Feb 06 2012
Joe Mercola: Quackery pays
We’ve written about Joe Mercola’s support for quackery on this blog several times (for instance, here and here). It’s good to see that some of the mainstream media are starting to take notice, as evidenced by this article by Bryan Smith for Chicago Magazine entitled Dr. Mercola: Visionary or Quack? It features comments from a couple of—shall we say?—familiar people.
Although this article did irk me a bit for its tendency to buy into the false “tell both sides” balance, even going so far as to claim that much of what’s on Mercola’s website is actually based in science, I do think it is nonetheless very useful in that it demonstrates just how powerful and influential Mercola has become:
According to traffic-tracking firm Quantcast, Mercola.com draws about 1.9 million unique visitors per month, each of whom returns an average of nearly ten times a month. That remarkable “stickiness” puts the site’s total visits on a par with those to the National Institutes of Health’s website. (Mercola claims his is “the world’s No. 1 natural health website,” citing figures from Alexa.com.) Mercola’s 200,000-plus “likes” on Facebook are more than double the number for WebMD. And two of his eight books—2003’s The No-Grain Diet and 2006’s The Great Bird Flu Hoax—have landed on the New York Times bestseller list.
What a depressing thought that Mercola.com draws about the same traffic as the NIH website!
I also now know where Barbara Loe Fisher and her antivaccine group the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) got all that money to run ads in AMC Theaters during Thanksgiving weekend 2010, ads on the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square last spring, and, most recently, to buy ads with the company that supplies Delta Airlines with its in-flight video content:
Mercola says he recently donated $1 million to several alternative medicine groups, including the National Vaccine Information Center, which describes itself as a “vaccine watch dog.” Part of the money, according to the group’s website, was used to pay for an ad called “Vaccines: Know the Risk,” which was shown hourly on the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square for several weeks last spring.
Mercola says he is simply trying to ask hard questions about the potential harm caused by inoculations and voice his opposition to government-imposed mandates. “There are virtually no safety studies done [on vaccines],” Mercola says. “We don’t know what the effects of combining them are. We don’t know what the long-term complications are.” He says the government and media downplay very real risks and either underreport or ignore serious adverse reactions. Meanwhile, “we don’t have the option to say no [to getting the shots]. It’s just insane what’s happening, and more and more vaccines [are coming] down the line.”
The NVIC has never exactly been particularly flush with cash, but apparently Mercola has changed all that. What I’d really like to know is what other alt-med organizations were beneficiaries of Mercola’s largesse.
What I also now know is that Joe Mercola is rich, as in filthy rich, as in “rolling in the dough” rich, as in “raking it in hand over fist rich.” After all, he had a spare $1 million lying around to give away to the NVIC and various other quackery-promoting groups.
Finally, I know what really matters to Mercola. (Hint: It’s not patient care.) To whit:
If there were any doubt about the importance of marketing to the operation, it was dispelled when I was given a quick tour of Mercola’s sprawling headquarters. The lobby of Dr. Mercola’s Natural Health Center looks like the kind of well-appointed suburban office where you’d expect vanity procedures such as face-lifts to be offered. As it turns out, only one short hallway is dedicated to patient services. “Marketing and customer service take up most of the rest,” a new-patient coordinator told me.
Based on what I know about Mercola, that sounds about right. One little section of his empire devoted to actual patient care, the rest all devoted to marketing and fulfilling online orders. That’s very telling and entirely consistent with Mercola’s behavior. He might have been a real doctor at one time, but in 2012 he exists only to enrich himself by selling a mixture of the unremarkable, the unproven, and what I consider to be quackery. Certainly the archive of articles on his website is a treasure trove of quackery, antivaccine rants, quack apologia, and rants against the government and big pharma, interspersed with videos and radio interviews, and more. Truly, it’s a multimedia empire of woo. In my opinion, of course.
Who says quackery doesn’t pay?
211 Responses to “Joe Mercola: Quackery pays”
One large point you have missed is that the Mercola site gives out a lot of free advice that is much more useful than the NIH site, staying well requires a commitment to understanding what that means not just fire fighting symptoms as they occur. 1.9 million people can’t be wrong, perhaps people are fed up with the idea that experts are the only people we need to crisis manage disease.
What’s wrong with being rich from providing a useful public service?
I mean who says the whole swine flu scam wasnt a pandemic of woo, every person I met thought it was complete bull and the NIH promoted this scare story on the level of world terrorism!
@sarah007
That’s the spirit. Flaunt your ignorance. Be proud of it. Run your Gish gallop with it. Dunning-Kruger? What do they know?
Exactly how is it that you determine that his free information is useful or accurate? I can’t even begin to understand how you could quantify the statement of his site being more useful than the NIH web-site. I hate to rain on your parade here, but 1.9 million people certainly could be wrong…or at least misinformed. What you don’t understand is that this whole “you don’t need to rely on experts, you can heal yourself…naturally” is nothing more than a marketing gimmick to make you feel empowered and, in turn, buy more garbage from the promoters of such non-sense. Both Mercola and Pharmaceutical companies are for-profit organizations that aim to make money. Don’t you at least want the option that has a process in place to demonstrate safety and efficacy? Referring to Mercola as “providing a useful public service” is as naive as I’ve heard. What he is doing, is misleading the public and exploiting the ignorance of the general public. “you don’t need experts, trust me” and you buy it hook, line and sinker. How many people do you know that are experts on infectious disease? Or is there some other reason to think that “every person you met…” had any idea what they were talking about regarding Swine Flu? Had a real pandemic occurred, you would be thanking your lucky stars that we had these organizations to, as best as they can, prepare us for the worst case scenario. The flu doesn’t go pandemic (again, it could have) and you honestly have the audacity to sit here and call it fear mongering and overreacting? That can be a very easy thing to say when we just happen to not have a large death toll. What people like this lack is perspective….the larger picture is not even on their radar.
The swine flu scamdemic you could say was pretty recent. Mercola was consistantly spot on about this big myth and that’s a good enough gold star for anyone. On the other hand the CDC NIH and just about every govenment apart from Poland got it completely wrong.
The only pandemic out there is BS
Hi Chaos
Well all the experts in the CDC NIH had less awareness than the average man on the street, where did you learn this idea that the bigger the expert the more right they are? Did you seriously buy the pandemic tale Chaos, I am sorry to point the finger but if you came to my bar you’d be laughed at. I find it difficult to believe I have actually met someone who believed in the pandemic, did you honestly sit at home watching tv all day and crapping it?
If that’s the best they can do its a good example of what to completely avoid, I mean in England 40 years of study by the national cold and flu unit, government dept, failed to proove the contagen theory of flu so it got shut down.
The origional pandemic was aspirin inspired, you need to read a bit wider than pubmed.
@ sarah007
have a go at this litmus test. read through mercola’s site. note how many times he references only himself. note how many and of what kind he utilizes as sources that constitute actual peer review (not simply other blog entries) – his work is “science based” after all, correct? look at those references, what do they have to do with what he is saying?
the thing in which you would be engaging, is actual skeptical investigation. right now you are telling us “chocolate is better than vanilla..so there.”
“mercola said mercola was right and all the people agree” should alarm you at least a little…
as you commented in progress…
“if you came to my bar…”
I hope that is not in reference to “a place where people come to drink and dispense their knowledge of infectious diseases.” That should be a self-refuting point of support on its face…
Eric
You quote peer review as if it was some kind of Chiltern rite. What is this magical approval process that is all truth? Mercola quotes sources and research all over the place so you must have selective vision Eric, maybe you should try some supplementation?
Come on Eric, as the only person I have conversed with who actually believed in the pandemic tell me what made you believe all that CDC nonsense, I am fascinated with your process here. You are not really coming across all that skeptical Eric, more fanatical. Unable to even see logical critique, who taught you not to think?
The EBM shows us that flu as a concept is bull. Mercola happens to agree, why would I log on to NIH for advice when most of its articles are some kind of relgious clap trap?
Why cant you let go? Tell me is Skeptical with a K different to sceptical with a C?
ah the sensible logic employed by assuming my thoughts and attitudes – not too sparingly peppered with insult, ramble and rhetorical questions. It comes as no wonder to me that no one here has wasted their time in the non-discussion you wish to have. i wonder if you thought, that by calling an individual a fanatic (as well as unthinking, credulous and dogmatic) despite nothing uttered of the sort, you would chance upon a friendly discussion aimed at mutual edification?
Flu, as a concept, is bull? Wow…you have to be a troll, right? I can’t imagine you typing that with a straight face. I don’t sit at home and watch tv and buy everything that’s fed to me. What I do understand is the extremely difficult situation that organizations like the CDC are in trying to be prepared, but not over do it. Sarah007, you confuse skepticism with conspiracy theory. If all the overhype was intentional then to what end? What was the goal of the CDC in creating panic that they “knew” wasn’t warranted? Let me guess….money. They were trying to boost the profits of there bed-fellows, the pharmaceutical companies? I don’t suppose you have a shred of evidence to support your claims? Is this really what your calling skepticism? It’s always the same with the conspiracy nuts……”I’m just asking questions, I’m just being skeptical”, when in reality….they are relying on poor evidence, anomaly hunting and jumping from one wild conclusion to another. The idea that trying to accurately predict the evolution and spread of something like the flu, any flu…is extremely difficult is realistic and backed by evidence. Again, if you want to fault them for overdoing it, then be my guest. I personally would rather they side with caution. But you don’t really care about reality, do you? None of you conspiracy types do. Had they given little attention to it and more dies, then you would be crying cover-up! “They knew and didn’t tell us!” At the end of the day you may be left with the most provocative and interesting view point, but for those of us that care about reality, we need not these things. You can go back to Mercola and Alex Jones and let them know that reality sends it’s regards…..it misses them.
Hey Sarah007
Mercola is wrong on several things, such As the A&D ratios being problematic in cod liver oil and Krill being a sustainable, better source of Omega’s than fish, and my favorite comparing the absorprtion of D3 on furry mammals compared to humans as a reason for us not to take showers after sun bathing. Joe is luck that he was right about the pandemic.
I am reminded of something Nassim Taleb wrote in, I think, “The Black Swan.” Suppose a senator pushed through legislation making cockpits totally inaccessible to passengers and other crew while in flight despite protests by airlines. The legislation went into effect on 9-10-01. 9/11 never had a chance to happen. The senator go voted out for needlessly raising the costs of air travel.
@sarah007,
“Tell me is Skeptical with a K different to sceptical with a C?”
No, they just reflect different spelling conventions in the US vs the UK.
Why haven’t you answered my questions?
@sarah007
“If that’s the best they can do its a good example of what to completely avoid, I mean in England 40 years of study by the national cold and flu unit, government dept, failed to proove the contagen theory of flu so it got shut down.
The origional pandemic was aspirin inspired, you need to read a bit wider than pubmed.”
Do you have any kind of source for the claim that the contagion theory of flu can’t be proven?
and on your second point, are you perhaps referring to the Starko article that proposed that part of the death rate from the 1918 pandemic was caused by overuse of aspirin? If so you should note that her conclusions have hardly been shown to be conclusive or applicable to many areas affected by the pandemic.
For the same reason you won’t engage in mine really.
Weing your wong. Flight decks have been inaccessable for years, by the way did you have a flu jab?
Chaos, the point is there was no evidence of anything about to kick off, and it didn’t. We now know all the preparations like anti virals were useless, the vaccines didn’t work and a lot of people were made ill. Oh I forgot all the Tamiflu data was lost by Roche when peer reviewed journals asked for it to do a post scamdemic audit, how convenient, that’s not a conspiracy it’s creative accounting, too big to fail.
So these marvellous experts at the CDC not only got it wrong they came up with a crap solution to nothing. It’s not a conspiracy Chaos, its bull. To cap it all the taxpayer undwrote the failure and paid for it. Where is your head, what on earth are you reading? Are you seriously believing in all this, I’m amazed.
I don’t know anyone who had a vaccine, I don’t know anyone who believed it either, I am fascinated that there is a community of people here who seem to think the lurgy might get them, that health is good luck, it’s so superstitious.
Did you get a flu shot?
@sarah007,
“For the same reason you won’t engage in mine really.”
Rubbish! You asked if I got a flu shot. I said yes.
How about a simple answer to the simple questions I asked.
If it turns out you don’t even accept the germ theory of disease or the basic principles of immunology, there is no way we could engage in any meaningful discussion.
No wonder she seems to be such a fan of a quack like Joe Mercola.
Harriet there you go again with the whole studying and learning and being tested as to show you understand that which you talk about. Why would anybody devote themselves to studying one area and being an expert on that subject. Better stick ones thumbs in their ears, stick out their tongue and wonder why all the scientists have funny Oriental names then it is to engage ones thinking box in critical thinking skills.
I love how Mercola is described here. There is a list of things that Mercola has claimed to cause autism:
Pasteurized milk
Fluoride
Aluminum (one wonders how Mercola gets food grown in soil that does not contain feldspars)
Mercury (of course)
MMR (of course), and I am curious if this was noticed in 1971 when it was introduced in the USA
Malnutrition
Lactose
Glutamine
By the way, I noticed that around three dozen people were sickened by raw milk from Pennsylvania. Well that sounds like a ringing endorsement of germ theory denial!
Hi Eric
Ah The condecending all powerful down nose glancing, ignorance of oppotunities to squeeze out of the anti/ pro distraction and look at the science. You know it is totally unscientific to polarise this into pro/anti, it forces the proers to cling onto the belief vaccines work when the rest of the modern world has woken up and realised the peer review approval process is nose diving into the pit. It is so desperate it is lobbying for mandatory legislation. If you look back at history Eric you will see that mandatory vaccine laws have been repealed just before for the same reasons some countries prefer to leave the choice to parents.
I don’t doubt your sincerity at all Eric, but you are misinformed, looking at selective science and wrong.
Bgoudie it shut down because it was unable to make more than 11% of people react to having virus sprayed up the nose, that’s half of placebo which is quite interesting really, maybe flu virus keeps you well? Isolating the virus did nothing for the unit, if this woo theory worked he would have made millions, better to shut the unit rather than risk the woo of flu getting out heh.
From David Tyrell’s obituary in the Lancet, June 2005:
The UK’s Common Cold Research Unit (later the Common Cold Unit), in Salisbury, came into being after World War II when Harvard University donated a wartime hospital it had set up for the British military. In 1957, David Tyrrell, who had worked at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, USA, and at the then-infant UK’s Medical Research Council but was still a “reluctant young virologist”, as he would later describe himself, became head of the unit. He took over what was planned as a last-ditch effort to culture the virus responsible for the common cold to forestall the closure of the unit.
The assignment, scheduled to last 3 years, paid off in 1960 with the publication of three papers describing common cold virus isolates in The Lancet. The Common Cold Unit lasted until 1990, when it was shut down…
The Common Cold Unit was well-known for its uses of volunteers, some 20 000 of whom spent days or weeks taking part in trials after responding to advertisements such as “Free 10 Day Autumn or Winter Break: You May Not Win A Nobel Prize, But You Could Help Find a Cure for the Common Cold.” A character in Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net met another character through volunteering there.
Chris it’s not the germs that make you ill, it’s the break down of the detritus. Germs are everywhere if all it took were a few gremlins to make us ill why are’nt we all ill all the time?
Purina, you are right better to dump a data scattergun than wake up and realise one is a dupe for buying into the flu protection scam, how distressing that must be. It’s a scientology tactic, if I am logical, she is illogical, if I am illogical she is logical. It’s also called believer syndrome, she just can’t engage with a belief system challenge.
Rather sad really and I wish her well.
Hats off to you folks at SBM for having the patience to even reply to this stuff.
