electron microscopy

A co-author of an antivax study attacks Orac for criticizing it. Hilarity ensues

oracknows — Tue, 07 Feb 2017 02:47:34 +0000

A co-author of an antivax study attacks Orac for criticizing it. Hilarity ensues

I wasn't planning on revisiting this topic, but sometimes a blogger's gotta do what a blogger's gotta do. You'll see what I mean in a minute. But before you do, I'll just provide a bit of background. Last week, I came across one of those truly awful antivaccine studies that gets the old Insolence flowing, this time a mix of the Respectful and not-so-Respectful. I'm referring, of course, to a paper that I came across as I was spending some time delving into the deeper darker parts of antivaccine social media. It was a study by Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari in the International Journal of Vaccines and Vaccination entitled New Quality-Control Investigations on Vaccines: Micro- and Nanocontamination, which led to an article being circulated in antivaccine circles by the Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute (CMSRI), an group made up mainly of antivaccine cranks, in an article entitled Dirty Vaccines: New Study Reveals Prevalence of Contaminants. Suffice to say, I laid down the not-so-Respectful Insolence that this awful, awful paper deserved, and didn't plan on revisiting the topic, even though I learned some things about the authors and thought of some additional issues with the study that I hadn't thought of the first time I discussed it.

Well, leave it to one of the authors to provide me with an opportunity—nay, an obligation—to do each of those things. Let's just put it this way. One of the authors, Stefano Montanari, is not happy with me. Not at all. Even though his primary language is Italian, that didn't stop him from trying to rebut my criticisms in two languages in an entry called Sono troppo forti per me. I was amused right from the beginning:

Naively foreign to the subject, the author of the mess begins badly, showing not only that he hasn’t got the faintest notion of what is declared to be actually contained in vaccines but that he ignores even one of the basic principles of classical toxicology: the different pollutants (that the author hastens to define “harmless”) exert a mutually synergistic activity. Well: even the most culturally backward toxicologist knows that in his field hardly ever two plus two equals four but equals very often a higher number. And he knows also that the higher the number of addenda, the farther from the arithmetic sum and the less predictable is the result. When, then, Mr. Orac, whoever is hidden behind the pseudonym, thinks back of Paracelsus, he exhibits without shame his being foreign to the pathologies caused by micro- and nanoparticles.

Ah, yes. That didn't take long. It always amuses me when I'm attacked because I use a pseudonym, given that my real identity is one of the worst kept "secrets" in the blogosphere. I do admit that, from time to time, I've been tempted to drop the 'nym, but somehow never do. I think it's just pure cussedness. (Also, I like the Orac 'nym.) Be that as it may, these days, I like to think of the 'nym as an intelligence test. If you complain about the 'nym and are too stupid or lazy to figure out who I really am, you fail.

Be that as it may, I am not unaware of the possibility of "synergistic toxicity." However, contrary to what Montanari seems to think, it's not as common a phenomenon. More importantly, if you're going to invoke "synergistic toxicity" in the context of vaccines, it would behoove you to—oh...I don't know—actually demonstrate any toxicity first, something Montanari's paper utterly failed to do.

I also couldn't help but think that the whole part about "micro- and nanoparticles" was starting to resemble a couple of things. For one, homeopaths like to invoke "nanoparticles" to "explain" how their quackery works. They even mistake low level contamination for something functional. The other thing it reminded me of is a the obsession of a certain pathologist named Sin Lee, who is obsessed about minimal quantities of HPV DNA that he detected in Gardasil using super, super sensitive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to detect. What Montanari did is similar (finding inconsequential amounts of scary-sounding contaminants) using highly sensitive techniques and then using that finding to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Basically, Montanari's is yet another variation on the antivaccine theme of claiming that vaccines are loaded with "toxins" that cause all sorts of harm.

Montanari was also rather defensive about having published in a pay-to-publish predatory journal:

Our scam is evident when Orac reveals how, to be able to publish in the infamous newspaper, you pay money. Evidently, Mr. Orac has never published anything. Had he done that, he would know that there is NO international medical journal that does not ask for money for publication, and the figure is higher, the higher the impact factor, i.e. the grotesquely fraudulent index (see televoting) that the journal boasts.

I'd be happy to send Montanari my PubMed list. Yes, I have published. Perhaps not as much as I would have wished by this stage in my career, but it's not insubstantial. (I actually have a commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine. Perhaps Montanari has heard of it.) Yes, many journals do charge page charges to publish. That's not what I was talking about. To repeat, the journal in which Gatti and Montanari published their paper is a MedCrave journal, and MedCrave is included on Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers, basically a list of “pay to publish” open access journals who charge significant sums to authors to publish their work but whose editorial oversite and peer review are—shall we say?—lacking. MedCrave, which was founded in 2014, is thought to be a new brand created by the well-established predatory OMICS group publisher. Interestingly, if you Google "MedCrave predatory publisher," you'll find a bunch of links denying that MedCrave is a predatory publisher, all with language quirks so similar that it's pretty obvious that they're probably coming from the same source.

No, there is a difference between predatory publishers who specialize in publishing low quality papers and charging for the privilege. I suspect Montanari knows that. He's also wrong that page charges are usually higher, the higher impact the journal.

Montanari then goes on with this hilarious paragraph:

Soon after, here is the confession: Orac knows nothing of microscopy, but he knows that samples should be viewed in a vacuum. If the '"expert" had any idea of the type of microscope we use - data, however, reported in the paper - he would not have done such a comic thud. Nor would he tell that we "evaporate" vaccines, because the methodology is quite another. Even if we did, however, that would have nothing to do with the presence of pieces of lead, steel, tungsten or any other element or combination of elements that appear with evidence in the photographed particles. Then, if Mr. Orac had any specific cultural basis, he would know what is the " protein corona" and would not shoot naive nonsense in this regard. But all this is not enough and he resumes the thesis of the " homeopathic quantity " messing with chemical concepts with which, apparently, he is not familiar but which, no doubt, impress the reader he addresses. If I did not know that the thing is useless, I would invite Mr. Orac to study at least the basic principles of nano-toxicology. This for his own good. Anyway, there is no reason to worry: even tap water might contain filth and no one injecting tap water into his veins, which of course falls in Orac’s habits, ever reported any trouble. And what if the pollutants came from the needle used to transfer the vaccine to the microscope? Oh yes: what if it were so? The fact is that the needle we use is obviously the one of the syringe which contains the vaccine. And if it were the cellulose matrix which filters the sample to be dirty? It’s a pity, however, that we, as an obvious practice, regularly check all the steps including the carbon support on which we deposit the sample without ever having found pollutants. More than 40 years spent on research taught us the basics of the trade.

Montanari might forgive me if I was unclear on how he prepared the samples. The Methods section of his paper was absolutely atrocious and abominable. There was insufficient detail to figure out just what Gatti and he did. Now, maybe someone who speaks Italian can tell if the Italian version of Montanari's post makes sense, because I consider it unfair to mock the incoherence of the above paragraph if it's just due to his lack of skill with English. In any case, whether due to lack of facility with English or muddled thinking or both, Much of what he's saying there makes no sense. I'm particularly amused by his concession that he didn't use any proper controls and his attempt to reflect it back at me with a jaunty, "So what if the contaminants came from the syringe?" The "fact" is that the needle he used is obviously the one that contains the vaccine? OK. But was it a medical grade, sterile syringe, just like the kind used to inject vaccines into babies? I'd bet it wasn't. Those syringes are usually 0.5 ml or 1 ml and can't measure finely enough to accurately and reproducibly deposit 20 μl onto the filters.

I could go on, but let's just recap the various problems with this study. Nowhere do Gatti and Montanari actually measure or report the actual concentration of the metal particles that they found. I was criticized for using what one commenter viewed as too simplistic an approach to likening the concentrations to molarity, but, as I said before, bloody hell. If Gatti and Montanari don't report the actual concentrations of the "contaminants" that they found, I did the best I could with what I was given. Another problem is that many of the vaccines tested were past their expiration date. Given that vaccines have proteins in them. Over time, proteins in aqueous solution tend to degrade and precipitate out. That's part of the reason why vaccines have expiration dates. In any case, another problem with the study is that there was no attempt to quantify the "contamination" in any meaningful way that could be compared and independently evaluated, nor is there any statistical analysis. Then, of course, there is the lack of proper controls, both negative and positive. Negative controls would include things like distilled, deionized water treated the same way as the vaccines and phosphate-buffered saline, which is buffer frequently used in vaccines.

Whether or not Montanari and Gatti are experts in "nanotoxicology" or not, it's clear that Montanari has some serious pseudoscientific leanings. For instance, Gatti is the editor of a bottom-feeding MedCrave journal, Journal of Nanomedicine Research. Particularly amusing to me:

The in-vitro and in-vivo toxicological studies performed later showed controversial results, as they led to opposite results: some scientists (mostly biologists and molecular biologists) believed that nanoparticles are safe since they do not induce an immediate cell death and there is not a clear dose-response answer. Others (mainly bio-engineers, chemists, etc.) replied that they can have a potential to induce biological, maybe pathological, reactions.

Maybe, that's because biologists and molecular biologists know what is and isn't important in terms of what can and can't cause physiologically and biochemically important changes in living systems. And, of course, Gatti and Montanari find nanoparticles everywhere! For example:

Studying a civilian patient died of lymphoma at the hospital of Sarajevo when the Balkan War was already over; we found the deepest and finest contamination of his lymph nodes by 10nm-sized particles of Carbon-Lead-Chlorine-Bromine. Such a small size, morphology (spherical) and chemical composition induced us to hypothesize an exposure to an important source of high-temperature-produced soot.

They've also found nanoparticles in the blood of leukemia patients, in clots forming on filters placed in the inferior vena cava, and even bread and biscuits!

It turns out that Gatti and Montanari have their very own electron microscope. From what I can tell using Google Translate on articles written in Italian (always a dicey proposition), it began in 2006 when the University of Modena stopped them from using its electron microscope to study "toxic emissions." So someone named Beppe Grillo launched , via his blog, a fundraising effort for the purchase of an environmental scanning microscope, and €378,000 was raised to purchase the microscope. Somehow this all went bad, with Montanari now featuring a drawing of Grillo as literally a werewolf. Hilariously, under this photo, there are references further showing that Gatti and Montanari can find nanoparticles everywhere.

In any case, it degenerated into accusations that Gatti and Montanari are using their microscope in much the way that Mike Adams uses his mass spectrometer, to find contaminants in everything and as a side business. This is actually a credible charge, as a glimpse at the Nanodiagnostic, Ltd. website (Gatti and Montanari's company) shows, particularly a page on pathologies of unknown origin, which speculates that nanoparticles are cause of—you guessed it—pathologies of unknown origin. Gatti and Montanari countercharge that Grillo exploited them for political gain. Apparently lawyer and defamation suits are involved. (Hat tip: herr doktor bimler.)

In any case, Beppe Grillo is the founder of the Italian political party Five Star Movement and is quite the crank himself. He's an HIV/AIDS denialist, having called AIDS a "hoax," perpetuated by pharmaceutical companies and is a rabid antivaccine activist. You might remember Paolo Vanoli, as I've discussed him before. He has claimed that vaccines can cause homosexuality and is a member of the Five Star Movement.

Not surprisingly, Gatti and Montanari aren't without a bit of crank tendencies themselves. For instance, they've co-authored a book called Vaccini: sì o no? (Vaccines: Yes or No?) In all my years in the biz, I know right away that any book that even askes this question in the title will be full of antivaccine misinformation, and a Google Translation shows that I'm not wrong here. In their book, Gatti and Montanari include analyzes of the content of the 28 vaccines used in Italy , with photos by electron microscopy. Trully, they are a couple of one-note cranks. In the blurb they also purport to discuss correlations between vaccines and autism, the "cover-up" of negative data, "false epidemics," the "lack of studies with a control group," and a lot of other antivaccine tropes.

I'd like to conclude by thanking Montanari for giving me the opportunity to revisit their study. They're into way more pseudoscience than I thought. That's the problem with dealing with cranks from non-English-speaking countries. If you don't speak and read the language, it's pretty hard to learn a lot about them, even with the almighty Google Translate. Thankfully, I was able to find out quite a bit about Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari. They'd be right at home here in the US with Mike Adams and his mass spectrometer.

oracknows Mon, 02/06/2017 - 21:47

I love it when an antivax "study" meant to show how "dirty" vaccines are backfires so spectacularly

oracknows — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 06:00:03 +0000

I love it when an antivax "study" meant to show how "dirty" vaccines are backfires so spectacularly

I've frequently written about what I like to refer to as the "toxins gambit" with respect to vaccines. Basically, in the hard core (and even soft core) antivaccine crowd, vaccines are feared as being loaded with all sorts of "toxins," such as aluminum, formaldehyde, mercury, and various chemicals that are dangerous enough separately, but, when combined, "poison" young babies, resulting in their becoming autistic, acquiring asthma and autoimmune diseases, or even dying of sudden infant death syndrome. Of course, many of the scary-sounding chemicals to which antivaccinationists point actually are in vaccines, but, as Paracelsus put it, the dose makes the poison, and the amount in vaccines is very much low enough not to pose a health threat. Also, formaldehyde is a product of normal metabolism present in the bloodstream of infants at a level much higher than what any vaccine contains.

So fearful of contamination of the precious bodily fluids of their babies are antivaccinationists (and, let's be real, it really does boil down to just that in many cases) that it's not enough to demonize vaccines based on the harmless ingredients that do make them up. They have to go beyond that and demonize vaccines based on what isn't even in them. Right now, that misinformation takes the form of what looks on the surface like a real scientific paper. That's what's happening right now with a paper by Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari in the International Journal of Vaccines and Vaccination entitled New Quality-Control Investigations on Vaccines: Micro- and Nanocontamination. It's a paper I found through an article being circulated in antivaccine circles by the Children's Medical Safety Research Institute (CMSRI), an group made up mainly of antivaccine cranks, in an article entitled Dirty Vaccines: New Study Reveals Prevalence of Contaminants. Note the "dirty vaccines" title. That is very much a matter of faith in much of the antivaccine community, that vaccines are "dirty," hence the rants about DNA, monkey cells, formaldehyde, and the rest in vaccines. The article cranks the fear mongering up to 11 right from the beginning:

Every Human Vaccine Tested Was Contaminated by Unsafe Levels of Metals and Debris Linked to Cancer and Autoimmune Disease, New Study Reports

Researchers examining 44 samples of 30 different vaccines found dangerous contaminants, including red blood cells in one vaccine and metal toxicants in every single sample tested – except in one animal vaccine.

Using extremely sensitive new technologies not used in vaccine manufacturing, Italian scientists reported they were “baffled” by their discoveries which included single particles and aggregates of organic debris including red cells of human or possibly animal origin and metals including lead, tungsten, gold, and chromium, that have been linked to autoimmune disease and leukemia.

Wow. Sounds really, really scary, doesn't it? The authors, after all, used electron microscopy, specifically a Field Emission Gun Environmental Electron Scanning Microscope equipped with the X-ray microprobe of an Energy Dispersive Spectroscope to detect the possible presence of inorganic, particulate contaminants and identify their chemical composition, to examine the vaccines and found all sorts of scary-looking stuff! My first response was: Unsafe levels. You keep using that term. I do not think it means what you think it means. My second response was: Baffled? Only if you have no idea what you are doing and talking about. You'll see why in a moment, when I take a look at the paper you'll see something that looks like a perfectly normal scientific paper. However, if you look at the publisher that publishes it, MedCrave, there are warning flags:

MedCrave is an Open Access Publishing website that contains ample scientific research information on categorized topics. MedCrave is a huge Online Publishing Library, where anyone can view, share and download research papers. The subjects covered here are vast, and every paper here is approved by the Editor and is peer reviewed. Unlike other Online Publishing Groups, MedCrave is the place for developing your educational standards and making yourself well acquainted with the latest research and development in all the fields. The authors of the research papers contribute a lot in making us one of the finest Online Publishing Groups and they also build up their prestige in MedCrave and the readers benefit from the reputed papers. The research papers from MedCrave also have an added visibility from all over the world. There is no charge viable for using MedCrave in any way.

This is what MedCrave means by peer review. Look at its flowsheet, and you will see that it looks as though there is almost no way for your paper to be rejected, period. In fact, I laughed at the flowsheet, having never seen anything like it in any legitimate scientific journal. Not surprisingly, MedCrave is included on Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers, basically a list of "pay to publish" open access journals who charge significant sums to authors to publish their work but whose editorial oversite and peer review are—shall we say?—lacking.

But what about the paper itself? Basically it's a lot of fear mongering rooted in either biological ignorance or intentional deception (take your pick—there is no third option, although I concede it could be a combination of the two). I'll show you what I mean. The authors show this photomicrograph of crystals of saline solution and aluminum phosphate and corresponding energy dispersive X-ray spectra (EDS spectra).

Aluminum crystals, chosen for maximal scariness.

They write this about the photo:

Figure 1a shows a layer of crystals of Sodium chloride (NaCl) embedding salts of Aluminum phosphate (AlPO4) in a drop of Gardasil (anti-HPV vaccine by Merck) as the EDS spectrum (Figure 1b) shows. Saline is the fluid base to any vaccine preparation and Aluminum salts or Aluminum hydroxide [Al(OH)3] are the adjuvants which are usually added.

Looking at the area outside these precipitates but inside the liquid drop, we identified other things: single particles, clusters of particles and aggregates (organic-inorganic composites) that are due to an interaction of the inorganic particulate matter with the organic part of the vaccine.

Wow! That looks scary, doesn't it? Basically, though, the authors are looking at a big aluminum phosphate crystal, given how the samples are prepared for electron microscopy:

A drop of about 20 microliter of vaccine is released from the syringe on a 25-mm-diameter cellulose filter (Millipore, USA), inside a flow cabinet. The filter is then deposited on an Aluminum stub covered with an adhesive carbon disc. The sample is immediately put inside a clean box in order to avoid any contamination and the box is re-opened only for the sample to be inserted inside the FEG-ESEM chamber. We selected that particular type of microscope as it allows to analyse watery and oily samples in low vacuum (from 10 to 130 Pa) at a high sensitivity.

When the water and saline the vaccine contains are evaporated, the biological/physical components emerge on the filter and it is then possible to observe them. This type of microscope

I'm not an expert in electron microscopy (EM), but I know that samples for EM generally have to be examined under vacuum. That's why, in the case of biological samples, you can't look at living cells. If you take a liquid sample and put it under even low vacuum, it evaporates. What's left? Crystals and precipitates. Also, as you might imagine, EM is very, very sensitive. So it's going to pick up incredibly tiny, biologically irrelevant amounts of everything. Antivaccinationists are obsessed with "purity"; so even these tiny amounts of "contaminants" will alarm them, and CMSRI knows that. Whether the authors of the article themselves know this or not, I don't know or care, but I do care that their article is now being used to frighten parents.

What follows, then, is a series of photomicrographs of all sorts of particles that they found after evaporating 44 vaccines from four different countries, as listed in Table 1 of the paper. If you look at the other tables, you'll see that the authors list all sorts of scary-sounding metals and compounds ranging from tungsten to aluminum to silicone to gold, to zirconium, all, ominously, "embedded in biological substrate" (i.e., precipitated proteins, which is what you would expect to find if you evaporated a vaccine, along with the minerals from the salt solution). The key table in the paper, however, for a chemist (my undergraduate major was chemistry before I went to medical school, and I took a considerable number of biochemistry and biochemistry-related classes during my education, both undergraduate and graduate) is Table 3. Look at it. More importantly, look at the numbers of precipitates found per sample. It ranges from two to 1,821.

O.M.G.! 1,821 particles! Holy crap! That's horrible! The antivaxers are right that vaccines are hopelessly contaminated!

No. They. Are. Not.

Look at it this way. This is what was found in 20 μl (that's microliters) of liquid. That's 0.00002 liters. That means, in a theoretical liter of the vaccine, the most that one would find is 91,050,000 (9.105 x 10⁷) particles! Holy hell! That's a lot. We should be scared, shouldn't we? well, no. Let's go back to our homeopathy knowledge and look at Avogadro's number. One mole of particles = 6.023 x 10²³. So divide 91,050,000 by Avogadro's number, and you'll get the molarity of a solution of 91,050,000 particle in a liter, as a 1 M solution would contain 6.023 x 10²³ particles. So what's the concentration:

1.512 x 10^-16 M. that's 0.15 femtomolar (fM) (or 150 altomolar), an incredibly low concentration. And that's the highest amount the investigators found. In reality, what they actually found is that vaccines are incredibly pure!

Yes, I know that I've simplified the calculations and that particles are not molecules [as has been pointed out in the comments]. I did it not to be perfectly scientifically, chemically accurate in a way that I'd do if I were in the lab doing an experiment. I used this example just to illustrate how a large number like 1,821 is not so very large at all. Then remember that 1,821 was the largest number of particles found in any vaccine. The vast majority of them contained many fewer particles, sometimes single digits numbers. Moreover, I note that the authors of the paper don't report the concentration of the particles anywhere in their paper, an unconscionable and likely intentional omission that led me to look for an exercise to estimate and illustrate just how small these numbers are. I realize it's an imperfect example; so let's look at another, one that our friend the Skeptical Raptor uses:

Therein lies the most problematic issue with the data. The numbers are well below the level of biological activity, if these various chemicals even have biological activity (most don’t). For example, the authors found 1569 particles or precipitates in one drop of Cervarix (an anti-HPV vaccine). Sounds horrific right? Except that one drop of vaccine contains around 1.39 X 10^21 individual molecules. This so called contamination approximately 0.0000000000000000000719% of these so called contaminants.

In that Cervarix sample, the researchers found aluminum hydroxide, one of those scary sounding compounds. Let’s say every one of those 1569 particles was aluminum hydroxide, it would mean that around 0.000000000001 ng of aluminum hydroxide in a vial of vaccine. That is simply biologically irrelevant. Even if the aluminum hydroxide was found, it’s level is so low, that the human body wouldn’t notice it. You breathe in more aluminum on a normal day than you would ever find in a vial of vaccine.

Let me repeat for emphasis. The investigators think that what they found is that vaccines are contaminated with all sorts of inorganic metals. What they really found is that the amount of inorganic contamination is so low as to be biologically irrelevant. In fact, what they found is that vaccines are incredibly pure products.

And I didn't even get into a very good question that our scaly friend asked: What were the controls? What would you find if you carried out the same analyses on tap water, for instance? It could very well be that syringe used to draw up and deposit the specimen could be the source of the "contamination." Hell, it could just as easily be the cellulose matrix on which the specimens are deposited for analysis that were responsible for the "contamination." I'm familiar with those filters, as they are commonly used in molecular biology. They are not ultra-pure. How were they stored? Often filters can pick up dust from the air. Whatever the source of the particles observed, without controls, there's no way of knowing if the source was the vaccines or not. It could be that vaccines are even more pure than this study shows!

Now, knowing this, go and read the discussion and conclusion of this paper. You will laugh, and you should laugh. The investigators deserve nothing but mockery for this idiocy, such as:

We come across particles with chemical compositions, similar to those found in the vaccines we analyzed, when we study cases of environmental contamination caused by different pollution sources. In most circumstances, the combinations detected are very odd as they have no technical use, cannot be found in any material handbook and look like the result of the random formation occurring, for example, when waste is burnt. In any case, whatever their origin, they should not be present in any injectable medicament, let alone in vaccines, more in particular those meant for infants.

Other forms of so-far unknown contaminations have recently been observed and, in any case, vaccines contain components that could themselves be the cause of adverse effects. It is a well-known fact in toxicology that contaminants exert a mutual, synergic effect, and as the number of contaminants increases, the effects grow less and less predictable. The more so when some substances are unknown.

Yes, laugh, because what Gatti and Montanari actually showed is that the level of inorganic contamination in vaccines is minuscule, suggesting that the manufacturing processes used to make them are very, very good at making sure that vaccines are pure, given that none of the vaccines contained more inorganic particles at a concentration higher than 0.15 femtomolar. But also get angry at the deception and cry that there will be parents taken in by this ridiculous paper, as groups like CSMRI spread it far and wide with terrifying language about "contamination." Given that the CMSRI's scientific advisory board includes antivaccine "scientists" like Christopher Shaw, Yehuda Shoenfeld, Richard Deth, Stephanie Seneff, and Vicky Debold, along with some others I'm not familiar with, it's not at all surprising that CMSRI loves it. It also amuses me to no end that the "scientific board" didn't see the obvious problems with this paper.

That's because it's all about antivaccine fear mongering, not science.

oracknows Thu, 02/02/2017 - 01:00

Categories

Medicine

A drop of about 20 microliter of vaccine is released from the syringe on a 25-mm-diameter cellulose filter (Millipore, USA), inside a flow cabinet. The filter is then deposited on an Aluminum stub covered with an adhesive carbon disc. The sample is immediately put inside a clean box in order to avoid any contamination...

...except you've drawn it up into a syringe and then put it through a filter, both of which were not controlled for in this "analysis", as you've noted.

Looking at the standards for reagent water purity (and I will preface with stating I trained undergrad as a physicist, so things didn't get much more complicated for me than hydrogen and, rarely helium), there are standards for purity per ASTM D1193-06. Given that the highest level of purity (ASTM Type 1) allows 50 mcg/L of TOC (total organic carbon) and 1 mgc/L each of sodium and chloride (as well as 3 mcg/L of silica), it does sound like vaccines they looked at were, as you note, incredibly pure.

What a worthless journal the "International Journal of Vaccines and Vaccination" must be to have accepted this rot.

"Looking at the area outside these precipitates but inside the liquid drop, we identified other things:"

I love it when they talk all technical-like.

I nominate this one for Italian Science Paper of the Year.

I'd be willing to bet that, if somebody were to use the same protocol to analyze homeopathic remedies, they would find similar or higher amounts of "contaminants". Because as mentioned above, there were no control samples on things like distilled water. And as I've mentioned before, there are limits on how pure distilled water can be made.

Can the next paper by this group be about contaminants in MMS, chelation remedies and the most commonly used biomed supplements, please?

Thanks to Magdalen, on Skeptical Raptor, for highlighting the horrible references. The first one to a website.

No, see, you have to look at it homeopathically. Those tiny amounts are super dangerous, because they're so small. *rolls eyes*

I note that many of the samples examined were well past their expiration dates, some by a dozen years (2004). I wonder if the fools understand that the reason for expiration dates for such products is that they are known to be less than perfectly stable. Elastomer closures on vials are subject to degradation over time. Even USP Type 1 glass is going to add contaminants to contents given sufficient time.

I wonder if they are aware that many parenteral products, including several vaccines, are suspensions, not solutions. Send 'em a bag of total parenteral nutrition goop. That ought to keep 'em occupied for quite some time.

@Orac,

You destroyed "them" on this one!

But, as you brilliantly suggested the vaccine packaging could contaminate the solution. I wish I would have thought of that sooner than 10 years ago. :-)

Let's be friends now okay?

Another prime example of individuals not understanding science...or even simple measurements.

So, you are saying they were wrong?

If they looked at Garasil there better be particles in the formulation. The capsid proteins in the vaccine should self assemble into virus-like particles to elicit an immune response.

The publisher's description of the journal reads like a cheeto tweet.
I kept expecting "huge" or "bigly".

Saline is the fluid base to any vaccine preparation

Yikes. The diluent for MMR, e.g., is sterile water.

I mean, ORAC, not a terrible article on your part except for this quote you lifted off of Skeptical Raptor (lobotomized propagandasaur):

...that Cervarix sample, the researchers found aluminum hydroxide, one of those scary sounding compounds. Let’s say every one of those 1569 particles was aluminum hydroxide, it would mean that around 0.000000000001 ng of aluminum hydroxide in a vial of vaccine. That is simply biologically irrelevant.

Now, what they are saying at Skeptical Raptor is highly disingenuous.

The amount of elemental aluminum in a vial of Cervarix, per data sheet, is .5 milligrams.

http://www.medsafe.govt.nz/profs/datasheet/c/Cervarixinj.pdf

Now let's play with the Skeptical Raptor number to see how deceptive they are:

0.000000000001 ng

1(10⁻¹²)ng Al(OH)₃

And one nanogram is (10⁻⁹)g correct?

1(10⁻¹²)(10⁻⁹)g Al(OH)₃

(10⁻²¹)g Al(OH)₃

So even if Sceptical Raptard didn't go right out and say it, they implied that this is the amount of aluminum hydroxide in Cervarix. At least some readers would get that impression.

And how much is there really?

Well, the data sheet has .5mg Al³⁺:

.5(10⁻³)g Al³⁺

Converting into Al(OH)₃ now:

.5(10⁻³)g Al³⁺ × (78g Al(OH)₃/ 27g Al³⁺)

1.444(10⁻³)g Al(OH)₃

This is the real amount of aluminum hydroxide in Cervarix.

The numbers side-by-side:

Sceptical Raptard: (10⁻²¹)g Al(OH)₃

Product Data Sheet: 1.444(10⁻³)g Al(OH)₃

http://www.medsafe.govt.nz/profs/datasheet/c/Cervarixinj.pdf

Big difference.

Micheal Dochniak, what do you think about the Skeptical Raptor quote?

Disingenuous yes?

It would be really nice if the clueless idiots who publish this stuff would, just once in a while, not down-sample and/or compress the images to the point of illegibility. As far as I'm concerned, the blame lies very squarely on the publishers. If the originals as submitted were illegible, then the publisher should have flung them back to the source with a rude note. If the publisher mangled them then the publisher is incompetent and culpable.

The methods section of the paper is utterly useless and would have been equally satisfactory if it simple said "we did some stuff." Millipore makes more than one type of cellulose filter. Identifying it by diameter is not helpful. Who made the syringes and needles used? We don't even know if they were standard disposable medical products or Hamilton syringes (which would be the standard for precisely measuring 20 µL, but reusable therefore requiring meticulous cleaning. Why evaporation if the interest is particulates? The standard is filtering through a membrane filter. "Flow cabinet"? How well filtered was the air through the cabinet? And as has been pointed out - where were the controls?

Go away, Fucklesworth.

Looks like odious troll has returned....

I see fuckelsworth is back again again.

@Snoopie (#15),

You've got a scoopie, snoopie (aka. Sherlock).

Nicely written post but my cell phone is out of energy so I can't verify your calculations in post #14.

Looks like odious troll has returned….

And Travis didn't even take the time to find the Unicode mult cross while cutting and pasting all the sups and subs.

I can't believe that ORAC would lift a quote off that idiotic website....

Sceptical Raptor?

A website with a corny mascot?

A fμcking dinosaur. What's next? Corny puns?

Sceptical Raptor is hungry for donations. Sceptical Raptor's teeth are sharper that Occam's Razor, ready to tear through the soft belly of pseudoscience.

Stalking pseudoscience in the internet jungle

LOL!!!

http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/

Skeptical Raptard says:

You breathe in more aluminum on a normal day than you would ever find in a vial of vaccine.

Okay now, this is just ridiculous.

Dorit, can you explain this? Can you show us the calculations for this one?

#14, 'Snoopie'
OK, you caught an error with regard to the amount of aluminum adjuvant in Cervarix (an understandable error, since not all vaccines contain aluminum). So what? Even a few milligrams of Al(OH)3 is perfectly harmless from a toxicology point of view -- it is the same order of magnitude that even an infant gets into its body every single day, without any harmful effects whatsoever.
Furthermore, aluminum hydroxide is nigh insoluble, and remains on the injection site for quite some time, only being cleared slowly by the body -- and this is exactly what should happen, because this triggers a proper immune immune response with only a fraction of the antigen needed otherwise. This persistence is also the cause of the 'knot' that sometimes appears at the injection site -- a known and harmless side effect.
The aluminum hydroxide from a vaccine does not enter the bloodstream in any significant amounts, and it most certainly does not enter brain in any measurable quantities. let alone harmful quantities.

Sorry, guys. It was an experiment. I was pretty sure it was Fendlesworth from the first post, but I wanted to do an experiment to see if I was correct. I'm becoming a lot more confident in my ability to spot Fendlesworth right from the beginning now.

https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/phs/phs.asp?id=1076&tid=34

And odious troll is still odious.

Speaking of which, RFK, Jr. is at it again. http://www.ecowatch.com/cdc-mercury-vaccines-kennedy-2226257805.html

How dare he/she/it use Snoopie as a name. Too close to Shultz's beloved aviator.

I will say, he certainly is persistent...

I’d be willing to bet that, if somebody were to use the same protocol to analyze homeopathic remedies, they would find similar or higher amounts of “contaminants”.

But, but, but, homeopathic remedies aren't injected! Everyone knows that injection instantly delivers any substance straight to the very core of your being, tainting your precious bodily fluids forever! I mean, it's not like we have some sort of built in defense mechanism against foreign substances that break the skin. /sarcasm

Thinking of controls, does anyone know offhand of the tested 'purity' of normal saline?

My favorite is when they say vaccines are "laced" with these things, invoking the imagery of deliberate and malignant tampering.

@Eric Lund:

I’d be willing to bet that, if somebody were to use the same protocol to analyze homeopathic remedies, they would find similar or higher amounts of “contaminants”.

I read somewhere (but can't remember exactly where) that homeopathic remedies were subjected to analysis and they found pieces of glass in them, most likely from the succusions.

I will say, he certainly is persistent…

Note that the sad attempt to start slipping in UK/Canadian spellings started before this instantiation. It's like Gerg in reverse.

Orac writes, (~#26),

Sorry, guys. It was an experiment.

MJD says,

Why do you use the word "guys" when you clearly mean all others?

This is an inappropriate continuation of "gender supremacy" that alienates more than 50% of the human population. Well, maybe just the 300,000 +/- 100 females that frequently visit and make comments here at RI.

Understand, I don't want to be an Orac minion if "gender supremacy" is the accepted language here at RI. :-(

As far as I’m concerned, the blame lies very squarely on the publishers.

MedCrave are low-life grifters even by the standards of predatory / parasitical publishers. Beall's Blog is closed now, but All Praise the Wayback Machine, which archived his post on MedCrave and the comment thread that followed!
https://web.archive.org/web/20161222210911/https://scholarlyoa.com/2016…

Like other publishers in the industry, they are favoured by cynical reality-obfuscating fraudsters who have a few k$ to spend on promoting their collection of Alternative Facts. The idea is that once the stuff has been puke-funneled through a simalucrum of a real journal, lazy journamalists are likely to assume that it does carry the imprimatur of peer-review.

The paper came up recently on one of Sylvie Coyaud's comment threads, and I had wondered about mailing a link to Orac:
http://ocasapiens-dweb.blogautore.repubblica.it/2017/01/25/o-tempura-o-…

Of the two authors, Gatti has carved out "nanodignostics" and "nanoforensics" as her own personal scientific discipline, where there are no competitors to cast shade upon her work. She edits the MedCrave mockademic dumpster "Journal of Nanomedicine Research".
http://medcraveonline.com/JNMR/JNMR-04-00075.php
The FBI would envy her miraculous ability to always find nanoparticles, in any "nano-autopsy" she performs, which always confirm her theory on how the victim died.

Though Elsevier are no less cynical and predatory -- they published the Gatti-Montanari tome:
ht_tps://www.elsevier.com/books/case-studies-in-nanotoxicology-and-particle-toxi…
.

Other author Montanari proves to be an anti-chemo, vaccines=autism alt-med nutbar with prior form for crankery:
http://www.stefanomontanari.net/sito/blog/archivio.html

QJulian Frost, #34

I read somewhere (but can’t remember exactly where) that homeopathic remedies were subjected to analysis and they found pieces of glass in them

Most likely it was this story.

Then again, they can just claim to be offering 'low potency homeopathically diluted glass'. Given that these clowns dilute-'n-shake anything up to and including shipwreck debris and light of Saturn, diluted glass sounds pretty normal in comparison...

I don't know how to use an electron microscope, but even I would not conclude that vaccines are full of poisons based on this. Can someone explain how the authors learned to use an EM yet did not learn to divide first?

While maybe some individuals might take offense, but I had thought that the word "guys" had become a more gender-neutral term to describe a group of people.

No one will be surprised to find that the web site is not liked by the Web of Trust (WOT) add-on: http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/medcraveonline.com?utm_source=addon&u… .

they can just claim to be offering ‘low potency homeopathically diluted glass’

Meh; Belladonna for baby??

Certain brands of "homeopathic" teething products contain belladonna, a toxic chemical, and shouldn't be used, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Friday.

The company that makes Hyland's homeopathic teething products has refused to recall them so the FDA said it was issuing a warning.

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/homeopathic-teething-aid-cont…

Gatti and Montanari have previously reported nanoparticles in the blood of leukemia patients, and in thromboses / scar tissue.
And in bread and biscuits!
ht_tp://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10408390802064347?journalCode=bfsn20
And in ice-cream, Mandrake, children's ice-cream!

They are worried about chemtrails (possibly one source of the nanoparticulate contamination), and geo-engineering, and global warming. Perhaps the chemtrails are causing global warming... I am not clear of the details.

There are hints of a scandal about how they came to have a personal electron microscope. There appears to have been a fund-raising campaign to buy one (led by Beppe Grillo), with the idea of documenting contamination from military bases and dirty industries across Italy... but it all ended in recriminations, mutual accusations of fraud, and toys out of the cot.

@herr doktor bimler, #37:

favoured by cynical reality-obfuscating fraudsters who have a few k$ to spend on promoting their collection of Alternative Facts.

I wonder how long before we see an actual, even peer-reviewed, journal with that or a similar name. The Journal of Alternative Facts (JAF). Kinda has a nice ring to it, but then so do some toilet bowels.

Lawrence writes (#42),

... I had thought that the word “guys” had become a more gender-neutral term to describe a group of people.

MJD says,

Male "gender supremacy" allows such thinking but will not consider the opposite i.e., I had thought that the word “gals” had become a more gender-neutral term to describe a group of people.

MarkN
In the US, the United States Pharmacopeia probably has a spec for purity of saline. I may be able to dig up at least the major points.

USP 32 specs the following for some impurities in sodium chloride (used at 0.9% w/v for normal saline):
Heavy metals 45 ppm maximum
Aluminum 0.2 mg/g max; footnote: If for use in peritoneal dialysis, hemodialysis or hemofiltration solutions.
Magnesium and alkaline earth metals 0.01% maximum
The table this came from does not show a separate allowance for aluminum for other uses; the three uses noted would be higher risk than others because of the volumes used.
USP will also have a specification for water for parenterals. High purity water is much "easier" to produce at point of use now than it was many years ago, but the USP standard isn't spectacularly high. You can buy a litre of Sodium Chloride Injection USP for a couple of dollars. A litre of high purity lab water will run to tens of dollars.

++++
With regard to particulates, standard filter needles have 5 µm filters. Such needles are recommended for draw-up from glass ampules - contamination with glass particles commonly occurs when the ampule neck is broken. As far as I know, filter needles are almost never used for draw-up from elastomer-stoppered vials. I do not know why 5 microns was established as the norm, but I suspect it is somewhat arbitrary and a compromise between removing particles known to be undesirable and the time taken for draw-up (it can take quite a bit of time to draw up the contents of a large ampule unless the needle is very large; filter needles are all around 18 gauge which is the largest in common use so reasonable in cost).

In other news...

One of Orac's occasional commenters, James Lyons-Weiler, has a new book out about autism ( see TMR for raves).

I wonder if we'll get free copies to review?

Lighthorse @46:
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/01/31/welcome-journal-alternative-facts…

Speaking of which, RFK, Jr. is at it again. http://www.ecowatch.com/cdc-mercury-vaccines-kennedy-2226257805.html

That's a heapin' pile of horse flops from Kennedy. I'm heartened that "Dr. Bob" wasn't used as the faux expert physician (I think Sears' attorney told him to shut up and stop doing anything that might rile the CA medical board), but annoyed that Kennedy uses the newest anti-vaccine pediatrician--one odious Paul
Thomas MD, FAAP who has his own "alternative" vaccine schedule he claims prevents autism but forgets to tell us how in 2012 he got in trouble with the Oregon Medical Board for prescribing narcotics. Yeah, a real "expert" that Thomas is. And if you're playing anti-vaccine shill bingo, Kennedy's article pretty much plays them all.

There are hints of a scandal about how [Gatti and Montanari] came to have a personal electron microscope
See here:
http://www.messinaora.it/notizia/2013/12/18/montanari-grillo-e-il-micro…

As far as I can tell, it all started about 2006 when Gatti and Montanari complained that the University of Modena had stopped them from using its EM for their research into toxic emissions. Grillo launched the campaign to raise €378,000 for a new EM that would allow the vital work to continue.

All culminating in accusations that Gatti and Montanari are using their toy not for environmental activism, but for a profitable business selling analyses through their company Nanodiagnostic Ltd.; and accusations from Montanari that Grillo just raised all that money for them as a way of exploiting them for political gain. Lawyers and defamation suits are involved. Meanwhile the original EM at the University of Modena is still available to Gatti, but only for University work.

I wonder how much the whole story was an inspiration for Mike Adams and his contamination-testing lab-coat cosplay.

Understand, I don’t want to be an Orac minion if “gender supremacy” is the accepted language here at RI. ?

You should be careful what you ask for. Orac is a kind and benevolent overlord and might just grant you your wish.

Paul Thomas, the "Vaccine-Friendly"* pediatrician, recently wrote a review of an antivax book (which he liked, natch) in which he repeated the trope that vaccine makers have complete immunity from lawsuits, and claimed that it was nearly impossible to get a monetary settlement from the vaccine court.

Thomas has a book out called "The Vaccine-Friendly Plan" which involves avoiding or delaying the great majority of childhood vaccines.

Speaking of recent (!) additions to the antivax literature, there's now a reprint of a golden oldie, "The Horrors Of Vaccination" (1870) by none other than Chr. Charles Schieferdecker Schieferdecker (I am not making this up).

Some of Schieferdecker Schieferdecker's complaints have a modern ring:

"We protest against the transplantation of an an-
imal virus, taken from a diseased brute, into the
blood of our children ; the operation is nauseating,
barbarous, and unnatural. It is our opinion, that
the purity of the blood is the supreme basis of our
well-being ; but it is made impure, and becomes the
source of diseases, when it is mixed with this beastly
poison...
Dr. Hebra, professor of Therapeutics at Vienna,
and author of a " Manual on Skin Diseases," enum-
erates some twelve life endangering, anomalous dis-
eases liable to occur to a person under vaccination."

https://www.amazon.com/Horrors-Vaccination-Chr-Charles-Schieferdecker/d…

Get your copy before they sell out!

O.M.G.! 1,821 particles! Holy crap! That’s horrible! The antivaxers are right that vaccines are hopelessly contaminated!

No. They. Are. Not.

Look at it this way. This is what was found in 20 μl (that’s microliters) of liquid. That’s 0.00002 liters. That means, in a theoretical liter of the vaccine, the most that one would find is 91,050,000 (9.105 x 107) particles! Holy hell! That’s a lot. We should be scared, shouldn’t we? well, no. Let’s go back to our homeopathy knowledge and look at Avogadro’s number. One mole of particles = 6.023 x 1023. So divide 91,050,000 by Avogadro’s number, and you’ll get the molarity of a solution of 91,050,000 particle in a liter, as a 1 M solution would contain 6.023 x 1023 particles. So what’s the concentration:

So, as someone who deals with molarity pretty much all the time, I have to step up a little bit here. I think you're skipping a step or two in calculating molarity.

At least from what's written, it's not clear to me how big these particles are or how identical they are --I may go and look at the paper, but I really don't know that it's worth spending the time. 'Molarity' really only matters if you're talking about molecularly identical species. If these particles are precipitates, then they are probably non-identical solid objects which have condensed out of solution during the evaporation process and are composed of a much more numerous small molecule (like a salt). To get to an initial molarity we really need to understand how small the particles are and what the molecular weight and density is of the fundamental chemical/salt... a large number of big particles would mean a higher base molarity of the original analyte which crystallized into the particle than the same number of a smaller particle. Are the particles micron sized or tens of nanometers? This would count for a factor as big as 10^9 in calculating molarity, which would take us from femptomolar clear up to high micromolar or low millimolar! We know little about the magnification: I can't read it very well, but is that scale bar 2.0 mm? If so, the particles are relatively big. If the particles are just insoluble plastic beads or dust, it's hard to count a molarity at all because any object like this is non-identical and has essentially no molarity (being the only one of its kind)... for such objects, usually colloids, we use mg/mL for concentration or weight percent.

Otherwise, the whole argument being made by this paper seems very screwy and poor quality to me. Hard to tell if the particles are from an outside source or got formed during evaporation with the precipitates... which are also particles. Can't tell in the EDS if any spurious signals might have come from shooting the electron beam through the sample into the substrate, which can happen, especially if you're probing at energies high enough to see some of these metals (I hit silicon from a substrate once when I was probing for titanium). Nothing about what they're saying seems particular clear to me or interest worthy.

I wondered how long it would be before a chemistry pedant showed up. :-) Yes, I realize this was simplified. That doesn't change the main point: That none of this is biologically relevant, particularly given that many of these were expired vaccines, some very expired, and given the lack of controls with, for instance, distilled, deionized water.

