It is generally believed that only something on the order of 1% of side effects reported to Doctors are reported by Doctors into the system, which would explain your last comment.
NatPhilosopher
There is fairly extensive data (not published in the peer reviewed literature) that groups which are unvaccinated have far lower autism rates than the general public.
UPI Reporter Dan Olmsted went looking for the autistic Amish. In a community where he should have found 50 profound autistics, he found 3. The first was an adopted Chinese girl who’d had vaccinations rushed before she was shipped from China and more here on the way to the adoptive parents. The second had been normal until developing classic autism symptoms within hours of being vaccinated. The third there was no information about. http://www.putchildrenfirst.org/media/e.4.pdf
Olmsted continued his search for unvaccinated Amish with autism beyond that community, finding none for a long time, but eventually found a Doctor in Virginia who had treated 6 unvaccinated Amish people from various places with autism. 4 of them had very elevated levels of mercury.
A telephone survey commissioned by the nonprofit group Generation Rescue compared vaccinated with unvaccinated boys in nine counties of Oregon and California [15]. The survey included nearly 12,000 households with children ranging in ages from 4 to 17 years, including more than 17,000 boys among whom 991 were described as completely unvaccinated. In the 4 to 11 year bracket, the survey found that, compared with unvaccinated boys, vaccinated boys were 155% more likely to have a neurological disorder, 224% more likely to have ADHD, and 61% more likely to have autism. For the older boys in the 11-17 year bracket, the results were even more pronounced with 158 % more likely to have a neurological disorder, 317% more likely to have ADHD, and with 112% more likely to have autism. [15]
In addition to the Generation Rescue Survey, there are three autism-free oases in the United States. Most publicized are Amish communities, mainly studied in Ohio and Pennsylvania [16].The Amish are unique in their living styles in largely self-sustaining communities. They grow their own food. Although they have no specific prohibitions against medical care, very rarely do they vaccinate their children. In local medical centers available to the Amish, most centers reported that they had never seen an Amish autistic child. The only Amish children that were seen as a rule were those with congenital disorders such as fragile X. The one autistic Amish child that was discovered during the surveys was taken to a medical office for an ear infection where the child was incidentally vaccinated, probably without the mother’s consent.
The second is the Florida-based medical practice of Dr. Jeff Bradstreet. While treating several thousand autistic children in his practice, Bradstreet has observed that “there is virtually no autism in home-schooling families who decline to vaccinate for religious reasons” [17]
The third, the “Homefirst Health Services” located in Chicago, has a virtual absence of autism among the several thousand patients that were delivered at home by the medical practice, and remained non-vaccinated according to the wishes of the parents [18].
Clusters of autistic children have also been found among parents with occupational exposures to chemicals prior to conception [19], and in children exposed prenatally to organochlorine pesticides [20].
excerpted from:
http://vactruth.com/2012/03/13/vaccines-human-animal-dna/
Reportedly the CDC has been surveying the vaccination status of the Amish for years, attempting to induce them to vaccinate (with some success I believe), and has consistently refused requests to include an autism question with their survey to gather data.
Its probably worth noting that Seneff et al, http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/14/11/2265 who have identified one pathway by which vaccines might be causing autism, have also in other work argued that glyphosate may invoke the same pathway, and the same groups may also be avoiding glyphosate. http://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/WAPF_Slides_2012/Offsite_Seneff_Handout.pdf
I don’t reject the possibility there are other explanations for the observation that unvaccinated Amish have very low autism rates. I even offered one: that they also reject Glyphosate.
However, when it turns out that the rare cases of Amish with autism that are found mostly turn out to be vaccinated, or have some very specific other cause obvious that’s not present in the general population (high mercury), the case for vaccination being a cause becomes much much stronger.
And when you realize that other groups of unvaccinated also have low autism rates, the case becomes stronger.
And when you realize that injecting the aluminum into animal models causes behavioral deficits, and injecting vaccines into post-natal animals causes brain damage, in every study I’ve found, the case becomes stronger still.
And when you discover that the safety surveys don’t cite any empirical measurements whatsoever of the toxicity of injected aluminum in neo-nates, (or even injected aluminum in adults, for that matter), and don’t generally address the issue of aluminum at all, and don’t cite or rebut any of the many papers published in mainstream journals observing these things, or rebut or cite any of the half dozen or more epidemiological studies showing aluminum is highly correlated with autism, then I think you should conclude there is strong cognitive bias at work, if not worse.
