Tag: vaccines

Don’t read the citations

I always find it intriguing how science posers always assume no one is actually going to read the links they provide, so they can get away with saying whatever they want. Brett Williamson posted this comment:

“Way before this debate took place Dr, Gorski laid out why the Hooker report is wrong (twice):

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/did-a-high-ranking-whistleblower-really-reveal-that-the-cdc-covered-up-proof-that-vaccines-cause-autism-in-african-american-boys/

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/08/22/brian-hooker-proves-andrew-wakefield-wrong-about-vaccines-and-autism/#comment-346695

Both blog posts make valid, well articulated points. Puts a different light on the twitter exchange I would think.”

So, naturally, I read the first link. David Gorski begins with no less than four paragraphs of an ad hominem attack on Brian Hooker, concluding with this statement: “Of course, just because Brian Hooker has demonstrated many of the
characteristics of an antivaccine crank doesn’t mean that he might not
have a legitimate criticism this time. Does he? Let’s find out.”

After complaining about Hooker mentioning past scandals of medical science in a video that has nothing to do with the published paper, Gorski goes on to point out that Hooker has not proved something that his paper doesn’t even address. He finally gets around to making one legitimate point when he notes that: “He analyzed data collected for a case-control study as a cohort study.”

That’s questionable, to be sure. But does this exonerate the CDC? Well, no, according to Gorski: “So is Hooker’s result valid? Was there really a 3.4-fold increased risk
for autism in African-American males who received MMR vaccination before
the age of 36 months in this dataset? Who knows? Probably not, though.”

Seriously, that’s Gorski’s big takedown. “Who knows? Probably not, though.” Well, obviously, in that case, the science is settled! What this demonstrates is exactly what I told Gorski at the start: statistical review is not science. What people are doing on both sides of the vaccine debate is playing statistical games in order to generate rhetorical ammo; they are not doing much in the way of actual science. And they harder they work their statistics, the more they amplify their rhetoric, the less credible they look to concerned parents and moderate parties alike.

As I’ve pointed out previously, the debate is not going to end until a large-scale double-blind study on the current US vaccine schedule is done with an unvaccinated control group. Pro-vaxxers can hide behind how that would be unethical and so forth all they want, but that is what it is going to take to convince those who are, quite reasonably, skeptical about vaccines due to the behavior of those who profit from the production and administration of them.

“Follow the money” may not be sound science, but it has historically proven to be reliable logic. 

Vaccine fraud at the CDC?

Despite the vaccine makers thinking they had put the Wakefield controversy safely behind them, another researcher has uncovered an apparent link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and from the CDC’s own data:

Background
A significant number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder suffer a loss of previously-acquired skills, suggesting neurodegeneration or a type of progressive encephalopathy with an etiological basis occurring after birth. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectof the age at which children got their first Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine on autism incidence. This is a reanalysis of the data set, obtained from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC), used for the Destefano et al. 2004 publication on the timing of the first MMR vaccine and autism diagnoses.

Methods
The author embarked on the present study to evaluate whether a relationship exists between child age when the first MMR vaccine was administered among cases diagnosed with autism and controls born between 1986 through 1993 among school children in metropolitan Atlanta. The Pearson’s chi-squared method was used to assess relative risks of receiving an autism diagnosis within the total cohort as well as among different race and gender categories.

Results
When comparing cases and controls receiving their first MMR vaccine before and after 36 months of age, there was a statistically significant increase in autism cases specifically among African American males who received the first MMR prior to 36 months of age. Relative risks for males in general and African American males were 1.69 (p=0.0138) and 3.36 (p=0.0019), respectively. Additionally, African American males showed an odds ratio of 1.73 (p=0.0200) for autism cases in children receiving their first MMR vaccine prior to 24 months of age versus 24 months of age and thereafter.

