Replies

--"Please don’t quote some anti-vaccine website as a source." blah, blah, blah.

Okay, fine. I'll quote the conclusion of a study which is published on one of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service's NIH websites: "The National Center for Biotechnology Information":

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170075

CONCLUSION:

"The US childhood immunization schedule requires 26 vaccine doses for infants aged less than 1 year, the most in the world, yet 33 nations have better IMRs [Infant Mortality Rates]. Using linear regression, the immunization schedules of these 34 nations were examined and a correlation coefficient of 0.70 (p < 0.0001) was found between IMRs and the number of vaccine doses routinely given to infants. When nations were grouped into five different vaccine dose ranges (12–14, 15–17, 18–20, 21–23, and 24–26), 98.3% of the total variance in IMR was explained by the unweighted linear regression model. These findings demonstrate a counter-intuitive relationship: nations that require more vaccine doses tend to have higher infant mortality rates."

"Efforts to reduce the relatively high US IMR have been elusive. Finding ways to lower preterm birth rates should be a high priority. However, preventing premature births is just a partial solution to reduce infant deaths. A closer inspection of correlations between vaccine doses, biochemical or synergistic toxicity, and IMRs, is essential. All nations—rich and poor, advanced and developing—have an obligation to determine whether their immunization schedules are achieving their desired goals."

Is that sufficient enough for you?

Cheers

A non peer-reviewed article, published by two people who have no institutional affiliation, one of whom gives their address as a P.O. Box, using nothing but statistical analysis to derive a correlation that supports what appears to be a predetermined conclusion?

No, I am not at all convinced.

Google tells me that Miller is a journalist, and Goldman is a computer scientist. In other words, they are not researchers and have no research training. I’m even less convinced.

Show me meaningful analysis. Show me where the infant mortality was compared, apples to apples—infants from the same backgrounds, vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated.

I happen to know, because I’ve read hundreds of statistical analyses (I hesitate to call them “studies” because they contain no experimental data), and I shared an office with a statistician for three years, that the vast majority of statistical analyses are junk. Get a good statistician to analyze the data, and almost any hypothesis can be “proven” with statistics. It all depends on which number sets are included, and how they’re combined.