I haven't actually read the book, I just know some quotes from it and the gist of what it argues about smallpox. Anyway, I flicked through the paper. It has a

I haven't actually read the book, I just know some quotes from it and the gist of what it argues about smallpox. Anyway, I flicked through the paper. It has a habit of making what it thinks are rebuttals but which either are agreeing with what the book says, or rebuts arguments she didn't actually make. If this is the highest quality sort of rebuttal that's out there then I guess I should read the book because it must be pretty solid. Example 1. Humphries points out that the vaccine rollout was coincident with a change in how polio was classified, which was guaranteed to significantly reduce the rate at which polio was reported regardless of the vaccine because the prior classification criteria had been very loose. The rebuttal is that yes this is true, but there were still a "significant number" of polio cases being reported after the change. This isn't a real disagreement yet the author uses it to claim that Humphries has callous disregard for polio cases, a nasty ad hominem they constantly repeat. It reduces their own credibility as it's so unlikely to be true. She's a medical doctor, not a profession famous for its callous disregard of disease. Example 2. Humphries points out that "more than half of the cases [in Michigan] were not polio virus related at all" and the rebuttal is that if you restrict to paralytic polio then that statement isn't true any longer, but, again, that wasn't the claim she made. Example 3. Another non-rebuttal is to point out that the author of one of the studies she cites was a vaccine fan. So? She was citing the data, not the author's general opinions. Example 4. The overall thrust of the argument here is that Humphries says the threat of polio was exaggerated, and the author admits this was true (redefinitions, FDR etc), but then claims again that anyone who objects is "callous" and it was OK if FDR was "dramatizing" his illness - which maybe wasn't even polio at all - because it spread awareness. Also that it doesn't matter if polio was actually rare because that's also true of childhood cancer and Americans care about that. Again a non-sequitur of a rebuttal that actually supports the points Humphries was making. What a crap set of counter-arguments. They don't point out any mistakes, it's just a big set of disagreements over emphasis and tone. If anything this seems to reinforce the overall impression formed in the past two years that pro-vaccine people seem systematically unable to accept that tradeoffs exist, accurate data matters and misleading people to win their support is bad. They also radically over-estimate their own rationality.