The Myths Promoted by a New CDC Vaccine Advisor
One of the U.S. government’s new advisors on vaccine recommendations, Dr. Robert Malone, is a frequent source of vaccine misinformation, including the false claims that COVID-19 vaccines can cause cancer and increase the risk of stillbirths. Indeed, Malone has personally pushed 13 claims from NewGuard’s Misinformation Fingerprints database of provably false claims.
Malone gained notoriety since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic by describing himself as the inventor of mRNA vaccines, although the extent of his contributions have been disputed by other scientists. He is now among the eight new members selected by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a panel that makes expert recommendations to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines, including what should be included on childhood vaccine schedules. (NewsGuard has compiled a list of the more than 100 false claims advanced by Kennedy and the anti-vaccine nonprofit he founded here.)
Kennedy dismissed the 17 serving advisory panel members on June 9, 2025, saying in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the panel “has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.”
ACIP’s recommendations are made through a majority vote and are not required to be adopted by the CDC, so neither Malone nor any one of Kennedy’s new members can change vaccine recommendations on their own. However, Malone’s frequent posts and articles on vaccine and health topics, circulated to his 1.3 million X followers and 357,000 Substack subscribers, show how the new ACIP may be steered toward anti-vaccine misinformation.
As noted above, NewsGuard found that Malone initiated or promoted 13 of the provably false claims on health topics in NewsGuard’s catalog of False Claims. NewsGuard left voicemails and sent emails to Malone and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services seeking comment on the claims described below, but did not receive a response.
The 13 False Claims initiated or promoted by Malone are presented here in reverse chronological order:
1. Measles vaccination can cause measles
On April 14, 2025, Malone stated in a Substack article: “Like polio, modern measles outbreaks have two general sources; ‘Wild’ or natural measles, and reversion of ‘live attenuated’ measles vaccine strains to become more infectious. Persons vaccinated with the currently marketed ‘live attenuated’ measles vaccines often shed infectious vaccine-strain measles for some time.”
Debunk: There is no evidence that the measles vaccine can cause measles, a highly contagious viral infection that can cause severe flu-like illness and rash. “The vaccine contains a live but weakened form of the measles virus that is designed to create immunity without causing full-blown illness,” Johns Hopkins Medicine says on its website. “In children with normal immune systems, the vaccine will not cause full-blown illness.”
2. Italy decided to leave the World Health Organization
A Jan. 28, 2025, post on X by Malone said, “Italy leaving the WHO.”
Debunk: Italy has not announced any plan or passed legislation to exit the organization.
3. Early polio vaccines caused a surge in cancers
In a Dec. 15, 2024, Substack article, Malone wrote: “Polio vaccines used in the late 1950s and early 1960s were contaminated with a virus called simian virus 40 (SV40) present in monkey kidney cells used to grow the vaccine. Subsequently, investigators found SV40 DNA in biopsy specimens obtained from patients with cancers such as mesothelioma (lung), osteosarcoma (bone), and non-Hodgkins lymphoma (lymph nodes). It should be noted that SV40 is so reliably carcinogenic that it’s what labs inject into the rats in order to INDUCE cancer and tumors in laboratory studies of cancer.”
Debunk: Polio vaccines, including those administered between 1955 and 1963, do not cause cancer, according to experts and published, peer-reviewed research. While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that some 10 to 30 percent of polio vaccines during that time were contaminated with a virus shown to cause cancer in animals, there is no evidence that it does the same in humans. Moreover, research conducted decades after the introduction of polio vaccines has found no link between the vaccines and cancer in recipients.
4. Canadian study proves that COVID-19 vaccines killed 17 million people
A Nov. 23, 2023, Substack article attributed to Malone included a Rumble video transcript of comments made by Denis Rancourt, a former University of Ottawa physics professor, who said: “So from this work, we’re able to calculate how many people would’ve died globally, given that we’ve studied so many countries now and we find that 17 million people were killed by the vaccines on the planet.”
Debunk: According to health experts, COVID-19 vaccines do not cause increased mortality, much less 17 million deaths worldwide. A study from the Canadian nonprofit organization Correlation Research in the Public Interest, which is the basis for this claim, “represent[s] a major distortion of the actual data,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Agence France-Presse in October 2023. “All-cause mortality spikes are likely due to the virus surging during certain periods and have nothing to do with booster campaigns.”
