A Bridge Across a Captured System: Reviewing Mumper’s Parent’s Guide to Childhood Vaccination Decisions

An Essay on harm reduction for parents who cannot refuse

My position on injecting children with the products in the CDC schedule is absolute. The substances in question are toxic by composition — aluminum adjuvants, polysorbate 80, formaldehyde residues, foreign proteins, glyphosate residues from culture media, mercury still present in some products. The trials that supposedly establish their safety use other vaccines or aluminum-containing solutions as comparators rather than inert placebo, which means the safety profile is benchmarked against other toxins. The vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated comparisons that have been done — Mawson, Hooker and Miller, Lyons-Weiler and Thomas — show the unvaccinated children are healthier across every chronic-illness category measured.¹ ² ³ Poison is poison. Do not inject children with these products.

That is my view, and I am not writing this essay to soften it. I am writing this essay because the readers I most want to reach cannot currently act on it.

Elizabeth Mumper writes within the establishment framework. She accepts germ theory, viruses, the immune system as conventionally described, and the legitimacy of certain vaccines. This review does not relitigate the framework. It assesses what her book offers to parents whose situations do not currently allow the position I hold.

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The cost of refusal

Refusing to vaccinate is not a single decision made in isolation by a sovereign individual. For many parents, refusal sits inside a structure of coercion they did not choose and cannot dismantle by themselves. A non-aligned spouse. A custody arrangement where one parent’s vaccination preferences are subject to the other’s veto, or to a court’s ruling. A school district that requires a documented schedule for enrollment and a state that has narrowed or eliminated personal-belief exemptions. A workplace that requires the children of staff to attend the on-site daycare, which itself requires vaccination. A family of origin that treats refusal as evidence of unfitness to parent. A medical system that flags unvaccinated children as a child-protection concern in some jurisdictions.

These costs are not natural consequences of declining a medical procedure. They are the product of a coercive structure that has been built deliberately, expanded relentlessly, and that uses the family, the school, the workplace, and the courts as enforcement points. The cost of refusal is the price the system charges for non-compliance. Naming this matters because the parent who cannot pay that price is not a weak parent. They are a parent caught in a structure that was designed to catch them.

Mumper’s book is a guide for parents inside that structure. It does not pretend the structure is just. It does not ask parents to bear costs they cannot bear. It works within the constraints those parents face and identifies what can be reduced, deferred, or eliminated within them. That is what makes the book worth reviewing, and that is the frame from which I review it.

What Mumper has been tracking

Mumper is a board-certified pediatrician with more than four decades in practice. Beginning in 2005, she and two colleagues began tracking outcomes in children who followed the CDC schedule, children on a modified schedule, and children who received no vaccines.⁴ The framing of that data set is itself notable — most pediatricians do not track this comparison, and most cannot, because their patient populations do not include enough unvaccinated children to compare. Mumper’s practice did, because parents seeking modified or no-vaccine care sought her out.

The findings she reports from her own practice and from collaborating researchers form the empirical spine of the book.

Autism prevalence in her practice was 1 in 297, at a time when the broader U.S. estimate was approximately 1 in 50. The current CDC estimate, based on a 2014 birth cohort, is 1 in 31. The 2018 California birth cohort data she presents shows autism rates among 4-year-old boys ranging from 5.3% in white children to 12.1% in Black children, with Asian and Hispanic children between. The “better diagnosis” explanation that the establishment offers is, on these numbers, insufficient. Diagnostic criteria do not multiply prevalence by an order of magnitude in two decades.

The Hooker and Miller analysis published in SAGE Open Medicine in 2020 reported that higher cumulative vaccine counts correlated with higher rates of developmental delays, asthma, ear infections, and gastrointestinal disorders, with vaccination before the first birthday flagged as a particular risk.¹

The Lyons-Weiler and Thomas study, published in 2020 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, examined 10 years of data from a pediatric practice with variable vaccination schedules.³ Across thirteen chronic-condition categories — asthma, allergic rhinitis, breathing issues, behavioral issues, ADHD, respiratory infection, otitis media, ear pain, other infections, conjunctivitis, other eye disorders, eczema, dermatitis, urticaria, anemia — the vaccinated cohort showed higher cumulative incidence in every measured category. None of the 561 unvaccinated children received an ADHD diagnosis. The study was retracted. Mumper notes the retraction was not attributed to defects in the data.

The 16,000-patient analysis that Dr. Paul Thomas was required to produce by the Oregon State Medical Board after the publication of The Vaccine-Friendly Plan sits behind that retracted paper. The board demanded evidence of safety. The evidence produced was inconvenient. The license came under attack. The paper was retracted. Mumper does not labor over this sequence; she records it. The reader sees what happened.

