Tag Archives: #science

A watercolor illustration of three smiling people standing together at a press conference with microphones. One person is balding with a ponytail, glasses, and a vest reading "LOGISTICS." Another is bald and wears a white lab coat with a small duck on the chest. The third has auburn hair, a large forehead, and a coat reading "SPORTS MEDICINE." Dollar bills peek out of their pockets.

A Takedown of the Levi-Ladapo COVID Vaccine Paper

Posted on by

A preprint published in 2025 claims Pfizer’s COVID vaccine kills more people than Moderna’s. Before you retweet it, let’s talk about why scientists and doctors with fancy credentials really, truly should know better.

There is a special kind of frustration that comes from watching people with impressive degrees — MDs, PhDs, MIT titles, Harvard pedigrees — produce work that most first-year epidemiology graduate students would flag in a methods critique. That frustration is what the preprint “Twelve-Month All-Cause Mortality after Initial COVID-19 Vaccination with Pfizer-BioNTech or mRNA-1273 among Adults Living in Florida” delivers in abundance. The authors are Retsef Levi, Fahad Mansuri, Melissa Jordan, and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo. Let’s go through exactly what they did wrong — and why they should have known better.​

So, What Does the Paper Actually Say?

The study examined nearly 2 million Florida adults who received their first COVID-19 shot — either Pfizer (BNT162b2) or Moderna (mRNA-1273) — between December 2020 and August 2021. The researchers matched Pfizer recipients with Moderna recipients based on age, sex, race, ethnicity, where and when they were vaccinated, and the neighborhood they lived in. Then they checked who died within 12 months.​

Their headline finding: Pfizer recipients had about 40% higher odds of dying from any cause compared to Moderna recipients (OR 1.407). That includes cardiovascular deaths, COVID deaths, and deaths from everything else. The authors concluded this finding has “implications for public health recommendations”.​

Translation: Pfizer is killing people.

Reader, the data does not actually show that.

Problem #1: This Paper Has Not Been Peer Reviewed, and It Shows

The very first page of the document carries a disclaimer: “This preprint has not been certified by peer review and should not be used to guide clinical practice”. That’s a genuine warning that independent scientists have not yet checked whether the methods hold up.​ (Spoiler alert: The methods don’t hold up.)

Three of the four authors — Mansuri, Jordan, and Ladapo — work for the Florida Department of Health. This is the same department run by the same Ladapo, who, in 2023, was reported by Politico to have personally altered a state-funded study on COVID vaccine cardiac risk to make the results appear scarier than the original data. Documents obtained through a public records request showed that an earlier version of that study found “no significant risk,” and that “Dr. L’s Edits” later changed the language to say young men were at high risk. An internal complaint accused him of “scientific fraud.” He called the allegations “factually incorrect”.​

The data underlying this new paper “is prohibited by statute from sharing in its raw form,” meaning outside researchers cannot check the numbers themselves. A Harvard-trained physician who has already been caught with his hands in the data jar probably shouldn’t be the only one with access to the data jar.​

Problem #2: One of the Lead Authors Is a Supply Chain Professor

Retsef Levi, the study’s corresponding author and the person who gets the credit or blame for the findings, holds a PhD from MIT’s Sloan School of Management… in operations management. He is not a physician, not a public health researcher, not an epidemiologist. He teaches supply chain risk analysis.​​

None of that would be disqualifying if Levi came to the question with an open mind. But on social media, he has called COVID vaccines “the most failing product in the history of products” and, in 2023, publicly called for them to be pulled from the market. He was appointed by RFK Jr. to the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee (ACIP) and then handed the job of leading the COVID-19 vaccine review subgroup — despite having no formal training in vaccine science or epidemiology.

When the lead author has already announced his verdict before running the study, scientists call that confirmation bias. People with PhDs in research methods know that confirmation bias poisons results. Levi has a PhD in research methods. You do the math.

