My first big splash in the blogosphere will have occurred five years ago in June, when I first discovered the utter wingnuttery that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It was then that I wrote a little bit of that not-so-Respectful Insolence that you've come to know and love entitled Salon.com flushes its credibility down the toilet, a perfect description of an article by RFK, Jr. published in Salon.com and simultaneously in Rolling Stone entitled Deadly Immunity. As I look back, I realize that, as widely linked to and discussed as it was at the time, that post, arguably more than any other, was the one that established me as one of the go-to bloggers when it came to vaccines. Of course, it may also have been the gloriously Orac-ian verbiage I employed. As longtime readers may (or may not) recall, at the time, I referred to RFK's article as the "biggest, steamingest, drippiest turd I've ever seen it [Salon.com] publish, an article so mindnumbingly one-sided and uncritical that in my eyes it utterly destroys nearly all credibility Salon.com has had as a source of reliable news and comment." Nothing in the five years since then has changed my assessment of RFK, Jr.'s investigative prowess. Indeed, if anything, he's gotten worse, such as the time he tried to out-crank CBS News' resident antivaccine propagandist Sharyl Attkisson (who has been in bed with someone at Age of Autism to coordinate counterattacks on its enemies) or the time he teamed up with David Kirby and Generation Rescue to cube the stupidity.
That was over a year ago, and since then RFK, Jr. has been fairly quiet, at least on the vaccine front. Maybe it had something to do with his being ignored by the then-new Obama administration when his supporters lobbied very hard to get him appointed to head the EPA. Or maybe it was embarrassment at having so successfully cubed the stupid. Who knows?
Whatever the reason for his year-long disappearance from the anti-vaccine fray, it would appear that he's been pulled out of storage, dusted off, and sent once again to tilt at mercury windmills. It feels like 2005 all over again. That's because RFK, Jr. has laid yet another one of his steamy, drippy, corn-textured turds on the blogosphere as only he can in the one place where such a stench of bad arguments and pseudoscience can go completely unnoticed among all the other turds that routinely drip from it. That's right, RFK, Jr. has reappeared on that bastion of anti-vaccine pseudoscience, The Huffington Post, and the title of his latest turd is Central Figure in CDC Vaccine Cover-Up Absconds With $2M. In what appears to be an obviously coordinated attack, Generation Rescue's anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism is promoting RFK, Jr.'s article and adding a few of its own with titles such as Poul Thorsen's Mutating Resume by the not-so-dynamic duo of fact-challenged anti-vaccine propagandists Mark "Not a Doctor, Not a Scientist" Blaxill and Dan "Why can't I find those autistic Amish?" Olmsted and NBC 11 Atlanta Reports: Vaccine Researcher Flees with $2M, featuring this news report:
Looks like the mercury militia got to another reporter. There's Lyn Redwood spewing misinformation and nonsense hither, thither, and yon.
So what's going on here? Let's look at RFK's article and how he starts it:
A central figure behind the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) claims disputing the link between vaccines and autism and other neurological disorders has disappeared after officials discovered massive fraud involving the theft of millions in taxpayer dollars. Danish police are investigating Dr. Poul Thorsen, who has vanished along with almost $2 million that he had supposedly spent on research.
Thorsen was a leading member of a Danish research group that wrote several key studies supporting CDC's claims that the MMR vaccine and mercury-laden vaccines were safe for children. Thorsen's 2003 Danish study reported a 20-fold increase in autism in Denmark after that country banned mercury based preservatives in its vaccines. His study concluded that mercury could therefore not be the culprit behind the autism epidemic.
You know, either heaven shines on them or the anti-vaccine movement must be the luckiest bunch of pseudoscientists in the world. Here it is, a mere couple of weeks after Andrew Wakefield's fall was complete, after he had, in rapid succession, been found guilty of research misconduct by the General Medical Council in the U.K.; had his pride and joy retracted from the scientific literature, his 1998 Lancet paper claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and "autistic enterocolitis," a paper that, with the help of Wakefield himself and the credulous, scandal mongering U.K. press, sparked a fear of the MMR vaccine that persists 12 years later and has resulted in MMR uptake rates plummeting; had his most recent pride and joy, an unethical bit of bad science in which he subjected baby Macaque monkeys to experimentation all in the name of "proving" that the hepatitis B vaccine causes autism and/or neurological damage withdrawn from the literature; and been ignominiously forced to resign from Thoughtful House by, of all people, Jane Johnson, heiress to the J&J pharmaceutical fortune. The result has been some truly tinfoil hat worthy conspiracy mongering from Age of Autism and Jenny McCarthy herself. And what happens? There's a vaccine scientist who appears as though he may have absconded with as much as $2 million dollars, giving Generation Rescue and the anti-vaccine crankosphere an opportunity to go full mental jacket putting a face to vaccine scientists that they could attack. As Paul Offit knows, that's what the anti-vaccine movement does best. (Certainly it's not science that it does best.)
But was Thorsen really the driving force behind the Danish vaccine-autism studies that the anti-vaccine movement hates so much? I've been paying close attention to the vaccine-mercury-autism manufactroversy for nearly five years now, and I've never heard of him, although I had heard of one of his coauthors. If Thorsen was so important to the pro-vaccine movement, you wouldn't know it from the two studies that the mercury militia is hoping to discredit by turning up its propaganda machine to 11 about Thorsen's possible criminal behavior. Those papers are:
- Madsen KM, Hviid A, Vestergaard M, Schendel D, Wohlfahrt J, Thorsen P, Olsen J, Melbye M. A population-based study of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination and autism. N Engl J Med. 2002 Nov 7;347(19):1477-82.
- Madsen KM, Lauritsen MB, Pedersen CB, Thorsen P, Plesner AM, Andersen PH, Mortensen PB. Thimerosal and the occurrence of autism: negative ecological evidence from Danish population-based data. Pediatrics. 2003 Sep;112(3 Pt 1):604-6.
It is the Pediatrics paper that the mercury militia appears to be concentrating mostly on because it directly deals with thimerosal in vaccines. But look at the citations above for both papers anyway. Do you notice something? Look where Thorsen's name is in the list of authors in both studies. Notice that it is not first, nor is it last. This is important because author order matters in scientific and medical studies. In straight science studies, the two most important authors are usually the first author and the last author. The last author is usually the senior author in whose laboratory the work was done, while the first author is the person whose project the work represents and who was the primary author of the manuscript. In medical papers, as in Pediatrics or NEJM, the author list usually signifies the relative contribution of each author to the article, the first being the most important and the last being the least important. In both types of articles, there is always designated one author who is the corresponding author. In scientific papers, the corresponding author is almost always the last author; in medical papers it is usually the first author. The corresponding author is responsible for answering inquiries about the study and, way back in the age before PDF files, used to be the author to contact to request reprints. Not only that, the corresponding author is generally considered to be the primary author for the paper.
Notice something else?
That's right. Poul Thorsen is not the first author for either of these studies. He is not the last author, either. He is not the corresponding author; that would be Kreesten M. Madsen, MD, who was corresponding author on both the NEJM and Pediatrics papers. As it turns out, Thorsen is safely ensconced in the middle of the pack of co-authors. That's why, when RFK, Jr. refers to the Pediatrics study as "Thorsen's study," he is either grossly ignorant or outright lying. (Take your pick.) Anyone who knows anything about how the scientific literature works would be able to spot that immediately just by looking at the abstracts of these articles. Trust me, if studies this large really were Thorsen's babies his name would not have been relegated to fourth or sixth on the list of authors. Basically, Thorsen's position in the author lists of these two papers indicates that, whatever leadership position he may have held at Aarhus University and in its vaccine studies group, he clearly was not the primary contributor for these studies, and they were not his studies primarily.
Not that that stops the mercury militia from going out of its way to paint him as such, referring to him as a "central figure." I have to tip my hat to RFK, Jr. his language throughout his article is truly Orwellian, a propaganda masterpiece of prestidigitation of language and innuendo. Here are just a few examples of perfectly loaded phrases sprinkled throughout the article, all designed to suggest concealment and conspiracy:
- ..."built a research empire..."
- "...failed to disclose..."
- "...has disappeared..."
- "...damning e-mails surfaced..."
- "...culprit behind..."
- "...leading independent scientists have accused CDC of concealing the clear link between the dramatic increases in mercury-laced child vaccinations."
- "...safe to inject young children with mercury..."
- "...CDC officials intent on fraudulently cherry picking..."
RFK, Jr. also parrots anti-vaccine lies about the study that were hoary back when David Kirby first published the mercury militia Bible, Evidence of Harm, lies like:
His study has long been criticized as fraudulent since it failed to disclose that the increase was an artifact of new mandates requiring, for the first time, that autism cases be reported on the national registry. This new law and the opening of a clinic dedicated to autism treatment in Copenhagen accounted for the sudden rise in reported cases rather than, as Thorsen seemed to suggest, the removal of mercury from vaccines. Despite this obvious chicanery, CDC has long touted the study as the principal proof that mercury-laced vaccines are safe for infants and young children. Mainstream media, particularly the New York Times, has relied on this study as the basis for its public assurances that it is safe to inject young children with mercury -- a potent neurotoxin -- at concentrations hundreds of times over the U.S. safety limits.
Notice how RFK Jr. really, really wants you to believe that the Danish studies are the primary foundation upon which the science exonerating MMR and thimerosal-containing vaccines as a cause of autism rests, the be-all and end-all of the epidemiology studying thimerosal-containing vaccines, when in fact there are multiple studies and lines of evidence, of which the Danish studies are but a part. Also notice how he conflates a study's being weak with its being fraudulent. The two are entirely different concepts, and it is entirely possible for a study to be poorly designed and executed without even a whiff of fraud. (In fact, fraud is almost certainly far less common than that.) Be that as it may, the Danish studies, although they have weaknesses inherent in a retrospective design, are actually pretty darned good studies. As I said before, RFK's whine in the passage above is the parroting of a hoary criticism of the Danish studies cribbed straight from anti-vaccine sites. The criticism goes like this. Anti-vaccine propagandists argue that because, beginning in 1994, outpatient records were used in addition to inpatient records for case ascertainment in Denmark for purposes of these studies, the whole set of studies must be crap. As Steve Novella points out, this change was not chicanery, and in fact Madsen et al tried to test whether the change in case reporting by doing this was significant. Here is a quote from Madsen et al:
In additional analyses we examined data using inpatients only. This was done to elucidate the contribution of the outpatient registration to the change in incidence. The same trend with an increase in the incidence rates from 1990 until the end of the study period was seen.
In other words, Madsen et al considered the possibility that adding outpatient records to inpatient records beginning in 1994 might change the results. They tested for that possibility and determined that the addition of outpatient cases did not change the trend of increasing autism diagnoses. Again, RFK, Jr. is either grossly ignorant of the facts or lying through his. (Take your pick--again.) The same is true of J.B. Handley when he repeats the same misinformation time and time again, particularly on his Fourteen Studies website, and and of Ginger Taylor when she in her arrogance of ignorance parrots the same lie. Come to think of it, so is SafeMinds when it touts the fact that many of the study authors are employed by Statens Serum Institut (SSI), claiming that it is a conflict of interest because as a "government-owned vaccine manufacturer," supposedly SSI makes a lot of money off of vaccines and would be liable legally if thimerosal in vaccines were found to cause autism. Believe it or not, this distortion was dealt with by a guest blogger Kristjan Wager (whose regular blog is here) way back in 2006. Not surprisingly, it's utter nonsense born of a misunderstanding (either unwitting or deliberate) of the medical and legal systems in Denmark. Unfortunately, anti-vaccine lies never die; like a certain undead dictator, they always rise again.
Meanwhile, Not A Doctor, Not A Scientist (Mark Blaxill, in case you forgot), along with No Longer a Journalist (Dan Olmsted) lay down flaming stupid like this:
Thorsen, of course, is pre-eminently one of those leading scientists and was a co-author of a New England Journal of Medicine study on the MMR. Thorsen and Aarhus, as we've reported for years, made important contributions to some of the most influential autism-vaccine mercury (thimerosal) studies - studies disputed as poorly done and unconvincing by critics that over the years have grown to include the head of a panel mandated by Congress to study the issue. But based on five studies, three of which included Aarhus - and one of which Thorsen co-authored -- the U.S. Institute of Medicine concluded in 2004 that "the evidence now favors rejection of a relationship between thimerosal and autism."
Here's what's going on. In the wake of debacle the implosion of Andrew Wakefield represented, the anti-vaccine movement needed a distraction badly, and they needed it fast. It would be even better if the distraction were one that they could spin to make it look as though there were some dark corruption at the heart of the vaccine science that has exonerated vaccines as a cause of the "autism epidemic." Like manna from heaven, Dr. Thorsen's case dropped seemingly from the sky. I'm going to admit right now that I have no idea of Dr. Thorsen is actually guilty of absconding with $2 million in grant money. He may well have, and if he did justice needs to be done. He needs to be caught and tried. But here's the rub.
It makes absolutely no difference to the science exonerating vaccines or thimerosal in vaccines as a cause of autism whether Thorsen is a criminal and thief or not.
As one of my readers pointed out, trying to argue that because Thorsen may have fled with stolen money is akin to arguing that if the fourth co-author of one of Einstein's papers describing the Theory of Relativity ran off with $2 million it would somehow invalidate the Theory of Relativity. Maybe J.B. Handley, No Longer a Journalist, RFK Jr., or Not a Doctor Not a Scientist can help me out here. Was there an allegation against Poul Thorsen of actual scientific--rather than financial--fraud of which I wasn't aware? Was there an allegation that somehow this alleged financial fraud had anything whatsoever to do with the design or excecution of Danish studies that failed to find a link between either MMR or thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism? Is there any evidence anywhere that Poul Thorsen committed scientific misconduct on the order of what Andrew Wakefield did? Seriously. I don't see anything in any of the number of vicious attacks on Poul Thorsen (who may or may not be a criminal), the SSI (which doesn't deserve them), or Aarhus University in Denmark (which also doesn't deserve them). It's a pure smear against these latter two institutions, guilt by association.
In other words, it's very typical of the anti-vaccine movement. The bottom line is that this is not a scientific scandal. It is a financial scandal that happens to involve a scientist.
Here's the other thing to remember. Even if RFK, Jr., Mark Blaxill, J.B. Handley, Dan Olmsted, and the rest of the merry band of anti-vaccine loons currently attacking these institutions were completely correct and the Danish studies were actually hopelessly tainted by Thorsen's alleged criminality--even if both studies were completely expunged from the medical literature--it would not change the scientific conclusion that neither MMR nor thimerosal-containing vaccines. That's because of a little pesky thing known as reproducibility. The Danish studies are not the only studies exonerating thimerosal as a cause of autism. There are Canadian, U.K., and U.S. studies whose results are concordant with those of Madsen et al.
For the anti-vaccine movement, the problem with the idea that thimerosal-containing vaccines cause autism was always that it makes a testable hypothesis. Remove the thimerosal from vaccines, and autism rates should plummet. This experiment has been tried in at least three countries, and the results have always been the same. Autism rates continued to rise after thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccines. Indeed, thimerosal exposure from the vaccine schedule in the U.S. is currently lower than it was in the 1980s (there is still trace thimerosal in some childhood vaccines, and the flu vaccine still has thimerosal), but there has not been a decline in autism prevalence to what it was in the 1980s. The hypothesis that thimerosal causes autism has been roundly falsified, not just by the Danish studies but by several other studies.
In the end, anti-vaccine propagandists are very much like creationists and other cranks. They focus on the person more than the science, and they labor under the delusion that there is a single study (or tiny handful of studies) that are the whole support for the scientific conclusions they despise and that, if destroyed, would lead to the edifice of the science they hate collapsing. That's why they prefer to attack persons rather than use evidence and reason to argue ideas. It's also why they are always seeking that one study that they can tear down and thus "prove" that evolution didn't happen, vaccines cause autism, the moon landing never happened, or the Mossad and the Bush administration were beind 9/11.
ADDENDUM: Further confirming that Thorsen was not a major player in the Pediatrics and NEJM publications reporting the Danish studies is this article at Philly.com:
In 2002, Thorsen was the sixth named author of a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that analyzed whether where is a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism by examining 537,303 children born in Denmark from 1991 through 1998.
The researchers concluded that their data provided "strong evidence" that there is no link.
"Poul Thorsen had absolutely no influence on the conclusions regarding this paper," wrote Mads Melbye, head of the division of epidemiology at the Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen and senior author of the study, in response to e-mailed questions.
"Thorsen was not actively involved in the analysis and interpretation of the results of this paper," Melbye said.
The second study, published in Pediatrics in 2003, examined 956 Danish children diagnosed with autism from 1971 to 2000. It concluded the incidence of autism increased in Denmark after thimerosal was removed from vaccines.
Kreesten Meldgaard Madsen, the lead author, said Thorsen played a minor role.
"Dr. Thorsen was not in a position to change or compromise the data," Madsen wrote. "Dr. Thorsen was part of the review cycle, but never very active in giving input. Dr. Thorsen never had access to the raw data nor the analysis of the data."
Which is pretty much what I would have expected based on his position in the list of co-authors. Of course, this makes me wonder why his name was on either paper at all. Ah, well, that's academia; you can sometimes get your name on papers for which you did very little work.
In the meantime, the comments after the Philly.com article make baby Jesus cry, so full of anti-vaccine pseudoscience, misinformation, and outright lies are they. The anti-vaccine contingent is there in full force, polluting the discussion thread with their ignorance. Come to think of it, they're there in the comments of RFK Jr.'s HuffPo article, too.
Pablo- "I'm curious as whether Ben is circumcised."
Not on the same day he was born and I held him when it happened.
Todd - No dispute that injuries such as death are extremely rare, as stated many times prior, vaccines save lives but at what cost? Who actually determines whether 5 is too many or 5,000 is too many?
My beef is that there should be measures taken to inform parents the same way they inform people about viagra. I saw a warning poster in a veterinarians waiting room about vaccines, there are no posters in pediatricians offices. Let me know the risks, saying theyre safe is a matter of opinion. Saying that 4 children out of 6,000,000 died is accurate factual, scientific information that I can make the decision on.
That should read "...birth defects in the child of your pregnant mother..."
benismyson:
The problem is you ARENT questioning everything. As has been pointed out to you before, you are accepting things that reinforce your preconcieved notions on some of the flimsiest evidence and questioning things that have massive amounts of solid eidence behind them.
To a certain extent, everyone is subject to some confirmatory bias, its the nature of the way humans think. Many of us try to guard against it or at least minimise it. Be honest with yourself and take a look at the things you question: Do you tend to question certain ideas more thouroughly than others? Which ideas and why?
Rob@498 -- I suspect Suzie is counting actual jabs. Remember that most childhood vaccines are given a couple of times (ex: HepB at birth, 1-2 mo and 12-18 mo.)
Raging Bee:
By your own admission, Raging Bee, you have pointed out that you (and your age group) got the full range of vaccines "And we were all quite healthy, and none of us because autistic, thankyouverymuch."
Well, that certainly is not something that the kids who get vaccinated according to the CDC's schedule today can say. We have a sick population of kids today. It is very relevant that back when you and I were kids and we received MANY less vaccines that we had better overall health.
It is scarey that the CDC keeps adding unnecessary vaccines to the schedule too. Take Rotateq for example -- its NOT necessary here in the US. And, that vaccine had 29 deaths attributed to it according to figures from the VAERS database which are almost more than a year old.
Its all about the money. What the pharmceutical industry and the CDC and the FDA are guilty of in causing harm to our youth's health is beyond unethical -- it is criminal.
We have a sick population of kids today.
For the third time: where is your supporting information? And where is your proof that the sickness in question (which you still haven't actually cited) is caused by vaccines?
It is scarey that the CDC keeps adding unnecessary vaccines to the schedule too.
Such as...?
And, that vaccine had 29 deaths attributed to it according to figures from the VAERS database which are almost more than a year old.
29 deaths out of how many people vaccinated?
I suppose that depends on your definition of necessary. Prior to the vaccine, one out of 200,000 children died from rotavirus. Thats about 20 kids per year, or 80 lives saved since it was added to the schedule four years ago. Maybe saving those 80 lives wasnt "necessary," but it certainly seems like a good idea.
Dave- I am looking at the reasoning of causation in my son's autism through my own personal experiences. Others have pointed out that perceptions change from reality when reality is unclear. Im not a scientist, I do not have scientific proof my son's autism was caused by a vaccine, I do have scientific evidence that he was vaccine injured whether or not it led to his autism who knows.
That is really not my point, my point is that vaccines cause injuries all the time. Some extremely serious, some causing death. No one knows the lifespan of a person with autism. It is assumed that it is a normal lifespan, but there is no documented evidence backing that up, believe me Ive looked.
I would love to be able to scratch vaccines off the list of the causation. It lets me off the hook to some degree. After all I held him down. I signed the waiver.
But my lack of trust in the FDA, the CDC, the other international agencies investigating the safety of vaccines will not allow me to accept studies like the Denmark one. It is my lunacy, my complete wacko mentality but I own it.
If I believed my lone voice, my foolishly sounding claims would be the cause of any child to suffer I would never utter a word publicly. Its just me. I checked, those linking from this site to my blog are at 41 total, this has been going on for a week now and only 41 people came to my blog. How many of those you suspect are looking for answers on whether or not to vaccinate. How many do you suspect come to AoA?
These 1 in 4 people in the US that think autism is caused by vaccines are not thinking that because of Jenny McCarty or AoA or me or David Kirby, they do so because they know someone or know someone who knows someone that has regressed immediately after vaccines. Plus people are curious about conspiracies. And these conspiracies are fueled when things like Thorsen come up or when Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of HHS, has asked newspapers, magazines, television journalists, who knows who else- specifically NOT to listen to parents and scientists in the autism community, not to respect their concerns, not to take seriously the condition of chronically ill children with autism and to disregard a growing body of evidence questioning the safety of our infant and toddlers' immunization schedule. This and the headlines about deaths caused by vaccines. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3336455/Secret-report-reveals-18… and http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iz5dsOE-Fu1X9ryU_oiVP…
Its not just me, I swear it, its all around us.
Dave:
Eighty kids lives "saved" -- impossible to say because generally kids (in the US) who die of diarrhea have other health complications that make them unable to tolerate any viral infection. So, maybe they were saved, or maybe they just were saved from dieing of rotavirus specifically.
We still have the 29 kids who died as a result of the complications from the vaccine. That's a fairly high number of deaths to saved ratio, isn't it?
Rotateq for example -- its NOT necessary here in the US. And, that vaccine had 29 deaths attributed to it according to figures from the VAERS database which are almost more than a year old.
That was quoted from "Hospitalizations and deaths from diarrhea and rotavirus among children less than 5 years of age in the United States, 1993â2003". J. Infect. Dis. 195 (8): 1117â25.
Maybe susie thinks it's not worthwhile because it tends to kill black babies.
"It is scarey that the CDC keeps adding unnecessary vaccines to the schedule too."
To the best of my knowledge, the last time the CDC added a vaccine was in 2006.
420
"Generation Rescue did a phone survey and found that vaccinated individuals had less risk of autism than those who were not vaccinated or only partially vaccinated."
I did my own analysis from GR's numbers, and found what I can only regard as outright, massive fraud, most notably the exaggeration of the autism rate in the fully vaccinated group by more than 50%. (See "Stupid Like a Fox" on evilpossum.weebly.com "Handley" page.) But even then, they couldn't hide that the highest rates were in the partially vaccinated group.
Chris:
No comparison whatsoever can be drawn between ethics of a proposed study of vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated and what happened at Willowbrook.
The Willowbrook population was a confined group of patients and even caregivers who were infected with HepB. That is not the case with the diseases that kids get vaccinated for now. There is absolutely no comparison that can be made.
The fact that there is so much resistance to the gathering of data on the health of vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated populations definitely indicates that the CDC, gvt and pharmaceutical industry know they have traded one set of illnesses with another in instituting an aggressive, dangerous and experimental vaccine schedule. The population of unvaccinated people exists -- a study of their health vs. vaccinated needs to be done. Don't we owe that due diligence to our kids?
Re: circumcision
"At 1.25 million circumcisions of newborns in the US per year, a 0.5% infection rate amounts to 6000 cases per year, and a 4% overall rate of complications requiring treatment represents 48,000 patients experiencing avoidable morbidity."
"...424 (4.7%) out of 8,967 operations in 2003-7 were for complications resulting from previous neonatal circumcision" (at Mass General)
Totally preventable.
Why would you have the skin cut off your kid's dick when there is nearly a 5% chance that there will be complications that require treatment in a hospital.
(Yes I'm circumcised, and no, I'm not Jewish. I'm also 50 years old.)
Dan Weber:
I think the current vaccine schedule is harming out kids, and that makes me a racist?
You must be an Obama supporter -- anyone who doesn't agree with his politics is also a racist.
That's really weak.
If we don't know the average lifespan of people with autism, it's because we haven't had that as an identified group long enough.
Once upon a time, autistic people would either have gone basically unlabeled (their families might have said they were shy, or weird, or wondered how to convince their sons to date, but they wouldn't have thought they had a medical issue) or, in more severe cases, labeled as crazy or mentally retarded and, probably, institutionalized with minimal care. I doubt there's any way to separate those people with autism from, for example, those with Down syndrome, who used to die young from heart failure. There's lots of speculation that this or that scientist had Asperger's; not testable, as the more careful writers note, but it suggests that Asperger's, at least, does not imply a poor life expectancy. Note "suggests"--by definition, the ones we've heard of were professional successes, meaning they had some kind of support structure. A boss or a department secretary isn't a family, but they'll notice if someone doesn't show up at the lab, maybe even remind them to get to the doctor or take a lunch break.
bensmyson @ 479:
Like Todd, I suspect the hospital recorded the Hep B vaccine before going to give it, but because you intervened, he did not receive it. No way to tell, unfortunately. I think it's safe to say that one of the biggest places for improvement in modern medicine is the hospital. I'm not down on hospital doctors or nurses; they are fine people and do fine work. The problems tend to be procedural. Your situation is an example of it; the message to withhold a particular routine intervention was not relayed to the nurse. Again, I have nothing against doctors and nurses in this situation; it's usually not their fault but the fault of the institutional procedures that stand between them. But that gets into other issues that are probably beyond the scope of this discussion; suffice to say, it's a big issue.
With all due respect, asking you if you had any allergies would not be relevant. You are not Ben; your allergy experience is of little value in predicting his. More significantly, even if he were to develop an egg allergy later in life, he could not have had one at that time. It just doesn't work that way.
I disagree that Hep B is "one of the more dangerous" vaccines. Last I read it, like most vaccines, had an extremely good safety record. Of course, you and I disagree on whether or not things like autism are actually related to vaccines, so it is perhaps unsurprising that we disagree on this point.
Yeah, I think it's pretty safe to say you had a jerk of a pediatrician. There's another one of those procedural things; the system does not do a good job of identifying and correcting problems. A bad doctor can practice for twenty years without anyone raising the slightest red flag. It's unfortunate, but true. My personal experience suggests that the majority of doctors are good ones, though; it sucks to get one of the lousy ones, especially since most people are really not in a position to know a bad doctor from a good ones, unless they've been unfortunate enough in life to have a lot of experience with doctors. (With luck, a person shouldn't need to see a doctor more than once a year, but we're not all that lucky.)
There's one doctor whom I won't see anymore except for the easy stuff like bladder infections. Twice now he's treated me poorly when I've come in with asthma symptoms. He's a very nice man, and a friend of the family, but he clearly does not understand asthma management.
@susie
Wow. Have you read any of the stuff that we've been telling you? About the ethics involved in a prospective, randomized trial? About the confounding variables in any sort of retrospective trial? Did you visit the site for the Office for Human Research Protections?
Put your blinders to the side for a moment, read what has been posted here, read the info at the OHRP (especially the Belmont Report) and then try actually using that grey matter between your ears.
susie:
Willowbrook
Though going on what you said about "have other health complications" it is obvious you don't care about kids with health issues or disabilities. You probably think my son deserved the illness he got that put him in the hospital.
susie, the obvious troll is obvious.
susie, this study was not about hepatitis (yeah, you really don't click on even the obvious links): http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi/reprint/52/Suppl_2/16.pdf
You still have not explained why it would be ethical to withhold vaccines from a large group of children, especially when the risk of measles, mumps and pertussis are increasing.
Chris,
Susie want a study of kids who haven't been vaccinated compared with kids who have. Just go out and enroll as many kids as you can find, see if autism rates are different. She cannot understand why such a study would not provide the information that she wants. The study could be done, but it would essentially be impossible to correct for innate biases in the subjects.
I don't think she understands the concept or importance of randomization in medical studies and why it is so important that they be blinded to obtain meaningful, statistically significant data.
She also cannot understand why the two populations would be innately different with respect to a wide variety of parameters, and although one could correct for all these variables, every correction makes the conclusions less reliable.
Think of a similar example. How about body mercury levels comparing people who have silver amalgam fillings with those who never had silver amalgam fillings. Just sign them up, draw a little blood, and compare the two groups. Presto, you have meaningless data, as it is impossible to correct for environmental exposure differences, which will likely be significant due to socioeconomic differences between the two groups. The study may indicate that people without fillings have higher mercury levels because of some unknown exposure due to innate differences in the two populations.
I don't think we should expect Susie to have experience in population studies or statistics, but we should expect her to listen to people who do.
Oh, gotta go. The mailman is here with my check from Merck. I get paid by the word; how do the rest of you shills get paid?
Between bensmyson and susie, this is becoming a never-ending thread. And all because bensmyson and susie can't accept what science tells them. Bensmyson admits that he/she feels guilty that their son has autism because it "is their fault". Why can't he/she accept the genetics more easily? It removes fault (you can't help your gene pool, anyway).
As a nurse, I have a lot of questions about how BMS's birth story is presented. I have never worked in a hospital that gave ANY injection right after birth. Even vitamin K is held off for at least an hour. If they utilized a birthing room where you labor, deliver, and stay in the room until you go home, I suppose I can see it, but even with those, most babies go to the nursery for initial exam and shots, along with erythromycin eyedrops. And, again, every place I worked at required a consent from the parents for Hep B. How did he get it without the parent's consent? This story bugs the heck out of me.
@susie: my kids had the full amount of shots for their ages (now 20 and 22). Even the old DTP instead of DTaP. Neither is autistic, and we do have family members who would fall at least under the ASD spectrum, if not fully autistic (wasn't a common diagnosis when these persons were young).
Susie,
Here is how a proper study would be done. Sign-up volunteers who are pregnant. You would need several thousand. Do extensive histories, economic status, education, employment, many, many other things. Randomly assign each volunteer into two groups, ensuring the assignment accounts for any differences in the above factors.
Then, when the women have their babies, each child would get the full regimen of shots, with half the group getting saline and half the group getting real vaccines. Neither the parents nor doctors know which is which. Then you follow every child for about 10 years, taking detailed medical histories along the way. Tons and tons of data, but no one knows who is in the vaccinated versus unvaccinated groups. Finally, you unblind the study, do a bunch of statistics, and see if there are statistically significant differences.
The problem is that half of these kids have been unvaccinated and are highly susceptible to the diseases for which they are not vaccinated.
See a problem with this?
The good news is that we can now deploy mosquitos as a vaccine delivery system!
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24947/?ref=rss
Todd @ 517: About the ethics involved in a prospective, randomized trial?
Thousands of people have refused vaccines for their kids, already. Why is it unethical to study the overall health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated kids?
About the confounding variables in any sort of retrospective trial?
Like studying 7 to 10 year olds for neuro outcomes from thimerosal exposure they got in infancy?
@cynic: Exactly. If you think Thompson et al. (2007) is flawed, you'll no doubt find excuses about the results of any retrospective study of vaccination vs. non-vaccination. That's the point. It doesn't matter how careful the study is, or how well the confounds were accounted for, or how open to the participation of anti-vax consultants it is.
If you don't think so, enlighten us on how Thompson et al. (2007) could have been better and convincing to anti-vaxers.
513
Is this the way you comprehend data? Who said anything about 5% requiring hospitalization? "Complications" may be the child needs ointment on his penis.
And hey, the numbers included in with the "complications" were cosmetically unsatisfactory results. http://www.circumstitions.com/Complic.html
Circumcision, whether to do it or not, was a big issue. There was much debate on it, we had some "complications" as well, but we talked about it, and were concerned as to what was the right thing to do. Is there any science one way or the other? Why is the procedure allowed? As I said, we were so concerned about it we stood there with him and did our best to comfort him, and were actually surprised as how bloodless and painless it was.
521 MIdawn
Yes the room had a section in the back that all this was done. It was done while Ben was being cleaned up and we were dealing with the placenta (saved it for a donation to cadaver dogs) maybe 10-15 feet away. There may have been a release stuck in with all the initial paperwork at admittance. But the doctor knew weeks before, no HepB at birth. And yes, I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt that it was written in the record PRIOR and for some reason (that does not excuse it) it was never corrected. What else was wrong in the report?
Ben stayed in the room until the following morning when he was taken for some reason that escapes me now, but it was briefly. Then we went home.
No one in my family tree has autism or anything like it. No mental illness other than a couple of alcoholics and dementia in some elderly relatives. A Parkinsons, an MS, a few dyslexias, some ADHD, long list of heart problems, most lived to over 75, some in their 90s, no child deaths in the last 100 years. Some extremely high achievers and high IQs, most extremely social and outgoing.
Now why would I think genetics as THE cause? I suspect a relationship with the heart issue though may be something worth looking into. MTHFR C677T single mutation and narrowed small arteries in the brain. Hyperhomocysteinemia is an independent risk factor for cerebrovascular disease and the homozygous C677T mutation in the methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) gene can induce hyperhomocysteinemia.
I believe we may find some answers as we learn more about epigenetics. This to me could explain a great deal, but not the regression.
516 calli
"With all due respect, asking you if you had any allergies would not be relevant. "
Seems to me it might, why not ask? But I will yield to you on that. It was just a thought, maybe before giving vaccines ask the parents about allergies and any immune disorders in family history.
cynic,
"About the confounding variables in any sort of retrospective trial?
Like studying 7 to 10 year olds for neuro outcomes from thimerosal exposure they got in infancy?"
Like the fact that two children who aren't vaccinated could otherwise be so different in hygiene, nutrition, access to medical care, genetics, etc., that they cannot usefully be treated as a single group.
Also, it's very problematic for the anti-vax movement that it is disproportionately upperclass and white, and that what it condemns vaccination, which is as much as possible made equally available to people of all social classes, in favor of things (nutrition, sanitation, etc.) that disproportionately benefit the upper class.
Is this the way you comprehend data? Who said anything about 5% requiring hospitalization? "Complications" may be the child needs ointment on his penis.
Yeah. Just like potential complications from a vaccine could be a rash. Or some lingering arm pain. Or crying.
See the point? Anything can sound scary if phrased the right way.
Joseph:
Thanks for asking about the Thompson et al. study from 2007 and how a Pro Informed-Consent person like myself can have a problem with that study.
I am going to paste below the disclosures that appeared on the study abstract that cited significant the authors' ties to 8 vaccine manufacturers -- one individual alone had ties to six vaccine manufacturers!! Given the track record we've had with Vioxx, Celebrex, Avandia etc,(Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb manufacturers as well), is there any reason why this data should be trusted?
Dr. Thompson reports being a former employee of Merck; Dr. Marcy, receiving consulting fees from Merck, Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, and MedImmune; Dr. Jackson, receiving grant support from Wyeth, Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, and Novartis, lecture fees from Sanofi Pasteur, and consulting fees from Wyeth and Abbott and serving as a consultant to the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee; Dr. Lieu, serving as a consultant to the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices; Dr. Black, receiving consulting fees from MedImmune, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, and Merck and grant support from MedImmune, GlaxoSmithKline, Aventis, Merck, and Novartis; and Dr. Davis receiving consulting fees from Merck and grant support from Merck and GlaxoSmithKline. No other potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Dr. Thompson reports being a former employee of Merck; Dr. Marcy, receiving consulting fees from Merck, Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, and MedImmune; Dr. Jackson, receiving grant support from Wyeth, Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, and Novartis, lecture fees from Sanofi Pasteur, and consulting fees from Wyeth and Abbott and serving as a consultant to the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee; Dr. Lieu, serving as a consultant to the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices; Dr. Black, receiving consulting fees from MedImmune, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, and Merck and grant support from MedImmune, GlaxoSmithKline, Aventis, Merck, and Novartis; and Dr. Davis receiving consulting fees from Merck and grant support from Merck and GlaxoSmithKline. No other potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.
bensmyson @ 526
The main problem is it's just not a good predictor. That is to say, the answer doesn't really help them make a good decision for your son, because there's no way of knowing if he'd have the same allergies or immune disorders. Most immune disorders are poorly understood, and do not have straightfoward genetic origins; they seem to be acquired. Allergies certainly are. They run heavily in my family, yet different members are allergic to different things. I had a nut allergy as a child, which I outgrew. (That does happen.) Nobody else in the family did. I also developed a citrus allergy, which again, nobody else in the family has. My hay fever is shared with several relatives, though the specific pollens are not the same; lilies are my nemesis, but my grandmother (who has the most severe allergies and asthma in the family) is fine with them. I suspect the answer is epigenetic, and I think they hygiene hypothesis, though unproven, has merit. (That's the one that says maybe we're too clean, so our immune systems don't get primed properly and we wind up overreacting to benign stuff.)
