Update - August 3, 2011
Following on from the wonderful Ginger Taylor Media Editor of Age of Autism, I have decided to attempt a daily update to this blog with stories from national and international media that are important to the issues of vaccination, health rights and natural health. Of course, I will continue to write original articles on these subjects, but every single day, there are stories that must be read and this is my way of letting you all know about them. If you see a media report that you think is important, please feel free to forward it to me by clicking here.
Selling Drugs as Scholarly Opinion
Although the Times vaguely identifies David Ropeik as “an instructor at Harvard University,” Harvard’s websites identify the former TV news reporter as Director of Communications for the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis (HCRA).
According to SourceWatch, Public Citizen and the Integrity and Science Project, HCRA has been funded by a who’s who of petrochemical, biotechnology and vaccine companies that include AstraZeneca, BMS, GSK, Hoffman-LaRoche, Janssen, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis, Parke-Davis, Pfizer, Pharmacia, Roche Pharmaceuticals, Schering-Plough Corporation, Wyeth-Ayerst and Eli Lilly – companies that were responsible for products that have killed, crippled or injured millions of Americans since 1990.
In his “opinion piece” published last week by the Los Angeles Times, Ropeik calls for new laws, incarceration and economic hardships against parents who refuse to vaccinate their children. To lend credibility, the Times identified Ropeik as “an instructor at Harvard University.”
My Comment:
We continually see people in the media being quoted as experts on this subject and yet, when you look a little deeper, you find that they actually hold strong financial interests in the subject they are being quoted on. Paul Offit is a perfect example of this ‘expert for sale’ mentality and he has been shown time and time again to have made statements that have no basis in fact yet are supportive of something he is profiting from. The fact that this man, David Ropeik, is being quoted as calling for people who don’t vaccinate to be sent to gaol or to be penalised financially should hold him up to ridicule even to those who use vaccines. The fact that he is able to say these sorts of things unopposed in a newspaper published in a country that claims to support freedom should be of concern to all of us.
And They Wonder Why We Don’t Trust Them by Sandy Gottstein
The New England Journal of Medicine just published a shoddy piece, innocently titled “The Age-Old Struggle against the Antivaccinationists”, in which they make a multitude of outrageous, unsubstantiated claims. Here is my response to many of them.
Labeling people who want their concerns about vaccinations to be taken seriously “anti-vaccinationists” is an age-old, shameless tactic. Some are; most aren’t. Regardless, dismissive and pejorative labeling does nothing to address the real question: do the benefits of vaccines really (far) outweigh their risks?
“Countries that dropped routine pertussis vaccination in the 1970s and 1980s then suffered 10 to 100 times the pertussis incidence of countries that maintained high immunization rates; ultimately, the countries that had eliminated their pertussis vaccination programs reinstated them.”
And the result of the rise in pertussis cases? This is a classic mistake (ploy?) made by those who unquestioningly promote vaccinations: equating incidence of disease with adverse disease outcomes. The number of people getting a disease is not useful information in and of itself. The only meaningful question is, “what are the long-term consequences of a disease and what are the long-term consequences of the vaccine designed to prevent that disease”.
Equating incidence with outcome is at best an example of sloppy thinking. At worst? By the way, Dr. Gordon Stewart published many articles about what actually happened in England when the pertussis vaccine went out of favor. You might want to familiarize yourself with him and them (1,2,3).
My Comment:
I read the article mentioned above yesterday and it literally made me feel sick. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a journal which has an undeserved reputation for publishing scientifically-based information, this is the sort of story you would expect to see in a Murdoch publication. It is nothing more than a hate-filled attack on health freedom using phrases such as:
“Today, the spectrum of antivaccinationists ranges from people who are simply ignorant about science (or “innumerate” — unable to understand and incorporate concepts of risk and probability into science-grounded decision making) to a radical fringe element who use deliberate mistruths, intimidation, falsified data, and threats of violence in efforts to prevent the use of vaccines and to silence critics. “
It is very convenient to call those who disagree with you ‘innumerate’. By doing so, you don’t need to deal with their arguments, you can just dismiss them. And as for intimidation and threats of violence, I have never, ever heard of anyone in the pro-vaccination choice camp who has stooped that low. The anti-choice brigade however, is well-known for these sorts of tactics.
As a reminder of the sorts of things these people will get up to in order to prevent others from accessing information on the other side of this issue, read the excellent article by Dr Brian Martin Professor at the University of Wollongong and Vice President of Whistleblower’s Australia - Debating Vaccination, and these past blogs from our own site as an example:
Then, decide for yourself who is using threats and intimidation and who is actually open to scientific public debate on these issues.
I thank Sandy Gottstein for her intelligent, reasonable and wise response to this horrible article. She certainly has more patience than I in dealing with this sort of discriminatory and unscientific writing.
Vaccination Adjuvant Works By Killing Cells: Cause of Autoimmune Disorders?
A new Nature Medicine study may provide insight into why there's so much autoimmune disease today. Have the authors unintentionally pointed to the smoking gun that even vaccinators must acknowledge?
Adjuvants are known to increase the ability of vaccines to cause the immune system to make antibodies. Aluminum has been used because it's particularly effective. However, how it works was unknown until a study just published in the journal Nature Medicine. What they found is quite disturbing. Aluminum in vaccines causes cell death, but not of a normal sort, as in apoptosis.
This may be the explanation for much of the autoimmune disease that's experienced by so many people today. Freestanding DNA and other bits of cells are not normal.
My Comment:
Adjuvants are added to vaccines to ‘provoke’ an immune response. Because vaccines are injected, bypassing the natural route of most infections which is over the mucous membranes or into the gut where between 70% and 80% of our immune system resides, adjuvants are required in order to alert our immune system in the hope that it will produce antibodies. All adjuvants are toxic - the only difference between the various sorts is their level of toxicity. After using adjuvants for well over 100 years, we are just now starting to study their effects. The results of these studies may shock and surprise you but they will also provide a biologically-plausible explanation for why vaccinations can be so harmful to a subset of the population.