Reply #54: Sorry, but I call bullshit on Dr. Healy's comments (or on your misinterpretation of what she said).

[moc]

Look, I'm a public health professor (doctorate in maternal and child health from Hopkins), so I have more than a modicum of training in these issues. I sit on federal-level grant review committees, and I've reviewed plenty of epi study proposals testing links between a host of environmental risk factors and different health outcomes. There's no reason on earth why an interested scientist who truly believes in the importance of such a subgroup analysis that you and Dr. Healy refer to couldn't submit a proposal, get a good score and get funded. Anyone who thinks otherwise has no understanding of how the peer-reviewed scientific process works. If Dr. Healy truly intended to convey what you think she's conveying, then she's being disengenuous because she darn well knows how the NIH review process works.

Be clear - the IOM doesn't fund research so implying they don't want to fund research is just silly. For what it's worth, I've sat on a federal review committee multiple times with the chair of that IOM committee (McCormick of Harvard), and we've had extensive discussions of her experience going up against the anti-vaxers. Never *once* did she suggest that generating fear re: vaccines had ANYTHING to do with their recommendations. The fact of the matter is that the science just isn't there. I have read the original research, and I concur completely with the IOM report. There is no there there.

Now, if your contention is that the empirical base is incomplete, what do you suggest? What *specific* subgroup of children should be studied? How? From where would the data come? If there is no technical barrier to such an analysis and there's a scientist who thinks it's worth pursuing, why hasn't s/he written a proposal and sought funding? And please, don't give me any conspiracy tin hat theories in response.