It is as I had feared. I must do one more post on a story that I’ve been blogging about for one solid week now. Hopefully after this, I will be able to move on to other topics last week, but after spending this whole week writing just about this, I figured, “What the heck? It’s Friday. Might as well make it a solid week and move on next week. I hope.” What am I referring to? Those familiar with the story, as in past installments, can skip the recap (but shouldn’t). I feel obligated to include one because of all the new readers who have appeared for these peerless bits of, in this case, not-so-Respectful Insolence.
This whole story about a “CDC whistleblower,” who, or so the rabid antivaccine contingent hoped, would “blow the lid” off of a massive CDC conspiracy to hide The Truth and bring their conspiracy theory to the mainstream press, is still limping along, even in light of the rather mealy-mouthed and disingenuous statement by the CDC whistleblower himself. This Revelation of The Truth would then build in the mainstream press to the point of leading to investigations of the CDC and the discovery of what they’ve hoped for passionately ever since they became antivaccinationists: Actual scientific evidence that vaccines, or the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal that used to be in most childhood vaccines, cause autism and all sorts of health problems. In this case, they thought that they had found slam-dunk evidence that the CDC had manipulated data to hide an “association” between the MMR vaccine and autism in African American males. At first, in a video by antivaccine hero Andrew Wakefield featuring the antivaccine biochemical engineer turned epidemiologist wannabe, this “whistleblower” was not identified, but then, a week ago, a new video identified him as William W. Thompson, PhD, a psychologist and senior scientist at the CDC, who, apparently, over a ten month period, helped Hooker produce his utterly incompetent “reanalysis” of a ten year old CDC study that had failed to find a difference in age of first MMR vaccination in children with autism compared with neurotypical controls. So incompetent was the analysis that I couldn’t resist titling my post a week ago about it, Brian Hooker proves Andrew Wakefield wrong about vaccines and autism, because that’s basically what he did.
When the expected media storm did not materialize, antivaccine activists lost their collective minds, ineffectively trying the “drip, drip, drip” revelation technique. Even now they are still relentlessly Tweeting the same discredited talking points over and over and over again under the hashtag #CDCwhistleblower, although the Twitter storm appears to be abating as I write this. Unfortunately, in light of Dr. Thompson’s two-edged statement, in which he insinuated that his co-authors on the Destefano et al paper (the ten year old study) had committed scientific misconduct, or, at the very least, very sloppy, ideologically motivated science, while at the same time attacking Brian Hooker for recording his conversations without his permission, which, if true, makes Hooker an utter slimeball in my book, and Andrew Wakefield for revealing his identity without his permission.
It’s all a convoluted mess that basically blew up in Hooker’s face. Hooker played Thompson, gaining his confidence and recording him in the process, while bragging to the faithful that he had an “inside man” who would blow the lid off the CDC. Wakefield played Hooker. We have no way of knowing how Wakefield found out about Hooker and Thompson, but, given Wakefield’s previous behavior, it’s not too far beyond the pale to speculate that Wakefield applied pressure to Hooker to do that video. Then Wakefield betrayed Hooker. Because Wakefield’s reputation is so toxic, he basically destroyed any chance of mainstream media attention to the story, relegating it to the fevered conspiracy swamp of “media” like NaturalNews.com, the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, and a variety of lesser, but no less loony, outfits.
All of this brings us to the question: What now? The story has blown up in Hooker and Wakefield’s faces. It very much reminds me of this:
In this case, I think it’s helpful to go back to the past and then back to the future, so to speak. There have been a couple of odds and ends that I’ve wanted to incorporate into previous posts, but somehow didn’t, and now seems as good a time as any to address them. From the past, let’s look first at Brian Hooker being interviewed at this year’s AutismOne quackfest in May:
For people not long familiar with Hooker and his activities, this is an excellent introduction to the origins of this manufactroversy from the antivaccine point of view. Hooker explains how he used Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to get the CDC dataset. Now here’s where it’s interesting. He says that he used the CDC’s own methods and confirmed its results. Then he claims he realized that the CDC used “very devious, duplicitous statistical methods,” which made me chuckle out loud, given that Hooker used very incompetent statistical methods in his reanalysis. Hilariously, he claims that he analyzed the data correctly, which is utter tripe. As I described, he analyzed data set up to be analyzed as case-control as a cohort study and, as many of you pointed out, used inappropriate statistical tests, all to torture the data until they confessed a relationship between MMR vaccine and autism. However he could only find such a relationship in African American males. As I also described, this relationship was based on very tiny numbers and almost certainly spurious. Basically, Hooker tells the same lies about the study that have been debunked. I wish I had seen this before I saw Hooker’s paper last week.
