At Senate hearing, anti-vaxxers seek to capitalize on friends in high places

For nearly a decade, anti-vaccine activists and film producers have been collecting tragic, mostly unverifiable stories from parents — accounts of deaths, injuries and autism allegedly caused by vaccines. On Tuesday, several of those activists served as witnesses inside the U.S. Senate for a hearing before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The hearing was punctuated by misinformation, conspiracy theories and genuine grief, as witnesses shared personal tragedies and an understandable search for causality — an emotional series of statements that drew expressions of compassion from both Democrats and Republicans on the subcommittee.

Led by Covid vaccine misinformer Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., the “Voices of the Vaccine Injured” hearing featured a witness list pulled straight from the anti-vaccine movement’s leadership roster: two senior employees of the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-founded nonprofit Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and parents featured in “Vaxxed,” the documentary-style film that helped launch the current anti-vaccine era.

Mary Holland, president of CHD, sat with members of her staff in the front row, in a section cordoned off for witnesses’ guests. Anti-vaccine attorney Aaron Siri took photos with supporters in the audience. As Johnson entered, a portion of the room — a little over half-full at that point — applauded.

The purpose of the hearing was “very simple,” Johnson said, “to give a platform to those individuals and families who have been abandoned; their injuries and suffering, dismissed and forgotten.”

Johnson’s hearing isn’t the first to amplify anti-vaccine activists. Indiana Republican Rep. Dan Burton, a “Clinton body count” conspiracy theorist, chaired several investigatory hearings in the ’00s. And Johnson has hosted a number of panels on purported harms from Covid vaccines, including one in May before the same subcommittee.

But Tuesday’s hearing is the first to target childhood vaccines — long proven very safe — since Kennedy’s appointment as health secretary. And with Kennedy in power, Tuesday’s hearing is more than just spectacle: It could inform policy and provide cover for the Trump administration’s broader campaign to dismantle federal vaccine programs and gut public health agencies.

Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Barack Obama and now head of a nonprofit focused on global health policy, Resolve to Save Lives, described the hearing as part of a “concerted attack on vaccines.” He echoed recent warnings that Kennedy’s moves at the Department of Health and Human Services — including the firing of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel and defunding the international vaccine organization Gavi — have weakened U.S. public health and endangered millions of children globally.

Frieden said parents watching the hearing and listening to stories from its witnesses should suspend their belief.

“Bad things happen. Sometimes they happen after vaccination,” he told MSNBC. “That doesn’t mean they were caused by vaccination. One thing we do know that is caused by vaccination is protection against illnesses that could harm or kill your kid.”

The safety of vaccines has been studied extensively — likely more than any other medical treatment or product — and continues to be rigorously monitored. Hundreds of large, long-term studies involving children around the world have found that childhood vaccines are very safe, do not cause autism or sudden infant death, and have saved millions of lives.

It was unclear what, exactly, the hearing was meant to investigate. Hours before the hearing, the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, said as much at a news conference with families affected by vaccine-preventable diseases, including a Massachusetts woman whose baby died of pertussis.

“I hope nothing comes of this hearing,” Blumenthal said. “I hope people don’t pay attention because it isn’t deserving of credibility and attention.”

While it centered on stories of alleged harms, the hearing offered no clear legislative or investigative agenda. Two of the witnesses’ claims had already been adjudicated through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP), a federal court designed to compensate individuals for rare vaccine-related injuries, where the burden of proof is lower than in civil court (often described as “50 percent and a feather”). One witness was awarded compensation on appeal; another’s was rejected. Earlier this month, Kennedy said he planned to “revolutionize” the program.

Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer at Children’s Health Defense, testified that his son has suffered a cluster of debilitating health conditions, including autism since receiving vaccines as a child.

A chemical engineer by training, Hooker is the father of an adult son whose autism he believes was caused by vaccines. Hooker is the architect of the movement’s foundational “CDC whistle-blower” conspiracy theory, an unfounded claim spun from a series of surreptitiously taped conversations with a senior CDC scientist, William Thompson, that posited government epidemiologists had buried evidence of a link between vaccines and autism. Hooker’s allegation didn’t hold up to scrutiny but became the central premise of “Vaxxed,” a propaganda film directed by Andrew Wakefield, the British gastroenterologist and author of a retracted paper in the Lancet medical journal that linked autism to the MMR vaccine and sparked a worldwide panic. Hooker’s 2014 paper supporting the theory, which suggested the MMR vaccine disproportionately harmed Black boys, was also retracted that same year.

Hooker’s original claim filed in 2002 under the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was rejected by the court’s special master who dismissed Hooker’s theory — that mercury in vaccines caused his son’s autism — as having already been disproven and described Hooker’s experts as unqualified, “sometimes scandalously so.”

Still, Hooker continued his activism. In 2023, he co-authored a book with then-activist and now HHS Secretary Kennedy that argued unvaccinated children are healthier than vaccinated ones. The book relies on cherry-picked, unreplicated studies, including Hooker’s own retracted research, while ignoring decades of rigorous scientific evidence.

Johnson asked Hooker to repeat an unfounded claim that federal health officials in the 2000s destroyed evidence of a link between vaccines and autism. “They literally all brought the evidence and they destroyed it together,” Johnson said.

Later, Sen. Blumenthal expressed sympathy for Hooker’s vaccine court failure. “I’m heartbroken to hear these stories,” Blumenthal said. “It makes me want to do something.” The audience applauded. He quickly added, “I can’t promise anything.”

Polly Tommey, CHD’s programming director, told the panel about her son and her belief that an MMR vaccine had caused his autism. Since moving to Austin, Texas, from England, Tommey has been documenting the stories of thousands of other parents who believe vaccines harmed their children. A longtime friend of Wakefield and producer of “Vaxxed” and its 2019 and 2024 sequels, Tommey has spent years traveling the country in the so-called “Vaxxed” bus, collecting stories for her films.

“We saw so much death, so much death,” Tommey said in her testimony.

Two of her subjects, featured in CHD’s video projects, also appeared as witnesses Tuesday.

Emily Tarsell said that speaking about her daughter Christina, who died suddenly in 2008, gave her purpose. “I’m trying to make her death matter,” Tarsell said.

A medical examiner could not determine the cause of Christina’s death, but Tarsell believes the HPV vaccine, Gardasil, is to blame. Her initial vaccine court claim was denied, but years later on appeal, a special master ruled that she had met the program’s low burden of proof. (More than 160 studies have shown Gardasil to be safe and effective at preventing cancers caused by HPV, according to the CDC.)

Krystle Cordingley, a self-described wellness practitioner whose infant son died 14 hours after a flu shot, claimed, without offering evidence, that she believes doctors hid the cause of death from her and that an independent investigator revealed vaccines were to blame.

Democrats invited no scientists or medical experts to testify, calling just two witnesses: Serese Marotta and Eric Stein, whose son and sister, respectively, died of complications from flu.

As the hearing wound down, Stein and Marotta attempted to fact-check some of the false claims from the other parents seated alongside them.

“I’m not here to debate the science,” Marotta said. “The science is clear.”