[The following was hoisted from the Facebook wall of someone referred to below as X.]
X: [approvingly posts link to video of RFK Jr. talking about infectious diseases and vaccines on Fox News — May 6, 2025]
Me: Not sure why you’d want to trust RFK on anything. He has zero credibility among mainstream scientists like me (my PhD is in Physiology & Biophysics). RFK is so uninterested in scientific evidence that his recent anti-vaccine book was unable to correctly explain the meaning of a p-value, and was dedicated to people such as fraudster Andrew Wakefield.
X: Thanks for your input! Being a scientist, and knowing a good study when you see one, can you tell me how many of the vaccines in the childhood schedule have undergone true (i.e., saline) placebo-controlled long-term trials?
Me: Virtually all vaccines have placebo controls somewhere in the history of their development. For ethical and scientific reasons, such controls are generally impossible at the stage of phase-III clinical trials. I am not especially well-versed in the American vaccine regimen, but consider the development of a vaccine for malaria (a disease I used to work on). To determine efficacy you have to inject thousands of babies in Africa, where malaria is most common and most severe. Local parents may not be up on all of the scientific details and may harbor some understandable distrust of a team of mostly foreign scientists. The injections will be temporarily painful for the babies. If you go in there and say, “Hey, 5000 of these 10000 babies will only get saline — sorry!” you will never get the study approved. In that case the best control, if you have to inject everyone with something, is a vaccine that offers protection against some other pathogens but not against Plasmodium.
X: Thanks – please reply with links to those saline placebo controlled trials.
Me: Starting with the RTS,S phase-3 trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2012, I worked my way backward through several references before finding one that I think is essentially what you’re asking for: KE Kester, DA McKinney, N Tornieporth, et al. Efficacy of recombinant circumsporozoite protein vaccine regimens against experimental Plasmodium falciparum malaria. J Infect Dis, 183 (2001), pp. 640-647. This study involved several control groups including an adjuvant-only group (no vaccine antigens included).
X: [no further comment given]
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Update, 9-4-25: here is more on this issue from the New York Times.
My Track Record 
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