The Banality of Evil — and modern medical practices

”The banality of evil” is a phrase famously used by Hannah Arendt in her description of the trial  of Adolf Eichmann. There has been much argument about what exactly she meant. For me, the insight is that evil is so often unintended, that it can result from perfectly well-intentioned actions.

The root of all evil is wrong belief.

If one believes that the most important thing about a human being is the immortal soul, and that the soul will burn in hell for eternity unless it has accepted what the Holy Roman Catholic Church believes, then obviously one should leave nothing undone in the effort to bring that soul to proper belief, even if that amounts to torturing the immortal soul’s body, even to death.

If one believes that one’s country was defeated and devastated by sabotage perpetrated by Jews, communists, homosexuals, gypsies, and the like, then obviously one should do whatever is necessary to rid the country of those perpetraitors.

 And so on

The human tragedy is that we acquire beliefs according to the environment into which we are born and in which we are raised; and once belief has been acquired, it tends to become increasingly entrenched and increasingly difficult to modify.

The problem for society is how best to ensure that collective public actions are based on correct rather than on wrong beliefs.

Nowadays that is taken to mean that public actions should be based on science.

Unfortunately, the nature of scientific activity is widely and thoroughly misunderstood [1], in particular its fallibility, which results inevitably from the fact that science is carried out by fallible human beings.

That fallibility is well illustrated by the history of medicine, where many past practices are now recognized as having been harmful rather than helpful — drawing out blood in sizable amounts, for example. Nowadays, the excellent intention to base medical practices on sound scientific knowledge has sadly gone wrong in several ways, as a result of beliefs that turn out to be wrong.  One pervasive reason is that statistical associations are taken as indicating cause and effect — an error that is warned against in even the most elementary introductions to statistical analysis.

Several pertinent stories are analyzed in Jeremy Greene’s magisterial Prescribing by Numbers [2].

One story has to do with blood pressure. Life insurance companies required physical examinations. Their accumulated data revealed that on average mortality increased with increasing blood pressure. Now, mortality increases with age; and it happens also that every relevant study has shown that blood pressure too increases naturally with age in otherwise healthy people. The association of blood pressure with mortality is an artefact illustrating the common principle in statistics that when two things, A and B, are each correlated with a third factor, C, then A and B will also show a correlation with one another; even though neither causes the other [3].

The misinterpretation of life-insurance statistics has resulted in contemporary medical practice based on a wrong belief, namely, that it is beneficial is to bring everyone’s blood pressure to a level that is normal only for people in their twenties.

This mistake becomes particularly harmful since the means used to lower blood pressure almost invariably involve administering drugs, though lip service is always paid to advising appropriate diet and exercise as the first resort.

That drug companies are permitted to advertise direct to consumers (among developed countries, only in the USA and New Zealand) means that such practices become so taken-for-granted as to be virtually unquestionable.

Another mistaken belief is that high levels of cholesterol in the blood constitute cardiovascular disease and increased risk of stroke and heart-attack. The corollary misguided belief is that bringing cholesterol levels down by administering statin drugs is beneficial; even though statins hinder the body’s production of coenzyme Q10, which is a necessary component of the energy-producing mechanisms of all cells. Inevitably, therefore, statins induce in muscular weakness, which is officially but quite mistakenly described as a “side” effect; it is a direct effect.

Many well documented books and articles have debunked the cholesterol theory (for example, Kendrick (2007) and Ravnskov (2000) in [4]), without effecting any change in standard practice — although many individuals ignore or defy their doctor’s prescribing of statins.

Not only do modern American medical practices rely on misleading, incompetent statistical analyses, they are based fundamentally on the wrong belief that preventive medicine can be successfully practiced by administering of drugs. This becomes increasingly harmful when those drugs continue to be prescribed as people get older and the steadily cumulating danger from drug “side” effects outweigh any possible benefit from “reducing risk” of one or another ailment [5].

