Did Andrew Wakefield Perpetrate an "Elaborate Fraud"?

[Plutonia]

FWIW, in my stepdaughter's world there are several "autistic" kids, some of whom are extremely popular. One of the boys in particular, who has Aspergers, has to beat the girls off with a stick (my stepdaughter even went for him for a while). I have a friend with an autistic son in high school, and this kid also does really well with the ladies. Go figure!

Not brain-damaged, mercury-poisoned, write-offs then? Who knew!

Oh, wait! Now somebody is going to come along and say that those kids are not really autistic.

Michelle Dawson is an autistic woman who has been fearlessly standing up for the rights of autistic children and adults in Canada. Her open letter No Autistics Allowed, which spotlighted the exclusion of autistic people from a meaningful place in the Canadian autism societies and the often-frightening practices of said autism societies, gained signatures from autistic and non-autistic people all over the world [...] It is inevitable that such writing will be controversial and produce a backlash. And now we see it, in an attack on Michelle Dawson containing a good deal of unfounded speculation: A Mother's Perspective, written by Kit Weintraub of FEAT and hosted by the Association for Science in Autism Treatment, [...]The article goes on to question whether Michelle Dawson is indeed autistic, [....]

>snip<

The messages about how different various children are from us can range from darkly amusing to frustrating for many of us. The children being described, depending on the context, range from similar to how we have been to similar to how we are now. Some parents tell us their children's lack of certain abilities means that all parts of autism need to be fixed, when we may have less of those abilities than the children being described. But they dismiss our views, and dismiss us as anomalies or liars.

To give an example, take the three of us who currently work on autistics.org, in the areas commonly cited by parents trying to claim we aren't autistic or at least aren't "like their children". Note that not all of these things are things we believe naturally stem from autism, but they are brought up frequently by parents in their quest to prove that we aren't fit to offer our opinions about autism. The following list makes us sound like a bundle of problems, but it needs to be said:

>snip long list of autistic traits, deficits, difficulties, except this<

* All of us have had our lives threatened as a result of both other people's actions toward autistic people and aspects of autism without proper support from our surrounding societies.

A lot of people have trouble believing that an autistic person could fit any or all of the above descriptions and still have our opinions. They appear to think, "If only you knew how autistic people really live, you'd want a cure and approve of everything we did." Unfortunately for them, this isn't the truth. It's our opinions that are different, not necessarily our lives. And even if we had to live our entire lives in negative circumstances or without an adequate means of communication (as we have all done at one point or another), we still believe we would be worthwhile human beings and that curing us would not be the answer.

But that, while frustrating, is not the central part of the problem. We shouldn't have to "prove" ourselves in this demeaning manner, and the only reason we are being asked to do so is the opinions we state. People like us in all other respects, but who are subservient to the wishes of others, get fewer interrogations about their autism status, although some of them get equally-demeaning praise about "overcoming" their autism. As soon as we change our minds, others change theirs about us. Instead of being seen as the compassionate and definitely autistic people we are, we are seen as vicious and cruel people who don't understand real autism. People try to have it both ways, telling us we're not autistic and then insulting us by telling us that our autistic characteristics prevent us from being ethical.

We know because some of us have done that kind of subservience, too. Obedient autistic people get condescending praise like beloved pets, while the same autistics standing up for ourselves get treated like rabid wild animals masquerading as housecats. As Larry Arnold, an autistic man fighting similar battles in the UK, writes, "I am not a tame, house trained autistic, I am the feral kind. I am a wolf, not a sheep dog."

What happens to us is the same as what's happening to Michelle Dawson, and other autistic people who challenge non-autistic assumptions about us, our place in society, and how we should be treated: People discount us for who we are rather than what we say, even in cases (such as The Misbehaviour of Behaviourists) when it is clearly universal human rights under discussion, not a personal perspective on autism. Whether we meet someone's stereotype of autism becomes more important than what's being said.

>snip<

As for blaming autistic people's difference for the cruelty we receive, that removes the accountability of the people who are being cruel to autistic people. It makes it sound as if autism is to blame for the harm done to autistic people by others, which makes no more sense than saying accent and skin color are to blame for racism. When a person is being discriminated against for a quality, it's not that quality that needs changing....