It wouldn't hurt to mention that family history, of course. If you have some rare genetic condition that does correlate to vaccine problems (which could include something like the mitochondrial problem that afflicted Hannah Poling), then it might be relevant. (In the Poling case, however, I suspect avoiding vaccines isn't the answer. Rather, the answer is to use them very cautiously; her condition is one that could be triggered by any fever, whether vaccine-induced or from natural infection. Vaccines, if they can be administered while her body temp is carefully monitored, could help reduce that risk. That's actually also true of Guillaine-Barre Syndrome, which can be triggered by any fever, even non-infectious ones. It's a bastard of a problem to have, though, because the only way to find it is to be injured by it.)
cynic @ 524:
It's not unethical, exactly. It's more that it wouldn't answer the question very well. The problem is that in general, when comparing two groups, you want them to be as similar as possible. If it all possible, they should be exactly the same apart from the one thing that you're studying. In the real world, that's impossible, because people are unique. So you settle for getting a really big number, randomizing them, and seeing how the results map to the demographics of the general population. So you wouldn't be looking to see if only one group gets autism; you'd be looking to see if one group gets it at a significantly higher rate than the general population. So, say the general population has a rate of 1 in 110. If the study group had a rate of 1 in 50, you'd be very worried. Assuming all else is equal, of course.
There's the rub -- in a group of intentionally vaccinated and intentionally unvaccinated kids, all else is definitely not equal. The groups are not randomized; they are self-selected, and this is liable to introduce bias. After all, people don't often just accidentally forget to get vaccinated; there's usually a reason why their parents have opted out, and that will affect the parents' observations of the child -- and parental observations are CRUCIAL to diagnosis and monitoring of autism, because parents spend so much time around their children. If the parents believe something already about vaccines and autism, it is likely to influence their observations.
Generation Rescue actually attempted this sort of study. They did it as a phone-in study, which is one of the least reliable methods. Not much better than the methods used by opinion polls, really. I wouldn't put a lot of stock in the results, but their figures actually suggested a modest protective effect -- that is, unvaccinated children in the study were at slightly *more* risk of autism than vaccinated ones. This has been widely attributed to the fact that autism often runs in families, and in the Generation Rescue crowd, if one child turns out autistic, the parents are much less likely to vaccinate subsequent ones. But it may just be an artifact of the study; telephone surveys are not very reliable.
So, the bottom line is that you can do this sort of a study, but it's not as easy as it sounds because there's a lot of confounding variables that you have to try and account for.
@cynic (524)
The ethics question was about a prospective, randomized trial where subjects would either receive real vaccines or a placebo.
A study using children who already have not received vaccines compared to children who already have been immunized would have a lot of confounding variables that would introduce a lot of bias and unreliability into the data.
@bensmyson
I know this is a fine distinction, one which you may have trouble understanding, but vaccination has health benefits, circumcision is elective.
An yes, that 4.7% REQUIRED TREATMENT IN A HOSPITAL.
"Thousands of people have refused vaccines for their kids, already. Why is it unethical to study the overall health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated kids?"
Ok lets look at Kim Stagliano. 3 kids, 2 vaccinated 1 unvaccinated. All 3 have autism. Problem solved.
Oh wait, Kim has said, essentially, that her unvaccinated child caught autism due to her (Kim's) vaccinations.
Idiocy like that is why a respective study can't be done.
calli - once again we agree on something
You said:
"(In the Poling case, however, I suspect avoiding vaccines isn't the answer. Rather, the answer is to use them very cautiously; her condition is one that could be triggered by any fever, whether vaccine-induced or from natural infection. Vaccines, if they can be administered while her body temp is carefully monitored, could help reduce that risk. That's actually also true of Guillaine-Barre Syndrome, which can be triggered by any fever, even non-infectious ones. It's a bastard of a problem to have, though, because the only way to find it is to be injured by it.)"
Rob- "An yes, that 4.7% REQUIRED TREATMENT IN A HOSPITAL."
Nope. You really should be quick about a retraction. Otherwise someone might get the idea you are as bad as one of those "anti-vaxxxxxxers" you love to beat up on so much.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/9w834626551u8087/
A total of 8,967 children were operated during the study period, of which 424 (4.7%) were for complications resulting from previous neonatal circumcision. Penile adhesions, skin bridges, meatal stenosis, redundant foreskin (incomplete circumcision with uncircumcised appearance), recurrent phimosis, buried penis and penile rotation were the most frequent complications.
Buried penis? Again Id have to go with my own personal science on that one. Depends on what it's buried in.
@bensmyson
Hello?
A 1-3% complication rate in neonatals for a surgery that has absolutely no health benefits? Subject your kid to a face-lift much?
That's only the immediate complication rate, and doesn't include complications after the child has left the hospital.
So you discussed giving your kid a dick-lift? Why would you even subject a child to cosmetic surgery?
Almost 5% of surgeries to correct problems with circumcision? For an operation with no medical value. WTF? How much money does that represent? Totally wasted money so someone's kid's dick looks a certain way.
You have no credibility. You cut the skin off your child's penis for no medical reason, without his consent.
If we are wondering if Ben got a HepB vaccine, couldn't the titers be checked? Or does HepB not reliably allow that measure?
While I agree with the basic point involving circumcision that Rob has raised and I do not think children should be subjected to it in general I do take issue with the statement "For an operation with no medical value." It does sometimes have value. I had an adult circumcision for phimosis, after having tried other methods of treating it, and am very much more happy now. I think it is of value at times. Of course, none of that changes the problems of doing it on an infant.
That is really not my point, my point is that vaccines cause injuries all the time.
Your point is pure, obvious bullshit. You're delusional. Get help.
Goofus argues by assertion about millions of people that he's never met, let alone spoken to.
Even if Goofus had spoken to all those millions of people, and even if they had claimed to him that it was not Jenny McCarthy or AoA or David Kirby who caused them to think autism is caused by vaccines, they have no way of know if what they say is true. Not unless they are in the almost unimaginably small group of people who never had any member of the anti-vaccine brigade put that idea into their heads.
Let me quote from a novel by the science fiction author Suzette Hadin Elgin:
So Jenny McCarthy gets on national television, and she spouts to millions of viewers her bigoted current beliefs (note that "current"!) that autistic children are "damaged" children, damaged by vaccinations. Her fervent expression of those beliefs shapes the way those listening to her see the world, just as delineating for someone the boundaries of the "athad" shapes the way they see the human body.
When those viewers see an autistic child, they are not seeing only what is there to see; they are seeing what Jenny McCarthy told them to see. Jenny McCarthy constructed a pattern for them, in just the way that the speaker from the novel constructed the pattern of the "athad". Jenny's pattern consists of a vaccination, followed by the onset of autistic symptoms. Jenny's viewers have been told to look for that pattern in autistic children, and they see it - even if, to explain an anomalous case such as autism in a child who was not vaccinated, they have to resort to bizarre special pleading (such as blaming a vaccination received by the mother of the child.)
But guess what? An "athad" is a man-made pattern. It doesn't represent anything with an objective existence. It just represents the portion of the world to which a human has elected to pay special attention. So too with Jenny McCarthy's pattern. It's being told that the vaccination is relevant to the autism that caused the viewer to see the vaccination as relevant to the autism. Otherwise, we would not be seeing the cases we see all the time, where the parent swears that the vaccination must be the cause of the autism, because the vaccination happened, and then the autism set in, and they choose to entirely ignore the year and a half in between... Or, as I believe happened with more than one of the Lancet children, the parents claimed (and apparently sincerely believed) that the children had received the MMR vaccine and afterwards had begun showing the first signs of autism... yet the medical records showed unambiguously that the parents' memories were false; that the parents had consulted medical authorities over signs of autism in their child before the MMR vaccination.
Anyone who is still inclined to argue "no, no! There must be some sort of cause-and-effect relationship between vaccination and autism; it can't simply be people seeing what they were told they'd see or have convinced themselves they'll see!" will need to consider something else. Remember how, when we were discussing Jenny McCarthy and her claims that she saw "the soul gone from [her son's] eyes" when he received the vaccination, we called these her "current" beliefs?
We call them that because she didn't always even think there was anything wrong with her son, let alone believe that his 'soul' was 'gone.' That's right, she thought he was a "Crystal child" and she was an adult "Indigo". (To hear her tell it then, she accepted that pattern just because a woman on the street suggested it to her!) Now she's removed all the Crystal-and-Indigo from her website, and it's all about the anti-vaccine talking points with her. If this pattern of "vaccination-then-autism" she promotes now is supposedly so unmistakable, how is it that McCarthy was oblivious to it for so many years??
feldspar said - "When those viewers see an autistic child, they are not seeing only what is there to see; they are seeing what Jenny McCarthy told them to see. "
And you know this how?
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/16/1531156/psychiatrist-gets-warning…
The FDA sent a warning label.
Someone want to defend this doctor and/or the FDA?
Please tell me why I should trust anything?
"For years, drug makers did not study most medications on children, largely due to ethical concerns over using kids as test subjects. More recently, however, Congress passed laws to encourage pharmaceutical companies to test their drugs for safety and efficacy with children by extending patents on drugs approved for adults."
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/16/1531156/psychiatrist-gets-warning…
@bensmyson: I still have some questions, but I'll let them lie.
Irrespective of that, remember the reason I brought this up was the comment
What an asshole. Whining because of the fear of a "prick of a needle" but no problem with circumcision.
She doesn't want him to feel any more pain than necessary. Yet has part of his penis chopped off.
I'm sure it was all ok, though, because "she held him during the procedure."
The bigger point, Pablo, is that there is a significant risk of moderate to severe complications with circumcision, that the procedure is completely elective, there is no medical purpose for the operation, and it is essentially cosmetic surgery. bensymson ELECTED to cut part of his penis off for no reason other than he/she wanted it to look a certain way, with no medical benefit to be gained, but complains that vaccines hurt her baby.
What a hypocrite.
Todd @531 (others chimed in similarly): A study using children who already have not received vaccines compared to children who already have been immunized would have a lot of confounding variables that would introduce a lot of bias and unreliability into the data.
Confounders are simply part of it, you cannot escape it... in anything (Thompson, 2007, anyone?). So there is no bias in a study that looks at neurological outcomes of children receiving varying doses of thimerosal in infancy seven years later? This is highly inconsistent.
Objectively speaking, continuing to claim that this kind of study is not worth doing due to confounders looks really bad. Vaccine defenders should clamor with every breath to prove to antivaxxing nutbags that their vaccinated population is overall healthier and has less incidence of autism than their unvaccinated counterparts. Why don't they want to do that?
Calli: It's more that it wouldn't answer the question very well. The problem is that in general, when comparing two groups, you want them to be as similar as possible.
I think you want each group to be as similar as possible. The vaccinated population should have inclusion criteria, as should the unvaccinated group. Each of these groups should be as similar as possible.... and measure various health outcomes, notably autism prevalence, in both groups. Saying that this kind of information would be useless is a bit denialist. I would think that vaccine defenders should want such a study to prove that prevalence is the same.... right?
Vaccine defenders should clamor with every breath to prove to antivaxxing nutbags that their vaccinated population is overall healthier
Just as a hypothetical, imagine if the vaccine defenders did prove such a thing, but the anti-vaxxers refused to listen and demanded some new study be performed? How long would you chase the rabbit down that hole?
Dan Weber @546:imagine if the vaccine defenders did prove such a thing, but the anti-vaxxers refused to listen and demanded some new study be performed
What good does it do to imagine? Reasonable people are not refusing to listen - they are listening. They are not convinced of the overall message.
They don't understand why the consensus is hanging their hats on some really bad science. I mean, let's be honest people. We started universally vaccinating US infants on their day of birth and we have no clue if that was a good idea or not. Anyone that suggests a newborn might have slightly different physiology than an adult is a blasphemer apparently... and of course that artificial exposure to disease with 'them peyoor antigens is way better than nachural eksposhur'.
I don't chase rabbits. I just watch both sides try to catch it and having said that, why should I be surprised that the provaccine garden is empty?
As already explained, there have been numerous examples where medical records and other documentation made at the time make clear that the real sequence of events was:
1) Child displays autistic symptoms, sometimes severe enough that medical authorities are consulted;
2) Child receives a vaccination;
3) Child displays more autistic symptoms.
But later, after the parents get the idea that the vaccination caused the autism, they entirely forget that 1) happened - even though they were the ones who took the child to the doctor saying "shouldn't he be looking at me more? should he be flapping his hands all the time like that?"
Oh, I suppose we could be very cynical, and we could hypothesize that each and every one of these parents is deliberately lying, trying to pretend that 1) never happened just so that they have a chance of cashing in from a fraudulent lawsuit.
But if we do not adopt that extremely cynical (and unlikely) explanation for every single such parent, we must find some other explanation for why they would have forgotten about events they themselves lived through. Thankfully, there is a copious body of research studying human perception, and if everything that we know about human perception was summed up into one sentence, it would probably be "What people see is shaped by what they expect to see." This video certainly demonstrates that!
Goofus' assertion that "those think autism is caused by vaccines are not thinking that because of Jenny McCarty or AoA or me or David Kirby" flies in the face of all we know about human perception. There is absolutely no way Goofus could know what he asserts, not unless he is talking about an individual who has never heard from Jenny McCarthy or AoA or David Kirby or any other anti-vaxxer - and even if he could find such an individual, it would only prove that some person perceived such a relationship, not that there was any reality behind the perception.
@bensmyson
The doctor clearly was in the wrong. Why would we defend him? And what are your particular objections to the FDA on this case?
Goofus demonstrates even more clearly here that she is committing the logical fallacy known as affirming the consequent.
Purely for the purpose of illustrating where Goofus' logic is faulty, let us temporarily pretend that the following points are unquestioned:
"Autism is damage from vaccine injury";
"The DUM protocol reverses damage from vaccine injury and produces better health."
Again, no actual belief in these statements is implied. We simply want to simplify Goofus' argument down to the following syllogism:
1) IF children in "Group X" are vaccine-injured children, THEN children in Group X who are treated with the DUM protocol will have improved health.
2) Children in Group X who are treated with the DUM protocol have improved health.
3) Therefore, children in Group X are vaccine-injured children.
Now, syllogisms are very powerful when used correctly. They are a way of taking two known facts (the "premises", seen on lines 1 and 2) and deriving from them a third fact (the "conclusion" seen on line 3) which must be true if the premises are true.
But this is only the case if the syllogism is a valid form! If any example can be found where two true premises can be combined in a particular form and the resulting conclusion is false, it means that syllogism form is invalid.
We transform Goofus' syllogism with the following substitutions:
* "children in "Group X" are vaccine-injured children" becomes "P";
* "children in Group X who are treated with the DUM protocol have improved health" becomes "Q".
The syllogism form is thus revealed to be:
1) If P, then Q.
2) Q.
3) Therefore, P.
Here's another syllogism that has the exact same form:
1) If my aunt Pamela is a rabbit, my aunt Pamela would enjoy carrots.
2) My aunt Pamela enjoys carrots.
3) Therefore, my aunt Pamela is a rabbit.
As you may have guessed, my aunt Pamela is not a rabbit. If the two premises of a syllogism is true but its conclusion is false, that means the form of the syllogism is invalid. That means no syllogism in that form proves anything!
And that is exactly the case with Goofus' syllogism. It doesn't prove anything. Just to drive this point home, let's go back to the original Goofus syllogism and create two more syllogisms from it:
REVISED GOOFUS SYLLOGISM A
1) IF children in "Group X" are left-handed vaccine-injured children, THEN children in Group X who are treated with the DUM protocol will have improved health.
2) Children in Group X who are treated with the DUM protocol have improved health.
3) Therefore, children in Group X are left-handed vaccine-injured children.
REVISED GOOFUS SYLLOGISM B
1) IF children in "Group X" are right-handed vaccine-injured children, THEN children in Group X who are treated with the DUM protocol will have improved health.
2) Children in Group X who are treated with the DUM protocol have improved health.
3) Therefore, children in Group X are right-handed vaccine-injured children.
This leaves fans of the original Goofus syllogism in a bind! Obviously, "vaccine-injured children" includes both "left-handed vaccine-injured children" and "right-handed vaccine-injured children", so anyone who accepts premise 1 of the original Goofus syllogism must accept premise 1 of both revised Goofus syllogisms. Yet the two revised Goofus syllogisms reach exactly opposite conclusions! At least one of them must be wrong, and this means there is no reason to think any of the Goofus syllogisms come to conclusions that aren't wrong.
cynic @ 545:
I'm sorry, I obviously wasn't very clear. If you can get the two groups to be equivalent, the data would be very valuable. I'm just not very optimistic about finding a large enough unvaccinated group that can be adequately paired with a vaccinated group. It's been attempted, and so far, the results have been disappointing; they still end up with too many confounding variables.
Ack, screwed up the blockquotes. Cynic's quote extends through the second paragraph (up through "prove that prevalence is the same.... right?")
Antaeus
Have you ever spent time around an autistic child? Have you personally observed the escalation of an autistic child's illness? Autism is NOT a mental illness. It is vaccine injury that affects many systems in the body. Children diagnosed with autism share the same biomedical markers. And it is not something that kids spontaneously recover from. The medical issues are too complex. Untreated children often grow "into" the illness, their medical issues do NOT resolve. These kids are literally too sick to develop, too sick to respond to the outside world. They withdraw, they lose their ability to process back what they take in from external sources. They lose their ability to communicate, they lose coordination, fine motor skills, I could go on but I think you get it.
They suffer from heavy metal toxicity and immune dysfunction. Most of them have hepatic dysfunction and severe intestinal dysbiosis. Some have neurotransmitter imbalances. They have mitochondrial disfunction and methylation dysfunction.
Parents, including Jenny McCarthy have and ARE successfully recovering their kids. Go ahead and make fun of that instead of educating yourself and showing the tiniest bit of scientific curiosity as to how she did that. It only emphasizes your arrogance and ignorance and lack of interest in finding truth.
Despite what the pharma PR machine coining the label and slapping "anti-vax" on her -- she has said repeatedly that she is not "Anti-vax". She has said repeatedly that she wants a more sensible vaccine schedule. She has said that neurotoxins like mercury have no place in any vaccine.
It appears that you hate someone who's strong and successful -- who didn't give up on her kid and she saved her son from the abyss of autism. You cannot attack the science she used to recover her son because you haven't bothered to educate yourself on the details. I sincerely hope you are not employed in pediatrics or public health, but if you were, I would say that you serve as a good example of the what we all dread in a healthcare provider: Know-it-alls who cannot think for themselves, refuse to listen to the people who actually deal with the illness / issue and make fun of something they don't understand.
"It is vaccine injury that affects many systems in the body."
Vaccine injury, eh? Care to explain how vaccines caused my unvaccinated child to develop autism?
Thanks in advance.
"It is vaccine injury that affects many systems in the body."
Vaccine injury, eh? Care to explain how vaccines caused my unvaccinated child to develop autism?
Thanks in advance.
Jen:
Are you sure the unvaccinated child you have was NOT given the HepB at the hospital without your consent? You could run vaccine titers on him / her to see if he has antibodies to Hepatitis B. I know parents of an autisic child who never authorized that vaccine, but titers show that it had been administered.
When our son was little, I had specifically told the pediatrician I did not want the triple dose MMR vaccine - not because I had heard about autism, but because the vaccine is cultured in aborted fetal cells and I have an issued with that. When I requested my son's records, I saw that the pediatrician had lied to me and he had given my son the exact vaccine I told him I did not want. He was too lazy to order the specific vaccines I requested and went out of his way to lie to me the day he injected my son.
Autism develops when genetically predisposed individuals receive toxic / immune insults that are the "tipping point" that push that child's immune and detox systems into dysfunction. There may be environmental triggers to autism in addition to vaccines, as toxic and viral exposures can occur outside of vaccine exposure, but vaccines are the single biggest trigger of this illness.
@susie: what kind of lies will you think of next? How did you not know your child (if she/he did) got the MMR (1 shot) instead of measles (1 shot), mumps (1 shot) and rubella (1 shot)=3 shots. Or can't you tell the difference between 1 and 3 injections?
As for your "aborted fetal tissue" objection: do you KNOW how old that line is? The fetal tissue is from the 1960's, from a fetus who was aborted because the mother caught rubella early in pregnancy. It was one of the very few reasons, back in those days before Roe vs Wade, that you could get an abortion (a medical indication). The cells from that fetus - and possibly 1 other, I forget now - were nurtured and cultured to obtain the virus and develop the vaccine. Geez, even Mothering.com has THAT information right.
And, you might read some of Jen from TX's posts. She knows quite well about her child. I don't always agree with her, but she at least backs up her assertions with some real science.
"Autism develops when genetically predisposed individuals receive toxic / immune insults that are the "tipping point" that push that child's immune and detox systems into dysfunction.'
CITATION PLEASE
Are you saying there are NO cases of autism that are not related to vaccination? In other words, that ALL cases of autism are caused by vaccination?
triskelethecat:
I am opposed to abortion, I have a right to be opposed to that, don't I?
So, if I went and did the research and told the doc to order in other vaccines instead of the triple MMR from Merck, and he said he did that, then I should have expected that he not lie because he was likely just too lazy to order the vaccines I requested.
In a free country, I think people have those kind of rights, do they not? I don't have to explain my ethical positions to someone else, especially when I made an honest effort to keep to the recommended CDC vaccine schedule.
Regarding the administration of the shots, in the interest of keeping the citation as short as possible, my son OBVIOUSLY received more than just the MMR that day. I questioned the doc on the shot #'s and he said that the number of injections fit the vaccines he got that day. He had an arrogant, "how dare you question what I'm doing here" attitude that I will never forget.
Like I said, the reason why we've got an autism epidemic is because pediatricians don't LISTEN to parents. They adminsiter assembly-line mentality, one-sized fits all medicine and don't call me if something happens -- that's what 911 is for.
Rob:
Reread the quote: "Autism develops when genetically predisposed individuals receive toxic / immune insults that are the "tipping point" that push that child's immune and detox systems into dysfunction.'
As I've said before on this post -- vaccines are the single, biggest and most consistent, coast-to-coast ENVIRONMENTAL insult these kids are exposed to. They are a TRIGGER to genetically predisposed individuals. I never said that autism could not be caused by some other triggers, but vaccines are a trigger that, unlike the environment, are a consistent insult that occurs to children with immature immune systems across the USA.
Citation: There is a lot of information from Generation Rescue citing the research that parents of autistic children have used to reverse the vaccine injury that caused the autism. Reverse the injury, the autistic behaviors go away.
Susie: Why don't you get something into your stupid head. The child is the patient. Not the mother. Because you have some Googlecrank opinions doesn't mean that a child has to be exposed to unnecessary risk or suffering. The relationship is between the doctor and his or her patient. Your views may be fascinating, particularly to yourself. However, they are determinative of nothing.
Similarly with the fraudster Wakefield. No parent can give permission for a child to be abused or assaulted: even inside a hospital. What parents may or may not think of the matter is of consequential interest only to themselves.
So why don't you go back to your pals at Generation Rescue, and all dribble down the same toilet?
Commenting:
Last time I checked, it is still the parents' legal right and ethical responsibility to make health decisions for their children, not the pediatrician.
Commenting:
Re your crude Gen Rescue comment, thank you for again demonstrating the intolerance for dissention that we see demonstrated by the ignorant portion of our scientific community who's been brainwashed into not questioning their paymasters, the pharmaceutical industry. There are lots of citations to protocols and stories of recovered autistic children on that website. Of course, I realize you'd rather continue to site epidemiological studies that were paid for by pharma and done by people with big time vaccine manufacturer ties.
With regard to Dr. Wakefield, unlike Dr. Scott Rueben of Boston, who FAKED DATA in 17 published studies, Dr. Wakefield NEVER FAKED HIS DATA. The hearing that was conducted on his medical ethics never brought into question the FINDINGS OF WAKEFIELD's STUDY. The parents of the children in Wakefield's study were never allowed to provide testimony to the GMC (who also had extensive ties to pharma). OPEN YOUR EYES!!!!! Amazing that the media is going ballistic over Wakefield, but there was virtually no outcry over Scott Rueben who FAKED DATA, and was found guilty of faking data and admitted to having faked the data and people got strokes and died from Vioxx and Celebrex. Rueben was complicit in the deaths and disablement of how many people? Why aren't your esteemed medical journals retracting the studies that are based on FAKED DATA?
If it weren't for the suffering of all the kids who have autism spectrum disorders and autoimmine diseases from vaccines, I would laugh my butt off at the double standards I see here. Instead I shake my head in disgust at the ignorance and inability to do honest scientific research into the effects of vaccines on the health of our children.
@susie
I'm sure you've heard this before, but anecdotes =/= data. Autism is not a static condition, it's developmental delay. As such, intervention and therapy (and I don't mean biomedical bs of dubious or disproven efficacy) and sometimes just growing older will mitigate autistic behaviors.
One or a number of instances of malfeasance on the part of the medical community does not falsify everything science has ever done. What you're not taking into account is that (despite the recent frothing about Poul Thorsen) the lack of connection or even weak correlation between vaccination and autism is not sitting on one single study.
However, on the anti-vaccine side, the entire case rests on Wakefield, whose study is riddled with conflicts of interest, shoddy experimentation if not outright fraud (50% of the children in his study did not have the GI symptoms he attributed to them)--a study the results of which have not been replicated by reputable scientists.
And, yeah, yeah, the Pharma Shill Gambit. It never ceases to sound tinfoil-hatted no matter how stated or how often. We're all in the employ of our Pharma Masters or, at the very least, gullible sheep for looking at a mountain of data on one side and unethical farts in the wind on the other and coming to the only rational conclusion: vaccines do not cause autism.
And Vioxx? Yes, that is an instance of fraud. But, if Big Pharma (TM) is so all-powerful, why is Vioxx (despite being very profitable initially) not still on the market? Pharmaceutical companies are so powerful and far-reaching that they can bury data proving the autism-vaccine connection and supposed ruin Wakefield, yet the malfeasance with Vioxx was revealed and the drug removed from the market. Why is that?
Cognitive dissonance anyone?
Perfect Circle:
Merck held data for three years that proved Vioxx caused an increase in the risk of heart attacks and stroke. The company knowingly kept a product on the market that was causing deaths and disabilities. That is indefensible.
Does Merck make any of the vaccines that have received notariaty for causing significant side effects?
@susie: yes, Andy Wakefield FAKED HIS DATA.
He
1)lied about some of the children having GI symptoms
2)lied about finding measles IN the samples
3)lied about the results in his media appearances
4)lied about drawing blood at his son's party (then retracted the lie when shown the video taken)
5)lied through omission about his conflicts of interest - or don't you think being paid by lawyers to FIND results is a conflict of interest?
So you don't like or approve of abortion. I can respect that. However, even the Catholic church has no problem with the MMR, and I doubt you will find anyone more anti-abortion then them.
As for your pediatrician...well, I still can't imagine how you would have missed 2 extra shots. At 12-15 months, a child does get a lot of vaccines, but I can't understand a mother not knowing how many her child is supposed to get each time (I always knew with mine and my pediatrician re-enforced what he/she gave at each visit, besides which I read the consent(s) I had to sign for the vaccines). Maybe you had a lousy pediatrician. I don't know. But I still am amazed.
Ooops...hit post by accident and somehow deleted part of a paragragh.
Meant to say:
I am amazed that you didn't know how your child got the MMR. After all, when not given as a trivalent vaccine, you have to give the injections approximately 1 month apart. You didn't question the fact that you weren't told to come in in a few weeks for the next shot? Or that you weren't told "today X got the rubella shot. you need to come in next month for the measles shot, then the following month for the mumps shot". AND, as a mother demanding something out of the ordinary, YOU should have been on top of that and asked about it. (which you obviously didn't do because you apparently just asked if X got the right amount of shots).
Hi Anteus Feldspar -
I think that I'm starting to catch on. Let me try one.
1) We have evaluated for a relationship between the MMR and autism.
2) The MMR is a vaccine.
3) Therefore, we have evaluated for a relationship between vaccination and autism.
Great stuff.
- pD
Calli,
Yes... we'll have some confounders to deal with, we always do. We adjust the best we can, and the study is still worthwhile to do. Will it be perfect? What is?
Isn't it also worthwhile to study children that have reportedly regressed and ask questions about their vaccination and immune status? Would it be statistically significant, or simply coincidence if they had all been vaccinated in some way, shape, or form? Epidemiology is useful, and can certain detect certain anomalies on a population level, but if the alleged damage that is occurring to young children is not overt, epi studies will tell us nothing.
The fact is, we have been universally vaccinating babies in the US on the day they are born since the early nineties. What data could possibly be available to demonstrate that this has no ill-effect? When the recommendation was made, there was none.
There should be no conceivable reason NOT to study a sick population of kids just because their parents think it had something to do with some part of the vaccine protocol. Public health agencies are fully aware of how fear can induce an irrational response in usually rational people. People that question the safety of the current US schedule are not irrational. They realize that we've seen an increase in the number of vaccines given, and the age in which they are given. I had five vaccines as a kid, and didn't have any until I was two, and logical, reasonable questions are: is this kind of expansion really necessary and is the target pathogen contained with nonvax measures? (I mean, we try to remove bugs that become invasive in a very small population of people... why don't look at that population of people instead of universally vaccinated and remove its circulation? This is playing Russian roulette with nature, and some people don't like that) and are there data that proves this doesn't perturb the undeveloped and immature nervous, digestive, and immune system of a newborn / infant? To tell them these questions are irrational and that it makes them an antivaccine crankjob is a message that is not being received very well.
Seems it's okay to call those parents psycho and open up debating dictionaries to show the skeptical community that we've been paying attention and can dissect debating styles. In the end, parents don't really care about who constructs the better strawman.
"Are you sure the unvaccinated child you have was NOT given the HepB at the hospital without your consent?"
Yup, I'm sure.
susie
"genetically predisposed individuals"
Please show me the medical literature on the genetic predisposition to autism.
Careful, some here say circumsision is abuse.
And who cares if the vaccines cause autism or not. It saves a million lives to every one it harms. Id say thats a good return on investment.
I know it's hard for parents to accept that their perfect babies were sacrificed on the alter of science but get over it, everything has risks. More kids fall off bikes and get injured.
As we examined before, Goofus showed an attachment to an invalid style of syllogism called affirming the consequent, which (unlike a valid syllogism) can take two completely true premises and return a false conclusion.
Goofus seems to have decided, at least temporarily, to move away from that particular fallacy. Of course, even if she were to change to using only valid forms of syllogistic logic, it wouldn't do any good unless she also restricted herself to using true premises!
Let's look at some of the premises she presents which are either unverified or known to be false:
Kids don't recover from autism spontaneously, but I think we know that what Goofus really means here is "Kids don't recover without the particular 'protocol' I have in mind, which imagines that autism is vaccine injury." Yes, they do recover without that protocol.
All of these are articles of faith for certain denominations of antivaxism. None of them, with the possible exception of "Some have neurotransmitter imbalances", have anything to back them up except faith.
Even that exception, "Some have neurotransmitter imbalances," is only true because autism would have to preclude neurotransmitter imbalances for it to be false. If we took instead the statement "Autistic children have a greater rate of neurotransmitter imbalances than non-autistic children," we'd be back to assertions based purely on faith.
Again, pure articles of faith. The only way it comes close to approaching anything we have objective evidence for is when she talks about viral exposures as a trigger. We know that exposure to rubella in a pregnant mother is associated with a higher probability of autism in the child of that pregnancy. There's no evidence behind any of the rest.
Antivaxxers often do cite the case of Hannah Poling, claiming that it is a known case where vaccines triggered autism. However, anyone who examines the case closely realizes that this is not so. Hannah Poling had a rare mitochondrial disease (how rare? only four other cases are known) which resulted in some autism-like symptoms.
It is not known why the mitochondrial disease abruptly got worse and produced the autism-like symptoms; the government elected to award compensation on the theory that it could have been a febrile reaction to vaccines that caused the abrupt worsening of the mitochondrial disorder. Consider that carefully. If a febrile reaction to vaccines could be the trigger for Hannah Poling's autism-like symptoms, so could any other febrile reaction, including those induced by the diseases that vaccines protect against. Saying that what happened to Hannah Poling proves that vaccines cause autism is like saying "this child was in the middle of the street; a milk truck was unable to brake in time and the child was hit. This proves that milk is harmful to children." What was actually harmful to the child was her pre-existing mitochondrial disorder.
The existence of an "autism epidemic" is itself an article of faith; there is actually no evidence that rates of autism have increased at all. Rates of autism diagnosis have increased, but only because people who would have been diagnosed with other conditions before (such as mental retardation) are now classified as autistic instead.
(As a side note, antivaxxers sometimes argue the slightly hilarious premise that there is so an epidemic of autism, and that the reason said "epidemic" cannot be detected by the epidemiological studies looking for exactly such a phenomenon is that the autism is the result of the "triggering" of rare preconditions by vaccines, preconditions too rare to be detected with epidemiological techniques that have previously detected side effects occurring at rates less than 1 in 100,000. But previously these same antivaxxers insisted that they knew there was an autism epidemic because supposedly everyone and his brother knew a child who got a vaccination and then became autistic! So now they're arguing that the "epidemic" is simultaneously a) so prevalent that individuals across the world can personally verify its existence solely through personal observation and b) so rare that it defeats the most searching epidemiological studies. It can't be both!!)
Fraud through omission is still fraud. Wakefield faked his data the moment he published his observations of the Lancet children without disclosing that they had been referred to him by lawyers because of the confluence of their perceived medical symptoms. One might as well pretend that it isn't fakery to trumpet "100% of respondents in this poll said they planned to vote for the Republican candidate in the next election!" without mentioning that the "poll" was conducted inside the Republican candidate's campaign headquarters.
In regards to the GMC hearing, the GMC stated beforehand that it "[could not] arbitrate between competing scientific theories generated in the course of medical research." There is no sane reason, therefore, to trumpet that the hearing "never brought into question the findings of Wakefield's study" because it only means that they confined their inquiry to issues that did not include the correctness of Wakefield's findings. One might as well trumpet that "the small claims court NEVER DECLARED A VERDICT OF GUILTY ON THE KIDNAPPING CHARGES!" which only sounds like it means something if you don't know that kidnapping is a federal offense which would never be heard in a small claims court.
And here is where Goofus shows that she says so many false things because she doesn't do her research. The allegations of fraud against Scott Reuben were first reported the week of March 11, 2009 by Anaesthesiology News. The hospital where Reuben was employed had already contacted the medical journals involved to request the retraction of all 21 papers by that date. The journal Anaethesia & Analgesia had already retracted 10 of Reuben's studies by that date. The journal Anaethesiology had already retracted 3 of Reuben's studies by that date. All the above information is located in two articles which are listed on the first page of Google results for "Scott Reuben retract".
It took me five minutes, in other words, to discover that 2/3rds of Reuben's studies have been retracted. (It took only fifteen minutes more to verify that the remaining studies were also, as expected, retracted.) Why should we believe anything Goofus says when she doesn't do five minutes of Google searching to see if what she's saying is actually true?
Or even closer to the current issue: if Big Pharma supposedly can and will twist the science to say whatever makes for the biggest market for their products, why isn't it still selling secretin?
Nope, sorry. That syllogism reduces to the following form:
1) A (the MMR vaccine) is a B (something that has been evaluated for its relationship to autism.)
2) A is a C (a vaccine.)
3) Therefore, all C are Bs.
That's not the fallacy of affirming the consequent; it doesn't even contain a premise of the form "if P then Q". It is an invalid syllogism. Which logical fallacy does your syllogism represent?
Well, any anti-vaxxer trying to pretend that the syllogism actually represents the position of those who support vaccinations is committing the straw man fallacy...
Guys, guys, guys, do you not see it's pointless to argue with boneheads who don't know the first thing about actual argument?
Dear Susie:
I find it difficult to believe that autistic behaviors "Go away." Especially since the definition of diagnostic criteria is quite vast, and they include quite a few behaviors which undiagnosed children, and adults, have as well.
My son's echolalia has abated, but it's not gone away; I realize I have a bit of it myself, in that I have a tendency to repeat out-loud several times something that amused me. My son never had any of the touch-sensitivity which gets a lot of play as a "marker" - would that, by you, be indicative of "gone away," that he never had a defining symptom, and now still doesn't have it?
My son has, however, progressed remarkably, and all of this without any of the interventions recommended to "reverse" "vaccine insults" or whatever you're calling them nowadays.
He's been developmentally delayed. And, if you'd look at real, honest-to-goodness scientific literature (you know, the kind that you've been programmed not to trust) you'd see that for autistic and autism-spectrum-disorder children that are not severe, improvement in symptoms, otherwise known as continuing development, is the rule rather than the exception.
Oddly enough, I enjoy my son's company immensely - he does have a tendency nowadays to make up neologisms and correct us when we don't remember them "A tradon is sixty hours," for instance: this grew out of him realizing sixty seconds is a minute, and sixty minutes is an hour, so there had to be something representing sixty hours.
I try and imagine how much time I've spent with him would have been wasted if I'd been dragging him to chelation therapy or fuming for years about how to get back at the vaccine conglomerate.
In other words, Susie:
Are you doing this for your children, or for you?
Cynic:
Really? Are you really making that argument about a poor, delicate baby's innards?
Babies are exposed to more insults and substances from their parents than any vaccine - and the parents aren't bound by any hippocratic oath. How many parents, for want of a pacifier, stick their finger in baby's mouth; not even certain of where it's been?
You think that is somehow less of an insult than what's in a vaccine?
Pathogens and vaccines aren't magic, you know.
A killed-virus vaccine is effectively a license-plate handed out to neighborhood watch. That license plate tells them what to look out for: a drive-by shooter in an automobile bearing that license-plate. By itself, the license-plate can't kill anyone; it has no gun, no wheels, no engine.
