HPV vaccination: a thalidomide-type scandal

I’ve posted a number of times about the lack of proof that HPV causes cervical cancer and that the anti-HPV vaccines are being touted widely by officialdom as well as manufacturers even though the vaccines have been associated with an unusually high number of adverse reactions, some of them very severe, literally disabling.

Long-time medical journalist and producer of award-winning documentaries, Joan Shenton, has just made available the first of a projected trilogy, Sacrificial Virgins, about the dangers of anti-HPV vaccines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAzcMHaBvLs&feature=youtu.be

The website, WHAT DOCTORS WON’T TELL YOU, comments in this way: “HPV vaccine ‘a second thalidomide scandal’, says new YouTube documentary”

 

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American Medicine Needs Reform — or perhaps revolution

Dozens of books and myriad articles have been published over the last few decades about What’s Wrong With Present-Day Medicine.

A recent addition is An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back by Elisabeth Rosenthal, lauded in a lead review  in the New York Times (4 & 9 April 2017) and with 250 customer reviews on amazon.com, >80% of them 5-starred.

The New York Times review is titled “Why an open market won’t repair American health care”, which indicates clearly enough why it may take a revolution, and perhaps a President Bernie Sanders, and certainly a squashing of the Republican Party’s free-market-above-all ideology, to bring American citizens the guaranteed and affordable heath care that is enjoyed by the citizens of every other major country on Earth.

It is far from only the political left that recognizes this need. Angus Deaton, 2015 Nobel Prize for economic science, wrote: “I would add [to possible ways of reducing income inequality] the creation of a single-payer health system; not because I am in favor of socialized medicine but because the artificially inflated costs of health care are powering up inequality by producing large fortunes for a few while holding down wages; the pharmaceutical industry alone had 1,400 lobbyists in Washington in 2014. American health care does a poor job of delivering health, but is exquisitely designed as an inequality machine, commanding an ever-larger share of G.D.P. and funneling resources to the top of the income distribution” (review of The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution — Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic by Ganesh Sitaraman, New York Times, 20 March 2017)

 

 

Scientific consensus vs. the evidence: Big-Bang theory and fudge factors

The scientific consensus is that the universe began in a “Big Bang” around 13 billion years ago.

As with the scientific consensus on most matters, the media and society at large treat this consensus as unquestionable truth. Serious and competent dissenters are almost invisible, and much of the media depict people who don’t accept the consensus as Flat-Earthers, crackpots.

Again as with the scientific consensus on many matters, the actual evidence, the facts, do not support the consensus unequivocally. Sorely missing from society’s respect for “science” is an appreciation of the difference between facts and theories.

Concerning the Big Bang, the facts are the differences in colors of the light emitted by the chemical elements as observed on Earth and on cosmic objects.

“Color” is the human sensation experienced when visible light of particular wavelengths (or frequencies, inversely proportional to wavelengths) hits the eye’s retina. A well established physical phenomenon is the Doppler Effect: an observer moving away from a source of waves registers a longer wavelength than an observer at the source itself (and vice versa, an observer traveling towards a source of waves registers an apparently shorter wavelength). The example typically given in schools, long ago in the days of steam-engine trains, was that the whistles from the train’s engine sounded a higher tone when the train was approaching the station and a lower note when moving away from the station; the Internet offers many illustrations of this, for example “Brass band on train demonstrates Doppler effect”.

All observations of distant cosmic objects show a “redshift”: the colors of light emitted by the chemical elements on the objects are shifted to longer wavelengths, to the red end of the spectrum of visible light. According to the Doppler Effect, that means the objects are moving away from Earth, in all directions; the universe is expanding, in other words.

However: Is the Doppler Effect the only possible reason for the cosmic redshifts?

No, according to observational evidence accumulated by astronomer Halton Arp, which suggests that the light emitted by quasars has a redshift that is only partly a Doppler Effect, the other part possibly characteristic of newly formed matter. Quasars are “quasi-stellar objects”, emitting much larger amounts of energy than would stars of apparently similar size, and they are key components in calculations of the distances and speeds of cosmic objects. If Arp was right, then Big-Bang cosmology might well be replaced by the Steady-State theory of the universe promoted by Fred Hoyle and others. Since quasars are far from fully understood (Frequently asked questions about Quasars ), Arp may turn out to have been right.

At any rate, that the scientific consensus on Big-Bang cosmology is almost universally accepted, that the common conventional wisdom has no doubts about it, illustrates how a scientific consensus can become popular public dogma even when there are substantive reasons to doubt its validity.

There are actually many reasons to doubt the validity of the Big-Bang hypothesis, set out for instance by the late Tom Van Flandern (The Top 30 problems with the Big Bang Theory) or more recently and succinctly by “Tanya Techie” (Top Ten scientific flaws in the Big Bang Theory).

What has seemed to me the kiss of death for Big-Bang Theory is the need for the fudge factors of “dark matter” and “dark energy” to explain the calculated rate of universe expansion; fudge factors that seem utterly absurd given that they are supposed to represent amounts much larger than the known amounts of normal matter and energy (Rethinking “Star Soup”) but have never actually been observed, they are postulated to exist solely to make Big-Bang Theory work.

An additional ground for doubt is that the calculations on which dark matter-energy are estimated appear to be seriously flawed: Donald G. Saari, “N-body solutions and computing galactic masses”, Astronomical Journal, 149 (2015) 174; “Mathematics and the ‘Dark Matter’ puzzle”, American Mathematical Monthly, 122 (2015) 407.

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Big-Bang Theory is far from alone as an almost universally accepted doctrine that in reality conforms only doubtfully with the actual evidence. Close examination of the actual facts on quite a number of other topics reveals that there are reasonable doubts about the validity of the scientific consensus on how to interpret the evidence about

Ø      the extinction of the dinosaurs

Ø      the mechanism of smell

Ø      the efficacy of anti-depressants

Ø      the cholesterol theory of cardiovascular disease

Ø      the blood-pressure theory of strokes and heart attacks

Ø      the cause of AIDS

Ø      when and from where the first human settled in the Americas

Ø      the hazards of second-hand tobacco smoke

Ø      whether nuclear fusion is feasible at ordinary temperatures (“cold fusion”)

Ø      whether human-generated carbon dioxide is responsible for climate change

Ø      whether continental drift (plate tectonics) adequately explains all the facts about earthquakes and other geological phenomena

Ø      the cause(s) of Alzheimer’s disease

Ø      the potential danger of mercury in vaccines and in dental amalgams

and more; see Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth