[quote]ActivitiesGuy wrote:
[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
The problem lies mostly with who is funding and carrying out the studies.[/quote]
Industry-funded research is, unfortunately, a necessary evil. This is a real issue and I don’t want to downplay it: studies-of-studies have shown that industry-funded studies are more likely to result in a favorable finding for that company’s drug. I acknowledge that, and have argued vigorously in other arenas for more truly “independent” research (although I think now all RCT’s must be documented at clinicaltrials.gov and must prepare public-access datasets for use, in response to a few instances of pharma-company chicanery).
The problem with dismissing all industry-funded studies:
Who else is going to pay for that research and development?
Clinical trials are ENORMOUSLY expensive. It’s not as simple as plopping someone in the doctor’s offices around the country and asking people to fill out exit surveys or collecting information on the Internet (see below). You need doctors on board, staff nurses to recruit patients, study coordinators to schedule all the visits, data managers, statisticians, an independent Data and Safety Monitoring Board. We’re talking a few million dollars for even a modest-sized trial with a couple hundred people and a year or two of follow-up. In graduate school, I worked on a moderately large RCT (2,000 patients followed for 5 years) with a budget around $100 million altogether. You can’t possibly fund a sufficiently large trial to test vaccines with public dollars or foundation money. It has to come from industry.
I made another point earlier which no one addressed: vaccines are the least profitable thing that pharmaceutical companies make, by a long shot. The cost-benefit ratio and net profit that they make on things like antidepressants, painkillers, diabetes drugs, and blood pressure medications is far, far better than what they make from vaccines.
AND, let’s come all the way back around to your initial question ONE more time.
[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
The problem lies mostly with who is funding and carrying out the studies.[/quote]
The “studies” that end up “favoring” any argument against vaccination are even more fucking biased than the pharma trials could ever be. Please go back to Page 2 of this thread and read my half-assed takedown of the “study” posted from vaccine-injury.info one more time. The only people who sign up for Internet surveys on a site dedicated to proving vaccines are the devil are either 1) parents of vaccinated kids that have some sort of problem and desperately need something to blame or 2) parents of unvaccinated kids who are desperately trying to PROVE that their decision was the right one. Parents of sick unvaccinated kids don’t go there, nor do parents of healthy vaccinated kids (by far the largest group). So this “study” (and pretty much every “study” that has ever suggested that vaccines do anything truly harmful) is an even bigger crock of shit than a pharma-funded trial.
Anything that’s done using a convenience sample collected over the Internet with people voluntarily filling out surveys is, in this case, going to be worthless. To really determine whether vaccines “cause” anything, we would either need an RCT (not ethical because it would withhold proven-efficacious treatment) or a large population study that represents a truly random cross-section of society and makes some effort to control for differences in SES, living location, etc between non-vaxxers and vaxxers.[/quote]
Bud, you seem like a nice and very intelligent person. Let me give you a small piece of advice I learned the hard way, arguing with LIFTY will give you a concussion from hitting your head on your desk.
Best just to walk away when he puts on his tinfoil hat.
