Epidemiology
[back] Medical study ploys

"Epidemiology is like a bikini. What is revealed is interesting. What is concealed is crucial"
“Any competent epidemiologist can employ particular tricks of the trade when certain results are desired.” Review: Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health by David Michaels

[2011 June] Dr. Lawrence B Palevsky’s Comments on Guillain-Barré Syndrome Rates After Vaccination  epidemiologists twist the statistics to understate the occurrence of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) after vaccination.

Vaccines and Autism - What Do Epidemiological Studies Really Tell Us?

MMR – Autism Epidemiological Studies: Just a distraction. By F. Edward Yazbak, MD, FAAP

Epidemiologic Evidence Is Insufficient To Prove There Is No Link Between The MMR Vaccine And Autism By Clifford G. Miller

See: Vaccines don't cause autism studies

"A perusal of the abstracts of papers presented at the 23rd annual meeting of the Society for Epidemiological Research … made me wonder whether epidemiology, in the absence of epidemics, is not a misnomer for scaremongering made respectable by the use of sophisticated statistical methods, and whether one of the reasons for this state of affairs is not a high prevalence of epidemiologists when the incidence of problems solvable by epidemiological methods is low."---Hilary Butler quoting Petr Skrabanek ---Science Friction by Hilary Butler

"The late Sir Richard Doll, perhaps the world's most famous epidemiologist had taken large amounts of undeclared money from Monsanto."---[Aug 2008] An Interest in Conflict? by Martin Walker MA

[2009 Dec] The Council of Foreign Relations Enters the Vaccine Biz. Desperate Attempts to Salvage a Corrupt Science with Sound-bites by Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null Federal health officials have been criminally negligent in looking at the thimerosal-autism connection, aside from relying on disputable and fallible cohort and epidemiological studies as a means to cover their backs. Data from these kinds of studies provide valuable fodder for pro-vaccine campaigns and have been shown to be an effective way to avoid paying vaccine injury compensation to parents with permanently damaged children..   The pro-vaccine agencies are very satisfied to sponsor, fund and propagandize cohort studies to discredit any one of hundreds of various adverse effects that have been associated with one or more vaccines.  Cohort studies are relatively cheap to perform, provide instant results, and do not involve real clinical science to observe and measure actual biomolecular activity in the subjects.  A good analogy would be vaccination cohort studies are to gold standard methodology as astrology is to astro-physical observation with the Hubble telescope. The medical literature is absolutely riddled with this kind of inaccurate science and Garrett and the rulers she represents at the CFR, the vaccine makers and our health officials, are all too happy that she rely on crap data of cohort and epidemiological calculations to sustain the vaccine miracle myth.  It basically boils down to if you fear the results of undertaking a gold standard clinical trial, then resort to a cohort study.

As most scientists know, statistics-based epidemiological studies cannot “contradict a link”; they can only assess the probability that there may be a link. Moreover, epidemiological studies, by their population-based nature, cannot generally find statistical significance when the effect (link) is confined to some small segment of that population.  Key realities about autism, vaccines, vaccine-injury compensation, Thimerosal, and autism-related research----Gary S. Goldman, Ph.D & P.G. King PhD

Cawadias (1953) has said that "the history of medicine has shown that, whenever medicine has strayed from clinical observation, the result has been chaos, stagnation, and disaster."--British Medical Journal, Oct 8th, 1955, p.867 (Quoted in Clinical Medical Discoveries by Beddow Bayly)

"How do you react when your own government lies to you systematically about life-and-death questions? As I have noted earlier, the answer is political action in the state legislatures, and one weapon in the hands of the public is an understanding of the pseudo-science and pseudo-epidemiology represented by articles like this one."--Harris Coulter http://www.pnc.com.au/~cafmr/coulter/sids.html

There have never been any safety studies done for any vaccine in use today that would meet the criteria of scientific proof. All we have are epidemiologic studies, which are indicators but not proof in and of themselves. [Oct 2004] Letter to the British Medical Journal by Harold E Buttram, MD,

Before we continue, a word about epidemiological studies. Epidemiological studies, also called population studies, are the poor cousin of true clinical trials. They are not controlled studies done under set scientific conditions, but rather attempts at verifying a hypothesis just by counting the incidence of a certain disease or condition within a certain population. The problem is that results from epidemiological studies are subject to widespread interpretation, depending on who's doing the counting, who decides the criteria for what gets counted, who publishes the results, etc. For this reason, epidemiological studies can be used to "prove" two completely divergent hypotheses.
    In the exploding vaccine industry today, epidemiological studies are quickly becoming the standard to validate our need for more vaccines, because they're faster, cheaper, and capable of supporting practically any required outcome. HPV - The First Cancer Vaccine Dr Tim O'Shea