Archive | Legal RSS feed for this section

Dear Mercury and MMR Militia

21 Jun

I want to write you all an open letter to offer you my opinion as to where you are going wrong. Before I do, I fully realise that this is a massive generalisation and that some of you won’t hold all the opinions I’m about to go through. I think though, that many of you do.

Three things prompted this open letter. First of all was David Kirby’s trip to the UK. Second was a comment from Kelli Ann Davies where she expressed surprise that some of us might know/guess/whatever the intentions of the science and medical community. Third was Ginger Taylor’s recent sulk about the AAP. I’ll touch on these things as I go through this.

You have a truly massive credibility issue which grows with every passing year. Once upon a time it was an issue with the science/medical community but now it is an issue with the general public. There are a number of reasons why this is so.

1) You cannot keep your story straight. You have (as I said to Kelli Anne) some first class marketing and PR people. As I recall, Lynn Redwood, Mark Blaxill and Sallie Bernard all have marketing qualifications. You also have numerous leading lights who are very, very rich. This means you have ample opportunity to lever your message into the heart of the US media system.

But that means nothing without a coherent story to sell. You don’t have one. I understand that you have recently talked about how the ‘story of vaccines’ has _evolved_ . That is stretching things more than a little. Its mercury, no its MMR, no its both, no its Aluminium, no its all three, no its all ingredients, no its the very vaccines themselves, no its the schedule they’re given. No – its ALL the above. And don’t forget the mitochondria!

The more ingredients you add to the pot, the more you have to explain why they are causative of autism. You didn’t even manage to do this when you were concentrating on just _one_ thing (thiomersal). The above is not an example of an evolving hypothesis. Its an example of an ever widening hypothesis as one after another, your original ideas have been taken down.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than David Kirby’s stumbling backwards and backwards:

In 2005, David said in a FAIR Autism Media interview:

It’s now 2005…..[W]e should see fewer cases entering the system [cdds] this year than we did last year.

When that didn’t happen he then said:

if the total number of 3-5 year olds in the California DDS system has not declined by 2007, that would deal a severe blow to the autism-thimerosal hypothesis…..total cases among 3-5 year olds, not changes in the rate of increase is the right measure.

That didn’t happen either.

You started off by pointing an air pistol at a target 20 feet away and missing. You worked your way through Magnums, Shotguns and Miniguns and kept missing. You currently have a canon wheeled right up to within a foot of the target and you’re _still_ missing.

2) Your science is weak and getting weaker. Sadly for you, the onus was (and still is) on you to provide evidence that vaccines in any of the myriad of hypotheses cause autism. Lets hypothetically agree with you that vaccines are in fact, fashioned by Satan and are in fact, tools of population control. That is not the point. The point is: _do they cause autism?_

There is not one paper that passes muster as valid science that offers corroborating evidence that any vaccine, any ingredient of vaccines or any schedule they are administered in causes autism. This is after over 10 years of trying to find one. What you are increasingly left with is a double conspiracy theory. In one barrel of the conspiracy theory, brave maverick doctors are having their research suppressed. In the other barrel of the conspiracy theory, Big Pharma shills are publishing science to refute the various vaccine hypotheses.

Of course, neither barrel is true. The brave maverick docs are not having their science suppressed. It is simply not good enough to pass peer review.

A good example of this is the science experts being presented at the Omnibus Autism proceedings. No Geier’s. No Jim Adams. No Boyd Haley. No Andrew Wakefield. At least, not so far anyway. And this is in the Vaccine Court, where standards of evidence are way lower than in a civil court, where – by the way – not a few of these same researchers science was not good enough to even be entered as evidence.

And you have this nasty habit of shooting yourselves in the foot. Only today David Kirby posted on the Huffington Post about how rubbish the VSD database was. The very same database the Geier’s recently used to allege a link between vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders.

And the list goes on. The Hornig study? Refuted by Rick Rollens MIND Institute. The Nataf paper on Porphyrins? Liz Mumper, head of DAN! medical admits that even ‘normal’ children have raised Porphyrin levels. The Bernard et al paper? Refuted. Richard Deth’s work? Exposed and questioned.

3) Your choice of media people to represent you is doing you harm. I am not sure how the idea of latching onto Jenny McCarthy as a spokesperson for the anti-vaccine/autism connection came up. There are a few other celebs I can think of with more gravitas than McCarthy. In truth, you couldn’t have chosen worse. Already, she has made a public fool of herself (and you). As has her partner, Jim Carrey, with his ‘lazy ass’ FUBAR and calls to notice ‘warnings from the universe‘.

I understand that these events feel terribly cathartic to you but I would urge you to take off your rose tinted glasses and see how the real world perceives these kind of things. Its not good. Don’t take my word for it, go to a _mainstream_ news source, discount the people you know as friends/associates who are leaving comments and then see what people think.

You have also latched onto the words of Bernadine Healy. I can see why but she (is/was) a member of a paid lobby group that advances the ‘science’ of Philip Morris to put forward the idea passive smoking isn’t dangerous. How desperate do you have to be to turn to _this_ ‘authority’ for backup?

4) You cannot see that you are being humoured. I know that some of you have been very proud of your success in getting involved with things like the IACC and y’know, thats great – well done to you. And then there’s the ‘coup’ of getting the AAP to attend a DAN! conference and ‘work with’ them. But there’s one thing you seem to have forgotten. AAP members are medical scientists. They will go with the decent science.

I read a blog post from Ginger Taylor today which seemed to be telling the AAP their ‘window of opportunity’ to work with DAN! et al had closed due to the fact they endorsed a letter that a paediatrician had written on how to tackle parents who were nervous about vaccination.

Amusingly, Taylor also chided the AAP for not turning up to the ‘green our vaccines’ rally:

I warned that the window would only be open for a short time unless we saw real action, and would probably close around the time of the Green our Vaccines Rally if they didn’t show up for us in some respect.

Well the AAP didn’t show up for the rally and well… this certainly signals that the window is closed. They want it closed. And it looks like they may be locking it.

Can you not understand that to expect the AAP will turn up for a rally which touts such anti-science as Aluminium and Formaldehyde being at singularly dangerous levels in vaccines and Anti-Freeze being in them at all is the height of arrogant stupidity? Surely you cannot be that naive?

The truth is – and I get this from speaking to AAP, NIH, FDA and NHS members – that you had, and always will have, an opportunity to impress them with decent, peer reviewed science. That’s all you’ve ever needed. And that’s what you’ve never had.

