Tag: science

A pro-vaccine researcher is indicted:

A scientist in Denmark has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Atlanta for allegedly stealing $1 million in grant money that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had earmarked for autism research. U.S. prosecutors on Wednesday said they are seeking to extradite Poul Thorsen, 49, accused of wire fraud and money laundering. He used the stolen money to buy a home in Atlanta, a Harley Davidson motorcycle and two cars, prosecutors said.

“Grant money for disease research is a precious commodity,” said Sally Yates, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, in a news release. “When grant funds are stolen, we lose not only the money, but also the opportunity to better understand and cure debilitating diseases.”

Thorsen, a visiting scientist at the Atlanta-based CDC in the 1990s, helped two government agencies in Denmark obtain $11 million in research grants. He moved back to Denmark in 2002 to be principal investigator for the program. Prosecutors said he was also in charge of administering the research dollars, earmarked in part to study the relationship between autism and exposure to vaccines.

The response from the vaccine propaganda camp is interesting. David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine writes: “If there’s one thing about the anti-vaccine movement, it’s all about the ad hominem attack. Failing to win on science, clinical trials, epidemiology, and other objective evidence, with few exceptions, anti-vaccine propagandists fall back on attacking the person instead of the evidence.”

The problem with Gorski’s attempted defense is that in the field of research science, an ad hominem attack is a valid and rational one because all of the other elements, the “science, clinical trials, epidemiology, and other objective evidence” are only as reliable as the scientific integrity of the researchers involved. Peer review, as we all know, is worthless, being nothing more than what in other fields is known as “editing”; if the underlying experiment has not been replicated then it has not actually been scientifically verified regardless of how many credentialed individuals have read the paper. If the “principle investigator” for the research program is financially corrupt, there is no reason to assume that the rest of the program, indeed, the rest of the field is devoid of similar corruption, particularly when such corruption has long been suspected of researchers working in the interests of Big Pharma and funded in part by it.

Moreover, Gorski’s argument is on the shady side, given that there is very little objective evidence that can be presented for the safety of vaccines and a good deal of circumstantial evidence that the dangers they pose to children’s health is both real and underreported. The millions of dollars paid out annually of the VAERS system, which despite the reluctance of doctors to admit or report negative reactions still records around 4,500 cases of “permanent disability, hospitalization, life-threatening illnesses or death”, is almost never mentioned by the “vaccines are totally safe” crowd. Nor do they admit that there is not a single double-blind experiment comparing the health of a control group of children receiving the current American vaccine schedule with groups receiving a partial schedule or a series of placebo shots.

Gorski also shows his own lack of integrity when he correctly points out that Thorsen was not the principle author of the NEJM and Pediatrics papers, but pretends not to know that “whatever leadership position he may have held at Aarhus University and in its vaccine studies group” was actually the chief of the North Atlantic Neuro-Epidemiology Alliance group based at the University of Aarhus, Denmark and funded in part by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

Science cannot be said to be on the pro-vaccine side for the obvious reason that its “scientists” simply have not been willing to do the relevant science. In fact, the vaccine propagandists have spent decades producing various statistical surveys and writing acerbic blog posts in an attempt to avoid doing the only sort of scientific experiment that would be conclusive on the matter.

Now, before the vaccine propagandists leap in, I will again point out that I am not an anti-vaccine activist; I got a tetanus shot myself not long ago. I am, rather, a vaccine safety advocate. Real doctors, with real concerns about real risks to children for whom they are responsible, do not blindly advocate the macro one-size-fits-all approach and sacrifice the vaccine sensitive upon the altar of herd immunity. No pediatrician worth his salt is going to administer vaccines according to the schedule once he hears that a child had a serious adverse reaction to a vaccine. The goal of herd immunity does not trump the physician’s oath to first do no harm.

The problem is not that parents are overprotective of their children or that they are too stupid to understand the potential benefits of herd immunity. The problem is that the vaccine propagandists have been deeply dishonest in the past and therefore rightly lost the trust of many parents. Vaccine advocates have not been straightforward with the actual risks of vaccines because they are afraid that fully informed parents will not abide by the program that they believe will be best for the entire community, but will instead do what is best for the individual child, which is a delayed and staggered schedule that ensures the child gets all the necessary vaccines without putting a risky amount of stress on their developing systems.

