Last week brought us two days of US Senate confirmation Hearings involving Mr. Kennedy. It went as many of us here suspected: Tough questions from (mostly) Democratic senators and fawning adulation by (mostly) Republican Senators. Kennedy was questioned in both the Senate Finance and Senate Health Committees regarding vaccines, Medicaid, Medicare, NIH research, abortion, and drug prices. Not surprisingly Mr. Kennedy worked mightily in his effort to reconcile his decades of anti-vaccine activism with his now hard-to-believe claims that he is all for vaccines. The Senate Finance Committee will meet Tuesday February 4th at 10 AM to vote on whether Kennedy advances to a full Senate vote.
Near the end of the second day (in the Senate Health Committee), Kennedy pulled a backhanded maneuver using what he thought was the ace up his sleeve — he cited as “other science” a newly published vaccinated versus unvaccinated (vax-unvax) study claiming (of course) unvaccinated children have fewer neurodevelopmental disorders (read: autism) than vaccinated. Here is the exchange between Dr. Cassidy and Kennedy starting at 2:53:44
[Cassidy]: You’re a smart guy. You’re reading the medical literature and you’re coming up with the recent medical literature on certain issues. But here is both an older article summarizing lots of older articles that have come out since the original refute of Wakefield article in the Lancet regarding measles and autism. And here’s somebody who you know it’s he said he said but somebody who said that previously you’ve had this presented to you. So back to me. I’m a doc. Trying to understand. If, how, convince me that you will become the public health advocate but not just churn old information so that there’s never a conclusion, as Senator Hassen suggested. But that will become the influencer for people to believe; know there’s 1.25 million kids studied and there’s no autism associated with measles. How, you tell me, you see what my question is in there.
[Kennedy]: I’m going to be an advocate for strong science. You show me those scientific studies and you and I can meet about it. And there are other studies as well. I’d love to show those to you. There’s a study that came out last week of 47,000 9 year-olds in the Medicaid system in Florida by a Loui — I think a Louisiana scientist called Mawson that shows the opposite. There are other studies out there, I just want to follow the science. And I will do if the science says that I am wrong about what I’ve said in the past as I said I will publicly apologize.
This did not sit well with Senator Cassidy who had endured Kennedy’s evasive responses for both hearings. Cassidy, being committee chair, passed the discussion to Senator Bernie Sanders while he looked at that study. Later Cassidy (at 3:08:57) remarked he had looked at the Mawson paper, but that it “seem to have some issues”. Time did not permit Dr. Cassidy to elucidate further.
“Some issues”
“It had some issues” is an understatement regarding Kennedy’s “other science” of Mawson’s paper, which has so many fatal flaws that it should never have been published (more on that later). What completely disqualifies this paper, however, is an undisclosed conflict of interest (COI) with Albert Dwoskin who, up until 2019, was a wealthy funder of anti-vaccine research and a partner of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense (CHD). In a nutshell, DEVEXI — which supplied a filtered version of the Florida Medicaid data to Mawson — was funded by a wealthy anti-vaccinationist (Dwoskin), without Mawson’s disclosure in his paper. THAT should have been disclosed, especially as Mawson could have obtained his data directly through the State of Florida instead of this nebulous third-party anti-vaccine-funded database.
I will also look at Mawson in the context of two other papers by anti-vaccinationists: (1) a December 2024 paper co-authored by Brian Hooker (CHD’s Chief Science Officer (CSO)) and Karl Jablonowski, and (2) a retracted November 2020 vax-unvax paper by Lyons-Weiler and Paul Thomas, an Oregon MD who surrendered his medical license in 2022 rather than face the Oregon Medical Board’s numerous charges against him for his anti-vaccine activities. The take home lesson is Mr. Kennedy and CHD claim they follow science, but all they really do is trash science.
Mawson’s Study
This new study was conveniently released a mere 7 days before this hearing. I suspect this was to thwart efforts at debunking. But even on such short notice, two researchers, Jessica Steier, DrPH, PMP and Andea Love PhD, laid bare on their Substacks many serious flaws in this paper (here and here). Among them: no correction for healthcare seeking behavior (which is always less in unvaccinated), an incomplete data set (by Mawson’s own admission), and an inability to track all vaccines received by the 47,000 nine-year-olds in the study. Any of these concerns would have torpedoed this vax-unvax paper on a legitimate editor’s desk. But the editor who published this is James Lyons-Weiler, who runs a web site pretending to be a medical journal (it isn’t) made for laundering retracted studies by anti-vaxxers. Because of this, Mawson’s article will never face the slightest test of actual science or scientists.
