Tag: vaccines

Don’t listen to your patients, Doctor!

California disciplines a doctor for doing what doctors are supposed to do:

In a decision that could signal how California’s fierce vaccine debates will play out in the coming years, the Medical Board of California has ordered 35 months’ probation for Dr. Bob Sears, an Orange County pediatrician well-known for being sympathetic to parents opposed to vaccines.

In 2016, the board threatened to revoke Sears’ medical license for wrongly writing a doctor’s note for a 2-year-old boy that exempted him from all childhood vaccinations. This week, the medical board settled on a lesser punishment.

Sears can keep practicing medicine but will be required to take 40 hours of medical education courses a year, as well as an ethics class, and also be monitored by a fellow doctor. He also must notify all hospital and medical facilities where he practices of the order and is not allowed to supervise physician assistants or nurse practicioners.

Sears found himself in hot water because, according to the medical board, he wrote a vaccine exemption for a young boy without obtaining even basic medical information, such as the child’s history of vaccines. He took the boy’s mother at her word when she said her son lost urinary function and went limp in response to previous immunizations, according to the filing.

They’re going to have to revoke every medical license in California if listening to a patient and taking them at their word is no longer considered proper medical practice. Especially since if a restaurant simply ignored a mother telling a waiter about her child’s nut allergy, they’d probably prosecute the owners.

A new meaning to metalhead

New questions about autism and vaccines are being raised:

Research at Keele University, published in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology, provides the strongest indication yet that aluminium is a cause of ASD.

The aluminium content of brain tissues from five donors who died with a diagnosis of ASD was found to be extraordinarily high; some of the highest values yet measured in human brain tissue. Why for example, would one of the four major brain lobes of a 15-year-old boy with autism be 8.74 (11.59) micrograms/g dry weight – a value which is at least 10 times higher than might be considered as acceptable for an adult never mind a child?

Yet, while the aluminium content of each of the five brains was shockingly high it was the location of the aluminium in the brain tissue which served as the standout observation. The majority of aluminium was identified in non-neuronal cells, which are involved in maintaining a constant internal environment. Aluminium was also found in inflammatory cells in the brain, alongside clear evidence of inflammatory cells heavily loaded with aluminium entering the brain via the surrounding membranes and those that separate the brain from circulating blood.

The fact that the majority of aluminium found in brain tissues in ASD was within cells and associated with tissues that maintain the body’s internal environment is, at least for now, unique to ASD and may begin to explain why young adolescents had so much aluminium in their brains.

So, the obvious question this raises is: how did so much aluminum get into the brain tissue in the first place? And the obvious answer is: from being injected with vaccines containing aluminum.

I always enjoy the idiocy of the mindless pro-vaccine crowd. From the comments on the article.

“Very irresponsible to put a headline like this here. The study was debunked and discredited years ago.”

Study? What study? Years ago? The research is new. For me, the most convincing thing about the obvious fact that vaccines are not as safe as they are advertised is the fact that every single time I discuss the matter with a vaccine advocate, they lie about something easily shown to be false.

Well, that and the fact that I have personally witnessed a severe adverse vaccine reaction. There is no amount of sophistry and appeal to metastudies and pseudoscience and herd immunity that will ever move me in the slightest.

Unvaccinated children pose no risk to others

A Harvard immunologist corrects a common misconception on the part of vaccine advocates:

Do unvaccinated children pose a higher threat to the public than the vaccinated?

It is often stated that those who choose not to vaccinate their children for reasons of conscience endanger the rest of the public, and this is the rationale behind most of the legislation to end vaccine exemptions currently being considered by federal and state legislators country-wide.  You should be aware that the nature of protection afforded by many modern vaccines – and that includes most of the vaccines recommended by the CDC for children – is not consistent with such a statement.  I have outlined below the recommended vaccines that cannot prevent transmission of disease either because they are not designed to prevent the transmission of infection (rather, they are intended to prevent disease symptoms), or because they are for non-communicable diseases.  People who have not received the vaccines mentioned below pose no higher threat to the general public than those who have, implying that discrimination against non-immunized children in a public school setting may not be warranted.

