It looks as though the check has finally cleared.
You might be wondering what I'm referring to. A little more than a week ago, I took note of how a truly awful survey masquerading as a "study" had risen from the dead once again as two publications in a notorious bottom-feeding predatory "open access" journal after having been retracted after publication in a somewhat less notorious but similarly bottom-feeding predatory "open access" journal. Whether or not these studies were actually retracted the second time around is somewhat unclear. What is known is that they were on the Open Access Text (OAT) website, and then they weren't.
For the second time, a journal has quickly retracted a study that suggested vaccines raise the risk of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.
The study first raised a furor last year, prompting a Frontiers journal to quickly retract it. After it was republished in the Journal of Translational Science this month, that journal has also retracted it.
Although the titles of the two papers changed, the abstracts were nearly identical. Both studies surveyed the parents of 666 home-schooled children, 39% of whom where not vaccinated, and concluded that vaccination increased the risk of neurodevelopmental problems, particularly if children were born prematurely.
A representative of the Journal of Translational Science told us “Pilot comparative study on the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated 6- to 12-year-old U.S. children” has been retracted, and it will update us with an explanation.
Not surprisingly, that never happened, and the mystery remained. Someone from the journal told Retraction Watch that the studies had been retracted, and then yesterday people started noticing that they were back on OAT website. Not surprisingly, given the nature of OAT journals, including the Journal of Translational Science, the jokes about the check finally having cleared wrote themselves. My purpose here is not to reiterate what's wrong with the two studies, the first of which purported to show that vaccinated children are much unhealthier than unvaccinated children, and the second of which purported to show that the only reason premature birth is a risk factor for neurodevelopmental disorders is because of vaccines. I discussed them both in great detail quite enough. I'm more interested in what this whole incident shows about the bankruptcy of antivaccine "science." Whatever happened, the CMSRI is gloating that the studies are back:
For instance, there's Celeste McGovern, some of whose antivaccine nonsense I missed last week, referring to the study as the "big taboo." That's how antivaxers always portray themselves, as the persecuted warriors for "truth" while those evil "skeptics" (or "Skeptics," as McGovern refers to them) are trying to "suppress" that truth. Here, she describes what happened when a Frontiers journal first retracted the Mawson paper:
There was no thought or delay in the Skeptic response. They did not waste time with letters of inquiry or professional concern. They did not wait to consider the methodology or the data or its interpretation or to read the full discussion.
Um, no. It was apparent from what we knew about the genesis of the survey and from the abstract itself that the methodology was without merit. McGovern was only getting started, though:
They jeered and screamed “anti-vaxx” – which is the equivalent of ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ and thrown like a bludgeon at anyone, even a credible professor and researcher with a 30-year career, who questions the safety of the expanding use of this particular type of pharmaceutical product for children. “Anti-vaxx” is a silencer.
A fumbling editor at Frontiers tweeted in haste that the study had only been provisionally accepted and the review would be re-opened “in response to concerns raised.”
One skeptic is gloating that he is solely responsible for blighting the entire study consideration process:
“I pride myself to have caused the Frontiers anti-vaxx retraction with one tweet!” Leonid Schneider tweeted this week. “The anti-vaxx paper was published as abstract, a reader alerted me, I tweeted, Frontiers got scared, pulled the paper.”
Even Retraction Watch reported the story that way. After receiving criticism on Twitter, Frontiers released a public statement, noting that the study was only “provisionally accepted but not published,” and is being re-reviewed. “
I described what happened when it happened. From my perspective, the study was so bad that even a Frontiers journal considered it too bad to complete the publication process and publish the entire article. So Mawson shopped the paper around and found a journal with even lower standards than a Frontiers journal.
McGovern then addresses the most recent "retraction" (or whatever the temporary "depublishing" of Mawson's papers was):
Now, an editor at the Journal of Translational Science has bowed to these forces again. Retraction Watch reports that the study has been “retracted – again.” But there has been no formal statement issued by the journal. I emailed the Editor in Chief, Terry Lichtor, a professor at Arkansas State University, twice. When I didn’t hear from him I called the London office and was told they would telephone him to make sure he got my questions. The person on the phone seemed to know about my emails. I’ve had no reply.
I contacted two editors at Retraction Watch and asked if they weren’t using the term “retracted” rather loosely for the study, considering the professional ethics and implications. No reply.
“With millions of views, the concerns that this study raises will not be easily wiped away from the public consciousness,” says Claire Dwoskin, founder of the Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute, which contributed to funding for the study.
“It would more greatly serve the interests of public health and science to replicate the study on a larger scale and determine the accuracy of the results, rather than harkening back to a time where book burning and persecution of scientists reigned the day. If the study is not restored on the journal's website, it may be fair to conclude that some of the lessons of the past have not been learned after all.”
This is the dodge that all quacks and pseudoscience advocates fall back on whenenver their terrible scientific methodology and bogus studies are criticized. In the case of one of the studies, we know that one of its key findings is so out of whack with what is known from many, many, many high quality studies dating back to the 1970s showing that premature birth is a major risk factor for neurodevelopmental disorders that it was a huge red flag. Moreover, the methodology and statistical analyses of the studies were so bad, so incompetently carried out, that it's quite safe to say that the results are almost certainly invalid. There is no need for "further research," at least not based on Mawson's utter dreck of a couple of studies. But I do love how predictable McGovern is in crying, "Persecution!" and comparing a retraction to a book burning.
She also, like most antivaxers, misunderstands what scientists mean when they refer to a finding as "settled science":
But people who say “vaccine science is settled” are being dishonest. Science is never settled. By its very nature, science questions orthodoxies and constantly seeks and discovers new things.
Well, yes, but not quite how McGovern means it. There are certain findings in science that are so well-supported by evidence that the burden of evidence to change or refute these findings is very, very high. Such findings are considered "settled science." That's not to say that they are findings that will never be changed or even radically altered; rather, it's a recognition of just how high the bar is to challenge findings in terms of evidence, given the level of evidence supporting the them.
I like to use homeopathy as an example because it is so incredibly, ridiculously improbable and for homeopathy to work huge swaths of existing chemistry and science would have gto be not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong. Even so, I concede the tiny possibility that this much science might be wrong but point out that to demonstrate that homeopathy "works" would take a mass of evidence at least as large, high quality, and compelling as the existing scientific evidence supporting current theory in physics and chemistry. One little study won't do it. But that's what homepathy advocates cite.
The same is true for antivaxers. Although it is less implausible that vaccines might cause autism than that homeopathy works, it is still very, very implausible indeed, based on a large, robust, and mutually reinforcing body of scientific research from multiple disciplines. Two crappy "studies" based on a crappy "survey" of an unrepresentative population, which, when you come right down to it is all Mawson's "studies" are, won't seriously challenge the existing scientific consensus that vaccines are not a risk factor for autism. Not even close!
None of this stops McGovern from engaging in the common crank fantasy of ultimate vindication:
Skeptics have closed ranks against this one line of inquiry. We don’t know how important that line is. But we can be pretty sure that history repeats itself and when medical history textbooks are rewritten a long time from now, there will be names of medical heroes like Semelweiss in there, people who challenged orthodoxy and went where no one wanted to go. And there will be brief allusions to the hordes of nameless scientific fools who impeded medical progress while countless children suffered.
Of course, skeptics have not "closed ranks against this one line of inquiry." We merely point out how incompetently Mawson and other antivaxers engage in this line of inquiry. After all, it's not as though real scientists (as opposed to antivaccine scientists) haven't done "vaxed/unvaxed" studies before comparing health outcomes between the two groups. There have been several such studies. And guess what? The results aren't what antivaxers would have you believe. Such studies have generally found either that there is no difference between the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated children or that vaccinated children are actually healthier. But that's not what people like McGovern want to hear.
I can't help but finish with a very old "friend" of the blog, J.B. Handley, founder of the antivaccine group Generation Rescue:
If you're confused, you're not alone. And just to clarify: this study has NEVER been retracted, only removed by two journals, and re-published by the second one...Starting to think this is the study that just "won't go away!"
I notice that The Gnat also thinks I wouldn't address this. Silly Gnat.
No, it is, as I referred to it before, the zombie study. Or the Jason study. Or the Michael Myers study. Or the Freddy Krueger study. Or pick the name of your favorite movie monster that appears to die at the end of one movie and always returns for another movie to kill again. I hope Retraction Watch will follow up on what happened, but somehow I doubt that there will ever be a coherent answer to the question of what happened here. My best guess remains that the check finally cleared, because Mawson's study is so bad that even a pay-to-publish journal balked.
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Hi Orac:
In a recent post, you cited the "thoughtscapism" blog article on "vax-unvax" studies.
Orac sattes: " it is a myth that there are no studies comparing the health of vaccinated children compared to unvaccinated children. In fact, there have been several. It turns out that they don’t show what antivaxers think a vaxed/unvaxed study will show. Basically, all of the vaxed/unvaxed studies not done by antivaccine-friendly scientists or quacks have shown either no differences in the prevalence of neurodevelopmental or chronic diseases between vaccinated children and unvaccinated children"
The studies cited did not actually look at neurodevelopmental or chronic disease outcomes (except for asthma and allergies). No vax-unvax study has ever looked at utism ADHD etc. All the alleged vax-unvax studies have severe problems that render the results irrelevant to the CDC vaccine schedule and how vaccines are used today.
The studies you cite are debunked here: http://vaccinepapers.org/alleged-vax-unvaxed-debunked/
Go look. Its clear these vax-unvax studies are not as you describe.
I've seen your "rebuttal" before and laughed. Part of the reason is that, yes, such studies have problems, but for some reason you seem to think the Mawson study as having "strengths and weaknesses" (as you put it in the comments) when in fact it has zero strengths that I've been able to find and glaring weaknesses that make it so bad that it's basically useful for nothing more than lining a bird cage. As for bias, you seem oblivious to the bias in the Mawson study. As for the third study, I like Matt Carey's take on it:
https://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/2014/01/22/a-vaccinated-vs-unvaccinat…
And then:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/10/21/are-unvaccinated-children-…
You see healthy user bias everywhere, whether it actually exists or not. :-)
hi Orac
The Mawson study has a few strengths that make it unique:
1) comparing fully vaccinated with zero-vaccine groups. And by fully vaccinated, I mean the US CDC schedule. Not a wimpy schedule with just a few vaccines. There is a large difference in vaccine exposure in the compared groups. None of the vax-unvax studies you cite (via the thoughtscapism blog) do this.
2) Looking at a variety of long term neurodevelopmental and immune outcomes. None of the thoughtscapism-cited studies do this either.
3) Good matching on socioeconomic status and income. The Bloom (Philippines) study is terrible in this regard. That all subjects were homeschooled adds to the matching.
4) The substantial size of the study. 666 subjects isnt too shabby. The KIGGS study had only 50 subjects with zero vaccines age 6+. The bloom study had only 85 fully vaccinated subjects.
Of course I agree there are weaknesses, like the fact is a survey and that parents were not interviewed. But I you have not explained in detail why this is such a fatal problem. All studies have weaknesses and I just dont see how the survey issue is a big enough problem to make it as terrible as you say. You are overreacting.
Healthy user bias IS everywhere in vaccine world. HUB explains why observational (i.e. nonrandomized) vaccine safety studies consistently fail to detect adverse outcomes.
Did you see this new result with the DTP vaccine? 5X higher mortality Orac. And it was a great study with randomization.
http://vaccinepapers.org/high-mortality-dtp-vaccine/
HUB also explains why all the MMR-autism study results are wrong. Its a systematic source of bias that affects MMR studies particularly strongly. Thats because infants injured by the first 6 months of vaccines dont getr MMR. The parents stop vaccinating after their terrible experience. These vaccine-injured children are used as controls in the MMR studies.
OOOOOPS!
"...we can be pretty sure that history repeats itself and when medical history textbooks are rewritten a long time from now, there will be names of medical heroes like Semelweiss in there, people who challenged orthodoxy and went where no one wanted to go."
I can be even more sure that medical history texts of the future will not be loaded with fulsome praise of John Brinkley (who implanted goat testes into men to improve their virility), or the people who challenged "orthodoxy" by doing wholesale lobotomies for mental illness, or the antivax quacks like Mark Geier who've inflicted chemical castration drugs on autistic boys.
"Orthodoxy" (a.k.a. evidence-based medical practice) of the future is extremely unlikely to remember Mawson and his cheerleaders kindly.
You say 'silly', but downright disgusting is more like it.
Check out this new comment on his blog -
http://www.autisminvestigated.com/new-american-measles/#comment-275013
I'm pretty sure we have a darn good example of Jake's editing here - as in editing a comment to say something the poster never said, or ever thought.
WTF? Thanks for bringing that to my attention Johnny. What a shitweasel Jake Crosby has become.
There have also been at least three studies that addresssed neurodevelopmental issues and vaccination rates. They found no difference.
A. A relatively small study looked at rates of ASD among vaccinated and unvaccinated siblings.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23045216
B. Smith and Woods looked at on schedule vaccination in the first year and neurodevelopmental outcomes.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/125/6/1134.abstract
Destefano looked at rates and ASD.
http://jpeds.com/webfiles/images/journals/ympd/JPEDSDeStefano.pdf
The recent meta analysis also looked at vaccines.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/24814559/
None are perfect, but there is data on that, and it will take more than a fatally flawed study to counter that.
I'm still trying to figure out the hypothesis. Unless the claim is that even one vaccine somehow does something irreversible besides generate immunity, what's the supposed difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated children?
I'm getting bored with the zombie metaphor, so I came up with one of my own.
Anti-vaccine studies are like a clown car act, where the clowns trip around trying to get the car restarted. All cheer when the car rattles off, but the car still runs into the scenery as it putters away.
While I like the imagery of a clown car to describe an antivaccine study (and indeed have referred to antivaccine blogs as "clown cars" in the past), I'm having trouble visualizing how this metaphor works... :-)
@Christine: The thing about clown cars is that they usually contain several more clowns than you would expect to fit in a car that size. Which, come to think of it, works as a metaphor for the anti-vax crowd.
Orac writes,
It looks as though the check has finally cleared.
MJD says,
An "open access" journal publication is simply a means of getting information into the public domain.
For some, it's not about "ego".........it's about connection.
I've been there (i.e., pay to publish) and would like to connect again if I had something to share that was worth the effort and expense.
Open Access Publication = Sharing is caring
@Eric Lund: I think it actually works literally rather than a metaphor. They ARE a bunch of clowns and there are always more of them than one might think possible.
I think it is time for us to develop our own bottom feeding science journal. We could call the journal, JUICES: Journal of Unreliable, Irresponsible, Crazy, Ethereal Studies.
If I don't comment again today or tomorrow morning, my next comments will be from Chiang Mia, Thailand.
So, the VP troll above thinks this is a legitimate study, even though no attempt was made to actually confirm any of the survey answers?
It's selection bias at its worst.
It doesn't "add" to the matching, it reduced the external validity.
Is "not to shabby" scientific vernacular? Cough*sample power*effect measure*cough.
The fact that you can't see how a survey, with the type of questions asked and no verification, is problematic emphasises why you have no credibility critiquing anything. Your bias is very obvious.
A survey, at best, can only be the least effective, least accurate kind of study. One that is internet based allowing no way to verify anything takes the 'least' status to zero.
To start digging, you then get it retracted from a crappy journal, then reopened (when the check clears?).
It "isn't too shabby," because the "survey" has conclusions that he agrees with.
Exactly.
Well, take a look at this - http://www.autisminvestigated.com/vaccinated-unvaccinated/#comment-2750…
Again, nobody that knows you thinks it's really your words.
It makes sense, really. Jake can't go with science, because he knows there isn't any that supports his position. He can't hang where free comments are allowed, because he's a gutless wimp who can't handle the meanies who tell him the truth. He can't turn to friends, because he's pissed off all the other AV communities so he doesn't have any (well, he has Hans and Rose, but I have no evidence they aren't socks). All he can do is stay in his safe space, and when something comes his way that shatters his little bubble, he has to defuse it the only way he knows how.
@Johnny and Science Mom: That's exactly why, if I bother to post on Jake's blog, I make sure I cross post the comment here. So that it can't be toyed with. AND...if there's a comment over there that *isn't* cross-posted here, then it's not from me, it is a sock. (Though, TBH, I can't be bothered to check out Jake's blog on any regular basis, because his writing is terrible.)
@Fake Science Mom, Does the gnat think he can draw blood with this (mis)appropriation of your nym? His readership won't know and their numbers must be frightfully small to make this sort of idiocy seem reasonable.
That comment and the others have a distinct whiff of a recently departed sock from here. Perhaps Jake can find the stones to clarify and remove those comments if he wasn't the perpetrator. Not holding my breath though.
I admit I hadn't considered that they were flat out sock-puppet entries. Knowing that Jake edits comments, I figured that was the case here. I wouldn't put it past He Who I Will Not Name As Long As He Doesn't Post Here, and I agree that Jake will probably be disinclined to do anything about it. I'd even go so far as to say that it probably brings a big grin to his face.
@MJD:
FTFY.
I missed this the first time around, but does the Mawson et al. survey really have 666 subjects? That number would be somewhat ironic, given the likely religious orientation of many of the participants.
And just to emphasize the point: Having larger numbers helps reduce the statistical errors in your result. The relative statistical error is proportional to 1/sqrt(N). But it does nothing to help your systematic errors. If your survey methodology is designed to prove your point, your results will be just as bad with N=20,000 as with N=20. Garbage in, garbage out.
So, the VP troll above thinks this is a legitimate study, even though no attempt was made to actually confirm any of the survey answers?
A survey in which anyone could participate (nothing restricting it to parents who had been sent invitations), and which had been announced on antivax forums well ahead of time.
I am sure this low life was just performing a study on how to change behavior in teenage girls:
In May 2017 the Chiropractic Commission charged chiropractor Derek Hayden (CH00034208) with unprofessional conduct. Charges say Hayden had a sexual relationship with a teenage patient he had been treating since she was 9-years-old. The patient allegedly lived in Hayden’s home for more than a year. Charges say the goal was to correct the patient’s behavioral problems, but Hayden lacked a license as a counselor or any other kind of mental health professional. Hayden allegedly gave her signature authority to one of his bank accounts. Hayden allegedly didn’t keep adequate records of his treatment of the patient.
Mawson's other OAText paper also de-retracted. The one on prematurity, with the eyebrow-raising report that premature birth, in the absence of vaccination, is *not* a risk factor for neurological problems.
And with author affiliations still wrong.
This really does have shades of the grifters at OAText finding a way to improve their personal liquidity.
My immediate reaction was that this was Travis. Jake doesn't use language like that. When he edits my comments, he does so by taking some stuff out so he doesn't have to respond to it, not completely changing the wording. Or in Becky's case, he renames her as Brian Deer.
Oh yes, the PDF has not changed; it is still date-stamped "28th April". And its temporary disappearance is not explained by the rationale offered by CMSRI for the disappearance of the vaccine / non-vaccine paper ("the editors took it down while they investigated the retraction of its earlier version in Frontiers"). Leaving us with the "ransom demand" explanation.
I am laughing so hard that the tears are dropping on to the keyboard.
The Mawson study has exactly 0 strengths (actually come to think of it, there might even be negative strengths). This lack of strengths start with the way the data was gathered: by internet survey that anyone could fill in, targeted at an unrepresentative group of the population but that anyone could fill in, promoted widely among the anti-vaccine groups, where participants were encouraged to recruit other participants, and where reporting of vaccination and health conditions was completely unverified.
There is an old statistics saying, more recently co-opted by people in computers, that goes: Garbage in, garbage out. The data for the Mawson papers was garbage of the lowest order - so putrid that no one else would touch it.
Here we have the council do hard rubbish pick ups, where you put out all your large pieces of rubbish to be collected. There is a thriving scavenger business where people go and search through other people's rubbish for metal, bits of furniture that might still work and other gems before the council picks it up. Many of the piles of hard rubbish decrease significantly in size before the pick up, but not ours. It seems we put out true junk* for collection. Mawson's data set reminds me of our junk.
*We have another old saying that goes: Stuff is the junk you keep and junk is the stuff you throw away. My wife accuses me of failing to properly distinguish between junk and stuff.
If there is such a difference in ascertainment (ascertainment bias), then why does the unvaccinated group have far higher rates of vaccine-preventable diseases?
If the respondents are lying, then again why did they report such high levels of vax-preventable diseases?
So the argument here is that the respondents just made everything up?
Thats it?
Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
Why are these not strengths?
These characteristics are objectively better than the KIGGS and 2 other alleged vax-unvax studies cited by Orac.
1) comparing fully vaccinated with zero-vaccine groups. And by fully vaccinated, I mean the US CDC schedule. Not a wimpy schedule with just a few vaccines. There is a large difference in vaccine exposure in the compared groups. None of the vax-unvax studies you cite (via the thoughtscapism blog) do this.
2) Looking at a variety of long term neurodevelopmental and immune outcomes. None of the thoughtscapism-cited studies do this either.
3) Good matching on socioeconomic status and income. The Bloom (Philippines) study is terrible in this regard. That all subjects were homeschooled adds to the matching.
4) The substantial size of the study. 666 subjects isnt too shabby. The KIGGS study had only 50 subjects with zero vaccines age 6+. The bloom study had only 85 fully vaccinated subjects.
ANY survey is objectively worthless as a scientific study. A survey previously advertised in the antivax swamp, where every brain-dead denizen thereof was encouraged to respond to it and lie their a$$es off--yeah, that's a strength.
I've encountered imbeciles online before--but you're the godd@mn ultimate.
Vaccine Papers, epidemiology, how much? For that matter, who were the epidemiology-trained researchers in that survey? (To call it a cross-sectional study is like calling your site an informational website.)
I've judged better 3rd grade science fair projects than the unverifiable nonsense of Mawson. A quick search on Facebook for when Mawson oh-so-unscientifically trolled for his survey participants shows posts like this from 2012 ( http://tinyurl.com/kcqwgky ) where a home school group soliciting participants notes:
No information is requested that could personally identify anyone. We are requesting only state and zip code of residence. Responses to the online questionnaire are dumped anonymously into a database from which no individual can be personally identified.
So, no way to monitor that no one is spiking the responses with fake answers, and no way to verify the reliability of what was submitted. No conclusions can be drawn from Mawson's nonsense when there are no means to verify the authenticity and reliability of responses. His work has all the validity of a Facebook poll.
In the 'Comparison; paper:
Note that Ref. 63 is not to the VAERS database, but to the NVIC version of it, the one that facilitates dumpster-diving by bypassing the 'data quality' caveats.
2) Looking at a variety of long term neurodevelopmental and immune outcomes. None of the thoughtscapism-cited studies do this either.
Some would call that "p-hacking". Or "fishing expedition". Not normally regarded as a 'strength'.
VP has previously demonstrated his grasp of these concepts by using a sample-size calculator to assert that if there were not 98% an ASD risk due to vaccines (leading to N = 2000 or something similar), the jig was up.
"So, no way to monitor that no one is spiking the responses with fake answers, and no way to verify the reliability of what was submitted. No conclusions can be drawn from Mawson’s nonsense when there are no means to verify the authenticity and reliability of responses. His work has all the validity of a Facebook poll."
This is a reasonable criticism and definite weakness of the study. But does it rise to the level of justifying complete dismissal of the results?
I tend to not think so, because I dont think that hundreds of people will make up nonsense to spike a survey like this. This is some research on this issue (human behavior in survey research). From what I have read, people generally dont act this way.
A strength of the study is the large difference in vaccine exposure in the compared groups. It was FULL vs ZERO vaccination.
no other study has such a large differential in exposure. I think thats valuable.
by comparison, the Smith/Woods study often cited by vaccine promoters compared groups receiving:
10.1 vs 11.8 vaccines
7.4 vs 11.8 vaccines
its not reasonable to expect this small exposure differential will create observable effects.
Also, we dont know the dose-response curve for vaccines and adverse outcomes. For all we know, the dose-response may be relatively flat in the 7-12 vaccine range.
"VP has previously demonstrated his grasp of these concepts by using a sample-size calculator to assert that if there were not 98% an ASD risk due to vaccines (leading to N = 2000 or something similar), the jig was up."
You are referring to my analysis of the Gadad study. Please explain why I am wrong.
With an assumed 2% autism rate from vaccines, and dichotomous endpoint (autism Y or N), and conventional alpha 0.05 and 80% power, 387 monkeys per group would be needed, or 774 total. Its basic biostatistics.
http://vaccinepapers.org/gadad-et-al-2015-pnas-journal/
Hello gang,
Just a quick note to tell that if my comments in the last few weeks sounded depressive, that's because it dawned on me that I am. I along with my cousin have been taking... scratch that... trying to take care of a soon to be 44 years old brother who's aspie, with SMH issues, 2nd grade high school and the hyperactivity of 10 cheetah at a bare minimum.
The good part of this period of the year is that I'll be scheduled for an interview with professor Erin Barker of Concordia university for a job in her lab. She, incidentally, studies parenting stress for parents of autistic child and/or SMH issues.
Alain
Let me put this in words of one syllable or less for you.
"There is no way of verifying that any of the data provided was correct"
Analysing junk gibes you junk with a 100% probability.
I am sorry that there are a few long words in there, but checking the meaning of words - even the short ones - with a dictionary is sure to help you understand them.
hi Orac:
Will you be writing any more articles about aluminum adjuvant? It seems you covered the Al adjuvant issue lightly in part of a post a few years ago, focusing on the ecological study by Shaw. I have not seen you address the experimental results, or new papers showing that Al is more toxic than previously believed (e.g. showing harm to animals at 3.4 mg/kg/day, a vaccine-relevant dosage).
An important new paper was published on Al adjuvant toxicity, described here:
http://vaccinepapers.org/al-adjuvant-causes-brain-inflammation-behavior…
I encourage you to write about the new reports on aluminum adjuvant.
Thank you Vaccine Papers. You've just confirmed your ignorance. In a sample size as small as the one in this, you don't need "hundreds of people" to submit fake answers to skew the results. 34 would be enough to do it.
One last thing. How do we know that Mawson didn't cherry pick the answers?
Here let me help you.
There is no way of verifying that the "unvaccinated" group had received no vaccinations or that the "vaccinated" group had received any or all of the vaccinations mentioned.
There is no way of verifying that any of the children involved had, or did not have, any of the neurodevelepment and immune outcomes mentioned.
There is no way of verifying that any of the socioeconomic status data were correct.
There is no way of verifying that all of the children in the study were homeschooled or lived in the four states mentioned. Indeed there was no way of verifying that these children actually existed.
Always happy to help.
ok fair enough. Since Mawson cannot prove these things didnt happen, reasonable people can disagree. I think its unlikely that the results were spiked, but thats merely an opinion based on subjective information. I think its likely that vaccines cause the adverse effects Mawson reported (in view of other science).
Are there any other vax-unvax studies I dont know about? And by vax-unvax, I mean zero vs substantial vaccine exposure comparison. Not necessarily the full schedule, but preferably pretty close, and including several aluminumn-containing vaccines. The current CDC schedule has 11 Al adjuvanted vaccines in the first 6 months, and 16 vaccines up to 2 years.
Analysing junk gives you junk with a 100% probability.
There has to be a pony in there somewhere!
Anyone that has researched enough (and isn't a paid shill), know that unvaccinated kids are healthier than vaccinated kids. It's obvious. How do I know that we are winning this argument? This used to be one of the only places that you could go to read about the topic on an ongoing basis... Now, it's everywhere! You are losing and will be seen as frauds and morons for years to come. Congrats!
VP: "I think its unlikely that the results were spiked..."
Based on what? Internet polls are notoriously inaccurate.
Real studies find no vaccine/autism link. Money would be WAY better spent actually looking for and at the real causes, not beating this dead horse.
That's because years ago, most people were unaware of the existence of your mentally diseased little cult. I would mention the existence of antivaxers to people and they would be either horrified or disbelieving. It is difficult to believe that such a cabal of evil miscreants could exist, but you do, and now that the light of publicity has started shining on you, you're scurrying like the roaches you are to escape it.
I don’t think that hundreds of people will make up nonsense to spike a survey like this.
In other news, when P.Z. Myers invites his readers to crash an on-line poll, the results are still plausible.
How do we know that Mawson didn’t cherry pick the answers?
I am confident that Prof. Mawson is treating his data honestly and with integrity. The problem is just that the data are crap.
I tend to not think so, because I dont think that hundreds of people will make up nonsense to spike a survey like this. This is some research on this issue (human behavior in survey research). From what I have read, people generally dont act this way.
Well, then you clearly don't get how life works when it comes to other open-ended polling activities like the TV show American Idol where fans can vote multiple times for their favorite performer--and do all the time.
And go onto Facebook and search "Vaccination Status and Health Outcomes among Homeschool Children" and look at where it popped up back in 2012 when the survey was available to anyone who had the link. That link shows up on all kinds of anti-vaccine web sites and Facebook pages with open solicitations for people to go fill it out. If you don't think AVers didn't swarm all over that like flies on dog poop, then I've got some ocean front property here in Arizona I'd like to sell you.
No. Sorry. From Square One, Mawson's 1st grade science fair project was fatally flawed.
Sorry, couldn't help myself, given the number of participants...
And to discussion at hand. @VP
Looking at the topic of the poll - would you agree that many people feel very strongly about the issue? I think we can agree on this point. Some, the community here would eve say most, of the people on the anti-vaccine side held rather radical beliefs, up to the government conspiracy and oppression. Even in this very discussion we have Joe, who accused everyone who does not think that unvaccinated children are obviously healther of being a shill.
Can you with any degree of certainty say, that among people who hold such strong opinions and who very much would like a study that proves them right, there are none who would falesly report in an internet poll or report multiple times?
Hell, we don't even need ideologically motivated sabotage - a bunch of trolls filling the poll for s**ts and giggles would render the whole thing worthless.
I don't understand a lot of science. But even a layman such as me can see how using only reliable data is the paramount. You wouldn't want engineers desiging next boeing to take measurements "by the eye". Or you would, if you are misantrophic enough and don't travel by plane. But I'd like to believe you wouldn't.
Supporting evidence required. And no, the remainder of your comment is not good enough.
@Julian Frost: well, if Joe wants to believe that, then I have to wonder what my fully vaccinated AND UTD kids would have been like if we hadn't vaccinated them? Super people? They are healthy, confident, employed adults. As children, yes, they had colds, chicken pox (unfortunately the year before the vaccine was approved), GI bugs and other things we don't vaccinate against. Frequent ear infections as infants because of lousy genetics until they grew old enough for their eustachian tubes to be longer (can't blame vaccines - both my husband and his mother had the same thing at the same ages, and very different vaccine schedules).
IOW...Joe is full of it. And he insults all the very intelligent Joes I know who are also fully UTD with vaccines because I nag. :)
In the real world, reasonable people with any limited level of expertise take one look at Mawson's pair of papers and recognise them as the junk they are. Based entirely on the methodology, but there are many other clear signs elsewhere in the papers - not forgetting the fact that they were published in the most predatory of predatory open access journals. There is nothing going for these two pieces of work.
Unreasonable people make excuses for Mawson and invent fairy tales where people with a vested interest are always completely truthful on anonymous internet surveys. The fact that you are spending so much effort making excuses for this study shows that you are completely anti-vaccine and stoop to cherry pick the the most massive colossal junk in order to support your precious pre-conceived notions.
This is the sort of thing that pretend scientists do.
VP: "The substantial size of the study. 666 subjects isnt too shabby."
It's...the Mark of the Beast! We've gone well beyond paid shills when antivaxers invoke dark powers like this.
Now if _this_ comment also goes into automatic moderation, I will know what evil force is behind it.
Yep. The only explanation for going on automatic moderation status is that Satan has assumed the body of Orac, or a troll was posting under my username/e-mail, or...could there be another dark reason?
I await the decision of the court.
A certain trolling sock puppet generator impersonated a number of regulars, and I was forced to put them into my automatic moderation filter. I've also done this with every new commenter for the last month or so, which is unfortunate but really helped me contain the problem. (One of his tactics was to start as a new commenter making a couple of reasonable comments and then going full nutjob after being out of automatic moderation.) These measures seem to have worked. It's been a while since our troll has made an appearance (at least as far as I can tell); so I might be able to start releasing the regulars. However, I've been very, very cautious because I've been burned before, prematurely thinking he had given up and gone away.
@ VP #49: If you want reliable data on a topic like this, you need medical records. You need documentation. You see, the problem is many "unvaccinated" kids got at least one vaccine, and many vaccinated kids either didn't get them on time, or are missing a few doses not because of any BSC AV nonsense, but because some parents just don't get it done when they should. You have to control for those confounding factors, and Mawson couldn't do that with the survey because he didn't verify anything.
Even if he treated his data with integrity, as HDB suggests (not sure if he's being satirical or not), if the data is crap, the results are crap. Garbage in garbage out as someone else noted.
"I think its unlikely that the results were spiked, but thats merely an opinion based on subjective information."
And that's why your thoughts on this are garbage. You are way too credulous for a scientific discussion.
Shifting the goal posts to aluminum isn't helping your case. There have been a number of well constructed studies. They've been discussed here many times. You are being disingenuous.
No, I'm referring to your performance here; I don't read your site.
"Thinking" of this nature is incompatible with quality research. There must be reasonable supporting evidence, not conjecture.
That's another of life's little pleasures I've let slip away. I haven't participated in pharyngulating a poll in ages.
I now refuse to participate in any sort of online or telephone poll for any purpose because of how badly designed nearly all of them are. Authoring a good poll is very difficult and it's my opinion that the number of people capable of doing it is vanishingly small. I once started to complete a survey from a provincial government agency and quit a very short way in because of how bad I thought it was. I mentioned this to the agency person with whom I had regular contact and her response was to agree entirely. She was a part-time lecturer in statistics.
@ #39 Herr Doktor Bimler
I took a moment to realize that NVIC was not National Vaccine Injury Compensation, but the "venerable" anti-vaccine organization of Barbara Loe Fisher, the National Vaccine Information Center. Of course they would strip away any warnings.
Some good news regarding antivaxers' attempts to frighten Somali-Americans into not having their children vaccinated.
"Local health officials are hosting forums in Columbus this week after a recent measles outbreak among Somali populations in Minnesota.
Columbus has the second-largest Somali population in the United States behind Minneapolis, and health officials fear a possible outbreak in central Ohio as families in both cities visit one another this summer...
Minnesota health officials link the high numbers of unvaccinated Somali children in their state with an aggressive campaign by anti-vaccine advocates several years ago that targeted Somali parents, saying that vaccinating their children would cause autism.
“This could happen in any community that is given misinformation,” said Jose Rodriguez, spokesman for Columbus Public Health.
Hassan Omar, executive director of the Somali Community Association of Ohio, said the community understands there are health risks. He said he hopes these events help to educate people, as well as break any stereotypes that residents might have about Somalis.
“Everybody is worried about this,” Omar said. “We don’t want there to be a stigma. We’re Americans, we’re Midwestern. We have children that are all up-to-date for vaccinations.”
http://www.dispatch.com/news/20170518/city-county-health-officials-to-h…
And includes foreign reports.
Alain -- best wishes to you. Adult care is hard.
Alain
Just a quick note to tell that if my comments in the last few weeks sounded depressive, that’s because it dawned on me that I am.
I am the world's worst on-line counsellor with the possible exception of Hannibal Lecter, so I will just say, "Look after yourself".
@ VP #4
This DTP study?
http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/rfk-jr-and-vacci…
Yeah, it's got its own problems . . .
To follow up on Panacea @63: There are ways you could conduct a study like this with rigor and integrity. Looking at de-identified data from a insurance providers, for example. Granted, that would still miss things like illnesses that didn't require doctor's visits, but it would all be verified. Or maybe data from CHIP?
But asking people to provide you with data to support a position that they hold dear is by the simple facts of human nature going to result in skewed data, even if no one deliberately stuffed the poll.
