The secret truth about vaccines

Earlier this month, two people in Pennsylvania died after contracting measles. Neither of them had been vaccinated. This is just the latest bit of bad news from an ongoing record outbreak that has generated over 5,000 known infections. Of those cases, 96% occurred among children and adults who had not been vaccinated.

Throughout this outbreak, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has continued to belittle the importance of vaccines, to insist that measles can be cured using folk remedies, and to spread false information about vaccines in general, as The Washington Post reports.

Kennedy took to social media the very same day [as the two newly reported deaths] to claim that one of the scientists who contributed to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine had admitted to “butchering” aborted fetuses during studies in the 1960s. He also claimed that the MMR vaccine included “646 billion pieces of human DNA” and “an unspecified amount of human cellular debris.”

Kennedy has also claimed that the deaths were "fabricated" and claimed this is all just a campaign against him by an aide to Governor Josh Shapiro.

At best, these statements are gross distortions by someone whose ignorance has directly resulted in deaths around the globe. More truthfully, these are deliberate and malicious lies expressly used to encourage more infections, lies coming from a man who has long profited by undermining the nation's health. His actions at are directly connected to death from treatable diseases and threaten one of the most promising cancer treatments ever developed.

However, even though Kennedy's statements about vaccines are utter mendacity, secrets do continue to emerge about the health effects of vaccines. And some of those secrets are astounding.

Over the last year, a series of reports have emerged on the long term effects from receiving the herpes zoster vaccine—the vaccine against the virus that causes shingles. The latest two-dose version of the vaccine has been found to be 90% effective against shingles; a disease that can cause long-term severe pain, blindness, and brain damage. That protection can last at least 10 years.

But that's just the start. A study published near the end of 2005, indicated that adults who had taken the shingles vaccine were 20% less likely to develop dementia. A second 2025 study indicated that, for those already living with dementia, the shingles vaccine can slow the progress of the disease. A study published in January 2026 indicated that the shingles vaccine can actually slow biological aging.

Shingles vaccination was significantly associated with lower inflammation scores, slower epigenetic and transcriptomic aging, and a lower composite biological aging score, suggesting potential benefits for systemic inflammation, molecular and overall biological aging.

That study also reported an "an unexpected finding" linking to "higher adaptive immunity scores." This suggests that taking a vaccine designed to target a specific virus, may increase immunity to other unrelated diseases.

Finally, in a study published just days ago in Nature, it appears that the shingles vaccine even helps protect against heart attacks and stroke.

Prevention of shingles. Lower risk of dementia. Lower risk of other infections. Lower risk of heart attack. That's a pretty good deal for a couple of shots that are free on almost every insurance plan.

But this is not a Shingrix ad.

While it may seem that the shingles vaccine has stumbled into some secret sauce that gives it miraculous broad-band protection, this isn't the first time something like this has happened.

In 1908. French physician Albert Calmette and veterinarian Camille Guérin teamed up to see if they could developed a "weakened" strain of Mycobacterium bovis, a bacteria that causes tuberculosis in cattle. They hoped to make a vaccine from this bacteria based on the previous success of the smallpox vaccine ... even though the actual mechanism for the transmission of smallpox, the variola virus, was still unknown at the time.

Using a (frankly disgusting) mix of cow bile, glycerine, and mashed potatoes, Calmette and Guérin managed to develop a strain of the bacteria that they suspected was less virulent. They took the results of the strain they believed was weakened and grew a new batch of bacteria from that. Then took the bacteria they thought most weakened from that batch and did it again. Then they did it 237 more times over 13 years.

Finally, in 1921, a baby born to a mother who died of tuberculosis just after delivery was the first to receive the vaccine that would be called Bacillus Calmette–Guérin or just BCG. When that child didn't have strong side effects or develop the disease, they administered the vaccine to a small group of other children.

In 1920, 130,000 Americans died from tuberculosis and between 50% and 80% of all adults were infected with the disease. BCG was a miracle, but it would take generations for the disease to be slowly eased into obscurity. Less than 0.005% of the United States population is infected with tuberculosis today.

