Volume 78, no. 7 July 2022
These days being called an “anti-vaxxer” is likely an indelible stain, which implies that one is anti-science and pro-disease. Anyone who voices a concern about any vaccine is likely to be tarred with this label. Almost everyone who writes about vaccine adverse effects prefaces the remarks with “I am not an anti-vaxxer. I’ve had all my vaccines, and so have my children, and my patients, and I firmly believe the creed that vaccines are the greatest medical advance in history, that they have saved millions of lives, and that without them we’d have vast epidemics of horrible diseases.”
This profession of faith may be as effective as proclaiming that “I am not a ***ist or ***phobe—I have friends who are black, ‘Latinx,’ gay, trans, or Jewish.” But change could happen.
COVID-19 vaccines have made a hole in the dike.
“The Gish Gallop of the panicked pro-vaxxers,” as described by one physician, has appeared (NY Times Mag 5/25/2022). (The Gish Gallop is a debate technique of overwhelming an opponent with an excessive number of weak arguments and half truths.)
“A wave of parents has been radicalized by Covid-era misinformation to reject ordinary childhood immunizations—with potentially lethal consequences.” Quoting Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, the article states that the anti-vaccine movement is “so strong, so well organized, so well funded, I doubt it will stop at Covid-19 vaccines…. I think it’s going to extend to childhood vaccinations.” A few parents are declining baby shots, and the number of fully vaccinated kindergartners has dropped from 95% to 94% over a year (https://tinyurl.com/mamkk3nf).
Pro-vaxxers blame “grifters” who manage to raise some money, conspiracy theorists, “right-wing” political leanings, and the strategy of emphasizing personal freedom. They ask “how much autonomy any individual should surrender for the greater good and how to apportion risk between individuals and society” (ibid.). There are apparently no inalienable rights.
Vaccines—Greatest Advance and Only Answer?
Sir William Osler wrote that the greatest medical advances were cinchona (source of quinine, of which hydroxychloroquine is a derivative), vaccination, and the principle of asepsis (surely he would not under-rate sanitation). Very few vaccines (e.g., (smallpox, tetanus, and rabies) had been developed in Osler’s time.
Smallpox is the only disease that vaccination is claimed to have eradicated—and it took 100 years. The original attempt, variolation, was based on the idea of causing a mild case so that the patient would be resistant when encountering a larger inoculum. This was dangerous—if even one organism evaded the immune system, a full-blown case might result. Next, patients were inoculated with a related but less dangerous disease, cowpox, which was observed anecdotally to be protective. Now, live virus vaccines use an attenuated strain made by passage through tissue culture. Since the immune response is generally not strong enough, an adjuvant is added, usually an aluminum compound. Thimerosal, a mercury-containing organic compound once used as a vaccine preservative, has adjuvant as well as disinfecting properties. Adjuvants have a nonspecific stimulating effect on the immune system—which is not well studied and could provoke allergies or autoimmunity.
So what is in vaccines? Never mind “accidental contaminants” like trace amounts of industrial chemicals or peculiar micro-debris. Vaccines are prepared in living cells, which contain a huge number of viruses, including retroviruses. We learned about SV-40 in polio vaccine—after millions got it, but what about others? As to mRNA, exactly what does it code for? And what if they change the formulation? It is impossible to determine.
Even if the initial purpose is laudable and some vaccines achieve that purpose, vaccination is a potential cover for injecting who-knows-what into non-consenting people, directed by powerful institutions that are known to be corrupted, tyrannical, and arrogantly incompetent. The escalation from “individual choice of medical procedure” into mandatory violation of bodily autonomy is built into the mass vaccination concept. Potential sinister motives range from undeserved profits to population control.
For those reasons, vaccine skeptics who are free to act might consider saying, “Yes, I am openly anti-vax; how can anyone be pro-vax after COVID vaccine tyranny? It is too prone to abuse.”