Hi David
Nice to see such a solid engagement in discussion, the fatherly nod of approval, nothing going on elsewhere? So I am interested, do you have a yearly flu shot and what do you think of the pandemic scam?
I am amazed at your lack of scientific enquiry Harriet. If I won’t believe your bible but want to question it you will not discuss anything at all! If I show you research that shows you your position is not sustainable you refuse to even comment on it, even though it has been published by your church!
This skeptical thang is wierd beard, the earth is not flat and you need to start reading more.
gretemike, yes talking with religious types is rather tiresome but hey ho miracles can happen.
@sarah007
Holy crap, you are an utter idiot. I admit I am challenging the bias here, but you need to submerge your head in a bowl of Froot Loops and just end it.
“it’s not the germs that make you ill, it’s the break down of the detritus. Germs are everywhere if all it took were a few gremlins to make us ill why are’nt we all ill all the time?”
As I suspected, sarah007 is a germ theory denier. I’m afraid that trying to set her straight would be as frustrating and as useless as trying to explain immunology to Th1Th2.
@HH
I agree
So lets get this right Harriet. Vaccines are supposed to stimulate antibody production to protect us. The flu jab apparently does provoke an antibody immune response along with all the cellular detritus and aluminium etc. but the problem is current peer reviewed EBM shows us it makes no difference to hospital admissions whatsoever.
So is the theory crap, and it is only a theory, or is the process of application crap or is the whole caboodle crap, which one is it.
I can’t stop laughing, you have no idea what you have brought into and you are still defending it like some religious nutter and JPZee agrees too, what exactly does he agree with? Harriet is even pround she went along like a sheep and let them do it!
“current peer reviewed EBM shows us it makes no difference to hospital admissions whatsoever.”
Do you have a reference? I thought you didn’t buy into the expert thing. Why would you need peer reviewed EBM anyway? Are the peers morons like you and Mercola? Or the ones in the next stall when you go to the loo?
OK, this Sarah has to be a troll. There is no way I can believe this person is being serious.
Sarah007 (just in case),
Logic stands on its own. It is not dependant on the topic at hand. You seem to have an unwillingness to admit that you are, indeed, a conspiracy loon. As such, you are using the same sort of anomaly hunting and broken logic that 9/11 truthers use. The effectiveness of vaccines overall, is well established. Flu’s are difficult to pin down because they are ever evolving and researches are forced to make certain educated guesses on what it will look like next year. Consequently, for seasonal flu, some years the flu shot if more effective than others. Again, if you understand logic, as you claim too, then just show us the goods. Your challenging the established reality with, what amounts to, some kind of ideological basis and you have yet to provide a single shred of compelling evidence to make your point. Your failure to do so clearly demonstrates that you are coming from a place of emotion and cognitive dissonance…..not logic, science, or anything approaching reality. At the end of the day, I don’t think you care about truth. To you it’s about standing your ground and deluding yourself into thinking that you and mercola know. You know what most don’t, you have special knowledge and the other sheeple just march to whatever drum beat is playing. It’s like mental masturbation for you people. Delusions of self-worth and intellect.
Hi weing “Do you have a reference?”
Yes it’s earlier in the post. There we are I am logical you are illogical and vise versa, are you reading from a hymn sheet or do you just go with the flow?
That means no, you don’t have one. I guess you were referring to the peers who come to your bar to use the loo.
Nice non sequitur ya got there.
I direct as much effort to responding as is warranted based on the quality of the argument.
The answers to your two questions are:
1. Yes. Every year. And I encourage others to do likewise.
2. It’s not a “scam,” except to antivaccine zealots and quacks.
Hi Weing, it was on the other post the EB for showing the flu vaccine is useless.
Effectiveness of vaccine against pandemic influenza A/H1N1 among people with underlying chronic diseases:
cohort study, Denmark, 2009-10 BMJ.
Hi David perhaps you need to come up to speed here with research, it will save you a lot of hassle and all that mercury is not good for you.
I can’t help but notice that the whackaloon keeps CLAIMING that there’s lots of evidence for her claims, but completely fails to provide it for any of the dubious claims.
Any bets that the claimed “evidence” is just Mercola.com links to various BS he’s made up out of thin air?
I get a spare minute to catch up on some SBM reading and another troll comes to replace Sid and Th1Th2? My, my.
Oh well, I got my chops dealing with those two so here is someone else for interested others to sharpen their teeth on.
The level of complete nuttery always makes me deeply question Poe status though. But thingy and Sid were consistent. Sarah seems to be as well… so far.
le sigh
I see that another resident of Htrae has come to endarken us.
Sarah007, you seem to think that one study that you agree with is enough to knock down all the rest that you don’t agree with. It doesn’t work that way. Especially since it was only one section of the population (chronically ill patients).
It would also help if you learned to cite properly.
I gave a list of things Mercola thinks cause autism, which one of those is the real reason?
Let’s also keep in mind that it’s neither controversial nor disputed that the influenza vaccine isn’t as effective as we’d like it to be.
Quite remarkable really, no wonder orthodox medicine is in the shit with this kind of debate going on. I mean what can’t you read about flu vaccine being ineffective, pandemic not happening!
So Nybgrus did you fall for the flu jab scam or did you leave it out. I can’t believe I have found so many of you all huddled together waiting for the next CDC output, all that EBC to catch up on its really funny.
So for the third time posting it, can you even dare to read it Chris and Ngborg?
Effectiveness of vaccine against pandemic influenza A/H1N1 among people with underlying chronic diseases:
cohort study, Denmark, 2009-10 BMJ.
And that the issues with the influenza vaccines do not also apply to other vaccines.
@ Sarah007
Everyone is ignoring it because it is clear, just from the title, that this study in no way demonstrates your conspiracy claim. How does a single study looking at a very specific subset of the population (those with underlying chronic diseases) in any way support your claim that vaccines are a scam? The fact that you take a study like this and what you take away from it is that vaccines are a scam is a clear demonstration of your ideological motivations, broken logic and general lack or real critical thinking. You want people to take you seriously, then how about some compelling evidence for the claim that your actually making?
In case anyone missed it on the other thread, I’ll repeat my comment here:
Sarah,
We are not ignoring your “evidence.” We read the study you cited. One study about one outcome of one flu vaccine in one select group of patients weighs practically nothing in the context of all the other published evidence. Part of the conclusions of that study even contradicts your beliefs: It didn’t significantly reduce hospitalizations, but “Among chronically ill people, this vaccine offered protection against laboratory confirmed H1N1 infection.”
We don’t give flu vaccines for the sole purpose of reducing hospitalizations in people with chronic disease. We give them to prevent suffering and in the hopes of reducing the spread of the disease.
I see we have attracted a Mercola Shill/Troll here.
Sarah 007: How would the extended period of time needed to actually manufacture each year’s seasonal flu vaccine, impact on the efficacy of a seasonal influenza vaccine?:
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/vaccination/virusqa.htm
How many children and adults worldwide, would have to die, before you and Mercola would give the WHO and the CDC your approval to start the manufacturing process for the seasonal flu vaccine of the H1N1 vaccine?
Isn’t it far better to do the research, manufacture, license and offer the H1N1 Flu vaccine to children and other vulnerable populations, using epidemiological data from Mexico where the H1N1 pandemic began? Or, would you rather we wait until the following seasonal flu season to incorporate that strain into seasonal flu vaccine? It seems to me that your hero Dr. Mercola knows nothing about immunology or antigenic shifts of the virus.
The tragedy is that Mercola has used the tragic deaths of children from H1N1 flu as more misinformation to impress his credulous sycophants and to sell his “brand”.
Harriet,
You beat me to it. 49% effectiveness in preventing the flu in this population. Not the greatest, but still effective. It looks like hospitalizations weren’t decreased significantly. Not surprisingly, Sarah007 doesn’t know how to read studies.
Oops; Brain fog…The sentence in my posting above should read:
How many children and adults worldwide, would have to die, before you and Mercola would give the WHO and the CDC your approval to start the manufacturing process for the seasonal flu vaccine OR the H1N1 vaccine?
Hi Harriet
So “hope” is now a medical term, I thought you had the science to back it up. You know I came here to see what happens if you point out the obvious, what I find is a hysterical non science response. The cochraine review of the flu jab looked at many of the claims made by advocates of the vaccine and found none of the claims could be supported. One claim made is that the flu vaccine halves winter deaths. It found that only 10% of winter deaths can be attributed to flu like illnesses so to halve winter deaths the vaccine would have to have an impact on road traffic accidents. Vaccinating helpers in old peoples homes protects old people, again no evidence of efficacy, the list is far longer than I can be bothered to type here. In fact the latter scotches the myth of herd immunity. The US has probably the highest vaccine compliance in the Western World but
It is disturbing that this site claims some kind of scientific basis for critique, polarising the vaccine issue into pro or anti means you are forced to support it even when the evidence does not exist, that is not scientific at all it is religious fervor.
Why does there need to be two studies saying the flu vaccine is bull? Again I don’t know anyone who has it and I don’t see flu kicking off unrestrained. As the national cold and flu unit found if you cannot make a cohort of volunteers ‘catch’ flu by spraying flu virus up their nose how the hell do you argue for it ‘going around’.
@sara007
I have been unable to find any citation of the claim that the CCU was unable to get more than 11% of subjects to react to having cold viruses sprayed up their nose.
I did find the following in an article on the development of cold vaccines British Medical Journal Vol 62 issue 1, pp 99-111. In the section discussing human parainfluenza viruses, specifically PIV3 one vaccine candidate was “was safe, immunogenic, and genetically stable in seronegative infants. However, only 11% of seropositive children developed a 4-fold increase in haemagglutinin titres and only 22% acquired nasal IgA antibodies.”
If this the source of your claim, it appears to have been rather broadly applied to a situation quite separate from the actual data.
The common cold unit was responsible for the isolation of several of the viruses responsible for colds and influenza. There’s the rub of the entire “cure for the common cold” as the concept is viewed by most of the public. The cold isn’t one thing, its simply a designation for a wide range illnesses caused by a large number of viruses. Viruses that have a habit of constant alteration and mutation. Each one has to be dealt with in turn and so must the changes in its descendants.
I’m not sure what you were trying say in your collection of quotes from a very short and imcomplete obituary.
lilady
Banana equals frog spawn. What kind of science is this then? What does the autism rate have to reach before the CDC and NIH admit there is a problem? How many people have to die from Vioxx a licensed RCT EBM drug before the FDA pull it, answer 160,000. That’s how many died before profits were overtaken by payouts.
Considering the flu vaccine has done nothing to prevent anything except good health the question you ask is complete bonkers.
So David have you added up the accumilation of mercury in your seasonal flu shots and worked out how toxic you must be, here is a list does any of it ring a bell? I will have a look and get back.
irritability
anxiety/nervousness, often with difficulty in breathing
restlessness
exaggerated response to stimulation
fearfulness
emotional instability
-lack of self control
-fits of anger, with violent, irrational behavior
loss of self confidence
indecision
shyness or timidity, being easily embarrassed
loss of memory
inability to concentrate
lethargy/drowsiness
insomnia
mental depression, despondency
withdrawal
suicidal tendencies
manic depression
numbness and tingling of hands, feet, fingers, toes, or lips
muscle weakness progressing to paralysis
ataxia
tremors/trembling of hands, feet, lips, eyelids or tongue
incoordination
myoneural transmission failure resembling Myasthenia Gravis
Given that there is no relation between the autism rate (which is, as far as we can tell, stable – as distinct from autism diagnosis rate), no rate of autism would lead to any admission of a problem related to vaccines. Evidence that there’s some relationship is what would be needed.
[citation needed] Most estimates are less than half that. Irrelevant to the point anyway.
Considering that even your own reference shows that it does prevent getting the flu with reasonable efficacy, you’re the one who is completely bonkers.
Doesn’t accumulate. It’s excreted quickly, and anyway dwarfed by other sources unless you don’t eat fish at all.
Sarah’s posts serve as a great example of Dunning-Kroger, but they are without any other merit and they are becoming quite tiresome.
“Why does there need to be two studies saying the flu vaccine is bull? Again I don’t know anyone who has it and I don’t see flu kicking off unrestrained.”
Don’t you worry your empty little head, dearie. Just wait around for the avian flu. It will come. Unfortunately.
It is fascinating to watch the contortions that folks like Sarah go through in order to not actually answer questions, and twist reality.
It seem that Sarah007 is in the minority here. Hardly surprising; she doesn’t have the critical thinking skills to differentiate between the advice and opinions of a quack and the real science as seen on the various NIH web sites.
Mercola has been promoting his pseudoscience for years. His AIDS denialism should have turned Sarah007 against him…but yet she hangs in, for his “valuable free advice” which is steeped in woo, about vaccines, about cancer and about diet and health.
Mercola is rolling in riches, thanks to the collective ignorance of his audience, who buy into his pseudoscience, his conspiracies, his quackery and his selling of potions, lotions, vitamins, supplements, “organic” food, cookware, bakeware, and tanning beds.
@ sarah007
You’re missing the fundamental point of both Dr. Gorski’s article and this entire website. For us to support a claim it must be grounded in evidence. In order to recognize the difference between evidence and baloney you need to have at least a basic understanding of how the scientific method works. In other words once you’re able to appreciate why physiology textbooks have a chapter on osmosis but not “chi” I’m confident you’ll be able to make a meaningful contribution to these discussions.
Like your comment Ladyboy, In the minority on a minor blog in nowhere land where a pile of anonymous saddos rant that no one is listening to them!
I’m quite proud of that. It is so funny that there is a very very little group of ‘people’ who believe in the NIH and the CDC and flu vaccine! How critical is that ladyboy?
I think what I have seen here is a lot of people very pissed that your opinions are not valid by others, well judged by your popularity. I mean who ever found anything interesting to read on WebMD! That’s like subscribing to ‘hernia monthly’ what kind of geekos/gorkos log in for a great read there?
Piles of ‘you’re all going to die’ or ‘weekly announcements of fake cancer cures’ someone needs to adjust your target boys because you’re about as scientific as the muppets. Bring on the frog.
At least we can all sleep safe in our beds knowing that dorks stupid enough to believe that a shot of jet trash and cellular detritis grown on a chickens egg and mixed with toxic waste will via their own population bias natural selection not be around long enough to make any impact. So get used to being small and ignored. I’m off to order some vitamin C from Mr Mercola.
Mercola’s 200,000-plus “likes” on Facebook are more than double the number for WebMD. And two of his eight books—2003’s The No-Grain Diet and 2006’s The Great Bird Flu Hoax—have landed on the New York Times bestseller list.
@sarah007,
“So get used to being small and ignored.”
We would LOVE to be ignored by you. Please, please, ignore us and go away!
“Mercola’s 200,000-plus “likes” on Facebook are more than double the number for WebMD. And two of his eight books—2003’s The No-Grain Diet and 2006’s The Great Bird Flu Hoax—have landed on the New York Times bestseller list.”
You tell em girl. Nothing is as good as the argument from popularity.
I can’t even follow this, WTH is sarah007 talking about?
Best I can tell it reads like a mish-mash of anti-vaccine talking points and AIDS-denial.
Yeah, no way Mercola is in it for the money (http://www.quackwatch.com/11Ind/mercola.html); check out his pad in Barrington.
@ Cowy 1: Thanks for the link to Quackwatch…which has been updated with additional information about “Health Liberty”, a coalition of crank pseudoscience organizations. Having worked in public health and actually investigated cases of listeriosis and other serious transmissible diseases caused by consuming unpasteurized milk and cheeses, I am especially concerned with the group he is funding that advocates consumption of unpasteurized milk:
http://www.cdc.gov/outbreaknet/references_resources/unpasteurized_milk.html
Yes, Mercola is the darling of his credulous simpleminded audience. To me, he is a public health menace.
Sarah007 is nothing more than a psychic vampire.
I don’t want to comment on any oft the previous postings, however there is indeed some important information missing in this discussion about influenza vaccination and its efficacy. Has anyone consulted the Cochrane Library regarding the efficacy of influenza vaccination, yet?
The study design used in Cochrane reviews, a systematic review of all relevant randomized controlled trials, is the highest level of evidence in Evidence Based Medicine (EBM)!
Recommended read:
Jefferson (2010) Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD001269.pub4/abstract
The authors of the systematic review entitled “Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults” conclude:
“The results of this review seem to discourage the utilization of vaccination against influenza in healthy adults as a routine public health measure.”
(…)
„Influenza vaccines have a modest effect in reducing influenza symptoms and working days lost. There is no evidence that they affect complications, such as pneumonia, or transmission.“ (– no herd immunity argument!!)
Finally there is a tiny but very important addendum („warning“) at the end of their review:
„This review includes 15 out of 36 trials funded by industry (four had no funding declaration). An earlier systematic review of 274 influenza vaccine studies published up to 2007 found industry funded studies were published in more prestigious journals and cited more than other studies independently from methodological quality and size. Studies funded from public sources were significantly less likely to report conclusions favorable to the vaccines. The review showed that reliable evidence on influenza vaccines is thin but there is evidence of widespread manipulation of conclusions and spurious notoriety of the studies. The content and conclusions of this review should be interpreted in light of this finding.“
Also interesting on the Cochrane Libraries Web site:
Jefferson et al. (2008) Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy children
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD004879.pub3/abstract
Authors’ conclusion:
(…)“It was surprising to find only one study of inactivated vaccine in children under two years, given current recommendations to vaccinate healthy children from six months old in the USA and Canada. If immunisation in children is to be recommended as a public health policy, large-scale studies assessing important outcomes and directly comparing vaccine types are urgently required.“
Jefferson et al. (2010) Vaccines for preventing influenza in the elderly
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD004876.pub3/abstract
Authors’ conclusion:
“The available evidence is of poor quality and provides no guidance regarding the safety, efficacy or effectiveness of influenza vaccines for people aged 65 years or older. To resolve the uncertainty, an adequately powered publicly-funded randomised, placebo-controlled trial run over several seasons should be undertaken.“
Being a healthcare worker I underwent vaccination every year as recommended by so called health authorities until 2010 and had at least one episode of (laboratory proven) influenza, which was very severe regarding symptoms and duration.
In light of the findings from the Cochrane Collaboration, I stopped this influenza vaccination hype. Read also: Thomas et al. (2010) Influenza vaccination for healthcare workers who work with the elderly. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD005187.pub3/abstract
However, not all vaccines are bad. Vaccination indeed has done a lot of good for humankind (eg. Hepatitis, Smallpox, Measles, Mumps, Rubella etc.).
/Martin
Skeptoscience is so weird. So it’s fiine for the NIH and CDC and all the peer reviewed medical journals including as many vaccine companies as one can list to con the whole world into buying into the woo of flu and when someone points this out to the only small corner of the world still hanging onto a medieval ‘medical practice’ all you can do is call me a vampire. Totally brilliant, I can see you all on the Titanic of vaccinology playing in the band telling everyone it’s fiine, you are all AAA star.
This is so much fun.
Brilliant Cowy now you’re inventing stuff from that polarisation crib sheet. Hey Harriet what do you do when people like me get bored with you, do you have mass crotch rub ins with pubmed?
Sarah, why should we care about your rude unsubstantiated opinions?
Now we are on a level playing field Chris.
So, if the playing field is level, then you would have answered my question. Which in the list of what Mercola claims causes autism is the actual cause? Support you answer with listing the title, journal and date of the paper you are using as evidence.
@Martin Grassberger,
“Has anyone consulted the Cochrane Library regarding the efficacy of influenza vaccination, yet?”
Yes, along with much more on the efficacy of vaccines: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/flu-vaccine-efficacy/
There are concerns about the elderly because they don’t respond as well to the vaccine; because of that, a high dose version is now offered to those over 65. No data yet as to how well that will work. See http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/high-dose-flu-vaccine-for-the-elderly/
Also no good data, but we have every reason to think that if enough people got the flu vaccine, the spread through the community would be decreased, thereby also protecting the elderly and those too young to have been vaccinated or those who refuse vaccination.
The flu vaccine is nowhere near as effective as we would wish, but the science-based answer is that the benefits outweigh the risks.
If you go to the original article in Chicago magazine and read the comments, you’ll find that they are overwhelmingly in support of Dr. Mercola, including many actual patients who credit him for changing their lives for the better after conventional medicine failed them.
In the words of Don King (of whom NO ONE had anything nice to say),
“It doesn’t matter what they say about you, as long as they use your name.”
Stanmrak:
An argument from popularity. So what?
Chris did you see the paper that compared symptoms listed on the autistic spectrum that had diagnostic value and the listed symptoms of mercury poisoning and that a direct comparison shows they are almost identical.
How is this dismissable when both listings are made by separate orgs.
For the record, there is very little overlap between the symptoms of mercury poisoning and autism. Feel free to look them up in any reliable source.
Yes, I did. It was a silly paper published in Medical Hypothesis written by people who don’t understand medicine and biology (like Blaxill). And since all pediatric vaccines are available in thimerosal free versions (including half of the influenza vaccine), it is a non-issue.
Now go look up what the word “hypothesis” means.
Answer my question. What on the Mercola’s list of things that cause autism is actually true? Provide the title, journal and date of the real papers to support your answer. Newsflash: it is not mercury, since its removal a decade ago did not change the numbers.
@sara007
I’ve noticed that you’ve failed to provide any actual citations for your claims on the only 11% virus transmission rate. You’ve also failed to support your other claims in regards to the CCU except by putting up semi random snips from an obituary. You’ve argued with vauge claims, insults, and appelas to popularity.
You may need to reconsider what “evidence” actually means.
I think though I’ve figured out your basic logic process here in this analogy.
The goverment has encouraged helmet use. But helmets have failed to prevent all head injuries. Therefore they are not a cure for impact tauma. Therefore helmets do nothing and are simple a lie peddled by the so called safety experts. I know people who haven’t had head injuries. Only sheep could think a helmet is needed to avoid head injuries.
Furthermore some helmets were made with metal. Bullets are made of metal and they do bad things to brains. So helmets must do bad things to brains.
I’ll go off and buy an orange, it will protect me.
@Sarah007
I’d very much like to discuss your ideas regarding health away from this blog.
Is there a way I can get in touch?
Aah the subtle removal of posts that show the grand bishop of septicism to be a fraud has begun. I can just imagine the crisis meetings that this has taken to show daddy that his minions are with the faith. Is there a relationship between the catholic denial of mercury/vacuumn and the septic denial of mercury/autism?
So I would like your comments on why you think the paper on this site that ‘attempts’ to refute the link between mercury and autism is anything more than ghost written tosh.
This article that attempts to disrupt the relationship between autism and mercury poisoning is nonsense. It is full of “may be” statements. Have you ever met an autistic person who can’t speak, the person who wrote this tosh obviously hasn’t. It is a stunning piece of tabloid dissing, so someone who at post mortem has elevated levels of mercury in the brain can’t be interviewed about their lifetime depression. If that’s evidence then you’re having a laff mate/
“In relatively mild mercurism in persons without characteristic motor or sensory changes, psychiatric symptomatology may be absent, and if present is nonspecific, with findings such as depression, anxiety, and irritability.18–20 There may be impairment of recent memory. Even for individuals with known elevated postmortem levels of mercury in brain, it may be impossible to conclude whether the nonspecific psychiatric findings they demonstrated in life were the result of mercury toxicity.21″
This is even more bonkers, so let’s assume it’s true that mercury causes autism what else could do this, an increase in industrialisation, that’s brilliant but hang on we would all be affected by that and I just don’t see loads of dribbling adults in town with ataxia.
“If, for the sake of discussion, we assume there was a true increase in the occurrence of autism in the 1990s, is exposure to thimerosal the only or the best hypothesis to explain the increase? There have been many changes in life in industrialized countries during the last decades, including changes in many environmental exposures and aspects of medical care that could be considered for their biological plausibility as contributors to autism occurrence or severity.”
This is fantastic, little is known about the impact of Thimerosol (ethyl mercury) so it can’t be a problem!
“A substantial literature describes the neurotoxicity of methyl mercury but relatively little is known about the impact of ethyl mercury on the nervous system, especially with repeated low-dose exposure.”
It must be safe we have no idea what it does, how’s that for septic science!
I can’t be bothered to read any more, it’s total bull, if this is the case for the defence you’re sacked mate.
Hi Conner, thanks for the vote of support but meeting on a floating turd isn’t really the best of places to start other discussions! It would seem that the only point on this site is a non scientific duality perspective, you’re either with it or against.
This has nothing to do with science, it’s about marketing. I am sure some are well intentioned and sincere here but the limited viewpoint is somewhat stiffling. Peer review is about reverting to mean, consensus all the non scientific flat earth stuff that keeps mythology alive and kicking. Add in a few very rich celebs, some politicians and a bit of media and it becomes orthodox.
The papers put up to ‘proove’ points are so full of holes, I suggest you read them and take them to bits and invite as many of your friends as possible to post on as many threads as possible so they have to stay up all night editing it all out! Bit of a drag but someones got to do it and the more the merrier.
Harriet, if you were a scientist you woud be looking for evidence for the discussion on flu vaccine not just efficacy evidence. It shows that you are only interested in proving it works. What exactly is scientific about you? I don’t have to be a murderer to know that it is wrong, any more than I need a degree to tell you that the evidence you are presenting is flawed, corrupt and population biased.
Kids are not getting healthier, nor is society so ‘proper doctors’ are failing to safegaurd anything but their nice cars and pensions.
So if their are no long term studies on the toxicity of ethyl mercury it doesnt mean it’s safe. How on earth do you expect me to take this as some kind of ‘it’s ok fact?’
Sarah007 – you should read The Great Influenza by John M. Barry. You may then realize why infectious disease specialists were so concerned about the appearance of H1N1 as a pandemic influenza strain that year.
Population health is of necessity population based. In time perhaps we will be able to exactly match genetics, epigenetics and current physiology to exact disease strains circulating at the time. Until then however, vaccinations are immensely helpful.
Kids are in fact getting much healthier, particularly since the advent of vaccination. Witness for instance, the precipitous drops in birth rates since more children survive to adulthood, as well as the incredible increases in lifespan over the past century. Claiming kids aren’t getting healthier is just bizarre; the sole exception would be increases in type II diabetes and obesity, and the recommendations from all mainstream medical organizations is the same – eat less, higher quality food and get more exercise. Surely you can’t be blaming doctors for the exercise and eating habits of their patients? A doctor can only recommend exercise, they can’t chase children around with a gun until they lose a pound or two.
Sarah007:
Citation needed.
I’m a noob poster here Sarah007, but I’ve been a lurker for some time. Anyway…
I’ve been following this particular discussion with some interest, and I’ve been impressed with your well-articulated rebuttals of the numerous hostile critiques directed at you. I’m guessing you’ve done a lot of your own research on immunology—or influenza in particular—as you’ve raised several pertinent questions in my mind.
Personally, I have no medical training whatsoever, and rely solely on the opinions and/or directives of others (hopefully!) competent in that field. But I can say that, contrary to my own GP’s advice, I’ve always refused to have the annual winter ‘flu shots (which were introduced in Australia in the late 60s).
More importantly, I’ve never had the ‘flu during that 40-year period. Which means that I’m yet to be entirely convinced by the overarching acceptance and/or efficacy of annual ‘flu vaccinations (which issue has generated heated debate every one of those years). Please note that I’m only commenting solely from the viewpoint of the rights of each individual as to whether they have the shots or not; I’m not referring to pandemic/epidemic prevention.
I’m also assuming that you have professional expertise in the fields of immunology or microbiology or some similar field. Could you kindly let me know what your academic accreditations are?
—Thanks, Geoff.
That image actually made this thread worthwhile. I salute you, sir!
“I don’t have to be a murderer to know that it [vaccination] is wrong.”
No, Sarah, you just have to be a Dunning-Kruger.
ausGeoff, how do you know you didn’t get the flu? Did you have a daily or weekly nasal swab to confirm infection? Or antibody titres to confirm immune response? Or some other way of confirming asymptomatic infection?
On a related note, are you familiar with both the term and specific case of Typhoid Mary?
@ausGeoff,
You would be better off discussing your questions with your own GP. Pay him for his time, though. Since we know it is not 100% effective, what would convince you of the efficacy of the flu vaccine? How would you go about checking out whether it is effective or not?
@ausGeoff,
“I’ve never had the ‘flu during that 40-year period.”
I’ve never had an automobile accident. Should I stop wearing my seatbelt?
I’ve never had a house fire. Should I drop my homeowner’s insurance?
Sorry William if you studied the papers of the time nothing was isolated as causative of pandemic flu and mass aspirin poisoning was the culprit. There have been many attempts to rewrite history and Barry is a very dull attempt. Considering all if the current virologists were anything to base facts upon the whole lot should be lined up and made to take the medicine. The whole thing is a pile of bullshit and to call vaccination ‘science’ is a disgrace.
Ausgeoff
Look at the national cold and flu unit England, it was unable to prove the contagen theory of flu with 40 years of spraying this virus stuff up volunteer’s noses. It was connected to Porton Down the medical warfare establishment.
I have seen a funny advert on British TV of a guy sneezing on a bus and lots of furry bugs flying around, this should be referred to the advertising standards, it’s bull.
Typhoid Mary, what an ass of a story that is. When they started swabbing for typhoid everyone had it so then they decided that if you had your gall bladder out you could be let out of prison (they imprisoned anyone who was deemed a carrier with no clinical symptoms). Mary refused to have her gall bladder out so I think she died in prison!
Another triumph for medical bullshit and legislation.
ausGeoff, do you know which on the list of things that Mercola thinks are causes of autism are really the cause? Since pediatric vaccines have been thimerosal free for a decade and autism has not gone away, we can scratch that off the list.
So, do please tell me which in that list is the real reason, with supporting scientific documentation.
So if Harriet can’t think independantly should she stop thinking?
Chris the article on mercury states quite clearly that ethyl mercury has no long term toxicity studies so what is an unproven ingredient doing in a vaccine and what evidence do you have that it has been taken out of multivial pediatric vaccines?
William my cat has antibody titres to all the so called infectious feline diseases and has never had a vaccine how do you account for that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic
I don’t often quote wiki because it has been taken over by systems geeks but the graphs are still there it’s their interpretation that is fantasy.
If you look at the w shaped graph of mortality you will see that the age of maximum mortality was young men between 17 and 34. Modern myth spreaders say this is because the ‘virus’ only attacked the fittest and turned their immune systems in on themselves. They use the Nova Scotia study which dug up permafrosted victims and ‘recreated the virus’ and then injected it into monkey brains which stuffed their immunes systems as justification for this Hans Christian Anderson account.
Many things wrong with this modelling, you can’t do histology on a corpse it’s all jet trash, ‘recreating virus’ is out of Jurassic park and even if it was true, and it isnt, there was no control. If they had taken cellular detritus from a non victim and injected it into monkey brains and shown no effect by comparison they might be able to prove something but they didn’t.
Contagen mythology doesn’t tell us that we ‘catch’ flu from a brain injection so the route of transmission had nothing to do with their own theory, when you consider that childs spit injected into an adult can kill it from immune responses to foreign proteins one wonders how on earth anyone with a scientific mind got it together to even attempt to publish this crap.
