Volume 80, no. 4
The U.S. is said to be a “Vaccine Nation.” The central dogma of public health and most pediatric practices is that vaccination is the most important medical advance. It purportedly has saved “millions” of lives, is the necessary bulwark against massive outbreaks of lethal diseases, and being “up to date” on some 70 doses of vaccine is needed to safely attend school. Questions about the COVID-19 vaccines are an existential threat: They might spark “vaccine hesitancy” about established childhood vaccines, and hinder the development of thousands of new vaccines on an mRNA platform, even for noninfectious diseases.
In an amicus brief in the case of Murthy v. Missouri (originally Missouri v. Biden), the American Academy of Pediatrics, the AMA, et al. argue for the compelling interest of the government in protecting the public against “misinformation” on vaccines. All approved vaccines are “safe and effective,” they state, but the American public is being strongly influenced by claims of harm including autism and infertility. Reportedly, “41% of parents with minor children were sometimes or often exposed to negative messages about vaccines on social media” (tinyurl.com/y3f3ht69).
One study showed that “viewing typical vaccine-critical websites for only five to 10 minutes increases the perception of risk” regarding the most common vaccinations for young children and significantly decreased the intention to vaccinate. Medical professionals must spend considerable time countering these messages, diverting resources from clinical care. “Post hoc efforts to mitigate the harm from vaccine misinformation are less effective at preserving public health than reducing the spread of misinformation in the first place” [by censorship] (ibid.).
AMA president Jesse Ehrenfeld writes that “vaccine misinformation poses a grave threat to public health…. [W]e seek to partner with the federal government to advance factual information.”
“Anything less than a comprehensive effort to prevent the dissemination of medical misinformation—using the powers of the federal government, public health agencies, healthcare organizations, social media companies and media outlets…—abdicates our responsibility” (https://tinyurl.com/2kduszfa).
Part of the “infodemic” causing vaccine hesitancy is said to be the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Prepandemic, few people were aware of it. The rapid roll-out of COVID vaccines brought global attention. Reports may “seed misinformation” when people are unaware that events are unverified or not necessarily caused by a vaccine (JAMA 3/26/24).
Vaccination vs. Treatment Paradigms
Vaccination targets the whole population, rather than the smaller set of sick persons. Vaccination strives to make a permanent or long-lasting change in the body’s immune system, so that it “remembers” a previous exposure and can turn on antibody production. In contrast, treatment is generally short-term—and it can be stopped if there is an adverse response.
Disease occurrence and death prevented by vaccination are hypothetical—unless subjects are (unethically) exposed to the disease. There’s inevitably guesswork—speculation that things would’ve been worse without the vaccine. With treatment, in contrast, there is a denominator—the number of actual cases. “Vaccine-preventable” diseases are usually declared to be untreatable, or like COVID they are simply not treated.
Vaccination Outcomes
It is frequently asserted—correctly—that mortality from childhood diseases such as measles, pertussis, and diphtheria is far less than it was in the 19th century. However, the precipitous drop in mortality occurred before the vaccines became available (https://tinyurl.com/57dyxtcz). Vaccine zealots still predict outbreaks if we relent. One test occurred in Sweden, where pertussis mortality fell 98% between the 1860s and early 1950s. Vaccine was introduced in 1953. In 1978, 84% of children diagnosed with pertussis had had three doses of whole-cell pertussis vaccine. The vaccination was discontinued from 1979–1996, with no increase in deaths (tinyurl.com/3wwxwutm). (Note that pertussis is treatable: erythromycin and vitamin C are reportedly effective.)
For other examples, see Jordan Henderson on “Vaccine Evangelists, Apostates, & Apologists” (tinyurl.com/3jsfdbrn).
A successful public health intervention should lead to a healthier population. The U.S., however, has a heavy burden of chronic disease and neurological disability, especially in children, including: food allergies, asthma, allergic dermatitis, recurrent otitis media, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (one in ten, https://tinyurl.com/mrya9m7c), autism, diabetes, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS, https://tinyurl.com/4f945hs2).