Conflicts of Interest
Kennedy could be confirmed as soon as this week as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, giving him absolute control over the NIH, FDA, CDC and vaccine review committees. If confirmed, Kennedy could easily modify or even gut the US vaccine program while himself profiting handsomely from tilting the vaccine landscape into the hands of his vaccine litigation colleagues who could make many billions from vaccine lawsuits and kicking back 10% to him in referral fees. Thus, this undisclosed COI for Mawson has importance as it turns Kennedy’s “other science” into non-science that Kennedy promoted to advance Kennedy’s own self-serving interests in becoming HHS Secretary.
Let’s look at this undisclosed COI.
Per Mawson, the Mawson paper used DEVEXI — “an integrated health and medical research platform for generating epidemiological studies” as the source for Florida Medicaid data. Mawson states in citation 24 of his paper that DEVEXI “is no longer in existence” and that they last accessed DEVEXI in 2022. Consistent with this, DEVEXI’s web site is gone and their last Virginia Corporation Commission activity was in 2021. DEVEXI’s prior web presence still exists and notes:
DEVEXI is a powerful, intuitive health and medical research platform linking 22 years of de-identified, HIPAA-compliant medical and dental claims data for approximately 11 million patients. This platform links data from medical and dental treatments, prescribed drugs and vaccines, exposures and short and long-term health outcomes to provide researchers with the data and unique analytics capability for groundbreaking, longitudinal epidemiological studies never before possible. This Web-based health research platform seamlessly integrates 100 national datasets on a range of important environmental, behavioral and socioeconomic exposures. DEVEXI enables researchers to improve the quality and cost effectiveness of healthcare across the industry including medical schools, public health programs, teaching hospitals, insurance payers, government health agencies and pharmaceutical companies.
So, yes, DEVEXI is a company that had access to health data for outcomes research. DEVEXI was also noted by the NIH in 2020 to be a TPWA (third party website application).
Follow the Money
While searching DEVEXI’s history (created in 2016), an entity named DEVEXI ADJ LLC, (created in 2015) was found. The key here is this earlier LLC is an adjunct to DEVEXI LLC and it listed Albert Dwoskin as its organizer and agent. This was almost certainly done so Dwoskin could bankroll DEVEXI, but even if not, he was involved in DEVEXI.
Dwoskin’s involvement in the creation of DEVEXI is not disclosed by Mawson. It should have been. Why? Two big reasons:
- Albert Dwoskin (when DEVEXI started in 2016) was ½ of the Dwoskin Family Foundation, DFF. The other half of the DFF being now ex-wife Claire Dwoskin). DFF, at the time of DEVEXI starting, funded numerous anti-vaccine activities and research including the Children’s Medical Safety Institute (CSMRI), which funded (of course) Mawson’s first vax-unvax study in 2017. DFF has shared the same address ( 3201 JERMANTOWN RD STE 700, FAIRFAX, VA, 22030) since 2019 with DEVEXI ADJ LLC, which has the same address as DEVEXI LLC. For completeness (and fairness), Mr. Dwoskin became pro-vaccine (likely concurrent with the Dwoskin’s 2018 divorce) and the current incarnation of the DFF is now pro-vaccine (but it was not when DEVEXI started).
- CSMRI, which the Dwoskin’s also funded at the time of DEVEXI’s existence, was a coalition partner with CHD (CSMRI ended with the Dwoskin’s’ divorce).
Thus, this “other science” by Mawson that Kennedy cited in his testimony to Dr. Cassidy came from Florida Medicaid data processed through an anti-vaccine-funded corporation, instead of being directly obtained from the State of Florida (as it could have been, shown below). On top of that, there is a coalition partnership between CHD and the person funding DEVEXI. And none of this was disclosed. Yet Kennedy still wants to hold this study up to Dr. Cassidy as “other science”. No, Mawson’s study is invalid.
