Thread by @jeremyrhammond

"His concern — that a Covid vaccine is potentially unsafe, and hasn’t been properly tested — is widespread, and dangerously wrong."

By making that statement, @drkerrymeltzer, you are implicitly claiming that...

https://twitter.com/drkerrymeltzer/status/1344251256219586560

... the #COVID19 #vaccines that have received emergency use authorization have been adequately studied such that we have scientific proof that they have no potential to cause harm.

But you are the one who is wrong and irresponsibly spreading dangerous misinformation.

As @RobertKennedyJr rightly notes, we do not have adequate data from the trials to be able to meaningfully claim that they are "safe". The data do not show that they prevent severe disease, hospitalization, death, or transmission. We have no data on long-term effects.

Absent randomized placebo-controlled trials comparing long-term health outcomes, including mortality, between individuals who've received the #COVID19 #vaccine and individuals who have not, no claim of "safety" can be meaningfully made.

That is one of the lessons of the DTP vaccine, which studies show to be associated with an increased rate of childhood mortality. Vaccines must be studied for what are known in the literature as "non-specific effects", and opportunity costs must be taken into consideration.

You also claim that a 2019 study showed that WMP (now @ChildrensHD) was responsible for spreading misinformation about vaccines via Facebook ads, but that is false. In fact, the study failed to present even a single example of such an ad from WMP.

What that study rather did was to define any information that might lead parents to conclude that strictly vaccinating according to the CDC's schedule is not in the best interests of their child as "anti-vaccine" and then equating anything "anti-vaccine" with "misinformation".

In fact, the study authors went so far in their anti-intellectual and unscientific exercise as to equate the simple advocacy of the right to informed consent with "vaccine misinformation"!

The full details of this are here:
childrenshealthdefense.org/ebook-sign-up/…

You also claim that @RobertKennedyJr spread misinformation about the MMR vaccine during the 2019 measles outbreak, but you fail to identify even a single example. You link to another @nytimes article that also fails to identify even a single example.

That linked article in turn links to the Politico article by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Joseph P. Kennedy II, and Maeve Kennedy McKean that likewise does not support your accusation.

Rather, like you, they made a broad claim that @RobertKennedyJr is "wrong about vaccines" without addressing ANY of the many LEGITIMATE criticisms many of us have about vaccines and public policy.

Your headline claims that "Vaccines Are Safe", but that is a meaningless anti-science assertion that accepts vaccination as a one-size-fits-all solution when what science tells us is that a risk-benefit analysis needs to be done for each vaccine and each individual.

In sum, you accuse @RobertKennedyJr of spreading dangerous "misinformation" about vaccines without substantiating that accusation while yourself communicating a message about their safety that is dangerously misinformative and dismissive of science.