I'm going to raise another complaint with the paper: "About 20 microliters". About? About? You just guessed at the volume of something you're preparing for electron microscopy?
How about you use the right tool for the job, like a pipette (!) and actually know how much you are using?
I regularly pipette 5 microliters with confidence, and they're telling me "about". Humph.

Biologists may like this from the paper:
Figure 7: Image of an area in a Repevax drop where the morphology of red cells (red arrows) were identified.

If a sample has dried in vacuum and still looks like a red corpuscle, then it wan't a red corpuscle. I'm guessing that it was really detritus from the nano-miniaturised submarine, the Proteus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Voyage

"MJD says,
Why do you use the word “guys” when you clearly mean all others?"
Old Rockin' Dave says,
Has MJD run out of discredited points about the topic at hand that this is what MJD picks on to criticize?
Old Rockin' Dave also says.
Why does MJD constantly refer to himself in the third person? Is he quoting someone who shares his initials? Or possibly does he have the type of dissociative disorder in which patients are incapable of recognizing themselves in the mirror or feel as if they are observing their bodies from a distance?
Old Rockin' Dave further says,
Has MJD never heard a woman in all female group address said group as "guys'? Perhaps MJD doesn't get out much?

International Journal. Hmph.

When I started teaching at a regional campus of a Major University (a nice way of saying a little college bought up by a big one but under the same banner for email) I started getting "Call for Papers" and Call for Presenter emails from this that or the other International Journal of Official Sciency Stuff.

Of course, the idea of presenting in a foreign country was pretty attractive: good for my tenure bid, gets me more faculty development money for the year, travel I can deduct. Then I started noticing all the spelling and grammatical errors. I started thinking about scam emails. Googling these "journals" quickly exposed the predatory nature of these offers.

Ever since, whenever I hear anyone say "International Journal" of any thing, I take a hard, hard look.

@ Old Rockin' Dave #58 - Hahahahaha! I love your response.

@ Old Rockin' Dave (~#58),

Keeping it simple, I learned in kindergarten that "guys" pee standing up, and sitting down, while "gals" only pee when their sitting down.

Therefore, "gals" should never be called "guys".

MJD: Oh, knock it off! You're winning no friends by pretending to be concerned about anyone else's feelings. You're a Trump voter (so, anti-semitic, probably racist, and certainly a despiser of women), an anti-vaxxer, too stupid to understand half the things you prattle about, a man who hates his own son, and you think everyone else is stupid and an easy mark. Over correcting doesn't help; it just makes you look like even more of a slimeball. I'm sorry I called you a weasel earlier, because clearly, I was insulting the weasels.

@PGpig (#63),

I've been commenting for five years now.

The words "Respectful" and "Insolence" are not compatible by nature and therefore have caused much uncertainty when commenting.

Therefore, Orac is the architect of this unfortunate situation and any anger or frustration you may be experiencing is understandable.

Oh, quit whining.

JustaTech
I suspect, but we'll never know because the methods section is so bad, that they used standard disposable medical syringes and needles and simply ejected a drop from the needle tip. As you probably know, that is moderately difficult due to sticktion of the plunger and the surface tension of the fluid (probably fairly variable depending on surfactant content of the vaccine and whether or not it was a solution of suspension), so I would expect substantial variability in droplet size. To get 50 drops per millilitre, you need a tip of quite small diameter. It used to be considered that a millilitre would yield about 15-16 drops with an "eyedropper." Not only do they fail to adequately describe how the drop was dispensed, they make no mention at all about how the sample was removed from the vial. I would expect decapping would be prone to adding particulates.

And what the heck is "adhesive carbon"?

Herr Dok, I looked at those images and was quite baffled. I recall RBCs being rather more consistent in size. An why on Earth would they be clustered? Perhaps they were three little RBC siblings holding hands while crossing the street, only to suffer the dreadful fate of Wanda June just before her birthday.

Maybe the method used can't detect it, but those vaccines are all blissfully free of nitrogen. So much for those horrible foreign proteins.

Titling the paper New Quality-Control ... is a bit rich considering the apparent lack of quality in the methods.

MJD: The words “Respectful” and “Insolence” are not compatible by nature and therefore have caused much uncertainty when commenting.

Dude, it's sarcasm. Also, every once in a while, Orac has been mostly respectful to people who appear deeply misguided.

MJD: Any anger or frustration you may be experiencing is understandable.

Condescending prick. I get frustrated when I am dealing with idiots. Unlike you, I understand Orac's intent perfectly, and he has nothing at all to do with my current state of mind.Mostly, I dislike that my whole country turned into evil soulless idjits overnight. Because of the dude YOU voted for, btw.

Gilbert @44, on the ProMed mailing last the other day, Hyland finally announced that they'd no longer distribute atropine, erm, I mean Belladonna teething products in the US.
The rest of the world remains in danger, obviously.

Tis a pity that hurricane Sandy spared that facility.

MJD:
I'm guessing that you went to kindergarten several decades past. Things have changed since then. Sometimes you just have to change with them.
L. P. Hartley says:
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

"Therefore, Orac is the architect of this unfortunate situation and any anger or frustration you may be experiencing is understandable".
That brushing that you hear is MJD picking nits.

1. Orac did not provide any references showing how much of any of these contaminants is safe.
2. What about catalytic effects of the contaminants?
3. Aluminum became a immunologist's dirty secret because, it was a contaminant that made vaccines work better (in some ways).May be we will discover that these contaminants too have an effect?

I think it's perfectly culturally acceptable to refer to a group of people as "guys" (or even "dudes") today. Regardless of their plumbing.

MJD, I find myself agreeing with PGpig. What on Earth have you done?

On James Lyons-Weiler, his new book is publushed by Skyhorse -who would have guessed - and he is flogging it on every comment thread on the internet. I have been rude about it once or twice.

The paper in question: Person with an electron microscope uses it to drive in screws. If you look at dried drops of water with an electron microscope all you are ever likely to see are the impurities left behind. Absolutely no surprises there. Sadly Gatti thinks they have discovered a gold mine. To understand how much junk this paper is, read the disclaimer at the end.

Go away Fendlesworth.

Junk science; junk journal. Fraudulent science; premier journal. Etc. Mad world, my masters.

Yeah, Fendlesworth has taken to impersonating regular commenters now. If the e-mail you use is publicly accessible (e.g., you use a university address to post here), you could potentially be a victim. I think he's figured out that I've gotten pretty good at recognizing him in his first benign-seeming comment that he posts in order to get me to approve it and let him comment. There have been a lot of attempts over the last couple of days, and I've denied them all. What bothers me is that it's certainly possible that one or more of those attempts might have been someone other than Fendlesworth trying to post. I doubt it, but the longer the increased vigilance goes on, the more likely it is that I'll inadvertently shut out new commenters who aren't a Fendlesworth sock.

In any case, keep an eye out for posts by regulars that don't sound like them. Help each other out, in case the person being impersonated doesn't see the comment impersonating him or her.

Yeah, Fendlesworth has taken to impersonating regular commenters now.

Such a class act, that one.

@ #54 Dangerous Bacon

Paul Thomas . . . claimed that it was nearly impossible to get a monetary settlement from the vaccine court.

That is pretty easily refuted. From an earlier post (http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2017/01/13/no-robert-f-kennedy-jr-is-…), responding to #11 in those comments:

Since 1988, over 17,732 petitions have been filed with the VICP. Over that 27- year time period, 15,312 petitions have been adjudicated, with 5,143 of those determined to be compensable, while 10,169 were dismissed. Total compensation paid over the life of the program is approximately $3.5 billion.

With more than a third of the petitioners receiving compensation at an average of $700,000 including lawyers' fees, that does not seem like impossible odds to me. Maybe his math skills are part of his problem.

With more than a third of the petitioners receiving compensation at an average of $700,000 including lawyers’ fees

I doubt that the mean is the best metric here. Moreover, dismissed claims also receive attorneys' fees.

It was not meant to be a detailed study, but a quick look. I believe that average I calculated may actually include lawyers' fees for dismissed claims. But most relevant is that 17,732 claims were filed and 5,143 of those received compensation. Thomas' reported claim, even allowing for hyperbole, was compensation was "nearly impossible." With over a quarter (which is what I should have typed, rather than a third) getting compensation, I would suggest that is not impossible odds, even figuratively.

The vaccine-court process is simultaneously (1) hopelessly unfair and loaded against claimants, as shown by how few claims are accepted, and (2) proof of the dangerous, damaging nature of vaccines, as shown by how many claims are accepted.

Fendlesworth alert in aisle 82.

Actually, that's not Fendlesworth. I know that for a fact. Be careful not to let your Fendlesworth detector get too sensitive, lest you lose specificity. :-)

I know HDB ( or... Smut... somebody) quite well and can easily tell the difference.

Harrumph. I can be annoying and offensive on my own without someone else's imitations.

Annoying enough for a Kiwi.

HDB @45

They are worried about chemtrails (possibly one source of the nanoparticulate contamination), and geo-engineering, and global warming. Perhaps the chemtrails are causing global warming… I am not clear of the details.

You have it backwards, the global warming conspiracy causes chemtrails. On my morning commute I drive by a
billboard that promises to enlighten you.

If a sample has dried in vacuum and still looks like a red corpuscle, then it wan’t a red corpuscle.

The authors state:

We selected that
particular type of microscope as it allows to analyse watery
and oily samples in low vacuum (from 10 to 130 Pa) at a high sensitivity.

They say it was evaporated. I was under the impression that red blood cells were solid, and nearly all hemoglobin and water.

They weren't freeze-dried, and they likely had retained some water. What strikes me is the correct scale. The "red blood cells" in the electronmicrograph are about 7 microns in diameter; this is what you would expect from a red blood cell.

The biconcave disk morphology can be seen in the electrograph: [fig 7b, the scale is 10 microns]

Compare and contrast with an electronmicrograph of known red blood cells here.

" I learned in kindergarten that “guys” pee standing up, and sitting down, while “gals” only pee when their sitting down."
Not entirely true. Women also pee squatting when there is no porcelain available. Also there are bathroom fixtures that allow women to pee standing up. So there are no hard and fast rules. Judging from your response, I'll bet your first reader, like mine, was about Dick and Jane.
"Look, Dick, oh look. See Spot. See Spot sniff the tree. Why is Spot sniffing the tree?"

They say it was evaporated. I was under the impression that red blood cells were solid, and nearly all hemoglobin and water.

Flexible (to go through capillaries) little sacks of cytoplasm. At osmotic equilibrium with their environment (hence bursting in water, or collapsing into little stars in strong saline). Also, sickle-cell trait.

To an unprejudiced eye, the artefacts reported by Gatti and Montanari are obviously the fossilised vertebrae of very very small ichthyosaurs.
https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2013AM/webprogram/Paper232163.html

” I learned in kindergarten that “guys” pee standing up, and sitting down, while “gals” only pee when their sitting down.”

Women not only pee squatting, but if they have a Sheewee or similar product they pee standing up, saves a lot of hassle when out walking from nettles etc, not to mention the fun to be had confusing anyone who does happen upon you while you are so engaged :)

When I was growing up, i'd always heard that girls' locker rooms and restrooms were much nastier than the guys' because of low-precision hovering so as not to touch the seat.

Which came first. The hovering so as not to touch a nasty toilet or the nasty toilet due to hovering?

Anywho,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C90uhvXW1KM

I'd go with the ichthyosaurs. Above and to the left of the bottom-most white arrow in Figure 7b you can see what is clearly the remains of a soft-shelled egg that has hatched.

If their microscope is supposed to be able to identify elements, why no reading of iron from the things that are supposed to be RBCs?

We don't know that the three things identified as having RBC shape are biconvex. All we see are the tops and the proportions are wrong, at least for mammalian RBCs - too much like mini doughnuts. Again, there is more size variability that would normally be expected with three random mature RBCs - not impossible, but pretty unlikely. Such shapes could equally well be produced by anything that formed tiny globules that first appeared like domes that "fell" in the centre with loss of water. They look to me like they were part of the blob that likes under the red arrows. It seems too coincidental that they are all rather oval with their long axes more or less parallel and normal to the blob. The smallest looks fully detached from the blob, the middle partially detached and the largest still part of the blob. Their idiotic incompetence a preparing the images (jpeg'd after addition of the arrows for criminy sake) doesn't help. To me, the suggestion that they may be RBCs simply fits with the generally sloppiness of the paper. (Every time I look at it I find something else - this time pressure in Pascals in one place and bars in another; 20[space]microliter in the very same sentence as 25[dash]mm.)
The vaccine in question is a suspension, which by definition contains insoluble particles.

^should be "lies under" not "likes under"

I did find this sentence to be redundant:

No
satisfactory explanation or, in many cases, no explanation at all has been given and it seems that those adverse effects happen on a random and stochastic basis.

I could be wrong, but I always took stochastic to be nearly synonymous with random.

And Doug, I think the EDS spectrograph was for the white arrows and not the red ones. Look at Figs 1-5: they all have white arrows to indicate where the EDS spectra were taken, and say as much in their respective legends. The red arrows make their first appearance in Figure 6:
The red arrow indicates the organic layer (less
atomically dense) that covers the Cerium particle.
And the white arrows in Fig 7, I would assume, still refer to the points in which the EDS spectra was taken.

And while the miniature ichthyosaur theory is very convincing, but the authors did not post any electronmicrographs of other miniature ichthyosaur bones. The skull would be conclusive, and could very well have ended up in a different batch of vaccines.

I'm going to leave this an open question. I personally wouldn't be worried about being injected with red blood cells, even from an opossum, and would be more concerned about the tungsten, aluminum, and lead particles.

Compare and contrast with an electronmicrograph of known red blood cells here.
The image is from SEM -- which is to say that the RBCs were preserved in some way (e.g. cryopreservation) and sputter-coated with a thin layer of heavy metal, to maintain their shape. Which is not an option when element analysis is the goal.

Aw, you beat me to it!

We had transmission electron microscopes in my junior high and high school and I prepared many a grid with samples that needed a metallic coating to preserve cellular shapes.
Alas, by the time our children went to the same schools, even the light microscopes were long gone. :(

Posts 87, 89 and 97 are not me.

I was alerted to this because someone used my e-mail address to post, which led to a notification.

Why, I nearly feel left out! ;)

Oh well, it is pretty hard to impersonate me.

Possible non-Chris on another thread.

Their idiotic incompetence a preparing the images (jpeg’d after addition of the arrows for criminy sake) doesn’t help.

Figure 7b features a faint rectangle overlaid upon the image (slightly above the centre, just to the right of the putative RBCs). Perhaps an artefact of the Photoshop process.

Posts 87, 89 and 97 are not me.

A word to the wise: Just because you're using your real name, you don't have to use your real E-mail address. Fer chrissakes, people, mail Orac from the real one, have that key (which is all it is) revoked, viz., banned, and notify him of a new one.

Problem solved modulo Gravastink, which shouldn't be much of a hurdle to redo with the same "avatar" for those who insist upon being well tracked across sites.

Hell, it's simpler than calling Travis's dad, the public servant, to suggest that his idiot son's activity might need a smackdown.

Anyway, on the antivaccine-crazy front, I just got around to looking at a few on the comments on this STAT item.

Some of them are recognizable verbatim churn, but I'll be damned if I know how I missed out on the "CDC SPIDER" routine.

Then again, it seems to have taken Rappoport and Mikey three months to pick up on it, so perhaps I'm not that far behind.

Or you could wait for the real Orac and forget the arse-wipe pretending to be him.

and you all shall get a new password

That reminds me of a story. (Pattimmy is in there, too, but it's mostly as odd anti-anti-bourgeois stage dressing.)

Die in a fire, Fendlesworth.

Lovely. While I was sleeping, Fendlesworth decided to impersonate me. Well, that was easily taken care of anyway, a very brief annoyance.

Oh, well. If any of the several comments appearing to come from regular commenters that got blocked were legitimate, I'm sorry. I'm pretty sure I got them all correct, but I can never be 100% sure. If any of those new commenters whose comments I did not allow were not Fendlesworth socks, I'm also sorry. I'm pretty sure they all were, but you never know. Until Fendlesworth tires and moves on, unfortunately new commenters have to be subjected to "extreme vetting," to borrow a term. Which is probably part of what Fendlesworth wants.

It is tragic to think how empty somebody's life must be that these kinds of petulant antics feel so relevant to them after so many months.

Well, ever, actually, but especially tragic if they can't stop wasting their life like that.

Narad@105,

I hear ya.. I do remembers a comment of yours regarding key == value. I guess my value is hard to dig out :)

Alain

On the original topic: two important points about the authors of the study:
1. They think that tungsten and wolfram are different elements. Does this compatible with competence? How likely is it that they have any idea what they're doing?

2. They mainly use their donated electron microscope for selling dubious body-fluid tests to hypochondriacs. That is to say, grifters.
http://www.nanodiagnostics.it/en/pathologies-of-unknown-origin/

I am wondering whether their claims deserve a detailed deconstruction. It would be easy to over-think it.

A quick search showed some images of red blood cells in desiccated condition.
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/red-blood-cells-coloured-scanni…

Yep, looks just like the image - in a pig's eye.

Did they examine slides with pure micro-filteres distilled water made in the same way to see what contaminants they were introducing?

@Richard #40.
Thank you for the biggest laugh I have had amidst the horrors of the new US administration. My husband and I had tears running down our faces as we read the link about the Rays of Saturn. The notion of people solemnly recording such symptoms as "seductively eating a sandwich" was more than we could bear!

@MJD #64,
I am obligated to point out that pedantry obligates its originator to establish very carefully that he (or she) has not exposed himself (or herself) to pedantry in return. Their, there, and they're are not interchangeable.
I await the obligatory reply from yet another commenter decrying my use of the Oxford comma or some other gaucherie.

I had a brief look at this nasty paper. On page 4 it is claimed that Engerix B has no Aluminium, but found Al(precipitates) . It is well known that Engerix-B is a recombinat Hep B vaccine, which is agjuvanted with Al(OH)3 with 0,5 mg Al 3+. So if you have a nearly insoluble Al-salt, you will find it.

On page 8 they wrote that Al PO4x 2H20 is the Adjuvant of Gardasil. In two different samples they found many different traces- including Aluminium Salts. However the Adjuvant of Gardasil is Aluminiumhydroxyphosphatesulfate. Why was sulfate not detected?

As commented in #113 they believe Tungsten and Wolfram are different elements.

Obviously the authors have no idea, what they are doing, they do not have controls such as Al-adjuvants alone, and obviously they have not validated their methods.

fake science !

Herr Doktor Bimler wrote in post #52
"There are hints of a scandal about how [Gatti and Montanari] came to have a personal electron microscope
See here:
http://www.messinaora.it/notizia/2013/12/18/montanari-grillo-e-il-micro…

All culminating in accusations that Gatti and Montanari are using their toy not for environmental activism, but for a profitable business selling analyses through their company Nanodiagnostic Ltd.; and accusations from Montanari that Grillo just raised all that money for them as a way of exploiting them for political gain. "

Beppo Grillo is the head of the political party 5 stars in Italy. But he is also an antivaxxer and HIV denialist.
And therefore he has followers, who claim to be a "researcher and scientist"

And the result of the research:

" Immunisation makes you gay,

homosexuality is a disease a micro- form of autism"

sorry it is in German - but even the greatest nonsense will find a newspaper to publish this bullshit.

http://www.20min.ch/panorama/news/story/27468141

On page 8 they wrote that Al PO4x 2H20 is the Adjuvant of Gardasil. In two different samples they found many different traces- including Aluminium Salts. However the Adjuvant of Gardasil is Aluminium hydroxyphosphate sulfate. Why was sulfate not detected?

Well, the solubility product constant for Al(PO₄) at 25°C is
9.8 x 10⁻²¹, and Al₂(SO₄)₃ is so soluble that it's solubility is expressed in grams per deciliter (36.4 g/dL at 20 °C). This would give me the impression that the (SO₄)⁻² ion dissociates almost completely and wouldn't necessarily be found in conjunction with the aluminum particles. I would guess the majority of the (SO₄)⁻² was spread evenly over the filter paper and/or had passed through the filter paper.

As commented in #113 they believe Tungsten and Wolfram are different elements.

Either that, or the translator was smoking something good. Here is the original Italian paper Nuovo controllo di qualità Indagini sui vaccini: micro e Nanocontamination

Hey, Travis, did ya ever get your car registered?

I'd like to add this fresh new nasty paper (Montanari S and his wife Gatti AM as co-authors)

Visani G et al.
Environmental nanoparticles are significantly over-expressed in acute myeloid leukemia
Leuk Res. 2016 Nov;50:50-56. doi: 10.1016/j.leukres.2016.09.004. Epub 2016 Sep 3.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27669365

Did they examine slides with pure micro-filteres distilled water ...

If you follow the link Orac posted you can see the whole paper.
If they used any sort of control they failed to mention it. The methods section of the paper is incredibly poor and lacking in detail.

It's so cute when Travis tries to pretend he understands stuff and writes something that demonstrates a complete lack of understanding: "etc. etc. passed through" - good gods he's dumb

I’d like to add this fresh new nasty paper (Montanari S and his wife Gatti AM as co-authors)
Visani G et al.
Environmental nanoparticles are significantly over-expressed in acute myeloid leukemia

Nice! As someone points out on PubMed Commons, they are applying t-tests and MANOVA to count variables... which is a statistical abomination... while the concept of "multiple comparison correction" is foreign to them.

They previously reported the same results to a predatory conference:
http://www.frontiersin.org/Community/AbstractDetails.aspx?ABS_DOI=10.33…
where the information is slightly more accessible. We learn, in particular, that

The particulate matter (engineered or nanosized by-products) identified in the blood has probably an environmental origin, but some chemical compositions may belong to nanotechnological-surfaced implants.

"Engineered" and "nanotechnological-surfaced" is their way of blaming Chemtrails.

Again, the SPEWS approach is highly effective, and what collateral damage there is, is a feature rather than a bug.

Beppo Grillo is the head of the political party 5 stars in Italy. But he is also an antivaxxer and HIV denialist.
And therefore he has followers, who claim to be a “researcher and scientist”

He is also a werewolf, according to Montanari, who self-published a book on Grillo's skin-walking tendencies. I am not making this up.https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0Wfm4EqWAIE/WJcLKcGU2XI/AAAAAAAAUyo/8PnmgA9B…

You would think that an anti-vaxxer (and chemtrail loon) like Montanari would work well with Grillo, but ultimately there are egos involved, and unaccounted-for donations.

decrying my use of the Oxford comma
The Oxford comma is an abomination.

