Great post on a very divisive subject. Thank you!
I think the research community and the medical community operate under a severe disconnect. I'm retired and you're about to enter what we've called the work-a-day world where a job, a family and responsibilities will seriously curtail further study. This happens to us all when we exit the educational system and enter the life-long, permanent system of self- and family support.
As a working adult my perceptions and opinions were arrived at by my attention to the media and my previous experiences within the public educational system (see: Iserbyt and Gatto) [1,2,3]. We only have an hour or so a day, if that, to further our personal education once we begin our careers.
As a retired publisher I've taken advantage of the opportunity of having an enormous amount of free time and I've used a great deal of that time to read peer review, collecting, sorting and aggregating into free eBooks—actually eMagazine might be a better descriptor.
I'd also like to briefly address the very current controversy [4] in the peer review community. That controversy regarding the quality of peer review is indeed profound so attempting to use peer review to support an opinion becomes a precarious endeavor at best.
To mitigate conditions as much as possible I've decided to use quantity and independence as my primary strategies yet also use pharmaceutical industry reports and studies and various countries' government reports and studies when appropriate.
As a result, one of my several eBooks on vaccines uses just over 1000 peer reviewed reports to make its points and conclusions in a page design format I styled specifically for the time-challenged, working individual with family responsibilities—and little time to read. A page sample is attached showing how the peer review is placed on a page using type size to make absorbing the essence of the report quick and easy.
Our opinions and positions on vaccines are firmly oppositional in nature. This has to do with our experiences in this field, the data we've consumed, the conversations and company we keep and the "system" within which we each live.
You live within the public educational system and as a retired person I live within a less regimented and less controlled system, thus, our experiences, our conversations, the people we're surrounded by and the data input we're exposed to differ immensely. Age is a factor as well in terms of overall time to consume data.
I've already experienced those many years of public education you're experiencing right now and I'm now well into my 60s. I'll suggest that I've spent a great deal more time and probably consumed a significantly larger amount of peer reviewed data on this subject than you although I can't be certain. However, your experiences in this area are certainly far more intimate than mine and surely you have a deeper and more "scientific" understanding and grasp of these issues.
For all of these reasons and more I'm as curious as I've ever been to engage in a dialogue with you on this issue if you have a desire and the time. And if not I'll certainly understand. Your personal commitments are obviously more time consuming than mine.
Should you be interested in carrying this discussion further, please feel free to access the links provided, peruse the data, and let's talk further.
To be sure, my family physician, you and I agree on certain facts, I believe.
I'm of the opinion that vaccines work, not 100%, but they do work. I believe you would agree and my family physician agrees. He also reads all of my eBooks and only vaccinates if it's requested by the patient.
Considering approximately 5% are non-responders, another 5% are low-responders, certain foods affect vaccination efficacy, certain environmental chemicals affect vaccine efficacy, certain food additives affect vaccine efficacy, a certain percentage of waning exists and shedding occurs in all live vaccines, all vaccines are subject to inherent contamination in the manufacturing process with enteroviruses, pestiviruses, nano-bacteria, two porcine viruses, bovine diarrheal virus and others, the complexities of adjuvants and the specific reason (financial) they're necessary and the debate over "herd immunity," this is a complex subject [5]. Then there's Macrophagic myofasciitis caused by just a molecule or two of aluminum remaining at the injection site which then leads to Autoimmune/Inflammatory Syndrome Induced By Adjuvants (ASIA), a disorder recognized as far back as the late 1980s and named in 2013 by Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld.
This is a subject I have tremendous interest in, fairly substantial knowledge, and a subject I'd love to discuss with someone with your specific background. If you have the time, perhaps we could engage in a dialogue.
Regards,
Jeff Prager
Founder & Publisher
Senior Magazine
[email protected]
https://jeffpragercollections.com
References:
The Deliberate Dumbing Down Of America by Charlotte Iserbyt, Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration:
https://jeffpragercollections.com/products/the-deliberate-dumbing-down-of-america-by-charlotte-iserbytDumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto, 3-time Teacher Of The Year:
https://jeffpragercollections.com/products/dumbing-us-down-by-john-taylor-gattoWeapons Of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto:
https://jeffpragercollections.com/products/weapons-of-mass-instructionInstitutional Corruption of Pharmaceuticals and the Myth of Safe and Effective Drugs by Donald W. Light, Rowan University, School of Osteopathic Medicine and Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Joel Lexchin York University and Jonathan J. Darrow, Harvard Medical School:
http://ethics.harvard.edu/news/institutional-corruption-and-pharmaceutical-policyThe History Of The Global Vaccination Program In 1000 Peer Reviewed Reports And Studies: 1915-2015 by Jeff Prager, January 2016:
https://jeffpragercollections.com/products/vaccine-peer-review
Hi, I generally have a rule where I don’t respond to comments that are longer than the blog post on which they are commenting but you seem nice. I’m not entirely sure if I’m the right person to ask for advice, if that’s what you’re asking. I should have made this clearer up-top, I’m a social scientist, I mostly study risk perception and trust in information. I currently study how people think about vaccination but I could easily be studying how they think about seatbelts, pensions or meat consumption.
As such, I defer my judgements about the safety and efficacy of vaccines to those that have the appropriate expertise. Vaccination is a truly massive area of study, while it’s clear that you have read a lot, your review of 1000 papers will barely scratch the surface of the available literature. From an estimate I read recently there are around 3000 new vaccine related papers published each year [1]. I also worry that seeing as you go back to 1915 there may well be papers in there from outdated research paradigms and as such you may run into positive hypothesis testing (being drawn to the information that supports a theory and not giving equal weight to information that refutes it). If you’re intending to write as a historian that’s obviously fine (although context would have to be made exceptionally clear), however to apply many of the papers published before, say, 1980 to modern vaccination practices would likely be misleading.
My advice, if that’s something you’d like, would be to focus your search down to meta-analysis’s and systematic reviews rather than potentially outdated research. There are individuals that spend an entire lifetime working on the tiniest of aspects related to vaccination, nobody has the time to know it all. Therefore, we distributed knowledge across many experts and combine findings into meta-analysis’s and systematic reviews through a rigorous process where we make sure to capture every angle. As such, it can sluggish for the system to change however, it is a highly accurate process in the long run.
[1] Portsmouth, D. (2012). Identifying appropriate journals in which to publish original research on vaccines against human infectious diseases. Medical Writing, 21(1), 26-35.
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