5. mRNA vaccines can cause cancer
At a Nov. 13, 2023, event in Washington held by Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Malone “revealed how Moderna’s patent shows that its (COVID-19) ‘vaccine’ vials contain billions of DNA fragments and other contaminants linked to birth defects and cancer,” according to an Expose-News.com (NewsGuard Trust Score: 7.5/100) article.
Debunk: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has acknowledged that residual amounts of DNA can remain in mRNA vaccines for COVID from the vaccines’ manufacturing process, according to a December 2023 USA Today fact-checking article. However, the FDA has also said there is no evidence this residual DNA could cause cancer. Malone was referencing a portion of an August 2019 patent application from Moderna that related to DNA, not mRNA vaccines, which mentioned that there were theoretical concerns that DNA vaccines could lead to mutated cells called oncogenes that can cause cancer.
6. Cleveland Clinic study proves vaccination increases COVID-19 infection risk
In a Feb. 12, 2023, interview with now-FBI deputy director Dan Bongino on Fox News, Malone said, “But the data regarding safety is becoming quite clear, and the more jabs you take, the more likely you are to get Covid according to the recent study that’s been published by the Cleveland Clinic.”
Debunk: This claim is based on a misinterpretation of the findings of an April 2023 study that was conducted by researchers at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and published in the peer-reviewed journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases. The authors did acknowledge an “unexpected finding of increasing risk with increasing number of prior COVID-19 vaccine doses.” They noted that the finding required “further study.” Lead author Nabin Shrestha told NewsGuard: “This was an association we found in our study. However, association is not causation.”
7. COVID-19 vaccines linked to increase in stillbirths
In a Nov. 10, 2022, article on his Substack, Malone republished a November 2022 article written by Dr. James Thorp, a Floria OB-GYN who has repeatedly made false claims about COVID vaccines. Thorp wrote: “A nurse Whistleblower from California has formal, incontrovertible evidence in an email received from the nursing administration of Women’s Services documenting a massive spike in the number of fetal deaths (stillbirths) that began after the vaccination push in pregnancy. In July 2021 there was an all-time institutional record at 22 stillbirths that required a significant diversion of the nurses’ clinical responsibilities. There were again 22 more stillbirths in August 2022 and as the administrator stated that does not even include other stillbirths that likely were not included as they came into different departments e.g., emergency departments, offices, or operating rooms.”
Debunk: Peer-reviewed medical research has no found link between COVID-19 vaccines and an increased risk of stillbirth. For example, an August 2022 study published in the British Medical Journal that included data on 85,000 births in Canada concluded, “We did not find evidence of an increased risk of preterm birth, small for gestational age at birth, or stillbirth after COVID-19 vaccination during any trimester of pregnancy.” A study of 32,000 births in Australia, published online by the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology in November 2022, said, “Vaccinated women had a significantly lower rate of stillbirth compared with unvaccinated women.”
8. Ventilators were the cause for nearly all early COVID-19 deaths
In an Oct. 7, 2022, article on his Substack, Malone stated: “Over 30,000 Americans appear to have been killed by mechanical ventilators or other forms of medical iatrogenesis throughout April 2020, primarily in the area around New York.”
Debunk: Ventilators have been used on critically ill COVID patients who likely would have died without one, according to medical experts. The fact that a high percentage of ventilated patients die reflects the severity of their COVID cases, not proof that the ventilator itself was responsible for their deaths.
9. COVID-19 vaccines caused excess deaths among millennials
In a July 26, 2022, article on his Substack, Malone wrote: “Millennials saw an acceleration of excess mortality into the second half of 2021 to new all-time highs, a stunning 84% above baseline. The rate of change during the fall vaccine mandates was particularly striking for us, as it coincided with the surge of corporate vaccine mandates during that time. We called this the smoking gun chart.”
