Aluminum adjuvants, autoimmune diseases, and attempted suppression of the truth

An earlier post (Adjuvants — the poisons hidden in some vaccines) described the danger that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines pose, including that they may indeed be associated with a risk of inducing autism. A recent book, How to End the Autism Epidemic,   underscores that risk and exposes what should be the crippling, disqualifying conflicts of interest of one of the most prominent accepted experts on vaccinations. I had learned about this from a splendidly informative article by Celeste McGovern at Ghost Ship Media (Prescription to end the autism epidemic, 17 September 2018).

It turns out that animals as well as human beings have experienced tangible harm from vaccines containing aluminum adjuvants: in particular, sheep. Celeste McGovern has reported about that in other recent posts:
Spanish sheep study finds vaccine aluminum in lymph nodes more than a year after injection, behavioural changes, 3 November 2018; Vaccines induce bizarre anti-social behaviour in sheep, 6 November 2018; Anatomy of a science study censorship, 20 March 2019.

This last piece describes the attempt to prevent the truth about aluminum adjuvants from becoming public knowledge, by pressuring the publisher, Elsevier, to withdraw an already accepted, peer-reviewed article in one of its journals: “Cognition and behavior in sheep repetitively inoculated with aluminum adjuvant-containing vaccines or aluminum adjuvant only”, by Javier Asína et al., published online in Pharmacological Research before being withdrawn. Fortunately there are   nowadays resources on the Internet that make it more difficult for the censors to do their dirty work. One invaluable resource is the Wayback Machine, which too few people seem to know about. In the present case, a PDF of the Asína et al. article, as accepted and published online as “In Press” in Pharmacological Research, is available at ResearchGate.

Elsevier publishes thousands of scientific and medical journals, including in the past some that were actually advertisements written by and paid for by pharmaceutical companies, presented dishonestly and misleadingly as genuine scientific periodicals: Elsevier published 6 fake journals); Elsevier had a whole division publishing fake medical journals).

Elsevier had also engaged in censorship on earlier occasions, in one case to the extent of emasculating a well respected, independent publication, Medical Hypotheses (see Chapter 3, “A Public Act of Censorship: Elsevier and Medical Hypotheses”, in Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth).

If the shenanigans and cover-ups about aluminum adjuvants make an insufficiently alarming horror story,   please look at yet another article by Celeste McGovern: Poisoned in Slow Motion, 1 October 2018:

“Immune-system disease is sweeping the globe. . . . Autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants, or ASIA — a wildly unpredictable inflammatory response to foreign substances injected or inserted into the human body . . . . The medical literature contains hundreds of such cases. . . . [with] vague and sundry symptoms — chronic fatigue, muscle and joint pain, sleep disturbances, cognitive impairment, skin rashes and more . . . that . . . share the common underlying trigger of certain immune signaling pathways. Sometimes this low-grade inflammation can smolder for years only to suddenly incite an overt autoimmune disease. . . . Chronic fatigue syndrome (also known as myalgic encephalitis), once a rare “hypochondriac” disorder, now affects millions of people globally and has been strongly associated with markers of immune system dysfunction. . . . One in thirteen American children has a hyperactive immune system resulting in food allergy,4 and asthma, another chronic inflammatory disease of the immune system, affects 300 million people across the globe.5 Severe neurological disorders like autism (which now affects one in 22 boys in some US states) have soared from virtual nonexistence and are also linked to a damaged immune system.”

[4. Pediatrics, 2011; 128: e9-17
5. Global Initiative for Asthma. Global Strategy for Asthma Management and Prevention. 2008.
6. Eur J Pediatr, 2014; 173: 33-43]

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These particulars offer further illustrations of the general points that I have been making for some time:

⇒  Science and medicine have become dogmatic wielders of authority through being co-opted and in effect bought out by commercial interests. Pharmaceutical companies are perhaps in the forefront of this takeover, but the influence of other industries should not be forgotten, for instance that of Monsanto with its interest in Genetically Modified products; see Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth, Jefferson (NC): McFarland 2012

⇒  Science, research, medicine, are very different things nowadays than they were up to about the middle of the 20th century, and very different from the conventional wisdom about them. Media, policy makers, and the public need an independent, impartial assessment of what science and medicine are said to have established; needed is  a Science Court; see Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland, 2017

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Adjuvants — the poisons hidden in some vaccines

Everyone knows that vaccines are ingeniously devised to work very precisely against certain unique threats, in particular to prevent infection by viruses. Preventing infection by a virus is especially important because there are no really satisfactory ways to cure a viral infection, whereas most bacterial infections can be treated quite successfully by means of antibiotics.

Every vaccine is engineered to work against the unique threat posed by a particular virus — measles vaccine protects specifically against measles, for instance, but offers no protection against mumps or whooping cough.

On the other hand, many vaccines contain, as well as the biologically specific agent, something called an adjuvant. According to the Centers for Disease Control , “An adjuvant is an ingredient used in some vaccines that helps create a stronger immune response in people receiving the vaccine”.

The adjuvant stimulates the immune system in a non-specific way. It arouses the immune system because the adjuvant is toxic, poisonous, something that the immune system wishes to guard its host against. The theory behind this practice seems to be that an immune system aroused by a non-specific poison is more likely to generate the uniquely specific antibodies which the biologically specific component of the vaccine seeks to create.

