Some people have forwarded to me online comments of people who are asking where the William Thompson documents are. I had included a link at the end of my recent article, but just to make it even more clear, here’s the dropbox link:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jxtr06s5ddc82s7/AADaZvp7yu_daBhbuZwMfQy4a?dl=0
—
By Matt Carey
[…] en längre förklaring på LeftBrain-RightBrain där även det finns en länk till det data som skulle ha […]
[…] For your edification, he even provided a link to download all the files yourself if you wish. It’s right here. I myself also reviewed the CDC whistleblower documents and agreed with Matt that there’s a […]
[…] see the actual documents we see a different story. When I put up my own analysis of the documents, I made the documents publicly available so people could form their own opinions. From what I can see Dr. Wakefield did not do […]
[…] see the actual documents we see a different story. When I put up my own analysis of the documents, I made the documents publicly available so people could form their own opinions. From what I can see Dr. Wakefield did not do […]
[…] de droit Dorit Reiss ont à leur tour demandé et reçu les documents. Carey a mis les documents à la disposition de quiconque voulait les voir. C’est quelque chose que personne n’avait encore fait du côté des anti-vaccins. Si […]
[…] If you want to read the William Thompson documents, here’s the link […]
Left Brain Right Brain 
Sigh. You linked to them; Orac linked to them. And still some people think they’re hidden.
File this under “comments that AoA belays posting” (assuming that it’s ever released from purgatory).
That is so benign, and informative, that there is no reason to hold it back.
But we are talking AoA
That is hilarious. But, again, we are talking the AoA.
Have the approved your comment? It looks like they are still complaining about the lack of the documents being made public.
Which, again, I’ll note the irony. Did Wakefield make them public? Hooker? Ben Swann? Any complaints about them holding back on the release? No.
But, complaints away for those of us controlled by “forces” who actually have released the documents.
Not mine. But a comment went up: http://www.ageofautism.com/2016/01/questions-about-autism-action-for-presidential-candidate-hillary-clinton.html?cid=6a00d8357f3f2969e201b8d18dbbe1970c#comment-6a00d8357f3f2969e201b8d18dbbe1970c
And still: “So now those documents have somehow, amazingly found their way into the very hands of those that are manipulated and controlled, by opposing forces. Forces of whom would desire this information NOT become released into the public realm.
Posey may have been well intentioned re his five minute speech, but ultimately, those documents are now yet in the hands of others who have not yet seen fit to releasing them.”
http://www.ageofautism.com/2016/01/questions-about-autism-action-for-presidential-candidate-hillary-clinton.html?cid=6a00d8357f3f2969e201b7c80425df970b#comment-6a00d8357f3f2969e201b7c80425df970b
Just saw that someone put up a link. And they are still going on about how the documents aren’t made public.
Had to take a screenshot of this exchange:
Yep, someone posts the link they’ve been asking for and gets called a shill. And the link ignored. I guess nothing has changed there.
Yah, “Bayareamom” is also their resident HIV/AIDS (and Ebola, back when it was fashionable) denialist. Among the other players are none-too-bright conspiracy paranoiac Linda1 (“LZ” on Disqustink) and Kostoff, who is apparently prized for his ability to generate normal English prose and wide-ranging fondness for toxic “EMF,” fluoride, etc.
It’s kind of like how many of them think that NVICP is a secret thing, being kept from parents, despite every single VIS mentioning it, the public web site for it, the mentions of it on other CDC web sites, etc.
Sigh. I don’t know how to make it any clearer.
Well, other than trying to leave a comment on AoA (which, as we’ve seen, doesn’t work).
Here’s a comment from AoA today
The force awakens…
You and Matt have made it perfectly clear and that’s why their heads are exploding. They need someone to tell them what this all means because they aren’t willing to look at and incapable of parsing the information. Whoever tells them what this means has to tell them what they want to hear.
The comment on AoA did go through.
Some of them still don’t realize the documents are up.
Sigh.
Hey Matt, those documents were all forged. 😉
I hoped you might show up given your previous arguments that these documents shouldn’t have been shredded.
So, do you still think they all should have been kept? Every meeting agenda?
I also find it amusing that a “giant” garbage can was needed for what amounted to a few reams of paper.
So, I’m assuming that Wakefield must have see than November 2014 statement by Thompson, yes?
Because I’m wondering how anyone could ethically make a film claiming that this is the biggest fraud in history and that thousands of black children have been injured, based on the say-so of a “whistleblower” who says that reasonable people can disagree about the data presentation, that the data doesn’t mean that the “race effect” is real, and that all the documents are on government servers.
I strongly suspect that Wakeield has seen that statement. So, in response I’ll just say–Asked and answered in my opinion. Key word “ethically”.
I wonder how many of the AoA commentariat will make that same claim [that the documents were forged] after they figure out the documents really are public and get over complaining that Posey released the documents to Matt and Dorit.
Jake, did you call Posey’s office and confirm that they gave the docs to Matt and Dorit? Why don’t you ask for a copy from Posey, compare it to what Matt and Dorit are making available?
Because that would take effort and kill the conspiracy. His mate Hooker has them, perhaps Jake could give him a call and then show us how they were forged.