Drug-based treatments are particularly well entrenched because the pharmaceutical industry is hugely profitable in large part because of the profligate prescribing of drugs stimulated by pervasive advertising.

The greatest immediate improvement in prescribing practices would result if the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory authorities would demand statistically competent and honest protocols for clinical trials, including that outcomes not be assessed as “significant at p ≤ 0.05” but in terms of NNT and NNH: numbers of patients needed to be treated for 1 successful outcome compared to numbers of patients needed to be treated to observe 1 undesired adverse event [6].

That would prevent much harm, for example that now perpetrated by HPV vaccines, which are responsible for the greatest number of officially reported averse events as well as many horrifying anecdotes [7]; while there is no actual proof that HPV causes any cancer at all, HPV having been found guilty only because a few strains (out of many dozens) are often statistically associated with some cancers.

Well intentioned physicians are doing harm because of wrong beliefs, even as dozens of books [4] have exposed the misdeeds and their causes.

Is it not an evil,
 to persuade people to ingest things that do harm
 without any compensating good?

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[1]    Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland, 2017
[2]    Jeremy Greene, Prescribing by Numbers, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007
[3]    “Seeking Immortality? Challenging the drug-based medical paradigm”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 26 (2012) 867-80
[4]    What’s Wrong with Present-Day Medicine
[5]    “When is enough, enough? Stopping medicines in older people”, Best Practices Journal, #27 (April 2010) 6-9; Rushabh J. Dagli & Akanksha Sharma, “Polypharmacy: A global risk factor for elderly people”, Journal of International Oral Health,  6 (#6, 2014) i–ii
[6]    How (not) to measure the efficacy of drugs
[7]    Mary Holland, Kim Mack Rosenberg & Eileen Iorio,  The HPV Vaccine On Trial: Seeking Justice For A Generation Betrayed, Skyhorse, 2018
Documentary: Sacrificial Virgins

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Percentages absolute or relative? Politicizing science

Convalescent plasma reduces the mortality of CoVID-19 by 35%, citizens of the United States were assured in a press conference on 23 August 2020, and the approval of this treatment for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) underscored that this constituted a breakthrough in treating the pandemic disease.

As usual, critical voices ventured to disagree. One physician reported that he had been using this treatment for a considerable length of time and had noted a perhaps marginal, certainly not great benefit for this intervention. Others pointed out that the use of convalescent plasma in general was nothing new.

That “35%” mortality reduction was emphasized a number of times in the televised official announcement. It was only a few days later that we learned that the original data suggested a reduction of mortality to about 8% from 11-12% for presumably comparable patients not so treated. In other words, 3 to 4% of patients may have derived a benefit in terms of decreased mortality.

Indeed, 8 is about 35% less than 11-12. However, a 3.5% reduction in mortality is nothing like a 35% reduction.

This episode illustrates what is quite commonplace as drug companies seek to impress doctors and patients with the wonderful benefits to be derived from their medications: relative effects rather than absolute ones are reported.

This is just one of the many things wrong with present-day practices in medicine, of course; dozens of works describing the dysfunctions are listed in my periodically updated bibliography.

Investigative reporters also revealed and that the FDA’s emergency use approval had come at the behest of the White House. Historians will recall that the whole science of genetics was derailed in the Soviet Union for a generation as Stalin’s administration enshrined as science the pseudoscience invented by Lysenko.

CoVID19 and the HIV legacy: Toxic “antiretroviral” drugs and PrEP

The blunder of believing that HIV is a sexually transmitted virus that causes AIDS has brought enormous harm to innumerable people across the world for more than three decades, and it continues to do so as toxic drugs are administered to “HIV-positive” individuals; and even as “pre-exposure prophylaxis” (PrEP) to perfectly healthy people categorized as being at risk of infection — black people, of course, in Africa and elsewhere, and gay men, and those who inject drugs.

Gilead’s PrEP drugs Truvada and Descovy list as “side” effects “Kidney problems, including kidney failure. . . lactic acidosis . . . which . . . can lead to death. . . liver problems, which in rare cases can lead to death. . . . Bone problems, including bone pain, softening, or thinning, which may lead to fractures”.

