Grand Junction chiropractor Wesley Sheader of New Life Chiropractic at 2532 Patterson Road is giving people trying to evade Covid-19 vaccine mandates a unique way to evade the jab: he suggests they join an unvaccinated study control group which can issue them an official-looking ID card saying they can’t be vaccinated because they are a participant in the study.
The only thing is, there is no study and the “control group” is a scam.
Sheader’s chiropractic website tells readers to “Become part of the Vaccine Control Group Study,” and “get your ID card…” so “YOU CANNOT BE VACCINATED!” and directs people to VaxControlGroup.com, which claims to be a “world-wide, independent long-term study” that is “seeking to provide a baseline of data from unvaccinated individuals for comparative analysis with the vaccinated population, to evaluate the success of the Covid-19 mass vaccination programme and assist future research projects.”
Misleading patients
As you may have guessed from the spelling of “programme,” the Vaccine Control Group Cooperative Ltd. is based in the United Kingdom (UK). It is not being conducted by any university, hospital, medical school, health authority or research lab. Instead, it is a social media pursuit that operates out of a room above a car rental office in Dartford, England, that lets people to pay a fee to join and helps them create a log of information about their own health over the next 30 years while giving them no assurance that it will ever be used for anything.
The people who created the Vaccine Control Group Cooperative have no training in epidemiology, immunology, virology or other medical specialty. They are a data analyst, a former nurse, a builder, and a paranormal investigator/poet. What they have in common is that all of them maintain social media pages on which they are openly hostile towards public health protocols and promote baseless conspiracy theories.
Here’s where the rip off comes in:
For an initial registration fee of about U.S. $27.00, a $5.50 setup fee (more for a whole family) and an ongoing subscription fee of about $8.00 U.S. per quarter, VaxControlGroup.com will take your photo and personal information and create a “SARSCov-2 Vaccine Control Group” ID card that says you “MUST NOT BE VACCINATED.” The group also solicits donations.
The group admits their ID cards have no legal status.
When Reuters News Service asked a UK health authority about the Vaccine Control Group, they told Reuters that data collected through the Vax Control Group’s platform could not be used in any official trial that would compare vaccinated and unvaccinated people. It’s not a single or double-blinded study, the populations aren’t matched, the people are all self-selected, and there are other problems that would render it unusable.
The Manitoba (Canada) government put out an alert to the public about “an alleged scientific study,” the Vax Control Group, saying that while the site collects your data and can provide people with ID cards, any information the group collects is NOT usable for any official study of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated people.
When I asked Sheader’s office on January 6, 2022 via a webform about why they had the Vax Control Group link on their website (without discussing the fraudulent nature of the site), his office wrote back:
Thank you for your inquiry. All vaccines carry a risk with them. The current COVID vaccines have not gone through proper studies and they are still under “Emergency Use”. Some people are choosing to wait until complete studies are finished and some are choosing to participate due to the fact that unvaccinated people are needed for this research.
Penny Lyons, PRCA
Office Manager
New Life Chiropractic Regenerative Therapy
I responded by pointing out that for people 16 and older, as of last August the vaccine no longer has “emergency use” status, but has gotten full approval from the FDA:
Thanks for your answer, but the Covid-19 vaccine is not just approved for emergency use any more. The FDA gave full approval for the Covid-19 vaccine to be used in people 16 and older on August 23, 2021. Here’s the FDA press release about it:
Does this change what you think of it? Hundreds of millions of people around the world have received it with only extremely rare problems.Thanks.
The reply I got back was:
Thank you for the information.
Despite being corrected about their basis for having the link on their site in the first place, the link to the fraudulent VaxControlGroup.com remains on Sheader’s business website.
State of Colorado to chiropractors: Thou shalt not advertise deceptively:
Here’s the Colorado State Board of Chiropractic Examiners’ Rule 12, about chiropractors using deceptive and unethical advertising:
he has creepy hair
I had no idea, very disappointing.
Have you reported him to the State? This is what gives chiropractors a bad rap tho there are many that are reputable
There’s always someone ready to take a dollar (or GBP, in this case) from an idiot.