I just looked at those posts from that discussion, and your description of the literature is clearly cherry-picked. You’re only concentrating on the studies which favor your argument and not contrasting them with the studies which oppose your argument. You only acknowledge that those other studies exist in passing. By going into great detail on your preferred studies instead of presenting a comprehensive overview you’re exposing yourself to sampling bias.
In 2002 the National Vaccine Program Office (NVPO) convened an expert group to study safety issues with adjuvants in vaccines. Among their conclusions:
“pervasive uncertainty [from] missing data on pharmocokinetics and toxicities of aluminum injected into humans… There seems to be abundant data concerning risk levels for ingested aluminum, but scant data about risk levels for injected aluminum. The oral minimum risk level, for example, appears to be in the range of 2–60 mg/kg of aluminum per day but there are no comparable data for injected aluminum.”[1]
This does sound worrying. But let’s take a look at the actual report. Here are the quotations in context (emphases mine, italics are NatPhilosopher’s lifted words):
From the Metal Ions in Biology and Medicine International Symposium held immediately prior to the aluminum workshop, we learned about “pervasive uncertainty”, a phrase used in this workshop to denote missing data on pharmocokinetics and toxicities of aluminum injected into humans. Even with identification of areas needing further study, it was apparent that aluminum which has been used as a vaccine adjuvant for more than 70 years, has an established safety record with low incidence of reported adverse events.
[...]
There seems to be abundant data concerning risk levels for ingested aluminum, but scant data about risk levels for injected aluminum. The oral minimum risk level, for example, appears to be in the range of 2–60 mg/kg of aluminum per day but there are no comparable data for injected aluminum.The uncertainties notwithstanding, there appeared to be a large margin of safety for aluminum adjuvants.
Not so worrying with context, is it?
The actual conclusion of the report (emphases mine):
In summary, a variety of aluminum salts have useful physicochemical and immunogenic properties that lend these minerals to use in vaccines. Based on 70 years of experience, the use of salts of aluminum as adjuvants in vaccines has proven to be safe and effective. Aluminum as an adjuvant enhances antigen presentation and stimulates a type II immune response. It has been possible, using aluminum adjuvants, to reduce the number of injections and the amount of antigen per dose, and thereby decrease the toxicity of some antigens. Without extensive research, it is impossible to know how removal of aluminum from vaccines would affect the known benefits of vaccines in which it is contained. More pharmacokinetic data are needed but there is an apparent wide margin of safety with the use of aluminum adjuvants and reported adverse events have been mostly minor and of low incidence. MMF histologic lesions may be a consequence of the normal immune response and may, in fact, be a wholly serendipitous finding in patients with ascending myalgias and fatigue. Some identified areas of research include: expanding the aluminum pharmacokinetic database, especially following IM injection in young children, conducting bimetal (mercury and aluminum) toxicological studies in animals, identifying biomarkers of toxicity, defining the frequency and duration of MMF in normal controls, determining the role of aluminum in the pathophysiology of the MMF lesion, developing new adjuvants, and establishing new methods for administering immunizations.
I am not in any way an anti-vaxxer, my own child has been vaccinated according to the standard protocols in my country, and I agree that NatPhilosopher should have mentioned that alongside the scary-sounding stuff s/he quoted the quoted sources contain statements that aluminium-based vaccines appear to be safe, and that not doing so is dishonest.
BUT it seems to me (as far as the material you’ve quoted goes; of course there may be more that points the other way) that NatPhilosopher is correct to say that this report suggests that the safety of injected aluminium salts is poorly understood, particularly with respect to long-term consequences as opposed to acute adverse events.
NatPhilosopher may very well be dead wrong, and indeed my guess is that s/he is. But the material s/he quoted doesn’t seem to me much less worrying with context than without.
The actual conclusions are crowd think. The fact of the matter, as they discussed, is they had no empirical basis to assess the toxicity of injected aluminum in neo-nates, or even adults for that matter, in spite of having done it for 70 years. They had never bothered looking. They still have no empirical basis for claiming its safe, in fact, just the opposite. In fact, they are injecting 100′s of times as much aluminum into neo-nates as they get from diet in the first six months, bypassing numerous evolved filters that served to keep it out. When people actually did animal experiments on neo-nates, they reported this was very toxic to development. When people actually look at any epidemiology that’s sensitive to it, they find its very toxic to development. Its highly correlated to autism, for example, as well as infant mortality.