All those risks in the absence of any real benefit at all.

Nevertheless, the US government recommends PrEP, alleging that “No significant health effects have been seen in people who are HIV-negative and have taken PrEP for up to 5 years”.

That bald claim is obviously misleading. All those “side” effects actually occurred in a significant number of people; that’s why they come to be listed.
It may well be true that some people, really healthy ones no doubt, and quite possibly a small number only, were able to tolerate the PrEP drugs for as much as 5 years, but that is not a legitimate basis for the sweeping generalization.
A different but also official page is only slightly less misleading:
“PrEP can cause side effects like nausea in some people, but these generally subside over time. No serious side effects have been observed, and these side effects aren’t life threatening. If you are taking PrEP, tell your health care provider about any side effects that are severe or do not go away.”
Perhaps it takes a little sophisticated cynicism to recognize this as an admission that some side effects that have not gone away might even be “severe”.

On everything pertaining to every prescription drug, it must be remembered that a drug is approved on the basis of clinical trials carried out for the drug company by groups whose livelihood depends on getting results that the drug company wants. Innumerable articles and books have documented that clinical trials always seem to find that the drug marketed by the trial-sponsoring company is better than competing ones, for example.
There are many ways to bias clinical trials toward a desired result, for example by judicious sampling of who gets included in the “treated” group and in the “placebo” group respectively.
One of the students at one of my seminars happened to have worked on arranging such trials, and she confirmed what I had read elsewhere: There are people, typically unemployed, often homeless, who get comfortable accommodation and earn some or all of their livelihood by being volunteers for clinical trials, having becoming known to and favored by trial organizers because of being outstandingly healthy and least likely to show undesired “side” effects that the drugs might have. (Leisinger et al., Healthy volunteers in clinical studies, Ch. 8 [pp. 67-70] in Schroederet al., Ethics Dumping: Case Studies from North-South Research Collaborations, Springer 2018; Sebastian Agredo, “Professional volunteers: human guinea pigs in today’s clinical research”, Voices in Bioethics, 26 March 2014).

For much more about routine deceptive practices by drug companies and their associates, see for instance (but not only) the books by Abraham, Angell, Braithwaite, Goldacre, Gøtzsche (2013), and Healy listed in What’s Wrong with Present-Day Medicine.

The hidden carnage perpetrated by PrEP, unremarked by pundits or mass media, is abetted with surely the best of intentions by such charities as the Gates Foundation. Mainstream “science”, “medical science”, has simply failed to recognize that HIV = AIDS is a blunder, let alone abandon it. Thus Anthony Fauci spoke favorably of Gilead’s experimental antiretroviral drug against CoVID19, Remdesivir, as “proof of concept” that SARS-CoV2 is vulnerable to drugs. Fauci recalled that AZT, the first drug used against “HIV”, had led the way to even better medications. But AZT is highly toxic (“AZT actually killed about 150,000 ‘HIV-positive’ people between the mid-1980s and the mid- 1990s” — see “HAART saves lives — but doesn’t prolong them!?”); nevertheless it remains in use, as do its toxic analogues, as well as the toxic later invented protease inhibitors, integrase inhibitors, and fusion inhibitors.
Treatment regimes for “HIV” have to be continually modified to preserve the lives of the patient-victims; see the official Treatment Guidelines.
For documentation of these facts, see   section 5, “What antiretroviral drugs do”, in The Case against HIV.

Never again say “just the flu”

Trying to understand whether CoVID-19 really is a disease caused by the new (in humans) virus SARS-CoV-2 has instead made me realize that I never had a proper understanding of so-called “normal” “seasonal flu”.

