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Forbes on “Stars Vs. Science” once again the autism community looks bad

15 Jan

Forbes Magazine has an article, Stars Vs. Science, From Jenny McCarthy to Tom Cruise, some Hollywood hot shots are leading a war against modern science. The opening paragraph is pretty telling about the tone:

When the medical journal Pediatrics released a consensus report early this year concluding that autistic children do not benefit from special diets, ABC News’ Diane Sawyer knew just whom to call. Jenny McCarthy, former MTV game host, nude model and now mother of an autistic son Evan, enthusiastically denounced the study. “Until doctors start listening to our anecdotal evidence, which is it’s working, it’s going to take so many more years for these kids to get better,” she opined

Or, you can just take a look a the URL–science-jenny-mccarthy-business-healthcare-hollywood-autism.html

Once again, the Autism community takes it on the chin that our representative in the public eye is, well, in a league of her own when it comes to understanding science. Even though the story is about celebrities and science in general, autism plays a big part in the story as a whole. Take a look at the celebrities that were selected for the “slideshow”

Of course, there are Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey (click to enlarge and read the caption):

Ms. McCarthy and Mr. Carrey have been trying to shake loose the anti-vaccine image for a while. It doesn’t appear to be working. From the article:

But some of the best-known celebrities use their soap boxes to spread scientifically dubious–and potentially harmful–messages. Jenny McCarthy believes vaccines cause autism, despite numerous studies to the contrary. She campaigns against child vaccines that have been shown to save lives. In 2008, the Centers for Disease Control reported that measles outbreaks had spiked because more parents were deciding to leave their children unvaccinated, thanks to the burgeoning anti-vaccine movement.

Others who made the cut? Arriana Hufffington, of the Huffington Post, (again. click to enlarge):

It is worth reading the caption to that one. Dr. Rahul Parikh is quoted from his Salon.com piece, The Huffington Post is crazy about your health, Why bogus treatments and crackpot medical theories dominate “The Internet Newspaper”.

The quote:

But Huffington has distorted science and facts…fairness and accuracy in health and medicine take a back seat to sensationalism and self-promotion

In his piece, Dr. Parikh had noted the Huffington Post blogs by “David Kirby, Jenny McCarthy’s pediatrician Jay Gordon and detox advocate Dierdre Imus” and also spends a considerable amount of time discussing a piece by Jim Carrey.

The Forbes piece also discusses Oprah Winfrey (click to enlarge):

Once again, autism is prominent in the description given by Forbes.

I’m sure some readers will assume I’m putting this up to embarrass these celbrities. Yeah, like being in Forbes is so low profile that LBRB is going to be the embarrassment for Oprah and company. No, this is just another vent of anger. Anger that the autism community is once again seen by the public as the home to people who are “leading a war against modern science.” Tell me how that helps us advocate.

One notable entry outside of autism is Bill Maher. (click to enlarge)

I bring this up because Forbes notes that Bill Maher has been discussed by “quack busting doctor-blogger David Gorski”. That’s the same guy you can find on Science Based Medicine,

The article does seem to be following a recent trend: they aren’t looking for “balance” by quoting groups from the anti-science side. Instead, qutoes are had by:

William Schaffner, chair of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt School of Medicine:

“These are folks who really don’t have the best information, but because they are vocal and well organized their message has gotten out” [as a result] “around the country pediatricians and their staffs are having to spend more and more time persuading parents to have their kids vaccinated in a timely fashion. It is an enormous problem.”

Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch.org

“Talk shows don’ t pay any attention to whether the advice on their program will kill people. … Producers consider it entertainment,” he says, adding: “Never take health advice from a talk show.”

and

Dr. Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia:

Why do celebrities feel the need to spout off on medical or scientific matters? Because they’ve excelled in one field, stars “think they’re an expert in many things,” says the vaccine expert Offit. “That part doesn’t bother me. It’s the part that we listen that bothers me.”

I’m inclined to agree with Dr. Offit. It is the part that we listen to celebrities when they talk about things far outside their expertise that bothers me.

My “hostile” or “threatening” messages to the Age of Autism editors

23 Dec

I’m critical of the Age of Autism blog and their so called “editors”. That comes as no news to anyone who has read this blog, I’m sure. But I found an odd bit in David N. Brown’s recent piece, Paul Offit’s Mythical Millions (v. 2), when he noted that Mr. Mark Blaxill and Mr. Dan Olmsted wrote in a recent Age of Autism piece:

Most notably, we have received hostile (and in one case threatening) messages from readers who take issue with our estimates

I sent email messages to Mr. Blaxill and Mr. Olmsted, pointing out their mistakes. Hostile and threatening were not the way I would characterize the emails, so I emailed Mr. Blaxill and Mr. Olmsted with my request for clarification of their comments. They have not responded, which I am taking as confirmation that they considered my communications “hostile” and/or “threatening”. I thought I would let the readers decide whether based on the actual messages below.

As a bit of a backstory, Mr. Olmsted and Mr. Blaxill wrote a piece where they estimated the amount of money Dr. Paul Offit earned from his share of his vaccine patents. In this piece, they made a number of errors. I pointed out some of the errors, errors that were easily confirmed with publicly available information, via email.

I thought I had phrased this in a non “threatening” and non “hostile” manner. Again, I leave it to you, the reader, to decide.

Here is my initial letter to Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted, editors at the Age of Autism blog.

Mr. Olmsted, Mr. Blaxill,

I am sure you are interested in accuracy whenever possible in your blog posts. I assume you want to know and want to correct errors.

In a recent post of yours, you estimated the royalty payment for Dr. Paul Offit from CHOP’s sale of it’s rights to the rotavirus vaccine Dr. Offit, Dr. Plotkin and Dr. Clark invented.

Your post makes an estimate that is markedly higher than the real number. This is in large part to two errors you made.

First, the Patent and Intellectual Property Policy you used is incorrect. You rightly note that this is a new policy and that the rotavirus patent was likely covered by a previous policy.

The details of the previous policy are included in this document (http://stokes.chop.edu/forms/btob/Jan07BtoB.pdf) , which can be easily found with the following google search:

Patent and Intellectual Property Policy site:chop.edu

Using the older policy and the $182M reported as the payment CHOP received for their patent, you can calculate an inventors share of $18,550,000.

