tiff

This is what happens when you have an attorney who thinks they understand the meaning of a placebo - and he clearly does not. So let us address this silly man's concerns. The Salk polio vaccine trial did not use “plain saline” in every arm because the goal was not to create a metaphysical definition of “nothing”—it was to match the experience of injection so that outcomes weren’t biased by who got a shot and who didn’t. So yes, the control injection contained the vehicle—the same background solution used to deliver the vaccine—without the active poliovirus antigen. That’s how you isolate the effect of the vaccine itself. Calling that “not a placebo” is like claiming a sugar pill isn’t a placebo because it contains sugar. The ingredients being waved around—culture medium, trace antibiotics, stabilizers—were non-active components, included to mirror the injection environment. They are not the intervention. They are the baseline. And here’s the part that ruins the conspiracy: The trial involved over a million children and showed a clear, dramatic reduction in paralytic polio in the vaccinated group. Not subtle. Not arguable. Follow that with real-world data and the result is unmistakable: polio cases collapsed. If this were some grand deception built on a “fake placebo,” it would have fallen apart the moment the vaccine hit the real world. Instead, it eradicated a disease. Or to put it plainly: when someone argues that a controlled trial isn’t controlled because the control wasn’t philosophically pure enough, they’re not doing science, they are not understanding science, and they do not know the meaning of a placebo. Yes, this was not saline - but it was a placebo. Yes this is just as good as a saline control and this is the issue - Siri has no idea what a placebo is and if he thinks saline is a placebo then it shows why lawyers should take some basic science