There is an entire field of study around how to build rigorous, consistent, accurate and reliable health surveys. the survey used in this study fails pretty much every single principle of good survey design.
What hdb said.
HDB@50: “There has to be a pony in there somewhere!”
Never say we’re not good to you.
I suppose it's marginally amusing that ddanimal has a lopsided criterion here, in addition to failing to show back up with his slide rule* to tell everyone what 2% of 14.7/1000 is.
* Of course I had one.
Re: Vaccine Paper's comments
While part of the problem with the data in Mawson's survey is that there was no attempt to validate the responses, to confirm that the responses are accurate, there are worse problems than that.
Even if the respondents were completely honest, their responses may be subject to recall errors and subjective assessments.
And going even further, even if all the responses are objectively accurate, there could still be systemic biases caused by sample selection. Let me illustrate this point a bit further.
1) Pretend for now that we are doing this in the late 80s*. Let the response variables be whether someone receives an academic scholarship ("yes", "no") and whether someone comes from an extremely rich family ("yes", "no"). The question we ask is whether or not the family background is associated with obtaining an academic scholarship. This design is analogous to the Mawson study.
2) Since the extremely rich (by whatever criteria) is only a very small proportion of the population, we decide to choose a subpopulation in which the extremely rich is over-represented, let's say the Yale freshman class (this is analogous to the choice of restricting the survey to homeschooled children).
3) We conduct the survey, tabulate the data, and find that there is a statistically significant association between family wealth and receiving an academic scholarship. Specifically, the extremely rich have lower academic scholarship rates than the non-extremely-rich.
4) We conclude that in general, people from extremely rich families are less likely to get academic scholarships.
5) Problem: A better explanation is that the extremely rich are as or more likely to receive academic scholarships, but though they receive academic scholarships at the average rate at Yale, the poor kids appear to receive academic scholarships at a higher rate because the ones who didn't had to get an education elsewhere. Consequently, you obtain a spurious result due to the choice of an unrepresentative subgroup.
6) How does this connect to the Mawson study? One possible effect of choosing homeschooled students is that parents of unvaccinated children tend to prefer to homeschool all their children, while a large proportion of parents of vaccinated children only homeschool their autistic children (due to inadequate special education services). This is all the more salient because vaccination is required (in theory) for public education.
As for your comments for the Gadad study, your reliance on the sample size calculator was inadvisable. The calculator (based on my attempts to replicate the numbers) assumes approximate normality and two-tailed test, when the underlying distribution is quite non-normal (binomial with tiny p parameter) and the appropriate alternative hypothesis is one-tailed (autism is higher in the vaccinated group than the non-vaccinated group). Making the same assumptions and using an appropriate statistical test (Fisher's Exact), I reach 80% power at around n=335 each group.
This is of course not a defence of the Gadad paper. I think it's silly. Orac thinks it's unethical (http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/09/30/three-dozen-dead-macaque-m…). What I am pointing out is that you don't know statistics as well as you think you do.
Dick
Thank you for the correction regarding the two-tailed test in the sample calculator I used for the Gadad study analysis. I edited the article accordingly. Can you link to a calculator that uses Fishers exact test?
"As for your comments for the Gadad study, your reliance on the sample size calculator was inadvisable. The calculator (based on my attempts to replicate the numbers) assumes approximate normality and two-tailed test, when the underlying distribution is quite non-normal (binomial with tiny p parameter) and the appropriate alternative hypothesis is one-tailed (autism is higher in the vaccinated group than the non-vaccinated group). Making the same assumptions and using an appropriate statistical test (Fisher’s Exact), I reach 80% power at around n=335 each group."
To detect a 2% difference from 1 in 68, I get around 2.6 million in each arm. Just sayin'.
@Narad #77
Oh, no dispute that the study was atrociously underpowered (as I said, it's silly). The first time I saw it, I was struck by how the paper failed to establish that the symptoms they were looking for actually occurred in macaques.
Unless you are talking about actual outputs from the calculator, in which case I'd check your input.
I'll take the opportunity to repeat this Tweet:
https://twitter.com/FoodSnoop01/status/862158228377014273
in which some racial-supremacist feckstick blames Google for taking down Mawson's paper. This is not just nutpicking because the AutismOne organisers -- that is, CMSRI and Generation Rescue -- Liked and retweeted the lurid conspiratorial fantasy. They own it.
Liz, HDB, JP,
Thanks. It took a heavy handed approach by my cousin (who's headed to Cuba in a bit over an hour) to fix the situation but the basic gist is that the brother will leave me alone for the week that the cousin is in Cuba and upon his return, there will be other fixes. He fail to do that, he's out of here.
Usual scenario: I'd work on my computer, with earphones cranking out music in full blast in my ears and the brother won't stop talking to me or asking questions despite me having told him 10 times to not bother me, I'm working and not listening. It might be difficult for him to uphold his promise but today, I went to the police station.
You can check the input yourself. Mind you, I'm not talking about whatever Gadad-paper "analysis" that he insisted I must have been referring to, but what's needed to signal a 2% difference in ASD diagnoses.* And 80% power wouldn't cut it anyway.
* I've been through this at painful length with Vapor Genie before, which is why I feel no urge to go looking for the comments. See Genie, Vapor.
FAO Orac, rather sad this, but inevitable, baby dies on a gluten free diet, parents owned a health food business and took the child to a homeopath. Let's spread the news and hope it never happens again.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/baby-gluten-free-diet-di…
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Thanks for the laugh HDB,
@Jay #82, that is so sad. And some studies have pointed out that if somebody does not have a gluten allergy, a gluten-free diet is bad because it can leave out vital nutrients.
@Narad #81
Okay, yeah, you are taking 2% to mean a relative risk of 0.98, while VP is working with the assumption that the risk difference is 0.02. Naturally, the results are not comparable.
I would usually complain about binomial with small p is very skewed, violating the normality assumption yada yada yada, but when each outcome is expected to have at least 20,000 observations even I have to admit the deviation is going to be negligible.
@Jay & Julien --
What killed that poor child was his parents' self-diagnosing him as lactose-intolerant and denying him dairy. Still, it's a textbook case of parental stupidity ending in a fatality, and in a just world the homeopath would be up on charges as well.
http://scibabe.com/no-gluten-free-diet-didnt-kill-baby/
#85, Shay
Why would the homeopath be charged? In the few articles I've seen the homeopath told the parents to go see a real medical doctor. It is even mentioned in the SciBaby's "source" (the daily mail..............!).
I do not see a reason to hold the homeopath personal responsible for that death unless there is some source saying that the homeopath saw the baby before that point or knew about the baby condition.
No, I'm taking it to mean a relative risk of 2%. But anyway, as the Cubs–Brewers game was postponed for no good reason, I went looking for the original exchange with VP* for context and couldn't find it here, which leads me to think that it must have been on Disqustink, which I'm really not going to root around in.
Along the way, though, I did glance at his Gadad entry. Recall his invocation of "basic biostatistics"** above, and then get this (italics added):
"But first, we need to describe some basic statistics.
"Statistics
"Determining the number of subjects necessary in a study depends a lot on how confident you want to be in the results. Highly reliable results require more subjects, of course.
"In these types of studies, there are two kinds of errors:
"Type 1: Observing an effect when its not actually there (false positive), and
"Type 2: Not observing an effect when it really is there (false negative).
"The chance of a type 1 error is also known as the 'p-value' (also known as 'alpha'). A p-value requirement of less than 5% (p=0.05) is standard in biomedical sciences."
The actual "calculation" is just painfully stupid – it's based on the assumption that there is zero ASD prevalence "incidence" in the unvaccinated, which means that no comparator group is needed. It gets worse:
"If the vaccines caused autism in 2% monkeys, it would not have been observed in the Gadad study. The vaccines would need to cause autism in at least about 38% of the monkeys for the Gadad study to detect it."
One does not need a sample-size calculator to determine whether one's monkeys might amount to an element of ℕ. He then starts babbling about Giardia, at which point I lost interest.
* Have "they" finally abandoned the Royal We?
** SYLLABLES IZ POW3R.
" ... the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans ..." - JFK
Fifty years later, the reality is the fate has been sealed for a new generation of Americans ...
Strong protein sequence alignment between autoantigens involved in maternal autoantibody related autism and vaccine antigens
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316785758_Strong_protein_seque…
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316785919_Significant_protein_…
Troels: homeopaths don't give valid medical advice. It's quackery ie fraud. Hence, if you are a homeopath and dispensing fake medical advice, you are contributing to poor health outcomes and should be held accountable when your patient dies from treatable medical conditions like malnutrition.
#88, I agree with anything you said.
But my point still stands.
I've only read a couple of news article about this death and the articles are probably based on the same source.
Based on the articles I’d say it is not clear how many times the homeopath saw the child. My initial reading of the articles made me think that the homeopath only saw the child once. All we know is the last time the homeopath told the parent to see a real doctor.
If that was the only time the homeopath saw the child then he/she did the right thing regardless of his/her profession. I’d agree that if the homeopath should be charged if he/she knew (or should have known) of his malnutrition before that point, or if the homeopath in anyway directly contributed to this tragedy. But at the moment I've seen very little details about the homeopath's actions, so I remain cautious in making any conclusion about the homeopath.
Correction for the above comment:
"#88, I agree with anything you said." should be "#88, I agree with everything you said."
And
"All we know is the last time the homeopath told the parent to see a real doctor." should be "All I know is the last time the homeopath saw the child he/she told the parent to see a real doctor."
I don't want to joke about such a tragic event, but I've thought the same thing when "Homeopaths without Borders" have been jetting off to some disaster scene to dose starving, homeless people with distilled water--shouldn't the homeopathic remedy for "not enough food" be "a whole cr@pload of food"?
@Narad #87
Relative Risk is defined as P(D=1|E=1)/P(D=1|E=2), where both E (exposure) and D (disease) are divided into two categories. Let's say E=1 for Group 1 and E=2 for Group 2, then the above becomes [Group 1 Proportions]/[Group 2 Proportions], which given your inputs is 1.02. If we let E=1 for Group 2 and E=2 for Group 1, the relative risk is 0.98. There is no reasonable arrangement using the numbers you gave that would give a relative risk of 0.02.
I thought the assumption that the incidences are 0 vs 0.02 to be a bit odd too, but for all possible combinations (incidence group 1, incidence group 2) where the risk difference is 0.02, (0, 0.02) has minimal* variance. So using this assumption gives a conservative estimate of the type II error when the alternative hypothesis is Ha: p1-p2=0.02. Not that VP knew that, of course.
I stopped reading before getting to the other stuff you mentioned, being more interested in figuring out how the calculator arrived at the number it did (answer: by ignoring the invalidity of its assumptions).
*Sketch of proof:
Assuming X and Y are two stochastically independent random variables, var(X-Y)=var(X)+var(Y).
Now, suppose X' is the number of individuals with the outcome of interest in a given arm of study, then X' has binomial distribution with parameters n (number of individuals in the arm) and p (an unknown constant between 0 and 1, inclusive). X' has variance np(1-p). This sufficient when dealing with raw outcome numbers, as when the arms of the study are balanced, but people tend to prefer working with proportions for some reason, so let X=X'/n be the random variable representing the proportion of people with the given outcome in this arm, var(X)=p(1-p)/n. For any fixed value of n>0, var(X) has global minimums when p is restricted to the interval [0,1] when p=0 or p=1 (var(X) viewed as a function of p is a parabola with a global maximum at p=0.5).
It is obvious that the way to get both p1 and p2 as close to 0 as possible while fixing their difference at 0.02 is to have one of them at 0 and the other at 0.02. Alternatively, you could have one at 1 and the other at 0.98 and get the same var(X).
Quod erat demonstrandum.
"So using this assumption gives a conservative estimate of the type II error when the alternative hypothesis is Ha: p1-p2=0.02. Not that VP knew that, of course."
I was well aware of this, which is why I assumed 0 incidence in the control group. The assumptions I made were intended to be simple and conservative. You can quibble with the details, but they are inconsequential to the conclusion: that the Gadad study was extremely underpowered, and the results are therefore meaningless.
The obvious fatal flaws of the Gadad study have not stopped vaccine promoters like Offit from declaring the Gadad results as "CLEAR AND DEFINITIVE" .
Offit wrote this last year about Gadad:
"The vaccine–autism controversy teaches us that, although it is easy to scare people, it is much harder to unscare them. Even with papers as clear and definitive as that by Gadad et al. (1), it is hard to unring the bell."-Dr Paul Offit
Offit is way out of line here, right?
"“All I know is the last time the homeopath saw the child he/she told the parent to see a real doctor.”"
Correction noted -- still, the homeopath had a moral (if not professional) obligation to call the Belgian equivalent of CPS.
Right, sorry; it's an attributable risk percentage [(RR − 1)/RR] of 0.02.
^ Um, "0.02 2%." Must not type after napping.
@ Vinu arumugham (#88),
Thank you!
@shay #94: I don't know if homeopaths/naturopaths are licensed in Australia (God I hope not) but if they are, yes they would be mandated reporters.
The invalidating factor of Mawson's study is that by not cross-referencing with medical records, they were not able to establish an actual cohort of unvaccinated children.
Most parents who decline vaccinations are unaware that their child has had one out of the three Hep B's; the "birth" dose.
Sometimes after the childbirth the nurse will mention the Hep B "will" be given.
Usually they just say; "We need to get baby cleaned up, get some measurements & we'll bring him right back to you!"
In my state, HepB is on all standing orders in all birth centers, for all doctors since at least 1994. It does not matter if baby is born in the car on the way, they will get HepB upon arrival. Home birth with certified Mid-wife? Yes; HepB. Written, notarized "birth plan" submitted to doctor at first visit? Yes; HepB (firstly, you don't give baby care instructs to the OB & secondly; nurses administer immunizations & nurses flip straight to doctors orders in chart for a newborn admission. "Legal" has it's own section & only DNR's go to front).
You would have to be very detailed in order to form a truly UN-vaccinated group.
The Lewin's group study(which did not show similar results) utilized EHR's but integration of EHR's & IIS's vary by state so you still have discrepancies.
After establishing a true unvaccinated cohort, I personally wouldn't consider a study that eliminated subjects based on any confounding variable other than those listed on the CDC's " “General Recommendations on Immunization: Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices", as a contraindication for immunization.
That would include PROM, prematurity, sibling history of anaphylaxis to vaccine, family history of SIDS, TB, etc ... If you administer to that population ... you include that population. But that's just me.
That is in fact one of the least of the problems in Mawson's study. However, it does point to another absurdity in Mawson's hypothesis.
Among all the other problems with the hypothesis is the implicit assumption that all vaccines are identical. We know this is not the case, so the whole totally unvaccinated versus totally vaccinated study as a hypothesis is not supported by the existing information about vaccines.
But then as it ever was among the anti-vaccine groups, it is all about the vaccines. Not a specific vaccine, but vaccines in general.
That is why you won't be asked to develop protocols for any epidemiological studies.
You don't say. Would you care to state how you ascertained this, or are you just going to leave everyone hanging?
P.S. Heh.
@#46 VP says I have not seen you address the experimental results, or new papers showing that Al is more toxic than previously believed (e.g. showing harm to animals at 3.4 mg/kg/day, a vaccine-relevant dosage).
Since the average daily dietary intake of Al is considerably higher than that received via vaccination, one has to wonder about that finding...
"Since the average daily dietary intake of Al is considerably higher than that received via vaccination, one has to wonder about that finding…"
Not true, and does not tell the whole story. Oral absorption of Al is 0.3%. So its not correct to directly compare ingested Al content. Have to multiple by 0.3% to obtain absorbed amount.
Also, Al adjuvant comprises PARTICLES, which have toxicity unrelated to dissolved Al3+ released by the particles.
Vaccines in the first 6 months of the CDC vaccine schedule contain about 3,675 mcg aluminum:
Birth (Hep B): 74 mcg/kg (250 mcg for 3.4 kg infant)
2 month: 245 mcg/kg (1225 mcg for 5 kg infant)
4 month: 150 mcg/kg (975 mcg for 6.5 kg infant)
6 month: 153 mcg/kg (1225 mcg for 8 kg infant)
Total for 0-6 months: 3675 mcg aluminum
Compare this to aluminum absorption (for infants) over the first 6 months from milk and formula. The total amount ingested must be multiplied by 0.3% to obtain the amount actually absorbed into the body.
breastmilk: 7mg x 0.3% = 21 mcg (0.021 mg)
formula: 38mg x 0.3% = 114 mcg (0.114 mg)
soy formula: 117mg x 0.3% = 351 mcg (0.351mg)
In the first 6 months of life, aluminum exposure from vaccines is 3,675/21 = 175 times higher than human milk. Infants receive far more aluminum from vaccines than from milk.
Giving a baby 175X more aluminum than normal exposure from milk is alarming to anyone with common sense.
Putting aside anything else, you're assuming that absorption from an IM injection is 100%. There's no basis for that. Here is a very detailed scientific discussion of this, and he points out that in the study that examined blood concentration of IM aluminum injection estimated bioavailability at 17% - and the basis for that.
https://scientistabe.wordpress.com/2017/04/15/sciencesjunk-sciencesbbb-…
@christine: re standing orders for Hep B
What state is that? Because standing order or no standing order, you are still required to obtain informed consent from the patient (or the parent) and give them a vaccine information sheet PRIOR to administering any vaccine.
Also, the parents should be given the immunization record card to take to their pediatrician's office so they can see what vaccines were given and when, so the child can be kept on schedule. Nurses are required to document the manufacturer, lot number, and expiration date of the vaccine on this card when they administer the vaccine.
Every parent should know what vaccines their kid got. If they don't, then there's a breakdown in the system in your area, or they're just really poor record keepers and threw away or lost the card.
@Panacea: yeah, christine is pulling facts out of her posterior again. There is no place (at least in the US) where a Hep B vaccine is given without a signed consent. And if you didn't give consent, you had to sign that, too. As a nurse and as a midwife, I can say without any qualms that she's full of inaccuracies.