The troubling thing here is that the author of the paper, “Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination timing and autism among young african american boys: a reanalysis of CDC data” reached his conclusions by examining CDC data that reached the opposite conclusion and served as the basis for a CDC doctor’s testimony before Congress. Bill Sardi writes on Lew Rockwell:

There is evidence of an intentional cover-up as it is alleged that data
from children who did not have birth certificates (not a pertinent
factor) was removed from the study to reduce the statistical power of
the study and claim there was no significant association between autism
and the MMR vaccine…. Dr. Hooker notes that the CDC used children under the age of 3 for a
comparison (control) group, which is an intentional way of skewing
results of its studies involving any alleged link between vaccines and
autism.  Symptoms of autism generally don’t emanate among children till
after age 3 and the control group was too young to have received a
diagnosis of autism, he notes.

Not only does this “reanalysis of CDC data” reopen the possible MMR-autism link, but it calls into question the integrity of the entire field of vaccine research. If Hooker is correct and CDC doctors such as Dr. Colleen Boyle have engaged in vaccine fraud, it will entirely explode the basic assumption that vaccines are safe because it will render all of the CDC’s data and assurances suspect.

It’s probably Jenny’s fault

I always find it amazing how vaxx-propagandists get worked up over American parents who don’t get their infants vaccinated against sexually transmitted diseases, then blithely turn a blind eye to mass immigration from countries with diseases for which there are not even any vaccinations:

Hundreds of West Africans could be carrying the deadly Ebola virus and not know it, potentially infecting hundreds more, as cash-strapped governments and overwhelmed aid agencies struggle to contain the virus’s spread.

At least 1,500 people have not yet been traced who are known to have come into contact with others confirmed or suspected to be infected with the haemorrhagic fever, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) told The Telegraph.

Many more could be moving freely in the three countries battling the virus, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, but fear of the illness and mistrust of Western medicine means they refuse to come forward to speak to doctors.

The current outbreak is the worst ever. So far 467 people have died and health staff have identified at least 292 other suspected or confirmed cases.

There were already serious concerns that Ebola had come to Italy with a boatload of illegal immigrants, which fortunately turned out to be a false alarm. Considering how Americans in Texas and Arizona are already catching tuberculosis and other diseases from the Border Intifada, it should be fascinating to see how Americans will react if one of those West Africans turns out to have hopped a plane to New York City… especially if it was in order to see Jenny McCarthy on The View.

Vaccine “safety”

The testing of vaccines is nowhere nearly as extensive as most people erroneously believe it to be:

Mick and Kirsten Button’s daughter Saba was just 11 months old when she received the Fluvax shot in April 2010. The then toddler suffered a hypoxic brain injury, kidney, liver and bone marrow failure. She can now no longer walk and talk and needs round-the-clock care. Three days after Saba was admitted at Princess Margaret Hospital, Fluvax was recalled. It is now banned for children under five….

In the claim the Buttons alleged Fluvax was defective after testing conducted by the company prior to April 2010 identified fever as a serious side effect of the 2010 batch. However the company denied liability then filed a cross-claim against the State of WA and the Health Minister. In return the State of WA filed a defence to the cross claim denying any liability. Settlement was reached between CSL, the State of WA and the family during recent mediation….

After Saba was admitted to hospital in 2010, it emerged there had
been more than 100 adverse reaction presentations to the vaccination at
PMH that flu season. But this information wasn’t passed on to the general public until after Saba was in the intensive-care unit.

The fact, the undeniable fact, is that vaccine companies have tremendous financial incentive to cut corners on safety, since they are not legally liable for their products in the USA. And what little information on the dangers exists is not, for the most part, available to the public. This combination of limited liability and limited information is bound to result in undesirable consequences.

Pro-vaccine dishonesty

If you are an advocate of mass vaccination who wonders why more and more people simply don’t trust those who are pushing vaccines on everyone, these two quotes from a vaccine debate on Reason should suffice to illustrate why:

PRO: A 2007 article in the Journal of the American Medical
Association compared the annual average number of cases and
resulting deaths of various diseases before the advent of vaccines
to those occurring in 2006. Before an effective diphtheria vaccine
was developed in the 1930s, for example, the disease infected about
21,000 people in the United States each year, killing 1,800. By
2006 both numbers were zero. Polio, too, went from deadly (16,000
cases, 1,900 deaths) to non-existent after vaccines were rolled out
in the 1950s and 1960s. Chickenpox used to infect 4 million kids a
year, hospitalize 11,000, and kill 105; within a decade of a
vaccine being rolled out in the mid-1990s, infections had dropped
to 600,000, resulting in 1,276 hospitalizations and 19 deaths.
Similar dramatic results can be found with whooping cough, measles,
rubella, and more.