Hilariously, Hooker laments that most journals don’t want to touch this stuff because it’s so controversial. In retrospect, we know that it’s more likely that the reason journals don’t want to touch papers such as those by Hooker is because, scientifically, they are utter and complete crap. At least he admits that there is such a thing as autism in the unvaccinated. There’s also the usual hodge-podge of “environmental causation” discussed, such as heavy metals, and, of course, GMOs. We do learn, however, that Hooker doesn’t trust the NIH to do a good vaccinated/unvaccinated study, even though one is going on. Of course, what he doesn’t like is that, from every indication we get from other studies, such a study would likely be negative; so instead he weaves conspiracy theories about how the NIH “suppresses” results that support his views and trumpets how he’s going to do a vaccinated/unvaccinated study using a Florida Medicaid database. Of course, given his utter statistical and epidemiological incompetence, there’s no way he could ever properly control for all the potential confounders in such data; so it’s virtually a given that he will be producing another “positive” study. Maybe he’ll get Jake Crosby to do the statistics. I am, however, touched at how much faith Hooker places in “large numbers” as arbiters of the truth in epidemiology. Apparently, he doesn’t realize that analyzing large numbers incorrectly will produce results just as wrong as analyzing smaller datasets.
Next up, hot off the YouTube presses, so to speak, the crank NextNewsNetwork has featured Andrew Wakefield:
I nearly spewed my coffee all over my laptop when the “reporter” described Andrew Wakefield an “international leader” on vaccinations. It’s one of the rare times when words fail me. My dear readers, the things I do for you. Watching the unctuous, arrogant, and smarmy Wakefield for 13 solid minutes induces in me the overwhelming desire to retch and vomit, but I did it anyway, all for you. Notice that, even in light of Dr. Thompson’s statement, the antivaccine talking point remains unchanged: That Dr. Thompson, as the CDC whistleblower, has admitted that the CDC intentionally removed data from Destefano et al in order to hide a relationship between MMR vaccination and autism in African American males. This is not what Dr. Thompson said in his statement. Rather, he insinuated less than scientifically rigorous decision-making at best and scientific misconduct at worst, all trying to temper the insinuation by couching it as “reasonable scientists” disagreeing about interpretation of data. In other words, his statement is far less inflammatory than it is being portrayed. Even Wakefield, cherry picking statements from Hooker’s recordings of Thompson, couldn’t make a case that Thompson had said this.
There’s more race-baiting, in which Wakefield claims that these African American boys were “neglected.” He also claims that this is vindication for him, but, of course, it is not. Notice how he completely neglects to mention that in every other subgroup, even Hooker couldn’t torture the data to make it confess a relationship between age at MMR vaccination and autism in any other population other than a very small population in the study: African-American males. Whenever that happens as you slice epidemiological data finer and finer, you should be alert for the very distinct possibility that what you’re really looking at is a spurious correlation. As I pointed out before, Hooker in reality merely confirmed that Wakefield was wrong about everyone except African-American males, and, given how small this subgroup was in the study, almost certainly didn’t find any evidence supporting Wakefield’s hypothesis (such as it is) for even African-American boys. Yet, Wakefield, as deluded as he is, spins it as “vindication.” He even thanks Hooker for getting a “senior scientist at the CDC” to come forward and “confirm” that some of those “ideas we put forward” are true. Holy hell! Even if you spin Thompson’s statements in the most unflattering manner possible towards the CDC and his co-investigators, Thompson said nothing of the sort!
Hilariously, the interviewer actually asks one pretty good question: Whether Wakefield had ever observed a greater effect of MMR causing autism in black male babies. Naturally, he took the opportunity to spin these results as an excuse to mention his dubious statements about Somali immigrants in Minnesota. Then, while implicitly acknowledging that Hooker’s reanalysis didn’t confirm his belief for white children (I refuse to call it a hypothesis any more) that MMR causes autism, proposes a much larger study to determine if MMR causes autism in non-African American children. No matter what the data show, to Wakefield MMR causes autism. Particularly despicable, however, is Wakefield’s repeated assertion that, because of the CDC “fraud,” for 13 years children have gone “untreated and uncared for.” Translation: Mainstream medicine haven’t embraced my biomedical quackery to treat autism as “vaccine injury” because it doesn’t accept that vaccines cause autism.
In any case, the rest of the interview is the same talking points we’ve heard ad nauseam from Wakefield. He does, however, get one more good question. Near the end of the interview, the interviewer makes the observation that one of the arguments against vaccines causing autism is that correlation does not equal causation and then asks him if there’s been a correlation between low vaccine uptake and spikes in vaccine-preventable diseases in unvaccinated children. (I know! Shocking! Actually another pretty good question that I bet Wakefield didn’t see coming! The answer is yes, by the way.) Wakefield completely ignores that part of the question and tries to convince the interviewer that correlation of autism diagnoses with vaccination is “not a coincidence,” something he repeats multiple times. He doesn’t answer at all about spikes in infectious disease in unvaccinated children, but rather finishes with a flourish of “too many too soon” and the “toxins gambit,” while calling for prosecution of CDC officials.