I could end here with this. It’s damning enough. But two other papers show just how deep the trashing of science is for the “other science” that Kennedy and CHD love to cite.
The 2024 Hooker Paper
Let’s now look at that 2024 paper by Hooker and Jablonowski, which looked at HibTITER vaccine effects on children in the State of Florid Medicaid database. Sound familiar? Anti-vaccinationists love Florida Medicaid data. Near the end of Hooker’s paper, a “Data Availability Statement” notes:
All data used is publicly available through the Agency for Health Care Administration (https://ahca.myflorida.com/) …
This is why I stated earlier Mawson did not need to use DEVEXI, at least according to Hooker. But here is where it gets truly bizarre: Hooker didn’t get his data directly from the State of Florida; instead, Hooker, like Mawson used DEVEXI. Yes, he did that even though Hooker did not disclose it in his paper. This is disclosed in a December 2024 podcast/video on CHD where Hooker interviews co-author Karl Jablonowski. Here is what Hooker and Jablonowski said starting at 3:55:
[Hooker]: I’ve literally thrown a large supercomputer at you that I knew nothing about and said, ‘Hey Karl, make this sing’, and you did. And tell us a little bit more about the data that you mined for this particular project is from the Florida Medicaid database. Tell us about that specific database you know, how many entries? How large is the database? You know, how is it organized and, and, I will tell you we did get this really kinda in a sort of a wink wink sideways way um it was actually it obtained from a politician in Florida and then it became the heart of a software package called DEVEXI. DEVEXI is now out of business but at the same time that DEVEXI got the database I was able to obtain a stack of CDs or DVDs I don’t know there were some D’s. that we were able to then get this database, and I had this data um and finally one day loaded it up on drop box but tell us a little bit more about you know besides the back story what is in there.
[Jablonowski]: Yes so, it’s um it’s about 2 decades worth of Medicare data coming out of the state of Florida and it contains um pretty much all of the diagnoses and all of the medical procedures that were performed on individuals. It’s one of the largest medical databases I’ve worked with. And so, it was really a beast to get into. It’s biased information in so much as all information has a bias to it. it’s medical coded data, so you have your pitfalls — are the doctor or entity that’s entering the codes for the data they are after money so they are going to code for things that will give them profit and if a particular diagnosis doesn’t yield any profit, they may not even bother to code for it.
Incredible. Hooker admits to using DEVEXI and then portrays how they obtained DEVEXI as not being above board. Ethics anyone? Apparently not for CHD and Hooker when it comes to scoring a data hit (wink, wink, you know). This Hooker paper, like Mawson’s, is no longer valid due to failing to disclose the COI with DEVEXI. As an aside to show you how bad this paper otherwise was, go listen from 32:30 to 34:30 where Hooker and Jablonowski talk about how their paper was rejected by twelve journals before being accepted. That could be a record.
Hide the DEVEXI
Hooker’s use and concealment of DEVEXI in his paper leads me to this assertion: CHD/Hooker supplied DEVEXI to Mawson, in order to finish his study, but then hid it (by not disclosing DEVEXI’s use in Hooker’s paper) because Mawson’s study needed to appear independent of CHD to make it “other science”. Mawson states in his paper that he last accessed the DEVEXI platform in 2022; so, this paper took two more years to come out since last DEVEXI access? I’ll wager Mawson wasn’t done doing data analysis and needed to access the remnants of DEVEXI held by Hooker. This is consistent with Mawson’s admission of incomplete data (cited in “Limitations of the Study” #4 and noted by Drs. Steier and Jones in their debunkings).
But most damning is that Hooker claimed to use direct access to Florida Medicaid data, when in truth he used DEVEXI. Hooker does not want DEVEXI linked to CHD, but clearly it is. One can only conclude DEVEXI existed solely as a faux-legit modifier of Florida Medicaid data for the purpose of guaranteeing vaccine research favorable to anti-vaccinationists, especially given the only two known papers that have used DEVEXI are those by Mawson and Hooker. And again, Mr. Kennedy has the nerve to sit there in front of the US Senate Health Committee and cite Mawson’s study as legit “other science”. It is not.
