Jen Kelly

Even if there are questions around confounders, a signal from this study would be reason to enough to do a prospective study. This is what typically happens after a retrospective study. What has become abundantly clear is that the unvaccinated group has not suffered negative health consequences due to their unvaccinated status.

It’s still very likely the total unvaccinated subpopulation is a tiny % of the population, and the fundamental differences in healthcare utilization and other key factors are likely to kill any efforts to get a fair comparison of this small unusual group with the rest of the population.

I see people say "why is there so much resistance to doing vaccinated vs. unvaccinated studies?" like the Henry Ford "Inconvenient" study. The reasons "any vs. no vaccine" studies are problematic have nothing to do with any "resistance" — they reflect genuine methodological limitations. The completely unvaccinated cohort is typically small and differs from the vaccinated population in so many systematic ways that isolating causal vaccine effects becomes nearly impossible. That's why most researchers focus on more tractable questions: specific vaccines, different schedules, timing of events relative to vaccination, and dose-response relationships. It is not "resistance", it is an attempt to do good science. There's a contingent that treats long-term saline placebo-controlled RCTs (possibly of all vs. no vaccines) as the only legitimate study design for assessing vaccine safety, and assumes the reason they aren't done is that researchers fear what they'd find. But this ignores the practical reality: no one advancing that argument has ever proposed a workable design, and if they tried, they'd quickly discover why it's infeasible. Even if such a trial were somehow conducted, it couldn't detect rare events, and its findings would still be constrained by whatever schedule was used in the active arm. The same people advocate for "any vs. no vaccine" observational designs as the gold standard retrospective alternative — again implying the only barrier is fear of results. But well-known biases and confounders make these designs deeply problematic, and the versions typically promoted fail to adjust for them, dramatically overclaim the strength of their conclusions, and refuse to acknowledge fundamental limitations. Most tellingly, this group dismisses the entire existing safety literature because it doesn't meet their preferred design criteria — effectively pretending no safety data exists. In doing so, they ignore the largest and most rigorous studies available, which happen not to support their conclusions.

US birth cohorts 1990–2010 totaled ~80+ million children. Even at 0.5% unvaccinated, that’s hundreds of thousands nationally. VSD would capture enough to assemble cohorts of 500–2,000+ unvaccinated children with follow-up data, adequate for common outcomes such as allergy, asthma, etc. This is the purpose of the database.

@jsm2334 This is where we disagree. I think there is enough data in the VSD to overcome confounding, and it should be analyzed.

Right -- but see above for the problems with "vaccinated vs. unvaccinated" comparisons. I agree it would be very useful if one could measure the total causal effect of all vaccines vs. none, but for the reasons mentioned above (fully unvaccinated small and very select group) the confounding may be too fundamental (depending on the event being studied) to ever obtain a reasonable estimate of the vaccine effect, and the differences may be misinterpreted as vaccine effects when in fact they are caused by the unadjusted confounding factors.

@Facts_R_Good @jsm2334 Read the post again. It doesn’t say that.

@jenshepp @jsm2334 So you would prefer studies that don’t control for confounding factors? As long as they get the results you want, that is.

@jsm2334 In the same way it makes little sense in smoking studies to compare 1-pack a day vs 3-packs a day, we should avoid comparing some vaccines vs more vaccines. We need vaccinated vs unvaccinated. Second point, I agree.

VSD data has been extensively analyzed for many vaccine safety issues. And it is of course not valid to "layer on 'key' confounders until you arrive at an insignificant result", but that does not mean that one can ignore all confounders and interpret raw differences as causal vaccine effects.

1. The Henry Ford cohorts are much smaller than numbers available in the VSD. This is the main issue. Why has this data not been analyzed? 2. The approach of layering on “key” confounding factors until you arrive at a result that is insignificant works very well to thwart any retrospective study.

It absolutely is true. The group is too small and select to get any reasonably comparable analysis. There are enough people to do what? Enough raw numbers for a naive comparison? Sure. Enough to perform a reasonable comparison adjusting for key confounders? In many cases, no. For example, one way to adjust for confounding would be to compute a matched cohort of vaccinated and unvaccinated, matched for key factors age, comorbidities, geographic location, type of school (public/private/homeschool), family income, healthcare utilization, amount of follow up in the health system, etc., in which case the comparison would adjust for the matching factors as confounders. This is one suggestion I made to the Henry Ford paper authors for how they could improve their study to adjust for the key confounders that biased the comparisons in their studies. However, is the group large enough to construct such a matched cohort that is balanced for all of these key factors? In the case of the Henry Ford data, I'm afraid not, and for many other places in which the fully unvaccinated proportion is only 1-5% of the population, then likely not.