Pediatrician Paul Thomas, M.D., of Portland, Ore., respected parents’ views on vaccines, and tracked children by vaccination status (2,700 variably vaccinated; 560 not vaccinated). The unvaccinated were “off the charts” healthier on numerous measures, and had zero diagnoses of ADHD in 10 years (https://tinyurl.com/bddj9z9p). In December 2020, the Oregon Medical Board suspended Dr. Thomas’s medical license and his license was surrendered in 2022 (https://tinyurl.com/26bcakej).
U.S. life expectancy has declined, and reports of sudden death, heart disease, strokes, and unusual or unusually aggressive cancers proliferate since 2021. What else new has happened? Climate change? A sudden invasion of microplastics? More PM2.5s?
$1.6 Trillion/Year Autism Tsunami
The prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the U.S. continues to increase. A new model, which accounts for this along with the shift to adult-dominated costs and the transfer of costs from parents to government, forecasts costs growing from $223 billion/year in 2020 to $589 billion/year in 2030 to $1.36 trillion/year in 2040. The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (JDD) retracted the article about it—one of its most frequently downloaded articles. It has been republished in Science, Public Health Policy, & the Law (https://tinyurl.com/3wyvnuc3).
One of the authors, Toby Rogers, discusses the back story (https://tinyurl.com/388s665n). He states that the article falsifies the genetic approach to autism. The Simons Foundation, the second largest funder of autism research, after the NIH, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars searching for the “gene for autism,” to the exclusion of environmental factors. The article nowhere mentions the “v” word that is on people’s minds, or other factors, but apparently even a discussion of costs cannot be tolerated by the “trillion-dollar autism industry.”
An unusual signal was noted in the prevalence data: an unprecedented decrease in ASD for birth years 2000–2013 in Marin County. Wealthy white parents began opting out of the CDC vaccine schedule. They may have done many other things as well. But the FDA and CDC never investigated this fascinating trend, the only positive sign we’ve ever seen in the autism data.
Absence of Evidence and Negative Evidence
“Since the 1991 Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendation of universal HepB immunization of infants, no evidence of either an increased trend in the overall number of neonatal deaths or in neonatal deaths after HepB vaccination reported to VAERS was found…. [I]ndirect indices, despite their limited interpretability, do provide some reassurance that HepB vaccination is not causing a clear increase in unexplained neonatal or infant deaths. As events reported to VAERS may be coincidental, detailed epidemiologic studies are needed for more definitive evaluation of potential causal relationships between vaccination and serious events or death” [emphasis added] (Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med Dec 1999, https://tinyurl.com/3jwac935).
As of 2024, I cannot find such a study on PubMed. Nor are there large retrospective cohort studies published in major journals to support or refute Dr. Paul Thomas’s findings. For such a controversial and important subject one would expect many NIH-funded studies by major academic institutions. Their absence is “negative evidence” of an agenda to conceal inconvenient information (https://tinyurl.com/3r2j3zas).
“[B]y means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial…. Meanwhile, the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.”
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
Mechanisms of Action—and of Adverse Effects
The medical student’s or layman’s view of vaccination, illustrated with lock-and-key cartoons, is that the vaccine contains an antigen that is present on the surface of a pathogen, without the whole pathogenic organism. The immune system produces an antibody that locks onto the antigen, and neutralizes the pathogen. Memory cells reactivate production of antibodies on later exposure. This is vastly oversimplified, but sounds benign.
One problem is that modern vaccines that use pure recombinant or synthetic antigens are less immunogenic (and less toxic) than the older live or killed whole-cell vaccines. Thus, an adjuvant, an agent to stimulate the immune system, is needed. Since the stimulus is nonspecific, undesirable allergies (e.g., to peanuts) or autoimmunity can also be provoked.
