens from independent
researchers does not happen from universities funded by the government, it doesn't happen directly
by the CDC or the National Institutes of Health.
This is independent scientists and this is what they come up with.
And when we publish this we don‘t have anything to gain, in fact we can lose our livelihood, we can go to
court, we can lose our medical licenses etc. etc. etc.
So in a lot of ways it gives me no joy to show the amount of damage and then also risk my
livelihood not so much anymore and my family's well-being.
But when you look at… Dr. Mawson did another study using the Florida Medicaid database,
again autism spectrum disorder, hyperkinetic syndrome, ADHD, epilepsy and seizures, learning disorders,
encephalopathy, tick disorders and at least one of the four mentioned neurodevelopmental disorders.
So the risks are anywhere between above 2%, above 2.5 % all the way to almost 7% for learning disorders.
Moving further at the same time he looked at pre-term birth and all these risks
increase so at pre-term birth we see a higher rate
and then we at Children's Health Defense, we bolstered our efforts,
we've been working directly with wonderful anonymous individual practitioners, they have vaccinated children in their
practices, they have unvaccinated children in their practices.
At last count, we have had 10 different practitioners where we've used their these are identified, these are all very, very
secure medical practices, we keep the data very, very secure, do not ever release anything that will dare identify the patients.
And we've seen this grow to now over, this is outdated, we now have over 100,000 patients.
Now we shouldn't have to do this, because the CDC has their own database that has not 100,000 children, but 3 million children.
But they will not release those records, they will not even, and I'm kind of loathe to say this, they will
not even release those records to Secretary Kennedy,
they keep on trying to hide it in different locations, and behind different legal barriers. But in this cohort we have
4,000 completely unvaccinated patients, and we've been following them from birth to a minimum of four years.
The older children in this group are anywhere between 13 to 15 years old,
but the youngest that you can be, because we want to have diagnoses under developmental delays,
autism, ticks, whatever, by four years of age.
And then the rest of the group, these are primarily partially vaccinated children,
and this was sort of the basis for my previous publications, but we've grown the group and we will continue to grow the group.
So, just to show you, this is hot off the press, this is in the process of being published, this information.
So, we wanted to look, you know, we looked at neurodevelopmental disabilities, we looked at
autoimmune disorders, now let's look at infections,
because vaccines are supposed to keep you healthy, they are supposed to prevent infections,
but what we saw in this cohort that… and these recurring infections were defined as having at least three
different diagnoses over a rolling 12-month period in the time that the child was enrolled in that pediatric practice.
Ear infections, respiratory disease, strep infection were all much, much greater.
And then, if we looked at the number of vaccines that were given, we added then the unvaccinated, and this is in the
first year of life, one to three in the first year of life, four to six, six to nine, and then ten or more.
And what you see is that overall, and in almost every case, the unvaccinated fare much better.
They‘re just healthier kids.
There is one lower bar for ten or more vaccines for respiratory disease, and that's really, I would attribute that to
the fact that when a child is healthy, if you're vaccinating the child is healthy, then you keep on vaccinating.
We call that the healthy vaccine-e effect.
And we typically see information like that.
We do not take that information lightly.
And I do want to also show my commitment
that if vaccines win, if vaccines are giving a better outcome, we want to give them every benefit of the doubt.
It only behooves us to make sure that we are absolutely fair and that we are absolutely showing the truth in our publications.
So overall, when we look at vaccinated versus unvaccinated children, it is very, very clear.
The vaccinated children are suffering in some way, shape or form.
We do not know what the specific disorder might be.
But we also know that the technology and the tools are available to anticipate these particular vaccine injuries.
I'm going to skip a few slides here just to go to the conclusion.
So they have less developmental delay and neurological diagnoses.
They have less asthma, ear infections, autoimmune disorders and allergies, respiratory
infections, strep, and they're healthier overall.
So this is conclusive.
We are not playing a shell game, and we are supported by 11 independent studies that show very, very similar results.
I've shown you the results of just Anthony Mawson, Children's Health Defense, and James Lyons-Weiler and Paul Thomas.
So that's just three of the research groups that are doing this type of study, and we consistently see ... this type of effect,
and this is, you know, obviously, this is very personal for me, and it's very personal for many individuals
that work for and support Children's Health Defense.
But again, we're not looking at telling people what to do.
We are looking at educating individuals and making sure that they have the right tools, in their hands, in order to make an
informed choice regarding any intervention, especially those interventions in early childhood and
within these very, very vulnerable developmental periods.
Thank you very much.
Dr. Brian Hooker, “Children’s Health Defense”