"Blindly trusting conventional wisdom is unscientific and potentially dangerous. But blindly trusting RFK Jr., who is now the top health official in the U.S. government, is also just blindly trusting. So I tried to approach this book with an open mind and open eyes.

The central premise of the title is reasonable: vaccines, like all medicines, should be rigorously tested to show that they do more good than harm. Who doesn't want vaccines to be as safe and effective as possible? This book looks like it would be a dream for people who care about scientific evidence. Pretty much every page contains a big graph, the title of the graph, a legend for the graph, and a brief paragraph about the graph including bibliographic information. Yes, graphs! So many many graphs!

Unfortunately, the content details are just bizarre. Whether from malice or incompetence, there doesn't seem to be much effort made to differentiate between strong and weak evidence, or to give context to interpret the data in the graphs.

To give one example, Fig. 3-8 is about harms from thimerosal, which is a mercury-containing chemical that was used in routine childhood vaccines in the past. The graph cites an article from the New England Journal of Medicine by a reputable CDC scientist. In the book, it's implied that this impressive article shows that thimerosal in vaccines is harmful because the study found an increased risk of tics with increased exposure to thimerosal. So I looked up that paper:

The actual conclusion in the paper is "Our study does not support a causal association between early exposure to mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines ... and deficits in neuropsychological functioning at the age of 7 to 10 years." It turns out the study looked at a whole bunch of different outcomes in kids. Some of the problems seemed to get better with thimersosal, some worse. Overall it was a wash. It's misleading to pick out one line from the huge results table without discussing the rest. It's possible that the study author is wrong about his own paper, but then you need to make that case. If this paper is valid for one line about harm from thimerosal, then it's right about the parts where it finds benefits from thimerosal. You can't have it both ways and say this paper is solid on this line but worthless on the others.

In any case, thimerosal has been taken out of the routine chidhood vaccines. So if thimerosal was the reason for the big increase in autism and such, then those neurological problems should have gone way down since then. That would have been important context to provide. (Yes, there is still thimerosal in some flu shots, but then one needs to do the math and show what that dose of mercury is vs. the previous routine exposure.)

I could keep going on about the problems with this one page from the book, but I think you get the picture. This is where a serious literature review would discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this graph and the paper it refers to, and put it in the context of what is known. Doctors in training do things called "journal clubs" where they spend a few hours taking apart one journal article to learn how to read the medical literature. I don't have the time to do that for every graph in this book. No reader should have to. But if you have some background in science you can maybe do it for one study as I did, and see for yourself with your own eyes if these graphs are accurate representations of high quality evidence.



Alternatives:
Polio: An American Story
Bad Science
Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients
Science Fictions
How to Lie with Statistics
The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It
Smallpox: The Death of a Disease - The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer


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"Do you rate a book only on the quality of the writing or on how it makes you think after you finish? This gets 5+ stars for provoking serious thought while the writing itself was just okay. Short recap: one spring day, 3 nuclear weapons are exploded over the US, generating an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP), frying everything digital. One second everyone is living in the digital wonderland of today and the next they are back in The Middle Ages, although that will take some time to become clear to everyone. There is no warning, no preparation for the attack, in the blink of an eye all things digital go out of existence. Do not read this book if you are seeking a pleasant read to pass the time. It is truly frightening to contemplate how life would change should this occur. And it is completely feasible for an attack like this to happen with absolutely no warning. We are so dependent now on computers and digital machines, we simply have no conception of life without. There were holes and gaps in the story, and I really wanted a better battle scene when the Posse appears. I also wanted better feel for the community and the people. He sketches very broadly. This is a book that will make you wonder how you would handle things if it happens. I just know I am not going to sell my 1964 Chevrolet C-10 pickup, not after reading this book."