The trouble is that adjuvants are wide-rangingly non-specific poisons that can cause harm in a variety of ways. As the CDC itself points out, “Adjuvanted vaccines can cause more local reactions (such as redness, swelling, and pain at the injection site) and more systemic reactions (such as fever, chills and body aches) than non-adjuvanted vaccines.”

In most of the public arguments over the safety of vaccines, proponents and opponents all too often fail to focus specifically on the possible influence of adjuvants.

Among the most common adjuvants are compounds containing aluminum. There is strong published evidence that these compounds are capable of damaging brain cells and may well be associated with such conditions as autism and dementia.

For details of fairly recent research on these matters, see the presentation on YouTube by Professor Exley: “Systemic Toxicity of Aluminium Adjuvants: Prof. Christopher Exley”  and the article in a mainstream, peer-reviewed journal, “Aluminium in brain tissue in autism” by Matthew Mold, Dorcas Umar, Andrew King & Christopher Exley, Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology, 46 (2018) 76-82.

The dangers posed by aluminum adjuvants — or for that matter any adjuvants — are obviously relevant to the Wakefield warning that simultaneous multiple vaccinations are capable of bringing on autism. Moreover, the vaccines against HPV (Gardasil and Cervarix) have been reported to be associated with some very severe brain-associated damage to some individuals; see for instance “The truth is out: Gardasil vaccine coverup exposed”, by Kelly Brogan, MD .

Some of the vaccines that contain aluminum adjuvants are listed at “Vaccine Ingredients – Aluminum”, albeit with text that downplays the associated risks of harm.

 

Australian university fires climate-change dissenter: dissent is not collegial…

Just another bit of evidence of politically correct dogmatism in science; see Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth, McFarland 2012

Tenured professor Peter Ridd, a marine scientist, was fired from James Cook University (Queensland, Australia), for sharing with a journalist his view that certain published work is misleading:

“Ridd’s expertise is in coastal oceanography and the impact of sediments on reefs and, for years, he has criticised research suggesting the Great Barrier reef is in serious trouble due to global warming and agricultural run-off, among other things. He claims the research lacks quality assurance, isn’t replicated often enough, and that the peer review system for research is inadequate. . . .
His trouble started in April 2016 when he received a ‘formal censure’ for ‘misconduct’. It was a curious incident: the university had got hold of an email that Ridd sent to a news.com.au journalist a few months before. In it, he urged the journalist to look into work Ridd had done suggesting that photographs released by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority indicating a big decline in reef health over time were misleading …
the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies – based at James Cook University –‘should check their facts before they spin their story . . .’

This was enough for the university to censure Ridd on the grounds that he breached the code of conduct by ‘going to the media in your professional capacity in a way that was not collegial and did not respect the rights of others or uphold professional standards’. It was a warning. Ridd could make public comments but they ‘must be in a collegial manner that upholds the university and individuals’ respect’”.

In other words, don’t offer evidence that contradicts the mainstream view, especially if there are mainstream proponents in your own university.

Academic freedom to teach and publish?

Open-minded science that respects evidence?

Read the full article in The Guardian: Gay Alcorn, “Peter Ridd’s sacking pushes the limit of academic freedom”. Note that the journalist, Alcorn, takes human-caused climate change as Gospel truth, yet recognizes that the University fired Ridd because he sought media prominence for his views and refused to allow himself to be censored into not speaking publicly about the University’s actions against him. The Guardian, a stalwart supporter of left-leaning political correctness, could not quite bring itself to state straightforwardly that the university stepped way over the line as to academic freedom, but that’s a minor quibble; I congratulate Gay Alcorn and The Guardian for straight, unbiased reporting.

Ridd has sued the University and raised funds for his legal costs though crowd-funding; “the court hearing has been set for 12, 13 and 14th November”.

Where to turn for disinterested scientific knowledge and insight?

The “vicious cycle of wrong knowledge” illustrates the dilemma we face nowadays: Where to turn for disinterested scientific knowledge and insight?

In centuries past in the intellectual West, religious authorities had offered unquestionable truth. In many parts of the world, religious authorities or political authorities still do. But in relatively emancipated, socially and politically open societies, the dilemma is inescapable. We accept that religion doesn’t have final answers on everything about the natural world, even if we accept the value of religious teachings about how we should behave as human beings. Science, it seemed, knew what religion didn’t, about the age of the Earth, about the evolution of living things, about all sorts of physical, material things. So “science” became the place to turn for reliable knowledge. We entered the Age of Science (Knight, 1983). But we (most of us) recognize that scientific knowledge cannot be absolutely and finally true because, ultimately, it rests on experience, on induction from observations, which can never be a complete reflection of the natural world; there remain always the known unknown and the unknown unknown.

Nevertheless, for practical purposes we want to be guided by the best current understanding that science can afford. The problem becomes, how to glean the best current understanding that science can offer?