CON: Judging from what one reads and hears in the popular media, it is easy to conclude that the science is settled, that the benefits of each vaccine clearly outweigh the risks, and that vaccinations have played the critical role in the decline of deaths due to infectious diseases such as measles, whooping cough, and diphtheria, all of which claimed many lives in the past.

However even a cursory look at the available data quickly reveals that the mortality from almost all infectious disease was in steep decline well before the introduction of vaccination or antibiotics. Diphtheria mortality had fallen 60 percent by the time vaccination was introduced in the 1920s, deaths from pertussis/whooping cough had declined by 98 percent before vaccination was introduced in the late 1940s, measles mortality had dropped 98 percent from its peak in the U.S. by the time measles inoculation was introduced in 1963-and by an impressive 99.96 percent in England when measles vaccination was introduced in 1968. In 1960 there were 380 deaths from measles among a U.S. population of 180,671,000, a rate of 0.24 deaths per 100,000.

The takeaway here is that vaccination played a very minor role in the steep decline in mortality due to infectious disease during the late 19th century and early to mid- 20th century. Improved living standards, better nutrition, sanitary sewage disposal, clean water, and less crowded living conditions all played crucial roles.

Again and again and again, we see the pro-vaccine side playing very fast and loose with the truth. They intentionally try to claim statistical benefits for mass vaccination that cannot possibly be attributed to it, even as the pharmaceutical companies disavow any responsibility for the products that they are lobbying to have legally imposed upon children who cannot possibly consent to having foreign substances injected into their bodies.

The vaccine lobby is a corrupt big government abomination that would vaccinate for oxygen if it could get away with it and no one who describes himself as a libertarian or even a conservative should support it in any way, shape, or form, regardless of his belief in the efficacy of vaccination. There is absolutely no libertarian case for mandatory vaccination and anyone who claims there is identifies himself as an ideological fraud.

Vaccine propaganda backfires

The faster they talk, the more readily apparent it is that they are lying:

Vaccines are doing their jobs preventing disease and death, and even bringing down societal costs, according to a new study in Pediatrics. But another study, published in the same journal issue, found that public health campaigns touting vaccines’ effectiveness and debunking the links between autism and other health risks might actually be backfiring, and convincing parents to skip the shots for their kids.

“Corrections of misperceptions about controversial issues like vaccines
may be counterproductive in some populations,” wrote the researchers
behind one of the studies, led by Dr. Brendan Nyhan, a health care
researcher at Dartmouth College in Hanover N.H. “The best response to
false beliefs is not necessarily providing correct information.”

It would help if the “corrections of misperceptions” weren’t so easily demonstrated to be false by anyone who is paying even a moderate amount of attention.

Vaccines are raciss

Or perhaps it is only the viruses that discriminate on the nonexistent basis of “race”:

[T]he HPV subtypes included in the existing two HPV vaccines — Gardasil, developed by Merck, and Cervarix, made by GlaxoSmithKline — are most common among white women but are significantly less common in non-white women. Within Hoyo’s trial, 65% of white women with HPV had the subtypes known as 16 or 18 , while only 36% of African-American women did. That means African-American women are only half as likely to get the type of HPV against which the vaccine works.

The findings highlight the complex role that race plays in medicine, especially as genetic studies reveal more biological reasons behind why racial and ethnic groups may have different propensities for disease, and respond in varying ways to drugs. “We don’t like to admit that race and ethnicity count, but they certainly do in the distribution of infectious diseases,” says Dr. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. “Not to sound like a dope, but when [race] matters it matters.”

HPV infection is hardly the first disease to be linked to race. Tay-Sach’s is more common in Ashkenazi Jews, sickle-cell anemia is found mostly in Mediterranean or African populations, and cystic fibrosis has a higher incidence among people with Irish or English ethnicity. But all of those conditions are driven by genetic mutations that can be detected through testing. What makes the HPV findings trickier is the fact that the vaccine is designed to protect women before they become infected, and there is no way to tell which strains a woman will get — except, as Hoyo’s findings suggest, by her race.