Thimerosal, which has an adjuvant as well as a disinfecting effect, has been removed from pediatric vaccines (except for influenza). Most vaccines contain aluminum adjuvants. Their mechanism of action is not well understood; they might target components that play a key role in brain development (https://tinyurl.com/29fnz6bw).
Brains of 10 autistic patients were demonstrated to contain some of the highest levels of aluminum ever recorded in human brain, in immune cells and microglia. Sheep injected with aluminum-containing substances develop behavioral changes comparable to autism (https://tinyurl.com/yb43ybdj).
The plethora of adverse effects reported after vaccination involve many different body systems. One of the best candidates for the common thread between those injuries is microstrokes throughout the body—from microclots or “sludging” of the blood. Understanding the biophysics of blood flow, largely neglected in American medicine, could be key to treating vaccine injuries and many chronic illnesses, writes “A Midwestern Doctor” (https://tinyurl.com/4uxswdbm).
Canadian neurologist Andrew Moulden linked vaccine injuries to blood clumping caused by reduced zeta potential, which measures electrostatic repulsion between adjacent, similarly charged particles in a colloidal dispersion. (This is related to crystalline water (see Gerald Pollack, The Fourth Phase of Water.) Colloids with high zeta potential are electrically stabilized while colloids with low zeta potentials tend to coagulate. “Blood stasis” from traditional Chinese medicine, linked to autoimmune conditions may be impaired zeta potential. The strong positive charge on the COVID vaccine’s spike protein likely impairs zeta potential, as does aluminum (tinyurl.com/4k9s534w).
Vaccines may trigger a sustained cell danger response (CDR) The common genes known to increase the risk of autism can be shown to play a role in CDR signaling or maintenance (https://tinyurl.com/bdehekr9).
AAPS Calendar
July 13, 2023. Missouri Chapter Meeting, Lake Ozark, MO. – https://mailchi.mp/aapsonline/july-13-2024-mo-chapter
Sep 18-21, 2024. 81st Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX. – https://aapsonline.org/2024am
ACTION OF THE MONTH
Scholarships are available to help medical students and residents attend the AAPS 81st Annual Meeting, Sept 18-21, 2024, in San Antonio. Details at https://aapsonline.org/2024am.
A Compelling Interest in Freedom
In its amicus brief (https://tinyurl.com/3ywt3khx) in Murphy v. Missouri, AAPS counters arguments by the AMA amici. “Abuse of government power through misuse of scientific or medical assertions is not new, and a robust First Amendment free of government censorship is necessary to deter such abuse,” AAPS writes. “Freedom to criticize is an essential safeguard against tyranny.” And “the proper antidote to alleged false information is a stronger right to free speech.”
“There have not been any new categories of unprotected speech in more than 50 years, and there is no textual, historical, or logical basis for making vaccine criticism unprotected.”
While AMA amici claim “there is no evidence of significant harm from the Covid vaccine,” the government “fails to investigate and disclose pervasive evidence of its actual and potential harm,” the brief states. AAPS cites numerous examples of past vaccine harms. It notes that more than 600 federal court decisions have cited VAERS. Federal law requires the posting of VAERS data. Congress having implicitly adopted a policy of transparency and robust public debate, the executive branch cannot properly engage in a censorship campaign.
Failure by government to investigate and disclose details about the uptick in reporting adverse events is “grounds for further alarm, and not a valid basis for denying possible harm.”
Young, Healthy Autistics Scheduled for Death
A 28-year-old Dutch woman, and a 27-year-old Canadian woman (M.V.) with a diagnosis of autism applied for state-facilitated suicide despite not suffering a terminal or debilitating physical illness. M.V.’s father is asking Alberta’s top court to block the death order on the basis of doubt about the “tie-breaker” doctor’s impartiality and her inability to give consent.
Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, noted, “Canada’s euthanasia law was not designed to protect vulnerable people. The law is designed to protect the doctors who are willing to kill.”
