An Urgent Warning From Dr. Vinay Prasad

Read his recommendations before you decide.

Dr. Vinay Prasad is a practicing oncologist and professor of medicine at the University of California.

He is considered one of the foremost evidence-based medicine practitioners in the world.

Today, he issued his recommendations concerning fall COVID boosters. If you ask your doctor, you will likely get different advice. Your physician will likely parrot CDC recommendations. If they work in a hospital-based practice, they will have no freedom to give you an independent judgment.

The Fall COVID19 Shot is already a US Public Health Disaster

Below are some important reminders from Dr. Prasad’s book Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives. His book was written before COVID and clearly ignored by politicians, the media, media-proclaimed experts such as Dr. Fauci, and most health professionals.

Medicine is the application of science. When a scientific theory is disproved, it should happen in a lab or in the equivalent place in clinical science, the controlled clinical trial. It should not be disproved in the world of clinical medicine, where millions of people may have already been exposed to an ineffective, or perhaps even harmful, treatment.

Evidence-based medicine was accepted because of the realization that, not infrequently, practices that seemed to work and practices that the best science said should work did not. In 1981 John McKinlay, a medical sociologist, wrote an article that perfectly summarized the state of affairs in the pre-EBM world. In the article, he described the “seven stages in the career of a medical innovation.” These stages began with a “promising report” in which a medical innovation is publicized based on its promise—often a good explanation of why it should work. In the second stage, the innovation is adopted by the profession, motivated by forces as disparate as belief that the innovation will benefit patients, peer pressure, and the promise of financial gain. Stage three, in which patients and payers accept the innovation as standard, follows quickly. Only at the fourth stage in McKinlay’s analysis do “data” begin to enter the story. However, the data supporting the innovation come only from insubstantial studies that support the innovation in the most superficial way. (We spend a great deal of ink in this book discussing the uneven data that support medical innovations.)

Finally, at stage five, the randomized controlled trial, the foundation of evidence-based medicine, makes an appearance. This kind of reliable, experimental study may either support the innovation or prove (or at the very least suggest) that it is ineffective. The latter case is what we refer to as reversal. Stages six and seven see the response to the reliable, experimental data: first denial, as entrenched interests deny that the innovation may not be effective, and then finally acceptance.