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Population cohort and ecologic studies have become today’s norm for determining vaccine efficacy and support the belief that vaccination has safely reduced the spread of infectious diseases and saved millions of lives. Never a gold standard for scientific inquiry, population studies now make up the bulk of vaccine advocates’ clinical arsenal to discredit more factual biological research favoring the arguments of vaccine opponents. A recent paper published in the November 2013 issue of the
New England Journal of Medicine, “Contagious Diseases in the United States from 1988 to the Present,” is the first of what will inevitably turn into a flurry of future studies to persuade legislators and the public that vaccination should be mandatory for assuring the health of the nation. The study was spawned from a new project launched at the University of Pittsburgh, Project Tycho, named after the renowned 16th century astronomer and mathematician Tycho Brahe and mentor of Johannes Kepler. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, the Project is an enormous multi-tiered undertaking to store mortality data for 56 infectious diseases between 1888 and the present for future data-mining and analysis, and to strategize future policies to increase vaccination rates.

The paper’s authors make the extraordinary claim that “103 million cases of childhood diseases (95% of those that would otherwise have occurred) have been prevented since 1924; in the past decade alone, 26 million cases (99% of those that would otherwise occurred) were prevented” from vaccination.  Always the obedient slave to CDC and Big Pharm demands, the
New York Times chimed in, stating that this is “one of the kind of analysis that can be done when enormous data sets are built and mined.” If this analysis is factual, it can be heralded as one of the most significant achievements to support the miracles and benefits of vaccines. On the other hand, if the University of Pittsburgh researchers’ analysis is scientifically unreliable and perhaps even found deceptive under sound empirical review, then the paper is one of the most misleading propaganda scams published in a peer-reviewed medical literature in recent years.  This wouldn’t be the first time the NEJM failed to perform diligent and satisfactory peer-review of papers submitted for publication.  In the past, the prestigious journal has been rife with publishing duplicitous science articles that are best described as medical racketeering.

What is most important is to review the data that the Pittsburgh scientists depended upon in order to reach their conclusions.  A review of the Project Tycho website and its database reveals an absence of the most critical information necessary for making any historical determination about a vaccine’s effectiveness let alone how many deaths were prevented.  The Projects sole accomplishment is to store vast amounts of data (200 million keystrokes) of mortality statistics, including time and location, for 56 infectious diseases over a 125 year period.  Scientific data pertaining to vaccination statistics for eight vaccine-specific contagious diseases noted in the
NEJM paper is nonexistent. There is no record for the number of people vaccinated for any of the targeted diseases in any given year or location. There are no records for the number of deaths among unvaccinated persons. Nor are there any records of deaths caused by an infectious disease that may have been caused by a vaccine’s infectious agent or in a data set of the population where the vaccine was ineffective and did not provide protection. In fact, the Project contains no data regarding vaccination data at all!!