Society’s knee-jerk response is to consult the scientific community: scientific associations, lauded scientists, government agencies, scientific literature. What society hears, however, is not a disinterested analysis or filtering of what those sources say, because all of them conform to whatever the contemporary “scientific consensus” happens to be. And, as earlier discussed (Dangerous knowledge II: Wrong knowledge about the history of science), that consensus is inevitably fallible, albeit the conventional wisdom is not on guard against that, largely because of misconceptions stemming from an holistic ignorance of the history of science.

The crux of the problem is that scientific knowledge and ideas that do not conform to the scientific consensus are essentially invisible in the public sphere. In any case, society has no mechanism for ensuring that what the scientific consensus holds at any given time is the most faithful, authoritative reflection of the available evidence and its logical interpretation. That represents clear and present danger as “science” is increasingly turned to for advice on public policies, in an environment replete with claims of truth from many sides, people claiming to speak for religion or for science, or organizations claiming to do so, including sophisticated advertisements by commercial and political groups.

In less politically partisan times, Congress and the administration had the benefit of the Office of Technological Assessment (OTA), founded in 1972 to provide policy makers with advice, as objective and up-to-date as possible, about technical issues; but OTA was disbanded in 1995 for reasons of partisan politics, and no substitute has been established. Society needs badly some authoritative, disinterested, non-partisan mechanism for analyzing, filtering, and interpreting scientific claims.

The only candidate so far on offer for that task is a Science Court, apparently first mooted half a century ago by Arthur Kantrowitz (1967) in the form of an “institute for scientific judgment”, soon named by others as a Science Court (Cavicchi 1993; Field 1993; Mazur 1993; Task Force 1993). Such a Court’s sole mission would be to assess the validity of conflicting contemporary scientific and technical claims and advice.

The need for such a Court is most obvious in the context of impassioned controversy in the public arena where political and ideological interests confuse and obfuscate the purely technical points, as for instance nowadays over global warming (A politically liberal global-warming skeptic?). Accordingly, a Science Court would need complete independence, for which the best available appropriate model is the United States Supreme Court. Indeed, perhaps a Science Court could be managed and supervised by the Supreme Court.

Many knotty issue beside independence present themselves in considering how a Science Court might function: choice of judges or panels or juries; choice of issues to take on; possibilities for appealing findings. For an extended discussion of such matters, see chapter 12 of Science Is Not What You Think and further sources given there. But the salient point is this:

Society needs but lacks an authoritative, disinterested, non-partisan mechanism for adjudicating conflicting scientific advice. A Science Court seems the only conceivable possibility.

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Jon R. Cavicchi, “The Science Court: A Bibliography”, RISK — Issues in Health and Safety, 4 [1993] 171–8.

Thomas G. Field, Jr., “The Science Court Is Dead; Long Live the Science Court!” RISK — Issues in Health and Safety, 4 [1993] 95–100.

Arthur Kantrowitz, “Proposal for an Institution for Scientific Judgment”, Science,
156 [1967] 763–4.

David Knight, The Age of Science, Basil Blackwell, 1986.

Allan Mazur, “The Science Court: Reminiscence and Retrospective”, RISK — Issues in Health and Safety, 4 [1993] 161–70.

Task Force of the Presidential Advisory Group on Anticipated Advances in Science and Technology, “The Science Court Experiment: An Interim Report”, RISK — Issues in Health and Safety, 4 [1993] 179–88

Fog Facts: Side effects and re-positioning of drugs

Fog Facts: things that are known and yet not known —
[not known to the conventional wisdom, the general public, the media
but known to those (few) who are genuinely informed about the subject]

For that delightful term, Fog Facts, I’m grateful to Larry Beinhart who introduced me to it in his novel “The Librarian”. There it’s used in connection with political matters, but it’s entirely appropriate for the disconnect between “what everyone knows” about blood pressure, cholesterol, prescription drugs, and things of that ilk, and what the actual facts are in the technical literature.

For example, the popular shibboleth is that drug companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars in the development of a new drug, and that’s why they need to make such large profits to plough back into research. The truth of the matter is that most new drugs originate in academic research, conducted to a great extent at public expense; and drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than they do on research. All that is known to anyone who cares to read material other than what the drug-company ads say and what the news media disseminate; and yet it’s not known because too few people read the right things, even books by former editors of medical journals and academic researchers at leading universities and published by mainstream publishers; see “What’s wrong with modern medicine”.

When it comes to drug “development”, the facts are all hidden in plain view. There’s even a whole journal about it, Nature Reviews — Drug Discovery, that began publication in 2002. I came to learn about this because Josh Nicholson had alerted me to an article in that journal, “Drug repositioning: identifying and developing new uses for existing drugs” (by Ted T. Ashburn and Karl B. Thor, 3 [2004] 673-82). I had never heard of “drug repositioning”. What could it mean?

Well, it means finding new uses for old drugs. And the basic reason for doing so is that it’s much easier and more profitable than trying to design or discover a new drug, because old drugs have already been approved as safe, and it’s already known how to manufacture them.

