I found another survey, from the National Academies Press, by Committee on the Assessment of Studies of Health Outcomes Related to the Recommended Childhood Immunization Schedule; Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice; Institute of Medicine of the National Academies,
The Childhood Immunization Schedule and Safety:
Stakeholder Concerns, Scientific Evidence, and Future Studies (2013)
http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2013/The-Childhood-Immunization-Schedule-and-Safety.aspx
237 pages.
So why did they reach a different conclusion than me?
Well, first off, they didn’t cite a single paper I cited except Smith and Woods.
They didn’t consider the animal data at all, even though animal studies can reliably establish causality while epidemiological studies are inherently plagued by confounders and can never establish causality or lack thereof.
They made no effort to compare vaccinated to unvaccinated.
They made no attempt to look at aluminum adjuvants, to seek epidemiological studies that would be particularly pertinent to the question of whether they are causing damage.
They made no mention, I don’t believe, of facts like infants get 100’s of times as much aluminum from vaccines as from diet (after factoring in the fact that the body is tuned so that 99.75% of dietary aluminum passes right through). (For citations see previous post.) The physics or biology or toxicology is not discussed, they are looking at epidemiology alone.
They made no evident attempt to examine the papers they cited to understand if they were so plagued by confounders as to be worthless, or possibly even indicating the opposite of what they claimed.
Basically, the paper describes how they went through a large, committee-based, group think process rather than any individual sitting down, looking at the science, saying what are the important questions here, and asking what is the actual answer to these questions. They went through the literature systematically by a specifically described committee process first deciding on search terms etc before considering the science, and their process apparently threw out all the most interesting papers and questions.
Does this remind anyone of the IPCC?
If we want society to reach better decisions, we need to provide a more rational review process than giant committees. More on this later.