Now I’ve learned that “influenza A and B viruses can cause epidemic disease in humans” whereas “type C viruses usually cause a mild, cold-like illness”.
And it is not only new viruses jumping to humans from other species that cause exotic dangerous diseases like SARS or MERS; influenza viruses too have natural reservoirs in other species, in particular aquatic birds, and can cause disease in a range of mammalian species including pigs, seals, horses, and humans (https://www.afro.who.int/health-topics/influenza).

During the so-called “flu season”, we often respond to inquiries about minor discomforts by saying, “it’s just the flu”, but we really should say, “it’s just a cold”, because flu — influenza — is not at all a negligible matter; it can result in significant illness and mortality and can spread rapidly around the world in seasonal epidemics. “Pandemic influenza is caused by a new or novel influenza that is introduced into a population where few people are immune. . . . The 1918 pandemic (influenza A/H1N1) which infected an estimated 500 million and killed 50-100 million people worldwide has been the most devastating pandemic to date . . . [while the] 1957 Asian Flu pandemic (influenza A/H2N2), 1968 Hong Kong flu pandemic (influenza A/H3N2) and the 2009 (influenza A[H1N1]pdm09) result[ed] in far fewer deaths” (https://www.afro.who.int/health-topics/influenza).

What we — meaning I — have been thinking of as “normal seasonal flu” is potentially much more deadly than I had realized. Between 1976 and 2006, annual influenza-associated deaths “with underlying pneumonia and influenza causes” averaged 6300 in the USA. But what makes flu so dangerous is that it can greatly exacerbate other “underlying” challenges to health; so the number of annual influenza-associated deaths with underlying respiratory and circulatory causes averaged 23,600, ranging in individual years from 3300 to more than 48,000; for instance, nearly 41,000 in 2001-2 and more than 95,000 in the two years 2003-5 (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 59 [2010] # 33).

The substantial mortality of “normal flu” hints at the problem of trying to understand whether what is happening nowadays can or must be properly attributed not to influenza but to a novel strain of a Corona virus. When it is “only” a matter of the flu, of course we do not see the sort of panic that the news currently brings us daily about overwhelmed healthcare systems, lack of protective equipment for caregivers, tragic individual deaths, and so on.

But what I just wrote happens not to be true. It turns out that such rather panicked communal behavior was in fact described in the 2017-18 flu season, with no other virus than influenza being blamed:

“medical centers are responding with extraordinary measures: asking staff to work overtime, setting up triage tents, restricting friends and family visits and canceling elective surgeries, to name a few. . . . The hospital’s urgent-care centers have also been inundated, and . . . outpatient clinics have no appointments available. . . several hospitals have set up large ‘surge tents’ outside their emergency departments to accommodate and treat flu patients. . . . some patients had to be treated in hallways . . . . Nurses are being ‘pulled from all floors to care for them’ . . . . Many nurses have also become sick, however, so the staff is also short-handed. . . ‘More and more patients are needing mechanical ventilation due to respiratory failure . . . .’ (Amanda Macmillan, “Hospitals overwhelmed by flu patients are treating them in tents”, TIME, 18 January, 2018).

Just like now, it seems. Yet I do not recall anything like the present media-wide, nation-wide hysteria accompanying these conditions — even though the death toll being ascribed to CoVID-19 seems unlikely to end up any higher than that attributed to “flu” in 2017/18: the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) estimated the number of “influenza-associated” deaths then at 61,000 — which happens to be the same as the current estimated projection for CoVID-19, down from much larger numbers projected a few weeks ago.

The many uncertainties in the 2017-18 estimate are illustrated by the range of the “95% confidence interval”: 46,404 – 94,987 (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm): not far from 100,000 Americans might have died of flu in that season.

Why did not the mass media as a whole pick up the story about the 2017-18 epidemic after it was published, including on-line, by TIME magazine? Is it just that a novel non-influenza virus thought to have come from China is more newsworthy than “just another bad flu season”?

The last question is, of course, of much less immediate interest than the issue of trying to find out whether the contemporary pandemic really is owing to a novel corona virus originating in China, as opposed to being a misdiagnosed pandemic of “seasonal flu”.

