Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Eric Gilbertson, Associate Teaching Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Seattle University

In the middle of a chilly October night in 2025, my two friends and I suited up at the Cottonwood Creek trailhead and started a trek into the Sangre de Cristo mountains of Colorado. It was a little below freezing as we got moving at 1:30 a.m., and the Moon illuminated the snowy mountaintops above us.

Our packs were a bit heavier than normal because we were hauling highly accurate surveying equipment to the summits of two peaks, each over 14,000 feet (4,267.2 meters). The peaks, Crestone and East Crestone, were close enough in height, with a short enough saddle in between, that only the taller of the two would count as a true 14er and the other as a sub-peak.

Crestone had traditionally been thought to be taller and sees hundreds of ascents each year. East Crestone, traditionally believed to be shorter, sees only a fraction as many ascents. Colorado has 58 mountain peaks over 14,000 feet that peakbaggers consider 14ers. For locals and visitors alike, bagging a 14er is a sport, and some people post reports about having climbed all 58.

I wanted to measure which was taller, since I suspected previous measurements people had trusted for years might be erroneous.

I teach mountain surveying, and I climb and research mountains around the world for fun. I’m trying to climb the highest mountain in every country on Earth. I have so far climbed 147 of 196, including tough, high-altitude technical ones such as K2 without supplemental oxygen in Pakistan and Pobeda in Kyrgyzstan.

Through my experience climbing, I discovered that not all countries in the world have been surveyed accurately enough to know the country’s true high point. The high point is geographically significant, as it’s the highest natural point or peak in the country, state or province. Often, high points are a source of national or state pride. I taught myself surveying to determine and verify these high points on my own.

Discovering high points around the world

I’ve so far discovered new high points in seven countries: Colombia – Pico Simón Bolívar; Saudi Arabia – Jabal Ferwa; Uzbekistan – Alpomish; Togo – Mount Atilakoutse; Gambia – Sare Firasu Hill; Guinea Bissau – Mount Ronde; and Botswana – Monalanong Hill.

I’ve surveyed over 60 peaks in the U.S. and Canada. In 2025 I discovered a new state high point in Michigan, Mount Curwood, at 1,979.3 feet (603.3 meters), and a new provincial high point of Nova Scotia, Western Barren, at 1,743.2 feet (531.3 meters).

I’ve determined the 100 highest peaks in Washington state, where I live and work, and studied how climate change is affecting the elevations of ice-capped peaks. My research showed that, while historically the contiguous U.S. had five ice-capped peaks, only two remain – Liberty Cap and Colfax, both in Washington state. Mount Rainier used to have as its highest point an ice dome named Columbia Crest on the western rim of the summit crater. But since 1998, Columbia Crest has melted more than 20 feet (6 meters) and is no longer the highest point on the mountain. The highest point is now a rock 436 feet (133 meters) to the south, on the southwest edge of the summit crater.

How to survey mountain high points

Surveying mountains is challenging due to the altitude, long approaches, difficult weather conditions and technical climbing. To get accurate surveying equipment to the summits requires ingenuity and specialized gear. Equipment needs to be as light as possible and adaptable to tricky terrain. For these reasons, very few mountains have been surveyed to the level of accuracy I can attain.

Historically, measurements have generally been made from a distance with theodolites. These are mechanical devices that can measure an angle up to a mountain summit very accurately. The distance to the mountain can be measured by other means, and trigonometry can be used with the distance and angle to calculate the summit elevation. But if the measurement is taken too far away, the error in elevation can be high. Theodolites are heavy and not easy to carry close to a peak.

I sometimes carry a 30-pound (13.61 kg) theodolite to a summit, but if the mountain is technical, this is challenging and requires complicated rope systems to haul it up. More often I bring an Abney level, which is a lighter mechanical device that also measures angles. I bring this to a summit to measure relative angles between nearby points to identify which is the highest point on the mountain.

I then use a highly accurate, survey-grade GPS to measure the absolute elevation of the highest point. The GPS requires an hour or more to get an accurate measurement, so it wouldn’t make sense timewise to measure many nearby points with this device. I’ve found time is usually limited when surveying a summit, due to incoming storms or approaching darkness when descents need to be made in daylight for safety. This is why I first identify the highest point with an Abney level or theodolite.

Many satellites overhead send data down that is collected by the GPS device and used to calculate the device’s position. To save weight, I use a device that then sends measurements over Bluetooth to my phone instead of requiring a dedicated computer.

A GPS receiver generally needs to be mounted on a vertical rod that touches the exact summit. I measure the GPS height, subtract the rod height, and that gives the summit height. To keep the rod perfectly vertical I use a tripod, and this also requires innovation.

Sometimes a summit is so sharp that regular tripod legs aren’t long enough to touch the ground. In this case, I strap on hiking poles to extend the legs. Another solution is to use a tripod with flexible legs, and I mold the legs to conform to the shape of a sharp boulder. This is what I used to measure the high point of Uzbekistan.

Another tool I use is LiDAR, which stands for light detection and ranging. This works by an airplane flying over a mountain and bouncing light signals off the summit. By using the plane’s location and the time it takes the signal to bounce back, the mountain’s elevation can be calculated.

Colorado 14ers

All measurements can have errors. I traveled to Colorado because I suspected LiDAR measurements of Crestone Peak, considered a 14er, might be erroneous. LiDAR measurements have been taken for nearly all mountains in Colorado, and these measurements are generally the most accurate available for mountain elevations.

LiDAR measurements hit the ground every few feet of horizontal spacing and can miss the top of sharp summits, leading to an underestimate of summit height. They can also hit things such as bushes, leading to an overestimate of summit height.

LiDAR data showed Crestone Peak and East Crestone within a few feet of the same height. But, interestingly, it showed a 3-4 foot (0.9-1.2 meter) spike on the top of Crestone. I climbed Crestone in 2020 while doing the Rocky Mountain Slam, a challenge to climb all the Colorado 14ers, Wyoming 13ers and Montana 12ers in two months, and knew the summit was pretty flat. I speculated that spike could have easily been a person, which meant the LiDAR elevation of Crestone might be too high.

East Crestone has a sharp boulder on the summit, which LiDAR could easily miss because of the horizontal gaps between measurements. So that elevation was possibly too short. In Colorado a point needs 300 feet (91.44 meters) of prominence to count as a separate peak. Other states have different rules, like in Washington where 400 feet (121.92 meters) is required. Prominence is a measure of how high a peak sticks up above a saddle connecting it to a taller peak. The saddle between Crestone and East Crestone is short enough that only the taller of them is a true peak and the other is a sub-peak.

On East Crestone I first set up a tall tripod, but the wind blew it down, nearly over a cliff. I switched it out with a shorter one, which was more stable.

I then scrambled over to Crestone Peak and mounted another identical GPS device. That summit was on the edge of a cliff, and I needed to extend one tripod leg with a hiking pole so it could touch the ground.

I logged data for over two hours with both devices simultaneously. This ensured both were receiving the same satellite signals – so any atmospheric distortion would be the same – and that enough data was logged so I could get elevations accurate to the nearest inch. This gave me a lot of time to admire the views and take pictures, but I also needed to check on the equipment every 5-10 minutes to ensure it was working properly.

After packing up, hiking down and flying home to Seattle, I spent a few weeks poring over the data. The results showed East Crestone is 0.3 feet (0.09 meters) taller than Crestone, with more than 99.9% confidence that East Crestone is taller.

This means Colorado has a new 14er: East Crestone. Crestone is, in fact, a sub-peak. Discussions are ongoing about whether this means the 14ers list that peakbaggers climb should retain Crestone and add East Crestone to be 59 peaks, or whether East Crestone should replace Crestone so the list stays at 58 peaks.

I’m planning to continue my work surveying mountains in Colorado and around the world to determine accurate summit elevations. My next plan is surveying several country high points in Africa this winter. The Benin country high point is still not known, and I hope to solve that mystery next.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Eric Gilbertson receives funding from The American Alpine Club.

– ref. Measuring Colorado’s mountains one hike at a time – https://theconversation.com/measuring-colorados-mountains-one-hike-at-a-time-269343

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Graeme Mack, Visiting Assistant Professor of History, University of Richmond

The Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary in 2026 is certain to be a time of national reflection.

Americans tend to look to the Constitution to assess whether the nation is living up to its founding principles when navigating major social and political issues.

But it is the declaration, signed on July 4, 1776, that declares the nation’s credo, that “all men are created equal.”

Throughout history, Americans have turned to the declaration for guidance about what the nation should stand for.