>snip<

http://www.autistics.org/library/dawson.html

I apologize for my terrible cut and paste job there. I'm trying to bring in "the autistic voice" sans the tl;dr. I recommend reading the essay in it's entirety at the link.

[compared2what?]

Also, thank you for being concise.

If c2w is gone, it will be up to barracuda or plutonia (or others) to ferret out the verboten association. I respect the need for someone to do so. Hopefully, whoever does that will be brief and effective.

I'm sure that as a (primarily) special-interest poster, you'd have no way of knowing that commenting repeatedly on the (implicitly) intolerable length of my posts is traditionally the maneuver of first resort used by RI trolls who are hoping to throw me off my game by getting me upset. Has been ever since I told a former poster here called marmot that I felt shame about my verbosity, prompting him -- as, of course, any caring, well-intentioned person in this crazy ole world would do -- immediately to start mocking and scorning and disdaining me for it.

I was, at the time, tracking someone's sockpuppets via a number of unique signifiers that no one besides me would even really notice, with which that particular little attempt to nudge me where it hurt had an interesting pattern of correlation.

So it was temporarily more advantageous for me to pretend not to notice it than it would have been to ask politely for the posters in question please to quit taking digs at me for something (they believed to be) personally hurtful to me. But it's not now. So would you mind keeping an eye out for those serial accidental reminders of how tediously wordy I am in the future?

I mean, don't go to any trouble or anything. But if you do happen to remember it in time to consider just how badly you really need one of those darn non-essential -- or even totally superfluous -- references to my stylistic quirks, I'd appreciate and thank you kindly for it.

Though be (and put) yourself first, needless to say.

[compared2what?]

I've stayed out of this thread till now, but it's my opinion that many cases of autism are caused by vaccines, but not in the way that anyone thinks.

I personally just know too many people who watched their kids completely change immediately after having vaccines.

I know what you mean. I personally have just known too many rainy days for it not be my opinion that it's raining all over the world, but not in the way that the lyrics to "Rainy Night in Georgia" suggest. I think it's literally raining. Everywhere. Because, you know. Personally, I've seen a lot of that.

[compared2what?]

A couple of things that have been on my mind

Show some proof of their great dangers or don't make the claim.

If they wanted to put wild monkey kidneys in to my vaccine than the onus is upon them to ensure that it is safe and free of any rouge contaminants, however minuscule .

That sounds reasonable. But isn't.

First of all, I may have missed something here, but on what basis do you even think that someone wants to put wild monkey kidneys in your vaccine? By which I mean:

Has it not occurred to anyone here who already knows how money-grubbing the pharmaceutical industry is (which I think is everyone here) to ask why the fuck any of them would in fact want to include such yucky-sounding, comparatively costly and medically unnecessary ingredients as "chick embryonic fluid" or "diploid cells from aborted human fetal tissue" in the vaccines they make in the first place?

Because at least wrt the chick embryonic fluid (aka "egg whites"), the answer is pretty straightforwardly that they (a) barely ever do; and (b) don't want to even then.

It is true that the flu vaccine is annually, slowly, laboriously and cost-intensively produced by first culturing whatever the WHO-specified-influenza-viruses-of-the-year are in chicken eggs. And here's a nice stock photo of that for you:



So if you're allergic to eggs, you shouldn't get that vaccine. Also -- PS -- you shouldn't eat eggs.

And (OBVIOUSLY), the same would go double in both cases for people who think that chick-embryonic-fluid consumption via, say, the seasonal ingestion of omelets is an unclean and unsafe covert form of human-animal gene-mixing.

Though if there are any such people, they'd have several millennia of intact human survival to account for. But since that would be their far-fetched and hypothetical problem, anyway, let's forget them for the moment.

Because everyone else (who isn't at risk of falling for the alarmist weasel-wording used by blatant internet propaganda sites) is already in the clear. As will be everyone, period, if or when the flu vaccine manufacturers finally manage to succeed in getting whatever the far cheaper biotech method that they've apparently been lobbying for permission to use for five or six years approved.

And since no one's more anti-egg-use than they are, I'd imagine that's a "when" and not an "if," personally. I freely admit that I don't know what they're proposing to do instead. But I'm sure that's discoverable, if anybody wants to look into it. I myself just didn't feel like going to all the trouble of borrowing dystopian trouble from the future when the present is already so well-appointed with it.