So at the end of all this, I’m still left wondering: WTF happened with Dr. Thompson? I’m beginning to wonder more and more if he has started down that slippery slope to becoming antivaccine. His public statement makes me wonder, and so does this snippet of conversation surreptitiously recorded by Brian Hooker, in which he states unequivocally that he thinks that thimerosal-containing vaccines given to pregnant women will result in tics in the infant and that there is “biological plausibility” that thimerosal causes “autism-like” features. Of course, his very own study, published in the NEJM in 2007, does not show that, nor do any other reputable studies. True, his followup paper found what was described as a “small, but statistically significant association between early thimerosal exposure and the presence of tics in boys,” but also cautioned that this “finding should be interpreted with caution due to limitations in the measurement of tics and the limited biological plausibility regarding a causal relationship.” There were also significant limitations in the study, for instance:
This study was also limited by the relatively crude measurement of tics. All the other outcome measures assessed in this study used reliable and valid measures that have published manuals, which allowed the researchers to provide feedback to parents of the child. Furthermore, all testers underwent a 2-day training session and required them to reach a specific level of reliability in terms of administering the tests appropriately as documented in the published assessment manuals. The tics assessments, however, carried out by the testers did not require them to meet any reliability criteria and the testers had no prior training in neurology or tic assessments. The only training the testers received for tic assessments was based on viewing a 30-min training video (“Tourette Syndrome: A Guide to Diagnosis of TS,” 1989).
Now, two years later, Thompson has gone from a tentative finding of a slight increase in tics in boys to saying that because tics are more common in autistic children, that there’s biological plausibility to the hypothesis that thimerosal causes “autism-like” features in children when given in vaccines to their mothers during pregnancy? WTF? It’s really hard not to conclude from his statements regarding tics and thimerosal that Dr. Thompson has not gone at least partially antivaccine, which, if true, may explain much.
I conclude as I began, by asking “What now?” It’s obvious that the antivaccine contingent will flog this story for all it’s worth as long as they can, but fortunately the mainstream press doesn’t appear to be getting the message. It’s also clear that Hooker will continue to crank out incompetently performed epidemiological papers that torture the data until they confess a relationship between vaccines and autism. After this kerfuffle, however, he will be even more unlikely to find an epidemiologist or statistician to team up with him, other than perhaps Jake Crosby, who still hasn’t finished school yet. I only wonder whether Thompson will go full antivax now that he’s been outed, perhaps further assisting incorrectly identified “unbiased scientists” like Hooker, or whether he’ll just put his head down and try to ride the storm out, hopefully perhaps to do good work again someday. I don’t know. I do know that Thompson has done horrific harm, but, thankfully, because of Wakefield, that harm is much less than it would have been if Thompson’s allegations had reached the mainstream media untainted by association with Wakefield.
Now can I please write about something else next week?
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^ The "[sic]" was not because of the spelling, but because of the circular application of the "there is no biomarker" routine.
@Narad, I agree that sudden onset of regressive autism is most likely rare at age 3 or older as your link concludes. I have also seen some of the studies that suggest there may have been always a gradual onset. I also agree that some children most likely had gradually begun showing atypical development before they suddenly lost skills. I guess that is why I look at the possible GSH issues. The gradual build up of malnutrition, poor absorption of nutrients due to GI issues http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100502080234.htm gets to a tipping point and suddenly the child loses all skills in a very dramatic way. So many cannot process cow's milk (something many parents switch to at 12 mths) along with inability to digest solid foods properly...also 12 - 24 mths when this type of diet is fully instituted. As most of the very obvious *regressive* autism seems to take place between 12 and 24 mths, I honestly believe that low GSH brought on by a babies poor ability to absorb nutrients possibly b/c of genetic mutations that occurred while they are a fetus (maybe even more fully as a newborn as well). I am not suggesting that it was not gradually occurring before that point.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18956241
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16119475
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22855372
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15362172
So, I wonder, if I am way off on this mindset. And wishing the research would look more into this area. B/c if parents could supplement safely with NAC - as Krebiozen suggests (for those at risk, those babies already showing a tendency towards colic and GI issues and reflux), could it help?
Dear Krebiozen,
From http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15691220
Thiomersal in Vaccines
Balancing the Risk of Adverse Effects with the Risk of
Vaccine-Preventable Disease
Mark Bigham and Ray Copes
So eliminating thiomersal in vaccines would remove around 50% of average infant’s mercury exposure in the US, not some negligible fraction of infant mercury exposure. Of course, since third-world countries have thiomersal in many more vaccines than the US does, arguably eliminating thiomersal in third-world vaccines would produce much more than a 50% reduction in their infant’s mercury exposure.
Also - eliminating thiomersal in vaccines would eliminate short-term, peak levels of mercury after vaccination which are significantly higher than from ingesting breast milk in the US, and much higher than that in third-world countries.
I can't help but wonder if antivaccination persons would be provaccination if, instead of autism, they or their children had a primary immune deficiency syndrome.
I have a primary immune deficiency syndrome and my life truly depends on protection from herd immunity via vaccinations and donated plasma (from those who have vaccinated or endured a virus) so that I can self-infuse immunoglobulins once a week.
Prior to my IgG replacement therapy, A cold with bronchitis landed me in a hospital for ten days in respiratory failure. I don't like to think about what might happen if I were to catch influenza from someone.
Testing to assess my immune system revealed that I failed the pneumovax challenge, so my immune system didn't respond to the pneumonia vaccine and probably doesn't respond to influenza vaccines either. Also, it is my understanding the immunoglobulins I infuse every week probably includes antibodies to influenza but they are previous years strains, so I'm still vulnerable to catching influenza.
I am so grateful to those who manufacture IgGs, and to those who vaccinate and donate plasma so I can live somewhat of a normal life.