If the amount of aluminum in certain vaccines was so alarming, we'd expect to see a jump in baseline blood levels after a shot was given. But we don't.
http://www.publichealth.org/public-awareness/understanding-vaccines/goe…
"...once aluminum is in the bloodstream, it is processed
similarly regardless of the source. Approximately 90 percent is processed by binding to a protein called transferrin, and about 10 percent is bound by citrate. Once bound, the majority of aluminum will be eliminated through the kidneys, a small amount through bile, and a small amount is retained in tissues of the body. About half of the aluminum in the bloodstream is eliminated in less
than 24 hours and more than three-quarters is eliminated within two weeks. The ability of the body to rapidly eliminate aluminum accounts for its excellent record of safety."
http://media.chop.edu/data/files/pdfs/vaccine-education-center-aluminum…
And of the 50-100 mg of tissue aluminum accumulated by adulthood, virtually all of it is from food.
VP needs to go back to Toxin School.
"If the amount of aluminum in certain vaccines was so alarming, we’d expect to see a jump in baseline blood levels after a shot was given."
Not true. Particles are toxic per se, due to surface chemistry effects and shape effects. Toxicity of dissolved Al3+ released by the particles is a separate, additional source of toxicity.
Al adjuvant comprises low-solubility particles, which explains why no rise in blood Al level is observed after injection.
This issue is considered here: http://vaccinepapers.org/debunking-aluminum-adjuvant-part-2/
The idiocy of #103 is truly breathtaking. Environmental Aluminum (the 3rd most common element on Earth, remember) has to be multiplied by .3%, but intramuscularly injected aluminum doesn't.
The oral route, which is "designed" to absorb material taken in, is only .3% efficient, whereas the muscles (which aren't) are 100% efficient. You can't make this stuff up!
Its injected. SO 100% enters the body. Simple concept.
But that simple analysis does not tell the whole picture. Also Depends on dissolution rate, transport kinetics and particle toxicity.
MI Dawn: I had thought we'd had this discussion with her before in some other comment thread as it has the ring of familiarity to it.
I forgot to mention that SO or no SO, the parents can still refuse the vaccine and many do. We get a lot of parents that come in with birth plans declining not only Hep B but VIt K.
@ VP #103. You don't multiply by 0.3% to compare oral vs injected. You look at bioavailability as much as absorption.
In any case aluminum is readily eliminated renally by patients with healthy renal function. So when you look at aluminum as part of vaccines, you don't stack the dose from one vaccination on top of all the ones before, because that aluminum has long been excreted by the time of the next dose. It's not like arsenic. Actual aluminum exposure is nothing like what you're trying to say.
Bioavailability = absorption. Its necessary to multiply by 0.3%
The fatally flawed Mitkus analysis is analyzed here:
http://vaccinepapers.org/debunking-aluminum-adjuvant-part-2/
The 3 problems with Mitkus are:
1) The MRL used by Mitkus is derived from feeding experiments, not injected Al adjuvant experiments.
2) Mitkus uses a proposed NOAEL of 26 mg/kg/day, but it is not a NOAEL. More recent science shows harm from ingestion of 3.4 mg/kg/day.
3) Mitkus assumes Al adjuvant particles have zero toxicity. There is no evidence for this, and much evidence it is wrong.
I agree with Vaccine Papers that Mitkus 2011 is flawed and addresses only a fraction of the safety problems associated with aluminum adjuvanted vaccines.
My review of Mitkus 2011:
Dr. Mitkus,
I was reviewing aluminum safety information for vaccines at the FDA website and found your study.1
You provide the following description of the effect of aluminum adjuvants on the immune system.
“Aluminum adjuvants are important components of vaccines, since they stimulate the immune system to respond more effectively to protein or polysaccharide antigens that have been adsorbed to the surface of insoluble aluminum particles. Specifically, these coated particles are phagocytized by cells of the innate immune system (e.g., macrophages) and activate intracytoplasmic sensors of pathogen-associated molecular patterns located within the cells, such as the nucleotide-binding domain leucine-rich repeat-containing family of sensors ([6]; Schroder and Tschopp [30]). The functional consequence of activation of this intracellular system is the activation of certain enzymatic caspases that cleave pro-interleukin (IL)-1β to interleukin (IL)-1β. The secretion of the mature cytokine, IL-1β, leads to an inflammatory reaction and a downstream Th2-dependent antibody response [7], which amplify the immune response to the antigen. Adjuvanted aluminum, therefore, plays a vital role in facilitating the response that underlies the immunoprotection afforded by vaccines.”
The rest of the paper focuses on body burden of aluminum AFTER it is absorbed from the muscle into the blood.
I was taken aback that you have COMPLETELY IGNORED any negative immunological effects that aluminum can have while it is still in the muscle.
The quoted paragraph above assumes that the only proteins in the vaccine are viral/bacterial proteins. In that case, as you state, the stimulation by aluminum plays a vital role in generating immunoprotection.
But obviously, vaccines contain numerous other proteins including food proteins (ovalbumin, milk, soy, yeast, etc.)2 , culture medium cell proteins (Vero monkey kidney cell proteins, calf serum proteins, WI38/MRC5 fibroblast cell proteins, etc.) that are also adsorbed to the surface of insoluble aluminum particles. As you state then, aluminum adjuvants stimulate the immune system to respond more effectively to ALL these proteins as well. The effect is an immune response that includes synthesis of antibodies against any and all of these proteins. The result of such a response of course includes food allergy3,4,5 and autoimmunity6.
How can you perform a safety assessment of aluminum in vaccines by COMPLETELY IGNORING this effect?
References
1. Mitkus RJ, King DB, Hess MA, Forshee RA, Walderhaug MO. Updated aluminum pharmacokinetics following infant exposures through diet and vaccination. Vaccine. 2011 Nov 28;29(51):9538–43.
2. Vaccine Excipient & Media Summary [Internet]. 2015 [cited 2016 Jan 16]. Available from: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/B/excipi…
3. Arumugham V. Evidence that Food Proteins in Vaccines Cause the Development of Food Allergies and Its Implications for Vaccine Policy. J Dev Drugs. 2015;4(137):2.
4. Platts-Mills TAE. The allergy epidemics: 1870-2010. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. 2015. p. 3–13.
5. Alice Hoyt, Peter Heymann, Alexander Schuyler, Scott Commins TAEP-M. Changes in IgE Levels Following One-Year Immunizations in Two Children with Food Allergy [Internet]. 2015. Available from: https://wao.confex.com/wao/2015symp/webprogram/Paper9336.html
6. Dahan S, Tomljenovic L, Shoenfeld Y. Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS)--A novel member of the autoimmune family. Lupus. 2016 Apr 1;25(4):339–42.
Vinu
Great comment. Yes aluminum causes a wide range of health damage, not just brain inflammation and all the downstream consequences of that (autism, mental illnesses, depression anxiety etc). Aluminum alos causes allergic disorders and autoimmunity.
Yes I should have said "not all cases of autism bein in utero". Obviously some do (like autism cases resulting from gestational infection. But of course vaccines cause MOST causes of autism.
But that all doesn't matter. In the anti-vaccine world, reason and science is to be misinterpreted and misused. Only their logic works, and they mock anyone who is actually educated and an expert. "Yeah, I don't have a science degree," they'll say. "But I've done my research." They're the same people who think they could fly and land a plane without any training if they are given the chance to look at some YouTube videos.
@VP troll:
Bioavailability.
You have heard of it I trust?
What is the bioavailability of aluminium compounds injected into muscle?
(Hint, it's not 100%)
Try Flarend's paper for enlightenment.
And I also notice you compared with human breastmilk, but not with formula milk or soyabased milk. (Now why would that possibly be, except to try and deceive readers into thinking only a comparison with breast milk's [lower] levels of aluminum is appropriate?)
www.merckmanuals.com
"Bioavailability refers to the extent and rate at which the active moiety (drug or metabolite) enters systemic circulation, thereby accessing the site of action."
That definition is not relevant when discussing immunotoxicity of intramuscularly injected aluminum.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11522584
Multiple studies like the one above have shown that aluminum injected into muscles persists for months at the site of injection. We are not interested in the amount of aluminum that enters circulation, as much as how much is left behind in the muscle, for how long and the immunotoxic effect of that persistence.
The fact that aluminum adjuvants make vaccines work, is the proof that aluminum adjuvants cause damage.
Today's vaccines contain relatively large quantities of a few poorly immunogenic target proteins and small quantities of thousands of contaminant proteins. So the immune system has to be fooled into treating the target proteins as pathogens. Aluminum injection does the necessary tissue damage thus boosting the immune response. However, the immune pathways activated by aluminum are not fully understood and are not the same pathways activated by a real infection. The result is the immune system's highly evolved intricately balanced response is replaced by a desirable disease-protecting vaccine target protein response + an undesirable contaminant protein response that causes allergy, asthma, autism and autoimmunity.
Details, with appropriate references:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313524429_Autism_Spectrum_Diso… https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316785758_Strong_protein_seque… https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313918596_Medical_muddles_that… https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312125211_Professional_Miscond… https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316785919_Significant_protein_…
Flarend is cited many times on the VP blog. Yes I am very familier with Flarend. Important results from Flarend:
1) biopersistence: AlOH adjuvant is biopersistent. only 6% eliminated after 28 days. For AlPO4, 22% is eliminated.
2) Aluminum travels to the brain and other organs.
Flarend results are not supportive of claims that Al adjuvant is safe. The persistence and transport to organs is concerning.
Anti-vaxxers I tell you...Wooo!!!
I bet they can't even bake cookies. I bet their aluminum-free cupcakes taste like shit. I am a cupcake connoisseur, and I know!
From Narad's link to Christine Kincaid's blog (who weirdly doesn't capitalise proper nouns like her name but does so with common nouns that aren't in German). Ms. Kincaid, perhaps you would like to tell me how this study will be conducted with sample power, effect measure, confounder control, etc. Vaccine Papers here seems to have a bit of difficulty with that hence the topic shift...again.
@108 I don't have "healthy renal function." In fact, I can't take Gaviscon which is the only thing that helps with Prednisone caused heartburn, but I will still get that flu shot every year because I'm old, and familiar with flu, and choose to try to avoid it, even with the tiny amount of aluminum that will stay with me until death. It makes sense to me - and to all my doctors, including my nephrologist.
Once again you fail to understand and account for kinetics: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22001122
The problems with Mitkus 2011 are explained here:
http://vaccinepapers.org/debunking-aluminum-adjuvant-part-2/
The 3 problems with Mitkus are:
1) The MRL used by Mitkus is derived from feeding experiments, not injected Al adjuvant experiments.
2) Mitkus uses a proposed NOAEL of 26 mg/kg/day, but it is not a NOAEL. More recent science shows harm from ingestion of 3.4 mg/kg/day.
3) Mitkus assumes Al adjuvant particles have zero toxicity. There is no evidence for this, and much evidence it is wrong.
@Ellie: while Im glad you've been getting the 'flu vaccine, you haven't been getting any with aluminium-based adjuvants. (Not that there'd have been reason to worry if you had.)
If you're 65YO+ and in the US, FLUAD™ is the first adjuvanted seasonal 'flu vaccine, approved in late '15 (and as early as 1997, in 38 other countries). Its adjuvant is squalene- based. The other 'flu vaccine for seniors, FluZone High Dose, is not adjuvanted (like all other seasonal 'flu vaccines), but delivers significantly more vaccine antigens.
@Narad: I noticed that Ms Kincaid's post comprises her comment on JB Handley's post. Amusing that he refers VP as "a group of scientists", with ebullient praise. It seems the royal "we" was not such an ineffective strategy for a one-man-band after all, at least for some audiences.
Al adjuvant is not eliminated by kidneys. It comprises PARTICLES, which are biopersistent and remain in the body for years, causing inflammation wherever they go. And they travel into the brain, where they cause inflammation. This is how Al adjuvant causes autism and other brain injuries.
Vaccine Papers wrote:
Could you please explain how the adjuvant particles not only "travel into the brain" but also travel back in time to cause the developmental changes that begin in utero, months or years before the administration of the postnatal vaccines that anti-vaxxers have long blamed for autism?
Al adjuvant particles are carried to the brain by macrophages. macrophages travel to the brain in response to receiving a signal from MCP-1, macrophage chemotactic protein, which is produced by brain microglia in response to inflammation (even peripheral inflammation).
Process is explained in detail here: http://vaccinepapers.org/vaccine-aluminum-travels-to-the-brain/
Autism does not begin in utero. Thats never been proven. Correlation is not causation.
Vaccine Papers,
"Autism does not begin in utero."
It may be more accurate to state that not ALL autism begins in utero.
Please see:
Strong protein sequence alignment between autoantigens involved in maternal autoantibody related autism and vaccine antigens
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316785758_Strong_protein_seque…
#121 "vaccine papers" best of luck communicating science to these folks. They are mostly in the medical profession and have been trained to think what they think just like soldiers in the army . TRAINED not educated. big difference, They wont give an inch. Their days are numbered their belief in pharmaceutical mysticism is quickly being eroded. God help them when it all comes crashing down. Its a blind spot.
Vaccine research is at best a primitive science, because it involves injecting into the bloodstream foreign substances, chemical and genetic, that would not otherwise naturally enter the body. When we bring into the equation the enormous amount of known and unknown genetic material and foreign proteins that vaccines introduce into the body, and then consider the rapid increase in epidemics raging through the American population – adult diabetes in children, large numbers of various inflammatory and immune deficiency diseases, asthma and new allergies, severe gastrointestinal disorders (e.g., leaky gut syndrome and Crohn's disease), chronic fatigue syndrome, and many different neurological disorders (e.g., autism, ADD and ADHD, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's) –
We must step back and reconsider their causes. We should avoid the kind of faith that the vaccine industrial complex has in its determinist, reductionist perspective of genetic materialism to find these answers without taking into account the bombardment of toxic chemicals such as vaccine adjuvants and preservatives, extraneous genetic material, pathogenic organisms, and foreign genetic fragments that assault our bodies from shortly after birth into old age.
"Autism does not begin in utero."
That's quite the dogmatic statement, but you're barking up the wrong tree. Just ask the folks at Autism Speaks:
https://www.autismspeaks.org/science/science-news/direct-evidence-autis…
There are some cases that begin in utero, but most do not.
Autism onset can occur as late as 10-11 years old. Autism is clearly brain injury from inflammation and cytokines.
This article explains why autism can occur postnatally: http://vaccinepapers.org/postnatal-immune-activation/
@VP 121: Source please. Because what you just said is utter bullshit.
Well, let's thank Theo for reminding us that the core of anti vaccine belief is the fear of making the body somehow impure.
Warning! Self referential statements for any finite path length risk infinite recursion, thermal runaway and other bad stuff.
Please hang up and try your call again.
VP's traffic must be down, given all the link whoring he's doing in the comments here.
orac
Traffic is doing just fine thank you. Its been on an upward trend of late.
You always fail to address the scientific issues. Why is that?
I stick to the science. Vaccine promoters prefer snark, insults and nonsense.
Vaccine Papers wrote:
That's quite a funny response, given that it comes from someone who just upthread stated that aluminum adjuvant particles travel to the brain and cause autism--which has "never been proven" and which, of course, cannot explain how the adjuvant particles might magically affect brain development months before vaccination.
It can be useful to understand something of gene expression and developmental biology. The free, full-text version of a recent Nature Neuroscience article linked below might serve as a reasonable startiing point, if you note that "transcriptome expression data implicates early fetal and midfetal stages of the developing human brain in ASD etiology."
http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/09/057828
Thi free full text of this article from last week's Nature Neuroscience might also be useful if you have even a nodding acquaintance with genetics:
http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/11/23/089342
I'm sure that you can find numerous similar articles on your own.
Aluminum adjuvant causes autism by inducing brain inflammation and the cytokine IL-6 specifically. Autism is becain damage caused by chronic or excessive inflammation during brain development. Can occur during gestation or postnatally. but most cases today occur postnatally, from vaccines.
^The second article that I cited was from the 15 May 2017 issue of Nature Genetics, not Nature Neuroscience.
Of course, the Couchesne article that DB mentioned was pretty good, too.
There's something you don't hear every day.
Whaddaya wanna bet if the particles are colloidal silver, they're just hunky-dory?
Colloidal silver does not seem to have the same inflammatory properties as Al adjuvant particles. But I definitely would not inject colloidal silver particles into anyone, especially a baby.
Yes but he capitalised it so it must be true. VP Dan, what is the order of tissue distribution for aluminium?
Wrong Dan VP, Mitkus used Priest et al.'s human/IV and Flarend's rabbit/IM aluminium experiments.
They do no such thing. Please cite your "more recent science".
They do no such thing. Please cite your evidence of harm from Al adjuvants and I'm not going to your site; you can explain it just fine here since you decided to show up. It's almost as if you expect that we haven't read these papers.
"Wrong Dan VP, Mitkus used Priest et al.’s human/IV and Flarend’s rabbit/IM aluminium experiments."
Mitkus used Priest and Flarend for KINETICS data only. For the toxicity data, Mitkus used a single feeding study (Golub 2001, as cited by the AYSDR 2008 report on Al). Golub reported that 26 mg/kg/day is a NOAEL, which us wrong. More recent science shows animals are harmed by 3.4, 4, 5.6, 6, 10 and 20 mg/kg/day aluminum ingestion.
So the Mitkus MRL curve is wrong by at least a factor of 7.6.
So you refuse to look at any information that challenges your beliefs? No wonder you get everything wrong!
"They do no such thing. Please cite your “more recent science”."
All these papers are summarized right here: http://vaccinepapers.org/the-foundation-for-al-adjuvant-safety-is-false/
Oh but you refuse to ever look at the VP blog. Cant be bothered with the facts, I see.
"They do no such thing."
Mitkus's modeling only considers the toxicity of DISSOLVED Al3+ released by the particles. The toxicity of the particles is not considered or discussed.
