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by vk4gsd on 19 April 2015 - 01:04

infowars...PT Barnum was right.

by Red Sable on 20 April 2015 - 11:04

http://healthimpactnews.com/2014/nurses-aid-awarded-11-6-million-for-being-paralyzed-by-mandatory-flu-vaccine/

Nurse’s Aide Awarded $11.6 Million for Being Paralyzed by Mandatory Flu Vaccine

http://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/an-open-letter-to-legislators-currently-considering-vaccine-legislation-from-tetyana-obukhanych-phd-in-immunology/

An Open Letter to Legislators Currently Considering Vaccine Legislation from Tetyana Obukhanych, PhD in Immunology

not internet Pseudoscience

by GSDtravels on 22 April 2015 - 13:04

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/study-finds-no-link-mmr-vaccine-autism-article-1.2193285

Fears about vaccines and autism began to spread after the publication in 1998 of an article by Andrew Wakefield that purported to find a link between the MMR vaccine and autism in 12 children.

It was later found to be fraudulent and was retracted by the journal that published it. Britain has also stripped the author, Andrew Wakefield, of his medical license.

But concerns over vaccine safety, particularly in the Internet age, have proven difficult to quell.

"Although a substantial body of research over the last 15 years has found no link between the MMR vaccine and ASD, parents and others continue to associate the vaccine with ASD," said the JAMA study.

by Red Sable on 23 April 2015 - 22:04

http://vactruth.com/2015/02/26/infant-dies-after-8-vaccines/

http://vactruth.com/2015/04/23/baby-dies-after-13-vaccines/

by vk4gsd on 24 April 2015 - 08:04

I am also a fellow immunologist that studied vaccines, and a mother of two, and I was eager to read this book because I was hoping that a scientist will provide an honest balanced narration of the history, efficacy and future challenges of vaccine programs, and raise some real questions that is worthy of thoughts. However this book can make Fox News and MSNBC News seem fair and balanced.
I intend to write a full length review approximately the same length as the book itself, with proper references to the statements I make. But it will take time, and I don't want more readers mislead by the lack of negative reviews, so here is a shorter version.
Here are the major problems I have with this book:

1) Lack of reference. The author make various statements which are critical for her stance against vaccination that is not reference at all. For example, she claimed that Jenner's smallpox vaccine was only effective for an undefined "a few years", and yet, all my searches yielded rather long effectiveness of vaccinia vaccine ([...]). The author seems to choose references that would suit her argument but ignore those that contradict hers.
2) Totally biased. I guess I can't really blame her for writing a book titled "Vaccine Illusions" and only criticize the efficacy of vaccines, but what I have a problem with is her disguising this book as a scientific book that can be used to educate parents who are trying to make vaccine choices. No, this book is for those who have already made up their mind to not vaccinate their children and are looking for validation for such a decision from somebody that can be perceived as "credible". This book has never given any figures on the widely available data from WHO on the amount of deaths for each vaccine preventable diseases before and after each vaccine campaign. Nor did she ever mention the frequencies of disease outbreaks among those who are vaccinated vs those who are not. Yet, she raises questions that seems legit to the untrained eyes, but totally idiotic to those who studies immunology. For example, she mentioned that tetanus toxoid acts in the CNS, mentioned that antibodies can not cross blood brain barrier, then asked seemingly intelligently:"Then how does antibodies protect you from the toxin?" Any Stanford trained immunologist would sure know that antibodies constantly circulating your blood would prevent any toxin from ever getting to the brain from your infection site. Questions like this makes me believe that the author was intentionally deceiving her audience. Another example, she mentioned original antigenic sin, and attribute flu vaccination as a culprit. However, she did not mention that original antigenic sin was first discover not with vaccination, but rather actual viral infection with similar viruses. And since the author knows quite well that actual virus infection leaves with stronger memory immunity, and as she claims vaccination is not effective for a few years, one could easily argue that getting the flu would leave you way more susceptible to original antigenic sin than getting the vaccine itself.
3) Raise questions about vaccine that she knows that can not be answered the way she wanted, and use that to discredit all vaccine studies. For instance, one of her problems with vaccine is that it's efficacy is not directly tested with a real infection. She knows that no human trials where people are given the actual virus/bacteria will ever be approved. Yet, she takes in no consideration of the very low mortality rate directly due to any diseases in countries that have vaccine programs versus the high rate in countries that do not have vaccine programs, or even historical data in the same country.
4) Make vaccine immunity as your only line of defense so that it better be perfect or you are screwed. The most widely mistaken fact about vaccine is that it has to protect a person from ever getting infected. Vaccine would rarely prevent you from being infected, in most cases, it buys you enough time so your own immune system would keep the infection under control so that you would show no symptoms of infection; in some cases, you still show symptoms but less severe; and if the vaccine is a good one, you would rarely have full symptoms. Vaccine safety is a huge issue for vaccine producers, and CDC takes it very seriously, and there is a national vaccine safety hotline for each vaccine. Therefore vaccines should be viewed more as an extra safety net to lessen the assault of an infection on your own immune system. Some of the questions author raised is legit, such as reduced amount of antibodies in breast milk of mothers who are vaccinated vs those who had the disease. However, author did not mention that without vaccines, some people never got a chance to become mothers.