That question may be well-nigh intractable, unanswerable with any degree of certainty, because of many uncertainties that are unlikely ever to be resolved, given the lack of sufficiently specific and genuinely trustworthy data. The reports of mortality from the CDC reflect the data available to them, and there is no obvious other source for such data. The CDC’s publications do not make it possible to specify the actual individual causes of death: deaths of patients suffering from influenza as well as other respiratory diseases and cardiovascular problems are designated “influenza-associated”, and similarly with patients dying of pneumonia, no matter what other than influenza might have been the precipitating cause of the pneumonia.

In the absence of better data than that available from the CDC, we will have to be satisfied with less than demonstrable certainty in seeking to answer the salient question, whether the global pandemic attributed to CoVID-19 might in fact be owing instead to a particularly virulent strain of influenza, or perhaps even some other virus.

But does it really matter, which virus is responsible for what is now happening? After all, the same practical measures — careful personal hygiene, social distancing — would be taken toward trying to limit the spread of whatever the infectious agent is.

In the long run, of course a vaccine could only the effective if it targets the actual cause, but that bridge cannot be crossed now, it lies more than a year in the future.

Irrespective of now or later, though, it does matter very much if we come to believe something about this pandemic that is not true. The consequences of being wrong could do damage in unforeseeable ways far into the future. The inescapable precedent for that is the case of HIV.

More than three decades ago, it came to be almost unanimously but wrongly believed that HIV causes AIDS (for overwhelming proof, see THE CASE AGAINST HIV). Among the consequences have been immeasurable physical and psychological harm to innumerable people; the establishment, as more or less routine medical practice, the use of inevitably toxic substances as though they could kill viruses without killing the host’s cells that the virus uses for its own replication; and the mistaken but widespread belief that testing HIV-positive is in itself proof of active infection with HIV.

That last belief seems to have become generalized to the extent that at present a positive test for “CoVID-19” is accepted without further ado as proof of infection, even as none of the tests have been established as valid in the only way that could be trustworthy, namely, the prior isolation of pure virus direct from an infected individual. How long-lasting the sad consequences of such mistakes can be is illustrated by the fact that no HIV test has yet, after some 35 years, been established as valid for diagnosis of active infection. The mistaken belief concerning HIV has even survived the open fact that a vaccine against HIV had been projected within a couple of years of 1984 but has never eventuated despite much effort.

A very informative and accurate recounting of the HIV blunder, in the context of the “CoVID-19” pandemic, has recently been posted by Celia Farber (“Was the COVID-19 Test meant to detect a virus?”, 7 April 2020).

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.

Aluminum, autism, Alzheimer’s

In earlier posts I referred to a number of studies reporting harmful consequences associated with aluminum compounds used as adjuvants in some vaccines (Adjuvants — the poisons hidden in some vaccines; Aluminum adjuvants, autoimmune diseases, and attempted suppression of the truth.
Measurements of aluminum in human brain-tissue have shown the presence of highly elevated levels of aluminum in individuals diagnosed with autism and with Alzheimer’s disease:
Mold et al., “Aluminium in brain tissue in autism”, Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology, 46 (2018) 76-82;
Mirza et al., “Aluminium in brain tissue in familial Alzheimer’s disease”, Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology, 40 (2017) 30-36.

The reference work, Trace Elements in Human Nutrition and Health (World Health Organization, Geneva, 1996; ISBN 92 4 156173 4), notes that while “There is no substantiated evidence that aluminium has any essential function in animals or humans”, there is considerable evidence that aluminum can be harmful. Encephalopathy (brain disease or damage) in people undergoing dialysis because of kidney failure was “attributable to the high aluminium content of some water used for the preparation of dialysates. Aluminium levels in the brain and in other tissues of affected subjects were consistently elevated. Excess aluminium also affects the skeleton by markedly reducing bone formation, resulting in osteo-malacia [weakening of bone through de-mineralization]. A further pathological manifestation of aluminium toxicity is a microcytic hypochromic anaemia not associated with iron deficiency. Such problems have practically disappeared since the use of aluminium-free de-ionized water for dialysis became routine”
(p. 221 in WHO manual).
“The risk of aluminium toxicity is greatly increased in persons with impaired kidney function” . . . “the use of aluminium cooking utensils with acidic foods may increase intake [of aluminum]” . . . “By far the most important contribution to aluminium intake comes from antacid medications that can provide several grams of the metal per day” . . . “Locally increased concentrations of aluminium occur in the brain of patients with Alzheimer dementia” (p. 222).