Get it? What you complain about goes on anyways with just about any substance introduced to baby. Any protein that might pass to the bloodstream gets the going-over. That includes the host of proteins in a lot of the "herbal" "toxin-cleansers" pushed by some of these fruity individuals. That includes the Drosophila that little Pete ate while you weren't looking, along with all of the dog-fecal-matter bacterial growth it had just landed on.
Complain all you like about our efforts to contain preventable infant mortality. Please do. You know, there aren't enough babies dying at an early age, and they don't suffer enough. I think I can see your point.
Everyone,
You're wasting electrons and photons, and wear and tear on your keyboard.
Let me rephrase a response to Susie's arguments in a less verbose manner.
YOU ARE WRONG.
Truly, the end of the discussion. Wrong is wrong, and everything she says is wrong. She will never be right. 'Nuff said.
Pat@Really? Are you really making that argument about a poor, delicate baby's innards?
Well, yeah. Are you really telling me that the development that human babies undergo in the first two years of life is meaningless? Or is that a strawman?
Babies are exposed to more insults and substances from their parents than any vaccine - and the parents aren't bound by any hippocratic oath. How many parents, for want of a pacifier, stick their finger in baby's mouth; not even certain of where it's been?
This is really a laughable comparison, and, no offense, I'm growing rather tired of it. Piercing the skin and delivering antigen through the needle is pretty different than encountering disease causing agents by casual contact. Since there is a fair amount of immune response that occurs in the gut, I'm not sure I'm all that bothered by parents sticking their fingers in their kids mouths. It's a normal route of exposure... and humans have evolved for a hellava long time to be exposed to pathogens in this manner.
A killed-virus vaccine is effectively a license-plate handed out to neighborhood watch. That license plate tells them what to look out for: a drive-by shooter in an automobile bearing that license-plate. By itself, the license-plate can't kill anyone; it has no gun, no wheels, no engine.
Sure, I get it. Generalizing the schedule to killed virus vaccines is dishonest. And how do you explain the folks that have the license plate but get shot and killed anyway? Sorry, they exist... and contradict your position adequately. Antibody levels alone do not demonstrate that any animal will resist the disease causing agent that they've been artificially provoked to identify. Are you telling me that people don't have to metabolize the ingredients in vaccines and that everyone does so equally? Even day old babies? Or is your analogy of a drive by shooting exclusive to a parallel with antibodies? puleez
Coming into contact with foreign proteins and DNA via ingestion is obviously part of life. Parenteral injections of proteins create anaphylactic responses in the receiving organism. This is not a novel concept and was established more than a hundred years ago.
Complain all you like about our efforts to contain preventable infant mortality. Please do. You know, there aren't enough babies dying at an early age, and they don't suffer enough. I think I can see your point.
Preventable? And how are you controlling for confounders? Or do they only overwhelm the question when we compare vaxxed and unvaxxed kids? How does breastfeeding impact infant mortality? How do other nonvax measures (quarantine, etc...) affect both morbidity and mortality? How about some plain old consistency skeptics? The difference between you, and the people you despise, is that you have escaped injury... while they care for the children sacrificed at the alter of vaccination - because most of the people that are questioning vaccine safety HAVE vaccinated their kids.
Keep trivializing their contribution to herd immunity, it's working very well for your camp.
Rob, Katharine: I am certainly not replying to you-know-who because I have any delusions that she has any capacity to learn and grow and correct her errors. That would require her to let go of her fanaticism and hatred.
No, when I post in response to her, or to any other "Goofus", it is because I think the disassembly of their arguments will illustrate for someone else who may be lurking, who might not yet have made up their minds on the issue, why the arguments of the anti-vaxxers are ultimately devoid of merit. Writing for that person is worth it, even though writing for some tiresome lamebrain who actually believes no one could disagree with them if they weren't receiving a paycheck is definitely not.
Pat:
A couple of clarifications for you:
1) A symptom, like echolalia is NOT a marker, like a measles titer that is 1,500 or 3,000 times, or 30,000 the level of measles antibody necessary to confer immunity. Touch sensitivity is also a symptom, not a biomedical marker.
2) I never said that I chelated my son. There are other natural protocols that are discussed on AutismOne and Generation Rescue's websites, but, sadly, very few people on here are willing to go to those websites and educate themselves. They prefer to make fun of what they do not understand.
I'm sure your slightly guilty conscience will not be happy to hear that we recovered our son fully from severe autism. And, I consider my motives for helping him no different than those of the people who recover their kids from leukemia, etc.
My son was NOT "born autistic". He was not meant to suffer a life of chronic illness. We recovered him because, like any other human, he deserves to have a chance to achieve his full potential in life.
Its funny, I've been called a liar and a racist on here and now Pat, you have the audacity to say that parents who recover their autistic children don't "love their children as they are". Get real, Pat.
You people all need to take a hard look at reality. You need to get off your high horses and ask yourselves HONESTLY why we have an autism epidemic. WHY do we have kids who are now sick with autoimmne diseases that were rare before the escalation in number of vaccines mandated?
You can go on defending a bunch of epidemiological studies that have been done by industry insiders. You can go on believing Paul Offit, who says that vaccines are so safe that you can "safely get 10,000 vaccines in one day". You can go on labeling and calling down the people who are begging vaccine manufactures and the government to STOP THE INSANITY. STOP MAKING OUR KIDS SICK.
And, no, I'm not angry. I'm pretty disgusted though. If people in my industry made fun of those who question the status-quo, we'd still be in the stone age.
You're like the emporer with no clothes.
And your brain has been sealed shut. Nothing that counters your preconceived biases gets through.
A closed mind is a terrible thing to have.
Chris:
My mind is not closed. I listened to the doctors telling me that my son was autistic and there was "no hope" to "go on disability" and that my son "would never live on his own". And I talked to parents of autistic children who had trusted the medical profession and not sought to reverse the vaccine injury and they regretted it. They are the angry ones who trusted their uninformed and closed minded doctors and didn't pursue natural treatments or pursued them too late because their doctors told them to "wait and see". Then I read the lousy epidemiological studies these same uninformed and closed-minded doctors based their "truth" on.
And then I went further and found people who recovered their kids and I made the informed decision to FOLLOW THE WINNERS, and dump the losers.
Have you read any of the research or information documented on either AutismOne's website or Generation Rescue's website? If not, then you are the one with the closed mind, not me. I've read the bullshit science you hang your arguments on and I'm not buying it.
There are other natural protocols that are discussed on AutismOne and Generation Rescue's websites, but, sadly, very few people on here are willing to go to those websites and educate themselves.
You can find a lot of things "discussed" on a lot of websites, but anyone serious would just look in the medical literature.
susie, it is quite clear that your mind is definitely closed. You have offered no real evidence, and despite being corrected several times with real documentation and yet you have not swayed one bit.
Dan: Regarding your comment, "You can find a lot of things "discussed" on a lot of websites, but anyone serious would just look in the medical literature."
Thanks, Dan. If you look at these websites, you will find documentation that will provide references to researchers, and their published work. But, that does require that you go to the websites.
www.generationrescue.org
www.autismone.org
Anything in Medical Hypotheses or JPANDS doesn't count. The rest of it has been systematically eviscerated time and again.
Just because some quack managed to slip a garbage paper past the reviewers doesn't mean it's accurate (much less the spin ignorant loons like GR/AoA/AutismOne put on it). This is why the literature must be read and evaluated, not simply taken as gospel.
And when someone with a bit of understanding and critical thought actually does read and evaluate, it is glaringly obvious that there's really only one credible conclusion. And it's not the one you're reaching.
Dan:
If you decide to go to the autismone.org website, you can click on "conference" and "presenters" to see some of the abstracts and research that these people are presenting, as well as information that doctors are sharing to help kids.
I noticed that there are two researchers that are not mentioned yet this year as presenting at autism one conference and that is Martha Herbert, MD, PhD, Professor of Neuropediatrics at Harvard Medical School and on staff at Mass General. Dr. Herbert has done good research into environmental triggers of autism and reversing autism. Also, S. Jill James, PhD, Director of the Metabolic Genomics Laboratory at ACHRI, University of Arkansas, who has done significant work in the study of genetic predispositions in autism.
These two researchers will likely present at the AutismOne conference as well, they likely have not commited to dates yet. Worth you time to look at their work.
Scott:
Thank you for continuing to demonstrate your own closed-mindedness. If you don't look, you obviously won't see anything. So please continue to demonstrate to people how resistant you are to considering ALL THE RESEARCH.
@susie: you never addressed our comments about St Andy's lies. Care to do so?
@590:
Requiring that supposed scientific information be published in a peer-reviewed journal before giving it credence isn't being closed-minded, it's having a modicum of understanding of the scientific process.
And evaluating a paper's reliability before determining how much credence to give it is the very definition of sane open-mindedness.
You have apparently resolved to define "closed-minded" as "don't unquestioningly swallow whatever bunk some loon chooses to feed you." Sorry, doesn't fly.
So? The conference also still seems to list Wakefield. Plus a bunch of chiropractors and self-described "nutrition" experts. And Dr. Deth, whose testimony in the Autism Omnibus trial were described as lacking coherence.
Sorry, even if they have a real medical degree... if they just make it up as they go along, it is not real scientific evidence. You have failed to provide any real documentation for your claims.
Chris@593
These people at autismone are reversing kids' autism.
Then we have the epidemiological studies you keep siting that provide no progress, are severely flawed, conducted by industry insiders, and do nothing but attempt to exonerate vaccines as the cause of autism.
Keep the websites I mentioned handy, as it is likely that you will know someone someday who's kid gets sick from a vaccine or vaccines and you can refer them to a place that offers true help, versus deflecting blame from the obvious.
www.generationrescue.org
www.autismone.org
Ooh, the AutismOne conference has a Jenny McCarthy keynote! What awesome science must be happening there!
If I click on abstracts I get a list of presentations, but I don't see the phrase "double blind" (or "blind" at all) anywhere on the page. Most likely because those aren't abstracts at all; it's cargo cult science and they are putting on a play of being like the big scientists, walking around in shoes 5 sizes too big for them and all proud of how grown-up they look.
susie, those websites are only to be kept handy if I want to have a good laugh.
My URL got eaten, this is it:
http://www.autismone.org/content/world-changes-may
Better websites:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/
and
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/autism/detail_autism.htm
@susie....crickets?
"Keep trivializing their contribution to herd immunity, it's working very well for your camp."
You may not have read the whole thread, cynic. Or you may have but reading the anti-vax idiocy caused you to miss over some stuff.
Anyhow, in this thread at least one of the anti-vax people either is too stupid to understand, or understands but rejects, the concept of herd immunity.
Time and time again pro-disease people come in on these threads and do the same thing. I've yet to see a pro-vaccine person dismiss herd immunity. That's kind of the point.
Yet they are completely incapable of providing evidence to that effect. Ooh, I know! God Told Them that is was working, so they don't need none of those stinking facts.
Evidence-free ranting and credulous acceptance of whatever lunacy a quack chooses to spew may make things easy for some parents. But they're REALLY bad for the children.
Scott:
The people at Autism One's conference are presenting facts. And, if people like me and my doctor are using those facts to reverse autism, then that is REALLY good for affected children.
Please continue to demonstrate your ignorance by labelling people cranks, googlecranks, anti-vaxx, quacks, goofuses, etc. The general public sees through the stubborn ignorance of "science" that ignores the truth and produces and promotes flawed research whose only purpose is self-redemption.
I'm sure that you're aware of a survey done recently, I think by MSNBC or NBC, where 25% of the population feels that vaccines cause autism.
The cause of autism has already been found. Just like women's hormone replacement therapy -- its only going to take about 50 years for industry and gov to fess up.
Susie--
Things aren't true because people think they are. (I can imagine an interesting fantasy novel in which, for example, light moved infinitely fast until Einstein published his work, and elves, who haven't studied modern physics, have FTL spaceships. But that's not our universe.)
On the other hand, since you think voting is relevant to scientific fact, why aren't you persuaded by the large majority of people who agree that vaccines do NOT cause autism?
No, they are presenting completely unsupported speculation, much of it mutually contradictory. And there is not one whit of credible evidence that any of that speculation is doing anything whatsoever beneficial for affected children. Beneficial for the quacks ripping off desperate parents, sure, but not for the children.
I am struck by how exactly accurate a description this is of the Autism One and related communities.
A larger percentage than that believes in ghosts, and denies evolution. Really quite irrelevant to the facts.
As a general statement, this is actually unintentionally reasonably accurate - the overwhelming bulk of the cause is known to be genetic, and we know quite a few things that are unrelated. Vaccines are among that group.
Really - you need to learn the difference between facts and wild speculation, and would benefit greatly by training yourself to evaluate various claims critically, as opposed to simply swallowing whole whatever lunacy happens to suit your preconceptions, with no regard for anything resembling facts or truth.
"I think by MSNBC or NBC, where 25% of the population feels that vaccines cause autism. "
Well that settles it. Who needs all this newfangled fancy pants science with its theories and hypotheses and experiments and peer review and learning and stuff. Its so HARD.
We'll just settle it with polls done by media conglomerates. It can then be backed up by actors, and I use that term loosely, who affirm what we already believe. Its so much EASIER that way.
@susie
"The cause of autism has already been found."
This is hands-down the most stupid statement I have see written on the internets. By making this statement, you have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that you have not one iota of knowledge of the subject of the etiology of autism. This statement is ridiculous that it is not even wrong.
I'm still waiting for susie to actually post links to actual studies, rather than to other people's opinions, making arguments by assertion, appeals to authority and other logical fallacies.
@Todd W.: don't hold your breath. I've been waiting all day for susie to address the Wakefield stuff she threw out, and all I'm hearing is crickets. She's too busy reading AOA, GR, and copy/pasting all that crap. She'll never go read Sciencebased Medicine or Factsnotfantasies or anyplace where her precious shibboleths get rousted.
(just looked up the spelling of shibboleths since I don't have spellcheck here at work...LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the wording of def #3 on dictionary.com: a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth.
I thought the article posted today on ScienceBasedMedicine was an appropriate response to her telling us to go read generationrescue.
Todd, I've done susie's homework.
The citation is from a noted scientist, Professor Yoda of the Jedi Temple, Coruscant, during a sabbatical to the swamps of Dagobah:
[Luke:] I canât believe it.
[Yoda:] That is why you fail.
I'm still waiting for susie to explain how autism develops in an unvaccinated child, since she stated quite clearly that autism is a "vaccine injury."
@Jen in TX
Well, she did try to weasel out of that one by saying that vaccines are one trigger. But, she still seems to believe that, if not responsible for all cases, vaccines are responsible for the majority of cases of autism.
I would not be surprised if she buys Kim Stagliano's opinion that Kim's own vaccines were the cause of her youngest child's (who was never vaccinated) autism.
@Todd W.
Wow, I've never heard that a mother's own vaccines can cause autism in their child. I wonder if the offspring of a vaccine-damaged autistic child will get autism. Sort of like the biblical "until the tenth generation" or whatever it is.
Susie,
Why on earth are you so fixated on the vaccine schedule in the US? You do recognise that not only does autism occur outside of the US, but that it occurs in similar numbers (per population) as the US, don't you? The UK does not vaccinate for HepB at birth except in cases where the mother or sometimes another relative living in the house is HepB positive, yet autism still occurs. If you honestly believe that the HepB vaccination has an impact on long term health and development of children beyond that of providing immunity to HepB, why are you not calling for a study comparing US and UK children? Of course, there will be many confounders, but no more than in the vaxed/unvaxed study that keeps being called for.
There are many, many possible triggers for autism in the environment, assuming one is even needed, but for most people the only one ever under consideration is vaccines. It's the MMR. Oh wait, no, it isn't. It's the mercury! Oh wait, reducing mercury levels actually didn't put a dent in the autism rate increase. Well, it's got to be something in the vaccines! There are absolutely no other things all kids are exposed to. Well, all kids except those who aren't vaccinated, but they were probably vaccinated on the sly or have been exposed to some other trigger that didn't trigger all of these vaccinated kids, right?
And how did kids with autism a decade or more ago ever continue to develop without DAN doctors if spontaneous recovery and/or further development are not ever a part of autism? My youngest sister's best friend from her preschool years was diagnosed with autism by 3 1/2. He definitely had a number of delays (I remember speech delays quite clearly from my babysitting duties and really, my sister was the only person he enjoyed any sort of social interaction with) and displayed many classical autistic traits, yet he will be graduating from a regular high school this spring, just like my sister, without ever having seen a DAN doctor. Impossible, isn't it?
Even if vaccines could cause autism, which has never been shown despite so many attempts, I'd still choose a risk of autism over the risk of death for my child.
@rob and others who may not have seen this
Here's the Kim Stagliano about the "genetic" role in autism:
"...My youngest had a traumatic inutero injury with birth related oxygen issues and inherited a mercury/toxin load from me. You know, the genetics part."
That quote is like the corpse-plant of anti-vaccine idiocy. Every once in a while it blooms and you're amazed/repulsed by its majesty.
@JohnV:
Oh, that's nothing compared to the measles virus transfer via bathwater and/or failure to wash hands after wiping my older boy's poopy butt theory!
I've even read posts at AoA that suggest that pharma shills are infiltrating blogs and other forums with stories of unvaccinated children with autism in order to cast doubt on the vaccine theory.
D'oh!
You mean you aren't? Maybe that is why it seems I am so alone in that venture.
Then again, I SHOULD be getting the bulk of the payout, but I don't think that is happening. I need to contact the OverLords about this.
Twelve days, 618 comments and counting. All I can say is: "holy hell people!"
I have been following this blog for ~ 6 months now, but I don't think I realized the enormity of ignorance involved. For twelve days now, I have witnessed the same talking points ad nauseum, expertly deconstructed (sometimes far too gently) by people who have spent their whole lives studying such things.
This thread is infested (in a good way ;)) with doctors, physicists, engineers...etc. All reasoning with facts. On the other side we have angry people making the same tired 'points' over, and over, and over, and over again. All the while convinced that they know more because they read a website that told them so. They are so ignorant that they think they are making a point, but utterly unable to see how very unintelligent they appear to any objective observer. They are winning in their own mind, and that is all that matters to them.
They are just like the black night, outmatched, but too stupid to notice.
@Susie, yes I am calling you and others like you bad parents. You don't love your actual child and try to get them the tools to function and cope with the world; instead, you are loving an ideal child that you mourn and hope will replace the child you do have: hence your frequent use of "recovering" your child.
You think you are "recovering" a child that was "lost?" That intimates you don't accept your child for who they are, but conditionally for who you think they should be.
Your child is different, and you can't accept that there is nobody to blame.
Here's a new idea: the incidence of cesarian sections has also increased, and spiked early in the "Autism Epidemic" - which could mean that because more big-headed kids survived, they passed on their genes, meaning that what formerly would have caused them to die instead can be passed on: a gene that causes larger heads and more disorganized social processing.
I can theorize along with the best of them, as well as pull out meaningless statistics and attempt to fit them to the data. Go ahead and look it up.
"Here's a new idea: the incidence of cesarian sections has also increased, and spiked early in the "Autism Epidemic" - which could mean that because more big-headed kids survived, they passed on their genes, meaning that what formerly would have caused them to die instead can be passed on: a gene that causes larger heads and more disorganized social processing."
Careful, Pat, the anti-vacc crowd has quite an overlap with the natural-birth-at-all-costs/unnecesarians-are-evil crowd so they may just take that idea and run with it. Although my guess would be they would claim that such a gene only "predisposes" the child to autism - because, ya know, it just HAS to be the vaccines!
@cynic:
My son is autistic So is my nephew. My second son (in my arm right now) is getting the normal schedule of vaccinations.
Yes I can type one-handed.
And I can reiterate a few other points: at what point did a child with peanut allergies get injected with peanuts? Did I unknowingly mainline ragweed? Did my wife trip and fall onto a very sharp strawberry? Did my father get bitten by a rogue avocado?
Or what about my aunt with Lupus?
Again, you seem to think there is a special magic in vaccinations, and that this is the only way for proteins to get into the blood. Please reconsider in light of the fact that you are still alive, and have not died of starvation.
Oh: and to reiterate: I have an autistic son, you insensate neochordate.
Pat:
Okay, so its your opinion that parents who help their children recover from autism are "bad parents". So, too, must parents who recover their kids from leukemia, or those who get a cast put on their child's a broken bone.
If I were you, Pat, for the sake of your son, I think you need to have an honest dialog with yourself. Your son is going to have a lifetime of illness and disability. At some point (if not already now) that illness is going to cause him sadness.
I doubt that his knowledge of your unconditional love for him (which I now realize that BAD PARENTS like me don't have) will be able to cancel the grief he has over loss of critical life skills and ongoing illness.
Hey, Susie,
Please tell me more about the etiology of autism. You made a blanket statement that the cause was known. Elaborate.
Are you a shill? Do you get paid to write such shit? Who pays you? Do you get as much as us Big Pharma shills? Personally, I'm making out like a dream. Planning a new kitchen, granite, solid wood cabinets, the works, all paid for by Big Pharma!
Note how Goofus' entire comparison here is based on the false premise that she possesses the magical secrets of how to "recover" children from autism, and that only through use of such magical secrets can autistic children ever avoid "a lifetime of illness and disability."
The reality is that autism is a disorder of developmental delay, not developmental stasis. Many autistic children, with their own hard work and with that of their parents, overcome the obstacle of that delay and make happy, successful lives for themselves. Most of them don't get the credit for their hard work stolen away from them and awarded to some pseudoscientific "protocol" that was practiced upon them, thankfully.
Anteaus:
I understand that you would think that recovery protocols are "magical" because you refuse to make yourself aware of the medical research that these protocols have been developed from. I have offered the websites, and you have not read the research.
I cannot say as I find fault with you -- after all, you clearly don't have any skin in the game. You don't have a sick kid and so why should you care about the research parents are using to help their sick kids? I am concerned that the medical community and public health community KNOWS that vaccines trigger autism, but there are people who have decided that the predisposed children are just collateral damage. And, to protect an overaly-aggressive vaccine schedule and protect themselves from justifiable law suits, there is no way any link will be acknowledged.
By the way, did anyone see page 6 of yesterday's Wall St Journal, Personal Journal section? The FDA suspended GSK's Rotavirus vaccine because the product was contaminated with Porcine (pig) circovirus-1 and this virus has been in the vaccine since its development, according to the WSJ. Gee I wonder what other yet-to-be-identified contaminents are in those vaccines? I think I read that the Chief Medical Officer at GSK said that there was no evidence that Circovirus 1 (PIG) virus psoed a health risk. I wonder if this same Chief Medical Officer said that there were no heart risks to Avandia? GSK has misled on product safety in the past. Once again, safety sacrificed for $$$$$$$$.
"The FDA suspended GSK's Rotavirus vaccine"
"Once again, safety sacrificed for $$$$$$$$."
Weird, I'd look at it like $$$$ were sacrificed (vaccine sales suspended) for public safety. Then again I don't have a financial incentive to blame deep-pocketed pharmaceutical companies for my problems.
hoho see what i did there?
"I am concerned that the medical community and public health community KNOWS that vaccines trigger autism, but there are people who have decided that the predisposed children are just collateral damage."
Perhaps you should be asking yourself what is making some kids "predisposed."
Aw, hell, I'm feeling generous. I'll help you get started:
http://www.thorne.com/altmedrev/.fulltext/14/4/364.pdf
http://www.grc.nia.nih.gov/branches/rrb/dna/pubs/Becker%20and%20Schultz…
http://www.cpdusu.org/newsflash/February2010/
http://pediatrics.jwatch.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1021/2
WHAT???? GSK's rotavirus vaccine is contaminated? For how long? Arent these things supposed to be safe? Who is in charge of looking after the consumer?
Is this buyer beware?
Susie, you need to work on your reading comprehension. It was a batch of the Rotarix vaccine contaminated during manufacturing. It will be back on the market soon.
It is much like the recalls of food products when there is an issue. Like recent recalls due to salmonella contamination (Pringle potato chip, some meat and chicken products, etc).
Also, there is another rotavirus vaccine that is available, RotaTeq.
It appears it was also GSK that found the contamination.
But that little tidbit will be safely overlooked, I can assure you, and I don't mean by GSK.
It's much easier to jump around screaming 'contamination!!1!', than it is to sit down and think what that contamination actually was and what it means.
@susie
Why do you continually lie?
The GSK vaccine does NOT contain the PCV-1 virus.
It contains material (pieces of DNA) derived from the virus, NOT the actual virus. This DNA was detected using a newly available assay for viral-related materials.
@bensmyson
Taking your comment to a different, but similar, context from not too far back:
"WHAT???? Spinach is contaminated? For how long? Aren't these foods supposed to be safe? Who is in charge of looking after the consumer?
Is this buyer beware?"
To answer your question about who is in charge, it is a shared responsibility between the company providing the "thing" (spinach or vaccine) and FDA. In both the contaminated spinach case and the rotavirus vaccine case, FDA stepped in and halted production in order to keep people safe, with the cooperation of the companies involved.
Whether the endeavor is vaccine production or food production, it is important to remember that it is a human endeavor. That means that mistakes and accidents happen, no matter how well designed the system. The key is to do our best to put mechanisms in place that can minimize the chance of these events occurring, react to them early and resolve them quickly, particularly when human health is on the line.
Bottom line: the rotavirus vaccine issue was a big mistake on the part of the manufacturer. Future lots they produced should be examined closely to ensure this doesn't happen again. It does not, however, mean that they are a corrupt, evil, faceless corporation that cares nothing for their consumers. To leap to that conclusion requires faulty logic.
@susie
In addition, you might note that the European Medicines Agency did NOT pull the rotavirus vaccine; ONLY the FDA did. The World Health Organization didn't recommend any change of usage of the GSK vaccine.
Looks like the FDA was taking the more cautious approach than the rest of the world. Funny how that seems to be a tradition with the FDA, going back decades. Think thalidomide.
Now I'm accused of poor reading comprehension:
Chris: The WSJ article stated that the contamination of this vaccine has occurred since the "early in its devlopment". This is NOT a "one-batch" isolated incident.
Dedj: GSK did NOT alert the FDA about the viral contamination -- the WSJ article says that an "independent US academic research team" had found the virus and alerted FDA.
Rob: The "pieces of DNA" have contaminated the vaccine since its development. How many people have gotten these "pieces of DNA"?
Todd W: Does the fact that GSK encouraged doctors to suppress significant negative side effects of Avandia concern you? Unless, GSK has had turnover at the top management level within their organization, we consumers and anyone else with a brain, can only assume that with GSK, the encouragement of suppression of negative information is the STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE within the organization, not a blip.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if GSK knew of the viral contamination, but it would have cost too much to clean up their product, so they left it in there.
Yes, Susie, you are right. It was a manufacturing flaw that has been there all along. Did you also miss these quotes in article:
Did you notice that it was a new form of testing that found the DNA? I still think you need to work on reading comprehension.
And if you fear anything that might have stray bit of DNA, I suggest you stop buying all food that you did not produce yourself. Stay away from all grocery stores. Just grow your own.
But remember, your garden soil is full of aluminum!
@susie: I'm still hearing crickets from you about St Andy. How come? You'd rather not show that you made a mistake? You prefer to try to show we are all wrong and you are always right?
Chirp...chirp...chirp....
@susie
There are all sorts of DNA fragments circulating in your blood all the time. Some from processes as simple as blood clotting, some are disease markers, some are from infections. It really is not a big deal, for the most part, as the DNA is rapidly degraded and recycled.
no one tell susie that her genome has all sorts of viral dna in it. who knows what the hilarious outcome might be?
"Dedj: GSK did NOT alert the FDA about the viral contamination -- the WSJ article says that an "independent US academic research team" had found the virus and alerted FDA."
Susie : don't quote mine an article that the person you're disagreeing with also has access to and has read - you will be found out immediately.
You will provide the exact quote that indicates that it was the independant research team tha alerted the FDA. The article makes no such statement.
From the exact same article which you 'somehow' conveniently failed to link to:
"The company said the material was first detected following work done by a research team in the U.S. using a novel technique for looking for viruses. It was then confirmed by additional tests conducted by GlaxoSmithKline."
Do you have any evidence of any form apart from a bad misreading of a newspaper article to substantiate you implied claims that GSK in any way tried to hush this up?
You will link to the original FDA statement in your next post. No other response is acceptable.
You will also address Chris' statement, and will provide full and clear arguementation for what you think it means. Snide implied accusations are not an acceptable reply.
You are basically proving me correct in my assertion that people like you ignore the particulars of a situation simply to score cheap points. Do not let yourself down.
Also, you will post your evidence that supports your implied contention that this discovery is in any way substantial, in terms of it's impact on the viability of the vaccine or the vaccine schedule.
@Chris,
This is, truly, the best this crowd can muster.
It's like the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel, although I've never understood that one, as wouldn't you put holes in the barrel from the bullets?
Whatever.
@Rob
It depends on the angle you're shooting at, as bullets slow down really fast once they hit water. Also, IIRC, it's actually the shockwave that propagates through the water, rather than the bullet, that kills the fish. I believe Mythbusters covered this one.
I'm waiting them to start blaming Paul Offit. They will start to claim he did it in order for RotaTeq to get a bigger share of the market.
Though this is the same crowd that thought he was responsible for RotaShield. So they probably think he also worked on Rotarix.
Yeppers. They looked (twice, as I recall) at how practical it was to shoot a person underwater - interestingly, low-velocity bullets work best as higher-velocity rounds tend to fragment when they hit the water.
They also found out that actually hitting a fish in a barrel with a bullet wasn't a given (unless you use a minigun), but that the shockwave would indeed be sufficient to kill any fish nearby.
Although I've always heard that the saying originally referred to salted cod packed into a barrel for shipment, as opposed to a fish swimming in a barrel full of water (which is a rather odd situation, if you think about it).
Chris:
Not to mention Rotarians, rotator cuffs, Roto-Rooter, rotogravure, Rototillers and Rotorua, NZ.
You know, what's really telling about this non-story is that the European counterpart to the FDA took no action. Why not? Because it is NOT a significant concern.
Next up: DNA causes autism.
Discuss.
Sure, no evidence of harm. Except for the studies that show that there probably is.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16202070
"Ultrastructural alterations in human blood leukocytes induced by porcine circovirus type 1 infection
CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that PCV has the capability of infecting human leukocytes in vitro, and should be considered a potential risk of viral transmission during xenotransplantation."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11041495
"Xenotransplantation and the potential risk of xenogeneic transmission of porcine viruses.
A major concern, however, is the potential for xenogeneic transmission of viruses from animals to humans via organ, tissue, or cellular transplantation or via ex vivo exposure of humans to porcine biologic materials. Xenotransplantation allows viruses to bypass the normal immunological defense mechanisms of the recipient. Furthermore, the use of immunosuppressive drugs following transplantation may facilitate the xenogeneic transmission of zoonotic agents. Of porcine viruses, swine hepatitis E virus does not cause any clinical symptoms in the natural host but is a likely zoonotic agent that can infect humans and cause hepatitis. Porcine circovirus type 1 is prevalent in swine populations with no known association with clinical disease, while circovirus type 2 causes post-weaning multi-systemic wasting syndrome. Porcine endogenous retrovirus is integrated into the host chromosomes while porcine cytomegalovirus undergoes latent infection. Two additional porcine herpesviruses have recently been identified in swine and have been named porcine lymphotrophic herpesviruses. These herpesviruses can potentially become reactivated in human recipients after xenotransplantation. All in all, there are a number of viruses in swine that are of primary concern to screen and eliminate from xenotransplantation protocols. Epidemiology and the current knowledge on xenogeneic risk of these viruses are discussed."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15099209
"Infection studies on human cell lines with porcine circovirus type 1 and porcine circovirus type 2
CONCLUSION: Although PCV gene expression and replication took place in human cells, the infection is non-productive. Alteration of protein localization suggests that protein targeting may be disturbed in human cells."
If someone castigated me for not "making myself aware of" a genuine and non-stolen Picasso being sold out of the trunk of someone's car, I would reply that the trunks of random cars is not where you find genuine and non-stolen Picassos being sold.
The same is what I say to Goofus' assertion that there are scientifically sound protocols which reverse autism, but that instead of being published in any of the major medical journals which would jump at the chance to publish such research if it was genuine, they are being "published" on websites such as Autism One and Generation Rescue.
If they actually had the scientific discoveries they claim they wouldn't have to settle for publishing on partisan websites which give them no credibility with the larger world -- they'd publish in a real journal and believe me, you could not keep Autism One and Generation Rescue from crowing about their triumph. But they simply haven't had any triumph - they haven't published in the real medical journals, for the simple reason that they don't have real medical research to present.
Antaeus,
That's because there is a conspiracy to hide these results. Major medical journals are conspiring with big pharma shills like you and me to suppress these remarkable results.
Try and get that through your thick skull, then head over to some global warming denier boards and work on that nonsense. You know, I've heard that global warming has been debunked. It isn't published, but it's on all the blogs.
Hey, has anyone seen susie? She never answered my question about St Andy and seems to have vanished without answering Chris or Dedj either. Gee....you think maybe she CAN'T answer us without her copy/paste garbage from AOA or other sites?
@bennysmom
Would you mind explaining why you think xenotransplantation is relevant to vaccination?
I would assume that bensparent cited those because they indicated that PCV-1 might, indeed, be infectious of human cells.
What she seems to have missed is that despite possible infection of leukocytes in xenotransplantation (not a danger in vaccination), there is no indication that PCV is associated with any disease in humans or in host, and there is indication that in humans it is "non-productive" (s/he may not understand, that paper seems to indicate that although PCV might replicate in human cells, the proteins it produces appear to be mis-addressed for a human context, and thus they don't seem to do anything),
What s/he seems to have forgotten is that the virus entire is not in the vaccine, only a few fragments of it -- which wouldn't indicate to me that this is enough to even be infectious to begin with.
And now, I'm going to go back to staying out of this conversation entirely, because [obscenity deleted] like susie (and very occasionally bensparent) make me want to scream and throw things, not to mention disembowel them and chew on their spleens, and I do not trust myself to be at all civilised.
Awww...luna_the_cat...don't be civilized. Be nasty like the rest of us. ;-)
dedj:
I mentioned in my notation that the information I got on the suspended vaccine was from the Wall Street Journal. If you don't consider that source reputable, then call them, don't bother me with issues regarding their reporting.
As I mentioned in previous posts, less than favorable information about vaccines seems to be pouring out from every direction -- that is why 25% of the general public believes that vaccines have a role in causing autism. The general public can see what the scientific community refuses to acknowledge. And, they don't buy the same old quoted epidemiological studies that are paid for by vaccine manufacturers, conducted by vaccine industry insiders and only serve to exonerate vaccine manufactureres from fault in the autism epidemic.
triskelthecat: I'm glad you don't like Wakefield. If you liked him, I'd know he's just another industry-owned hack. His findings have NEVER been proven to have been faked --- and he has never said he faked data --- and his findings were NOT disproven by the GMC. And, he never stated that vaccines caused autism -- but that his data was indicative of problems with the MMR causing bowel problems.
Wakefield's findings just happened to piss off the big boys. The GMC, with its extensive industry influence and ownership, did what they were told to do -- make an example of him.
Again, I see that the medical establishment and industry protects itself FIRST, willingly sacrificing the safety of patients, when it comes to vaccines. As I've pointed out, this has happened time and again, specifically pointing out Vioxx, Avandia, and women's HRT.
Bottom line is that the same people who have the most to lose in analyzing vaccine safety have been given the responsibility of policing themselves. How moronic.
The result of a self-policing pharmaceutical industry is the nightmare that many families are living with epidemic levels of autoimmune diseases and autistic spectrum disorders.
And, Luna-the-cat, too bad you'd rather disembowel people than LISTEN to them -- another illustration of the arrogance that feeds the continued rising levels of autism, asd, autoimmune disorders. You all need to read ALL THE RESEARCH, open your eyes. You've been dumbed down by your own industry.
I see susie is still stamping her feet...not even entertaining anymore, really.
*sigh* Oh, very well....
susie:
You are a perfect storm of ignorance and the arrogance of ignorance, the very Dunning-Kruger effect made flesh. You are not just a shmeggegie, you are a complete paskudnyak.
You accusing other people of ignorance and of "not listening" creates a vein of irony so rich and deep that one might mine it for decades without ever coming near its limits. You are completely oblivious to factual information, your posts are ripe with misunderstanding of what you read, and you are happy to make all sorts of assumptions about other people's backgrounds and integrity while maintaining an air of self-righteous superiority about how arrogant we are, and an equal air of martyrdom about how dare people judge you. You have no understanding of biology, medicine, standards of evidence, logic, or your own limitations, and you are happy to work to keep it that way, since you would not allow even the hint of the idea that there might be things you don't know into your tiny, tightly-shut little brain. Did I mention the Dunning-Kruger effect and the fact that you are a paskudnyak?
There, got that off my chest.
Wakefield published, in his 1998 Lancet paper, information that was factually incorrect about whether the children in his study actually had GI symptoms, and when they developed them. He published factually incorrect information about how they came to his study. The evidence of this is clear in hospital records, among other things. He could not have done this by accident. He had plenty of time and opportunity to present documentation in his own defence -- hell, he could have released specific testimony as to how and why this wasn't true to the many channels of media he has access to, to get his defence heard outside the courts, too -- and he could not. This makes what he did knowing fraud.
When allegations of Wakefield's dishonesty and fraud were brought some years ago by Brian Deer, he sued Deer for libel -- here in the UK, where libel law is plaintiff friendly and in order to defend against such a suit, the accused must prove that what he said is true -- and in this case, completely separate from and independent of any medical board and outside the influence of any pharmaceutical company, Wakefield's own lawyer told him to drop the case and pay Deer's court costs. But you hand-wave this away, as if it didn't exist. You're an idiot.
