Sayer Ji pushes retracted anti-vaccine articles – cause he’s got nothing
https://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalrapt...t-nothing/
Sayer Ji is the founder of the pseudoscience pushing website GreenMedInfo. Ji is a slightly different version of Mike Adams who runs his own pseudoscience pushing website, Natural News. To be honest, if you read a random article from either one, they sound alike, and they promote the same junk science. In case you wondering, they hate vaccines for all the same gibberish reasons that are pushed by all anti-vaccine websites.
So what is Sayer Ji saying today? Well he’s pushing some nonsense conspiracies about Anthony R Mawson’s anti-vaccine papers. And if you don’t recall who Dr. Mawson is, he’s the brainless researchers had a paper retracted.
Then resubmitted that same paper and got it retracted again. What makes these retractions juicily ironic is that they were both retracted by awful predatory journals.
Mawson’s article was published for the first time in Frontiers in Public Health, a part of the Frontiers Media empire. It was published for the second time in the Journal of Translational Science, a part of OAT. Both Frontiers Media and OAT are predatory publishers according to the definitive Beall’s List.
A predatory publisher is an “exploitative open-access publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals.”
I never have written about it, but there’s a second article written by Anthony Mawson, “Preterm birth, vaccination and neurodevelopmental disorders: a cross-sectional study of 6- to 12-year-old vaccinated and unvaccinated children,” also published in OAT’s Journal of Translational Science JTS).
Go ahead, look for that article, I’ll wait. Oh, Google is of no help? I forgot to mention but that article was also scrubbed from the JTS website, just like Mawson’s other articles. Well, if you’re really interested in the article, because the internet never forgets, here it is.
In case you’re wondering, this other article uses the same data, same techniques, and same bogus conclusions as the double-retracted article. Let’s take a quick look.
Why these articles are bad?
1.Because the journals in which they were published are bad. Frontiers in Public Health (FPH) is not indexed in PubMed. And the Journal of Translational Science (JTS) is not indexed in PubMed. PubMed is one of the most valued resources in searching for biomedical articles, even in obscure journals.
Both FPH and JTS lack an impact factor. As we mentioned above, both FPH and JTS are published by predatory publishers (one of the possible reasons that the journals are not indexed). There is nothing positive to say about these journals.
2.I wrote previously about what makes these articles so bad, but here’s a quick review. They use questionnaires instead of medical records, which brings in parental confirmation and observation bias to the research. The questionnaires only target home schooled children an internally biased group. Small study population. And many more issues.
A real study to compare vaccines effects is generally a meta-review (at the top of the hierarchy of scientific evidence) of several large epidemiological case-control and cohort studies.
For example, this study, by LE Taylor et al., included five cohort studies involving 1,256,407 children, and five case-control studies involving 9,920 children.
It examined the possibility of links between vaccination and autism, MMR vaccine and autism, and thimerosal and autism. (A more detailed analysis of this article can be found here.) This was a huge, well-designed systematic review that found a simple conclusion –
Findings of this meta-analysis suggest that vaccinations are not associated with the development of autism or autism spectrum disorder. Furthermore, the components of the vaccines (thimerosal or mercury) or multiple vaccines (MMR) are not associated with the development of autism or autism spectrum disorder.
Dr. Mawson actually has the background to run a well-designed study such as this one. Why doesn’t he, instead putting together studies so bad that even junk science journals retract them?
Apparently, he’s trying to find data that supports his preconceived conclusions about vaccines, which is really just how pseudoscience works.
Those of us who are pro-science tend to gather high quality data published in real high quality journals, and see where it leads us. And unless you only believe in studies in awful journals, then any rational mind would see that the overwhelming scientific evidence continues to show us that vaccines are relatively safe. And they most certainly are not involved with neurodevelopmental disorders.
https://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalrapt...t-nothing/
Sayer Ji is the founder of the pseudoscience pushing website GreenMedInfo. Ji is a slightly different version of Mike Adams who runs his own pseudoscience pushing website, Natural News. To be honest, if you read a random article from either one, they sound alike, and they promote the same junk science. In case you wondering, they hate vaccines for all the same gibberish reasons that are pushed by all anti-vaccine websites.
So what is Sayer Ji saying today? Well he’s pushing some nonsense conspiracies about Anthony R Mawson’s anti-vaccine papers. And if you don’t recall who Dr. Mawson is, he’s the brainless researchers had a paper retracted.
Then resubmitted that same paper and got it retracted again. What makes these retractions juicily ironic is that they were both retracted by awful predatory journals.
Mawson’s article was published for the first time in Frontiers in Public Health, a part of the Frontiers Media empire. It was published for the second time in the Journal of Translational Science, a part of OAT. Both Frontiers Media and OAT are predatory publishers according to the definitive Beall’s List.
A predatory publisher is an “exploitative open-access publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals.”
I never have written about it, but there’s a second article written by Anthony Mawson, “Preterm birth, vaccination and neurodevelopmental disorders: a cross-sectional study of 6- to 12-year-old vaccinated and unvaccinated children,” also published in OAT’s Journal of Translational Science JTS).
Go ahead, look for that article, I’ll wait. Oh, Google is of no help? I forgot to mention but that article was also scrubbed from the JTS website, just like Mawson’s other articles. Well, if you’re really interested in the article, because the internet never forgets, here it is.
In case you’re wondering, this other article uses the same data, same techniques, and same bogus conclusions as the double-retracted article. Let’s take a quick look.
Why these articles are bad?
1.Because the journals in which they were published are bad. Frontiers in Public Health (FPH) is not indexed in PubMed. And the Journal of Translational Science (JTS) is not indexed in PubMed. PubMed is one of the most valued resources in searching for biomedical articles, even in obscure journals.
Both FPH and JTS lack an impact factor. As we mentioned above, both FPH and JTS are published by predatory publishers (one of the possible reasons that the journals are not indexed). There is nothing positive to say about these journals.
2.I wrote previously about what makes these articles so bad, but here’s a quick review. They use questionnaires instead of medical records, which brings in parental confirmation and observation bias to the research. The questionnaires only target home schooled children an internally biased group. Small study population. And many more issues.
A real study to compare vaccines effects is generally a meta-review (at the top of the hierarchy of scientific evidence) of several large epidemiological case-control and cohort studies.
For example, this study, by LE Taylor et al., included five cohort studies involving 1,256,407 children, and five case-control studies involving 9,920 children.
It examined the possibility of links between vaccination and autism, MMR vaccine and autism, and thimerosal and autism. (A more detailed analysis of this article can be found here.) This was a huge, well-designed systematic review that found a simple conclusion –
Findings of this meta-analysis suggest that vaccinations are not associated with the development of autism or autism spectrum disorder. Furthermore, the components of the vaccines (thimerosal or mercury) or multiple vaccines (MMR) are not associated with the development of autism or autism spectrum disorder.
Dr. Mawson actually has the background to run a well-designed study such as this one. Why doesn’t he, instead putting together studies so bad that even junk science journals retract them?
Apparently, he’s trying to find data that supports his preconceived conclusions about vaccines, which is really just how pseudoscience works.
Those of us who are pro-science tend to gather high quality data published in real high quality journals, and see where it leads us. And unless you only believe in studies in awful journals, then any rational mind would see that the overwhelming scientific evidence continues to show us that vaccines are relatively safe. And they most certainly are not involved with neurodevelopmental disorders.
