Tag: methodolatry

Trump is antivax.

“Best practices”: The buzzword that the Trump administration will use to eliminate as many vaccines as RFK Jr. can

The CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices met last week, eliminating the universal recommendation for the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine. There was, however, a more insidious threat to vaccines in a White House press release after the meeting cloaked under the buzzword "best practices."

/ December 8, 2025
Robin toppled. (Vinay Prasad.)

EBM “Boy Wonder” Vinay Prasad is toppled

Evidence-based medicine "Boy Wonder" Dr. Vinay Prasad was fired as CBER Director after less than three months on the job. What can the kerfuffle surrounding his ouster tell us about the FDA and doctors who enabled Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.?

/ August 4, 2025
Cartoon character Kirby holding a red sign with large yellow letters that read "STFU." Kirby has a cheerful expression and is set against a blue background.

Dr. Vinay Prasad is Repeatedly Undermining RCTs. Why?

It's quite the journey from "RCT or STFU" to "we will always have a place for controlled clinical studies."

/ June 10, 2025
EBM hierarchy

HHS is weaponizing evidence-based medicine to falsely portray vaccines as unsafe

Last week, HHS announced that all "new vaccines will undergo safety testing in placebo-controlled trials." Sounds good? Not so fast. This is really a deceptive weaponization of evidence-based medicine to undermine confidence in vaccines and eliminate at least some of them.

/ May 5, 2025
EBM hierarchy

2023: The year that the evidence-based medicine (EBM) paradigm was weaponized against vaccines and public health

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has been a very useful paradigm for assessing evidence in medicine. However, like any other framework, it can be misused, particularly when fundamentalist EBM methodolatry leads to its inappropriate application to questions for which it is ill-suited, a misuse that has been weaponized against public health during the pandemic.

/ January 1, 2024
Cochrane Collaborative

The Cochrane mask fiasco: How the evidence-based medicine paradigm can produce misleading results

Last week, the Cochrane Collaborative was forced to walk back the conclusions of a review by Tom Jefferson et al that had been spun in the media as proving that "masks don't work." Tom Jefferson himself has been problematic about vaccines for a long time, but the rot goes deeper. What is it about the evidence-based medicine paradigm that results in misleading...

/ March 13, 2023

“Natural Immunity” Stans Forget Babies Will Always be Vulnerable to COVID

Children are still getting hospitalized with COVID, no matter how many times contrarian doctors mindlessly repeat the mantra "natural immunity". Doctors who know where babies come from understand why this might be.

/ July 29, 2022

Methodolatry and COVID

Doctors who call for an RCT for everything generally haven't run a single RCT on anything. Why is this?

/ May 12, 2022

The hijacking of evidence-based medicine

A hero of the blog, John Ioannidis, worries that evidence-based medicine has been hijacked, and when Ioannidis says something we at SBM listen. But has EBM been "hijacked"?

/ March 21, 2016

Are the recommended childhood vaccine schedules evidence-based?

We write about vaccines a lot here at SBM, and for a very good reason. Of all the medical interventions devised by the brains of humans, arguably vaccines have saved more lives and prevented more disability than any other medical treatment. When it comes to infectious disease, vaccination is the ultimate in preventive medicine, at least for diseases for which vaccines can...

/ February 29, 2016