As a proportion of all deaths in Holland, the first country to legalize euthanasia, doctor-assisted suicides increased from less than 2% in 2002 to more than 4% in 2019 and continue to climb, reaching 8,720 in 2022 (https://tinyurl.com/5n6hcrms).
FDA Agrees to Remove Anti-ivermectin Postings
In a settlement that dismissed the case of Mary Talley Bowden v. HHS (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Galveston Division, No. 322-cv-184), FDA agreed to permanently remove several social media posts urging people not to take ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 (tinyurl.com/2sy5dauh). Dr. Bowden stated: “This landmark case sets an important precedent in limiting FDA overreach into the doctor-patient relationship.” The FDA denies any wrongdoing and states that it has not changed its position that available clinical trial data do not demonstrate ivermectin’s effectiveness against COVID-19.
Some might speculate the FDA opted to settle to avoid…the discovery process and [being] forced to produce documents that might reveal information it would prefer the public didn’t know,” writes journalist Eric Starkman (tinyurl.com/bdev4eef).
Tip of the Month: The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) might protect some victims of sham peer review and other unfair retaliation. The ADA extends its protection to any impairment that substantially reduces someone’s ability to function in an important part of life, which can even include substance abuse. It is only when substance abuse or another disability impairs someone’s ability to do the job that the person, including a physician, may be fired or denied an employment opportunity on that basis. Nearly 50 years ago, decades before ADA, the leading decision on this was by the California Supreme Court when it rejected the notion that a physician employed by the State as a medical consultant could be fired for lunchtime alcoholic consumption not proven to affect his work performance. Skelly v. State Pers. Bd., 15 Cal. 3d 194, 199 (1975).
FDA Promotes Products Off Label
During his first term as FDA Commissioner during the Obama administration, Robert Califf, M.D., proposed allowing companies to advertise their products off label, an illegal practice under FDA regulations. Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) pushed back with a letter concerning off-label use of opioids. Others in the Obama Administration blocked Dr. Califf’s proposal.
In 2009, Pfizer pled guilty and paid a record $2.3 billion criminal fine for illegally marketing more than a dozen drugs off label.
Dr. Califf, back for a second term under Biden, posted a message on X promoting the off-label use of COVID vaccines to protect children against long COVID, citing a news article in Nature Magazine about a small, non-peer-reviewed study.
CDC Director Mandy Cohen, M.D., M.P.H., also promoted this off-label use on X (https://tinyurl.com/mtu26uzw).
Texas Pediatricians Forced to Order COVID Shot
Juana Salazar, TVFC/ASN Audit Coordinator . Garland Public Health Clinic, wrote to participants in the Texas Vaccines for Children program: “TVFC providers please make sure to add covid vaccines to this months order, I wont be approving orders unless I see covid vaccines included see email below. It is not a choice it is a REQUIREMENT. Thank you all J [sic].”
A physician reported having to buy a special freezer that can send temperature data to the health department. Each time a temperature outside the correct range was recorded, she was supposed to call the vaccine manufacturer, document their instructions about the vaccines that were being stored, and send the instructions to the health department.
Thanks to the intervention of Sen. Bob Hall, the Texas Dept. of Health and Human Services backed down, and orders for vaccines were not to be placed on hold because of this requirement.
From Checks and Balances to Gold Rush
Pharma took advantage of the deep recession to pass the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act that allowed federal officials and recipients of taxpayer-funded grants to patent their research. A healthy system of checks and balances—regulators and academic and corporate researchers—was transformed into a gold rush as all were now on the same team looking for profit from their intellectual property (https://tinyurl.com/2s43wb6f).
