By Toby Rogers, Ph.D.
Systematic review and meta-analysis shouldn’t just be a reflection of power — who can fund the most randomized controlled trials, who can perform the most statistical wizardry. They should be about gathering the most high-quality information to create the most comprehensive picture of any problem and any proposed remedy.
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I. How systematic review and meta-analysis are supposed to work
Imagine a world where scientists, doctors, government regulators and the general public actually cared about high-quality data. We all know that such a world does not exist.
But just as a thought experiment, let’s imagine that everyone involved in science and medicine really wanted high-quality data to make appropriate medical decisions to improve health.
Even with the best of intentions, it’s pretty difficult to draw accurate conclusions about any medical intervention. Every human is different so there is enormous variability in any group of people that is studied. Any chemical or biological intervention will have a range of effects.
Other factors — the weather, what someone had for breakfast, existing chemicals in one’s system, hormonal cycles, etc. can influence research outcomes. There are always errors in administration, note-taking, reporting, etc. in any clinical trial.
To overcome some of these problems, large data sets are sought. The larger the data set the better because that enables various small natural variations to cancel each other out so that one can look for the larger signals about safety and efficacy.
Because humans are always biased, double-blind randomized controlled trials are used so that the investigators themselves do not know who has received the medical intervention.
However, large, well-conducted, double-blind randomized controlled trials are very expensive. One way to overcome the problem of small sample sizes is to group lots of different clinical trials together in a systematic review or meta-analysis.
In a systematic review, one formulates a research question, identifies the keywords or phrases associated with that question and then engages in a search of high-quality medical databases (Google Scholar, PubMed, etc.) to identify every study related to that question over a certain time period (e.g. the last ten years or the last twenty years).
Then one reads through the studies to identify any that are contaminated by bias or low-quality methods and those are thrown out. Then one summarizes the remaining high-quality studies to see if the results agree with each other and to identify areas of disagreement.
In a meta-analysis, one follows the same initial steps as a systematic review (formulate a research question, identify keywords, find every relevant study, read them and throw out any low-quality studies).
Then one obtains the data from all of these studies (it’s often available online or one can write to the researchers to request it) and pools that data to create one massive data set. Finally, one runs the analysis (about safety or efficacy) on that new larger sample.
This problem of how to obtain reliable, reproducible, medical results is so enormous that an entire field has developed called evidence-based medicine to help clinicians sort through the available data.
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II. The reality
How does one decide which studies to include and which studies to exclude?
It is standard practice to exclude from a systematic review or meta-analysis any study that is not a double-blind randomized controlled trial.
However, we know that pharmaceutical companies using contract research organizations have figured out how to game randomized controlled trials (RCT) to create their preferred results.
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Contract research organizations select healthy young people with no underlying conditions to decrease the possibility of side effects, use a long ramp-up period and kick people out of the study who show any initial side effects, kick people out of the study for going to the emergency room (for violating the trial protocol) and other gimmicks to give pharmaceutical companies favorable results every time.
Common sense would suggest excluding any study contaminated by a conflict of interest. Indeed there is a whole field of research into the “funding effect.”
As the name suggests, these studies focus on how financial conflicts of interest influence research outcomes. These studies universally find that ANY financial conflict of interest no matter how small — literally a single slice of pizza — changes research outcomes in the direction of the funder.
So the presence of any financial conflict of interest means that the results will not accurately reflect the underlying reality. Of all the findings in modern science, the funding effect is the largest, most reliable and most reproducible.
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So a proper systematic review or meta-analysis will only use RCTs, but even RCTs are often manipulated by Pharma, and studies with any financial conflict of interest no matter how small should be excluded.
III. It is impossible to do a proper systematic review or meta-analysis of the mainstream vaccine literature
A. The censorship is extreme
Professors self-censor in universities so that they don’t lose their jobs. Literally, they will not conduct a study that could possibly show harm from vaccines because they do not want to be blacklisted.
Scientific journals block the publication of any study that shows harm from vaccines. It won’t even make it to peer review. It’ll just be rejected outright.
Databases including Google and Google Scholar block access to critical studies. So it’s as if those studies never existed.
B. There are no mainstream RCTs
The vaccine industry claims that because vaccines are “Safe & Effective™️” it would be unethical to have an unvaccinated control group.
This is an example of the “circular reasoning fallacy” — an argument that assumes the very thing it is trying to prove is true. But thus far they’ve gotten away with it and they simply do not conduct RCTs of vaccines (as proved by the Informed Consent Action Network [ICAN]).
C. All mainstream studies of vaccine safety and efficacy are contaminated by financial conflicts of interest
The studies are either conducted directly by pharmaceutical companies (via contract research organizations) or by scholars who are taking money from pharmaceutical companies.
So under the standard rules of evidence-based medicine, one must exclude from any systematic review or meta-analysis all of the studies that are generally relied upon by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the mainstream media to claim that vaccines are safe and effective.
If one wants to engage in proper evidence-based medicine one has to admit that the current evidence generally relied upon to make vaccination decisions is scientifically meaningless.
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I have been studying up on frequency medicine, aka energy medicine, Trace. Matt Ehret did an excellent interview with a frequency medicine specialist on TNT Radio this week, and we have a number of frequency medicine specialists in the local holistic clinic I just started with the friend. I'm starting to believe this i the future of health care. It's far cheaper, in the long run, than doctors and hospitals, mainly because it works. According to the interview, this was where Western medicine was headed with their electric current and magnetism treatments until the Flexner Report made all alternatives to allopathic medicine illegal in 2011.
Impossible or we don't want people to realize that the rich have better medicine and care? And they always have...