I don’t watch Bill Maher, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he tears this letter apart, because it would be quite easy for him to do so. I am not very familiar with Shermer, but I’ve liked what I’ve seen of him, and I’m surprised that a fellow skeptic is capable of such twists of logic.

And by the way, more people in the 50’s died of the shots then [sic] the Flu.

Any chance of you providing a shred of evidence to support this ridiculous assertion?

In general, if a study has not passed through a process of peer review before publication, it probably won’t be worth reading.

However, peer-review is not a guarantee of quality, it is merely the first step in a process. Most journal editors struggle to persuade established scientists to review papers – after all, it is unpaid and takes time away from doing science and generating results and writing grant applications. In many cases, a Principal Investigator will delegate reviewing a paper to a post-doc or a PhD student. Peer review sometimes also permits an eminent scientist to quash criticism of his / her own work. So, the peer review process is flawed, but no-one has yet thought up a better way to do it.

As I said, though, peer review is just the first step in a process.

Once a paper is published, it may be subjected to a far wider range of criticism. Competition between two rival ideas is one of the ways in which science progresses, but there have to be wrong ideas published for this competition to occur.

Often (and especially if a paper is controversial), other researchers will attempt to duplicate the work described in a paper. Failure to achieve this will result in the science community as a whole rejecting the initial idea, especially if several other groups have tried and failed to duplicate a published result. That’s why most scientists do not believe “cold fusion” is possible (aside from the lack of a credible mechanism).

Ultimately, though, the arbiter of truth is reality. In any controversy, we will eventually have enough evidence that the correct idea prevails.

This is the current state of affairs with respect to vaccines. The actual evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the benefits outweigh the risks substantially.

@Todd W, Justin Olson

Great, so we’ve established that peer-reviewed research is biased and based on the agenda of those who fund it.

Well, first off, no. You’re wrong. We have established that the antivaxxers are behaving unethically in order to push their own agenda.

Most peer-reviewed research is as unbiased as it is possible for human being to get.

What has been established is that the antivaxxers are prepared to lie about the facts to push their agenda.

Lets talk about glaxo……

I guess you refer the the established past unethical behaviour of various big pharma companies. Well, that’s been established for some time, and it’s not news. Several of them have pushed their potentially-biggest money-spinning drugs using every trick in the book.

However, since that has nothing whatever to do with vaccines, it is irrelevant. Vaccines do not make big profits for big pharma. Even if they did, that would not change the fact that vaccines work, and that the benefits of vaccination hugely outweigh the risks.

The first author of that study, Laura Hewitson has a child who is a petitioner in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Also another author, pseudoscientist Andrew Wakefield acted as a paid expert in MMR-related litigation. Those are huge conflicts of interest!

Not only that, but Wakefield (who started the MMR scare in the UK) actually made up his results to “suggest” a link between MMR and autism.

Yet he turns around and does the exact same thing himself? What the hell?