Incidentally, when they talk about “low incidence of adverse events”, they are talking about adverse events within 72 hours. I am talking about the impact of aluminum on development and the immune system and the development of the brain. Much of the aluminum gets stuck in the muscle and only leaks out over periods longer than 72 hours. The total load infants get from vaccines over the first six months is hundreds of times the total load they get from diet, taking into account that the dietary system filters 99.75% of ingested aluminum but virtually all parenterally injected aluminum eventually makes its way into systemic flow.
The results of the various medical surveys are crowd think. The summaries as a general rule present blather that soothes the soul. If you look at the actual empirical results published in the scientific literature, the situation is clear, even though it is the opposite of what all the surveys tell you in their summaries. If you ignore this, you are destined to fail to realize that committees of doctors or government officials are incapable of understanding a scientific literature or making medical decisions that are better for health than random, and more generally that crowd think is an important phenomenon in the world.
Regardless of the conflicts between your beliefs and that of others, it is dishonest to misrepresent the writings of other people to bolster your arguments.Do not manipulate quotes from a report to make it say what you want it to say, even if you believe that the original report is incorrect.
I didn’t manipulate it. I quoted it accurately, and I quoted everything it had to say about the relevant empirical results. My quote is an accurate depiction of the state of knowledge, which is what I quote. I didn’t say they had no other conclusions, I said this was “among their conclusions”.
They have no empirical basis to make any other conclusions of relevance once you understand that conclusion.
I am proving to you you are delusional about huge swaths of what you believe, and you in reaction are apparently arguing irrelevant fine points and down grading me. Are you interested in being “less wrong”, or not?
Quoting something accurately means more than just that the words you typed appeared in the source in the right order. You selectively quoted it in a way that made it seem to support a claim that it wasn’t really supporting.
It was 100% supporting the claim they didn’t know the first thing about the toxicity of injected aluminum in neo-nates.
What claim do you think I made it seem they were supporting? Here’s how I summarized the quote.
“Doctors had been injecting aluminum adjuvants into children for 70 years, committees of doctors and government officials had decided numerous times to inject more aluminum into younger children, but as late as 2002 nobody had empirical data on toxicities of injected aluminum [1].”
I would say my quote was 100% accurate, not out of context, and I don’t have a clue what claim you think I made it seem to support that it wasn’t supporting.
It was 100% supporting the claim they didn’t know the first thing about the toxicity of injected aluminum in neo-nates.
No it wasn’t. It only sounded like that because you quoted it out of context. What it said is that they had “scant data”. Scant data is not no data, and the rest of the quote makes it clear that they do have some data and that data says that it is safe.
They didn’t have any data on the toxicities of injected aluminum. They had none. They had never injected an animal and collected any. The only data they had was on oral administration. My clarification is 100% accurate, of what the article conveys if you put the quote in context.
You seem to think the fact that they minimize the extent of their incompetence or corruption by using the euphimism “scant” for “none” is more important than the facts (1) that they had been injecting aluminum into tiny kids for 70 years before checking the toxicity, and (2) since then all of the published peer reviewed data shows its doing great damage, and (3) all of the safety review boards and safety surveys are simply and blithely ignoring the scientific literature on the subject, not bothering to cite it or to rebut it or to offer alternative studies on the issue.
Breast fed infants ingest about 7 milligrams. But about 99.75% of that goes straight into the poop, as the dietary system is incredibly good at not absorbing dietary aluminum. By contrast virtually all of the 4.4 mg of aluminum they get injected from vaccines eventually makes it to their systemic flow. That results in a total load of aluminum entering the blood from diet of .0025*7mg= .01 mg compared to the 4.4mg of injected aluminum reaching their system. Or in other words, the ratio of aluminum reaching the blood from vaccine is about 250 times the amount reaching the blood from diet.
This study does not dispute the safety of vaccines but reinforces the need to study long-term effects of early exposure to neuro-toxic substances on the developing brain.