I’m a new user on lesswrong. I entered into a discussion on the bias in the medical literature where I happen to have studied the literature in some detail, and knew some facts about the bias I could add, and could demonstrate. Now the subject there happened to be vaccines, which is apparently one where some of the patrons are caught up in the crowd think, so when I pointed out politely that reality was different than their crowd think, I promptly got a −4 karma score, preventing me from posting.
I point this out because it appears that the Less Wrong system itself contains systematic flaws that tend to reinforce crowd think dynamics, rather than piercing through them. I think crowd think is the largest cause of irrationality in the world by far.
Added later: Note I have linked and commented further here: http://whyarethingsthisway.com/2015/01/15/more-wrong-by-calculated-effort/
Well, read what I wrote. It’s demonstrable that the IOM and the other review boards are ignoring whole literatures just by searching their PDF for all of the results I’ve cited. They have no defense to aluminum, they never even study the subject, and both animal results and epidemiology show its damaging. And it is being introduced into neo-nates in amounts 100′s of times greater than what they get from diet in the first six months, with the injections bypassing about 6 or 7 filters evolution has created to keep it out. They also have no coherent articles whatsoever studying the issue of whether too many vaccines too early are causing problems. Every single study they ever do compares individuals getting large numbers of vaccines to other individuals getting large numbers of vaccines, and they ignore all the epidemiology that compares people getting many vaccines to people getting more vaccines, like regressions on vaccine compliance across states or regressions on infant mortality by number of vaccines in national series, all of which show damage. The only randomized placebo test I’m aware of of a vaccine that followed the health of the children, rather than whether they got a specific disease, found recipients of the vaccine got 4 times as many respiratory ailments as recipients of the placebo. Comparisons of vaccinated to unvaccinated, for example in the third world where you get decent statistics, also report the vaccines are raising mortality dramatically. Every animal study studying the challenge of immune systems of post-natal animals with injections reports its damaging to immune system and/or brain development. All of this the surveys simply ignore, rather than rebut or provide any evidence on the other side of.
If you don’t make the effort to look at the literature when I’ve laid it out for you, you are going to avoid discovering the plain fact that medicine has become a cargo cult science, and they don’t actually know what they are doing. The notion that committees of Doctors and/or government officials make better than random decisions about health care practices, or understand the import of scientific literatures, is fanciful, but also empirically disproved. This may impact your health and wallet in a big way if I’m right, and I am, so its worth paying a little attention to. its also a representative of an even wider phenomenon about the world, that a lot of what you think is real is actually crowd think delusions.
The actual conclusions are crowd think. The fact of the matter, as they discussed, is they had no empirical basis to assess the toxicity of injected aluminum in neo-nates, or even adults for that matter, in spite of having done it for 70 years. They had never bothered looking. They still have no empirical basis for claiming its safe, in fact, just the opposite. In fact, they are injecting 100′s of times as much aluminum into neo-nates as they get from diet in the first six months, bypassing numerous evolved filters that served to keep it out. When people actually did animal experiments on neo-nates, they reported this was very toxic to development. When people actually look at any epidemiology that’s sensitive to it, they find its very toxic to development. Its highly correlated to autism, for example, as well as infant mortality.
Incidentally, when they talk about “low incidence of adverse events”, they are talking about adverse events within 72 hours. I am talking about the impact of aluminum on development and the immune system and the development of the brain. Much of the aluminum gets stuck in the muscle and only leaks out over periods longer than 72 hours. The total load infants get from vaccines over the first six months is hundreds of times the total load they get from diet, taking into account that the dietary system filters 99.75% of ingested aluminum but virtually all parenterally injected aluminum eventually makes its way into systemic flow.
The results of the various medical surveys are crowd think. The summaries as a general rule present blather that soothes the soul. If you look at the actual empirical results published in the scientific literature, the situation is clear, even though it is the opposite of what all the surveys tell you in their summaries. If you ignore this, you are destined to fail to realize that committees of doctors or government officials are incapable of understanding a scientific literature or making medical decisions that are better for health than random, and more generally that crowd think is an important phenomenon in the world.
