Source: Children’s Health Defense

The BMJ last week published an op-ed urging the public health community to engage the so-called anti-vaccine groups — like Children’s Health Defense (CHD) — without “capitulating to misinformation,” as the author alleged CHD has done.

These groups who “mistrust science” have moved “from the fringe into the mainstream,” and are now “politically empowered,” the Commonwealth Fund’s Lucinda Hiam wrote. Rather than dismissing the groups outright, conventional public health must engage with them, she wrote.

However, contrary to her own advice, Hiam did not engage directly with CHD, which she disparaged in her op-ed. She also didn’t engage with scientists and doctors who have questioned the “all vaccines are safe and effective” narrative.

CHD CEO Mary Holland said in a response letter submitted to The BMJ that she “couldn’t agree more” with Hiam’s argument that public health must “bridge the divide with groups who mistrust science.”

“But my question is, does science require trust? I thought real science required proof, not trust,” Holland said. “We at CHD see ourselves as ferociously pro-science and pro-proof; we don’t ‘trust’ science; we seek to do science based on evidence. We are as much a science-based organization as one engaged in advocacy.”

Holland’s response also stated:

“We don’t believe that one should have to put blind faith in anything related to children’s health, and especially not in vaccines, not a single one of which has ever undergone a true, rigorous, inert placebo-controlled clinical trial, let alone a gold-standard retrospective or prospective trial evaluating the whole childhood vaccine schedule.”

Hiam wrote that she attended CHD’s annual conference in November 2025 in Austin, Texas. “It’s easy to pick apart such events or refute the data, but does it do any good?” she asked. However, in her op-ed, Hiam did not attempt to refute any data.

According to Hiam, the problem is that for people who attend such events, “scientific studies are seen as products of untrustworthy institutions and pharmaceutical companies rather than impartial evidence.”

CHD CEO Mary Holland invites author of BMJ op-ed to debate

Pharmaceutical company influence and institutional corruption have long been flagged as an endemic problem in public health, even by public health leaders.

Fifteen years ago, Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote in the The New York Reviews that “it is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published,” due to researchers’ financial ties with pharmaceutical companies.

In June 2025, Angell and colleagues — former editors at top medical journals — wrote in an op-ed in STAT that scientists have increasingly turned to pharmaceutical companies to support their research.

They said that research comes with “explicit or implicit pressure on researchers to find and publish only positive results, which can seriously distort their work.”

Hiam said that lack of trust in science is exacerbated by “people, including some influential physicians and political actors, who peddle mistruths or performative doubt for their own gain, deliberately manufacturing uncertainty to erode trust and sow confusion.”

Holland invited Hiam to debate.

“I extend my sincere invitation to Ms. Hiam; if she is prepared to have a civil, open-minded conversation about the true risks and benefits of vaccination and inaccurate information about vaccines, I would be delighted to host it on CHD.TV and any other platform of her choosing. Let’s bridge that divide!”

Commonwealth Fund COVID vaccine claims based on assumptions, not data

The Commonwealth Fund, which employs Hiam, is a private foundation that funds research and advocacy for healthcare systems. It was established in 1918 by Anna Harkness, widow of Stephen Harkness, director of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Commonwealth Fund advocated for the continuation of strict COVID-19 regulations, including vaccine mandates.

In May 2025, data supplied by the Commonwealth Fund sparked controversy during a Senate hearing on the failure of public health officials to adequately warn about the risk of myocarditis associated with COVID-19 vaccines.

As Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) made his statement, his staff set up two posters. One cited a statistic from a Commonwealth Fund blog post study stating that the “COVID-19 vaccines have saved more than 3 million American lives.”

Blumenthal said the study also found that 18 million hospitalizations were averted and $1 trillion in healthcare costs were saved by the vaccines in the first two years of the pandemic alone.

Later in the hearing, attorney Aaron Siri called out Blumenthal on those claims, saying they were sourced from a blog, not from reliable data or sources.

After the Commonwealth Fund published its blog post in 2022, mainstream media widely repeated and amplified the claims. For example, Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D. — in interviews and in his 2024 congressional testimony — cited that same blog post, touting 3.2 million lives saved by the vaccines.

Canadian research organization Correlation published a critique of the Commonwealth study in October 2025.

According to Correlation, Commonwealth’s claims were not based on hard data, but on counterfactual modeling, where researchers project an alternative scenario from the one that occurred.

By design, this model was based on a series of assumptions that the Correlation researchers said ranged from tenuous to outright wrong.

The Commonwealth Fund simply plugged Big Pharma’s data into a formula, which then showed that millions of lives were saved, they wrote.

“The medical establishment paid by pharma are just worker bees trying to find ways to please their masters by inventing these back propagation methods called counterfactual calculations or simulations,” Correlation researcher Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., said. “It’s garbage science.”

Related articles in The Defender

• ‘This Is Going to Be a Slog’: Senate Hearing on Cover-Up of COVID Vaccine Risks Just the ‘Tip of the Iceberg,’ Johnson Tells Committee
• New Report: ‘Garbage Science’ Behind Claims COVID Shots Saved Millions
• Vaccine Advocate Peter Hotez Calls for Use of Police, Military Against ‘Anti-vaccine Aggression’
• ‘Total Sham’: Vaccine Injury Lawyer Destroys Doctor’s Claims That Hundreds of Placebo-Controlled Trials Show Childhood Vaccines Are Safe