  • IPV (inactivated poliovirus vaccine) cannot prevent transmission of poliovirus. Wild poliovirus has been non-existent in the USA for at least two decades. Even if wild poliovirus were to be re-imported by travel, vaccinating for polio with IPV cannot affect the safety of public spaces.  Please note that wild poliovirus eradication is attributed to the use of a different vaccine, OPV or oral poliovirus vaccine.  Despite being capable of preventing wild poliovirus transmission, use of OPV was phased out long ago in the USA and replaced with IPV due to safety concerns.
  • Tetanus is not a contagious disease, but rather acquired from deep-puncture wounds contaminated with C. tetani spores. Vaccinating for tetanus (via the DTaP combination vaccine) cannot alter the safety of public spaces; it is intended to render personal protection only.
  • While intended to prevent the disease-causing effects of the diphtheria toxin, the diphtheria toxoid vaccine (also contained in the DTaP vaccine) is not designed to prevent colonization and transmission of C. diphtheriae. Vaccinating for diphtheria cannot alter the safety of public spaces; it is likewise intended for personal protection only.
  • The acellular pertussis (aP) vaccine (the final element of the DTaP combined vaccine), now in use in the USA, replaced the whole cell pertussis vaccine in the late 1990s, which was followed by an unprecedented resurgence of whooping cough. An experiment with deliberate pertussis infection in primates revealed that the aP vaccine is not capable of preventing colonization and transmission of B. pertussis. The FDA has issued a warning regarding this crucial finding.[1]
  • Furthermore, the 2013 meeting of the Board of Scientific Counselors at the CDC revealed additional alarming data that pertussis variants (PRN-negative strains) currently circulating in the USA acquired a selective advantage to infect those who are up-to-date for their DTaP boosters, meaning that people who are up-to-date are more likely to be infected, and thus contagious, than people who are not vaccinated.
  • Among numerous types of H. influenzae, the Hib vaccine covers only type b. Despite its sole intention to reduce symptomatic and asymptomatic (disease-less) Hib carriage, the introduction of the Hib vaccine has inadvertently shifted strain dominance towards other types of H. influenzae (types a through f).These types have been causing invasive disease of high severity and increasing incidence in adults in the era of Hib vaccination of children.  The general population is more vulnerable to the invasive disease now than it was prior to the start of the Hib vaccination campaign.  Discriminating against children who are not vaccinated for Hib does not make any scientific sense in the era of non-type b H. influenzae disease.
  • Hepatitis B is a blood-borne virus. It does not spread in a community setting, especially among children who are unlikely to engage in high-risk behaviors, such as needle sharing or sex. Vaccinating children for hepatitis B cannot significantly alter the safety of public spaces.  Further, school admission is not prohibited for children who are chronic hepatitis B carriers.  To prohibit school admission for those who are simply unvaccinated – and do not even carry hepatitis B – would constitute unreasonable and illogical discrimination.

In summary, a person who is not vaccinated with IPV, DTaP, HepB, and Hib vaccines due to reasons of conscience poses no extra danger to the public than a person who is.  No discrimination is warranted.

Well, that would appear to settle that. No doubt the vaccine enthusiasts will soon be rushing to apologize to Jenny McCarthy for incorrectly charging her with murder. That being said, I note that she didn’t say anything about the measles vaccine, which presumably does help reduce the incidence of the disease – although not as much as travel and immigration bans would.

My personal opinion is that the entire debate is a charade. If people actually cared about public health, they would not permit any immigration from the third world. As long as mass migration is permitted, relying on vaccines to combat imported diseases will be a losing battle. So, unless and until the mass migrations are stopped, don’t even think about trying to force vaccines on anyone who doesn’t want them for them or their children.

Mercury is mercury

And none of it is good for you, regardless of how it is ingested or administered:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) once again advised pregnant women to curb consumption of fish in order to limit fetal exposures to neurotoxic mercury. This warning raises the baffling query: How can the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) justify its recommendations that pregnant women get flu shots which are laden with far more mercury than what’s found in a can of tuna?

The CDC has long answered that nettlesome question with the controversial claim that ethylmercury in vaccines is not toxic to humans. Now, two CDC scientists have published research decisively debunking that assertion. As it turns out, there is no “good mercury” and “bad mercury.” Both forms are equally poisonous to the brain.