YD,
So US infants get a minuscule amount of mercury from both breast milk and vaccines. In the absence of any evidence that US infants suffer any adverse effects from mercury, so what? I remind you that people in Greenland consume vastly more methylmercury, with pregnant women consuming an average of "42 micrograms per day in the fall and 66 micrograms per day in the summer, mostly methylmercury, making their yearly intake around 20,000 micrograms" (source above, somewhere). We see no adverse effects on neurodevelopment in the infants of women who consume this amount of methylmercury, though we do see possible effects at higher levels. Since the fetus is far more vulnerable to mercury poisoning than an infant, it seems very unlikely to me that an infant consuming 328 mcg/year ethymercury will suffer adverse effects when the infant of a pregnant woman consuming 20,000 mcg/year methylmercury does not.
In the absence of any evidence that this is harming them, spending money on producing mercury-free vaccines when children are dying for want of clean water, food and basic medical care seems more than a little perverse to me.
What is the problem with these transient peak levels of mercury exactly? They aren't high enough to be of concern even if they were persistent. The highest post-vaccination level I have seen in the literature is 5.7 mcg/L, with most infants having much lower peak levels. If we look at Greenland again we see persistent blood levels of 20.5 mcg/L among men and 14.7 mcg/L among women. I don't see the problem.
eliminating thiomersal in vaccines would eliminate short-term, peak levels of mercury after vaccination which are significantly higher than from ingesting breast milk in the US
YoDaddy is stating this as a fact, rather than his own supposition, only obtained by once again forgetting the different dynamics of methyl- and ethyl-mercury.
and much higher than that in third-world countries.
YD has so far been informed at least four times in this thread that mercury levels in third-world countries such as Greenland and the Seychelles far exceeds that in the US, but continues to maintain the opposite. I begin to wonder whether YD cares much about facts.
I have seen pictures (in NatGeo or some other periodic) of people in Africa near their water well, if we can call a hole in the ground a well, their hands burnt by the high concentration of arsenic and other nasty minerals in their water.
(a lot of people on the planet don't have the privilege to have access to clean water)
I have seen pictures of deformed children next to a dilapidated oil processing plant in south USSR (and BTW, that was mercury poisoning, the real stuff - and autism was not mentioned).
In either case, I very much doubt that removing mercury from vaccines will drop their heavy metal exposure by half. They will be lucky if it removes as much as 1 per thousand.
It seems that the absorption of various amounts of mercury and aluminium into the body differs depending on the way it is taken in and in what form. The injection of a vaccine, bypassing the normal excretory routes of the digestive system makes its way straight to the immune system before going to the blood for excretion.
I think that this needs to be addressed in your deliberations as well as the synergistic effects that many toxins have entering the body at the same time. See quicksilverscientific.com for an introduction to the various complexities in this issue.
There's something you don't hear every day. Speaking of "excretory routes," have you ever wondered what happens to spent RBCs?
Yes, you've pimped them before. There's no there there.
ParadigmShift:
Even if we accept your premise, there is so little thimerosal in a vaccine that I can't see the relevance of your comment.
paradigmshift:
Out of curiosity, if the injected stuff goes to the immune system before hitting the blood and this is some sort of a problem, why would it be better to be exposed to mercury orally? After all, in the gut, substances meet the immune system right away, before they get absorbed. In fact, the gut has the most potent immune system of the whole body, undoubtedly because it's the body's number one clearinghouse for handling foreign material and thus the most likely place to actually meet a pathogen.
paradigmshift,
It has been addressed; I have referred to blood mercury levels and the amount of mercury absorbed in my comments. How do you think a vaccine goes, "straight to the immune system before going to the blood"? The immune system is largely within the blood, in the form of antibodies and white blood cells.
I would love to see evidence of synergistic effects of 25 micrograms of ethylmercury with any other toxins that would make it toxic to even a premature newborn.
The company website you linked to only seems to offer analysis of blood, urine and hair for inorganic and methylmercury, but not ethylmercury, which is what thimerosal breaks down into. There is no mention of synergistic interaction between mercury and anything else.
@Dawn #'s 500, 501, 505
@Krebiozen #499
Low selenium?? Low Selenium/High iodine --> low glutathione???
High copper?? Low zinc --> high copper --> low glutathione????
So, pretty much everything in a 'vaccine'?
http://tacanow.org/family-resources/detoxification-glutathione-autism/
http://doctordoni.com/2014/04/folic-acid-and-mthfr-could-you-have-a-gen…
So, Try no *folic acid* and go for real *folate* as well as some l- selenomethionine?
Tim, it is clear that you don't understand chemistry. This is causing you to make all sorts of mistakes.
I will start with folic acid. Folic acid and folate are essentially the same thing. The chemical difference between the two is that folic acid has a protonated carboxylic acid group, whereas folate has lost this proton. However, the two are in equilibrium and the proportion present as folate or folic acid is dependent only on the pH of the solution they are in. Folate will have another counter ion because it is negatively charged, being present as a salt. Consuming folate (the salt version) compared with folic acid, will make next to no difference.
Humans have large amounts of glutathione. We have to as we are exposed to active oxygen compounds (ROS) all the time. In fact our bodies deliberately make ROS, we need a system to remove them, because they are dangerous and we don't want the effects to last forever. There is insufficient of anything in a vaccine, or even 10 vaccines to significantly deplete glutathione in a human.
Except for folic acid's being more bioavailable.
^ That should have been two different links. The more recent one is here.
@ Tim
I would be surprised if lack of selenium is widespread in the human population. It's a micronutrient (we don't need much compared to, say, iron or calcium) and our bodies are quite thorough at squeezing it out of the environment or recycling it (on par with iodine, if not better).
You need to keep feeding a selenium-lacking diet to mice for three generations before you start seeing effects of selenium deficiency.
According to the Wikipedia article on selenium, if you are a ruminant in North America , you are at risk of selenium deficiency. In New Zealand, despite low amounts of selenium in the soil, humans aren't at risk. So I guess this amount to, "don't be a sheeple".
As a sidenote, while selenium supplementation will correct a selenium deficiency, high doses of selenium may disrupt assimilation of zinc and/or copper.
Nothing is simple in biology.
I would also point out that, if you have selenium deficiency, you will have a lot more issues than a tendency to get side effects from vaccines. There is more to selenium and glutathione than just "detoxifying" one mL of vaccine.
@Narad,
It is precisely this higher absorbability which concerns me. And what of some 'downregulation' if *folic acid*, with some part of it unconverted, is accepted as *folate*? -- I know that, in my youth, I preferentially absorbed Cheetos over seaweed and turnip greens and wasn't hungry anymore come dinnertime; Just like mom told me would happen, dammit!
-------
I'm now adopting the view that the food supply fortification with various UPC things is like unto Kurt Vonneguts' Harrison Bergeron. Though instead of *Handicapper General* we have *Lifespan-and-Quality-Capper General*.
That is to say that, indeed, these additions improve life for those with poor diets; Sometimes, drastically. However, they're detrimental, sometimes even toxic, to those with good nutrition otherwise.
============================
@Helianthus,
I've this friend, let us call him SWIM, who'd always been kind of *up tight/ wound up /anxious* all the time. So when Fukushima shot its' wad to the four winds, SWIM flew into a panic being denied KI at the local pharmacy {he sees conspiracies just about everywhere}. SWIM did obtain a little brown vial of KI via the internet and stumbled into iodine related issues (cleaning out bromide, floride, breast and prostate cancers, the promise of youthful 'morning wood' that can drive nails... all the usual quackery).
So, for a dietary supplement, SWIM grew very frustrated at how to divide up the little vial for daily use -- he'd always been afraid of too much iodine before -- and resorted to taking just a few grains of the stuff depending on their size and taking it *just whenever*.
But along came the DEA to put his cure-all on a list of no-no chemicals to where a great big bottle of povidone iodine that was $4 is now unavailable; All that's left is tiny $10 bottles. Now SWIM, seeing conspiracy everywhere, decided to start taking his KI daily at the ~13 mg rate commonly found in the Japanese diet as well as what the common folk there got from what they ate. He'd been doing this for ~ two years.
Something came up in SWIM's life that made him take a close, hard look at what he put into his body (which mostly consisted of EToH and culminated with basically a $2000 anxiety attack he can't afford) so that he was delighted when his $20 AWS GEMINI 20 portable milligram scales arrived. He dropped his estimated dose on the scales and BINGO! 12mg. He tried another sampling of grains, his 'little pinch', and BINGO! 15 mg. SWIM was happy. Sort of. What was he always babbling about?? Oh yea -- "If you don't know the where, what and why, then prescribe ye the K and the I). But Something was still very wrong (besides draconian prohibition of God's green plants).
When he went back to revisit the iodine issue, he came across something very important -- The Japanese also obtain a correspondingly high level of Selenium from the same sources (fish/seaweed).
SWIM inadvertantly fired his doctor and he knows he's swimming in unfamiliar 'dark water'. he tries not to "follow the lights". At least, he's been doing great these past few days. Though, he still hasn't shut up about eyeballs on dollar bills or some such.
FTFY, tim. Remember: it's the dose that makes the poison.
Why? What evidence suggests the greater bioavailability of folic acid as compared to folate engenders risk?
Tim: First of all, why not come out and say 'this is me' rather than inventing a 'friend' with a terribly transparent pseudonym? Secondly, potassium and iodine are pretty easy to find, and no, neither are prohibited. Finally, how the heck do you 'inadvertently' fire a doctor? Did you just stop going or what?
Tim -- think of it this way. You wouldn't offer your family bleach to drink. But if you live in hurricane country and keep a bottle of bleach on hand, you know that by reading the instructions on the bottle and putting the correct (minute) amount of bleach in a gallon of water, it will make it safe for them to drink after a storm knocks out the local water treatment plant.
It won't taste very good, but it will be safe to drink.
Well; Yes, Shay. That is what I'm saying. Personally, I'd still preferre the pure and natural spring water without stuff added to it to 'protect' me from something that usually isn't there. Also, some people drink more water than others -- standard dosing ( something I oppose; Universal X -- Fits everything but your car) of 'medicine' kinda goes out the window with those kinds of policies (think: flouride), does it not??
@Tim,
Personally, I'd like to make sure my drinking water doesn't have germs that will make me sick any time, even if they are "usually" not there.