No I’m not. I am looking at every empirical study on aluminum, for example. I’m looking at every study that compares vaccinated to unvaccinated, or even more vaccinated to less vaccinated.
The safety surveys are cherry picking. I am not. I am following the scientific literature to find all the papers that address semantic issues like: is the aluminum in vaccines causing damage? Are vaccines in the first year or two of life inherently dangerous because they disrupt development of the immune system and brain? What studies of vaccinated and unvaccinated address the impact on long term health?
If you know of any studies on the other side of anything I’ve written, I am intensely interested in citations. The safety surveys don’t cite anything, and I haven’t been able to find anything.
I suspect the reason you think I’m cherrypicking is you assume there must be a literature on the other side of these issues that I have ignored. There is not. There is no empirical paper indicating that injecting the aluminum in vaccines into neo-nates is anything but highly toxic that I have found, or any of the rest of it. If you find any, please post a citation.
I didn’t manipulate it. I quoted it accurately, and I quoted everything it had to say about the relevant empirical results. My quote is an accurate depiction of the state of knowledge, which is what I quote. I didn’t say they had no other conclusions, I said this was “among their conclusions”.
They have no empirical basis to make any other conclusions of relevance once you understand that conclusion.
I am proving to you you are delusional about huge swaths of what you believe, and you in reaction are apparently arguing irrelevant fine points and down grading me. Are you interested in being “less wrong”, or not?
I wasn’t an anti-vaxxer till I started reading the scientific literature on it. I vaxxed my first 2 kid too.
It was 100% supporting the claim they didn’t know the first thing about the toxicity of injected aluminum in neo-nates. What claim do you think I made it seem they were supporting? Here’s how I summarized the quote.
“Doctors had been injecting aluminum adjuvants into children for 70 years, committees of doctors and government officials had decided numerous times to inject more aluminum into younger children, but as late as 2002 nobody had empirical data on toxicities of injected aluminum [1].”
I would say my quote was 100% accurate, not out of context, and I don’t have a clue what claim you think I made it seem to support that it wasn’t supporting.
Actually, Doctors practice reflects little about what the scientific literature says about vaccines, or most anything else. Medical decisions are routinely made worse than randomly. Here’s a recent review article. They reviewed all the articles for 10 years in a high impact journal. The majority of the articles surveyed study a new practice, but of the 27% that test an existing practice, 40% reverse the practice and 38% reaffirm. My remark on this is: 50%-50% would be what you’d expect if the result of the test were random. So this indicates they are doing no better than random in introducing new practices replacing old ones. If you go on a random walk with each step forward or backward, how long does it take before you know nothing? http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196%2813%2900405-9/abstract
This isn’t unusual. Everybody who looks seriously at medical practice, finds between 10-30% of it is supported by science. Here’s an article with a bunch of references to such studies by the BMJ and the Congress and the like. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-larry-dossey/the-mythology-of-science_b_412475.html
And like I pointed out, the vaccine safety surveys routinely ignore all of the actual pertinent scientific literature on dangers, so no wonder they decide they are safe.
If you read naturopaths online, they actually justify what they prescribe much better than Doctors ever will.
Here’s another one Clin Oncol (R Coll Radiol). 2004 Dec;16(8):549-60. The contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adult malignancies. Morgan G1, Ward R, Barton M. RESULTS: The overall contribution of curative and adjuvant cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adults was estimated to be 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the USA. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15630849
Personally, I’d try some recommendation like Curcumin first. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18386790
I pointed out I’m not cherrypicking and have discussed every relevant citation that I’ve found. Please post a citation that I missed that is within the scope of my investigation or retract your comment and any negative points you have given me.
Just to point out one other thing you might be missing: The scope of my investigation is whether the aluminum and many early vaccines are causing developmental damage. It explicitly omits the only things the safety surveys focus on, which is thimerosal and mmr and acute effects . I omitted these because (a) they claim to have removed it from vaccines (except flu) and (b) mmr doesn’t have adjuvants and is normally given second year of life and (c) its the only thing they defend, so why attack it, which will only involve great effort and likely be hard to decide in the end anyway? For aluminum and many early vaccines, there is no defense in the scientific literature of their safety, its a walkover to all intents and purposes, so it made the review task of deciding on the safety straightforward as well as relatively simple.