Problem #3: They Forgot to Match on the Most Important Thing

The authors matched their Pfizer and Moderna groups on seven criteria: age range, sex, race, ethnicity, vaccination site type, month of vaccination, and neighborhood census tract. That sounds thorough until you notice what is completely absent from that list: health conditions.​

No diabetes. No heart disease. No obesity. No cancer. No record of whether someone was already seriously ill before they ever got a shot. The authors acknowledge this in the limitations section and then essentially shrug it off, citing a prior study suggesting that omitting health conditions “does not appear to increase the risk of bias”. The problem? That cited study was comparing vaccinated people to unvaccinated people. That is a very different question than comparing two vaccine types in a population where underlying health heavily shaped which vaccine someone was likely to receive in the first place.​

In early 2021, Moderna doses were heavily routed through hospitals and county health departments, while Pfizer was dominant in pharmacies. People vaccinated at hospitals in January 2021 were not the same population as people vaccinated at Walgreens in August 2021, and no amount of census-tract matching fixes that. Any clinician or epidemiologist who has spent time in a hospital knows this immediately. These authors apparently did not find it worth pausing over.​

Problem #4: Their “Sanity Check” Isn’t Very Sane

A standard practice in observational research is to use a negative control outcome, which is something that shouldn’t be affected by the exposure you’re studying, used to check whether hidden bias is warping your results. If your negative control shows a difference between the two groups, that’s a red flag that something other than the vaccine is explaining your findings.​

The authors chose suicide and homicide as their negative control. Their logic: vaccine type shouldn’t affect whether someone gets shot or dies by suicide. And indeed, the odds ratio for the Pfizer group vs. the Moderna group on suicide/homicide was 1.218 and not statistically significant. The authors called this a clean bill of health for their study.​

But look at that number again. An OR (odds ratio, or the ratio of odds of exposure in the cases versus controls) of 1.218 with a confidence interval from 0.936 to 1.585 is close to — but not at — 1.0. That’s the very definition of a borderline result, and it actually hints at residual confounding rather than ruling it out. Suicide and homicide rates in Florida during 2020–2021 were shaped by poverty, housing instability, mental health access, and geographic factors. Many of these factors overlap with the same social conditions that drove vaccine type selection. The fact that the negative control is whispering “something’s off,” and the authors heard “all clear,” is a problem.​

Problem #5: When and Where People Got Vaccinated Matters Enormously

Between December 2020 and August 2021, Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were not distributed to identical groups of people at identical times, as mentioned above. The rollout shifted dramatically: in January 2021, about 15% of Florida vaccines were given at hospitals and 10% at pharmacies. By August 2021, hospitals accounted for less than 1% and pharmacies for about 80%.​

People vaccinated at hospitals in January 2021 — during the early priority phases — were largely older, sicker, and more vulnerable than people who walked into a Walgreens in August. Moderna was concentrated in those early, institutional settings; Pfizer spread more broadly into pharmacies as the rollout scaled up. That means the Pfizer group, on average, included more of the younger and healthier people who got vaccinated later in the rollout, while the Moderna group skewed toward the higher-risk early recipients.

If that’s true, then Moderna recipients should actually look sicker at baseline. And that would predict more deaths in the Moderna group, not fewer. The fact that the results show the opposite suggests the confounding is more complicated than the authors’ matching captured. Matching on the month someone was vaccinated does not fully capture whether they were a priority-tier patient or a healthy adult who just finally got their turn.

Problem #6: The Sensitivity Analysis Is Circular

The authors ran an additional analysis to estimate how powerful a hidden confounder would have to be in order to wipe out their findings. Their answer: an unmeasured variable would need to be associated with both vaccine type (OR 1.6) and mortality (OR 5.2) to make the results disappear. They took this as proof that no plausible confounder could explain away their results.​

Here’s the catch: serious cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes with complications, and advanced frailty regularly produce mortality odds ratios well above 5.0 in real-world data. The authors chose not to match on any of these conditions. So what they’ve actually demonstrated is: we didn’t control for the most important confounders, and then we showed those confounders would have to be strong to matter. They are, and which we know they are, because that’s what the clinical literature says.​

That’s a circle drawn very carefully around a hole more than a “robustness check”.

Problem #7: The Conclusions Are Way Bigger Than the Evidence

Here is what this study’s methods could honestly support: Among matched Florida adults who received a first COVID-19 vaccine dose in 2020–2021, Pfizer recipients had higher observed mortality over 12 months, and we couldn’t fully rule out confounding.