That suggests that medical predictions should be based on some type of racial profiling; is it ethical to recommend different vaccines for different women based on race?

It’s fascinating that the magical belief in the nonexistence of something that is materially and scientifically observable appears to be on the verge of being elevated to an ethical principle that trumps medical science.

We already know that this magical belief trumps statistical correlation. But it is remarkable to observe that some of those who otherwise claim to value science uber alles should reveal themselves to have elevated their fixed ideas on human genetic and cultural sameness to a state of ethical priority.

Of course, this is very dangerous ground for the equalitarians. Once one admits that different racial and ethnic groups not only exist, but have different propensities for disease, it becomes considerably harder to deny that both logic and history dictate that different human population groups have different propensities for things like crime and building, maintaining, and participating in advanced civilizations.

A lethally unsafe vaccine

Clinical equipoise notwithstanding, it should be interesting to see the anti-science vaccine extremists attempting to claim that “the lead researcher in the development of the human papilloma virus vaccines” doesn’t know anything about science or vaccines due to her expressed opinion concerning the risk of adverse side effects from the vaccine:

All trials of the vaccines were done on children aged 15 and above, despite them currently being marketed for 9-year-olds. So far, 15,037 girls have reported adverse side effects from Gardasil alone to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (V.A.E.R.S.), and this number only reflects parents who underwent the hurdles required for reporting adverse reactions.
At the time of writing, 44 girls are officially known to have died from these vaccines. The reported side effects include Guillian Barré Syndrome (paralysis lasting for years, or permanently — sometimes eventually causing suffocation), lupus, seizures, blood clots, and brain inflammation. Parents are usually not made aware of these risks.

44 dead.  Notice how the trials were completely unsuitable for proving the safety of the vaccine for the age of the girls to whom it is being administered.

Vaccines are not magic, like everything else, they need to be subjected to a basic risk/reward analysis.  But the scientific community has not only failed to due its duty to provide the public with the necessary information to perform this analysis, it has clearly failed to inform the public of the risks even when they were known, and known to be potentially fatal.

Some vaccines are necessary for certain people at certain times.  Gardasil and Cervarix are not, and no parent with a teenage daughter should permit her to receive them.

Vaccines is safe because SCIENCE!

In addition to demonstrating that vaccines are not intrinsically safe, this posterior-covering action by the CDC should suffice to conclusively prove that the organization cannot be trusted with regards to its statements concerning vaccine safety:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has once again been caught removing pertinent but indicting information about vaccines from its website. This time it involves the infamous polio vaccine, up to 98 million doses of which have been exposed as containing a cancer-causing virus that is now believed to be responsible for causing millions of cancers in America, according to the CDC.

The information was posted on an official CDC fact sheet entitled Cancer, Simian Virus 40 (SV40), and Polio Vaccine, which has since been removed from the CDC’s website. Fortunately, RealFarmacy.com was able to archive the damning page before the CDC ultimately removed it, presumably because SV40 has been receiving considerable attention lately due to its connection to causing cancer.

This also explodes Orac’s attempt to utilize “clinical equipoise” in order to justify not performing scientific studies.  Due to that “equipose”, putting 98up to 30 million Americans at an increased risk of cancer may turn out to be little more that the tip of the iceberg.  I know that biologists and epidemiologists are not trained in logic or basic risk/reward calculations, but I would think that even those whose academic backgrounds are in the softer sciences could handle the math involved in balancing the potential risk to a few hundred, or a few thousand, children provided placebos versus the risks involved in administering a completely untested schedule combining dozens of vaccines to hundreds of millions of very young children.

Vaccines, science, and equipose

Phonician previously embarrassed himself by demonstrating that he couldn’t tell the difference between Massachusetts and California.  Now he follows that up by showing that he can’t tell the difference between science and someone providing excuses to not make use of science.

Tell us again how much better you understand the science, Dipshit…

I will first point out that epidemiology is not science.  It is little more than professional statistical review and pattern recognition, and most epidemiologists are not even trained as scientists but have “a master’s in public health or a related field.”  They’re government bureaucrats. “More than half of epidemiologists work for government agencies at the local, state and federal levels.”