The second mistake in your estimation is in assuming that Dr. Plotkin and Dr. Clark. did not share in the CHOP inventor share. This is incorrect. Again, a quick google search will demonstrate that Dr. Plotkin and Dr. Clark were, indeed, CHOP faculty. Therefore, the $18,550,000 is divided by 3, resulting in an inventor share of $6,183,333.

The CHOP 2006 annual report (http://stokes.chop.edu/publications/annual_report/pdf/annual_report_2006.pdf page 42) clearly states that Dr. Plotkin and Dr. Plotkin were part of the CHOP team that invented the vaccine. Other pages on the CHOP site note that Doctors Plotkin and Clark were, indeed, faculty there.

I have already emailed Dr. Offit to check that this is an accurate representation of the facts, and he confirmed this.

I look forward to seeing how you make use of these corrections.

Mr. Blaxill reponds:

Dear Sullivan,

Please identify yourself. I do not respond to unsigned communications.

Sincerely,

Mark Blaxill

Sullivan:

Mr. Blaxill,

I realize that this is your policy and I respect that. I apologize for contacting you like this, but I felt it important that you have accurate information in this case. The links I supplied confirm this. That information is independent of whether I sign or do not sign my email.

I believe your mistake to be an honest one. At the same time I believe it was easily avoided as accurate information is readily and publicly available. Note that I made a conservative estimate, using the full $182M of the Royalty Pharma payment, not the $153M you report as net income from CHOP’s sale.

I respect your policy and I was not and am not looking for a response. I do hope that you will act on the information provided.

Mr. Blaxill:

Dear “Sullivan”,

Your information is interesting but equivocal. I have information that goes in the other direction. More to the point, we asked both Offit and CHOP to comment on the story before publication and they declined. The only definitive way to resolve the ambiguity is full disclosure of the amounts Offit received from all sources and he has declined to do so. So we have no plans at the moment to act on this or any other new information, which at the most amounts to a distinction without a difference. The conclusion stands: Rotateq made Offit a millionaire.

In the meantime, you continue to hide behind an anonymous email address. You must understand that discredits you as a source.

Sincerely,

Mark Blaxill

Sullivan

Dr. Offit has publicly stated how much he was paid by CHOP.

http://counteringageofautism.blogspot.com/2009/09/paul-offit-explains-money-side-of.html

A blogger contacted Dr. Offit and Dr. Offit responded. The blogger (David N. Brown) used his real name in reporting the information. No different than had he responded to you and you had included that information in your blog under your name.

Were you both unaware of that blog and that post?

Will you make the correction now?

Mr. Olmsted and Mr. Blaxill did not make the correction. The recently admitted their mistakes, but have yet to make the correction.

Upon reading the comment that they had received “hostile” and “threatening” responses, I decided to inquire as to whether they were referring to the exchange above. Below is my final email in this exchange.

Mr. Olmsted, Mr. Blaxill:

In reading David Brown’s discussion of your recent blog post on Dr Offit, I found this comment: ” Most notably, we have received hostile (and in one case threatening) messages from readers who take issue with our estimates. ”

I would like to know if you include this exchange as either hostile or threatening.

I thank you for your time.

This has remained unanswered. I take this as a strong indication that, yes, they considered my discussion “hostile” or “threatening”.

Frankly, I believe either clarification or an apology are in order from Mr. Blaxill and Mr. Olmsted as the above discussion was quite respectful. Do I expect that? No. I don’t expect such behavior from people who would write the passage below:

“The only definitive way to resolve the ambiguity is full disclosure of the amounts Offit received from all sources and he has declined to do so. So we have no plans at the moment to act on this or any other new information, which at the most amounts to a distinction without a difference. “

The message was clear to me: the blog post would remain uncorrected unless Dr. Offit met their demands. The fact that Mr. Olmsted and Mr. Blaxill were clearly mistaken had no bearing on whether the piece would remain. Note that even though they have admitted their mistake, no mention is made in their original post to this day.

I started the above communication with the assumption that Mr. Blaxill and Mr. Olmsted were honorable people who, while we disagree, would put accuracy above smear.

I am willing to admit my mistake.

Paul Offit’s Mythical Millions (v. 2)

22 Dec

This is a PUBLIC DOMAIN document (dated 12/11/09, revised 12/12). It may be copied, forwarded, cited, circulated or posted elsewhere. The author requests only that it not be altered from its current form.

Breaking news: Dan Olmsted and AoA have finally admitted that CHOP paid Paul Offit $6 million, not $29M, $45 or $55M, for the Rotateq patent.
So why isn’t the Evil Possum sneering and laughing a single “HAH!” of contempt as he surveys the smoking wreckage and broken bodies of his enemies?

Because, the “correction” was embedded in another hate piece against Paul Offit, “Counting Offit’s Millions.” Here are some of the things Olmsted has to say to rationalize his earlier incompetence and/or dishonesty, and justify further suspicions against Paul Offit, and what I have to say in reply:

“Our new estimate of Offit’s total profit of $13-35 million through 2019, overlaps the range of our original estimate of $29-55 million. Both those estimates exceed Offit’s recent — and apparently partial — disclosure that he made `about 6 million.'”

I object strongly to the reference to this statement as “recent”. I posted it on “Evil Possum” (See “Offit’s Mythical Millions (v. 2)” back on August 18. I would also remind everyone of Dr. Offit’s statement to me: “CHOP sold its patent for $182 million. This information was made publicly available and was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time. The inventors, Fred Clark, Stan Plotkin, and me split 10 percent of that three ways. This means that we each received about $6 million.” As we shall see, AoA is not trying to dispute this. They are arguing that he received more money from other sources. Fair enough, but that does not make his disclosure “partial”. It should be clear from context that Offit is disclosing the amount he was paid from the CHOP inventor’s share.

“Offit’s recent revelations do little to change our conclusion, that he was `voting himself rich’ while sitting on a government vaccine standards body.”

This “conclusion” would make no sense even if their original “estimate” were correct. From the standpoint of ca. 1999, even in the event of the recommendation of rotavirus vaccination the eventual development of Offit’s own patent into a commercial product was uncertain at best and improbable at worst. So, as long as the charge is intentionally using his position to pursue anticipated monetary gain, accusers don’t have a leg to stand on. It should also be noted that they have not offered any evidence that Offit made a single decisive vote on the issue.