Here is what the authors actually write: the findings “may have implications for public health recommendations and evaluation frameworks for vaccines” and are “consistent with cumulative evidence from prior literature showing worse outcomes” with Pfizer.​

Then look at how they plan to share these still-unreviewed results: not through peer review, but through “press releases by the institutions represented by the authors and through patient organizations”. This is not how rigorous science gets communicated. This is how unreviewed claims skip the checking process and go directly to people’s social media feeds.​

Problem #8: Check the Acknowledgments

At the very end of the paper, the authors thank Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, PhD, “for assistance with study method development and writing during the early stage of this research”. Høeg — a sports medicine doctor who has publicly questioned the U.S. childhood vaccination schedule, questioned CDC guidance, and, as of late 2025, was appointed acting head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research — helped design the methods of this study. At the FDA, she has reportedly been working to change COVID vaccine labels to say the risks outweigh the benefits for young men, based in part on an analysis with no supporting data released publicly.​

The methods of this study — the same methods we’ve just spent several hundred words critiquing — were shaped in part by someone whose stated goal is to restrict access to COVID vaccines. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is in the acknowledgments section. They wrote it themselves.

“We gots the receipts,” as the kids would say.

The Bottom Line

Joseph Ladapo attended Harvard Medical School. Retsef Levi holds a PhD from MIT. Tracy Beth Høeg holds both an MD and a PhD. These are real credentials, and they matter. But credentials are not a substitute for intellectual honesty, and intellectual honesty requires following the evidence wherever it leads. It’s not about constructing a study, on data only you control, with methods shaped by ideological allies, published without peer review, and then issuing press releases before anyone can check your work.​

The conclusion this paper wants you to walk away with — that Pfizer’s COVID vaccine is meaningfully more deadly than Moderna’s — is not supported by the methods used to reach it. The matching missed the most important confounders. The negative control hinted at bias rather than ruling it out. The sensitivity analysis set a threshold that known confounders can easily clear. And the people who designed, ran, and interpreted this study have publicly stated, before and after, that they believe COVID vaccines are dangerous and should be restricted or removed.​

People with doctorates are supposed to be able to spot the difference between a finding and a predetermined conclusion. Here, unfortunately, the line was crossed — and in a paper that could genuinely mislead people about a vaccine that helped prevent millions of deaths.

This paper is a preprint, available at doi: 10.1101/2025.04.25.25326460. The disclaimer on its first page tells you not to use it to guide clinical decisions. The authors put that disclaimer there themselves, further proving their rutabaga-like self-awareness.

Bless Your Heart, JB. Bless Your Heart.

Posted on by

You guys remember JB Handley? He’s the guy who can’t seem to get his story straight about the vaccine injury he claims his child received. He’s basically claimed that vaccines hurt his child to the point of causing autism, but he can’t quite nail the timeline. Anyway, he’s always lurking in the anti-vaccine recesses of society, the places where aliens, Bigfoot, and ghosts exist. And he’s back.

He’s written some book about ending the “autism epidemic.” (Note: To our knowledge, Joe Blow Handley [as we assume his real name is Joe Blow] is not an epidemiologist. How he intends to end an epidemic without knowledge of epidemiology is beyond us. Better yet, there is no autism epidemic. Seriously, there isn’t. Nope, there’s not.)  Come on, Joe Blow. When you don’t know the difference between incidence and prevalence of autism, you probably shouldn’t be jumping into the deep end of the scientific pool.

As it turns out, he wasn’t anti-vaccine enough for his friends, and he took to Facebook to whine about it like a three-year-old. Since he didn’t post his screed to the public, only to his friends, one of his friends took it upon themselves to stab Joe Blow in the back and posted a screenshot for the rest of us to see. Ready for some whine with anti-vaccine tear-flavored cheese?

handley

Vaccine abolitionists? Seriously, these “freedom fighters” think that they’re being oppressed to the point of calling themselves abolitionists. This as they endanger African American children by lying to them about vaccination. We’ve never seen a bigger collection of privileged people be so self-aggrandizing. (Except maybe for the Trump Administration.)