What seems obvious, however — albeit only as a Fog Fact — is that the very success of repositioning drugs should be a red flag warning against the drug-based medicine or drug-first medicine or drug-besotted medicine that has become standard practice in the United States. The rationale for prescribing a drug is that it will fix what needs attending to without seriously and adversely affecting anything else, in other words that there are no serious “side” effects. But repositioning a drug shows that it has a comparably powerful effect on something other than its original target. In other words, “side” effects may be as powerful and significant as the originally intended effect. Ashburn and Thor give a number of examples:

Cymbalta was originally prescribed to treat depression, anxiety, diabetic peripheral neuropathy, and fibromyalgia (all at about the same dosage, which might cause one to wonder how many different mechanisms or systems are actually being affected besides the intended one). The listed side effects do not include anything about urination, yet the drug has been repositioned as Duloxetine SUI to treat “stress urinary incontinence (SUI), a condition characterized by episodic loss of urine associated with sharp increases in intra-abdominal pressure (for example, when a person laughs, coughs or sneezes)”; and “Lilly is currently anticipating worldwide sales of Duloxetine SUI to approach US $800 million within four years of launch”.

Dapoxetine was not a success for analgesia or against depression, but came into its own to treat premature ejaculation.

Thalidomide was originally marketed to treat morning sickness, but it produced limb defects in babies. Later it was found effective against “erythema nodosum laprosum (ENL), an agonizing inflammatory condition of leprosy”. Moreover, since the birth defects may have been associated with blocking development of blood vessels, thalidomide might work against cancer; and indeed “Celgene recorded 2002 sales of US $119 million for Thalomid, 92% of which came from off-label use of the drug in treating cancer, primarily multiple myeloma . . . . Sales reached US $224 million in 2003 . . . . The lesson from the thalidomide story is that no drug is ever understood completely, and repositioning, no matter   how unlikely, often remains a possibility” [emphasis added: once the FDA has approved drug A to treat condition B, individual doctors are allowed to prescribe it for other conditions as well, although drug companies are not allowed to advertise it for those other uses. That legal restriction is far from always honored, as demonstrated by the dozens of settlements paid by drug companies for breaking the law.]

Perhaps the prize for repositioning (so far) goes to Pfizer, which turned sildenafil, an unsuccessful treatment for angina, into Viagra, a very successful treatment for “erectile dysfunction”: “By 2003, sildenafil had annual sales of US $1.88 billion and nearly 8 million men were taking sildenafil in the United States alone”.

At any rate, Ashburn and Thor could not be more clear: The whole principle behind repositioning is that it’s more profitable to see what existing drugs might do than to look for what might be biologically speaking the best treatment for a given ailment. So anti-depressants get approved and prescribed against smoking, premenstrual dysphoria, or obesity; a Parkinson’s drug and a hypertension drug are prescribed for ADHD; an anti-anxiety medication is prescribed for irritable bowel syndrome; Alzheimer’s, whose etiology is not understood, gets treated with Reminyl which, as Nivalin, (generic galantamine) is also supposed to treat polio and paralysis. Celebrex, a VIOXX-type anti-arthritic, can be prescribed against breast and colon cancer; treatment of enlarged prostate is by the same drug used to combat hair loss; the infamous “morning after” pill for pregnancy termination can treat “psychotic major depression”; Raloxifene to treat breast and prostate cancer is magically able also to treat osteoporosis.

And so on and so forth. This whole business of drug repositioning exposes the fallacy of the concept that it is possible to find “a silver bullet”, a chemical substance that can be introduced into the human body to accomplish just one desired thing. That concept ought to be recognized as absurd a priori, since we know that human physiology is an interlocking network of signals, feedback, attempted homeostasis, defenses against intruders.

It is one thing to use, for brief periods of time, toxins that can help the body clear infections — sulfa drugs, antibiotics. It is quite another conceit and ill-founded hubris to administer powerful chemicals to decrease blood pressure, lower cholesterol, and the like, in other words, to attempt to alter interlocking self-regulating systems as though one single aspect of them could be altered without doing God-only-knows-what-else elsewhere.

The editorial in the first issue (January 2002) of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery was actually clear about this: “drugs need to work in whole, living systems”.

But that editorial also gave the reason for the present-day emphasis on medicine by drugs: “Even with vastly increased R & D spending, the top 20 pharmaceutical companies still churn out only around 20 drugs per year between them, far short of the 4-5 new drugs that analysts say they each need to produce to justify their discovery and development costs”.

And the editorial also mentions one of the deleterious “side” effects of the rush to introduce new drugs: “off-target effects . . . have led to the vastly increased number of costly late-stage failures seen in recent years (approximately half the withdrawals in the past 20 years have occurred since 1997)” — “off-target effects” being a synonym for “side” effects.

It’s not only that new drugs are being rushed to market. As a number of people have pointed out, drug companies also create their own markets by inventing diseases like attention-deficit disorder, erectile dysfunction, generalized anxiety disorder, and so on and on. Any deviation of behavior from what might naively be described as “normal” offers the opportunity to discover a new disease and to re-position a drug.

The ability of drug companies to sell drugs for new diseases is helped by the common misconception about “risk factors”. Medication against hypertension or high cholesterol, for example, is based on the presumption that both those raise the risk of heart attack, stroke, and other undesirable contingencies because both are “risk factors” for such contingencies. But “risk factor” describes only an observed association, a correlation, not an identified causation. Correlation never proves causation. “Treating” hypertension or high cholesterol makes sense only if those things are causes, and they have not been shown to be that. On the other hand, lifelong ingestion of drugs is certainly known to have potentially dangerous consequences.

