Imagine you’re a parent considering the CDC’s vaccine schedule: 43 shots with somewhere around 63 doses of vaccine your child is supposed to get by age 18—measles, flu, Covid, the works. You’ve heard the pitch: vaccines save lives, protect the herd, keep diseases in check. But you may naturally wonder: What’s the actual risk to my kid from all these shots when compared to the diseases they’re meant to stop?
Here’s the catch—no one’s ever put out a full, public breakdown of those cumulative odds, assuming vaccines even work as advertised. (Spoiler: they don’t always—Covid shots don’t stop infection or spread, some vaccinated people still catch measles, mumps, and flu today, and all of the last cases of polio in the US were caused by the vaccine.)
Enter Grok, an AI from xAI, which I asked to crunch the numbers. Grok is imperfect, and yet it can still provide us a window and the best idea we, as outsiders, can get to arrive at ballpark numbers and some insight into a vexing controversy.
The results?
On paper, using publicly available data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and other sources, vaccinating looks way riskier for your kid than skipping the shots in 2025. There are caveats, but I’ll examine this conclusion step by step, and explain why, when parents raise eyebrows, it’s not just unfounded conspiracy talk.
An obvious note to add here is that the numbers are so shockingly clear, this article will doubtlessly inspire immediate fake “fact checks” and effort to censor, launched by the usual suspects. The propagandists will crunch different odds and figures, and try to poke holes in this analysis to make it sound as though this is a complete misinterpretation. Debunked. Conspiracy Theory.
For example, they would doubtlessly rather utilize calculations that incorporate worst case scenario numbers from decades past when diseases were at their height, without taking into account a disease’s natural ebb and flow. They would rather look at disease toll from a time when there were fewer medical advancements to prevent disease spread and serious illness. And— fair enough on this one— they would prefer to use calculations that look at disease risk in the distant past when nobody was vaccinated, rather than look at the risk today with most people vaccinated. I’ll address that in this article.
In any event, I offer this simply for your own analysis and consideration, to add to the body of knowledge.
Hellbound and Down 