Questions to ask: Do ethical physicians and scientists oppose human sacrifice? (And does that include imposing a risk on one person to protect another?) How about experiments without adequate control groups (such as the use of “placebos” that contain adjuvants)? Lack of rigorous after-market surveillance for long-term effects such as infertility, cancer, chronic disease, developmental disability, and birth defects? Shielding malefactors from liability? Suppressing alternate modalities? Calling dissent “misinformation” and “canceling” dissenters? Depriving people of liberty or property without due process of law?
Anti-vaxxers need to challenge pro-vaxxers to change my mind. Are the above effects acceptable? Have they not occurred or can they not result from mass vaccination?
One public commenter to the NYT article writes: “The COVID situation allowed regular people to realize that that the governments and mainstream news outlets have lied to them, repeatedly and relentlessly. The radical skepticism of the establishment was an inevitable consequence of these sorts of deceptions, and is fully warranted.”
What Vanquished Infectious Disease?
To credit vaccines or antibiotics for the precipitous decline in infectious disease mortality is even worse than assuming that correlation proves causality or falling into the Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy. Mortality was already in steep decline—in measles, diphtheria, and pertussis before vaccines (tinyurl.com/2s36y3vk), and in tuberculosis, typhoid, scarlet fever, and pneumonia before antibiotics. This was not because of the miracles of modern medicine, but thanks to first-generation public health measures including slum reforms, food and factory inspections, and most importantly, sanitary engineering to safely remove and treat human waste and provide clean water. We are indebted to plumbers, not doctors, for these wonderful results.
Aggressive vaccination programs have failed to eradicate measles. What works better? Toilets (tinyurl.com/5vs6aj98).
This seems counterintuitive for a respiratory disease, but the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), or “Clean India Campaign,” which had the lofty goal of eliminating open defecation, found that for every 1% increase in households in a district with toilets, there are 0.33 fewer measles cases per 1,000 children under age 5. In a few short years, it appears that getting toilets into homes has reduced the burden of measles more than jabbing 80% of Indian children with two doses of measles vaccine in the first two years of life.
Authors of a report in BMJ Open (tinyurl.com/mu2kr2ex) calculated that about 12% of the decline in measles cases is due to a drop in growth stunting caused by environmental enteropathy, which impairs immune function. Availability of toilets may also have enhanced the impact of vitamin A supplementation, which reduces the risk of death from measles by 87% for children under two years of age.
Eradicating measles does not necessarily confer a net health benefit. Getting childhood measles is associated with a lower risk of dying of cancer at ages 15–60 years, acquiring lymphoma or chronic lymphocytic leukemia, developing Parkinson disease, or having allergic disease or asthma, among other possible benefits.
In terms of lives saved, vaccines cannot come close to the record of vector control. DDT is estimated to have saved 500 million lives from malaria alone (tinyurl.com/yckjmdhr).
The U.S. is conducting an uncontrolled experiment in bringing back open defecation in homeless camps, and hampering vector control through rigid environmental regulations.
Prenatal Tests: Chinese Gene Harvesting
One of the most popular prenatal tests in the world, called NIFTY for Non-Invasive Fetal TrisomY, is the source of genetic and population data for BGI, a company that works in cooperation with the Chinese military. With the aid of artificial intelligence, data from millions of women could be used not only to diagnose genetic diseases but to try to “improve population quality.” Large data sets could expose genetic vulnerabilities to disease in a population, which an adversary could exploit in a targeted genetic attack. Some women prefer to use a different test when they learn about the secondary research done with their DNA—and their child’s (https://tinyurl.com/3j4yytcx).
“The object of persecution is persecution…. The object of power is power.” George Orwell, 1984
Data Related to Viral Origin Suppressed
Questions about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus are unanswered, but the National Institutes of Health restricted public access to genetic sequencing data from the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the lab’s request. The documents, obtained by Empower Oversight Whistleblowers and Researchers (EO) through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, seem to suggest that the epidemic did not originate in the Huanan market and thus to reinforce claims of some experts that the virus likely escaped from the WIV. The EO report claims that NIH staff members were using off-the-record emails to influence media coverage. Dr. Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins were prominently mentioned (tinyurl.com/3nhec3tu).