“Aspirin misuse may have made 1918 flu pandemic worse
October 2, 2009
The devastation of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic is well known, but a new article suggests a surprising factor in the high death toll: the misuse of aspirin. Appearing in the November 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases and available online now, the article sounds a cautionary note as present day concerns about the novel H1N1 virus run high.
High aspirin dosing levels used to treat patients during the 1918-1919 pandemic are now known to cause, in some cases, toxicity and a dangerous build up of fluid in the lungs, which may have contributed to the incidence and severity of symptoms, bacterial infections, and mortality. Additionally, autopsy reports from 1918 are consistent with what we know today about the dangers of aspirin toxicity, as well as the expected viral causes of death.
The motivation behind the improper use of aspirin is a cautionary tale, said author Karen Starko, MD. In 1918, physicians did not fully understand either the dosing or pharmacology of aspirin, yet they were willing to recommend it. Its use was promoted by the drug industry, endorsed by doctors wanting to “do something,” and accepted by families and institutions desperate for hope. ”
On a final note on this the newspapers of the time were full of accounts of osteopaths having a .25% mortality rate over the massively higher ones in medical hospitals that used between 5 and 35grams of aspirin the first drug to be licensed to Bayer. MDs were calling for more osteopaths who left the fever high, didnt use aspirin, fasted the patients and gave an enema when constipated. They called it 3 or 4 day flu and most recovered. The new NICE guidelines on fever do not recommend reducing fever now but most doctors have no idea why and usually ignore this.
Postmen at the time noticed that all the patients who ordered aspirin were dead by the following day and those who ordered homeopathic remedies survived, which is interesting and likely to get me banned from posting here or suspended if Daddy gets to hear of it.
The recent ‘pandemic saga’ probably had a negligable mortality rate because most people ignored CDC and NIH advice to get a vaccine or take antivirals so really the moral of this tale is to totally ignore any government or centralised advice on any health matter and do the opposite!
For anyone who is reading these comments, Sarah is a germ theory denialist. Every one of sarah’s arguments can be easily demolished, but it would be time-consuming and wouldn’t change her mind. If any reader thinks Sarah has a single valid point, please let us know and we will explain why she is wrong.
Sarah:
What article are you talking about? There is more than one under discussion.
My evidence is here, and in the following Autism/Mercury Yahoo message by Sallie Bernard requesting “old DTaP” vaccines with thimerosal in 2001, which means you really should get over it:
# Subject: Thimerosal DTaP Needed
# From: Sally Bernard
# Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 00:01:50 -0400
# Yahoo! Message Number: 27456
http://onibasu.com/archives/am/27456.html
Hi all:
A group of university-based researchers needs several vials of the older DTaP vaccine formulations which contained thimerosal for a legitimate research study. If anyone knows an MD who might have some of these vaccines or knows where to get them, please email me privately.
Thank you.
Sallie Bernard
Executive Director
Safe Minds
“William my cat has antibody titres to all the so called infectious feline diseases and has never had a vaccine how do you account for that?”
How do I account for that? Simple. You are lying. Show us the lab report of all those titres.
Hat off to Sarah! Great job taking on all these “science” fanatics! So much so in their fanatic adulation of science that they tend to sweep away the hard evidence of a diseased world, in favour of lab results and paper theories. Yep, the germ theory’s brought us into this “enlightened” antibiotics era, where we’re all in fear of germs and each other, fighting adversaries all the time. Long live the terrain theory!!!
It is time that the paradigm changes, and it already started.
Weing, wong again. Many people who are not vaccinating animals are obtaining these certs, you obviously live in the dark ages of provaxx. It is nice to know that you actually have no idea what these antibody markers mean. It is well known that if you take a cat or dog to lots of shows prior to the test the levels wil be high. If you then take the same animal to no shows, ie no interaction there will be low titres.
What this means is that a healthy animal has a natural immunity that is infinitely adaptable whereas a vaccinated animal has a disabled system unable to adapt and more likely to move toward atopy.
Love your scientific enquiry too, also I have never wormed my cat and she has no parasites in her gut either, how do you account for that.
See the septic scientist doesnt even have the facility to ask questions, you vomit out ‘liar’ because what I am saying challenges what you believe to be true.
That aint scientific thinking mate.
So what you are saying is that you are, in fact, a liar. You do not have any lab report of your cat’s titres to support your claim. You just have wishful thinking, which you call scientific, to support your claim. So, you are not only lying to us, you are also lying to yourself. You are also asking us, and anyone else reading this, to believe a liar. No thank you.
Tissue samples preserved from the 1918 pandemic were analyzed and the specific strain identified:
http://www.pnas.org/content/96/4/1651.full
Are you saying papers from 1918, before the world even knew what a virus was, are a more reliable source of information than a study from 1999?
Typhoid Mary died in isolation, not prison, as she was an asymptomatic carrier of a bacterial infection for which there was at that time no cure.
How much did it cost to have your vet run all those titres? Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to simply have your cat vaccinated?
As for accounting for titres, antibodies can develop in response to a vaccine or wild-type infection. The whole purpose of vaccination is to cause the immune system to develop antibodies to a relatively safe antigen (safe because it’s either killed or attenuated) so when you are exposed to the living infectious agent your body’s subsequent reaction is both faster and stronger. The immune response is the same, irrespective the source of exposure – it’s just a lot less dangerous to get vaccinated than to risk wild-type infection. Polio vaccine side effects – sore arm. Wild-type infection – general paralysis, iron lung, permanent disfiguration and muscle wasting of the limbs.
Symptoms of aspirin overdose – ulcers, tinnitus. Appearance of Reye’s syndrome – primarily in children. Risk of death due to acute aspirin overdose – 1% at a dose of 500mg/kg – for a 175 pound man (80kg) that’s 40 grams of aspirin, basically an entire bottle. Majority of deaths due to influenza, fall/winter 1918 – healthy adult males.
I wasn’t aware newspapers were reliable sources of medical information. I was under the impression that they generally reported controversies and uncertainties. Incidentally, if osteopathy is so effective, why is the discipline’s current curriculum so close to that of conventional physicians, including the prescription of drugs?
If a healthy animal has “infinite immunity”, does that mean no animal in the wild ever dies of infectious disease? If that’s the case, it’s curious why everyone is so worried about rabies.
Also curious is why human life expectancy increased so quickly when vaccination was introduced, and why smallpox doesn’t exist anymore.
How do you know your cat doesn’t have any gut parasites?
@Harriet Hall, regarding germ theory denialism.
A little googling seems to indicate that mistakenly believing you can substitute titer testing for vaccinations in kitties is not uncommon in cat fancier circles. Perhaps an article by the resident Science Based Vet on the topic could be informative.
(formerly M in M)
@mousethatroared:
Love the new name, BTW. I was quite disappointed recently to fail to lay my hands on the entire series.
I have 2 Lab certificates that show full titre coverage for the main cat ‘infectious diseases’, and another one that shows no egg infestations for the commonest gut parasites cost about £40 each to have done.
Why the hell would your offer of the cheaper option of vaccination be relevent?
If you want to do a piece on the animal vaccination saga make sure you cover the complete revolt in not vaccinating due to the increase in auto immune diseases in vaccinated animals, correlates with what we are seeing in human populations.
It’s laughable watching you guys scream ‘heretic’ this septic science would be an interesting theme for a remake of the Salam witch trials.
Hey William the basis for modern germ theory is older than that so I think you should apply that logic to your hero that wanker Pasteur.
Oh on aspirin overdose you forgot haematemesis, hyperpyrexia, hypoglycaemia, hypokalaemia, thrombocytopaenia, increased INR/PTR, intravascular coagulation, renal failure and non-cardiac pulmonary oedema.
Why did you leave these out, looks like you’ve got Roche syndrome, if the data doesn’t fit the septisism leave it out!
As to life expectancy and vaccination you have obviously used the ‘notification’ graphs rather than the more reliable coronor’s graphs that certainly don’t reflect the magic of vaccination William, tut tut, more Roche syndrome there mate.
Wong if I thought you were a decent honerable person genuinly interested in science I would send you both of them now. As to much, so far you have shown that you are a bigoted twat and therefore do not qualify for full disclosure, sorry.
It is quite amazing that this site has removed whole posts of mine and then started critiqing sic them in their abscence, this is so like peer reviewing I must say it is an insight into your bizarre world and anyone watching it must be finding it rather revealing.
So resident vet here is the study that they can’t do in humans
A team at Purdue University School of Veterinary Medicine conducted several studies to determine if vaccines can cause changes in the immune system of dogs that might lead to life-threatening immune-mediated diseases. They obviously conducted this research because concern already existed. It was sponsored by the Haywood Foundation which itself was looking for evidence that such changes in the human immune system might also be vaccine induced. It found the evidence.
The vaccinated, but not the non-vaccinated, dogs in the Purdue studies developed autoantibodies to many of their own biochemicals, including fibronectin, laminin, DNA, albumin, cytochrome C, cardiolipin and collagen.
This means that the vaccinated dogs — ”but not the non-vaccinated dogs”– were attacking their own fibronectin, which is involved in tissue repair, cell multiplication and growth, and differentiation between tissues and organs in a living organism.
The vaccinated Purdue dogs also developed autoantibodies to laminin, which is involved in many cellular activities including the adhesion, spreading, differentiation, proliferation and movement of cells. Vaccines thus appear to be capable of removing the natural intelligence of cells.
Autoantibodies to cardiolipin are frequently found in patients with the serious disease systemic lupus erythematosus and also in individuals with other autoimmune diseases. The presence of elevated anti-cardiolipin antibodies is significantly associated with clots within the heart or blood vessels, in poor blood clotting, haemorrhage, bleeding into the skin, foetal loss and neurological conditions.
The Purdue studies also found that vaccinated dogs were developing autoantibodies to their own collagen. About one quarter of all the protein in the body is collagen. Collagen provides structure to our bodies, protecting and supporting the softer tissues and connecting them with the skeleton. It is no wonder that Canine Health Concern’s 1997 study of 4,000 dogs showed a high number of dogs developing mobility problems shortly after they were vaccinated.
Dogs commonly develop cancer at the site of the vaccination so the American vet association issued guidelines on vaccinating in the tail or leg so that when it happened you could amputate. How’s that for advice?
@ Scott, Thanks, I’m afraid it makes me look like more of an enthusiast than I am. I haven’t seen the movie since I was a kid, but the title stuck with me. The name is actually a reference to my mouse (wild- rescued from my cat and raised from a pup) who looks like she’s roaring when she yawns. So I will, sadly, be oblivious to any movie or book references you throw my way.
So it’s not all diseases but some. That still makes your prior claim a lie. Post the actual titers and the name of the lab.
Also, who’s wong? Looks like you guys have a crazy cat lady on your hands.
Sarah007:
Why are you lying?
Dr. Gorski does not by habit remove posts, nor restricts discussion on this blog. One reason is to let you hang on your own words. Now if you had included a certain number of web links it may have gone into moderation, something that happens to all of us. You are welcome to re-post your missing comments, though I would suggest waiting a while to see if they come out of moderation.
As for the rest of your comment: citation needed.
What proof do you have that autoimmunity is increasing in pets? How did you gather the data?
Perhaps my math is off, but in order for 20 million people to die of aspirin overdoses, given a lethality rate of 5%, which is I think generous, you’d need something like 400,000,000 people across the world to take on average 40 grams of aspirin each. But mostly healthy men, and very few children or the elderly. That’s 40 grams of aspirin, with each individual pill containing many times that amount in filler. So imagine taking, let’s roughly guess, 400,000,000 people across the planet taking 100 of those 1 gram vitamin C pills enough for 5% of them to get a lethal dose. On the other hand, it would quite handily explain why Reye’s syndrome is so rare, because that would exert significant selection pressure against anyone with a predisposition to it.
Could you provide the citation to your Purdue study please? Why do you believe the Purdue study, but not the massive convergence of evidence that influenza is actually a very dangerous condition that can be prevented by vaccination with a well-matched antigen? What contrary evidence would you accept as proof that you may be wrong about some of your beliefs? If you don’t believe there is any evidence sufficiently convincing to make you ever change your mind, then you’re not doing science.
I also find it amusing that you’ve responded to my polite requests and questions with the term “bigoted twat”.
mousethatroared:
Excellent idea.
When I mentioned that my teenagers all received the Tdap, someone told me I should have had their titers measured before giving them the vaccine. They seemed to think that before any booster the titers should be taken. I asked him to tell me why getting expensive blood tests was preferable to just getting a simple vaccine. Especially since my kid with the very severe genetic heard condition (one that may require open heart surgery soon) would have perished if he had had pertussis. I never received an answer.
I also love the new ‘nym and reason behind it. Hubby and I remembered enjoying the movie in our youth, but when we saw it again a few years later it had not aged well. Le sigh.
WLU:
On the other thread I asked her why insults and name calling (she seems to have a problem remembering Dr. Crislip’s name) were a valid form of evidence. She has not answered that particular question.
Not content to attack SBM for humans…Sarah now attacks SBM for dogs!
http://www.dogsadversereactions.com/scienceVaccineDamage.html
Sarah and the other other cranks on the internet have drawn the illogical conclusion that the author of the linked article, who is not a veterinarian and who has cherry-picked studies from Purdue Veterinary College and is a doggy world anti-vaxer, has hit upon research that is applicable to human vaccines and human SBM.
I am not a veterinary expert, but I love animals. I think someone ought to speak up for dogs and for Sarah’s cat William.
I also think that Sarah should still to human SBM…when she is posting on this blog.
lilady you are proving to be a good internets detective. It is getting kind of scary. But in a good way!
@ Chris: I “manage”…for the sake of human SBM. And, I have finally figured out “linking”. My burgeoning talents disprove the idiom “You can’t teach and old dog new tricks”.
Bah, humbug. You are young in spirit!
And, wow! You have lots of spirit!
AHH, decorum in the chapel. Praise the lord EBM
So if animal research is ok for testing the usefullness of drugs why is it suddenly not good enough to show how poisonous vaccines are. Well that’s easy, if I am a provaxxer all vaccines work and are valid, if dog experiments show they actually precipitate auto immune pathways then the experiment must be wrong.
Brilliant!
Treble EBM’s all round
Animal research is used to tentatively demonstrate safety, pharmacokinetics and efficacy. Dogs and humans are very, very different. For example, humans have a long, convoluted, relatively low-acid environment suited to digesting meat, fruits and vegetables. Dogs have the short, high-acid GI tract of carnivores and scavengers. In GI tract alone, making a leap from dog to human is illogical. Dogs also sweat through their tongues, humans through their skin, which if nothing else has implications for possible excretion routes for drugs or other compounds. If dog experiments show that vaccines are harmful to dogs, that is suggestive of their effects in humans. There’s a reason all drugs must be demonstrated in two animal models before being tested on humans – it’s hoped that the differences in physiology will “average out” and we get a better sense of the potential drug’s efficacy and adverse effects.
No drugs or vaccines are given first to animals then directly sold to humans, there are several stages of safety and efficacy testing in between.
No doctor believes a priori all vaccines work; vaccines are swapped out or outright withdrawn if evidence of safety or efficacy are lacking – such as when the decision was made to use the killed Sabin vaccine instead of the live attenuated Salk vaccine for polio due to wild-type regression. Or when the extremely effective whole-cell pertussis vaccine was withdrawn in favour of the acellular type due to possible gastrointestinal effects and fever. You can continue attacking straw men, it’s a welcome chance to educate any other readers on how science is actually done rather than how you (or they) might think it is done.
Nah nah nah, you’ve got this all wrong. Dogs have a long snouty nose and usually fur, unless you want to get complicated and include the hairless varieties. Humans have short noses and only hair on the rude bits and the head, considered rude in some religious situations so covering sorts that.