“Based on two crucial new disclosures from Offit, we estimate in a revised and more detailed analysis that Offit has received and will continue to receive multiple payments based on Rotateq® licensing revenue, that he may already have earned $10 million from Rotateq® and that he stands to earn between $13-35 million over the lifetime of Rotateq’s key patents (based on different assumptions regarding the product’s future worldwide sales forecasts).”

At this point, any sensible person should be thinking, “Consider the source…” When Olmsted was working from figures and other facts that could easily be established from a few public records, he came up with a “minimum” of $30M for a payment whose actual amount was $6M. He also seems to have overlooked such basic things as the prominent listing of CHOP on Clark’s and Plotkin’s resumes and a clear statement in the CHOP document used as a “source” that a policy was not applicable to patents disclosed before July 1, 2005. So why should anyone put much trust in what he has to say on more complex issues, especially market projections?

“(Paul Offit) has thrust himself into the spotlight as both a vaccine safety authority and an autism expert, spokesman roles that have little to do with his work on Rotateq®. “

This is an entirely frivolous criticism. It cannot seriously be disputed that he is a “vaccine expert”. As for the label of “autism expert”, that is not a label Offit has applied to himself. The only place I personally have seen it applied it to him is in the sarcastic headline of an October 26 AOA post.

“Most notably, we have received hostile (and in one case threatening) messages from readers who take issue with our estimates. Although these threats have concerned us, they have also been a useful source of new information, the full implications of which our critics had clearly not grasped.”

I think it is not improbable that this is directed against me; in another instance, I have been referred to by name as “abusive”. In the interests of completeness, here is the text of a private email sent to Mark Blaxill: “I have attempted several times to post additional comments on article `Voting himself Rich’. I recognize that I have allowed the tone to get overly harsh, and I would rather discuss this in a private discussion, before posting my own work in progress… If you have any response or emendation to offer, I will duly note it in any public posting. But your previous report and response, as such, cannot stand.” So, what in this is “threatening”?

“(W)e have been unable to fully explain the $29 million difference between Royalty Pharma’s reported payment ($182 million) for CHOP’s royalty interest and CHOP’s reported proceeds ($153 million) from the monetization of its royalty rights.”

This is a decidedly frivolous aside, unless Olmsted wishes to imply that Offit’s disclosure regarding the CHOP sale is incomplete. By this point, any remaining “mystery” is on par with “What happened to Jimmy Hoffa?”: What we don’t know, can easily be guessed! It is reasonable to suppose about $18.5M was paid to the inventors. As for the other $10.5M, that could be accounted for by any number of things. Filing a patent costs money. Arranging the sale of a valuable intellectual property costs a lot of money. I attempted to explain the inevitable expenses in one of the few posts that were not censored by AoA: “I’m sure the 29M would include payments to others; for example, a 15% fee is typical from inventors’ royalties.” It should have been clear that I was no longer just discussing the inventor’s share, but also the presumable expenses related to the patent and sale. A reply by Mark Blaxill completely failed to acknowledge the issue: “David Brown, please read the article before making incorrect statements… Offit would have received the entirety of the CHOP inventor’s share.” Olmsted’s continued display of bafflement likewise shows a failure to apprehend (or openly acknowledge) just how far the claims of the original article were from what was known or even plausible.

“Based on the current CHOP policy, it is clear that such private arrangements between inventors are anticipated. `If there is only one such Inventor, Author, or other creator, the total Inventor Share is payable to that person’ reads the `Patent and Intellectual Property Policy” from CHOP’s Administrative Policy Manual. But `where there is more than one such Inventor, Author, or other creator, and all such persons unanimously agree in writing how the Net Income should be distributed among them … then the Net Income will distributed in accordance with such agreement.‘ According to Offit, he, Clark and Plotkin reached a private agreement to share the inventor proceeds, which resulted in a three way split of the inventor distribution.” (Underlining added)

This passage caught my attention because it seemed eerily familiar, and not just because I had read it in the CHOP patent policy manual. Just now, I was checking on my first draft (no longer online) of “Offit’s Mythical Millions”: “CHOP’s manual, cited by Blaxill and Olmstead, makes the following statements: `The Inventor Share… is the total amount payable to all Hospital Personnel who are Inventors, Authors, or other creators of the Intellectual Property… Where there is more than one such Inventor, Author, or other creator, and all such persons unanimously agree in writing how the Net Income should be distributed among them… then the Net Income will distributed in accordance with such agreement… (If) all such persons have not unanimously agreed on the distribution… then the IPA, or his/her designee, will determine an appropriate allocation of Net Income among the Inventors, Authors, or other creators… Each Inventor, Author, or other creator will be entitled to receive his/her Inventor Share of Net Income in accordance with this policy whether or not he/she remains Hospital Personnel. In the event of the death of an Inventor, Author, or other creator, such Net Income will be paid to his/her estate.’ (All italics added.)… It is also clearly the hospital’s intent that coworkers settle the issue among themselves. The implication is that the division of the share among a team would be negotiated among the team as a whole, with a reasonable balance of bargaining power even between a leader and his subordinates.” (Underlining new.)

Given the degree of similarity between their quotes and mine, I think it is very possible (I won’t go so far as to say probable) that their quote of the CHOP document is simply copied and pasted from mine. And that raises some question in my mind whether Olmsted (and Blaxill) have ever gone to the trouble of reading their “source” with any care. Then there is the remark that follows, which looks to me very much like what I suggested in the first draft of “Mythical Millions”. My correspondence with Offit on the matter convinced me otherwise, which was why I replaced that document.

“But if Offit shared the Royalty Pharma proceeds with Plotkin and Clark, then Offit would also stand to receive a share of any Rotateq® related payments made to Wistar, payments we did not attribute to him previously and that he has not disclosed.”

This is a reasonable conclusion, but an unacceptable argument. The reason Plotkin and Clark were eligible for payment from the CHOP share is that they both were present or former employees of the hospital. For the same argument to apply to Offit and the Wistar payment, it must be shown that he is or was a Wistar employee. As it happens, he is (a fact which I was aware of back in August). But, Olmsted has not gone to the minimal effort of establishing this fact, nor has he shown that he understands why he was in error in the first place.

