Even persons familiar with RFK Jr.’s damning statistics about American health might be surprised by the information contained in Del Bigtree’s new documentary An Inconvenient Study — a film that also depicts with gut-wrenching impact the human misery represented by those numbers thanks to the cowardice, greed, arrogance, and power of the medical and pharmaceutical industries.

The film’s Emmy Award–winning producer has been a medical journalist for two decades, first at CBS and later as host of the High Wire internet show.  Bigtree’s prior documentary, Vaxxed (2015), brought him to national attention when the film, which had been touted by Robert De Niro, was pulled from the actor’s own Tribeca Film Festival for being anti-vaccine and containing junk science.  This linked news segment about the incident provides an example of how major media serve as a megaphone for powerful corporate interests — a role effectively noted in An Inconvenient Study. 

The aforementioned RFK Jr. statistics can be summarized using this single data point: 54 percent of American kids now have a chronic disease of some sort, whereas in the 1980s, that number was 12.8 percent.  Coincident with that precipitous rise has been a dramatic increase in the number of vaccines administered to kids from birth to age 18 — from around 20 in the 1980s to 72 or more now.  The question raised by this correlation is obvious: Is there a causal link between vaccinations and chronic disease, and especially between vaccinations and the huge increase in autism?

The specific study that Bigtree’s film revolves around was done by the Henry Ford Health System and was directed by Ford’s head of infectious diseases, Dr. Marcus Zervos.  It was designed as retrospective and compared health outcomes of vaccinated with unvaccinated patients in Ford’s system.  Such a study is the only option available, since medical authorities consider double-blind placebo trials of vaccines unethical.  A study of that sort, it’s argued, would be using kids as guinea pigs.  Consequently, vaccines are often tested against similar vaccines, trials that show if one vaccine is more dangerous than its cousin, but not if either vaccine has unintended consequences.  Additionally, some tests to secure the “safe and effective” label reiterated ad nauseam by politicians, media, and the pharmaceutical industry are absurdly small and of short duration, as was true of the Hepatitis B recombinant vaccine often administered to infants on the first day outside the womb.  Its “safe and effective” label was secured by testing 147 infants for 5 days.

Three prior retrospective studies are presented in the film.  Each showed significantly negative results for the vaccinated.  Dr. Peter Abby focused only on the DTP vaccine he administered to half the children of the African country of Guinea-Bissau.  Thirty years later, he found that although the vaccine was effective at preventing diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough, those infants who took the vaccine died from other diseases at five times the rate of the unvaccinated.  A more limited cohort of patients was broadly analyzed by a Portland pediatrician who discovered negative outcomes for the vaccinated in terms of allergies, autoimmune diseases, ADHD, and infections of all kinds.  For his trouble, the doc had his published paper retracted and his medical license revoked.  Another physician was raked over the coals for a study analyzing 600 kids.  It showed significantly negative results for vaccinated patients in terms of allergies, neurological disorders, and especially autism.   

As with the movie Vaxxed, these studies were panned for being too small or otherwise flawed in ways that voided their unwanted findings.  Consequently, Bigtree pushed hard for Dr. Zervos, a respected pro-vaccine doctor at a major medical center, to use Ford’s extensive database to perform a comprehensive and rigorous vaccinated vs. unvaccinated analysis.  In 2020, Zervos agreed to oversee such a project and to publish it no matter the results.  In pressing his case, Bigtree noted that such a study could finally shut the mouths of vaccine critics like himself.  Two years later, the analysis had been completed, but the Ford Health group wouldn’t publish it.  Its results, however, were made available to Bigtree.  

The climax of the documentary is Bigtree’s hidden camera discussion with Zervos (June 5, 2022) during which the producer makes a final plea to Zervos to make good on his prior pledge to publish the study no matter the results.  Zervos acknowledges that the study, with its largely negative findings for the modern vaccine regimen, is, in his opinion, a good study that should be published.  He insists, however, that in the current political and media environment, its publication will only result in his firing and a trashing of the study’s quality.  In Zervos’s own words, “publishing something like that — I might as well retire.  I’d be finished.”  Zervos knew whereof he spoke, since previously he had been torn apart for publishing a heretical article on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID.  He wasn’t willing, he told Bigtree, to go through that again.  “I can’t handle it.”

The Ford Study was based on a population of 18,468 subjects, 1,957 of whom were fully unvaccinated.  The results were, in Bigtree’s words, “a bombshell.”  Among the devastating findings were the following:  The vaccinated group had a six times higher risk for autoimmune diseases, a four times higher risk for asthma diagnoses, a 5.6 times higher risk for neurodevelopmental disorders, and a 4.47 times higher risk for speech disorders.  Several comparisons were statistically impossible to calculate because no cases of the disorder were found among the unvaccinated — conditions that included brain dysfunction, diabetes, behavioral problems, learning disabilities, and ADHD (the latter of which had 262 diagnoses among the vaccinated).  A similar mathematical issue arose with autism, where the single case among the unvaccinated could not be usefully compared to 23 within the vaccinated cohort.

A summary statistic found that after ten years, there was an 83-percent likelihood that the unvaccinated would avoid any chronic disease, whereas in the vaccinated group, there was a 43-percent chance of being free of a chronic disease.  This result tracks perfectly with the aforementioned fact that over half of American kids now suffer from some chronic disease.

The devastating human toll for medical, pharmaceutical, political, and media complicity in silencing studies like those mentioned in An Inconvenient Study is presented during the first twenty minutes of the film.  It can be viewed for free on the Internet via aninconvenientstudy.com as long as Bigtree resists Ford Health’s cease and desist order.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: “Who’s to Say?” is also available on Kindle.

Image: spencerbdavis1 via Pixabay, Pixabay License.