Well, there are indeed some very real chemtrails. They're just not what the propeller hat crowd thinks that they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JP-7

The answer from Montanari (the second part is written in english):

http://www.stefanomontanari.net/sito/blog/2959-sono-troppo-forti-per-me…

And therefore [Grillo] has followers, who claim to be a “researcher and scientist”
And the result of the research:
” Immunisation makes you gay,
homosexuality is a disease a micro- form of autism”

Vanoli came up at RI a few years ago:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2013/04/05/who-can-quack-the-loudest/

I'm still not sure that Vanoli "claims to be a scientist". It looks like some HuffingtonPost writer was the first to dignify him with that title, and lazy churnamalists have been recycling it as a fact ever since.

The answer from Montanari (the second part is written in english):

The English translation works best if read aloud in the voice of Daffy Duck. However, a Yosemite Sam voice is also good.

The particulate matter (engineered or nanosized by-products) identified in the blood has probably an environmental origin, but some chemical compositions may belong to nanotechnological-surfaced implants.

“Engineered” and “nanotechnological-surfaced” is their way of blaming Chemtrails.

I suppose the implants could alternatively have been left by those anal-probe aliens.

from Montanari's reply: "More than 40 years spent on research taught us the basics of the trade."
After forty years I would expect performance beyond the basics. I would expect ability to prepare a paper that would not get a third or fourth year student a lot of red ink and a poor grade.

Do these predatory journals charge authors by the word?

@herr doktor bimler
Excuse me for my bad english, sir.

English has been a frequent jest of mine, for few are its masters.
A language that is exemplified by its rules being violated incessantly.
So, comparing your usage of the language against my own, I'll fall back to another jest.
One not quite truthful, hence, the jest.
I speak two languages, English and bad English.*

*The realty is, I can curse fluently in seven languages. Finding cardinal directions on a map, about as well. Finding a bathroom, not so much. ;)

@herr doktor bimler
Excuse me for my bad english, sir.

Your English is fine, Janox! And whoever translated Montanari's rebuttal into English -- was it you? -- worked marvels in capturing his literary 'voice'.

If you liked the previous paper by the two nano-scientists (Montanari and wife) about the nanoparticles in AML patients, maybe you'll also appreciate this one (well, this it's just Gatti without Montanari):

Roncati L, Gatti AM et al.
The first investigative science-based evidence of Morgellons psychogenesis
Ultrastruct Pathol. 2016 Sep-Oct;40(5):249-53. doi: 10.1080/01913123.2016.1190434. Epub 2016 Jun 7.

So, are 387000 euros for a microscope worth enough to delucidate the nature of the fibers found at home, in the washing machine of the Morgellons reported case ?
( I apologize for my english, anyway, I hope make sense)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27269255

Since the authors come from Italy they should follow the nomenclature from the European Pharmacopoeia.regarding the name vaccine.

And as example the correct name of Tetanus vaccine is Tetanus Vaccine (adsorbed), or Influenza vaccine (split virion inactivated) and all the other vaccines in Table 1 which were analysed.

But because they are anti-vaxer, they have their own nomenclature and name all vaccines as "anti-Tetanus vaccine" or" anti-flu vaccine".

Also #6 in Table 1 is called an Adsorbed anti-Tetanus Vaccine - but this is not a vaccine at all, but a Tetanus Immunglobulin (Trade name .Tetabulin) .

So the authors do not know the difference of passive immunization with human immunglobulin ( Tetabulin i.m ). and active vaccination with a normal vaccine.

Shame on you!

In 2011, the US Supreme Court has declared vaccines "unavoidably unsafe." I would say that this is an accurate assessment considering the fact that the US Vaccine Injury Compensation Court has awarded over $3 billion in compensation for cases of vaccine-related injuries and deaths since the late 1980s. To cause injuries and deaths, the vaccines obviously either contain dangerous toxic ingredients, or else harmful contaminants, or both. I would say it is both. Feel free t have every recommended vaccine, but there is absolutely NO WAY I would let anyone with a vaccine come near me or any child of mine.

Obviously Erwin didn't bother to read the 2011 Supreme Court decision, where the majority specifically refuted the term "unavoidably unsafe" when applied to vaccines.

Also, a person might have a reaction to something, which in no way or form makes that "thing" a toxin or poison.

If a person is allergic to shellfish & dies from eating it, does that mean all shellfish are toxic or poisonous?

Also, if you parse the actual compensation numbers, you'll find that the chances of serious vaccine reaction are a magnitude smaller than the chances of being struck and killed by lightning.

For a lightning victim or vaccine victim, all those probabilities and statistics mean nothing. For them, the wave function has collapsed.

The only question left is, are we doing enough to improve vaccine safety? The answer is absolutely, NOT.
Is there a plan outlining when the injuries listed on the vaccine injury table will be addressed? Where are the new, safer vaccines?

http://encyclopediaantivaccinemovement.blogspot.com/2014/01/erwin-alber…

Always nice when we get such auspicious guests.....

I'm really afraid that someday people like Erwin--really, people like Erwin's children--are going to find out the hard way what it really means to get measles, mumps, and rubella. Three billion dollars over 30 years is nothing. To add to irony, many of the vaccine injured would likely have the same people who were hit the worst by the diseases they didn't get.

Life is about choices and chances. Don't choose the odds of finding out what it's like to watch your child grow up with shingles, or deafness, or impaired vision, all because you can't understand the odds.

Obviously Erwin didn’t bother to read the 2011 Supreme Court decision, where the majority specifically refuted the term “unavoidably unsafe” when applied to vaccines.

It's an article of faith – even Mary Freaking Holland has tried to sell this one. Just to be clear, it was the Bruesewitzes that tried to make the claim, not Wyeth. The idea was that it could have entitled them to a case-by-case evaluation back in state court.

He does live in Thailand - I'm sure he's seen many of these diseases up close, though I'm sure he won't admit it.

Anti-vaxers take a lot of things, where are thoroughly debunked and false, on faith....

I’m really afraid that someday people like Erwin–really, people like Erwin’s children–are going to find out the hard way what it really means to get measles, mumps, and rubella.

I suspect Errwyn's problem is more likely to wind up involving antibiotic resistance.

I’m really afraid that someday people like Erwin–really, people like Erwin’s children–are going to find out the hard way what it really means to get measles, mumps, and rubella.

Those are bad. Diphtheria and Pertussis are even more vicious.

The pertussis vaccines does not work very well. It can turn you into an asymptomatic carrier of pertussis. And give you multiple sclerosis.

Waning Tdap Effectiveness in Adolescents
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2016/02/03/peds.201…

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0171298515301078

Quite an achievement for a vaccine ...
And in a deacde we may find out that there is a similar story for diphtheria as well ...

Hey vinu, fun fact: humans are *terrible* at building long-lasting immunity to pertussis, regardless of the form of exposure. That's right, even a wild-type case of pertussis won't necessarily protect you from another infection.

Oh, and if a person gets pertussis and becomes very sick and requires IV fluids, those fluids might include gelatin!

There are too many open questions to even perform a risk/benefit assessment. So any claim of pertussis vaccine benefits outweighing the risks has no scientific basis.

http://journals.lww.com/pidj/Fulltext/2005/05001/Duration_of_Immunity_A…

Vinu: Wow, that's a new low for you rectally sourcing things. Yes, the pertussis vax doesn't last very long, and that's a real problem, but the people who say it causes MS are lying, about everything. If they told you the date or made a statement about the weather it'd have to be triple-checked.

(I assume you're referencing CIA Parker there? She's such a doubtful source I don't even believe she has a kid, let alone a grandkid.)

Secondly, as far as the diptheria vaccine goes, that's about the oldest vaccine still in use today. I think we'd have noticed a problem by now.
(And even if there were, you give a parent a choice between baby dying RIGHT now, and a small risk fifty years later.. I guarantee you most parents are gonna go for the small risk fifty years later.)

Orac is mostly correct about the Gatti et al. The lack of controls is a fatal flaw. They should have used pure water samples as controls, prepared in exactly the same way, by the same people, using identical tools on the same day.

Also, the use of evaporation for sample preparation is concerning because dissolved salts will form crystals as the water evaporates. Montanari said in his response that the samples were not evaporated, but this makes no sense, because electron microscopy requires high vacuum.

Another issue I dont think has been mentioned is the filtration efficiency of the flow hood. Did they use a HEPA hood or an ultra filtration hood? Some (many?) flow hoods use filters that have rated efficiencies down to 0.3 micron. But they report particles down to about 0.1 micron. And the filtration specs of the flow hood are not mentioned in the paper. So thats another problem.

The promotion of this paper is a fail by vaccine activists.

electron microscopy requires high vacuum

Not necessarily, with the kind of EM used here. But in this paper the authors are explicit that they did use the "low vacuum" setting. I am not sure that Montanari has actually read it.

There exists an interview in Italian with someone who worked at nanodiagnostics, Montanaris private laboratory. The former collaborator mentions various facts:
1. In 2009, they had one microscope which no-one knows which state it is in these days, but which in any case is not suited for for studying anything at nano-scale.
2. They have or had a second microscope, financed by donations, that seems to be a very complicated device. I have no knowledge of microscopes, but the ex collaborator says while he was working there it was hardly ever used, since they didn't have the staff to operate it. Furthermore, they didn't accept the producers conditions for ordinary maintenance of the device, so when something was wrong costs were high and often they didn't fix it at once. So this second microscope for nano-scale observations remained in the basement, most of the time unused.
3. The former collaborator describes only Gatti as a researcher. Montanari himself is doing the PR for their cause. He doubts whether it is actually admissible that Montanari be named co-author, since he does no research whatsoever.
4. Samples were prepared under non aseptic, contaminated conditions, often at the nearby university of Modena, and transported in little paper packages to the laboratory where they were again handled in a non contamination-free manner. The ex-collaborator remembers one situation in which he dropped a sample and it fell to the floor. He tried to convince Gatti not to use it for analysis, but it was used all the same with the subsequent declaration of having identified "hot particles" which certainly stemmed from an incinerator (they are very affiliated politically and some years ago the construction of incinerators was a widely discussed matter in their town and province, so they kindly offered themselves to make analyses).
5. The former collaborator mentions three times throughout the interview that he would not describe what is happening at the laboratory is "scientific research", as "this implies basic principles which in this case are quite disputable".

herr doktor bimler-

Yes. Thank you for the correction. Forgot about ESEM.

The paper says the samples were evaporated, but it also says they used ESEM.

Another issue I dont think has been mentioned is the filtration efficiency of the flow hood. Did they use a HEPA hood or an ultra filtration hood? Some (many?) flow hoods use filters that have rated efficiencies down to 0.3 micron. But they report particles down to about 0.1 micron. And the filtration specs of the flow hood are not mentioned in the paper. So thats another problem.

Wow. The best criticism against the paper so far was made by Vaccine Papers.

Anyone using Parker as a source should be advised that she thinks MS can also be caused by falling asleep in the sun.

I don't know what this "Parker" stuff is about ...

I am referring to:

The potential role of subclinical Bordetella Pertussis colonization in the etiology of multiple sclerosis
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0171298515301078

Why build then attack this strawman when all you have to do is look at the INSERT for the HepatitisB vaccine they give infants in their first 24 hours. One of the statistically significant side effects is Pharyngitis! Caused by...wait for it...Streptococcus virus.

I'll say it again. Statistically significant streptococcus in your allegedly uber pure vaccine. Fully disclosed and admitted by the manufacturer, and accepted by the FDA for APPROVAL. So WTF is the point of this strawman you're fighting with EM and salt crystal traces? You have a full admission of contamination from the manufacturer. You're a joke for claiming anything else with your idiotic junkscience.

But wait it gets worse. Streptococcus has a 2-3 week incubation interval. The monitoring window for most of these vaccine studies is often only 2-4 weeks. So beyond the statistically significant reported cases, how many cases went unreported (who even expects a vaccine to give them strep) or presented after the monitoring window closed? You don't know because all you can do is fight strawmen when the genuine article is telling you you are flat out wrong. Also note that vaccine studies do not allow children, pregnant women, people with autoimmune diseases or invalids. But then they give the vaccine to these people afterwards. How many of them do you think got strep if healthy people got it at a statistically significant rate? Its gross.

You want to know about another clear case of contamination? Merck is currently being sued by none other than the DOJ in Texas (much to the FDAs chagrin) because the Mumps component of the MMR does not work AT ALL. And in order to cover that up, Merck bullied 2 employees into spiking clinical trial samples with rabbit blood which contain natural antibodies to mumps. They have data, e-mails, samples and federal whistleblower protection. But nothing to see here right? After all the TV networks, 70% of whose ad budget comes from big pharma, haven't said anything.

Integrity thy name is Vaccines! Don't make me laugh or puke. You people are delusional. You wrecked your kids because you listened to the TV. Accept it and try giving all this attention to them instead of these hilarious and embarrassing strawmen that 'contradict' things that the vaccine makers admit openly. The downtrend of nearly every disease we vaccinate for was steeper BEFORE the vaccines were introduced. In 50+ years MMR has only reduced deaths related to these diseases from 0.30 to 0.15 per 10000. Orders of magnitude less than the % of people that got strep throat from a Hepatitis vaccine. And in the same time Autism has risen from 1:10,000 to 1:35. THIS is what you call effective public health? Could you be any dumber or more deluded?

HepB vaccine is contaminated with yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae).

Atopic dermatitis caused by vaccine-induced allergy to Saccharomyces cerevisiae?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305905780_Atopic_dermatitis_ca…

@TBone. The only host of natural Mumpsinfection is the human species. However in the Laboratory it is experimentally possible, to infect rabbits too. But rabbits are not a natural host of mumps virus infection.
And the Merk mumps Vaccine strain (Cheryl Lynn) works very well, with a very low rate of adverse events following immunization. And correlation does not mean causation.

Streptococcus virus

and there we have another fine exemplar of knowledge level

all you have to do is look at the INSERT for the HepatitisB vaccine they give infants in their first 24 hours.

Argument by Package Insert. You fail.

Merck is currently being sued by none other than the DOJ in Texas (much to the FDAs chagrin)

False.

because the Mumps component of the MMR does not work AT ALL.

Given that Mumps cases are virtually unheard of in the U.S. or places which vaccinate, false.

After all the TV networks, 70% of whose ad budget comes from big pharma,

Citation needed.

The downtrend of nearly every disease we vaccinate for was steeper BEFORE the vaccines were introduced.

Wrong again. Learn the difference between mortality and morbidity. Just because medicine was better at lessening death and negative sequelae doesn't mean the diseases were going away.

And in the same time Autism has risen from 1:10,000 to 1:35.

Correlation!= Causation. Do you know what has an almost perfect correlation to the rise in autism diagnoses?
Organic food.
TL;DR: You are just another antivaxx ranter repeating tropes we've all seen and refuted before literally dozens of times.

The links between vaccines and the supposed health problems (notably autism) has been studied umpteen times and no correlation has been shown. To get around this, you have to posit willful misinterpretation of the studies by everyone who's qualified to interpret them, or wide scale fraud that should be easy to review and check. Then there has to have been a huge conspiracy among people who have dedicated their lives to health care. You think at least some of them would be sincere, qualified, and brave enough to say something really substantial.

I wasn't able to find anything about the supposed bacteria in MMR, or about the Texas DOJ suing Merck over this, or the rabbit blood. To be fair, I did find a federal lawsuit by whistleblowers who claim that Merck got sloppy with their mumps vaccine testing because they have a monopoly already. There have been a few mumps clusters where vaccinated persons got sick. Note that if all this is true, it proves that the vaccine works!

"studied umpteen times"

It does not matter how many times you study it, if you are looking at the wrong causes.

Autism: A special case of vaccine-induced cow’s milk allergy?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313248416_Autism_A_special_cas…

@Christine, well, there is one link with vaccines, vaccine preventable diseases and various syndromes and diseases some children were diagnosed with.
After all, had they suffered and died from a vaccine preventable disease, they'd have never survived to be diagnosed with whatever was an occult condition.

I mean really, if a child dies from measles encephalitis, any autism that might have been diagnosed would be missed.

On a more serious note, child and infant mortality and morbidity has dropped precipitously and that has had major impacts in our society.
When my parents were young, it wasn't unusual for a sibling to die during childhood, families were correspondingly larger to account for the losses.
Today, the loss of a child is a tragedy that some families never recover from, in part due to the rarity of such a tragic event.
Some think that isn't an improvement, although for the life of me, I'm unable of comprehending the thought process, or lack thereof, behind such a view.

@TBone, Streptococcus is a bacteria, not a virus. As it is a bacteria, it can usually be treated with antibiotics. Streptococcus also colonizes people's nasal passages, as it is a ubiquitous bacteria. Indeed, my father was colonized with MRSA, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. That means that it's quite likely that I and my wife were also colonized by the bacteria as well, as we lived with my father and cared for him over his final years of life.
Incubation time that you gave is wrong, incubation time is 2 - 5 days for someone infected with the bacteria.
Indeed, you got so much wrong in your tirade, I was astonished at the sheer volume of wrong information that you possess! Astonished to the point of wondering if you actually know any correct thing whatsoever.
Seriously, when you fill out a form, do you also manage to get your name wrong?

I wasn’t able to find anything about the supposed bacteria in MMR, or about the Texas DOJ suing Merck over this, or the rabbit blood. To be fair, I did find a federal lawsuit by whistleblowers who claim that Merck got sloppy with their mumps vaccine testing because they have a monopoly already.

It's the same thing, just hopelessly garbled.

@TBone - You mean Pharma advertising accounts for around 5% of advertising revenues (Financial Years 2014 and 2015). See page 16 of this report.

https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/IAB-Internet-Advertising…

all you have to do is look at the INSERT for the HepatitisB vaccine they give infants in their first 24 hours.

OK (PDF).

One of the statistically significant

These words do not occur in the insert.

side effects

These words do not occur in the insert.

is Pharyngitis!

"In a group of studies, 3258 doses of RECOMBIVAX HB, 10 mcg, were administered to 1252 healthy adults who were monitored for 5 days after each dose. Injection site reactions and systemic adverse reactions were reported following 17% and 15% of the injections, respectively. The following adverse reactions were reported:

"Incidence Equal To or Greater Than 1% of Injections
. . . .
RESPIRATORY, THORACIC AND MEDIASTINAL DISORDERS
Pharyngitis; upper respiratory infection"

(emphasis added).

Caused by…wait for it…Streptococcus virus [sic].

Wait for it . . . .

But wait it gets worse.

Yup.

Streptococcus has a 2-3 week incubation interval.

Whoops.

Thanks @Narad.

Still no evidence of staph in vaccines. It actually seems more plausible than rabbit blood. Staph would just be criminally poor quality control. I think we can safely assume that the small number of pharyngitis cases were unrelated to the vaccine.

I caught an annoying upper respiratory tract infection a couple of weeks after my influenza vaccination. Know what that means?
If I were in their tracking, I'd be listed as having a side effect.
Alas, having poop for luck that month can be listed as a side effect, even when it's just bad luck.*

The cold lasted a lot longer than usual, probably due to my having an extremely dry house, as my humidifier is broken and secretions tended to be thicker, due to the extreme dryness of the air in the house.
The weather and cold broke at the same time, really annoying sinus infection!

I did have one side effect from the influenza injection, although I more attribute it to technique than to vaccine, pain in the injection site for a few days. Why, it felt like someone stuck a steel object into my deltoid muscle!
Oh wait, they did. ;)

*Well, bad luck in the form of a thoughtless young woman brought her sick toddler over to visit. Sick with, wait for it...! Strept throat.

"After all the TV networks, 70% of whose ad budget comes from big pharma"

It takes a bit of checking to discover that this claim is a crock of fetid hog drippings.

Annual drug company spending on network TV ads was about $3.6 billion in the latest year (2015) for which I could find figures. _Prime time_ TV network ad revenue was about 8.36 billion, so total network income from ads is even higher - let's say $10 billion at least. That means a little over one third of network TV ad revenue comes from drug companies. That's a lot of dough, but nowhere near 70%.

Meantime, the logic of "Big Pharma spends a lot on ads, so Vaccines Bad" escapes me. Most of those ads are for drugs to treat diabetes, depression, sleep disorders in the blind and the dreaded ED, very few by comparison for vaccines (on occasion you'll see spots for shingles and HPV vaccines, but they're dwarfed by drug ads).

Apparently RFK Jr. is one of those spouting the 70% figure, when he's not fulminating about getting mercury out of "vaccines".

There are times that I'd be tempted to believe that 70% number, but that's largely out of jesting frustration over commercials for the latest immune modulating drug that is being advertised (we've recently had a blitz with ads for several drugs to treat psoriasis.

Personally, I'm from the school of thought where, I don't ask my doctor about an advertised drug. I figure if doctor thinks that that drug is appropriate, he'll ask me if I want to try it.
Although, I have discussed with doctor some new pharmaceutical families of drugs, which had nothing to do with my medical condition, out of curiosity over the efficacy of a rather new drug family, just for general knowledge about that drug and his experience with that class of medication.
Of course, I'm also the type of guy who speaks pharmacology with pharmacists, just to clarify how certain drugs actually operate.

They have data, e-mails, samples and federal whistleblower protection.

This is just a painfully engorged sac of fail.

I found one quote by RFK:

I ate breakfast last week with the president of a network news division and he told me that during non-election years, 70% of the advertising revenues for his news division come from pharmaceutical ads. And if you go on TV any night and watch the network news, you’ll see they become just a vehicle for selling pharmaceuticals. He also told me that he would fire a host who brought onto his station a guest who lost him a pharmaceutical account.

He obviously isn't referring to the entire industry here. His anecdote refers to a singular "news division".

This is just a painfully engorged sac of fail.

Well if Merck could work on that mumps vaccine....

I found one quote by RFK:

Shirley you mean RFK Jnr, whose statements bear no discernable relationship to truth.

I do mean RFK Jr, and don't call me Shirley.

Still no evidence of staph in vaccines. It actually seems more plausible than rabbit blood.

Krahling & Wlochowski's allegations include the spiking of samples with rabbit antibodies, like Dong Pyou Han in reverse. The whole "Protocol 007" routine is more complicated than that, but this case is likely to continue to move at the glacial pace that it's been going at. I should update the RECAP/archive.org docket one of these days.

This is just a painfully engorged sac of fail.

Well if Merck could work on that mumps vaccine….

Try reading for content.

Funny, I didn't see too many Pharma ads during the Super Bowl....if they really constituted that much revenue, where were they?

CDC:

It usually takes two to five days for someone exposed to group A strep to become ill.

Strep A, notably S. pyogenes, is the usual group responsible for "strep throat." Pharyngitis is more likely to be viral than bacterial. It has been a huge player in the "gimme antibiotics" demands that have fueled the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria (which, fortunately, does not include Strep A species, which remain easily treatable with penicillin & other common antibiotics).

As I recall, S. pyogenes also is known for carrying some interesting bacteriophages, some transmitting some clinically relevant toxins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streptococcus_pyogenes#Lysogeny

Wow. The best criticism against the paper so far was made by Vaccine Papers.

D.S. does have his fans, although spectacular irony can be a pitfall.

"... best criticism ..."
Except that everything in that comment was covered by Orac and/or much earlier comments.

I don't understand why the pro-vaccine team will never admit to any failures.

Hey pro-vaccine guys.. Can you name any vaccines that have been really harmful?

Question your bias. Every product class that's been manufactured or produced in the world has had it's failures.

Can you guys admit to any vaccines that were just horrible and caused deaths, disease, and other nasty side affects?

I remember when I had the measles. (everyone I grew up with went through it...I know I'm dating myself....but it was no big deal)

Well, Dick. Tell us of a single and utter vaccine failure that had any morbidity or mortality rate beyond car accidents?
I can name one that still didn't approach that rate, but was our most dangerous of vaccines and has since been retired, as that disease is extinct in the wild or civilization.
Meanwhile, polio is extinct in the US.
What do you have, other than bovine defecation and rectally procured "facts"?

"Tell us of a single and utter vaccine failure that had any morbidity or mortality rate beyond car accidents?"

Why are we spending so much money on infrastructure? We are already way better than Bangladesh.

OK, Richard, I'll bite.

Hey pro-vaccine guys.. Can you name any vaccines that have been really harmful? Smallpox - except that the risks from the disease were much higher. No vaccine has been kept on the market for which the risks of the vaccine are higher than the risks of the disease with or without complications. Guess why we don't get the smallpox vaccine any more? Because vaccines and isolation of sick people ELIMINATED the disease and it has no carriers in nature besides humans.

Can you guys admit to any vaccines that were just horrible and caused deaths, disease, and other nasty side affects? None that I can think of that are commercially available. Lymerix is off the market, Rotashield is off the market. Because they were found to have higher risks than benefits (see above).

I remember when I had the measles. (everyone I grew up with went through it…I know I’m dating myself….but it was no big deal) Waves hand. I had measles, rubella, mumps, chicken pox. It still was a big deal. I didn't die from them, but I was miserable. I have the so-called blessing of knowing that I could get shingles any time. I did not develop immunity to measles or mumps, so I get the MMR vaccine since as an adult of certain age I don't WANT to get the disease again.

But, as for them being "no big deal"...ask my mom who had a classmate die from measles. Ask my brother, who has a friend who is sterile from mumps. But hey, no big deal, right? Jerk.

Now, Richard...can you admit that you haven't done due diligence in researching the subject? Don't bring a knife to a gun fight.

@Richard, #190

I don’t understand why the pro-vaccine team will never admit to any failures.

Pardon my French, but this is nonsense. Vaccine proponents fully acknowledge that vaccines can have negative effects, both structural and incidental. Structural disadvantages are things like side effects and the ever present chance of complications, however small -- any medical intervention such as an injection has the potential to cause harm, e.g. infections. Statistically, it is likely that vaccines cause a few deaths every year.
Then there are incidental problems; in 1928, twelve children died from a contaminated diphtheria vaccine (this was the main reason for introducing thimerosal and other preservatives in vaccines); in 1993, there was a problem with the mumps vaccine in Japan, causing several thousand cases of encephalitis, and three deaths; and recently, there was the problem with one particular swine flu vaccine increasing the chances of triggering narcolepsy in certain people (although strictly speaking, the cause was not the vaccine per se but the H1N1 virus protein -- so people who caught the swine flu had the same increased chance of developing narcolepsy). And undoubtedly, several more incidents with vaccines have occurred in the past century.

What vaccine proponents will not admit, however, is that vaccines are the cause of structural and/or severe harm such as autism, chronic fatigue or any of dozens of ailments that antivaccine activists claim are caused, triggered or aggravated by vaccines -- because there is no evidence to support a causal relationship between vaccines and the conditions mentioned.

"What vaccine proponents will not admit, however, is that vaccines are the cause of structural and/or severe harm such as autism, chronic fatigue"

There is solid evidence for both.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313248416_Autism_A_special_cas…

Significant protein sequence alignment between pyruvate dehydrogenase and vaccine antigens

Background

Metabolic profiling indicates impaired pyruvate dehydrogenase function in myalgic encephalopathy/chronic fatigue syndrome

http://insight.jci.org/articles/view/89376

Pyruvate Dehydrogenase Complex Deficiency

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/948360-overview

Method

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310021910_Significant_protein_…

Results

Pda1p [Saccharomyces cerevisiae R103]
Sequence ID: EWG96330.1Length: 355Number of Matches: 1
Related Information
Range 1: 3 to 314GenPeptGraphics
Next Match
Previous Match
Alignment statistics for match #1 Score Expect Method Identities Positives Gaps
382 bits(981) 1e-130 Compositional matrix adjust. 175/312(56%) 230/312(73%) 0/312(0%)

Query 48 EGPPVTTVLTREDGLKYYRMMQTVRRMELKADQLYKQKIIRGFCHLCDGQEACCVGLEAG 107
E P ++ ++ L+ Y+ M +RRME+ D LYK K IRGFCHL GQEA VG+E
Sbjct 3 EPPDLSYETSKATLLQMYKDMVIIRRMEMACDALYKAKKIRGFCHLSVGQEAIAVGIENA 62

Query 108 INPTDHLITAYRAHGFTFTRGLSVREILAELTGRKGGCAKGKGGSMHMYAKNFYGGNGIV 167
I D +IT+YR HGFTF RG SV+ +LAEL GR+ G + GKGGSMH+YA FYGGNGIV
Sbjct 63 ITKLDSIITSYRCHGFTFMRGASVKAVLAELMGRRAGVSYGKGGSMHLYAPGFYGGNGIV 122

Query 168 GAQVPLGAGIALACKYNGKDEVCLTLYGDGAANQGQIFEAYNMAALWKLPCIFICENNRY 227
GAQVPLGAG+A A +Y +D TLYGDGA+NQGQ+FE++NMA LW LP +F CENN+Y
Sbjct 123 GAQVPLGAGLAFAHQYKNEDACSFTLYGDGASNQGQVFESFNMAKLWNLPVVFCCENNKY 182

Query 228 GMGTSVERAAASTDYYKRGDFIPGLRVDGMDILCVREATRFAAAYCRSGKGPILMELQTY 287
GMGT+ R++A T+Y+KRG +IPGL+V+GMDIL V +A++FA +C SGKGP+++E +TY
Sbjct 183 GMGTAASRSSAMTEYFKRGQYIPGLKVNGMDILAVYQASKFAKDWCLSGKGPLVLEYETY 242

Query 288 RYHGHSMSDPGVSYRTREEIQEVRSKSDPIMLLKDRMVNSNLASVEELKEIDVEVRKEIE 347
RY GHSMSDPG +YRTR+EIQ +RSK+DPI LK +++ +A+ E+K D RK ++
Sbjct 243 RYGGHSMSDPGTTYRTRDEIQHMRSKNDPIAGLKMHLIDLGIATEAEVKAYDKSARKYVD 302

Query 348 DAAQFATADPEP 359
+ + A A P P
Sbjct 303 EQVELADAAPPP 314

pyruvate dehydrogenase [Streptococcus pneumoniae]
Sequence ID: WP_061640533.1Length: 322Number of Matches: 1
See 2 more title(s)
Related Information
Identical Proteins-Identical proteins to WP_061640533.1
Range 1: 10 to 321GenPeptGraphics
Next Match
Previous Match
Alignment statistics for match #1 Score Expect Method Identities Positives Gaps
239 bits(609) 7e-75 Compositional matrix adjust. 126/315(40%) 190/315(60%) 9/315(2%)

Query 62 LKYYRMMQTVRRMELKADQLYKQKIIRGFCHLCDGQEACCVGLEAGINPTDHLITAYRAH 121
L+ +R M+ +RRM+LK QL K+ + G H G+EA VG +NP D + + +R H
Sbjct 10 LEMFRKMEEIRRMDLKIAQLVKKGKVPGMTHFSVGEEAANVGAMLALNPDDLITSNHRGH 69

Query 122 GFTFTRGLSVREILAELTGRKGGCAKGKGGSMHMY---AKNFYGGNGIVGAQVPLGAGIA 178
G +G+ + ++AE+ G+ G KGKGGSMH+ A N G NGIVG + + G A
Sbjct 70 GQAIAKGIDLNGMMAEILGKYTGTCKGKGGSMHIADLDAGNL-GANGIVGGGMGIAVGAA 128

Query 179 LACKYNGKDEVCLTLYGDGAANQGQIFEAYNMAALWKLPCIFICENNRYGMGTSVERAAA 238
L+ + ++ + +GDGA N+G EA NMA++W LP IF C NN YG+ +++
Sbjct 129 LSQQMQNTGKIVVCFFGDGATNEGVFHEAVNMASIWNLPVIFYCINNGYGISADIKKMTN 188

Query 239 STDYYKRGDF--IPGLRV-DGMDILCVREATRFAAAYCRSGKGPILMELQTYRYHGHSMS 295
++R IPG+ + DG +++ V E + A + RSG GP+L+E TYR+ GHS S
Sbjct 189 IEHIHQRSAAYGIPGMFIEDGNNVIDVYEGFQKAVDHVRSGNGPVLIESVTYRWLGHSSS 248

Query 296 DPGVSYRTREEIQEVRSKSDPIMLLKDRMVNSNLASVEELKEIDVEVRKEIEDAAQFATA 355
DPG YRTREE+ E+ + DPI L++ ++ +N+AS EEL+EI V+V++ +E + +FA
Sbjct 249 DPG-KYRTREEV-ELWKQKDPIENLRNYLIENNIASAEELEEIQVQVKEAVEASVKFAEE 306

Query 356 DPEPPLEELGYHIYS 370
P PPLE IY+
Sbjct 307 SPFPPLESAFEDIYA 321

ABC transporter substrate-binding protein [Bordetella pertussis]
Sequence ID: WP_050832146.1Length: 323Number of Matches: 1
See 2 more title(s)
Related Information
Identical Proteins-Identical proteins to WP_050832146.1
Range 1: 5 to 318GenPeptGraphics
Next Match
Previous Match
Alignment statistics for match #1 Score Expect Method Identities Positives Gaps
178 bits(451) 2e-51 Compositional matrix adjust. 101/317(32%) 167/317(52%) 6/317(1%)

Query 57 TREDGLKYYRMMQTVRRMELKADQLYKQKIIRGFCHLCDGQEACCVGLEAGINPTDHLIT 116
+E L Y+ M +R +EL+ +L+ + GF HL GQEA + + P D + +
Sbjct 5 NKEQLLDAYQRMLGIRLVELRLGRLFADGEVPGFIHLSVGQEAVAAAMGMVLRPDDTVAS 64

Query 117 AYRAHGFTFTRGLSVREILAELTGRKGGCAKGKGGSMHM--YAKNFYGGNGIVGAQVPLG 174
+R HG +G+ + + EL R+ G KG+GGSMH+ + G N IVGA +P+
Sbjct 65 THRGHGHALAKGIDMDDFFLELMAREEGICKGRGGSMHVANMSIGMLGANAIVGASIPIA 124

Query 175 AGIALACKYNGKDEVCLTLYGDGAANQGQIFEAYNMAALWKLPCIFICENNRYG-MGTSV 233
G ALA + D + + +GDGA +G + E+ N+AALW+LP +F+CENN + +
Sbjct 125 LGSALAHQVRKTDALAVAFFGDGAMAEGGLHESLNLAALWQLPLLFLCENNGWAEFSPTH 184

Query 234 ERAAASTDYYKRGDFIPGLRVDGMDILCVREATRFAAAYCRSGKGPILMELQTYRYHGHS 293
++ A D IP +VDG D+L V +A + A A R+GKGP ++E +R+ GH
Sbjct 185 KQFVAPLDKLSAAFSIPHAKVDGNDVLAVMDAAQAAVADIRAGKGPRVLECIPHRWRGHY 244

Query 294 MSDPGVSYRTREEIQEVRSKSDPIMLLKDRMVNSNLASVEELKEIDVEVRKEIEDAAQFA 353
DP YR +EI + + DP+ + +++S S + +++ V+ +++ A + A
Sbjct 245 EGDPQ-KYRDSDEISGL-DEHDPVARF-EAVLDSKGVSQAQRQKVRDAVQAQVDQAVERA 301

Query 354 TADPEPPLEELGYHIYS 370
P E +Y+
Sbjct 302 RKGRPPVWETARTDVYT 318

1-deoxy-D-xylulose-5-phosphate synthase [Neisseria meningitidis]
Sequence ID: WP_049223434.1Length: 637Number of Matches: 1
Related Information
Range 1: 84 to 185GenPeptGraphics
Next Match
Previous Match
Alignment statistics for match #1 Score Expect Method Identities Positives Gaps
39.7 bits(91) 0.081 Compositional matrix adjust. 31/102(30%) 45/102(44%) 6/102(5%)

Query 138 LTGRKGGCAK----GKGGSMHMYAKNFYGGNGIVGAQVPLGA--GIALACKYNGKDEVCL 191
LTGRKG G +++ Y G+ + +GA G+A A K G D +
Sbjct 84 LTGRKGQMHTMRRYGGLAGFPKRSESEYDAFGVGHSSTSIGAALGMAAADKLLGSDRRSV 143

Query 192 TLYGDGAANQGQIFEAYNMAALWKLPCIFICENNRYGMGTSV 233
+ GDGA GQ FEA N A + + I +N + +V
Sbjct 144 AIIGDGAMTAGQAFEALNCAGDMDVNLLVILNDNEMSISPNV 185

My pediatrician friend (now retired, so he remembers the good old days) informs me that measles used to be the largest cause of cases of brain damage in children (due to the occasional high fever). Before vaccination there were millions of measles cases per year, resulting in thousands of brain-damaged children.

But hey, no big deal. Unless its your kid.

"I remember when I had the measles. (everyone I grew up with went through it…I know I’m dating myself….but it was no big deal)"

I remember it too, and I wouldn't want any kid to have to go through that.

Interesting how antivaxers tend either to be too young to remember the impact these diseases had,or old enough to forget them and/or put a shiny gloss on the experience ("Mama brought me cocoa in bed!").

Question your bias. . . .

. . . . .

I remember when I had the measles. (everyone I grew up with went through it…I know I’m dating myself….but it was no big deal)

Irony much?

Anyone who is reading this who thinks measles is no big deal should ask the next ten 50+ people they meet--

Did you have measles, mumps, and/or rubella?
Was it serious?
Did you have any serious, long lasting complications?
Did anyone you knew (school, family, etc.) have a serious, long lasting complication?

Saying that complication rates were only 1% or something like that doesn't quite convey the reality of having your classmate go to the hospital and come up unable to see.

I expect the parents of these 31 German kids who died slowly from a measles complication would disagree that measles is fun.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0068909

Herd immunity is how we eliminated polio, rubella, and diphtheria in the U.S.. It's what protects vaccine-deprived children from their parents' error.

I remember when I had the measles. (everyone I grew up with went through it…I know I’m dating myself….but it was no big deal)
In the pre vaccine era there have been about 6.000.000 deths due to measles, now about 180.000 die each year of measles.
All these kids are unable to tell us, that it was no big deal.
And many more who had measles enzephalitis with permantent intellectual sequaelae are not able to type the messsage into there computer that it was no big deal-

anti-vaxers are severly biased.

Cervantes, you like most dumbass armchair epidemiologists can't do maths. But by all means, please get yourself infected with measles and stay home.

How are the odds running on cervantes being Travis J Schwochert of 239 S Church St, Endeavor, WI 53930?

I think Cervantes might have been hacked. There's a real one who comments at SBM and occasionally here.

The real Cervantes hasn't posted since 2014; so yes, today's Cervantes was almost certainly Fendlesworth, a.k.a. Travis Schwochert.

I'm not sure if will be able to detect nanoparticles, but there's a new cellphone app due out soon that's touted as performing spectral analysis, enabling consumers to detect pesticide and heavy metal residues in their food:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/this-app-uses-spectral-analysis-to-an…

If it works, it's not only paradigm changing, but could put the Health Deranger's Sooper-Certified Reference Laboratory out of business.

Power to the People!!!

I suspect another Travis sock, above.

As a recent bout of Shingles has reminded me, these diseases aren't "fun" and I certainly would never want anyone to suffer what I just did either (especially my own children).

Something else vaccine "opponents" will never admit - that there used to be hundreds of schools, around the country, for the deaf and blind....and now, there are a mere handful.

VPDs were the number one cause of pediatric blindness and deafness - and now the rate for both is as low as it has ever been.

How are the odds running on cervantes being Travis J Schwochert of 239 S Church St, Endeavor, WI 53930?

Given that both JD and cervantes were commenters here who haven't been around in a while, I'd say certain. It's Fucklesworth's new M.O.

Should have known. It really boggles my mind that creeps like Schwochert have nothing better to do.

Is it so hard for vaccine sellers to do proper tests and show exactly what is in the vaccines?
Don't spend so much time debunking you don't actually use your wisdom to do a better test for the benefit of those interested.

"Is it so hard for vaccine sellers to do proper tests and show exactly what is in the vaccines?"

They don't want to find out. Let sleeping dogs lie.

"Don’t spend so much time debunking you don’t actually use your wisdom to do a better test for the benefit of those interested."

Talk is cheap.

You may want to check out Dirty Vaccines Part Two
http://www.ghostshipmedia.com/2017/02/10/lead-iron-chromium-metals-rout…

Bwahahahaha. I might have to put that in my folder of quackery for more fun. But probably not before the middle of next week; that is, if I bother at all. "Me too" articles have to be really outstanding before I'll take them on. :-)

"Bwahahahaha."

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X15007884

Orac finds serious vaccine safety studies performed by vaccine manufacturers to be amusing "quackery"?

Who knew that the CDC was promoting "a 64-vaccine schedule"?

Golly, that's a heck of a lot of diseases kids are being protected against.

Geez, that's like a bushel of protection!

(and a few ounces of autism and SIDS)

Fortunately, stavros, the MMR vaccine prevents one known cause of autism: Congenital Rubella Syndrome. And babies who don't get pertussis don't die suddenly:

Vaccine. 2007 Jun 21;25(26):4875-9. Epub 2007 Mar 16.
Do immunisations reduce the risk for SIDS? A meta-analysis.

Pediatr Infect Dis J. 2006 Sep;25(9):768-73.
Encephalopathy after whole-cell pertussis or measles vaccination: lack of evidence for a causal association in a retrospective case-control study.

Expert Rev Vaccines. 2005 Apr;4(2):173-84.
Acellular pertussis vaccines in Japan: past, present and future

From the last study's abstract:

An antivaccine movement developed in Japan as a consequence of increasing numbers of adverse reactions to whole-cell pertussis vaccines in the mid-1970s. After two infants died within 24 h of the vaccination from 1974 to 1975, the Japanese government temporarily suspended vaccinations. Subsequently, the public and the government witnessed the re-emergence of whooping cough, with 41 deaths in 1979. This series of unfortunate events revealed to the public that the vaccine had, in fact, been beneficial.

Proves that stopping vaccinations is not the solution.
Improving vaccine safety IS the solution.
However, there have been ZERO improvements to DTap or MMR in decades. Although we have been finding out more problems with the vaccines during that time.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313524429_Autism_Spectrum_Diso…

You may want to check out Dirty Vaccines Part Two

I am left wondering how much the fact that Schlegl, Weber, Wruss and Mohlen have a patent on an alternative aluminium adjuvant influenced the decision to start this investigation?

May be there is a pattern. Vaccine problems will only be revealed when somebody develops and tries to market a competing product.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0171298515301078

@Joe, #212

Is it so hard for vaccine sellers to do proper tests and show exactly what is in the vaccines?

Well, actually, yes, that is quite hard. This has, however, nothing to do with vaccine manufacturers being sloppy or trying to poison our children, but with two simple facts:
- These days, we can routinely detect substances at sub-ppb levels (< 1 part per billion).
- All the 'contaminants' mentioned are in fact normal constituents of our natural environment; they also leach from stainless steel and glassware used for processing foods and pharmaceuticals.

What this means is that it is for all intents and purposes, it is impossible to list anything and everything that can be found in vaccines (and other pharmaceuticals, and food and drink, for that matter) -- simply because our modern day analysis methods are sensitive enough to detect those 'contaminants' at their natural levels. This also means that the actual amount of each substance found can vary wildly, depending on the source materials, the equipment used for production etcetera.

This also means that it is in fact impossible to avoid having these substances in vaccines (and other pharmaceuticals, and food and drink). This holds even when pharmaceutical companies switch to cleanroom practices such as used in the semiconductor industry (the use of pure quartz instead of glass or stainless steel, ultra-pure water, and extreme rinsing procedures), since quite a few vaccine ingredients have a biological origin, which can be 'contaminated' from the onset.

And even if such 100% 'contaminant-free' vaccines could be achieved, this would be prohibitively expensive -- and totally ridiculous, since there is no evidence whatsoever that these contaminants do any harm in the concentrations present.

"there is no evidence whatsoever that these contaminants do any harm in the concentrations present."

Please post the relevant references.

Actually, Vinu, stopping vaccines when the disease they protect against has been eradicated is an excellent way to avoid their side effects, like we did with smallpox.

We might be able to do this with measles in the future if idiots like RFK Jr don't keep making it harder.

And you ignore the fact that DTAP was an improvement to reduce the side effects of the whole cell Pertussis vaccine.

Eliminating the disease would be nice but we need safer vaccines NOW because we don't know how long it will take to eliminate them. Then they may mutate and we are back to square one.

Offit wants to get the whole cell vaccine back because the Dtap does not work well and has it's own side effects (food allergies/asthma/autism). So we are not making progress, we are going backwards with vaccine safety.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/862432?pa=qBYKJZpkx4sH%2F768%2FnujU…

Richard (~#221) says,

And even if such 100% 'contaminant-free' vaccines could be achieved, this would be prohibitively expensive — and totally ridiculous, since there is no evidence whatsoever that these contaminants do any harm in the concentrations present.

MJD says,

Let's make it clear.

Vaccines by design mimic contaminants (pathogens) to induce acquired immunity. So, the body treats an effective vaccine as a contaminant.

Therefore, we can ask the question how can a contaminated contaminant (i.e., vaccine) be harmful?