The toxicity of Al is much lower than that of thimerosal
Mild post-vaccine symptoms in young infants, especially neonates, are non-specific and considered tolerable; rare (neurologic) adverse effects are unlikely to occur as a result of adjuvant-Al per se or in combination with thimerosal-Hg.
From the article I didn’t gather what type of exposure was more worrying to the authors—acute or chronic. They seem to admit acute exposure has been proven safe, but on the other hand they dare not make any definite statements on chronic exposure. And above all, they never suggest that vaccinations should be stopped: in their conclusion they make it very clear that the purpose of understanding better the toxicity profile of vaccines is for increasing trust in vaccination.
in their conclusion they make it very clear that the purpose of understanding better the toxicity profile of vaccines is for increasing trust in vaccination.
That’s a huge red flag right there. It means they’ve already decided what research must prove.
The article I cited reported that breast fed infants wind up getting up to 1000 times as much aluminum from vaccines as from diet. That is the empirical result that paper was reporting. The rest is window dressing which would be at best the authors opinion.
The question of whether getting that amount of aluminum is toxic is more complicated. The natural experiment is to scale it for weight and inject it into post natal mice. That experiment has been done and reports they suffer great developmental damage. There’s also a fair amount of epidemiology that bears on the subject, which also suggests the aluminum is causing damage. Its highly correlated with autism, for example. I reviewed the literature all with links to about 3 dozen citations at http://whyarethingsthisway.com/2014/03/08/example-1-pediatrician-belief-is-opposite-the-published-scientific-evidence-on-early-vaccine-safety/
Also, I suggest to you that there is demonstrably very strong crowd think effects on the subject of vaccines. A phenomenon of crowd think is persecution of heretics. In such a climate, scientists publishing results that challenge the orthodoxy have to tread very sensitively indeed if they wish to avoid the inquisition. And they often respond to this by adding various flowery prose to their publications such as that which you mention, mitigating the distaste of having to report such contrary results. If you wish to understand crowd think better, I recommend:
http://whyarethingsthisway.com/2014/03/22/why-are-the-pediatricians-so-confused-about-the-actual-state-of-the-scientific-literature/
There’s no “inquisition” in medicine. There’s peer review to ensure you did your homework, and government agencies to ensure you don’t hurt (too many) people.
window dressing which would be at best the authors opinion [...] various flowery prose [...] mitigating the distaste
What criterion are you using to select what counts as fact and what is immaterial? How would you identify an author who is being reasonably cautious not to make any unjustified statements?
There’s no “inquisition” in medicine.
That’s an unsupported opinion I believe is false.
Laura Hewitson and Andrew Wakefield are immediate counterexamples that come to mind. I expect any Doctor that took a public position against vaccination would come under a lot of social pressure at least, and may well lose job or opportunities.
What criterion are you using to select what counts as fact and what is immaterial? How would you identify an author who is being reasonably cautious not to make any unjustified statements?
I don’t look to authors to make statements or draw conclusions. If I can’t draw the conclusion myself, its not valid. I look to authors to report empirical data, and maybe spell out a proof or calculation of its implications, but if I can’t personally follow the proof or calculation of the implications, then its not valid. The point of the scientific literature is, its supposed to be verifiable by scientists, so I look at it in that spirit. The scientists writing it are really supposed to keep their opinions out of it, but when they can’t help themselves the readers should exercise judgement themselves.
I am looking at the questions as semantic, as being questions about the physics of the world, and understanding it as a physicist should. What’s relevant is what’s relevant to answering the physics questions such as “are vaccines causing damage?” and is decided by the physics of the world and rationality.
I wasn’t aware of Ms. Hewitson, but it appears she can’t devise a proper experimental design to save her life. As for Mr. (and most decidedly not Dr.) Wakefield, charlatan is the kindest word I can apply to him. His link between vaccination and autism has been disproved over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
I could cite other articles showing Wakefield was right on the science. For example, multiple peer reviewed articles showing that vaccine strain measles is in fact found in the guts of autistics but not of normal kids. Also, all the articles you cited talk about whether MMR causes autism. What does that have to do with whether Wakefield was attacked for even saying negative things about vaccines? None of those articles show fraud, or misconduct or that Wakefield was even wrong on anything, (I don’t believe, didn’t always read further than abstract) all they show is data supposedly showing that MMR doesn’t cause autism. Wakefield never claimed it did, he just discussed the issue scientifically. Why did Wakefield have to leave his job and country for publishing science on the other side?