“His claim of a 10% inventor distribution for Rotateq® is supported by a document we received from a critic of our analysis: a January 2007 newsletter from CHOP call `Bench to Bedside.’”

I will add a significant detail: I mentioned this document in the first draft of “Mythical Millions”, and gave Blaxill notice of what I intended to publish on August 10.

“Offit has now publicly disclosed both of these terms (a disclosure that Age of Autism Contributing Editor Jake Crosby confirmed in direct correspondence with Offit).”

This immediately reminded me of one of Crosby’s periodic visits to Left Brain/Right Brain. On September 14, he left this confrontational “comment”: “When did Paul Offit receive the royalty payments for the Rotavirus vaccine? It was added to the schedule in February 2006, but the new patent code went into regulation in November 2006. If Paul Offit’s vaccine was added to the schedule in early 2006, but received payment in late 2006 (either November or December), or beyond, then he would have received inventor’s share of the money according to the current patent policies of CHOP.

Also, how would Drs. Clark and Plotkin receive CHOP inventor’s share of the vaccine when they already received some through Wistar and no longer work at the hospital, and only Paul Offit does? That does not seem to make sense.” He did not offer any further comments or questions in response to detailed explanations. I mention this because it is indicative of how slow and recalcitrant AoA has been in retracting their original article: Nearly a month after I posted Offit’s statement, it appears that even a major member of the AoA staff was either wholly unaware of the correction or not yet fully informed of the extent to which the original story had been shown to be in error.

But even this revised lump sum estimate likely understates Offit’s total return from the CHOP royalty streams. According to the announced payment terms, Royalty Pharma only purchased the rights to CHOP’s royalty stream “from and after October 1, 2007.” Based on its quarterly financial statements, Merck reported Rotateq ® sales of $537 million before that date. If CHOP retained the royalty rights to Merck revenues before that date, then Offit could have received royalty payments directly from CHOP based on Merck’s early Rotateq® revenues in addition to the lump sum payment he received based on the Royalty Pharma transaction…

This is an odd tangent. If Olmsted thinks that Offit received a significant amount of money from this transaction, why doesn’t he give an amount? For that matter, why doesn’t he mention this after providing some suggestions as to calculate royalties? This immediately raised my suspicion that, as in the inclusion of $55M in the original piece (see “18/3=29”), Olmsted has put forward a claim he knows is improbable at best, to lead readers to draw erroneous conclusions.

As it happens, Olmsted suggests later (see below) that the royalties to the hospital(s) would have been 2.5%. If that is applied here, the hospital would have received $13.5M. Based on the complex policy in place in ca. 2000, the inventor’s share would be $200,000 for the first $500K, $675,000 up to $5M, and $850,000 for the rest, for a total of $1.725M, or $575K per inventor. Or, so it would seem. For 2006, matters seem straightforward. Olmsted reports that there were $163M in sales for Rotateq before the end of the year, which comes out as $4M for the hospital and $242K for each inventor. But what about 2007, which is when the greater part of the royalty would come into play? That would depend on the terms on which payments were made. If CHOP had received a royalty payment for each quarter, then the institution would have pocketed the royalties up to October. But if the royalty was an annual payment, it appears quite possible that, in making the sale, CHOP forfeited all royalties for 2007. Needless to say, I consider the second possibility more likely.

“Wistar’s immediate receipt of $45 million was subject to the same inventor distribution requirements as the CHOP transaction. So just as Offit received a share of the CHOP inventor distribution, the Wistar deal created an occasion for a second lump-sum payment. According to the “Guidelines for Wistar inventors”. Offit would have received 5% of the Paul Capital proceeds, or $2.25 million … In his recent disclosures regarding his CHOP payment of $6 million, Offit has consistently neglected to mention that he received another seven-figure payment from Wistar a few months before. Adding these payments together gives Offit a total of $8.4 million from lump sum payments alone.”

I mention this to point out that (contrary to what Olmsted seems to believe) none of this is news to me. As already mentioned, I was aware of Offit’s employment at Wistar around the time I contacted him for comment on his CHOP share. If he didn’t tell me his income from other sources, I will grant that, given the opportunity, I chose not to ask. Also, to the best of my recollection ,I had at that point taken a look at the Wistar policies, and come up with a figure in the neighborhood of of $7M for the inventor’s share. If I had chosen, I could have suggested the same figure Olmsted is presenting now. I had little reason to go to the trouble. For one thing, Olmsted had placed the focus on the CHOP share. For another, he had so preposterously inflated Offit’s income that two million or so either way would make no difference in judging the the credibility of his “reporting”. As far as I’m concerned, it still doesn’t.

“(I)n order for Paul Capital to be willing to pay $45 million for a 13 year royalty stream between 2006 and 2019, we calculate that Wistar’s royalties on the first $300 million in Rotateq® revenues would need to fall somewhere between $6-9 million per year, depending on the discount rate Paul Capital applied to the future royalties… This calculation would mean that Wistar has a royalty rate somewhere in the 2-3% range. For simplicity’s sake, we have assumed that Wistar’s actual royalty is 2.5%, which after adding an equal amount for the CHOP license brings Merck’s total royalty for its Rotateq® patent license to 5%.”

This whole passage is far from convincing. It is clear that what is “calculated” is based on a series of assumptions, of which the first- “for Paul Capital to be willing to pay $45 million for a 13 year royalty stream… Wistar’s royalties on the first $300 million in Rotateq® revenues would need to fall somewhere between $6-9 million per year”- is clearly the most questionable. How does one know what businessmen would be “willing to pay”, unless either a) one is telepathic or b) the businessman can see the future? It’s not at all clear to me how Olmsted came up with his figure.

Rather than try to sort out his calculations (in which he has given me no reason for confidence), I will do my own math. $45 million divided by 13 is $3.46M, or 1.15% of $300 million. It can be assumed on this basis that royalties were more than 1.15% , because Paul Capital would have had no chance of making a profit otherwise. But, if it were that much more, it is more likely Wistar would not have sold. So, I will settle for 2%, which would have given Paul Capital the chance of almost double return and allowed them to break even by the time sales hit the $150M mark. A 5% inventor’s share (1/3 of 15%) would come out at 0.1% of gross minus $300M.

