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We should review what we actually have here.
Paul has shown us I think two court cases where damages were awarded for brain inflammation for two different vaccines.
That paper says there should be more research to see if vaccination causes brain inflammation, and it postulates a link between brain inflammation and autism.
All of that may have been followed up.
To follow up properly we’d have to read the whole review paper, and all the papers it was based on, to see if it properly reflects those papers. But there’s no way Paul has done that because:
– “..the formula that Paul uses is simple: Pick a scientific paper that I agree with and believe blindly in everything the paper I agree with says. The rest is all big pharma lies.”
Precisely. We can spend hours checking out that paper; meanwhile Paul is on the covid-19 thread spreading another form of lethal disinformation.
Citing a paper like that one is basically a clever way of cheating. It’s like filibustering; a massive time eater. But crucially, Paul doesn’t know he’s been set up to cheat. He just gets the link from an anti-vax site and accepts it in good faith. Paul is someone who can’t even tell that Dane Wigington is a charlatan.
And Paul does not have the courage of his convictions to answer me. He hides. What hope do we have of being believed if someone who claims to be progressive and anti imperialist, HIDES from answering a fellow anti imperialist just because I am telling the truth and know more about the subject than he does. Come on Paul be courageous, defend your reputation.
SA, sorry, I was replying too quickly without reading your comments thoroughly enough; I see you’d already dealt with most of the issues I’d raised. To be fair to myself, also some of our comments crossed.
With such small samples and the conflict of interest statement, Paul’s cited paper does look particularly weak, especially since it’s up against broad studies with samples of hundreds of thousands.
Paul, it would be nice to be able to turn to you for the following, and as it is you that raised the matter, it is you that I should turn to, but you have consistently demonstrated contempt for the scientific process, so I shall turn to SA.
SA, PubMed has a list of eighteen citations of the article “Relevance of Neuroinflammation and Encephalitis in Autism”. I don’t yet know how many support or criticise it, but it shows that this issue has not been ignored by the scientific community.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4717322/citedby/
The other article was retracted by the journal’s editors; here’s the retraction notice:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5705728/
The editors indeed cited inadequate declaration of conflicts of interest, but I’m more interested in this bit:
– “Furthermore, the article itself contains a number of errors, and mistakes of various types that raise concerns about the validity of the conclusion. As a result, this article is being retracted by the editors without the agreement of the authors.”
I’ve had a fish around but I haven’t found any discussion as to what the errors are. Any idea where I should look?
@ Clark
You seem to be looking into that link I gave. Anything you come up with I will try to follow up.
You seem to blow hot and cold; one comment you have a reasonable tone, the next is threatening or abusive.
Let me make a few things clear. I believe Craig and his Moderators are perfectly capable of policing this Blog, and don’t need Deputy Dogs or vigilantes backing them up.
—[ Mod: Indeed we are empowered to moderate discussions, Paul, and there is a case to answer here. You may have noticed that you’ve been premoderated for the last few days, due to your continuing dilation and distraction. The reply below about the use of mercury in medicine serves as further evidence of that phenomenon.
Your previous contributions are under review with regard to adherence to the commenting guidelines. As you’ve posted more than 6,400 comments over the years, along with hundreds of forum replies, the process will take some time to complete, at which point we’ll highlight issues of concern in the blog support forum and decide whether further intervention is required. In the meantime, kindly refrain from submitting further public comments to this blog. ]
—
If I am told by them I cannot post on vaccine matters, I shall obviously desist.
—[ Mod: Kindly desist from posting further comments about vaccines (or indeed any other topic) which involve allegations of widespread conspiracy. Thank you for your co-operation. ]
—
Re SA, I already told him I would not respond to him due to his hostile and threatening posts – Hell is likely to freeze over before I relent on that.
If you, Clark, continue to threaten me and pile on the ad hominems, I shall cease responding to you as well. I hope it doesn’t come to that. Peace and Truth.E1012 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — Extensions of Remarks May 21, 2003
MERCURY IN MEDICINE—TAKING UNNECESSARY RISKS I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
‘…FDA will allow a product to present more of a risk when its potential benefit is great—especially for products used to treat serious, life-threatening conditions.’’ This argument—that the known risks of infectious diseases outweigh a potential risk of neurological damage from exposure to thimerosal in vaccines, is one that has continuously been presented to the Committee by government officials. FDA officials have stressed that any possible risk from thimerosal was theoretical: that no proof of harm existed. Upon a thorough review of the scientific literature and internal documents from government and industry, the Committee did in fact find evidence that thimerosal posed a risk. The possible risk for harm from either low dose chronic or one time high level (bolus dose) exposure to thimerosal is not ‘‘theoretical,’’ but very real and documented in the medical literature. Congress has long been concerned about the human exposure to mercury through medical applications. As a result of these concerns, in 1997, Congress instructed the FDA to evaluate the human exposure to mercury through drugs and foods. Through this Congressionally mandated evaluation, the FDA realized that the amount of ethylmercury infants were exposed to in the first six months of life through their mandatory vaccinations exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) limit for a closely associated compound methylmercury. The FDA and other Federal agencies determined that in the absence of a specific standard for ethylmercury, the limits for ingested methylmercury should be used for injected ethylmercury. The Institute of Medicine, in 2000, evaluated the EPA’s methylmercury standard and determined that based upon scientific data that it, rather than the FDA’s, was the scientifically validated safe exposure standard. Rather than acting aggressively to remove thimerosal from children’s vaccines, the FDA and other agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) adopted an incremental approach that allowed children to continue to be exposed to ethylmercury from vaccines for more than two additional years. In fact, in 2001, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) refused even to express a preference for thimerosal-free vaccines, despite the fact that thimerosal had been removed from almost every childhood vaccine produced for use in the United States. On three occasions in the last 15 years, changes have been made to vaccine policies to reduce the risk of serious adverse effects. First, a transition from oral polio vaccine to injected polio was accomplished in the United States to reduce the transmission of vaccine-induced polio. Second, an acellular pertussis vaccine was developed and a transition from DTP to DTaP was accomplished to reduce the risk of pertussis—induced seizures in children. And third, when the Rotashield vaccine for rotavirus was linked to a serious bowel condition (intersucception), it was removed from the U.S. market. Ethylmercury has been largely removed from every major childhood vaccine manufactured for use in the United States, except the influenza vaccine, which continues to contain trace amounts. This success, however, does not change the fact that millions of American children were exposed to levels of mercury through vaccines that exceeded comparable federal guidelines. Many parents, and a growing number of scientists, believe that this mercury exposure may have contributed to the explosive growth in autism spectrum disorders, and neurological and behavioral disorders that this country has experienced…’From that excerpt from a report to Congress, it is clear that Mercury is dangerous, and the CDC has played around dangerously with children’s lives, and that the mercury/Autism/ASD link is certainly not settled.
You know yourself the majority of ‘Scientific Papers’ are financed in one way or another by Big Pharma, and the bias in them is to be expected (as Ben Goldacre might say).
It happened with cigarettes, lead, mercury, Bisphenol A etc. A number of chemicals banned in Europe are still allowed in the US, thanks to the Corporations lobbyists.
In the case of vaccines, the government is also backing the same horse as Big Pharma, and mostly backed also by the MSM (you explained how there was a time the MSM backed the dissidents).Clark
We are both contributing to the longevity and length of this wild goose chase of a ‘discussion’. I have finally resolved not to contribute any more, even though discussion with you has been interesting and fruitful. But I find that this has been such a huge diversion from what we should be spending our time on. So now we are researching neuroinflammation! Leave that to the specialists and let us concentrate on the governments serious incompetence in everything they are doing.
The answers in any case are summed up from this article from 2010PAUL, YOUR ARGUMENT TECHNIQUE IS AGGRESSIVE AND I OBJECT.
I am merely one person, and I cannot cope with an onslaught that you need only copy and paste from the formidable anti-vax publicity organisation.
—[ Mod: Paul has been advised to desist from submitting further contributions (see the inline moderation notice above). His commenting history is currently under review and issues of concern will be posted in the blog support forum in due course. ]
Node’s going to be livid with me.
Paul, I’m sorry it came to this, and I’m sorry you can’t reply. You wrote:
– “You seem to blow hot and cold…”
If you want to understand where I’m coming from, read your copy of Bad Science until you understand it. Yes, there are important issues of corruption and distortion in medical science, but no, just dismissing counter-arguments with “Big pharma, government buddies, MSM” and then changing the subject yet again does not address it.
After you’ve understood Bad Science you’ll be ready for Bad Pharma to learn how medical corruption is really done, and it’s a fascinating story. This book started a parliamentary review, I think, but there is still much work to be done.
