Last edited Sat Dec 20, 2025, 05:34 PM - Edit history (1)
...given how easy it is to make a fake report, even a trained scientist would have to give low weight to anything on VAERS.
The is something I deal with all the time, albeit not with health care. There are web sites that list reported fossil occurrences. The problem? Many of the reports are made by people with expertise in one particular group (e.g. primates), but who are also reporting fossils from other groups found at the same site (e.g., rodents, ruminants, turtles, crocodiles, horses). One's expertise drops the further away one moves from the point of expertise. I'm reasonably good with bird, lizard, and turtle material, though I'm not qualified to identify them beyond "bird," "lizard,": or "turtle." My error rate would be higher if you asked me to identify a bunch of mammal fossils. And when it comes to fish, any identification I might make should be ignored.
Since these web sites are based on literature reports and haven't been vetted by people who actually work on the groups found in the report, they can yield misleading results. I've reviewed manuscripts on research based entirely on some of these data sets, and the authors are always surprised at the number of mistakes in their work that arose from data base error.
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