by vk4gsd on 24 April 2015 - 08:04

YES internet Pseudoscience, nothing but internet Pseudoscience

Her evidence

Chapter 1. Jenner, the father of immunology and inventor of vaccination, was wrong. He was fooled because he tested his vaccinated subjects for resistance to variolation rather than to natural smallpox, and he didn’t realize that the protection wore off after a few years. As a result, horrible smallpox epidemics occurred in communities where people had been vaccinated once and thought they were still protected. She thinks this proves that vaccination “is not an equivalent of immunity.” (But of course we know that periodic revaccination is necessary for some diseases; and even if smallpox vaccines weren’t perfect, they were good enough for vaccination campaigns to achieve worldwide eradication of the disease.)

Chapter 2. When the tetanus vaccine was developed using modified toxins (toxoids), its success was attributed to the stimulation of antibody production. She claims this assumption has never been properly tested and should be tested by giving the vaccine to a control group of animals that are genetically unable to produce antibodies and then exposing them to infection to find out if they are protected anyway. She claims that anyone suggesting such testing would be slapped down for going against antibody-centered dogma. (I think such testing is more likely to be squelched because of ethical objections to giving deadly diseases to defenseless animals to test an improbable hypothesis.)

Chapter 3. She found a series of 1920s experiments in China that she interprets as showing that natural immunity to tetanus has “nothing to do with antibodies.” Wrong! One study showed that guinea pigs developed natural immunity when fed tetanus spores, but only to the specific strain of spores. The amount of antitoxin they measured in the blood did not correlate to immunity; so they concluded not that antibodies weren’t responsible for immunity, but that some other type-specific antibodies must be involved. Another study found that a third of people in Peking were carriers of tetanus bacteria and had “natural” immunity to the disease. My interpretation of these studies is that they showed that production of antibodies and achievement of immunity could be achieved through intestinal colonization with tetanus spores. Interesting, but what are its implications for medical practice?

Chapter 4. She says the tetanus toxoid vaccine was never properly tested in randomized controlled trials, but was instituted following WWII because tetanus frequency was reduced from WWI levels; and that could have been due to non-vaccine factors. The CDC webpage says that the efficacy of the tetanus toxoid vaccine has never been studied in a vaccine trial. But it has; just to mention one, I found this 1966 randomized double blind study of 1,618 women in rural Colombia that used influenza vaccine as a control and found that vaccinating the adult female population with tetanus toxoid vaccine reduced the death rate for neonatal tetanus from 7.8 per 100 births to zero.

She repeats the naïve argument, so common in anti-vaccine circles, that the death rate from tetanus was already decreasing before the introduction of the vaccine, so maybe the vaccine did nothing. As we have pointed out so many times, it’s not useful to look at the death rate, because fewer patients die as medical care improves. We must look at the incidence of the disease, which drops dramatically in vaccinated populations. The clinical effectiveness of the tetanus toxoid vaccine is virtually 100%; cases of tetanus in fully-immunized people are extremely rare. It would be unethical to deny patients that protection to do a controlled trial of vaccines vs. intestinal colonization.