The solution is honesty, scientific integrity, and openness. Until the pro-vaccine camp is willing to be honest about the risks as well as the benefits of vaccines to the individual child, all of their efforts to convince parents will not only be in vain, but will be counterproductive.

They’re contagious:

It may seem like bad news for the thin among us, but socialising with people heavier than yourself could make you put on weight…. where two people who are friends for a long time, and where one is heavier than the other, the thinner friend tended to increase in weight by up to 57 per cent over time.

No offense to the heavyset, you understand, it’s just that it’s catching….

Nature questions the assumed wisdom of churning out more PhDs:

In developed nations, the number of PhDs given in the sciences each year has grown by almost 40 percent since 1998, reaching about 34,000 doctorates in 2008. This type of expansion sounds great in theory: interest in the sciences is growing, and we now have a population that is more educated than ever. However, the effects of this worldwide trend are troubling. The workforce cannot absorb all these highly trained graduates, there is little money to support these expensive programs, and the quality of education is often low, among other problems. This week’s issue of Nature examines the problems with the expansive growth of the PhD.
A worldwide phenomenon

Worldwide, the plan is essentially the same: to stimulate the economy by educating the population. Increasing the number of students that pass through the higher education system isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but the resources must be there to make the system work. In much of the world, this just isn’t the case.

I have three observations. First, why are we supposed to respect scientists for their intelligence when they obviously can’t figure out simple concepts like “supply and demand” or bother to do enough research to see if there will be any jobs available in their field by the time they finish collecting degrees.

Second, the idea that education produces economic growth is one of the more obvious post hoc ergo propter hoc arguments I’ve ever seen. Given that there is now sufficient empirical evidence gathered in numerous countries to prove this is untrue, how many decades will need to pass before it is abandoned as a political policy? I would say the over/under must be at least two.

Third, I contend this supports my point that the advancement of science is a consequence of societal wealth, not a cause of it.

This explains all the recent movies and TV shows. It was a warning from the PTBs: killer fungus turning rainforest ants into colonies of zombies

Sure, they say it’s just ants now, but how long will it be before scientists employed by the U.S. government start experimenting with the fungus? You know they won’t be able to resist playing with it anymore than they left the killer WWI flu virus alone. Or worse, what if the fungus is extraterrestrial… and by extraterrestrial, I mean from Yuggoth!

Amazing. The fact that psychiatry is a completely bogus pseudoscience concocted by the lunatic ravings of an Austrian pervert couldn’t kill off credentialed talk therapy for more than 100 years, but simply making insurance companies pay for such “therapy” appears to have it on the edge of extinction in less than a decade.

Alone with his psychiatrist, the patient confided that his newborn had serious health problems, his distraught wife was screaming at him and he had started drinking again. With his life and second marriage falling apart, the man said he needed help. But the psychiatrist, Dr. Donald Levin, stopped him and said: “Hold it. I’m not your therapist. I could adjust your medications, but I don’t think that’s appropriate.”

Like many of the nation’s 48,000 psychiatrists, Dr. Levin, in large part because of changes in how much insurance will pay, no longer provides talk therapy, the form of psychiatry popularized by Sigmund Freud that dominated the profession for decades. Instead, he prescribes medication, usually after a brief consultation with each patient.

Is there any chance we can force insurance companies to pay for Neo-Keynesian economics while we’re at it? But in light of how we were contemplating earlier those white-collar jobs that can be automated, it occurs to me that psychiatry is clearly an occupation that can be easily replaced with software programs that are much cheaper than psychologists or even social workers. How hard can it be to make a synthetic speech program that asks “so how does that make you feel”, “I’m sensing you harbor some ambivalence about your mother”, and “I’m just going to prescribe you Xanax and we’ll see how that works for you.”

The Supreme Court renders vaccine makers unaccountable:

The Supreme Court today gave vaccine manufacturers greater protection from lawsuits by parents who say vaccinations harmed their children, ruling that Congress had blocked those types of claims against drug makers. In a 6-2 decision, the justices said Congress had effectively shut the courthouse door to these lawsuits in 1986, when it created a special vaccine court designed to compensate victims of vaccine injuries.

