Be the CDC: Turn Off Vaccines and Watch What Happens

Explore the real cost of a pre-vaccine world

RFK Jr.’s frontal assault on vaccines kicked into high gear this week with two remarkable developments: a proposal to strip vaccines from the U.S. schedule, so we can emulate a country that invest less than 2% of our medical research budget, and news of a no-bid contract for a planned Danish-led clinical trial of established vaccines in African nations with high Hepatitis B rates, despite decades of data demonstrating their efficacy.

Meanwhile, if you listen to the proclamations coming out of HHS, you might conclude that the primary function of vaccines is to pump children full of toxic metals, cause side effects, and enrich Big Pharma. What’s almost never discussed are the diseases themselves.

Given how distorted the conversation has become, this seems like a good moment to refresh our collective memory about the infections these vaccines have nearly erased.

The Vaccine Schedule: Roll Your Own

To provide for that trip down memory lane, we’ve built the Vaccination Scheduler, an interactive tool that lets you explore the consequences of modifying the current U.S. vaccine schedule. It begins with no vaccines at all, effectively dialing the clock back to a pre-vaccine world, and lets you turn individual vaccines on and off.

The calculator applies historical disease and mortality rates to today’s U.S. population. A lot has changed since these vaccines were introduced — population age structures, medical care, supportive technologies, all of which can shift mortality risk. These estimates are therefore approximate, but they illustrate something essential:

Without vaccines, vaccine-preventable diseases would once again become common, disruptive, and deadly.

Even with conservative assumptions, the current U.S. schedule prevents, each year:

• ~18 million cases of acute illness

• ~50,000 chronic diseases or cancers

• ~80,000 deaths

Here are the approximate annual burdens avoided if we were to abandon vaccination entirely:

Estimated annual U.S. rates of acute illness, chronic disease and death without specified vaccines.

How Serious Are These Diseases?

Below is a quick reference table summarizing severity and long-term consequences.

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What About Side Effects?

Vaccines do have adverse effects, some mild, some serious but rare. Those risks deserve study, transparency, and continuous improvement. But meaningful risk assessment requires context, and the context is clear:

The risks of these diseases dwarf the risks of the vaccines that prevent them.

I plan to add vaccine side-effect estimates to the calculator. If you have suggestions with credible references email them to info@scienceaccountability.org. (Suggestions without citations will be ignored.)

A Note on Influenza and COVID-19

This calculator does not yet include influenza or COVID vaccines because their formulations (and therefore their performance) change annually. They will be covered in a follow-up post.

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Sources & Methodology

These rates are based primarily on the “pink book” from CDC with additional references related to chicken pox (varicella), and RSV . The intent is not to produce perfect modern burden estimates, but to give readers an intuitive, order-of-magnitude sense of what we are preventing by maintaining high vaccination coverage.