This issue is analyzed here: http://vaccinepapers.org/debunking-aluminum-adjuvant-part-2/
This paper demonstrates particle-associated toxicity of the Al adjuvant:
http://vaccinepapers.org/al-adjuvant-causes-brain-inflammation-behavior…
If they're so toxic, why don't they kill the macrophages before they magically arrive at the brain to deliver their sinister payload?
Good question. Its likely because the Al adjuvant particles are present inside the macrophage lysosomes, which can be considered to be outside the macrophage.
The brain is probably very sensitive to Al adjuvant, for 2 reasons:
1) The brain is very sensitive to aluminum generally. Causes inflammation of neuro tissues at nanomolar concentrations.
2)The brain is very sensitive to inflammation, and Al adjuvant induces inflammation. Its an immunotoxic effect.
Because macrophages don't have brainz or immune systems and aluminium is only toxic to brainz or immune systems or both depending on the day of the week and what Mr. Vaccine Papers website thought he read in the literature last month.
VP: "Autism does not begin in utero. Thats never been proven. Correlation is not causation."
And yet actual science has discovered at least half of the genetic sequences that cause autism, and they are striving to find the rest. This is why there is a call out for fifty thousand families to participate in this study:
https://sparkforautism.org/
Here is a video presentation of genetics, the history of autism, and what they have learned... plus the fact there are now parent groups based the their child's genetic sequence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOQ9s0GcG5s&index=41&list=PLjvfRtcMhn4P…
110:
If you swallow it, it's ingested. SO 100% enters the body. Simple concept. Apparently no concept is simple enough for you, though.
You claim that only .3% of ingested aluminum is absorbed by the body. I assume you're pulling this figure out of your butt, but aluminum that sits around in the muscle at the injection site is going to be absorbed even less efficiently.
The elephant in the room is that there is no way to avoid aluminum. It's 8% of the Earth's crust. Every lungful of air is loaded with aluminum-containing PARTICLES!!!!! that will be absorbed a lot more easily by capillaries in the lungs than in muscle tissue.
AND...THIS DOES NO HARM!
Vaccine Papers waved her hands and attempted to ignore the mounting evidence that autism begins long before the administration of vaccines that anti-vaxxers have long blamed for ASD by sputtering
So you got nothing?
"autism begins long before the administration of vaccines"
There are multiple mechanisms.
Mechanism 1: Vaccines (that Mom received) induce maternal antibodies that attack the fetal brain.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316785758_Strong_protein_seque…
Mechanism 2: Cow's milk protein contaminated vaccines that the child receives, induce folate receptor autoantibodies that block folate uptake and result in autism.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313524429_Autism_Spectrum_Diso…
The argument that the injury occurs in utero is based on unsupported assumptions, and is contradicted by better quality evidence showing the brain can be unjured by inflammation postnatally.
For example, Hotez and other have argued that cortical layer disruption must happen in utero because this is mostly when these layers form. Well, thats not totally true (layers continue to form postnatally), and its a bad assumption that layers cannot be disrupted by subsequent inflammation occurring during developing. Its an assumption without evidence.
This study shows that infants later diagnosed with autism have normal eye tracking as neonates, and this eye tracking deteriorates over 2-6 months, when vaccines are given: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24196715
While some cases of autism are definitely the result of gestational injury , the evidence clearly indicates this is not the case for all (or most) cases.
The human brain develops intensely postnatally. The brain is vulnerable to immune activation/cytokine injury during development. In particular, synaptogenesis is MORE intense in the postnatal period, and disruption of synapse formation is definitely involved in autism.
An important study (Wei 2012) showed that IL-6 elevation in the brain, BEGINNING POSTNATALLY, caused synapse imbalance (excess excitation) and autistic behavioral abnormalities.
the overwhelming majority of the evidence shows that the developing brain is vulnerable to immune activation injury in the postnatal period.
More on that here: http://vaccinepapers.org/postnatal-immune-activation/
Note this paper states:
"in the first months of life, this basic mechanism of social adaptive action--eye looking--is not immediately diminished in infants later diagnosed with ASD; instead, eye looking appears to begin at normative levels prior to decline."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24196715
So, infants later-diagnosed with autism have normal eye tracking at birth. Their eye tracking deteriorates during months 2-12, when lots of neurotoxic vaccines are given.
“autism begins long before the administration of vaccines”
Cow's milk contaminated Tdap is administered to every pregnant woman to protect the newborn against pertussis. As described in the article below, Tdap can cause the synthesis of folate receptor autoantibodies (FRAA).
Autism Spectrum Disorders: A special case of vaccine-induced cow’s milk allergy?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313524429_Autism_Spectrum_Diso…
Such maternal FRAA bind to folate receptors in the fetal brain, block folate uptake and affect brain development. Similarly, they can also block folate uptake to the fetal thyroid gland and affect thyroid development.
Maternal FRAA in breast milk can continue the damage in the newborn. A vaccine schedule with numerous cow's milk contaminated vaccines can cause the child to begin synthesizing FRAA.
So Mom can synthesize FRAA. The child can synthesize FRAA. Or both. This can explain the spectrum in Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Maternal FRAA associated ASD may be mistaken as having a genetic origin when in fact vaccines are still to blame.
Would the following preventive measures help until the vaccines are cleaned up?
Pregnant women should be tested for FRAA and IgE to folate receptor protein.
If positive, they should avoid cow's milk to reduce FRAA levels.
Folinic acid treatment for pregnant/lactating women?
Delay administering cow's milk contaminated vaccines to the newborn until cow's milk is introduced in the diet? Thus reducing the risk of synthesizing IgE (and eventually FRAA) to cow's milk proteins.
Thyroid dysfunction in children with autism spectrum disorder is associated with
folate receptor alpha autoimmune disorder
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jne.12461/epdf
Folinic acid improves verbal communication in children with autism and language impairment: a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial
http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp2016168a.html
ORAC
"VP’s traffic must be down, given all the link whoring he’s doing in the comments here."
The questions and objections here are not new. I have answered them in detail many times. Several articles on the VP blog are written to address the common questions and objections.
So thats why I provide the links. I could also copy/paste the articles. Would you prefer that? the cited papers and images would not show up.
I invite you to write rebuttals to my answers to the common questions (e.g. about immune activation injury, Al adjuvant toxicity and kinetics, the Mitkus paper etc).
@154 (Vaccine Papers)
OK, you don't understand developmental biology and you didn't read the full-text papers that I cited. What else?
@VaccinePapers #154:
Assumes that autism is as a result of injury, not genetics. Please try again.
The evidence that autism is primarily genetic is very weak. its a gene-environment interaction. Autism is rare without the environmental exposure (usually vaccines).
The "its genetic" argument is based on twin studies. but the twin studies are based on a bad assumption: that there are no gene-environment (GXE) interactions in autism. In order for the twin studies to calculate the genetic and environmental contributions to risk, it must be assumed that GXE interactions are not present. If GXE interactions are present, they falsely inflate the genetic/heritablity estimate.
“In basic twin models, gene–environment interactions are assumed not to exist, and if present, they are included as part of the additive genetic variance, inflating heritability estimates.”
“In some contexts, gene–environment interactions, i.e., that environments modify the effects of genes on the trait being studied, may account for a substantial part of the apparent heritability.”
quotes from:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22934540
There is a lot of evidence for GXE interactions in autism.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4260177/
So, the high estimates (70-90%) of heritability in autism are wrong.
"Assumes that autism is as a result of injury"
Not only are some forms of autism a result of injury, it is partially reversible. Folate receptor autoantibodies block folate uptake and cause injury. It can be reversed by folinic acid treatment.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313524429_Autism_Spectrum_Diso…
Folinic acid improves verbal communication in children with autism and language impairment: a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial
http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp2016168a.html
All this leaves me wondering whether Sin Hang Lee has any new scams going these days.
I address scientific issues practically every day. It is you whom I choose not to address. There's a difference. I'm not a fan of going down the rabbit hole chasing a practitioner of the Gish gallop.
@ VP
Is there any randomized trial of delaying vaccines in high risk babies?
This study shows that infants later diagnosed with autism have normal eye tracking as neonates, and this eye tracking deteriorates over 2-6 months, when vaccines are given: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24196715
The key word from the publication in question is decline, not deteriorate, don't try to twist word please. An alternative explanation to aluminum can be explained by perceptual functioning, namely enhanced perceptual functioning (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=search&term=Mottron+L) in which case, the neonate wouldn't just focus on the eyes but other features in the environment and I would be very curious about your answer, VP, to that and how the h*ll, aluminum is supposed to enhance perceptual functioning given that the bellcurve (you do know about statistics) properly emulate random events (i.e. by your tangent, aluminum is not neuron specific) yet, enhanced perceptual functioning is nowhere near a random effect; it is neuron and brain area specific.
Alain
more about the bellcurve:
https://mathbabe.org/2017/05/22/eugene-stern-how-value-added-models-are…
Al
Given that VP made the hysterical claim that autism *can begin* as late at 10-11 years old (totally ignoring the diagnostic criteria required), I'll take anything posted by them with many, many grains of salt.
BTW...how did we end up with the unholy trinity of VP, MJD and VA all posting their own Idee fixe on one blog post?
It might not be that bad a thing. Keep them quarantined from the rest of the blog. :-)
BTW…how did we end up with the unholy trinity of VP, MJD and VA all posting their own Idee fixe on one blog post?
that post itch under their fingernails...
Alain
The literature quotes the 0.3% figure.
The figure for bioavailability from vaccine injection into muscle is 17%, so larger, but over 28 days. However, there is a lot more exposure by ingestion than by vaccination.
Added to this there has been 80 years of use of aluminium adjuvants in vaccines and somehow they have only been causing autism for the last 15 years once thiomersal was removed. It is truly magic.
The bit I like is how they have all been congratulating each other on their insights, despite the three theses being completely at odds. It has been a nice little illustration of crank magnetism writ small.
Chris,
I have to admit I'm very curious to see how VP will drive out of the cognitive dissonance he/she drove into WRT my comment.
Very curious indeed.
Alain
Alain, their normal response has been to change the topic.
Alain, their normal response has been to change the topic.
Unfortunately, I know. It's a friggen game of whack-a-mole but see my comment on our host today's post. An "interesting" side effect of such a proposal would be never ending "fun" playing whack-a-mole with them.
(No I wouldn't look forward to 3000+ comments posts...)
Alain
"I would be very curious about your answer, VP, to that and how the h*ll, aluminum is supposed to enhance perceptual functioning "
It doesnt. Aluminum causes brain injury. The decline in eye tracking indicates pathology, not heathy/normal functioning.
"Given that VP made the hysterical claim that autism *can begin* as late at 10-11 years old (totally ignoring the diagnostic criteria required), "
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12369775
“On the DSM-IV symptom checklist for autistic disorder, he met all the criteria for autism except the onset criterion because he did not have a history of any symptoms before three years of age.”
The authors state that this case “… provides further evidence that autistic symptoms can sometimes emerge after the age of three years following an external event such as an infection.”
The age 3 diagnostic requirement is arbitrary. Its not based on any mechanistic understanding of the injury.
Autism is brain injury caused by inflammation and cytokines. The brain becomes less vulnerable to injury with maturation. Children over age 3 can experience the same injury from inflammation as younger children.
Vaccine Papers, aluminum is one of the most common elements on the planet. Why are we not seeing the same results people getting dirt in wounds?
Gray Falcon,
"Vaccine Papers, aluminum is one of the most common elements on the planet. Why are we not seeing the same results people getting dirt in wounds?"
If dirt cheap dirt worked as well as aluminum adjuvant, why would vaccine makers not use dirt as an adjuvant instead for paying for Alhydrogel?
"The figure for bioavailability from vaccine injection into muscle is 17%, so larger, but over 28 days. However, there is a lot more exposure by ingestion than by vaccination."
For AlOH, its 6% over 28 days (Flarend 1997).
Not true for ages 0-6 months. Do the calculations. And you can even use the 6% and 22% numbers from Flarend (which ignore toxicity of the particles).
Birth (Hep B): 74 mcg/kg (250 mcg for 3.4 kg infant)
2 month: 245 mcg/kg (1225 mcg for 5 kg infant)
4 month: 150 mcg/kg (975 mcg for 6.5 kg infant)
6 month: 153 mcg/kg (1225 mcg for 8 kg infant)
Total for 0-6 months: 3675 mcg aluminum
6 months from ingestion:
breastmilk: 7mg x 0.3% = 21 mcg (0.021 mg)
formula: 38mg x 0.3% = 114 mcg (0.114 mg)
soy formula: 117mg x 0.3% = 351 mcg (0.351mg)
6% of 3675 mcg is 220 mcg, x 6 months (rough estimate) gives about 1300 mcg. And thats with the false assumption that all the Al is AlOH (which has lower solubility than AlPO4).
1300/21 mcg = 62X more than from human milk.
For AlPO4, the number is higher.
"Vaccine Papers, aluminum is one of the most common elements on the planet. Why are we not seeing the same results people getting dirt in wounds?"
1) dirt is generally not nanoparticulate unlike Al adjuvant, which is a gel, and 2) people clean their wounds, and 3) dirt in wounds is superficially deep, not injected into muscle.
"I address scientific issues practically every day. It is you whom I choose not to address. There’s a difference. I’m not a fan of going down the rabbit hole chasing a practitioner of the Gish gallop.
Orac-
You cannot describe my arguments as a gish gallop. I make 3 arguments: aluminum toxicity, immune activation and healthy user bias. THREE.
And I am specific about how they relate to autism (Al injection>Al transport to brain>IL-6 in brain> autism). I make detailed, falsifiable claims, and I show my reasoning. I dont hide the ball. I dont make vague assertions. I dont make dozens of superficial claims without reasing (thats a true gish gallop).
So I say you avoid my arguments because you do not know how to refute them.
It doesnt. Aluminum causes brain injury. The decline in eye tracking indicates pathology, not heathy/normal functioning
Oh, So that body of knowledge here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=search&term=Mottron+L does not exist? You need to take a stronger look because the subject described by that aforementioned body of knowledge are indeed autistic and it was found that they have increased perceptual functioning. Let me explain that again VP, autism == enhanced perceptual functioning
Do you get it?
Alain
"Added to this there has been 80 years of use of aluminium adjuvants in vaccines and somehow they have only been causing autism for the last 15 years once thiomersal was removed. It is truly magic."
Dosage of Al adjuvant from vaccines increased enormously during the 1990s, when the autism epidemic exploded.
other factors contribute, like vitamin D deficiency for example.
Al adjuvant has never been shown to be neurologically safe in EMPIRICAL studies. The safety studies (e.g. Mitkus) are garbage and not look at neurological outcomes. Further, the Mitkus analysis is not based on ANY empirical safety/toxicity data for Al adjuvant. Mitkus only uses toxicity data for INGESTED aluminum lactate (from a SINGLE study-Golub 2001).
The toxicity data used by Mitkus is from this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11485839
All the empirical evidence shows that Al adjuvant causes brain injury at vaccine dosages. Here is the latest study:
http://vaccinepapers.org/wp-content/uploads/Non-linear-dose-response-of…
"it was found that they have increased perceptual functioning"
In what way? Can you be more specific about what was enhanced?
In autism, there is an excitatory/inhibitory synapse imbalance, in favor of excitation. It may be that in early development, the excess of excitation produces increased sensitivity to stimuli. Is this what you are referring to? Is your "increased functioning" the result of excess excitation?
The excitatory excess is certainly pathological at older ages (causes hypersensitivity to lights, sounds, stimming etc).
I suppose you are talking about this one:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27631982
Interesting results there. Impossible to know if the improved visual reasoning is caused by the cause of autism (inflammation) or is a result of the genes that confer autism risk (via GXE interaction with vaccines).
There was an article yesterday that intelligence-associated genes are also associated with autism. So the visual performance results may be because the genes that confer autism risk, also provide improved visual reasoning. Impossible to know the causal connections.
VP,
Not at all, look at my link again because this is the search result for 128 publications with over 4/5 of them on enhanced perceptual functioning by the same PI, Laurent Mottron. Obviously, this is not the only body of knowledge on enhanced perceptual functioning (other groups are investigating that hypothesis) but this one is the most familiar to me, I worked for the PI.
128 publication spanning close to 2 decades. Look at the link again.
OK i get it. Autism is associated with enhanced visual reasoning, according to these tests. Thats interesting, but does not mean much in the present discussion. Why are you citing this?
if your point is that there is no way aluminum could cause this, I disagree. The mechanism for autism causation is inflammation. And inflammation causes many changes in how the brain develops, connectivity etc. Most changes are pathological. But I certainly would never argue that absolutely 100% of the changes caused by high inflammation in the brain are pathological according to every measurement test.
its clear that autism is pathological.
"Is there any randomized trial of delaying vaccines in high risk babies?"
No. This is the type of study thats needed. The results would put an end to this ongoing tragic failure of orthodox medicine.
the medical establishment is terrified of facing he blame for the autism epidemic and epidemic of vaccine injury, so they oppose well-designed research into vaccine injury.. But science and truth cannot be stopped forever.
Orthodox medicine will be deeply ashamed and embarrassed when the truth is known.
No, Mitkus et al. (sec. 2.4) used the ATSDR Tox Profile 2008 (which consists of several studies) to establish MRL and pharmacokinetics are intrinsically tied to availability, excretion and deposition. By all means cite your evidence of harms with the figures you posited.
Prove it. Show your evidence here; I'm not going to your site.
No, I refuse to bring this to your crank site. You came here making the claims, you show the evidence.
Ooooo the particles. Toxicity was already established so whatever you're on about is outside the scope of the Mitkus et al. paper. You have still yet to establish your claim as well as tell me the order of tissue distribution of aluminium.
Of course and only bold, maverick, amateur "scientists" like yourself will show us the way. How long have you kooks been at this?
@VP: autism is a developmental delay not inflammation of the brain, TBI, or anything else. You posted a paper from 2002. While the first author has a respectable CV, I don't see any publications on THIS subject more recent that about 2005. I assume he's moved beyond that theory in those years.
Science Mom,
I guess I can color myself embarrassed and ashamed to divert part of the funding in the research for autism... ;)
Alain
I mean "this subject" as autism being an environmental insult.