@give_henry @PedsGeekMD @jsm2334 Someone needs to analyze the data. It is not difficult. Vote by committee who should be on the analysis team.

@jenshepp @PedsGeekMD @jsm2334 Children’s Health Defense is no longer a closeted cult. It is not enough to say everybody else is bad. Only we know the truth. You need to address the specific complaints against the Geiers.

@mcfunny @jsm2334 Some idiotic statements merit an emoji at best.

@jenshepp @jsm2334 i know that it is hard for anti-vaxxers to muster substantive responses.

@give_henry @PedsGeekMD @jsm2334 Go for it.

@jenshepp @PedsGeekMD @jsm2334 Then for god’s sake get a competent and ethical person to do it.

@mcfunny @jsm2334 😂

@jenshepp @jsm2334 it is true. people who are unvaccinated are different in many ways from vaccinated people. they cannot be compared.

@give_henry @PedsGeekMD @jsm2334 The upshot is the data exists and should be analyzed. The reason it has not been analyzed is that this is an ongoing cover-up. It’s not hard. Do a retrospective cohort study of vaccinated vs unvaccinated.

@jenshepp @PedsGeekMD @jsm2334 Have you actually looked at what David Geier and his father did? Have you looked at any of their studies?

@PedsGeekMD @jsm2334 Look up Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) and proposed analysis by David Geier. They pulled out the tried and true character assasination techniques against Geier and shut off access because they claimed he might “corrupt” the database. No joke. As if databases are not mirrored.

@jenshepp @jsm2334 What evidence do you have that they did that?

@drterrysimpson @WaitingForPerot @ButHisEmails Profit from the largest industry in the world vs profit opportunities from a grass roots health freedom movement. I wonder whose wallet has been overcome by conscience.

@WaitingForPerot @ButHisEmails never think a person's wallet will be overcome by conscious

This is what happens when you have an attorney who thinks they understand the meaning of a placebo - and he clearly does not. So let us address this silly man's concerns. The Salk polio vaccine trial did not use “plain saline” in every arm because the goal was not to create a metaphysical definition of “nothing”—it was to match the experience of injection so that outcomes weren’t biased by who got a shot and who didn’t. So yes, the control injection contained the vehicle—the same background solution used to deliver the vaccine—without the active poliovirus antigen. That’s how you isolate the effect of the vaccine itself. Calling that “not a placebo” is like claiming a sugar pill isn’t a placebo because it contains sugar. The ingredients being waved around—culture medium, trace antibiotics, stabilizers—were non-active components, included to mirror the injection environment. They are not the intervention. They are the baseline. And here’s the part that ruins the conspiracy: The trial involved over a million children and showed a clear, dramatic reduction in paralytic polio in the vaccinated group. Not subtle. Not arguable. Follow that with real-world data and the result is unmistakable: polio cases collapsed. If this were some grand deception built on a “fake placebo,” it would have fallen apart the moment the vaccine hit the real world. Instead, it eradicated a disease. Or to put it plainly: when someone argues that a controlled trial isn’t controlled because the control wasn’t philosophically pure enough, they’re not doing science, they are not understanding science, and they do not know the meaning of a placebo. Yes, this was not saline - but it was a placebo. Yes this is just as good as a saline control and this is the issue - Siri has no idea what a placebo is and if he thinks saline is a placebo then it shows why lawyers should take some basic science

@LeaderJohnThune @DHSgov Pass the SAVE Act.

For 67 days now, Democrats have refused to fully fund @DHSgov. That is unacceptable. And it’s why Republicans are going to move forward this week with a budget resolution that will allow us to take up a funding bill for the law enforcement and border security components of DHS.

@walterkirn @hyonschu I took underwater basket weaving in college.

@hyonschu I can weave baskets. Or at least I can learn. I think.

We need to preserve a control group as we enter the Borg era. I volunteer. I say we get a nice island. I'd like a cohort of five hundred. We will come out after ten years and compete with the augmented, plugged-in, Singularity people on a range of tasks. I'm completely serious.

@DefiyantlyFree Wake up barbie you’re a useful idiot

On October 7, 2023, Hamas l invaded southern Israel and murdered roughly 1,200 people in a single day. They burned families alive, raped women next to the corpses of their friend and kidnapped 251 hostages, including children, the elderly, and Holocaust survivors. They livestreamed all of this on their victims’ own phones to terrorize the families. On April 20, 2026, a single Israeli soldier operating in southern Lebanon, where the IDF was rooting out Hezbollah rocket positions in a war Hezbollah started by firing on Israel in support of Iran, took the blunt side of an axe to a fallen statue of Jesus in a private garden in the village of Debel. No human being was harmed. The statue can be restored. The senior Catholic hierarchy of the Holy Land, led by Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa in Jerusalem, issued same-day written statements in response to both events. The October 7 statement, released as Hamas gunmen were still inside Israel killing Jews, never used the word “Hamas.” The word “terrorism.” The word “condemn.” It referred to the worst antisemitic atrocity since 1945 as “the operation launched from Gaza” passive, faceless, geographic and placed it in the same grammatical breath as “the reaction of the Israeli Army,” as if the two were morally equivalent phenomena. It described the dead Israeli civilians as “casualties and tragedies” that “both Palestinians and Israeli families have to deal with.” It called for the international community to “de-escalate the situation” and “restore calm.” Then it pivoted to a political concern about preserving the status quo at religious sites in Jerusalem. The April 20th crucifix statement, named the perpetrator directly: “an Israeli soldier,” “IDF soldiers.” It used the words “profound indignation” and “unreserved condemnation.” It made concrete demands: “immediate and decisive disciplinary action, a credible process of accountability, and clear assurances that such conduct will neither be tolerated nor repeated.” It cited Saint Paul. It quoted Pope Leo XIV. It ran for six substantive paragraphs of escalating moral indictment. Within hours of the photograph surfacing, the IDF confirmed the soldier was theirs and announced the incident was under investigation by Northern Command. The Israeli military issued an official statement that the soldier’s conduct was “wholly inconsistent with the values expected of its troops” and that “appropriate measures will be taken against those involved.” The IDF also publicly committed to helping the local Christian community restore the statue. Prime MinisterNetenyahu posted within the same news cycle: “I was stunned and saddened to learn that an IDF soldier damaged a Catholic religious icon in southern Lebanon. I condemn the act in the strongest terms.” Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called the act “grave and disgraceful” and added: “We apologise for this incident and to every Christian whose feelings were hurt.” The U.S. Ambassador to Israel called for “swift, severe, and public consequences” and Israel signaled full agreement. In other words: a single act of vandalism, no human harmed, was condemned within hours by the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, and the military command of the State of Israel, all of whom apologized publicly, named the act, took responsibility, opened an investigation, and committed to restoration. Are the moral institutions of the world capable of applying the same standard to Jewish victims of terrorism that they apply to a damaged stone statue in a garden? A statue gets six paragraphs and a same-day denunciation. Twelve hundred murdered Jews get moral relativism where there can be none. It’s really an insane response that has absolutely no justification. And all it does is for their solidify in the minds of those who are Bible believing Christians that moral relativism will kill the West.

@LocasaleLab The system optimizes profit not health. It’s operating as designed. Health improvements are subjective and can be gamed. See biomarkers.

Thank you. One of the reasons I write some of these posts on the edgier side is to make the issues visible. The moment you challenge the status quo, the conversation shifts and substance such as the balance of cost and benefit gets lost in pile-ons and personal attacks. We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, and we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars across both private and federal contexts pursuing oncogenes as the central therapeutic strategy against cancer. It has produced interesting basic science but very small gains in outcomes. This has been going on for over 30 years. The reduction in cancer mortality from this approach has been very limited. Compared to interventions like reducing smoking or obesity, it’s a drop in the bucket.

@LocasaleLab Academia selects for those who follow the rules and play the game well. Good science demands the opposite.

Many years ago, I knew a very talented and hardworking student when he was an undergrad. I encouraged him to pursue a PhD and develop his abilities. While he was in a PhD program at another institution, he came to me for advice. He was struggling and told me his advisor was someone who spoke well but lacked depth, pushed him into poor research directions, and didn’t have much regard for trainees. I told him to finish as quickly as possible and move to a better environment. I think about that now when I see the same person resorting to virtue signaling and ad hominem attacks to publicly shame me on social media instead of engaging with the substance of what I said. I should probably just say who it is.