RFK Jr wants placebo controlled clinical studies for vaccines

The post discusses the flawed belief that all vaccine safety must be proven through placebo-controlled studies, as promoted by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It emphasizes that ethical considerations often prevent such studies, and…

There’s an old anti-vaccine trope that the only way to know if vaccines are safe and effective is to use a placebo-controlled clinical study, in which some people receive the vaccine and others receive an inert substance, such as a saline shot, before the results are compared. HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has embraced this trope and has ordered that all new vaccines must have placebo controls..

What HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and his anti-vaccine sycophants don’t understand is that sometimes we do have placebo-controlled clinical studies for vaccines. Still, sometimes, using a placebo for a vaccine study may be highly unethical.

Furthermore, clinical studies are not the only way to determine a vaccine’s safety and effectiveness. Large epidemiological studies, like case-control and cohort studies, also provide a wealth of evidence about vaccines. But anti-vaxxers completely ignore that, and so does RFK Jr.....

Why anti-vaxxers are wrong about placebo-controlled studies for vaccines
The first point is that many, if not a majority of, clinical trials test an experimental drug (or device) versus the standard of treatment. So if we have an XYZ drug that kills small cell lung cancer, we don’t put one arm of that study of patients receiving a saline placebo. That is beyond unethical – giving a patient with small cell lung cancer something that doesn’t work, a placebo, just to see if the new drug is better than the placebo is objectively and morally wrong.

The actual study would test the experimental drug versus the standard of pharmaceutical treatment for that cancer. If the drug is safer and at least equivalent to the older methods, it might get FDA approval. If it’s the same, it may or may not receive approval.

This is the same for vaccines. If we have a new measles vaccine, we are not going to test it against a placebo, because it is unethical to put half of the trial group at risk of measles when they receive nothing. It is frustrating to me that RFK Jr and his acolytes fail to see this......

So, let’s be clear here. Any new vaccines that replace older vaccines will probably not use a true placebo-controlled group. The new vaccine will almost always be compared against the older version of the vaccine, but there may be a way around that; I don’t see it......

Summary
First, the process to get a vaccine to market is long and difficult. I often say that your average anti-vaxxer thinks that some scientist throws a virus into a blender with a dollop of mercury and aluminum, mixes, and then gives it to screaming children. That is not even close to the truth.

Second, placebo-controlled studies of vaccines can happen, but if there is a predecessor vaccine, like with measles, it would be unethical to run such a study. I do not understand why anti-vaxxers do not grasp this simple concept, but here we are with the man who runs our healthcare system believing it must be so.

Third, we have epidemiological studies that continue to examine the safety and effectiveness of our vaccines.

The push for placebo-controlled clinical studies for vaccines does not really give us any better information than we currently have. It seems like this is just an attempt to cast a cloud over vaccines, confusing people about the safety of vaccines. This is frustrating.

Furthermore, if they can force placebos on every vaccine clinical trial, and I’m skeptical that they can, it will add additional cost and time to getting new vaccines to market. This could limit vaccine access, making more Americans vulnerable to vaccine-preventable diseases.