"No, Mitkus et al. (sec. 2.4) used the ATSDR Tox Profile 2008"
The ATSDR gets its NOAEL number (26 mg/kg/day) from Golub 2001.
if the 26 mg/kg/day NOAEL is wrong, then Mitkus is wrong. And 26 mg/kg/day is wrong. Its definitely NOT a NOAEL.
"Prove it. Show your evidence here; I’m not going to your site."
Its based on a 2016 study from Alawdi et al showing neurotoxicity (behavioral changes and neuroinflammation) from a dosage of 3.4 mg/kg/day (17 mg/kg/day AlCl3).
26/3.4 = 7.6. So, the Mitkus MRL is wrong by a factor of AT LEAST 7.6. I say at least because 3.4 mg/kg/day is not a NOAEL. Adverse effects were observed at this dosage.
Here is the Alawdi study:: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/articles/26897372/
This article explains this stuff in detail (for people not scared by information they disagree with): http://vaccinepapers.org/the-foundation-for-al-adjuvant-safety-is-false/
Alawdi is NOT the only study showing toxic effects at dosages less than 26 mg/kg/day. There are many others (I count 7-8 or so).
"Ooooo the particles."
Yes the particles. They matter. Particles have different transport/kinetics properties and totally different mechanisms of toxicity.
Here is a review paper on the subject:
"Toxicity of Nanomaterials"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703119/
I don't know if you're thivk or just stubborn, Vaccine Papers.
The key phrase there is "enhanced reasoning", which would appear to refute your conjecture that autism is a brain injury.
"autism is a developmental delay not inflammation of the brain,"
There is widespread, intense and chronic inflammation in the brains of autistic people. Lots of studies on this.
Here is the seminal paper on this topic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15546155
Thanks Julian,
You said it better than I could. I need to work on my phrasing & writing ability.
Alain
VP: the doses DO NOT STACK. Aluminum is excreted by the kidneys. Any aluminum given in one dose is eliminated well before a subsequent one is given.
If your insane theory were correct, EVERYONE would have neurological impairments.
If that's what he considered to be the "seminal" work, no wonder he's delusional.
"The key phrase there is “enhanced reasoning”, which would appear to refute your conjecture that autism is a brain injury."
enhanced VISUAL reasoning, according to the specific test.
Autism is very clearly a brain injury and pathological, even if by some measures they perform better.
As I pointed out, we dont know if the enhancement is due to the autism, or merely associated with it (e.g. the enhancement may be because the genes that confer autism risk also improve visual reasoning).
Schizophrenia is also associated with some enhancements in visual performance tasks.
Does this mean that schizophrenia is not pathological?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3756604/
@Vaccine Papers #196, I had a look at the paper you referenced.
1) It dates back to 2005. Please use something more up to date.
2) Sample size.
That's just 24 subjects. 11 corpses, seven non-autistic patients and six autistic patients.
Somehow, that doesn't strike me as very convincing.
"If that’s what he considered to be the “seminal” work, no wonder he’s delusional."
The vargas paper has been cited by 339 other papers. its one of the most highly cited papers in the autism literature. It stimulated huge interest in brain inflammation in autism. Its definitely seminal and very important.
The Vargas results have been replicated many times. Example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23404112
Its proven beyond any doubt that the brain is inflamed in autism. There is no debate about this. Its as settled as science ever gets.
So important that you can't cite anything better?
Sorry, but color me entirely unconvinced.
So how exactly do unvaccinated children suffer from exactly the same symptoms of autism as children who are vaccinated?
"the doses DO NOT STACK. Aluminum is excreted by the kidneys. Any aluminum given in one dose is eliminated well before a subsequent one is given."
Not true. See Flarend 1997, which provides the best data on Al adjuvant kinetics. It showed that excretion of Al adjuvant after 28 days is:
6% for AlOH
22% for AlPO4.
Other studies show it hangs around for months and years. Khan 2013 demonstrated Al adjuvant particles in mouse brain ONE YEAR after injection.
the kidney cannot excrete Al adjuvant particles. They dont even travel via the blood. They are carried around the body by macrophages.
And diseases such as measles, which used to infect just about everyone back in the day, caused much more robust "inflammatory" responses than any vaccine could.
VP,
Instead of relying on a single paper about enhanced visual reasoning for which you provided the situation, how about you look at the 128 papers I mentioned and which also, refute your hypothesis of brain damage?
Alain
Someone has aluminum on the brain, and it isn't people with autism.
"So how exactly do unvaccinated children suffer from exactly the same symptoms of autism as children who are vaccinated?"
CITATION NEEDED. There is no study supporting your claim.
Note that the MMR vaccine does not contain aluminum, and its the only vaccine studied in relation to autism. There have been no epidemiological studies of Al adjuvant exposure and autism.
typo: situation == citation.
Alain
"And diseases such as measles, which used to infect just about everyone back in the day, caused much more robust “inflammatory” responses than any vaccine could."
What matters is inflammation in the brain. Al adjuvant causes inflammation in the brain specifically.
Also, chronic inflammation is what matters. Inflammation from an infectious illness is transient. Al adjuvant causes long term, chronic brain inflammation.
"how about you look at the 128 papers I mentioned and which also, refute your hypothesis of brain damage?"
Im not going to dig through 128 papers to find support for your argument. Thats your job. You are making a GISH GALLOP. I looked at a number of them and did not immediately see that all of them reported enhancements.
What enhancements occur other than visual reasoning in the specific test mentioned in that paper I identified?
Wow, just wow.
And I wonder why VP is wasting all of our time here & not submitting for a Nobel Prize?
"Sorry, but color me entirely unconvinced."
You are skeptical that inflammation is present in the autistic brain?
This is autism 101. Please learn the basic scientific facts about the disorder before commenting.
https://www.autismspeaks.org/science/science-news/study-suggests-brain-…
"And I wonder why VP is wasting all of our time here & not submitting for a Nobel Prize?"
Ah the Nobel prize gambit. So funny! Like I havent heard that bullshit before. Vaccine promoters are so predictable.
Thats not an argument.
@Vaccine Papers #203:
No it isn't. As to the study you mentioned, it had 20 subjects. In addition, "excessive microglial activation" is not indicative of brain injury.
"The investigators conclude that the brain inflammation likely resulted from, rather than caused, autism"
There are lots of other studies establishing inflammation> autism causation. Like this study in monkeys.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24011823
Epidemiological studies in humans also show that autism is caused by immune activation (inflammation).
You are making a GISH GALLOP
False accusation. I provide the evidence against your hypothesis of autism being brain damage. There is also auditory enhancements and better results on the Raven Standard progressive matrix including in neuroimaging beside faster response time.
Now if you won't go read that evidence, you have no business or any grounding to say that autism is a result vaccine injuries.
Alain
Link to the specific citations and I will look at them. Not going to look at a list of 128 unsorted papers produced by a search query!
Enhancements in a few types of test results does not establish its not a brain injury/pathological. Overwhelming science shows autism is a brain injury.
A study mentioned by "Autism Speaks" in 2014? Seriously?
"Autism Speaks" pushed the "vaccines cause autism" line long after it was no longer tenable. And the number of subjects?
Another study with a ridiculously small sample size. That's the third one you've posted. And did you see the word "suggests"? That doesn't mean the study is definitive, just preliminary.
And that rhesus monkey study you mention had 13 subjects and 11 controls. "Underpowered" doesn't even begin to cover it.
The authors of that small study are mortified by how it has been co-opted and completely abused by cranks like you leading to parents shovelling Rx anti-inflammatories and anti-virals into their autistic children. No, there is not "widespread, intense and chronic inflammation in the brains of autistic people." And no there are not "lots of studies on this." Not surprised ignorant attention-whores like you just make things up though.
Just making sure you see this response re: Mitkus.
“No, Mitkus et al. (sec. 2.4) used the ATSDR Tox Profile 2008”
The ATSDR gets its NOAEL number (26 mg/kg/day) from Golub 2001.
if the 26 mg/kg/day NOAEL is wrong, then Mitkus is wrong. And 26 mg/kg/day is wrong. Its definitely NOT a NOAEL.
“Prove it. Show your evidence here; I’m not going to your site.”
Its based on a 2016 study from Alawdi et al showing neurotoxicity (behavioral changes and neuroinflammation) from a dosage of 3.4 mg/kg/day (17 mg/kg/day AlCl3).
26/3.4 = 7.6. So, the Mitkus MRL is wrong by a factor of AT LEAST 7.6. I say at least because 3.4 mg/kg/day is not a NOAEL. Adverse effects were observed at this dosage.
Here is the Alawdi study:: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/articles/26897372/
This article explains this stuff in detail (for people not scared by information they disagree with): http://vaccinepapers.org/the-foundation-for-al-adjuvant-safety-is-false/
Alawdi is NOT the only study showing toxic effects at dosages less than 26 mg/kg/day. There are many others (I count 7-8 or so).
“Ooooo the particles.”
Yes the particles. They matter. Particles have different transport/kinetics properties and totally different mechanisms of toxicity.
Here is a review paper on the subject:
“Toxicity of Nanomaterials”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703119/
"“excessive microglial activation” is not indicative of brain injury."
Oh yes it is. Microglial activation indicates ongoing neuroinflammation. Activated microglia cause all sorts of damage to the brain.
There is PLENTY of science richly demonstrating the brain injury present in autism. its preposterous to say autism is not a brain injury. Just shows a complete ignorance of the literature. Not interested in debating this point.
VP,
How many papers do you have on your website?
Alain
"And no there are not “lots of studies on this.” Not surprised ignorant attention-whores like you just make things up though."
So you are suggesting that there is not inflammation in the autistic brain? Really?
Arguing this is utterly ridiculous. Im amazed.
And another example of the VP crank abusing studies about maternal infection to make the chasmic leap to vaccinesdidit.
ANother paper on the chronic inflammation in the autistic brain:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2770268/
Really, you guys need to stop arguing this point.
Immune markers found in the brain tissue of a handful of autistics is not "inflammation in autistics' brains. Really.
It certainly is given your woeful ignorance of biology and study interpretation. Glad we agree on something.
""And another example of the VP crank abusing studies about maternal infection to make the chasmic leap to vaccinesdidit.
Autism is brain injury caused by early life inflammation in the brain. And thats exactly what Al adjuvant does.
Al adjuvant in fact stimulates the exact same type of immune activation (interleukin-6) proven to cause the disorder.
So you are suggesting that there is not inflammation in the autistic brain? Really?
I haven't said that, neither that the normal brain doesn't have any inflammation either. My point of contention is autism being brain damage. I provide the evidence to the contrary.
So, how many papers do you have on your website^ and second question, is that an exhaustive search for paper?
Alain
There are so many pathologies in autism: inflammation, impaired methylation, oxidative stress, cogntiive impairments, immune dysfunction. And there are many associations with other disorders: autoimmunity and allergy are examples.
Autistics also have higher mortality. We can agree this is pathological, right?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23008058
The scientific literature does not often specifically describe it as pathological, because it does not need to. Everyone knows that chronic inflammation is pathological.
Orthodox medicine faces the blame for the epidemic of vaccine brain injury known as autism. Thats why they want to shift the blame to things like genes, and pretend like its not really a problem. Politics, not science, is driving opinions about autism in the medical community.
"No, there is not “widespread, intense and chronic inflammation in the brains of autistic people.”"
CITATION NEEDED.
Every study ever done on this question has reported the same thing: widespread, intense and chronic inflammation in the autistic brain.
And, a study of several dozen autistic brains is a good size study. Very difficult to obtain human autistic brain samples and analyze them. You are expecting/demanding a study of THOUSANDS of brains? Really?
The Vargas 2005 study looked at dozens of cytokines and inflammatory markers in numerous brain regions separately, in controls and autistics. That study was a huge amount of work.
Its not reasonable to demand such an impossibly high level of evidence.
Again, I'm confused why VP is wasting time on us "ignorant" folk & not applying to the Nobel committee....
VP,
Again, how many papers do you have on your website? And also, is that an exhaustive search for papers?
Alain
"And also, is that an exhaustive search for papers?"
I dont understand this question.
Vaccine Papers,
You responded to DB's citation of a study that suggested that lesions in the brains of people with autism arose early in gestation by stating that "cortical layers continue to form postnatally." Uh huh.
In response to a citation of work that involved the comparison of whole exome sequencing data from over 80,000 individuals, you indicated that you don't like twin studies. Got it.
You're just embarrassing yourself.
Thats an insult, not an argument.
"And that rhesus monkey study you mention had 13 subjects and 11 controls. “Underpowered” doesn’t even begin to cover it."
Thats a decent size for a monkey study, which are very expensive to do.
The results were highly statistically significant, which is what counts.
"In response to a citation of work that involved the comparison of whole exome sequencing data from over 80,000 individuals, you indicated that you don’t like twin studies. "
The claims of high heritability are based on the twin studies, not the genome sequencing studies, because genome sequencing has failed to provide evidence that its highly heritable. There are hundreds of genes associated with autism, most with weak association. That indicates its NOT a genetic disorder. Its a gene-environment interaction.
Not to tooth my horn but I also wonder why VP isn't inclined to read only 128 papers of my own choosing while, in my case, from our publication, there is this text:
Of over 7000 articles retrieved, 58 (19 PET and 39 fMRI) satisfied all inclusion criteria and were included in the analysis
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21833294 and http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00241/full
Of which, I personally read over 2000 of them at a rate of 50 per day ;) While attending my undergrad study...and doing my usual daily chores.
That said, I'm perusing the list of 128 article I provided to VP to trim that down to a readable list...if only VP would give me the number of publication for his / her evidence that autism is brain damage...Will I be waiting? :)
Alain
Papers on the VP website are contextualized and explained. They are not merely listed without explanation, as you have done.
VP,
To answer your question, for our paper, we did an exhaustive search for papers (which in our case, was over 7000 papers needing screening and assessment). I want to know if the list of papers on your website is as complete as possible and how many there is? Your website doesn't specify the number of papers you have there. I want a number.
Alain
You are free to go count them. I havent done that.
# 167 Dr. Corcos,
"Is there any randomized trial of delaying vaccines in high risk babies?"
What is considered "high risk" in this case?
You are free to go count them. I havent done that.
oooohhhh....Now that doesn't support your argument that there is massive evidence of brain damage if you are not even able to count the number of papers on your website which is the bare minimum task to do if one want to be considered a scientist. Did you even read them?
Alain
I'm sure that curl or wget would be more than happy to provide you with the answer to that. More interesting to me is how many of them are pirated.
Narad,
Sure I can and will do that but I wanted to verify his / her assertion that there are massive evidence of brain damage.
Alain
Here is a suggestion: you should engage with my evidence and arguments. Explain why my arguments are wrong.
Explain why this causal chain is wrong:
Al adjuvant injection > transport to brain > inflammation in brain > autism.
Again, why are you wasting time trying to convince us of your hypothesis?
Why aren't you accepting a Nobel Prize as we speak, since you've got it all figured out?
Ok,
I will mention it again, the enhanced perceptual functioning and associated hypothesis (Markram et al. at least but there are other) goes against your hypothesis that autism is a result of brain damage. Furthermore, IQ range of autistic peoples goes from mental disability range (not testable) to over 150 IQ point score (98th percentile on the RSPM) which argue against brain damages.
Of course, there can be inflammation in autistic brain but that can be present in the normal brain too (fever among others), that is not, automatically brain damages. Furthermore, there is evidence from, at a minimum, the lab I was working in of excellent memory (we also studied autistic savants for which, the epidemiology is 1/5 autistic subjects having savants abilities compared to the general population rate of 1%).
Which again, goes against brain damage. Yes, autism is a pathology (a social one and sometime, a language one) but that doesn't mean brain damage.
You get it?
Alain
While VP insists that "every" study on the question reveals that there's widespread chronic inflammation in the brains of those with autism, VP ignores that such inflammation to some extent may be the _consequence_ and not the cause of autism.
https://www.autismspeaks.org/science/science-news/study-suggests-brain-…
If we accept the idea that inflammation causes autism, then VP will have to continue doing a dance around evidence that autism begins during gestation and inflammatory changes in utero could have a causative role.
"Autism likely begins in the womb, during brain formation, and animal studies indicate that layer formation in the fetal brain may be damaged by inflammation in the mother. A study published in February 2014 followed 1.2 million pregnancies in Finland. Researchers measured the women's levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a well-established measure of inflammation. They found that the risk of autism in the children of women with the highest levels of CRP was 43 percent higher than in those of the women with the lowest levels."
"Other studies have begun to show that mothers who have certain pro-inflammatory conditions are at greater risk of having children with autism—these conditions include rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, celiac disease, diabetes, and obesity. Women with autoimmune diseases are more likely to produce "antibrain antibodies," which can attack the brain tissue of a fetus. Women who have an infection during pregnancy may also be at increased risk of having children with autism.
These studies suggest that measuring inflammation in pregnant women may help identify those children most at risk for developing an ASD and help get them early intervention."
http://www.healthline.com/health-news/connection-between-inflammation-a…
Note that last part about infection-associated risks. VP would have you believe that minute quantities of aluminum-based adjuvant or other Vaccine Toxins are grievously harmful to developing brains, but somehow serious infections with their raft of actual toxins causing release of large amounts of cytokines are inconsequential.
In a way, it's amusing to see so many fallacies dressed up in pseudoscientific jargon in defense of antivax ideology.
But it's also depressing.
I want to reemphasize your later point - that if inflammation was the issue, the diseases would be the concern, not the tiny amounts of aluminum salts in vaccines. VP suggested earlier that measles does not cause inflammation in the brain - which is strange in a disease for which one of the complications is encephalitis, in about 1:1000. Mumps can also cause encephalitis, and other diseases also have such effects. So if the issue was inflammation, why are the vaccines the culprit and not the solution?
" Researchers measured the women’s levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a well-established measure of inflammation. They found that the risk of autism in the children of women with the highest levels of CRP was 43 percent higher than in those of the women with the lowest levels.”"