This question is immensely complicated but there are inquisitive scientists that continue to gather information and propose hypotheses in an effort to gain knowledge and affect vaccine-safety standards.

...if idiots like RFK Jr...

Big words for a tree rat.

@Joe, #212

Is it so hard for vaccine sellers to do proper tests and show exactly what is in the vaccines?

Well vaccines are not normal pharmaceuticals - thes belong to the class of biologicals. And biologicals are very complex.

An apple is also of biological origin. I am not aware, that one tried to identify all ingriedients of an apple with analytical procedures. However apples are not toxic, an apple a day ..... and vaccines specially in the first year of live perform much better than an apple a day.

"And biologicals are very complex."

Exactly why doctors cannot go around claiming vaccines don't cause allergies/asthma/autism or any number of other problems.

http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Reports/2011/Adverse-Effects-of-Va…
"For the vast majority, (135 vaccine-adverse event pairs), the evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship." In other words, we have no idea if vaccines are safe.

If apples caused any of those problems in some individuals, evolution has taken its course and eliminated them. So apples are NOW safe. But thanks to vaccines, we are converting safe foods such as eggs, milk, peanuts, into poisons for some people.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312125211_Professional_Miscond…

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313524429_Autism_Spectrum_Diso…

You keep posting crap from the spamming, stealing, faking researchgate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResearchGate#Criticisms
Do you wonder why nobody is wasting time on you?

Vaccine problems will only be revealed when somebody develops and tries to market a competing product.

Seriously?

Don't be a dill. Problems with vaccines become apparent when there is a cluster of side effects. This has seen various vaccines withdrawn - even when there hasn't been any alternative product.

I haven't read the paper in detail yet, but reading the abstract and introduction, I am left with the idea that they were researching a not a problem.

vinu said: "Offit wants to get the whole cell (pertussis) vaccine back because the Dtap does not work well and has it’s own side effects (food allergies/asthma/autism)."

In reality Offit has said no such thing. And I cannot find any statement by him which calls for a return to whole-call pertussis vaccine.

Offit discussed a study which looked at the likely effect of incorporating whole-cell vaccine into the immunization schedule.

"As we transitioned from the whole-cell bacterial vaccine to the purified protein vaccine, some children received only the whole-cell vaccine, some received only the acellular vaccine, and some received a combination—meaning they were primed with the whole-cell vaccine but then boosted with the acellular vaccine. This study looked at what happened to the latter group of children."

"They found that priming with the whole-cell vaccine and then finishing the series with the acellular vaccine produced a much better immune response. Using mathematical modeling, this group determined that using a single dose of the whole-cell vaccine to prime, and then acellular vaccine for booster doses, would result in a 95% reduction in the incidences of disease, as well as a 96% reduction in the incidence of disease in neonates."

"This is just a theoretical mathematical modeling paper. They did not actually conduct this experiment. Frankly, it would be tough to move back to the whole-cell vaccine because of the perception that it caused permanent harm in terms of epilepsy or developmental delays, although that wasn't true. We would struggle against that perception of harm. It is an interesting thought, and certainly, if we were to do it, we would be better off than we are today."

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/862432

"An interesting thought" does not equate to "we should do it". (except in vinu-land, where truth is fungible).

Offit:
"It is an interesting thought, and certainly, if we were to do it, we would be better off than we are today."

The very fact that they are even discussing the possibility of getting a vaccine from ~20 years ago, shows we have a vaccine safety progress problem.

It 's like seriously considering replacing the 787s with 747s or running DOS on your computer.

It ‘s like seriously considering ... running DOS on your computer.
Wait, is this a bad thing now? (high-end legacy software).

The very fact that they are even discussing the possibility of getting a vaccine from ~20 years ago, shows we have a vaccine safety progress problem

I am impressed as ever by Vinu's ability to take a speculation about how to improve a vaccine's effectiveness and pretend that it's an admission of unsafety. That 's some weapons-grade intellectual dishonesty.

"how to improve a vaccine’s effectiveness "

If the discussion of improving vaccine effectiveness includes the option of bringing back a vaccine from 20 years ago, it shows the incompetence of the people who designed/approved the acellular vaccine. And it takes 20 years to figure out we have an effectiveness problem?

"pretend that it’s an admission of unsafety. "

http://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(15)00584-9/fulltext
"The reasons why peanut allergy has become more common might include (1) changes in vaccines, particularly the change from cellular to acellular pertussis; ..."

“The reasons why peanut allergy has become more common might include (1) changes in vaccines, particularly the change from cellular to acellular pertussis; …”

How predictable it is that that sentence is nowhere in the referenced document.

Do you see colored boxes with text inside?
Otherwise, may be you can see Table IV?

"Table IV
Pre-existing factors and changes that could be relevant to the increase in peanut allergy in the United States, 1990 to the present
I.Differences in the preparation of peanut products
A.Roasted vs boiled
B.Emulsified peanut products in the United States
II.Delayed oral consumption of peanut proteins
A.Comparison of Israel and London
B.American Academy of Pediatrics policy regarding avoiding peanut products
III.Changes in skin as a result of daily bathing with soap or detergents
A.Removal of lipids from skin
B.Other damage that could allow increased skin penetration
IV.Changes in vaccination policy
A.Increase in frequency
B.Change from cellular to acellular pertussis"

Yet, your quoted box fails to contain your initial quote.

In the table, II and IIB are one in the same, with IIA being confounded by genetic differences between two populations, one having significant founder effects. III's entries make less than no sense, as lipids have always been removed from the skin by a special, quite novel substance: soap. Oh wait, that's been around for thousands of years.
IV is just pulling things from thin air, again, making unrelated blind guesses.

@Stavros,

Perhaps.

But I still have both eyes and I'm only mildly overweigjt.

I keep coming across the "vaccines turn people gay" thing, and it made me wonder.
My childhood preceded many, maybe most, of the vaccines routinely given today. The only ones I'm sure I had were for smallpox, tetanus, and the Salk polio vaccine. Could it be that getting only a few vaccines kept me from turning all the way gay? Could it be the reason I ended up bisexual?
If so, all I can say is, thank you, vaccines, thank you, thank you, thank you!

@vinu:

If the discussion of improving vaccine effectiveness includes the option of bringing back a vaccine from 20 years ago, it shows the incompetence of the people who designed/approved the acellular vaccine. And it takes 20 years to figure out we have an effectiveness problem?

Wrong. The whole-cell pertussis component was replaced with acellular pertussis component because it was suspected that the whole-cell component was responsible for seizures. Large scale investigations later revealed that it wasn't, but by then DTP had been dropped.
With regards to effectiveness, the experts knew that acellular pertussis would be less effective than whole-cell pertussis, but accepted this for safety reasons.
It was a risk/reward assessment, not incompetence.

"Large scale investigations later revealed that it wasn’t, but by then DTP had been dropped."

Designing a a new product without first UNDERSTANDING what is wrong with the old product is defined as incompetence.

"the experts knew that acellular pertussis would be less effective than whole-cell pertussis, but accepted this for safety reasons.
It was a risk/reward assessment,"

The "experts" did not even know that the acellular vaccine DOES NOT PREVENT transmission, until a few years ago. How did they perform a "risk/reward" assessment? ASSUMPTIONS! The entire vaccine safety enterprise is a fraud.

Wzrd, having found that with several "references" Vinu cited I have saved myself the bother of checking his "sources" and just assume that he is making stuff up: it saves time. See also that berk in another thread who made all manner of claims about a GMS FTP hearing, whose transcript contradicted what they claimed...

Wzrd, having found that with several “references” Vinu cited I have saved myself the bother of checking his “sources” and just assume that he is making stuff up: it saves time.

Yeah, same here. But, with such a trivially searchable quote and considering how quickly I can read through a document, I rolled the dice.
Having a very good idea what the result would be. Hence my remark on it being predictable.

Derp: that would be GMC...

@Rockin' Dave
#11

If so, all I can say is, thank you, vaccines, thank you, thank you, thank you!

I can imagine that every "thank you" was spoken in progressively escalating volume and coincident with rusty squeaks of an aging boxspring.

@Vinu, #226

but we need safer vaccines NOW

No, we don't, since safety concerns about vaccines exist only in the minds of scaremongers and deluded people who have no idea what they're talking about.
Vaccination is probably the safest and at the same time single most effective medical intervention in existence, a notion which is supported by decade after decade of ongoing research. Child mortality and morbidity are at a historic low, and the few childhood conditions that may be more prevalent now than half a century ago have good explanations, other than vaccines. Sure, we can't explain everything at this moment. But only fools blame vaccines for the things they don't understand yet -- especially in the light of the fact that any connections between those things and vaccines have been researched (often ad nauseam) and found not to exist. In other words: we don't know (exactly, yet) what causes e.g. autism or chronic fatigue syndrome or ADHD etc., but we know with a very high degree of certainty that it isn't vaccines.

"No, we don’t, since safety concerns about vaccines exist only in the minds of scaremongers and deluded people who have no idea what they’re talking about."

The Flumist flip/flop fiasco is the latest proof of how little the vaccine "experts" know about vaccines.

https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/resources/adverseeffects.pdf
"For the vast majority, (135 vaccine-adverse event
pairs), the evidence is inadequate to accept or reject
a causal relationship. "
Vaccine safety is an oxymoron.

vinu: "The very fact that they are even discussing the possibility of getting a vaccine from ~20 years ago, shows we have a vaccine safety progress problem."

Apart from concern that you will need surgery to repair the hernia caused by that goalpost-shifting (and wondering what a "vaccine safety progress problem" is), "they" have not promoted using a 20-year-old vaccine. Rather, some have speculated that using a whole-cell vaccine might be desirable. There's no indication on whether this involves consideration of a newly formulated whole cell vaccine. And since no one is seriously considering such a change, flailing your little arms about it is pointless.

Question: If you take a flight on a 787 on which 180,000 packets of peanuts have been served to 74,360 passengers, 11,528 of whom have been immunized against pertussis, how many will ultimately become lactose intolerant?

Frequent Lurker:
"I can imagine that every “thank you” was ...coincident with rusty squeaks of an aging boxspring."
I wish.

I can imagine that every “thank you” was …coincident with rusty squeaks of an aging boxspring.

In my case, the rusty squeaks would be associated with my efforts to sit up. As my foundation is wooden and not spring based, the source of the squeaks is a mystery.
Although, the sounds appear suspiciously to originate near my joints.

Old Rockin' Dave:

I was given more childhood vaccines than you were (including MMR, DTP, and the BCG vaccine against tuberculosis, though I don't remember offhand which polio vaccine I got), with the same outcome. I'm not counting vaccines I got since I came out, though someone probably has an atemporal theory of causation that would give the credit to my relatively recent hepatitis vaccine.

Can we blame the measles vaccine that I got in college for my relatively late discovery that I'm bisexual, not lesbian?

Vinu wrote:

“there is no evidence whatsoever that these contaminants do any harm in the concentrations present.”

Please post the relevant references.

The claim that you are arguing with is that there is no evidence. What are you looking for, a list of every publication in human history that does not contain such evidence? That's a tall order; why don't you start with Wikipedia, the complete works of William Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, and Isaac Asimov, and the Internet Archive for weather.gov. (The works of Christie are relevant to vaccine-preventable disease; Asimov's may be as well.)

I suspect they don't pull this out of a hat but I could be wrong ...

https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms?cdrid=546…
"maximum tolerated dose listen (MAK-sih-mum TAH-leh-RAY-ted …)
The highest dose of a drug or treatment that does not cause unacceptable side effects. The maximum tolerated dose is determined in clinical trials by testing increasing doses on different groups of people until the highest dose with acceptable side effects is found. Also called MTD."

Oh, wow, this was a howler!
Vinu "If apples caused any of those problems in some individuals, evolution has taken its course and eliminated them. So apples are NOW safe."
Yeah, no. 1) apple seeds, in quantity, are poisonous 2) most apple varieties are totally inedible (which is why they only grow wild) so who knows if all apples are safe for all humans.

Once again demonstrating that biology is complex, and rather beyond vinu's current ken.

Yeah, no. 1) apple seeds, in quantity, are poisonous 2) most apple varieties are totally inedible (which is why they only grow wild) so who knows if all apples are safe for all humans.

Odd, I'm unaware of any apple variety (true apple forms, not other fruits bred to resemble apples) that is inedible. Mealy, sour or even bitter, yes.
But, I happen to like nibbling on the fruit of the European crabapple. Seriously!
Fortunately, for a truly toxic dosage from apple seeds, one requires a ludicrous number of seeds. Otherwise, we'd read of home made applesauce related poisonings.

In the wild, what to eat and what not to eat is passed along from one generation to the next. Then there is the taste defense. If it does not taste good, it probably is not good for you. I did not claim all varieties of apple are safe for humans. Whatever we ate as we evolved, is safe.

“If apples peanuts caused any of those problems in some individuals, evolution has taken its course and eliminated them. So apples peanuts are NOW safe.”

Until some incompetent "experts" started injecting it into people ...

@vinu:

The “experts” did not even know that the acellular vaccine DOES NOT PREVENT transmission, until a few years ago.

Less effective != Not effective. DTaP may be less effective than DTP but it is still effective.

Don't you think that the same amount of toxin taken orally will have different effect when taken straight to the blood or muscle?

I've been having an online exchange with a (usually) rational pediatrician, who's angry at other peds who discharge patients with antivax parents from their practices.

This guy says it's "unethical" to do this (because it burdens other pediatricians like himself), and that it's better to keep vaccine refusers/delayers in the practice so that he can gradually convince such parents over time. Oh, and he insists that the risk to other patients of maintaining these unvaccinated kids is "essentially zero", even if they're infants who can't be vaccinated or immunosuppressed due to primary deficiency or medications.

This same pediatrician is fond of pointing out that in preventable disease outbreaks, most victims have been vaccinated.

Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference between brain farts and trollery.

You first have to define "toxin." Because water is toxic, in a large enough dose.

"Whatever we ate as we evolved, is safe."
Raw meat. Undercooked pork. Sassafras. Kimchi. Frying in peanut oil. Frying in general. Alcohol. Hallucinogenic mushrooms. Lots of other kinds of mushrooms. Blowfish tail. Absinthe. Pica in pregnancy. Nitrates. Nitrites. Smoked foods.
...just off the top of my head.

Vicki:
Always nice to meet another member of the club. Good luck.
I wish I had been born in a time when coming out as bi isn't necessarily suicidal. Just for starters.

Dogs were domesticated tens of thousands of years ago.

In vinu-Logikk(tm), this means that any security procedure which employs dogs, such as having them guard a property, must be unsafe, since it's using technology tens of thousands of years old.

AF: Well, it's definitely unsafe for anyone unauthorized who happens to be in the property at jaw level. Even the sweetest dogs are likely to bite an intruder.

I realize this is a long post,with many hyperlinks,but I hope this makes it past mod queue.
@vinu arumugham

With all due respect sir,you are an idiot.I don't know what it is about antivaxers that they are so willing to connect any inborn or inherited defect related to the immune system or metabolism with vaccines.Dr. Vincent Ramaekers and Dr. Edward Quadros would both be very upset with you,to say the least,that you are twisting their research in this matter.I suggest you contact one,or both,of these gentlemen,to ask what they believe the role of vaccines is in the development of folate receptor autoantibodies.

Here is Dr. Ramaekers contact information
http://www.chu.ulg.ac.be/jcms/c_11119/centre-de-ressources-autisme-liege

And here is that of Dr.Quadros
http://www.downstate.edu/cellbiology/faculty/Dr.EdQuadros.html

They are very good about answering phone calls and emails,I am sure they would both be very interested in hearing from you.

There is ample evidence that folate receptor autoantibodies are something children inherit from their parents.Often from the mother,but sometimes from both parents,or even just from the father.There are often complex family histories of mental illness,intellectual disability,autoimmiune diseases,neural tube defects,stillbirth,etc.

Here is a summary of this research but there is lots more evidence http://search.proquest.com/openview/68cc5d09ef398c9f16fd8f92855d6d86/1?…

Here too
http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v18/n3/full/mp2011175a.html

Dr.Ramaekers has since found folate receptor autoantibodies are present in a subpopulation of adults with schizophrenia,and treating these patients with folinic acid has reversed or dramatically improved their illness.

http://www.mgmjournal.com/article/S1096-7192(14)00311-4/abstract

Folate receptor autoantibodies are also found in patients with mitochondrial disease with and without autism.

http://www.neurology.org/content/70/16/1360.extract

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1525505014004120

I am in a group on Facebook just for cerebral folate deficiency and folate receptor autoantibodies.There are a number of parents there whose children were found to have folate receptor autoantibodies,and these children were unvaccinated.There are parents in this group,who are on both sides of the vaccine issue,but vaccines is not a topic the administrator of the group likes to discuss.You might want to join this group,and learn something from real families living with this condition.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/363697893680469

I was diagnosed with cerebral folate deficiency due to folate receptor autoantibodies a few years ago in my 40s.Too old for the MMR vaccine,or any of the other vaccines you antivaxers scream about.I had an autism diagnosis that was verbal,but otherwise low functioning.I have never worked,and I lived with my mother up until her death a few years ago.I also have had many medical issues since I was an infant.The same doctors that found the folate receptor autoantibodies,found two undiagnosed conditions,a serious inborn error of metabolism,and a very rare genetic disorder,that can both effect the brain,and cause immune deficiency.It took a few years,but I was able to reverse my autism,learning disabilities,and related conditions with high dose folinic acid.

Cerebral folate deficiency is something I take very seriously.I am a big believer in testing,treatment,and awareness.I do not want the real science,and results of treatment,tainted by antivaxers,to the point where the public does not take this disorder seriously.

"There is ample evidence that folate receptor autoantibodies are something children inherit from their parents."

Sorry, but you are absolutely wrong. If what you claim were possible, babies would inherit the ability to generate antibodies to ALL the diseases the parents suffered too. No need for any vaccines. They would be protected against all those disease at birth and for life. DOES NOT HAPPEN.

Sorry, but you are absolutely wrong. If what you claim were possible, babies would inherit the ability to generate antibodies to ALL the diseases the parents suffered too. No need for any vaccines.

Boy, oh boy, but you got the cart before the horse! As in, not even wrong.

If I'm immunized against rabies virus and am bit by a rabid animal, my body would have produced antibodies against the virus and defeat it before I was actually infected.
If I'm vaccinated against rabies immediately after a bite by a rabid animal, my body will still produce antibodies against the virus and defeat it before the infection travels far. That was true of my parents as well, an ability that every human inherits.
What is not inherited is the antibodies themselves, although some antibodies can be passed through human breast milk (not all, but some).

Mistakes in thought, the ability to create an antibody is heritable and for many antibodies, species wide (or even vertebrata wide). The antibodies themselves, no, not heritable.
We'd need a much larger genome to pass those along! ;)

Roger Kulp wrote:
“There is ample evidence that folate receptor autoantibodies are something children inherit from their parents.”

Roger Kulp wrote:
“There is ample evidence that folate receptor autoantibodies are something children inherit from their parents.”

Jesus H Christ's scrotum! Get your mind made up! Previously, we managed to agree that antibodies cannot possibly be inherited, only the ability to create them can be.
Now, some gadfly from Autism Speaks, a known antivaxer idiocy group, is an authority that Google itself never heard of beyond that group of ass-ociates!
Grow a set, man! Figure out where you stand, rather than stand upon vacuum and shift the goalposts!
You'll get a hernia that way.

http://autismgadfly.blogspot.com/2009/07/roger-kulp-published-on-age-of…

You are very confused. We are discussing Roger Kulp's post #42.

Oh? I thought we were discussing Alex Jones reports on the war that we lost against the space aliens.
Followed by the report on the war we won, at the same non-extant location we fought a war and won against the space aliens.

Fiction is cheap and plentiful.

"It took a few years,but I was able to reverse my autism,learning disabilities,and related conditions with high dose folinic acid."

Nice to hear that. However, I don't see folinic acid mentioned as a mainstream treatment for ASD. With 75% of ASD patient testing positive for FRA, I would expect that folinic acid should be a top treatment. Any idea why it is not a mainstream treatment?

"Dr. Vincent Ramaekers and Dr. Edward Quadros would both be very upset with you"

I have exchanged many emails on this matter with Dr.Quadros and he is certainly not upset with me.
I have also contacted Dr.Frye and he found my idea that milk contaminated vaccines cause ASD to be "very interesting".
I have not yet contacted Dr. Ramaekers. Will do now.

Google's definition:
an·ti-vax·xer
"a person who is opposed to vaccination, typically a parent who does not wish to vaccinate their child."

If someone is opposed to vaccination and they don't vaccinate their children, why would they care about what is in the vaccine? What difference would it make to them if vaccines contained mercury or even cyanide?

What difference would it make to them if vaccines contained mercury or even cyanide?

Simple enough, to justify their stupid decision to others, especially when others object to their young becoming a risk to those unable to or too young to receive their vaccines.

From your own reference:
http://search.proquest.com/openview/68cc5d09ef398c9f16fd8f92855d6d86/1?…

"In 27 of the 35 autistic children, both parents tested negative, suggesting postnatal development of FR autoimmunity as the likely mechanism."

So autoantibodies are not inherited.

"findings suggest that FR autoimmunity in either one or both
parents may contribute to the development of autism in their
offspring"
Yes, some people can be GENETICALLY PREDISPOSED to developing FRA associated autism but you need the milk contaminated vaccine to make it happen.
If you have a gene that predisposes you to smoking related cancer, you are still ok if you avoid smoking. So don't blame the genes.

In other anti-vax news...

Tomorrow RFK jr and Robert DeNiro wil make a grounddbreaking statement to the Washington Press Club about vaccine most likely involving mercury as the World Mercury Project website is where they'll link
( see Mike Adams. Natural News today)

Hoo boy, here we go again.

RK: I don’t know what it is about antivaxers that they are so willing to connect any inborn or inherited defect related to the immune system or metabolism with vaccines.

Generally speaking, anti-vaxxers are middle-class, college-educated (Though not usually in chemistry or any scientific field, somehow they managed to skip those classes) career-oriented,white, usually and unfortunately female and primrose-pathed, so they tend to fall apart at any bump in the road.
They refuse to believe that autism might have a genetic component because a) they can't accept that something in their family isn't perfect, b) they need some outside force, and c) it isn't socially acceptable to tell people 'actually, that kid is a fairy changeling, not mine.'

In other other news...

Jake Crosby rags on about Fiona O'Leary confounding a few issues as usual. ( Autism Investigated) actually displaying tweets of his own.