Please say what claim I made it support it wasn’t really supporting or retract your comment and any negative points you may have given me.
I’m quite curious to see what claim you think I made it support.
They didn’t have any data on the toxicities of injected aluminum. They had none. They had never injected an animal and collected any. The only data they had was on oral administration. My clarification is 100% accurate, of what the article conveys if you put the quote in context.
You seem to think the fact that they minimize the extent of their incompetence or corruption by using the euphimism “scant” for “none” is more important than the facts (1) that they had been injecting aluminum into tiny kids for 70 years before checking the toxicity, and (2) since then all of the published peer reviewed data shows its doing great damage, and (3) all of the safety review boards and safety surveys are simply and blithely ignoring the scientific literature on the subject, not bothering to cite it or to rebut it or to offer alternative studies on the issue.
Breast fed infants ingest about 7 milligrams. But about 99.75% of that goes straight into the poop, as the dietary system is incredibly good at not absorbing dietary aluminum. By contrast virtually all of the 4.4 mg of aluminum they get injected from vaccines eventually makes it to their systemic flow. That results in a total load of aluminum entering the blood from diet of .0025*7mg= .01 mg compared to the 4.4mg of injected aluminum reaching their system. Or in other words, the ratio of aluminum reaching the blood from vaccine is about 250 times the amount reaching the blood from diet.
Better read the fine print or they will pull the wool over your eyes. See also http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20010978 for some measurements.
But I want to commend you polymathwannabe. You are the first reply I have gotten that attempted to engage any meaningful question.
The article I cited reported that breast fed infants wind up getting up to 1000 times as much aluminum from vaccines as from diet. That is the empirical result that paper was reporting. The rest is window dressing which would be at best the authors opinion. The question of whether getting that amount of aluminum is toxic is more complicated. The natural experiment is to scale it for weight and inject it into post natal mice. That experiment has been done and reports they suffer great developmental damage. There’s also a fair amount of epidemiology that bears on the subject, which also suggests the aluminum is causing damage. Its highly correlated with autism, for example. I reviewed the literature all with links to about 3 dozen citations at http://whyarethingsthisway.com/2014/03/08/example-1-pediatrician-belief-is-opposite-the-published-scientific-evidence-on-early-vaccine-safety/
Also, I suggest to you that there is demonstrably very strong crowd think effects on the subject of vaccines. A phenomenon of crowd think is persecution of heretics. In such a climate, scientists publishing results that challenge the orthodoxy have to tread very sensitively indeed if they wish to avoid the inquisition. And they often respond to this by adding various flowery prose to their publications such as that which you mention, mitigating the distaste of having to report such contrary results. If you wish to understand crowd think better, I recommend: http://whyarethingsthisway.com/2014/03/22/why-are-the-pediatricians-so-confused-about-the-actual-state-of-the-scientific-literature/
There’s no “inquisition” in medicine. That’s an unsupported opinion I believe is false. Laura Hewitson and Andrew Wakefield are immediate counterexamples that come to mind. I expect any Doctor that took a public position against vaccination would come under a lot of social pressure at least, and may well lose job or opportunities.
What criterion are you using to select what counts as fact and what is immaterial? How would you identify an author who is being reasonably cautious not to make any unjustified statements? I don’t look to authors to make statements or draw conclusions. If I can’t draw the conclusion myself, its not valid. I look to authors to report empirical data, and maybe spell out a proof or calculation of its implications, but if I can’t personally follow the proof or calculation of the implications, then its not valid. The point of the scientific literature is, its supposed to be verifiable by scientists, so I look at it in that spirit. The scientists writing it are really supposed to keep their opinions out of it, but when they can’t help themselves the readers should exercise judgement themselves. I am looking at the questions as semantic, as being questions about the physics of the world, and understanding it as a physicist should. What’s relevant is what’s relevant to answering the physics questions such as “are vaccines causing damage?” and is decided by the physics of the world and rationality.
I didn’t read that ridiculously long distraction you linked, did you? However every phrase in my statement I believe to be true. Thompson was a collaborator. Thomson issued a statement through his lawyer saying as follows: “My name is William Thompson. I am a Senior Scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where I have worked since 1998. I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.”