Oh and the idea that you can stimulate an immune system out of its homeostatic mechanism and order it to do something else comes at a price. It’s the single issue factor of how this perverts the immuno system that is conveniently not studied. Science and medical science are not compatable, the latter has more in common with PR so cannot be relied upon to produce a lineage of honesty, it’s too open to population bias at every level of validation and by the time it is approved it’s too late.
Again like Harriet you use the term ‘hope’, are you sure this is not a major tenet of this medical science? Nice admission on withdrawl of ineffective vaccines, but surely they got licensure because they worked or were they only withdrawn once the profits got dented by claims for fall out or hidden data side effects. You seem to not be aware that parents are not going to accept this guinea pigging anymore, if they are safe why not test them on doctors and nurses. Mind you those in New York last year got a court injunction to stop them having to have mandatory flu vaccines to keep their jobs so how’s that for a belief system collapse.
Nice try, your serve.
Well there you go, all posting being moderated and deleted so EBM wins again, didn’t your nan tell you that cheating at cards is naughty?
Can you support that in any way, because your personal opinion isn’t particularly convincing. Also, that’s not how the acquired immune system works. Our immune system is continuously being challenged by pathogens, and continuously fights them off (or we die). You don’t appear to understand how acquired immunity works. Briefly, the first time an antigen is presented to the immune system, the response is sluggish and weak but the immune system remembers the antigen. Subsequent exposures result in a much faster and stronger response, to the order of several hundred times. That’s why generally you can’t get the same disease twice (one exception is influenza, which because of how quickly the hemagglutinin and neuraminidase proteins on the viral coat change and evolve – it’s the same virus but the expression of the two key proteins are so different it’s as if the immune system has never been exposed before). It doesn’t matter how your immune system encounters the antigen; wild-type infection and vaccination both work. The difference is, vaccine antigens are non-infectious; they either don’t replicate (killed type) or don’t cause significant symptoms (live attenuated, the pathogen has been passed through multiple nonhuman vectors). Therefore, vaccination is much, much safer than wild-type exposure as it essentially can’t (in most cases) cause the disease.
No, science is an empirical methodology that is used in medicine to ensure good results and reliable knowledge. Though drug companies do indeed make a profit, and it’s widely recognized that they do attempt (with some success) to influence prescribing habits, they are not all-powerful. Individual consumers are still responsible for much of their health through lifestyle habits, and the scientific community is both aware, and quite critical of the influence of pharmaceutical firms.
I think you mean “publication bias” by the way. I’ve never heard of “population bias”.
Also, do you realize that pharmaceutical firms would actually make more money if they didn’t produce vaccines? Treatment is far more expensive than prevention.
My specific comment is that it is hoped that using two animal models would be more informative than a single one. However, as you still are apparently ignorant of how drugs are released, I’ll repeat – animal studies are only the first steps in producing a new medication and the remaining steps involve human trials.
Any doctor will tell you that vaccines have been withdrawn. It’s hardly a secret, it’s part of evidence-based decision-making, the so-called phase-IV trial, postmarketing surveillance. It’s an enormous strength of science in general since it changes its mind in the face of new evidence. “Science” is a process, not a body of knowledge. Vaccines have also been repackaged and improved, such as combining multiple vaccines into a single dose.
Sounds like doctors and nurses have, like so many Americans, drunk deeply of the general trend of conspiracy theories that so infect the culture – beliefs like Birtherism, 9/11 conspiracies, moon landings and intelligent design. I consider it evidence of the declining standards of American education and critical thinking as well as evidence of an empire in decline (which is sad, because in principle the great American experiment is both unprecedented and incredible). I do take hope however, those who avoid vaccination are more likely to become sick due to the pathogen the vaccine prevents. Over a long enough timespan, there should be a genuine evolutionary trend to stupid people dying out.
But I’ve seen your nub point before – conspiracy theories are simple and have definite heroes and villains. As story-telling apes, we’re deeply interested in compelling narratives where roles are acted out. It’s one of the inborn tendencies of humans to lie to themselves and simplify the complicated. The uninformed and ignorant, and those with an exaggerated opinions of their own competence (see the Dunning–Kruger effect), are far more vulnerable because they simply don’t realize just how damned convoluted reality actually is. I have sympathy for your position, the world is confusing, but learning about it in real books rather than the echo chamber of CAM germ denialism will lead you to making better decisions. Or, remain ignorant, that’s your choice to.
In the immune response the percentage of ‘aquired immunity’ is about 2%. The other 98% of our reaction to any ‘disease process’ is non specific. That is fever, Diahorreah, vomiting, sweating.
So William what is the point in claiming that the risk of serious systemic health problems is worth the 2% that is ‘claimed’ by vaccine supporters to be saving lives, there is no EBM for any vaccine efficacy claims it’s tiddly boo science.
Where have I denied germs? Of course there are germs, it’s what they do and why they are there that is the point of contention. Anti biotics have made them stronger, no one denys that. But if I have not taken any medication for 30 years or so why don’t I have the infections that others have?
By the way both threads are becoming swiss cheese with regard to re editing, moderation and whatever the medical peer review process is. Quite nice to think I am that important you have to do this!
William said: “I do take hope however, those who avoid vaccination are more likely to become sick due to the pathogen the vaccine prevents. Over a long enough timespan, there should be a genuine evolutionary trend to stupid people dying out.”
This is a remarkable statement William. Considering most people do seem to vaccinate I see little evidence that society is healthier, when I was at school 1 kid had an asthma inhailer, no one had nut allergy and no one had an epipen. Now classrooms are full of sick kids and shoe boxes full of inhailers.
germ denialism
I don’t know where you get the idea I am a germ denialist. The idea that you can ‘prevent pathogens’ with vaccines is germ theory fantasy.
Your simplified idea of health being based upon killing pathogens is very sad William, most doctors don’t even know what a balanced diet is, they are so concerned with palliating symptoms it never occurs to them that each time they do it they add to the load and start the road to chronic ill health.
In America there are 2 million people over 40 stone in weight, every programme I have seen on this the doctors talk about it being a surgical issue, they have no idea what to do about it and talk about it as if we need sexy gene therapy to fix it. They have no idea of the complexity of the disease process, it is they who reduce the body to a sum of specialist fields and attempt to reassemble it. Sorry but you don’t really know what an alternative is, the song sheet of Septicism is out of date.
Again you end with a duality, for or against. These devil/god ideas you have don’t have a basis in reality it is much more complicated than that.
@ WilliamLawrenceUtridge: IIRC, a vaccine which was withdrawn 12 years ago was Rotashield. It was tested during the pre-marketing/licensing period and found to be safe and effective to decrease the incidence of hospitalizations of young infants, due to infections caused by rotavirus.
After Rotashield was licensed and given to infants to prevent this serious diarrheal illness, August 1998, a slight uptick in the incidence of intussusception were reported; here is the results of the post licensing investigations and the removal of the Rotashield vaccine from the market:
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/rotavirus/vac-rotashield-historical.htm
I suggest that Sarah read the entire link to find that post-licensing surveillance really does work. The vaccine was removed after 13 months (October, 1999). Sarah should also read through about the “background” incidence of intussusception in infancy versus the slight increase during the time the vaccine was licensed.
Here is the FDA site about the Rotateq Vaccine, presently in use, that describes the dramatic decrease in hospitalizations for infants (estimated decreased 200,000 hospitalizations/year in the USA), since the licensing and widespread use of this vaccine:
http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/QuestionsaboutVaccines/ucm100242.htm
“By the way both threads are becoming swiss cheese with regard to re editing, moderation and whatever the medical peer review process is. Quite nice to think I am that important you have to do this!”
This is the Dunning-Kruger effect, carried to the extreme, that Sarah refers to.
Thanks for playing Dunning-Kruger Bingo, Sarah. You can collect your prize at the door, on the way out.
@sarah, please go ahead and look up death rates and annual mortality from Smallpox, and look at the benefit we have as humans from eradicating it from the planet. If we ranked human achievement of the last 150,000 years, vaccinations would probably be the absolute greatest thing we’ve done.
Looks like Septikalhealth is still in the land of notification graphs rather than actual cause graphs. Jenner said after years of smearing pus taken from children he hauled around riddled with small pox as living petridishes,
“My suppositions were based on a fallacy, there is more disease than there was”
You can live in fairy comfort land if you want but a lot of people are still finding the honest historical disaster of vaccination and as hard as you try it isn’t going to go away. You may sincerely believe that vaccination has saved the world, but you are unfortunately very wrong.
There we go, the germ theory of disease debunked by a single quote. You’ve sold me. Thank you Sarah.
Those are symptoms of acute infection while the infectious pathogen is still actively replicating and being fought off by the body. Fever raises the body temperature, which reduces the replication rates of bacteria and inceases the metabolic activity of certain immune cells. Diarrhea and vomiting are attempts to remove ingested pathogens from the GI tract. They have nothing to do with acquired immunity. One of vaccination’s benefits is you get to avoid symptoms like these, since acquired immunity means these bacterial and viral invaders are neutralized before your body needs to respond to infection.
Well, you have yet to demonstrate vaccination results in systemic health problems, though you personally seem quite convinced it does. Successful vaccination generally results in 100% protection against the pathogen, though vaccination is not always successful. That’s why you get two, or sometimes three shots of the same vaccine as boosters. The point of getting vaccination is to avoid these symptoms, which can be life threatening. Mild fever is better than severe, brain-boiling fever; a baby with a sore arm is better than a baby losing so many electrolytes from diarrhea and vomiting that their central nervous system shuts down.
Antibiotics do not “make germs stronger”. Improper use of antibiotics makes germs specifically more resistant to those specific antibiotics. It’s not like bacteria are “stronger” because of antibiotics, it just means our number of treatment options are severely reduced.
As for why you don’t have any infections, chances are you are probably in good health due to a good diet and regular exercise (as recommended by every doctor on the planet). But you may have sub-clinical infections. You could be lying. You could discount symptoms as not being caused by infections. You may not be exposed to serious pathogens as a result of significant public health measures taken over the past century (clean drinking water, vaccination, isolation of infectious patients, effective treatments for diseases). You could be a healthy adult due to significant exposure to minor infections as a child. All the serious diseases, polio, smallpox, bacterial meningitis, measles, tetanus, rabies, they are all significantly reduced due to major public health efforts over the past century, including vaccination.
Sure, that’s a possible side effect of society’s unwarranted obsession with cleanliness (there’s no real need for a sterile environment beyond surgery, yet Lysol still sells very well – it’s dumb). But how many parents have lost a child due to polio, smallpox, measles, rubella, pertussis, chicken pox and similar diseases that were the scourge of the pre-medical world? If you measure health as “number of autoimmunity cases”, perhaps we’re getting less healthy. I measure health in terms of “percentage of children surviving to their teens”. By that measure, we’re remarkably health. Sufficiently so, people can fool themselves into thinking vaccination is unnecessary.
That’s a straw man of what doctors actually do. There’s no diet that’ll let you live forever in perfect health, but we do know the importance of unprocessed foods, well-cooked meat and adequate consumption of vitamins and minerals.
Question, if a fat guy comes into your house with a bullet wound, would you lecture them about the benefits of a healthy diet and exercise plan? Doctors treat acute problems while counselling for long-term health. It’s not the doctor’s fault if a patient ignores advice to exercise and eat better.
You get your medical information from TV shows about people who need bariatric surgery? No wonder your idea of health is skewed. Those are the extremes, people whose health is endangered because of their weight (a phenomenon not restricted to the US). It’s like judging the attractiveness of the UK by looking at Elizabeth Hurley and Kate Winslet. People know being fat is unhealthy, it’s not like real doctors are saying “tuck into some bacon there, it’ll prevent you from dying of frostbite”. The standard recommendation is diet and exercise to keep weight at a healthy level.
I’m not the one misrepresenting reality by claiming doctors don’t counsel the importance of healthy weight, healthy diet and moderate exercise. You’ve constructed your own duality – a strawman of the current medical system on one hand (doctors only prescribe drugs, never counsel lifestyle changes and ignore the risks of their treatments) and some sort of bizarre utopia that never existed on the other.
Except, is it a real quote? Again, without a citation we cannot tell. And the lack of an ending period in the sentence makes me wonder what came after. It seems like it is cherry picked, or completely made up like Pasteur’s last words.
It is at times like this we need to bring up the Pfeiffer incident (and it is given in more detail in the book Pox, an American History). Unfortunately history is repeating itself with those who are germ deniers bringing back measles and other illnesses, with some children paying very high prices.
What makes it worse is that Mercola is profiting from those who ignore history, like Sarah.
I see that no one has come forth to tell me which in the list of causes for autism by Mercola is actually real. Someone tried to pin it on mercury, but since that was removed from pediatric vaccines a decade ago that was obviously nonsense.
But, wait… what about pasteurized milk? Surely this means raw milk is all okay dokay. Well, except for the dozens of people each year who get seriously ill from it. Most recently around sixty people came down with Campylobacter jejuni recently.
Ack, mucked up the link:
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2012/02/campylobacter-cases-from-raw-milk-outbreak-rise-to-60/
@ Chris: It’s not just contamination with the C. jejuni bacterium in unpasteurized milk and dairy products, that one has to worry about. Outbreaks of serious illness from unpasteurized milk and cheeses that are caused by the salmonella, E. coli and Listeria bacteria are reported frequently to local and state health departments.
I recall investigating cases of Listeria-infected pregnant women who miscarried. Their infections were caused by consuming unpasteurized cheeses:
http://www.fda.gov/Food/ResourcesForYou/consumers/ucm079516.htm
Joe Mercola is a public health menace.
“1.9 million people can’t be wrong…”
sarah007, I really can’t believe you said that.
Once again, the Natural Hygiene shoe drops. It’s always the pus.
Banshees screaming in the church, once again.
Sarah, that is not a reasoned argument, a source that can be trusted, or any other reason to change anyone’s mind. It’s yet more of your assertions that science is biased, doctors can’t be trusted and the only real skeptics are the ones who agree with you. Of course, you are not a skeptic, you are a denialist who puts the rest of the world at risk. Skeptics change their minds in the face of evidence; denialists pervert, distort and lie about evidence to support a conclusion they refuse to alter. Your peers are Duane Gish, Peter Duesberg, the Koch brothers, Thabo Mbeki, David Irving, Fred Phelps and that senator who was openly a member of the KKK. Congratulations.
Again, science changes in the face of more and better evidence, such as autism rates remaining the same despite the removal of thiomersal from most vaccines. Your efforts to deny reality in order to maintain the sense that you can somehow control an unpredictable and complicated world only hurt yourself and place your children and their peers at risk.
What Sarah has done quite effectively is to show the lack of evidence to support Mercola, and the depths of her ignorance.
What an interesting state of affairs. Removing posts to suit the thread is what we have all become used to in the medical peer reviewed world, good to see you are sticking to medical standards.
Again Sarah, your posts will not go into moderation if you cite article titles, authors, year and journal. Of course, if you try to cite whale.to you might never leave moderation – but who cares, since whale.to isn’t a source of accurate medical information. You realize whale.to cites David “transdimensional alien-lizard shapeshifters control the world!!11!!11!!!!” Icke as a source? THAT is what you use for medical information?
Actually, WLU, she probably thinks she is posting comments, but they are actually imaginary. She only dreamed she posted them.
Either that, or she knows full well that she’s lying through her teeth.
I’d just like to say that as far as I know, no post of Sarah’s has ever been deleted. It is our policy to let even the most ridiculous and offensive comments stand. Anyone who has been following our blog knows how we have tolerated even the likes of Th1Th2. As an editor, I share the power to delete posts, but I have never done so. And there is something weird about which comments go into moderation that I don’t understand; several times my own comments have gone into moderation and I have had to act as editor to release them.
