In 2025, it is easier to publicly doubt the existence of God than to question the safety of vaccines. Say the word "anti-vaxxer" and the modern inquisition begins: social excommunication, deplatforming, professional ruin, even loss of custody of your children. Yet the core claim, that every vaccine on the schedule is "safe and effective" for every person in every circumstance, rests on a foundation of faith, not the rigorous, long-term, placebo-controlled evidence we demand of every other medical product.

This is no longer medicine. It is bad theology.

1. The Holy Water of the Modern Age

As the Midwestern Doctor and Robert Mendelsohn before him observed, vaccines function as the sacramental baptism of our secular religion.

Newborns receive their first dose of hepatitis B within 12 hours of birth, a disease almost exclusively transmitted sexually or via infected needles.

Refuse, and hospital staff will call child protective services.

Doctors and nurses must be fully vaccinated to keep their jobs, regardless of natural immunity or personal risk, a loyalty oath to the faith.

The white coat has replaced the priest's collar; the syringe is the aspergillum sprinkling holy water. To decline is not a medical choice, it is blasphemy.

2. Dissenters Must Be Cancelled

The response to doubt is never calm rebuttal with data. It is ritual denunciation.

Andrew Wakefield lost his license and was stripped of his career for daring to suggest a possible link between vaccines and autism, something presently debated.

Another respected pro-vaccine researcher in Africa, published data showing the DTP vaccine increased overall mortality in girls. Result? His funding was threatened and the findings buried.

Doctors who prescribed ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine in 2020–21 were delicensed in real time, even when their protocols saved lives.

During COVID, Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya, Oxford's Sunetra Gupta, and Harvard's Martin Kulldorff — three of the most credentialed epidemiologists alive — were smeared, censored, and labelled "fringe" for opposing lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

This is not science correcting error. This is the vaccine Church burning heretics to protect doctrine.

3. The Gold Standard Evidence That Doesn't Exist

We are told vaccines are "the most studied medical products in history." Then why has no large, long-term, placebo-controlled trial ever been conducted on the entire childhood schedule?

The hepatitis B vaccine given on day one of life was tested for safety for only four days after injection.

The HPV vaccine's "placebo" was an aluminium adjuvant — known to be neurotoxic — so any child who got sick in either arm could be declared "normal background rate."

The original acellular pertussis vaccine trials used the old, highly reactogenic whole-cell vaccine as the "control" — guaranteeing the new version would look safer by comparison.

Pre-licensure trials for the mRNA COVID vaccines lasted a median of two months. Pfizer's six-month data was the longest follow-up ever presented for approval.

No pharmaceutical drug — not statins, not SSRIs, not chemotherapy — would be approved on that timeline. Yet when the COVID vaccines were rolled out under Emergency Use Authorisation, we were told "the science is settled" and that questioning the absence of long-term safety data made you a murderer.

How, exactly, were rare or delayed adverse events supposed to be excluded when the observation period was measured in weeks, not years?

4. The COVID Revelation: Emergency Dogma in Real Time

The COVID vaccines were the ultimate stress test of the religion.

The trials were unblinded early.

The placebo groups were vaccinated, destroying the ability to ever gather long-term comparative data.

Serious adverse events of special interest (myocarditis, blood clots, Guillain-Barré, turbo-cancers) were dismissed as "coincidental" even when they occurred days after injection.

All-cause mortality in highly vaccinated countries began rising in 2021–22 in age groups that should have seen no excess deaths from COVID itself.

Yet any doctor who pointed this out was silenced. Pharmacies refused to fill ivermectin scripts. YouTube deleted videos of board-certified physicians discussing peer-reviewed papers. The White House openly pressured social media companies to remove "misinformation" — a word that simply meant "data contradicting the narrative."

When the state must censor scientists to protect a medical product, you are no longer in the realm of evidence-based medicine. You are in the realm of religious cult enforcement.

5. Absence of Evidence is Treated as Evidence of Safety

The ultimate theological sleight of hand:

"There are no large, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials comparing fully vaccinated to completely unvaccinated children… therefore vaccines are safe."

Try applying that logic to any other field:

"There are no long-term studies proving this new antidepressant doesn't cause suicide in teenagers… therefore it is safe to give to every child."

You would be laughed out of the court room. But with vaccines, this circular reasoning is repeated ad infinitum, and anyone who points out the absurdity is excommunicated.

6. The Breaking of the Spell

For seventy years the spell held because vaccine injuries were relatively rare, scattered, and easy to dismiss as "coincidence." The COVID shots shattered the illusion. The injury rate was simply too high, too obvious, and too concentrated in time. When the athlete collapses on the pitch, when the healthy 32-year-old drops dead of a heart attack, when the funeral director reports never-before-seen clots — the lived reality finally overpowered the propaganda.

That is why trust in vaccination has collapsed faster in the last four years than in the previous forty. The high priests overplayed their hand, and the congregation is walking out of the cathedral.

Conclusion: From Faith Back to Evidence

Vaccines are not totally evil. Some have clearly saved lives … maybe. But treating them as infallible sacraments — beyond criticism, beyond proper testing, beyond informed consent — is not science. It is the very superstition that the Enlightenment was supposed to have killed.

Until we demand the same gold-standard, long-term, placebo-controlled evidence for vaccines that we demand for every other pharmaceutical product, we are not practising medicine.

We are practising cultist religion.

And the first commandment of that cult is simple: Thou shalt not question the needle.

https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/why-have-vaccines-become-a-religion