As a historian of the United States and the coordinator for the University of Richmond’s Forging a New Nation initiative, which commemorates the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary, I have been thinking a lot about this phenomenon.

Particularly during times of social and political upheaval, Americans have sought out the Declaration of Independence when they wanted to remedy contemporary problems and create new visions for the country’s future. Many of the nation’s greatest leaders have praised and memorialized its rhetoric and ideas in the promotion of their own.

Inalienable rights?

During the turbulent 1850s, the divisive issue of slavery permeated every facet of American life and challenged basic precepts of American freedom.

In his 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass, the formerly enslaved abolitionist, used the declaration to set a standard for American society. As a Black American, Douglass insisted he was “not included within the pale” who enjoyed the “inalienable rights” articulated in the declaration.

Nonetheless, the “great principles of the Declaration” gave Douglass hope and cause for optimism. He predicted that the “glorious hour” would soon arrive when all Americans would be defined “by equal birth.”

Conceived in liberty

In its 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, the Supreme Court denied Black Americans the rights of citizenship.

Abraham Lincoln denounced the decision and countered by defining a more capacious view of American freedom based on the declaration.

Lincoln told one audience that Thomas Jefferson and the signers of the declaration “set up a standard maxim for free society,” which they “intended to include all men” and to be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for.”

Their goal, Lincoln said, was “augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”

As civil war ravaged the country and claimed thousands of American lives, Lincoln again drew on the declaration to articulate a vision for the country as president.

In his 1863 Gettysburg Address, commemorating the dead on that Pennsylvania battlefield, Lincoln described the United States as a “nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

The nation, he said, was undergoing a “new birth of freedom” as it waged war on slavery and defended its government against domestic rebellion.

Self-evident truth

Seventy years later, the declaration provided inspiration for President Franklin D. Roosevelt as he steered the nation through a crippling economic depression and the run-up to a world war. Roosevelt advocated for building America’s first social safety net by drawing on the declaration.

Reflecting Roosevelt’s aims, the 1936 Democratic Party platform illustrated this rhetorical strategy, borrowing from the declaration at its very beginning: “We hold this truth to be self evident – that government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens.”

During his 1944 State of the Union Address, Roosevelt said the nation was built on the rights embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But, he argued, “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”

All created equal

Amid the political and social upheaval of the 1960s, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. drew directly and self-consciously on the declaration.

In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, King defined an America that “guaranteed unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to its citizens.

Though the nation had “defaulted on this promissory note insofar as its citizens of color are concerned,” King said, the declaration still offered him hope: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.”

In 2025, Americans saw the deployment of U.S. troops in major cities, as well as mass immigrant deportations. These changes have upended communities and challenged basic norms of civil society. They have also challenged Americans’ understanding of themselves as a nation of immigrants.

With the declaration’s anniversary coming up at a time when so much about contemporary society and politics are being contested, Americans may well return once again to this founding document to define themselves as a people and a nation.

Graeme Mack does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Declaration of Independence’s promises ring out today as loudly as they did for Lincoln, FDR and through 249 years of US history – https://theconversation.com/declaration-of-independences-promises-ring-out-today-as-loudly-as-they-did-for-lincoln-fdr-and-through-249-years-of-us-history-269355

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Stuart Soroka, Professor, Communications and Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles

Accounts of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York City mayor have highlighted both his online presence and his ground game.

Mamdani won the general election with 50.4% of the vote, a larger share than was predicted by most polls, and his get-out-the-vote campaign has received some of the credit. Mamdani claims that his campaign had over 100,000 volunteers knocking on doors across New York City.

This focus on on-the-ground mobilization stands out given the increasing attention devoted to online campaigning over the past 15 years.

Particularly during that time period, online platforms have been a major focus of political campaigns and campaign research. Targeted advertising and new media strategies are increasingly viewed as central to campaign success. So is coverage of the campaign by legacy and social media more generally.

Moreover, solid empirical evidence of the effectiveness of door-to-door canvassing is limited. Recent work finds very few effects of in-person canvassing, except in very specific circumstances. One recent paper suggests that door-to-door canvassing by the candidate can make a difference to election outcomes. But in a race in New York City, it is not likely that Mamdani himself was able to reach enough voters to make a difference.

How much did Mamdani’s ground game contribute to his victory? As a political communication scholar, I know that assessing the impact of different methods used by political campaigns is difficult – in part because political campaigns include multiple lines of communication.