5) The future. The person you’ve decided will be your public face is writing another book. <a href="http://stopthinkautism.blogspot.com/2008/06/today-autism-recovery-tomorrow-crystals.html"She says that:

It’s really an Indigo book…….We’re definitely the Indigos, you know, breaking down these walls so this, you know, New Earth behind us can happen.

And what’s your role in this?

…But people aren’t quite there yet and I kinda had to, not lower my vibration, change my vibration to focusing on the world hearing that message. Hearing that biomedical treatment does help these kids.

And then, slowly, you know I can put it in my speeches. and then in my last book I talked about the indigos and crystals. And I’m just like, I’m really following source, kind of I felt the need to do that, I’m just kind of dribbling it here and there until people, you know, have that spiritual awakening of spirituality.”

That’s where you’re going. You’re close to abandoning any kind of rational basis for your beliefs and just becoming Jenny’s followers in an Indigo Spiritual Awakening to herald in the New Earth..

Omnibus Autism testimony: Dr. Lord on what makes autistic kids improve

18 Jun

The following is transcribed by me from the first mp3 file for May 28th. This part starts around 41 minutes 24 seconds.

Ms. Ricciardella: Do children with autism, in general, improve?

Dr. Catherine Lord: Absolutely.

Ricciardella: What percentage? Do you know?

Lord: I mean I think that all children with autism improve in some ways, and how much is highly variable.

Ricciardella: Would that include children who have a regression in autism? Do they improve as well?

Lord: Yes.

Ricciardella: Do we know why?

Lord: No. I mean, some of the improvement seems to be getting back on developmental course. It’s like asking why do normal kids learn to do the things that they do. We can describe how they learn things but that process of how do kids learn to walk or talk when no one is really teaching them, we don’t know. And that’s the same for autism. We know that behavioral treatments make some difference but it’s a relatively small amount of difference compared to that force of development.

I’m not so sure that it’s only behavioral treatments that make “some” difference, but I agree that whatever therapy or teaching is provided, professional or parental, it’s the “force of development” that is the main thing that causes children to…. develop, which I believe is another way of saying, “improve.” I don’t believe there’s anything that one can do to speed up that force of development. Though I think it’s obvious that judicious use of reasonable kinds of therapies would probably help any autistic child make full use of what abilities he or she has to work with at any given point in time.

Tags: , , , ,

More Talks for David Kirby

16 Jun

According to his HuffPo blog David is giving some more talks. This time not in the uninterested UK but in the NE US.

David says:

I sincerely encourage any and all vaccine-autism skeptics, critics, agnostics and cynics living in the northeastern US to please consider attending one of these talks, armed with all of your most pointed, difficult and critical questions.

I have some questions which, had family circumstances allowed, I would’ve liked to have asked David when he was over here. What I hope is that NE US skeptics who might be attending, will ask some of the following questions.

1) Given your book is subtitled ‘mercury in vaccines and the autism epidemic’, do you feel it has now been scientifically established that mercury in vaccines does not cause autism? If not, what peer reviewed journal published science touching on mercury in vaccines do you believe supports your books subtitle?

2) You say that during the talk(s) you will discuss ‘The Poling Case – in which the government conceded that vaccines induced autism in one little girl…’. Could you read out the statement from the government where they provide this concession – that vaccines induced autism – and also tell us where we can read it for ourselves, including the location of the source document.

3) Do you agree with Professor Sander Greeland (PSC witness for the families in the continuing Omnibus Autism Procedings) that if vaccines did cause autism and were responsible for ‘an autism epidemic’ that would be detectable in the epidemiological literature? If so, how do you account for all peer reviewed journal published science not establishing an autism epidemic?

4) IN 2005, you said in a FAIR Autism Media interview: ‘It’s now 2005…..[W]e should see fewer cases entering the system [cdds] this year than we did last year.’ – was that the case? If not, does this explain why you then said in a reply to blogger Citizen Cain: ‘if the total number of 3-5 year olds in the California DDS system has not declined by 2007, that would deal a severe blow to the autism-thimerosal hypothesis…..total cases among 3-5 year olds, not changes in the rate of increase is the right measure.’. Do you consider a severe blow has been dealt to the autism-thiomersal hypothesis?

5) Do you consider yourself a fair and impartial journalist on this issue? If so, could you explain how Wendy Fournier of the National Autism Association built your website? Could you further explain to us where you feel the vaccines-autism hypothesis falls down?

6) You state in your literature that a ‘former NIH director’ has stated autism is an epidemic. Is this Bernadine Healy, former member of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition who are lobbyists for Phillip Morris and Lorillard Tobacco (amongst others) and claim that second hand smoking is not dangerous? Do you feel comfortable with her stance on medical science issues?

What about you Dear Reader? What skeptical questions would you like to ask – or have someone ask – David?

Omnibus Autism hearing: Dr. Lord on autism and regression

16 Jun

Dr. Catherine Lord is widely viewed as the world’s foremost expert on autism diagnosis. The Department of Justice lawyer who examined Dr. Lord in the thimerosal portion of the Omnibus hearing spent what seemed to me to be a very long time just going over Dr. Lord’s credentials and accomplishments as they are considerable.

I was listening to the recording of her testimony yesterday, again, and was reminded of how much I had learned from listening to Dr. Lord’s testimony about what is now known about the early months and years of autistic children. I already knew the basics of what she was explaining but there were some fascinating details that I didn’t know. Links to two audio clips that contain the following testimony are found at the end of this blog entry. Once again, I did the transcribing of the audio, and once again I’m guessing the Dept. of Justice lawyer is Ms. Ricciardella:

Ms. Ricciardella: Does any of your research or research of others support a distinct subtype of regressive autism?

Catherine Lord: No. I mean as especially as we have looked at the toddlers… it’s clear that even, even these very large studies where we felt like we were asking parents many, many questions in great detail probably do not get at what the essence of what happens in those early months because the changes are more subtle and our ability to observe them is so much dependent on the context. It dependent on when do you see a child and what are you looking for. So I think that that has that has moved us, and I think much of the field, toward a sense that there isn’t a regression or not a regression the question is the degree and type of worsening that occurs, how long it lasts and how many skills a child has before that occurs.

Ricciardella: Now in terms of the clinical outcome of a 5 or 6 year old with autism. Is there any marked difference in the clinical outcome of a child who had what I’ll term “early onset autism” versus a child who did indeed have regression.

Lord: Most studies have found no difference at all. The studies that have found differences have found these relatively small differences in verbal skills.