True to form, Joe Blow has decided to tone down his anti-vaccine rhetoric and recommend a “reduced vaccine schedule, with many screening tools, delays, etc. rather than an elimination of vaccines.” By now you should know that alternative vaccine schedules are not scientifically nor medically sound, and the douchebag who made alternative vaccine schedules a thing has publicly admitted to making it up out of nowhere:

douchy_response_reddit

No, there is no evidence alternative schedules encourage vaccination, either. If people think vaccines are poison, they’re not going to want a little bit of poison, would they?

In the past, Joe Blow “JB” Handley has stated that he wants to bring the US vaccine program to its knees, but here we see his “softening” about vaccines in the name of convincing more people to come to his side. The health and safety of children, protecting them from deadly vaccine-preventable diseases, you see, is some sort of a game for Joe Blow “JB” Handley.

There is no reliable evidence that 5%-10% of children should “NEVER” be vaccinated. There is no reliable evidence that a lower “vaccine load” would do anything to reduce the number of autistic children… BECAUSE VACCINES DON’T CAUSE AUTISM. In fact, we’d wager that you would get better vaccine advice from Miss Cleo, from the grave, than you would from Joe “Self-Righteous” Blowhard “JB” Handley.

Of course, he closes by mentioning his appearance on a television show. If that’s the standard by which we’re measuring someone’s expertise on something, then you need to remember that Charlie Manson was interviewed by Geraldo, so…

At the end of the day Joe Blow “JB” Handley is just another privileged guy with a ton of cash with a chip on his shoulder about his child. It seems that he sees his child as lost or stolen or dead from autism when nothing could be further from the truth. He uses that privilege and that cash to promote his ideas and get people on his side all riled-up. And then, as you see above, he seems to get all riled-up himself when someone dare criticize him. He’s such a big, fat snowflake.

Folks, get your vaccine advice from your personal healthcare provider, someone who is licensed in your state to deliver care, someone who went to school for a very long time and had his knowledge tested by people who know better, and someone who is not out to be popular and/or on television for the hell of it… Someone who isn’t a self-righteous douchebag.

In case you were wondering how evil the anti-vaccine cult can get

Posted on by

I know that you probably won’t be surprised to hear how evil the anti-vaccine zealots can get over the topic of vaccination. But, just in case you think that theirs is a religion of peace, let’s take a look at what is happening in California right now.

State Senator Richard Pan, a pediatrician, has proposed legislation that does away with the personal belief exemption from vaccination requirements for school. That’s all the bill does. If an anti-vaccine parent wants their precious little snowflakes to go to school with the rest of society, then they need to due their civic duty and protect the most vulnerable from vaccine-preventable diseases. Hey, everyone does this for them, so it’s time that they do it for others.

In no place within the bill does it state that children would be forced to be vaccinated. There are no civil or criminal penalties for not vaccinating. Anti-vaccine cult members can continue to not vaccinate their children, but they can’t take advantage of herd immunity provided by the children of responsible parents. They also can’t erode herd immunity at a school level.

Sorry, creeps, but we took a vote, and we want you to be responsible if you’re going to be part of our society.

Of course, the anti-vaccine priests came out in full force and decided to brand Dr. Pan a traitor, a Nazi, and other choice adjectives, just like they do so much with Dr. Paul Offit. As a result of their anger, the California Capitol has had to be under a state of alert because…

“Emotions have flared as deliberations begin on SB 277 and anti-vaccine advocates lobby aggressively against the bill. At a raucous committee hearing last week, where several audience members were ejected, Democratic senators Holly Mitchell of Los Angeles and Bill Monning of Carmel chided opponents for calls to their offices that they said crossed the line.

The office of Sen. Ben Allen, a Santa Monica Democrat who is a co-author of Pan’s bill, declined to comment on whether he was also receiving threats or additional security.

Pan blamed the “vitriol” of prominent anti-vaccine advocates, such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who apologized this week for calling the rise in autism, which he believes is linked to vaccines, a “holocaust.””

See, when a high priest like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., stands up in front of his congregation and proclaims that vaccines are bringing about a “holocaust,” many if not all of the congregation members are going to collectively lose their goddamned minds. There’s no science in what RFK Jr. says. There’s no good evidence of what he stands for (or against, really). But why listen to evidence when the lies make you feel more comfortable?

