There is a falling when people push anecdotal evidence as equal to scientific evidence and statistical evidence. I am going to throw simple math at you now. Pretend there is a horrible disease that strikes young girl between the ages of 18 and 25 and results in disfigurement followed by painfully death, but is rare, say 10 cases in a million girls, or 1 in 100,000 girls. Tragic, but a very small number. Let's say that girls age 16 are given a vaccine that prevents a virus strain from infecting girls that causes cancer. Let's say also that some of them a few years later get that very horrible disease and their parents blame the vaccine for this disease. Let's say that in there are a thousand cases of this disease reported and all these girls received the vaccine too. And people then conclude that the vaccine gave them the disease.
This is human nature but it is not a fact, because it does not provide any context. If it was a thousand cases in a thousand girl community, that would be serious. If it were a thousand cases in a country with 100 million girls, that would be a tragedy, but it would also be statistically what you would expect. If it were in a billion girls, that would be important too, because it would mean that the vaccine works on that disease too, you would expect ten thousand cases not just a thousand.
Facts without context mean nothing. That there were some girls that got sick and had the vaccine means nothing, if the girls got sick at the same rate as girls who did not get that vaccine. There are lots of kinds of medical studies. The best are the double blind studies, which is when the patient and the doctor don't know what treatment or which dose that a patient gets. It is best because there is no chance for that knowledge to affect the results. Typically there are a segment of the study population that receive a placebo that has no effect and part that has the drug. All patients are asked what symptoms they get and their health is monitored. The treatment that patients are getting is only known after the study is completed. People report all sorts of symptoms and side effects even when they are getting the placebo.
The second best kind of study is a blind study where the administrating doctor knows the treatment that patient received. This can be dangerous, because the doctor can subtly influence the results with leading questions or purposely influence patients if they have a stake ing the study. The worst kind of study is the one that both patient and doctor knows what they are getting. The patient can assume that the new treatment is causing severe side effects or diseases that it simply is not.
The most famous in the recent past was Andrew Wakefield who published a study that stated that a vaccine gave patients autism. Never mind that the patients had been diagnosed with autism already. Andrew Wakefield published the study, because he had a different vaccine that would have made him money if the other vaccine was found to be harmful. What happened was that people, thanks to a brain compromised penthouse model, began to believe that vaccines cause autism, which they don't. We all get vaccines and parents whose children are diagnosed with Autism are looking for a cause. The cause is genetic, that the penthouse model grabbed hold of this information and has not let go of it despite the overwhelming evidence, suggests to me that she is e source of her son's Autism.
It is not true. Autism is not increasing, autism is just being diagnosed more often. I went through twenty-two years of school without being diagnosed. These days, if a teacher notices an issue, the child will be quickly diagnosed and most often it will be earlier than later. The point is, when you know that your child received a vaccine and later gets a disease, the human mind makes a quick association and assumes that the two events are linked.
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