Contrary to the common assumption, I am not uniformly anti-vaccine. I think some vaccines make sense and represent a reasonable risk. On the other hand, I simply do not understand those people, especially left-wing scientists, who insist that all vaccines are intrinsically good. The following questions spring to mind:

1. Why does profiting from vaccines rather than anything else magically make a corporation intrinsically good rather than presumably greedy and evil?

2. How can one justify vaccines for non-lethal and non-communicable diseases on the basis of historically lethal and highly communicable diseases?

3. If vaccines are not capable of causing serious harm to children, why is it necessary to set up a system to compensate children who have been harmed and immunize vaccine makers from financial responsibility for those their products have injured?

4. How can anyone rationally claim that science uniformly supports vaccine use when no empirical studies that actually utilize the scientific method of experimentation and observation are utilized in testing vaccine safety?

5. Why do pro-vaccine advocates attack those who don’t vaccinate their children according to the vaccine schedule when doctors specifically tell parents not to vaccinate their children according to the schedule if an older sibling has had a negative reaction to a vaccine?

6. Why do pro-vaccine advocates assume that vaccines which are proven to be safe for adults are also safe for infants and toddlers who weigh a fraction of what an adult weighs?

Now, based on the principle of “follow the money”, I am confident that the current vaccine schedule is significantly more dangerous than most anti-vaccine people believe. If they were anywhere nearly as safe as advertised, it wouldn’t be necessary to provide special protection to the manufacturers. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t make sense to get vaccinized for tetanus and polio, but why on Earth would it make sense to take any risk, however slight, in order to avoid getting a cold or the chicken pox?

In case you ever wondered why I harbor such complete scorn for psychiatry and consider it to be intrinsically less scientific than astrology or even evolutionary biology, here is a pair of illuminating examples provided by Dr. Hervey Cleckley:

“I have become increasingly convinced that some of the popular methods presumed to discover what is in the unconscious cannot be counted upon as reliable methods of obtaining evidence. They often involve the use of symbolism and analogy in such a way that the interpreter can find virtually anything that he is looking for. Freud, for instance, from a simple dream reported by a man in his middle twenties as having occurred at 4 years of age drew remarkable conclusions. The 4-year-old boy dreamed of seeing six or seven white wolves sitting in a tree. Freud interpreted the dream in such a way as to convince himself that the patient at 18 months of age had been shocked by seeing his parents have intercourse three times in succession and that this played a major part in the extreme fear of being castrated by his father which Freud ascribed to him at 4 years of age. No objective evidence was ever offered to support this conclusion. Nor was actual fear of castration ever made to emerge into the light of consciousness despite years of analysis

Faithfully following Freud’s method of establishing proof by analogy, a prominent psychiatrist in his well-known book Beyond Laughter has given us a remarkable interpretation of the drum majorette. Most of us are likely to think that the average man’s pleasant reaction to these well-built, sparsely clad young ladies who prance happily and often somewhat sexily before the band at football stadiums can be pretty well accounted for by tastes and impulses quite obvious in nearly anyone’s consciousness. Such tastes and impulses, according to the interpretation in Beyond Laughter, must be considered as superficial or perhaps even as the result of reaction formation. The lissome girl, we are solemnly told, stands out before the grouped band just as an erect penis stands out before the larger mass of the body. This analogy is taken as evidence that interest and excitement about the provocative lass do not lie primarily in the fact that any ordinary man would find her attractive. In our unconscious she is said to be equated with the erect male organ, and it is maintained that men really feel toward her, as she stands projected before the group, as they unconsciously feel toward the penis of another male. Our positive reactions toward her, we are told, arise from our unrecognized and unaccepted homosexuality. No corroborative evidence is offered, nor any doubt expressed, about this interpretation. It is soberly offered as a fact, presumably discovered by science.”
– The Mask of Sanity pp 407-408

Keep in mind that this pseudo-scientific analogical “proof” is not only the sole basis for much atheist speculation about theistic mental health, but is also the conceptual foundation underlying Keynesian General Theory as well as Paul Samuelson’s statistical perversion of it. It is also remniscent of the quality of empirical evidence that has been gathered in support of the natural selection mechanic.