RFK Jr. is not the only one stoking the flames. There are plenty in the anti-vaccine cult who are thirsty for blood. So stay safe out there, as you continue to fight the good fight.

The future of science and technology in this country and the world

Posted on by

It’s been almost a moth since I last brought you the story of a woman who compared herself to victims of the Holocaust because she thinks she’s being persecuted for being irrational and acting like she’s insane when it comes to vaccines an anti-vaccine zealot. Since that time, I took a walk in the wild, so to speak, to get a feel for where I want to go with this whole struggle against anti-vaccine groups and anti-science misinformation permeating just about every form of media out there. You might not be surprised if I told you that all of this is exhausting.

It is exhausting because I keep reading the same lies and misinformation over and over and over and over and over again. Anyone who promotes the proper use of vaccines is in the pockets of Big Pharma. Anyone who opposes the idea that vaccines cause autism is disrespecting families of autistics. And anyone who sees autistic children and adults as not lost and not stolen somehow doesn’t understand autism. Those are just a few of the things that are floating out there.

There are, of course, other lies being perpetuated. The government is trying to kill us. Bill Gates is trying to depopulate the planet. (Good luck with that one. We keep multiplying and cramming ourselves into cities.) And, naturally, Monsanto is trying to feed us genetically modified organisms whether we like it or not.

Oh, and the Apple Watch will give us all cancer.

I’m really tired of it all. I could use my time for better things because, frankly, everything that needs to be said on the subject of vaccines has been said, or other people are saying it. But what about the next anti-scientific thing on the horizon? Quacks don’t sleep. (If they do, I hope they don’t sleep well.) They’re going to come up with some scheme to get rich quick and they don’t care much about who they hurt in the process.

There will always be suckers who will fall for whatever the quacks will sell to them. I don’t mean “suckers” in that it’s their fault that they fall for these things. Often times, these “suckers” are people who are desperate for a cure or relief for whatever ails them or their children. Often times, these “suckers” are people who cannot accept the established answers for whatever is going on and so they look for an answer that is more palatable.

Thinking about all this has me thinking about the future of science and technology in this country and the world. Can a child of an ardent anti-vaccine activist ever grow up to be involved in science and technology? Sure, there are physicians who are anti-vaccine, and there are plenty of scientists who believe in the vaccine-autism lie. But can a child really contribute to the body of knowledge that is science if their parents raise them in an anti-science household? We’ve all seen what “The Kid” has become, how hard he seems to work to destroy anything that is reasonable about the science and evidence of autism.

I’ve also been listening to some of the stupidity coming out of the Republican party pre-presidential candidates. They deny global climate change. They think that STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) are not subjects that should be taught in school. (They want religion to be taught instead, because the Earth is so 6,000 years old or something.) Sadly, more and more people are seeing things their way, electing more and more of them to positions of authority.

Lucky for me, I’m a hopeful kind of person. We’ve been in these types of scientific darkness kind of days before. Unfortunately, something has happened that shakes us all out of the apathy of not caring about science. I just hope it doesn’t take another world war or space race or cold war to do that. I hope it doesn’t take an outbreak of something more serious than measles to get us to vaccinate at adequate levels again. People shouldn’t die so we can continue our march forward as human beings.

So, for now, I’ll continue to wander in the wilderness and evaluate what my role in this whole thing is.

A blood test for prenatal autism? What could possibly go wrong?

Posted on by

(UPDATE 1-20-15: The reporter from the San Diego Union-Tribune has contacted us to point out that, “contrary to the original article, the reporter has corrected the story to reflect that the test is not being promoted for use during pregnancy” as was previously attributed to the CEO of the company, Ms. D’Alvise. See his comment below or click here.)

Back in 2013, the UC Davis MIND institute put out some research into maternal antibodies and their association with autism:

“UC Davis MIND Institute researchers have identified the specific antibodies that target fetal brain proteins in the blood of a subset of women whose children are diagnosed with autism. The finding is the first to pinpoint a specific risk factor for a significant subset of autism cases, as well as a biomarker for drug development and early diagnosis. The researchers have named autism related to these antibodies “Maternal Autoantibody-Related,” or MAR autism.