Modern drug-based, really drug-obsessed medical practice is as misguided as “Seeking Immortality”.

Vaccines: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Only in recent years have I begun to wonder whether there are reasons not to follow official recommendations about vaccination. In the 1930s, I had the then-usual vaccinations, including (in Austria, perhaps Europe) against smallpox. A few others in later years when I traveled quite a bit.

But the Andrew Wakefield affair *, and the introduction of Gardasil **, showed me that official sources had become as untrustworethy about vaccines as they have become about prescription drugs.

It seems that Big Pharma had just about run out of new diseases to invent against which to create drugs and had turned to snake-oil-marketing of vaccines. We are told, for example, that 1 in 3 people will experience shingles in their lifetime and should get vaccinated against it. Have one in three of your aged friends ever had shingles? Not among my family and friends. One of my buddies got himself vaccinated, and came down with shingles a couple of weeks later. His physician asserted that the attack would have been more severe if he hadn’t been vaccinated — no need for a control experiment, or any need to doubt official claims.

So it’s remarkable that the Swedish Government has resisted attempts to make vaccinations compulsory (“Sweden bans mandatory vaccinations over ‘serious health concerns’” by Baxter Dmitry, 12 May 2017).

That article includes extracts from an interview of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on the Tucker Carlson Show, which included such tidbits as the continued presence of thimerosal (organic mercury compound) in many vaccines including the seasonal flu vaccines that everyone is urged to get; and the huge increase in number of things against which vaccination is being recommended:

“I got three vaccines and I was fully compliant. I’m 63 years old. My children got 69 doses of 16 vaccines to be compliant. And a lot of these vaccines aren’t even for communicable diseases. Like Hepatitis B, which comes from unprotected sex, or using or sharing needles – why do we give that to a child on the first day of their life? And it was loaded with mercury.”

 

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* “Autism and Vaccines: Can there be a final unequivocal answer?”
      “YES: Thimerosal CAN induce autism”

** See “Gardasil and Cervarix: Vaccination insanity” and many other posts recovered with SEARCH for “Gardasil” on my blogs: https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/?s=gardasil and https://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/?s=gardasil

Political Correctness in Science

Supposedly, science investigates via the scientific method: testing the validity of hunches (hypotheses) against reality and allowing reality to establish beliefs, thereby discarding disproved pre-judgments, hunches, prejudices, biases. Scientific theories. are determined by facts, evidence.   Science is empirical, pragmatic; it does not accept beliefs on authority or from tradition.

Historians, philosophers, sociologists, scholars of Science & Technology Studies have long recognized that this view of science is mythical (i), but it continues to be taught in schools and in social-science texts and it is the conventional wisdom found in the media and in public discourse generally. A corollary of the misconception that scientific theories have been successfully tested against reality is the widespread belief that what science says, what the contemporary scientific consensus is, can safely be accepted as truth for all practical purposes.

So it seems incongruous, paradoxical, that large numbers of scientists should disagree violently, on any given issue, over what science really says. Yet that is the case on a seemingly increasing range of topics (ii), some of them of great public import, for instance whether HIV causes AIDS (iii) or whether human-generated carbon dioxide is the prime cause of global warming and climate change. On those latter matters as well as some others, the difference of opinion within the scientific community parallels political views: left-leaning (“liberal”) opinion regards it as unquestionably true that HIV causes AIDS and that human-generated carbon dioxide is the prime cause of global warming and climate change, whereas right-leaning (“conservative”) opinion denies that those assertions constitute “settled science” or have been proved beyond doubt. Those who harbor these “conservative” views are often labeled “denialists”; it is not to be countenanced that politically liberal individuals should be global warming skeptics (iv).

In other words, it is politically incorrect to doubt that HIV causes AIDS or that human-generated carbon dioxide is the prime cause of global warming. It requires no more than cursory observation of public discourse to recognize this pervasive phenomenon. Governments and Nobel-Prize committees illustrate that those beliefs are officially acted on as though they were established truths. One cadre of mainstream scientists even wants criminal charges laid (v) against those who question that global warming is caused primarily by human-generated carbon dioxide. So political correctness is present within the scientific community in the USA.

I’m of a sufficient age to be able to testify that half a century ago it would not have occurred to any researchers in a democratic society to urge the government to prosecute for criminal conspiracy other researchers who disagreed with them. Declaring certain scientific research programs as politically incorrect and therefore substantively without merit, and persecuting those who perpetrated such research, characterized totalitarian regimes, not free societies. Stalin’s Soviet Union declared wrong the rest of the world’s understanding of genetics and imprisoned exponents of it; it also declared wrong the rest of the world’s understanding of chemical bonding and quantum mechanics. Nazism’s Deutsche Physik banned relativity and other “Jewish” science.

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Political correctness holds that HIV causes AIDS and that human-generated carbon dioxide is the prime cause of global warming. Those beliefs also characterize left-leaning opinion. Why is political correctness a left-wing phenomenon?

In contemporary usage, political correctness means “marked by or adhering to a typically progressive orthodoxy on issues involving especially ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or ecology” (vi) or “conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated” (vii), evidently “progressive” or “liberal” or Left-ish views. But those descriptions fail to capture the degree of fanatical dogmatism that can lead practicing scientists to urge that those of differing views be criminally prosecuted; political correctness includes the wish to control what everyone believes.