If epidemiology is science, then so is Tetris and technical analysis of the stock market.  Very little epidemiology involves the scientific method of developing hypotheses, performing experimental tests, and observing the results; the fact that the goal of epidemiology is to reduce infectious diseases doesn’t make it any more intrinsically scientific than sacrificing a white bull to Apollo to allay his wrath.

Orac explicitly points out that he is excusing the refusal of vaccine researchers to use the scientific method of blind clinical experiments to determine the safety of vaccines used in combination on very small humans due to “research ethics”.  That is not correcting me on the science, that is confirming my most central point!  There is no science being utilized at all, the “good scientific reason(s)” to which Orac appeals refers to the general consensus of the scientists based on unscientific grounds and not to genuine scientific evidence produced by the scientific method.

“Vox needs a lesson in clinical trial ethics. Again. Sadly, it will probably fall on the proverbial deaf ears, but I’ll give it a try again, starting with two words: Clinical equipoise.

Stated briefly, for purposes of clinical trials, clinical equipoise demands that there be a state of genuine scientific uncertainty in the medical community over which of the drugs or treatments being tested is more efficacious and safer or whether a drug being tested with placebo is better or worse than doing nothing. Without that genuine scientific uncertainty over which option being tested in a clinical trial is better (or at least less harmful), the trial cannot be ethical because investigators would be knowingly assigning one group of subjects to a treatment known to be inferior, or at least strongly suspected to be….  

Vox, for all his self-proclaimed Mensa awesomeness, seems totally unable
to understand that for some questions that is the best we can do
because scientific rigor sometimes conflicts with human subjects
research ethics.”

Of course, this is the same medical community that once possessed genuine “scientific” certainty that opening up patients’ veins and bleeding them was better than doing nothing. The long history of incorrect scientific consensuses that were eventually overturned by an individual who performed an actual scientific experiment suggests that one day, clinical equipose notwithstanding, it will be clearly seen that the mass administration of hundreds of millions of vaccines without any scientific evidence to support their safety was a far more egregious ethical violation than permitting a few hundred children to go unvaccinated for a few years.  And it strikes me that was a pattern recognized, so do you realize what we’re doing here?  That’s right, this is straight up epidemiology!

On a tangentially related subject, Scoobius Doobious demonstrates a certain failure of logic while bringing up the conventional justification for the mass administration of vaccines:

I’m no controversialist on the vaccine question (don’t know enough
to comment with a strong opinion), but I will remind you that there are
two very prominent bits of historical data worth pondering:

a) within
living human memory, polio was a terrible, monstrous scourge; and in
the wake of vaccine development, it is all but forgotten — polio didn’t
just burn itself out the way the Black Plague did, it was consciously
eradicated via vaccination.

b) ditto smallpox, IIRC.

Worth pondering.

I’m not sure why Scoobius appears to think it is necessary to remind anyone involved in this discussion of those two prominent bits of historical data.  But very well, let us ponder.

  1. Correlation is not causation and the correlation is not precise. The 95 percent decline in smallpox, diphtheria, pertussis, scarlet fever, and
    measles deaths from 1850 to 1945 all preceded the mass vaccination programs.
  2. Polio and smallpox killed or severely harmed considerably more people than whooping cough, measles, and chicken pox have.  The reward aspect of the risk/reward ratio for the vaccines is very different.
  3. Different vaccines result in different adverse reactions. They pose different risks.  The risk aspect of the risk/reward ratio for the vaccines is very different.

Post-pondering, it should be clear that justifying the administration of any and all vaccines because polio and smallpox is logically indefensible.  Even if we assume that the near-eradication of both diseases was the result of the mass vaccination programs, the risk/reward ratios of the various vaccine schedules need to be compared.  Unfortunately, that is the very information that clinical equipoise denies us.

I am not anti-vaccination.  I got a tetanus booster a few years ago myself.  My children were vaccinated against certain diseases, but not according to the government schedule, let alone the US schedule that many European doctors believe to be, (and here I quote a highly respected European epidemiologist), “insane”.  But I do take a very conservative approach to vaccines because I have personally witnessed an adverse reaction, and because, unlike Phoenician, I am aware that there is absolutely no scientific evidence for the safety of the current US vaccine schedule. Because clinical equipose.