As for fluoridation, here in the west most ground water contains it naturally because it leaches in from minerals. In many places, it has to be removed to get it below the 1.5 mg/L level needed to avoid fluorosis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation
And, bottled water doesn't have to disclose the amount of fluoride it contains, so if you really want to avoid the fluoride and increase your risk of tooth decay, you should buy bottles of distilled water and avoid all the minerals in that spring water. Besides, it's probably cheaper.
Tim: do you actually know what's in water? Fish crap, bacteria, occasionally amoebas and other organisms...and that stuff is in there ALL the time, 24/7. You know what people drank back before industrialization? Not a lot of 'pure water.' If you want to drink unpurified water after a hurricane that's fine. Enjoy the dysentery. (And if you're buying bottled water- well, a lot of it is actually tap water in fancy packaging.)
As for your personal bogeyman, even if you drank eight glasses (or more) in most regions, you're not going to get anywhere near a *gram* of flouride. And I believe the lethal dose is a lot higher then any amount of water that's normally ingested. Not to mention that water in the human body is pretty self-regulating.
Ohh, SQL. I think not! I'd learned early on the constipating effect (goat-knots my grams would call it) when just drinking too much springwater initially after being used to the city stuff. -- Many of those minerals are trace elements not yet poisoning the food/water supply as a UPC.
Also, I *think* there is a huge difference between the natural bound calcium flouride {my ancestors were feldspar miners as well as pernicious anemics} and the industrial waste, hydrofluorosilicic acid, we're inundated with.
Because fluoride
http://youtube.com/watch?v=rPGZHQHsjD0
"I’ve this friend, let us call him SWIM, who’d always been kind of *up tight/ wound up /anxious* all the time. So when Fukushima shot its’ wad to the four winds, SWIM flew into a panic being denied KI at the local pharmacy {he sees conspiracies just about everywhere}."
You're buddies with Mike Adams? Does he ever pick up a check?
"I *think* there is a huge difference between the natural bound calcium flouride {my ancestors were feldspar miners as well as pernicious anemics} and the industrial waste, hydrofluorosilicic acid, we’re inundated with."
Yep, there's a vast difference between fluoride ions depending on what compound they come from, as my old chemistry professor used to say (before they took him away).
And didja know that chemotherapy came from mustard gas, same as they used in the WWI trenches?!?!?
And did you know, Dangerous Bacon, that nitric turns your skin yellow kinda like hydroflouric turns it loose?? -- I didn't; Not knowing any chemistry, or anything.
Personally, Dangerous Bacon -- nitrosamine whore, I'd rather be momentarily sheltering in place with an open 1-lb can of plutonium than a trench full of mustard gas any day...
""they're coming to take me away... to the funny-farm where life is beautiful all the time, with birds, and bees, and flowers, and trees, and basket-weavers that sit on the walls and smile.. hehe, haha...
Dr. Demento, Funny Farm
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZIUZbA1bxnE
Tim@529:
Well, that was in English, and was even spelled and punctuated correctly. Didn't make a damned bit of sense, though.
Shay: At least Tim gets points for being consistently incoherent.
Oh look - Tim spells it "flouride". That, as we all know, is a massive pointer to green ink tendencies and colossal wintgnuttery.
And I ought to point out that the song he's thinking of is called "They're coming to take me away, ha-haa!" and is by Napoleon XIV.
Grr.
"wingnuttery".
Curiosity aroused, I turned off the killfile script. I read, I shrugged, shaking my head sadly, and reengaged the killfile. It's more interesting guessing what Tim wrote from the responses than it is actually reading what Tim wrote.
Ohh, bother. Rebecca Fisher, I often do spell that one wrong but left it these times in the spirit of my previous posts of mass poisoning of people through folic acid supplementation of flour.
I didn't tell you to "stop playing with your food," now did I?
Stop playing with your food, Rebecca.
"fortification"
Grr.
Tim: Learn some math and chemistry before spouting off about 'poisons', 'kay?
PgP,
Math is hard. But, I found a video that makes me want to learn some...
Nature by Numbers:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=kkGeOWYOFoA
Tim: Percentages are *not* that hard. If stuff is measured in milligrams or micrograms, chances are any effect it's going to have on a working human digestive system are negligible. Heck, ingesting an apple seed's worth of cyanide isn't going to kill *anyone* and cyanide's an actual poison.
Tim is mainly about spouting off weird ideas from the top of his head. Logic has very little to do with it, but the power of suggestion is strong.
Since he completely missed my point about fluoride being naturally in ground water and chose to focus on a by-product of the production of phosphate fertilizer that has uses in tanning leather, setting dyes as well as being convenient for increasing the fluoride content of water to the desired, low level; discussing science with him is unlikely to be productive.
As for plutonium, I note from the EPA
So, as long as it's purified and solid, I'd be much happier next to a one pound can of plutonium.
It's the nasty gamma-emitting decay products I worry about.
And, my one tiny bit of scientific research actually involved measuring the alpha spectrum from a (small admittedly) sample of plutonium.
I’d be much happier next to a one pound can of plutonium.
Ah, but Tim specified an open tin of plutonium, and there is the whole "self-spalling" and "spontaneously igniting" concern. Solid plutonium doesn't stay solid.
