Words to live by (at least if you want a high paying job in medical research at a major university): (1) Follow the science; (2) publish or perish. There are a lot of footnotes to those seemingly simple rules. First, science is essentially anything that is published in a widely respected journal, such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association or anything that the medical editors of the New York Times and Washington Post follow. The need to be published is so strong that it has led to the creation of garbage journals that will take anything that lands on the edited desk. Consider the importance of “Ovum Disruption Secondary to Gravitational Influences” a.k.a. Humpty Dumpty Sat On A Wall. This won’t pass NEJM, but somewhere there will be an editor who will take anything, up to and including a check clipped to the first page.
On the other hand, real science can be excruciatingly demanding, and so can the study sponsors. If the study was funded by a Pharma company, they want studies that prove, or at least claim to prove, that their product is the best in its class. The system leads to sloppy science with a few innocent mistakes, or plagiarism, or tweaking the results. A really well tweaked study study can escape detection for years. The peer review system, in which every study is examined by a qualified expert in the subject before it’s accepted for publication, isn’t reliable, perhaps because reviewers don’t get either credited or paid.
Also, the guideline for a study being worth reading is whether the results are “significant.” Merriam Webster defines “significant” as “important. a significant piece of legislation. Also: of a noticeably or measurably large amount. a significant number of layoffs.” But that’s not what it means in mathematics, or science, where the definition is just that the result has only a 5% chance of happening by chance – like the possibility of flipping a coin and getting 5 heads in a row. The chance or that happening is 1 time in 32 repeats. Actually, that’s better odds than playing a single number in roulette (1 in 37 on a European wheel, 1 in 38 in an American wheel).
The way to determine whether a study is valid or not (assuming there are no obvious flaws in the methodology) is to repeat the study. The most famous “study” connecting vaccinations with autism was written by Andrew Wakefield, and published in the respected British journal Lancet. The study, if there really was one, claimed to be an examination of 12 children who had claimed to be developing normally until they had been vaccinated with MMR (measles, mumps, rubella). This report, on a small sample, set off the anti-vaxer movement, where parents were afraid to have their children vaccinated against almost anything. It also created a modest industry of medical researchers looking for a link between vaccinations and autism.
PubMed, a free service of the National Library of Medicine, lists 1,138 studies that, at some level, looked for a relationship between vaccination and autism. In comparison with Wakefields claimed 12 subjects, a report, “Vaccines are not associated with autism: an evidence-based meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies,” published in Vaccines, June 2014, reviewed studies that came to 1,256,407 children without finding any relationship between vaccines and autism.
A Danish study (Annals of Internal Medicine, Apr 16, 2019) followed 657,461 children born in Denmark from 1999 through Dec. 31, 2010, were followed from 1 year of age and through Aug. 31, 2013. They reported “no increased risk for autism after MMR vaccination was consistently observed in subgroups of children defined according to sibling history of autism, autism risk factors (based on a disease risk score) or other childhood vaccinations, or during specified time periods after vaccination.”
Finally, a review, “The myth of vaccination and autism spectrum” (European Journal of Paediatric Neurology, January 2022), concluded “… the fact that the diagnosis of autism is typically made after the age of receiving the main childhood immunizations, as well as the occasional occurrence of regression after the age of first year vaccinations. In spite of vast evidence that the main contribution to the increase in incidence is from improvement of the diagnostic process, this rapid and publicized rise in autism diagnoses feeds parental concerns regarding any medical intervention that may be associated with the health of their children.”
If you want to bet against the odds, buy a Powerball ticket (1chance in 1 292.2 million), but stop risking the health of children.
Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in Louisville, Ky. Email sdu01@outlook.com.
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2023
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