In this scenario, in 2008, when gross Rotateq sales reached $665M, Offit and associates would have received $365,000. This doesn’t come close to justifying Olmsted’s figures. As noted, his claim at the start was that Offit has made $10M from Rotateq, which since he estimates lump sums to be $8.4M would mean $1.6 million, over 3 years, or on average $533,333 per year. My calculation for 2008 provides only 68%, and that is so far the peak for Rotateq sales. Moving up the percentage is little help: At 2.5%,, the royalties come out at $456,000 for 2008, which is 70K short. Even at 3%, I come up with $547,500 to Offit, which is only barely more than what Olmsted requires. So how is it that Olmsted has arrived at an “average” of $533K per year, when applying the royalties percentage he claims to have used to the highest sales on record falls short by about 14%?

That brings us to the final sentence of the passage, which I can only regard as an outright lie. Now, Olmstead previously suggests that Offit received royalties on Rotateq sales through ca. Q3 2007, on grounds which seem plausible. But that is not what Olmstead appears to be saying. Instead, he gives every indication of saying (briefly and offhandedly) that Offit is receiving ongoing income from both Wistar and CHOP. There is absolutely no chance that this is true, or even what Olmstead believes to be true. He repeatedly states, in this very article, that any current income to Offit can only come from Wistar. That he seems explicitly to say otherwise here cannot be excused as mere “error”. Witness the next item…

“(W)e estimate that Offit receives an eighth of a cent (or .125%) for every dollar of Merck’s Rotateq® revenue above $300 million If Rotateq® performs well, it can generate a large annual income for Offit: a relationship we have illustrated graphically in Figure 1.”

Year Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Total/300 Royalty
2007 85 119 171 149 224 $280,000
2008 190 178 134 162 364 $455,000
2009 134 126 127 120* 207 $258,750
Total $993,000

*Estimate by the author, minimum

It is clear from the chart that Olmsted’s “estimate” has no basis even in his own data. Even the 2008 “spike” falls $78K short of the $533K per year necessary to add up to the $1.6M that Olmsted implies. The sum of them all is only 62% of that figure. (Even granting his doubtful claim of CHOP royalty payments through Q3 2007 won’t quite get to $1.6M without rounding.) The only readily apparent means by which Olmsted could have come up with that, based on ongoing royalties alone, is by assuming two sources of such income, ie by adding CHOP payments which he has admitted do not exist. In summary, it is again proved absolutely impossible that Olmstead could have arrived at in the methods he describes. Furthermore, if he did not necessarily lie in producing the first story, it cannot be doubted that he is doing so in this one. I will grant him the benefit of one doubt: It is possible that the untenable figures precede the apparent “miscalculations”, and that the former were foisted onto him by another, possibly with initials of H, B and J, not necessarily in that order.

That brings us to the graph, which can be traced to what appears to be a protected site created by Generation Rescue, and kept disappearing or getting messed up when I tried to include it here. To the extent that I am able to analyze it (a task which required magnification, a printout and a ruler), I must admit its figures are less objectionable than Olmsted’s. At the least, it is clear enough (when the graph is examined closely enough!) that Offit’s annual royalty would not reach or exceed $500K until around $750M in gross sales. (By Olmsted’s math, the royalties on $750M would be $562,500.) But that is more than nullified by the extravagant scale assumed. Based on available fiscal data, it can be predicted reasonably that Rotateq sales will remain stable at around $500M per year. But the anonymous graph maker saw fit to illustrate Offit’s royalties on sales up to $3.5 billion.

After this, the only remaining question is why, after four months of denial, silence, censorship and the occasional insult, AoA is finally making a “correction” now. It certainly is not to convince me or those in the communities of which I am a part. If they cared about what we had to say, they would have issued corrections a long time ago. The only intelligible interpretation is that this is a “rear guard” action, and a sign that even loyal AoA members, perhaps even some of their leaders, are growing tired of this “story” and/or “anti-Offit” tactics in general. I suspect that the role of Olmsted in particular has been to stall, waiting either for criticism to die down or to perfect exactly what he has finally done: create a story which would admit his previous error(s) while allowing himself to “save face” before his loyal followers. In that event, I have only one thing left to say to Olmsted: This is the best you could do??!
And the Possum just says, “HAH!”

David N. Brown is a semipro author, diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome as an adult. Previous works include the novels The Worlds of Naughtenny Moore, Walking Dead and Aliens Vs Exotroopers, and the nonfiction ebook The Urban Legend of Vaccine-Caused Autism. This and other articles related to autism are available free of charge at evilpossum.weebly.com

Age of Autism Abandon Pretence

9 Dec

To many of us who have been following the online ‘careers’ of the various people and factions behind Age of ‘Autism’ for many years (at least 7 in my case) this will be no surprise but it still needs pointing out once more:

The Age of ‘Autism’ blog is a repository of and a flag waver for anti-vaccine quackery.

Easy to say and growing easier and easier to demonstrate every day. As of the time of publishing of this post, the latest *six* posts from Age of ‘Autism’ have absolutely nothing to do with autism. These posts are (in reverse order):

1) Counting Offit’s Millions: More on How Merck’s Rotateq Vaccine Made Paul Offit Wealthy
2) Is One Man to Blame for the WorldWide H1N1 Panic?
3) $300K to Banyan Communications from Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines?
4) Harvard and CNN Report on Lower than Expected H1N1 Vaccine Uptake
5) Oops. Flu Pandemic May Be The Mildest since Modern Medicine Began Tracking.
6) Kickin’ the Tires of the Green Vaccine Initiative

*All* the above have no relationship to autism. *All* the above have a direct relationship to anti-vaccine beliefs.

One or two stories every now and then that don’t touch on your blog’s core subject is routine and only to be expected – but six in a row? Thats only routine if your core subject is drifting. Or if your *real* core subject is slowly being revealed.

Age of Autism to Autism Families: Make your children suffer

24 Nov

Your pretty red house is engulfed in a roaring fire. You keep feeding the fire. Maybe petrol will help. Pour it on. Maybe some oil. Pour that on too. You don’t know. Nobody knows. Some guy you met on the internet tells you he’s a fireman and that the best way to stop a fire is to try and smother it with bone dry hay.

