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A Midwestern Doctor's avatar

I think one of the large issues is that students in medical school and residency are not trained to critically evaluate scientific research. There’s a very specific algorithm they learn for interpreting papers which makes it extremely easy to be misled by research fraud and the entire journal/research industry has essentially disorted around this. For example, when the NEJM Pfizer paper came out, there were a large number of major red flags in it many people trained to evaluate research caught, but the whole medical community got fixated on the “95%” effective, and all I got from everyone I discussed it with was “Well we thought the vaccines would be effective, but we never imagined they would be this effective, this is a miracle.”

A lot of this comes from the undergraduate level where people in college are trained to focus on citing expert sources and deferring to them rather than thinking critically or challenging the points, which builds on something that's filtered into the pre-college education over the last century (in part due to Robber Baron money going into education). I’ve been drafting together something to explain the entire context, but this has been a major issue for a long time, it just has not been as patently obvious in the past. The two authors (both MDs) I feel have done the best job explaining a lot of these systemic issues in medical research are Malcom Kendrick and Peter Gotzche. They don't focus as much on vaccinations (rather other pharmaceuticals) since they originally came from a very strong pro-vaccine background, but they've made a lot of very good points. A more conventional author, Ben Goldacre (MD) has also made a lot of the same points, although I prefer the former 2.

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CaliforniaLost's avatar

The Public Health and medical "experts" all entered into a conspiracy with the PharmaKings when they started trumpeting "safe and effective ", and now, they have to toe that line, or they will be held criminally and civilly liable.

"No one could have known" is not an excuse for professional negligence. Rot in hell, kid-kiling "experts".

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