Also, btw, none of those articles shows what their titles say: there isn’t a one of them for example, that looks at whether the aluminum load in vaccines causes autism or is sensitive to the issue. There isn’t a one of them that looks at whether more vaccines earlier is more likely to cause autism than less later (although Stefano is sometimes misrepresented in that fashion.) The evidence on those issues is a resounding yes, if they cared to look at it. They have all carefully cherry-picked the data.
I could also argue the same on Hewitson. Hewitson was the only person I’m aware of to inject actual vaccines into post-natal animals. And she found they damaged the animals. If people don’t like her experiments, my question is: why didn’t anybody repeat them, rather than go on blithely hoping they are wrong and the kids are not being damaged?
Shouldn’t such experiments be done before you start injecting dozens and dozens of vaccines into every infant in the country?
But I’m not interested in arguments that are purely about ad hominem attacks. The point here is to prove to you that doctors who speak out about their understanding that actual science is against vaccines are punished and/or prevented from communicating. Here’s another citation. This Dr. has had to cancel her speaking tour because of pro-vaccine terrorism.
https://www.facebook.com/vaccineinfo/posts/10152993156565891?fref=nf
I pointed out I’m not cherrypicking and have discussed every relevant citation that I’ve found. Please post a citation that I missed that is within the scope of my investigation or retract your comment and any negative points you have given me.
Just to point out one other thing you might be missing: The scope of my investigation is whether the aluminum and many early vaccines are causing developmental damage. It explicitly omits the only things the safety surveys focus on, which is thimerosal and mmr and acute effects . I omitted these because (a) they claim to have removed it from vaccines (except flu) and (b) mmr doesn’t have adjuvants and is normally given second year of life and (c) its the only thing they defend, so why attack it, which will only involve great effort and likely be hard to decide in the end anyway? For aluminum and many early vaccines, there is no defense in the scientific literature of their safety, its a walkover to all intents and purposes, so it made the review task of deciding on the safety straightforward as well as relatively simple.
No I’m not. I am looking at every empirical study on aluminum, for example. I’m looking at every study that compares vaccinated to unvaccinated, or even more vaccinated to less vaccinated.
The safety surveys are cherry picking. I am not. I am following the scientific literature to find all the papers that address semantic issues like: is the aluminum in vaccines causing damage? Are vaccines in the first year or two of life inherently dangerous because they disrupt development of the immune system and brain? What studies of vaccinated and unvaccinated address the impact on long term health?
If you know of any studies on the other side of anything I’ve written, I am intensely interested in citations. The safety surveys don’t cite anything, and I haven’t been able to find anything.
I suspect the reason you think I’m cherrypicking is you assume there must be a literature on the other side of these issues that I have ignored. There is not. There is no empirical paper indicating that injecting the aluminum in vaccines into neo-nates is anything but highly toxic that I have found, or any of the rest of it. If you find any, please post a citation.
sorry to jump in, but given the development of laser adjuvants at the moment there might at least be a viable alternative within a few years, whether companies would adopt it I don’t know.
I just looked at those posts from that discussion, and your description of the literature is clearly cherry-picked. You’re only concentrating on the studies which favor your argument and not contrasting them with the studies which oppose your argument. You only acknowledge that those other studies exist in passing. By going into great detail on your preferred studies instead of presenting a comprehensive overview you’re exposing yourself to sampling bias.
NatPhilosopher is also underhandedly manipulating quotations by lifting words out of context.
Take a look at NatPhilosopher’s first quotation and citation in their pièce de résistance arguing against the safety of pediatric vaccination:
This does sound worrying. But let’s take a look at the actual report. Here are the quotations in context (emphases mine, italics are NatPhilosopher’s lifted words):
Not so worrying with context, is it?
The actual conclusion of the report (emphases mine):
I am not in any way an anti-vaxxer, my own child has been vaccinated according to the standard protocols in my country, and I agree that NatPhilosopher should have mentioned that alongside the scary-sounding stuff s/he quoted the quoted sources contain statements that aluminium-based vaccines appear to be safe, and that not doing so is dishonest.