Debunk: According to the CDC website, “Excess deaths are typically defined as the difference between the observed numbers of deaths in specific time periods and expected numbers of deaths in the same time periods.” According to the data, there were 63,000 more deaths among 25- to 44-year-olds in 2021 compared to 2019, before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, those figures represent a 44 percent increase, not 84 percent. Moreover, the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics told Reuters in a March 2022 statement that the increases in excess deaths coincided with COVID waves in the second half of 2021 and could not be attributed to vaccines.
10. The 2022 mpox outbreak was predicted in a simulation
Malone published an article on June 3, 2022, in LifeSiteNews.com (Trust Score: 17.5/100) that stated: “The preponderance of current evidence is pointing towards a hypothesis for the origin of this outbreak [mpox] which is increasingly consistent with prior ‘war game’ scenario planning, remarkably akin to an event which occurred during last spring, which posits emergence of an engineered Monkeypox virus into the human population during mid-May of 2022.”
Debunk: The Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based nonprofit “focused on reducing nuclear and biological threats imperiling humanity,” according to its website, did host a pandemic preparedness exercise involving a fictional mpox virus at the Munich Security Conference in March 2021. However, the scenario had major differences from the actual 2022 mpox outbreak. For example, the NTI scenario said it involved “an unusual strain of mpox virus that first emerged in the fictional nation of Brinia and spread globally over 18 months.” In this exercise, the outbreak was caused by a terrorist attack using a virus “engineered in a laboratory,” according to NTI, and was projected to result in 3.2 billion cases and 271 million deaths by December 2023.
11. India stopped a surge in COVID-19 cases by using ivermectin
On Jan. 16, 2022, Malone posted on his Substack: “The curious case of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh is often sited [sic]. Densely populated, relatively poor, and they have absolutely crushed the COVID-19 death curve. Widespread availability of a package distributed throughout the region, rumored to contain the repurposed drug Ivermectin, have often been credited for this amazing success. But until now, these rumors have remained unsubstantiated…. So, without further ado, I am glad to finally be able to provide photographic evidence of what is responsible for the miracle of Uttar Pradesh.”
Debunk: It is true that COVID-19 began to decline in India in May 2021, approximately 10 days after the Indian government issued a new guideline allowing for the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19. However public health experts and fact-checking organizations have said that there is no evidence of a causal relationship between the use of ivermectin and a reduction in COVID-19 case counts in India, and multiple peer-reviewed studies have found no evidence that ivermectin is an effective COVID treatment.
12. The spike protein in COVID-19 vaccines is toxic
During a Dec. 12, 2021, speech at the anti-vaccine Global Covid Summit, Malone stated: “The first is that a viral gene will be injected into your children’s cells. This gene forces your child’s body to make toxic spike proteins. These proteins often cause permanent damage in children’s critical organs, including: Their brain and nervous system; their heart and blood vessels, including blood clots; their reproductive system; and this vaccine can trigger fundamental changes to their immune system.”
Debunk: COVID-19 vaccines do not contain the spike protein, and the protein produced in vaccinated people is harmless. mRNA vaccines work by delivering mRNA to the body’s cells, instructing cells to make a piece of the COVID-19 virus called the spike protein. “Our immune systems recognize that the protein doesn’t belong there and begin building an immune response and making antibodies, like what happens in natural infection against COVID-19,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states on its website. “In terms of the spike protein itself being pathogenic in some way that’s just simply not true,” Dr. Dan Kaul, an infectious disease expert at the University of Michigan, told The Associated Press in a June 2021 fact-checking article.
13. The FDA did not approve the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine
The claim appeared to originate with comments made by Malone in an Aug. 24, 2021, interview with Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist under Trump. Malone said, “Once again, the mainstream media has lied to you…the product that’s licensed is the BioNTech product, which is substantially similar but not necessarily identical. It’s called Comirnaty…and it’s not yet available. They haven’t started manufacturing it or labeling it.”
Debunk: On Aug. 23, 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted full approval, also known as licensure, to the COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech for use in people aged 16 and over. The agency also approved the vaccine’s brand name, Comirnaty, as the FDA does not allow drugs or vaccines to be marketed under brand names until they are licensed.
Andie Slomka, Anicka Slachta, and Elisa Xu contributed reporting.
Interested parties seeking detailed information about one or more of these claims, including the specific facts debunking them, can contact media@newsguardtech.com.
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