Elevated inflammation during gestation creates higher risk of injury from inflammation from vaccines. Its the "two-hit" model. First hit does not cause great damage, but creates vulnerability to a second hit. The second hit (vaccines) causes the injury.
"VP would have you believe that minute quantities of aluminum-based adjuvant or other Vaccine Toxins are grievously harmful to developing brains, but somehow serious infections with their raft of actual toxins causing release of large amounts of cytokines are inconsequential."
The quantities are not minute. They are proven to cause life-long debilitating brain injury and inflammation in the brain, at vaccine dosages. Al adjuvant causes long term chronic inflammation in the brain, because it puts aluminum in the brain. Normal infectious illnesses do not do this. They cause transient inflammation, not necessarily in the brain.
Of course he doesn't.
Because he's talking about a "brain damage" which is so specific that this "inflammation" cannot be replicated by anything other than aluminum salts adjuvants.
Which leads me back to the question of why we find autistic children (and adults) who are entirely unvaccinated.
Al adjuvant injection > transport to brain > inflammation in brain > autism.
The part in bold: inflammation in brain, does not always lead to autism. This is a non-specific finding which can present in every brain on this planet leading to different results or pathology, if any (pathology that is) is present.
Alain
"Of course, there can be inflammation in autistic brain but that can be present in the normal brain too (fever among others), that is not, automatically brain damages. Furthermore, there is evidence from, at a minimum, the lab I was working in of excellent memory (we also studied autistic savants for which, the epidemiology is 1/5 autistic subjects having savants abilities compared to the general population rate of 1%).
Which again, goes against brain damage. Yes, autism is a pathology (a social one and sometime, a language one) but that doesn’t mean brain damage.
You get it?"
yes I get it. Thank you for explaining.
Yes inflammation must be intense and/or long enough to cause injury.
Autism is associated with intelligence genes. So, association with some types of improved cognitive function does not establish its not injury. We dont know what the cognitive function would be like in these individuals if they were not autistic.
As I mentioned, there are MANY reasons why autism is an injury-the inflammation, missing purkinje cells and associations with diseases. We know some of the causes, like early life infections and toxin exposures, and they are definitely not beneficial or benign.
See the literature on immune activation and autism. Experiments in animals prove causation, i.e. the link:
inflammation 9IL-6) >> autism.
example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22310922
Lawrence,
Agreed. Time for me to go to work.
Later ;)
Al
Remarkably, recent evidence suggests that gene-environmental interaction at very early periods of fetal brain development produce ASD-related phenotypes. This has nothing to do with postnatal administration of adjuvanted vaccines.
Atladottir HO, Thorsen P, Ostergaard L, Schendel DE, Lemcke S, Abdallah M et al. Maternal infection requiring hospitalization during pregnancy and autism spectrum disorders. J Autism Dev Disord 2010; 40(12): 1423-1430.
Baron-Cohen S, Auyeung B, Norgaard-Pedersen B, Hougaard DM, Abdallah MW, Melgaard L et al. Elevated fetal steroidogenic activity in autism. Molecular psychiatry 2015; 20(3): 369-376.
Birnbaum R, Jaffe AE, Hyde TM, Kleinman JE, Weinberger DR. Prenatal expression patterns of genes associated with neuropsychiatric disorders. The American journal of psychiatry 2014; 171(7): 758-767.
Brimberg L, Sadiq A, Gregersen PK, Diamond B. Brain-reactive IgG correlates with autoimmunity in mothers of a child with an autism spectrum disorder. Molecular psychiatry 2013; 18(11): 1171-1177.
Courchesne E, Mouton PR, Calhoun ME, Semendeferi K, Ahrens-Barbeau C, Hallet MJ et al. Neuron number and size in prefrontal cortex of children with autism. JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association 2011; 306(18): 2001-2010.
Jiang HY, Xu LL, Shao L, Xia RM, Yu ZH, Ling ZX et al. Maternal Infection during Pregnancy and Risk of Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Systematic Review and Meta analysis. Brain Behav Immun 2016.
Lee BK, Magnusson C, Gardner RM, Blomstrom A, Newschaffer CJ, Burstyn I et al. Maternal hospitalization with infection during pregnancy and risk of autism spectrum disorders. Brain Behav Immun 2015; 44: 100-105.
Lombardo, MV, Moon, HM, Su, J, Palmer, TD, Courchesne, E, Pramparo T. Maternal immune activation dysregulation of the fetal brain transcriptome and relevance to the pathophysiology of autism spectrum disorder. Molecular Psychiatry advance online publication 21 March 2017; doi: 10.1038/mp.2017.15
Parikshak NN, Luo R, Zhang A, Won H, Lowe JK, Chandran V et al. Integrative functional genomic analyses implicate specific molecular pathways and circuits in autism. Cell 2013; 155(5): 1008-1021.
Stoner R, Chow ML, Boyle MP, Sunkin SM, Mouton PR, Roy S et al. Patches of disorganization in the neocortex of children with autism. N Engl J Med 2014; 370(13): 1209-1219.
Willsey AJ, Sanders SJ, Li M, Dong S, Tebbenkamp AT, Muhle RA et al. Coexpression networks implicate human midfetal deep cortical projection neurons in the pathogenesis of autism. Cell 2013; 155(5): 997-1007.
Do you even know what a lysosome is?
""Because he’s talking about a “brain damage” which is so specific that this “inflammation” cannot be replicated by anything other than aluminum salts adjuvants.
Which leads me back to the question of why we find autistic children (and adults) who are entirely unvaccinated.
Anything that causes the right type of inflammation in the brain, of sufficient duration and/or intensity, can cause autism. Infections can cause autism, because infections can cause inflammation in the brain.
"Remarkably, recent evidence suggests that gene-environmental interaction at very early periods of fetal brain development produce ASD-related phenotypes. This has nothing to do with postnatal administration of adjuvanted vaccines."
The injury can occur prenatally or postnatally.
There is nothing in your cited papers that indicates the injury can occur only in the prenatal period.
The human brain has intense development after birth, including the formation of most synapses. Synapse formation is known to be disrupted in autism.
"There is nothing in your cited papers that indicates the injury can occur only in the prenatal period."
Remarkably, prenatal development can explain postnatal phenotypes, but postnatal exposure to adjuvants cannot explain observed ASD-related changes during fetal development.
"but postnatal exposure to adjuvants cannot explain observed ASD-related changes during fetal development."
Actually they can, because your evidence is mere correlation.
Differences observed in the prenatal period are simply indicators of vulnerability to vaccine injury.
Specifically, this vulnerability can be caused by things like nutrient deficiency (e.g. vitamin D deficiency) or genetic tendency to high inflammation or autoimmunity (which would create vulnerability to vaccination).
No it doesn't and your hand-waving isn't a substitute for evidence. As usual the VP crank starts off with his aluminium fixation, can't answer rebuttal nor provide evidence to support his claims then moves on to his other obsession, IL-6. Tell me VP crank, what is the order of tissue deposition for aluminium?
You should read my arguments, including articles on the VP blog, before commenting.
Lots of scientific evidence supports the IL-6 > autism connection.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23994594
That study had 11 controls and 13 subjects. There is no way on Earth it was statistically significant.
Summary of the results. Several results had P<0.01.
(A) Maternal immune activation (MIA) off- spring exhibit increased frequency of motor stereotypies and self-directed behaviors. Left panel: When observed alone in a large cage at 10 months of age, second trimester MIA (MIA2) animals produce significantly more repetitive behaviors than control animals (CON) (**p # .01). The first trimester MIA (MIA1) offspring also produce more repetitive behaviors than control animals, but this difference does not reach statistical significance at 10 months (p 1⁄4 .06). Middle panel: When observed alone at 22 months of age, MIA1 offspring produce significantly more repetitive behaviors (*p # .05). Second trimester MIA animals also produce significantly more repetitive behaviors than control animals at 22 months (**p # .01). Right panel: When tested at 17 months of age in the Y- maze social preference assay, MIA2 treatment animals produce significantly more repetitive behaviors than control animals (**p # .01). (B) Maternal immune activation offspring display decreased affiliative vocaliza- tions. Left panel: At 22 months, MIA2 offspring produce significantly fewer coo calls than control animals (**p .01). Right panel: When observed with a novel conspe- cific at 24 months of age, MIA1 offspring produce significantly fewer coo calls than control animals (*p # .05). (C) Maternal immune activation offspring exhibit inappropriate interactions with unfamiliar conspecifics. Left panel: First trimester MIA offspring demonstrate inappropriate social interactions with an unfamiliar animal, as indexed by high frequency of approaching (*p 0.05) and more frequently moving within arm’s reach of the unfamiliar animal (**p .01). Right panel: First trimester MIA offspring remained near the unfami- liar animal, as indexed by the duration of time spent in physical contact or within arm’s reach of the unfamiliar animal (*p .05).
You're really not clear on this concept, are you?
By the way, most of the Papers you list use the words "suggest" "may" and "might".
Such language is common in scientific literature, which is typically written with an (over) abundance of caution. What matters most is the data presented, not the opinions of the authors. The Wei IL-6 paper reviews strong evidence proving that IL-6 causes autism in animal models. Its proven beyond any reasonable doubt, at least in the animal models.
Also see this (IL-6 induces IL-17, so this paper is another replication of the IL-6 results):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26822608
If I resume that correctly:
Autism is brain damage caused by 9IL6 which is a causative agent even in autistic people having an IQ off the chart for which if there where no vaccines given and no injuries to the brain, autistic people would have even greater IQ. Everything else is correlational.
I think there's lots of assumptions in there but I'll leave it to the regulars because of work and commenting on a phone is awful.
Al
"autism in animals" model?
So, via the current DSM, what should autism in a Rat look like?
abnormal social and communicative behavior, and repetitive behavior. Also, damage to purkinje cells and cerebellum. Successful animal model replications have been done in monkeys, which are obviously more human-like. The animal models are excellent models of human disease, since immune activation (infection) also causes autism in humans, and they produce the same physiological damage and behaviors. Also, the same drugs and brain inflammation is observed. The animal models match human autism in every way thats been tested. The validity of the immune activation animal models is accepted, by consensus.
A recent quote from a well known autism researcher:
“These MIA (maternal immune activation) animal models meet all of the criteria required for validity for a disease model: They mimic a known disease-related risk factor (construct validity), they exhibit a wide range of disease-related symptoms (face validity), and they can be used to predict the efficacy of treatments (predictive validity).”
–Dr Kimberley McAllister, UC Davis MIND Institute, Science, August 2016 (i.e. this paper: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6301/772 )
Uh huh. So here are some fetal neurodevelopmental "indicators of vulnerability to vaccine injury":
Blurring of the gray/white matter junction as the result of a migratory defect where cells that should move to the cerebral cortex get stuck in the subplate region.
Corpus callosum abnormalities that indicate axonal guidance defects related to abnormalities of neuronal migration, e.g., heterotopias, an increase in subpial neurons, and cortical malformations.
Disorganization of minicolumns, the units of the basic architecture of the brain.
Reduction of the number of interneurons along with abnormal migration of radially migrating neuroblasts as a result of mistiming of migration.
You dont have evidence that those defects are present prenatally. Thats ASSUMED.
"Begging the question" appears to be something else that has failed to sink into Dan's cranium.
Autism is a "spectrum" which ranges from very severe to high functioning.....so pray tell, how can you use these "animal models" that you put so much faith in, to relate back to a single vaccine ingredient?
I ask the question, knowing that you really can't answer it.
Again, if you're so sure, why aren't you receiving your Nobel Prize?
"how can you use these “animal models” that you put so much faith in, to relate back to a single vaccine ingredient?"
The connection is IL-6.
IL-6 causes the injury in the animal models, and aluminum adjuvant induces IL-6 in the brain.
Al adjuvant > IL-6 in brain > autism
I've read some of your block. You're a hack and obviously out of your depth.
Something something opinion piece and nothing to do with vaccines as usual.
You guys are supposed to have mountains of evidence that vaccines do not cause autism, right? How come I have not seen any such evidence with regard to aluminum adjuvant?
This was a howler. Data pl. numpty and the interpretation of the data by the authors who know a helluva lot more on the subject than you do matters, not your free-wheeling associations and lack of intellectual integrity.
They argue that IL-6 causes autism.
quotes:
"All these evidences suggest that brain IL-6 may play an important role in the development of autism."
"IL-6 elevation in the brain, caused by the activated glia and/or MIA could mediate autism- like behaviors, through impairments of neuroanatomical structures and neuronal plasticity"
"Wei et al. developed a mouse model of over-expressing IL-6 in the brain with an adenoviral gene delivery approach and confirmed that IL-6 is an important mediator of autism-like behaviors. This study found that mice with an elevated IL-6 level in the brain developed autism-like behaviors (Wei et al., 2012a). These findings suggest that IL-6 elevation in the brain could modulate certain pathological alterations and contribute to the development of autism."
If there is no animal model for autism, you haven't established vaccines induce IL-6 in the brain to produce pathology and that pathology is autism, then how can you possibly expect not to be laughed at.
There is an excellent animal model of autism: immune activation exposure during early development.
Several studies show al adjuvant induces long term inflammation in the brain and pathology, and there is some evidence now that it induces IL-6 in the brain. Several studies show Al induces IL-6.
http://vaccinepapers.org/aluminum-inflammation-interleukin-6/
Oh and still waiting for VP crank to list the order of tissue deposition for aluminium since he's such an expert on the subject.
Well Dan, when you going to get around to that?
Well what is it? There is no animal model of autism and I'm not going to your blog, you can cough your evidence up here. I'm not doing your job for you.
Because he can't....guess he's too busy writing up his Nobel submission, right?
So?
And G-d = $latex G_{uv}$.
^ "[sic]" for the subs.
"Model." You keep using that word, etc.
VP: "Autism does not begin in utero."
VP: "The injury can occur prenatally or postnatally."
I detect a subtle lack of consistency here. :)
Of course, we're dealing with someone who's convinced of "strengths" in the Mawson article, while being incapable of understanding how its conclusions are disqualified by its multiple fatal flaws. When it comes to critical thinking skills, lack of consistency is the least of VP's problems.
Of course, this post will be dismissed as "snark" that doesn't address The Science - which I and others have discussed at length, only to be met with denial, Gish galloping to other misunderstood and/or irrelevant publications, and admonitions to read VP's blog, where all will be revealed..
Correction: Autism usually is not caused in utero, but the conditions that create vaccine vulnerability may begin in utero, though these conditions will not cause autism on their own.
Going back to VP's thing about aluminum. First VP says that Al (injected intramuscularly) can't be excreted, that it is stuck in the muscle.
Then VP says that Al moves to the brain.
Well, which is it? AL is stuck in the muscle forever, or Al can move through the body?
You can't have it both ways.
Never said it was stuck in the muscle. I said it was stuck in the BODY. The particles dont dissolve and they cannot be excreted by the kidneys.
Some of it travels into the brain. In the mouse experiments with 200mcg/kg, about 1.3% traveled to the brain, which was enough to cause long term brain inflammation and brain injury.
Its carried into the brain by macrophages. Thats explained here: http://vaccinepapers.org/vaccine-aluminum-travels-to-the-brain/
How does altered gene expression during fetal development suggest that macrophages carrying postnatally-delivered, vaccine-derived particles of aluminum across the blood-brain barrier cause ASD?
Vaccine Papers:
Um, are you unclear what "model of autism" means? Because you just said that the animal model of autism is the thing you claim causes autism.
We're not asking what you claim causes autism. We're asking how you know these animals have autism at all (or something similar enough to count). Merely possessing the thing you claim causes autism isn't enough, because you're trying* to test whether or not this thing causes autism.
*Well, theoretically. I'm making the possibly unwarranted assumption that you possess some degree of intellectual honesty.
Same behaviors. Same physiological damage. Same treatments are effective as humans. Same causes as in humans.
Thats a good animal model.
“These MIA (maternal immune activation) animal models meet all of the criteria required for validity for a disease model: They mimic a known disease-related risk factor (construct validity), they exhibit a wide range of disease-related symptoms (face validity), and they can be used to predict the efficacy of treatments (predictive validity).”
–Dr Kimberley McAllister, UC Davis MIND Institute, Science, August 2016 (i.e. this paper: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6301/772 )
Those statements are based on decades of research in developmental biology. If you hope to contradict not only that evidence but the evidence from an entire field of biology, you need to do something more than wave your hands.
Let's see if I can not-b0rk the markup here:
<stagmom>And are due to maternal vaccinations.</stagmom>
"
<Dachelbot>"Besides bad genes, experts like to associate the habits of mothers with the developmental of autism: old moms, young moms, fat moms, moms who have C-sections, drinking moms, smoking moms, moms who have babies too close together, moms who marry old dads, moms who live too close to freeways."</Dachelbot>
All those things cause inflammation prenatally, which greatly increases vulnerability to vaccine injury. When there is already inflammation present, additional inflammation (from vaccine) is made more harmful.
Oh, dear. The odd thing is that this really only appears in the abstract* and pretty much identtically in the conclusion. Well, that, and the fact that the subject warranted a six-page review paper.
How the VG thinks this glues anything together for his idée fixe beyond selective word associations is beyond me.
* Apparently the only part of a Neuroscience paper that receives the otherwise conventional benefit of "hyphenation."
^ Dan's copy of Wei et al. (2013) (PDF) came from LibGen,* just in case anybody was wondering whether he actually got off his ass and went to the library or anything before posting it.
* XMP, honeybunch.
So you prefer to attack me instead of attacking my evidence and arguments.
I say thats because you dont now how to refute my arguments.
Ah, of course--and which vaccinated-unvaccinated studies--the studies that your fellow travelers claim have never been conducted--show this? Because vaccines.
Was I talking to you, Dan? Mind your place.
Slightly OT: looks like the VAXXED folks have pi$$ed off a Maori doctor.
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/watch-your-presence-here-ca…
@ VP
I don't think that your hypothesis is impossible. But before it is seriously considered, you should provide some evidence of the correlation between aluminium in vaccines or changes in the schedule of vaccines and the rise in autism incidence.
