Myers M, Pineda D. Do Vaccines Cause That?! A Guide for Evaluating Vaccine Safety Concerns. Immunizations for Public Health (I4PH) Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9769027-1-3; US$14.95
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In each province and territory across Canada, the implementation of universal publicly funded vaccine programs has led to a remarkable decline of many infectious diseases that previously regularly sent shock waves (paralytic polio) and death rays (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, measles and Haemophilus influenzae meningitis) into communities. Long-term success in controlling these scourges here in Canada means that most parents, and even many physicians and health care providers, are now no longer familiar with the terrible consequences of these diseases. Unfortunately, most vaccine-preventable diseases are still out there – either locally (tetanus and pertussis) or internationally, just a plane ride away. Each is able to snap back to pick off the unimmunized or underimmunized, if the opportunity arises. Despite these risks, many in Canada are complacent about the need for vaccines, and some fear the risks of vaccines so much as to refuse vaccines for their children. The parental grapevine fuelled by the Internet is rife with misinformation about vaccines – both the benefits and the risks. This pocket book by Meyers and Pineda from the National Network for Immunization Information (NNii) –an affiliation of the American academic medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, was written to help parents understand the confusing information on the Internet and in the media. It is an excellent companion to the Canadian Paediatric Society's book, Your Child's Best Shot – A Parent's Guide to Vaccination . Your Child's Best Shot – A Parent's Guide to Vaccination is centred on chapters discussing each illness prevented, and the benefits and risks of vaccine, followed by an excellent vaccine question and answer chapter. Do Vaccines Cause That?! A Guide for Evaluating Vaccine Safety Concerns does not cover specific diseases and vaccines; section 1 provides thoughtful, articulate explanations on how best to weigh and evaluate what one reads and hears about vaccines (chapters on vaccine side effects and risk perception, cause or coincidence, missing information and technical jargon, how do I find the right information in the first place, etc). The second section has four chapters dealing with specific concerns: Do vaccines cause asthma? Do vaccines cause autism? Do vaccines cause damage to the immune system? and Other vaccine concerns. While written for American readers, Canadian parents and health care providers will find this an excellent primer for understanding causality and for assessing vaccine information. Both Your Child's Best Shot – A Parent's Guide to Vaccination and Do Vaccines Cause That?! A Guide for Evaluating Vaccine Safety Concerns are a must read for the paediatrician and family physician, and are excellent bookshelf resources for dealing with vexing vaccine issues that parents raise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.048 | 0.034 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".