So far AoA isn’t claiming the documents are forged. But, according to John Stone, the article was written by Dorit Reiss.
The AoA response has the potential to be worse than the “Bonnie Offit” or “Matt was hand picked by Alison Singer for the IACC” conspiracy theories.
I think maybe this is all going a little too far. Nobody thinks they were forged.
It’s hard to tell if Mr. Crosby is joking at this point.
The comments at Mothering are hilarious.
http://www.mothering.com/forum/47-vaccinations/1546753-whistleblower-documents-released.html#post19208817
If I am following the gist of those responses…
— These aren’t the *real* papers.
— Don’t try to confuse us with facts.
— There are a thousand pages there; the smoking gun must be in there somewhere, otherwise why would They try to conceal it within so much verbiage?
— There are a thousand pages there; any innocent-sounding explanations are just cherry-picked.
— There are a thousand pages there; you are trying to make us waste our time reading them, to deflect us from the real issues.
— If pro-vaxxers are so dismissive of Thompson’s claims then why are they going to so much trouble to rebut them?
— Dorit Reiss isn’t a real lawyer.
Did I miss anything?
“These are not the documents you are looking for…”
“Look at who is putting these up! They have an AGENDA! Believe only Wakefield and Hooker as they are agenda free!”
er…yeah…
After reading the first bunch I stopped. Did anyone ever actually look at the documents?
It just seems to be a lot of “PRO VAXXERS POSTED THIS!!! IT’S AGENDA DRIVEN”!!!!”
Go ahead. Analyze them yourselves.
My guess is that they sincerely hope these are not the real papers. Then they can claim some sort of deception on my part and keep the hope alive that the story is real.
I
For those wondering why no real comment yet from any of the “cdcwhistleblower” types, they don’t want to acknowledge that this is really all there is. They are likely now requesting the documents (assuming they were waiting for Ben Swann to make them public and didn’t request them already) and hoping that Ben Swann will put out the “real” story.
If one reads Brian Hooker’s statement, there is nothing more to the story than what he’s already (falsely) alleged.
A) the CDC changed the protocol in response to finding a race effect. Changed to include the birth certificate sub analysis to “dilute” the effect.
B) that the protocol calls for race to be studied as an exposure variable. He does this by misrepresenting (and in the case of his ORI complaint changing) the wording of the protocol. The fact that he changed the wording in the ORI complaint strongly suggests he knows the wording as written doesn’t support his claim
Matt: Can you explain the “exposure variable” bit?
Thanks–I should have made that more clear. Let me try to explain by example.
For an exposure variable, let’s consider one that Wakefield discusses in his talks about this study: age of MMR vaccination. The CDC team set out to explore whether the age that a child got the MMR would lead to a higher number of kids reported to be autistic.
For a confounding variable, consider maternal education (one that was used in the study). One can reasonably assume that families with higher education might access healthcare more (have insurance, be more informed about autism and seek out a professional, etc.). So, it is reasonable to adjust the calculations to account for that–give more weight to data from families with lower maternal education and less to higher maternal education–so that the contributions from each group are comparable.
Maternal education is a socio-economic factor and is known to affect healthcare seeking behavior.
Race could also be a proxy for socio-economic factors (healthcare seeking behavior due to income, culture, etc.). Consider that Thompson in his phone calls with Hooker stated that African Americans in this dataset were much less likely to have an autism diagnosis. Thompson’s memory was incorrect I believe given this study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12503976). But from that study we read
“Schools were the most important source for information on black children, children of younger mothers, and children of mothers with less than 12 years of education.”
and
“Black children, children of younger mothers (<30 years), and children of mothers with less education (< 12 years) were primarily identified at school sources. As maternal education and maternal age increased, there was a greater likelihood that children were identified only at non–school sources."
There are differences by race. And that's before we consider "other" (they only categorized by White, Black and Other). The prevalence in the "other" group was lower than for Blacks and Whites.
Another way to put this–there are biological and behavioral differences between some groups. If you want to answer biological questions (does MMR cause autism), you have to adjust for behavioral differences. If one doesn't–as Brian Hooker didn't–adjust for behavioral differences we know exist, one's results are suspect.
To me, this is where these kind of studies get a bit voodoo. At least with RCTs you don’t (in my experience) get hit with much of this kind of stuff. Coz how you do the weighting is bound to have an element of subjectivity.
Which raises my core anxiety about a lot of CDC stuff, which is that the researchers are quite often senior managers in a very institution-political environment.
Off topic, I know.
RCTs are a whole other animal with a considerable amount of control due to prospective vs. retrospective data collection. There is subjectivity if the study design is weak and data collection incomplete to answer the question. This is not the case here. When it comes down to it, Thompson’s claims that:
1.) There was deviation from the initial study protocol.
2.) Post-analysis data burying occurred.
3.) Relevant documents were destroyed.
Are completely refuted by Thompson’s own documents. The only contention here which isn’t even dubious, just a disagreement was the decision to omit the unadjusted (non-birth certificate) results for race. That’s it.
Yes, I can see that.
There’s an AoA entry from stalwart Linda1/LZ that gave me a bona fide chuckle: