That there is no evidence to support it does not mean it cannot be true. But it should inform your assessment of probabilities.

Bingo. That is an absolutely correct factually true statement.
What you left out is that the job of the individual is to correctly assign probabilities.

Odd, I thought he was working for Putin.

Insulting people doesn't help convince them.

Be careful. It has not been absolutely proven that vaccines never cause XXX. It probably can't be. It's just that there is no valid evidence that vaccines do cause autism. (At least that I know of.)

The original claim was a deliberate fraud, but many people believed it, and their part in it was not a "deliberate fraud", at least not on their part. But they *did* believe it because they wanted to, in the face of contrary evidence.

China has a history of not caring about people outside it's borders. This long predates the CCP.

They did review and change the policy. Just too late to do any good. The point is that evidence-based medicine has to be treated as a starting point for diagnosis and treatment decisions, not a rigid decision tree.

Of course, none of that makes the CDC's new claims that "vaccines don't cause autism" isn't an evidence-based statement any less absurd. You can't ever realistically prove definitively that X cannot cause Y, because that would require knowing that there exists no combination of recognizable human genetics in which X would cause Y. Evidence-based medicine would mean assuming that X cannot cause Y until evidence exists to prove that it does or can, which has not happened.

What they're doing is rejecting evidence-based medicine based on a belief that the anecdotal information they have should be taken more seriously than the broad evidence to the contrary. This would be fine if that anecdotal information were based on actual brain scans prior to vaccination that showed that the vaccine triggered a change, but it isn't. Rather, involves mistaking correlation for causation, and a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, with a complete lack of any actual plausible explanation for how vaccines could cause autism beyond some vague hand-wavey pseudoscience.

And on top of that, we have a bunch of people who lack enough understanding of the scientific method and/or lack enough understanding of the subject to recognize when it is not being followed properly, and they are getting misled by charlatans with a political or personal agenda, presented in the form of pseudoscientific bulls**t papers that don't hold up to even modest scrutiny by someone with limited understanding of the subject or the scientific method, much less actual scientists in the field.

We also have a bunch of journals that publish papers outside their area of expertise, relying on outside experts that are in league with the papers' authors, and all sorts of other fun scientific fraud, which further contributes to this problem.

I'm not sure how to solve this problem, because it seems like a large percentage of the public simply lacks basic critical thinking skills and the ability to read over a paper and think, "Yes, but did you consider the following twelve common factors that could influence both the proposed cause and effect?" and realize that the paper is garbage. But a good starting point would be to pressure the news media across the political spectrum to hire actual science writers who UNDERSTAND SCIENCE to cover science-based stories.

Another good starting point would be to get more science-based shows on PBS that can talk about these issues and explain them to people and debunk bulls**t every week.

Unfortunately, evidence-based medicine has become a code word for "treat everyone with the same illness identically even when the data doesn't support doing so. That's how I ended up fighting a c. diff. infection. I was hospitalized for a related condition, and the first day of antibiotics put me at no fever, but after a day, I got a fever again, and I asked if the antibiotic had changed, and they said no, but maybe the ER gave me something different. They checked, and determined that yes, I had been on a different antibiotic in the ER, but said that they should keep the current antibiotics, and used "evidence-based medicine" as the reason. I had my doubts.

They were wrong. And six months later, the general standards for treating the condition I came in with changed, and they now treat it with the antibiotic that the ER gave me instead of one of the two that the hospital put me on afterwards, precisely because the standard treatment had a tendency to make c. diff. take over.

Whoops.

So I'm all for evidence-based medicine as a starting point, but when you realize it isn't behaving normally, you should adjust accordingly. Otherwise, patients suffer enormously.

But in theory, I do agree with you that evidence-based medicine is better than evidence-free medicine based on gut feelings and assumptions that correlation means causation and other fallacious reasoning.

When Google sells a 24-inch tablet, I'll care about Google being able to sell me a replacement that can do this. In the meantime, I want this feature on older, non-Google Android devices. :-)

Actually, I was remembering wrong there. Although TB can spread in other ways, it is primarily an airborne pathogen. So the biggest way to reduce the spread would be to add central heat and air with fresh air mixing and reduce the number of people sharing air for long periods of time. The second best way is contact tracing and prophylactic treatment.

But to add further to the comment about vaccine effectiveness, bacterial vaccines can be at least somewhat effective at preventing disease, e.g. the bacterial meningitis vaccine has something like 65% to 85% effectiveness, depending on age group and other factors, which is way better than nothing.

The TB vaccine only reduces infection risk by 20%. And when you're exposed frequently, that's barely even useful. The reason for this is that it hides from the immune system, which, as a result, takes a long time to start reacting to the bacteria, allowing it time to multiply for a while before you get a reaction. In mouse models, the reaction takes a whopping two weeks.

TB actually infects macrophages (primitive immune cells), and manages to literally hide inside them by adapting its exterior to maintain a neutral pH and by synthesizing enzymes that prevent the macrophages from maturing and that slow down apoptosis, which otherwise would release the bacteria, which would trigger T-cell activation. It's unclear whether there is a realistic way to prevent this delay.

It also plays tricks like triggering certain antigen-specific CD4+ T cells to the point of functional exhaustion while reducing antigens that would trigger other CD4+ cells so that they don't get detected. It somehow brings mesenchymal stem cells (blood vessel/lymphatic/connective tissue precursors) to the infection site, which further inhibit stem cells.

Presumably any better vaccine would have to either convince CD8+ T cells to react even without macrophages recognizing that something is wrong (perhaps by increasing the number of antigens that are included so that they are more likely to recognizing an antigen on the bacterium itself directly, early in the infection process, assuming this is even possible), convince CD4+ T cells to trigger macrophages in spite of signals to not do so, or overcome one of the design limits of the immune system (preventing T-cell exhaustion, increasing random macrophage apoptosis without an infection, etc.), some of which would likely require changing the person's DNA.

So fast diagnosis (universal health care and widespread rapid TB testing), contact tracing, etc. are critical to bringing it under control, and other prevention, such as not having large numbers of people in constant contact in areas with limited air circulation can also help. Meanwhile, vaccines, although not entirely infeasible, are likely to be more of a long shot.

It depends on the precise definition. But teleportation of sizeable objects is probably impossible. In the use of the term in quantum experiments it means something like "moving the state of one particle to the state of another without determining what the state is that you moved". And it's "moved" rather than communicating because the residual state has been changed. I.e., for a macroscopic analogy, if I "communicate" something to you, it doesn't make me forget it, but if I teleport (say a book) to you, I no longer have it.

Yeah, the word was chosen because it sounded catchy, but it *does* describe a legitimate effect that has no macroscopic counterpart.

Sure. I would expect that each country would want to protect themselves from other countries.

...over 143 years, 46 of which were before the discovery of the first antibiotic.

over six years, all but about one of which were post-vaccine. These two diseases are not really comparable in any meaningful way.

About 1.23 million people die from TB in a typical year, which is not that far off from the worldwide COVID death toll each year. We're mostly not talking about COVID anymore, either.

Vaccines for bacteria are... problematic at best, because they have relatively low effectiveness at preventing infection. The best way to eliminate TB is to get clean water everywhere. Stopping TB through vaccination is like stopping pedestrian deaths with inflatable pedestrian balls. Yeah, it might reduce the mortality, but the real problem is unsafe pedestrian crossings / unsafe drinking water.