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Friday, 23 January 2026

More vaccine shenanigans

YES I AM ALIVE AND I AM BACK. Whether I'll continue to write after this is anyone's guess. This shit is exhausting.

Aaaaaaaanyway...

Every so often, more reliably than my pager waking me at 1AM to take care of yet another idiot who thought that driving without a seatbelt while drunk was a good idea, the same claims crawl out of the murky depths of the internet swamp and into real life. These idiotic claims, which have been corrected, recorrected, re-recorrected, and re-re-recorrected ad nauseam, are inevitably delivered with great confidence by someone who has never read a protocol for a clinical trial, let alone evaluated safety data. And yes, I’m talking again...yet again...about vaccines. Since it’s been quite a while (5 years? Really??) since writing about vaccines (or anything, I suppose), I thought I’d dredge the topic from the mire, mainly to mollify my own stupid obsession with demonstrating that antivaxxers are not just wrong, but dangerously wrong. But you already knew that. 

Unless, of course, you’re an antivaxxer. And if you are, please do the entire world’s population a favour and get completely and entirely fucked. 

Sorry. Moving on.

The first stupid claim I’m constantly seeing bandied about these days is "No vaccine has ever been tested against a saline placebo”. And the second is "Vaccine trials are rushed and way too short”. Both are impressive wrong, and yet they persist like idiots who just can't conceive that women can be physicians or men can be nurses. This is just how medical misinformation works. It continues to make the rounds, truth be damned. 

So let's get this underway, shall we?

I'll start with the saline placebo nonsense, because it’s the loudest, dumbest, and most easily disproved, today, at least. There will be other stupid claims to refute later. The idea that vaccines have never been compared to saline placebo is simply false. Let’s start with these studies, which ALL used saline placebos:

There you go. Is that every vaccine ever? No, but I never claimed that every vaccine ever developed was tested against saline placebo. Now if you’re someone who has ever made the "saline placebo" claim, you’ve now been proven demonstrably wrong, and I expect you’ll never feel the need to make such a wrong (and stupid) claim ever again. Right? RIGHT? And if you’re a rational human being who enjoys engaging with antivaxxers and proving them wrong, now you have a nice handy list to use. You’re welcome. 

Now if I know how antivaxxers think, and I do, they'll move the goalpost to the equally stupid (and wrong), “But vaccines have never been studied against an unvaccinated control group!” (yes, a BONUS CLAIM!), which is a stupid argument for two reasons: 1) yes they have, and 2) you don’t understand why this is an unethical study design. But then again you don’t really seem to understand anything. Anyway, there have been many studies where some subjects got the real vaccine and some got nothing. No placebo, no "other vaccine", just nothing. The largest (and arguably most famous) is the 1954 Poliomyelitis Vaccine Field Trial, where over 1.8 million children were studied. About 440,000 children received active polio vaccine, about 210,000 children got a placebo (which was not saline but was essentially the vaccine components minus the active ingredient), and 1.2 million children received neither. And guess what was found? Well, considering that you’ve never met anyone who’s had polio (unless you’re over age 75), I think you know. And yes, it was found to be safe. Shocking.

There are other vaccines that have been studied with an unvaccinated control group: 

Now that I’ve put those issues thoroughly to bed, you antivaxxers will probably shift the goalpost again to “But some of those are newer studies! But newer vaccines are compared to older vaccines! But the full vaccine schedule has never been studied! I want what I want now!” Fortunately, biomedical research ethics has evolved significantly over the past several decades, and the studies that you want (like a fully unvaccinated cohort vs a vaccinated cohort) are not ethical. I have neither the time nor inclination to delve into a full biomedical ethics dissertation, so let me offer you a scenario instead: 

Let’s just say that some unethical researcher offers you and your neighbours (who, unlike you, are well informed and vaccinate their children) exactly the study you’re yammering about – a double blind, saline placebo-controlled study of the full vaccine study. Keep in mind that “double blind” means neither the researcher nor you knows which arm your child will be in, and you do not get to choose. Half the children will receive all the vaccines, and half will receive none. Did I mention that you do not get to choose? Now think for one second. No, keep thinking. Are you done? Good. Now that you've tasked your brain, ask yourself this very simple question: Would you be willing to sign your children up for this study knowing there is a 50% chance they would be in the active arm and get the full vaccine schedule? HAHA no of course you wouldn't, because you think vaccines are poisons. And now ask yourself, would your neighbours be willing to roll the dice, knowing there’s a 50% chance their child would be left unprotected against over a dozen deadly and/or debilitating diseases? FUCK NO, of course we wouldn't. We all (even you) care about our children and want what's best for them.