You assume that the General Medical Council -- which in my experience is actually far too reluctant to condemn doctors for incompetence and fraud in general -- must be in the pay of pharmaceutical companies. I would love to see you prove this. There is, of course, not a shred of evidence for it; you've just decided that since they have something to do with mainstream medicine, they must be. Personally, I think if the pharmaceutical companies had any real influence in this country at all the drug pricing policies here would be very different to they are, since this is a very direct and simple way that pharmaceutical companies are impacted. But basically, you've made up your mind, and that is that, your preconceptions present an impenetrable wall to anything like evidence or even the necessity for such. You're an idiot.
The GMC specifically said that they were not making a statement on his findings. But they DID specifically make a statement on his methods and practices, which were dishonest and deceptive -- again, ignoring what was actually said, in favour of the voices in your head, makes you an idiot.
The fact that teams independent of Wakefield have consistently not been able to duplicate his results, and that valid criticisms have been brought of how he got them (and, sweetie, I've done PCR, I know *exactly* why what he did with his lab tests was wrong, and either deliberately dishonest or hopelessly incompetent) -- that makes his results disproven. The fact that you absolutely will not under any circumstances take this information in -- that makes you an idiot.
You don't know my background. You don't know my experience. You don't know how much I have read or what I know. You don't know what I do for a living, and you don't know what my experience is of either medicine or autism. But you assume that since I do not toe your line, and in fact look on you with complete contempt, that I must be "dumbed down" or paid off by industry. You're an idiot.
Further: this situation is not symmetrical. We here on the mainstream medical side do not reach our conclusions out of ignorance, misunderstanding (willful or otherwise), or immunity to evidence. We do not hold to our conclusions in the face of genuine evidence to the contrary; you would find, if you were not blinded by your own pettiness, that people here are able to deal with information on its own merits, and change their minds when there is objective evidence that our beliefs do not match up well with reality, something that you have shown absolutely no ability to do yourself. You accuse us of the things that you are most guilty of -- gullibility, willful ignorance, and imperviousness to new information; but the reverse is not true, when we accuse you of this, and here's the part of it you truly don't grasp -- we have objective evidence to that effect. Basically, you're an idiot.
You represent an utter failure as a human being; you were gifted with a brain capable of complex concepts and a life in a technology-rich world where verifiable information is readily available to you, and you piss this away in favour of blind belief in things shown to be false and a glaring contempt for people who are trying to do better than that. You are a waste of space and oxygen.
And no, I really don't care if I have hurt and offended your precious widdle feelings. You deserve no less, for stupidity above and beyond the tolerable, and more than that, for your efforts to propagate fear and misinformation to others. The reason why "why 25% of the general public believes that vaccines have a role in causing autism" is because arrogant ignorant twats like yourself take an active role in spreading false information, and you are too arrogant and ignorant and above all gullible of the personalities you worship to question what you are doing. You should be ashamed of yourself; the true tragedy is that you are simply too willfully stupid to understand even this.
Luna_the_cat for president.
Hell no, JohnV, I don't want that job. That would entail dealing with flaming idiots all day.
"If you don't consider that source reputable, then call them, don't bother me with issues regarding their reporting."
I said nothing about thier reputation. Indeed, I did not criticise the article at all. Such a thing would have been an odd thing to do given that I (in the same post) provided a direct quote from the article.
What I did point out was that your interpretation of the artilce was not supported by the contents.
You will provide the direct quote from the article that backs up your assertions. I provided a direct quote from the article that indicated that GSK was, in fact, involved with the discovery of the contamination.
I kept the question as simple as possible, yet you failed to address it or even understand it. No one else here appears to have done so. Given how badly you appear to have misunderstood a deliberetly simplified question - why should I trust your assertions further?
@luna_the_cat: we've pointed out to susie before that Wakers falsified his data, and lied when he said measles was found in the samples (as was testified to by Wakefield's research assistant who states he told Wakefield BEFORE the publication that no measles were found). She won't listen to reason anyway.
Since we are all in the pay of Big Pharma (and I STILL didn't get my checks...), since I don't like him, he must be right. Uh....wrong. I don't like him because he falsified data. He lied, and carried out unnecessary tests on children. I'm glad he has been asked to leave his position at Thoughtful House.
Austism has been around for ages, susie. The diagnosis criteria has changed. People and genetics have not.
Luna_the_cat:
That was awesome.
Luna FTW!! Where would you prefer your Internets shipped to? :-)
susie @ #654:
Others have already pointed out that the issue isn't with the source but with your peculiar "interpretation" of it.
This is shown by Dedj's comment at #639...
Please note that Dedj didn't say that the problem was with the source, the problem is with how you distorted the article's message. Please read the rest of Dedj's post at #639 slowly and for comprehension before getting defensive again.
The term "quote mining" refers to when someone (you "susie" in this case) quotes a line out of context of the rest of what was said, thereby making it look like the speaker/writer was saying something other than what they actually meant, when viewed in context. It's considered at best a sign of heavily biased (and therefore incorrect) comprehension, and possible outright dishonesty. Earlier you complained about people questioning your comprehension skills. It may surprise you but they were attempting to be polite, because the alternative is that you are deliberately lying. In other words, they were attempting to give you the benefit of the doubt that you sincerely didn't understand what was being stated.
Even your reply at #654 seems to indicate that you didn't understand what Dedj (or the others) were stating, let alone what the article you cited actually meant.
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@ bensmyson: we're still waiting for you to answer the questions you've been ducking since #63.
@luna_the_cat
Wow. Truly poetic. You give Orac a run for his money on the insolence.
...That'd been building for a while.
I donât mean to be rude budding in on this conversation at such a late point, but In an earlier post Susie made some points regarding immune system dysfunction, toxic insult during development, reduced detox capacity, ect that didnât seem to be adequately addressed. I have personally never been to either AoA or Generation rescue websites, I have however, been to Pubmed on numerous occasions and have accessed a lot of literature that from my perception indicates there is a valid reason to scientifically debate vaccines and autism in the context of immune dysfunction.
I guess my first question would be:
What is your opinion on immune system dysfunction and autism?
What literature have you read to come to this opinion?
That is probably as good a place as any to start.
Hopefully this can lead to a fruitful and civil discussion about this issue. In this light, would It be possible to not interject emotion into the arguments, just stick to the science.
@skeptiquette
Many of us try to stick to the science, but others willfully ignore and lie about the science. The problem here is that the science has overwhelmingly failed to find any link between vaccines and autism.
@skeptiquette:
Stick around for a while, I'm sure that much of this will come up in conversation, just not necessarily on this thread.
A couple of things to start off with, though:
In terms of having any connection whatsoever to autism, "immune system disfunction" does not appear to have a significant amount of support in the actual scientific literature. Genetically, a suite of about 15-16 genes have been identified as playing into autism, and although work is still in the early stages, so far they mostly appear to influence things like cell-surface proteins which help regulate cell adhesion and between-cell signalling. How this plays into brain development is being actively investigated. There's no indication whatsoever so far that it plays into "clearing toxins" or the other "TOXINZ" gambit issues.
The other thing that you seriously need to think about, which has been covered before on this blog but which may well end up being covered again, is the actual amount of "TOXINZZ" in a vaccine shot -- which is to say, so miniscule as to make no biological difference whatsoever, since people have a natural body burden of things like aluminum and mercury which is far higher (sometimes orders of magnitude higher) than anything in an injection, and this is from activities like "breathing", or nursing from a mother who has eaten tuna, or had fried eggs for breakfast. Some of the things in vaccines which are painted as "toxins", like squalene and formaldehyde, are actually manufactured in our own cells, too. These can indeed have bad effects on the body, but when one is exposed to literally industrial amounts of them -- not 0.000025 of a gram.
Similarly, for the people who talk about how we might be "overwhelming immune systems" with vaccines -- for the vast majority of human history, people did not bathe, covered sewers were unheard of, and in many parts of the world people shared their living quarters with their livestock, and babies were living in this too. If infant immune systems were likely to be overwhelmed by being exposed to 5-6 [weakened, non-replicating] potential pathogens at once, this normal onslaught of thousands at once would have wiped out every baby, ensuring that our species not be around for long. The truth of the matter is, vaccines represent a truly minute fraction of the ordinary level of "insult" that any infant immune system could be expected to handle, and it presents in a deliberately non-dangerous form otherwise very dangerous disease-causing organisms in order for the immune system to learn what that danger looks like before it arrives for real. For this, it works quite well.
The simple fact of the matter is, there is no support in reputable primary research (and by "reputable" I specifically mean: 1. methodologically sound, 2. independently replicable, and 3. performed by people with no financial stake in a specific outcome) for a link between autism, immune disfunction, or vaccination. And in places where vaccination has dropped or never been established, like in areas of Japan or uber-religious groups in the Netherlands, there is exactly the same rate of autism as in the surrounding populations -- or slightly higher, as ASD symptoms can result from neurological damage from some of the diseases that vaccines protect against. That, right there, should be enough to tell people that looking at vaccines is not the right direction. But there have been a small but very vocal minority who just have a "gut feeling" that it is vaccines, since symptoms of autism often become overt during a period of time when children are normally recieving vaccines -- and they will under no circumstances let go of this "link."
Skeptiquette--
My opinion is that there is no evidence for a link between immune system dysfunction and autism, despite people looking.
Further, my opinion is that if you are introducing a claim, the burden is on you to produce evidence for it. Not on other people to analyze it for you.
Suppose (to pick an unemotional issue) someone claimed that Benjamin Harrison was the greatest of all American presidents. If I cared about the subject at all, I would ask "What makes Harrison great? How is he greater than Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt?" (Someone else might ask them to compare Harrison to different presidents, or just say "state your evidence" without saying "was he better than X?") We wouldn't take someone seriously who said "Harrison is greatest, I dare you to disprove it!" and then insisted that his point was proven because he kept coming up with obscure statements about Harrison's life.
Also, "toxins" is a very broad term. Are you claiming that autism is caused by mercury or by the poisons put out by diphtheria? By soot in the air, poison ivy, or stannous fluoride? State a specific claim and maybe you can test it, or find people to test it. Or find that the tests have already been done.
Skeptiquette states:
He/she then asks:
My response to this would be:
Having made a statement that there is a "valid reason to scientifically debate" autism and vaccines, it behooves her/him to support that statement rather than rely on everybody else to explain all the reasons this may or may not be so.
However, in the interest of open dialogue, I'll toss out one supported opinion.
Even if the indirect measures of "immune dysfunction" [there are studies alleging both hypo- [1] and hyper-normal [2,3] immune responses in autism] are correct and some autistic children have "immune dysfunction", how would their immune system response to a vaccine-strain or an inactivated pathogen be more deleterious than the response to the real thing?
References:
[1] Enstrom AM, et al. Altered gene expression and function of peripheral blood natural killer cells in children with autism. Brain Behav Immun. 2009 Jan;23(1):124-33.
[2] Ashwood P, et al. Preliminary evidence of the in vitro effects of BDE-47 on innate immune responses in children with autism spectrum disorders. J Neuroimmunol. 2009 Mar 31;208(1-2):130-5.
[3] Enstrom A, et al. Increased IgG4 levels in children with autism disorder. Brain Behav Immun. 2009 Mar;23(3):389-95.
[Note: all three citations are published by the same lab]
Prometheus
Luna the cat:
In YOUR DREAMS!!! It was NEVER proven that Wakefield faked his data. The GMC made no finding that he faked his data. Wakefield (and the other two brave authors who weren't intimidated by this witch hunt) never admitted to faking data. It was alleged by one individual, but it was not proven.
There is a difference between alleged and proven.
With regard to your mention of the libel suit that Wakefield's attorney advised Wakefield that he drop, you obviously don't know much about libel law either. It is highly likely that Wakefield's attorney advised that the suit be dropped because it doesn't matter if something written about a public figure is TRUE or UNTRUE. What must be proven is MALICE. And, that is a very difficult thing to prove because a reporter will claim that he/she was only doing their job as a defense.
Your arguments are so weak that you have to resort to name calling in order to substantiate your claims against me. No surprise.
Also, I chuckled at your reference that I did not know "who I was dealing with" and "what your experience with autism" is. I may not know how important you are convinced that you are, but I can tell you this: I am sure that you have never alleviated the suffering of or helped an autistic child recover from his/her illness because you deny the cause. You'd probably rather see to it that these kids get some black-boxed medications to mask their autistic behaviors vs a wholistic, natural protocol which actually allows the body to recover from the vaccine injury.
Finally, I have never come on this little board as someone who was looking for pity. I do, however, pity the parents who are searching for answers about what happened to their child, should they consult an egomaniac like yourself. And, I pity the children who are sick because a profession would rather believe the lies that are spun by the pharmaceutical industry than open their eyes to the truth.
Dedj
Re your assertatiion that I lied about who actually found the contamination in the vaccine, if you look at the article, bottom of column one, it says that an "independant academic research team" found the contamination, then they reported it to GSK, who confirmed it.
I did not misrepresent who found the contamination, nor do I need a reading comprehension course. Your intrepretation of the news article was likely clouded by your own perconceptions.
susie:
Three days, and that's the response you come up with? I suppose that's not bad for a smoking hole in the ground...
T Bruce:
Instead of calling people names, why don't you people make yourselves aware of all the research that's being used to recover autistic kids?
There is a growing body of research done by very credible sources that substantiates toxicity and immune disfunction as the underlying causes of autism.
This is not settled science.
Let me clarify my comment on "settled science".
Luna, and like-minded-individuals, would like to treat the vaccine - autism connection as though it is "settled science". It is not.
susie:
I have made myself aware of what you call "research". It's all garbage. That is all.
BTW, the "smoking hole in the ground" comment was not name calling. It was a description of you after Luna was done. Or would you prefer to be compared unfavourably to the Black Knight?
susie @ #671:
Still defending Wakefield despite that it's been proven that he was involved in several ethical breaches, tried to hide his conflict of interest, had neither the authority nor the training to do the research he attempted. That he also used contaminated lab equipment that created false positives, and afterward nobody credible has been able to replicate his findings.
Also, you seem to be confusing England with the USA. In England the libel laws are far more in favor of the plaintiff than in the USA and many other countries, so much so that it's almost impossible to defend yourself from a libel suit. Proving malice isn't necessary in England, simply alleging it is apparently enough to win a libel suit there, just ask Simon Sing (who lost the suit against him over the word "bogus" in reference to useless, and sometimes dangerous, treatments). The only good reason a barrister representing Wakefield would have encouraged him to drop the suit against Deer was if there was no chance of winning the libel suit because what Deer wrote was true.
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susie @ #672:
[Sigh] After several days you still don't understand what Dedj said you got wrong.
Let me try to make this even more simple for you...
Nowhere in the article did it say that the independent group is the one that alerted the FDA, it just stated that they found it first while using a new technique. In fact the article doesn't actually say who alerted the FDA at all, but you were the one claiming that the it was the independent group that alerted the FDA (while implying that GSK was hiding it). This is why Dedj asked you to back up the claim that it was the independent group that reported the finding to the FDA.
Dedj didn't ask you to prove that it was the independent group that found the contamination, that wasn't what was being disputed. Nor did Dedj question the integrity of the reporting at the WSJ, as you earlier thought.
What is in dispute was your claim that it was the independent group (as opposed to GSK) that was the party that reported it to the FDA. That's all.
Does that make things more clear now?
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susie @ #674:
OK then. Care to cite any credible peer-reviewed studies to support that assertion? Honestly, if you have evidence to support the claim I'd be glad to read it. It can't hurt to provide us with credible supporting evidence of such a claim can it?
Please note that simply asserting that there is "a growing body of research" supporting your claim does not count as credible supporting evidence. If you want to convince people that are being motivated by science you'll need credible evidence for your claims, otherwise your just wasting your (and everyone else's) time.
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The vaccine-autism connection is considered settled by the majority of the scientific community since all of the credible evidence shows against there being any such connection. The scientific community goes by the evidence, not your personal feelings. If such evidence can be provided then you'll see a big change in policies and perhaps new research into treatments. So far though neither you, nor anyone else on the anti-vax side has been able to offer credible evidence of such a connection. If you have any such credible evidence please present it, with links (or references) to the material in question, simply making more assertions doesn't prove anything.
Susie wrote :"I did not misrepresent who found the contamination, nor do I need a reading comprehension course."
And I did not accuse you of misrepresenting who found the contamination, unless you count misrepresentation by complete and total omission of GSK's involvement in confirming the discovery. It is both odd and suspicious that you failed to state their involvement despite it being clearly mentioned in the line after the part of the article you chose to post in your original quote.
You did, however, state that GSK DID NOT alert the FDA, yet no such thing is found in the article that you have posted as supporting evidence.
My question has been put to you plainly and clearly twice now, and has been explained to you by others. Your errors in interpretating the article have been explained to you by a number of people, including persons such as myself who have experience in translating letters, documents and concepts for people with cognitive and intellectual difficulties.
I am not going to give you any further chances. Not only are you clearly unable of understanding your comprehension error, but even if your claim was true, the article would not lend support to your implied claim that GSK made any attempt to cover it up. You were given a clearly worded chance to back up what you tried to claim and you failed very, very badly.
It has already been pointed out to you that the method is relatively new. Please take that information on board and adjust your misleading and borderline dishonest presentation of events accordingly.
As for Wakefield - you must be an idiot. The GMC did not attempt to disprove Wakefield's hypothesis, yet found significant evidence - including GP reports, admission reports, test submissions, and other clinical documents - that indicated that the validity of the data should be in significant doubt. Don't just rely on the opening statement or the interpretation of a (overwhelmingly untrained, unqualified, inexperienced) Wakefieldian, but actually go and read the document yourself. It's neither a long nor complex document so you have no excuse for believing what you do.
I consider our exchange to be at an end.
I've noticed that a thick enough layer of complete cluelessness can act as better armor than Teflon.
Susie
Here's a little lesson for you; autistic children are not sick.
Helping an autistic child means something totally different from what you think it means.
No one here is recommending giving an autistic child medication to mask their symptoms. You don't know anyone here. You just stomp over here itching with anger and contempt for science, because you already know more than science...you just know. Then you drop your inane, rambling bullshit. And when called out on your stupidity and ignorance, you start accusing others here of not caring about autistic children.
You think you and your angry conglomerate of mothers who will do any and everything to their children, make them 'normal' at all costs. You think you are the ones who are helping?
Let me recommend your next move: Take your opinions, shove them up your ass to keep your head company. And go back to the AoA rock you crawled out from under.
susie, whether or not Wakefield committed fraud does not matter. The 1998 Lancet paper was a just a small set of case studies, and it did not even claim to connect the MMR vaccine with autism. Plus his conclusions were never replicated (the odd little list of papers that have been posted are not replications, especially the ones on adults).
There is no credible science that the MMR causes autism. Do get over it and move on.
Kristin:
Kids who suffer from vaccine injury, which presents as autism are very sick, physically. They do not have a "mental illness" because, when you reverse the vaccine injury, the autistic behaviors go away. And, once these kids are restored to good health, they can continue to develop naturally again.
I see the group on here is now describing autistic kids as "developmentally delayed" to again mask the event of vaccine injury. You forget that these kids with "developmental delays" also have OCD, anxiety disorders, sensory integration disorders, food allergies, processing issues, etc, etc. If you look up these symptoms and compare them to the symptoms of heavy metal poisoning, you will see that the symptoms of heavy metal poisoning present the same as the symptoms of autism.
Chris:
I did not say that MMR was the single vaccine that triggered autism. The vaccine schedule is too aggressive -- it is untested, unless, of course you want to look at how sick our population of vaccinated kids are -- that is where you see the results our vaccine schedule.
We are all genetically different. Some people can handle the viral load and all the toxins in those vaccines, some people cannot. I believe that the researchers who developed vaccines never intended that some kids immune and detoxification systems would respond the way they did. But, nonetheless, we now have epidemics of autoimmnue diseases and autistic spectrum disorders and it is time to stop hurting these innocent children.
susie:
Name those toxins!
What makes you think that a person who cannot tolerate the viral load of a vaccine can tolerate the viral load of measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, hepatitis and polio? Just show us that a child without a known immunity disorder would do better with the actual disease instead of "teh ebul vaccine."
I only mentioned the MMR because of your because you continue to bring up Wakefield like he has some significance. He really doesn't. If he has problems, they are of his own making. He is a non-issue, and his future is up to him. But it will not be in any sort of vaccine research.
Wow. This thread is still going? And susie still has not provided any links or citations to back up her claims? Color me surprised.
Chris:
I didn't keep bringing up Wakefield -- other people on this string who want to apply the halo effect of Wakefield's ethics inquiry to all research implicating safety issues with vaccines kept bringing him up. If you look back, I was heckeled by triskelcat numerous times until I responded to his /her inquiry about how I would defend "St Andy".
I am not going to get into it with you over the toxins in vaccines. Look at the inserts -- there's really too many for me to list. Yes, I DO have a problem with mercury, but it is not the only toxic exposure of the vaccine. Squalene, aluminum, msg, formeldahyde, for starters. Then, there's all the "yet to be identified" viruses and "dna particles" from monkeys, pigs, and other gross culture mediums that are a ticking time bomb. The incident with GSK's vaccine last week is a sign of what is yet to be found out about vaccines.
I am not saying that vaccines should not be given to help prevent diseases that are truely a threat to our health, however, vaccines have really now just become another profit vehicle for drug manufacturers. The medical community also needs to admit that there is a population of people who simply cannot tolerate vaccine toxins and 6 or 9 live or attenuated viruses introduced simultaneously. The medical establishment needs to be more careful, more thoughtful. For example, it is absolutely irresponsible to vaccinate a 2 hour old baby for Hep B. Why is this on the vaccine schedule? Profit.
"Some people can handle the viral load and all the toxins in those vaccines, some people cannot."
If this were the case, why, prior to the development of vaccination, was there not a constant stream of viral infection-induced autism due to the viral loads present during an infection?
Symptoms of autism:
http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/autism-symptoms
A table (at the bottom of the page) of the "Most Commonly Encountered Metals" and the most common symptoms for both acute or chronic exposure
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/814960-overview
Please expand on where the "symptoms of heavy metal poisoning present the same as the symptoms of autism" because I don't see it...
@susie
Squalene - not used in U.S. vaccines. It's also produced by the body and is in many cosmetics.
Aluminum - used in a salt form in some vaccines. However, the average person consumes and breathes in more aluminum in a single day than in the entire vaccine schedule.
Formaldehyde - in miniscule, non-toxic amounts in some vaccines. Also produced by the body in significantly greater amounts (orders of magnitude more) than found in vaccines.
I keep hearing this, but I have yet to see how much profit is actually made from vaccines (y'know, money left over after development costs, manufacturing costs, distribution costs, etc.). I also have yet to see any explanation of why getting a profit is a bad thing. Without profits, they would have no money to work on making vaccines better, safer, more effective. I also wonder about the profits from the drugs and devices used to treat diseases once a person is infected, and how that compares to the profits from vaccines.
You mean the incident where GSK verified the presence of parts of a porcine virus and voluntarily stopped production like a responsible corporation?
Citations to show that this is the case, please.
Of course it couldn't have anything to do with preventing chronic Hep B infection, which can lead to liver damage and cancer? Or that Hep B is a blood-borne disease that can be transmitted via cuts? Or that those who carry it often don't realize they do? Sure, they test mothers, but rarely if ever do they test fathers, grandparents, playmates, siblings or others with whom the newborn may come in contact.
susie:
Still an idiot, and still completely ignorant about biology. Surprise, surprise, in three days this has not changed a bit. But I'm confident you won't let that stop you. (Pure ignorance, the gift that keeps on giving.) But even simple ignorance can't account for all of this -- you seem quite set on not being able to understand anything said to you. You genuinely don't seem capable of understanding straightforward sentences pointing out the logical and factual problems with what you keep asserting. Is the problem words? Do we keep using big words? Do we need to see if we can use nothing but simple sentence structure and one-syllable words? Do we need to type more slowly? Would it help if we drew pictures?
Oy.
Autism is not a "mental illness." It *is* a developmental delay. It can involve problems with sensory integration, but doesn't always. There is very little overlap in symptoms with "heavy metal poisoning", despite the ignorant blitherings of AoA (where in any description of heavy metal poisoning does it even mention sensory integration problems?), and there is absolutely no evidence that autistic kids HAVE heavy metal poisoning (but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you are simply too stupid to understand why the "challenged" tests measured on an unchallenged scale mean nothing). I certainly haven't seen any credible evidence that those with autism have a higher rate of allergy or autoimmune disease than in the non-autistic population, only blank assertions by people (and I use that term as loosely as possible, as I have had more intelligent conversations with potted plants) such as yourself -- but I doubt that your inability to bring in actual evidence for any of your assertions gives you any pause. Black Knight, indeed.
Oh wait, I forgot. You don't need no steenkin' objective criteria; you will simply define autism as heavy metal poisoning, and then every autistic symptom becomes a symptom of heavy metal poisoning, right?
...Oh, you know what DOES help fix autistic symptoms?
TIME.
It is not stasis, it is delay. Time, a stable environment, interaction with people. It's amazing how functional autistic kids without your miracle "wholistic [sic] treatments" become.
But let me guess -- you think that feeding kids potentially neurotoxic, completely untested (and this irony is certainly noted by some of us) chelating agents helps....all the while decrying the (yes, tested) vaccines for "toxins".
Ye gods and little fishies. Stupid. Truly, deeply, offensively stupid.
Don't anyone tell susie that people get transplanted heart valves that are sometimes from - gasp - pigs.
I would also demand citations explaining why such individuals cannot tolerate the vaccines, but somehow CAN tolerate the vastly greater quantities of such "toxins"/viruses in the environment.
@Scott
Good catch. Yes, that citation should also be included.
susie @ 682:
This is a very odd thing to say. Forgiving for a moment that "developmental disorder" or "learning disorder" is generally more accurate than "mental illness", what exactly is your problem with calling autism a mental illness? Even if it were caused by a vaccine injury, and even if it could be reversed . . . why are you resistant to describing something that manifests itself through changes in a person's mental state as a mental illness? If it's caused by vaccines, and can be reversed through chelation, it would be a curable mental illness. Why would that be a bad thing?
Mental illness has a massive stigma in the world. People don't want to admit they have a mental illness, or that a loved one does. For things which are impossible to deny, it is said that the person has some other problem, because mental illness is just so shameful. But why? Why is it preferable to call it "injury" than "mental illness"? Why are the words important? It baffles me. Worse, as soon as the word comes up, a big cloud of fear and uncertainty billows up. People shy away from the term -- yet obviously are unclear on what it means. It's like for many people, the word connotes evil or something. But it shouldn't, and it is long past time for us as a society to grow beyond that.
susie, you're just continuing to be ridiculous. Let's go through that list of "toxins" that you made:
Squalene: Necessary for human life, and produced by the body. Since when is it evil? Also, has never caused an adverse reaction.
Aluminium: The amount present in vaccines is insignificant compared to environmental exposure, given that it's the most abundant metal on the earth's crust. Again, has never been a problem.
MSG: What the hell? This doesn't even show up in vaccines.
Formaldehyde: Less than a tenth of a milligram is present in vaccines, and we rapidly metabolize it to formic acid (which isn't dangerous). Even if it wasn't metabolized, it wouldn't be a problem.
"dna particles": Now this is just silly. Since when are nucleotides "toxic?" There's no way these could be a problem.
Now the question is, will susie have a coherent reply to this?
Maybe it's in Chinese vaccines?
FluMist has MSG in it. You can review inserts on vaccine ingredients at the website for Johns Hopkins Institue for Vaccine Safety, Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Regarding the other toxins that you admit are in vaccines (plus many more not covered here thusfar), again, I will state that a percentage of the population cannot tolerate any level of toxic exposure due to having multiples of toxins injected into their bodied simultaneously. And, yes, there are toxins in the environment, but we do have our lungs, our gastrointestinal system, our skin, etc., to protect from some of those toxins, but there is no line of defense when toxic materials and viruses are injected directly into the body. There is a difference.
Luna:
And your specific experience helping kids recover from autism is...
Time. hmmmmm
Is that what you recommend we do if people get cancer too? Time will take care of it, you're right.
@susie
No citations...again. Why don't you like to support your claims with evidence?
At any rate, you talk about "any level of toxic exposure", yet fail to indicate what a "toxic" level of any of those substances is. If you define "toxic" as any exposure to even 1 nanogram, then the person has other things to worry about than vaccines. I mean, their body would basically kill itself, as it attacks the locally produced squalene and formaldehyde, or the aluminum absorbed through the nasal walls, the lungs or whatever makes it through the digestive walls.
By the way, the lungs are pretty piss poor at protecting us from things, seeing as how they are exceedingly permeable and allow direct access to the blood stream. The GI system is pretty good for some things, but not for others. The skin is, admittedly, a pretty good defense organ, but it doesn't do a whole lot against things that bypass it by, for example, entering the nasal cavity and being absorbed into the bloodstream or making it into the lungs.
Uh, yes there is. It's called the immune system. But are you really saying that injecting killed viruses or parts of viruses is worse than being infected with the fully virulent, living virus?
Please provide some examples that illustrate that infection with a virus or bacteria is safer than the corresponding vaccine. Citations to scientific papers from credible sources would be advised.
More internets for luna_the_cat!
Where do you want them sent?
Your patience with susie is impressive. I have given up on her. She continues to lie about Wakefield, she continues to misrepresent autism as heavy metal poisoning (and I would bet she has never actually SEEN someone with heavy metal poisoning).
Actual case of "mercury poisoning" mentioned in Emergency Doctor (Edward Ziegler, Lewis R. Goldfrank) Dr Goldfrank talks about a woman who tried to commit suicide by injecting herself with elemental mercury. She was unsuccessful. A few years later, they followed up with her. The mercury was under her skin where she had injected it. Her urine mercury levels were hundreds of times normal. Yet she did not display any autistic symptoms, and few symptoms of mercury poisoning, and underwent successful surgery to remove the majority of mercury under the skin.
@Scott and Todd W: don't you know that INJECTING the poor babbies causes autism? Obviously, it's not the amount of toxins that are in the vaccines, it's the needles! /snark(And yes, I know there are several vaccines that are oral)
Chris:
Re the squalene in vaccines -- it is not derived from human tissue, but from sharks. More foreign animal proteins injected into the human body.
She's correct, FluMist does contain a trace of MSG, presumably as part of the buffer system http://www.medimmune.com/pdf/products/flumist_pi.pdf . All of 0.2 mg. If you compare that to the daily gram quantities people recommend as supplement your realize how significant the impact is.
Susie while you conjure up an explanation as to why the viral load in a vaccine is enough to cause autism while the viral load in a viral infection isn't (added bonus not all vaccines are against viruses), maybe you can explain the difference in human derived squalene and shark derived squalene?
MI Dawn:
The adult mercury poisoning that you describe did not occur at the time of this woman's brain was developing, when she was learning speech, life skills, hitting milestones.
There is a difference.
Why didn't they just leave the mercury in her? If you say she was having no symptoms other than high levels of mercury in her urine -- then what the hell?
Squalene is a single substance, and is the same stuff whether from sharks or from humans.
@susie
Perhaps you could provide some evidence that squalene from sharks is chemically different from squalene in humans?
And why are we even discussing squalene? It isn't used in the U.S. at all. In Europe, it's been used for well over a decade with no adverse events.
Todd w:
Man's immune system did not evolve having viruses and toxins injected directly into the body.
"but there is no line of defense when toxic materials and viruses are injected directly into the body."
Really?!? Oh my! We better all start wearing full-body protection then, so people don't start dropping off like crazy everytime they get a cut! I mean, once it bypasses our skin, all those TOXIC materials are being "injected" DIRECTLY INTO THE BODY!!!111!!!
Poogles: You better go get that full-body protection, especially if you think that every time you cut yourself you'll be exposed the amount of viruses and toxic materials that a single round of vaccines contain.
Actually, it's several times more than what's in most vaccines. Susie, listen closely, this is important. You don't care about the truth, you care about being right. There's a big difference.
@susie
You're right. It evolved by "seeing" antigens and forming defenses against them. The immune system doesn't really discriminate on how the antigen got there; it just acts on what it encounters.
And I'm still waiting on those citations I asked for earlier, as well as the ones about squalene.
"Poogles: You better go get that full-body protection, especially if you think that every time you cut yourself you'll be exposed the amount of viruses and toxic materials that a single round of vaccines contain. "
Actually, I don't think that I'll be exposed to the same level - in fact, unless the thing which cuts me happens to have been recently sterilized, I'm pretty damn sure whatever cuts me will have much much more on it than what's in a vaccine.
I think that is the most hilarious thing susie has said in this entire thread because it is displays a completely inverted reality.
@susie: she chose to have the surgery to remove the area where the mercury had localized because it was discolored and the mercury was encapsulated in the area so the area was also hard and, IIRC, uncomfortable (haven't read the book for a few years). But mercury can cause brain damage even in adults. Remember the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland? Hatters often developed mercury toxicity - tremors, "madness" (often a version of dementia). But hatters worked with elemental mercury. Much more dangerous than the thimerosol that was ever in vaccines, and is mostly gone from them.
"Poogles: You better go get that full-body protection, especially if you think that every time you cut yourself you'll be exposed the amount of viruses and toxic materials that a single round of vaccines contain."
oh, susie, you are hysterical! Oh, wait. You are serious? No, really...you ARE serious? You must live in a house that is totally sterile, in a neighborhood that is more sterile than a hospital operating room. Haven't you ever SEEN what grows on a petri dish from your house? Cough while you are washing a cut knee and you have exposed that person to thousands of more pathogens than most vaccines.
Sorry. I live in the real world. Where bacteria, viruses, pathogens reign and we hope to survive.
Don't you get it? Anything natural is GOOD and could NEVER cause any kind of harm. Cutting open one's foot on a rock and then tramping about in the mud will only produce an infection if one's body has not been weakened by all those CHEMICALS in modern life. Like that nasty DHMO, that's a bad one!
*headdesk*
Except shark squalene. Human squalene is ok, though.
Oh, I "forget" do I? You are an ignorant bitch of the highest magnitude! My son is autistic, my husband has Asperger's, my nephew has Asperger's. What are you basing your assumptions on? Mental illness my ass, if you were here I would slap you in the face for that comment. Yes, Gabriel has sensory issues and anxiety problems. But we are helping him overcome his challenges. We are not using multiple unproven protocols to 'recover' him.
And how many adult and adolescent persons with ASD's have you spoken with? How many books written by these people have you read? The only people who want autism to go away are the selfish parents who feel they got jipped out of having a 'normal' child, and the 'doctors' who make money off of them. I suspect you don't even have an autistic child, but if you do I feel sorry for him/her.
Susie,
On the contrary, our immune systems did evolve with having bacteria, viruses, and dirt injected directly into the body: any time you or any of your ancestors pricked their finger on a thorn, that injected things into your body. Every open cut or laceration—any skinned knee that bled—exposed the bloodstream to pathogens.
What the immune system didn't evolve with was antibiotics, antisepsis (alcohol swabs and boiled water only seem simple because we're used to them), and viruses that help your immune system learn how to kill the nasties before it meets them.
Amazing how much life expectancy has changed since we got all those things.
We also didn't evolve with computers, electrically powered anything, or coffee and tea.
What we have evolved with, for millions of years, is tool-making. Humans are a tool-making species. We learn things, we teach each other, and we improve things.
You get to choose from that huge toolkit, as we all do, but there is nothing more "natural" about a lightbulb or a sweater than about a vaccine.
(The most "unnatural" thing I've done in a long time was eat fresh watermelon in New York City on the first day of spring.)
Ah, you're expecting logical consistency? How very foolish of you!
Kristin: It is the medical profession that classifies / codes autism as a mental illness. That's why little insurance coverage exists to help with the complex medical issues these kids have. This is really a crime because parents of autistic kids should not have to sell their homes to pay all the medical bills associated with autism.
It is not a mental illness. I have stated that many times on here.
And, NO, I no longer have an autistic son. We recovered him completely. And we did NOT chelate him, sorry to disappoint. It took us over 3 years to turn around all the damage vaccines had done to his immune and detox sytems, but today he attends a regular school, he is at the grade level for his age and all his crazy symptoms are gone, along with all the underlying biomedical issues. If I walked up to his teacher and told her that our son used to be autistic, she'd laugh in my face.
All the while I watched him suffer with this illness, I continued to read about all the other people recovering their kids and how the medical establishment
1) ignores and denies the recovered kids and
2) further denies the diagnosed ones the help they rightfully deserve by classifying autism as a "mental illness", instead of a physical illness, so insurance covers very little of the needed medical interventions and therapies.
So, you know what, Kristin? I'm on your side. I've been where you're at and it is hell. But, don't find fault with someone like me who was lucky enough to reverse all the vaccine injury that occurred to our son.
If you have anger, don't be mad at parents who are begging the establishment to show some caution. Kids are being injured by a reckless and overly-aggressive vaccine schedule. The establishment continues to allow this to happen. Then, to add insult to "injury", the establishment classifies autism as a mental illness, so the average family cannot get the critical financial assistance needed to cover the cost to recover these great kids from the hell hole that vaccines throw them into. If you have anger at me, it is misdirected.
@susie
Again, where is your evidence for this? Simply asserting something does not make it true. Support your claims with evidence!
Actually, Kristen's anger is not at all misdirected. You are promoting a pro-disease standpoint by arguing against vaccines and by spreading the idea that vaccines have a causal connection to autism, when there is absolutely no evidence to suggest such is the case. Further, there are quite a number of studies, now, that support the idea that there is no connection.
Because you spread the false idea that vaccines cause autism, you contribute to a fear of vaccines and an increase in preventable diseases. You put people, indirectly, at far more risk than any vaccine does.
@susie:
I see that you are precisely as familiar with the medical classification of PDD-NOS/autism as you are with UK libel law and the understanding of squalene.
Who classifies autism as a mental illness? Provide evidence.
...One thing I am profoundly grateful for, for your child's sake, is that you say you have not used chelation. Alright, just out of curiosity, what is it you think "recovered" your son? And why? Why do you think this worked some miracle that time and consistent interaction doesn't? (Oh, and you *didn't* just compare autism to cancer. I'm just going to ignore the mind-boggling fuckwittery of that.) Is this another of those things that you "just know"?
@MI Dawn -- that last was by no means internets worthy, there are a lot of better responses than my off-the-cuff one. Besides, I have no idea what I would do with an internets, our closets are already stuffed with junk. ...One thing bemuses/amuses/astonishes/delights hell out of me, though -- you think that's what patience with susie looks like? Man, what do you think impatience looks like?! :-D
Vicki @717: On the contrary, our immune systems did evolve with having bacteria, viruses, and dirt injected directly into the body: any time you or any of your ancestors pricked their finger on a thorn, that injected things into your body. Every open cut or lacerationâany skinned knee that bledâexposed the bloodstream to pathogens.
You are stretching the definition of "injected" to suit your provaccine viewpoint.
Vaccine delivery via injection, quite obviously, pierces the skin and bypasses it entirely. The biochemical cascade is also very different.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20081864
http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=8146
Y'know, I have to kinda agree with anon. Antigens entering in via a cut do differ quite a bit from injecting a vaccine. Vaccines are administered either subcutaneously, intramuscularly or nasally. Antigens delivered through a cut either enter under the skin, but more often enter directly into the blood stream.
All this talk about "recovery" from autism reminds me of a joke from a show I saw when I was a kid, involving one character teaching another how to deepen his voice through breathing exercises, a process that would take three years. When asked if this had worked, the expert stated that it worked for his cousin, who started at age twelve.
It took me a moment to get it.
Todd W:You are promoting a pro-disease standpoint by arguing against vaccines and by spreading the idea that vaccines have a causal connection to autism, when there is absolutely no evidence to suggest such is the case. Further, there are quite a number of studies, now, that support the idea that there is no connection.
Reasonable people don't argue 'against' vaccines. Provaccine people, 'skeptics' in particular, have an odd propensity to lump all vaccines together as if they are equal in both efficacy and their safety profiles. Industry in general also has a tendency to misconstrue efficacy data as safety data. Reasonable people realize that some vaccines work quite well at limiting the transmission of certain communicable diseases. The same provaccine people that state that confounders will preclude the possibility of studying vaccinated and unvaccinated kids to determine overall health status (or autism prevalence) are perfectly content to accept the clinical trial data for Hep B vaccine that requires extrapolation from adolescents to newborns. There is absolutely no consistency, and this is a real problem.
As it relates to autism, the studies that you mention, have only looked at MMR and Thimerosal. These two components of the US vaccine schedule do not equal "vaccines" in their entirety. Each time a skeptic says that the current battery of evidence suggests that vaccines have no connection to autism, they are either being willfully ignorant or intentionally misleading.
Epidemiological studies from different countries that have a less vigorous schedule don't exactly support the assertion that there is no relationship. And when the outcomes are neutral, or suggest more research is needed... that is a far cry from being conclusive.
Given that counterexamples to these claims are routinely posted here, I'm going to have to demand evidence.
In order for there to be no consistency, you would have to demonstrate (a) that we are so content and (b) that such extrapolation is inappropriate. Please do so.
Entirely untrue. If autism were related to vaccines in general, then there would be shifts in the rate of autism diagnoses correlated with changes in the vaccine schedule. Never been detected.
@anon,
Industry in general also has a tendency to misconstrue efficacy data as safety data
Bullshit. Efficacy and safety are both examined in studies, but are each discussed separately and quite specifically. You claim different? Prove it.
Epidemiological studies from different countries that have a less vigorous schedule don't exactly support the assertion that there is no relationship.
Really, now. I'm sure you can tell us what those studies are, right? And why they "don't support the assertion that there is no relationship"? Go on; I am making a direct request for the citations of these studies, and your explanation of why they don't support a "no relationship" conclusion.
anon @ 722:
Ah. So a skinned knee does *not* bypass the skin, nor does a puncture wound from a thorn? Gee. I wonder why Johnson & Johnson makes so much money off of Band-Aids if that's the case. Nobody should need them, since puncture wounds don't pierce the skin.
*blinks*
Is that really what you meant to say, anon? It doesn't make sense. While I agree that "injected" really doesn't come close to the level of trauma involved in a puncture wound or skinned knee, I'm curious to know how you get to the idea that injecting a substance makes it vastly more harmful than scraping open the body and rubbing it in. I would tend to think the latter would be worse.
When I was eight, I was stupid enough to go into a paddock in bare feet, and predictably enough had my right foot crushed by a horse. Aside from the broken bones, I lost a heck of a lot of skin and a little bit of muscle tissue (the horse in question was shod), and there was a heck of a lot of dirt and manure ground into the raw bleeding bits -- as I recall, it took about 20 minutes or so for my parents to be content that all the crud was washed out. Amazing that I didn't immediately die of toxic shock, since my poor little immune system wouldn't have evolved to deal with accidents like that, which tear open skin! o_0
Although, come to think of it, that was the first time I went and got a tetanus booster. Gee...
Luna:
Most insurance policies here do NOT cover autism because it is a classified mental / behavioral. I don't know any parents who get coverage for ABA, and and most get very limited assistance with speech, ot, etc.
Regarding natural protocols to reverse autism, each child has different issus due to what specific immune and detox insults occurred, either as a result of vaccinations or of viral illnesses, etc. We tested our son extensively to identify all his issues, which I could write a book about - literally.
The biggest single factor in helping him was removing gluten and casein from his diet. Vaccine titers showed that he had not responded to vaccines the way he should have - he was either not immune at all to half of them, or he had antibodies in the stratosphere to things like measles, tetanus, and diptheria. At one point, he had food sensitivities to over 60 foods. We used "functional medicine" with an MD who tested the crap out of our son to get the exact status on his metabolism, intestinal health, immune system, neurotransmitters, methlyation. We did genetic tests and looked at the following two genetic profiles: Cytochrome 1B1 and Cytochrome P450, looking at Phase I and Phase II detoxification. Glutathione was the other big intervention we did which helped our son immensely.
I am probably providing this info for your entertainment, but I am willing to share with you in the hope that you meant it when you said that you are open-minded.
You probably have access to journals -- I don't -- I just have printed out version of this study. I have an abstract electronically, so I will send that. Also, there is a lot on the internet regarding the work of S. Jill James and the protective role glutathione plays in oxidative stress, see one study below.
Neuro Toxicity 26 (2005) 1 - 8
S.J. James, et al.
Thimerosal Neurotoxicity is Associated with
Glutathione Depletion: Protection with
Glutathione Precursors
S.J. James1,*, William Slikker III2, Stepan Melnyk1, Elizabeth New2,
Marta Pogribna2, Stefanie Jernigan1
1Department of Pediatrics, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Arkansas Childrenâs
Hospital Research Institute, Little Rock, AR 72202, USA
2Division of Biochemical Toxicology, National Center for Toxicological Research, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA
Received 24 May 2004; accepted 28 July 2004
Available online 29 September 2004
Abstract
Thimerosol is an antiseptic containing 49.5% ethyl mercury that has been used for years as a preservative in many
infant vaccines and in flu vaccines. Environmental methyl mercury has been shown to be highly neurotoxic, especially to
the developing brain. Because mercury has a high affinity for thiol (sulfhydryl (âSH)) groups, the thiol-containing
antioxidant, glutathione (GSH), provides the major intracellular defense against mercury-induced neurotoxicity.
Cultured neuroblastoma cells were found to have lower levels of GSH and increased sensitivity to thimerosol toxicity
compared to glioblastoma cells that have higher basal levels of intracellular GSH. Thimerosal-induced cytotoxicity was
associated with depletion of intracellular GSH in both cell lines. Pretreatment with 100 mM glutathione ethyl ester or Nacetylcysteine
(NAC), but not methionine, resulted in a significant increase in intracellular GSH in both cell types.
Further, pretreatment of the cells with glutathione ethyl ester or NAC prevented cytotoxicity with exposure to 15 mM
Thimerosal. Although Thimerosal has been recently removed from most childrenâs vaccines, it is still present in flu
vaccines given to pregnant women, the elderly, and to children in developing countries. The potential protective effect of
GSH or NAC against mercury toxicity warrants further research as possible adjunct therapy to individuals still receiving
Thimerosal-containing vaccinations.
# 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
susie -- you are correct that most insurance policies do not cover developmental disorders such as autism. Nor do they cover other equally valid problems in need of treatment, such as clinical depression, bipolar mood disorder, ADD, etc. I am fortunate enough to have a mental health plan, however, and so my daughter's care is partially covered. But there is a tremendous way to go before the public begins to accept that mental health issues should be treated exactly the same way as "physical" issues, because frankly, just because they involve the mind does not mean they aren't physical disorders as well. There is a tremendous and very unfair stigma against mental disorders, learning disorders, and developmental disorders in our society. It's better than in some countries; in some countries, an autistic child might be killed or abandoned or simply chained up in an asylum. But we've got a long ways yet to go, and the lack of insurance coverage is a symptom of it.
Calli@731:
OMG, I am agreeing with someone on here!!!!! I agree, Calli. Our kids, our future, deserve all the help that anyone else with any other medical condition is eligible for. And, unfortunately, it is the poor who suffer the most from the insurance company policies, as the more affluent can invest discretionary $$ to help their kids, but what about the truely poor people? This is blatently wrong.
Scott: Really? I've seen Calli argue that groups of vaxxed an unvaxxed kids could never be close enough to study and compare. And the onus, would be on the person claiming that adolescents and newborns are comparable... you know... the makers of the vaccine? Not me. I'm actually rather shocked that you are claiming they are. It's borderline ridiculous.
Luna the Surly Sailor Bullshit. Efficacy and safety are both examined in studies, but are each discussed separately and quite specifically. You claim different? Prove it.
I just love it when someone finds the need to sling profanity and arrogance in the same paragraph. I'm happy to prove it:
http://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/ApprovedPr…
Top of page six:
Safety as an afterthought is a regular practice. Incidentally, the NCKP Efficacy study had an investigational vaccine as the control. Nice.
I'm sure you can tell us what those studies are, right? And why they "don't support the assertion that there is no relationship"?
Well, yeah, I can - but why (since they've been discussed here ad nauseum)? Since you're the one hanging your hat on said junk science, perhaps you can tell me which one you'd like to talk about? It's your contention that they exonerate "vaccines"... is it not?
Calli: Is that really what you meant to say, anon? It doesn't make sense. While I agree that "injected" really doesn't come close to the level of trauma involved in a puncture wound or skinned knee, I'm curious to know how you get to the idea that injecting a substance makes it vastly more harmful than scraping open the body and rubbing it in. I would tend to think the latter would be worse.
I did post evidence, did you read it?
@susie:
You forgot to include sodium chloride and dihydrogen monoxide on your list of dangerous vaccine chemicals! Just helping you there. ;-)
Still waiting for those citations of articles that back up you claims though.
@anon:
So if penetrating past the skin suddenly makes things so-much more dangerous (one might almost say "magically dangerous") how is that people routinely survived being stung by some of the larger insects, getting large splinters, bites, deep cuts, etc, before modern medicine?
It makes one wonder how modern humans have managed to survive for a few hundred thousand years if our immune systems are so fragile once you get past the skin.
Zetetic: So if penetrating past the skin suddenly makes things so-much more dangerous (one might almost say "magically dangerous") how is that people routinely survived being stung by some of the larger insects, getting large splinters, bites, deep cuts, etc, before modern medicine?
Sorry, but you are constructing a bit of a straw man, because I made no such assertion. I simply corrected the person that said that scraping your knee was the equivalent of being injected. The fact remains that vaccination is in evolutionary infancy, and it should be no surprise that the skin plays a fairly central role in developing immunity. For researchers to call this a novel observation 80 years after we started delivering vaccines via injection should probably resonate with people that consider them skeptical. It also runs counter the constant claim that natural exposure isn't "better" than artificial.
It makes one wonder how modern humans have managed to survive for a few hundred thousand years if our immune systems are so fragile once you get past the skin.
I did not make that claim, therefore I'm not required to refute it. I simply stated that host response is obviously different, and perhaps better.
@ anon @# 735:
I apologize if I misunderstood you, but that does seem to be what you were implying earlier when you typed comments such as...
Since the idea that bypassing the skin is part of what makes vaccines dangerous is a common claim among the anti-vax groups, and you weren't more explicit, I apparently came to an incorrect conclusion about what you were trying to state. I apologize for that.
Please note though that you seem to rather vague in many of your statements. Are you arguing that injected vaccines aren't strong enough? The articles you linked are about research to make vaccines stronger by studying the immune system and scarification.
If that's not your point then what exactly is it? You seem to be implying rather vaguely (perhaps inadvertently) that there is something wrong with injecting vaccines, if so then what is it and what does it have to do with inducing a stronger immune response through scarification?
Perhaps some clarification of your point would be helpful.
susie,
If you want to talk about not responding to vaccines and glutathione depletion, please see the links I posted above at post #627.
Then ask yourself how much sense it makes to keep harping about vaccines, especially in light of the fact that 1)Wakefield's vaccine research at Thoughtful House was, until recently, funded by the Johnson & Johnson family. (J&J manufactures Tylenol.) and 2) the links between thimerosal, MMR, and/or the combination to autism have already been refuted.
Don't you think that all this focus on vaccines and/or miscellaneous toxins is diverting attention away from Tylenol, a more likely (and thus far, not fully explored) cause of autism?
Come on, susie...join me in my anti-Tylenol crusade!
The glutathione depletion hypothesis was brought up in the latest set of omnibus proceedings and laughed out of the room as having even less evidence than Wakefield's claims.
Loony Jen @737:
Autism has an immune component that tylenol exposure cannot account for. It also has a behavioral component that mimics heavy metal toxicity. Tylenol poisoning does not cause autistic behaviors, inflammatory bowel disease, and many other autistic health complications.
Hi Loony Jen (waves). How's TX? It's cold and rainy here in NJ. As I've said before, at least you post references to support YOUR beliefs, so you're not that loony! (grins).
@anon: IIRC, the statement had more to do with comparing injections with being punctured by thorns, etc, (the skinned knee was later, and appeared to me to be another example of how pathogens can enter the blood system).
@luna_the_cat: to me, that is patient. I want to go boppity-bop on susie's head. You stay cool and give good responses. (Don't talk to me about closets full of junk...it's the same here WITHOUT the internets! LOL)
mu@738:
Glutathione depletion is not the only factor. Do you understand the meaning of the word "multifactorial"? And, yes, I'm sure everyone at those Omnibus hearings is laughing their asses off at these autistic kids and the efforts made on the part of their parents to help those poor kids when they regressed and became totally sick.
@susie:
"Tylenol poisoning does not cause autistic behaviors, inflammatory bowel disease, and many other autistic health complications."
And you know this how, exactly?
@triskelethecat:
(waves back) After an unusually cold winter, it's warm and sunny today. I lived in Michigan for many years, and I must say, I don't miss the cold one bit! :P
@Jen in TX: you're an expat Michigander too? Orac was one also, you know, until he lost the battle and returned to his home stomping grounds. I grew up outside Detroit, went to UofM, and left after marrying. Still have family there though so get home once a year or so.
Jen in TX:
Because autism is *not* liver failure.
When S. Jill James speaks of glutathion depletion, she is talking about cellular glutathione levels, not liver toxicity.
"Because autism is *not* liver failure."
susie,
I might suggest you go to pubmed and look at the rapidly accumulating evidence linking acetaminophen to asthma and allergies. (things that anti-vaxxers also tend to blame vaccines for).
You might note some similarities.
susie @ #741:
No susie they aren't laughing at autistic kids and their parents, if any laughing is in fact going on (Mu was simply exaggerating a little bit) it would be at the lack of credible evidence. You know that stuff we keep asking you for, but you never seem to be able to provide.
I could clam that Thiomersal is used by aliens to track human children then perform experiments on them turning the children autistic, but that doesn't make it true. I have no doubt I could even find a few parents that either believed such a story already or could be convinced that it was true and happened to their child.
No court in their right mind(s) should decide in favor of such a claim (or any other vaccine-autism link) without credible evidence to support that assertion, especially when all of the credible scientific evidence shows no such connection. We keep asking you for any such evidence but all you have done is make more assertions and commit numerous fallacies.
So again, aside from the known risks of vaccines, where is the credible supporting evidence of further harm (such as autism)? We know the harm that many diseases can cause, the risks of vaccines have to weighed against those risks we actually know about. They do not consider imaginary potential risks or risks that you really believe in, in spite of research that says you're wrong.
Why aren't anti-vax groups using their resources to conduct credible research if the heads of such groups really believed that vaccines cause autism, and that outside sources can't be trusted? Why aren't they even trying to narrow down what it is in the vaccines that they think might be causing autism? All they are doing instead is constantly adding to the list of things to point fingers at, and never ruling anything out no matter how much it's already been studied and found to have no effect. The more vague the accusations of harm become, the harder it becomes for the medical/scientific community to take them seriously. You yourself have provided a veritable laundry list of possible culprits, many of which have already been discredited by research, but you still haven't provided any credible evidence of there even being a link in the first place.
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I've said it before... This will go on and on until researches can point to a specific cause with certainty.
Until your doctor can point to a test and say something like "this gene *here* is what is causing your child to have autism", every thing under the sun will continue to be blamed, especially scary looking needles. Unfortunately, undirected "wild goose chases" are unlikely to answer such a question. Studying Thiomersal (or the other compounds) yet again will probably not change anything, studying autism itself (especially genetic research), is far more likely to yield results.
Of course, even after such an answer is found there will always be those that will refuse to accept the scientific answer.
Jen: I've never heard tylenol exposure blamed on the devleopmen of autism. I'd like to suggest that people who cannot tolerate even minute amounts of tylenol also cannot tolerate minute amounts of vaccine ingredients -- live and attenuated viruses, mercury, aluminum, etc, etc.
Autism also has an immune component which I'm guessing the tylenol theory would not address. Also, the inflammatory bowel disease symptom common in autism cannot be explained by tylenol.
But again, stepping back further, the same population who genetically cannot tolerate tylenol likely cannot process the vaccine ingredients.
By the way, are you "friends" with that triskelthecat? I suspect that he/she is only your "friend" on the condition that you not become pro-informed consent (that's antivax on this site).
susie @ #747:
Really? Care to mention anywhere on this site were someone argued against informed consent?
Please note that informed consent only deals with known risks, not imagined ones. Just because some people think vaccines are part of an conspiracy to control people's minds doesn't mean that such an opinion should be included in the informed consent too. If something is to be listed under informed consent it has to have been shown to be an actual risk, so far you have been failing to establish that. As I noted just above your post @ #746.
Zetetic:
The Omnibus hearings: A panel of 3 government employees (special masters) appointed to hear testimony to determine if a government mandated vaccine schedule is the underlying cause of the autism epidemic. What could the outcome of such a hearing possibly be?
I think I just read a bedtime story like this to my kids. The foxes sit in judgement of their own brother who is accused of eating the chickens.
zetetic @748
To have good familiarity with the side effects of vaccines, I refer you to the Inserts section of the Johns Hopkins Vaccine Safety website. The inserts mention all kinds of potential side effects of vaccines, including DEATH. You should encourage people to read those inserts, if you truely feel that you embrace informed consent.
When we vaccinated our kids, there was no mention of any potential side effects. The doctor simply responded to any questions stating that side effects are "so rare" and "one in a million". What a line of BS, provided to docs by their pharmaceutical reps to blow off the valid questions of parents.
Do you think that constitutes giving the parents INFORMED CONSENT?
I tell anyone who asks me if I think they should vaccinate to go and read the inserts, research the ingredients in those vaccines and make the best choice for their child. After all, when your kid gets sick from a vaccine, you -- not the doctor -- are responsible for straightening things out, if you can. That's informed consent ==> that is not a luxury we had when we gave consent for our pediatrician to poison our kids.
I am responsible for the health of my kids and I failed them when I allowed them to be vaccinated. I won't fail them again.
@ susie:
Still deliberately avoiding all of the points for no other reason that to spread more fear-mongering, eh?
Tell us then why does the vaccine court have a lower standard of evidence of harm that a regular court? Why has the court awarded vaccine injury settlements when it just suspected that the vaccine *might* have triggered a problem. Why is it that when asked about the time-line of progression of their children's autism the videos of the children didn't back up the parent's claims, indicating that the autism started before the parent recognized it (and before the child's vaccines)?
Why is it that you you still can't provide a single shred of credible supporting evidence for a vaccine-autism connection? Why can't you answer the hard questions, and instead keep trying to change the subject?
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Once again susie, your answers show why a vax vs. un-vax study will be useless, unless it provided you with the answer that you (and other anti-vaxers) already want to hear, you'll just dismiss it out-of-hand as being biased. Unless such a study verifies and connection between vaccines and autism, you (and the majority of the anti-vax movement) will just ignore it, like you do all of the other contrary evidence.
You like to accuse everyone else hear of being closed-minded and influenced by their preconceptions, but the only one consistently demonstrating such behavior is you. We're the ones asking you for evidence supporting your position, you're the one that has been failing to do so constantly trying to change the subject over and over.
Think I'm being unfair with that? Then prove me wrong by providing credible supporting evidence for you claim. After all if you're so unbiased you must have arrived at your position from research and would have made sure that the sources of information are credible, right? So where is the credible evidence?
susie @ #750:
You are the one claiming that people hear are opposed to informed consent. I asked you support that claim, I didn't ask you to tell us a story about how you learned to read the vaccine inserts. Which BTW are also normally available upon request or can be found online for free.
What does any of that have to do with your claim that people here are opposed to informed consent? Nothing, you're just throwing out more baseless accusations and trying to change the subject, yet again.
Good job on yet again failing to address any of the points made towards you.
zetetic:
I am a mom -- I'm not employed in the field of autism research or medical research.
I have referred people to the sources I went to to recover our son. Generation Rescue and autismone websites cite researchers and findings. If you look at the conference section of autismone, you can click on abstracts of presentations by researchers (and other autism speakers -- educators, behavioral therapists, etc) and see the research and work that these people have done. Further, there are vidoes of presentations of different speakers that will give you information that you may or may not accept as credible. Whether you accept that research or not is not a concern to me -- I have offered it many times here and the standard response to offering this information is that it cannot be credible because of the source. If you don't read it, you won't know. But, I have offered these sources NUMEROUS times and every time, I get rebuffed. So be it. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.
zet:
I provided the inserts example because you accused me of advocating informed consent of ***imaginary risks***.
Nope. I advocate true disclosure of the potential side effects of vaccines that appear right in the insert, which was required by law to be disclosed by the manufacturer. I advocate parents RIGHT to know what is being injected into their kids.
No time is provided at the doctor's office to review the insert. There is no discussion of ingredients. The potential for side effects is not discussed. So, no informed consent occurs, yet the parents are asked to sign a waiver stating that they will not sue should their kid die, etc, as a result of vaccine side effect.
That is not infomed consent.
The only reason why I brought this whole "INFORMED CONSENT" issue up is because the PR firms for the pharmaceutical companies are now labeling people who advocate vaccine safety as "ANTI-VAX". You know that is a trick from Psych 101 textbooks. So, if you are going to call me "anti-vax", them I am going to call you "anti informed-consent". How do you like being an anti?
@susie #753:
The reason why those sites get rebuffed is because they don't offer credible evidence, period. Almost everyone here is familiar with them. We're familiar with how they misrepresent legitimate research, with how they make baseless claims, with how unlike pro-science sites (like this one) they regularly silence (through comment "moderation") those that speak out against the party line. Were familiar with no matter how corrupt an "anti-vax researcher" (Wakefield) or how dangerous and illogical the therapy, they won't speak out against him/her/it. We're familiar with how whenever there is research indicating that some (say Thiomersal for example)is not the cause of autism, they just ignore the research, because the idea that they might be wrong about something is inconceivable to them. They don't even try and "police" themselves for accuracy...as long as you say something against vaccines or their advocates almost any accusation is treated as fact no matter how demonstrably untrue. The list of why they aren't considered credible goes on and on. They have long since exhausted any credibility that they might have once had due to their dogmatic and censorious behavior. That is why just citing those groups isn't sufficient. If they had anything credible to offer you should have had no trouble finding it on their sites.
I for one haven't found anything credible on their sites, odd how you seem to be having the same problem, isn't it?
Case in point, after Thiomersal was removed from the childhood vaccines, Dave Kirby (in 2005) predicted a drop in autism and that such a drop would vindicate the claim that vaccines cause autism. I actually agree with Kirby on that point, it would have been powerful evidence that there was a link. The problem is the predicted drop in autism unfortunately never came, so now in 2010 Kirby is claiming that the rise in autism rates proves that vaccines are causing autism, but he won't stop blaming Thiomersal.
What we've ben asking you for was links to credible research that supports the position that vaccines cause autism, not to where people will assure you that they do, but actual research. I'm not a medical researcher either, but I have no trouble finding research that discredits claims of a vaccine-autism link. If such research existed you should have no trouble finding it, even if it was through groups like AoA and GenRes.
Why can't such groups provide you with links to credible research? Blogs like this one do it all the time. If such research existed they should be advertising it all over the place, but where is it? Why do they feel a need to silence those that question the dogma? Blogs like this one don't.
The ultimate point is that if (hypothetically) there is a link between vaccines and autism, things will not change until there is credible scientific evidence to that effect. Why are such groups not trying to conduct research that would be considered credible through careful controls and methodology? They have no trouble funding research that is not considered credible due to poor controls and methodology, why won't they do proper research?
Susie @ #754:
You still haven't provided any evidence to the effect that people posting on this blog are against informed consent.
How odd because that is what is already provided, I naturally assumed you were talking about other unproven risks like autism. Tells us are you now going to reveal who here is opposed to such a practice?
It's amazing what you can get if you just bother to ask for it, or look into it at home beforehand. Again, where is anyone here opposing this?
Like you said earlier..."So be it. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink."
Another baseless assertion, where exactly is someone labeling you as anti-vax for wanting to know what is on the product sheet, or looking it up online?
No susie, you're being referred to as anti-vax because you confidently assert that vaccines trigger autism in spite of your inability to prove evidence to support that assertion. You're being referred to as anti-vax because when ever you make a post about the subject you just spew out more baseless assertions, misquote news articles in a way that supports your assertions, and refuse to admit when you make a mistake (instead trying to change the subject). You're being referred to as anti-vax because you apparently want vaccines to be perfectly safe (which is impossible), but refuse to accept any evidence showing that they are relatively safe and that the relative risks are far outweighed by the benefits.
It's not because you want parents to know about a freely available product sheet, as much as your persecution/martyr complex may lead you to want to believe that.
@luna 729,
That sounds even worse than my recent hand injury from breaking up a fight between two of our dogs.
I'm glad you had such a good recovery. I couldn't remember how long it had been since my last tetanus booster, so we went ahead and got a DTaP shot. I also got both the seasonal and H1N1 flu shots this year. Since I haven't turned into a zombie or vampire yet, I guess I am still alive! Maybe none of those vaccinations are very effective mankillers after all.
susie @ 732:
One thing I firmly believe is that most of us actually have a great deal of common ground, and I feel that if we can find that common ground, we can work towards a better tomorrow. That common ground here is our children.
The biggest shame of our health system in America is not a vaccine conspiracy, nor the rate of autism, nor any of the usual bogeymen. It's the fact that it is so very expensive, and an increasing number of Americans simply cannot afford it. There is no reason this has to be the case. I know a lot of people who are up in arms about the idea of obligatory health insurance, but one way or another, we *have* to get everybody insured. It's the only way to get health insurance costs down sufficiently -- health insurance costs rise because people, trying (sensibly) to save money, cancel their policies while healthy, leaving the insurer with a greater percentage of ill customers; ill customers are more expensive for the insurer, so they have to raise premiums; so more people end up having to cancel their policies, and round and round it goes. (Of course, there's also the greed factor; insurers have been posting quite impressive profits even while deliberately pricing some customers out of a policy in states where they can get away with that.) I'm not convinced the current health care reform is the answer, but it's definitely a start.
anon @ 733:
Well, my argument was more along the lines that it would be extremely difficult to get a sufficiently large group of each without serious self-selection biases. It's theoretically possible; I'm just cynical about the odds. Thing is, most unvaccinated people are unvaccinated for a reason, and that inherently makes them different from the vaccinated. Is that important? Hard to say. I lack the expertise. But I'd need to be convinced.
Regarding the scrapes versus injections thing, my point was that it sounded like you were saying only vaccination breaches the skin, whereas puncture wounds and scrapes don't, which is a fairly ridiculous thing to say. Obviously, they *all* breach the skin. Now I understand what you meant, and I appreciate your clarification.
Vaccination does indeed produce a different response than a scrape, and this is intentional. Scrapes are poorly controlled and traumatic for the body. An intramuscular injection results in far less damage to the body, and the immunological component is more easily controlled. For some vaccines, adjuvants are consequently required to get an adequate immune response; personally, I'd rather have a little aluminum than a skin scraping, but skin scrapings were indeed commonplace means of innoculation in days gone by. In fact, the original vaccination was just that -- the skin was scraped and innoculated with the Vaccinia (cowpox) virus (from whence we get the word "vaccination", as I'm sure you know, but I do enjoy etymology).
My mom carries her smallpox vaccination scar proudly. I have no comparable scars to show off. (I do have some interesting surgical scars, but that's a horse of a different color.) I think all of my vaccinations were by injection, either intramuscular or subcutaneous, except for the polio vaccine. I'm old enough that I probably got the oral one. I'm not sure, though; I don't remember.
Luna 721,
I guess I'm going back and forth on this one. I'm not sure if you're patient or impatient with susie (I would certainly be impatient), but you are certainly persistent in responding.
Thanks for the effort and hang in there.
http://xjonnexaaronx.buzznet.com/user/photos/?id=4022435
Zetetic @ way up there :o)
@ anon @# 735:I apologize if I misunderstood you, but that does seem to be what you were implying earlier when you typed comments such as...
But that person I replied to said:
On the contrary, our immune systems did evolve with having bacteria, viruses, and dirt injected directly into the body: any time you or any of your ancestors pricked their finger on a thorn, that injected things into your body. Every open cut or lacerationâany skinned knee that bledâexposed the bloodstream to pathogens.
My comments viewed in the correct context, are fairly straightforward. Then you said:
I didn't say that, and my response was very specific, at least I thought. Scraping your knee and getting vaccinated are not the same. I didn't make the assertion that being vaccinated was dangerous - or that by bypassing the skin, that made it dangerous. It is definitely different, and I posted evidence as to why. And FTR, you have engaged me with civility, no need to apologize.
I'm happy to clarify, and I'm sorry you feel I've been vague. Since I responded to a previous poster that stated that scraping your knee was the same as being vaccinated, or that it injected "bad stuff" into your bloodstream (not exactly true on either account, but I was picking my battles) I simply posted in disagreement. This is patently false, and this person, in my opinion, redefined the term 'injected' to justify their viewpoint regarding the safety of injected vaccines.
I cited peer reviewed evidence that reviewed the role of the skin in developing immunity, and that by delivering antigen through the skin (the way humans have encountered disease causing agents for millions of years) that the host responded better than when delivered via the current delivery system.
I certainly don't think vaccines are weak and need to be stronger. Animals and humans can respond poorly (or allergically) to any injected organic substance, and this is clearly demonstrated in the literature. Any delivery system that reduces the possibility of anaphylaxis (in any varying degree) should be encouraged, and if it induces 'better' immunity, then it should be pursued and the research furthered.
Physiologically, the first two years of life are critical for normal development (nervous system, brain, GI). Could injecting a human infant / toddler roughly 20 times in those first two years with antigens and other organic (or otherwise) compounds and substances produce ill-effects?
Are you really prepared to say no? I'm not. There is no data, whatsoever, to even make this assertion.
Drug metabolism, genetics (epi), gestational age, inflammation etc... the variables are innumerable. People that try to make vaccines black and white are NOT helping to convince fence sitters with reasonable questions.
calli @ #758:
Agreed. Unfortunately for some people it seem to be less about the children, and instead it's looking for a scape-goat. Rather like a "witch hunt" for some people, as in trying to pin the blame for misfortune on someone else.
Prometheus had an interesting post on his/her blog a while back. I don't know if you read it, but in case you hadn't here's a link....
âLetâs put on a Study!â
Susie, you may want to read it too.
One of things to also consider is that even without conducting a vax/unvax study certain elements can still be ruled out. Thiomersal being a good example there. Studies have been done with no Thiomersal, and even with higher than normal does of it in the vaccines. The result was no detectable change. Just like with the autism levels with the population after it was removed from childhood vaccines. So even without such vax/unvax studies we can eliminate one component at a time from the list of suspects.
Unfortunately, that will never be good enough for the more dogmatic elements of the anti-vax movement. Personally I'd like to see increased funding of genetic research on autism, (IMO) I think it will be more fruitful in the long run.
@ anon:
Thank you for your reply, it was the context (being that the reply you were responding to was in reference to the claim that injection below the skin makes the vaccine more harmful) that confused me. Thank you for clarifying. Personally I found the articles you linked to rather interesting, thanks for sharing them.
As to your question...
Personally I'm open to any credible data showing such a risk from vaccination, to my knowledge there is none at this time. As for investigating one way would be to look for spikes in autism (or other problems) that occur in during testing the vaccines on the specific age group (but if rare or delayed any such causal effect could be missed). Of course you can try changes in the vaccine formulation instead, but that will never satisfy some people. Then even if such a risk is proven it still must be weighed against the benefits of disease protection (assuming that it's not a simple matter of replacing a chemical or two).
Either way we have to choose between a definite known risk (disease) versus a hypothetically "possible" but unproven risk. A risk that if it does exist is apparently uncommon (or delayed) enough to have escaped detection by the studies so far. Not the best answer perhaps, but sadly it's not a perfect world.
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To conduct a true vax/unvax test will in all likelihood result in preventable deaths and injury (and not just among the test subjects) to investigate what so far, based on the current data, looks like an unlikely (albeit not impossible) connection. I don't see practical way around the ethical problems such a study will raise, so I tend to side with protecting against the known risk (disease) rather than assuming an unproven and unmeasured risk of neurological damage (as the anti-vax side tends to do).
I hope that helps to clarify my own position.
susie @753 said
B.B. King said
I say "You can lead an antivaxxer to evidence but, it would be easier to teach a pig to play the violin than to get the antivaxxer to think."
@susie: no,Jen in TX and I are friendly combatants. While I don't agree with her about a Tylenol/autism link, she at least posts actual research information to support her theory. She has earned my respect.
As for informed consent: I don't know about YOUR doctors, but I had to sign consents for most of my kids' vaccines, even back 20+ years ago. Those consents pointed out the most common and the most fearsome (DEATH!! OMFSM!!!!11!!) side effects, and my doctors told me what to look for and when to call if I was concerned.
As a nurse and midwife, I am VERY pro-informed consent. I've signed them and I have obtained them. I also know that ALL consents have the risks laid out. Did you read the consent you signed when you gave birth? Did you know that one ALSO probably pointed out that death was a possible risk of childbirth? And the risk is higher if you had a c/section (yes, I have seen women die in childbirth, even in the 20-21st centuries, in very good hospitals. I have seen babies die, too). So don't blather about informed consent to ME.
Off to work.
Zet:
The studies that were done on thimerasol were all epidemiological studies that were done by people with extensive ties to vaccine manufacturers and they were flawed to the point of proving nothing. So, we cannot rule out thimerasol's role in the development of autism.
I have a second problem with the data exonerating thimerasol -- the studies assume that the infant's blood / brain barrier is the same as an adult's. I dont' think this has ever been proven.
Lastly, and unfortunately, because vaccine manufacturers are running around claiming tht thimerasol is "settled science", they are actually putting in into more vaccines and its in a lot of them anyway because its used in manufacturing, so it doesn't have to be listed on the insert as an ingredient if its used in the manufacturing process. So, when people say the thimerasol has been taken out of vaccines, and autism rates keep rising, they are either misinformed or being dishonest.
Zet and triskel:
I am not a martyr. You misinterpret my rumblings. I do have a great sense of what an injustice is, however. And, I made a promise to myself that I will not stand by and see these kids be vaccine injured when it is preventable. Most parents are not as lucky as me -- their kids do not come through this unscathed.
What happens with informed consent in day-to-day practice with people who are not from the medical / scientific community is different from the Utopic description you two provide. The average parent has no idea that inserts are available. And, until recently, they have been grossly underinformed about the risks of vaccines. Ingredients are never discussed either. As a parent, I've been treated like a sheep, and I don't appreciate it.
Since it is not true that I am 100% anti-vax, and you are not anti-infomred consent, I will make a deal with you:
If you stop calling me the PR-Firm manufactured label of "anti-vax", I'll stop calling you "Anti-Informed-Consent".
@susie: so you are claiming that my doctors treated me differently because I was a medical person? Wrong. How could they get consents only from the medical people? And the nurses,who did a lot of the vaccine information teaching, didn't know I was a nurse. I was just the mother of Child, and the literature was out in the open, in the waiting room. You were encouraged, when signing in, to get any literature that applied to the visit. EVERY parent was given the same spiel when they signed in their child. Maybe my doctor's office was different, but the times we used the health department for vaccines (due to a shortage) over the MD office, we still were given the literature to read while we waited. And the HD certainly didn't know I was a nurse. Maybe, because I am a nurse, I actually READ the literature instead of dropping it on the floor, in my purse, or ignoring it entirely. But that is the parent's fault. NOT the fault of the medical staff.