The book’s argument, vaccine by vaccine

The vaccine-by-vaccine treatment is where Mumper’s book does most of its useful work for the trapped parent, and it is where her own framework’s limitations matter least to the practical reader. She works through each product on the schedule and identifies what the establishment’s own evidence shows about it.

Hepatitis B. The CDC’s own ACIP presentation acknowledges that “universal birth dose contribution to acute case decline is likely very small.”⁵ The ICAN FOIA request to the CDC for documented cases of hepatitis B transmission in school settings returned no recorded cases.⁶ The Gallagher and Goodman analysis of NHIS data, published in 2010, found that male neonates vaccinated with the hepatitis B vaccine before 1999 had a threefold higher risk of an autism diagnosis compared with boys not vaccinated as neonates, with non-white boys at greater risk.⁷ Mumper notes that this finding has been in the literature since 2010. Hospitals have continued the routine birth-dose practice in the years since.

Rotavirus. The manufacturer’s own data shows fussiness and irritability in approximately 70% of vaccinated infants and loss of appetite in approximately 30%. Mumper raises the question that follows: what are the infants telling us when they cannot be comforted and stop nursing? She does not answer it definitively. She places the question and lets the parent sit with it.

DTaP. The Warfel et al. study published in PNAS in 2014 demonstrated that the acellular pertussis vaccine protects against disease but fails to prevent infection or transmission in a primate model.⁸ Klein et al. documented waning protection after the fifth dose.⁹ Most of Mumper’s patients diagnosed with pertussis were up to date on the vaccine. In 2024, a peak outbreak year, surveillance reported zero pertussis deaths in U.S. children ages 7 through 19.¹⁰ Mumper’s tetanus assessment is also worth pausing on. The risk of dying from tetanus in the U.S. is vanishingly small. Tetanus enters through wounds contaminated with soil; supervised infants and toddlers are not the at-risk population the schedule treats them as.

Hib. This is the vaccine Mumper presents most favorably, calling it “one of my preferred vaccines.” Her case rests on the establishment narrative that the introduction of the vaccine produced the 50-fold decline in Hib meningitis. Within her framework, that is the dominant reading. Within mine, the question of what caused the decline — vaccine, sanitation, nutrition, reporting changes, definitional changes, surveillance artifacts — remains open. What Mumper does add, even within her favorable presentation, is the package-insert problem: the Hib safety studies use other vaccines as comparators rather than inert placebo, which she identifies as a limitation.¹¹ That admission, in her own voice, points the careful reader toward the larger pattern across all the products.

IPV. Mumper’s treatment of polio acknowledges that “the history of polio vaccination is complex.” She notes that most current polio cases worldwide are vaccine-derived. She does not press further. The complexity she gestures toward is the entire history that runs from the DDT and lead-arsenate exposures of the 1940s and 50s, through the diagnostic redefinitions that reclassified paralytic cases as aseptic meningitis or Guillain-Barré, through the SV40 contamination, through the oral vaccine’s role in producing cases in regions where the wild form had been absent for decades. She does not tell that history. She tells the reader the history is more nuanced than they have been told.

Prevnar. The irony Mumper records is that in her clinical research, higher numbers of vaccines received — including Prevnar — correlated with higher rates of ear infections and pneumonia. The product marketed as protection against ear infections is, in her data, associated with their increase.

Varicella. Natural chickenpox produces lifelong immunity. The vaccine has been associated with shingles at younger ages.¹² The widespread use of the vaccine since the early 1990s has reduced exposure in adults, removing the periodic immune boosting that protected against shingles and shifting the disease burden into populations where it had not previously appeared. Mumper records this pattern as “a double-edged sword” in the language of the cited paper.

MMR. The most contested entry. Mumper writes that “for a subset of children, there may be an association between MMR vaccination and autism.” She delays the vaccine to age 2 in white children and age 3 in Black children. The 2014 Hooker reanalysis of CDC data — based on documents brought forward by the CDC’s William Thompson — reported an age-related autism signal in African American boys who received MMR at younger ages.¹³ The paper was retracted. The signal in the underlying data is what it is.

