The struggle goes on against additional vaccines in India.

“The Delhi High Court has admitted a public interest petition filed by a group of medical experts led by a former health secretary against the central government’s plans to introduce “irrational vaccines” into the national immunisation programme without proper epidemiological studies.”

in response to this article:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/336/7647/750

I’m glad to see the word getting out.

Jupiter put the URL of the full editorial in the first comment on 7 March, the day the comment/opinion went up.

You put it up again, on April 3.

How come you missed it the first time?

You say ***They seem content to cherry-pick the quotes that suit them. I was a little surprised that they would decide to spin information that could be easily checked though.***

In your post above, you cherry picked exactly the points that a provaccine would pick, and ignored the points which others might concentrate on.

Presumably you don’t care about the non-existent or fraudulent data, or the fact that India doesn’t consider WHO neutral and has problems with vaccine manufacturers trying to get India to accept cocktails, because you’re provaccine, so all those things aren’t important to you.

My biggest problem with you though, is why it took you nearly a month to see that the link to the full article was put up the same day.

You talk about blindness, jdc, but perhaps you have a moat in front of the log in your right eye?

Can we move on to content now, please?

BTW – I don’t know the reason for the abstract comment, so I can’t respond to the bulk of your post, but I fail to see how it invalidates the argument.

Your first paragraph centers on the pro-vaccine nature of the editorial – is that a problem? The stated purpose of this blog is to discuss vaccination; pro-vaccination arguments are certainly a part of that discussion, no?

So, you point out that the authors favor an economical alternative to the available vaccines. True enough. But a major question raised in the above post is “do they need the vaccine AT ALL?”, and what data are they using to demonstrate that need? Would you agree that no vaccine is even cheaper than a cheap vaccine?

The second point I would like to make is that Inside Vaccines blog also has a curious statement: “Little wonder there is no abstract!” Inside Vaccines claim that they are looking at the science rather than dealing in propaganda, but this statement hints that there is some obvious reason why there is no abstract. They seem to be implying that this paper is somehow hidden or unavailable. The implication being that, because it’s critical of vaccine manufacturers, the piece is so unpopular with the powers-that-be that we are denied the opportunity to read an abstract. Well, we don’t need to read an abstract in order to find out what the authors wrote – the full text of the editorial is available. Free. This is the paper – see for yourself. So why didn’t Inside Vaccines give a link to the free full text? It could have easily been done.

Could there be another reason why this paper did not have an abstract on Pubmed? Yes. Editorials do not routinely have abstracts. For an example of this, try searching Pubmed for ‘cholesterol’ (or trauma, or cancer, or vitamin or…). and limit your search to editorials. I tried this and the first page of results for cholesterol showed 20 hits, of which 3 had links to abstracts, 3 had links to full text and 14 had the ‘no abstract’ icon. The next page had four links to abstracts and only one link to to full text – leaving fifteen results showing the ‘no abstract’ icon. So twenty nine out of the forty results were ‘no abstract’, which comes to 72.5% and my point is that it’s not unusual for an editorial to not have an abstract. Which makes the closing statement of the Inside Vaccines blog post highly misleading. This is probably just another example of the spin that Inside Vaccines put on information. Either that, or they didn’t realise that they were able to see the free full text. Which would be rather surprising for such an educated and wise assemblage of persons (scientists, authors, engineers, librarians, researchers, parents and grandparents – About Inside Vaccines) and is all the more unlikely given that they actually gave the PMID number (but no link to the free full text – that only arrived in the course of a comment from ‘Jupiter’). I’m finding it difficult to imagine what their thought processes were.