Immunofudging on Shots for Kids
In FDA advisory committee hearings on authorizing COVID shots for children under age 5, Pfizer and Moderna used the “immunobridging” statistical trick to compensate for lack of actual health benefits, writes Toby Rogers, Ph.D. They compared antibody levels in 300 kids (10% of the trial subjects) in each age group against antibody levels in 300 adults ages 18–25 from a previous clinical trial. Antibody levels being similar, Moderna claims, “Therefore it will prevent disease in the future in kids!”
Additional ways of rigging the game included releasing risk benefit documents (190 pages, single-spaced) one to two days before the meeting. “Endless layers of complexity [were added] to hide how bad the data really is.” One “expert” after another acknowledged that there are no “correlates of protection” for these vaccines: “You cannot use antibodies (or B-cells, T-cells, or any other proxy) to predict whether someone is immune or not.”
Eric Rubin, a committee member and the editor of the NEJM stated it bluntly, “We know what kind of antibody response can be generated, we just don’t know if it works.”
Since data were collected in mid-2021, the Omicron variant has replaced the earlier strains, and neither Moderna nor Pfizer shots are effective against the current variant.
By fall of 2021, 26 high-quality studies from outside the U.S. showed a two- to seven-fold increased risk of myocarditis from mRNA shots. FDA, CDC, and Kaiser-Permanente fixers massaged it down to 7% to 50% higher.
“The public health establishment has abandoned science, logic, reason, rationality, empathy, health, and medicine. The FDA is more than happy to sacrifice children in order to ingratiate themselves further with the cartel,” Rogers concludes (https://tinyurl.com/2jrvxc9t).
AAPS Calendar
June 25. Texas Chapter, Ft. Worth, TX, https://texasaaps.org.
July 9. Missouri Chapter, Lake Ozark, MO, https://moaaps.org/.
October 13–15. 79th annual meeting, Springfield, MO. https://aapsonline.org/2022am
ACTION OF THE MONTH
The AAPS Educational Foundation offers scholarships to medical students and residents to attend our annual meeting. Have interested persons contact us at [email protected].
Medical Board Ordered to Void NPDB Entry
In a stunning 8-to-1 decision (tinyurl.com/5evhzna3), the Texas Supreme Court held that the Texas Medical Board must issue a Void Report to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), which it had refused to do although Robert Van Boven, M.D., D.D.S., had been exonerated on all accusations (AAPS News, September 2021). Dr. Van Boven has been fighting false accusations for nearly a decade.
“This decision by the Texas Supreme Court establishes a cause of action for physicians to obtain justice for outdated and inaccurate reports about accusations that were never proven,” stated AAPS general counsel Andrew Schlafly.
Doctors Sue over Ivermectin Prohibition
Dr. Robert L. Apter, Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, and Dr. Paul E. Marik, represented by Boyden Gray, have sued the Dept. of HHS and the Food and Drug Administration over the FDA’s unlawful attempts to prohibit the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Galveston Division (Case 3:22-cv-00184).
Dr. Bowden stated: “I provided treatment when other doctors told my patients to stay home. I have kept over 3,900 patients out of the hospital, but it hasn’t been easy. Sadly, fighting the system has been a much bigger challenge than fighting the disease.”
The FDA’s efforts to prevent use of ivermectin “ignore both statutory limits on the FDA’s authority and the significant body of scientific evidence from peer-reviewed research, over 80 medical trials, and results from ivermectin’s use in medical settings worldwide, showing the safe and effective use of the drug in fighting COVID-19,” said Dr. Marik (https://tinyurl.com/4kdxvkvz).
Attempts by the FDA to influence or intervene in the patient-physician relationship amount to interference with the practice of medicine, and breach the critical boundary between federal and state authority, the Complaint argues. As Dr. Apter notes, FDA statements, even if FDA cannot legally enforce them, affect the practice of medicine, which is now highly driven by standards and guidelines (https://tinyurl.com/yd8rp6wf).