Ricciardella: Now you touched on earlier doctor that you are continuing to research the phenomenon of regression is that correct?

Lord: That’s right

Ricciardella: And you are conducting a longitudinal study. Is that correct?

Lord: That’s right.

Ricciardella: And what information is emerging from that study with regard to regression?

Lord: With that study we have been doing is seeing children who are at risk for having autism, either because they have a sibling with autism, so they may not have any behaviors associated with autism but they have a sibling and their parents are eager to have somebody follow them, or something has occurred, or something has has been seen, often identified by parents, but sometimes by a pediatrician, for example the child has had seizures in the first year of life and so someone is concerned that this child might develop autism.
And we see the children once a month, have parents fill out the same forms each month and then we do standardized assessment, a toddler version of the ADOS. So we do a standardized observation of the child’s social behavior with us and with the parents every month.

What has come out of this is that the trajectories are much less clear than we would have thought from retrospective descriptions years later of what the children are like, and when we have tried to sort that out, I think that there a number of implications. One is that different skills are changing at different rates and at different times. So that you have, for example, eye contact is typically getting worse for almost all of the children for from 12 month to 24 months. And social engagement responsiveness to someone trying to get the child to interact with them typically is getting worse in children who have autism diagnoses say by the time they are 2 1/2.

So those things are changing but they actually cycle back around, so they get worse for a while and then for some children they start getting better again.

We also have other skills, for example response to joint attention, or response to somebody pointing, or trying to get the child to look at something, and that for a number of kids gradually gets better even at the same time that some of these social skills are getting worse.

So I think what we’ve realized is it’s just much more complicated changes in development than we thought.

And that these things we used to think only happened in kids who had regressions are actually happening in almost everybody who has autism, because there are some children who look very different from typical children at 12 months, but those are few and far between, and in fact in our follow up study that is not necessarily predictive.

The kids who are not making eye contact at 12 months are not the most autistic kids at age 3. So many things change during that toddler period and I think our conceptualizations of what regression is are partly based retroactive trying to figure out what happened and didn’t happen, which is quite different than when we can see it happening right before our very eyes.

…
(the second audio clip)
Ricciardella: Doctor are you are aware of any evidence showing that the etiology of regression in autism is different from that in “non-regression” for lack of a better word.

Lord: No. And I think again that the idea that there aren’t these clear patterns makes it much harder to draw conclusions about etiology. Because basically could arbitrarily divide these kids up in millions of different ways. So far, … people have tried to divide them up and haven’t found differences in etiology. But it’s not even clear that we know how to divide them up, or that they can be divided up.

Ms. Ricciardella: Doctor before this litigation had you ever read in any published literature that thimerosal containing vaccines cause regressive autism only.

Dr. Lord: I had not.

Ricciardella: Are you aware of any study that has ever suggested that hypothesis?

Dr. Lord: No.

Ricciardella: Doctor did you review the report submitted by Dr. Marcel Kinsbourne in this litigation?

Lord: Yes.

Ricciardella: On page 14 of his report, he states that the, “late onset of the regressive subtype and the subsequent remission or relapses become more understandable if autism is due to disease than if it is the aftermath of congenital maldevelopment.” Do you agree with this statement?

Lord: No

Ricciardella: Why not?

Lord: There are many different disorders where the onset occurs later on. We have Huntington’s disease and schizophrenia and sickle cell anemia and all kinds of disorders… where in some cases we know are genetic, but which occur later on. So I think we can’t make a simple inference that because something emerges later that means that somehow someone has caught a disease or had some kind of particular environmental event that caused it.

Ricciardella: Dr. Kinsbourne also draws a distinction between what he terms as classical or congenital autism and regressive autism. Is this a proper distinction?

Lord: I think the term congenital autism means nothing. Because, I mean, as I said it’s a developmental process. We can’t diagnose autism in a brand new baby. And so in all cases something is developing that would lead us into autism. So to make this distinction between congenital and regressive is a false dichotomy.

Ricciardella: … Dr. Kinsbourne has also describe what he terms his “over-arousal model” as an explanation for autistic behavior. Does his over-arousal model accurately describe what is known about autistic behavior?

Lord: I don’t believe so, I mean the over-arousal model has been around for 40 or 50 years and used to describe many different disorders. I think one of the hard things is that it’s becomes very circular. And children with autism do respond to being over-stimulated as do many other kids, and children with autism may respond in more conspicuous ways, and may have a lower threshold. But the problem is that often the behaviors are used to say that a child is responding by over-arousal, for example by flapping or getting very physically excited, or distracted, are the same behaviors that occur when the child is under-aroused. You know, we can get children who have a lot of self-stimulatory behaviors to do these behaviors by putting them in a situation where there’s nothing to do. We also see children do these behaviors when they are very happy or when they are not so happy. So that the behaviors that used to define over-arousal are behaviors that occur in many different contexts.

Ricciardella: Thank you. That’s all I have.

…

PSC Lawyer, Tom Powers: … I do have some questions to ask you as you might imagine based on the report you filed and the testimony you gave today. …Your testimony … is that there’s no phenotype for regressive autism. … Regression within autism is not a distinct phenotype with in autism spectrum disorder, is that correct?

Lord: Yes.

Powers: You’ve also describe regression in autistic children as a striking phenomenon. … How would you describe the difference between a phenotype and striking phenomenon?

Lord: My point about the striking phenomenon is that it is a remarkable experience to watch a child who has been able to do things not be able to do those things. Or to watch a child who has been relatively socially engaged become less engaged and be more and more difficult to engage or attract. But I think that is different from a phenotype because a phenotype implies that there are a cluster of behaviors that are associated with each other, and that there’s something unique about that cluster of behaviors. I think regression is a real phenomenon in autism, but there’s a continuum of regression. … And we can create a phenotype, I can say, well I’m only putting kids who lost words into this group and I’m going to call it the Lord phenotype. But there has been no, nobody has been able to show that that phenotype is associated with anything other than the characteristics which I used to define the phenotype.

Powers: And that would be because, as I understand it, is because autism diagnostically is entirely a symptomatic diagnosis that is there’s not a biomarker … is that correct?

Lord: It’s not, the problems with defining the phenotype aren’t because autism is defined by purely by behavior, it’s because we haven’t been able to find an association between any of these particular phenotypes that people have pulled out, and the ways in which people have pulled out the phenotype.