The CDC study, Alkyl Mercury-Induced Toxicity: Multiple Mechanisms of Action, appeared last month in the journal, Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. The 45-page meta-review of relevant science examines the various ways that mercury harms the human body. Its authors, John F. Risher, PhD, and Pamela Tucker, MD, are researchers in the CDC’s Division of Toxicology and Human Health Sciences, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

“This scientific paper is the one of most important pieces of research to come out of the CDC in a decade,” Paul Thomas, M.D., a Dartmouth-trained pediatrician who has been practicing medicine for 30 years, said. “It confirms what so many already suspected: that public health officials have been making a terrible mistake in recommending that we expose babies and pregnant women to this neurotoxin.

One would have thought that simply the term “neurotoxin” would be sufficient to dissuade scientists and doctors from recommending ingestion, but apparently not. Look, they can produce all the “metastudies” they like to claim that injecting any amount of poison into very small children is absolutely harmless, but the concept simply defies logic on multiple levels.

And one doesn’t have to be “anti-vaccine” to question the medical community’s mantra that all vaccines are equally efficacious, safe, and necessary. Or to be aware of the reality of corporate profit motives, their historical indifference to consumer health, and regulatory capture.

Immigration and disease

A measles outbreak in Minnesota is the direct consequence of immigration:

An outbreak of measles is sweeping through a community of Somali refugees in Minnesota and the growing number of cases may be starting to test the limits of the Hennepin County healthcare system.

According to reports from the health commissioner’s office, there are now 30 cases of children in Hennepin County who have been diagnosed with measles, and 28 of them are Somali children who have not been vaccinated. All of the cases involve children 5 years of age and younger.

There have been 10 new cases of measles reported in Hennepin County in just the last four days. What’s worse, the outbreak has now spread to Ramsey and Stearns counties, where two more cases have now been reported, making a total of 32 cases in Minnesota as of 1:30 p.m. Friday.

The first Minnesota case was reported in March and has been steadily growing each week. It is the worst measles outbreak in Hennepin County, which includes the city of Minneapolis, since 2011, when 26 cases were reported. That outbreak also involved unvaccinated Somali children.

“Eleven of the 30 children have been hospitalized,” Doug Schultz, spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Health, told WND. He said he did not know how many of those cases have required intensive-care treatment. “But it wouldn’t surprise me if there were some,” he said.

WND received unconfirmed reports Friday that pediatric cancer treatments at Children’s Hospital Minneapolis were postponed Thursday due to the presence of measles patients at the hospital.

The parents of the cancer patients either “opted out” of their treatments when they were told of the measles outbreak, or had their treatments postponed, a healthcare worker told WND….

Measles were declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, But Minnesota and other states see sporadic cases, typically linked to international travel and the influx of Third World refugees and asylum seekers.

Now, we’re told that it is immoral for parents not to vaccinate their children, even when there is almost zero statistical risk of them contracting the diseases that are vaccinated against and there is a small, but real risk of harm from the vaccines.

How, then, can anyone possibly argue that immigration is moral when it clearly poses a direct threat to the health of the native population? And what is the point of working to eliminate diseases if you are simply going to import them later?

Overvaccination and brain inflammation

It appears that researchers may be zooming in on the nexus that connects vaccines and vaccine-related developmental issues:

Analyzing five years’ worth of private health insurance data on children ages 6-15, these scientists found that young people vaccinated in the previous three to 12 months were significantly more likely to be diagnosed with certain neuropsychiatric disorders than their non-vaccinated counterparts.

This new study, which raises important questions about whether over-vaccination may be triggering immune and neurological damage in a subset of vulnerable children (something parents of children with autism have been saying for years), was published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, Jan. 19.

More than 95,000 children in the database that were analyzed had one of seven neuropsychiatric disorders: anorexia nervosa, anxiety disorder, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and tic disorder.

Children with these disorders were compared to children without neuropsychiatric disorders, as well as to children with two other conditions that could not possibly be related to vaccination: open wounds and broken bones.

This was a well-designed, tightly controlled study. Control subjects without brain disorders were matched with the subjects by age, geographic location and gender.

As expected, broken bones and open wounds showed no significant association with vaccinations.

New cases of major depression, bipolar disorder or ADHD also showed no significant association with vaccinations.

However, children who had been vaccinated were 80 percent more likely to be diagnosed with anorexia and 25 percent more likely to be diagnosed with OCD than their non-vaccinated counterparts. Vaccinated children were also more likely to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and with tics compared to the controls.

Now, I’m as dubious as anyone about the legitimacy of psychiatric disorders, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in the main thrust of the story. But here is the potentially more significant issue that is not readily apparent. The tests which revealed the brain inflammation by which the psychiatric disorders are believed to have been caused occurred in children who were receiving shots as young as five. This raises the obvious question: what is happening to the brains of smaller, younger children who are receiving even more shots than their older counterparts?

