Dr. Philip McMillan,  John McMillan

Somewhere inside UK Office of National Statistics data sits a pattern that should have triggered alarm bells years ago. When you chart non-COVID mortality by vaccination status, one group stands apart: individuals who received only a single dose of a two-dose COVID-19 vaccine. Not the unvaccinated. Not the fully vaccinated. The one-dose cohort consistently shows the worst mortality outcomes, especially among adults aged 18 to 39.

Dr. Philip McMillan, a clinician and researcher, first identified this anomaly in 2022. He recently revisited the same ONS datasets with AI tools to process the full breadth of the data. The result was “as clear as a bell” across nearly all cohorts. The question it raises is uncomfortable: did those individuals stop at one dose because the first shot made them seriously ill? Some people simply never bothered with a second appointment. But what if the majority abandoned the regimen because of a significant adverse event? A leaked document from a US federal advisory committee suggests that people at the highest levels of public health already know this investigation is overdue.

The Leaked ACIP Document: A Secret Discussion Brought to Light

Earlier this year, a confidential document from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) COVID-19 Immunization Workgroup found its way into the public domain. Marked “not for distribution,” the report was titled “Post COVID-19 Vaccination Chronic Injuries – Proposed Action” and was prepared for a planned ACIP meeting on March 18–19, 2026. That meeting never happened, derailed by a federal court injunction two days before it was set to begin.

The document introduces a clinical framework called Post-Acute COVID-19 Vaccination Syndrome, or PACVS: persistent, multi-system symptoms lasting at least 12 weeks after vaccination that cannot be explained by another condition. Patients may present with neurological, cardiovascular, immune, and autonomic dysfunction. At the heart of the workgroup’s proposal was a deceptively straightforward request: give these injuries a formal ICD code. Without standardized classification, chronic vaccine injuries remain, as Dr. McMillan puts it, “nebulous.” No code means no data. No data means no research funding, no clinical pathways, no awareness among frontline clinicians.

The Numbers That Demand Attention

The leaked document contained survey data that should stop anyone in public health from looking the other way. Over a third of vaccinated respondents reported experiencing side effects following COVID-19 vaccination. Ten percent reported those side effects as major. And in a separate survey, 24% of participants said they knew someone who had died from the adverse effects of a COVID vaccine.

Whether or not the public’s perception aligns with clinical reality is beside the point. Nearly one in four people believe they have witnessed a fatal vaccine injury. Even halved, that represents a staggering loss of faith. And no one with authority has stepped forward to prove them wrong with data, because the investigations that would generate that data have never been conducted.

This is where Dr. McMillan’s ONS analysis intersects with the ACIP document. The single-dose mortality signal is not some fringe anomaly. Public health authorities could go back through vaccination records, identify every single-dose recipient, and ask a basic question: why did you stop? Did you have an adverse reaction? What has your health looked like since? That is bread-and-butter epidemiology. And yet, it has not been done.

Reassessing Early Pandemic Messaging

Part of what makes this situation so maddening is the messaging that preceded it. During the vaccine rollout, people who felt unwell after their shot were broadly reassured. Fever, fatigue, swollen lymph nodes – these were described as signs the vaccine was “working.” Dr. McMillan takes a sharply different view. In a formal research trial, every one of those reactions would be documented as an adverse event. What we now understand about severe COVID-19 is that it is primarily a disease of immune dysregulation. Spike protein exposure can provoke immune responses that are not merely active but disordered. A proportion of people with significant post-vaccination symptoms may have been experiencing early signs of the immune disruption that leads to longer-term illness.

For those who did develop chronic symptoms, the absence of a formal diagnostic pathway has been devastating. The leaked ACIP report acknowledged this gap, noting that US vaccine surveillance systems were designed to capture acute reactions, not the persistent, multi-system illness that PACVS patients describe.

Institutional Paralysis: Legal Battles and Committee Disarray

The story of how this investigation was stalled is as troubling as the data itself. In May 2025, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. directed the CDC to stop recommending COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant women and healthy children without consulting ACIP. Weeks later, he fired all 17 committee members and replaced them with a smaller group, including Dr. Robert Malone, a figure critical of COVID vaccine policy, and Christine Stabell-Benn, a respected pro-vaccine researcher known for asking uncomfortable questions about non-specific vaccine effects.

The reconstituted committee drew immediate fire. Major medical organizations argued that several appointees lacked relevant expertise and that the overhaul was politically motivated. A lawsuit filed in July 2025 in the District Court of Massachusetts expanded over time to challenge the ACIP reconstitution itself and sweeping changes to the national immunization schedule.

On March 16, 2026, US District Judge Brian Murphy issued a preliminary injunction finding that Kennedy had likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act and that several appointees appeared “distinctly unqualified.” The ACIP meeting was cancelled. The discussion of PACVS, the ICD code proposal, the entire framework for recognizing chronic vaccine injuries – all frozen. Dr. Malone briefly claimed the workgroup was being disbanded, then corrected himself, saying dissolution remained one option under consideration.

Misinformation by Omission

Dr. McMillan frames the core problem in blunt terms: “I think the greatest damage that has been done to trust overall in vaccines has been the approach of the scientific and medical community to ignore the public, to effectively gaslight them and tell them that what they are seeing or what they are thinking is not relevant.” That is not the language of an anti-vaccine campaigner. It is the frustration of a clinician who understands that public trust, once broken, bleeds across every vaccine on the schedule.

And the fallout is already visible. Vaccine uptake for routine childhood immunizations is falling. Parents who once followed the schedule without hesitation are now questioning everything, not because of social media misinformation, but because they watched a public health establishment refuse to ask obvious questions about a product it pushed on hundreds of millions of people.

“Misinformation goes both ways,” Dr. McMillan warns. “And I think the failure to investigate is probably one of the most dangerous ones – by pretending there are no problems.” If even a fraction of survey respondents are correct, the scale of unacknowledged harm is enormous. If they are wrong, the only way to demonstrate that is through rigorous investigation. The refusal to conduct it is not caution. It is a choice to leave the question unanswered.

The leaked ACIP document represents something that should be unremarkable in medicine: a proposal to count what is happening to patients, give it a name, and study it. That this modest ambition has been blocked by court orders and buried under political warfare tells you everything about where public health priorities stand. The patients are still waiting. The data is still there. The questions remain unanswered.

Reference:
https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/ebc45e1a68aeb270/4f9a5e62-full.pdf