I realize now that if my own (now adult) ASD child been a part of Dr. Lord’s baby siblings study that they would have been able to document a “regression” because, basically all autistic children regress, depending on how strictly you define “regression”. I remember my ASD child as an infant apparently losing the ability to respond to the sound of his/her name, and then regaining that ability. Looking back, I doubt that I could isolate the dates when this “regression” started and when it ended, since is was just aggravating to me at the time and not something I brought to the attention of our family doctor.

(Edited to fix some errors my transcribing. Also, I just listened to the second clip I uploaded to boomp3.com and realized that it is a little shorter than I thought.)

Click here for the first clip.

Click here for the second clip.
For some reason I can only embed one “player” and it must be at the very end of the post. This plays the second clip:
http://static.boomp3.com/player.swf?song=by6i9hwl7_0<a style=”font-size: 9px; color: #ccc; letter-spacing: -1px; text-decoration: none” target=”_blank” href=”http://boomp3.com/listen/by6i9hwl7_0/lord-2″>boomp3.com</a&gt;

Tags: ,

Mitochondria and autism:time to recalibrate

6 Jun

We all have heard a lot about mitochondria and autism in the past few months.    This message has been dominated for the most part by David Kirby.  Someone got some of the confidential court documents to him, and he leaked one to the public, and discussed another in a news story. 

So, it seems like we are stuck with the idea that “there are a lot more Hannah Polings out there” and “20% of autistics might have mitochondrial disorders” and “1 in 50” (or some such number) “are at risk.” Since the Polings aren’t releasing their information, the government isn’t releasing it’s information, the reasearchers can’t talk and haven’t submitted their paper yet,  we are sort of stuck.  There just isn’t any other specific information out there on people with mitochondria issues and autism.

Is this really the case?

As it turns out, no, this is not the case.  There are a number of descriptions of people with mitochondrial disorders and autism.   And, guess what, they present a different story than we have been fed so far.

We all know about the case study on Hannah Poling.    But, in terms of how many kids (and, presumably, adults) have mitochondrial disorders come from Dr. Oliveira’s group in Portugal.  People tend to use the estimate for autism+mitochondrial disorders from his work (about 4%), but they don’t look closely enough to see that he actually describes a few details on 11 individuals.  In addition,  Dr. DiMauro’s group discussed five individuals in their paper. Gargus of UCI discussed three brothers as well.  Most recently,  Tsao and Mendell discussed two individuals in this paper.

Total it up, and we have information on 22 individuals to consider when we ask the question, “what does autism look like in mitochondrial energy challenged individuals”?

Another way to put it, does mitochondria+autism=Hannah Poling?  Did they all undergo regression ?  Of those that regress, did they all appear normal before regression?   I want to know, because this is what we are being told: autism with mitochondrial disorders/dysfunction result in kids who look normal and then regress.

We get this from David Kirby, who makes statements like:

“That would mean some 190,000 Americans with mito issues who, after normal births and development, suddenly stopped talking and regressed into autism following some kind of childhood fever.”

He seems to be getting this from statements in Hannah Poling’s Rule 4c reports and discussions with the researcher who made them.  Statements (from the Rule 4c report) that describe Hannah Poling as having:

“an etiologically unexplained metabolic disorder that appear[ed] to be a common cause of developmental regression.” He continued to note that children with biochemical profiles similar to [Hannah Poling] develop normally until sometime between the first and second year of life when their metabolic pattern becomes apparent, at which time they developmentally regress.”

David Kirby also uses comments from the researcher stating that he is working on a study of 30 kids similar to Hannah Poling who all underwent regression.  In that as yet submitted study, only Hannah Poling is considered a definite case of vaccine injury.  There is another child whose regression did occur within 7 days of a vaccination.  Somehow, this “possible” case of vaccine injury morphs into a “definite” in the later sections of David Kirby’s blog piece.   I also find it odd that David Kirby claims that people are already preparing to challenge the idea that only 2 of the 30 are possibles.  This, even before the paper is submitted!

Given all the qeustions that are raised, I’d like to know more about what kids with mitochondrial disorders and autism look like.  Don’t you?

The Kids

Let’s first take a look at the DiMauro group paper.  DiMauro’s group discusses 5 kids.  Of those patient 5 had a fever at 14months and showed regression. “At 14 months of age, she had a viral illness with high fever, encephalopathy, regression of previous acquired skills, and significant acidosis. She gradually recovered and continued developing slowly.” Sound like Hannah Poling?  Consider however that she showed developmental delay by 6 months (along with a number of other problems). She did not appear “normal” as Hannah Poling is described before her regression.  Another big difference: Patient 5 had clear mitochondrial disorder.  She has 70% mtDNA depletion in a biopsy sample.  While she is described as “gradually recovered”, she never spoke and is significantly challenged in many areas.

And that is the closest example we get to Hannah Poling in these studies

Patient 3 in the DiMauro study is described as having “…neurologic deterioration during intercurrent illnesses and recovered gradually over several weeks.”  However, he doesn’t fit the “Hannah Poling” mold as he had clear impariments since early infancy.  

The other three patients in the DiMauro study did not have any mention of regression.   There is an Aspie, a PDD kid and a kid with excellent visual/spacial skills but delayed speech and language.

OK, so the DiMauro study doesn’t have “Hannah Polings”.  What about Oliveira?  He describes 11 kids with possible, probable or definite mitochondrial resperatory chain (MRC) disorder.   Of these 11, only 1 is noted as having an “autistic regression”.  (No, it is not noted if this was coincident with vaccination).

One interesting fact in the Oliveira paper: they were studying older kids.  All the kids (with mitochondrial disorder or not) were in the 11-14 year old ages.  Why do I find this interesting?  Because I read a lot of people postulate on the web that Hannah Poling no longer shows “biomarkers” for mitochondrial dysfunction and, thus, thet disappear with age.   People are trying to say, essentially, “A lot of older kids were probably ‘Hannah Polings’ but their tests won’t show mito dysfunction because they are too old” as in, “they were vaccine injured even though we have no proof.”   Since these same people tend to rely on Oliveira’s data to estimate the prevalence of mitochondrial disorders in autism, it seems a bit of a stretch.

In our search for more “Hannah Polings”, we seem to be striking out.  But, there are still two more papers to consider.

Tsao and Mandell describe two patients.  Both were globally delayed from “the early months of life”.  Neither child developed expressive or receptive language, and one never sat up or walked.  Again, these were not “apparantly normal” kids who went through regressions.

