# Proof Narrative: Childhood vaccines are not properly tested for safety because they were never tested in placebo-controlled clinical trials before approval.

## Verdict

**Verdict: DISPROVED**

The factual premise the claim leans on — that no childhood vaccine has ever been tested in a placebo-controlled clinical trial before approval — is not true, and several plain counterexamples are easy to point to.

## What Was Claimed?

The claim says childhood vaccines are unsafe in some meaningful way *because* they have never been tested against a placebo before approval. It is a common talking point in present-day vaccine debates and underpinned a 2025 HHS announcement that future vaccines would be required to undergo placebo testing — implying the previous ones had not. The whole argument stands on whether that premise is true.

## What Did We Find?

The premise is false. The single most famous vaccine trial in U.S. history — the 1954 polio Field Trial led by Thomas Francis at the University of Michigan, testing Jonas Salk's inactivated polio vaccine — randomly assigned roughly 200,000 schoolchildren to receive an injection of saline solution as the control, with about the same number receiving the actual vaccine. It was placebo-controlled, double-blinded, and conducted before the vaccine was licensed. The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia confirms it "administered a saline placebo to the control group."

The polio vaccine is not the only example. The American Academy of Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins' International Vaccine Access Center, and Voices for Vaccines (a program of the Task Force for Global Health) each independently document childhood vaccines whose pivotal pre-licensure trials were placebo-controlled. The Voices for Vaccines list explicitly names rubella, pneumococcal, Hib, HPV, Salk polio, measles, Tdap, and COVID. Other documented examples include the 1992 NEJM hepatitis A trial in 1,037 children (519 vaccine, 518 placebo), the 1980s NEJM varicella trial, the 2006 NEJM rotavirus trials, and the FUTURE I and II HPV trials supporting Gardasil's approval — all placebo-controlled trials in children, conducted before licensure.

A FactCheck.org article (April 2026) addressed the claim head-on, calling it a refrain that "misunderstands the vaccine safety testing process and takes advantage of a narrow definition of a placebo." The dispute is largely definitional: the strictest claimants accept only saline as a "real" placebo and dismiss any control containing the vaccine's inactive carrier (adjuvants, stabilizers, buffers). The FDA's regulatory definition is broader. The key point: even under the strictest saline-only definition, the polio, hepatitis A, varicella, rotavirus, and HPV examples above remain placebo-controlled trials of childhood vaccines conducted before approval. The premise fails under either definition.

Five independent authoritative sources — a journalism fact-check, a professional medical society, a university public-health center, an academic medical center, and a public-health communications nonprofit — were assembled to verify this. All five citations were checked against their original web pages and confirmed verbatim. Four were verified live; one was confirmed via the Internet Archive.

## What Should You Keep In Mind?

A few caveats. First, the proof addresses the *factual premise* of the claim — the "because" half. It does not separately establish that vaccines are safe; that is a larger empirical question with its own evidence base (multi-phase trials, FDA review, post-marketing surveillance via VAERS, VSD, V-safe, and CISA). The proof shows only that the *reason* the claim offers for distrusting vaccine safety testing is mistaken.

Second, not every dose on the current schedule was approved on the basis of a saline-placebo trial. For vaccines that improve on a licensed predecessor — Prevnar-13 replacing Prevnar-7, for example — the regulatory approach is to compare the new version against the older licensed version. This is a deliberate ethical choice: withholding an effective pneumococcal vaccine from thousands of infants would knowingly leave them vulnerable to invasive disease the older vaccine already prevents. WHO, FDA, and bioethicists concur that placebo arms are inappropriate when an effective vaccine already exists.

Third, the disproof speaks to the universal-negative form ("never tested"). A weaker version — "*long-term* placebo-controlled safety studies of years-to-decades follow-up have not been conducted for every dose" — has more empirical merit, but it is a different claim.

## How Was This Verified?

The verification process is automated and reproducible: a Python script identifies five independent sources rejecting the claim's premise, fetches each source over the live web (with an Internet Archive fallback for one), and confirms that the quoted passage is present verbatim on the page. The verdict is determined mechanically from the citation-verification results, not from author judgment. You can read [the structured proof report](proof.md), inspect [the full verification audit](proof_audit.md) for the citation-verification details and the four adversarial checks, or [re-run the proof yourself](proof.py).
