It's so cute when anti-vaccine activists try to use citations to bolster their arguments. Quite often, it seems as if they simply read the title of a study and leap to the assumption that it supports their notion that vaccines are useless, dangerous or cause autism. In those instances where they actually do get past the title, they either misinterpret the study or misrepresent the results, hoping, perhaps, that whomever they are speaking to won't go through the trouble of actually reading the citation. Actually, in most instances, they probably rely on people not reading their citations at all. It's very impressive to throw out a bunch of study titles and author names. The casual observer is likely to just think, "Huh, they must have a point. I mean, look at all of those studies."
And I can't really blame the average person for taking that approach. It takes a lot of effort and time to actually examine the citations critically. Scientific papers are generally geared toward academics, people in the same field who already have a basic background education. They understand the methods and why certain things were done, while others weren't. They know the various jargon used. The language of science is probably the biggest barrier to a layperson understanding (let alone reading) a study. After all, there are a lot of new, unknown words and, let's face it, study papers are boring (unless you have a keen and obsessive interest in the subject, maybe). But those who deny some scientific concept rely on this to overawe their audience. It allows them to use a tactic known as the
Gish Gallop: throw out lots of studies that you claim support your position and depend on your audience not making the laborious effort to see if the studies say what you claim they do.
I encountered this on a small scale just recently in the comments of an article in the
Independent Online discussing what happens when vaccine refusal has fatal results. When one commenter claimed that modern measles outbreaks occurred predominantly among the vaccinated, I countered with examples from recent outbreaks in which the majority (or all) of the cases were unvaccinated. A second commenter responded to me with a list of six studies purporting to support the assertion that measles outbreaks disproportionately occur among vaccinated, rather than unvaccinated, individuals. But as expected, the reality is rather different than this person claimed.
