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Originally Posted by Lightspeed
Is there a way to find out what someone actually qualified has to say about these studies?
Even in my area of expertise I still rely on secondary sources, working experts with reputations they depend on explaining the nuance of a study, bringing in some history and the wider landscape of studies that are relevant.
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Yeah, this is something I kind of struggle with myself. Anti-vaxxers take a shotgun approach - they figure that if they throw enough shit at the wall eventually some of it will stick. And just by chance, somewhere along the way, there might be some stuff that they're even right about.
But by that point, like the boy who cried wolf, anyone serious will be so sick of their shit and the fact that they use this shotgun approach instead of the scalpel which would be the right tool for the job, that nobody will want to listen to them. They're their own worst enemy in that way.
Take this study that Nich has posted - it's not peer reviewed yet. What are we to make of that? It's being shared by someone who we can tell by the way they're commenting isn't employing any nuance when evaluating these things. 18 - 98 hospitalisations. Definitely all hospitalisations. Doesn't even stop to question whether every SAE is actually a hospitalisation or not.
It might be reasonable to think that a big part of the *reason* that he's sharing a study that hasn't been peer reviewed is simply because the authors of the conclusions he has already decided are true aren't ever likely to get their publication *past* peer review.
But yeah, I haven't bothered taking the time to look into the authors of that paper and whether they're in any way credible or not. If there are honest to god problems with the vaccine, it might be the case that one day we'll know about it. In the mean time I'm certainly not going to run around being chicken little every time an anti-vaxxer sounds the alarm and posts some new credible looking bullshit.
They specialise in credible looking bullshit, and the vast majority of it ends up not stacking up for all sorts of different reasons. I'm comfortable with the view that if and when there are problems, actual credible sources will let us know.