Gargus and Imtiaz describe three children, all siblings, who have “a weak mitochondrial defect and a recognized 15q inverted duplication” (we’ll discuss some genetics in another post). The older had poor eye contact and echolalia from early infancy. He developed stimming behavior at age 3 and, sadly, died after a one-day illness at age 5.

OK, sidetrack here.  The authors describe this as  “At age 5, after a 1-day illness, he died suddenly with respiratory arrest and shock, characteristic lethal presentation of a carnitine-deficient fatty acid oxidation”.  In other words, illness can be fatal to the energy challenged.  This is precisely why doctors recommend vaccinating people with mitochondrial disorders, or at least, their close family members.

Back to the paper, the younger twin bothers (monozygotic, monochorionic) hit their developmental milestones in their first year. However, they showed language delay and limited eye contact. One had a near-SIDS event at 4 months, and was the more “severely affected” of the two.

So, the kids in the Gargus study aren’t “Hannah Polings” either as they didn’t regress and showed signs of being “not normal” from early in life.  Now, I suspect people will latch on to the “near SIDS event” at 4 months and suggest that is connected to 4 month vaccines.  No mention of vaccination is made in the paper.

Discussion

There is a huge variation in the presentations of the individuals in the above studies, leaving one to ask, “what can we take away from all of this?”.   One answer is that the huge variation is precisely one of the take-away points: if you think that autism is a spectrum disorder, you shouldn’t be surprised that the mitochondrial energy challenged present as broad or broader of a spectrum.

Second, everyone keeps looking to mitochondria+autism=”must be regressive”.  It just isn’t so.  The “30 child paper” will apparantly concentrate on regressive kids, but the other papers already published do not.

The majority of the individuals described in the DiMauro, Oliveira, Gargus, and Tsao papers show no regression. Of those who do regress, they were not “developing normally” before the regression.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line: Hannah Poling does not appear to be a good representative of the kids with mitochondria issues and autism.   The individuals discussed in papers other than the Hannah Poling case study are very different from her.  Even the other kids in the paper that will concentrate on regressive autism are mostly not like her in one major aspect: they didn’t suffer vaccine injury.

Does that mean that we can’t and shouldn’t learn from Hannah Poling?  Absolutely not.  But, we need to have experts look at and understand all the kids with mitochondrial disorders and autism.  We need this to be a scientific investigation to arrive at real answers, not a series of public relations events to shape the public view.

In honor of the “Green our Vaccines” rally: facts from the Omnibus Autism hearing

4 Jun

The lawyers for the parents in the Omnibus Autism hearing (thimerosal portion) have been claiming that one cause of “clearly regressive” autism is thimerosal at vaccine doses, even the dose of thimerosal in one vaccine. One of their supports for this odd claim is that whatever DAN! docs do to help their patients deal with “mercury toxicity” makes the kids less autistic or healthier or something. It’s all pretty vague. Dr. Mumper spoke confidently of what chelation had done for autistic kids and the boys under discussion in this portion of the trial were chelated multiple times in spite of never having shown any elevated mercury levels in their urine tests (even their chelated urine mercury levels were what would be expected for a typical person being chelated).

So what about this claim? If you do any old treatment and you think it makes the patient better in some perhaps very vague, undefined way, is this evidence of anything? Eric Fombonne, expert in autism epidemiology and clinician who works with autistic children and adults says, “Mais non.” Well, actually he said the following

Ms. Ricciardella (?): Are there standards that are used by the medical and scientific community before a treatment is recommended?

Dr. Fombonne: Yes, there are different kinds of standards to evaluate the efficacy of interventions the rule is to rely on the evidence that is the most robust that stems from a randomized clinical trial which are usually double blind placebo controlled for this method there is no study which has been relying on this method for the practices and treatment that have been discussed this morning [by Dr. Mumper]

Ms. Ricciardella: Do you have experience with randomized clinical trials?

Dr. Fombonne: Yes actually, I do. I started my research career and did my thesis my first two publications, I think, have to with randomized clinical trials.
And I am currently, we have tested the efficacy in a randomized clinical trial of a treatment which is not which is not biomedical which is a language based intervention to improve communication skills in young children with autism.
And we did a randomized clinical trial. It’s a 12 weeks treatment and we allocated at random parents and their children to a group where they were immediately treated with this intervention and there was a waiting list for the control group and 36 families in each group so it’s quite powerful in terms of it’s statistical power.
I just wanted to share with you my, my, our findings that it’s an intervention that everybody likes, eh and when we did the trial we had all the impression that it was actually achieving some positive results. The parents were happy and were convinced that the methods were showing some efficacy, and we did too.
But as we did the study well we didn’t analyze the data before the data were finally collected and when we broke the blind and looked at the results and there is no difference between the two groups–which is breaking my heart, in some ways–but this also shows that our experience as clinicians and as parents can be misleading.
And I think the field of autism has been replete over the last 30, 40 years of treatments and interventions that practitioners engage in when the parents apply to their children. And the story has been that when you take these practices and put them to rigorous empirical test, that of a randomized clinical trial, usually the story is much more disappointing. And a case in point is the secretin trial.

I don’t know if it was Ms. Ricciardella asking the questions, but that’s my guess. After this portion he explained about how many parents and clinicians from all over the world had been so excited about secretin when it became popular, and how for about 5 years clinicians used it and had some great stories to support it’s use. But when the double blind, placebo controlled studies were completed it turned out to be no more effective than placebo. And if someone tells you that there were “responders” you can tell them that there were “responders” to the sterile-saline injections, too, so why not just go with those, since they are cheaper than secretin? Besides which there’s no reason to expect that secretin (much like sterile saline) ever would do anything for the symptoms of autism. Further, the Mead boy got one or two injections of it but the family didn’t continue with them, apparently they weren’t so great for that child. Perhaps they decided to go with worm eggs, maternal fecal implantation enemas or even Eskimo oil (possibly purchased from Dr. Green’s office) instead.

http://static.boomp3.com/player.swf?song=bjsb2fd<a style=”font-size: 9px; color: #ccc; letter-spacing: -1px; text-decoration: none” target=”_blank” href=”http://boomp3.com/listen/bjsb2fd/fombonne-randomized-control-trial”>boomp3.com</a&gt;

Tags:

Green Our Vaccines Eve – Dr Jeffrey Brent

3 Jun

On the eve of the ‘green our vaccines‘ rally, I thought it might be interesting to share a ten minute or so segment from the Autism Omnibus.