BCG is, and has been for many decades, the most widely administered vaccine in the world. It wasn't all smooth sailing. A disaster in 1930, in which 72 babies diedfrom a contaminated batch of vaccine, nearly ended its use. But its effectiveness against a disease that caused millions of deaths each year swiftly brought it back into use. (Tuberculosis still needlessly exists in about 4% of the global population, largely thanks to a failure of wealthy nations to care about this once it was pushed beyond their borders, lower vaccine efficiency with certain concurrent infections, and the many idiocies of war).

Within a couple of decades of the vaccine's introduction, health officials began looking at groups of people who had received BCG to determine if there were long term effects. Many seemed to worry that the vaccination would generate health issues over time. That's not what they found.

Instead, it appeared that children vaccinated with BCG weren't just far less likely to develop tuberculosis, they were less likely to die from ... well, anything. Their all cause mortality was significantly lower.

As time wen't on, long term studies on BCG showed that it provided protections against other diseases, especially other respiratory diseases, even though the bacteria or viruses behind those diseases had no relationship to Mycobacterium bovis.

And, yes, it did this too:

Vaccines such as Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) can apparently defer dementia onset with an efficacy better than all drugs known to date, as initially reported by Gofrit et al., now confirmed by other studies. 

Vaccines like BCG and Shingrix appear to have an overall stimulating effect to the immune system. They don't just put up a wanted poster for a single disease vector and tell the system to get ready, they recruit posses that stay out there riding the immune system range, looking for any kind of outlaw. BCG is even effective against some forms of bladder cancer and is being used as a pre-treatment in some cancer vaccine trials.

For some time, BCG's widespread effectiveness has been put down to the fact that it uses a complete, if weakened, bacteria. That's part of what has encouraged the RFK Jr-supported $500 million project to develop a "universal vaccine" using the 80-year-old technology of inactivated viruses.

As Science reports, this project is moving forward, and being awarded funding taken from other vaccine research, even though the evidence behind the scheme is almost nonexistent.

Equally baffling to some vaccine researchers is the dearth of published evidence to support Taubenberger and Memoli’s project, which relies on inactivating viruses, a “platform” that first proved its worth in the 1940s with flu vaccines. ... When he saw the HHS announcement, “I thought, ‘Have I missed something in the literature?’” says [virologist Stanley Plotkin] ... “Well, no, I haven’t.”

This all-or-nothing pile on to a 1940s technology is particularly baffling when you take a second look at the vaccine featured at the top of this article: Shingrix.

The two-dose shingles vaccine was made using recombinant DNA technology. All that it has of the virus behind shingles is a single protein. This protein, glycoprotein E, is mixed with a lipid from a bacteria and an extract (QS-21) from the soapbark tree. There's no whole bacteria, or whole virus, or whole anything.

Shingrix is thought to work so broadly because that lipid-extract pair, which has the industry name of AS01B, appears to rev up the immune system and put it on alert. In 2022, the World Health Organization approved another vaccine using AS01B: Mosquirix, the first vaccine that protects children against Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite behind the most deadly form of malaria.

We're still learning what makes some vaccines so effective, others less useful, and some so surprisingly beneficial that they do more than anyone expected. BCG and Shingrix are far from the only vaccines that provide unexpected benefits.

Six randomized trials, pooled in a 2023 meta-analysis, found that influenza vaccination in patients with established heart disease reduced major cardiovascular events by roughly 26% and cardiovascular death by a third. The American Heart Association recommends several vaccines, including flu, pneumovax, shingles and COVID-19, as part of cardiovascular care due to their ability to lower risk of heart disease.

The secret truth about vaccines is that they're better than you thought. Better even than the expectations of the people who made them. We may not know exactly how these vaccines are bringing us extra health, but we can all have more time to contemplate that issue—with clear minds and beating hearts—if we don't let the vaccine skeptics lead us down a deadly path.

Note: In case you're wondering, most Americans have not received a BCG vaccine. Unless you were around in the 1940s, were dealing with bladder cancer, or were traveling in areas where you were likely to be exposed, you probably haven't had this shot. Some studies have indicated that, while BCG administered to children appears to reduce their long term risk of dementia, it has only a minor effect when administered to adults. So don't feel like you need to start pestering your doctor.