Is Your Risk of Death from the Pertussis Vaccine Higher Than from the Disease?
Why do some people think that their risk of death from the pertussis vaccine is higher than their risk of death from actually getting sick with pertussis?
The usual suspects…
Is Your Risk of Death from the Pertussis Vaccine Higher Than from the Disease?
In this case, Paul Thomas, the propaganda is coming from a pediatrician who lost his medical license because of dishonorable conduct and repeated gross negligence.
The guy who was telling parents that their kids had a 1 in 7 billion risk of dying from COVID!
Now, since over 2,000 kids died with COVID in the United States alone, hopefully you realize that Paul Thomas isn’t the guy to go to for advice about vaccines.
But for grins, let’s take a look at what he is saying about pertussis and just why he thinks pertussis vaccines are so risky.
He thinks that it is 30 times more likely that the pertussis vaccine will kill you than if you got sick with pertussis.
And he is emphatically telling folks to not vaccinate their kids!
“No, I’m not going to risk my baby’s life with a dangerous product when there’s things I can do naturally to boost my child’s immune system so they can fight off any infection, not just pertussis, not just whooping cough, but everything.”
Paul Thomas
While he once pushed an alternative immunization schedule in his Vaccine Friendly Plan book, he now seems to be advocating for a “natural route” to use “that natural immunity, that innate immunity, God given immunity, the beautiful, amazing bodies and immune systems that we have, than relying on a faulty product that has no safety testing.”
Not surprisingly, Paul Thomas still seems to get everything wrong about vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases.
Let’s start with his idea of your child’s risk of dying from pertussis.
Paul Thomas claims that your children have only a one in two million chance of dying with pertussis.
“And this is why you're. Thank you for covering it today with this show. And people are living in fear. What would you do if you were a forget being a doctor, just a young parent with a young baby, Would you vaccinate with the DTAP or tdap? Would you vaccinate yourself or your baby? Or would you just get through whooping cough if it came your way? Well, if you had asked me that 10, 15, 20 years ago, I would have said of course I'm going to get the D tap. Don't you know babies are dying from pertussis, whooping cough, pertussis. And yes, very, very rarely babies will die from whooping cough. It was somewhere between 1 and 4 per year for the last couple decades with occasional years where it was a little higher out of roughly 4 million births. So it's a one, let's call it a one in a million risk of your baby dying of whooping cough.”
A Big Whoop: Pertussis + Death After DTaP
Or one in a million…
Even he can’t keep his numbers straight!
Not that either is correct, of course.
For one thing, he is including infants who are vaccinated and who had mothers who got a Tdap vaccine during their pregnancy. These infants are at low risk of getting and dying from pertussis.
So if you take into account that 80% of pregnant women get a Tdap vaccine, then about 20% of births are at risk for severe pertussis infections.
And since there were just over 3.6 million births in 2024, that would be about 720,000 babies, of which six died with pertussis.
We also need to consider that most deaths occur in the first few months of a baby’s life too.
So clearly you can see that the risk of death for an unprotected infant (mom didn’t get Tdap) is much more than one in a million!
“Ten fatal cases were reported, all in infants. Nine were previously healthy infants younger than 2 months at illness onset who had not been immunized against pertussis; 7 of these infants were younger than 6 weeks.”
California Pertussis Epidemic, 2010
With a risk of death that is very high if your child actually gets pertussis.
“The case-fatality rate among infants younger than 3 months was 1.3%.”
California Pertussis Epidemic, 2010
And that’s the real risk, isn’t it?
As more parents listen to these types of anti-vaccine influencers and stop getting vaccinated and stop vaccinating their kids, it will increase the risk of your child being exposed to pertussis.
Eventually, we will get back to pre-vaccine era levels of pertussis deaths.
Do we really want to go back to the days when thousands of kids died with pertussis, plus diphtheria and tetanus each year?
Paul Thomas on Pertussis and Pertussis Vaccines
Not surprisingly, Paul Thomas gets a lot of other things wrong about pertussis.
He says that:
“
People don't know this, but the Tdap when they made the acellular pertussis part of the vaccine, it's not providing protection. So the chances that you vaccinate your infant at 2, 4 and 6 months is going to have any difference on the death of your child is close to zero. The organismBordetella pertussishas changed. It's nowpertactinnegative. That vaccine was designed to recognize the proteinpertactin, so it's not working.” — pertactin is only one of the components of pertussis and DTaP and Tdap are still protective against pertactin-negative Bordetella pertussis bacteria“There's solid evidence now that if you get that vaccine, you're more likely to get whooping cough than if you don't get the vaccine.”— this is also not true. As always, more unvaccinated than vaccinated folks always get pertussis, and getting vaccinated doesn’t make you more susceptible to pertussis.“
And then the most damning of all evidence is the information about what is your chance of dying from the vaccine compared to what's your chance of dying from the disease. And the answer to that is rather shocking. Your risk of death from the disease from pertussis is less than 2 million. From the vaccine, it's more than 1 in 76,000. So we're talking 30 times more likely that the vaccine will kill you than the disease.” — we have already shown how Paul Thomas is wrong about your risk of dying from pertussis. What about the risk from the vaccine? He is simply talking about VAERS reports and not true vaccine deaths.“
It's important to also know that we now understand that those who are vaccinated with this acellular whooping cough vaccine, the acellular pertussis, actually are more likely to be colonized with whooping cough pertussis and therefore they're also more likely to transmit it to others… And so it is the vaccinated who are a greater risk to the unvaxed and also a greater risk to those babies who are too young to get vaccines, are really too young to develop a good immune response.” — this isn’t true and simply misrepresents a study in baboons that showed they could become asymptomatic carriers after they were vaccinated.“
And don't get me started on vaccines during pregnancy. Giving the Tdap to a pregnant woman is a double whammy. It's killing babies in the womb, increasedmiscarriages, but also it's harming the immunity of that newborn.” — none of this true. Tdap vaccines in pregnancy are safe and are necessary to protect your baby from pertussis.“
The best way to have optimal immunity for the newborn is for mom to have had natural whooping cough at some point in her life and to be breastfeeding.” — even this isn’t true! Whooping cough doesn’t necessarily provide life-long immunity and breastfeeding, while great, isn’t going to protect your baby from pertussis. Plus, not everyone survives having natural whooping cough!
Not surprisingly, most of his statements are simply anti-vaccine talking points that we have refuted a thousand times over the years.
What does he get right?
The only thing Paul Thomas gets right is that “…babies will die from whooping cough.”
Tragically, more and more babies if parents continue to listen to folks like him.
References
Vaccination Coverage among Pregnant Women https://www.cdc.gov/adultvaxview/about/pregnant-women.html
2024 Provisional Pertussis Surveillance Report https://www.cdc.gov/pertussis/media/pdfs/2025/01/pertuss-surv-report-2024_PROVISIONAL-508.pdf
The viroists eyes rolled as it squirted the virus deep into the little kids body. Just for a second the mask dropped and the parents saw the twisted pleasure in its eyes. A sly grin and a smirk slide across it's face.