Fortunately for all of you, this study will never be done, because it is not ethical to withhold a vaccine that is known to work just to quell your stupid obsession (or shut you up, which would be nice). That’s not a conspiracy, it’s basic research ethics. We don’t randomise people to “nothing” when “something” is already known to save lives. We stopped doing that after learning a few hard lessons from unscrupulous researchers last century. Seriously, get with the times. 

Now on to the “Vaccine trials are too short!” claim, which is usually made in the same breath as the previous one. Yes, pre-marketing trials happen over months to years (not days, as I've seen claimed too). That’s because vaccines aren’t magic potions that lurk silently in the background, quietly waiting in your arm for a decade before pouncing. The overwhelming majority of serious adverse events, including life-threatening ones like Guillain-Barré syndrome and anaphylaxis, occur hours to days after study drug administration. Rarely weeks, and even more rarely months. This is in no way a mystery. Vaccines aren’t new – we’ve been studying them for decades and keeping meticulous records like the boring, obsessive professionals we are (and you aren't). It is known.

Long-term safety isn’t ignored either, like you like to pretend. Post-marketing surveillance exists precisely because no trial can ever be large enough to catch everything. Millions of doses, real-world data, and ongoing monitoring just don’t fit neatly into a meme, so you ignore it. But the people who actually care about this (and do it for a living) don't. 

What really grinds my gears is the implication that everyone involved is either incompetent or lying (or your favourite insult: a SHILL). Thousands of clinicians, statisticians, regulators, and researchers across multiple countries on every continent over the entire globe, over decades, would all supposedly need to miss the same obvious flaws that Susan With WiFi And An iPhone spotted between episodes of Stranger Things or whatever conspiracy video she happens to be watching. 

In trauma we have a saying: common things happen commonly. Rare, delayed, mysterious effects are – you guess it – rare. And surveillance systems are in place to catch them. We adjust when evidence demands it, like when the 2009 H1N1 flu vaccine was found to cause narcolepsy in some people. That seriously sucked, but it's another piece of evidence that the system works. It’s messy but cautious, and it’s relentlessly dull compared to the thrill of a good conspiracy. 

The real problem isn’t that people ask questions. Questions are absolutely fine, even healthy and necessary. Without questions, Edward Jenner would never have wondered why milkmaids who had previously gotten cowpox didn't get smallpox, he would never have invented the first vaccine, and we all would have died of smallpox (not really, but a fuckload of people would have). The problem is when the same bad questions get recycled endlessly, long after the answers have been found (but curiously ignored), because outrage spreads better and faster than explanation. Comfortable lies are easier to accept than uncomfortable truths. And once someone decides the entire medical system is corrupt, no amount of data will ever be enough. The goalposts just keep moving. 

So that’s why I’m here, yet again, explaining the same damned thing I’ve explained to antivaxxers repeatedly. At this point I don’t even know whom to blame. Bobby Kennedy, maybe? Probably. But seriously, the entirety of mankind’s knowledge is literally at your fingertips at all times (assuming you keep your phone plastered to your body 24/7 like I do), so maybe try learning something once in a while instead of just yelling. I’m not saying to trust me, because if you’re an antivaxxer, you don’t. I acknowledge that. But if you’re going to distrust medicine, at least get your facts straight first instead of repeating the same tired bullshit like it’s some kind of revelation. You haven’t discovered anything that thousands of researchers (real ones, not you) have missed.

You're not a researcher. You just have internet access.
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