I’ve decided that sarah007′s idea of providing evidence reminds me of the bit from A Mighty Wind
“Our beliefs are fairly commonplace and simple to understand. Humankind is simply materialized color operating on the 49th vibration. You would make that conclusion walking down the street or going to the store. ”
She’s just about that rational in her premise and only slightly worse in her supporting arguments.
Perhaps Sarah assumes all blogs are like AoA, where comments are regularly removed by the moderator. For all she knows she may actually think she has posted comments that have not appeared, but it is more likely she is showing the level of honesty we have often seen from those who support Mercola.
I am sure that she has had posts deleted. In her mind only. Not in reality. Her beliefs about disease and science are facts, again, only in her mind. Her reality is just fantasy or a lie.
William I have never quoted this whales thing so have no idea what you are talking about. Lots of people are posting up the research that is quietly avoided, unless you work for the FBI or are psychic I have no idea how you believe you can guess what I read!
Most of what I have posted has been taken from articles published in journals like the BMJ.
So Harriet also tells us that she knows posts have not been deleted, it seems to me that we have another septic tank here where there are rarely any real posters, 3 or 4 maybe on a sad committe trying to pretend that the hub of cutting edge science discussion is happening here!
So can I act as editor! With Harriets skills it’s no wonder whole parts of threads are disappearing like medical data from a vaccine study.
Bjougie’s belief in whatever he understands is very enlightening, thanks for sharing your ideas.
Hi Chris, what’s AoA?
Weing, wong again. So you think that arthritis is deficiency in analgesics and indigestion is caused by lack of proton pump inhibitors, well your doctor does.
William said: “Skeptics change their minds in the face of evidence”
Lovely septic prose William, it’s just the “evidence” you believe in is an artificial construct, reviewed by some of the greatest axxxhxxxx around who just have no ethical morals or humanity as part of their process. Of course there is the odd saint in there but as soon as they show the medical consensus to be wrong they are removed from the arena and it’s back on your heads boys.
William said: “you are not a skeptic, you are a denialist who puts the rest of the world at risk.”
Well with the swine flu scamdemic william the whole world was put at risk and you still believe it happened.
Not vaccinating only puts profit at risk, you have no data to challenge this statement because comparison studies between unvaccinated populations has never been done. Funny that, why not?
“Weing, wong again. So you think that arthritis is deficiency in analgesics and indigestion is caused by lack of proton pump inhibitors, well your doctor does.”
I am a doctor, and, besides being off topic, that is sheer straw man nonsense.
“Most of what I have posted has been taken from articles published in journals like the BMJ.”
And, by picking only some of the sentences written, showing your complete inability to understand the totality of what is written.
You may or may not get your information from whale.to, but your comments and arguments, like many in the antivaccination camp, bear strong resemblances if not outright identical structure and content to those found on whale.to – who cites David “Transdimensional Shapeshifting Lizards Control the World” Icke without qualification or irony.
I strongly question your posts, which reflect a very partial and certainly ideologically motivated reading of the sources – for instance, claiming Aaby supported vaccines being dangerous, when in fact it is only a suggestion of one vaccine being possibly dangerous while the others have strong indications of having protective effects above and beyond merely preventing single diseases. On top of giving blatantly one-sided and often incorrect summaries of what literature you do cite, you are either not reading or not including summaries of the dissenting literature that strongly converges on vaccines being cheap, safe, effective ways of preventing extremely serious diseases (including cancer).
Not really, so far I can only think of a single post that actually cited a source that was reasonable, and it didn’t actually support your position.
Only 3-4 people think it’s worth spending the time to correct the errors in your post. Everyone else realizes you are a lost cause. I’m only here to point out the flaws in your argument, so other readers can realize they are largely, if not totally, without merit. You are a lost cause since you seem unwilling to admit you might be wrong, but this is very helpful for the undecided and worried.
Age of Autism, a site notorious for claiming autism is caused by vaccination (and sometimes mercury, though that goalpost has since shifted), despite many studies involving thousands of children that indicate vaccines may in fact prevent autism, and that autism is far more genetically determined than it is environmental. You’d like it.
Nobody thinks arthritis is caused by a lack of pain medications. Arthritis can’t be treated directly, all we can do is address the symptoms – primarily pain. If it weren’t for pain, arthritis would be a fairly benign condition since it doesn’t cause much direct functional impairment. As for indigestion, there are myriad causes. You seem to be alluding to ulcers, not indigestion, and most ulcers are now treated with antibiotics to clear up H. pylori infections that are a major cause. A real doctor would assess what could cause indigestion, not simply hand over something to reduce stomach acidity. Again, this is a straw man of actual medical practice, you’re criticizing an illusion.
Again, you are accusing the entire medical community of being biased, bribed and untrustworthy. Where is your evidence? Particularly since criticisms of drug trials funded by large pharmaceutical firms have been criticized by that very medical community you claim to be biased, bribed and untrustworthy. Science is hard, and it takes money – some of which comes from Pfizer. This is why the editors of Sciencebasedmedicine.org, and all doctors really, urge caution and disclosure of funding sources at the end of nearly every article regarding who paid for it. Common practice, has been for years, and undisclosed funding sources are a big deal to the point of being considered a blatant and inappropriate violation of ethics to omit such information, even accidentally.
I believe H1N1 was a pandemic, I believe the first reports of its lethality were quite scary (and given Spanish Influenza’s lethality, you can’t idly dismiss those reports), I believe the virus was less lethal than it could have been, and I believe universal vaccination would reduce the lethality of all annual pandemic influenza cases, which is on the order of several hundred thousand every year. Half a million unnecessary deaths every year – but as long as you are OK, that’s all that matters to you I suppose. I’m a healthy adult male with uncompromised immunity – chances are I will be fine no matter the strain. I get vaccinated for my grandmother, your grandmother, your children, my friends’ children and really, for the strangers I don’t know but still don’t want to give the flu to.
Are you sure about that? Are you absolutely positive that no placebo-controlled studies have been done? Are you sure there haven’t been sixteen randomized, controlled trials of children alone? Are you sure that placebo-controlled trials aren’t done all the time? Are you sure that there aren’t regular reports of placebo controlled trials indicating vaccination consistently reduces symptoms? Are you sure a search on pubmed for “influenza vaccine placebo” won’t turn up more than 500 hits, eight of which are from 2012 alone, and some pretty sophisticated studies of various combinations of vaccine-influenza type-placebo combinations? I mean, you are claiming that there are no studies comparing vaccinated versus nonvaccinated groups, that seems like it would be pretty damning if it were true.
“Not vaccinating only puts profit at risk, you have no data to challenge this statement because comparison studies between unvaccinated populations has never been done. Funny that, why not?”
Really now? Here’s just a few studies with comparisons between vaccinated and non vaccinated groups.
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/1/193.short
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2393147/
http://www.bmj.com/content/329/7467/660.short
The of course there is the simple evidence of the effect that mass immunization had on Polio and Smallpox. We had huge control group on those. Humanity before the development of the vaccines, humanity afterwards.
Sarah:
Seriously? You really think that treating an illness is more cost effective than preventing it?
Actually, there are studies comparing the costs. There are epidemiological studies that are done in populations, and take into account the numbers of those who are not vaccinated. I know you cannot understand that because you live in a fantasy world with your mind welded shut against all new information. I will be listing several in a form that will make them easy to find on PubMed, without using links.
One such study that compared vaccinated children against completely unvaccinated children comes from Germany:
Dtsch Arztebl Int. 2011 Feb;108(7):99-104. Epub 2011 Feb 18.
Vaccination status and health in children and adolescents: findings of the German Health Interview and Examination Survey for Children and Adolescents (KiGGS).
The less than surprising finding was that the only difference between the two groups is that the children who received no vaccines had more vaccine-preventable diseases.
Now, as far as costs go, there are several studies in that regard. Let’s start with the measles epidemic from about twenty years ago where over 120 Americans died, many of them in California. If you have an open mind you can read what the hospital care cost, and how much it cost the state here:
West J Med. 1996 Jul-Aug;165(1-2):20-5.
Pediatric hospital admissions for measles. Lessons from the 1990 epidemic.
Now here are several that are actual economic analysis of the uses of vaccines:
Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2005 Dec;159(12):1136-44.
Economic evaluation of the 7-vaccine routine childhood immunization schedule in the United States, 2001.
J Infect Dis. 2004 May 1;189 Suppl 1:S131-45.
An economic analysis of the current universal 2-dose measles-mumps-rubella vaccination program in the United States.
Pediatrics. 2002 Oct;110(4):653-61.
Impact of universal Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccination starting at 2 months of age in the United States: an economic analysis.
Vaccine. 1998 May-Jun;16(9-10):989-96.
A benefit-cost analysis of two-dose measles immunization in Canada.
Now, Sarah, it is up to you to explain clearly how vaccines provide more profit to pharmaceutical companies than the drugs needed to treat those who get the diseases. You must factor in the costs of antibiotics, anticonvulsant, respiratory support, and everything else. Be sure to show your work by actually posting the journal, date and titles of the PubMed indexed papers supporting your assertion that it costs less to treat than to prevent a disease.
By the “AoA” is the Age of Autism blog, which is edited by Dan Olmsted. They guy who “researched” the Amish in Lancaster County but completely missed the “Clinic for Special Children.” It is heavily moderated with comments removed so often that some have created blogs with names like “silencedbyageofautism” and “counteringageofautism.”
Chris, your links and studies are useless – they are only reliable if they support the conclusion that vaccines are worthless and/or dangerous. Otherwise they’re too biased by Big Pharma to be trusted. But you can trust Joe Mercola – he doesn’t make any money from his advice. His clinic’s services is provided completely free of charge. He doesn’t sell any supplemennts. He sells no books. His speaking engagements are also free. He makes absolutely no money from any source. That is why you can trust him. He has absolutely no bias and no incentive to distort science and promote the idea that vaccination is harmful. He certainly doesn’t gain any sort of personal ego-based satisfaction from the adulations of millions of visitors to his website and speaking engagements. And he would always admit when he was wrong, or qualify his statements when they went wildly beyond what the actual research says. Not that you can trust the research, unless it supports your conclusion.
:-p
Indeed, I hoped people would pick up on the sarcasm
It’s always amazed me that people criticize Big Pharma, which as an amorphous entity makes money from a large number of products streaming into a collective coffer or set of coffers – but completely ignore the fact that many of the individual practitioners make much of their income from either criticizing the system directly, or selling a competing product that they have to justify through conspiracy because there’s no evidence to support the claims.
Seriously, the parallels with creationism, AIDS denialism, global warming denialism and the Apollo moon landing hoax conspiracy are incredibly obvious…
Chris your logic is about as logical as, words fail me..
Not getting diseases is about staying well. Orthodox medicine is about fire fighting conditions like cardio vascular disease and obesity with sexy surgery. If doctors showed an iota of interest in teaching people how to maintain health none of these proceedures would be necessary. Your average doctor has no idea what even a healthy diet is. Why try to prevent a disease that doesnt produce mortality in well nourished people?
Willy said: “Arthritis can’t be treated directly, all we can do is address the symptoms – primarily pain. If it weren’t for pain, arthritis would be a fairly benign condition since it doesn’t cause much direct functional impairment.”
This is uninformed jet trash. Read Bogduck on arthritis, he makes it clear that to call it a disease is to misunderstand what it is. I certainly know of many cases that have successfully halted and reversed this condition by simply changing their diet and stopping taken the anti inflammatories that are contributing to the degeneration by impacting on collagen formation. Try telling someone who is being managed by a Rheumatologist how benign their condtion’s functional impairment is when they are on TNFL’s. When their liver eventually collapses ask them how they are doing on the treatment. All you can do is fire fight because you refuse to even look at work done to overcome this condition.
Chris said “I believe H1N1 was a pandemic, I believe the first reports of its lethality were quite scary” Fear is lack of knowledge Chris, I am genuinly sorry you were scared but most people were not. Collective fear of the mystery of disease is the biggest mistake that your postition holds, healthy people don’t get ill.
Mercola may make money, so what, but what he does is dispell the mythology that modern medicine touts that you cant do anything about any disease without your sexy doctor, most of it apart from acute combative truama is fairly easy to do yourself. You can take quite a lot of the knowledge and use it without the result costing anything.
Oh and on the Ebola nonsense posted earlier a colleague of mine spent time in an Ebola area in Africa, when he arrived he was shitting it. By the time he left he realised that the only people who presented with this condition were poorly nourished natives with high oxidative stress to boot.
Vaccination is no different, when we are healthy we don’t contract diseases, it is far cheaper to stay well.
Chris your logic is about as logical as, words fail me..
Not getting diseases is about staying well. Orthodox medicine is about fire fighting conditions like cardio vascular disease and obesity with sexy surgery. If doctors showed an iota of interest in teaching people how to maintain health none of these proceedures would be necessary. Your average doctor has no idea what even a healthy diet is. Why try to prevent a disease that doesnt produce mortality in well nourished people?
Willy said: “Arthritis can’t be treated directly, all we can do is address the symptoms – primarily pain. If it weren’t for pain, arthritis would be a fairly benign condition since it doesn’t cause much direct functional impairment.”
This is uninformed jet trash. Read Bogduck on arthritis, he makes it clear that to call it a disease is to misunderstand what it is. I certainly know of many cases that have successfully halted and reversed this condition by simply changing their diet and stopping taken the anti inflammatories that are contributing to the degeneration by impacting on collagen formation. Try telling someone who is being managed by a Rheumatologist how benign their condtion’s functional impairment is when they are on TNFL’s. When their liver eventually collapses ask them how they are doing on the treatment. All you can do is fire fight because you refuse to even look at work done to overcome this condition.
Chris said “I believe H1N1 was a pandemic, I believe the first reports of its lethality were quite scary” Fear is lack of knowledge Chris, I am genuinly sorry you were scared but most people were not. Collective fear of the mystery of disease is the biggest mistake that your postition holds, healthy people don’t get ill.
Mercola may make money, so what, but what he does is dispell the mythology that modern medicine touts that you cant do anything about any disease without your sexy doctor, most of it apart from acute combative truama is fairly easy to do yourself. You can take quite a lot of the knowledge and use it without the result costing anything.
Oh and on the Ebola nonsense posted earlier a colleague of mine spent time in an Ebola area in Africa, when he arrived he was shitting it. By the time he left he realised that the only people who presented with this condition were poorly nourished natives with high oxidative stress to boot.
Vaccination is no different, when we are healthy we don’t contract diseases, it is far cheaper to stay well.
Oh looked at the bougie pile of pro flu vaccine ‘evidence’ and what do we find in the pile
“We estimated vaccine effectiveness, the proportion of deaths attributable to influenza that were apparently prevented by the vaccine, from these fractions.”
I can’t be bothered to wade through this crap, it is so indicative of the quality of ‘evidence’ I wonder who funded it too.
If your doctor has not recommended getting enough exercise, sleep, eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, lean meats and other rather banal, well-known bits of information, you should change doctors. Beond those spare bits of advice and urging vaccination, there’s not much general information a doctor could provide, though for specific medical conditions they will obviously have more detail. What else do you expect from a doctor, the secret formula to eternal youth? My doctor is 60 and looks it, so apparently Big Pharma hasn’t given him the nanobots yet.
If you think doctors should ignore acute hyperglycemia caused by diabetes, or myocardial infarction caused by atherosclerosis in order to lecture patients on the importance of good diet and exercise – I can only hope nobody ever comes to you for medical advice.
What kind of arthritis, there are more than 100. Some are caused by wear and tear, some by autoimmunity, some by sepsis. I doubt there is a one-size-fits-all approach. But please, provide a citation that demonstrates a quick and easy solution to all types of arthritis.