‘Hybrid’ campaigns

No campaign exists in isolation — nearly every candidate’s campaign occurs alongside opposing candidates’ campaigns. The effects of one campaign are often masked by the countering effects of the other.

The size of a campaign on one platform also tends to be correlated with the size of that candidate’s campaign on other platforms. When television advertising increases alongside social media advertising and door-to-door canvassing, identifying the effects of any single platform can be difficult.

Clever research designs are in some instances able to identify effects. These generally find that the impact of not just door-knocking but also ads and online advertising can be relatively limited.

In the modern technological environment, the impact of any single aspect of a campaign may be especially difficult to assess. Campaigning increasingly occurs in what researchers have called a “hybrid media” environment. Campaigns are waged in person, on the news and across multiple social media.

Each of these platforms comes with different advantages and disadvantages. Each also prioritizes different kinds of information.

Plainly stating your policy platform may work for coverage of a campaign stop on the evening news. But if you want that policy to go viral on TikTok, then you may need to add a dance – or an influencer.

Find volunteers online, send them knocking

Candidates have increasingly recognized the need to tailor messages for different communication platforms, such as television ads, Facebook posts and TikToks, building hybrid campaigns that attempt to spread a message across multiple, different spaces.

This interactivity across platforms has been especially evident in postelection assessments of the Mamdani campaign. His social media campaign was adept at producing the kinds of content that attract attention online. That campaign also appears to have been able to convert online engagement into real-world activism, including door-to-door canvassing.

There have been growing concerns among academics and campaign organizers about “slacktivism” — activism that amounts to one or two clicks online but nothing more. One worry is that a quick online endorsement may in some instances give people a sense that they have done their share and limit more active forms of engagement. The Mamdani campaign appears to have overcome this problem, at least in part.

But 100,000 people knocking on doors probably does not happen without the success of an online campaign. Finding and mobilizing campaigners was one important focus of Mamdani’s engagement online, after all.

Do it yourself − then repeat on socials

In-person campaigning by Mamdani, on the street and in the taxi line, is almost certainly made more effective through circulation on Instagram and TikTok.

Using mass media to broadcast campaign stops is not new, of course.

The construction of campaign stops that produce good social media content is becoming more common, however. The ways in which campaigns unfold in person are increasingly intertwined with the way they unfold online.

In this way, the Mamdani campaign may have been a textbook example of a modern hybrid campaign and an illustration of the coevolution of digital and on-the-ground campaigning.

To be clear, the success of the Mamdani campaign is probably not about his online presence or his ground game, but both at the same time.

Stuart Soroka research has been funded from the National Science Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

– ref. Everything everywhere all at once: How Zohran Mamdani campaigned both online and with a ground game – https://theconversation.com/everything-everywhere-all-at-once-how-zohran-mamdani-campaigned-both-online-and-with-a-ground-game-269693

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Tiziano Piccardi, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University

Reducing the visibility of polarizing content in social media feeds can measurably lower partisan animosity. To come up with this finding, my colleagues and I developed a method that let us alter the ranking of people’s feeds, previously something only the social media companies could do.

Reranking social media feeds to reduce exposure to posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity affected people’s emotions and their views of people with opposing political views.

I’m a computer scientist who studies social computing, artificial intelligence and the web. Because only social media platforms can modify their algorithms, we developed and released an open-source web tool that allowed us to rerank the feeds of consenting participants on X, formerly Twitter, in real time.

Drawing on social science theory, we used a large language model to identify posts likely to polarize people, such as those advocating political violence or calling for the imprisonment of members of the opposing party. These posts were not removed; they were simply ranked lower, requiring users to scroll further to see them. This reduced the number of those posts users saw.

We ran this experiment for 10 days in the weeks before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. We found that reducing exposure to polarizing content measurably improved participants’ feelings toward people from the opposing party and reduced their negative emotions while scrolling their feed. Importantly, these effects were similar across political affiliations, suggesting that the intervention benefits users regardless of their political party.

Why it matters

A common misconception is that people must choose between two extremes: engagement-based algorithms or purely chronological feeds. In reality, there is a wide spectrum of intermediate approaches depending on what they are optimized to do.

