Anti-vaccine Gayle DeLong tries to correct her HPV vaccine article by blogging
A few days ago, I wrote about a terrible, laughable anti-HPV vaccine article by Gayle DeLong, a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and Finance in the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College/City University of New York. She has zero background, experience, knowledge, education, or credibility in vaccine science.
Her appalling article tried to convince the reader that the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine caused a decrease in their fertility. If this were a real article, I’d be appalled that it got published, but it was clearly a bad article with bad science, bad methodologies, and bad conclusions.
It failed basic scientific statistical analysis like accounting for confounding data. Furthermore, Gayle DeLong provided no convincing biologically plausible mechanism describing how the HPV vaccine could affect pregnancy rates. And her references were ridiculous – she cited Mark and David Geier, who can charitably be called charlatans who attempted to “treat” autistic children with a horrific and unethical procedure. And she actually mentioned Mark Geier in her acknowledgments.
Furthermore, she ignored the vast body of evidence, published by real scientists, not an expert in international finance, in real journals that the HPV vaccine is demonstrably safe. And in those huge studies, some with millions of patients, there was no detectable difference in fertility rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. This issue only exists in the mind of Gayle DeLong and other anti-vaccine activists.
I’ve read a bunch of anti-vaccine papers in my time, but this one may be one of the worst. All anti-vaccine papers are bad, that’s why they are rarely if ever, published in respected journals.
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