BUT it seems to me (as far as the material you’ve quoted goes; of course there may be more that points the other way) that NatPhilosopher is correct to say that this report suggests that the safety of injected aluminium salts is poorly understood, particularly with respect to long-term consequences as opposed to acute adverse events.
NatPhilosopher may very well be dead wrong, and indeed my guess is that s/he is. But the material s/he quoted doesn’t seem to me much less worrying with context than without.
I wasn’t an anti-vaxxer till I started reading the scientific literature on it. I vaxxed my first 2 kid too.
The actual conclusions are crowd think. The fact of the matter, as they discussed, is they had no empirical basis to assess the toxicity of injected aluminum in neo-nates, or even adults for that matter, in spite of having done it for 70 years. They had never bothered looking. They still have no empirical basis for claiming its safe, in fact, just the opposite. In fact, they are injecting 100′s of times as much aluminum into neo-nates as they get from diet in the first six months, bypassing numerous evolved filters that served to keep it out. When people actually did animal experiments on neo-nates, they reported this was very toxic to development. When people actually look at any epidemiology that’s sensitive to it, they find its very toxic to development. Its highly correlated to autism, for example, as well as infant mortality.
Incidentally, when they talk about “low incidence of adverse events”, they are talking about adverse events within 72 hours. I am talking about the impact of aluminum on development and the immune system and the development of the brain. Much of the aluminum gets stuck in the muscle and only leaks out over periods longer than 72 hours. The total load infants get from vaccines over the first six months is hundreds of times the total load they get from diet, taking into account that the dietary system filters 99.75% of ingested aluminum but virtually all parenterally injected aluminum eventually makes its way into systemic flow.
The results of the various medical surveys are crowd think. The summaries as a general rule present blather that soothes the soul. If you look at the actual empirical results published in the scientific literature, the situation is clear, even though it is the opposite of what all the surveys tell you in their summaries. If you ignore this, you are destined to fail to realize that committees of doctors or government officials are incapable of understanding a scientific literature or making medical decisions that are better for health than random, and more generally that crowd think is an important phenomenon in the world.
Regardless of the conflicts between your beliefs and that of others, it is dishonest to misrepresent the writings of other people to bolster your arguments. Do not manipulate quotes from a report to make it say what you want it to say, even if you believe that the original report is incorrect.
I didn’t manipulate it. I quoted it accurately, and I quoted everything it had to say about the relevant empirical results. My quote is an accurate depiction of the state of knowledge, which is what I quote. I didn’t say they had no other conclusions, I said this was “among their conclusions”.
They have no empirical basis to make any other conclusions of relevance once you understand that conclusion.
I am proving to you you are delusional about huge swaths of what you believe, and you in reaction are apparently arguing irrelevant fine points and down grading me. Are you interested in being “less wrong”, or not?
Quoting something accurately means more than just that the words you typed appeared in the source in the right order. You selectively quoted it in a way that made it seem to support a claim that it wasn’t really supporting.
Please say what claim I made it support it wasn’t really supporting or retract your comment and any negative points you may have given me.
I’m quite curious to see what claim you think I made it support.
It was 100% supporting the claim they didn’t know the first thing about the toxicity of injected aluminum in neo-nates. What claim do you think I made it seem they were supporting? Here’s how I summarized the quote.
“Doctors had been injecting aluminum adjuvants into children for 70 years, committees of doctors and government officials had decided numerous times to inject more aluminum into younger children, but as late as 2002 nobody had empirical data on toxicities of injected aluminum [1].”
I would say my quote was 100% accurate, not out of context, and I don’t have a clue what claim you think I made it seem to support that it wasn’t supporting.
No it wasn’t. It only sounded like that because you quoted it out of context. What it said is that they had “scant data”. Scant data is not no data, and the rest of the quote makes it clear that they do have some data and that data says that it is safe.
They didn’t have any data on the toxicities of injected aluminum. They had none. They had never injected an animal and collected any. The only data they had was on oral administration. My clarification is 100% accurate, of what the article conveys if you put the quote in context.