Thus political correctness has been appropriately called “liberal fascism”, which also reveals why it is a phenomenon of the ultra-extreme Left. Attempted control of beliefs and corresponding behavior is openly proclaimed, unashamedly, by the extreme Right; it is called, and calls itself, fascism, Nazism, and needs no other name. But the Left, the “liberals”, claim to stand for and to support individual freedom of belief and speech; so a name is needed for the phenomenon by which proclamations of liberal ideals are coupled with attempts to enforce adherence to particular beliefs and social norms. Political correctness is the hypocrisy of self-proclaimed liberals functioning as authoritarian fascists.

That hypocrisy pervades political correctness, I was able to observe at first hand during my years in academic administration. People say things they don’t mean, and that they know everyone knows they don’t mean, and no one dares point to the absence of the Emperor’s clothes. For instance, the Pooh-Bahs assert that affirmative action means goals and not quotas, even as hiring practices and incentives demonstrate that they are quotas. For innumerable examples gathered over the years, see the newsletter I edited from 1993 until my retirement at the end of 1999 (viii).

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Science had represented for a long time the virtues associated with honest study of reality. Around the 1930s and 1940s, sociologist Robert Merton could describe the norms evidently governing scientific activity as communal sharing of universally valid observations and conclusions obtained by disinterested people deploying organized skepticism. That description does not accommodate researchers urging criminal prosecution of peers who disagree with them about evidence or conclusions. It does not accommodate researchers lobbying publishers to withdraw articles accepted for publication following normal review; and those norms do not describe the now prevalent circumstances in which one viewpoint suppresses others through refusal to allow publication or participation in scientific meetings (ix).

Science, in other words, is not at all what it used to be, and it is not what the popular view of it is, that common view having been based on what scientific activity used to be. It has not yet been widely recognized, how drastically science has changed since about the middle of the 20^th century (x). Among the clues indicative of those changes are the spate of books since the 1980s that describe intense self-interested competition in science (xi) and the increasing frequency of fraud, again beginning about in the 1980s, that led to establishment of the federal Office of Research Integrity. That political correctness has surfaced within the scientific community is another illustration of how radically different are the circumstances of scientific activity now compared to a century ago and by contrast to the outdated conventional wisdom about science.

Political correctness began to pervade society as a whole during the same years as science was undergoing drastic change. The roots of political correctness in society at large may be traceable to the rebellious students of the 1960s, but the hegemony of their ideals in the form of political correctness became obvious only in the 1980s, when the term “political correctness” came into common usage:

The origin of the phrase in modern times is generally credited to gallows humor among Communists in the Stalin era (xii):

“Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.”
“Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.”

That political correctness is in contemporary times a Left-ish phenomenon is therefore true to its modern origin.

How seriously political correctness corrupts science should be obvious, since it more than breaks all the traditional norms. Those norms are often summarized as universalism, communalism, disinterestedness, skepticism — taking for granted as well simple honesty and absence of hypocrisy. Nowadays what was taken for granted no longer applies. It is simply dishonest to assert that something has been proven beyond doubt when strong contrary evidence exists that is taken seriously by competent researchers. One cannot, of course, look into the minds of those who assert certainty where there is none (xiii), but among possible explanations, hypocrisy may be the least culpable.

Science cannot be isolated from the rest of society, so the incursion of political correctness into science is understandable. Moreover, what used to be the supposedly isolated ivory tower of academe is nowadays the very epicenter where political correctness breeds and from where it spreads. Whatever the causes may be, however, it is important to recognize how science has changed and that it can be corrupted by the same influences as the rest of society.

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i        Henry H. Bauer, Scientific Literacy and Myth of the Scientific Method, University of Illinois Press 1992; http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/77xzw7sp9780252064364.html.

ii       Henry H. Bauer, Dogmatism   in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth, McFarland 2012.

iii      Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland 2007.

iv      Henry H. Bauer, “A politically liberal global-warming skeptic?”, 2012/11/25; https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/a-politically-liberal-global-warming-skeptic.

v       Letter to President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, and OSTP Director Holdren, 1 September 2015; http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/09/19/letter-to-president-obama-investigate-deniers-under-rico.
The original pdf posted in 2003 at http://www.iges.org/letter/LetterPresidentAG.pdf is no longer there. The Wayback Machine says, “The letter that was inadvertently posted on this web site has been removed. It was decided more than two years ago that the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES) would be dissolved when the projects then undertaken by IGES would be completed. All research projects by IGES were completed in July 2015, and the IGES web site is in the process of being decommissioned”.
As of March 2017, however, a Google search for “Institute of Global Environment and Society” led to a website with that header, albeit augmented by “COLA”: http://www.m.monsoondata.org/home.html accessed 4 March 2017. Right-leaning Internet sources offer insight into this seeming mystery: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/22/lead-climate-scientist-behind-obamarico-letter-serious-questions-answer/ and http://leftexposed.org/2015/10/institute-of-global-environment-and-society, both accessed 4 March 2017.

vi      http://www.dictionary.com/browse/politically-correct?s=t (accessed 4 March 2017).

