I should also add that efficacy trials often also simultaneously monitor safety alongside efficacy, but the abstract alone might not always reflect that. Here’s one, sadly paywalled, that does include a sentence on it:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/abs/10.1056/NEJM198405313102201
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According to RFK, the FDA would like to ban exposure to sunlight, and exercise, because pharma can’t patent it.
Do I need to disprove that?
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It flabbergasts me how frequently @Giltil’s posts start with these Arguments from (False) Authority from yet another credibility-free crank.
Do we have any more evidence supporting this claim, that “the HSS has admitted that no children vaccine has been tested pre licensing for safety”, than for any of his previous “according to …” appeals to (false) authority (“according to Dembski …”, etc etc)? It would seem not.
Gil, when your source has no credibility, and you have proffered no evidence to support their claim, it is not a genetic fallacy to point out that this is a “problem”.
So why Gil do you keep repeating this dysfunctional behavior?
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Not when you are touting him as an expert.
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If you can provide a primary source for this statement from “the HSS” (I’m guessing you mean HHS, the Department of Health and Human Services), I can comment on the substance of it. Absent that, I can only point out again that clinical trials have been conducted on childhood vaccines.
The statement was that there were no trials at all. As a convenience, I linked directly to one trial because it specifically was a double-blind, randomized trial with a placebo control, the exact sort that supposedly doesn’t exist. I mentioned that the ACIP document had links to additional studies. Here is another of them, a safety and immunogenicity trial.
You could also look at the body of the ACIP document itself, where it discusses the safety of the vaccine. For example, it mentions:
Varicella virus vaccine was first licensed for use among high-risk children in several European countries in 1984, in Japan in 1986, and in Korea in 1988. In Japan and Korea, licensure was extended to healthy children in 1989; no concerns about vaccine safety have been identified after the administration of greater than 2 million doses in these countries.
Clinical trials for vaccines run in three phases, which tend to grow exponentially in scale. The first two phases are typically focused on dosing, safety, and immunogenicity. Phase 1 trials typically involve on the order of 100 participants. Phase 2 trials are typically an order of magnitude or 2 larger. Phase 3 trials are generally larger still, which enables them to also examine efficacy.
A major reason for scaling things in this way is to minimize the impact of any adverse outcomes; if 1 in 10 people are going to have a problem, you don’t want to already have given it to 10,000 people when you could have found that out from the first 100. At the same time, since they scale up, there is the potential to identify rarer and rarer adverse outcomes, which is why, as @Rumraket pointed out, safety is still assessed in efficacy trials as well. Safety also continues to be monitored after licensing. The public health community takes the safety of vaccines quite seriously.
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I am not @Rumraket, but “according to” me, what is “unreasonable or unscientific in RFK’s above statements” on vaccines, is the same as what’s “unreasonable or unscientific” about pretty much everything he says about health – there is no evidence backing it up.
I think a better title for this thread would be:
RFK on RFK’s completely-made-up bullshit
I have to wonder, particularly given recent events, that Americans might be under a pervasive delusion that the size of one’s soapbox equates to the level of one’s expertise or competence.
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No. Concluding that the claim is false based on the source would be a genetic fallacy. Concluding that the claim is worthless because it comes from a highly unreliable and biased source is not. Indeed it is the only rational position.
.
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It is indeed a point saying the claim is false based on its source. But what makes such arguments fallacious is if that is the only reason provided.
The claim is not said to be wrong because RFK said it and we have axiomatically decided in advance that anything RFK says is wrong. Rather the point here is that you relying on RFK as an authority on matters he either knows nothing of or is happy to lie about is a problem for you.
And the reason nigh all here would say this is because of their experience fact-checking things RFK says about the subject. Almost without fail he says absolutely asinine nonsense.
Does that mean RFK will always be wrong about all things? No. Does it mean you are making a mistake treating him as your source instead of investigating the claim first (i.e. before perpetuating it, like someone who is inclined to do their due diligence out of a basic sense of intellectual and social accountability) and retrieving actual evidence of it to cite in his place? Yes.
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That’s not even “According to RFK…”, it’s ‘According to some-one citing RFK…’.
For the record, here are RFK own words on the matter (from his book The Real Anthony Fauci on pages 594-595)
Most medicinal products cannot get licensed without first undergoing randomized placebo-controlled trials that compare health outcomes — including all-cause mortalities — in medicated versus unmedicated cohorts. Tellingly, in March 2017, I met with Dr. Fauci, Francis Collins, and a White House referee (and separately with Peter Marks from CBER at FDA) to complain that HHS was, by then, mandating 69 doses of sixteen vaccines for America’s children, none of which had ever been tested for safety against placebos prior to licensing.
Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins denied that this was true and insisted that those vaccines were safety tested. They were unable, however, after several weeks, to provide us a citation for a single clinical trial using an inert placebo against a vaccine. In October 2017, Del Bigtree and Aaron Siri — who both attended these meetings — joined me in suing HHS under the Freedom of Information Act to produce the long promised safety studies. Ten months after the meeting with Fauci and Collins, on the courthouse steps, HHS admitted that we were, in fact, correct: none of the mandated childhood vaccines had been tested for safety in pre-licensing inert placebo tests.
So, you still haven’t produced any reliable or trustworthy sources for this claim. Why should we believe it?
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This claim strikes me as very odd. Why was this admission made “on the courthouse steps”, rather than in a court filing or on the record in front of the presiding judge?
@Puck_Mendelssohn: can you weigh in on this?
What evidence do we have that this court case even existed, let alone came to the claimed conclusion – rather than being yet another figment of Kennedy’s worm-eaten imagination?
Another question that probably should be raised is are there situations where there are good medical reasons for not having placebo trials? And were they applicable here?
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Another term has snuck into Gilbert’s quotes. Inert. The placebo must now also be “inert”, whatever that means.
All the previous claims were false. ALL. The vaccines are placebo tested before licensing. But this “inert” crap is going to be the next goalpost about vaccines.
So if they’re given… a saline solution, or a sugar pill, or a calcium tablet, it’s not “inert” enough? There’s going to be ATOMS in the placebo, and the atoms will POTENTIALLY be involved in some sort of chemical reaction. The effects of the placebo itself will be known from still other studies, where it was tested against something EVEN MORE INERT. But the vaccine won’t be directly compared against the most inert possible substance known to man, and so Gilbert and all RFK’s other sycophant idiots will fall for it and make this the idiot hill to die on.
Wanna take bets on where this is going?
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There is of course also the possibility that @AllenWitmerMiller referred to in his first post, that some vaccines are compared to previous vaccines, which themselves were previously tested against placebos and passed FDA approval through that.
But we need to spoonfeed the facts and logic to @Giltil. He has not, and isn’t going to at any point, check the veracity or sensibility of anything RFK says. He is here to only ever quote him, defend him, and move the goalposts for him.
He has still not checked anything. He just brainlessly quotes his new messianic idol and takes every word as gospel truth.
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Of course not. The right-wing media have given RFK Jr one of the biggest soapboxes possible over the last year – what more evidence could we possibly ask for that everything he says is the ‘hand to God’ truth?
According to the homeless wino who panhandles at the local Walmart, he asks for money to buy alcohol because he says it’s like antifreeze and he needs it to stay warm on cold nights sleeping outdoors. I figure that nobody drinks more alcohol than he does nor spends more time in the cold than he does. He is obviously an expert. Just like RFK Jr. knows more than everybody else about vaccines. (Or perhaps the worm that lives in his brain knows more. I don’t know which but it shouldn’t matter. Facts are facts.)
Anyway, as to RFK Jr: He said it. I believe it. That settles it.
(I hope that any newcomers to Peaceful Science understand that my post is satire.)
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Yes, isn’t it shocking and scandalous that saline IV treatments have been used for almost two centuries now—starting with Dr. Thomas Latta in Scotland around 1831 in a cholera epidemic—and it has yet to be adequately tested against a placebo in children.
I blame Big Pharma for this injustice.
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Yeah. Well, here goes.
First, what’s very important to remember – and has a tendency to get lost in the conversation – is that @Rumraket and @AndyWalsh, above, have already shown the underlying claim made by RFK Jr. to be false. That being so, the probability that RFK Jr.'s attribution of the statement to Fauci is true is vanishingly small. Had Fauci “admitted” such a thing, he’d have been mistaken in so admitting; but it is highly unlikely that Fauci was laboring under any such delusion.
RFK Jr., on the other hand, is a known serial liar with some truly bizarre antivax views, whose other behavior suggests that he is suffering from some severe cognitive deficits. Knowing his character, the best interpretation of the claim is that it is an outright lie, though I suppose someone might think he is too delusional, as a result of whatever it is that ails him, to remember facts accurately. But we have, here, evidence other than his known dishonest character.
The scale tips heavily in favor of “lie” because of just what you pointed out. Why was this admission, of central importance to the dispute, made off the record? Because it didn’t happen. Lying about matters of record is much more hazardous than lying about a conversation off the record.
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So, the thing that gets me: why do these strange beliefs fly together so often? Between the Shroud of Turin, weird creationist or quasi-creationist notions, anti-vax, Ivermectin-as-a-treatment-for-something-it’s-not-effective-for, and goodness knows what else…
The odd thing is that these things have little to do with one another. Yes, many people profoundly lack critical thinking skills, and yes, that leads to anti-scientific and pseudoscientific beliefs. But why do the SAME pseudoscientific beliefs fly together like a flock of geese, nesting in the same heads? Why don’t we hear about alignment of chakras, magic Mormon underwear, alien abductions, pre-Columbian horses, Bigfoot and Nessie, too?
I get that religious prejudice has a lot to do with it. People wedded to a primitive theology will accept creationism and the reality of magic relics, for example, as part of the same basket. But Ivermectin? Vaccines? Surely there is some strange cultural history that binds all these things together, but it cannot be JUST a complete intellectual failure in the evaluation of evidence. The patterns in it are too consistent and durable to be that.
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