Friday, April 18, 2014

Vaccine Autism Journal Club announcement

The question of vaccines and autism came up again on Facebook, as it often does.  I made my usual comment: the key study that supposedly linked vaccines and autism was falsified; many other studies have tried to reproduce its results, and failed; if you know of a study that does show a link between vaccines and autism, please post a link to it.  Obligingly, someone did post a link to a blog post listing 22 studies that supposedly link vaccines and autism.  There's no shortage of problems with the blog post, but that's not the fault of the authors of the 22 studies.

I'm therefore launching a vaccine autism journal club project.  I will read each of these papers, one per week, and invite you to read them along with me. Each week, I will post my thoughts on the paper here, and we can have a discussion in the comments section. We'll discuss whether the evidence the authors show justifies the conclusions they draw, whether there are any other interpretations that explain the data equally well, and whether the representation of the authors' findings in the original  blog post is fair.

So next week, we'll start with the first paper.  See you then.

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