Giving evidence is Dr Jeffrey Brent:

Jeffrey Brent, M.D., Ph.D. is a sub-specialty board certified medical toxicologist. He is an active member of the medical school teaching faculty and is an attending physician on the clinical pharmacology/toxicology consultation service at the University Hospital. Currently he holds the rank of Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado Denver. Dr. Brent has a long list of publications, virtually all related to clinical toxicology. He is senior editor of Critical Care Toxicology: The Diagnosis and Management of the Critically Poisoned Patient and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Toxicological Reviews, a major international state-of-the-art review journal devoted to human toxicology.

Dr. Brent is the former President of the American Academy of clinical Toxicology, the largest organization in the world devoted to this discipline. Currently he serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the American College of Medical Toxicology.

We pick up testimony around five and half hours into day 15. I’ve transcribed directly from the audio, so please forgive minor errors. Emphasis is Brent’s, inserts are marked [].

Q: Dr Mumper discussed today some key aspects of chelation therapy….as a medical toxicologist do you see any reason for the chelation to remove mercury from either Jordan King or William Mead in these cases?

Absolutely not….there is no test in medicine that is more valid for for assessing mercury toxicity than an unprovoked urine mercury concentration.

[For Jordan King and William Mead]…their unprovoked urine concentration is exactly in the normal range.

On the other hand, they have been chelated. And the justification for that chelation with regard to mercury comes from what you see in the right hand column where in both cases, 4 out of 5 provoked examples have been…uh…increase urine mercury. Well, you’re supposed to have increased urine mercury with provoked examples! Therefore there is absolutely no indication based here or anywhere else I saw in the medical records that suggest that there is any mercury effect in these children and therefore that was absolutely no reason to chelate them for any mercury related reason.

Q: Dr Mumper also testified today to seeing an increase in lead levels in children and that chelation may help with the adverse effects from lead. Is there any scientific or medical basis for that statement?

It is true that chelation therapy is the appropriate therapy for lead toxicity. However, the records do not reflect any lead toxicity in the case of either of the two children at issue here, Mead or King. Neither of them have had an elevated blood lead level and a blood lead level is the ‘gold standard’ test for lead toxicity. Because, contrary to testimony that was given earlier today [Dr Mumpers – KL], blood lead remains elevated and it will be elevated for years in children that have lead toxicity. It equilibrates with tissues and if there’s high tissue burden there will be high blood burden.

Q: So you disagree with Dr Mumper that the blood levels would only test for acute toxicity?

Thats absolutely wrong. So there was no indication therefore for treating these two children with a chelator for any lead effects.

Q: Is there any other accepted tests for lead toxicity, other than blood?

Blood is the ‘gold standard’ and there are no other accepted tests in medicine now that we can routinely get blood/lead levels.

Q: Was there anything about the levels you observed in the medical records [of either King or Mead – KL] post chelation that would cause you to think that these were extraordinarily high levels of excretion upon chelation?

No. You always expect to see levels in the urine bump post-chelation. It would happen to any one of us. There are no validated reference ranges post chelation, thats why they’re not used in medical practice – there is no valid way of using them and in fact if you look at these two children they had mild increases in urine/lead excretion as I recall but they were nothing different than what you would normally expect to see if you gave a chelator to them.

Q: And you’ve given chelators to a lot of children?

I’ve chelated a number of children.

A: There’s nothing here that would be out of the ordinary – from your experience – absent, even in the absence of a standard reference range.

Well, in truth we don’t (?) urine/leads because the ‘gold test’ is blood/lead so I haven’t looked at many urine/leads in children that I have chelated. So I can’t speak to that in my experience. But I have seen a number of patients now come to me because of these ‘doctor’s data‘ type of laboratories which are based on urines – chelated urines – and they always have high leads in their chelated urines and I tell them ‘well, lets just do the gold standard test, lets get a blood/lead level and so far, 100% of the time they’ve been normal.

Q: Are the post chelation mercury levels in either of these two boys in excess of what you would see…or in excess – I take it there’s no standard reference range…?

No standard reference range. You do tend to see small increases, they’ve had minor increases in their mercury excretion over the reference ranges over the non-provoked. It was certainly not very dramatic and certainly well within the range of what you would expect to see. For example if you look at the studies that I cited where they were studying chelators and they were looking at the effect of the chelator on urine/mercury excretion.

Now thats a valid time to do a post chelation mercury – if you want to study the effect of the chelator. And if you look at the normal controls in those studies, when they give them a chelator you do see some increase in the urine/mercury excretion and its a moderate increase and its really not very different than what we saw in these children [King and Mead – KL]

Q: Have you chelated children for lead or mercury toxicity?

Actually, both.

Q: And under what circumstance did you chelate for mercury toxicity?

I’ve had a number, but probably the most common and the most dramatic relates to the fact that I live in Colorado and in the Rocky Mountain area there people who are still panning for Gold…..[they extract the gold from ore using liquid mercury]…and to get rid of the mercury [afterwards] they will heat it. In their house. In their kitchen. When you volatilise mercury like that [it gets into the air]….and I’ve had a number of families have become profoundly mercury poisoned.

Q: So when Dr. Mumper said that she saw ‘mobilisation’ of heavy metals by chelation and then assumed that the chelation was beneficial – do you agree with that statement?

No, I think what you see is – you give a chelator, you look in the urine and there’s more than in the non-chelated reference range is for the metals in the urine and its what you would normally expect. It tells you nothing about mobilising stores of heavy metals.

Q: Dr Mumper also talked about supplements. And those supplement were referred to increase Glutathione to treat mercury toxicity. Do you agree that that therapy is warranted in cases?

Glutathione? No. Supplemental glutathione to treat mercury toxicity has no validity at all.

The Bernadine Healy Card

31 May

Last month, ex NIH leader, Bernadine Healy came out of her semi-retirement to weigh in on the autism/vaccine hypothesis:

….the rise of this disorder, which shows up before age 3, happens to coincide with the increased number and type of vaccine shots in the first few years of life. So as a trigger, vaccines carry a ring of both historical and biological plausibility.

It was a credulous article designed, I suspect, to have a bit of a snipe at HHS – currently embroiled in the Autism Omnibus. Why do I say that?

Well, being a UK citizen I’d never heard of Bernadine Healy so I did a bit of looking around to see if I could adequately explain to myself why such a luminary would say such plainly silly and unscientific things.

It seems that:

on 10 Feb [1993], Healy, who is known for her bluntness, went to her new boss, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Donna Shalala and asked about her future. Shalala apparently matched Healy for bluntness. “She let me know it wouldn’t work out in the long term.” Said Healy.

