Allison Hagood

One vaccine clinical trial to rule them all — moving goalposts

by Michael Simpson
2022-05-11
Andrew Wakefield, Anti-vaccines, Vaccines

If you spend time listening to anti-vaxxers, you would hear that they would support vaccinations if there were better vaccine clinical trial design. The problem with the anti-vaxxer demand for a better vaccine clinical trial design is one of several moving targets for their denialism, relying on a form of the Argument from ignorance, claiming that if we can’t absolutely “prove” that vaccines are safe, then it must be absolutely unsafe. It’s trying.

For example, there are literally thousands of articles, (an example here and was discussed here), that provide overwhelming evidence of the safety and effectiveness of vaccines using real science, real statistics, and real hard work. The antithesis of the fake science, bogus statistics, and 2 hours of Google.

Racist Facebook troll attacks pro-science writers

People try to claim that there’s some sort of debate about vaccines. In fact, one side, supported by the facts that the safety and effectiveness of vaccines is overwhelming and unbiased. The other side has nothing, so they employ a racist Facebook troll to game the system to make it appear that “we” are bad people.

It’s kind of a funny strategy on their part. The troll attacks Allison Hagood, an accomplished author and one of the leaders of the movement to protect children with vaccines. The racist troll has attacked Dorit Rubinstein Reiss and ghostly Orac, both of whom are intellectual heavyweights, who know more about the science and ethics of vaccines than the racist Facebook troll would know in a million years.

One of the troll’s and her minions’ latest attacks was a photoshopped image that made Professor Hagood look like a weird looking Hitler. And just to remind the reader, generally, using images that attempt to link an innocent person to Hitler or Nazism is a form of anti-Semitism, and is considered hate speech.

The racist troll has done all she can do to suppress the intelligent and thoughtful discourse about vaccines – that they protect lives and have saved nearly a million children’s lives in the past few years.