Vaccines are not all equally safe and effective

The article below is copied from the website of the Roanoke Times:

https://www.roanoke.com/opinion/commentary/bauer-all-vaccines-are-not-equally-safe-and-effective/article_ef1bf6b6-4e8f-5dcd-b071-91736b99c68a.html

The article also appeared on the Opinion page of the Times on 11 July 2019.

The Roanoke Times is a local/regional newspaper in South-West Virginia. I had tried for a wider audience, but essentially the same piece had been rejected by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall St Journal, and Financial Times.

Several people have been unable to access the Internet link given above, either asked to subscribe to the newspaper or told that it is not available outside the USA, but a number of people accessed it without difficulty.

Recent outbreaks of measles have brought widespread unrestrained criticism of parents who have avoided vaccinating their children under the presumed influence of misguided ideological “anti-vaxxers.” But at least some of the anger and blame should be directed at official sources for refusing to admit that some vaccines occasionally do bring sometimes very serious harm to some individuals. By not admitting that, officialdom provides unwarranted credibility to allegations of official cover- ups, allegations then expanded to blanket warnings against vaccinating in general.

There are three main ways in which vaccines can sometimes cause harm to some individuals.

One is the presence in some vaccines of preservatives to protect against contamination by bacteria. Being toxic to bacteria, they can also be toxic to higher forms of life. A commonly used preservative, thimerosal, is a mercury-containing organic substance, and organic-mercury compounds are indeed often toxic to human beings.

A second possible source of harm in some vaccines is the use of so-called adjuvants. These cause a non-specific stimulation of the immune system, in the belief that when the immune system is already aroused it will respond better to the specific components in the vaccine. Adjuvants work through being recognized by the immune system as foreign and undesirable, in other words as being potentially harmful to the person receiving the vaccine. Commonly used adjuvants include organic aluminum compounds, which are known to be harmful if they accumulate in the nervous system, particularly the brain; some people of my age may recall the long-ago warnings against aluminum cookware because of that possible harm.

A third possible danger lies in the inherent specific action of the particular vaccine. Some vaccines sometimes, though quite rarely, actually bring about the very disease against which they are intended to act. More generally, since vaccines are intended to cause the immune system to do certain things, it is far from implausible that the immune system may sometimes react in a different fashion than desired, for example by setting in process an autoimmune reaction. Our present understanding of immune-system functioning does not warrant dogmatic, supposedly authoritative pronouncements alleging that all vaccines are safe for everyone.

The known sources of possible harm from vaccination makes it not unreasonable, for instance, to recommend that babies be vaccinated against mumps, measles, and rubella separately, at intervals, rather than with a single dose of a multiple (MMR) vaccine. The known nervous-system toxicity of organic aluminum and mercury compounds makes it unreasonable to dismiss out-of-hand that these additives in some vaccines may produce such neural damage as symptoms of autism; reports and claims need to be investigated, not ignored or pooh-poohed. Moreover, wherever possible we should be offered the option of vaccines free of adjuvants and preservatives.

The public would be better served than we are now if official proclamations were to distinguish among different vaccines. The benefit-to-risk ratio of measles vaccine, for instance, or of polio vaccine, seems well established through long experience of efficacy and relative safety (“relative” because there is never 100.000…% certainty). By contrast, vaccines against HPV (human papillomavirus) have accumulated quite a substantial record of serious adverse events: the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program of the Department of Health and Human Services had by 2013 awarded about $6 million to 49 victims in claims against HPV vaccines, with barely half of 200 claims adjudicated at that time; by May 2019, 130 of 480 claims against HPV vaccines had been compensated. Here the benefit-to-risk ratio is not known to be favorable because it cannot yet be known whether the vaccines actually prevent cervical or other cancers, it is only known that they act against viruses sometimes associated with cancer but never yet proven to actually cause cancer.

It is dangerous and without reasonable basis for ideological anti-vaxxers to raise alarm over all vaccinations because of instances like the HPV vaccines. But the conspiratorial and ideological anti-vaxxers are lent unwarranted public credibility and plausibility because officialdom refuses to admit the harm done by, for example, the HPV vaccines, while emphasizing the desirability of maintaining herd immunity against, say, measles, as though the same logic and practical experience applied to all vaccines including new, recently-devised ones. “Since they are lying to us about HPV vaccines, why should we trust them about measles vaccine?”
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Dr. Christian Fiala, MD, adds:
You may add the experience that vaccines have been withdrawn because it became obvious that they were mainly dangerous and had little if any benefit, like Swine flu. Furthermore it because known in this case that most of the recommendations were by people paid for by the industry, including WHO ‚experts‘. This example is proof of the fact that pharmaceutical companies do in some cases exert a strong influence on bodies which are supposed to be neutral. Just like the Cochrane scandal.
The fact that these negative examples are totally left out by the vaccine lobby seriously harms their credibility.

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Modern Psychiatric Diagnosis is Bullshit

I use the term   “bullshit”, of course, as the appropriate description of “assertions made without regard to whether or not they have any truth value”, following the analysis of professor of philosophy Harry Frankfurt in his book On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005).

Those who commit bullshit orally or in writing do, of course, often imagine that they are asserting something that is true, but they are merely parroting popular shibboleths, “what everyone knows”,  without having taken any time it to examine the evidence for themselves (see Climate change is responsible for everything, as everyone knows (but what everyone knows is usually wrong).

Extraordinary as it may seem, the professional reference work on psychiatric diagnosis, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association and (since 2013) in its 5th edition (DSM-5), gives every appearance of having been put together without any careful attention to evidence, or for that matter to whether it makes any sense.

A couple of years ago, I pointed to the nonsense incorporated in DSM-5 about ADHD — Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (The banality of evil — Psychiatry and ADHD).

Now, the peer-reviewed professional journal Psychiatry Research has published a detailed analysis revealing that the diagnostic categories in DSM-5 make no sense in theory or in practice: (Allsopp et al., Heterogeneity in psychiatric diagnostic classification, Psychiatry Research 279 (2019) 15–22; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2019.07.005).

It should suffice to offer two quotes:

“ [I]n the majority of diagnoses in both DSM-IV-TR and DSM-5 (64% and 58.3% respectively), two people could receive the same diagnosis without sharing any common symptoms.”

“[T]here are 270 million combinations of symptoms that would meet the criteria for both PTSD and major depressive disorder, and when five other commonly made diagnoses are seen alongside these two, the figure rises to one quintillion symptom combinations — more than the number of stars in the Milky Way.”

QED

Of course, the professional literature refrains from exposing its guild’s follies, the nakedness of the unclothed Emperor, to the general public, hence the article’s title is “Heterogeneity in psychiatric diagnostic classification”, unlikely to catch the eye of the uninitiated, rather than the plain “Modern psychiatric diagnosis is bullshit”, but both are saying the same thing. As George Bernard Shaw noted a century or so ago, “All professions are conspiracies against the laity”.