Clark, I agree that the factual arguments should stand on their own without recourse to the motives of the researchers. However, it seems Paul doesn’t quite understand the science, so he’s choosing his side based on motives. He tries to undermine the claims of the medical and scientific professions who are confident that vaccines (with or without the thimerosal/ethylmercury preservative) do not cause autism, by alleging that they’re swayed by financial incentives. Their ethics are being bought off by Big Pharma, according to Paul, and they’re prepared to mislead and endanger the public on that basis. Of course that view implies a wide-ranging conspiracy of fraud, malpractice, silence and cover-up. Well, if that’s the line Paul wishes to pursue, it would be even-handed to examine the motives on the other side of the debate as well.
We’re aware there are a few bad eggs who bend the rules for their own purposes: Andrew Wakefield is perhaps the most prominent example. As it happens, the authors of the paper Paul cited earlier – “Relevance of Neuroinflammation and Encephalitis in Autism” – are equally disreputable. The head of the research team, Dr Mark Geier, was struck off for numerous misdemeanours including professional misconduct, hazardous negligence, incompetence and misrepresenting areas of expertise. That’s not mere subjective opinion: those are words from the actual court rulings.
In the mid-2000s, riding the wave of concerns about thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative, Maryland doctor Mark Geier and his son, David, began to promote a theory that a pathological interaction between mercury and testosterone explained many symptoms of autism. That claim came after the Geiers published a few studies suggesting a link between thimerosal and autism—studies that the Institute of Medicine characterized as having “serious methodological flaws.” Despite that review, the Geiers proceeded with their controversial work. They established an unapproved treatment that involved daily injections of leuprolide (Lupron) , a drug used to treat prostate cancer and to chemically castrate sex offenders. In children, the drug is approved only to treat precocious puberty, a rare condition in which puberty begins before the age of 8 years. Side effects in kids can include bone and heart damage. Leuprolide also carries a risk of exacerbating seizure disorders, a condition commonly associated with autism. The Geiers sometimes paired those injections with chemical chelation, a risky treatment for patients with heavy metal poisoning. To peddle their treatments to parents and insurance companies at a cost upward of $5000 a month, the Geiers improperly diagnosed children with precocious puberty—without performing the necessary diagnostic tests. They also misled parents into believing that the regimen was approved to treat autism, according to a 2011 investigation by the Maryland Board of Physicians. The board revoked Mark Geier’s state medical license, saying his practice “far exceeds his qualifications and expertise,” and other states followed suit. His son, who holds only a Bachelor of Arts degree, was charged with practicing medicine without a license.
The Wikipedia page on Mark Geier doesn’t mince words:
Mark R. Geier (born 1948 in Washington, D.C., U.S.) is an American former physician and controversial sometime professional witness who testified in more than 90 cases regarding allegations of injury or illness caused by vaccines.[2][3] Since 2011, Geier’s medical license has been suspended or revoked in every state in which he was licensed over concerns about his autism treatments and his misrepresentation of his credentials to the Maryland Board of Health, where he falsely claimed to be a board-certified geneticist and epidemiologist.[4]
Mark and his son, David Geier, are frequently cited by proponents of the now-discredited claim that vaccines cause autism. Geier’s credibility as an expert witness has been questioned in 10 court cases.[5] In 2003, a judge ruled that Geier presented himself as an expert witness in “areas for which he has no training, expertise and experience.”[2] In other cases in which Geier has testified, judges have labeled his testimony “intellectually dishonest,” “not reliable” and “wholly unqualified.”[2] Another judge wrote that Geier “may be clever, but he is not credible.”[6]
Geier’s scientific work has also been criticized; when the Institute of Medicine reviewed vaccine safety in 2004, it dismissed Geier’s work as seriously flawed, “uninterpretable”, and marred by incorrect use of scientific terms.[2] In 2003, the American Academy of Pediatrics criticized one of Geier’s studies, which claimed a link between vaccines and autism, as containing “numerous conceptual and scientific flaws, omissions of fact, inaccuracies, and misstatements.”[7] In January 2007, a paper by the Geiers was retracted by the journal Autoimmunity Reviews.[3] New Scientist reported that the supposed institutional review board (IRB) that Geier claimed approved his experiments with autistic children was located at Geier’s business address and included Geier, his son and wife, a business partner of Geier’s, and a plaintiff’s lawyer involved in vaccine litigation,[8] and the Maryland State Board of Physicians referred to it as a “sham IRB” that did not meet the requirements of state or federal law.[4]
There’s more detail about the suspension of his licences in an article entitled “Mark Geier: Not a Leg to Stand On“:
Dr. Geier, through his Institute of Chronic Illness and Genetic Centers of America, misdiagnosed autistic children with precocious puberty so he could claim that he was using Lupron on label, rather than for an unapproved, experimental indication (i.e., autism). This also allowed him to bill insurance companies for the lupron. His actions got him into hot water with various state medical boards, starting with his medical license in Maryland being suspended on April 27, 2011. Since then, one by one, 11 of his 12 medical licenses were suspended, an application for a thirteenth license in Ohio was denied, and some of those suspensions became complete revocations. The last actions I wrote about were the revocation of his license in Missouri and suspension of his Illinois license. At the time, the only state left in which Dr. Geier could practice was Hawaii.