You seem to think the fact that they minimize the extent of their incompetence or corruption by using the euphimism “scant” for “none” is more important than the facts (1) that they had been injecting aluminum into tiny kids for 70 years before checking the toxicity, and (2) since then all of the published peer reviewed data shows its doing great damage, and (3) all of the safety review boards and safety surveys are simply and blithely ignoring the scientific literature on the subject, not bothering to cite it or to rebut it or to offer alternative studies on the issue.
On the contrary,
While infants receive about 4.4 milligrams of aluminum in the first six months of life from vaccines, they receive more than that in their diet. Breast-fed infants ingest about 7 milligrams, formula-fed infants ingest about 38 milligrams, and infants who are fed soy formula ingest almost 117 milligrams of aluminum during the same period.
Breast fed infants ingest about 7 milligrams. But about 99.75% of that goes straight into the poop, as the dietary system is incredibly good at not absorbing dietary aluminum. By contrast virtually all of the 4.4 mg of aluminum they get injected from vaccines eventually makes it to their systemic flow. That results in a total load of aluminum entering the blood from diet of .0025*7mg= .01 mg compared to the 4.4mg of injected aluminum reaching their system. Or in other words, the ratio of aluminum reaching the blood from vaccine is about 250 times the amount reaching the blood from diet.
Better read the fine print or they will pull the wool over your eyes. See also http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20010978 for some measurements.
But I want to commend you polymathwannabe. You are the first reply I have gotten that attempted to engage any meaningful question.
The article you cite says,
From the article I didn’t gather what type of exposure was more worrying to the authors—acute or chronic. They seem to admit acute exposure has been proven safe, but on the other hand they dare not make any definite statements on chronic exposure. And above all, they never suggest that vaccinations should be stopped: in their conclusion they make it very clear that the purpose of understanding better the toxicity profile of vaccines is for increasing trust in vaccination.
That’s a huge red flag right there. It means they’ve already decided what research must prove.
The article I cited reported that breast fed infants wind up getting up to 1000 times as much aluminum from vaccines as from diet. That is the empirical result that paper was reporting. The rest is window dressing which would be at best the authors opinion. The question of whether getting that amount of aluminum is toxic is more complicated. The natural experiment is to scale it for weight and inject it into post natal mice. That experiment has been done and reports they suffer great developmental damage. There’s also a fair amount of epidemiology that bears on the subject, which also suggests the aluminum is causing damage. Its highly correlated with autism, for example. I reviewed the literature all with links to about 3 dozen citations at http://whyarethingsthisway.com/2014/03/08/example-1-pediatrician-belief-is-opposite-the-published-scientific-evidence-on-early-vaccine-safety/
Also, I suggest to you that there is demonstrably very strong crowd think effects on the subject of vaccines. A phenomenon of crowd think is persecution of heretics. In such a climate, scientists publishing results that challenge the orthodoxy have to tread very sensitively indeed if they wish to avoid the inquisition. And they often respond to this by adding various flowery prose to their publications such as that which you mention, mitigating the distaste of having to report such contrary results. If you wish to understand crowd think better, I recommend: http://whyarethingsthisway.com/2014/03/22/why-are-the-pediatricians-so-confused-about-the-actual-state-of-the-scientific-literature/
There’s no “inquisition” in medicine. There’s peer review to ensure you did your homework, and government agencies to ensure you don’t hurt (too many) people.
What criterion are you using to select what counts as fact and what is immaterial? How would you identify an author who is being reasonably cautious not to make any unjustified statements?
There’s no “inquisition” in medicine. That’s an unsupported opinion I believe is false. Laura Hewitson and Andrew Wakefield are immediate counterexamples that come to mind. I expect any Doctor that took a public position against vaccination would come under a lot of social pressure at least, and may well lose job or opportunities.
What criterion are you using to select what counts as fact and what is immaterial? How would you identify an author who is being reasonably cautious not to make any unjustified statements? I don’t look to authors to make statements or draw conclusions. If I can’t draw the conclusion myself, its not valid. I look to authors to report empirical data, and maybe spell out a proof or calculation of its implications, but if I can’t personally follow the proof or calculation of the implications, then its not valid. The point of the scientific literature is, its supposed to be verifiable by scientists, so I look at it in that spirit. The scientists writing it are really supposed to keep their opinions out of it, but when they can’t help themselves the readers should exercise judgement themselves. I am looking at the questions as semantic, as being questions about the physics of the world, and understanding it as a physicist should. What’s relevant is what’s relevant to answering the physics questions such as “are vaccines causing damage?” and is decided by the physics of the world and rationality.