So possibly there is some lingering resentment towards HHS. Who knows. It seems doubtful that this would entirely (if at all) explain Healy’s decision to parrot pseudo-science but – people do silly things sometimes.

What I found fascinating was that this is not the first time Healy has taken an active role in direct opposition to science and the scientific process:

…..patients are forced into a one-size-fits-all straitjacket…..EBM [evidence based medicine] carries its own ideological and political agenda separate from its clinical purpose.

Dr. Bernadine Healy, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report and former director of the National Institutes of Health, falsely claimed that “several” neurologists who “evaluated” Terri Schiavo determined that she had “a functional mind” and was “minimally conscious.”

Dr Bernadine Healey, former director of the National Institute of Health said, “Blenderizing these diverse trials into one giant 232,606-patient-strong study to come up with a seductively simple proclamation is just silly….”

That latter was Healy’s attack on a study that highlighted the dangers of vitamins.

So we can see that Healy has a history that is peppered with leanings toward a credulous approach.

It also seems that she is first and foremost a politician, willing to sacrifice her scientific credibility to support her party (she is a Republican):

Healy was appointed director of the National Institutes of Health in 1991….when Healy assumed control, the agency was beset with problems…..[s]cientists were leaving in record numbers because of…..politicization of scientific agendas (a prime example was the ban on fetal-tissue research because the Republican administration believed it encouraged abortion)

Healy had, at that time expressed support for fetal-tissue research:

….she had been a member of a panel that advised continuation of fetal-tissue research, her appointment was also seen as a move away from politicized science.

So, it must’ve come as something of a shock to NIH scientists when:

….she lobbied against overturning the Bush Administration’s ban on fetal tissue research, despite her previous support for such research.

She also had to defend herself against charges of mishandling a scientific misconduct case:

Healy demanded that OSI (like internal affairs for the NIH) rewrite a draft report that found misconduct on the part of Popovic. The OSI report also severely criticized Gallo.

“When her order for a rewrite was refused, Dr. Healy replaced the chief investigator [Suzanne Hadley] with one more malleable,” the subcommittee report said. The resulting OSI report was “watered down,” the subcommittee document said.

……….

In 1992, the National Academy of Sciences’ panel completed its investigation and produced a report critical of Gallo.

Healy chose to ignore the findings of the NAS panel and commissioned her own ad hoc committee of top NIH scientists, whom she called her “wise men,” the report said. Healy required the members to sign a secrecy agreement.

(Full story also here).

Maybe the biggest question mark against Healy’s scientific credibility and ability to be impartial as this. She was a member of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition:

The Advancement of Sound Science Center (TASSC), formerly the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, is an industry-funded lobby group which promotes the idea that environmental science on issues including smoking, pesticides and global warming is “junk science”, which should be replaced by “sound science”.

Notably, TASSC promote the interests of tobacco companies:

Initially, the primary focus of TASSC was an attempt to discredit research on Environmental Tobacco Smoke [passive smoking] as a long-term cause of increased cancer and heart problem rates in the community — especially among office workers and children living with smoking parents. It subsequently advanced industry-friendly positions on a wide range of topics, including global warming, smoking, phthalates, and pesticides. Later still, they extended the role of TASSC to Europe using Dr George Carlo. TASSC used the label of ‘junk science’ to criticise work that was unfavorable to the interests of its backers.

TASSC’s funders included:

3M
Amoco
Chevron
Dow Chemical
Exxon
General Motors
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lorillard Tobacco
Louisiana Chemical Association
National Pest Control Association
Occidental Petroleum
Philip Morris
Procter & Gamble
Santa Fe Pacific Gold
W.R. Grace

More can be found here.

So, all in all, I am disposed to not trust the words, or ‘beliefs’ of Bernadine Healy very much. Anyone who campaigns against the dangers of passive smoking to children or who is prepared to block science they allegedly once supported when it is politically expedient doesn’t seem that good a judge of what constitutes good science.

Dr John Briffa is wronger than wrong on vaccines and Hannah Poling

30 May

Media nutritionism is a crowded field, but John Briffa has managed to carve out a niche for himself. And Briffa’s take on vaccines stands out, even among media nutritionists. JDC takes a broader look at Briffa’s take on autism, but I’m going to focus on Briffa’s claim that:

the US Government recently looked at such evidence relating to just one girl (Hannah Poling) and concluded that vaccination had contributed significantly to her autism.

As readers of this blog can probably spot, almost every word of that statement is inaccurate: impressive work, indeed. Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Dean Jones PhD- oxidative stress and the Omnibus Autism hearing

28 May

Dr. Dean Jones testified on the topic of oxidative stress in the morning of Day 9 of the Thimerosal-only portion of the Omnibus Autism Proceedings hearing. Dr. Jones is a professor at Emory University. He received a Nobel fellowship to do research in molecular toxicology in Stockholm. He is currently a peer reviewer for the journals Toxicology, Nutrition, Science, and Nature Methods. He also has been the chair of a “study section” at the NIH, as such it was his job to oversee peer review process of grant applications.

He is the recipient of grants to do research. One of his major grants for looking at oxidative stress in cell nuclei. He is one of the asst. program directors for a $22 million award from the NIH for translational research. Dr. Jones oversees two labs at Emory, one is his own research lab focusing on redox chemistry. He lectures on nutritional biochemistry, pharmacology and metabolism and has written many articles on sulfur metabolism, and he estimates that he has written over 100 original research articles on oxidative stress.

Dr. Jones testified that sulfur is the 5th most common element in biological systems and sulfur is ubiquitous in living systems. All this sulfur beneficially affects how our bodies deal with heavy metals.
The following is more of my rough transcription of what Dr. Jones said as he was examined by Ms. Renzi. Words in parentheses are my summary of what was said, the rest is more of an attempt to get what was said word-for-word. Keep in mind, there is a lot more than this. I haven’t tried to transcribe all the testimony by Dr. Jones wherein he explains a lot about what Glutathione is and details the reasons for his conclusions about Dr. Deth’s hypothesis and the idea that thimerosal in the doses contained in the vaccines given to even the tiniest babies ever could do anything vaguely like harm:

Ms. Renzi: …. Glutathione does more than just detoxify heavy metals, is that correct?

Dr. Jones: Glutathione has a very important role in metabolism. It is the major thiol. (It’s a major) sulfur containing chemical…. maybe 1/3 of the total sulfur (in the body is found in glutathione) the most abundant thiol.

