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.


Is turnabout not fair play?

Setting aside the absurd and provably unscientific attempt of many vaccine advocates to blame whooping cough deaths on vaccine critics, it is informative to see the difference in the way the media covers the death of a child killed by an infectious disease versus the way it covers the death of a child killed by a reaction to a vaccine:

On March 9, 2009, four-week-old Dana McCaffery’s heart stopped after whooping cough left her tiny lungs unable to breathe…. Little did they know then that Dana’s death from whooping cough, and the media coverage that followed, came to represent a very inconvenient truth to the anti-vaccination lobby – and thus began an extraordinary campaign against this grieving family.

The McCafferys are today breaking their silence on the cyber bullying,the anonymous letters and the cruelty of some members of the anti-vaccination movement.

The couple has been accused of being on the payroll of drug companies; they have had their daughter’s death questioned and mocked; they have even been told to “harden the f . . . up” by an opponent of vaccination.

“The venom directed at us has just been torture and it’s been frightening, abhorrent and insensitive in the extreme,” says Toni, who has not had the strength to talk about this until now.

First, let’s do what the Australian Telegraph article failed to do and address the facts.  The child’s death from whooping cough was not likely the result of anti-vaccination campaigns or unvaccinated children.  The increased incidence of whooping cough in the United States, and therefore the death of Dana McCaffery, is primarily due to the reduced effectiveness of the current pertussis DTaP vaccine, which replaced the more effective, but less safe DTP vaccine in the 1990s.

As evidence, I again cite Science magazine to prove that the scientists, unlike the vaccine advocates, believe that it is the vaccines and not the anti-vaccination campaign that is responsible for what is described as “the return of the disease”.

Whooping cough, or pertussis, has exploded in the United States in recent years. A new study confirms what scientists have suspected for some time: The return of the disease is caused by the introduction of new, safer vaccines 2 decades ago. Although they have far fewer side effects, the new shots don’t offer long-lived protection the way older vaccines do.

Pertussis bacteria colonize the upper airways, causing a severe cough and shortness of breath that can be fatal in babies. The disease seemed to have mostly disappeared from the United States by the late 1970s—in fact, scientists believe, it continued to spread, undiagnosed, among adults—but over the past 2 decades the disease has bounced back with a vengeance, with strong outbreaks among school-aged children in 2010 and last year, when the United States reported 40,000 cases. Many European countries have also seen increases.

Researchers have long suspected that new vaccines might have something to do with it….  Physicians at Kaiser Permanente of Northern California compared the protective effects of these vaccines with the old ones when included in a four-dose series of shots called DTP (for diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis), given to children before the age of 2. They studied children born between 1994 and 1999, years in which Kaiser Permanente gradually introduced the new vaccines. As a result, some children had received only the old-style shots, some only the new ones, and some a mixture of both. Of the 1037 children included in the main part of the study, 138 got pertussis during a massive epidemic in California in 2010 to 2011.

Children who had received only the acellular vaccine were more than 5.6 times more likely to get sick than those who received the old, whole-cell vaccine, the team will report next month in Pediatrics. Those receiving one or more of each type had an intermediate risk.

The results confirm other recent research. In August, a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that acellular vaccine-vaccinated children in Australia were six times more likely to get sick than those receiving the old vaccine. And a study of another California population, published online in March by Clinical Infectious Diseases, showed an eightfold increased risk of illness associated with the new vaccine.

“We’re now finding out that the acellular vaccine’s doesn’t offer protection for as long,” says the first author of the new study, pediatrician Nicola Klein. “It does work well in the short term. But there was definitely a tradeoff in phasing out the whole-cell vaccine.”

Now, it is certainly impolitic to criticize, even by implication, grieving parents.  But that impolity and lack of respect for parental grief has been an aspect of the vaccine debate for years thanks to the vaccine advocates viciously attacking parents who have lost children to vaccine reactions.  Moreover, the media’s dishonest reaction to the McCaffery child’s death, including the linked Telegraph article, demonstrates that the vaccine critics were entirely correct to express their doubts about the child’s death and attempt to get more detailed information on it.

As the head of the Australian Vaccination Network stated: “To my mind, while an entire community of conscientious objectors
were being victimised by the government and the media and being blamed
for the death of a child who was too young to be vaccinated, I had every
right to ask for this information.”

The complaints of the mother, “they were just tearing apart everything we had just witnessed and lived through”, are totally misplaced.  She lost her right to private grief the moment that she permitted her child’s death to be used as pro-vaccine attack propaganda.

Every family, the McCafferys included, have the right to private grief so long as their grief remains private.  It does not have a right to use their grief as propaganda without expecting skepticism and criticism, much less to hide behind the emotional rhetoric of their child’s death to avoid legitimate, science-based criticism of their spurious attacks on vaccine skeptics.

And it is the height of hypocrisy for pro-vaccine advocates to object to the use of their very arguments against parents actively campaigning for vaccines:

Like the McCafferys, he went public to raise awareness about vaccination. In 2010 he did three television interviews and he left his phone number with each network for other parents to get in touch.  Soon after, he received a call from a woman who claimed she was from the AVN. He does not recall her name.

She accused him of doing the community a disservice, saying he should not be promoting immunisation.

“Then she went on saying my son was obviously weak and the weakest of the herd are not meant to survive, I should just get over it,” he says. Kokegei was gobsmacked. “I didn’t think someone could be that cold, to belittle what happened to my son in such a heartless way,” he says.

And yet, is this not the very argument that pro-vaccine arguments implicitly make when they argue that it is worth permitting some children to die in the interest of herd immunity?  For every sob story the vaccine advocates have to offer, the anti-vaccine advocates can cite a dozen that are equally rhetorically effective.  And they will never be won over, because all the statistical studies in the world will never convince a parent who has seen, with his own eyes, an infant scream and slump unconscious in immediate reaction to a vaccine injection.


Don’t blame Jenny McCarthy

It’s not the unvaccinated causing the increase in the incidence of whooping cough, it’s the vaccines:

Whooping cough, or pertussis, has exploded in the United States in
recent years. A new study confirms what scientists have suspected for
some time: The
return of the disease is caused by the introduction of new, safer
vaccines 2 decades ago. Although they have far fewer side effects, the
new shots don’t
offer long-lived protection the way older vaccines do….

Researchers have long suspected that new vaccines might have something
to do with it. Until the 1990s, children routinely received a so-called
whole-cell
vaccine, made from pertussis bacteria, Bordetella pertussis,
that were killed by exposure to formalin or other chemicals. These
vaccines were known to contain a toxin that can provoke powerful
side effects. Most vaccinated infants had fever and severe pain at the
injection site,
sometimes accompanied by febrile seizures or fainting fits in which
the infant turned pale, unresponsive, and “floppy.” 

Strange that while researchers “have long suspected” the new vaccines, the vaccine advocates writing in the media have constantly pointed at Hollywood actresses and vaccine skeptics.


Hair of the dog?

In which a vaccine for autism is posited:

A first-ever vaccine created by University of Guelph researchers for gut
bacteria common in autistic children may also help control some autism
symptoms. The groundbreaking study by Brittany Pequegnat and Guelph chemistry professor Mario Monteiro appears this month in the journal Vaccine.

They developed a carbohydrate-based vaccine against the gut bug Clostridium bolteae. C. bolteae is known to play a role in gastrointestinal disorders, and it often shows up in higher numbers in the GI tracts of autistic children than in those of healthy kids.

More than 90 per cent of children with autism spectrum disorders suffer from chronic, severe gastrointestinal symptoms. Of those, about 75 per cent suffer from diarrhea, according to current literature.

Thus raising the obvious question, how does C. bolteae manage to inordinately get itself into the intestinal tracts of autistic children?  It’s customary, at this point, to ritually denounce Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy. But ask yourself this question: if as much as 50 percent of the studies published in academic science are, to put it kindly, flawed, what are the chances that the oft-cited surveys funded by the vaccine manufacturers, (who, you will recall, are one of the very few industries that are not legally responsible for their products), are not?

To reiterate, I am not a “vaccine denier”.  Based on past discussions, I appear to understand the science and financial issues involved considerably better than most vaccine enthusiasts, including some medical doctors. I even got a tetanus vaccination myself only a few years ago. However, to understand that some vaccines are appropriate in some situations is very different than blithely assuming that all vaccinations are safe and appropriate in all circumstances.

It certainly fits with the break it and charge to fix it model that is presently so popular in the big business of modern medicine.


Vaccine “safety” and the swine flu vaccine

I find it tragically unsurprising how even with more than 800 confirmed cases of something as rare as teenage narcolepsy staring them in the face, the vaccine providers are still staunchly holding to their usual position of “no causal link”:

Emelie is one of around 800 children in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe who developed narcolepsy, an incurable sleep disorder, after being immunised with the Pandemrix H1N1 swine flu vaccine made by British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline in 2009.

Finland, Norway, Ireland and France have seen spikes in narcolepsy cases, too, and people familiar with the results of a soon-to-be-published study in Britain have told Reuters it will show a similar pattern in children there.

Their fate, coping with an illness that all but destroys normal life, is developing into what the health official who coordinated Sweden’s vaccination campaign calls a “medical tragedy” that will demand rising scientific and medical attention.

Europe’s drugs regulator has ruled Pandemrix should no longer be used in people aged under 20. The chief medical officer at GSK’s vaccines division, Norman Begg, says his firm views the issue extremely seriously and is “absolutely committed to getting to the bottom of this”, but adds there is not yet enough data or evidence to suggest a causal link.