I wasn’t aware of Ms. Hewitson, but it appears she can’t devise a proper experimental design to save her life. As for Mr. (and most decidedly not Dr.) Wakefield, charlatan is the kindest word I can apply to him. His link between vaccination and autism has been disproved over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
I could cite other articles showing Wakefield was right on the science. For example, multiple peer reviewed articles showing that vaccine strain measles is in fact found in the guts of autistics but not of normal kids. Also, all the articles you cited talk about whether MMR causes autism. What does that have to do with whether Wakefield was attacked for even saying negative things about vaccines? None of those articles show fraud, or misconduct or that Wakefield was even wrong on anything, (I don’t believe, didn’t always read further than abstract) all they show is data supposedly showing that MMR doesn’t cause autism. Wakefield never claimed it did, he just discussed the issue scientifically. Why did Wakefield have to leave his job and country for publishing science on the other side?
Also, btw, none of those articles shows what their titles say: there isn’t a one of them for example, that looks at whether the aluminum load in vaccines causes autism or is sensitive to the issue. There isn’t a one of them that looks at whether more vaccines earlier is more likely to cause autism than less later (although Stefano is sometimes misrepresented in that fashion.) The evidence on those issues is a resounding yes, if they cared to look at it. They have all carefully cherry-picked the data.
I could also argue the same on Hewitson. Hewitson was the only person I’m aware of to inject actual vaccines into post-natal animals. And she found they damaged the animals. If people don’t like her experiments, my question is: why didn’t anybody repeat them, rather than go on blithely hoping they are wrong and the kids are not being damaged? Shouldn’t such experiments be done before you start injecting dozens and dozens of vaccines into every infant in the country?
But I’m not interested in arguments that are purely about ad hominem attacks. The point here is to prove to you that doctors who speak out about their understanding that actual science is against vaccines are punished and/or prevented from communicating. Here’s another citation. This Dr. has had to cancel her speaking tour because of pro-vaccine terrorism. https://www.facebook.com/vaccineinfo/posts/10152993156565891?fref=nf
I pointed out I’m not cherrypicking and have discussed every relevant citation that I’ve found. Please post a citation that I missed that is within the scope of my investigation or retract your comment and any negative points you have given me.
Just to point out one other thing you might be missing: The scope of my investigation is whether the aluminum and many early vaccines are causing developmental damage. It explicitly omits the only things the safety surveys focus on, which is thimerosal and mmr and acute effects . I omitted these because (a) they claim to have removed it from vaccines (except flu) and (b) mmr doesn’t have adjuvants and is normally given second year of life and (c) its the only thing they defend, so why attack it, which will only involve great effort and likely be hard to decide in the end anyway? For aluminum and many early vaccines, there is no defense in the scientific literature of their safety, its a walkover to all intents and purposes, so it made the review task of deciding on the safety straightforward as well as relatively simple.
No I’m not. I am looking at every empirical study on aluminum, for example. I’m looking at every study that compares vaccinated to unvaccinated, or even more vaccinated to less vaccinated.
The safety surveys are cherry picking. I am not. I am following the scientific literature to find all the papers that address semantic issues like: is the aluminum in vaccines causing damage? Are vaccines in the first year or two of life inherently dangerous because they disrupt development of the immune system and brain? What studies of vaccinated and unvaccinated address the impact on long term health?
If you know of any studies on the other side of anything I’ve written, I am intensely interested in citations. The safety surveys don’t cite anything, and I haven’t been able to find anything.
I suspect the reason you think I’m cherrypicking is you assume there must be a literature on the other side of these issues that I have ignored. There is not. There is no empirical paper indicating that injecting the aluminum in vaccines into neo-nates is anything but highly toxic that I have found, or any of the rest of it. If you find any, please post a citation.
How high a probability would you assign to aluminum in vaccines being removed in 10 years? 20 years? 30 years?
sorry to jump in, but given the development of laser adjuvants at the moment there might at least be a viable alternative within a few years, whether companies would adopt it I don’t know.
That’s a good point and a reason to consider it likely independent of NatPhil’s claim.