The study found that the mothers of children with autism were more than 21 times as likely to have the specific MAR antibodies in their systems that reacted with fetal brain proteins, or antigens, than were the mothers of children who did not have autism. In fact, specific combinations of MAR antibodies were not found in the blood of mothers whose children were typically developing.”

From that research — or some variation of it — comes word of a new blood test that expectant mothers can take to find out if they’re at an increased risk of having an autistic child:

“A blood test for one of the most common forms of autism is due to be launched in the third quarter of 2015, San Diego’s Pediatric Bioscience said Wednesday.

The test identifies maternal antibodies that interfere with prenatal brain development, the company says. These antibodies are implicated in a form of autism spectrum disorder representing 23 percent of all cases. The test can help with early diagnosis or steer potential mothers toward alternatives such as surrogate pregnancy.

The antibody test delivers a false positive response just 1.3 percent of the time, making it highly predictive, said Jan D’Alvise, president and chief executive of privately held Pediatric Bioscience. D’Alvise spoke at the Biotech Showcase conference in San Francisco, an annual meeting of biotech investors and companies held concurrently with the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference.”

If I were an unethical son of a bitch, I would invest heavily in this company because that test is going to sell like hotcakes at Pamela’s on a cold Pittsburgh morning.

I say unethical because the research looking into the maternal autoantibodies and autism didn’t come up with any causal association between the antibodies and the children’s autism. It’s an interesting theory that boils down to, “We found these antibodies in a lot of the women who had autistic children. Not all of them, but a lot of them. These antibodies seem to target the unborn fetus’ brain, so it stands to reason that they may cause some sort of damage that leads to autism.” It’s not their words, but it’s something that I’m hearing in my mind as I read their paper. It’s something I’m sure a reasonable person might interpret as a test that can predict autism. I feel it would be unethical for me to profit off of something so seemingly unnecessary.

This is troubling to me because autism is so often referred to as a “disease” or as “brain damage” by many people claiming to know more about autism than they do. It is also troubling because the research doesn’t seem to show any prediction for how “severe” or socially impairing the autism will be. The mother with the positive test has a higher-than-expected chance of having an autistic child, but the test will in no way predict the degree to which the child will be able to be part of society. There is the very real possibility that mothers (and fathers, but it’s the mother’s decision) will want to terminate the pregnancy out of fear of having a “brain damaged” child.

(I can feel my blood pressure rising at the thought of ignorant fools calling autistics “brain damaged.”)

The test only really tells a person that they have these antibodies. It doesn’t say whether or not the antibodies cause the autism. That’s why the researchers call them autism related antibodies, not autism causing antibodies. I don’t think from the research that they can make that claim. A similar argument could be made that autism is genetic, and that those genes are present in the mother and causing those autoantibodies to be produced by the mother. The genes are then passed on to the child and the child develops autism. In short, there is way too much that we don’t know about autism.

One thing we do know is that vaccines don’t cause autism, of course.

Here’s the weirdest part of it all: From Pediatric Bioscience, the makers of the test, we learn the recommended reasons for having the test done:

“The MAR antibody test should be ordered on three types of “at risk” women : 1) Women of child-bearing age who have already had a child with autism, 2) Mothers of young children in need of a diagnosis for their child’s perceived developmental delay, and 3) Women over the age of 30 who are at least 2 times more likely to give birth to an autistic child. Specifically, women in this group who are considering In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) to become pregnant may want to consider taking the test before they proceed with the procedure. The MAR test is not intended for pregnant women or women who think that they may be pregnant.”

Read that last sentence and marvel at the contradiction from what Jan D’Alvise, president of the company marketing the test, said to the San Diego Union-Tribune:

“If a pregnant women gets a positive diagnosis, preparations can begin before birth to get the child into therapy if needed, D’Alvise said. Or a baby showing delays in development can be diagnosed faster if the mother tests positive.”

Which is it? Either the test is not to be done on pregnant women or it is. It is very possible that Ms. D’Alvise didn’t know that their website states that the test is not intended for pregnant women or that the website is outdated and their test is now to be used on pregnant women who think their unborn child may be autistic. Either way, the message is fuzzy on whether or not this test will be able to tell with 100% certainty that the unborn child (or any future children) will be autistic.