If you don't appreciate being treated like a sheep, then find a doctor who doesn't treat you like one. I've left doctors that talked down to me or didn't answer questions. My current doc is great, but I had a lousy one prior to him.
VACCINES DO NOT CAUSE AUTISM. End of story. Vaccines have risks. Breathing has risks. Eating has risks. More people die choking on food then from vaccine injury. Let me know when your crusade takes on the evil eating industry.
My husband was in the military and our children have had several pediatricians in the past. Every single one of them, including the military clinics and the health department, every one of them gave me the little handouts that told the risks and benefits of vaccination.
If you read them you know. But I am sure most parents don't even look at them because they are busy and/or not concerned. Ignorance is not the same as lack of informed consent.
I think Susie is trying to make the facts fit her view of the world. She wants someone to blame, why not that evil doctor who didn't tell her. Why not those horrible needles that injected teh toxenz. Because she couldn't have gotten the handouts and forgotten about them, no, she is infallible. If you listen to the anti-vaxers you would be led to believe there is an epidemic of inept pediatricians who became doctors just so they could hurt children.
triskelethecat, I have been trying to not comment to Susie anymore because it is obvious that she has a brain the consistency of lead. But I have appreciated your rebuttles. I get very angry when anyone disparages autistic persons, because the two people I love most in the world are autistic.
I don't think there is anything wrong with them, just that they don't fit into our current society and the world is frustrating to them. Too many assaults on the senses and too many confusing emotions*. If people spent half as much time trying to understand autistic persons as they spend trying to get rid of them, life would be much better for those with ASDs.
*Disclaimer, my understanding from being married to a man with Asperger's for 10 years. Everyone is different results may vary. :)
susie @ 765:
Lastly, and unfortunately, because vaccine manufacturers are running around claiming tht thimerasol is "settled science", they are actually putting in into more vaccines and its in a lot of them anyway because its used in manufacturing, so it doesn't have to be listed on the insert as an ingredient if its used in the manufacturing process. So, when people say the thimerasol has been taken out of vaccines, and autism rates keep rising, they are either misinformed or being dishonest.
Okay, I can understand your concerns about thimerosal not having been tested clinically in infants (though there is data we can use in lieu of a placebo-controlled trial), but this claim is another matter. You say that vaccine manufacturers have been putting in more and more thimerosal, and that thimerosal used in manufacturing isn't really removed. That's a pretty extraordinary claim, and also one that should be easily testable. What's your basis for the claim? What you are alleging would be fraud -- if measurable amounts of thimerosal remain, the manufacturers DO have to list it as an ingredient. If they don't, the vaccine would be considered an adulterated* product and subject to seizure by the FDA.
So do you have evidence for this claim, or is this just your assumption based on what you believe of "Big Pharma"?
*Note: that's a legal term; "adulterated" in this sense doesn't just mean somebody put something poisonous in it, it means there is an undeclared ingredient. It can be something poisonous, but doesn't have to be; the term is broader than that. It also applies if there is a *missing* ingredient or the proportions of the ingredients are wrong; for instance, a vaccine which has been diluted with saline would be considered adulterated. It isn't what it says it is, therefore it is adulterated. There was a big scandal here in Minnesota a couple of years ago when a nursing assistant swiped a used 5mL vial of flu vaccine, diluted it with saline, and then ran an unlicensed flu clinic for unsuspecting college students, pocketing the money they paid. She lost her job and her license for that, of course.
The studies that were done on thimerasol were all epidemiological studies that were done by people with extensive ties to vaccine manufacturers and they were flawed to the point of proving nothing.
Describe the specific flaws, and their actual impact on the studies, or admit you have no case.
@anon
Others already responded to you, but since you addressed me, I figured I should probably respond as well.
I readily admit that vaccines vary from each other, and have said so in the past when this very point is brought up. In fact, almost every pro-vax person I've seen has readily admitted that you cannot use one vaccine as a proxy for another vaccine. Contrast this with the more extreme anti-vax stances that all vaccines are bad, simply because they are a vaccine.
Please show where data on efficacy has explicitly been used as the sole basis for safety. As far as I am aware, safety endpoints are part of every clinical trial, even if they are not the primary endpoints for the trial. Safety data is always being collected. Further, safety data does not solely consist of adverse reactions, but also takes into account efficacy. If a company were to make a vaccine for, say, pertussis, that had absolutely no side effects but was not at all effective, that vaccine would be considered unsafe, because the use of it actually puts the patient at harm for infection with pertussis. So, efficacy, by itself, is not the totality of safety data, but it is a component of the safety profile of a product.
Agreed. There are some who, while generally anti-vax, admit that some vaccines work well and should not be eliminated entirely.
You are creating a false comparison. The reasons for a vax vs. unvax study being "precluded", as you say, are that a prospective, randomized, placebo-controlled trial would be unethical. A non-randomized trial would have too many confounding differences between the populations. Statistical controls and analyses can only go so far in reducing these.
Regarding extrapolating Hep B trials in adolescents to newborns, we don't need to. (And, indeed, I'd like to see where anyone has done such.) Before a vaccine can be marketed for use in a special population (e.g., newborns), the manufacturing must conduct studies in that population. If they don't, then the package insert typically contains a statement that the product has not been studied within population X. Now, doctors could still use it in those populations, but the maker cannot legally market the drug or promote its use in that population. Let's take a look at the insert for Engerix, a Hep B vaccine put out by GSK. It has information from clinical trials regarding the vaccines effects in neonates. They are not extrapolating from its use in adolescents.
Which were the two things that the anti-vax movement crowed about until studies showed that they were not causally related. It was reasonable to take a look at them, since there was a temporal correlation that appeared to fit. Once that information started coming out, then the goalposts shifted to aluminum or formaldehyde or antifreeze (which isn't even in vaccines) and so on. These have no plausible reason to be associated. The latest things are squalene (which isn't even used in the U.S.) and "too many too soon". Yet, when we look at countries where fewer vaccines are used, we generally see that autism rates are about the same.
Well, it would be nice if those against vaccines could provide some plausible reason to examine vaccines further. There is zero data from well-designed and conducted studies that show any reason to suspect vaccines.
Actually, they do, since rates of autism are about the same as the U.S., thus addressing some of the "too many too soon" questions bandied about.
If by "conclusive" you mean 100% absolutely certain, then of course I agree with you. Nothing in science is 100% certain. There is always the possibility that something comes along showing that hypothesis or theory Y is incorrect. But, when the likelihood of that occurring gets smaller and smaller, it is reasonable to say, "There is no connection".
Oops...I meant to include a link to the Engerix insert. Here it is.
triskelethecat:
The science has been done, the link between vaccines and autism does not exist. It is a dead link⦠âItâs not pininâ! âItâs passed on! This link is no more! It has ceased to be! Itâs expired and gone to meet its maker! Itâs a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadnât nailed it to the perch itâd be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now âistory! Itâs off the twig! Itâs kicked the bucket, itâs shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedinâ choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-LINK!! â (hat-tip to Monty Python and the dead parrot sketch)
Raging Bee:
I will provide the most recent thimerasol sutdy released, and I am going to do this from memory, because I don't have access to these journals, but there was an Italian study which was released around January 2009. I think it was published in Pediatrics. Paul Offit was quoted by the AP of this study stating that it further demonstrated that there was absolutely "no link" between thimerasol and autism. The study initially enrolled about 2100 kids who'd been vaccinated and observed their development over 10 years. There were two variables that were ignored by the establishment that made this study totally invalid:
1) the study had a 30% drop-out rate on participants.
2) participants in the study did not recieve the same amount of vaccines or follow any standard schedule.
Any study that measures childhood development and has a 30% drop out rate would automatically be invalidated by the high drop out rate. Paul Offit knows this, yet he provides a statement to the Associated Press saying that this study further demonstrates "no link" between thimerasol containing vaccines and autism. He is not being honest -- the study has too high a drop out rate to prove anything!!!
There are problems with all the epidemiological studies -- either in terms of design or conflict of interest of the authors. I believe that Generation Rescue has best covered the objections to the design and conflict of interest on their website where they discuss "14 studies". I would refer you to that, if you really want to see what us Pro-Informed-Consent people are saying about the studies.
And, in the defense of the Pro-Informed-Consent people, I will say that at least we will go to establishment websites and review studies, etc. All I get on this thread when I suggest people look at autismone or gen rescue is RAGE. So be it. I can at least say that I look at both sides, that I read the pharma-generated studies as well as research from independant researchers who are helping kids recover from vaccine injury that manefests itself as autism.
I have a 16 mo old, and so the process of going through childhood vaccinations is pretty current for me. We did shots at birth, 2 mo, 4 mo, 6 mo, 9 mo (probably - I don't remember), 12 mo, and 15 mo.
And every time, we were given a handout of safety information for each of the vaccines we received, including a list of the side effects and their frequencies. These range from things that occur as often as 20% (redness at the injection site) to things that "have been reported but are so rare that they cannot be necessarily attributed to the vaccine."
And every time we go in, we have to sign the vaccine consent questionnaire that includes questions like, "Are you pregnant?" Which is really funny, because the last time in, my wife answered "yes." I said, "I think that refers to the person GETTING the shots, and not you."
Funny mommy.
@susie
Re: the 14 Studies site. Read this. It goes into why AoA's 14 Studies site is a bunch of crap.
Also, please drop the "pro-informed consent" thing. All of us are in favor of informed consent. (E.g., I am on an institutional review board...basically a committee that reviews studies in humans to ensure that subjects are adequately informed of the risks and benefits, are not coerced or unduly influenced to participate, that any risks, not just physical, from the study are minimized to the greatest extent possible, that the risks are outweighed by the benefits and a host of other ethical considerations.) Now, if there were actual valid data showing that vaccines cause autism, I would be right beside you in saying that such information should be given to parents and patients.
You keep saying you do not have access to journals. Pay a visit to PubMed, where you can search for journal articles, some of which are even free. Also, if you live near a university or hospital, you may be able to use their resources to read journals that you cannot access for free on your own.
@susie
Oh, and one other thing. Age of Autism is an echo chamber. You will find few dissenting voices there, because they censor comments. In fact, because they started censoring me, I created a blog where my comments could be read. I did not violate their commenting policy in my comments (except for being slightly off-topic on one thread and, when given a warning, I apologized and said I would stay on topic...that post and all subsequent ones were never allowed through moderation). If you take a look at some of the comments over at Silenced by Age of Autism, you will find some that actually do not disagree with posts at AoA! Despite that, I'm still banned.
I have not used profanity. I have not attacked people simply to attack them; any criticisms I levied were related to what the authors specifically wrote, not the authors themselves. In fact, my comments have been far more tame than a lot of the AoA locals, who are allowed to comment without any admonishments from the moderators. That, in my mind, makes AoA a rather unreliable source for valid information.
@susie: Oh, the Italian study. That HAS been reviewed by Orac. He discussed the study on January 27, 2009 in his post The first of (I hope) many very bad days for antivaccinationists in 2009
Even back then, Orac predicted what you would claim, that since it didn't show what you want, you would say it's a bad study. Go back and read his post. He points out the good and bad points of the study.
Try again. OH...and I HAVE gone to your fav sites and read some of the crap posted there. I'd rather go to *ch*n and read their stuff...it makes more sense.
So, susie, since you don't like the "anti-" titles, which would you prefer:
pro-disease?
pro-irrationality?
pro-fear?
pro-crankery?
pro-preventable death?
Zetetic: To conduct a true vax/unvax test will in all likelihood result in preventable deaths and injury (and not just among the test subjects)
I'd agree that it is profoundly unethical to do this kind of study. I am, however, extremely interested in the health outcomes of both populations (specifically autism prevalence) in groups that have surpassed the target age group for which the schedule mostly applies. I agree that confounders will be a definite and trying issue as it relates to interpretation of data collected. I don't think anyone thinks it will be perfect, and it hasn't stopped other studies from being conducted.
Either way we have to choose between a definite known risk (disease) versus a hypothetically "possible" but unproven risk. A risk that if it does exist is apparently uncommon (or delayed) enough to have escaped detection by the studies so far. Not the best answer perhaps, but sadly it's not a perfect world.
I agree, but there are certainly flaws in the evidence collected to date (ie. the change of autism diagnosis from hospital dx to outpatient halfway through the study). I don't think epidemiology is the best way to detect neurological changes within the first two years of life, as these kinds of changes are simply not overt and visible with a preverbal population.
I've enjoyed the exchange.
Todd W: Contrast this with the more extreme anti-vax stances that all vaccines are bad, simply because they are a vaccine.
I don't think they represent the whole of those now questioning the schedule the way it is administered. Perhaps the most vocal (and annoying), but from my professional lurking, I see just regular parents trying to sift through all of this rubble.
Please show where data on efficacy has explicitly been used as the sole basis for safety.
I didn't meant to infer such. My point, that I demonstrated with the FDA licensing information for Prevnar 7, was that the safety data is often taken from the efficacy data and very often interchanged. It certainly was for Prevnar 7. How reliable (nonbiased) is a primary endpoint if it's constructed AFTER the trial has occurred?
The reasons for a vax vs. unvax study being "precluded", as you say, are that a prospective, randomized, placebo-controlled trial would be unethical.
Absolutely, I would never suggest such a thing. In animals? You bet. Some direct infection studies in animals have interesting results, and there might be one or two unethical ones in humans. I think it's a little bit fallacious to measure host response by symptomalogy though. Just because a person / animal is symptom free, they are not excused from spreading disease.
There are some who, while generally anti-vax, admit that some vaccines work well and should not be eliminated entirely.
These people fall into selective and delayed categories, and are allies for the provaccine camp. They are simply being pushed into the antivaccine camp due to all or nothing behavior. And some vaccines work extremely well, measles vaccine for example.
Regarding extrapolating Hep B trials in adolescents to newborns, we don't need to. (And, indeed, I'd like to see where anyone has done such.)
? That's exactly what we did when the ACIP recommended all newborns be vaccinated prior to hospital discharge in the early 90s. The trial data for hep b used adolescents, all the way up to the age of 30... there were less than 150 infants in that trial... and NO newborns. No, we don't have to now - because we've been vaccinating newborns for 20 years. Some would argue that this has resulted in harm to an entire generation of children. The anecdotal evidence of injury resulting from vaccinating the very young is growing.
Once that information [MMR and thimerosal] started coming out, then the goalposts shifted to aluminum or formaldehyde or antifreeze (which isn't even in vaccines) and so on.
Correct, antifreeze is not in vaccines. I've had to often point that out to people. The chemical is a surfactant, or detergent so to speak. I've read some information that's given me pause about it... too bad it's being overshadowed by blatantly incorrect information though. I see goal post shifting on both sides actually, but will concede that it does occur most often in the antivaccine camp.
"too many too soon".
The slogan may be new, but the concept is not.
Yet, when we look at countries where fewer vaccines are used, we generally see that autism rates are about the same.
Can you be more specific?
Well, it would be nice if those against vaccines could provide some plausible reason to examine vaccines further. There is zero data from well-designed and conducted studies that show any reason to suspect vaccines.
This is where I disagree. Data? No. Human babies undergo A LOT of development in the first two years of life. There are physiological states that alter the blood brain barrier in humans, which isn't really fully formed until 6 months and we've vaccinated children several times by then. Druge metabolism and liver function... demylenation is certainly something else to consider. Allergic response to injected substances is also very plausible. There are multiple reasons to consider the vigorous fashion with which we vaccinate, and how that may be harming children.
If by "conclusive" you mean 100% absolutely certain, then of course I agree with you.
Conclusive was perhaps the wrong word. But people are very often portraying the current evidence as conclusive, and at best, they show that we have no idea.
Susie, since you're so categorical against anything the vaccine injury court might find, does that mean we don't have to hear about the Poling case anymore?
Triskelcat:
Go read the study! It was designed to measure developmental delays in children and it had a 30% drop out rate on participants. You cannot ignore a 30% drop out rate when you're specifically studying developmental delays!!!!! That flaw alone invalidates the study.
Just because the evidence is not 100% conclusive does not mean we have no idea. You are being intellectually dishonest.
"I see goal post shifting on both sides actually"
Not saying you're lying or incorrect, but could you please give some examples of the pro-vaccine side moving goalposts? It would also be great if you could back up the accusation (for lack of a better word) with specific quotes/examples/links. TIA!
@susie
No, it doesn't. What matters more than that simple fact are the following: what were the reasons for the drop outs and how were those cases handled in the statistical analysis?
While a 30% drop out rate does raise some questions about why people were dropping out, that does not, in and of itself, invalidate the study.
@susie
'And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head.' Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett.
@anon
Those with the "vaccines are bad no matter what" mindset are, indeed, some of the most vocal. They are also the ones running sites like Age of Autism/Generation Rescue, the National Vaccine Information Center, AutismOne, etc., and writing anti-vaccine articles for the Huffington Post. The majority of people who comment elsewhere (e.g., here) tend to be parents who have been taken in by the rhetoric and misinformation that the vocal elements expound. It's rare to find someone against vaccines (in part or in whole) who are not simply echoing key talking points from places like AoA.
The problem with animal studies, though, is that the only decent autism models we have are genetic models, and so do not represent the vaccine conjecture. Simply injecting animals with vaccines and noting what, if any, changes occur does not necessarily translate to autism in humans.
Do you have some citations for this, for my own curiosity?
We also have, as I pointed out, clinical trials in newborns.
As the others requested, please provide some examples of goalpost shifting on the pro-vaccine side.
You appear to be asserting that because babies change a lot in their early years, vaccines are plausibly connected to the development of autism. Your conjecture is not what I asked for. I asked for data showing that there is a causal connection. Using your proposition, then we should also be studying many, many other things with just as much energy as vaccines have been examined: pollution, diet, frequency of doctor visits, socioeconomic status...basically anything that might possibly affect development.
First, for those reading this, it should be stated again that an allergic reaction cannot occur unless a person has been exposed to the allergen at least once or twice before. That out of the way, if an allergic reaction to an injected substance is plausible, then allergic reactions, in general, should also be plausible and, therefore, investigated with just as much energy as vaccines.
Other than your "just asking questions" attitude, you have not provided plausible reasons why vaccines, specifically, should be investigated beyond what has already been done. Provide some quality evidence that suggests vaccines cause autism.
No, we do have an idea. We know that MMR is highly unlikely to be involved in development of autism. We know that thimerosal is highly unlikely to be involved in the development of autism. As to the other bogeymen that are harped on, a plausible reason for why they are plausible has not been presented.
The two at the top of my list now are Creamy Desitin and car seats.
I have contacted Johnson & Johnson and tried to find out the year that Creamy Desitin was introduced to the market, and I have gotten the complete run-around. They appear to be hiding something. The answers I have gotten by email so far are, 1) check the website (I did, and it isn't there; I did find that the Original Desitin has been around for more than 80s, but nothing about the creamy stuff. When I told them that, they said) 2) call our helpline.
I mean, how hard is it for someone to say, "Desitin Creamy was developed in 1955 and put on the market in 1957"?
And carseats. All these pushes for laws to make children sit in carseats have been happening. When I was little, we rode whereever, and we didn't have a problem with autism. How do we know that riding in carseats doesn't cause autism? Where are the double-blind studies?
@susie: did you bother to read Orac's discussion of the study? He discussed many of the issues with the study.
As for your 30%!!!!11eleventyone!! lost to study... Garbage.
Even reading the extract, it says clearly:
PEDIATRICS Vol. 123 No. 2 February 2009, pp. 475-482
"Children who were enrolled in an efficacy trial of pertussis vaccines in 1992â1993 were contacted in 2003. Two groups of children were identified, according to thimerosal content in vaccines assigned randomly in the first year of life (cumulative ethylmercury intake of 62.5 or 137.5 µg), and were compared with respect to neuropsychological outcomes....RESULTS. Nearly 70% of the invited subjects participated in the neuropsychological assessment (N = 1403)."
So your "missing 30%" were simply parents who didn't respond to the invitation or declined for whatever reason to have their child tested. They were NOT lost to follow up.
Try again, and this time, try to get something that supports your beliefs. This one won't do it...oh wait.
You are claiming the study is invalid because a "30% drop out rate". But your 30% "drop out rate" is inaccurate. A drop-out rate involves the families who began in the study then dropped out. That is totally inaccurate for this study. In THIS study, they invited the families who were in the pertussis study to have their children tested. 30% declined, so never BEGAN the study. That is NOT a 30% drop out rate. You can say that 30% of those invited to participate declined, but not that the study had a 30% drop out rate. (And, to be honest, IRRC, getting 70% of a group to participate in ANY study is pretty darn good).
Triskel:
30% drop out / non-participation rate when you are looking at developmental delays invalidates the study. We will not agree on this, so move on.
@triskelethecat
Thanks for actually providing the study points specifically addressing susie's concern re: the 30%.
What's the basis for non-participation invalidating a study?
@susie:
By your logic, I'm a drop out from Harvard.
@susie
Please explain your reasoning. How does the fact that 30% of those invited to participate declined invalidate the study? Note, declining to participate is not equal to dropping out once enrolled.
@Todd W. you're welcome. :-)
@JohnV: Well, John, I guess in susie's world, the 30% who didn't participate all have autism so the results are skewed. Personally, I think she needs to take a job as a mall surveyor. When I did that job, we figured a 10-20% participation rate was pretty decent. (yes, I WAS one of those annoying people at the mall who ask if you are willing to answer "a few questions" and finally release you 3 hours later...lol)
@T.Bruce...me too. And many other colleges/universities, too.
susie @ #765:
Untrue. You see susie this is why you are getting called anti-vax. First of all there have been several studies from around the world by various governments testing Thimerosal. It was just one study there have been lots of studies involving different parties from countries with different medical systems, they all say the same thing "No Connection". But again you can't point out what is wrong with the studies, but since it doesn't correspond to your preconceptions you just brush it off as "they must be biased".
Why? Because they reached a conclusion that don't agree with your preconceptions.
Tell us susie why then hasn't autism rates dropped in the USA since removing Thiomersal from the childhood vaccines? It should have, but it didn't why not? Is everyone in the USA on the take from big pharma and hiding it from everyone else? That makes no sense. Tell us susie exactly what study testing Thiomersal would you accept, if it said that Thiomersal wasn't to blame for autism?
Studies when it was removed from the vaccine? Already done.
Studies where children were given higher than normal doses? Already done.
Studies from countries with socialized medicine? Already done.
The problem is that no matter what studies are done (or how ever many are done, or who does them) that apparently nothing will ever convince you that it's not the Thiomersal. Refusing to accept evidence that is contrary to your preconceptions is what make you "anti-vax". Because no amount of evidence against you position will ever get you to stop blaming the vaccines, you just ignore the data for no other reason than it's not what you want to hear. Even removing it from the vaccines isn't enough to convince you that it's not the Thiomersal.
No matter what is done you always blame the vaccines and refuse to accept any notion that you're wrong. You can't be for vaccines, as you claim, when no amount of evidence will ever be able to convince you that they are not what is causing autism. That is why you are being called anti-vax susie. Because you will always be opposed to vaccines no matter what, since you can't accept that you might be wrong about them.
BTW some studies have been done on Thiomersal in infants, unlike methyl-mercury the ethyl-mercury produced has a half life in the body of just a few days (3.4 days IIRC) for infants.
As other have already asked evidence please...not just more assertions. The fact of the matter is that an increasing number of vaccines are being made without the Thiomersal. The H1N1 flu inhaler for example has 0 (zero) micrograms of Thiomersal in it.
Again this is why you are being called anti-vax, you just make baseless assertions against vaccines that promote fear-mongering. Do you just make this stuff up, or to you just parrot what the anti-vax groups tell you (without ever questioning it) since they tell you what you want to hear?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
susie @ #766:
False comparison since nobody here has spoken out again informed consent, but you repeatedly speak out against vaccines and refuse to accept any contrary evidence. Anti-Vax isn't a PR label....It's a description made by the scientific medicine/skeptical community to describe someone that frequently claims they don't want to encourage disease, but blames vaccines for things were science has shown no link and where they refuse to accept opposing evidence on the grounds that it contradicts there preconceptions. So far that fits you pretty well susie. Time and time again you just refuse to accept any thing that opposes your preconceptions.
Think I'm being unfair?
When Jen pointed out that her child got autism, but didn't get a vaccination, what was your response?
That the hospital slipped her child a vaccine without Jen knowing it.
We point out that studies have been done around the world and they show no connection between Thiomersal and autism.
Your response?
That they're all in the pocket of big pharma (without ever showing such a link) and that the studies are all flawed (without showing any such flaws). In other words you just ignored it.
We point out that Thiomersal has been removed from childhood vaccines.
Your response?
Oh, well they're just sneaking it all back again.
Again no evidence of your assertion, and absolutely no logic behind it either. Just deny what doesn't fit you preconceptions. Tell us susie what would big pharma have to gain by going through the expense of putting Thiomersal back into vaccines that they already spent money getting it out of? Did you ever think of that? Tell us susie why then didn't we still show a drop in autism rates after it was removed, but before (as you claim) it was put back in? Did you ever think that through?
Again and again....deny, deny, deny. But no evidence.
See the pattern here yet?
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Please tell us susie, just to show us that you're not anti-vax, what reasonable test can you think of by a government agency (since the anti-vax groups are unwilling to do it themselves) that would ever convince you that vaccines (or even just Thiomersal for that matter) isn't what is causing autism?
I'm serious...What reasonable test by any modern government would convince you that your wrong, even just about Thiomersal?
I'm betting nothing will. Please prove me wrong.
That's the big difference between us and you susie...
We keep asking you to prove us wrong. You just need to provide a good case for your position, which you haven't yet.
You, on the other hand, seem to refuse to accept even the possibility that you might be wrong.
@susie, 790
No, you should drop it unless you can actually say why it invalidates anything. triskelethecat's post shows why it is not even a drop out rate. It would be a lot more honest to simply admit you were mistaken about what the study indicated in regards to this. Not to shift to drop-out/declined which is still disingenuous.
Wasn't there a famous anti-vaxxer back the early 2000s who said something like (about the removal of thimerasol from childhood vaccines), if the autism rate doesn't drop by 2005 (or so), then the thimerasol link is dead?
Zetetic, you haven't listened to the authorities (aka AoA) where the head mom, asked why her third (unvaccinated, thimerosal-free) kid was autistic too decided it was due to the stuff in her (the mom's) body. Autism rates due to thimerosal won't drop for another generation, just wait for Kirby's next book.
Yeah pablo that was Dave Kirby himself. He was called on this many times on huffpo (shockingly the censors there permitted the question to be asked on occasion).
No response from him, the anti-vax peanut gallery typically chimed in with the entirely predictable "omg big pharma is lying about thimersol then"
Zet:
So, are you saying all the thimerasol has been removed? You know that is untrue. And, I think I said on the first post to I made on this thread that mercury is not the only problem with vaccines.
The study that needs to be done is vaccinated vs unvaccinated.
Pablo: I think this has previously been addressed. Mercury has not been removed from all the vaccines.
as if on cue...
None of the vaccines on the regular schedule of childhood vaccinations has thimerasol in them. Multi-batch flu vaccines will have some, but that is not part of the normal schedule.
More to the point, I wasn't the one who made the claim. As JohnV points out, that was one of your anti-vax crusaders who said it. It's very clear - at the time, HE thought that thimerasol was sufficiently removed to prevent any problems that it supposedly was causing. HE was the one who predicted that the autism rates would drop. HE was the one who said that if they didn't drop, then the autism/thimerasol link was dead.
If you got a problem with that, take it up with him.
Of course, the fact that he was hoisted on his own petard means nothing to him, and only goes to illustrate the point that nothing can change the mind of an anti-vaxxer.
So are you ever going to explain the difference between shark squalene and human squalene? Or you are just going to continue letting yourself be paraded around as a punchline and the poster child of the arrogance of ignorance?
Pablo: Is this is you quote at #695:
695
MSG: What the hell? This doesn't even show up in vaccines.
Maybe it's in Chinese vaccines?
Now that someone else on here (not me) confirmed that YES, MSG is in a vaccine, you will probably defend it til you drop too.
Re Squalene, we don't know what we don't know about these experimental ingredients, but squalene causes a lot of autoimmune diseases in animals, so that should be a huge concern for vaccine safety, shouldn't it?
@susie
Do you have citations to the animals studies? Thanks.
Now, if squalene causes more autoimmune diseases, then we should see more autoimmune diseases in Europe than in the U.S., since squalene has been used for at least a decade in Europe but has not been used in the U.S.
@susie
Once again, you lie. The Italian study of thimerasol did NOT have a 30% dropout rate.
I quote: "Telephone interviews were conducted for the remaining 1704 families [from the 1979 who were invited to participate]. We detected, through the telephone interviews with parents and reviews of medical charts, 1 case of autism among the 856 children in the lower thimerosal intake group and no cases among the 848 children in the higher thimerasol intake group"
Susie, for your edification 856 + 848 = 1704. The remainder of the 1979 families either declined to participate (114), were not contactable (160), or the child had died (1). If you add those numbers up (use a calculator), you will find that 1704 + 114 + 160 + 1 = 1979.
These workers went on the examine the children by neuropsychological evaluation. A total of 301 families declined to participate, and 1403 accepted. This left a near perfect distribution of 697 children in the lower intake group and 706 in the higher intake group. These workers set a target of 1400 children in order to obtain a statistically significant result.
I quote: "The characteristics of...the two groups were similar in terms of sociodemographic characteristics, clinical characteristics, and parents' educational level, whereas birthweight was slightly lower in the higher intake group."
So far, a perfect population to study dose dependent effects of thimerasol.
After a thorough series of tests, too detailed for me to replicate, the authors concluded, using a statistical analysis, that "an association between thimerasol exposure through vaccination in infancy and neuropsychological deficits is unlikely or clinically negligible."
Read the damn paper before you start quoting results. It's available for free.
Anyone else would have recognized the joke about Asian cooking. This is the problem with you, Susie, you're so obsessed with being right, you latch onto anything you think will confirm your beliefs, even if basic common sense proves otherwise.
Do you have a source for that claim? We aren't just going to take some random stranger's word that it's the truth. And don't claim that we're taking the word of the large corporations, we're really going on the words of several independent people, most of whom have conflicting interests.
Slight blockquote error in 807, the second paragraph was also supposed to be susie's.
Since squalene is added as an adjuvant to lessen the amount of antigen needed it's a good thing, isn't it? You know, the too many too fast thing?
@susie
BTW, in a retrospective study, you cannot have "drop-outs." Damn, you are truly ignorant of the science you purport to know.
Also, BTW, there is no chemical difference between squalene in vaccines and the squalene that your body synthesizes to make cholesterol and all of the sex hormones. Shark liver oil is used as a dietary supplement, and it contains boatloads of squalene. It is in olive oil and has been proposed as a chemopreventive agent. Truly, truly, you need to learn some science before you spout your nonsense. It's like a vomit of words.
Gray:
here's a start for you.
Squalene Induces Autoimmune Disease in Animals
1. Whitehouse MW, Orr KJ, Beck FW, Pearson CM [Division of Rheumatology, DeÂpartment of Medicine, University of California School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California], âFreundâs Adjuvants: Relationship of Arthritogenicity and Adjuvanticity in Rats to Vehicle Composition,â Immunology, (1974) Aug;27(2)311-30.
2. Beck FW, Whitehouse MW, Pearson CM [Division of Rheumatology, Department of Medicine, University of California School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California], âImprovements for consistently inducing experimental allergic encelphalomyelitis (EAE) in rats: I. without using mycobacterium. II. inoculating encephalitogen into the ear,â Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, (1976) Mar; 151 (3):615-22.
3. Kohashi 0, Pearson CM [Division 6f Rheumatology, Department of Medicine, UniÂversity of California School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California], âArthritogenicity of Mycobacterium smegmatis subfractions, related to different oil vehicle and difÂferent composition,â International Archives of Allergy Applied Immunology, (1976);51(4):462-70.
4. Beck FW, Whitehouse MW [Division of Rheumatology, Department of Medicine, University of California School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California and DepartÂment of Experimental Pathology, John Curtin School of Medical Research, The Australian National University, Canberra A.CT. 2600, Australia], âModifications in the Establishment of Allergic Encephalomyelitis (EAE) in Rats; an Improved Assay for Immunosuppressant Drugs,â Agents Actions, (1976) July;6(4):460-7.
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7. Lipman NS, Trudel LJ, Murphy JC, Sahali Y [Division of Comparative Medicine, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139], âComparison of Immune Response Potentiation and In Vivo Inflammatory Effects of Freundâs and Ribi Adjuvants in Mice,â Laboratory Animal Science, (1992) April;42(2): 193-7.
8. Leenaars PP, Hendriksen CF, Angulo AF, Koedam MA, Claasen E [National InstiÂtute of Public Health and Environmental Protection (RIVM), PO. Box 1,3720 BA, Bilthoven, The Netherlands], âEvaluation of several adjuvants as alternatives to the use of Freundâs adjuvant in rabbitsâ Veterinary Immunology and Immunopathology, (1994) Mar;40(3):225-41.
9. Leenaars M, Koedam MA, Hendriksen CF, Claassen E [National Institute of PubÂlic Health and Environmental Protection (RIVM), Bilthoven, The Netherlands], âImmune responses and side effects of five different oil-based adjuvants in mice,â Veterinary Immunology and Immunopathology, (1998) Feb 27;61(2-4):291-304.
10. Leenaars PP, Koedam MA, Ester PW, Baumans V, Claassen E, Hendriksen CF [National Institute of Public Health and Environmental Protection (RIVM), P.O. Box 1, 3720 BA, Bilthoven, The Netherlands], âAssessment of side effects induced by injection of different adjuvant/antigen combinations in rabbits and mice,â LaboÂratoryAnimals (1998) Oct;32(4):387-406.
11. Kleinau S, Erlandsson H, Klareskog L [Department of Clinical Immunology, UniÂversity Hospital, Uppsala, Sweden], âPercutaneous exposure of adjuvant oil causes arthritis in DA rats,â Clinical Experimental Immunology, (1994) May;96(2):281-4. (âRefers to olive oil, which contains squalene).
12. Yoshino S, Yoshino J [Rheumatology Unit, Royal Adelaide Hospital, Adelaide, SA5000, Australia], âRecruitment of pathogenic T cells to synovial tissues of rats inÂjected intraarticularly with nonspecific agents,â Cellular Immunology, (1994) OctoÂber 15;158(2):305-13.
13. Smialek M, Gajkowska B, Ostrowski RP, Piotrowski P [Department of NeuropatholÂogy and Laboratory of the Ultrastructure of the Nervous System, Medical Research Centre, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warszawa, Poland], âExperimental squalene encephaloneuropathy in the rat,â Folia Neuropathologica, (1997);35(4):262-4.
1 4. Gajkowska B, Smialek M, Ostrowski RP, Piotrowski P, Frontczak-Baniewicz M
[The Laboratory of the Ultrastructure of the Nervous System, Medical Research Centre, Polish Academy of Sciences,S Pawinskiego Street, 02-106 Warsaw, Poland], âThe experimental squalene encephaloneuropathy in the rat,â ExperimenÂtal and Toxicologic Pathology, (1999) January; 5:75-80.
15. Lorentzen JC [Department of Medicine, Karolinska Hospital, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden],â Identification of arthritogenic adjuvants of self and foreign origin,â Scandinavian Journal of Immunology, (1999) Jan;49( 1 ):45-50.
16. Carlson BC, ]annson AM, Larsson A, Bucht A, Lorentzen]C [Department of MedÂicinee, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden], âThe endogenous adjuvant squaÂ
lene can induce a chronic T-cell-mediated arthritis in rats,â American Journal of Pathology: (2000) ]un: 156(6):2057-65.
17. Holm BC, Zu HW, ]acobsson L, Larson A, Luthman H, Lorentzen]C [Center for Molecular Medicine, Department of Medicine, Unit of Rheumatology, Karolinska Institutet, S-17176 Stockholm, Sweden], âRats made congenic for Oia3 on chromoÂsome 10 become susceptible to squalene-induced arthritis,â Human Molecular GeÂnetics, (.2001) Mar 215;10(6):565-72.
18. Holmdahl R, Lorentzen]C, Lu S, Olofsson P, Wester L., Holmberg], Pettersson U, [Section of Medical Inflammation Research, Lund University, Sweden]. âArthritis induced in rats with nonimmunogenic adjuvants as models for rheumatoid arthritisâ Immunological Reviews, (2001) Dec;184:184-202.
19. Holm BC, Svelander L, Bucht A, Lorentzen ]C [Department of Medicine, Unit of Rheumatology, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm and Department of Medical CounÂtermeasures, Division of NBC Defense, Defense Research Agency, Umea, SweÂden], âThe arthritogenic adjuvant squalene does not accumulate in joints, but gives rise to pathogenic cells in both draining and non-draining lymph nodes,â Clinical and Experimental Immunology, (2002) Mar;127(3):430-5.
20. Whitehouse MW, Beck FW], Matsumoto G [Department of Medicine, University of Queensland, Princess Alexandra Hospital, Queensland, Australia; Wayne States University Medical Center, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A.], âSqualene is an Auto ToxiÂcant Inducing Polyarthritis in Rats and Immunopathies in Man, Abstract,â The AusÂtralian Health and Medical Congress, 2002, no. 1143.
21. Gherardi RK [Groupe Nerf-Muscle, Departement de Pathologie, Hopital Henri Mondor, Creteil], âLessons from macrophagic myofasciitis: towards definition of a vaccine adjuvant-related syndrome,â Revue Neurologique (Paris), (2003) Feb; 159(2): 162-4.