Before the usual suspects on both sides of the vaccine debate react instinctively, keep in mind that this isn’t a question of the known benefits of vaccines or the known risks. This is a matter of balancing the known knowns against the known unknowns, which, by definition, cannot possibly be done until more can be learned about the unknowns. And even if any one vaccine, or series of vaccines, are beneficial, that does not mean that overvaccination is impossible, particularly if each shot causes a small amount of brain inflammation.

One shot of tequila won’t hurt you either. That doesn’t mean 25 in quick succession are harmless.

Vaccine lawsuit in Japan

This anti-Gardisil lawsuit could prove interesting, as Big Pharma’s political influence is considerably less in Japan:

Sixty-three young women are seeking a combined 945 million yen ($9 million) in compensation in the first mass lawsuit concerning side effects from cervical cancer vaccines.

The women are suing the central government and pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline Plc and MSD KK.

The lawsuits were filed July 27 in the district courts at Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka. The plaintiffs are aged between 15 and 22.

The women argue they have suffered health problems, such as pain in various parts of their bodies, difficulty in walking and also impaired eyesight, as a result of taking the vaccines that were meant to prevent cervical cancer.

They were mostly in junior or senior high school when they took the vaccines between July 2010 and July 2013.

The vaccines under question are GSK’s Cervarix, which was approved for domestic use in 2009, and MSD’s Gardasil, which was approved in 2011.

The plaintiffs argue that reports had been filed overseas where the two vaccines were in use before Japan about various side effects, including cases of death and serious illness.

On the downside, it looks as if the Japanese government is one of the defendants, which may be a tactical blunder by the plantiffs’ lawyers. But perhaps not; I know very little about the Japanese legal system. However, Japan is very big on taking full responsibility even when the individual is known not to be directly to blame, so I expect the pharmaceutical companies’ customary utilitarian defenses will not go over particularly well.

Vaccine safety and “ovarian failure”

Once more, we see that those oh-so-trustworthy scientists appear to have carefully buried the risks in the name of not allowing parents to make informed decisions about what they inject into their children:

The HPV vaccine is heavily pushed to both teen girls and boys. Even though countries such as Japan won’t formally have stated that they don’t want to support it, the United States continues to massively push this vaccine despite all the push back world-wide. The HPV money grab by pharmaceutical companies is blatant and unchecked. Well, now things just got a whole lot worse: The American College Of Pediatricians has announced that the HPV vaccine is “possibly” associated with ovarian cancer. You can view the document here.

     It has recently come to the attention of the College that one of the recommended vaccines could possibly be associated with the very rare but serious condition of premature ovarian failure (POF), also known as premature menopause.

The rest of the press release is a defensive mess, claiming that the studies aren’t proof positive. But here’s the thing, if the ACP is admitting this small amount, imagine how large the actual issue likely is? They are always in a mode of protection when it comes to this vaccine, it creates a lot of revenue, so for them to admit this is a really big deal.

Pharmaceutical companies do not want any negative publications regarding Gardasil. And certainly, they’ve coerced and influenced this organization into not putting out negative claims over the matter. This tells me that this new discovery is huge and creates potential liability for them. It is so big that they actually fear not disclosing it.

It’s amazing that so many scientists insist on continuing to do the one thing that is ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED to destroy all trust in them, which is point-and-shriek at those who do nothing more than dare to notice all the little anomalies and ask questions about the doubts that are quite naturally raised by their behavior.

Go ahead, shriek some more about Jenny McCarthy killing people. That’s ever-so-convincing to everyone who wonders about your integrity.

Science SJWs always lie

Orac Knows is always looking for a chance to take a shot at me because I spank him every time he tries to attack  my vaccine skepticism or whatever. He’s a typical scientist, educated, but not very smart, and totally unable to grasp the fact that his science degree doesn’t make him a match for an opponent with a significant advantage in intelligence.

He tried to leap on the fact that, according to him, the study cited by the New York Times in the story I linked to yesterday was flawed, and thereby claim that I don’t know what I am talking about.

There was just one little problem with that. I never read the study. I never pretended to read the study. I neither linked to nor cited the study.