As of April 11, 2013, that is no longer the case.David Geier (his son and co-author), who was also charged over the same affair, was convicted of practising medicine without an appropriate licence (he only had a BA degree in Biology). The co-author Janet Kern is an employee at Geier’s private institute, which operates from a residential suburb between Baltimore and Washington. You can read an investigation into their misdemeanours by Brian Deer – the same journalist who exposed Andrew Wakefield: “What Makes an Expert?” (BMJ, 2007).
Geier’s malpractices managed to extract large medical insurance payouts for the benefit of his own business (and his own bank balance). If anyone has been swayed into manipulating medical research for a profit motive, Paul, it’s the authors of the very paper you rely on. Well done for rooting out another disingenuous quack – to set alongside Andrew Wakefield, Loretta Bolgan and Judy Mikowitz – whose malfeasance was confirmed by judicial rulings. Yet somehow you cast the allegations of corruption at the mainstream industry-wide consensus. It really beggars belief.
It seems to me that you lose the “motives” round with a swift technical K.O. But let’s put that aside and focus on the issues.
Several of Geier’s published articles were retracted due to serious flaws and misrepresentations. The Harpocrates article outlines an underlying confusion between methylmercury (a neurotoxin, commonly found in seafood) and ethylmercury (used in thimerosal, easily flushed out of the body). Moreover, the causal theory implodes with the simple observation that the incidence of autism in the US continued to increase after thimerosal (and thus, ethylmercury) was completely removed from regular vaccines in 2001. I’ll conclude with an up-to-date summary from “Epidemiological controversies in autism”, published in January this year:
Claims that childhood vaccines fuelled an epidemic of autism were widely publicised in the late 1990s. One “theory” incriminated the measles component of the triple measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, the second one implicated thimerosal (ethylmercury) received through other childhood vaccines. However, trends in rates of ASD were shown to be uncorrelated to trends in uptake of MMR or thimerosal-containing vaccines [8]. Controlled observational studies (case-control and cohort studies) equally failed to show increased risk of ASD in individual children exposed to MMR or thimerosal-containing vaccines in various doses [9]. Thimerosal was removed from vaccine production in the early 2000s, with no effect of autism trends. Younger siblings of children with ASD also have no raised risk of ASD after immunisations [10]. Remarkably, no study has ever supported a risk association of autism with vaccines, and as shown in meta-analyses and systematic reviews [9], the convergence of negative findings across investigators, study designs, samples and countries has been impressive. Further claims were made that the risk could be confined to a small, vulnerable, subgroup that epidemiological studies would not be capable to detect. Systematic search for this hypothetical subgroup (defined by regression, onset immediately after MMR shot, co-occurrence of gastrointestinal symptoms and inflammation, and abnormal persistence of measles virus in the gut wall) failed to validate its existence [11–13].
There is a wealth of scientific literature on this topic (although I note you have already discounted it with an allegation that it’s all funded by Big Pharma).
Paul, debating with you is like fighting the Black Knight from Monty Python’s Holy Grail: he loses a limb with every strike but battles on regardless.
“You’ve no arms left”
– “It’s only a flesh wound. Have at you!”
“What are you going to do, bleed on me?”
– “I’ll bite your legs off! I’m invincible!”
“You’re a loony!”.Like Mark Geier, you have no legs left to stand on, Paul.
