Nothing scares the vaccine establishment more than a meaningful control group. Some vaccine trials do use inert placebos, but most compare a new product with an existing vaccine or another formulation. What we almost never get is long-term randomized evidence comparing children who receive the full schedule with children who receive none of it.

Thanks to ubiquitous mandates, cultural taboos, and pressure from pediatricians, truly unvaccinated children are also increasingly difficult to find in large numbers. That is why the Amish data are so revealing — and why they should be studied rather than waved away.

Why treat a naturally occurring unvaccinated cohort as an inconvenience rather than an opportunity?

Last year, the Supreme Court vacated a shocking Second Circuit decision siding with the state of New York against Amish parents who declined to vaccinate their children. In Miller v. McDonald, the parents argued that forcing the Amish to violate their religious beliefs in their own private schools violates the First Amendment. Yet after the Supreme Court sent the case back for reconsideration in light of its recent religious-liberty precedent, the Second Circuit last month again ruled for New York.

The legal fight continues and so does the coercion.

Putting aside the legal and moral issues at stake, the facts presented during discovery about the health of the unvaccinated Amish should be newsworthy across the world, especially as we debate both the new mRNA flu shot and the discovery that Anthony Fauci was aware of COVID vaccine injuries from the beginning.

Siri & Glimstad LLP, which represents the Amish families, provided the federal district court in New York with sworn expert medical evidence about the health status of 168 students in the three Amish schools targeted by the state for financial penalties.

The doctor’s declaration states: “I am advised that there are 26 families across the three Amish schools at issue, which have a total of 168 unvaccinated children (meaning they have received no vaccines) and that none of them have any health issue that arose after birth.”

The declaration then compares those 168 children with national background rates for allergies, autism, asthma, and ADHD. Using those rates, a random sample of 168 U.S. children would be expected to include several cases of each condition. According to the declaration, however, there were no documented cases of autism, ADHD, asthma, or food allergies among the 168 Amish children.

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No, that does not magically turn 168 Amish children into a randomized clinical trial. The Amish differ from the broader population in diet, lifestyle, environment, genetics, health care use, and countless other ways. But it does make them a rare, naturally occurring cohort of completely unvaccinated children — exactly the kind of population serious researchers should want to examine.

And the court filing does not rely only on the Amish. It also presents records from 99 unvaccinated children who had religious exemptions in four contiguous school districts in Ulster County, New York. Those records were drawn from state school health examination forms completed by physicians. Here is the comparison presented in the filing:

The numbers are striking. The filing reports zero cases of autism and diabetes in the Ulster County group, lower rates of ADHD and allergies, and a much lower asthma rate than the cited background figures.

Those differences do not prove vaccination caused the higher general population rates. They do raise an obvious question: Why not study the difference rigorously?

The court-filed evidence also notes that the expansion of the childhood vaccine schedule has occurred during the same decades in which autoimmune, developmental, and neurological diagnoses have risen sharply. Correlation is not causation, and anyone pretending otherwise is doing bad science. But correlation can be a reason to investigate — especially when government is mandating the products in question.

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These retrospective comparisons do not prove that vaccines cause autism, asthma, allergies, ADHD, or any other condition. They cannot control for all the differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. But when government mandates a growing schedule of products for healthy children, shouldn't the burden be on public health authorities to pursue the strongest possible long-term safety evidence?

Why treat a naturally occurring unvaccinated cohort as an inconvenience rather than an opportunity?

That problem remains with the latest mRNA flu vaccine, which is being compared against another flu vaccine rather than an unvaccinated cohort. If officials want to mandate these products, why not demand the strongest possible evidence about their long-term effects? And why did the New York Department of Health decline to engage the data the Amish families placed before the court rather than explain why the comparisons are misleading?

What is self-evident is that vaccine mandates make these questions harder to answer by shrinking the pool of children who remain completely unvaccinated. New York is willing to coerce Amish families in the name of public health? Then public health officials should be willing to confront the data those families have put before them and show their work.

Religious liberty demands no less. Neither does science.