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    • There is science on both sides, it just takes way more digging to learn about science on the other side.

      There's also water on both sides of a dam.

      I'm not an expert on structural engineering or fluid dynamics. I couldn't tell you how to build a dam. But if you show me a picture of a dam, I can tell you with 100% certainty which side of that dam I want to be on when the floodgates open.

      How am I able to do this? By using common sense and by observing a preponderance of evidence.

      Science is a little bit like this. Through research and experimentation, consensus builds on one side or another, like water on either side of a dam. Research can be complicated. Sometimes different experiments have different results. Sometimes results are mixed. You rarely end up with all the evidence on one side, and that's normal, because that's the nature of science.

      But the overwhelming majority of scientific evidence indicates that vaccines are statistically more beneficial than they are harmful. In other words, when more people are vaccinated, fewer people get sick and die.

      Some people do still get sick. Some people do still die. In rare cases, some people can even get sick as a result of a vaccine. But overall, when more people are vaccinated, more people live.

      Yes, there is water on both sides of the dam. But if you go fishing on the wrong side, you're probably going to have a bad day.

    • Science is never settled. But with enough work, it can reach a high degree of certainty.

      When you get into a car and drive somewhere, you feel safe because you have a high degree of certainty that you will arrive at your destination. But you also know that car accidents happen. You may even have experienced a car accident yourself.

      Every time you drive somewhere, there's a small chance that you will be injured or killed. But you drive anyway. And you'll probably be fine. Not because science has proven that car accidents don't happen, but because statistics show that you're much more likely to arrive at your destination safely than you are to die in a car accident.

      A preponderance of evidence tells us that driving is generally pretty safe. The fact that some people have car accidents doesn't change that.

      In the same way, a preponderance of evidence tells us that vaccines are generally pretty safe.

    • I read the intro to Obukhanych's book and this was part of the first sentence she wrote:

      I have yet to encounter one among my own kind: a scientist in the trenches of mainstream biomedical research who does not regard vaccines as the greatest invention of medicine.

      It's a powerful sentence and I immediately wanted to know more about her to give some perspective on the book. All I really knew is it was self-published in 2012. Where is she working? So I searched YouTube and found this fascinating talk that she gave a year and a half ago:

      I paid a lot of attention and learned a number things. You can tell she's very educated.

      She opens with a paper from the 60s by two scientists from the CDC who said measles is a relatively mild disease and fatalities are rare. When asked why they wanted to develop a vaccine they replied "because they can."

      She's right, compared to the diseases they had seen recently back then like polio, measles is relatively mild. I would have preferred her to be precise and say about 500 children were dying of measles per year in the U.S. back then instead of using the term rare.

      I wasn't sure where she was going with this. If she could show that deaths from the vaccine were higher, then that would be a valid point. Instead she said the government was taking our liberties away for a relatively mild disease. I understood the sentiment but it's not science and I think it's valid to be concerned about 500 deaths per year.

      The next thing she pointed out is that tetanus is not contagious. I checked and she's right. I didn't know that. Her point seemed to be the government had no right to require the tetanus vaccine if children sick with tetanus don't endanger other kids at school. Fair point, correct science. I just don't think we should have any child go through tetanus unless there is some greater harm from vaccines. I was expecting her to get to that.

      Her next point is people who have had measles have greater immunity than people who just get vaccines. She's right again. It's possible to get measles even if you're vaccinated. So a higher percent of the population has to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity than the percent of the population who has had measles.

      I was still having trouble getting the point. If you don't vaccinate, a lot of people have to get sick and some die to get much herd immunity.

      Near the end of the talk she brought up the case of a measles outbreak in Canada where the mainstream press reported that it was because of the number of unvaccinated, but she said through surveillance they found out that wasn't true. Wait, surveillance? That seems like a bold claim. Can we see that data? She just dropped that statement and moved on. That didn't sound like science at all. The numbers are usually very reliable about who is vaccinated and how the disease spread from person to person.

      Somewhere along the way she displayed a chart very much like the one below to show you can still have outbreaks in the age of vaccines. I thought it was an extraordinary chart. How two scientists can look at the same chart and take away two completely different conclusions leaves me thunderstruck. The only thing I could think of is she must have some real data to show the vaccines are potentially worse than all those deaths. But she ended her talk without going there. I don't know what to say to that. Maybe she covers it in her book?

    • From an outside point of view, it sounds as if this person is pushing just the right buttons to get the attention of a crowd that values "freedom" and "lack of government interference" above all else.

      This could be a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy (if she hadn't pushed those buttons, we would be talking about a random other person that did instead) - but it could also be by design. Further above, it was suggested to "follow the money" in a different context. I wonder if anyone did the same in this case, following her money back to whatever origin might be found.

      "Divide and rule" is not exactly a new concept. Maybe it is at work here, too:

    • I stayed up late last night and read the book. I take her at her word that she has yet to encounter one among her own kind: a scientist in the trenches of mainstream biomedical research who does not regard vaccines as the greatest invention of medicine.

