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Editor’s note: Since this article was published, the study retracted by Preprints.org has been published here, on the preprint server Zenodo.
Preprints.org on Wednesday retracted a paper by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) scientists. The research showed that infants vaccinated in their second month of life were more likely to die in their third month than unvaccinated infants.
Lead author Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., called the retraction “an act of censorship.” He told The Defender:
“There are 318 members of the Advisory Board for Preprints. Not a single one of them has published on vaccine safety. Not a single one of them has published on infant mortality. Not a single one of them would have been chosen to peer-review our article. Its retraction, therefore, cannot be a peer-reviewed nor a scientific decision.”
Retraction is an important tool for the scientific community, which needs the ability to edit itself, especially when “negligent or bad actors are at work,” Jablonowski said. “But retracting is also a tool of the censors, by those who muzzle scientific discourse,” he said.
The paper, published on the preprint server last month, analyzed data obtained from the Louisiana Department of Health.
The data revealed that depending on which vaccines they received, vaccinated children were between 29%-74% more likely to die than unvaccinated children. Vaccinated Black infants were 28%-74% more likely to die, and vaccinated female infants had a 52%-98% greater risk of death.
Overall, children who received all six vaccines recommended for 2-month-olds were 68% more likely to die in their third month of life, the data showed.
The paper represents one of the first studies on the cumulative effect of vaccines at age 2 months, when the vaccines are administered according to the pre-January 2026 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended schedule.
Since the paper was published, the CDC has revised the childhood schedule, reducing the number of routine vaccines recommended for infants and children.
The authors described the analysis as a “proof-of-concept,” demonstrating that statistically significant associations between vaccination timing and infant mortality can be identified in real-world data.
They called on health authorities and researchers to make similar linked datasets available for independent analysis, arguing that transparency is essential for evaluating vaccine safety at the population level.
The paper was viewed more than 15,000 times before it was taken down. Several independent media outlets reported on the findings.
Why was the paper retracted?
Jablonowski said the project complied with institutional review processes for accessing data, and the authors kept the data secure.
Preprint.org didn’t accuse the authors of legal or scientific misconduct, or of committing scientific errors. The paper doesn’t violate any laws or commit any copyright infringement.
“This covers all reasons enumerated in the ‘withdrawal policy’ of Preprints,” Jablonowski said, “except the last one: ‘the content poses risks to the general public.’”
“Since our article demonstrates grave concern about common vaccination practices, I would argue that stifling our scientific communication is what poses the risk to the general public,” Jablonowski said.
The authors continue to work with the state of Louisiana to analyze vaccine and mortality data. They’ve also begun similar collaborations with other states. They said they hope to include multiple states and other countries in a joint effort to validate and explore the signal for mortality that they identified in their analysis of the Louisiana data.
“If our future work does indeed uncover a persistent signal of mortality, the censors will have a lot to answer for,” Jablonowski said.
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., who co-authored the paper, said, “These dead-end ‘actions’ do nothing to advance science and medicine or inform the public.” When important findings about infant harm from vaccines is suppressed, there is “no gain, and it is the infants and their families that lose out in the end.”
The authors are submitting the publication for peer review and plan to get it published on a different preprint server.
Preprints.org did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment.
Preprint servers have a track record of censorship
Preprint servers were established in the early 1990s to address inefficiencies in academic publishing.
The peer-review process typically takes months or more, delaying the real-time sharing of scientific findings with the public. Many journals are proprietary, accessible only through expensive personal or institutional subscriptions.
Preprint servers make scientific reports and papers immediately available to the public while the paper goes through peer review, opening them up to broader public debate.
They allow for “fast circulation, priority publication, increased visibility, community feedback, and contribution to open science,” according to an analysis of the preprint process published in Science Editing.
There is no peer review process for preprints. But there is a vetting process, which varies by server.
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Although they have been around for decades, preprint servers experienced a “watershed period” in 2020, when publishing first through preprint became the norm as scientists raced to publish research on the rapidly evolving understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Dr. Vinay Prasad, several of the preprint servers have become “gatekeepers” for what science gets published.
In 2023, Prasad, who was then professor and director of a medical policy lab at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a Substack post that his lab has submitted hundreds of papers to preprint servers — but only those that deviate from the official COVID-19 narrative were rejected or removed.
Thirty-eight percent of his lab’s papers on COVID-19 were rejected or removed. Yet those same articles were later accepted in peer-reviewed publications and extensively downloaded.
Prasad said the basis for rejecting those papers is inconsistent with the standards applied for other topics, or with the fundamental rules of the servers.
“The preprint servers are really a disgrace,” he said.
Related articles in The Defender- ‘Deeply Troubling’: Higher Mortality Rates Detected in Vaccinated 3-Month-Olds Compared With Unvaccinated Infants
- ‘Stunning Act of Scientific Censorship’: Journal Retracts Peer-Reviewed Study Critiquing COVID-19 Vaccine
- ‘Startling’: Preprint Servers Censored Research That Contradicted Government’s COVID Narrative
- Breaking: HHS Makes Sweeping Changes to Childhood Vaccine Schedule