Back in a moment.

[compared2what?]

Is there anyone here whose objection to vaccines is based on either his or her rejection of or his or her unfamiliarity with the generally accepted premises that:

(1) Viruses are infectious agents that can only multiply from within the cells of a living host organism.

(2) Viral reproduction sometimes outplays the immune-system defenses of the living-host-organism population in which it occurs, consequently causing very serious permanent damage and/or death to a sizable percentage of it.

(3) In those cases, the subset of organisms whose immune systems have already generated antibodies while successfully fighting off a viral infection are in a much more robust position, defensively speaking, than those whose immune systems haven't. Typically.

(4) The youngest, oldest and weakest members of the host population overall are therefore at the highest risk for serious permanent damage and/or death in those same cases. Typically.
__________________

Because if so, let those who reject state their cases. And let those who were unaware be duly informed that the data supporting those premises is as close to conclusive as data ever gets.

I'm assuming that everyone else is utterly unshocked and unhorrified that "animal by-products" -- ie, cell-culture media -- are used to make vaccines. Because the immunization properties of vaccines are derived from their inclusion of just enough of the virus in an attenuated form (sometimes live, sometimes not) to safely provoke an immune system response in the overwhelming majority of the people who receive it. Because you can't make attentuated viruses without viruses, which only multiply in the cells of living organisms -- again, ie, cell-culture media.

Vaccines are never entirely safe for everyone. And when they're dangerous, they're often unpredictably so, stuff like egg allergies aside.

But that has nothing whatsoever to do with the use of standard lab media that are, in one form or another, routinely used for about one-zillion-and-one commercial and clinical applications. Including in the all-but-totally unregulated manufacture of any number of naturopathic dietary supplements, as well as in the production of livestock feeds and medications, as well as [FILL IN THE BLANK].

I mean, there are lots of standard lab procedures that use other media, and also lots of standard lab procedures that use plant-or-other-non-bird-or-mammal cell cultures. But newsflash: It's not at all new or unique or bizarre or exotic or intrinsically unsafe to use lab media that include cultured living cells. Biochemists do it all the damn time. They also routinely use autoclaves and other lab-safety, contaminant-preventative procedures or pieces of apparatus.

There are, of course, both labs and lab-technicians that don't adhere to best-practice standards. For example, the Irish lab that Wakefield et al used to get false measles-positive readings on the gut tissue samples they got by performing unnecessary invasive medical procedures on children at the Royal Free. That place was a mess.

However, that's a lab safety and oversight issue when it is one. And it should be taken one whole hell of a lot more seriously than it is by both pharmaceutical manufacturers and the governmental enforcement agencies that don't regulate them, if you ask me. But that has no bearing on vaccine safety, per se. It's just a safety issue. And therefore almost entirely off-topic.

Speaking of which:

[compared2what?]

Do you realize that if you made a list of every single ingredient in the things you consume/absorb/inhale on a daily basis it would be loaded with all of the things that are or sound toxic on that list, and in much larger quantities?

Absurd statement.

No. It's not an absurd statement at all, actually.

Did you know that one of the ways that propagandists working for the numerous interests that would prefer to have the wide, wide range of unsafe-to-toxic industrial practices that they've been employing to soak the whole world and most of the consumer goods in it with poison for decades continue to go unnoticed frequently operate is by directing all of the attention of the target audience towards one or two emotionally compelling but nevertheless false and/or massively overhyped dangers?

Because it is.

[compared2what?]

And oh, man, I just don't know what to say about those aborted human diploid cells.

Except that if they're human, and they're not spermatzoa or ova, they're diploid. We are diploid organisms. That's what we are. So I guess that seems to me like kind of an extraneous detail to be mentioning in a context that doesn't do anything to apprise the reader of its relevance.

And except that "aborted" must mean "spontaneously, naturally aborted" if the assertion is even true at all. Because it would be a political impossibility if it weren't. As well as much too much of a hot-button winner of an issue not to have been very vocally exploited into a state of universal common knowledge by anti-choice activists decades ago.

And also except that....I really don't know. I have a very hard time believing it. No obvious explanation for the assertion presents itself to me. And I haven't stumbled across any by accident, either.