(UPDATE 1-20-15: The reporter from the San Diego Union-Tribune has contacted us to point out that, “contrary to the original article, the reporter has corrected the story to reflect that the test is not being promoted for use during pregnancy” as was previously attributed to the CEO of the company, Ms. D’Alvise. See his comment below or click here.)

The test is said to cost $1,000. No word on whether or not health insurance will pay for it, or what additional steps should be taken for a positive test. There is also no word on what the FDA has to say about this test. We’ll be on the lookout for their opinion. In the meantime, there’s a little something we need to talk about next time.

The only controversy here is why this is “controversial”

Posted on by

In life, there are things that are true and there are things that are not true. In between those things are things that could be true and things that could not be true. To figure out where things gall on that spectrum, we have science.

Science is not an abstract concept that is hard to understand. When you look at how science works, it’s a pretty simple thing. You probably do quite a bit of science every day and don’t even know it. Science begins with a question, then a period of gathering of evidence, then the formulation of a theory on what the answer might be, a series of experiments to confirm that theory, and then a period of analysis to confirm those findings. Very rarely will we scientists accept something as true based on one study or one set of data.

Question: Do vaccines work? Answer: Yes. But that answer is not written blindly and with no thought behind it. I don’t write it with passion or because I have a personal stake in the answer. I write it because there is a wealth of evidence that shows that vaccines work, and they work wonderfully. It wasn’t until the introduction of the MMR vaccine in the 1960s that cases and deaths from measles truly started to come down. The introduction of other vaccines has done the same for some other very deadly diseases.

It’s human nature to cling on to something we believe in and refuse to let it go no matter what the evidence. Just look at all the abusive relationships where either party (or both) think that they can change themselves or change each other. Even with beatings and arrests, they cling to each other in the hopes that they’re wrong and that they truly will live happily ever after. Anti-vaccine activists do the same thing. They hope against all odds that they are correct, even when children die from vaccine-preventable diseases, even when mothers lose pregnancies to Rubella. They pray to God (or their version of a god) that they are correct and that all this science, all this research done by devoted and hard-working people, is wrong. They pray to be correct.

With something as serious as people’s lives, I like to go with the evidence. I throw away any and all personal beliefs and gut feelings and go with what works. It’s not only in my nature as a scientist, but it should be in my nature as a “thinking ape.” Our brains should be in the business of allowing us to think and allowing us to let go of gut instincts whenever we can.

How many inaccuracies about the vaccine court and autism can you fit in one blog post?

Posted on by

The last time we talked about a blog called “Thinking Mom’s Revolution”, it was in the context of a woman by the name of Cindy Killeen Waeltermann. This time, the blog is back with a post by a person named “Beaker”. Who is “Beaker”? Here’s her bio:

“Beaker started her professional career in the lab as a bewildered chemist who often felt she was a round peg in a square hole! After the birth of her children and the unexpected medical journey that her youngest would take their family on, she found out the EXACT reason she had that chemistry degree and put it to good use as she set out to restore her children’s health. Along the way she found her true calling: sharing their family’s experience with other mothers and helping them improve the quality of life of their children, by staying true to their guiding light . . . their God-given mother’s instinct.”

If I had a dollar for every time someone forgoes the guiding light of science and reason for the guiding light of “instinct”, I’d have a lot of cash on hand. As you read the blog post (go ahead and click on it, they get no increase in ranking), remember that you are dealing with someone who wants instinct to rule her decisions, not the evidence. Continue reading →

The crazy rises again, and again, and again

Posted on by

Sorry I’ve been away for a bit. I’m finishing up the details on my likely new job. I’m weighing my options. A well-paying job up north, or a not-so-well-paying job down south, but in a great place down south? The options are endless when the world is your oyster. I’ll let you know once that decision is made, but I’ll be traveling a lot to both places in the meantime. Me and Pedro (not her real name) have to decide.

Speaking of jobs, there’s a reason why I will keep the new job’s location, nature, and name very much hermetically sealed. Remember my first legal threat? The same guy has been at it again. This time, he’s going after Dorit Reiss, a lawyer law professor and vaccine advocate from California. And he has done it in the most creepy way:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

What? He didn’t have pictures of her kids to really ramp up the creepiness factor to 11?