Your burns are bad. Your kids burns are worse. Do you throw them out of a window where a few other ‘firemen’ are holding on to a sheet made of melting plastic? Or do you push them down the stairs, where the rest of the injured and dead families are?

Thats my response to the utterly asinine response Kim Stagliano posted on the Age of Autism blog today to the Chicago Tribune’s series of articles on the quacks and hacks infesting the autism community. She wheels out the same old strawmen…

That’s my response to the Chicago Tribune accusing us of performing “uncontrolled studies” on our kids. (Our medical doctors are thorough and safe, by the way.)

I know of at least two doctors associated with the biomed movement who are on sex offenders registers. I know of one DAN! doc who is associated with the death of a child. I know of one other who hospitlaised a child. I know another who performed exorcism on autistic kids. I know another who is under investigation for more than one complaint.

And why does it bother journalists like Trine Tsouderos and Pat Callahan that some of us are improving our children’s lives?

I can’t speak for these journalists but I’ll speak as the parent (and step-parent) of two autistic kids. You’re not improving your childs autism. Thats the claim that these journalists are challenging. I challenge Kim Stagliano or Mark Blaxill to show the autism community where a biomed treatment discussed by the Tribune led to a measurable and scientifically documented improvement in their child’s autism. In fact, I can’t think of a child belonging to the founders of Autism FAIR Media, Generation Rescue, Age of Autism, SAFE MINDS or the NAA that has either been cured of their autism or made any sort of progress towards that end result as a sole consequence of biomed treatments. Why? Because in terms of curing/recovering/treating autism *they do nothing* . As a direct consequence of that obvious fact, parents continuing with detox, urine injections, exorcism et al are – as the Tribune indicate – experimenting on their children.

Boyd Haley brings the weirdness

19 Nov

On 12th Novemeber, Vueweekly featured the second part of an interview with Boyd Haley during which Professor Haley contradicted so many of the basic tenets of the autism/vaccine hypothesis – and also of good ol’ common sense (remember her?) that I was left wondering if he was in fact an Evil Neurodiversity spy sent to make himself look like an asshat.

“What about the argument that autism rates haven’t declined since thimersoal has been removed from vaccines?” I pose. “It’s a total deception,” he says. “We don’t actually know the autism rate for the last officially thimerosal-vaccinated cohort. And according to parents who asked to look at vaccine inserts, thimerosal was still present in childhood vaccines as late as 2004 in many places. Then in 2004, the flu vaccine, which contains thimerosal, was recommended for six-month-old infants. I don’t know if we even have a thimerosal-free time frame.”

Uh….what? Whilst Haley is literally right he kind of misses points so large they’d fit perfectly on the head of a stag. He claims we don’t know the autism rate for the last officially thimerosal-vaccinated cohort, whereas it might be more accurate to state we don’t really *know* the rate for any autism cohort, ever. No one’s looked. The latest estimates in both the UK and US come in at around 1 in 100. And really, he has the question bass-ackwards. What we need to know is how much thiomersoal was in official use during the last few years as the autism estimates have been rising. The answer to that is, aside from the voluntary flu vaccine and a trace amount used in the manufacture of one brand of vaccine, none. Doesn’t need a professor to work this out…lets go through it Boyd, no thiomersal, rising autism estimates…hmmmm….

We don’t _need_ a thiomersal free time frame. We simply need to compare the autism estimates for when there was a lot of thiomersal in use to now, when there’s pretty much none.

Cherry picking another bemusing quote, we get:

Autistic infants are totally incapable of excreting mercury. They’d be fine if they weren’t exposed to thimerosal.

Hmmm, a Professor of chemistry who’s not aware that even Jill James doesn;t claim that autistic infants are *totally incapable* of excreting mercury. And a professor of chemistry who’s not aware that mercury occurs naturally in humans in greater amounts than vaccines.

Haley then brings on a strawman:

Whatever is causing autism must affect boys more than girls, as autism rates are higher among boys than girls. It is well-known and documented that testosterone accentuates the effects of mercury…

Firstly, it is now suspected (I’ll try hunt down the link) that autism affects females in a much greater number than previously suspected. It should also be noted that whilst testosterone does accentuate the effects of mercury, no valid research has ever been done to show that testosterone is working with thiomersal to heighten the effect of the mercury. Haley is just making a specious correlation.

More weirdness:

“We know autism isn’t genetic,” he says. “You can have a genetic susceptibility, which together with an environmental toxin is what I believe is causing it, but autism went epidemic in all 50 states at one time. This isn’t the behaviour of a genetically caused disease.

Actually, a goodly proportion of autism *is* assocated with genetic abnormalities. Rett syndrome – a form of autism – is _entirely_ genetic.

Haley is also in error when claims autism ‘went epidemic’. Nobody knows wether the rates of autism have ‘gone epidemic’ because we have no base measurement. Nobody can say how many autistic people there were five years ago, let alone 20. And Boyd, really, doesn;t the fact that – as you state – something happened ‘at one time’ lead you to look for explanations closer to reality? Something like…oh, say, a change in the DSM criteria which massively expanded the definition of autism? Something that _did_ happen 20 yeas ago?

The rest of Haley’s piece is a pointed reference to himself as a hero whos truth is being hidden from us all by the nasty pharma companies.

Weird. Just weird. Haley needds to catch up with the rest of the anti-vax loons who have cottoned on to the truth that the thiomersal boat is full of massive holes and pretty much lies waterlogged somewhere off the coast of Stupidville.

Why don’t the so-called “vaccine safety” orgs talk about vaccine safety?

30 Oct

I really do plan to get back to real autism related subjects. I do. This subject just came up yesterday and it really bugs me so I decided to write something quick.

One of the most common statements from the groups (Generation Rescue, Think About Curing Autism (TACA), the National Autism Association, SafeMinds….) who promote the vaccines-caused-autism-epidemic idea is that they are “vaccine safety” groups, not “anti-vaccine”. The self-named “National Vaccine Information Center” is, I would think, supposed to have vaccine information.

One vaccine these groups love to hate is Rotateq, a vaccine against rotavirus infection. Why? Because it was invented by a team including Dr. Paul Offit, who just so happens to be one of the most vocal critics of the vaccine-caused-autism-epidemic.

Take, for example, this comment by SafeMinds member, and Age Of Autism blogger Mark Blaxill:

“Paul has saved hundreds of thousands of lives (granted mostly in underdeveloped countries, but rotovirus still kills a small few in the US).”

That’s quite an extravagant assertion, and almost certainly false. What evidence do you have that Rotateq (Offit’s invention) has been adminstered in sufficient quantities to prevent death in developing countries from complications of diarrhea? Rotateq is deployed in only one country besides the US. Here in the US we know Rotateq (and Rotashield before it) has CAUSED death and have little information that it has prevented any.

The consistent hyping of the benefits of marginally beneficial vaccines is one of the most disturbing features of a vaccine development industry run amok. Rotateq is perhaps the most egregious example of a vaccine product that provides next to zero benefit in the markets in which it has been deployed.

Let me be clear. In the markets in which it might have value, Rotateq is far too expensive to be widely deployed and is therefore rarely used. In the markets in which it is not needed, it is mandated at high prices and used widely with little benefit and documented (and almost certainly underestimated) serious risk. Those mandates and high prices are justified by a marketing non sequitor that Josh perpetuates here: pointing to deaths outside the geography in question as justification for a vaccine blockbuster that can have no impact whatever on those deaths.

Orwell never dreamed of doublespeak as bad as this.

What made this comment stick in my mind is the unsupported claim that Rotateq “CAUSED” death (nice use of all caps, there, by the way).

I am also drawn to the common belief (not directly expressed in the above quote) that there is no or only minimal safety research done.

This week, the CDC put out an MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) on the effects of Rotateq. The cliniical trial showed that Rotateq works. The surveillance shows Rotateq works–the number of submitted samples that tested postive went down after Rotateq was introduced.

The big point I’d like to bring to light was a recent talk given at the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meeting. They are monitoring intussusception in children given Rotateq. Intussusception is an intestinal problem, potentially fatal, that was linked to the previous rotavirus vaccine. It is why that vaccine, Rotashield, was pulled from the market. As such, it is good an proper that they monitor intussusception with Rotateq.

The results?

Results provide no evidence that RotaTeq®receipt is associated with an increased risk for IS [intussusception] 1-30 days or 1-7 days following vaccination.

Typically those trying to claim that Rotateq is dangerous use the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). Any event reported to VAERS is taken to be caused by the vaccine. VAERS is a “passive” system. People report into VAERS and no one checks that the diagnoses are accurate. Also, intussusception happens even without vaccines. So you really can’t take every VAERS report as a causal event–i.e. just because someone reports to VAERS that a child had intussusception sometime after Rotateq, that doesn’t mean Rotateq caused it.

Do I expect people like Mr. Blaxill to stop claiming that Rotateq is dangerous? No. But I put this out there to take away any last shred of “plausible deniability”. They, the self-styled “vaccine safety” groups, don’t report on actual vaccine safety studies. That doesn’t mean they don’t read them and know about them.

Amy Wallace discusses the responses she got to the WIRED article

28 Oct

A recent article in WIRED magazine took a close look at the vaccine/autism discussion. I discussed it briefly in a previous post. The article took a very science-oriented stance which, you can imagine, did not please the vaccines-cause-autism organizations.

For example, the “vaccines-cause-autism” organizations are listed by WIRED as “anti-vaccine” organizations.

The WIRED piece has caused a stir, even outside of the autism communities. Ms. Wallace’s piece has been noticed by Time Magazine, MinnPost.com, and The Atlantic. Oh, and some of the “anti-vaccine” orgs blogged about it too.

Not surprisingly the author of that piece, Ms. Amy Wallace, received a lot of responses to her article. In an interesting move, she has discussed many of the responses on Twitter. These have been compiled on the “bastard sheep” blog.

In addition to the WIRED article getting noticed, the responses are getting noticed. The Terra Sigillata blog has a piece up. The LA Times LA Observed has a piece on their blog.

Let’s take a closer look at the responses. She got about 250 so far, with about 3:1 in favor of the article. Some of the responses from her twitter feed: Some responses, like the one noted in Terra Sigillata, were quite harsh. Here are a couple:

I’ve been told I’ll think differently “if you live to grow up.” I’ve been warned that “this article will haunt you for a long time.”

“If she lives to grow up”? Pretty clear threat there.

She has every right to complain. Instead Ms. Wallace has reported on these comments, but for the most part she hasn’t added commentary. This hasn’t stopped her detractors from calling her a “cry baby”.

I’ve been called stupid, greedy, a whore, a prostitute, and a “fking lib.” I’ve been called the author of “heinous tripe.”

This is one view the outside world is getting of the autism communities. Does anyone think this is helping? OK, there are the small minority. So, to be more precise, does anyone reasonable disagree with the idea that this hurts the autism communities?

Here are some more comments she received that focus more on the autism communites:

In his book, Autism’s False Prophets, Dr. Offit writes about scientists who have been intimidated into staying silent about autism/vaccines. If scientists – who are armed with facts and trained to interpret them – are afraid, can it be any surprise that a lot of parents are, too?

No, it isn’t a surprise. Sad, yes. Surprise, no.

One persistent theme in their emails is the idea that vaccination policies abridge our civil rights. As one reader put it, “Me and mine are not a herd. Human beings are capable and entitled to decide for themselves what to put in our bodies.” Another mom wrote, “The PARENT knows their child more than anyone in the world. The PARENTS, Ms. Wallace, NOT Mr. Offit.” Another said, “I have a Son that needs Me – not another needle.”

To which Ms. Wallace responded rather well:

This idea – which we discuss in the Wired story – is powerful: that parents, not medical experts, should be the ultimate authority on their children’s health. To which I say, with all due respect, and as a parent myself: loving your child doesn’t make you an expert. It makes you a devoted parent.

Ms. Wallace goes on to state:

The dominant emotion in even the angriest emails to me is despair. Forget the vitriol, the slurs, the insults. The despair is what I find truly painful to read.