      I'm not sure that statement supports or harms her credibility. But she did say up front the book is intended for parents of children, largely non scientists.

      As I read it I couldn't stop thinking of Elizabeth Holmes, the woman who founded Theranos. I am fascinated by that story too, how someone could raise billions of dollars and attract powerful, smart investors, none of whom were scientists.

      This book is filled with perhaps a hundred complicated points with scientific jargon that would take an expert weeks to understand, if ever. Here's an example:

      Furthermore, far from being a biologically inactive substance, alum was capable of activating granulocytes and antigen-presenting cells that prime the immune system for antibody production ( and

      👆 Scary. If you follow the first link, you come to a 2004 paper rarely cited whose abstract reads:

      Exposure of naïve B cells to the cytokine interleukin-4 (IL-4) and/or antigen leads to a state of "priming," in which subsequent aggregation of major histocompatibility complex class II molecules induces the mobilization of calcium ions and cell proliferation. However, it is not clear how critical this priming is for immune responses or how it is normally induced in vivo.

      (The exposure was in mice.) I don't think there is a person on earth who could read that paper and understand its significance. Not even the scientists who performed the experiment and published the paper could, and they said so in the abstract.

      The thing is, scary passages like those were the ones being highlighted on Kindle readers.

      I took two things from the book and her talk that will bother me for the rest of my life:

      1. To trust this book you have to mistrust the scientific community. But trust in this book comes from her being a scientist. I can't reconcile that.

      2. She makes very bold and scary claims throughout the book, like vaccines are the cause of the rise of childhood allergies and asthma, but she presents no data, no charts or graphs, to back them up. There is a ton of published data on allergies, asthma and vaccines but she doesn't reference them. They show the same thing as vaccines and autism: no link.

      Here she is in her talk standing in front of one of the world's most astonishing charts. And yet she looked for whatever alternative explanation to the chart she can propose: lack of vitamin A, intravenous injection of vitamin C, better hygiene, quarantining — all without evidence. What makes it believable by some people is better nutrition, better hygiene, and quarantining all help. But as mountains of data show, they are not enough.

      I don't mean this to be sarcastic, but I really do think she explained her opening sentence about why she is the only scientist in her field who does not believe vaccines are the greatest advance in medicine. It's in the chart she's displaying:

    • Chris, your analysis has me speechless—it was that incredible. I think it brings me back to our debate of whether 👏 or 🙌 is the more appropriate accolade.


      I think the blindness of being “highly educated” is that you think that several hours of research via the Internet and books will give you enough knowledge to make an informed medical decision that’s better than that of the medical community.

      It isn’t that the medical community never makes the wrong treatment decision. It’s that as a layman you don’t have the prerequisite knowledge to understand the data required to draw conclusions.

      And so instead of trusting a doctor, some choose to trust other voices. If your doctor has ever misdiagnosed or failed to diagnose a problem with your child, you’re going to be open to considering those other voices. I think @tornadik mentioned that had happened with her own child.

      I don’t think there’s a rejection of science. Instead there’s a rejection of who mainstream society is telling them to trust.

      I choose to put my trust in mainstream medicine, including vaccination, but I definitely understand why some parents make the decision not to.

    • It's hard to reconcile that all progress depends on believing we can do better than something that exists today — that what we have now isn't perfect, there are flaws, advances to make. I think that's what makes Elon Musk such a great inventor.

      But all progress also depends on someone being able to show that they can make improvements. Anyone can point out that air travel isn't safe, but the people who really matter are the ones who make it safer.

      Anyone can point out that, like air travel, vaccines aren't perfectly safe. But I think the ones we should listen to are the ones who either improve their safety or come up with something better. I don't think the ones we should listen to are the ones who propose that because jets crash we should drive instead. That takes us backwards in safety.

    • I completely agree. I would love for more public push for safety. I am still against uninformed forced “one fit for all” approach due to so many medical deviations in our health condition so I think we should have a right to discuss options.

      We all agree that food is essential for surviving yet somehow we want our food to be tested for safety, quite a few would prefer it to be local and organic, nonGMO, etc. But food saves lives, so shouldn’t we agree that pros outweigh possible cons of someone getting sick from bad food? Yet, we continue on insisting on safe standards.

      Same applies to vaccines or any other no matter how mild medication. If I can exercise informed consent, I feel much safer. The more the topic becomes hush-hush and any questions on safety are put down, the more it fuels anto-vaxxer movement.


      I think that's very fair. That's what my son-in-law the family physician advocates.

      On a slightly different topic, one thing I have no understanding of is why vaccines are terrifying and painkillers are not. By the numbers, painkillers are incredibly dangerous and vaccines are incredibly safe. The worry about profit motive of pharma makes more sense with painkillers than vaccines.

      There must be something very important about human emotion I don't understand.









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