Book Review
The hard lessons learned in the mid-twentieth century when diethylstilbestrol (DES) and thalidomide were prescribed during pregnancy had a profound effect on James Thorp as he was training to become a physician. Indeed, these avoidable tragedies helped shape public health policy, and today, even most over-the-counter medicines and many supplements carry a label warning women not to take the product if pregnant or nursing without first checking with a doctor.
In their book Sacrifice: How the Deadliest Vaccine in History Targeted the Most Vulnerable (Skyhorse Publishing, 2025), obstetrician James Thorp and journalist Celia Farber describe how decades of caution were inexplicably abandoned in late 2020 with the introduction of the experimental COVID-19 vaccines.
In the summer of 2020, well aware of the multigenerational effects of DES, Thorp, who specializes in high-risk pregnancies, publicly demanded long-term safety studies be undertaken before any experimental vaccines were given to pregnant women. According to Thorp and Farber, from about 1938 to 1971, an estimated 10 million women were prescribed DES, a synthetic form of estrogen, which resulted in malformations of the reproductive organs of their babies. Many of those exposed to DES while in their mother’s womb subsequently also experienced their own reproductive issues, with DES affecting a third generation.
Thalidomide, known to be responsible for approximately 80K infant deaths and 20K serious birth defects in Europe, was not licensed in the U.S. due to the caution of newly-minted FDA safety officer, Frances Kelsey. Sadly, Thorp and Farber opine that Kelsey’s decision represents the “high water mark” of the public health sector to this day.
Thorp, who looks upon Kelsey, as well as Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, as his heroes, was called by his conscience to speak out when he observed a rise in fetal demise at the Sisters of St. Mary’s Health System, the hospital where he worked. Thorp recalls a poignant scene,
I reviewed the couple’s vaccine history, and my heart sank. They had both received two Pfizer shots and one “booster.” Their chart had them listed as “the best thing you could be: Fully vaccinated.”
I felt absolutely helpless. This was the third baby that had died in our practice, close to birth, in a week. Why in the world is not everybody at this hospital acknowledging this calamity?
At first, Thorp himself was struck dumb by the apprehension that he might hurt the parents at this psychologically delicate moment if he suggested that the vaccine had killed their child. He worried they would be guilt-ridden or become suicidal. As he observes, what had happened to these parents was “something so dark and sinister, to have to conceal it, even if it meant almost literally lying, when they asked the piercing question: ‘Dr. Thorp, why?’”
He was not able to give an honest answer. Instead, he hoped the parents would ask him if he suspected the vaccine. But they never did.
Meanwhile, as the authors observe, other obstetricians, sonographers, paramedics, and delivery room nurses started seeing alarming signals early on. However, as they tried to report on the rise in miscarriages, fetal demise, and infant deaths, they were censored, fired, or threatened with job loss. Thorp decided to become vocal about the “carnage” he was witnessing and published a number of viral blogs and social media posts about the situation.
Sacrifice’s main contribution to the literature on the effects of the COVID-19 vaccine on pregnancy is its anecdotal evidence. Sacrifice also documents how an Orwellian edict to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears seems to have been in effect.
Today, the CDC website contradicts what is reported by Thorp and Farber. According to a report published May 15, 2024, infant deaths in 2021 were only up 2% from 2020, and the neonatal death rate went down, from 3.56 in 2020 to 3.49 in 2021. The CDC also reports no alarming signals with the stillbirth rate at 5.70 for 2019, 5.74 for 2020, 5.73 for 2021.
In addition to Thorp’s testimony, Sacrifice relates the stories of three other key witnesses, a nurse in a neonate ICU, a paramedic, and a vaccinated woman who lost her baby.
Michelle Spencer, a postpartum registered nurse, reports that, although COVID cases in the ward were few and uneventful, after the shots were introduced, there was “an avalanche of destruction. Every time I’d come to work, I’d see a dead baby.” Spencer revealed an internal memo, giving staff members new instructions for transporting the little dead bodies to the coroner, stated that there were about twenty deaths per month, far more than the typical four per year.
I would speak up about it and people around me just . . . said it’s pesticides, someone else said it’s something in the water. People didn’t want to say it’s the vaccine.
Paramedic Harry Fisher recalled that during most of 2020, emergency calls were down, but then suddenly “people were dropping dead at vaccination stations.” Before long, he found himself in a “blood-soaked nightmare. Pregnant women arriving in droves at hospitals, miscarrying, nearly bleeding to death—once it was nine in a single shift.” Initially stunned and unable to process what was happening, Fisher resolved to start warning the public when a doctor observed to him privately, “We’re witnessing a genocide.”
Twenty-seven-year-old nurse Victoria White was pregnant with her second child when she was required by her employer to get the COVID-19 vaccine. The baby survived only eleven hours after birth. The umbilical cord was a third the typical length and the placenta was “the size of a baseball.” The baby was diagnosed with diaphragmatic malformation, which, White was told by her doctor, normally appears in 1 in 2,500 births. But the doctor had seen three in his practice in one month.
Spencer, Fisher, and White became whistleblowers. Like Thorp, they faced repercussions for speaking out. Thorp’s role as whistleblower eventually resulted in the loss of his position as the top high-risk obstetrician, and later, he was at risk of losing his certification.
Thorp was criticized for citing a study suggesting that pregnant women were at lower risk of COVID-19. “In-Hospital Mortality in a Cohort of Hospitalized Pregnant and Nonpregnant Patients With COVID-19,” by Pineles et al. published in 2021 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, shows a 75 percent reduced risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to non-pregnant women. Thorp was criticized for reporting that he successfully treated patients who contracted COVID during pregnancy and for reporting no increase in risk of stillbirths with COVID-19 in 2020. His and his colleague’s findings were later published in “COVID-19 Vaccines: The Impact on Pregnancy Outcomes and Menstrual Function” in the Journal of the American Physicians & Surgeons.
Early in 2021, Thorp argued that the COVID-19 vaccines should have been pulled for all persons on December 21, 2020, when there were already over 120 documented deaths. Instead, public health officials made the decision to specifically target women in marketing campaigns because they tend to make the family’s medical decisions. Thorp and Farber provide considerable details about the funding and strategies of public health campaigns. When the CDC recommended the vaccine to pregnant women, the authors contend that this created a false sense that it had been properly tested, given the previously high safety standards for this group. They were sacrificed to reduce vaccine hesitancy.
Thorp and Farber’s critique takes special aim at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the American Board of Obstetrics & Gynecology (ABOG), and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM), which not only recommended the COVID-19 vaccine to pregnant women but persecuted doctors like Thorp who pushed back. The book includes a long letter Thorp wrote to the ABOG on January 12, 2022, exposing their misconduct and fraud.
In the opening lines of Sacrifice, the authors declare the vaccine roll-out constituted “war on life” and was carried out by a “rogue transnational military government” whose crimes are so “grotesque.” Although other medical professionals might proceed with a lighter step when reporting on medical malfeasance, in this case, one can sympathize with Dr. Thorp’s sense of urgency.
Thorp and Farber relate the human suffering behind the concerning statistics reported in documents collected in Naomi Wolf and Amy Kelly’s The Pfizer Papers, to which Sacrifice makes a good companion book. The Pfizer trial documents reveal that the predicted reproductive harms caused by the COVID-19 vaccines are consistent with what Thorp and other eyewitnesses have reported.
Thorp and Farber tell the stories that have been censored, and they explore why many chose to stay silent during the reckless and predictably damaging experiment on pregnant women.
