Brian Hooker's paper showing vaccines increase mortality was REMOVED from preprints.org

Here's how they justified the removal and why they got it wrong. If they found an explanation other than the vaccine, why are they keeping it a secret from everyone including the authors?

Executive summary

They censored this paper as a danger to public safety. This means they know the paper is incorrect and can explain the observed data. But they are keeping their analysis a secret. From everyone, including the authors.

So Karl wrote the entire advisory board. Only ONE member bothered to respond with the reasoning. The rest ghosted him.

But the BIG problem is that the “reasoning” does not EXPLAIN what the study observed. At all. We are left clueless. If the vaccines didn’t increase the mortality, then what did? All we have is COMPLETE SILENCE.

In this article I’ll post what the Advisory Board member wrote and what I wrote back.

Please vote at the end of the article who you think is correct.

The paper in question... CAUTION: the paper is unverified

Available here: Increased Mortality Associated with 2-Month Old Infant Vaccinations

The response Karl got from an Advisory Board member

Dear Karl:

I am writing to you in my personal capacity, not as part of the advisory committee. I did not review this paper, but if I had, I would have rejected it too. Here are some reasons why.

The paper was likely withdrawn because its design and analysis cannot support the conclusions it makes about vaccination and infant mortality, owing to multiple fundamental methodological errors that invalidate causal interpretation. Most critically, the study conditions entirely on death by including only children who died before age three, which makes it impossible to estimate mortality risk or compare vaccinated and unvaccinated populations; the analysis therefore examines only the timing of death among decedents rather than whether vaccination increases the likelihood of death. This fatal selection bias is compounded by the absence of a living comparison group and a population denominator, rendering terms such as “mortality rate,” “increased risk,” and “more likely to die” incorrect and devoid of epidemiologic meaning. The study further introduces immortal time bias by defining vaccination exposure in a way that requires survival to a specific age window, thereby structurally excluding early deaths from the vaccinated group and inflating apparent post-vaccination risk. Odds ratios are calculated despite the data not arising from a valid cohort or case–control design, rendering the reported statistics uninterpretable. In addition, the analysis fails to adjust for confounding factors that strongly influence both vaccination timing and mortality, such as prematurity, congenital conditions, healthcare access, and underlying illness, and stratified analyses by race and sex merely reproduce these biases rather than reveal biological effects. Cause-of-death comparisons rely on very small numbers, making them numerically unstable and highly sensitive to minor reclassification, yet are presented as meaningful differences. Finally, the paper repeatedly uses causal and harm-implying language that is not justified by the study design, even at an exploratory level. Taken together, these issues represent foundational violations of epidemiologic and statistical principles rather than differences of interpretation, which is why the preprint was withdrawn and labeled scientifically inaccurate.

Preprints generally do not withdraw, so this must have been an obvious mistake on their part.

My response

Dear Professor xxxx,

I am a journalist with ~1M readers worldwide. I’ve written over 1,500 articles on vaccines.

You obviously spent an extraordinary amount of time carefully reviewing the Hooker paper to have written such a detailed review.

I was wondering if you would be willing to do a short interview lasting 5 -10 minutes about why this paper must be removed from public view?

All studies have limitations. This one is no exception.

But I have not found anyone who can IDENTIFY the confounder or methodological error that could possibly EXPLAIN the results that were presented in the paper (other than a causal result of the vaccine).

The results are directional the same way for every single vaccine. All six. No exceptions. No “well, this one vaccine showed a protective effect so maybe it’s noise.” Every jab, every subgroup, same direction. The consistency across vaccines, across racial groups, across sexes — that’s not a statistical artifact. Noise doesn’t line up that neatly.

What methodological error did Hooker make that can EXPLAIN such consistency across all 55 subgroups?

The key question I have is this:

If you (or any of your advisory board colleagues) cannot identify the error explaining the observed signal (WHICH YOU DID NOT DO in your email to Karl), then how can you be CERTAIN you are CORRECT in your support of REMOVAL of the paper rather than simply asking the authors to moderate their conclusions and note the limitations?

If you are wrong, then you have advocated for the suppression of a scientific study that could save lives.

In particular, you wrote:

In other words, you claim the study must answer the question: does vaccination increase the absolute probability of death in the population? Interesting question, but that would require a different dataset — a full birth cohort with survivors which the authors didn’t have.

But the important thing is that the study never claimed to answer YOUR question!

It claimed ONLY to find an association between 2-month vaccination and death in the 3rd month of life. Which it does.

You are essentially saying “this study can’t answer a question it wasn’t designed to answer, therefore it’s invalid.”

That’s not a critique of the study. That’s a critique of a straw man.

The question the study does answer is arguably more important: if vaccines are genuinely harmless, vaccination timing should have zero relationship to death timing.

The fact that it does — consistently, across all vaccines and 55 subgroups — is exactly the kind of signal you’d want to investigate further, wouldn’t you?

Calling this “impossible to interpret” seems unjustified.

I’d also like you to explain your reference to immortal time bias in your note as there is no immortal time bias in the study. Anywhere. Both groups had the exact same rules for the exposure and observation windows.

Please cc: the interested parties on your response. Thanks!

-steve

Note: I cc’ed RFK, Senator Johnson, Aaron Siri, Karl, Brian, Mary Holland, and more.

I also wrote the advisory board asking them to identify what could have caused an “error” of this magnitude and how they know for certain they are correct.

My email to the advisory board

Dear Preprints Advisory Board,

I am an independent journalist specializing in vaccine policy, with a global readership of nearly 1M. I have written over 1,500 articles on vaccine-related issues.

I am preparing a story regarding your January 2026 withdrawal of the study by Karl Jablonowski and Brian Hooker: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202512.1865

The paper performed 55 subgroup analyses, all of which showed a consistent signal of increased mortality in the 30-day window following vaccination.

If this signal is not caused by the vaccines, the advisory board must have identified a specific methodological error or confounder that explains why the data appears the way it does. I have summarized the causal dilemma presented by these data here:

I have spoken with multiple experts, and none have been able to identify a non-causal mechanism that explains the consistency of this signal across all vaccines, racial groups, and the dramatic sex disparity.

If the board concluded this paper was a danger to public safety, you must have definitively concluded that the findings are incorrect because there was a much more likely explanation than vaccine harm. Therefore, I am asking you to share the specific evidence or methodological error you identified that can explain these 55 consistent signals and satisfy the requirements enumerated in the image above.

If you are certain this is not a causal effect, you should be able to name the confounder.

If you keep the explanation a secret, you are advocating for the suppression of a scientific study without providing the public with the necessary evidence to justify that suppression.

Please cc: the interested parties on your response. Thanks!

- steve

Who do you think was right?

Can you identify the confounder that was more likely to produce the results noted in the Hooker paper than the vaccine? Or do you think it should remain a secret known only to preprints.org Advisory Board members?