Good point, herr doktor!
I guess I'd prefer it as a solid chunk with the surface oxidized for chemical sealing and try to get it into a dry inert atmosphere and a sealed container ASAP, but I'd still prefer it to breathing mustard gas.
Tim:
"They're Coming To Take Me Away" by Napolean XIV, was a top 40 chart hit in 1966. Dr. Demento played the record regularly on his radio show, and it was probably re-released on a compilation of old novelty songs 'as featured on Dr. Demento.' I think I had the 45 when I was a kid. Great song.
..............
Having no background in medical science, I can't speak to its specific applicability here, but it strikes me that Tim's J.C. Whitney Theory of Imprecise Universality is keenly observed general principle of existence. It's not that 'X' is entirely useless, but that 'some drilling may be required' is an understatement, and after you've sustained multiple minor hand injuries forcing 'X' into place - kind of - it still leaks a little and bangs your chassis when you over a bump.
............
I have been informed by unreliable sources that these YouTube clips contain inaudible digital homeopathic energy beacons that can break down the fish-crap in your body water transforming it into 'micro-carp' that cobble-up the bad bacteria and amoebae and exit via the colon once satiated. All without chemicals or excessive microwave radiation!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tBaMlAUj08
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjeL2YOItU
My informants have also claimed that the inaudible energy beacons in the next two cuts constitute the digital homeopathic version of righteous reefer, though repeated playback may be required and the psychoactive effect is dependent on the presence of a certain baseline amount of fluoride in the listener's system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6efBdH3aDY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIUxX82xlX8
............
"Tim, it is clear that you don’t understand chemistry."
Well, chemistry doesn't understand Tim, so even-steven.
Bonus points for using "clear" and "Tim" in the same sentence, though.
"why not come out and say ‘this is me’ rather than inventing a ‘friend’ with a terribly transparent pseudonym?"
What fun would that be?
"nitrosamine whore"
Mustard maintenance may manifest metaphor mutation. I don't think Tim really meant to call DB a whore. I think the thought Tim was actually reaching for was 'nitrosamine pimp.'
.............
"that was even spelled and punctuated correctly"
"Tim gets points for being consistently incoherent."
PGP: I think you underestimate Tim. I think he's inconsistently incoherent, and I suspect there's method in it: something along the lines of Skinnerian operant conditioning...
..............
"He’s been doing great these past few days. Though, he still hasn’t shut up about eyeballs on dollar bills or some such."
Glad to hear SWIM's feeling better, and also that the Selenium or whatever hasn't made him 'normal.' Of course, the conspiracy theory about the Eyeball being a symbol of the Satanist Freemason Illuminati is nonsense, but that doesn't make it any less disturbing. My guess is that Roosevelt had been reading Jeremy Bentham, and had the eye put on the money for the disciplinary effect of the resulting panoptic presence in order to discourage revolutionary impulses resulting from the Great Depression. Our thrifty ancestors watched their money. Now our money watches us...
STOP LOOKING AT ME!!
..................
Which actually brings me back to the neighborhood of William S. Thompson, by which I mean not Atlanta but Conspiracy Theories. The anti-immunos posit a conspiracy to suppress the bleats of Thompson's whistle at the CDC's conspiracy to suppress data exposing the Big Pharma Shill conspiracy to discredit Andrew Wakefield revelations about the Big Pharma conspiracy to spread ASD for profit. The conspiracies run four levels deep. I say, let's go for five. Why not put the whole mess under the Conspiracy Theory conspiracy theory? This would posit that powerful social actors encourage the spread of conspiratorial fantasies to provide harmless low-resistance paths to drain off the public's well-founded fears of abuse-of-power, and deflect attention from the ACTUAL conspiracies that are messing us up, but are too reified to imagine challenging.
I'm just having fun presenting this as 'a conspiracy theory,' warping a real not-conspiracy theory that warns about this effect bu doesn't allege any of this is intentional, much less an agreed-upon plan of some cabal.) As s.g. collins put it in his dissection of moon-landing hoaxers:
Meh.
Ah, Sadmar. Yes? Hard to exist in a vacuum of information and not be so. The crust of *controlled opposition* and deflection -- Inhomogenious vaccum deposition into a most (what's probably most accurately described as some kind of porphyritic dike) irreproducible amalgam of atypical cleave and part. It's probably a good superconductor, or something. I'm pretty sure it causes cancer.
Maybe it takes a commune...
Supplemental:
Alternative 3:
http://youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=2y_0MFowGaA#t=2819
~47:00 min in
OT, but at least comprehensible: Does anyone have a good refutation for the claims here: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10152434341017989&id=287991… ?
The locus for the image seems to be D'Ohlmsted. "Lot A" is discussed here.
^ Aka "lot 64201," it appears.
@Antaeus,
This gripe seems popular on the antivax sites, including vaccineriskawareness.com and vaclib.org. I also got a couple hits on whale.to.
Here's one paper which analyzed the connection.
http://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC1779219&blobtype…
It was hard to read that old typing from the photo, but here's my transcription.
It appears to me that Bernstein and his colleagues were concerned about the problem of having one location getting caught with most of their inventory from the same lot # if that lot # were subject to a recall in the future. This might lead to a shortage and leave them unable to provide vaccines for a short period.
