Developed nations requiring the most neonatal vaccine doses tend to have the worst childhood mortality rates, according to a peer-reviewed study published July 20 in Cureus Journal of Medical Science.

“Health authorities emphasize that vaccines save lives,” lead author Neil Miller told The Defender. “Yet our data suggests that when developed nations require two versus zero neonatal vaccine doses, or many versus fewer vaccines during infancy, there may be unintended consequences that increase all-cause mortality.”

Miller, director of the Institute of Medical and Scientific Inquiry in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has been researching this topic since the early 2000s. In a 2011 paper with the same co-author — Gary S. Goldman, Ph.D., an independent computer scientist — they showed that developed countries requiring the most vaccine doses for infants had the least favorable infant mortality rates.

In 2021, they replicated those results using updated data, and earlier this year, they responded to critics of their findings.