Geriatrics

Every month, there are generally 10-20 new papers published in prominent biomedical journals about vaccines. I try to read most of them, but they’re generally boring. Blah blah blah, vaccines are relatively safe and effective.

I mean how many times am I forced to read an article that supports the scientific consensus about the incredible advantages to human health derived from vaccines. Enough already. Let’s publish something more interesting like the overwhelming safety profile of GMO foods. Oh, we’ve done that.

To be fair, occasionally there are published articles that try to provide evidence that vaccines are dangerous or ineffective. Almost always, those articles are almost always published in very low impact journals, some of them with, at best, cursory peer review.

Given all of the mountains of data that support the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, a dues-paying member of the anti-vaccine world has little choice but to cherry pick articles, though they know that the ones they do pick are often poorly done and published in obscure, very low ranked journals.

Generally, their next step is to then cherry pick a sentence or tiny piece of data out of a larger positive article, so that they can say “see, there’s a conspiracy going on, they’re hiding data.” Let’s take a look at a recent published article where some of this nonsense is happening.

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