Most people don’t understand what “influenza” truly is – or measles, mumps, diptheria, rubella, smallpox, polio and the like. I know about influenza and I’m afraid of a repeat of the 1918 epidemic. I know about the other diseases because I’ve researched them – most people do not because vaccination means you never have to see how bad they can get.
Healthy people never get sick – so everybody with AIDS had a pre-existing condition? The 80-90% die-off of Native Americans due to their first exposure to smallpox – every single one of them had compromised immunity? Surprising.
So it’s OK if Joseph Mercola makes money, but it’s not OK if a pharmaceutical firm does? That’s an odd double-standard.
Nearly every disease has some form of preventive care that can be taken – cook food thoroughly, get vaccinated, avoid drinking the water, wash your hands. Can’t do much when the person next to you on the bus has a rhinovirus and sneezes. Could wear a face mask I suppose.
Oh, well then, if you know a guy, then that completely changes how all medical research and knowledge is conducted. I knew 10 guys who died of Ebola despite being in their late 20s and in peak physical fitness. I guess that means I win, right? Because I knew 10 guys who died of Ebola.
If you can’t read through that “crap” and understand the abstract in less than five minutes per paper, I seriously doubt your ability to substantively criticize medicine. If you’re curious about the funding sources for each paper, you can see it in the conflict of interest disclosure found at the end of the paper.
Conflict of interest merely means we should read the paper with a critical eye – it doesn’t mean we can ignore it. In particular, though many denialists use “conflict of interest” as a shortcut to avoid dealing with information they don’t like, this is not a valid research or reasoning strategy. All you are doing is finding excuses to ignore information that might change your mind, if approached rationally.
Skeptics change their mind in the face of good evidence. Denialists distort and ignore good evidence to avoid changing their mind. Like your use of Aaby, which you didn’t appear to read (or read and didn’t understand). The paper made me re-evaluate the use of the DTP in certain populations as it is suggestive – but not convincing. And since pertussis is a very dangerous disease, I still wholeheartedly support the use of the vaccine, particularly in the First World where there does not seem to be any evidence of increased female deaths (or, as the WHO’s expert panel pointed out, decreased male deaths as the vaccine may be protective to males rather than harmful to females, and the research to date does not allow you to make that distinction).
Sarah:
Oh, do tell us how the ten babies in California who died from pertussis were supposed to accomplish that? Or how about the over a dozen people in Indiana who now have measles? Do tell, how do you keep a person who has never had measles nor the vaccine from getting measles when they have been near a person who has it? What do you think causes measles, bad thoughts?
Sarah:
Your lack of reading comprehension is catching up to you. I never said that.
You can’t read, you cannot stay on topic, you post illogical statements, you insist we provide evidence while you don’t, you live in a fantasy world where there no such things as germs and yet you expect us to believe that little homily. You are delusional.
Chris, I actually said that. The first reports were indeed scary – in a town of 3,000 people, 1800 were sick with unusually strong symptoms and two babies died. But I’m sure they were not healthy, and thus deserved it – right Sarah? Because all we have to do is stay healthy and we’ll never get sick.
Don’t forget, only the weak get sick and die, and they’re not worth keeping anyway. Right Sarah? If you’re healthy, there’s no reason to get vaccinated because who cares if you give it to someone who already had AIDS, cancer, an organ transplant or some other impairment of the immune system – if you die of influenza, you deserved it. Right? Why should I contribute to herd immunity when I don’t benefit directly?
I know, I was using it as an example of how she is really not reading the responses. Much like she is not answering questions with actual evidence.
Love the eugenics bit. The babies who died from pertussis must have deserved their fate. It is obvious that they were inferior beings, and pertussis did their parents a favor. She is probably just like the person yesterday who took her truck and drove down a street ignoring all of the traffic laws, the flashing lights behind her and crashed into six cars. Total disregard for anyone else, much less reality.
Correction, she hit eight cars.
Here is a good example of wonky science the study finds that increased antibiotic use is associated with increase risk of MS but suggests it’s the unamed infection rather than the antibiotic.
From Medscape Neurology > Medscape Neurology Minute
Penicillin and Multiple Sclerosis: What’s the Connection?
Alan R. Jacobs, MD
Authors and Disclosures
Posted: 01/27/2012
A total of 1922 patients redeemed penicillin prescriptions and 2290 patients redeemed any type of antibiotic prior to the index date. They found penicillin use to be associated with increased risk for multiple sclerosis with an odds ratio of 1.21. Moreover, they found use of antibiotics to be similarly associated with increased risk for multiple sclerosis with an odds ratio of 1.41. Odds ratios for all types of antibiotics ranged between 1.08 and 1.83. The investigators conclude that penicillin use and use of other antibiotics are associated with an increased risk for multiple sclerosis and that this suggests that underlying infections may be causally associated with multiple sclerosis. This study was selected from Medscape Best Evidence.
So what? Why should we care about anything you post since you have demonstrated a lack of basic English literacy, logic, common sense and the ability to stay on topic?
Sarah, you have now graduated to full troll status with your declaration that “Vaccination is no different, when we are healthy we don’t contract diseases, it is far cheaper to stay well.” You do not discuss, you just pontificate without data. You should be ignored, and others will be warned that it is pointless to attempt to reason with you.
william said “I get vaccinated for my grandmother, your grandmother, your children, my friends’ children and really, for the strangers I don’t know but still don’t want to give the flu to.”
Sorry but Cochraine found this idea to be baseless.
William goes on and on”2 babies dies but I’m sure they were not healthy, and thus deserved it” banana plus banana equals elephant.
You missed the point of health William, if you think that everyone who is not healthy deserves to die you must be bonkers or a medical doctor, which one is it?
William rants on “Don’t forget, only the weak get sick and die, and they’re not worth keeping anyway.”
No one needs to be sick, this is a medical artficial construct. Telling us how to stay well is the point, not waiting until we are then suppressing the bodys attempts to get well.
Chris you are going bonkers, Sarah said “Vaccination is no different, when we are healthy we don’t contract diseases, it is far cheaper to stay well.”
Chris replied “You can’t read, you cannot stay on topic, you post illogical statements, you insist we provide evidence while you don’t, you live in a fantasy world where there no such things as germs and yet you expect us to believe that little homily. You are delusional.”
Any plant expert will tell you that healthy plants don’t get diseases, if you find that illogical. The evidence is all around you if you looked instead of spending hours staring at lab reports. Who mentioned eugenics, now you are hallucinating.
William anecdoted “I knew 10 guys who died of Ebola despite being in their late 20s and in peak physical fitness.”
What kind of healthy were they, doctor healthy!
Why should I contribute to herd immunity, well it doesn’t work does it.
Oh, great she is now comparing the human immune system to plants. Humans are also not triploid.
@sarah007,
Let me tell you why your posts stink of excrement. It is because they are the excrement of your mind. They are the undigested and partially digested fragments of material you were incapable of digesting. That is basically what crap is. So, do us all a favor, and stop sending us your turds for analysis of what you can’t digest.
Sarah states:
“Oh and on the Ebola nonsense posted earlier a colleague of mine spent time in an Ebola area in Africa, when he arrived he was shitting it. By the time he left he realised that the only people who presented with this condition were poorly nourished natives with high oxidative stress to boot.”
I think the WHO and the CDC “might” be interested in her opinion about the spread of Ebola virus:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/spb/mnpages/dispages/ebola/qa.htm
Sarah, up to her usual trick of “cherry-picking again… without citations” then states:
“Vaccination is no different, when we are healthy we don’t contract diseases, it is far cheaper to stay well.”
“Oh looked at the bougie pile of pro flu vaccine ‘evidence’ and what do we find in the pile” and….
“We estimated vaccine effectiveness, the proportion of deaths attributable to influenza that were apparently prevented by the vaccine, from these fractions.”
Here is the PubMed Abstract for Sarah’s statement:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15313884
And, here are the conclusions from the study:
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE:
Death.
RESULTS:
In unvaccinated members of the cohort daily all cause mortality was strongly associated with an index of influenza circulating in the population (mortality ratio 1.16, 95% confidence interval 1.04 to 1.29 at 90th centile of circulating influenza). The association was strongest for respiratory deaths but was also present for cardiovascular deaths. In contrast, in vaccinated people mortality from any cause was not associated with circulating influenza. The difference in patterns between vaccinated and unvaccinated people could not easily be due to chance (P = 0.02, all causes).
CONCLUSIONS:
This study, using a novel and robust approach to control for confounding, provides robust evidence of a protective effect on mortality of vaccination against influenza.
Sarah, I’m getting tired of reading your responses and providing citations for your cherry-picked citation-less quotes. Why don’t you haunt another blog?
I’m finding this all very amusing. “Healthy plants don’t get diseases.” If a plant gets a disease, that means it wasn’t a healthy plant. If a person gets sick, that means he wasn’t healthy. If people followed Sarah’s plan for health (whatever that is) all disease would vanish from the Earth. Yeah, sure!
@ Harriet Hall: It’s like playing Whack-A-Mole with Sarah. Or, in the words of our respected blogger, “…like trying to nail Jello to the wall”.
Sarah, science doesn’t know everything. If it did, it would stop. Science will test if MS is related to infection or antibiotics, and our knowledge will grow. People will change their mind. Doctors will change their practice. And ultimately, fewer people will get MS. Hooray!
But you can’t trust the Cochrane Collaboration – their conclusions are based on studies funded by Big Pharma. Right?
Nope, I think health is a precious thing that should be preserved through vaccination.
How are we “suppressing the body’s attempts to get better? Through vaccines? So nobody got sick before vaccination?
Your definition is tautological; any plant that is healthy doesn’t get disease; any plant that gets diseases isn’t healthy. It’s the “no true Scotsman” logical fallacy.
Healthier than your anecdote, but it didn’t help them. Therefore I win.
Smallpox was eliminated by boosting the herd immunity of individual cases found to be contagious, so it could not spread. Science doesn’t say “all vaccination is the same”, vaccination for influenza has more problems than vaccination for pertussis, which has more problems than vaccination for smallpox. The world is complicated, it’s not like just because we use the word ‘bridge’ for many ways of crossing rivers, that all bridges are the same or built the same way. I know you want the world to be simple – it isn’t.
The irony of her bit about plants not getting sick is that the first virus that was discovered was the tobacco mosaic virus. Also, the Dutch tulip mania was over flowers with intricate patterns, which turned out to because by an aphid borne mosaic virus, tulip breaking virus.
I suspect that Sarah does not do much gardening. I’ve had tulips with the breaking virus, and just this week I sprayed an oil/lime sulfur winter spray on my pear tree to prevent pear rust, a fungal disease.
She probably has not idea about importance of rootstocks for disease resistance. Even from certain insects, like phylloxera.
Weing, wong again. Jeez you need anger management.
It does amaze me somewhat, and many others judging by how few visit here, that your heads are shoved firmly up the arse of vaccine woo. The funding bias of the ‘research’ you quote isn’t worth the paper written on and to meet some people online who actually believed in the swine flu pandemic and took worthless medication is enough for me to realise you’re wrong.
Healthy plants are naturally disease resistant, any twit knows that.
The arogance that you think you can second guess nature with regard to health selection is mindnumbing. All those arthritic people that you doctors are destroying with bloody painkillers and joint replacement show your lack of understanding.
““We estimated vaccine effectiveness, the proportion of deaths attributable to influenza that were apparently prevented by the vaccine, from these fractions.”
If pubmed research can estimate then so can anyone, this site is a laughing stock.
William bleated “Nope, I think health is a precious thing that should be preserved through vaccination.”
Donkey, what an incredibly nonk statement.
No wonder suicide is popular in doctors, imaging waking up with that kind of logic!
I find it very amusing to note how thoroughly sarah ignores it when her ignorance and lies are unequivocally demonstrated.
Sarah:
Again, demonstrating that you have no knowledge of botany or basic gardening. Healthy plants attract insects, and insects can make a healthy plant sick. You have obviously never dealt with aphids, mites or cutworms.
Are you now an insect denier?
At this rate how long until she gives us the argument “Have you ever seen a sick rock? Healthy granite doesn’t require immunization to avoid smallpox, ergo neither do humans.”?
“Woo” is a term used to refer to unproven treatments with improbable mechanisms. Vaccines are neither improbable (they are based on a solid, well-validated understanding of acquired immunity) nor unproven (with a track record going back well over a century).
I didn’t take any medication, worthless or otherwise, for H1N1. I got vaccinated. And didn’t get sick that year. Most of the recommendations by public health agencies were quite mild – don’t panic and get vaccinated. Good advice on any year, but even better when you’re talking about a potentially serious strain of seasonal influenza. While the media tried to turn it into “Swinemapocalypse versus Vacciholocaust”, that’s simply their usual reactionary and inflammatory response to the need for a 24-hour news cycle.
Yes, this statement is trivially true. But “disease resistant” doesn’t mean “never gets sick”. Healthy organisms are naturally more able to resist most illnesses than those with compromised nutrition or immunity – but they still get infected. Sometimes it is subclinical and we’re not even aware our immune system is fighting off a pathogen (i.e. if you are successfully vaccinated, you’ll never know your blood is swimming with polio). Other times it kills.
Arthritis is generally a disease of old age, well past the point at which most people have had children (certainly true before the advent of scientific medicine). Arthritis’ selectionary pressure on humans would be minimal. We now have the luxury of living to old age, where diseases of degeneration cause problems – in large part because vaccination and other public health measures have reduced deaths due to infectious diseases to a negligible level. Arrogance is thinking that a group of people, most appearing to have no real understanding of the immune system or even basic human biology, can dismiss the majority of research without even reading it (let alone understanding it). That’s what you do when you cite studies only on the basis of whether someone else tells you the study in question supports the viewpoint you’ve already chosen to adopt.
Pubmed aggregates research, which is a systematic process of increasing our understanding of the world based on data, hypotheses, testing and more data. Estimates within research are a set of assumptions based on a well-founded understanding of the world within a very carefully defined set of parameters. It bears no resemblance to your “estimate” of the harm of vaccines, which is better described as an assumption that they are harmful and ineffective.
If you’re so confident vaccination is ineffective and your immune system effective, go get bled on by someone with Ebola or inject yourself with a little HIV+ blood. You can demonstrate your amazing powers, possibly winning $1,000,000 from James Randi since the results would probably qualify as miraculous.
bougie”If you’re so confident vaccination is ineffective and your immune system effective, go get bled on by someone with Ebola or inject yourself with a little HIV+ blood. You can demonstrate your amazing powers, possibly winning $1,000,000 from James Randi since the results would probably qualify as miraculous.
Well that’s logical! Why would anyone want to ask for James Randi’s opinion on anything? A man who smuggles a minor illegally into the country with dodgy nationality paperwork is surely not someone to trust.
“Pubmed aggregates research, which is a systematic process of increasing our understanding of the world based on data, hypotheses, testing and more data. Estimates within research are a set of assumptions based on a well-founded understanding of the world within a very carefully defined set of parameters.”
‘Aggregates research’ is weasel words for fiddle William, it is still their bias and judging by their leaning towards the consensus it means nothing.
“I didn’t take any medication, worthless or otherwise, for H1N1. I got vaccinated.” You did, there was no EBM for it when you made that choice, just because you didn’t get sick means nothing. There was no pandemic!
“Healthy organisms are naturally more able to resist most illnesses than those with compromised nutrition or immunity – but they still get infected.” No they don’t William, if they are healthy they don’t get sick. If you supposition was true we would all be sick and we are not, unless you are lying.
You are quoting fantasy if you think you can dismiss arthritis as an old disease that is only here because of the success of vaccination making us live older! Contrary to this misconception, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, 300,000 children and young adults have reported that they have been diagnosed with arthritis.