Perhaps, as supposed to be the case with the increase in autism, what we’re seeing here is nothing more than a sudden increase in the parental awareness of narcolepsy…. What one always has to keep in mind when hearing the pro-vaccine parrots squawking “no causal link, no causal link” is that the standard they use for a causal link would eliminate the link between “being shot in the head” and “death” in the vast majority of lethal shootings.

In most cases, unless someone keels over dead after receiving a vaccination while still in the doctor’s office, the vaccine propagandists will claim that there is no link between the administration of the vaccine and the resultant harm that has been suffered by the individual receiving it.  Of course, having personally witnessed an individual collapse unconsciousness within two seconds of receiving a vaccine and hearing the doctor exclaim “oh, no”, I tend to have a considerably more skeptical outlook concerning the purported safety of vaccines and the vaccine schedule than the average individual.

The undeniable fact of the matter is that vaccines are not entirely safe, nor as they as safe as the vaccine advocates claim they are.  The precise degree to which they are unsafe is completely unknown, by either side, because no real and replicable scientific experiments have been performed concerning the current U.S. vaccine schedule.

Furthermore, we also know for an absolute fact that the vaccine manufacturers cherry-pick their statistical studies purporting to demonstrate the safety of the products they are selling.  The only rational position one can take concerning the safety of vaccines is a cautiously skeptical one, particularly in light of the legal immunity granted to those who manufacture, sell, and administer them.

To be clear, I am not against all vaccines.  I even received a tetanus shot when my kneecap was torn open on the soccer field a few years ago.  But it is also perfectly clear to me that not all vaccines are equally safe, or equally necessary.


The gun, she smokes

One of the main reasons I am a vaccine skeptic is that the organizations which vaccine advocates repeatedly cite in their attempt to claim vaccine safety are caught concealing information that indicates the opposite:

 Documentation received from the National Coalition of
Organized Women (NCOW) states that between 2009 and 2010 the
mercury-laden combined flu vaccinations have increased Vaccine Adverse
Events Reporting Systems (VAERS) fetal death reports by 4,250 percent in
pregnant women. Eileen Dannemann, NCOW’s director, made abundantly
clear that despite these figures being known to the Centers for Disease
Control (CDC), the multiple-strain, inactivated flu vaccine containing
mercury (Thimerosal) has once again been recommended to pregnant women
as a safe vaccination this season….

Despite evidence that the CDC knew of the 4,250 percent increase in
fetal death reports in 2009/2010, in order to ensure the continuance of
the vaccine program for pregnant women, the CDC published a study in
AJOG authored by Dr. Pedro Moro of the CDC in the fall of 2010. The
study articulated that there were only 23 miscarriages caused by the
single flu vaccine in 19 years between 1990 – 2009, an average of 1.2
miscarriages per year. This study formed the basis of a CDC worldwide
publicity campaign that the flu shot was safe for pregnant women by
willfully and strategically excluding the 2009 pandemic data, which was
available to them.

For those who blithely argue that all vaccines are developed scientifically and therefore safe – a fascinating approach from a logical perspective – and insist that the CDC should be considered more reliable than other government regulatory agencies such as the BEA or the SEC, I wonder how they can defend the notion that the CDC data is trustworthy when it is confirmed that the organization is making knowingly false statements concerning the safety of vaccines known to cause adverse effects.


Mandatory guinea pigs

The AMA contemplates “compulsory involvement in vaccine studies“.  From a paper entitled “Should Participation in Vaccine Clinical Trials be Mandated?”

“If progression of promising vaccines from the lab to the clinic is to remain unaffected and financial inducement is an ethically unacceptable solution to the recruitment shortage, other strategies need to be considered. Compulsory involvement in vaccine studies is one alternative solution that is not as outlandish as it might seem on first consideration. Many societies already mandate that citizens undertake activities for the good of society; in several European countries registration for organ-donation has switched from “opt-in” (the current U.S. system) to “opt out” systems (in which those who do not specifically register as non-donors are presumed to consent to donation, and most societies expect citizens to undertake jury service when called upon.”

It goes without saying that this is monstrous.  But the fascinating thing here should be the response of those vaccine advocates who have repeatedly argued that the only reason there are no serious double-blind studies of any approved vaccine series is that it would be unethical to use people in such scientific experiments because they would not know if they had received placebos or the actual vaccines.  I’m curious to see if they will suddenly pivot and start arguing that while giving placebos – which are by definition harmless in themselves – is unethical, forcibly giving test vaccines to unwitting human lab rats is perfectly acceptable.

We already know they’re morally and logically bankrupt, I’m mostly interested in learning how far down into the abyss they are willing to plunge.