How Convenient
Mawson’s study appeared just in time for Kennedy to cite it in his testimony. The paper was submitted in October 2024 and approved December 2024, yet Mawson was working on it way back in 2018 as noted in the Discussion section of his paper which states in “Strengths of the Study” #7:
The authors were the first users to test and operate the initial version of DEVEXI (Personal communication from Mitch Praver, co-founder of DEVEXI, 07/19/2018).
So, the work on this paper started 6 ½ years ago and only just now one week prior to Kennedy’s testimony it just coincidentally gets published. I think not. This was done to minimize any chance such execrable vax-unvax research could get debunked and refuted.
CHD’s Undisclosed Reach Into Other Vax-Unvax Studies
Now let’s look at the third paper — the now-retracted vax-unvax study by Lyons-Weiler and Thomas. In a recent January 24 NBC News article, investigative journalist Brandy Zadrozny finally showed why Kennedy was in Samoa in June 2019 — he went to perform a prospective “vax-unvax” study on the children of this island nation that had seen its MMR vaccination rates drop precipitously from 2018 to 2019, in part due to the efforts of Kennedy’s allies. Regarding Kennedy’s Samoa visit, Zadrozny reports information relevant to this SBM post:
Kennedy wasn’t alone at the dinner. He brought the Children’s Health Defense’s new chief information officer [CIO], Dr. Michael Graven, a lauded neonatologist known for creating information systems that tracked and improved health outcomes in the world’s poorest countries…
…In 2019, Graven was analyzing the data for a study that would be published in 2020 by two prominent anti-vaccine activists, scientist James Lyons-Weiler and Oregon pediatrician Paul Thomas, whose license would be suspended the same year — in part for his failure to adequately vaccinate patients — and then voluntarily relinquished two years later.
Comparing health outcomes of Thomas’ patients, the study concluded that unvaccinated children in his practice were healthier than vaccinated ones. It was retracted a year later following an investigation that “raised several methodological issues and confirmed that the conclusions were not supported by strong scientific data.”
The Puppet Master
Zadrozny refers here to the same retracted Lyons-Weiler and Thomas paper I cited above. Dr. Graven really was CHD’s CIO, as seen on page 7 of CHD’s 2019 IRS form 990 (but also confirmed by Zadrozny in interviews of Graven’s family and friends). Graven was also involved in this now-retracted Lyons-Weiler and Thomas paper, as Thomas himself notes in Chapter 1 of his new book “Vax Facts”:
In January of 2019, I received a letter from the Oregon Medical Board saying that I needed to prove the vaccine-friendly plan was as safe as the CDC vaccine schedule. While their letter didn’t convey an overt threat, my attorney advised me that failing to comply with their demands, even when they were unreasonable, could cost me my license. So, we did. I hired an independent consultant (a pediatrician, neonatologist, and informatics expert) and tasked him with pulling the data on every baby born into my practice from the day we opened our doors (June 1, 2008) to the day he closed that dataset in February 2019. We had 10.5 years of data on many health outcomes. The analysis of the data was published…
Thomas verifies Graven was an unnamed “independent” consultant involved in his retracted paper where Thomas describes him as a neonatologist and informatics expert. Given Graven was CIO of CHD at the same time he was pulling Thomas’ data, Graven was not at all “independent”. Lyons-Weiler and Thomas should have disclosed it. They did not.
Earlier I asserted CHD was involved without disclosure in the new Mawson study. I assert here that Kennedy’s CHD — without disclosure — was deeply involved in the creation of the Lyons-Weiler and Thomas vax-unvax paper as well. Kennedy/CHD is behind multiple “other sciences” they love to cite as independent research and they are not willing to disclose it. Wakefield all over again, anyone?
What It All Means
Kennedy, throughout the two days of hearings, repeatedly refused to acknowledge the vast amount of valid, peer-reviewed research showing vaccines are not associated with autism. We now know he will never do that, given he straight up cited invalid science as valid to Dr. Cassidy. If confirmed, Kennedy will keep trashing science. He will not become the public health advocate Dr. Cassidy encouraged him to be. He will never apologize for being wrong about what he’s said, indeed he will never admit to being wrong. Instead, Kennedy will continue exploiting the trashed science he helps create for his own benefit. He will further drive down US vaccine rates like happened in Samoa. We will see outbreaks of measles, pertussis and meningitis that will hospitalize and kill our infants and children. And it will be horrible.