vii     https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/politically%20correct (accessed 4 March 2017).

viii    https://web.archive.org/web/20131030115950/http://fbox.vt.edu/faculty/aaup/index4.html.

ix      Ref. ii, especially chapter 3.

x       Henry H. Bauer, “Three stages of modern science”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 27 (2013) 505-13; https://www.dropbox.com/s/xl6jaldtx3uuz8b/JSE273-3stages.pdf?dl=0.

xi      Natalie Angier, Natural Obsessions: The Search for the Oncogene, Houghton Mifflin 1987; David H. Clark, The Quest for SS433, Viking 1985; Sheldon Glashow with Ben Bova, Interactions: A Journey through the Mind of a Particle Physicist and the Matter of the World, Warner 1988; Jeff Goldberg Anatomy of a Scientific Discovery, Bantam 1988; Stephen S. Hall, Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Synthesize a Human Gene, Atlantic Monthly Press 1987; Robert M. Hazen, The Breakthrough: The Race for the Superconductor, Summit 1988; David L. Hull, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science, University of Chicago Press 1988; Robert Kanigel, Apprentice to Genius: The Making of a Scientific Dynasty, Macmillan 1986; Charles E. Levinthal,. Messengers of Paradise: Opiates and the Brain, Anchor/Doubleday 1988; Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins, Simon and Schuster 1987; Ed Regis, Who Got Einstein’s Office: Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study, Addison-Wesley 1987; Bruce Schechter, The Path of No Resistance: The Story of the Revolution in Superconductivity, Touchstone (Simon and Schuster) 1990; Solomon H. Snyder, Brainstorming: The Science and Politics of Opiate Research, Harvard University Press 1989; Gary Taubes, Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit, and the Ultimate Experiment, Random House 1986; Robert Teitelman, Gene Dreams: Wall Street, Academia, and the Rise of Biotechnology, Basic Books 1989; Nicholas Wade, The Nobel Duel: Two Scientists’ 21-Year Race to Win the World’s Most Coveted Research Prize, Doubleday 1981.

xii     Jon Miltimore, “The historical origin of ‘political correctness’”, 5 December 2016, http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/historical-origin-political-correctness; Angelo M. Codevilla, “The rise of political correctness”, Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2016, pp. 37-43; http://www.claremont.org/download_pdf.php?file_name=1106Codevilla.pdf.

xiii    Henry H. Bauer , “Shamans of Scientism: Conjuring certainty where there is none”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 28 (2014) 491-504.

 

All vaccines are not the same; some are worse than useless

I am not among those who question the value of all vaccines on principle. I don’t doubt the value of vaccines in controlling smallpox, measles, polio. I do question the use of adjuvants and preservatives in vaccines, and I do think it makes sense to vaccinate babies against measles and the rest in single shots administered over a period of time instead of all at once in multiple vaccines.

But it gets difficult not to over-react as Big Pharma concentrates on generating vaccines that do more harm than any good that has ever been proven.

It seems that Big Pharma has been running out of new diseases to invent (see Moynihan & Cassels, Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients and other works listed in “What’s Wrong with Present-Day Medicine”) and has been turning increasingly to inventing vaccines supposed to guard against old or new infections.

The expected but not forthcoming “swine flu” epidemic led to rapid invention and marketing of a vaccine that turned out to have nasty “side” effects, for example, “How a swine flu shot led to narcolepsy”.

Gardasil and Cervarix, anti-HPV vaccines claimed to prevent cervical cancer, are a scandalous illustration; see for example “Merck Dr. Exposes Gardasil as Ineffective, Deadly, Very Profitable”  and related links. The only suggestion that HPV causes cervical cancer — or rather, that 4 out of four or five times that number of strains of HPV cause cervical cancer — comes from a correlation: those strains have often been found in women who have cervical cancer.

But correlations never, never, never prove causation, no matter that too many medical “experts” ignore this well established, long established fact.

I’ve become all too cynical about Big Pharma, lack of regulation, conflicts of interest, and the like. Yet I was taken aback to find that the National Institutes of Health profit from royalties from sales of Gardasil, and that there are exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act that enable them to hide that fact and the amounts involved.

NOVA’s vaccine propaganda: Media coverage

NOVA’s presentation on vaccination  was obviously one-sided, and a few observers noted as much:

Verne Gay at Newsday recognized  the program to be “designed as an ironclad, insistent, well-reported film that, in the very nicest way possible, tells those who have decided not to vaccinate their children that they are — essentially — blithering idiots. There is no debate, or should be no debate, or if there is a debate, those doing the debating have spent way too much time on the Internet. . . . like an industry film in support of a product”.

Dave Walker at the Times-Picayune allowed the program’s producer, Sonya Pemberton, to confess her bias. She described herself as “from a medical family” and rather immodestly as “scientifically educated”, whatever that might mean substantively. In practice, of course, it’s spin intended to inveigle her audience that she knows what’s science and what isn’t. She was “trying to take people on this journey so that they can come to the conclusions that the science clearly supports”, in other words not presenting pro- and con- but only the one side. As Walker observes, “That point of view will cause some viewers to write off Pemberton’s journey before it starts”; though I would put it that it should cause all viewers to write off Pemberton’s journey.