22. Backdahl L, Ribbihammar U, Lorentzen ]C [Center for Molecular Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm], âMapping and functional characterization of rat chromosome 4 regions that regulate arthritis models and phenotypes in congenic strains,â Arthritis and Rheumatism, (2003) Feb;48(2):551-9.
23. Satoh M, Kuroda Y, Yoshida H, Behney KM, Mizutani A, Akaogi], Nacionales DC, Lorenson TD, Rosenbauer R], Reeves WH [Division of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology, Department of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville], âInducÂtion of lupus autoantibodies by adjuvants,â Journal of Autoimmunity, (2003) Aug;21(l):1-9.
24. Kuroda Y, Akaogi ], Nacionales DC, Wasdo SC, Szabo N], Reeves WH, Satoh M [Division of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology, Department of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville], âDistinctive Patterns of Autoimmune Response Induced by Different Types of Mineral Oil,â Toxicological Sciences, (2004) Apr;78(2):222-8.
25. Kuroda Y, Nacionales DC, Akaogi J, Reeves WH, Satoh M [Division of Rheumatol. ogy and Clinical Immuryology, Department of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville], âAutoimmunity induced by adjuvant hydrocarbon oil components of vaccine,â Biomedicine & Pharmflcotherapy, (2004), Jun;(5S)5:325.37.
26. Holm BC, Lorentzen JC, Bucht A [Diabetes Research, Immunology Unit, Depart. ment of Endocrinology, Lund University, Malmo University Hospital, Stockholm], âAdjuvant oil induces waves of arthritogenic lymph node cells prior to arthritis on. set,â Clinical and Experimental Immunology, (2004) Jul;137(1):59.64.
Adverse Reactions in Humans to Experimental Vaccines Containing Squalene
27. Keitel W, Couch R, Bond N., Adair S, Van Nest G, Dekker C [Baylor College of Medicine, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, One Baylor Plaza, Hous. ton, Texas 77030], âPilot evaluation of influenza virus vaccine (IW) combined with adjuvant,â Vaccine, (1993);11(9):909.913; â[See also Nos. 27 & 31);
Squalene Stimulates the Immune System
28. Ott G, Barchfield GL, Chernoff D, Radhakrishnan R, van Hoogevest P, Van Nest G
[Chiron Corporation, Emeryville, California 9460S], âMF59. Design and evaluation of a safe and potent adjuvant for human vaccines,â Pharm Biotechnol, (1995);6:277. 96.
29. Ott G, Barchfield GL, Chernoff D, Radhakrishnan R, van Hoogevest P, Van Nest G [Chiron Corporation, Emeryville, CA 9460S], âMF59. Design and Evaluation of a Safe and Potent Adjuvant for Human Vaccines,â Vaccine Design: The Subunit and Adjuvant Approach (Monograph), (1995) Chapter 1 0:277 .311.
30. Ou G, Barchfield GL, Van Nest G [Chiron Corporation, EmeryvilIe, CA 9460S], âEnhancement of humoral response against human influenza vaccine with the simple submicron oil/water emulsion adjuvant MF59,â Vaccine, (1995) Nov; 13(16): 1557.62.
31. OâHagan DT, Ott GS, Van Nest G [Chiron Corporation, Emeryville, CA 94704], âRecent advances in vaccine adjuvants: the development of MF59 emulsion and polymeric microparticles,â Molecular Medicine Today, (1997) Feb; 3(2):69-75.
32. Allison AC [Suromed Corporation, 1060 East Meadow Circle, Palo Alto, California 94303], âSqualene and squalane emulsions as adjuvants,â Methods (1999) Sept; 19( 1 ):S7 .93.
How the Immune System Processes Squalene
33. Depuis M, MurphyTJ, Higgins D, Ugozzoli M, Van Nest G, Ott G, McDonald DM
[Cardiovascular Research Institute, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143], âDendritic cells internalize vaccine adjuvant after intramuscular injection,â Cellular Immunology, (1998) May 25; 186(1): 18-27.
34. Depuis M, McDonald OM, Ott G [Cardiovascular Research Institute, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143], âDistribution of adjuvant MF59 and antigen gD2 after intramuscular injection in mice,â Vaccine, (1999) Oct 14; 18(5Â6):434-9.
35. Depuis M, Denis-Mize K, LaBarbaraA, Peters W, Charo IF, McDonald OM, Ott G [Cardiovascular Research Institute and Department of Anatomy, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143], âImmunization with the adjuvant MF59 induces macrophage trafficking and apoptosis,â European Journal of Immunology, (2001) Oct;31(10):291O-8.
Specificity of Antibody Response to Squalene
36. Asa PB, Cao Y, Garry RF [Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Tulane Medical School, 1430 Tulane Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana 70112], âAntibodies to Squalene in Gulf War Syndrome,â Experimental and Molecular Pathology (2000) Feb;68(1):55-64.
37. Matyas GR, Wasseff NM, Rao M, Alving CR [Department of Membrane ~iochemÂistry, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, 20910-7500, Silver Spring, MD], âInduction and detection of antibodies to squalene,â Journal of Immunological Methods (2000) Nov 1;245(1-2):1-14.
38. Alving CR, Grabenstein JD [Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program Office], âRE: Antibodies to squalene in Gulf War Syndrome,â Experimental and Molecular Pathology (2000) Jun;68(3): 196-8.
39. Asa PB, Cao Y, Garry RF [Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Tulane Medical School, 1430 Tulane Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana 70112], âReply,â Experimental and Molecular Pathology (2000) Jun;68(3): 197-8.
40. Asa PB, Wilson RB, Garry RF [Department of Microbiology and Immunology, TuÂlane Medical School, 1430 Tulane Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana 70112], âAntiÂbodies to Squalene in recipients of anthrax vaccine,â Experimental and Molecular Pathology (2002) Aug;73(1): 19-27.
41. Matyas G, Rao M, Alving C [Department of Membrane Biochemistry, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, 503 Robert Grant Avenue, 20910-7500, Silver Spring,
MD, USA], âInduction and detection of antibodies to squalene. II. Optimization of
the assay for murine antibodies,â Journal of Immunological Methods (2002) Sep 15; 267(2):119.
42. Matyas GR, Rao M, Pittman PR, Burge R, Robbins IE, Wassef NM, Thivierge B, Alving CR [Department of Membrane Biochemistry, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research], âDetection of antibodies to squalene: III. Naturally occurring antibodies to squalene in humans and mice,â Journal of Immunological Methods, (2004) Mar;286(102):47-67.
Ingested Squalene Is Processed Differently from Injected Squalene
43. Tilvis RS, Miettinen TA [Department of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland], âAbsorption and metabolic fate of dietary 3H-squalene in the rat,â Lipids, (1983) Mar;18(3):233-8.
44. Gylling H, Miettinen TA [Second Department of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland], âPostabsorptive metabolism of dietary squalene,â Atherosclerosis, (1994) April; 106(2): 169-78.
45. Relas H, Gylling H, Miettinen TA [Department of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland], âEffect of stanol ester on postabsorptive squalene and retinyl palmitate,â Metabolism, (2000) April;49(4):473-8.
Gray Falcon:
Will you be interpreting all of Pablo's posts for him in the future? Are you now his official spokesperson? I'm just curious.
Now you're trying for the "Drown your opponent in information" tactic. It looks impressive, but you'll note that most people here only bother with one or two articles. That's because that's all the information that's needed. Also, there are plenty of words, but no substance: No abstracts, no quotes, for all we know, they could be saying the exact opposite of what you're claiming. (That actually happened to someone here once.)
Also, I'm not Pablo's spokesman, I was just stating what was obvious to most people.
Susie, will you ever acknowledge your mistake about the drop-outs in that paper or justify your statement that the people declining to participate invalidates the paper or do you plan to simply move on and try to talk about other topics, ignoring what was said as you appear to be doing?
Rob's post has a nice little discussion about how the groups were in fact quite good populations for such a study. Can you address those statements?
susie,
It's in FluMist,a frikkin intranasal vaccine. It's administered to the nasal cavity. From there it'll end up in the stomach, just like the MSG from chinese food. Are you seriously arguing that chinese food causes autism?
Gray Falcon @813
So, I notice that list of papers is basically directly lifted from a document I found at www.vaclib.org
More of what Gray Falcon said. drown the opponent. Who knows whether any of those really support anything you are saying.
Also noticeable, while the list contains 45 articles, only one, nr. 27, is actually on adverse reactions in humans, and that's a report on a pilot in 1999. The black helicopters must have been very efficient in suppressing any further research on that matter.
@ Todd W
I disagree.
I'm not talking about autism. The only time I have even mentioned it, was when discussing vaxxed and unvaxxed populations.
You're doing it now, by using my observation of human development in the first two years of life and the possible problems encountered by having antigens and adjuvants injected into them and equating that to "autism". I'd probably consider it a strawman, nonetheless, it's distracting. In the course of debate, this usually ends in calling the person a parasite or some similar term to describe their delusional caution about vaccines forcing them to defend someone elses discriminatory behavior.
The 1991 ACIP recommendation.
I did not assert that, and not even in this context (another strawman you are demanding that I defend). You said that antivaxxers have not put forth a plausible explanation as to how "too many too soon" could relate to autism. How on Earth could I show you data when there is none? There isn't a single study that reflects the recommended schedule and the combinations in which it is given. Odd that people dismiss the possibility of perturbing the immune system from this aggressive schedule, and then tell me to prove it causes harm when anyone that is paying attention knows the research has not been done. That said, you are left to my conjecture.
I'm not sure I follow your disagreement of my statement. Indeed, allergic reactions tend to escalate if they exist at all. Obviously, they will vary in degree depending on numerous variables. Perhaps we agree, it's just that since you consider me antivaccine, you are finding the need to correct me.
Diet, absolutely. BUT, none of the possibilities mention actually pierce the skin and deliver antigens and adjuvants into the muscles.
This is another strawman, since I didn't make that assertion. The assertions I've made (skin scraping and injections are different, efficacy and safety blurred lines) I DID support. My conjecture that irritated you dealt with the "too many too soon" slogan that YOU previously posted.
Travis, she wants us to drop the 30% drop-out issue.
I would want people to drop it, too, if I posted bullshit and was caught on it.
I like the "30% drop out / non-participation rate." Joining two different things together so you can pretend they are the same. Classic.
I'm gonna go home and do a study of children under 10 / astronauts.
I'm just asking questions. Where is the chinese-food versus non-chinese-food study? Why is Big General Tso so afraid to do the study? Is it because it will show that they really didn't remove MSG from the pu pu platter?
I actually regret posting about those papers. I think that is how these people can cause threads to go on this long, we let them change topics when they are confronted with problems. I would love it if everyone kept on an issue, pushing, and pushing.
I was wondering if that "30% drop out / non-participation rate." would eventually become "non-participation rate" after a few more posts, erasing the error.
Right, I apologise in advance if this isn't as coherent as it should be, it has been a very long day.
@susie: Ok, you know what, I am perfectly willing to accept that insurance companies class autism as a mental illness. I will further enthusiastically endorse any opinion to the effect that American health insurance companies are evil bastards which fail autistic kids and their families miserably.
Moving on -- well, responding to your comment just above, deliberate injections of large doses of squalene has been used to induce immediate autoimmune symptoms in rodents, yes. Not only were the objective quantities considerably larger than what is in any vaccine, the amount per kg bodyweight was way out of proportion in the rodents. The other interesting thing was that the reaction was immediately visible, too. It wasn't something that developed weeks later. It's not a good comparison for a variety of reasons.
Everyone in the world produces squalene in their bodies. And between 90%-100% of the humans tested, in a wide variety of populations, even those who have never recieved a vaccine in their lives, also have antibodies to squalene. It is something that happens, but cannot be linked to an illness. (I will see if I can dig up citations for this, I did have them.)
Second, as has already been pointed out repeatedly (thank you triskele, you beat me to it), the Italian study did not have a 30% dropout rate, 30% of invited families did not enter the study. People decline to enter studies for a lot of reasons, and generally one of the major ones is "We don't want to commit to having to keep records and/or keep checking in with people, it's too much bother." Please explain how you think this makes it a bad study...and bear in mind that everyone who has done medical or populational studies is aware that a 70% participation rate actually IS very good.
Now, regarding the paper you referenced at post 730, "Thimerosal Neurotoxicity is Associated with Glutathione Depletion" --
1. They claim that all the childhood vaccinations together amounted to "up to 200 μg/kg cumulative dose" of thiomersal. Then they used an amount of thiomersal in mmol/liter which they claimed was equivalent. Problem: it has been shown experimentally that ethyl mercury is cleared out of the body in less than 4 days, and they are using an entire amount which would have been spread over 18 months as a single administration. How is this equal?
2. They did not even test cells in vivo, in a living body; they used cultured cells in an artificial medium, bathed in fetal bovine serum and penicillin/streptomycin, and then bathed these cells in thiomersal solution. Problem: cells in the highly artificial environment of a culture very frequently do not behave like cells in a body. This is why all those "miracle cures" you hear about for cancer, which are oh-so-promising in test tubes, simply disappear -- because over 90% of the time when the things which behave one way in a test tube or cell culture are tested in a body, something entirely different happens.
Without going into the paper in more depth (and there are plenty of depths to go to), these two issues right there tell me that this study would need to be replicated under better matching conditions and in a more realistic environment to have any meaning.
However, big thing, following up one of your other postings: yes, thiomersal/thimerosal HAS been removed from almost every vaccine, and it hasn't made any difference. You claim it isn't gone; first off, ALL ingredients MUST be listed on the inserts, even if they are in undetectable trace amounts -- if you are claiming that the vaccine manufacturers are committing such an illegal act as putting thiomersal back in and not declaring it, then you need to produce evidence of that and then the manufacturers can be heavily fined for that. Your evidence?
Secondly, though, that "trace amounts" issue? When thiomersal is used during the manufacturing and then removed, the vaccine insert will declare the maximum amount which can remain. I do not believe there is a single vaccine other than flu which can contain >1μg. This is hugely less than used to be used. Again, if this had any influence on "vulnerable" children, this change in amount should have made a difference. It hasn't. Period.
Regarding the rest of it...well. I suppose your doctor was suposedly looking at cytochrome P450 1B1 cytochromes are involved in drug metabolisation? If not, then why? And what, precisely, were you being told that it had to do with autism? I would like to know how this was sold to you. And on another note, "at one point he was sensitive to over 60 foods", and this was determined how? And why is he (apparently) not sensitive any more? Genuine food sensitivities tend to be persistent.
See, the problem I have here is that what you are referring to is not particularly credible to anyone with a background in biology, because it just doesn't fit with things we already genuinely know to work certain ways.
Now...
@anon post 733 -- that link you provided, http://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/ApprovedPr…. You claimed, I quote,
No. That is a completely false characterisation of what is done, and your own link demonstrates this clearly. Safety is examined in efficacy studies, but it is clearly handled and discussed as a separate issue, as the next 14 pages of discussion of specifically safety and not efficacy methodology and data attests! A study can track both safety AND efficacy, and this does not make the safety data invalid, nor an afterthought; it's the fact that we need to get as much data out of every study as possible. The idea that safety data is not good, is only an afterthought, if it is looked at in the same study as efficacy, that's just...insane. Or ignorant. Or both.
You don't like my using the term "bullshit" -- I can assure you, no matter how polite the language, the thing to which I refer would still stink. I just don't see the need to be polite about it, just now. Bullshit is bullshit.
There is also the issue, which I have not seen you address (I'm not holding my breath) that historically, infant exposure to environmental toxins and pathogens has been FAR higher than it is now. In fact, a major issue with vaccines is to ensure that they are strong enough to provoke an immune response, because the amount of antigen in them is so tiny that it tends to get cleared away too quickly. There is, in fact, quite a lot of discussion of this in papers on vaccine development, should you ever check PubMed and read instead of skim titles.
From the 18th Century, household furnishings and cleansers, patent medicines, popular remedies, and even drinks and clothing tended to contain very high amounts of antimony, lead, mercury, and other such toxic heavy metals. This was not without consequence -- in fact, a lot of illnesses and deaths were undoubtedly a direct consequence. If this kind of toxicity were anything to do with autism, though, where was the 19th century plague of autistic children? Why on earth didn't the prevalence of autism drop as the harmfulness of these substances was recognised and they were phased out of things like teething powders? That just happened in the 1950s, after all.
@anon, wait. There isn't a single study that reflects the recommended schedule and the combinations in which it is given.
Again, bullshit. Most vaccine studies involve a new vaccine given as an addition to the existing schedule!
@susie -- yes, let me just reiterate. In order for a human to receive a proportional amount of the squalene injected into those unfortunate rodents, I believe we would have to injected with about 50 grams of the stuff. Inducing an autoimmune reaction with massively disproportionate amounts of a natural substance in the body, is not even vaguely like what might happen with the tiny amount in a vaccine, given that what is in the vaccine is itself a tiny fraction of what is already in the body. Do you understand that?
Okay, nearly every time. I was thinking of insane Dawn and her six-hundred page legal document.
Luna the cat asks
I think the answer to your question is No.
Luna: A study can track both safety AND efficacy, and this does not make the safety data invalid, nor an afterthought;
LOL. Okay. And data points that are set after a study is done is the perfect way to inject bias into the results. Just like using an experimental vaccine as the control does... both of which are demonstrated with Prevnar 7.
You don't like my using the term "bullshit" -- I can assure you, no matter how polite the language, the thing to which I refer would still stink. I just don't see the need to be polite about it, just now. Bullshit is bullshit.
Since when is anyone polite on this blog? I'm afraid I'd be setting the bar a little high this place. It reduces the discussion to bar room antics that most people could care less about. Maybe that's the point.
which I have not seen you address (I'm not holding my breath)infant exposure to environmental toxins and pathogens has been FAR higher than it is now. In fact, a major issue with vaccines is to ensure that they are strong enough to provoke an immune response, because the amount of antigen in them is so tiny that it tends to get cleared away too quickly.
Why do I need to support or address your assertion?
If this kind of toxicity were anything to do with autism, though, where was the 19th century plague of autistic children?
You are free to continue talking to yourself and Todd W. about autism and saying bullshit all the while. Please direct me to my assertions regarding autism and teh ebil toxins... and please, do say bullshit some more.
Most vaccine studies involve a new vaccine given as an addition to the existing schedule!
Bullshit, of the stinkiest kind. My fork says this thread is done.
Because if you don't, it would be an admission of defeat. You see, let premise A be: "Mercury causes autism." Premise B is "Mercury was in extremely common use in the late 19th century." If both A and B were true, then the following would be true: "There was a massive surge of autism in the late 19th century." Since that one is false, either A or B, or both, must be false. B is true, we have physical evidence of mercury in teething powders from the time. Therefore, A is false. QED.
susie @ #801:
EXACTLY the response I knew you'd make! Thanks for proving my point again for me susie!
Notice that I never said "all vaccines", rather I said the "childhood vaccines". I know because I was careful to make that point (repeatedly and in more than one post), to differentiate the childhood vaccines that you believe are causing autism (HepB, MMR,etc) from the non-childhood vaccines that typically aren't given until after autism can be diagnosed. You know the childhood vaccines that just earlier you stated that pharma companies were trying to put the Thiomersal back into. Please go back and read my earlier posts if you don't believe me.
I'm still waiting for you to answer my question.
What reasonable study would convince you that just Thiomersal isn't was causes autism?
A vax/unvax study isn't reasonable as was earlier discussed. Such a study would result in preventable death/injury beyond the current standard of care. A true vax/unvax study will also endangers the members of the public that aren't a part of the test. That's not acceptable. I even made a link to an article about why it's not reasonable and suggested in the post that you read it (at #761 when I was responding to calli). I even pointed out why a vax/unvax study isn't even needed to rule out some components from the list of suspects. Again, it was a point that I have made repeatedly on this thread.
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susie @ #811:
Yes...so a chemical used to increase immune response when given in high enough doses (relative to the size of the organism, species may also be a factor) can induce an auto-immune disorder. Not at all surprising, but that says nothing about the levels in vaccines, let alone autism. If you inject someone with enough Thiomersal (about ten thousand times [10,000] times the normal dose) it will poison them and can kill them, that says that you can't give someone too much but it has nothing to do with the much smaller (1/10,000th of lethal) levels administered in a typical vaccine.
Hell, susie, even too much water or oxygen can kill you. Should we fear them too? Maybe it's the dreaded Dihydrogen Monoxide that needs to be removed from vaccines.
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susie:
A true skeptic or scientist can answer what it would take to prove that vaccines cause autism, and wouldn't insist on a test that would knowingly endanger the public. The dogmatist, on the other hand, has trouble answering that question.
Please answer my very simple question....
What reasonable study would convince you that just Thiomersal isn't was causes autism?
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anon @ #819:
With all due respect I think that again (as with myself earlier) that this a case of misunderstanding your intention in your posts. In fact, unless you're a different "anon" I think we had this discussion before on another thread several months back.
In all fairness, when you tend to critique only one side (the pro-vax side) and you are making points that are peripherally related to the main subject of conversation, it tends to lead to misunderstandings of your intent/point.
Please note I'm not claiming that is in any way your intent, but it's any easy mistake to make. I made such a mistake in misunderstanding your intent earlier in this thread. I believe I mentioned (in the other much older thread) that balancing your critiques and being more careful to clarify the ultimate point you are trying to make may help to prevent such misunderstandings.
IMO Todd wasn't likely engaging in goalpost shifting so much as misunderstanding the ultimate thrust of your point. If you and he were openly debating neurological damage in general and then he changed it to autism, then yes I would have to agree that it was goalpost shifting, but that doesn't appear to be the case here.
I hope that helps to straighten things out.
"Bullshit, of the stinkiest kind. My fork says this thread is done."
Yes please, leave. The fewer conspiracy nuts on this blog the more enjoyment I might get out of it. Now please actually follow through and never return. Your lot adds nothing to these discussions but get offended from the slightest nick. You are hypocrites, poor thinkers and a general nuisance.
Then kindly fork off.
@T. Bruce McNeely: re:
What does a MD prescribe for causing coffee to be snorted through the nose?
Thanks for my morning laugh!
Prometheus:
Good call, should have started out differently. Just wanted to get a feel for the knowledge base to help tailor a response.
So, my opinion on âimmune dysfunctionâ and autism, in a nutshell, is that we should continue to allocate funds to research into the neuro-immune paradigm of autism. I think by incorporating the body of research (and this body is growing rapidly)which interrogates the neuro-immune etiology of autism only strengthens ones understanding of the etiology of autism. Integrating this knowledge does not mean that you have to preclude any other research, including the large body of research into the genetics of autism. In fact, understanding the âgeneticsâ of a multigenic disorder such as autism, and I am pretty sure I am agreeing with those here, is a prerequisite to any useful scientific discourse.
Luna writes:
I am not sure if you are trying to dumb this down for me, but, it is rather devoid of much meaning or insight into âgeneticâ basis of autism. It is also not a very accurate description of the nature of a multigenic disorder, which follows a model of genetics X environment X development X sex. At the very least It would facilitate discussion if you could identify those genes and their putative role in normal physiology. It would also be helpful if you had a strong enough understanding of the risk alleles to describe possible epistatic interactions, which would increase susceptibility to altered neurodevelopment. Lastly, it would be a bonus if you could comment on how the interplay of these particular risk alleles with the environment during sensitive periods of brain development impacts the progression of altered neurodevelopment. Like I said I donât want to make any assumptions as to your overall knowledge on the âgenetics of autismâ but what you have written above indicates you may not have the basic conceptual framework necessary to accurately interrogate these issues.
I would be comfortable saying that there is a scientific consensus that Autism is a multigenic disorder, where numerous risk alleles combine with environmental, and developmental factors to produce the particular phenotype observed. Furthermore, this type of model also supports the notion that Autism is heterogenous both phenotypically, and genotypically, an observation borne out of many lines of research. These facts have become established based on the evidence available and IMHO would be difficult to falsify.
Would you find it acceptable, to posit that the etiology of autism follows this particular model of G x E x D x S?
Letâs move on to what I initially had asked about, and I will try to substantiate why I think it is imperative to continue allocating funding to neuro-immunological research into autism.
Letâs look at a series of gene expression profiling studies which interrogate, through different methodologies, the differential expression of genes in autistic tissue samples or cell lines (LCLâs) and controls.
The results may become evident based on the title of this study, but it makes sense to highlight some of the findings and discuss whether the methodology was sound. The Article entitled âImmune transcriptome alterations in the temporal cortex of subjects with autismâ [1] provides evidence that there is a altered gene expression profile in the temporal cortex of subjects with autism compared to controls, indicating a commonality of âimmune system dysfunctionâ amongst the cases compared to controls.
I am going to excerpt some sections of text that are relevant to immune system dysfunction (you should probably read the whole study, I think this one is free access)
First, just to reinforce what I stated above, the authors also opine:
While this is not news to me, it may help persuade some of you to actually become interested enough to start reading literature related to the neuro-immunology of autism. The study I am quoting, used a two-pronged approach to help validate findings, and a multi-faceted statistical analysis of the data (four different stat analyses). The initial research used a microarray analysis to identify differential genetic expression between brain tissue samples from autistic cases and healthy controls, the second prong, was a qPCR analysis to validate the microarray findings. Both the microarray dataset and the qPCR dataset were subject to four different statistical analyses for the following reason:
Further analysis using a literature based research to classify the dysregulated genes based on biological function and GSEA (gene set enrichment analysis) helps elucidate the biological consequences of the observed dysregulation.
As I stated above understanding the biological consequence of the altered transcription or genetic risk allele has a fairly obvious utility, which is why I suggested that doing so would facilitate discussion and also why the authors decided to subject the transcripts to an extensive literature search. However, this method of analysis has a limitation due to subjectivity and therefore further GSEA was performed⦠I hope that it should be obvious that integrating neuro-immune research with any existing knowledge is not going to be detrimental to your overall understanding, but rather will augment any existing understanding you have.
These results support the contention that immune system dysregulation is a central feature of autism, with an emphasis on cytokine signaling pathways, inflammation and innate immune dysfunction. While the results definitively show a trend towards immune system abnormalities, I donât think that we can categorically infer an etiological consequence from these immune differences without further research. In order to understand how immune system dysfunction can contribute to the autism phenotype, one has to explore the exciting field of neuroimmunology and how the immune system functions in normal physiological processes of higher brain function and normal brain development. Basically, it is a paradigm shift and there really is no way around it⦠the immune system is integral to normal brain function and development. This avenue of research is central to understanding how immune system dysfunction translates into a neurodevelopmental disorder, but at the same time is an expansive and highly complex topic. Accordingly, I will just briefly introduce this topic after we parse through the gene expression profiling studies.(in a subsequent post) Lastly, I would like to leave you with a longer excerpt from the discussion which should help stimulate some critical thinking.
Next, I would like to present the results from another independently performed genome wide expression profiling study that further replicates these findings.
The article, âGene expression profiling of lymphoblastoid cell lines from monozygotic twins discordant in severity of autism reveals differential regulation of neurologically relevant genesâ [2], and the research results, also suggest a role for immune system dysfunction in the etiopathogenisis of autism.
In this study the objective was to tease out important patterns of gene expression which may contribute to the degree of the autism phenotype in genetically identical subjects (monozygotic twins) where one of the twins was clinically diagnosed with autism and the other with a diagnosis of ânot quite autistic.â The results indicated that genes relevant to the immune system show the most important differences
The reason I qouted this larger paragraph is because it demonstrates a crucial context to understanding multigenic disorders. For example, here you can see that inflammation (pro-inflammatory cytokine signaling) can have divergent effects on a wide range of biological processes including, as Luna pointed out earlier as one of the putative causes of autism, cell adhesion processes. So, maybe one particular individual may have an SNP related to integrin activity resulting in a transcriptional repression (this could also arise from an alteration in a non coding region of DNA, an alteration in genetic structural variation (CNV) related to integrin, affecting gene dosage and/or an epigenomic alteration such as a hyper/hypo methylated promoter region or abnormal miRNA .) This particular individual may also have an altered âgeneticâ (genetic in parentheses, because it encompasses much more than just a sequence mutation) component related to an inflammatory pathway, which results in an increase transcription of inflammatory mediators, resulting in an epistatic interaction between the DAPK1 risk allele, the inflammatory mediator risk allele and the integrin risk allele, culminating in a substantial suppresion of integrin activity. This is just represents the genes part of G x E x D x S, once you start entering in the environmental context the understanding progresses. For example, what if this individual experienced a prolonged immune insult due to infection, how would this affect the cell adhesion molecule integrin and the overall developmental trajectory? Of course, this is just a hypothetical situation, but it serves well to illustrate how gene gene interactions and gene environment interactions can alter the penetrance of risk alleles.
Ok, onto the next one this article entitled âGene Expression Profiling Differentiates Autism CaseâControls and Phenotypic Variants of Autism Spectrum Disorders: Evidence for Circadian Rhythm Dysfunction in Severe Autismâ[3] this study was generated by the same research lab as the previous study, so the results wouldnât be considered âindependently replicatedâ, but nevertheless, they provide a interesting insight into the etiology of autism and the potential contribution of neural immune interactions. Letâs take a look.
The results further validate their earlier findings, which illustrated a central tendency towards immune dysfunction in the cases compared to controls. Moreover, the finding that there exists a circadian rhythm dysfunction is quite intriguing based on the growing body of evidence which implicates the immune system as a central component of, not only sleep related disorders, but normal circadian rhythm function and normal sleep patterns.
The journal article entitled âNeuroimmunology of the circadian clockâ [4] does a good job summarizing the current research and knowledge associated with the immune system and the circadian clock. An interesting tid bit of information from the research is that the communication between the immune system and the circadian clock is bi-directional. For example, the peripheral immune system can influence the regulation of circadian genes and sleep patterns through various pathways which alter cytokine levels in the brain. On the other hand, lack of sleep can alter the genetic expression of cytokines in peripheral immune cells. The end result of this type of bi-directional communication is a feed forward cycle that may contribute to some of the immune system irregularities seen in Autism. In fact, there have been quite a few studies investigating sleep disturbance prevelance in autism in the recent literature that I have come across.
âGene Expression Profiling of Lymphoblasts from Autistic and Nonaffected Sib Pairs: Altered Pathways in Neuronal Development and Steroid Biosynthesisâ [5] is another study produced by Hu et al. from George Washington school of Medicine (same lab as last two studies) which validates previous findings of altered immunes system transcriptomics in autistic cases compared to controls. I am not going to go through all of the results but here is an excerpt from their conclusion:
Not only are there several genome wide expression profiling studies which point toward a common underlying theme of immune system abormalites, both innate and adaptive, in those with autism, but there are also several lines of clinical and experimental evidence which further substantiate the genetic evidence that the immune system is dysregulated. Moreover, most of the literature recognizes this line of research as contributory to the overall knowledge base. For example, this recent text pertaining to the genetics of Autism entitled: âPathogenesis of autism: a patchwork of genetic causesâ[6] authored by Elena L Grigorenko from the Child Study Center, Department of Psychology, Department of Epidemiology & Public Health, Yale University, has this to say about the immune system and autism:
How exactly are you guys going to tell me that there is no rational basis to examining immune system abnormalities in those who have Autism?
Do you really think that you are smarter or more well informed than all the researchers in the field of neuroimmunology studying their respective field in the context of Autism? Sorry guys, Orac isnât omniscient, he is only humaâ¦. A blinking box of lights or whatever and is fallible.
I have to wonder if the âarrogance of ignoranceâ doesnât also affect some of you, or most of you for that matter. Have you reviewed all the literature pertaining to the immune system and Autism? I doubt it, it seems more likely that most if not all of you havenât a clue about neuroimmunology or its connection to autism, but at the same time are steadfast in your determination that the autism and the immune system are mutually exclusive.
I call this âarrogance of ignorance.â
What do you call it?
What I have written is really just a teaser, just a start to unraveling the complexities of autism and immune involvement. I think I will stop here and let this soak in before I address all of the other lines of evidence which support the premise that immune system dysfunction is a central component of Autism.
References:
[1] Garbett K. et al. Immune transcriptome alterations in the temporal cortex of subjects with autism. Neurobiol Dis. 2008 June ; 30(3): 303â311
[2] Hu VW, et al. Gene expression profiling of lymphoblastoid cell lines from monozygotic twins discordant in severity of autism reveals differential regulation of neurologically relevant genes. BMC Genomics 2006, 7:118
[3] Hu VW, et al. Gene Expression Profiling Differentiates Autism CaseâControls and Phenotypic Variants of Autism Spectrum Disorders: Evidence for Circadian Rhythm Dysfunction in Severe Autism. Autism Res. 2009 April ; 2(2): 78â97.
[4] Coogan AN, et al. Neuroimmunology of the Circadian Clock. Brain Research.2008;1232. p104-112
[5] Hu VW, et al. Gene Expression Profiling of Lymphoblasts from Autistic and Nonaffected Sib Pairs: Altered Pathways in Neuronal Development and Steroid Biosynthesis. PLoS ONE; June 2009 . Volume 4. Issue 6.
[6] Grigorenko E. Pathogenesis of autism: a patchwork of genetic causes. Future Neurol. 2009 ; 4(5): 591â599.
Wow, skeptiquette, good snobbery you've got going there. It flavours the strawmen nicely.
First, yes, I was dumbing it down for you...in your first request, you didn't give a lot of indication you had any real idea of what the research was or what your level of understanding of biology in general might be. I'm still not sure what level of real understanding you have, only that you are capable of copy&paste from real research. Being able to use large words doesn't mean you actually know what you are talking about or that you understand how it fits together; on the contrary, what I have found is that the people who tend to use the biggest words in informal discussion of research are the ones who are trying to baffle with bullshit, and the people who understand it and are trying to get other people to really understand it try to find ways to put it into plain English. Just a thought, you know.
Second, no-one has claimed that autism and the immune system or neuroimmunology are completely separate and cannot possibly have any connection to each other. You state it seems more likely that most if not all of you havenât a clue about neuroimmunology or its connection to autism, but at the same time are steadfast in your determination that the autism and the immune system are mutually exclusive. -- but this comes purely out of your head, not out of what other people have written here. If you actually read what people WRITE, here, you might note that multiple people have pointed out that there is no evidence whatsoever of a link between vaccination and autism, and the idea that people might not be metabolising the TOXINZZ in vaccine shots is nonsense. That still stands.
I will pick apart your references and strawmen further later, but I'm at work right now so it will have to wait a few hours.
@susie
I picked one of those papers at random and read through the materials and methods. They injected a single time with 200-300 ul of 99.8% pure squalene at 0.86 g / ml. That means the rats were injected with between 0.17 g and 0.235 g of squalene.
I'm having issues finding a good average mass for these rats, but a number around 300 g looks to be close. If that's the case, these rats were getting anywhere from 0.05% to 0.08% of their body mass worth of squalene injected.
For human boys at 3 months I see a mass range of 5 kg to 8 kg, so we'll use 6500 g as an average. That means for this to be comparable to whats included in a vaccine, the shot would have to contain between 325 g and 520 g of squalene. TO CAUSE ARTHRITIS.
Now lets take a look at the rat strain they used. DA rats are an inbred line (F77) which are genetically sensitive to the development of arthritis from injections of a number of compounds, including squalene and the ever dangerous collagen. This does not happen in most rat strains. (http://rgd.mcw.edu/tools/strains/strains_view.cgi?id=60997 )
So I picked one paper from your list at random and discovered the following: if you give a genetically susceptible inbred rat an injection of pure squalene several orders of magnitude higher in terms of body mass ratios than a human baby gets during a vaccination it (the rat) develops acute arthritis.
So what was the point again?
@anon
Just pointing out my experience. The majority of people that I run into who are against vaccines are merely repeating the same talking points that AoA and similar groups put out.
Right. And you were responding to my comment about a vax vs. unvax study. I was talking about autism. You admit here that when discussing the vaxed/unvaxed populations you were talking about autism. Your comment regarding animal studies could therefore be construed as being about (animal models of) autism. As Zetetic said, you were unclear. Whether that was intentionally so or not, I can't say.
Here is what I said, in the context of the "vaccines cause autism" issue:
It would appear, then, that once more, your lack of clarity and, indeed, your changing of the subject, leads to misunderstanding. I was continuing on my same thread of questioning when, unknown to me, you decided to head off on a side tack. The failure is therefore yours for not staying on topic.
As I said, it appeared that that was what you were saying. I was not creating a strawman, but trying to interpret your comment as best as I was able. As to a lack of data, I was a bit unclear myself in demanding data showing a causal connection. I should have said that data should be shown that suggests a plausible causal connection. In the absence of such, there is little justification that vaccines should be the primary focus of research into the cause(s) of autism.
And later, you said:
The original commenter was correct, in a fashion. When a new vaccine is developed, the clinical trials performed test the vaccine in conjunction with other vaccines that are likely to be administered at or around the same time. This is following FDA guidelines that products should be tested along with other products that are likely to be used concurrently. The reason for this is to determine if the products interact in a manner that would decrease the efficacy of one or more of the concomittant products or whether the concomitant use would result in a decrease in safety for the patient. If you take a look at package inserts for vaccines, you will typically see a section that discusses the vaccine's use with other vaccines.
Now, it is possible that you meant that there are no single studies investigating the totality of the vaccination schedule. Once again, clarity would probably have helped here. I would agree that there are not, to my knowledge, any individual studies examining the entirety of the vaccine schedule, though there are studies that examine the safety and efficacy of parts of the vaccine schedule.
I was not necessarily disagreeing, but rather expanding on your thought. If an allergice reaction that happens to be caused by a vaccine ingredient is implicated in causing autism, then it stands to reason that all allergic reactions would be implicated as possible causes, since the mechanism of action of an allergic reaction does not necessarily depend on the route of exposure. In other words, if allergic reactions are a possible cause, then investigation should not be limited solely to vaccines, and this line of argumentation is, therefore, not a condemnation of vaccines.
