Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science

by Kent Heckenlively

In 1995, the CDC hired a PhD computer analytics expert, Dr. Gary Goldman, to perform the largest-ever CDC-funded study of the chickenpox vaccine. Goldman’s results on an isolated population of 300,000 residents of Antelope Valley, California, showed that the vaccine waned, leading to dangerous outbreaks of chickenpox in adults and that ten-year-old children who received the vaccine were getting shingles at over three times the rate of unvaccinated children. Shingles has twenty times the death rate of chickenpox and causes blindness. CDC ordered Goldman to hide his findings and forbade him from publishing his data. In 2002, Goldman resigned in protest. He sent a letter to his bosses saying that he was resigning because “I refuse to participate in research fraud.”