From @oracknows: Quoth Vox Day: Antivaxers are more educated. Quoth the study Vox cites: Not exactly…

Vox Day @voxday 
You’re dishonest, Orac. More educated does not mean more intelligent. Look at us. You have more education. I’m smarter.

Orac ‏@oracknows
Of course, it amuses me that someone who is so “smart” didn’t seem to understand what the study he touts actually says. 🙂

Vox Day @voxday
You prove my point. I never read any study. I merely linked to the New York Times. You’re not amused, you’re dishonest.

Orac ‏@oracknows
In other words, to borrow a phrase from @WilliamShatner, I’m laughing at the superior intellect.

Vox Day @voxday 
My intellect is observably superior to yours. And you’re not laughing. You’re posturing.

Orac ‏@oracknows
Nope. I’m mocking you for being so lazy and anxious to believe the NYT version that you didn’t bother to check!

Vox Day @voxday
Why would I check it? I don’t check most news sources I link. The only
person leaping at anything is you. Why attack me, not NYT?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
And you also claimed I cited the study. I didn’t. You even knew I didn’t. You lied. See, YOU, I would check. Because you lie.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Proof @oracknows lied:

1. “Quoth the study Vox cites”
2. “it’s obvious that he just read the news…but didn’t actually look up the paper”

Notice how as soon as he’s busted on his two bait-and-switches – he tries to substitute “more intelligent” for “more educated” and “Vox is stupid because he got it wrong” for “I think the New York Times got it wrong”, he tries to back up and say that he’s just mocking me for excessive credulity in citing the New York Times.

You know, the leading American liberal news standard. Someone had better alert Wikipedia! The New York Times is no longer a reliable source!

This is like me claiming someone doesn’t understand economics because they cited GDP or inflation figures reported in the Wall Street Journal. It’s just ludicrously dishonest. But then, Orac isn’t actually interested in correcting the science or he would have focused on the New York Times and not me. He’s just another SJW with such short-term time preferences that he’s willing to throw his own reputation as well as the reputation of a liberal newspaper and a science reporter under the bus just to take an ill-advised shot at me.

The funny thing is that Spacebunny can land a killshot 100x more effective than all the SJWs desperately flailing about, and she can do it with considerably less effort.

UberFacts @UberFacts
A study found that astronauts had more difficulty doing things that required spacial reasoning and motor skills after 6 months in space.

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
@voxday would come back a vegetable…..

Anti-vaxxers are MORE educated

The news that anti-vaxxers are whiter, wealthier, and better-educated than those who place blind faith in vaccines won’t surprise anyone who has actually engaged a vaccine enthusiast on the subject. None of them know anything about history, few of them know anything about science, and all of them are prone to simply repeating the usual vaccine scare rhetoric:

The people most likely to refuse to have their children vaccinated tend to be white, well-educated and affluent, researchers report.

A study published in the January issue of the American Journal of Public Health used California state government data on “personal belief exemptions,” or opting out of vaccinations for nonmedical reasons. From 2007 to 2013, the rate of vaccine refusal for personal belief doubled, to 3.06 percent.

The researchers reviewed data among all kindergarten children in the state during that time. More than 17,000 children, attending 6,911 schools, were exempted.

Exemption percentages were generally higher in regions with higher income, higher levels of education, and predominantly white populations. In private schools, 5.43 percent of children were exempt, compared with 2.88 percent in public schools.

In some suburban areas, rates of exemption were near 50 percent, and more than a quarter of California’s schools have measles immunization rates below the 92 to 94 percent required for herd immunity, the level of vaccination necessary to protect people who are not immune.

The very simple fact of the matter is that vaccines are far, far less important in halting the spread of infectious disease than controlling entry and immigration from non-first world countries. This is obvious, since vaccine rates are still very high in the USA and Western Europe, and yet there is a massive rise in various diseases that is the direct result of global travel and large-scale immigration.

The idea that the current vaccine schedule is responsible for the huge decline in deaths from infectious diseases in the 19th century is not merely ahistorical, it requires a combination of ignorance and stupidity. This will become readily apparent before long as most children will continue to be vaccinated but disease rates will continue to rise thanks to the behavior and lifestyles of the New Americans.

You can be reliably certain that a position is wrong if it is inordinately held by magical thinkers or cargo cult scientists. Vaccines aren’t magic, they are merely a medical tool that is useful in some circumstances and useless in others. The simple and science-based fact is that most children don’t need most vaccines.