Whooping Cough Back With a Vengeance in California

[jeff47]

37. Wow...that's a shitty paper.

From their "introduction" section:

Because acellular pertussis vaccines replaced whole-cell vaccines in the 1990s, pertussis has reemerged at a startling rate in the United States despite nationwide vaccine coverage in excess of 95%

Bzzzzzzt.

You're putting your conclusion up front. All you are supposed to know going in is the infection rate is independent of the disease rate. The point of the study is to examine if the acellular vaccine is the problem.

If you state that it is the problem before you even get out of your introduction, you've demonstrated you're entering the study with bias towards the results you want.

Moving on to the next problem in their introduction:

Two common hypotheses for the resurgence have been proposed: i) current acellular pertussis vaccines (aP) vaccines are less effective than the whole-cell pertussis (wP) vaccines they replaced and ii) aP-induced immunity wanes more quickly than anticipated

Uh....or perhaps vaccination rates are not 100% uniform? That 95% national rate is an average. It does not equal a 95% rate everywhere in the nation. So that's a really lousy assumption going in.

Next problem: Their "methods" section doesn't exist. They kinda have some methods in the end of their introduction, and then they have some methods in their results. They don't go into sufficient detail in these pseudo-methods sections to indicate what they did. For example, how did they expose the baboons? How long were they in contact? The baboons were injected with human doses of the vaccine. How did they demonstrate that the human dose was the correct dose?

In the paragraph that starts "Acellular Vaccines Fail to Prevent Infection Following Natural Transmission." they have no control. They infected a baboon, and then put it in a cage with an unvaccinated baboon and two vaccinated baboons. But more importantly, why does Figure 1 massively contradict Figure 2? Figure 1 shows a massive difference between unvaccinated and aP vaccinated. Figure 2 does not. So why was WBC so low in Figure 1 despite the high bacterial load in figure 2?

Next, the transmission from aP but infected:

Because aP fails to prevent colonization we hypothesized that aP-vaccinated animals can transmit B. pertussis infection to contacts. To test this hypothesis, two aP-vaccinated animals were challenged with B. pertussis and placed in separate cages. After 24 h, a naïve animal was added to each cage, and all animals were followed for colonization.

They left them in the same fucking cage. They have no idea if the bacteria came from the vaccinated baboon or from the cage. They needed to sterilize the cage (and bathe the vaccinated baboon) before putting the two baboons together in order to show the bacteria came from the vaccinated baboon.

At this point, I got bored and stopped reading.

Btw, they do not say herd immunity doesn't exist. Their claim is the new DTaP vaccine doesn't work as well as the old DTaP vaccine.