Of course, if you’re diligent enough, you can find these things out on your own. The creepiness comes from a rabid anti-vaccine activist who continues to claim that his very much alive child is dead due to vaccines (hence his former Facebook name of “Death by Vaccination”) and his call for people to harass a vaccine (and, thus, science) advocate. If they can’t win the scientific argument, they’ll do this. They’ve done it before. They’ll do it again. Just read what “the kid” tried to do to Orac a while back, or what a “douchebag” did to Ren a couple of years ago.

It’s how they roll. It’s how they’ll continue to roll because the science doesn’t back them up.

Politics and science again

Posted on by

I won’t give you the details, but lets suppose that there is a disease X that is caused by agent Y and that agent Y is found in Z. Further, Z is found everywhere in the world. So, if you catch X, odds are you were exposed to Y from Z here, there, and everywhere.

Epidemiologists will tell you that it’s useless to test for the presence of Y in Z based on one case of X because finding Y will not tell you that the person caught it from that location of Z. Of course, this is of little relief to the friends and relatives of a person with X because they want answers. We put a man on the Moon, so why can’t we do a simple test and determine how the person got sick, or where they were exposed before they got sick.

However, if a group of people come down with X and all were in location A where there is plenty of Z, then Z will get tested to see if our suspicions are confirmed. Location A will also get tested if one person spent all of their time, 24/7, in that location an nowhere else. Again, these tests are done to confirm the outbreak, not to diagnose a single case of X.

It seems simple, right? There are rules based on evidence and science on when and where to test for Y in Z. Unfortunately, these rules, like many others, are subject to the whims of the people in power.

The people in power tend to want to stay in power. In the United States, most of the political power is subject to the demands of the electorate in an election year. (I think they could care less the rest of the year.) So, if someone related to a case of X knows someone in power, that someone in power will demand that those of us in public health, who work at the whims of those in power (because they sign our paychecks), go against the scientific rules and epidemiological guidelines.

This is exactly the situation an epidemiologist friend of this blog is going through. He is being asked, bullied, and strong-armed into testing for Y in location A because of one case of X. Testing will achieve nothing. It will not confirm the diagnosis, which has been made using advanced lab methods on the patient’s specimens. It will not cure the patient. It won’t even keep other people from getting sick because, as I told you, Y is everywhere where there is Z. People are just unlucky enough to get the right dose at the right time. (And smoking, cancer, lung disease, and old age don’t help, either.)

I advised our friend to swallow hard and endure, take it. They’ll hate him for it, but that’s the point of being an Epi, he can be the outcast. He can make the choice that no one else can make, the right choice.

Or he can just do the goddamn test and get it over with before the weekend.

US girls decide to become less slutty, wash their hands, or get vaccinated? You tell me.

Posted on by

The NY Times is reporting a study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases where it is reported that the prevalence of HPV infection in girls ages 14 to 19 is half of what it was in 2006. So what happened? Did these girls decide to be “less slutty“? Did hygiene and sanitation finally make their way to these girls’ vaginas? No.

What happened was that anti-HPV vaccines came online in 2006, and lots of girls are getting them. Lots, but not as many as we need to sustain this decrease. We’re far behind other countries in that respect. According to CDC:

“This report shows that HPV vaccine works well, and the report should be a wake-up call to our nation to protect the next generation by increasing HPV vaccination rates,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden, M.D., M.P.H.  “Unfortunately only one third of girls aged 13-17 have been fully vaccinated with HPV vaccine.  Countries such as Rwanda have vaccinated more than 80 percent of their teen girls. Our low vaccination rates represent 50,000 preventable tragedies – 50,000 girls alive today will develop cervical cancer over their lifetime that would have been prevented if we reach 80 percent vaccination rates.  For every year we delay in doing so, another 4,400 girls will develop cervical cancer in their lifetimes.”

Most of you will know that HPV vaccine continues to be demonized, against all the evidence, and anti-vaccine people keep blaming deaths and disabilities on it. A presidential candidate fueled the fire based on similar misconceptions about the vaccine. But, guess what? The evidence keeps coming in. The vaccine is safe, effective, and it is cutting infections in half. Now, we need to replicate these findings in those highly-vaccinated countries to put yet another nail in the coffin of the HPV vaccine conspiracy.