Feed algorithms are typically optimized to capture your attention, and as a result, they have a significant impact on your attitudes, moods and perceptions of others. For this reason, there is an urgent need for frameworks that enable independent researchers to test new approaches under realistic conditions.

Our work offers a path forward, showing how researchers can study and prototype alternative algorithms at scale, and it demonstrates that, thanks to large language models, platforms finally have the technical means to detect polarizing content that can affect their users’ democratic attitudes.

What other research is being done in this field

Testing the impact of alternative feed algorithms on live platforms is difficult, and such studies have only recently increased in number.

For instance, a recent collaboration between academics and Meta found that changing the algorithmic feed to a chronological one was not sufficient to show an impact on polarization. A related effort, the Prosocial Ranking Challenge led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, explores ranking alternatives across multiple platforms to promote beneficial social outcomes.

At the same time, the progress in large language model development enables richer ways to model how people think, feel and interact with others. We are seeing growing interest in giving users more control, allowing people to decide what principles should guide what they see in their feeds – for example the Alexandria library of pluralistic values and the Bonsai feed reranking system. Social media platforms, including Bluesky and X, are heading this way, as well.

What’s next

This study represents our first step toward designing algorithms that are aware of their potential social impact. Many questions remain open.

We plan to investigate the long-term effects of these interventions and test new ranking objectives to address other risks to online well-being, such as mental health and life satisfaction. Future work will explore how to balance multiple goals, such as cultural context, personal values and user control, to create online spaces that better support healthy social and civic interaction.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

This research was partially supported by a Hoffman-Yee grant from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

– ref. Down-ranking polarizing content lowers emotional temperature on social media – new research – https://theconversation.com/down-ranking-polarizing-content-lowers-emotional-temperature-on-social-media-new-research-271071

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Frank Han, Assistant Professor of Pediatric Cardiology, University of Illinois Chicago

The Food and Drug Administration is seeking to drastically change procedures for testing vaccine safety and approving vaccines, based on unproven claims that mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines caused the death of at least 10 children.

The agency detailed its plans in a memo released to staff on Nov. 28, 2025, which was obtained by several news outlets and published by The Washington Post.

Citing an internal, unpublished review, the memo, written by the agency’s top vaccine regulator, Vinay Prasad, attributes the children’s deaths to myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle. And it says the deaths were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, but provides no evidence that the vaccines caused the deaths.

The death of children due to an unsafe vaccine is a serious allegation. I am a pediatric cardiologist who has studied the link between COVID-19 vaccines and heart-related side effects such as myocarditis in children. To my knowledge, studies to date have shown such side effects are rare, and severe outcomes even more so. However, I am open to new evidence that could change my mind.

But without sufficient justification and solid evidence, restricting access to an approved vaccine and changing well-established procedures for testing vaccines would carry serious consequences. These moves would limit access for patients, create roadblocks for companies and worsen distrust in vaccines and public health.

In my view, it’s important for people reading about these FDA actions to understand how the evidence on a vaccine’s safety is generally assessed.

Determining cause of death

The FDA memo claims that the deaths of these children were directly related to receiving a COVID-19 immunization.

From my perspective as a clinician, it is awful that any child should die from a routine vaccination.

However, health professionals like me owe it to the public to uphold the highest possible standards in investigating why these deaths occurred. If the FDA has evidence demonstrating something that national health agencies worldwide have missed – widespread child deaths due to myocarditis caused by the COVID-19 vaccine – I don’t doubt that even the most pro-vaccine physician will listen. So far, however, no such evidence has been presented.

While a death logged in VAERS is a starting point, on its own it is insufficient to conclude whether a vaccine caused the death or other medical causes were to blame.

To demonstrate a causal link, FDA staff and physicians must align the VAERS report with physicians’ assessments of the patient, as well as data from other sources for monitoring vaccine safety. These include PRISM, which logs insurance claims data, and the Vaccine Safety Datalink, which tracks safety signals in electronic medical records.

It’s known that most deaths logged only in VAERS of children who recently received vaccines have been incorrectly attributed to the vaccines – either by accident or in some cases on purpose by anti-vaccine activists.

Heart-related side effects of COVID-19 vaccines

In his Substack and Twitter accounts, Prasad has said that he believes the rate of severe cardiac side effects after COVID-19 vaccination is severely underestimated and that the vaccines should be restricted far more than they currently are.