Again, I was extending your thought. If you are arguing that the injection of antigens and adjuvants is a plausible cause of autism (again, as I've been from the beginning, I am sticking to the topic) because it interferes with the development of a baby, then anything that can affect the physical development of a baby is a plausible cause. So why vaccines specifically? Babies breathe in polluted air, which can have a physiologic effect on their development. Infrequent doctor visits can have an impact because things which might have been found and corrected by regular visits may affect physical development. Socioeconomic status can play a role due to either lack of resources, leading to deficiencies in nutrition or other factors, and affluence may introduce products to the home that contain chemicals which cause damage to the developing child. There are many, many other factors that can also affect the physical development of a baby. So again, why a specific focus on vaccines?
I was talking about plausible reasons to focus on vaccines in the context of "vaccines cause autism". You responded with some stuff about how babies are developing. In fact, you said:
I took that in the context of the thread, namely the idea that vaccines cause autism. Now, if you are just concerned that vaccines cause harm beyond the risks already known, and not solely autism, then feel free to provide some evidence to support that idea. It isn't enough to just say "Maybe the vaccine schedule is harming children." There needs to be some reason to suspect that. I could just as easily say "Maybe the global decline in piracy is harming our children." Should I be taken seriously without presenting some reason for my statement?
To be clear, my comments in this thread have all been within the context of the idea that vaccines cause autism. I have asked for evidence that supports such an idea or that suggests that further research into the idea is warranted beyond what has been done already. You have made comments that appear to be within that context, but then later you claim that you were talking about something else. So my question to you is this: Are you being intentionally vague so that you can extricate yourself later, or are you simply unable to stay on topic?
And on a final note:
I'd like to think that I am pretty polite. I generally refrain from name-calling and ad hominems, preferring to stick to the arguments that people are making. There are others who also are generally polite, sticking to the arguments rather than vilifying the person making those arguments. I and others also typically refrain from swearing. So yeah, people are polite on this blog.
skeptiquette @ 836 typifies a polite response. I am impressed, seriously. Thanks for helping keep this civil.
@susie
How's that 30% drop-out rate working for you? Care to comment on how participants/subjects are enrolled in a retrospective study?
Have you pointed out to your anti-vax friends over at AoA, et al., that this criticism of the Italian study is so stupid that it is not even wrong?
Susie is a great example of the well-recognized problem of how clueless people are too clueless to realize they are clueless. For example, even if any of her list of references about squalene had any significance at all (which they don't, but who cares), they would not address the lunacy of her implication that shark liver squalene is bad but human liver squalene is not. So why did she post it? My interpretation is that she doesn't understand what we are criticizing in the first place, and all she is doing is cutting-and-pasting from a standard anti-vax site (come on, Susie, tell us where you found that list)
In terms of the MSG in vaccines, I don't know why she responded to me. Someone else asked if MSG was even in vaccines, and all I said was maybe it is in Chinese vaccines. I can't imagine that joke was too subtle, was it? Unless you don't actually know what MSG is and how it is normally used (maybe I should have added the part that I left out about, how if you get a Chinese vaccine, you need to to come back and get another an hour later?)
But back to squalene. I remember when I first heard about squalene (from anti-vaxxers), my initial response was, "man, if this wasn't a component in vaccines, how many of these loons would be claiming it was a great natural supplement?" Sure enough, it is indeed marketed and sold as a supplement. I'm sure Susie has been a vocal opponent and gone after Big Suppla, right?
(oddly enough, the dosages that people would be ingesting in supplement tablets is actually not far off of those applied in the rat studies described above)
I wonder if anon is the same anon that posted this recently over at AoA:
@Pablo,
It was a subtle joke, and understanding subtleties is not a strong suit of susie. Actually, understanding is not a strong suit of susie.
The "hour later" part is a bad joke. Glad you left it out.
@Todd W.
Don't you love the extrapolation? Overt adverse effects from keeling over and dying? What a perfect example of stupidity. Yes, we do require some measurable effect to detect causation.
Was it really that subtle though? I can't be the only one who immediately thought of Chinese food when she brought up MSG.
No argument there, which is why I left it out in the first place...:-)
Hi Skeptiquette -
Very nicely done. For all practical purposes, the immune component of autism is the Rodney Dangerfield of autism research; giving it any respect is problematic, because at the end of the day, we haven't studied vaccination so much as one vaccine ingredient, and one particular vaccine.
I've read all of the papers you have posted. I appreciate very much your post.
- pD
I didn't make the Chinese food/MSG connection because raising MSG in the first place is incredibly ignorant. FFS, it is a salt of glutamic acid, a natural amino acid. It's present in tiny amounts, and is rapidly absorbed and metabolized.
Next, susie is going to be telling us the dipotassium phosphate in vaccines is harmful.
Skeptiquette--
You asked what our reaction would be if someone asked, without providing evidence in any direction, whether we thought immune dysfunction had a role in autism. We answered. Basically, what I was saying is, if you come in with a hypothesis and no data, my reaction is going to be "where's your data?" I'm not going to start trying to prove your idea. That's your job.
You didn't ask for reactions to specific evidence or studies in favor of such a hypothesis. That might get a different answer.
Next, susie is going to be telling us the dipotassium phosphate in vaccines is harmful.
Well, we don't really know for sure, do we?
If the pro-vaccine people would just do a dipotassium-phosphated-versus-undipotassium-phosphated study, that would settle the issue once and for all.
Hi Prometheus -
Good question. I have some ideas on why this is a big over simplification and some studies that may point a direction.
This analogy allows no room for a time sensitive component. The biggest increase in our shot schedule has occurred in at the earliest time frames, the two, four, and six month well visits. This is an area with absolutely zero research on vacccination, only thimerosal presence or absence. It also happens, as pointed out by Stephen Novella, it is the timeframe when many children with autism begin a developmental regression; though a subtle loss of skills, as opposed to a drastic deterioration.
While a child that got one of the diseases we vaccinate against earlier than six months would face a dire situation, that is no reason to ignore a time sensitive component to our analysis.
In Postnatal Inflammation Increases Seizure Susceptibility in Adult Rats, Galic showed that a single, transientory inflammatory increase in tnf-alpha could dispose rodents to be more seizure prone into adulthood, and that this effect was time dependent. From Galic:
Another study, Early-life immune challenge: defining a critical window for effects on adult responses to immune challenge, by Spencer, reported:
There are several other studies involvin difficult to predict behavioral, and immune changes as a result of early life activation of the innate immune response. A good review of many of these is Early-Life Programming of Later-Life Brain and Behavior: A Critical Role for the Immune System, by Bilbo 2009, that speculates on mechanisms by which early life infection can have long term effects.
We have several studies telling us that people with autism have an exaggerated innate immune response compared to their peers without that diagnosis. Excepting Enstrom 2009, wherein a particular TLR (TLR9) showed a reduced innate immune response, I'm not sure of other hypo-responsive papers regarding an inflammatory response. Regarding hypo-responsiveness, I understand correctly, (?) the Enstrom 2009 paper you referenced indicated a reduced cytotoxic capacity in children with autism, which is a bit different than the type of thing I'm describing above.
Secondly, we are beginning to understand that when we evaluate the robustness of the innate immune response to a single bacterial or viral pathogen, versus several pathgoens simultaenously, the resulting cytokine profile increases synergistically, as opposed to additively. For an example, see, "Toll-like receptor ligands synergize through distinct dendritic cell pathways to induce T cell responses: Implications for vaccines" (Zhu, 2008). Todays vaccine schedule goes to a lot of trouble to toggle a lot of TLRs all at once, and because of this, it seems a bit of an over simplification to compare the Hib-Hep-B-Polio-DTP shot schedule at two months with catching one of these diseases at that time. One thing is for certain, we don't have any measurements of the robustness of the innate immune response for today's schedule in a pediatric population; the assumption has always been that a challenge without actual virulence of the pathgoen was harmless, excepting the immediately obvious signs such as seizures, and death.
We have taken a set of children predisposed to create exaggerated innate immune responses and gradually increased the number, and strengths, of immune challenges they experience at the earliest stages of life. This is a big, big change in how we have evolved.
- pD
Hi Skeptiquette -
Your post on Garbett and Hu got me thinking to something that struck me when I read those papers; I'd be interested in your thoughts on it. (or anyones).
It looked to me that on a numerical basis, Hu and Garbett had opposite findings in terms of how many genes were overexpressed in the groups; i.e., Garbett found more genes that were overexpressed in autism, and Hu found fewer genes overexpressed in autism. The two studies, were, of course, using peripheral versus CNS tissue samples, and I'm not nearly up to speed sufficiently to understand if sample choices could have been a factor here. It is salient to this discussion, I think, that in both cases, genes involving inflammation were overexpressed.
Anyways, do you have any ideas on this?
Thanks.
- pD
@843
Pablo
No, your weren't. :)
@836
Skeptiquette
I appreciated your post. I am really curious (of course) about the subject. I am going to try to look through the studies cited today.
I try to be polite, I really do. And I don't usually comment when there is something that seems plausible to me (like your comment) until I find more information.
I know why parents of autistic children seeking information are so easily fooled, because I am one. When something is worded well, and feeds into my emotions, it is natural inclination to want to believe it. The reason I am here is because this site, and most of those who comment here give me the explanations I seek. The best part is that the points are "dumbed down" just enough for me to understand, but not so much as to make me feel stupid (I have some knowledge).
When the subject turns to autistic children being "sick", "damaged", "destroyed" or otherwise not good enough, I get angry. I am not welcomed into most online support groups because I doubt their message, and I don't agree that my son is not good enough because he is different. So I have a very emotional response to these same people coming here and injecting their rhetoric into the discussion.
I have said things on past posts that I regret, I am learning every day, but isn't that's the point of science, one needs to recognize being wrong; adapt, grow and learn.
...just a very fast note to say I have not deserted this thread....
Sorry about not getting back in here last night. Working my way through some papers and gene databases -- glad to see the conversation continues to be interesting, the bad part is that this means there's more to catch up on. :(
Skeptiquette, a few thoughts.
In post 666, you said,
First, you are right, I did specifically say "no link between autism, immune disfunction, or vaccination" -- let me clarify, I meant that (and I apologise if I left out this vital clarification in the first instance, and merely assumed it), I do not see a causal link between immune disfunction and autism, although I suppose the possibility exists that there is a coincident link. It is entirely possible that the genetics which cause autism can also have effects in the immune system; rather than "A causes B", where A is immune system disfunction and B is autism, this would be more "both A and B are caused by C", where C is a genetic condition.
Nor, since you were specifically referring to points of susie's and stating that we needed to discuss a possible role of vaccines, have I seen any indication in primary literature that immune disfunction is such that vaccines pose a danger to these kids, or increase their risk of autism.
I'm not moving goal posts, I was responding very specifically to your implication -- what appeared to me to be your CLEAR implication -- that immune system meant that vaccines were injuring children causing autism. IF that isn't what you meant, then please clarify it now.
Then, you stated that WE are claiming -- and these are your exact words -- your determination that the autism and the immune system are mutually exclusive.
Nobody said that autism and the immune system are "mutually exclusive." That can't be determined. But refer back to "no causal link" again, please. Once again, no matter what you think of the biology, there are issues which make the implication of vaccines extremely unlikely -- to wit, the fact that fully vaccinated populations are statistically absolutely no more likely to develop autism than unvaccinated or less vaccinated ones. However, as noted, there still might be abnormalities of the immune system. This situation is possible even though vaccinated/unvaccinated makes no difference, because the "assault" of vaccines on the immune system is genuinely far smaller and less traumatic than the assault of illness. So either the vaccines are not enough to cause permanent physiological damage in autistic children with compromised immune systems (if autistic children do indeed have compromised immune systems), or else the damage caused by normal childhood illnesses even or especially in unvaccinated children swamps any signal that vaccines might have. Either of those is more likely than the idea that vaccines cause more damage than not vaccinated, given genuine prevalence rates of autism in different populations.
As a side note, If mine was too complex because I used too many âbig wordsâ -- no, no, feel free to use big words with me too if you really feel like it. What I was trying to get at was simply that using big words was not necessarily an indication of understanding (or of correct interpretation, for that matter), and that it isn't an automatic indication of knowledge. If you "get" what I was getting at, fine.
Right,
Autism is heterogenous both phenotypically, and genotypically
...I think this falls into the "no SHIT, Sherlock" category. Really.
genetics X environment X development X sex
In general, possibly to probably -- the open question is to what, if any, degree does "environment" and "development" contribute to the etiology. Autism is very obviously sex-skewed, and the point is that we are finding genetic alleles strongly linked with autism, but what hasn't been identified are particular aspects of environment which either probably or definitely contribute (except in those cases where another disease's progression has damaged neurobiology), or how. Also, perhaps it would be useful if you could clarify exactly what you mean by "development" as a contributing factor. I mean this seriously: in the context of autism, what do you mean by "development" as a contributing factor to the aetiology, as opposed to "this disorder affects development"?
if [I] had a strong enough understanding of the risk alleles to describe possible epistatic interactions
F*** me, you don't want much, do you -- this is not so much a blog comment you're asking for as a thesis project. Or a full-blown fully-funded 5-10 year lab project, complete with grad students to do the scutwork. This is just about the most wide-open part of the genetic investigation going on. As it stands, I can make a few comments, but the research on it the gene interactions is really just getting started and there is quite a lot not done yet, and environmental interactions are second even to that -- and I kind of think it's a problem that you're giving us the impression that you want DEFINITE ANSWERS, NOW, OR WE CAN'T BE CONSIDERED EDUCATED ABOUT IT. Maybe you don't actually mean to implicate vaccines, either, in which case I apologise, but that is kind of how this comes across -- as the argument that because we don't know everything we can't know anything, again, and cannot possibly eliminate the involvement of vaccines...or perhaps it's just that you are trying to impress us that you know SO MUCH MORE than we all do. Heh. Am I misconstruing your statement that we are so obviously not up on neuroimmunology?
Anyway, I got sucked into looking at gene databases when I started looking again at the EIF4E gene last night, and this IS taking me a while. I would like to come back with something substantial on that side, but I would also like to be correct and I don't necessarily trust my memory with this.
Hi Luna the Cat -
Can I hop in?
I'd be curious on your thoughts regarding the variety of studies that show correlations between autism behavioral severity and measures of immune function; specifically, a propensity towards either inflammation, or propensity towards problems controlling inflammation and more severe autistic behaviors.
Specifically, in "Macrophage Migration Inhibitory Factor and Autism Spectrum Disorders" (Grigorenko, 2008) found that as plasma levels of MIF increased, so did autism severity. From Grigorenko:
Note that importance of a time sensitive component to the hypothesis and consider how this may relate to my posting above regarding critical windows during which innate immune system disturbances can have long lasting effects.
The authors aren't proclaiming that there is necessarily a link between innate immunity, but they do think that it is a reasonable question with supporting evidence. Maybe you don't feel this way. (?)
Recently, a paper from Italy also found correlations between autism severity and innate immune system factors, specfically HMGB1, "Increased serum levels of high mobility group box 1 protein in patients with autistic disorder" (Emanuele, 2010). Though a relatively short paper when compared to Grigorenko, it still found that as plasma levels of HMGB1 increased, so did autistic behavioral severity.
If we look in the other direction, cytokines responsible for controlling inflammation, we can see an inverse relationship, the less we have, the more severe the autistic behaviors, "Decreased transforming growth factor beta1 in autism: A potential link between
immune dysregulation and impairment in clinical behavioral outcomes" (Ashwood, 2008).
Again, we have references to critical windows of development, and in this case, data implicating reduced ability to regulate an immune response with autism severity.
Now, I'd admit that this isn't enough to prove a causal link, but to my mind, it raises a lot of questions. We can probably theorize on mechanisms by which there are coincidental means allow us to find phantom relationships in both directions of an immune response in terms of autism severity, but shouldn't we have better reasons that the expediency of not asking tough questions as reasons to do so?
This situation is possible even though vaccinated/unvaccinated makes no difference, because the "assault" of vaccines on the immune system is genuinely far smaller and less traumatic than the assault of illness.
I'd be interested in your thoughts concerning time dependent effects of some of the studies I posted above; very, very few children would get even a single vaccine preventable disease before two months, but they are vaccinated against a great number of them at that age. I'm not sure we can perform apples to apples comparisons between the two and reach conclusions with any certainty. In an extremely complicated system like the developing immune system, it confuses me how over simplifications like this, or alternatively, antigen counting, have become useful metrics of anything. Do you believe that the time of an infection is important in this type of discussion?
Can you provide a reference for an unvaccinated population which has had autism rates measured? Can you provide any references except the MMR?
- pD
Passionlessdrone--
The point here isn't that correlation is not causation. It's that, in this case, even if there's a correlation between immune problems and autism, that doesn't mean immune problems cause autism. It could be that autism somehow causes immune problems. Or that they are both caused by the same thing.
For example, there is a correlation between lung cancer rates and stroke rates. That doesn't mean that lung cancer causes strokes, or vice versa. It's because cigarette smoking can cause both of these problems.
It may be that the genes that cause/predispose to autism also cause immune problems. Or they might be located close enough to genes for immune function that they tend to turn up in the same people.
I am kind of sad susie has not come back to address the points that were raised. I guess I am just a sadist who enjoys seeing someone getting eviscerated a little bit too much.
Does anyone know where she got her list of "the evils of squalene" references? I am pretty confident she didn't come up with them herself.
No doubt she's furiously looking for differences between shark and human squalene. That's ok, once she does that I'll ask about plant-derived squalene which is being touted as a replacement since it doesn't require harvesting shark livers.
@Pablo
Travis noted further upthread that the list appears to be from a document at vaclib.org. Just highlight part of the list and do a google search of it in quotes.
Sorry, I missed Travis's note. It's been a long thread.
As Viki already pointed out in regards to the autism/immune dysfunction hypothesis, changes in gene expression that effects one trait often has other effects on other traits that aren't immediately obvious. For example the genetic changes that make cave fish blind also causes that an increase in their mid-line sensory organs. In the case of the cave fish it happens to be a beneficial change (for fish that live exclusively in the dark), but other changes in gene expression can have multiple negative effects.
Therefore even with the assumption (for the sake of argument) that autism is caused solely by genetics, it in no way would rule out an accompanying immune dysfunction.
Without further research evidence we are left with deciding against protecting against a known and measurable risk (protecting against disease), versus an assumed and unmeasured risk (the vague possibility that vaccines might somehow be triggering autism) when there are other possible (and arguably more likely) causes.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
@ Travis:
The three most likely possibilities:
1) susie is too busy.
2) susie lost interest after realising that just preaching the holy word of Jenny McCarthy and J.B. Handley isn't effective at converting a group of people that practice skepticism towards her talking points.
3) susie is still waiting on the forums of AoA and GenRes for what to say next.
...or susie got tired of getting her a$$ kicked on a repeated and frequent basis.
Todd W.
Do you have a citation for your assertion that there is a global decline in piracy? My impression is that has been increasing lately which could pose problems for the Pastafarian beliefs about global warming.
Hi Vicki -
Thank you for pointing this out to me. Unfortunately, I'm not sure it is very useful in the context of this discussion. We don't really know what causes the overwhelming majority of autism cases.
For example, consider the Grigorenko paper, "Macrophage Migration Inhibitory Factor And Autism Spectrum Disorders" that I referenced above. In this study there were over 1000 participants, and it included behavorial diagnosis, genotyping, and plasma measurements. That's a big study, and one that cost a lot of time, and dollars to complete. It was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health. Here was their hypothesis:
Thus, the central hypothesis underlying this research was that a genetic predisposition to a particular level of MIF production may lead to a proinflammatory profile of cell activation that, if present during a neurodevelopmentally sensitive period, might contribute to the etiopathogenesis of autism.
They were looking for a genetic predisposition that led to a specific immunological profile that contributed to autism. Now we have to ask ourselves, do the researchers from America, Russia, and the Netherlands understand the concept of correlation and causation? Do the people that funded this study understand this concept? One option is that they do not, and even though there was nothing to learn from a study like this, no one involved with the study realized that their effort was futile. The other option is that they do understand correlation and causation, and that because we really don't know what casues autism, there was sufficient reason to perform this very time consuming and expensive experiement, the premise of which was looking for an immunological profile. Which do you feel is more likely?
Likewise, the Vargas paper, "Neuroglial Activation and Neuroinflammation in the Brains of Patients with Autism" used a lot of very difficult to obtain resources, brains from deceased people with autism, and again received partial funding from the NIH.
This was their hypothesis:
Why spend all the effort involved with this paper if there wasn't something to be learned? Why have nearly 300 other papers cited Vargas its findings are so tainted by a simple correlation versus causation problem? How much of the autism researcher community should we really believe fails to understand the concepts of correlation and causation?
A few months ago, researchers found that among children with Fragile-X, those with autism and those without had distinct immunological profiles. "Plasma cytokine profiles in Fragile X subjects: Is there a role for cytokines in the pathogenesis?" (Ashwood, 2010) Here we have one of the most widely accepted genetic causes of autism, and we find that, perhaps by coincidence, those children have immunological biomarkers that identify autism and fragile-x, and fragile-x without autism.
I certainly believe it is possible that the findings of abnormal immune function in autism are coincidental, but the fact that some things are coincidental isn't enough of a reason to start discounting our available evidence. I am treating the question of immunological causation as an open question with a lot of evidence to support the idea, are you?
- pD
passionlessDrone,
I would suggest actually reading Vargas et al., rather than just the abstract. Their conclusions are a lot more nuanced and conditional than you've presented. They readily state that their study doesn't address whether the signs of inflammation they found are a contributing cause to autism or whether they are instead caused by autism.
Also, I wish they had given their data in a less "processed" form, considering that 13 of their 15 autistic brain tissue samples came from subjects who also had mental retardation. It would have been interesting to see if the subjects without mental retardation differed from the others. Also, since many disorders of the CNS involve neuroinflammation, it's not really surprising that people with autism and comorbid CNS disorders show neuroinflammation.
Hi nsrib -
I've read Vargas, but I do appreciate your message, and I don't have any problem with nuance. I am no stranger to the argument that it is possible that neuroinflammation is a coincident, or, that in fact, there is a possibility that the neuroinflammation is, at least in part, benificial.
I've got to say, however, considering what we are learning about innate immune participation in seizures, which are highly co-morbid with an autism diagnosis, a strictly benificial component of neuroinflammation is a difficult case to defend.
But the bigger problem with this argument is that our immunological findings in autism are a lot bigger than just Vargas. Not only do we need to find a mechanism by which the neuroinflammation observed in Vargas is caused by autism, but we also need to find a way that more MIF is caused by autism (and, along the way, that having the MIF promoter allele is caused by autism), and that having less TGF-B1 is caused by autism, and that having autism casues your to respond in an exaggerated fashion to agonists for TLR2 and TLR4. While all of these things are possible, the fact that graphs of pirate attacks inversely correspond to global warming isn't necessarily a good reason to assume that they are. I'm treating this as an open question.
Your thoughts concerning mental retardation are a good one, and in fact, I was very surprised to find that I simply could not find anything in the literature regarding even looking for an immune component in the CNS of people with MR. I think this would be interesting information to evaluate. What are your thoughts on the Fragile-X study I referenced above? Fragile-X is the most common pathway to mental retardation, and yet, it seems to have a different immunological profile than Fragile-X and autism, though, of course, CNS measurements were not available.
As far as the widespread presence of neuroinflammation in a variety of CNS disorders, I think that speaks directly towards a participatory role of the immune system in these disorders. The alternative is that many of our CNS disorders have disparate causes that somehow, coincidentally, create a state of neuroinflammation.
- pD
@Militant Agnostic
I'm just asking questions. Maybe it's the decline in Caribbean piracy. Or too many pirates, too soon in the Somali area. Or that they use automatic weapons. Or that their boats contain antifreeze!
@ Todd W:
No! It's the dangerous levels of both Sodium Chloride and Dihydrogen Monoxide (dangerous chemicals both) in the sea water! Don't forget that there are fetal cells in the ocean too!
To protect the environment something must be done about these dangerous substances in the ocean!
;-)
The benismymom-Sue M antivax hissing cockroaches are antivax. Back under your rocks, ladies. There you can take the time necessary to open your minds to science and reason so you don't miss the part about Wakers being a fraud... or you can keep posting your little hopes and dreams on AoA and ABMD to the willing 10's of like-minded lemmings.
Ah. Herein lies, perhaps, one part of the key to the puzzle of autism: heredity. As the more fervent anti-vaxers seem to find themselves somewhere on that scale, at least to this layman, maybe some of them also are closet autists, unwilling to admit the possibility of having given their kid the same or worse genetic setup.
Sorry for the late response to this monster debate. I only now got to #279 or wherever that bright spot was.
The benismymom-Sue M antivax hissing cockroaches are antivax. Back under your rocks, ladies. There you can take the time necessary to open your minds to science and reason so you don't miss the part about Wakers being a fraud... or you can keep posting your little hopes and dreams on AoA and ABMD to the willing 10's of like-minded lemmings.
The benismymom-Sue M antivax hissing cockroaches are antivax. Back under your rocks, ladies. There you can take the time necessary to open your minds to science and reason so you don't miss the part about Wakers being a fraud... or you can keep posting your little hopes and dreams on AoA and ABMD to the willing 10's of like-minded lemmings.
The benismymom-Sue M antivax hissing cockroaches are antivax. Back under your rocks, ladies. There you can take the time necessary to open your minds to science and reason so you don't miss the part about Wakers being a fraud... or you can keep posting your little hopes and dreams on AoA and ABMD to the willing 10's of like-minded lemmings.
Really all this clever stuff in this blog but I have taken note of some of your previous comments and I have checked and rechecked and brought my data up to date etc., and I more convinced than ever that causation and association are not the same thing but I do not believe that there are any unvaccinated autistic people at all! So what should I make of that?
The disappearance of Poul Thorsen and the recent disclosure that in some no-link studies that kids who seemed to be autistic before getting the MMR were counted as unvaccinated simply strengthens my case. Many US mothers told me their kids were not vaccinated but then admitted that they thought I was only referring to the MMR.
Some kids may be damaged by Rhogam and even dental amalgams but I will take a bet that vaccination per se is the problem.
Tony Bateson, Oxford, UK.
You are an idiot. You've been told about several children, including Kim Stagliano's youngest, who have never had any vaccines and are autistic. Don't try to back up and say "oh, they only thought it was the MMR"!
Seriously, dude, it is like you have the same memory as water.
Yes, I'm pretty sure that Kim Stagliano wasn't just confused and thought only the MMR was a vaccine. The infamous Generation Rescue phone survey also turned up a number of unvaccinated autistics; it is curious, then, that Bateson would call people who generally agree with him either idiots or liars, though curiously, that is what many others would call them, for entirely different reasons.
On the other hand, it just shows that Bateson is a typical anti-vaxxer, in that he's willing to throw anybody under the bus if they happen to present an inconvenient bit of evidence.
"Allow me to congratulate you, sir. You have the most totally closed mind I have ever encountered."
-- the 3rd Doctor
I am definitely stealing that(although it is ineffective against homeopaths).
Take note that in this discussion, Bateson was told:
So his claim about what he was been told is either a lie, or he may be suffering from some kind of persistent memory loss disorder. I vote that he is a clueless git.
From what I gather from his posts on other blogs, particularly LBRB, Bateson will not accept anyone as unvaccinated and autistic unless he has confirmed it by seeing their medical records.
Why anyone would want to do this, I have no idea.
Firstly, why would anyone want to show their personal medical records to a stranger with no medical credentials? Secondly, if you did not vaccinate your child, you probably do not have a strong desire to prove to the world that unvaccinated children can still get autism.
In addition, he has stated that unvaccinated children born to parents with dental amalgams (or, apparently, mothers who got Rhogam) don't coun't either.
It has been pointed out to Mr. Bateson that the number of unvaccinated individuals in a population would be exceedingly small by chance alone, approximately .003% (~0.3% of children being unvaccinated x 1% chance of being autistic - do correct me if my calculations are off) of the population.
He has countered by arguing that he has it on some kind of authority through a personal contact that the completely unvaccinated population in England is much higher, though I have not seen any evidence.
Factor in the dental amalgams and the lack of desire to hand over medical records, and it is not at all surprising that Mr. Bateson has never personally met a qualifying autistic child.
I think I will copy this to a text file and just post it up every time I come across his drivel.
There are also people who believe the purple furry spiders are eating their skin. Their belief is, unfortunately, less ludicrous than yours.
I've come to the conclusion that Tony is either a deliberate liar, or profoundly mentally ill.
"Tony Bateson" @868:
You know, I don't believe that your name is really Tony (or Anthony or Antonia or Antonio) or Bateson, or that you've ever lived within 10 kilometers of Oxford. I suspect you of being one of the reptilian extraterrestrials.
"I don't believe that" isn't a scientific argument, especially when it requires you to accuse just about everyone of lying, and forget evidence as soon as it's presented to you. It's not even a good approach in most day-to-day business: if you assume most people are lying most of the time, sooner or later you'll be hit by a bus because you ignored the sign that warned of traffic, or die because you treated healthy food as poison or vice versa. When a B-movie actor advised us to "trust, but verify," the point was that verification is possible, not that everything you hear or know is false.
Slightly whimsical observation: though that certain B-movie actor turned politician heavily popularized the expression in the West, it actually originated among his adversaries. It's actually an old Russian proverb.
"I do not believe that there are any unvaccinated autistic people at all! So what should I make of that?... The disappearance of Poul Thorsen and the recent disclosure that in some no-link studies that kids who seemed to be autistic before getting the MMR were counted as unvaccinated simply strengthens my case."
The only report of Thorsen "disappearing" stated specifically that he "vanished IN MARCH 2009." The reporter who made that claim was Jane Burgemeister, who apparently corresponds with the notorious conspiracy theorists Len Horowitz and David Icke. Other investigators easily documented his public activities long after that time; I personally documented that twenty papers had been published in his name up to a year after his alleged "disappearance". In any event, Thorsen's resignation of several positions AFTER it was claimed he was missing was sufficient to refute that claim.
As for unvaccinated autistics, even Dan Olmsted's highly questionable "Amish Anomaly" story acknowledged some such individuals. What is your justification for not believing HIM?
This blog post went up on March 12, 2010.
The discussion went on for quite a long time but finally petered out in April, regular commenting ending on April 4 with one straggler comment showing up on April 26.
Absolutely nothing happened on this thread in May.
So, why does Tony "Don't Bother Me With Facts" Bateson wait until halfway through June to post on this thread the tiresome canard he posts everywhere about there supposedly being no unvaccinated autistic persons?? A month and a half at the minimum after everyone else is done commenting here?
I think the answer is that Tony Bateson was afraid of encountering exactly what he did encounter: people who could demolish his ridiculous claims and could point out how often he has been notified of the counter-examples to the claims he makes everywhere, which makes him a liar to keep making those claims.
He's like the guy who sneaks into a stadium after hours, gets up on the pitcher's mound, hurls baseball after baseball until three of them chance to go over the very empty home plate - and then he tells people "Oh, yeah, I pitched a no-hitter at Yankee Stadium!!" In just the same way Tony Bateson traipses around the Internet claiming "I have never seen any evidence that anyone unvaccinated has autism!" "Well, Mr. Bateson, perhaps I can show you --" "OH HEY I JUST REMEMBERED A REALLY IMPORTANT APPOINTMENT LET ME RUN THIS WAY IT IS A COINCIDENCE THAT MY HANDS ARE OVER MY EARS"
Robert Kennedy Jr is just another spoiled kennedy brat he uses oil and fuel while berating everybody over this oil spill what he needs isa swift kick in his spoiled little kennedy backside
The benismymom-Sue M antivax hissing cockroaches are antivax. Back under your rocks, ladies. There you can take the time necessary to open your minds to science and reason so you don't miss the part about Wakers being a fraud... or you can keep posting your little hopes and dreams on AoA and ABMD to the willing 10's of like-minded lemmings.
Really all this clever stuff in this blog but I have taken note of some of your previous comments and I have checked and rechecked and brought my data up to date etc., and I more convinced than ever that causation and association are not the same thing but I do not believe that there are any unvaccinated autistic people at all! So what should I make of that?
The disappearance of Poul Thorsen and the recent disclosure that in some no-link studies that kids who seemed to be autistic before getting the MMR were counted as unvaccinated simply strengthens my case. Many US mothers told me their kids were not vaccinated but then admitted that they thought I was only referring to the MMR.
Some kids may be damaged by Rhogam and even dental amalgams but I will take a bet that vaccination per se is the problem.
Tony Bateson, Oxford, UK.
The benismymom-Sue M antivax hissing cockroaches are antivax. Back under your rocks, ladies. There you can take the time necessary to open your minds to science and reason so you don't miss the part about Wakers being a fraud... or you can keep posting your little hopes and dreams on AoA and ABMD to the willing 10's of like-minded lemmings.
Really all this clever stuff in this blog but I have taken note of some of your previous comments and I have checked and rechecked and brought my data up to date etc., and I more convinced than ever that causation and association are not the same thing but I do not believe that there are any unvaccinated autistic people at all! So what should I make of that?
The disappearance of Poul Thorsen and the recent disclosure that in some no-link studies that kids who seemed to be autistic before getting the MMR were counted as unvaccinated simply strengthens my case. Many US mothers told me their kids were not vaccinated but then admitted that they thought I was only referring to the MMR.
Some kids may be damaged by Rhogam and even dental amalgams but I will take a bet that vaccination per se is the problem.
Tony Bateson, Oxford, UK.
The benismymom-Sue M antivax hissing cockroaches are antivax. Back under your rocks, ladies. There you can take the time necessary to open your minds to science and reason so you don't miss the part about Wakers being a fraud... or you can keep posting your little hopes and dreams on AoA and ABMD to the willing 10's of like-minded lemmings.
Really all this clever stuff in this blog but I have taken note of some of your previous comments and I have checked and rechecked and brought my data up to date etc., and I more convinced than ever that causation and association are not the same thing but I do not believe that there are any unvaccinated autistic people at all! So what should I make of that?
The disappearance of Poul Thorsen and the recent disclosure that in some no-link studies that kids who seemed to be autistic before getting the MMR were counted as unvaccinated simply strengthens my case. Many US mothers told me their kids were not vaccinated but then admitted that they thought I was only referring to the MMR.
Some kids may be damaged by Rhogam and even dental amalgams but I will take a bet that vaccination per se is the problem.
Tony Bateson, Oxford, UK.
The benismymom-Sue M antivax hissing cockroaches are antivax. Back under your rocks, ladies. There you can take the time necessary to open your minds to science and reason so you don't miss the part about Wakers being a fraud... or you can keep posting your little hopes and dreams on AoA and ABMD to the willing 10's of like-minded lemmings.
Really all this clever stuff in this blog but I have taken note of some of your previous comments and I have checked and rechecked and brought my data up to date etc., and I more convinced than ever that causation and association are not the same thing but I do not believe that there are any unvaccinated autistic people at all! So what should I make of that?
The disappearance of Poul Thorsen and the recent disclosure that in some no-link studies that kids who seemed to be autistic before getting the MMR were counted as unvaccinated simply strengthens my case. Many US mothers told me their kids were not vaccinated but then admitted that they thought I was only referring to the MMR.
Some kids may be damaged by Rhogam and even dental amalgams but I will take a bet that vaccination per se is the problem.
Tony Bateson, Oxford, UK.
The benismymom-Sue M antivax hissing cockroaches are antivax. Back under your rocks, ladies. There you can take the time necessary to open your minds to science and reason so you don't miss the part about Wakers being a fraud... or you can keep posting your little hopes and dreams on AoA and ABMD to the willing 10's of like-minded lemmings.
Really all this clever stuff in this blog but I have taken note of some of your previous comments and I have checked and rechecked and brought my data up to date etc., and I more convinced than ever that causation and association are not the same thing but I do not believe that there are any unvaccinated autistic people at all! So what should I make of that?
The disappearance of Poul Thorsen and the recent disclosure that in some no-link studies that kids who seemed to be autistic before getting the MMR were counted as unvaccinated simply strengthens my case. Many US mothers told me their kids were not vaccinated but then admitted that they thought I was only referring to the MMR.
Some kids may be damaged by Rhogam and even dental amalgams but I will take a bet that vaccination per se is the problem.
Tony Bateson, Oxford, UK.
The benismymom-Sue M antivax hissing cockroaches are antivax. Back under your rocks, ladies. There you can take the time necessary to open your minds to science and reason so you don't miss the part about Wakers being a fraud... or you can keep posting your little hopes and dreams on AoA and ABMD to the willing 10's of like-minded lemmings.
Really all this clever stuff in this blog but I have taken note of some of your previous comments and I have checked and rechecked and brought my data up to date etc., and I more convinced than ever that causation and association are not the same thing but I do not believe that there are any unvaccinated autistic people at all! So what should I make of that?
The disappearance of Poul Thorsen and the recent disclosure that in some no-link studies that kids who seemed to be autistic before getting the MMR were counted as unvaccinated simply strengthens my case. Many US mothers told me their kids were not vaccinated but then admitted that they thought I was only referring to the MMR.
Some kids may be damaged by Rhogam and even dental amalgams but I will take a bet that vaccination per se is the problem.
Tony Bateson, Oxford, UK.
The benismymom-Sue M antivax hissing cockroaches are antivax. Back under your rocks, ladies. There you can take the time necessary to open your minds to science and reason so you don't miss the part about Wakers being a fraud... or you can keep posting your little hopes and dreams on AoA and ABMD to the willing 10's of like-minded lemmings.