Huffpost Report on CDC Vaccine Safety Datalink Uninformative and Completely Misleading

[varkam]

EpiWonk
http://epiwonk.com/?p=79

“Medical reporter” David Kirby has delivered a potentially explosive report to his unfortunate and misinformed minions at the Huffington Post, in which he shows a startling string of misunderstandings and complete lack of knowledge of basic epidemiologic design and methods. Furthermore, he writes that Dr. Julie Gerberding “admits to a startling string of errors in the design and methods used in the CDC’s landmark 2003 study that found no link between mercury in vaccines and autism, ADHD, speech delay or tics,” when, in fact, the CDC report admitted no such thing about the 2003 study.

Gerberding was responding to a 2006 Report of the Expert Panel on Thimerosal Exposure in Pediatric Vaccines: Feasibility of Studies Using the Vaccine Safety Datalink to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). Nowhere in the 2006 report, however, did the NIEHS panel conclude that the CDC’s 2003 thimerosal safety study was riddled with “several areas of weaknesses” that combined to “reduce the usefulness” of the study. In fact, in the NIEHS panel meeting that generated the 2006 report, the quality of the CDC’s 2003 thimerosal safety study was not even discussed. This can be seen clearly if you carefully read the NIEHS Report of the Expert Panel.

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Well, yes, that’s what the CDC thinks about using the VSD for ecologic analyses. I couldn’t agree more. At this point I obviously need to step back and explain about ecologic analyses. Fortunately, I taught epidemiologic design and methods for about 35 years, I had some students almost as clueless as David Kirby, but I’m a patient teacher. Another interesting fact is that there has only been one ecologic study published using the VSD, and I’ve written extensively about the study on this blog. Guess what? It wasn’t done by the CDC, who knew better long before the 2006 NIEHS Expert Panel. I’m speaking of the infamous Young-Geier Autism Study. So let me paraphrase from my explanation of “ecologic” in my previous critique of that paper:

More after the jump.

Kirby's making shit up again? Say it ain't so.