Paula Apsell, NOVA’s senior executive producer, was fully in favor of making propaganda rather than a documentary: “to present the scientific facts to people in a convincing way . . . . we’re all going to be very curious as to how the ‘anti-vaxxers,’ as they are called, the people who really don’t accept vaccination, react to this film”. Evidently like Pemberton, Apsell thinks “vaccination” is unproblematically good always and everywhere, when in fact any halfway “scientifically educated” person — or anyone with common sense who thinks about it even briefly — can recognize that vaccination against an infectious disease to guard against epidemics could be an entirely different matter than vaccination against something endemic in the population, let alone against something not yet proven to cause any harm at all.

I was curious about the term “anti-vaxxer”, which was new to me. Through Google I was able to trace it to no earlier than 2009. Perhaps it is not coincidental that the HPV vaccine Gardasil was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2006, and within a few years some severe adverse reactions were being reported by parents. Perhaps as a result of public concerns over parental rights as well as adverse reactions, Merck claimed to be suspending its lobbying to have vaccination with Gardasil made compulsory for school attendance [1].
That the reports of serious harm from Gardasil and Cervarix have not faded away is illustrated by the 2013 decision in Japan to suspend vaccination “because several adverse reactions to the medicines have been reported” [2]. In Britain, reports of adverse events were allegedly suppressed [3].

There is no need to speculate about why it was in Japan that official public notice was taken of the fact that serious adverse events from Gardasil and Cervarix are far more frequent than with other vaccines: None of the Big Pharma companies  are Japanese-owned. This is not a conspiracy theory: “conspiracy” implies secrecy, and the misdeeds of Big Pharma have been described and documented in dozens of books and articles.
The same non-conspiracy fact explains why the mass media in the USA did not disseminate this action by Japanese authorities.

The Japanese findings also answer a question that the NOVA program posed but did not answer: Why there has been an unusual amount of controversy about Gardasil and Cervarix by comparison to other vaccines? It’s because of the much greater frequency and considerably greater seriousness of adverse reactions to those vaccines.

As with drugs, a largely unrecognized danger is that there exists no systematic monitoring of adverse events once a drug, a medical device, or a vaccine has been approved. Physicians are not well placed to discern whether an adverse reaction results from a drug or from some other condition, typically the ailment for which the drug is prescribed in the first place. A study comparing systematic monitoring with spontaneous reporting found that under-reporting was as high as 98% [4]. In other words, adverse events might be 50 times as frequent as official data reveal.

At any rate, it seems not unlikely that the term “anti-vaxxer” was introduced by determined supporters of mainstream practices as a way of maligning and discrediting those who were bringing to public attention the reports of such serious consequences of vaccination by Gardasil or Cervarix as blindness, convulsions, deafness, paralysis.

Back to media coverage of the NOVA puff-piece:
While a few observers like Verne Gay at Newsday and Dave Walker at the Times-Picayune recognized how one-sided a piece of propaganda this is, others were taken in, or simply too lazy or thoughtless to see it. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it was “balanced” and concluding “gently” that vaccines are “safe and effective”, “without dodging or downplaying the mild, occasional serious and rare deadly risks vaccines can pose”. Chris Mooney, whose own biases are worn on his sleeve [5], was gullible and enthusiastic: “If you care about science, it’s something you should watch” is a remarkable and reprehensible comment about a program that avoided any discussion of the scientific issues and argued purely from authority. Mooney was also taken in by the program’s featuring of a “decision psychologist”, citing “our faulty risk perceptions around vaccines”.
I would put this to Mooney, Sonya Pemberton, and other groupies of universal vaccination: The NOVA program mentioned that officially required vaccinations for attending school vary from State to State within the USA, demonstrating that they are not based on science.

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[1] Linda A. Johnson, Merck suspends lobbying for vaccine
[2] Cervix vaccine issues trigger health notice; Japan withdraws HPV Vaccine recommendation for girls; Japan’s suspension of recommendation for Gardasil & Cervarix HPV Vaccines for women – Caused by large numbers of unexplained serious adverse reactions; Japan and the HPV Vaccine Controversy; Japan: International medical researchers issue warning about HPV Vaccine side effects
[3] UK Drug Safety Agency falsified Vaccine Safety Data for 6 million
[4] A. P. Fletcher, “Spontaneous adverse drug reaction reporting vs event monitoring: a comparison”, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 84 (1991) 341-4
[5] Henry H. Bauer, “Not even wrong about science and politics”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 27 (2013) 540-52 — essay review of Mooney, The Republican War on Science and Berezow & Campbell, Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left

Big Pharma beware: The comedians are on to you

Authoritarian regimes, and politicians in general for that matter, are terrified of being made fun of.  In present-day Egypt, for example, the local equivalent of The Daily Show is being persecuted. So it is a very promising development that our very own Daily Show last night, Tuesday 16 September, had a segment featuring  Peter Gøtzsche describing the drug companies as organized crime, as in his book, Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare.

It was mentioned that Pharma’s propaganda for painkillers like oxycontin and percocet is misleading and damaging, and some of Pharma’s ads were satirized.

I would like to think that the clip was quite genuine, that showed a Pfizer person — perhaps a security guard? — waving away the Daily Show correspondent and the camera.