vaccination research/reading

freyley

Vaccination is probably one of the hardest topics to have a rational discussion about. I have some reason to believe that the author of http://whyarethingsthisway.com/2014/10/23/the-cdc-and-cargo-cult-science/ is someone interested in looking for the truth, not winning a side - at the very least, I'd like to help him when he says this:

I genuinely don’t want to do Cargo Cult Science so if anybody reading this knows of any citations to studies looking at the long term effects of vaccines and finding them benign or beneficial, please, be sure to post them in the comments.

I'm getting started on reading the actual papers, but I'm hoping this finds someone who's already done the work and wants to go post it on his site, or if not, someone else who's interested in looking through papers with me - I do better at this kind of work with social support.

I genuinely don’t want to do Cargo Cult Science so if anybody reading this knows of any citations to studies looking at the long term effects of vaccines and finding them benign or beneficial, please, be sure to post them in the comments.

The quickest way to investigate most issues is to look to see if there is a consensus among experts. In this issue there is. If you don't have a lot of experience in the field thinking you can do better original research or synthesis than the experts is probably not reasonable.

In my experience, if there is a field where there is a big consensus opinion among "experts", and a small group of wacko's on the internet contesting the "expert's" finding with their own citations to the scientific literature, if I've investigated and read what the science says, the wacko's have turned out right every time.

The problem with your quick way of investigating is its based on the utterly fallacious theory that annointed "experts" know what they are talking about. In general, they are just spouting crowd think.

“Sci... (read more)

3ChristianKl12y

You don't need to hold that belief to think that the experts are wrong. The expert might be wrong because they are willing to downplay the risks associated with vaccination because they think the benefit from higher vaccination rates outweigh the cost. There also a huge commercial interest in the experts supporting vaccination. Experts can be wrong and it's often useful to read papers yourself.