Correspondence
‘Misinformation’ Is at Least 2,000 Years Old. The chief priests and scribes, the “Disinformation Governance Board” of the day, brought charges against Jesus, saying, “We found this man misleading our people; he opposes the payment of taxes to Caesar and maintains that he is the Christ, a king.” (Luke 23:2-3) But, of course, Jesus never opposed paying taxes to Caesar, and he never put himself forward as a king. At one point when people wanted to carry him off and make him a king, he fled. Based on these false charges and the accusation of spreading misinformation and disinformation, a sham trial ensued, and the rest is history.
Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Lake View, NY
Return Soul, Reduce Costs. Personalized care, the soul of medicine, was possible in the early 1980s, before the mass consolidation and corporatization of the medical industry, caused in large part by a federally imposed non-market artificial payment system. Government attempts to control run-away healthcare costs, by removing the patient from control of the funds, have failed, partly by creating a massive bureaucracy that consumes about one-third of all medical costs. We need to return medical buying power to the patient.
Ken Fisher, M.D., https://tinyurl.com/nhpu9385
Machiavelli and Adam Smith. I have not seen others make the connection between these two men, probably because the first is hated and the other loved, but to me it seems obvious. Machiavelli broke with the classical and Christian aspiration to temper the tyrannical temptation through an education in virtue, scoring the premodern philosophic tradition as an unbroken series of unrealistic and unreliable fantasies, “for the gap between how people actually behave and how they ought to behave is so great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to an ideal will soon discover that he has been taught how to destroy himself, not how to preserve himself.” Machiavelli proposed grounding a political philosophy upon readily observable human behaviors of pride, selfishness, greed, and the quest for glory, arguing that liberty and political security were better achieved by pitting different domestic classes against one another. Our Founders applied Machiavelli’s arguments, pitting the different branches of government against each other.
Toby Rogers, https://tinyurl.com/2p8xznwn
Logan’s Run? In Canada, the number of assisted suicides has increased every year since 2016, reaching 13,241 in 2022 for a total of 44,958. Since 2021, death does not need to be reasonably foreseeable. The government apparently has a financial interest in the death of children in the welfare system: a conflict of interest.
Robert W. Malone, M.D., https://tinyurl.com/ckkxesh3
Is This a Free Democratic Society? Charlatan modellers and civil liberty executioners have been showered with honours and sycophantic treatment while Western governments criticised China for adopting similar measures. Russia and China are here among us, pressing you to conform, think and act alike like Fritz Lange’s zombie-like citizens in his greatest movie, Metropolis.
What’s left of evidence of insane COVID policies after the official cull is what in archaeology would be called “residual deposits surviving later disturbance,” meaning what’s left of documentable and verifiable evidence after thieves, robbers, and demolition squads have taken their toll.
Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan, tinyurl.com/muhxkwcc
Information Dominance. The mainstream media in our country has won the battle for control of information. Six corporations have full control of the narratives disseminated by government agencies, corporations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Once an entity has full control of information, it controls the country. After the successful 2020 cultural Marxist coup in the U.S., Americans need to study the history of communist countries. In Romania, Ceausescu’s reign of terror (1965-1989) killed thousands of religious and political dissidents; arrested and jailed more than one million non-criminals; demolished 7,000 villages to destroy the peoples’ ties to their centuries-old traditions and civilization (the Marxist euphemism for this destruction was “systematization”); destroyed tens of thousands of historical buildings and monuments; employed hundreds of thousands of Romanians to work for the much-feared Securitate. Worse than the hunger and poverty was the destruction to the human psyche and soul. Giurescu described it so: “after 45 years of communist rule, the country has been psychologically crippled and physically lowered to sub-minimal standards. People fear each other…. Envy and hostility prevail over civic spirit; profiteering and idleness over steady work.” Thus the result of information dominance.
Ileana Johnson, Ed.D., https://tinyurl.com/2esph5pk
A New Record. In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the CDC “released” a 148-page study of myocarditis after COVID “vaccination.” Every single page was completely redacted (https://tinyurl.com/5ycvd8tf). The redaction code was said to be (b)(5), deliberative process privilege.
Willie Soon, Ph.D., Salem, MA