"Tomorrow RFK jr and Robert DeNiro wil make a grounddbreaking statement to the Washington Press Club about vaccine most likely involving mercury as the World Mercury Project website is where they’ll link"

Well, they and their antivax cohorts are always breaking new ground:

https://esp.rt.com/actualidad/public_images/58f/58f632e2d286201a3b7d20e…

vinu @33: "Until some incompetent “experts” started injecting it into people …"

Fine. Prove, with citations, that no one on earth *ever* had an allergic reaction to peanuts before 1844 (when the first hypodermic syringe was invented).

I bet you'd eat wild almonds too.

Roger @42: Thank you very much for your post and all the links! I'm glad it made it past moderation, and I'm doubly glad that we have people here who are knowledgeable on these topics and correct people who are wrong.

Interesting. I still think this is a pointless diversion. I was under the assumption that the allergic response was only geared towards proteins. I don't see how an oil could create an allergic response.

Nor would I expect any proteins in the lipid fraction of peanuts.

Allergenic cross-reactions are a proven phenomenon as far as I can tell, but I just don't see it happening in vaccines for anything besides egg protein. Nothing else really exists in more than ultra-trace quantities.

I would say: prove an egg allergy first, and then maybe move on to other potentialities.

FL @49: Yup. I've repeatedly asked about how strawberries get into vaccines, or bee venom, or jellyfish venom, and shockingly I get no answers. It's almost as though there aren't any logical answers and no data.

I still think it's that someone is afraid of needles and is looking for a "scientific" reason to get rid of them.

@Vicky, #27
I wish people like Vinu would make up their mind which level of scientific evidence they consider sufficient. Because they expect their ideas to be accepted with no evidence at all, or at best the tiniest smidgen of a rumored hint of evidence for a causal connection with some sort of adverse reaction or other -- whereas at the same time, they demand an impossible level of evidence(*) before they will accept that vaccination is generally safe.

This, of course, is simply their way of saying that they will never, ever accept the reality that vaccination is very safe and very effective.

*: Apparently, even a body of one hundred years of continuous research by hundreds of thousands of scientists and a proven safety record in administering vaccines to literally billions of people is not enough to prove that, yes, it's very safe.

any security procedure which employs dogs, such as having them guard a property, must be unsafe

It's quite definitely unsafe for the intruder.

Fine. Prove, with citations, that no one on earth *ever* had an allergic reaction to peanuts before 1844 (when the first hypodermic syringe was invented).

1884? The belief system is a little more specific. There is no evidence that peanut products are used or have ever been used as a vaccine additive, but Vinu likes to cite the 1964 patent on the concept of peanut oil as an excipient, followed by a demand for sufficiently definitive proof that peanut oil is not being used (when his attention is called to the absence of peanut oil in the lists of ingredients, he reckons that in his unique misunderstanding of the regulations manufacturers would not have to list if they did use it, therefore they must be using it; then the goalposts shift to a completely different playing field).

So even in Vinu-world, his belief-system has the corollary that peanut allergies only started in 1964.

JustaTech notes another corollary of Vinu's argument-by-evolutionary-perfection --
“If apples bee-stings caused any of those problems in some individuals, evolution has taken its course and eliminated them. So apples bee-stings are NOW safe.”

The labeling regulation - 21 C.F.R. 601.61 - requires mentioning adjuvants on the label.

Subsection o.

I agree with you that peanut oil is not used as an adjuvant in vaccines.

“If apples bee-stings caused any of those problems in some individuals, evolution has taken its course and eliminated them. So apples bee-stings are NOW safe.”

Pretty close .. but not quite. Mosquito bites are safe (unless it is an infected mosquito). Bee stings are mostly safe. Why the difference? Rate of occurrence. With mosquito bites being so common, people who have fatal reactions to mosquito bites would have been quickly eliminated. Bee sting are much rarer. So people can still withstand several bee stings but evolution did not prepare us for beekeeping levels of stings.

Eich-Wanger C, Muller UR. Bee sting allergy in beekeepers. Clin Exp Allergy. 1998;28(10):1292–8.

Pretty close .. but not quite. Mosquito bites are safe (unless it is an infected mosquito). Bee stings are mostly safe.

No. I'm sensitive to the saliva of certain species of mosquitoes, which cause severe dermatitis. So much for your theories of evolution.
My wife is deathly allergic to bee stings. Do you want to know how angry I got the last time I had to pay full price up front for an ana-kit, in US green stamp cash?
Of course, now the damnable things are non-formulary, due to a certain greedy motherlover.

Is Vinu aware of the survival rate of beestings and peanut allergies before the epi-pen was invented? 'Cause I would be willing to bet that an awful lot of people died of both those things before vaccines were ever invented. I'd also be willing to bet that those deaths were either not recorded or attributed to something else entirely. Also, in places where infants re more likely to start eating 'grown-up food' earlier, peanut allergies are a lot less common. Explain that, jackoff.

"Also, in places where infants re more likely to start eating ‘grown-up food’ earlier, peanut allergies are a lot less common."

Eating peanuts induces immune tolerance. So of course if you introduce peanuts early, you are less likely to develop allergy to subsequently injected peanut contaminated vaccines.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/136/3/600

Of course, this was known a hundred years ago.

THE BIOLOGICAL REACTIONS OF THE VEGETABLE PROTEINS.

http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/8/1/66.short

Interestingly, Wells and Osborne were studying sensitization caused by
injections of vegetable proteins. They noted during their study that
ingestion of these proteins provided protection against future
sensitization by injection (oral tolerance).

Of course, this was known a hundred years ago.

Female hysteria and the vapors were also known a hundred years ago. We don't have fainting couches or doctors making house calls with a vibrator to treat female hysteria with an orgasm any longer.

Eating peanuts induces immune tolerance. So of course if you introduce peanuts early, you are less likely to develop allergy to subsequently injected peanut contaminated vaccines.

Interestingly, just recently it was suggested that early exposure prevents allergies to certain food items, such as peanuts. That replaced guidance that lasted nearly a generation that suggested later exposure to allergens, such as peanuts.
The reason is simple enough, after noticing an up tick in peanut allergies in children, it was suggested that a later exposure might lower incidence.
Alas, the converse was observed, leading to testing and revised advice.
No need to dust off century old misapprehensions of how organic systems work. Especially in an era where we can gene map, identify specific proteins and understand many of the receptors our cells use.

"The reason is simple enough, after noticing an up tick in peanut allergies in children, it was suggested that a later exposure might lower incidence.
Alas, the converse was observed, leading to testing and revised advice.
No need to dust off century old misapprehensions of how organic systems work. "

With all the technology we have, you should reinvent the wheel too. Those who don't learn from history ...

With all the technology we have, you should reinvent the wheel too.

Yeah, because when I was born, in 1961, we had PC's and oh, wait, a supercomputer of the era still ate up a sizable part of a city block floor of a city block sized building (0.1 mile in each side).
To give you a hint, I saw an electron microscope of the first generation, used a late 1960's electron microscope in junior high school and a 1970's model in high school (all donated by a generous donor, who was long gone by the time our kids went to the same school (both donor and microscopes)).
Due to my generation, I know how electron tube circuits work, how germanium transistor circuits work and silicon circuits work to component level, maturing to VLSI levels to current levels *and* know a whale of a lot of military medicine in a Special Operations environment.
The latter is why I fight against those who object to vaccines. I've witnessed a simultaneous outbreak of polio and measles, those memories still awaken me at night from nightmares of far too many tiny graves being filled by children a little bit older than my own grandchildren.

I fondly recall an earlier thread a few years ago in which Vinu dealt with the fact of between-nation differences in allergy rates, by deducing that other nations must be using country-specific vaccines with excipients matched to local diets. For instance, Israel must be using specially-formulated vaccines that substitute sesame oil for the non-existent peaut oil. Which they would do because reasons.
That boy ain't right.

Allergens in vaccines per the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) report

https://www.nap.edu/catalog/23658/finding-a-path-to-safety-in-food-alle…

NAM report pg.241
"Allergens in Vaccines, Medications, and Dietary Supplements

Physicians and patients with food allergy must consider potential food
allergen exposures in vaccines, medications, and dietary supplement prod-
ucts (e.g., vitamins, probiotics), which are not regulated by labelling laws.
Also, excipients (i.e., substances added to medications to improve various
characteristics) may be food or derived from foods (Kelso, 2014). These
include milk proteins; soy derivatives; oils from sesame, peanut, fish or
soy; and beef or fish gelatin. The medications involved include vaccines;
anesthetics; and oral, topical, and injected medications. With perhaps the
exception of gelatin, reactions appear to be rare overall, likely because
little residual protein is included in the final preparation of these items. The
specific risk for each medication is not known.
Vaccines also may contain food allergens, such as egg protein or gela-
tin."

With perhaps the
exception of gelatin, reactions appear to be rare overall, likely because
little residual protein is included in the final preparation of these items.

OK, so then the howler is in the next sentence.

Vaccines also may contain food allergens, such as egg protein or gela-
tin.

Which is it? The proteins aren't there or are there or is this a famous cat that's dead and not dead?
Hint: Schrödinger's cat never existed, it was a thought experiment. Proteins are filtered out of medicinal oils, especially those used in real medicine (as opposed to homeopathic medicines or OTC crap, which is really food grade oil).

Lord, oh lord, how I loathe those who add content that wasn't originally present and am so intolerant for those who contradict themselves, but still believe that they're right!

I simply quoted the National Academy of Medicine report.

So I assume your comments are directed at them ...

I simply quoted the National Academy of Medicine report.

Yeah, a PDF, which is text searchable, but that text was not present in the report.
That's one hell of a quote, out of your own rectum!*

*See rectally procured "facts".

Try the page number, 241 of the document or 256 of the pdf.

Only when you agree that we'll sit together and that cane bit.
Otherwise, I'll not waste my time again on you, vinu.

Let's review priorities. Watch paint dry, superior to wasting time with vinu. Fixing the clothes dryer, superior by far to wasting time with vinu. Watching grass grow, still superior to wasting time with vinu. Masturbating with a cheese grater, superior to wasting time with vinu's sources.

For instance, Israel must be using specially-formulated vaccines that substitute sesame oil for the non-existent peaut oil. Which they would do because reasons.

Yeah, sheer nonsense. Everyone knows that the peanut oil would be replaced by chickpea oil because of falafels.

Yeah, I ain't right either, but at least I can induce a grin by not even being wrong. ;)

Peanut Oil has been used in Merck's Adjuvant 65. This isn't some mythical unicorn, and it apparently showed promise in the '60s. The New York Times archive has two articles referencing this peanut oil adjuvant.
https://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/%22peanut+oil%22+adjuvant/

This full article in Nature references Adjuvant 65 and may be of interest to some.
http://www.nature.com/icb/journal/v82/n5/full/icb200475a.html#bib17

However. The vaccine text entitled Vaccine Adjuvants and Delivery Systems speaks of a 1972 study which found unacceptable toxicity with this adjuvant, and licensure was never granted as a consequence. I will hide this extremely long Google Book URL in a hyperlink.

Peanut Oil has certainly been used in vaccines experimentally, but I have yet to find proof of it's use outside of the lab.

Maybe someone else can continue this spelunking; someone that has access to these 40-year old journal articles.

Peanut oil is NOT approved for use as an adjuvant in vaccines approved for use in the US, per the FDA.

But peanut oil is approved for use in injections.

http://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(14)00432-1/fulltext#sec5.1
"The package inserts for dimercaprol for injection, progesterone capsules, and valproic acid capsules list peanut oil as an ingredient, and the former 2 drugs also list peanut allergy as a precaution. However, there are no reports of allergic reactions to peanut oil in these medications, presumably because pure peanut oil is not allergenic."

Two points:
1. So, ANY injection including vaccines can be contaminated with peanut oil.
2. Allergen quantity needed to develop allergy (sensitization) is LESS than allergen quantity required to cause a reaction. So injections that don't cause a reaction, can still cause the development of an allergy. Example: Flublok (egg-free recombinant) contains 3X the HA proteins than a regular vaccine. Regular vaccines cause the development of HA allergy. Flublok will cause you to react.

Allergic reactions after egg-free recombinant influenza vaccine: reports to the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25428412

Jumping from the fact that there are other medications that explicitly tell you they have peanut oil to a claim that vaccines have it doesn't work.

If anything, your other examples show that when peanut oil is in something it's stated.

Polysorbate 80 is sourced from vegetable sources. Those sources are not listed in any vaccine package insert.

As the NAM report says below, "no labeling laws".
"Excipients may be food or food derived ... including peanut"

https://www.nap.edu/catalog/23658/finding-a-path-to-safety-in-food-alle…

NAM report pg.241
"Allergens in Vaccines, Medications, and Dietary Supplements

1. So, ANY injection including vaccines can be contaminated with peanut oil.

Yet another rectally procured "fact", as such is not in the article provided, as usual.

2. Allergen quantity needed to develop allergy (sensitization) is LESS than allergen quantity required to cause a reaction.

Not true and again, not in the article provided.
I've learned two things about you, vinu. One, your colon is immense, its productivity phenomenal and must be considered a national treasure for the amount of fertilizer that it produces. Alas, that fertilizer must be composted before it is useful and it still shan't be considered useful as fact.

How about we save a little time? We'll sit together, vinu. Each time you rectally source a fact, I hit you with my cane. If my cane breaks, you replace it with another like it.
A quality wooden cane is only around $15. Although, I did have my eye on a nice carbon fiber number... ;)

Before somebody nitpicks ...
"Flublok will cause you to react"
should be:
Flublok CAN cause you to react.

Stay away form this apparent clickbait article by Dr. Palevsky. Utter trash. It starts out:

There is adequate scientific evidence that peanut oil has been used in vaccines since the 1960's.

Don't hold your breath. If there is abundant evidence he is certainly economical with it.

If current vaccine package inserts do not contain the specific evidence that peanut oil, or peanut meal, is contained within the final vaccine product, it does not mean that peanut antigen is not in the final vaccine product.

True, but here comes the madness...

Vaccine manufacturers use different growth media on which to manufacture the vaccines. They do not report, and I believe are not required to report, the exact ingredients in all of the growth media. Therefore, we may not know whether peanut antigen is used in the vaccine manufacturing process just by reading through the package inserts. Our lack of knowledge about it does not mean it isn’t knowledge waiting to be discovered. And, it may, or may not, have anything to do with an attempt to purposely hide the information that peanut antigen is present in vaccines.

Okay, so if it isn't listed on the label then it's in the growth media? I thought he was going to explain how vaccines were covertly spiked to get rid of old Merck 65 stock. Never mind that peanut growth media probably isn't suitable for growing anything besides a few peculiar strains of mold, and even then could probably be outdone by your classic Rye, Potato, or Rice media. The vaccine culturalist works with bacteria and viruses.

I'm pretty sure that Stainer-Scholte medium, Mueller’s medium, and Lather medium are all standardized with well-defined compositions of which you can easily Google.

So how does this guy go from "abundant proof" to speculating on a near absurdity?

http://www.drpalevsky.com/articles_pages/346_peanut_oil_in_vaccines_sin…
(Don't bother)

Okay, so if it isn’t listed on the label then it’s in the growth media?

Absolutely! If I grow a vaccine in radishes, I have to put dirt in the ingredient lists, so that vinu can tell us all proudly, "That vaccine has dirt in it!".

"well-defined compositions"

Yes, well-defined compositions including those from vegetable sources and contaminated with vegetable proteins. And of course animal proteins such as milk.

And even if there was no peanut contamination, the vaccine antigens themselves have epitopes that resemble peanut epitopes.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310021910_Significant_protein_…

Again with the pay for play researchgate, a site lousy with controversy and nonsense. Why not whale dot to or infowars, while you're at it?

It’s quite definitely unsafe for the intruder.

Particularly at our house where any intruder would be licked to death.

Particularly at our house where any intruder would be licked to death.

Our pit bull was infamous for her attacks. She'd reach up with her front claws, pull you down and lick anyone entering the house into submission, or something.

The only time I ever saw her become aggressive was one time in the park, when a person who was known to be insane approached us and she aggressively barked and got between us.
The rest of the time, she was friends with the world.
I still didn't trust her unsupervised with small children, too easy to accidentally knock a kid over by accident.

@vinu:

If what you claim were possible, babies would inherit the ability to generate antibodies to ALL the diseases the parents suffered too.

Did you even read the data RK supplied?

Julian, of course he didn't: he doesn't even read most of the stuff he links to himself; or if he does he cannot understand it as he keeps claiming things say the opposite if what they do, so he'll stand no chance with Roger's references.

Julian, of course he didn’t: he doesn’t even read most of the stuff he links to himself...

Fair's fair, I don't read 99+% of the drivel that vinu pastes in myself. Each time I did, I found either the polar opposite of what he wrote or it was unrelated to what he wrote.

Bee sting are much rarer. So people can still withstand several bee stings but evolution did not prepare us for beekeeping levels of stings.

Our primate and hominid ancestors have been foraging for honey for much, much longer than they were cultivating apples, long before a seperate speciality of "bee-keeping" emerged to incur all the burden of bee-stings. But I get it, the "argument from evolution" is only intended to explain why we are *not* allergic to some environmental exposures, and can be conveniently ignored for everything to which we *are* allergic.

Peanut Oil has certainly been used in vaccines experimentally, but I have yet to find proof of it’s use outside of the lab.

In addition, records of peanut anaphylaxis goes back at least to 1920, long before the 1960s research into the use of peanut oil as an adjuvant. Yet Vinu reckons that we evolved to tolerate peanuts 'until some incompetent “experts” started injecting it into people'. HOW CAN THIS BE?!

@HDB - 66

BECAUSE HE'S AN ARSE.

:-)

Given that peanuts are from the New World it seems extremely unlikely that there could have been sufficient global evolution of humans to eliminate intolerance.

Vinu: Oh, that hoary old paper again. I don't know if you're aware of this, Vinny, but we have made a lot of progress since then. A hundred years ago, people thought that the flu was a bacterial disease, that the miasma theory still had some juice in it, and more soldiers died of diphtheria and dysentery than from enemy action.

While I couldn't find the world wide death rate for diphtheria for 2016, the fact that I found 3 deaths in Venezuela, 2 in Malaysia, suggests that it's really low now. Dysentery is practically unknown in most countries. And you, for some reason, want us to go back to those days. Maybe you should do some reading of historical records, instead of listening to rogue neurons rattling around your empty skull.

Particularly at our house where any intruder would be licked to death.

We call the younger dog the Kissing Bandit.

Wonder what vinu-idiot makes of the upcoming "peanut allergy" vaccine.....

Don't trust the guys who created the problem, to solve it.

He claims that injections cause allergies when they have aluminum in them, but if you leave that out then injections can treat allergies - or at least for grasses.

There are two states of allergy. IgE dominated and IgG4 dominated. IgE and IgG4 are of course primarily defense mechanisms against worm infections. IgE state corresponds to a low level of infection. IgG4 corresponds to a high level of infection.
In the IgE dominated case, the body produces a strong allergic response. In the IgG4 dominated case, the body scales back the response to avoid damaging itself.

Allergen immunotherapy is about slowly moving from an IgE to an IgG4 dominated state, by increasing the level of allergen "infection"..

Turner JD, Faulkner H, Kamgno J, Kennedy MW, Behnke J, Boussinesq M, et al. Allergen-specific IgE and IgG4 are markers of resistance and susceptibility in a human intestinal nematode infection. Microbes Infect. 2005;7(7-8):990–6.

And food contaminated vaccines take you from an IgE/IgG4 free state, to an IgE dominated allergy state.
And remember IgG4 state is not a cure, it is currently thought to be a more tolerable disease state. The IgG4 state can cause diseases such as eosinophilic esophagitis. IgG4 state is not a cure. So our allergic children have been condemned to walk this narrow path between two disease states, thanks to our food protein contaminated vaccines.

“The package inserts for dimercaprol for injection, progesterone capsules, and valproic acid capsules list peanut oil as an ingredient, and the former 2 drugs also list peanut allergy as a precaution. ....”
Two points:
1. So, ANY injection including vaccines can be contaminated with peanut oil.

OFFS. "Dimercaprol for injection" is not 'contaminated with peanut oil', it contains peanut oil AS AN INGREDIENT -- on account of dimercaprol being non-water-soluble. While "progesterone capsules, and valproic acid capsules" incorporate peanut oil as an ingredient for the same purpose, and of course are NOT INJECTED.

Vinu has regressed to the point of basically arguing that "peanut butter contains peanut oil, therefore ANY product can be contaminated with peanut oil".

OFFS. “Dimercaprol for injection” is not ‘contaminated with peanut oil’, it contains peanut oil AS AN INGREDIENT — on account of dimercaprol being non-water-soluble. While “progesterone capsules, and valproic acid capsules” incorporate peanut oil as an ingredient for the same purpose, and of course are NOT INJECTED.

Now, there you go again, trying to confuse the *issues* with silly little things like facts.

Peanut oil is approved for injections. Vaccines contain numerous excipients (Polysorbate 80, sorbitol, antibiotics, etc.). Contamination is therefore possible at numerous points.
Murphy's law applies.
Assuming vaccines are peanut protein-free is just wishful thinking.

The most sensitive peanut protein detector on the planet is called the human immune system. It detected peanut protein in one or more of these vaccines:

https://wao.confex.com/wao/2015symp/webprogram/Paper9336.html

Contamination is therefore possible at numerous points.

Therefore, all injections, from this day forward, are expressly forbidden!
Courtesy of the village idiot and his Nirvana Fallacy. It it can be fouled up, it must be forbidden.

Here's a thought experiment. Rabies vaccine is a rather primitive vaccine, likely contaminated. I'll produce a rabid animal to bite you, do you accept the peanut filled vaccine (your standard, not mine) or die?
As I'm intimately familiar with contraindications and indications, side effects, etc and have honestly considered a cricothyrotomy in an under 12 year old child, considering everything up to and including a can lid as a surgical instrument and it was my own, turning blue daughter, do you honestly want to reconsider?
Had I been forced to proceed, it was likely that she'd never be capable of speech again.
Do you really want to proceed?*

*Thankfully, just as I was reaching for my belt knife and had sent my wife for various items in the establishment that I'd require, I managed to dislodge the airway obstruction.
To be brutally honest, having been in firefights quite a few times and that experience, I far preferred a direct threat to my own life.

i suspect that Vinu's mental model of pharmaceutical manufacturing is rather like the popular conception of a large bakery, with flours and chocolate and peanuts all going in at one end of the production line, and peanut brownies coming out on the conveyor belt at the other. Then the bakery switches over to a production run of (let's say) Tim-Tams, but they warn consumers that these "may contain peanuts" because of possible residual flour.

