Category Archives: Vaccines/Alternative Medicine

Anti-vaccers are fundamentally wrong about placebo-controlled trials

Anti-vaxxers love to demand placebo-controlled trials and insist that nothing else will suffice for demonstrating vaccine safety. This approach to medical research is flawed for a number of reasons. First, as I’ve explained previously, new vaccines are, in fact, tested … Continue reading

Posted in Nature of Science, Vaccines/Alternative Medicine | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Understanding analogies in logical arguments

Yesterday, on this blog’s Facebook page, I posted the stick figure comic on the right, lightly making fun of anti-vaccers and using analogies to demonstrate why they are wrong that 100% effectiveness is needed for vaccines to be useful. I … Continue reading

Posted in Rules of Logic, Vaccines/Alternative Medicine | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Big pharma is not buying favorable peer-reviews

Science-deniers have a long history of blindly assuming that any research they don’t like must have been corrupted by “big whatever,” and I constantly see people assume a study had conflicts of interest rather than actually checking for conflicts. Lately, … Continue reading

Posted in Nature of Science, Vaccines/Alternative Medicine | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Vaccines are tested against placebos

Lately, my Facebook page has been flooded with people insisting that  “no vaccine is tested against a placebo” (sometimes stated with additional qualifiers like “double-blind” or “saline placebo”). This claim, like so many anti-vaccer claims, is blatantly false. Nevertheless, I … Continue reading

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Don’t be intellectually lazy

In recent conversations on this page, I have been struck by just how intellectually lazy science-deniers usually are. This is hardly a novel observation, but I think it bears discussion. I also want to note that this sort of lazy … Continue reading

Posted in Rules of Logic, Vaccines/Alternative Medicine | Tagged , | Comments Off on Don’t be intellectually lazy