In a July 2025 presentation, Prasad quoted a risk of 27 cases per million of myocarditis in young men who received the COVID-19 vaccine. A 2024 review suggested that number was a bit lower – about 20 cases out of 1 million people. But that same study found that unvaccinated people had greater risk of heart problems after a COVID-19 infection than vaccinated people. In a different study, people who got myocarditis after a COVID-19 vaccination developed fewer complications than people who got myocarditis after a COVID-19 infection.

Existing vaccine safety infrastructure in the U.S. successfully identifies dangers posed by vaccines – and did so during the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, most COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. rely on mRNA technology. But as vaccines were first emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic, two pharmaceutical companies, Janssen and AstraZeneca, rolled out a vaccine that used a different technology, called a viral vector. This type of vaccine had a very rare but genuine safety problem that was detected.

VAERS, the Vaccine Safety Datalink, clinical investigators in the U.S. and their European counterparts detected that these vaccines did turn out to cause blood clotting. In April 2021, the FDA formally recommended pausing their use, and they were later pulled from the market.

Death due to myocarditis from COVID-19 vaccination is exceedingly rare. Demonstrating that it occurred requires proof that the person had myocarditis, evidence that no other reasonable cause of death was present, and the absence of any additional cause of myocarditis. These factors cannot be determined from VAERS data, however – and to date, the FDA has presented no other relevant data.

A problematic vision for future vaccine approvals

Currently, vaccines are tested both by seeing how well they prevent disease and by how well they generate antibodies, which are the molecules that help your body fight viruses and bacteria.

Some vaccines, such as the COVID-19 vaccine and the influenza vaccine, need to be updated based on new strains. The FDA generally approves these updates based on how well the new versions generate antibodies. Since the previous generation of vaccines was already shown to prevent infection, if the new version can generate antibodies like the previous one, researchers assume its ability to prevent infection is comparable too. Later studies can then test how well the vaccines prevent severe disease and hospitalization.

The FDA memo says this approach is insufficient and instead argues for replacing such studies with many more placebo-controlled trials – not just for COVID-19 vaccines but also for widely used influenza and pneumonia vaccines.

That may seem reasonable theoretically. In practice, however, it is not realistic.

Today’s influenza vaccines must be changed every season to reflect mutations to the virus. If the FDA were to require new placebo-controlled trials every year, the vaccine being tested would become obsolete by the time it is approved. This would be a massive waste of time and resources.

Also, detecting vaccine-related myocarditis at the low rate at which it occurs would have required clinical trials many times larger than the ones that were done to approve COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. This would have cost at least millions of dollars more, and the delay in rolling out vaccines would have also cost lives.

Placebo-controlled trials would require comparing people who receive the updated vaccine with people who remain unvaccinated. When an older version of the vaccine is already available, this means purposefully asking people to forgo that vaccine and risk infection for the sake of the trial, a practice that is widely considered unethical. Current scientific practice is that only a brand-new vaccine may be compared against placebo.

While suspected vaccine deaths should absolutely be investigated, stopping a vaccine for insufficient reasons can lead to a significant drop in public confidence. That’s why it’s essential to thoroughly and transparently investigate any claims that a vaccine causes harm.

Vaccine vs illness

To accurately gauge a vaccine’s risks, it is also crucial to compare its side effects with the effects of the illness it prevents.

For COVID-19, data consistently shows that the disease is clearly more dangerous. From Aug. 1, 2021, to July 31, 2022, more than 800 children in the U.S. died due to COVID-19, but very few deaths from COVID-19 vaccines in children have been been verified worldwide. What’s more, the disease causes many more heart-related side effects than the vaccine does.

Meanwhile, extensive evidence shows that COVID-19 vaccination reduces the risk of hospitalization by more than 70% and the risk of severe illness in adolescent children by 79%. Studies also show it dramatically reduces their risk of developing long COVID, a condition in which symptoms such as extreme fatigue or weakness persist more than three months after a COVID-19 infection.

Reporting only the vaccines’ risks, and not their benefits, shows just a small part of the picture.

I am a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and regularly go on social media to share pro vaccine information.

– ref. FDA claims on COVID-19 vaccine safety are unsupported by reliable data – and could severely hinder vaccine access – https://theconversation.com/fda-claims-on-covid-19-vaccine-safety-are-unsupported-by-reliable-data-and-could-severely-hinder-vaccine-access-271028