But I'm just not in a position to think of and then eliminate every single conceivable thing or circumstance under which it might be true, plus, just for good measure, every single conceivable thing or circumstance that was kinda-sorta distantly like using aborted human fetal cells to make vaccines out of to which it might possibly refer.

So if anyone has a reliable source either confirming or refuting the allegation, I'd be very grateful to see it. Maybe I'm overlooking something that's really, really embarrassingly obvious. Probably even. Nevertheless. Idiotic of me as it may be, that just continues to strike me as both an unaccountable and incredible charge to make.

So bracingly corrective responses are both invited and welcome.

[psynapz]

FWIW, in my stepdaughter's world there are several "autistic" kids, some of whom are extremely popular. One of the boys in particular, who has Aspergers, has to beat the girls off with a stick (my stepdaughter even went for him for a while). I have a friend with an autistic son in high school, and this kid also does really well with the ladies. Go figure!

Sorry, this topic scares the shit out of me so bad I haven't followed the whole thread. I just swoop in for a few pages, find some new and heretofore contradictory opinion to noodle over, then run screaming incoherently away towards something less scary, like 99% of the other threads about the end of the fucking world as we know it, because at least they don't specifically target children specifically, or seek to fuck them up in any really truly irreparable way, which whatever the fuck is going on with vaccines and those symptoms they lump into autism is, because it is for damn sure raining everywhere. At least everywhere white, middle-class people follow the CDC's poor-urban-no-healthcare-pack-it-all-in-ASAP-because-they-might-never-come-back-again stab-and-squirt soft-metal injection schedule.

Maybe when I grow some balls I'll go back through this thread, but for now, consider my pop-cultural reference to the Aspergian Pussy Paradox my official opinion on Wakefield et. al., sad as that might be for now.

/c2w

[Plutonia]

Sorry, this topic scares the shit out of me so bad I haven't followed the whole thread. I just swoop in for a few pages, find some new and heretofore contradictory opinion to noodle over, then run screaming incoherently away towards something less scary, like 99% of the other threads about the end of the fucking world as we know it, because at least they don't specifically target children specifically, or seek to fuck them up in any really truly irreparable way, which whatever the fuck is going on with vaccines and those symptoms they lump into autism is, because it is for damn sure raining everywhere. At least everywhere white, middle-class people follow the CDC's poor-urban-no-healthcare-pack-it-all-in-ASAP-because-they-might-never-come-back-again stab-and-squirt soft-metal injection schedule.

Maybe when I grow some balls I'll go back through this thread, but for now, consider my pop-cultural reference to the Aspergian Pussy Paradox my official opinion on Wakefield et. al., sad as that might be for now.

/c2w

May I submit that that is what makes for a successful psyop, psynapz. Ah! Look away! Look away!

[nathan28]

I'd been staying out of this thread but then I saw that someone defended Gary "No One Told Me Overdoses Were Toxic" Null.

Null managed to get severe vitamin D poisoning from one of his own products. Whoops. Maybe want to re-formulate that, dude.

Dude is a charlatan and a hack. I tried listening to him for irony value, but just got tired of him selling really expensive stuff as the "healthy" "alternative" to everyday "toxins". WBAI pre-empted actual programming to let Null talk garbage nonsense about how Vitamin C Injections Will Prove 9/11 Truth. So now I'm here.

Simply put, the "alternative" "natural health" industry may not be the size of the pharma cos., but it's still a $30 billion/year industry, it's extremely poorly regulated--extremely so, to the point of DEA violations and gross misreprsentations practically being its sole marketing technique. It's just as hyperbolic if not more so, and without anywhere near as much testing or for that matter research from the public sphere that it draws on. It is just as prone to abuses, just not at the same scale.

And it is just as profitable. How much do you think vitamin C powder costs wholesale? What wages do you pay a vat full of bacteria squirting out amino acids? I'm pretty sure they haven't unionized yet.

So the rejection of knee-jerk mainstream medicine for the knee-jerk acceptance of alternahealth is just as bullshit.


Onto vaccines.

Is there anyone here whose objection to vaccines is based on either his or her rejection of or his or her unfamiliarity with the generally accepted premises that:

(1) Viruses are infectious agents that can only multiply from within the cells of a living host organism.

(2) Viral reproduction sometimes outplays the immune-system defenses of the living-host-organism population in which it occurs, consequently causing very serious permanent damage and/or death to a sizable percentage of it.

(3) In those cases, the subset of organisms whose immune systems have already generated antibodies while successfully fighting off a viral infection are in a much more robust position, defensively speaking, than those whose immune systems haven't. Typically.

(4) The youngest, oldest and weakest members of the host population overall are therefore at the highest risk for serious permanent damage and/or death in those same cases. Typically.
__________________

No disagreement here, except on point 2. Sometimes the symptoms of a viral infection only manifest during overactive immune response, like shingles or herpes.

immunization properties of vaccines are derived from their inclusion of just enough of the virus in an attenuated form

True!

sometimes live, sometimes not) to safely provoke an immune system response

Er, usually. But I'm pretty wary of that "attenuation" process. Sometimes I get the impression that some corner-cutting was done down on that end. E.g., polio vaccine strains suddenly de-attenuating w/ no understanding of why, which says to me that there's gaps in the theory and the data.

in the overwhelming majority of the people who receive it. Because you can't make attentuated viruses without viruses, which only multiply in the cells of living organisms -- again, ie, cell-culture media.

Vaccines are never entirely safe for everyone. And when they're dangerous, they're often unpredictably so, stuff like egg allergies aside.

I'm willing to be wrong here:

I really have to question the "unpredictable" part of the dangerous, again,, simply b/c "ajudants" really appear to be poorly tested and often poorly understood but used for the hell of it (This is especially obvious w/ animal vaccines. How many people are going to notice a world with one less cat in it? Three, maybe?). Is it "unpredictable" or unstudied? WTF is up w/ the thimersol fetish, w/ that stuff going in everything from vaccines to contact lens fluid? Yeah, it was supposed to be 'safe', b/c the kidneys could sequester and eliminate it in small amounts. Unless you eat fish, you know, those things that are like vegetables in the water except they're made out of meat. Etc. It really strikes me as a case where attempts at constant innovation--a necessity in any business in a capitalistic set-up--are dangerous.

To get back to the "unpredictable" part, the studies that cleared the polio vaccines contaminated w/ SV-40 of being problematic did, after all, clear it. But now SV-40--which was one of those cases of industrial contamination, rather than unpredictability--has shown up in human tumors, again, and at least a few years ago the basic mechanisms were poorly understood. What's a little funny is that they can't admit it's an industrial accident, or a problem caused by poor oversight. No, they do studies to prove it's safe. Even assuming those studies were, in fact, reliable, as I tend to think they might have been--well, when you go and buy a bottle of beer you don't expect there to be formaldehyde in it, even if it's at non-toxic levels as demonstrated by hundreds of studies. Or like Union Carbide doing a study to prove, hey, Bhophal didn't cause a world-wide decline in air quality.

Instead you get "hey what's the big deal? turns out it was safe all along!" Then the lab assistant drops some hepatitis C samples into the dialysis machine. It's okay, they're going to autoclave it, they promised.

What I mean to say is that, simply, there is a lot of missing information out there. There's huge gaps in theory, too. Does that exclude practice? Of course not. You still perform surgery even if you don't have the best tools. It'd be great if Lymes' disease (which was weaponized) and adenovirus were vaccine-able. But whenever I read these anti-vaccine vs. vaccines-are-harmless debates I have to wonder. Because if you believe in the efficacy of science when you use the word "unpredictable" it usually means "researchers have been too lazy to care" or "idiopathic" which is a five-syllable word for "not understood". It doesn't mean "can't be understood", it means not understood. Poorly examined. A blind spot.

Which is why I'll give people who talk about the heavy metals used in vaccines until, when was it? the early 1980s a little bit of wiggle room. A little. Not much. But they're trying to tell us that b/c there's a blind spot that MUST BE THE PROBLEM!

B/c vaccines obviously do more good than bad. Obviously! Do you want polio? Do you want grandkids with polio? STFU. Stop trying to sell me an e-meter.

But why is there so little elaboration of these gaps in information? I know, I know, when scientists say "climate change models" or "climate change theories" every fucktard in the business-lobbying world jumps on their ass. But vaccines are sold by pharma, made by universities, not sold by Gary Null and "invented" by chiropractors.

So, there you go: the free market causes autism.