Since all vaccinations are recorded by lot # anyway (at least I think so), multiple adverse events connected to the same lot would still be picked up by the system and lead to an investigation. So, complaint about hiding problems by dispersing them around is just hand waving.
Also, this case was pre-NVICP and VAERS.
I'm inclined to guess that if one wants to untangle confounders, dispersing lots makes sense; one can still correlate reactions with the lot itself, but I'm still looking at whether there was an actual signal to start with.
@Narad,
I see the Roberts paper I linked to is one of the references for your link.
Some of the phrasing even sounded a bit familiar, but that may just be the limits of medical technical writing.
Also, Narad, pg 757 of the Roberts paper reads:
That makes sense. Of course, some context would help: I doubt this memo exists in some sort of vacuum. The exact reason for its floating around in isolation in the first place is also thoroughly opaque; I started browsing lawsuits, but I don't really have the energy.
FTFY. "Finished Stock Requirements Division."
Antaeus:
I have a few apologies for you and further stuff, which I need to compose and will be too long to post here...
However, I shall begin by apologizing for misreading your name, and thus mis-spelling it repeatedly. My eyes are not-so-good, and the text on my laptop is rather small, so I rely on context and easily mistake one name for another if graphically similar. Regardless, it was careless and I am sorry.
Moral to me: read carefully and do your research.
Vaccine Hot lots?
That's a favorite among the anti-vaxxers, who advise parents to get the lot number off the vaccine vial...the theory being that the CDC directs vaccine manufacturers to split up those "hot lots" among multiple States, so that the resulting severe adverse reactions (including SIDS), are distributed among the 50 States:
http://sfsbm.org/wiki2/index.php?title=Vaccine_Misconception_3
The child's Vaccine Administration Record is found in the front of the child's chart and the lot number/vaccine manufacturer is listed for every vaccine the child receives:
http://www.immunize.org/catg.d/p2022.pdf
Looking back at my yellow book from the mid to late 1970s, I see that smallpox and yellow fever were the only ones that were tracked by lot number (for example, I had yellow fever from NDC lot 1763GD in Oct 1977). DTP, no record of lot number in my records, nor a place to record it, but I should note that D&T were separate from P.
/anecdote
Johnny: Now you have me thoroughly confused, about notations contained in your "yellow book".
Is the yellow book a record of your childhood vaccines? (I had a yellow sheet provided by a local health department, indicating I received a smallpox vaccine, prior to departing the USA for Europe in 1972).
According to the Wikipedia entry, diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus vaccines were combined in 1949.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DPT_vaccine
By 'yellow book' I mean PHS-731 International Certificates of Vaccination (Rev 9-71). If you want childhood I have to go wayback.
I came of age in the 70's (class of '75) and joined the AF very shortly there after. In my AF records, D&T are noted, but looking closer, I don't see pertussis listed. I confused "P" purtisis with "P" polio in my above post.
I am not a medical person, and can't go toe to toe with you or any other medico. I can only say what is pen and ink that I have in my hand.
Perhaps there were a coupla versions back in the day, D&T with separate P, vs DTP. I only know D&T are listed in my records on their own lines ( with no place to indicate batch number).
(A smallpox vaccine? I have records of 5 revaccinations, but I did travel quite a bit. I'm glad that one is dead in the wild, it made an ugly scab. Nobody got laid with that on their arm. Polio, too. I remember being told 'don't touch that (standing) water, you'll get polio'. These kids today don't understand what it was like back when.)
Thanks for the clarification Johnny. When I traveled to Europe again, the smallpox vaccine was not a requirement.
My daughter, born in 1970, was part of the last birth cohort who was required to have the smallpox vaccine at one year of age. In 1972, the CDC eliminated smallpox vaccine from the Recommended Childhood Vaccine.
I volunteered to receive the smallpox vaccine during the run up to the WMDs scare and I vaccinated a few physicians and nurses from each area hospital in my County. We used the NYC Department of Health Dryvax vaccine, which was still potent after many years. It was long sleeves for me and an occlusive bandage when I visited my medically fragile son in his group home, until the scab fell off.
thank you, everybody, especially Narad and Squirrelelite. That explanation makes a great deal of sense.
I have some follow-up questions, which would help me set the context better:
1) was anyone else other than Wyeth manufacturing this vaccine at that time?
2) approximately how much of an area's demand for a vaccine might be filled by one lot? A little Googling says that the 2013 recall of an HPV vaccine lot involved nearly 750,000 vials. Would the size of a Wyeth lot of DPT in 1979 have been comparable?
Antaeus: I'm just guessing here, but I'm assuming the lots would be smaller in '75, because there were less people back then.
I have my vaccine record that my mother was given, and, until I handed them off to the kids, I had theirs. In none of those records are the lot numbers recorded. However, I do remember that the nurse carefully put the lot number in my kids' medical records when she gave the injections. So there is a records *somewhere*.....
It was 32,000 vials.
In 1984, the CDC reported this:
"Now, two of the three U.S. commercial manufacturers (Wyeth and Connaught, Inc.) have stopped distribution of their products. Thus, only one manufacturer (Lederle) now markets DTP vaccine in the United States."