All this makes increasingly plausible the possibility that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines may contribute to the development of autism in some individuals.

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

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.

 

Vaccination, HIV, and a reminder that we are all fallible

A favorite family stories: On a road trip in an unfamiliar country, I had taken a wrong turn that sent us tens of miles in a wrong direction. When I discovered that and confessed to my passengers, my nine-year-old daughter pointed out that “No one’s perfect, not even Daddy”.

I was reminded of that once again after reading a book review by neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, who has a great deal of good things to his credit.

“HENRY MARSH studied medicine at the Royal Free Hospital in London, became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1984 and was appointed Consultant Neurosurgeon at Atkinson Morley’s/St George’s Hospital in London in 1987. He has been the subject of two documentary films, Your Life in Their Hands, which won the Royal Television Society Gold Medal, and The English Surgeon, which won an Emmy, and is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Do No Harm and NBCC finalist Admissions. He was made a CBE in 2010.”

Nevertheless Marsh too is fallible even when he appears to speak with authority. In his review of a book about vaccination, Between Hope and Fear by Michael Kinch, there are some seriously misleading comments:

“Dr. Gordon Stewart went on to maintain that AIDS was caused not by H.I.V. but by homosexual behavior. His view had a major influence on the South African president Thabo Mbeki, whose AIDS policies were subsequently estimated in a report by the Harvard School of Public Health to have resulted in 365,000 avoidable deaths” (Henry Marsh, “ Protecting the Herd”, New York Times Book Review, 9 September 2018, p.17).

In reality, AIDS is indeed not caused by HIV [1]. Stewart had observed the symptoms of AIDS resulting from drug abuse in New York City and New Orleans during 1968-71, long before “AIDS” came on the scene; John Lauritsen [2] pointed out from the beginning that what was common to the first AIDS victims was drug abuse, not homosexuality. Stewart’s insight enabled him to project correctly future official data on AIDS in Britain, whereas official projections based on HIV theory were dead wrong. As to “avoidable deaths” in South Africa [3], it was not a “report by the Harvard School of Public Health” but simply an article whose authors happen to be employed at that Harvard School, moreover an article that has been thoroughly debunked [4].

 

Marsh’s review also refers to the “false claims” of Andrew Wakefield. It is by no means established that Wakefield’s observations were incorrect, namely, that in some cases vaccination at an early age by the multivalent MMR vaccine appears to be associated with the appearance within a few weeks of symptoms of autism [5].

Altogether, controversies over vaccination and “anti-vaxxers” are badly flawed in several respects. Most notably, at the very beginning of any argument about “vaccination”, distinctions ought to be drawn between such long-established vaccinations as against smallpox or polio by comparison with the flurry of new vaccinations being produced by the pharmaceutical industry as it exhausts the possibility of marketing new prescription drugs for newly invented diseases; thus the vaccines (Gardasil, Cervarix) widely touted as preventive of cervical cancer (as well as other cancers) have never been demonstrated to do what they are supposed to do even as they have been demonstrably responsible for serious harm to a significant number of individuals [6].