Nurse Sentenced for Medical Error
Nurse RaDonda Vaught of Tennessee was sentenced to three years’ probation after being convicted of criminally negligent homicide and impaired adult abuse. The charges stemmed from the death of a 75-year-old patient when the nurse inadvertently administered vercuronium instead of Versed, having overridden several alerts. (Nurses typically have to override alerts in the electronic medical record to get anything done.) No mens rea needed to be demonstrated. Vaught could have been sentenced to years in prison. The prospect of error in a dangerous, high-pressure environment being criminalized is causing many nurses to consider a career change (https://tinyurl.com/538ssbdu).
While Nurse Vaught reported her error immediately, though too late for the patient, Vanderbilt University Medical Center failed to notify the medical examiner or CMS as required. Serious system problems were found only when an anonymous tip prompted an unannounced federal inspection a year later (https://tinyurl.com/rdfdepur).
Vaccine Injury Claims
More than 10,000 Australians were planning to file claims for COVID-10 vaccine injuries under the government’s no-fault indemnity scheme last November (tinyurl.com/c3ys6jej), but so far only 861 have done so, and only one has been paid. The scheme covers only clinical conditions that are diagnosed by a treating doctor and are included in the product information document. Patients reported that “there was often resistance from doctors to link their symptoms to the vaccine” (tinyurl.com/53vn3aey).
In the UK, a single tax-free payment of €120,000 is said to be available to persons suffering from a vaccine injury (https://tinyurl.com/6zpwwc8t). As of Feb 27, 920 compensation applications linked with COVID-19 vaccination injury had already been filed, compared with a usual 100 per year, but no payments have been made yet. (https://tinyurl.com/5n8axxnk).
Missouri Protects Right to Prescribe
Despite the fact that it is perfectly lawful to prescribe FDA-approved drugs off-label, many patients have been unable to obtain hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin for COVID-19 because physicians and pharmacists are intimidated by threats to their licensure. The Missouri legislature passed, nearly unanimously, a law protecting the right to prescribe and dispense these drugs (https://tinyurl.com/4wfvt64e).
Tip of the Month: Hospital mergers result in a loss in price transparency. Decreased competition makes it more difficult for patients to find out what services will cost. Despite hospitals’ complaints about reduced business due to COVID-19, in an increasing percentage (now 16%) of mergers the acquired hospital had billion-dollar revenues. Fortunately, some independent hospitals are refusing to be acquired by a big hospital chain, so the number of mergers decreased despite their increased size. Patients and physicians are better off with more independent hospitals.
Hospital Monopolies Sued
Three giant hospital systems are being challenged for anti-competitive behavior: HCA Healthcare, Hartford Healthcare Corp., and Advocate Aurora Health. Fairmark Partners LLP is bringing the lawsuits, supported by funding from Arnold Ventures, a philanthropic organization founded by the ex-energy trader John Arnold and his wife Laura.
“I don’t think there’s really any enforcement failure that’s had a larger negative economic impact for consumers than the failure to enforce antitrust laws against hospitals,” said Fairmark’s Brennan Bilberry. “Supporting employers and workers suing hospitals for price gouging and anticompetitive contracting is one way to overcome the imbalance of power in the market,” said Erica Socker, vice president of health care for Arnold Ventures.
Since 2010, there have been 979 deals among hospitals, and by 2016, 90% of the nation’s metropolitan hospital markets were highly concentrated. Formerly locally owned community institutions are now part of vast networks.
Arnold has also announced that his philanthropy “will break the insulin oligopoly by bringing $30 insulin to market” (Wall St J 6/11/22, https://tinyurl.com/3bjjrhxp).
Correspondence
FDA: Ministry of Bias and Illogic. Yet another generic drug to treat early COVID is rejected by the FDA—fluvoxamine. One large randomized controlled trial in Brazil found that those who stuck to the treatment regimen were 66% less likely to be hospitalized and 91% less likely to die. Other drugs the FDA has approved for emergency use authorization (EUA) haven’t done as well. The author of a WSJ editorial writes that there is no evidence that regulators are trying to protect drugmaker profits by limiting access to repurposed generics, but her own op-ed reviews the evidence for this (https://tinyurl.com/wzneaae3).
Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Lake View, NY
Pfizer Trials Stopped Early. When I was an employee in the Trump HHS in August 2020, I wrote a letter to the FDA regarding my concerns that Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins were saying they would stop the COVID-19 vaccine trials early and not collect the safety data. I stated the need for at least 500 events to occur if a vaccine trial was to be stopped for benefit. I said that stopping at an event number of 150 or so was devastating and bogus and will be an over-estimation of vaccine effect, and that safety surveillance long term was critical. I sent this paper to high-level people in government and was told that I had to find a way to withdraw it from circulation. I did not do so, and resigned under threat of being fired (tinyurl.com/ms2ypum8). [Pfizer based its analysis on 170 cases, 162 in the placebo group; there were only 10 severe cases, nine in the placebo group (https://tinyurl.com/2p8v7hw4).]
Paul Elias Alexander, Ph.D., brownstone.org
Public-Private Censorship Partners. Information released by Sen. Grassley’s office regarding a whistleblower document suggests that the Department of Homeland Security has been planning to “operationalize” its relationships with private social media companies to implement its public policy goals. These are not restricted to foreign disinformation but include “conspiracy theories about the validity and security of elections” and “disinformation related to the origins and effects of COVID-19 vaccines or the efficacy of masks.” The Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) was to be much more than a simple “working group” to develop guidelines and standards, but rather was designed to be the Department’s central hub, clearinghouse, and gatekeeper for Administration policy and response to whatever it happened to decide constituted “disinformation” (https://tinyurl.com/55rrzfa5).
Jeremy Snavely, Tucson, AZ
Loss of Trust. No one believes public health agencies any longer. That public health has acted for a century as if it were entitled by a “noble lie” to its methods for manipulating the public is now shown to be only a lie. There is nothing noble about pandering to special interests over population health.
Evidence for benefit of early treatment need not be strong. What matters is strong evidence for safety. There is no evidence of harm from hydroxychloroquine used in COVID outpatients, and 65 years of prior safe use. Yet there is a summary relative risk of a five-fold mortality reduction with HCQ in a dozen or more studies of 40,000 subjects. If that isn’t a “striking effect,” then nothing is. But no evidence will be good enough for the scoffers.
Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., New Haven, CT
A Tool for Intellectual Tyranny. In Plato’s Dialogues, Socrates explains how the “Noble Lie” is useful for achieving political harmony. It has been a constant feature of politics and is the foundation of the administrative state, a way to control the populace with the presumption that the elite knows what is best. The motive for the thought police and groupthink mendacity is the thirst for power and control (tinyurl.com/mu6u47b2).
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Brownwood, TX
No Thinking Allowed. When the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines engage in war planning, they have a blue team that presents a proposal, and then a red team that tries to tear that proposal apart and search for any weaknesses. The U.S. Public Health Service is officially part of the military, but eschews military best practices and instead requires groupthink and censors unfavorable data. So, we get all of the worst aspects of military hierarchy, but none of the responsibility and commitment to excellence. Event 201 and pandemic preparedness exercises conducted by Johns Hopkins University, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CIA, etc., did not include a red team to identify deficiencies in their carefully prepared scripts.
Toby Rogers, Ph.D., https://tinyurl.com/j6c8y7jf
Malfeasance in Blocking Early Treatment. Nebraska Attorney General Douglas Peterson’s Opinion (tinyurl.com/2yswskhp) on the use of ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 is a stunning exposé of official and medical misconduct. Political commentator Joe Herring called it “one of the most comprehensive summations of profit-driven malfeasance on the part of pharmaceutical companies, public medicine officials and their media allies that I have ever read coming from an official government source” (https://tinyurl.com/2ya54wcj).
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Brownwood, TX
