So, some “alternative medicine” focused people on Facebook are linking to articles which link back to this 2011 paper by Lucija Tomljenovic, Ph.D. The short version is that governments have been covering up the dangers of vaccines (not all autism-related).
I am instantly dubious because the author is a Ph.D., not a medical doctor, and affiliated with the Neural Dynamics Research Group, Dept. of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of British Columbia (whatever that is.) An epidemiologist, pathologist or immunologist would be more credible.
However, I’m not about to go through the paper itself line by line (or more importantly, check the underlying sources.) Not at work, anyway. Am I missing something?
Color me unsurprised that anti-vaxxers, who have been losing ground in the wake of epidemics they caused go running for the cover of an all-encompassing multi-government coverup conspiracy.
Lucia Tomljenovic and her sidekick, Chris Shaw have been churning out papers on badly done “vaccine research” for quite awhile now, and are among the handful of go-to “scientific” sources for the antivax movement (like Andrew Wakefield and the Geiers).
For good takedowns of their crappy work, I recommend Respectful Insolence (example here).
Shaw has his own page featured on whale.to, which is an excellent indicator of severe crankery.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, many, if not most, of the medical research PhDs were also MDs or had such an MD/PhD in the research group co-authoring the papers and on the grant applications.
This would be most of the people I met from the various Med Center hospital/universities in Houston while I was in grad school. So, at least I thought it was a little suspicious there weren’t any medical professionals as tertiary authors. It’s not a deal breaker, but it was at least a red flag.
The presented paper appears as a publication in the British society of Ecological medicine which is entirely devoted to nutritional woo, and elimination of “toxins”. Skimming the report it seems like the author just read through very long proceedings of a meeting on vaccines, cherry picked anything that sounded bad out of context and pasted them in her paper. There is no data presented and no scientific rigor what so ever.
The vast majority of medical research is done by PhDs. A small percentage might have an MD too, but not many. Your average PhD immunologist is going to be able to tell you more about how a vaccine works than an MD by several orders of magnitude.
FWIW, I do not have a medical degree but did some graduate work in cardiopulmonary assist devices. So, I also fall into the ‘research done by non-doctors’ category.
But more pertinently, what prompted my post was that we still had guys with medical degrees (one foreign medical degree though) who also had PhDs as co-authors on our papers, even if they did very little of the work. In other words, they didn’t do much of the research, but they were still authors on the papers.
This is common - people signing on as co-authors even if they don’t do much work. And there’s enough of that going on that any reasonably good paper at any reputable research institution will have tons of people trying to get attached to such research. And there should be enough of a pool that any halfway decent paper will have at least one co-author will some kind of medical background, even if they do little or none of the actual work.
Or so I would imagine. I could be wrong about that.
Co-authors abound, so I still find it a red flag when you don’t have any doctors or even immunologists on a paper discussing vaccines.
I always thought the term immunologist referred exclusively to physicians, but apparently I was wrong. I was also dubious because she’s affiliated with an ophthalmology department, though.
I’m not claiming that Lucija Tomljenovic is qualified to have such an opinion on vaccines. Merely that her disqualification is not due to her having a PhD instead of an MD. You’re making it sound like I need an MD to act as a parent to sign off on what I publish in scientific journals!
Besides, the linked article is not a “paper” in the scientific sense. It’s not even a proper review article.
An immunologist, is almost by definition a PHD (or an MD with a PhD). There are exceptions of MDs who have extensive lab experience (the dearly departed Ralph Steinman one such notable).
An MD who works in the field would generally be an allergist or a rheumatologist or something similar. But, unless someone has lab experience in the field, the word “immunologist” would not be used.
Yep, an MD just means the person went to a trade school. No terminal research involved. But “qualifications” are a bullshit way of making a determination of research quality. Let the work stand on its own. I will do so once I’m able to access the pdf.
Something you shouldn’t overlook is the section of that article where Tomljenovic declares that she doesn’t believe in herd immunity (the well-established principle that high vaccination rates prevent community spread of infectious disease).
That indicates the level of (in)competency we’re dealing with.
For an additional laff riot, consider Tomljenovic’s complaint that public health officials who promote immunization “Persistently relied on methodologically dubious studies, while dismissing independent research, to promote vaccine policies”.
They’re a handy way of recognizing crackpots, though. I don’t think it’s unfair to assume that someone who works in Field A is probably wrong when they challenge the near-universal wisdom of people in Field B about that specific field.
That would require doctors from countries without MD degrees to always have as their co-author at least one doctor from a country with MDs. Somehow I don’t think that would fly.