“The chance that a young adult will develop RA is more common than previously thought,” says Cynthia Crowson, MS, a Mayo Clinic biostatistician and RA researcher who recently published a paper in Arthritis and Rheumatism on the lifetime risk of developing several autoimmune rheumatic diseases. Crowson says that the odds of someone in their 20s developing RA is 1 in 714 for women and 1 in 2,778 for men.
Ad hominen attack on James Randi, No True Scotsman regarding “healthy organisms”, complete misunderstanding of what pubmed is, and again a curious propensity towards hypocrisy – specifically, citing research when it supports your opinion and claiming it to be too biased when it doesn’t. Another post made up of little more than logical fallacies.
@ WLU: We are now treated to Sarah’s “expertise” on arthritis….just when I was convinced her “expertise” (fixations) were limited to immunology and vaccines.
I just love it when confronted with some facts about the onset of osteoarthritis, such as surviving to adulthood and being prone to age-related osteoarthritis, Sarah pulls another factoid from her store of dubious medical minutiae to discuss another type of arthritis:
Oh lookie here, there are hundreds of types of arthritis…some of them associated with infectious diseases!
http://www.arthritis.org/types-arthritis.php
Lilady it is sad that your belief in the wonders of the doctor is preventing you from probably sorting your problem out but I suppose that is what blind faith is.
William there is no ad hominen in my post, it’s all over the web:
Alvarez’s transformation into “Carlos” was part of Randi’s crusade to expose mystics and psychics around the world as frauds. The two men, who live together in Randi’s Plantation home, met when Alvarez was a teen, and they put on the “Carlos” performances for 15 years.
More recently, the artist’s paintings were featured this spring at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, and have graced Art Basel in Miami and galleries in New York and San Francisco.
Alvarez’s alleged alternate reality came apart Thursday morning, with the arrival at his door of an investigator from the U.S. State Department who specializes in fraudulent passports, visas and other travel documents. Alvarez initially said he was born in Venezuela, then said New York, according to court records. He was arrested on a charge of supplying false information to obtain a passport, a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
The charge filed against Alvarez alleges he stole a New York man’s date of birth and Social Security number, which he used to obtain a U.S. passport in 1987. He has since renewed the passport twice.
Outside court, one of Alvarez’s attorneys said his arrest had been “totally out of the blue.”
Alvarez has lived at Randi’s home for at least two decades, has traveled the world for seminars and has established himself as an internationally renowned artist, said Susan Dmitrovsky, a defense attorney for Alvarez. She said everyone has known him as Jose Luis Alvarez for years.
Hi William, back to old septic tricks again “citing research when it supports your opinion and claiming it to be too biased when it doesn’t.”
Pot calling kettle black, sir.
“Lilady it is sad that your belief in the wonders of the doctor is preventing you from probably sorting your problem out but I suppose that is what blind faith is.”
And…what “problem” would that be, Sarah?
Perhaps my “problem” as you view it, is dissecting and debunking all the fallacious statements you have made on this blog. Or, is my “problem” actually knowing the science behind the research? Would my “problem” be that I along with others on this blog think that you are an uneducated, ignorant and childish troll?
I don’t necessarily disagree that many health issues could be alleviated (prevented?) independent of healthcare professionals (although getting people to eat properly, e.g., is a socioeconomic issue going far beyond the scope of this discussion). But Dr. Mercola’s approach is simply not science-based, even to that end (for instance, the demonization of sugar, focus on taking “essential” fatty acids, etc.) Yes many of his ideas sound sensible (eat like our *ancestors*!) But what is sensible is not always true. Only rigorous experimentation bears the truth, not grandoise theory.
And it would appear, sadly, that each person who follows these eating guidelines is balanced by several hundred dollars in profit to Mercola et al.
I do think we in the scientific community, though, deserve some of the blame. Many of us have stood idle while charlatans have spent the last 50 years peddling pharmaceutical estrogen, serotonin “reuptake” inhibitors, and allowed honey nut cheerios to be labeled a health food (no saturated fat in them!). I don’t blame people for flocking to Joseph Mercola, though their health will suffer as a result.
Blogs like this are a first step. It’s sad to see people like Sarah007 who have suffered so much under the current paradigm. She deserves our compassion.
Best,
-David R. Logan, University of Nebraska
““Healthy organisms are naturally more able to resist most illnesses than those with compromised nutrition or immunity – but they still get infected.” No they don’t William, if they are healthy they don’t get sick. If you supposition was true we would all be sick and we are not, unless you are lying.
”
This continues to stink of crap. She lacks the ability to fully digest any scientific/medical material. I don’t think she is so much cherry picking as smearing a painting of the world with the partially digested remains of her reading, in other words, crap. She doesn’t even know the difference between infection and disease. I hope the graduates of the American school system are equipped with the tools that she so obviously lacks, or we can forget about being at the forefront of R&D.
Has the citation for this tidbit turned up yet? As reported, it seems to occur only in comments here and there from “sarah007,” “DrJohnson”/”MrJohnson,” and “orwell123.”
Ad hominen attack on James Randi
Worked for Marc Stephens. Oh, wait.
Lilady said “And…what “problem” would that be, Sarah?”
That you accept that your arthritis cannot be treated beyond symptomatic relief.
David Logan said And it would appear, sadly, that each person who follows these eating guidelines is balanced by several hundred dollars in profit to Mercola et al.”
This is not true, avoiding loads of sugar and eating more essential fatty acid foods is cheaper than eating lots of processed food and taking medicine to ‘treat’ the side effects. Why does it mean that Mercola makes money from telling us this information?
“It’s sad to see people like Sarah007 who have suffered so much under the current paradigm.” I suffer not David as I don’t use the current paradym of disease managment, I have not seen a doctor for decades, my family doesn’t seek them for health advice either! If I am run over by a lorry rest assured I am grateful for the advances in acute combative trauma healthcare, but that’s about it, I pay tax for that anyway.
Weing, wong again “This continues to stink of crap. She lacks the ability to fully digest any scientific/medical material”
Most medical material is undigestable pap, why would I want to eat something that has little value to health care? Can someone suggest an anger managment course to Wong, I am worried about his CV health.
Alverez was on the board of JRF so it’s not my fault if Randi decides to employ someone who has been indited for identity theft, perhaps he doesn’t care? That’s not an ad hom it’s a statement of fact.
“Lilady said “And…what “problem” would that be, Sarah?”
And….
“That you accept that your arthritis cannot be treated beyond symptomatic relief.”
Troll…I’m not the one who confuses RA with OA. I’m not the one who equates Vitamin C intake to avoid/treat scurvy with the ingestion of more dietary or supplemental collagen to avoid/treat OA.
Why don’t you take some basic science courses? A good start for a novice like you might be anatomy and physiology…then you “might” understand the inflammatory response and the pharmocology of NSAIDs for symptomatic relief.
Just for the record: rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is treated with disease-modifying drugs (DMARDs) that actually change the course of the disease to reduce deformity and disability. And of course there’s no evidence that any kind of diet prevents or cures it.
I’d like to believe that eating right and having a healthy lifestyle could prevent all disease, but then there’s reality…
@Sarah007,
You continue to misread, showing, as Bugs would say, what a maroon you are. I care absolutely nothing about you. Not even enough to be angry. Disgusted by someone smearing stool? Yes. Grateful that we aren’t related? You bet.
lilady:
Actually, Sarah may benefit more by taking some Adult Basic Education classes since she has some severe reading comprehension issues.
I’ve got to confess, I’ve absolutely no idea what Jose Luis Alvarez has to do with the current thread. He seems like a complete non sequitur mixed with a bit of Chewbacca defence.
Lilady missed the point again “ingestion of more dietary or supplemental collagen to avoid/treat OA. ”
Taking supplements is not about diet reform dear, that’s a medical misconstruct and unfortunately you fell in that hole. All the people I know that have taken control of their arthritis would not consider that taking collagen suppements was part of their plan, I don’t know why you continue to misread this.
“Why don’t you take some basic science courses? A good start for a novice like you might be anatomy and physiology…then you “might” understand the inflammatory response and the pharmocology of NSAIDs for symptomatic relief.”
Only a complete fxxxwit would think that eating an atrophic diet and getting ill can be fixed by taking drugs that poison immune system flags for ‘doing something wrong’.
If you are really that stupid that you would prefer to cling to a burning ship rather than swim for it I can’t help you. Has medicine disempowered your critical thinking this much? Are you unable to get a grip?
Harriet said “Just for the record: rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is treated with disease-modifying drugs (DMARDs) that actually change the course of the disease to reduce deformity and disability. And of course there’s no evidence that any kind of diet prevents or cures it.
I’d like to believe that eating right and having a healthy lifestyle could prevent all disease, but then there’s reality…”
This is so good I had to copy the lot. So clever Harriet is so up herself with this medical belief crap that she cant even imagine that eating and staying healthy is connected, for almost every disease you can think of. Despite the fact that in papers posted here on measles myths that the most important factors in prognosis are well nourished and not vitamin A deficient. The WHO considers measles only to be fatal in the malnourished. Try reading some newer papers on cancer and MS in Scotland being linked to Vitamin D deficiency. Oh weren’t we told to slap on sun cream by doctors?
So TNFI’s used in RA are disease modifying aren’t they Harriet, so modifying that you need a liver function test every few weeks to spot the point that your liver is melting down. Well I suppose that’s the wonder of scientific monitering for you.
So Harriet will you be eating the new petri dish meat that scientists are planning to mass produce, I bloody well hope so, it will be a great experiment to watch you lot proove this one out!
Harriet this is bullshit “Just for the record: rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is treated with disease-modifying drugs (DMARDs) ”
Treatment implies cure so DMARDS most certainly do not cure anything. How does medicine claim to cure anything when none of the drugs given in the vast majority of conditions is curing the disease?
One plus two equals banana
OK. I get it. Silly Sarah thinks the food you eat is the one true cause of all disease. How could we be so stupid to think that, while healthy eating habits are necessary for good health, it is not sufficient.
“Treatment implies cure so DMARDS most certainly do not cure anything”?!
Oh dear, we must tell the dictionary Sarah says it is wrong. I’m sure it will gladly correct its error on her say-so. The poor, “septic” dictionary defines treatment as:
“the care and management of a patient to combat, ameliorate, or prevent a disease, disorder, or injury.”
DMARDs improve outcomes in RA in our world, but apparently not in Sarah’s world.
Damn! Sarah has hijacked what? 4 comment threads now? and I’m still succumbing to the temptation to respond to her absurdities. Must stop, must stop, must stop…
Harriet said: “treatment as:
“the care and management of a patient to combat, ameliorate, or prevent a disease, disorder, or injury.”
That’s the all ecompassing modern health care system, the work fix covers everything. If I get the leak in my roof treated then I would expect complete resolution. If my doctor treats my ‘illness’ he can do anything from stick a plaster to implanting a new joint and still call it treatment!
Looks like the medics have got to the dictionary too.
“Damn! Sarah has hijacked what? 4 comment threads now? and I’m still succumbing to the temptation to respond to her absurdities. Must stop, must stop, must stop…”
Yes it is somewhat adictive talking to people who still fascinate at the wonders of ‘disease treatment’ and sexy fixes for things that don’t need sexy fixes.
Wow, seven plus zero certainly equals banana. I’m not even sure what the objection is. That drugs have adverse effects? That surgery is risky? Iatrogenesis? Strippers? Stripers? I think someone wants the last word.
“Postmen at the time noticed that all the patients who ordered aspirin were dead by the following day and those who ordered homeopathic remedies survived,”
Oh, gosh. I haven’t read the whole thread but this really gave me a laugh.
“reality sends it’s regards…..it misses them.”
Ha, I like that
“Don’t forget, only the weak get sick and die, and they’re not worth keeping anyway. Right Sarah? If you’re healthy, there’s no reason to get vaccinated because who cares if you give it to someone who already had AIDS, cancer, an organ transplant or some other impairment of the immune system – if you die of influenza, you deserved it. Right? Why should I contribute to herd immunity when I don’t benefit directly?”
This is an important point. As I said to Sarah in another thread, I think sadism is lurking below the surface in a lot of CAM-style rhetoric. Sarah has expressed contempt for people in pain and people who are overweight, among others. Historically, these callous, victim-blaming ideas are rooted in punitive religious traditions. Originally opposition to vaccination was religious – diseases are God’s punishments, and fighting them would oppose God’s will. This is reflected today in beliefs such as Sarah’s that basically no one gets sick unless something was already wrong with them; essentially they deserved it. (Aside from the comical logic, in statements such as “Healthy plants don’t get sick.” No, really?)
Historically, I think we set aside punitive ideas about disease when we come to understand the disease, that is, as the science advances. The people clinging to these ideas today do seem to represent a poorly educated group, perhaps not equipped by their education to grapple with the science (I think we see this in Sarah’s inability to write sentences that aren’t run-ons or fragments and full of misspellings).
I can’t believe I read the whole thing …
@Harriet:
I genuinely think it’s someone having a laugh. I’m not even sure they believe what they are saying. I think they may just be trolling and stirring the pot for the heck of it.
DW ranted ““Don’t forget, only the weak get sick and die, and they’re not worth keeping anyway. Right Sarah? If you’re healthy, there’s no reason to get vaccinated because who cares if you give it to someone who already had AIDS, cancer, an organ transplant or some other impairment of the immune system – if you die of influenza, you deserved it. Right? Why should I contribute to herd immunity when I don’t benefit directly?”
That’s an interesting construct, why do weak people need to die they need help to get well? Herd immunity means whatever you want it to mean, it’s a theory.
“I think sadism is lurking below the surface in a lot of CAM-style rhetoric.” You can think what you like, mind numbing religious studpidity is at the forefront of your rational.
“Originally opposition to vaccination was religious – ” No lots of people saw lots of people dying from people like Jenner cutting them and rubbing pus into the wound. I saw a kid today who had reacted to the 5 in 1 meningitis conjugate, leg swelled up to size of a beach ball and went purple, won’t get reported as a vaccine issue though, docs said it cant be must have been an infection that went in with the needle! Needless to say she won’t be carrying on with vaccine woo. If we had an active reporting system this crap would flag up the real picture.
This is the same vaccine that killed 117 kids in its first year of use in the USA from FDA returns, the previous year 23 died from the diseases it was supposed to protect so the vaccine killed what 5 times as many as would have happened. 23 deaths is bad enough but to claim that the vaccine will protect with herd immunity is bull, look at the evidence.
Oh recent rants about India being polio free for a year dont include the 100′s who have got polio from the vaccine so is that what you mean by herd immunity? You know they dont count vaccine induced polio in the stats, we dont want confusion do we?
Harriet said “Damn! Sarah has hijacked what? 4 comment threads now? and I’m still succumbing to the temptation to respond to her absurdities. Must stop, must stop, must stop…”
I know how you feel, talking to people who believe in pandemic flu is borderline insanity but someone has to do it, imagine all those people looking at this site and reading this, is anyone doing an audit of whether you are converting or losing support, I’d love to know.
“Sarah has expressed contempt for people in pain and people who are overweight, among others. ”
No, that is your medical peer review cock in action. If people are in pain they deserve to know why, if I have a nail in my foot how can giving me morphine and sending me home be logical. Lilady has refused to tell us what she eats, is that because she is embarressed to share this with us, is she too lazy to consider taking responsibility for and aspect that may be the cause of her condition? If fat people are eating crap it is not a disease, for medics to pander to this and call it a surgical emergency is colluding in the lie and making bucks out of it. I don’t have sympathy, I have empathy.
Mattyp said “I genuinely think it’s someone having a laugh. I’m not even sure they believe what they are saying. I think they may just be trolling and stirring the pot for the heck of it.”
Well it is fascinating finding a group of flatearthers who actually believe in pandemic flu, it’s like watching dogs pissing on each other.
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