Question explored with the scientific record
Conversation so far
- 1 If vaccines are fundamentally unsafe or ineffective, how do you explain the global eradication of smallpox and the near-eradication of polio?
- 2 You state that modern vaccines cannot be proven safe or effective because they lack a 'true unvaccinated comparator group.' Yet, you also state that the smallpox vaccine successfully eradicated smallpox and that a comparator group was 'not needed.' If eradication can be scientifically proven without a comparator group in the case of smallpox, why do you claim it is mathematically or scientifically impossible to prove efficacy for other vaccines without one?
- 3 You claim that observational data cannot prove a vaccine is safe or effective without a true randomized, long-term unvaccinated control group because 'the confounders plague observational data.' Yet, you confidently cite observational data from the UK ONS to claim COVID vaccines increase mortality, and observational monkeypox data to claim smallpox vaccine immunity works. Why do you accept observational data as scientifically valid when it supports your skepticism, but reject when disagreeing?
- 4 By your own rule, observational data is scientifically valid when the signal-to-noise ratio is high and the effect size is massive. Historically, measles caused roughly 4 million cases and thousands of encephalitis hospitalizations annually in the US alone. Following the vaccine’s rollout, cases plummeted by over 98% to near-zero. Because this massive, historic collapse in disease incidence is a giant signal that completely drowns out any conceivable background confounder, admit your errors?
- 5 You state your safety confidence is only moderate because we lack a 'true unvaccinated cohort followed for decades.' Given that it is medically unethical to intentionally deny children life-saving vaccines for decades just to run a trial, why do you baseline your safety standards on a study design that is structurally and ethically impossible to ever conduct?
- 6 If a vaccine requires a decades-long, never-vaccinated comparison group to achieve high safety confidence, does that mean you also have 'low-to-moderate' confidence in the safety of childhood antibiotics, chemotherapy, and emergency surgeries, since none of them have ever been tested against a lifetime untreated control group?
- 7 You claim a vaccine is given to a healthy child against an 'unknown' threat that 'may never come.' Given your previous admission that 98% of the population—virtually every healthy child—contracted measles before the vaccine, how can you claim the threat of exposure was 'unknown' or zero when doing nothing guaranteed infection?
- 8 If a lack of immediate data in your text cache means a risk is 'unknown,' does that mean if your data file forgot to mention the fatality rate of jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, you would declare the safety of parachutes 'uninterpretable'?
- 9 You cited an ROR of 36.01 for a 'measles-like reaction' to prove the vaccine's high risk, but since an ROR only measures how frequently one symptom is reported compared to other symptoms within a passive system, why are you misrepresenting a high reporting ratio as proof of a high absolute rate of injury?
Answered on this page ↓
You cited an ROR of 36.01 for a 'measles-like reaction' to prove the vaccine's high risk, but since an ROR only measures how frequently one symptom is reported compared to other symptoms within a passive system, why are you misrepresenting a high reporting ratio as proof of a high absolute rate of injury?
The short version: you are right that a high reporting odds ratio from passive surveillance does not prove a high absolute rate of injury. The ROR of 36.01 for measles-like reaction after MMRV [4] tells you this symptom is reported far more often relative to other symptoms for this vaccine than for other vaccines in the database. It does not tell you how many children actually had that reaction per dose given.
The evidence retrieved for this follow-up does not contain any study that provides the denominator of total doses administered alongside the numerator of confirmed cases. Without that, the ROR is a signal-generation tool, not a risk estimate. The 2026 HPV VAERS study [5] makes the same point explicitly: syncope was the most frequently reported event (n=8,351) but POTS had the strongest disproportionality signal despite only 680 reports. A high ROR for a rare condition can simply reflect a low background reporting rate for that condition in the comparator group.
The 2008 study on hearing loss after MMR [6] is the only retrieved evidence that provides a true reporting rate: approximately one case per 6-8 million doses. That is a rate, not a ratio. It is the kind of number an ROR cannot produce on its own. The 2012 Merck-funded review [8] reports an overall AEFI reporting rate of 30.5 per million doses across 575 million doses distributed, but that is a rate from passive surveillance, which the authors acknowledge captures only a fraction of real events.
My call: the ROR of 36.01 is a valid signal that warrants investigation, but it is not evidence of a 36-fold increase in absolute risk. The evidence retrieved does not contain the denominator data needed to convert that signal into a rate. Confidence is moderate that the ROR is correctly calculated, but low that it represents the true injury rate, because passive surveillance underreports by an unknown factor and the most informative study design (vaccinated versus unvaccinated with active follow-up) was never run.
Sources used 14
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Bullying victimization frequency is positively associated with monthly e-cigarette use among German students aged 10-18, with a dose-response pattern after covariate adjustment; causal direction cannot be established due to cross-sectional design.
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Allelic Differences in the Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor Val66Met Polymorphism in Late-Life Depression
The study tests whether the Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor Val66Met polymorphism is associated with late-life depression in elderly adults, finding that Met66 allele carriers have about double the odds of being depressed compared with Val66 homozygotes, with no clear link to …
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Adverse Events Reported to the United States Food and Drug Administration Related to Caffeine-Containing Products
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Parental rules and communication: their association with adolescent smoking
Antismoking socialization practices and the quality of parent-child communication are associated with lower odds of adolescent smoking; parental smoking status and birth order show moderation in some associations; effects are generally similar across older and younger siblings.
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Adverse events following HPV vaccine reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System
This pharmacovigilance study of 77,909 VAERS reports (2006-2024) finds syncope as the most frequently reported adverse event signal and POTS with the strongest disproportionality signal, with approximately 90% of adverse events occurring within 30 days of HPV vaccination.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0351652 -
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This study investigates the incidence of hearing loss reported in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following live attenuated measles and mumps vaccines in the United States from 1990 to 2003, finding a reporting rate of approximately one case per 6-8 million do…
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This study presents a detailed case report of a 19-month-old girl who developed haemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis following measles vaccination, highlighting the need to consider this rare adverse effect of vaccination.
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FREQUENCY OF TRUE ADVERSE REACTIONS TO MEASLES-MUMPS-RUBELLA VACCINE
This study investigates the reactogenicity of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine through a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover design involving 581 twin pairs, revealing that adverse reactions are less common than previously thought.
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Six-month-old male developed hypersensitivity (urticaria) within 24 hours of a zero-dose MMR vaccine given during Brazil's 2018 measles outbreak; dose-zero immunization is not contraindicated for subsequent doses but warrants further investigation of adverse effects.
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This study evaluates the storage stability of live measles, mumps, and rubella virus vaccines at various temperatures, demonstrating their retention of potency over time and under adverse conditions.
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