Vaccines are considered one of the greatest achievements in public health. However, an e-book titled, “Truth will Prevail: 1200 Studies that Refute Vaccine Claims” written by Chiropractor, Dr. Alan Palmer, claims that there are 1,200+ studies and sources that widely dispute what we are currently being told about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
The entire e-book is essentially an amalgamation of every antivax argument to date which includes a significant portion of the e-book dedicated to claiming that vaccines cause autism despite the fact that it has been debunked again & again & again & again & again & again.
Continuing the trend of making the same arguments as other antivaxxers, Palmer claims that vaccines and their ingredients cause a wide array of ailments even though most of the ailments he claims the vaccines are causing, studies fail to show. Even the ones that do show an association have already been previously known for years so it’s nothing new and vaccines are still considered to be generally safe. Palmer also claims that vaccines aren’t effective due to things such as waning.
What’s worse is that Palmer seems to be ‘pro-infection’ and even dabbles in germ theory denial (see page 496 of his e-book). Palmer also brings up deaths due to medical error because this e-book couldn’t be more of an antivax stereotype if it tried.
Over a year ago, I made a Youtube response video to the claims made in the e-book. While making the video, I noticed that there didn’t appear to be that many studies as Palmer claims as he would sometimes spend 1 or more pages dedicated to talking about a single study. At the time, I wanted to investigate whether there were actually 1,200 studies but due to time constraints, I never pursued it. After sometime had past since the video had been published, I finally booted google sheets up, created a criteria for inclusion though this wasn’t always followed, and began charting the number of studies in the e-book.
To no one’s surprise, there are not 1,200 studies. There are only ~403 studies which is only a third of the advertised number of studies.
This is still quite a significant number of studies until you realize that there are well over 1,700 studies showing that vaccines are generally safe & effective and that when looking at the studies the e-book cites:
• ~64 studies do not mention vaccines.
• ~40 studies were authored by researchers whose work has been heavily criticized and debunked including the Geier family, Christopher A. Shaw and Colleague, Lucija Tomljenovic, Chris Exley, Brian Hooker, and, of course, Andrew Wakefield.
• ~40 studies using weak design including Case Reports/Series, In Vitro, and Animal studies. I also included reviews of the literature here because, while they can be useful, in the context of the e-book, the reviews that Palmer cites are basically glorified opinion pieces, usually authored by debunked researchers that do nothing more than speculate.
• ~20 studies that were retracted or published by potential predatory journals and publishers.
• ~30 studies that Palmer cites that he misrepresents or fails to consider the entire literature as well as flat out contradicting his claims such as one study that he cites saying,”Epidemiologic evidence to date has consistently shown no increased risk of ASD with vaccines. ” By the way, that’s the only time vaccines are mentioned in the entire study.
There are some limitations with the charting of the studies. I only included what I thought were studies such as ones published in journals (whether predatory or not), or if Palmer either said, “A study published in…” or “…article published in…”, as well as links to pubmed were included. I did not include government reports such as the CDC MMWR reports, blog posts, reports done by special interest groups, or news articles. If you think I should have included or removed a study or studies, please let me know.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention that I’ve been using Palmer’s second version v.2. of the e-book for my response and charting which claims to contain 1,400 studies. So, instead of it being a third as advertised, it only contains roughly 29% of what is advertised. Unfortunately, this version does not contain studies on the Covid-19 vaccines. That version or “v3” claims to contain, “1,600 articles and published PubMed studies”, and Palmer is now charging £8 or $10 for it so I won’t be responding or charting that version (v3) though I strongly doubt that there are 1,600 studies.
To conclude, the Truth will Prevail e-book claims to contain over 1,200+ studies that widely dispute what we are currently being told about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. However, it only contains about a third of that number and most of the studies use a weak design, are authored by researchers whose work has been heavily criticized, published in questionable journals, contradict Palmer’s claims or studies that he misrepresents. Furthermore, there are over 1,700 studies showing that vaccines are generally safe & effective. Vaccines are considered one of the greatest achievements in public health and that is the truth.
Palmer’s studies: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YAMhpvFBBBlbKKDLKY2vK8onuqPIPxOIKM_87XVSLnQ/edit?usp=sharing
1,700 studies (I plan on updating it in the future and converting it into a spreadsheet): https://docs.google.com/document/d/12i1oZl_ABZEC6D4dF9tIdNzakTgyl07qwJEjhmzCfpQ/mobilebasic
Vax Data 