In Vinu's mind, there is a single centralised Pharma factory making everything. So there is a run of Dimercaprol, until the stockpiles of arsenic-poisoning chelator are high enough; then the machinery is switched over to making Epilim tablets; then it is switched again and vaccines are coming out on the conveyor belt, but they're contaminated [cue scary theremin music] with peanut oil from the previous production runs.

I don't think that's how it works, Vinu.

Definitely not for biologics. Biologics license involve licensing not just the product but the production facility, and there are pretty strict requirements.

The biologics production facility still has to use excipients produced at other facilities. And as the NAM report noted, there are no labeling laws to track contamination.

Um, no. Part of the certification is a certification of sources of components.
Do your homework!

Wonder what vinu-idiot makes of the upcoming “peanut allergy” vaccine…..

Let me see.

It will be CONTAMINATED WITH PEANUTS!!!!ELEVENTYONE!!!

WOOOOOOOOHAWOOOOOOOOOOOOOHAWOOOOOO

Biologics license involve licensing not just the product but the production facility, and there are pretty strict requirements.

In the case of Vinu's example of Dimercaprol, Imma pretty sure that the world's supply comes from a handful of factories in China and India. Which reduces the opportunities for contaminating the Merck vaccine of your choice.

Again, you are forgetting the worldwide supply chain of excipients used in vaccines.

Again, you failed to actually look up and learn how a facility gains certification and how it can lose it.
Sources of components are also part of the certification, indeed, decertification has occurred and recalls have occurred for using a non-certified source, long before a drug made it into distribution.

And vinu is ignoring the strict standard by which vaccine are manufactured and tested....in fact, if you check out the official lists of "recalled" vaccines, you'll find that most, if not all of them, were identified by the manufacturer themselves through internal testing procedures.

"strict standard"

What is the use of strict standards when peanut oil is an APPROVED contaminant? And of course there are numerous food proteins DOCUMENTED and present in vaccines, such as milk, soy, egg proteins.

Interesting link Vinu, but just because a vaccine increases IgG production that are specific to peanuts does not mean that the vaccines contained peanut proteins.

The vaccines may simply be amplifying IgG production.

This is complicated stuff. I hope Vinu that you can check for foreign proteins in vaccines. Can you simply centrifuge the vaccines and then take the protein fraction and run one of those neat bioassays on the protein fraction, they type that immunologists use. What is that...ELISA?

Has this been done Vinu? I apologize if you had posted information on this that I had glossed over.

Keating,

Thanks for the respectful comments. (a rare commodity in this forum!)

1. In this case we are talking about IgE not IgG.

2. Setting peanuts aside for a bit, the Prevnar 13 vaccine contains casamino acids (cow's milk derived) and soy peptone broth.

http://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/ApprovedPr…

So we know that vaccines do contain numerous foreign proteins as the NAM report I quoted in a previous post shows.

Please see details here:

http://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i5225/rapid-responses

3. I am not an immunologist and don't have access to a lab. I requested a senior author of the Hoyt et al. article, Dr.Commins, to check for peanut protein, as you have suggested.

4. Interestingly, peanut allergy can be a problem even if there is no peanut protein in the vaccine, because bacterial amino acid sequences match peanut allergen amino acid sequences, as I show here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310021910_Significant_protein_…

5. "The vaccines may simply be amplifying IgG production."

Unlikely. We have many examples where repeated injection of a protein increases IgE levels and IgE mediated allergy.

"As expected, allergic beekeepers had been stung most frequently before the first allergic reaction."

Bee sting allergy in beekeepers.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9824397

The Tdap booster vaccine was created with reduced diphtheria toxin because of allergic reactions in children who had previously been repeatedly vaccinated with Dtap.

Lots of details and references here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312125211_Professional_Miscond…

Sorry, should read diphtheria *toxoid*, not toxin.

The most active anti-vaxer, AIDS denialist, virus- denialist etc pp Hans Tolzin (no academic education) has collected money to look what is in vaccines. He wanted to detect mercury- but this was not found in the vaccines examined- because it is no longer addded in the production process, and also not used as preservative.
He now published the results. Details of the analytical procedure are not given, but the outcome is: vaccines are very clean. Until now only elements were shown in the results. It is unclear of vaccines have been expired or were within expiry date. It is also unclear were applied like injections ? That means if the vaccine went through the stainless free needle or was otherwise applied to the analytical instruments.

Details are given here. Note, that results are given in µg/lt (=ng/ml)

http://www.agbug.de/download/Impfstoffuntersuchung01.pdf

@vinu: alls excipients in vaccines are from controlled origin, have analytical certicficates including purity and contaminats. Allergies to snake oil, peanut oil etc are not known. One should consider the amount/concentration of an allergen, which can cause an IgE mediated allergy.

People allegic to hens egg albumin can be safely vaccinated with MMR- vaccines

"@vinu: alls excipients in vaccines are from controlled origin, have analytical certicficates including purity and contaminats. Allergies to snake oil, peanut oil etc are not known."

Please post pointer to the certificates.

" One should consider the amount/concentration of an allergen, which can cause an IgE mediated allergy."

Please cite relevant scientific literature.

https://www.emdmillipore.com/US/en/product/Tween-80-%28Polysorbate%29,M…

says:

"The following materials are used as raw material but are not present in

the final product: Maize, Wheat

We point out that we do not perform any testing on allergens in the

above-mentioned product."

Polysorbate and other excipients derived from vegetable sources are present in many other vaccines and most suppliers do not have allergen information.

And if they don't test it, how do they know the allergen is not present?

"People allegic to hens egg albumin can be safely vaccinated with MMR- vaccines"

Two separate issues. It takes LESS allergen to cause the development of allergy than it takes to have a allergic reaction. People with egg allergy can safely get MMR but a non-allergic person who gets MMR can develop egg allergy.

Please see section:
"Sensitization needs less injected allergen than elicitation"
in:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285580954_Evidence_that_Food_P…

Wow! I didn't realize that my German has atrophied so far from disuse!
It took me a full minute to translate the elements. :/

I guess we'll have to have an extended vacation in Germany. Maybe in October, when all of the best foods get prepared, along with the beer sampling. ;)

Looking at the sample and recalling German soil composition, those results look extremely suspect. Did they, perchance, mistakenly dilute a soil sample from a farm, then remove the nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen results?

Again, you are forgetting the worldwide supply chain of excipients used in vaccines.

So Vinu's current thesis is that peanut allergens are so widespread in consumer-product consumption that they find their way into vaccines not through specifically pharmaceutical ingredients, but through contamination of the Polysorbate 80 and other multiple-use products.

In which case there was no point in raising the use of peanut oil as a solvent in a couple of pharmaceutical products, except to muddy with water with FUD, and to make himself look like a cockwomble.

Here's the problem... if polysorbate-80 is routinely contaminated with peanut allergens, well, the stuff is used in everything from toothpaste to ice-cream, children's ice-cream, Mandrake! Therefore peanut-allergic individuals are going into shock after every exposure to toothpaste, no wait, they're not.

if polysorbate-80 is routinely contaminated with peanut allergens, well, the stuff is used in everything from toothpaste to ice-cream, children’s ice-cream, Mandrake! Therefore peanut-allergic individuals are going into shock after every exposure to toothpaste, no wait, they’re not.

No, they're not all dying. Obviously, in vinu land, they're all dead.
Hence, still not a problem.
Or something.

That nanu nanu finds a no no no no inside of everything, due to the oddly non-hernia driving goalpost shifting into nanu nanu land.

Toothpaste Allergy Diagnosis and Management
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2922711/

Wzrd1@80,

How about taking a dump? (Way better than arguing with vinu).

For the computer geek among us:

alain@johnson ~ $ python
Python 2.7.12 (default, Jan 29 2017, 19:52:04)
[GCC 5.3.0] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import tensorflow as tf
I tensorflow/stream_executor/dso_loader.cc:135] successfully opened CUDA library libcublas.so.8.0 locally
I tensorflow/stream_executor/dso_loader.cc:135] successfully opened CUDA library libcudnn.so.5 locally
I tensorflow/stream_executor/dso_loader.cc:135] successfully opened CUDA library libcufft.so.8.0 locally
I tensorflow/stream_executor/dso_loader.cc:135] successfully opened CUDA library libcuda.so.1 locally
I tensorflow/stream_executor/dso_loader.cc:135] successfully opened CUDA library libcurand.so.8.0 locally
>>> hello = tf.constant('Hello, TensorFlow!')
>>> sess = tf.Session()
I tensorflow/stream_executor/cuda/cuda_gpu_executor.cc:910] successful NUMA node read from SysFS had negative value (-1), but there must be at least one NUMA node, so returning NUMA node zero
I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:885] Found device 0 with properties:
name: Quadro K2000M
major: 3 minor: 0 memoryClockRate (GHz) 0.745
pciBusID 0000:01:00.0
Total memory: 1.95GiB
Free memory: 1.92GiB
I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:906] DMA: 0
I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:916] 0: Y
I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:975] Creating TensorFlow device (/gpu:0) -> (device: 0, name: Quadro K2000M, pci bus id: 0000:01:00.0)
>>> print(sess.run(hello))
Hello, TensorFlow!
>>> quit()

Next task in line, register for a genomics stream of courses on coursera or edx to put that beauty to good use at crunching genomics tasks[1].

Alain

[1] == way better than dealing with vinu...

So in response to -

Here’s the problem… if polysorbate-80 is routinely contaminated with peanut allergens, well, the stuff is used in everything from toothpaste to ice-cream, children’s ice-cream, Mandrake! Therefore peanut-allergic individuals are going into shock after every exposure to toothpaste, no wait, they’re not.

vinu post a link to an article that doesn't include the words "peanut" or "polysorbate-80".

Why?

To show that:
1. Toothpaste allergy exists.
2. Toothpaste (like vaccines) are contaminated with so many proteins that nobody can be sure what caused someone's reaction.

Polysorbate and other excipients derived from vegetable sources are present in many other vaccines and most suppliers do not have allergen information.
And if they don’t test it, how do they know the allergen is not present?

Vinu answered that question himself when he earlier wrote

The most sensitive peanut protein detector on the planet is called the human immune system.

Therefore the best way of testing whether polysorbate-80 contains peanut allergens is to put the product in toothpaste, ice-cream, cosmetics, detergent, etc. where human peanut detectors will consume it in large amounts, externally and internally. Which is happening... "In Europe and America, people eat about 100 mg of polysorbate 80 in foods per day on average." The results are resoundingly negative.
I hope Vinu is reassured.

You should check your facts. You are talking about a list that does not even exists anymore.
Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers
Update 1/17/17 6:05 p.m. Eastern: We’ve received a statement from the University of Colorado Denver:

Jeffrey Beall, associate professor and librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, has decided to no longer maintain or publish his research or blog on open access journals and “predatory publishers.” CU Denver supports and recognizes the important work Professor Beall has contributed to the field and to scholars worldwide. CU Denver also understands and respects his decision to take down his website scholarlyoa.com at this time. Professor Beall remains on the faculty at the university and will be pursuing new areas of research.

You should check your facts.

You should check the link.

You are talking about a list that does not even exists anymore.

What are the received and published dates on the paper, again? Do you think Medcrave suddenly came to Jesus because Beall took down the list?

2. Toothpaste (like vaccines) are contaminated with so many proteins that nobody can be sure what caused someone’s reaction.

Sometimes I could swear that Vinu is really a Simpson character who escaped into the Intertubes.

i'm not gonna go into endless arguments whether the amounts are minuscule or too much to be concerned with. i think no one can be certain how much is too much so i understand the view on demanding extreme purity.

looking at how in US 24 difference vaccines are given to babies under 1 year old, which is more than in any other country, and US has a massive autism epidemic, so something must be causing it. unless you have a better suggestion, then in the meantime this vaccine contamination issue and it's additives such as mercury (which was suppose to be removed already in 2009) is where i suggest we need to keep looking at.

if the vaccine manufacturers came up with this data people would certainly be questioning it, but it'd atleast have shown their attempt to show their stuff to be uncontaminated. perhaps they knew this could be an issue and chose not to research it further.

despite whatever the blog writer thought of the amounts is irrelevant cos he's just 1 person. the data is valuable and i think there's probably as many people who think the amounts are big enough to look at, than there are those who think it's acceptable. especially those who are hired by big pharma to grassroot lobby that way ;)

I gotta say that this comment really makes me sad. You've obviously spent a fair amount of time looking at this issue, yet every statement you make is wrong, and worse, every statement you make has been addressed on this blog. So if you found your way here, you should have the resources to answer your own questions.

The US does not have the largest vaccine schedule. There is not an autism epidemic. Autism is a fairly new diagnosis. These people used to be called schizophrenic or retarded.
There's debate whether there's a small real increase or whether it's all changes in diagnoses.

No one knows how much is too much, but we know there's a white area, a grey area, and a black area, and vaccine preservatives are in the white. To claim otherwise is to claim we simply can't know anything to the millionith billionith degree, and that claim is empty and pointless.

The opionions on this blog are more than a bit caustic, but they are not one person's opinion. They're scientific data. A lot of data. And Orac is not hired by big pharma to do this. That's just made up. If you believe it, you should put up or shut up.

If you really want to have an opinion on this, and you won't trust the people who have studied it all their lives, then learn enough statistics and biology to convince yourself. Don't just quote irresponsible liars. You do you and yours no favors by basing your medical decisions on lies.

To add to Christine Rose's answer : we have truckloads of "better suggestions" for a possible environmental cause of autism. Age of parents, weight of mother, in utero exposure to drugs (valproate), diseases, pesticides (just avoid Seneff's work on this issue) or pollution, and the list goes on... Suggesting that there aren't any better leads does not speak well of your knowledge on current autism research.

How do any of those "leads" explain the fact that 75% of ASD patients test positive for folate receptor autoantibodies?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313524429_Autism_Spectrum_Diso…

Don: "looking at how in US 24 difference vaccines are given to babies under 1 year old"

The actual recommended number is 7 separate vaccines for children under the age of 1.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/downloads/child/0-18yrs-schedule…

Where did you get the idea it was 24 different vaccines, Don? And since that number is obviously erroneous, perhaps you should rethink the accuracy of other information from such a source.

He's counting individual doses and moving all the ones that have an age range as far back as possible.

If you do that for Brazil, they get 39. Brazil has a very different infectious disease profile than does the US obviously. To be fair a lot of the Brazil recommendations are for certain areas of the country only.

http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2010/10/20/do-children-in-the-u-s-have-to…

Don Mega:

i’m not gonna go into endless arguments whether the amounts are minuscule or too much to be concerned with. i think no one can be certain how much is too much so i understand the view on demanding extreme purity.

Then you utterly and completely fail. Whether the amounts are miniscule or too much is precisely the question that needs answering if you want to know if vaccines are safe. Avoiding that question because it yields uncomfortable results for you says that you are not actually interested in the truth. You just want a reason to justify your distaste for vaccines.

The amounts detected are so miniscule they could just as easily be contamination from the lab apparatus. This does not matter to you? This still frightens you? Then you are actively resisting learning what is actually harmful. You prefer fear to knowledge. I find that rather tragic.

Montanari's claims were examined in Franch last year.

The French medicine-safety agency ANSM examined the purity of vaccines, using SEM for qualitative analysis and "Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry" for quantitative analysis. Then:

Conclusions
Le CSST, réuni à nouveau le 13 mai 2016, a étudié les résultats des analyses conduites sur le vaccin Méningitec par l’ANSM, le Pr Alvarez et le Dr Montanari. Les données présentées dans le rapport du Dr Montanari ont été considérées comme difficilement interprétables en raison de problèmes méthodologiques.

That is, as an expert witness, Montanari lacked expertise or basic competence.

(Thanks Camille over at OcaSapiens).

Yes, the hypothesis was that narcolepsy could be triggered by Pandemrix vaccine through the hypocretin receptor.

However, the original paper proposing this was subsequently retracted.
http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/6/247/247rt1

http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/7/294/294ra105

@vinu arumugham #151, the name of the publication you linked to is "Science Translational Medicine", a name that suggests quackery. In addition, I could only access the abstract. Finally, the last sentence includes the phrase "may explain".
Once again, you got a whole load of conjecture, and little else besides.

Yes, yes it is quackery. Dr.Offit accepted the conclusion and cited it though.
You should tutor him on his journal choices.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/855558

The font for the word "Science" is different. May be that makes a difference? The full article is behind a pay wall, sorry.

Paul Offit in medscape (free registration)

Hi. My name is Paul Offit. I'm talking to you today from the Vaccine Education Center here at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Of interest, in the past couple of months, an influenza vaccine is now on track for licensure. It's called Fluad®. It is different from all of the other vaccines that we have ever used in this country in that it contains an adjuvant named "squalene." Squalene is derived from shark oil. We all have squalene in our bodies. It's part of cholesterol synthesis.

Adding squalene to an influenza vaccine is the third time that an adjuvant has been used in the United States. The first adjuvant was aluminum salts, which are contained in a number of vaccines. The second was monophosphoryl lipid A—a detoxified lipid A product that is present in one of the human papillomavirus vaccines. Squalene will be the third adjuvant used in this country.

Squalene has been used in other countries, and it's an excellent adjuvant. If you look at the data with the squalene adjuvant in influenza vaccine, you can see that in people over age 65 years, it induces a better immune response than the inactivated influenza vaccine that is not adjuvanted. And it's more likely to induce broader cross-reactivity when there is a mismatch of strains. For all of these reasons, I think this will be an excellent product.

The issue, however, that no doubt will come up is that, in 2009, associated with the pandemic influenza that swept across the world, a squalene-adjuvanted influenza vaccine was used in Europe as well as in Scandinavian countries. It was called Pandemrix®, and it was found to be a rare cause of narcolepsy, which is a disorder of wakefulness. Depending on which country you looked at, the incidence of narcolepsy was from 1 in 16,000 to 1 in 50,000 people who got that vaccine.

However, another squalene-adjuvanted pandemic influenza vaccine that was used, called Focetria®, did not cause this problem.

In a recent paper in Science Translational Medicine,[1] researchers explained the difference between those two vaccines. The difference was that whereas Pandemrix contained a fair amount of influenza nucleoprotein, Focetria didn't contain that influenza nucleoprotein. And the nucleoprotein was the key because it appears that nucleoprotein has molecular mimicry with at least one of the receptors for hypocretin, the product made by cells in the hypothalamus that is associated with wakefulness. Apparently, it was a phenomenon of autoimmunity. Antibodies directed against the cells that produced hypocretin were made, and these antibodies destroyed those cells and caused the permanent disorder of narcolepsy.

Some people will fear squalene, especially squalene-adjuvanted influenza vaccines, because of the experience with narcolepsy. Realize, however, that the problem is not the squalene but rather the squalene plus the influenza nucleoprotein. It's an avoidable problem. All one has to do is to make sure that there is no contaminating influenza nucleoprotein in the squalene-adjuvanted flu vaccine. That problem has been fixed.

Hopefully, this information will help you in trying to deal with the inevitable concerns about squalene-adjuvanted influenza vaccine in the United States. Thank you.

Orac, too bad you failed to research the Cervarix vaccine and find that there are 500mcg of aluminum hydroxide per 0.5ml dose of Cervarix. And it is not an unintentional contaminant, but is there purposefully to act as an adjuvant. Your entire presentation is non-credible. You've only succeeded in demonstrating that you don't know what you're talking about.

Bill, you seem to be implying that you have research skills superior to Orac's. That's great. Please educate us as to the amount of aluminum that's present in 500 µg of aluminum hydroxide, and then point us to the peer-reviewed scientific research showing that this dosage of aluminum has a deleterious effect on human health. You don't want your entire presentation to be non-credible, do you?

You might save yourself some time by using the search box at the top of this page to see if Orac has discussed "aluminum" in the context of vaccines. Just a thought.

There is actually something I missed and should have commented on, but it's not what Bill thinks it was. Finding so few aluminum hydroxide precipitate particles is another reason to question the study. Aluminum hydroxide should have precipitated out of solution big time under vacuum. Yet the authors found so little? Hmmm....

@Bill, it is YOU who does not know what he is talking about.
Adjuvants are NOT contaminants.

madder: "...Then point us to the peer-reviewed scientific research showing that this dosage of aluminum has a deleterious effect on human health."

Another criteria should be that it not be a speaker at this "conference" sponsored by the Dwoskin family:
http://www.vaccinesafetyconference.com/speakers.html

@Chris:

Yeah, Bill looks to be one of those people afflicted with fractally-wrong ideas, with obvious implications for his sources. It might be fun to set up a crackpot bingo game or otherwise take bets on what those sources might be.

The presentations of this "conference" of the anti-vaccine lobby

http://www.vaccinesafetyconference.com/speakers.html

are also available as youtube videos. The Aluminium "expert" Chris Exley states in his video, that aluminium is an "antigen" (atomic weight 27 !!!) . And in his publication Exley does never mention which internal controls (if any) he is using nor can one find the use of international Al- Standards.
So one can asume that his findings are not validated. But he is funded be the Dwoskin Family Foundation.

Another criteria should be that it not be a speaker at this “conference” sponsored by the Dwoskin family

The bio for Shiv Chopra is really something to behold:

"His latest book, CORRUPT TO THE CORE: Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower, was published in English and French in 2009, due to which he is frequently referred to as the most persistent whistleblower in Canada."

If you say so.

"Even if the aluminum hydroxide was found, it’s level is so low, that the human body wouldn’t notice it." If that's true, then why is the aluminum hydroxide being used as the adjuvant in the HPV vax? Seems it's rather a waste of resources if the human body "wouldn't notice it." Isn't that the point of using an adjuvant?

Terri, when you cite, it would help if you would say whom you are citing, so other readers can see the context of the original quotation. Not being able to find the context makes it difficult to answer your question.

Adjuvants stimulate the immune response more vigorously so in a sense yes the body does notice it. However, that's not saying that adjuvants have any other impact, particularly in the area of neurotoxicity.

The dose makes the poison so to speak. And if you read the article very carefully what you find is that our vaccines are actually rather pure.

But still, the dreaded italian consumer union (Codacons) took this laughable study to force Italy procure to look into these vaccines. What a spectacular waste of resources and time...
https://goo.gl/hWBWaI

Puy the article Upside Down is great explanation :-)

This study is absolute rubbish.
The main conclusion is that " This new investigation represents a new quality control that can be adopted to assess the safety of a vaccine. [...] a close inspection of the working places and the full knowledge of the whole procedure of vaccine preparation would probably allow to eliminate the problem."
Well, it make sense.
So, let's find someone that can do this kind of analysis...gotcha! NanoDiagnostics, a specialized lab..let's call them...oh, look who we've here! NanoDiagnostics Director is dr. Stefano Montanari...and dr Gatto is also a worker fo this lab! Incredible ;)