There are sound general reasons why new vaccines should be tested to the utmost degree and with the greatest caution:

Ø     Vaccines are intended to make the immune system do new things, but the immune system remains far from completely understood

Ø     Reports that an autoimmune disease has set in following vaccination are therefore not implausible

Ø     Vaccines are touted as being entirely specific, yet they commonly include so-called “adjuvants”, which are entirely non-specific toxic substances intended to arouse the immune system

Ø     For commercial and not scientific reasons, vaccines often include preservatives, which are biologically active toxins

Ø     Since vaccination is intended to stimulate the immune system in some manner, it seems quite plausible that employing several vaccines simultaneously could cause adverse reactions, at least in some individuals

Ø     Officialdom has admitted harm from vaccinations in some instances by the fact that about $4 billion over a 40-year period have been paid to people harmed by vaccination, by the US National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program , including “$5,877,710 dollars to 49 victims in claims made against the highly controversial HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccines. To date 200 claims have been filed with VICP, with barely half adjudicated” (“U.S. court pays $6 million to Gardasil victims”)

 

To return for a moment to the issue of AIDS: Why is it that after 35 years of intensive efforts, there has yet to appear the vaccine against HIV that Robert Gallo had promised to produce within a few years of 1984? Perhaps there really is no exogenous “HIV” retrtovirus?

—————————————

[1]    See The Case against HIV  which cites ~900 articles and dozens of books

[2]    John Lauritsen, “CDC’s tables obscure AIDS-drugs connection”, Philadelphia Gay News, 14 February 1985; reprinted (ch. 1, pp. 11-22) in The AIDS War, New York: ASKLEPIOS, 1993.

[3]    Pride Chigwedere, George R. Seage III, Sofia Gruskin, Tun-Hou Lee & M. Essex, “Estimating the lost benefits of antiretroviral drug use in South Africa”, JAIDS 49 (2008) 410-5

[4]    Peter H. Duesberg, Daniele Mandrioli, Amanda McCormack, Joshua M. Nicholson, David Rasnick, Christian Fiala, Claus Koehnlein, Henry H. Bauer & Marco Ruggiero, “AIDS since 1984: No evidence for a new, viral epidemic — not even in Africa”, Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology, 116 (2011) 73-92.

[5]     Officialdom and its groupies continue to maintain that the charges against Wakefield were correct (see e.g. Do Vaccines Cause Autism?), but he also has strong and informed defenders, for instance VAXXED: From Cover Up to Catastrophe or Andrew Wakefield’s Theories about MMR Vaccines and Autism

[6]    Sacrificial Virgins: Homepage: “How young girls are being seriously damaged by the vaccine with the highest reported adverse reactions of any existing vaccine” [emphasis added]
See also, for example, The Truth is Out: Gardasil Vaccine Coverup Exposed
The Gardasil Vaccine—Bad Science, Great Promotion, Dangerous

The Case for a Science Court

I mentioned the concept of a Science Court in a previous post on this blog: “Who guards the guardians? Who guards science?”

and I’ve mentioned it in a number of other places as well. Sometimes those mentions have brought comments on a variety of blogs. Some raised objections to the idea, unfortunately most commonly individuals who have not read my full discussion of the concept, which comprises the 20 pages of chapter 12 in my latest book, “Science Is Not What You Think”  (see reviews of it).

Obviously I cannot reproduce here the 20 pages of that book chapter. Here are the salient points:

Ø     Nowadays, science is almost universally taken as the ultimate authority on knowledge about the natural world

Ø     Media, pundits, policymakers, and governments accept as reliable knowledge what science says

Ø     “What science says” is taken to be the contemporary “scientific consensus”, the mainstream view, the view held by the contemporary elite group of experts on the given topic

Ø     The history of science is unequivocal, that any given contemporary scientific consensus has been quite often significantly mistaken

Ø     History also records that contemporary experts who dissented from the scientific consensus sometimes — though by no means always — turn out to have been closer to the truth and then the consensus was

Ø     Society at large, and policymakers in particular, would benefit from an impartial independent assessment of the evidence respectively for and against the contemporary consensus. The aim of a Science Court would be precisely to facilitate such an impartial independent assessment.

The need for such an institution is nowadays quite pressing because on a whole host of topics there is no substantive, open, public, debate between proponents and challengers of the contemporary consensus. Many of those topics are of little or no immediate practical public significance, say, what the mechanism is of the sense of smell, or what caused the extinction of dinosaurs, or some other matters discussed in my earlier book, Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth (2012) .

However, there are also some topics of prime human, social, political importance on which informed and qualified experts have offered strong evidence that the contemporary consensus is dangerously flawed: HIV/AIDS, human-caused global warming and climate change, the role of prescription drugs in preventive medicine. On those, the popular media illustrate well enough that official institutions accept the scientific consensus and dismiss all challenges as “denialism”, no matter how eminent are the challengers. Something like a Science Court would seem to be the only conceivable mechanism by which the consensus could be forced to confront openly and substantively the challenges to its hegemonic, dogmatically held, view.

In my chapter-length discussion, I consider also the following:

Ø     The formal structure, sponsorship, authority and powers of the Science Court

Ø     Staffing of the Court: permanent and also ad hoc as appropriate to each specific topic

Ø     The choice of advocates for and against, on each particular topic

Ø     The choice of which issues are to be considered by the Court

My chapter discusses the benefits the Science Court would bring on questions concerning prescription drugs, climate change, and HIV/AIDS. It also describes the history of the concept of a Science Court, which dates back half a century to qualms about the potential safety of generating power in nuclear reactors, when equally qualified experts were arguing both sides of the issue. In more recent times, several legal scholars have argued that a specifically Science Court would be of considerable benefit to the judicial system in general and as a whole, since that system is called on increasingly to decide cases in which central questions involve scientific evidence and the qualifications of expert witnesses.

The pressing need for a Science Court nowadays arises because the scientific consensus cannot be relied upon to deliver the benefits that “science” supposedly brings, namely, the best available impartial, objective, unbiased assessment of what is actually known, what “science” has established.

Science did indeed bring those benefits for the first several centuries of what is generally called “modern science”, beginning around the 16^th/17^th centuries or so with the Reformation and the subsequent Enlightenment. What has not yet been widely enough recognized is how different scientific activity is since the middle of the 20th century, by comparison with those earlier centuries of modern science. Those differences are described in considerable detail in chapter 1 of my recent book; in a nutshell:

The circumstances of scientific activity have changed, from about pre-WWII to nowadays, from a cottage industry of voluntarily cooperating, independent, largely disinterested ivory-tower intellectual entrepreneurs, where science was free to do its own thing, namely the unfettered seeking of truth about the natural world; to nowadays a bureaucratic corporate-industry-government behemoth in which science has been pervasively co-opted by outside interests and is not free to do its own thing because of the omnipresent conflicts of interest. Influences and interests outside science now control the choices of research projects and the decisions of what to publish and what not to make public.

Aspects of that change were noted by John Burnham in his book, How Superstition Won and Science Lost (1987), and by Jacques Barzun in his magisterial From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (2000).

Science nowadays plays much the same societal role as the Roman Catholic Church did in Western Civilization before the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The Church had become corrupted through bureaucracy and self-interest and the dysfunctions that arise inevitably as a result of human failings when an activity becomes too big and too powerful. It became obvious that the Church’s policies and actions had grown seriously at variance with its founding ideals. The Reformation and the Enlightenment brought and demonstrated the benefits of empirical, rational, evidence-based, pragmatism in the search for reliable understanding, by contrast to taking for granted what the authorities said.

Today’s scientific activity has become similarly dysfunctional through growing too big and too influential; something like a Science Court is needed to bring society the benefits of empirical, rational, evidence-based, pragmatism in the search for reliable insights.

 

Please note that I am far from alone in noting the dysfunctions of contemporary science and medicine: consider the many books, articles, and reports listed in these bibliographies:
http://henryhbauer.homestead.com/CRITIQUES_OF_CONTEMPORARY_SCIENCE_AND_MEDICINE.pdf
http://henryhbauer.homestead.com/WhatIsWrongWithMedicine.pdf