Mumper documents that measles outbreaks have occurred in populations with 98%+ MMR coverage: Corpus Christi 1985, the Massachusetts high school outbreak in 1984, the Israeli military in 2017.¹⁴ ¹⁵ ¹⁶ Primary vaccine failure has been reported as high as 10%.¹⁷ Vaccine-induced immunity wanes; natural infection produces lifelong immunity. The risk of death from measles in the U.S. has been approximately 1 in 10,000 since before the vaccine was introduced — vitamin A status, sanitation, and access to care drive the risk profile, not vaccination status.¹⁸

The pattern across the vaccine-by-vaccine treatment is consistent. Mumper records the establishment’s own admissions, the manufacturer’s own data, the peer-reviewed literature on failures of effectiveness and durability, and the FOIA-released documents on absence of evidence. She does not need to argue that the products are problematic. The documents she cites argue it.

The modified schedule

The practical output of Mumper’s book is a schedule that sits between the CDC schedule and refusal. The shape of it:

Birth. No hepatitis B vaccine unless the mother is hepatitis B-positive. This eliminates the largest single intervention in the first week of life for 99.5% of infants.

Zero to twelve months. No vaccines until at least two months. One or two vaccines per visit, never more. Hib and IPV at 2 and 4 months, IPV again at 9 months. DTaP and Prevnar spaced across the 3-, 5-, and 6-month visits. The seventh and eighth months reserved as catch-up visits if a vaccine has been deferred for illness. No live vaccines.

Twelve to twenty-four months. MMR and varicella separated; live vaccines never given alongside other vaccines. MMR delayed to age 2 in white children, age 3 in Black children. Hepatitis B series, if required for school enrollment, started between ages 2 and 5.

Three to five years. Wellness visits each year. Kindergarten vaccines (DTaP, IPV, MMR, varicella) given no more than two per visit.

Minimalist alternative for breastfed infants not in daycare. No vaccines until 6 months. Hib at 6 months as a three-dose series. Polio only if traveling to regions where it circulates. Personalized risk-benefit on Prevnar based on actual exposure. Live vaccines case-by-case, never simultaneously. Hepatitis B deferred until specific risk is present.

Vaccines Mumper recommends declining outright. Rotavirus, Gardasil, COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children.

This schedule is a substantial reduction in exposure. By delaying hepatitis B, deferring all vaccines until at least two months, separating live vaccines, eliminating rotavirus and Gardasil and COVID, and capping per-visit doses at one or two, the cumulative aluminum adjuvant load in the first year of life — the period her own data flags as the highest-risk window — is reduced sharply. The schedule is not what I would do. It is a long way from what most pediatricians do.

Where her caveats point

The bridge frame matters here. A bridge has planks, and a bridge has a far end. The planks of Mumper’s book are the documents and admissions she records. The far end is the place those documents point to, even though Mumper herself does not walk to it.

The Hib package insert problem she raises applies to every product on the schedule. None of the childhood vaccines have been tested against inert placebo. The trials that established their safety profile compared them to other aluminum-containing vaccines or to aluminum-containing solutions designated as placebo. This is a structural feature of vaccine licensure, not a limitation of one product. The reader who sees Mumper raise the problem for Hib is positioned to see it for the rest.

The pertussis pattern she documents — vaccinated cases, waning immunity, transmission despite vaccination — applies to every vaccine for which the establishment claims herd immunity as the justification. If pertussis circulates in vaccinated populations, the herd-immunity argument for mandates collapses. Mumper records the pattern for pertussis. The reader who sees the pattern for pertussis is positioned to see it for measles, mumps, and the rest.

The HepB pattern — CDC admission of negligible birth-dose contribution, ICAN FOIA showing no documented school transmission, 2010 NHIS finding of threefold autism risk, sixteen years of unchanged practice — is a model of how the system processes inconvenient findings. The reader who sees this for HepB is positioned to see how every other vaccine has been defended through the same procedural moves.

The retraction of Lyons-Weiler and Thomas is the procedural move at its clearest. The data showed unvaccinated children were healthier. The board demanded the analysis. The analysis was performed. The findings were published. The license came under threat. The paper was retracted. The data did not change. Mumper records the sequence.

The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act — the liability shield she describes — is the structural fact that explains the rest. When manufacturers and physicians cannot be sued, the financial incentive to discover, report, and act on harm signals disappears. The system that produced the schedule is a system in which the entities producing the products bear no cost for harm. The 1986 Act is the floor on which the entire current practice stands.

The reader who walks across these planks ends up in a different place than where they started. Mumper does not push them there. She lays the planks down and lets the reader walk.

The book as bridge

Approximately one-third of the families who work through Mumper’s process choose not to vaccinate at all. This figure deserves attention. It is not a marginal outcome. It is what one in three of her patient families decide after they have read the package inserts, asked the eight questions, reviewed the schedule, and considered their child’s specific situation.

This is what the book does. It walks the parent through what informed consent already requires. The information that informed consent requires, fully presented, leads one in three families to refuse entirely. The remaining two-thirds proceed with a modified schedule that is itself a substantial reduction in exposure compared to the CDC default.

For the parent reading this who is caught — in a marriage where the spouse will not consider refusal, in a custody arrangement where the court has the final say, in a school system that requires documentation, in a job that requires daycare, in a family that treats refusal as a moral failure — Mumper’s book is the structure under your feet for the part of the walk you can currently make. It will not ask you to leave your marriage, lose custody, give up income, or move states. It will not require you to bear costs the system has imposed and that you cannot pay today.

It will give you a board-certified pediatrician’s published, modified schedule that you can show to your spouse, your pediatrician, your custody mediator, your school administrator. It will give you the language to say: this is what shared decision-making looks like, and here is what the new ACIP guidance and the literature support. It will give you the package-insert references, the FOIA documents, the peer-reviewed studies, and the confidence that the position you are taking is not fringe but is the position of a pediatrician with forty years of practice.

It will also, if you read carefully, give you the planks to walk further than the book itself walks.

The far end of the bridge is where I am. I do not pretend the bridge is unnecessary, and I do not insist that everyone walks all the way across today. The bridge exists because the coercion exists, and the coercion is real. One in three of Mumper’s families crosses. The other two-thirds reduce harm substantially. Both are walks worth respecting.

Mumper’s book is available through the Independent Medical Alliance, free to download.¹⁹ For the parent caught in the structure I have described, it is the most honest thing a board-certified American pediatrician can publish without losing her license, and the most useful guide available within the constraints you face. It is not the destination. It is the walk you can make today.

Parent's Guide to Childhood Immunizations

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References

1. Hooker BS, Miller NZ. Analysis of health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children: developmental delays, asthma, ear infections, and gastrointestinal disorders. SAGE Open Med. 2020;8.

2. Mawson AR, Ray BD, Bhuiyan AR, Jacob B. Pilot comparative study on the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated 6- to 12-year-old U.S. children. J Transl Sci. 2017;3(3):1-12.

3. Lyons-Weiler J, Thomas P. Relative incidence of office visits and cumulative rates of billed diagnoses along the axis of vaccination. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020;17(22):8674.

4. Mumper E. Can awareness of medical pathophysiology in autism lead to primary care autism prevention strategies? North Am J Med Sci. 2013;6(3):134-144.

5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ACIP presentation on hepatitis B. December 2025.

6. Informed Consent Action Network. CDC concedes it lacks proof of hepatitis B being transmitted in a school setting. icandecide.org.

7. Gallagher CM, Goodman MS. Hepatitis B vaccination of male neonates and autism diagnosis, NHIS 1997-2002. J Toxicol Environ Health A. 2010;73(24):1665-1677.

8. Warfel JM, Zimmerman LI, Merkel TJ. Acellular pertussis vaccines protect against disease but fail to prevent infection and transmission in a nonhuman primate model. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014;111(2):787-792.

9. Klein NP, Bartlett J, Rowhani-Rahbar A, Fireman B, Baxter R. Waning protection after fifth dose of acellular pertussis vaccine in children. N Engl J Med. 2012;367(11):1012-1019.

10. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2024 Provisional Pertussis Surveillance Report. 2025.

11. Hiberix [Haemophilus b Conjugate Vaccine]. Package insert. GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals; 2025.

12. Edmunds WJ, Brisson M, Gay NJ, Miller E. Varicella vaccination: a double-edged sword? Commun Dis Public Health. 2002;5(3):185-186.

13. Hooker BS. Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination timing and autism among young African American boys: a reanalysis of CDC data. Transl Neurodegener. 2014;3:16.

14. Gustafson TL, et al. Measles outbreak in a fully immunized secondary-school population. N Engl J Med. 1987;316(13):771-774.

15. Nkowane BM, et al. Measles outbreak in a vaccinated school population. Am J Public Health. 1987;77(4):434-438.

16. Avramovich E, et al. Measles outbreak in a highly vaccinated population — Israel, July-August 2017. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2018;67(42):1186-1188.

17. Jacobson RM, Poland GA. The genetic basis for measles vaccine failure. Acta Paediatr Suppl. 2004;93(445):43-47.

18. Goodson JL, Seward JF. Measles 50 years after use of measles vaccine. Infect Dis Clin North Am. 2015;29(4):725-743.

19. Mumper E. A Parent’s Guide to Childhood Vaccination Decisions. Independent Medical Alliance; April 2026. Available: imahealth.org/tools-and-guides/parents-guide-to-childhood-immunizations/

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