Did it cause "autism"? I doubt it. I can't remember who it was, but someone pointed out that really the way "autism" has been handled has improved singificantly and people have suddenly learned that, OMG, it's not all the same and that people who are "austistic" can function. (Never mind that some of the "Asperger's" symptoms read a lot like garden-variety narcissisms ("does not display significant empathy" "interrupts conversations frequently" etc.)... is the child a genetic degenerate, or was he neglected, beaten or abused? Who cares! Let's make it an untreatable "disorder"!)

[jam.fuse]

Gary Null, through his radio show, has introduced me to some positive things.

No doubt the man has his flaws, as do we all, but I think he has done a lot of good.

Just my personal experience.

Anyway he is not the topic of this thread.

And truth is truth, regardless of who speaks it, as far as I am concerned.

[stickdog99]

Vaccination as a monolithic disease preventative strategy has been proven to work very well if the goal is to maximize the weight of the herd's meat in a cost effective manner.

Things get a little trickier when you are deciding whether to inject your currently healthy children with an assumed preventative that has a small possibility of "unavoidable" permanent injury. A neurologically damaged cow sells for the same price as a neurologically healthy cow.

Just as with any other medical decision, the potential benefits must exceed the potential costs and risks. More and better studies are needed to better quantify both the benefits and risks.

In the case of Gardasil, for example, the promised benefits are both unproven and dubious, the cost is astronomical and there are already very effective medical treatments for cervical cancer available to most first world citizens. So if the risk is anything other than infinitesimal, getting your daughter three doses of Gardasil for $500 is an imprudent medical decision. And how was the risk level assessed? Basically, a few thousand adults (not kids) were given Gardasil and another few thousand adults were given Gardasil without HPV (but with a healthy dose of aluminum) as the "control". Adverse effects were compared and found to be not that much greater for those subjects given Gardasil, so the vaccine was declared safe. Vaccine injuries in the field are tracked by a voluntary system that was designed to be so unscientific that no quantitative safety data can be inferred. And thus the "horrific experiments" that were once inflicted on prisoners are now inflicted on entire populations via slick television marketing campaigns.

[psynapz]

And thus the "horrific experiments" that were once inflicted on prisoners are now inflicted on entire populations via slick television marketing campaigns.

Side effects may include nausea and loss of self-preservation instinct...

[nathan28]

In the case of Gardasil, for example, the promised benefits are both unproven and dubious, the cost is astronomical and there are already very effective medical treatments for cervical cancer available to most first world citizens.

"Dubious" isn't accurate, and the vaccine should "work" in theory. What you didn't mention is that the first round of HPV vaccine targeted *two* viruses (virii? viri?). There are something like 100 known HPV viruses and something like 15-20 are genital, with some of those being completely asymptomatic, and some causing cancer, and some of those cancer-causing strains being successfully cleared by some hosts' immune systems. Likewise most sexually active adults have "been exposed" to HPV. If I'm not mistaken the current version of Gardasil now targets four different virus. That's an improvement for sure.

You also neglected to mention that one "treatment" for cervical cancer is hysterectomy. Surgeries, even those that end in -tomy, don't count as "injuries", but you might want to consider that organ removal may be involved when weighing costs and benefit.

OTOH, head, neck, mouth and throat cancers also appear to be caused by HPV strains. But why is the injection only given to women, and why is it genital, if the entire endometrium can be affected by it?

Vaccine injuries in the field are tracked by a voluntary system that was designed to be so unscientific that no quantitative safety data can be inferred. And thus the "horrific experiments" that were once inflicted on prisoners are now inflicted on entire populations via slick television marketing campaigns.

That's what I mean by blind spots in data.

[compared2what?]

And truth is truth, regardless of who speaks it, as far as I am concerned.

I agree. In fact, I'd even say that truth is truth regardless of who speaks it as far as anyone is concerned. Or, for that matter, no one. And lies are lies.

As far as I'm concerned, though, none of the primary parties to the public debate about vaccine-safety can reasonably be expected to tell me or anybody else disinterested truths. Because none of them is disinterested. All of them have very serious credibility issues. And the top dogs on each side are explicitly engaged in an all but frankly declared competition to persuade and/or coerce all other people in the world to abide by their truths, by any means necessary. Including by either killing them or letting them die, if that's what it takes.

So you know. You really can't be too careful. Is I guess what I'm saying.