I usually like your posts but I have to say I’ve lost a lot of respect for you here. If this is the way that you research a topic I am starting to doubt a great deal of the previous posts of yours that I’ve read and gained knowledge from.

I worry that, to a casual observer, your take here looks well researched and informed, but from having a few years in a vaccine related field I’m spotting a great deal of arguments that lack the appropriate sources (and basic epidemiology theory) to back them up.

For instance, it’s pretty disingenuous to use statistics dating back more than say 50 years when talking about current interventions for disease. A lot of public health in general improved dramatically over the first half of the 20th century, and trying to pick out the effectiveness there is problematic (as you sometimes state yourself). Death rates are a good example of how graphs such as you have here skew the reader’s perception of the issues. With polio for example the invention of the iron long dramatically reduced then number of deaths from polio however it still wasn’t a disease that was solved by any stretch of the imagination. The same can be said for death rates of those suffering from measles, small pox or pertussis. These improvement also came with a reduction in cases, but that didn’t mean that the diseases were on the way out on their own, they were being reduced through a long line of medical improvements, the next of these being vaccination.

Once we take into account these improvements the impact of vaccine on measles vaccine looks like this:

Graph made by the Oxford University Vaccine Knowledge Project. Data taken from Public Health England

That’s the kind of improvement we’re really interested in these days. If we have the power and resources to ethically reduce the cases of measles (to zero, if possible) shouldn’t that be what we aim for?

I am not an epidemiologist but I work with many of them. They assess vaccine safety and efficacy through a number of different ways (rarely do they just eyeball graphs and say how they make them feel). One of these ways is through regression models (which I’m sure you’re well practiced in being an economist), they include many different variables in their models and each variable explains part of the variance in disease reduction. Vaccination frequently comes out as a highly effective means of preventing the spread of disease. The same is true for the cost effective analysis that our economists do.

The work that they do isn’t skewing the data so that it looks “pro-vaccination” it is applying the appropriate controls so as to reach a reliable answer.

I don’t do these analysis myself as I know how complicated they can be and I’d be sure to mess them up, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing after all. What I do instead is I trust that Epidemiology as a discipline is as rigorous as my discipline (psychology) and that those that train in it have to go through the same hell like process of becoming an expert that I’m in the middle of right now.

Everyone is of course completely within their rights to have doubts and ask questions about vaccination (the Oxford University Vaccine Knowledge Project is a great evidence based public focused resource for this by the way) however presenting such thoroughly debunked arguments in such a light as you do here is somewhat intellectually dishonest in my opinion.

You are in a growing minority of people that are feeling like this about vaccination; please only contribute to this viewpoint if you are 100% certain in what you are saying, as I worry that we are very soon going to be seeing what happens when more people refuse vaccination in the near future. This is an “experiment” we do not need run, we know what the outcome will be.

If you want to write further on this topic in the future I'd happly work with you on posts, as I do genuinely think you're acting in good faith here.

Full disclosure, I'm currently doing my PhD as part of a group called The Vaccine Confidence Project