Which she follows with this comment from a parent:

“Those of us with autistic children are really sick of you know-it-alls,” one mom wrote me. Then she delivered the best description of what a loving parent wishes for their child that I have received so far. “I want my daughter to feel like a ‘typical’ child,” she wrote. “I want her to experience ONE day of no GI pain or headaches. I want my daughter to be able to gain weight and be able to have enough energy to play on the playground with her friends. So, in between therapies, doctors’ appointments, crying, diarrhea, no friends, trouble with school, countless vitamins to keep her tiny body going and being near bankrupt, you think I want to be in this fight?”

Ms. Wallace responds:

No, I don’t think she wants to be in that fight. Who would? Autism can be truly devastating to families. There is no debate about that. Which is why – as so many parents have said — every available research dollar should be aimed at finding the causes of the disorder

Leaving aside the discussion of whether autism is a medical condition for the moment (although I expect and welcome comments on this):

With all due respect, here Ms. Wallace made a common mistake in equating understanding causation with progress towards therapies. Ms. Wallace seems to have bought into the assumption that if we know the causes, we will automatically know treatments. Well, yes and no. Yes, understanding causation may help in many cases. At the same time, in many cases it likely will not.

Take, for example, the idea that autism is vaccine injury. The alternative medical community already assumes autism is a vaccine injury. They already claim to be treating autism as vaccine injury. Do they have a “cure”? No. Do they even have any proven therapies? No. For that matter, are any of their therapies really based on treating vaccine injury, as they claim? No. As a simple example: can anyone point to a truly innovative therapy that Andrew Wakefield (father of the MMR-causes-autism theory) has developed?

Consider HBOT (Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy). Can anyone give a clear explanation how that ties into vaccine injury? The closest “therapy” based on vaccine injury proposed so far is chelation. The removal of mercury from a body supposedly mercury poisoned from vaccines. The latest study, from their own researchers mind you, shows it is as effective as a placebo. Which is a nice way of saying: chelation doesn’t work.

I am not saying that causation research is useless. Far from it. However, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce the medical therapies many parents are searching for to treat their children.

I’ve gone off track from reporting the responses Ms. Wallace received to her piece. I’ve probably also sidetracked the discussion that will happen here.

Today Ms. Wallace added some comments she has received from autistics.

n the past week or so, I’ve heard from several people who said they were on the autism spectrum. They all said they enjoyed the article. What they don’t enjoy, however, is hearing themselves described as people that no one wants to be.

I’ll end with one comment out of those tweets:

“I have Autism. But: I am a person, not a problem. I am an asset, not a subject. I’m not a lab mouse, I am human.

Paul Offit honored by American Academy of Pediatrics

24 Oct

Paul Offit has been honored by the American Academy of Pediatrics for Outstanding Service.

Here is the press release:

WASHINGTON, DC – The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) will present Paul Offit, MD, FAAP, with the President’s Certificate for Outstanding Service at the National Conference and Exhibition of the AAP. The award recognizes an individual’s outstanding service and long-term, personal dedication to the mission of the AAP and to the health, safety and well-being of children. Dr. Offit is a pediatrician, chief of infectious diseases and the director of the vaccine education center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The AAP is honoring Dr. Offit in recognition of his ongoing commitment to promote immunization.

Dr. Offit is a co-inventor of a vaccine against rotavirus. He is also the author of the book, Autism’s False Prophets.

Hat tip to “I Speak of Dreams“

Wired Magazine: an epidemic of fear

20 Oct

Amy Wallace has written her first piece for Wired Magazine, and it is sure to draw a lot of attention. The article, An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All, covers a lot of ground. The main focus is basically an extended interview with Dr. Paul Offit.

Just in case there are any readers who haven’t heard of Dr. Offit, he is an infectious disease specialist, co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, and outspoken critic of the idea that vaccines caused an autism epidemic. Or, as Ms. Wallace writes in her introduction, “To hear his enemies talk, you might think Paul Offit is the most hated man in America.”

Orac, over at Respectful Insolence, has already blogged the article.

The piece points out the very real dangers of vaccine preventable diseases. It also discusses briefly some of the luminaries of the anti-vaccine movement: people like Jenny McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr and his deeply flawed article in Rolling Stone, Barbara Loe Fisher…unfortunately it is a long list.

Ms. Wallace also discusses autism’s thriving alternative medical community. Search for “Enter the snake oil salesmen” if you want to find that section quickly. Ms. Wallace attended an Autism One conference and reports on her findings.

In discussing how the membership in the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has changed from mostly medical and vaccine professionals to mostly epidemiologists and public health professionals, Ms. Wallace writes:

That’s not by accident. According to science journalist Michael Specter, author of the new book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, the controversy surrounding vaccine safety has made lack of expertise a requirement when choosing members of prominent advisory panels on the issue. “It’s shocking,” Specter says. “We live in a country where it’s actually a detriment to be an expert about something.” When expertise is diminished to such an extent, irrationality and fear can run amok.

Dr. Offit makes a very good point in the article about risk:

“The choice not to get a vaccine is not a choice to take no risk,” he says. “It’s just a choice to take a different risk, and we need to be better about saying, ‘Here’s what that different risk looks like.’ Dying of Hib meningitis is a horrible, ugly way to die.”

Unfortunately, we now have highly visible doctors like “Doctor Bob” Sears who recommend that people who don’t vaccinate “hide in the herd” so to speak. He tells people in his book that if they don’t vaccinate they should keep quiet about it so that vaccination rates stay high and their family remains protected by the rest of us who do vaccinate.

While morally reprehensible, Dr. Bob’s advice is accurate. From the Wired story:

The frightening implications of this kind of anecdote were illustrated by a 2002 study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.

Wired makes special note of the organizations which are particularly vocal in the “anti-vaccine” message:

Anti-Vaccine Websites

Though many of these organizations would not define themselves as such, these are the most active organizations and websites in the current battle against vaccines:

National Vaccine Information Center
Autism One
Generation Rescue
SafeMinds
Treating Autism
National Autism Association
Autism File

As Orac points out, the Age of Autism blog would fit in well with the above list.

I wish I could bet on the criticisms that are headed towards Dr. Offit after this article. I’m fairly confident I can pick out the paragraphs that will be focused upon.

If you read the article, you will understand this: Bonnie, thanks for loaning us your husband. He is a true friend to children.

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