She describes a controlled trial of tetanus patients in Bangladesh where both groups got standard care including tetanus immune globulin, and adding intravenous vitamin C decreased the death rate. She thinks this means that vitamin C is an effective treatment for tetanus. In my opinion, it only showed that adding vitamin C to conventional treatment improved survival in a population that had not been immunized and that may well have been malnourished and deficient in vitamin C.

She even questions the efficacy of tetanus immune globulin for treatment of infection, saying that tetanus toxin acts in the central nervous system and antibodies can’t cross the blood-brain barrier. But they don’t need to: circulating antibodies neutralize antigens in the blood to prevent toxins from reaching the brain.

More unsubstantiated assertions

That was just the first four chapters. In ten more chapters, she goes on to make a whole series of unsubstantiated assertions, false statements, and speculations:

Immunologic memory is a myth.
Allergies can’t develop from exposure to allergens alone in the absence of adjuvants.
Alum in vaccines is the cause of the increasing incidence of allergies.
Vaccine protection from vaccines doesn’t last as long as immunity from natural infection, immunized people sometimes still get the disease, and vaccines only delay infection until the person is at an age where the infection has more serious consequences.
The immature immune system of infants can’t deal with natural viruses or even with artificially attenuated viruses, but after the age of two children can withstand childhood diseases without complications.
Injection bypasses mucosal surfaces whereas natural infection induces mucosal antibodies.
Mothers can’t transfer vaccine-induced antibodies to their infants in breast milk.
Vaccines have made childhood diseases more dangerous.
Flu vaccines create “antigenic sin” (when antibodies cross-react without perfectly matching, thereby “freezing” up the immune system).
Taking a flu shot is tantamount to playing Russian Roulette and might turn the next flu into a deadly disease.
It is “unacceptable” to give annual flu shots to young children or to require them for health professionals as a condition for employment.
Homeopathy is better than Tylenol. It has been proven to work but has been denied the status of a legitimate science only because we don’t understand how it works.
There is no herd immunity in the US (she even mistakenly says that herd immunity exists when the proportion of non-susceptible people is above 68%).
Vaccination does nothing to prevent sporadic outbreaks of viral diseases that are no longer endemic but are brought into the community from abroad.
After you make informed vaccine decisions “you will need to use appropriate legal vaccine exemptions for your child’s school attendance.”

She questions vaccine safety, because:

Oral polio vaccine causes polio in one out of a half million recipients. (There is a small risk. That’s why countries switch to the injected version as soon as the prevalence of the disease is low enough to make that the better option; the oral vaccine is more risky but its increased effectiveness makes the benefits greater than the risks where the disease is endemic.)
The inactivated polio vaccine has never been tested. (This claim stands out as egregious nonsense even in this list. One of the largest medical experiments in history was the placebo-controlled field trials of IPV in the 1950s.)
Babies have died after the HepB shot. (She cites anti-vaccine website testimonials. Reliable sources don’t report any deaths attributable to the vaccine; severe problems are very rare, with serious allergic reactions occurring at a rate of less than one in a million).
Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, has resulted in “numerous accounts of healthy teenagers who died or developed horrendous neurological problems.” (Here she cites another anti-vaccine website; and again, reliable sources don’t attribute any serious side effects to the vaccine.)

She misrepresents the results of a study on subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a late complication of measles infection. She says the rate of SSPE rose 25-fold in the 1990s because of decreased maternal immuno-protection from vaccinated mothers. The study she cites examined the risk of SSPE following the resurgence of measles in 1989-91, found that previous estimates of risk were probably too low, and it underscored the importance of childhood immunization programs, concluding that the prevention of measles cases through vaccination may prevent more cases of SSPE than was previously recognized.

In the Appendix, she lists a number of blogs, websites, and books that are unreliable sources that provide anti-vaccine propaganda, pro-homeopathy propaganda, and nutritional misinformation.