There are no epidemiological studies of Al adjuvant exposure and autism. There is zero human data. The MMR-autism studies dont count because MMR does not contain aluminum. No studies of autism look at Al adjuvant exposure.
There is the Shaw ecological study, but being ecological, it doesnt mean much. Its useful for hypothesis generation only.
The animal studies on autism and Al adjuvant are convergent and strongly indicate that Al adjuvant is a serious safety hazard. Animals suffer brain injury and inflammation from the same dosages given to human infants.
@ Dorit reiss"VP suggested earlier that measles does not cause inflammation in the brain – which is strange in a disease for which one of the complications is encephalitis, in about 1:1000. Mumps can also cause encephalitis, and other diseases also have such effects. So if the issue was inflammation, why are the vaccines the culprit and not the solution?"
I never stated that measles does not ever cause inflammation in the brain. it definitely can. But your risk of 1:1000 is overstated. That may be the risk for REPORTED cases, not total number of actual cases of measles.
Vaccines are the culprit because of the aluminum adjuvant. it travels to the brain, which is extremely sensitive to low levels of aluminum. Vaccines contain far more than enough aluminum to cause brain injury. In the recent experiment with 200mcg/kg, about 1.3% traveled to the brain over 6 months, which was enough to cause brain injury and long term inflammation.
Slightly OT: looks like the VAXXED folks have pi$$ed off a Maori doctor.
And Lo, there was a mighty butt-hurt across the land, and great was the clutching of pearls.
Orthodox medicine faces the blame for the epidemic of vaccine brain injury known as autism.
You are trying to convince Alain that he is brain-damaged. Alain does not believe you. Your main rhetorical technique seems to consist of begging as many questions as possible within each single sentence, so you're probably not convincing anyone else either.
Sorry. I dont know Alain. Its nothing personal. Im not here to insult anyone.
OK. I get an e-mail notification every time there is a comment. I'm getting tired of seeing half the comments here by VP. This is basically the sort of flooding of a comment thread designed to drown out the rest of my commenters. I've put up with it for around three days now, but it has be, and VP's responses are very repetitive and incredibly tiresome. If the pace of posting doesn't slow, I will take measures to slow it. I won't ba outright, but I have my ways. Moderation delay is generally the first step.
I am merely responding to objections and questions. Im not trolling or flooding. I am the only one here representing contrary opinion, so of course that creates a higher level of responses. Not my intention to take over. Sorry that impression occurred. Was planning to abandon this thread today, since it is getting repetitive.
Orac-
Are you going to address the new science showing brain injury from Al adjuvant? Like the new Crepeaux paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27908630
The new science showing the Mitkus analysis (the foundation for Al adjuvant safety) is wrong?
The links between Al adjuvant and immune activation/cytokine brain injury?
This is where the vaccine controversy is headed.
Oh, you'll be back. You always come back eventually. This episode had just started to get on my nerves because of your repetition. And, yes, you were trolling and flooding. As for the "science," you do seem way too enamored of mouse studies.
I will be back!
A big advantage of animal studies is that they can be properly controlled. Poorly-matched controls is the big problem with human epi studies of vaccines (i.e. healthy user bias).
We have some good studies now on immune activation brain injury in monkeys.
I do enjoy reading your blog. Its helpful to understand opposing opinion.
It is next to impossible to miss Measles. And if anything, Dorit understated the risk of Measles encephalitis.
And neither do I
@ Vinu
I mean babies with autist siblings.
@ VP
What has to be explained is the rise in autism incidence after adjustment for diagnostic criteria change. If there is no evidence for concomitant changes in aluminium injections, why would people be interested in your hypothesis, knowing that testing it will be tricky?
"I mean babies with autist siblings."
In that case we have to account for the fact that autism may have been caused by maternal autoantibodies against the fetal brain.
Another case of Dan the VP crank hearing what he wants to hear and not understanding or critically-evaluating.
Oh look it's the Who's Who of aluminium cranks. Another case of overdosing, non-randomisation, non-blinding, irrelevant animal tests, a couple of statistically-significant results and no clinical relevance. But this tells the VP crank what he wants to hear so it's "good science".
What is this "new science" you speak of?
Evidence?
Only in your fevered imagination. But I guess every crank needs a hobby.
Darn, I was hoping to hear further revelations about f VP's Dreadful Particles, which "dont dissolve and they cannot be excreted by the kidneys" but somehow magically cross the blood-brain barrier and cause The Autism.
I'm sure that can be explained as readily as the concept of brain inflammation in utero and in early infant life which is perfectly harmless if it comes from infection and maternal autoimmune disorders - but not if it is due to DEM EVIL VACCINES, in which case it causes The Autism.
I see VP is still fixated on the idea that IL-6 from "vaccine induced inflammation" is the cause of autism, but somehow overlooks the inconvenient fact that the main triggers for IL-6 production are infections, particularly the childhood vaccine-preventable ones.
If IL-6 caused autism, then the rates would have been higher prevaccine than they are now.
Yah, he failed to get back to me on that hiding-in-lysosomes proposal, apparently preferring to wait for something he could whine was a personal attack instead.
Oh look, Vinu is blaming the mother's vaccines now.
Thanks HDB,
You are trying to convince Alain that he is brain-damaged. Alain does not believe you. Your main rhetorical technique seems to consist of begging as many questions as possible within each single sentence, so you’re probably not convincing anyone else either.
Given that in the last two day, I only slept 3 hours but did enjoy an overfull night of sleep last night, I had the time to think about the whole mess and will write about it targeting VP in a few hours but I had to dig deep in the past WRT some of my experiences posting on AoA (among other) but definitely Orac is very right on a recent post (not referring to this one although this one is very right & fine too).
Al
Sorry.|
I dont know Alain. Its nothing personal. Im not here to insult anyone.
Me. I go by my first name. You could even deduct my last name from the post where I list the publication I worked on as part of the team of scientist coworker working on an auditory neuroimaging meta-analysis close to 10 years ago.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21833294
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00241/full
I have no qualm about putting up my real name here.
Alain
For certain values of "understand." Face it, Dan: your whoe trip is priggish in the extreme. Is there some reason you host the pirated material rather than just commenting on it and telling you audience how to steal it themselves?
I'm somehow reminded of the Little Rascals/Our Gang episode in which a chicken plucks off the cowlick from a hiding Alfalfa, who has to suppress a loud cry of "My personality!"
Given the behaviors unvaccinated mice exhibit (eating their babies for one) I'm not sure that they're a great behavioral model for humans.
VP (Dan): "I do enjoy reading your blog. Its helpful to understand opposing opinion"
So did you check out the genetics of autism that was discussed on this video:
https://youtu.be/ub3WlwRM1F0?list=PLjvfRtcMhn4PB0NTW0RlvsMJGu1Csnn5s
Yes.
Its not genetic. Its a gene-environment interaction, which explains:
1) why all the twin studies show high heritability (a wrong result).
2) why there are hundreds of associated genes,.
Aargh, failed "Copy video URL" in moderated comment!
Okay, VP (Dan), since you said " Its helpful to understand opposing opinion” it would seem you would understand actual opposing data. Did you watch the video I posted earlier on autism genetics? Did you understand that this is what is going forward with discoveries that will actually help children?
In case you missed it, here it is again (I hope):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOQ9s0GcG5s&list=PLjvfRtcMhn4PB0NTW0Rlv…
Danny Boy who thinks his Vaccine Papers are relevant: "Its not genetic. Its a gene-environment interaction"
So you did not even watch the video. You really do not want to even watch opposing fact. Pity.
I watched the stupid video. its wrong.
Heritability estimates are derived from twin studies, which must assume there is no GXE interaction. That assumption is wrong, so the high heritability estimates are wrong.
The associations of hundreds of genes with autism is meaningless. No way to calculate or estimate heritability from those results.
VP (Dan the Vape Man): "I watched the stupid video. its wrong."
So that is your answer? Do tell us how being a vape supplier gives you moew expertise than the actual autism researchers who gave the presentation. Then post the PubMed indexed studies that show the following is wrong:
(for those following along, the relevant pie charts start at about a half hour into the video)
5% are Genetic Syndromes like Fragile X, Tuberous Sclerosis (TSC1 and TSC2), …. etc
10% are Copy Number Variants like 15q11-1, 1q21…. etc.
2% are 16p11.2
30% are De novo gene variants like DYRK1A, ADNP, … etc
1% CHD8
8% are rare inherited gene mutations (letters too small to make out).
And 45% are still unknown, hence the massive recruitment for families for SPARK for Autism by the Simons Foundation (https://sparkforautism.org/).
At around the 57th minute there is a slide of various groups parents have formed around the specific genetic sequence their child has. It includes FamiliesSCN2A and ADNPkids.
At 59 minutes there is a slide showing how knowing the specific gene sequence is important. For instance those with SCN1A need to avoid sodium channel blockers, and those with SCN8A need to use sodium channel blockers.
Just post your "Vaccine Papers" showing those sequences are wrong right here. Because we are not going to your silly cherry picked web site.
And Lo, there was a mighty butt-hurt across the land, and great was the clutching of pearls.
He frightened her, the big bully.
(Say, do Kiwis always go off into a haka like that when they're angry? It's pretty impressive)
It's amusing to see yet again that while anti-vaxxers think that "gene X environment" interactions must somehow, sorta-kinda implicate vaccines, they ignore that the environment includes the expression of other genes. I suppose that the fact that the parents and siblings of children with ASD are more likely than the general population to be similarly affected or to evidence the broader autism phenotype must mean, in AoA-speak, well, nothing. Or vaccines. Because vaccines.
Oh, lo! Here I am stuck in automatic moderation because of a stupid sock puppet from Wisconsin! And yet Dan the Vape Man can tell us exactly why he is smarter than actual PhD persons who research autism genetics.
Woot!
I don't think you are. I looked at the list and didn't see your e-mail address anywhere on the automod list. I can't figure out why you got stuck. Ditto for a couple of the other regulars, whom I also checked. Strange are the ways of WordPress.
At the end of the day, I think it's Dan's carefully reasoned nuance that really makes the performance so persuasive. It's not as though there are dozens of spot-on reviews he could be "deconstructing" on his site, after all.
Muttley, Mumbly . . . Mumbly, Muttley. So many choices.
^ So close, yet so far.
Gene environment interaction may mean, for instance, that, in order to get a disease, you MUST have some genetic factors AND an environmental factor. If the environmental factor is widespread, then you may conclude that there is very strong heritability. Is it so hard to understand, or should people refer to authority? Like these two:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25554788
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28336671
Please allow me one offtopic comment but really great news.
For many years, I've been an important person in the life of the daughter of my best female friend (I've been living with them for many years despite having my own apartment) and I learned very recently that she got accepted to veterinary medicine school and will begin her studies next august.
Alain (best friend also said that I make a really good father).
I learned very recently that she got accepted to veterinary medicine school
Kudos to your friend's daughter. Med school is for people who aren't good enough to get into vet school.
(Say, do Kiwis always go off into a haka like that when they’re angry? It’s pretty impressive)
I have never performed a haka, nor have any of my immediate family, and it is not for lack of getting angry. Of course we may not be representative Kiwis. Family traditions are more along the lines of "Gnaw at the edge of shield, howl like a bear, froth at the mouth, charge into battle wielding sword in a frenzy".
This turns out to be an unconstructive way to approach an academic disagreement.
"I watched the stupid video. its wrong. "
And that's VP, intrepid Person of Science, who derides others for allegedly favoring snark over substance.
Meantime, while we hear of celebrities who go to the dark side, here are a couple of them supporting children's health. And they had to navigate dense underbrush and brave an onslaught of hippos, crocodiles and antivaxers:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-4516300/Julia-Roberts-Bear…
Orac: "I don’t think you are."
Thank you. Though it has been frustrating this past week.
Ohh, oh... there's 'a study to show':
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/05/marijuana-component-reduces-sei…
Of course, there is no 'high' associated with CBD although the whole herb witch includes THC remediates some CBD side effects.
I'm ambivalent; Something that is deemed 'medicine' is still taken away from the people and put behind a sometimes-insurmountable prescription wall.
Yeah, but did you read the entire article? Didja see this part?
Effective? Maybe. Safe? Gee, I dunno.
Citation needed. I don't see that in either the report you linked to, nor at http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1611618 I freely admit I haven't seen the entire paper. Have you?
There's a lot of medicines that are prescription only. Mostly those that are effective and have high incidence of side effects. You know, like possible liver failure.
Isn't that the smart thing to do? Controlled, measured dosage to achieve the desired therapeutic effect. That's hard to get in a biological sample - too much variation. That is, if your goal is good medicine. If you just wanna get high, well, YMMV.
I know, right? Who paid for this study? From your link -
Did you read the disclosures? (bolding mine)
And may the Gods of HTML protect me from the lack of preview.
Hmm. That was addressed in the article. Valproic acid (depakote), which is also given for seizures/epilepsy, will elevate detected liver enzymes all by itself:
What is the major damage of this society that disgards *use until desired effect* for an otherwise non toxic substance? There is immediate feedback with smoking/vaping vs ingested/pills. People are different; The homogenized 'standard dose' is retarded with most drugs -- Universal joint; fits everything but your car.
**THC remediates some CBD side effects.**
It is universally known amongst users that the THC component stimulates appetite and alleviates nausea. That is why it is popular amongst those undergoing chemotherapy or HIV individuals.
Citation? I guess, there are no studies to show. Is there a study to show that multiple stab wounds can mean shorter lives?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ7J7UjsRqg
Chris @112: At least you're only stuck in moderation here. I'm stuck in moderation over at Aardvarcheology too.
Gilly*, just say that you want easy access to legal pot so you can get high, and stop with the medicine stuff, m'kay? We know it, you know it, and it would save all of us a lot of time. It might even happen someday. I want drive-thru 5 cent beer stands, and, while beer is currently legal, I think you'll get your wish sooner than I get mine.
I'll admit that there might be a therapeutic use for weed. There are enough chemical compounds in it that I believe it's more than possible. But claiming it's a cure all prior to finding the evidence is just dishonest.
Yes, the current drug laws are pretty messed up. Pot is mostly legal to have and use almost everywhere, but it's illegal to import, grow and sell across the entire country. It was a screwed up situation during Prohibition, and it's just as screwed up now. Working to change the law is a noble endeavor, but trying to back-door legalization under the guise of "it's medicine" is despicable.
*Heh - autocorrect changed it to Silly. Sometimes it knows better.
I have Timmeh in the killfile, but . . .
I vaguely wonder whether these include cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome. Whatever.
@ Chris #102:
I have zero interest in pursuing a future in Epidemiology. I just question why many studies list "excluded due to confounding variables" that match the criteria in the "Conditions commonly misperceived as contraindications" column in the CDC guidelines.
If a demographic group has already been declared as part of the representative group by the CDC, don't you lose the discretion to exclude?
@ Narad #103:
It occured to me that something may have changed as I have not worked Mom/Baby for about 10 years so I did check & Colorado is still vigilant in their "Colorado Universal Hep B" campaign that provides incentives & annual "scoring" of facilities & MD's utilizing standing orders.
My statement was not meant to imply that vaccination is done without signed consent; it was made in the context of a study that could have been invalidated due to recall bias of the mothers, as it did not utilize medical records to cross-reference their recall.
This is my position based on personal assessment vs "just" professional & I don't claim any scientific precedent for my reasoning.
Simply put; I gave birth to 11 children here in Colorado & 9 out of the 11 were born after 1991 when the Hep B was added to the CDC schedule.
I can "recall" giving consent for exactly 5 of those 9 although their immunization records reflect that I consented for all my children to receive not just the Hep B but all their recommended immunizations.
I'm sure the consents are legit; I would not have refused. I just don't "recall" it.
Seven of the eleven were born during the years when the "Discharge home 24hrs post-delivery for low-risk prenatal/birth/infant apgar" was a trend with MCO's. Do you know how many times various department representatives run in & out of the room with stacks of papers to be signed, all while you are sleep-deprived & half delerious when discharge is planned for 24 hrs post-delivery?
I just don't think there is much potential for "accurate recall" & the study relies soley on accurate recall; thats all.
And; you & your links. I vascilate. I'm concerned & I want to be wrong. Am I not in the right place (this blog/venue) if I'm looking for the right people to make me wrong?
I'm pretty sure I've written less than 10 comments here & I believe I've asked questions as many times as I've made statements. Carry on ...
Because they are confounding variables and will confound.
So, we know for example that fragile X syndrome results in symptoms similar to autism. If you include these children in a study of whether vaccines are related to autism, you will have a whole group of children showing autism-like symptoms regardless of whether they were vaccinated or not. That muddies the water unnecessarily.
The fact that you lack the understanding that this is a problem renders your comments about which children should be included in a study useless.
While all you pro-vax losers are spending Saturday night home alone in your basements "blogging", the Fun people are whooping it up at the AutismOne gala in Colorado Springs, featuring:
"A meaty carving station, hor d'oeuvres, a mouth-watering fountain of chocolate dessert options, and more included!
TWO-HOUR OPEN BAR! (Followed by cash bar.)
Check out the ever-exciting raffle, and dance, dance, dance to the DJ's tunes!"
Sort of disappointing they aren't dancing to the hip tunes of The Refusers. And seeing the emphasis that crowd places on avoiding unhealthy diet to improve symptoms of autistic children, they're not setting a great example with a menu heavy on meat and calorific chocolate desserts.
Hey, I was in the basement alone because I was trying to figure out what was going on with an iMac A1174 from the campus recycling so I could hand it off to a friend who really needs an upgrade.
Actually, we had some strawberries with thick dark chocolate sauce with a nice Merlot wine, and just now finished watching "The Accountant" with Ben Affleck playing the autist who is a sharpshooter with math and bullets.
Dear Wordpress: :-p
I hate automatic moderation, and so does Orac if he is not in control of it!
@DB: I spent MY Saturday night (and all day Saturday) riding roller coasters at the local amusement park.
I have no doubt I had a much better time than attending a crank fest. And that includes the sun burn.
#131 --> travis???
Al
@Alain no. Just Dangerous Bacon being really sarcastic.