I believe there are also phone tapes of him which he wasn’t expecting to be published that take a stronger position, and at the above link you can read old emails from him to the then Head of CDC, (Now Head of Mercks’ Vaccine Division) and others documenting and extending the claims.
If you visit the CDC webpage on the question of whether kids are getting autism from vaccines, the paper they link you to has the same lead author. This is the only primary source they link. So I repeat my question: Does the CDC really need to rely on him as their sole source for arguing vaccines don’t cause autism?”
Incidentally, the more important question is the second one I point out, if you read that paper it is being misrepresented just as the data reportedly was in the earlier paper, to say things it doesn’t say. This study doesn’t indicate that too many vaccines too soon aren’t causing autism. It is blind on that subject. At best it indicates that DTP and the rest of the vaccine series isn’t dramatically more likely to produce autism than DTaP and the rest of the vaccine series.
In addition to that, its my belief that a minor reanalysis of their data, just changing the entries in a column of table 1 from “number of antigens” to “mcg of Al in vaccine” and running the data through their computer again, would give much more interesting results. Also changing the entries from “number of antigens” to “1″ (ie total number of vaccines, counting 1 per vaccine) would give more interesting results. (The actual paper contrived to use a column that contained “3004” for DTP and some single digit number for everything else in common use, so it basically reduced itself to a single vaccine test while being presented as a test of multiple vaccine effects.)
Did you find anything relevant to any of the questions I address, such as long term effects of total vaccine load, especially of aluminum, and of early vaccine use?
Did you find anything rebutting the extensive animal literature I cited that reports early and often vaccines are a problem? Did you find anything rebutting the epidemiological literature I cited, that suggests similarly.
Did you find anything confirming or refuting Original Antigenic Sin—the phenomenon that a vaccine while training the immune system to a particular type of response to a particular virus, damages other responses of the immune system, such as cellular, both to that virus and to other infections?
Did you find anything interesting on how long immunity lasts, particularly that addresses the question of how soon after their last booster vaccine recipients become susceptible to sub-clinical infections and may become contagious?
The actual problem is that the surveys routinely ignore all the articles showing vaccines causing problems. There is always a lot of attention to whether thimerosal causes autism, or whether MMR causes autism. There is never any examination of whether the aluminum in vaccines causes autism, or whether getting any vaccine at all at a critical period of brain development causes autism, or whether getting too many vaccines too soon causes autism*, for all of which there are published peer reviewed papers indicating a likelihood they do, or the contaminants in vaccines cause autism (contaminants suggested in the literature include human DNA, which is suggested to cause autism, Simian retroviruses, Simian virus SV-40, and Mycoplasmas), nor any comparison of vaccinated to fully unvaccinated individuals. I did a quick survey of the surveys cited above, and none of them considers aluminum. I also wrote a survey article on some of the literature suggesting early and adjuvanted vaccines cause damage, and none of the dozens of peer reviewed papers I found suggesting damage is cited in the IOM’s numerous 800+ page surveys. My survey can be found at http://whyarethingsthisway.com/2014/03/08/example-1-pediatrician-belief-is-opposite-the-published-scientific-evidence-on-early-vaccine-safety/
If you read later posts in that blog you will find more criticism of the cognitive biases and outright omissions in the vaccine safety and effectiveness literature. Basically there is extensive scientific evidence indicating that any vaccine that happens to come during critical periods of brain development may harm development, and that various cumulative effects of vaccines may cause problems. The safety surveys basically only compare patients who got one specific vaccine and many others to patients who got many others, so they are blind to the kinds of damage that seem likely to be occurring. Also, the only RPC study I know of that injected saline or vaccine randomly into children and followed their health (not whether they got a specific disease) for more than a few months found the vaccine recipients (a flu vaccine) got 4 times as many respiratory illnesses as the recipients of the placebo.
*The paper of Stefano et al that is sometimes cited as showing this, upon closer examination effectively only compares patients who got DTP and other vaccines to patients who may have gotten DTaP, but did not get DTP, and got other vaccines. See the survey above for more discussion. I’ve never seen any other paper mentioned on the subject.
I would be very grateful to people who can supply citations to articles I haven’t yet found contradicting my conclusions, for example other RCP studies following health for a prolonged period, especially of children.