Ms. Renzi: What is the role of glutathione in the body?

Dr. Jones: … The one that has probably received the most attention in the past 50 years is the function of glutathione as an anti-carcinogen. Glutathione is used to counter reactive chemicals that would otherwise cause mutations in the DNA and cause cancer. A little over 50 years ago it was recognized that many chemicals we are exposed to are activated in the body to reactive chemicals, the most central way that the body gets rid of these is by reacting these with glutathione. Glutathione is the most anticarcinogenic chemical we have in our body.

It is also an antioxidant….Hydrogen peroxide is produced in the body all the time, about a pound a day of oxygen consume, about 1% of that is converted to hydrogen peroxide– a large portion of that is eliminated by glutathione.

…there is a coenzymatic function of glutathione. One of the main ways we get rid of formaldehyde is through a catalytic action, involves using glutathione as a catalyst. The glutathione is not used up (in doing that).

Ms. Renzi: Deth’s hypothesis is thimerosal containing vaccines disrupt sulfur metabolism and causes autism. …

And Based upon your knowledge and research in the area of sulfur metabolism and glutathione do you have an opinion as to whether thimerosal at the doses administered in thimerosal containing vaccines can significantly affect sulfur metabolism.

[This is about the 22 minute mark.]

Jones: What the data show is that the dose of thimerosal (under discussion) will not affect in a significant way, sulfur metabolism.

Renzi: Why is that?

Dr. Jones: (He gives the amount of sulfur in a human body. He gives estimated total body glutathione.) 1 millimolar (is) 1000 micromolar. (He gives the amount of sulfur in sulfur containing foods a typical baby would eat: 500 micromoles per kg of body weight.) … We have a huge total thiol content in the body.

Ms. Renzi: (In your scenario that compares sulfur exposure to mercury exposure from vaccines,) how did you calculate the thimerosal dose?

I took the cumulative dose (that) was 180 mcg. I rounded it up (apparently to 200 mcg). (I calculated it as if) that were given all at once to a 1kg child, so that would be a two pound child. This is a very conservative way to look at this, the exposure would probably be six-fold lower than this. If you calculated it this way that would be equivalent to one micromole per kg of body weight. The more realistic would be 0.1 micromole per kg. The cumulative dose of thimerosal is considerably less than that daily intake of sulfur amino acids would be… 2000 fold lower than the total body thiol.

Renzi: Do food items also contain reactive materials that our body use glutathione to deactivate.

Johnson: … if we look at the amount of reactive materials in a 8 oz glass of 2% cows milk that number is 21,700 nanomoles. If you assume that a child would consume 4 oz in a serving would be the equivalent of 10 micromoles. One 4 oz serving would contain more than 10 times as much of the reactive materials (as is in the estimated 200 mcg of mercury from thimerosal.)

Renzi: The amount of reactive materials (in those common foods are) above that cumulative dose in a thimerosal normally administered over a 6 month period.
…
(1 hour 36 minutes)

Dr. Jones: (summing up) … at 4 critical sites in this scheme the pieces don’t fit together that that’s a plausible hypothesis and plausible mechanism that changes in sulfur amino acid is a cause of autism

Ms. Renzi: So, the data that Dr. Deth presented actually in formulating his hypothesis doesn’t support his hypothesis is that correct? …

Yes. … Slide 28 is Dr. Deth’s slide 41… What I think that the data show, uh, you know, to me fairly clearly in, you know, that that there really is not appropriate evidence, this is just not, the data, saying that the dose of thimerosal is enough to alter the sulfur metabolism, this is not, not established by the data. And similarly if you had a perturbation in the sulfur even if a very minor effect happened it really wouldn’t be of a magnitude that one could consider that that is the cause of oxidative stress. I think you have to conclude that this is not established, either, the second point. And finally then if you look at the subsequent aspects of that the variations, the oxidative stress, there’s a normal variation in oxidative stress and that the magnitude of effects are really not appropriate, and in fact the mechanisms that he’s drawn can not account for changes in the methionine synthase activity and the in vitro data he’s provided without in vivo data supporting it, really you have to conclude that this step in the pathway is also not established. That is the oxidative stress to the methionine synthase.

…And so from that summary, from my standpoint there really is no plausibility to this hypothesis at all. It’s what I would consider a, a scaffold without a building. there’s a lot of components to it but it really doesn’t have the strength, solidity of being solid science, of being reasonable or plausible. …

So, this is my final slide, slide 29 … I think in terms of the overall, you know, my overall consideration of this:

I think the point one is the cumulative dose of thimerosal is too low to cause the magnitude of effects on glutathione metabolism that would be required to conclude that there’s any likelihood of effect there. It’s not plausible.

Point two, the natural variations are greater than one would expect from the low dose of thimerosal that are present in thimerosal containing vaccines.

The third point, … if you did have an effect, you’d have to conclude that the low non-toxic dose would probably be protective, because that would be activating protective mechanisms that ubiquitously occur.

Fourth, the in vitro studies show that thimerosal disruption of metabolism is probably occurring under non-specific conditions–ones that were you simply have the cellular conditions set up so that you are going to be disrupting lots of things–that you are not going to be giving any specificity. That’s simply because they are at irrelevant concentrations, irrelevant amounts.

I have to conclude that the data really don’t support this hypothesis that there is an effect on the glutathione system that’s causing oxidative stress and that that’s the cause of autism.

Ms. Renzi: Thank you.

Special Master Vowell (addressing PSC lawyer, Mike Williams): Are you prepared to begin cross examination or would this be a good time for a break?

Mr. Williams: I would very much enjoy a break, if that would be alright with you.

One can only imagine how much Mr. Williams needed that break.

I’m running out of adjectives to describe how thoroughly the dead parrot hypothesis has been demolished by the Department of Justice’s experts up to this point. I would not like to be Dr. Deth or even Dr. Wally. There work in cell cultures was described as basically not worthy of publication and it puzzles experts on how it got past peer review. Even the Petitioner’s Steering Committee’s own experts are doing serious damage to their own hypotheses from my observation, via sloppy testimony, bad evidence, citing what amount to speculative essays by absolute non-scientists “published” in non-peer reviewed magazines, experts with unusual ties to unusual funding sources, shaky sources for “data” in testimony that most would consider plagiarized because the real source was not cited, self plagiarism from previous reports, inflated–bordering on fabricated–credentials, extreme lack of expertise in the area where they are testifying, lack of preparation, and a lack of agreement and coherence between the petitioners own experts’ stories. Oh, and they keep bringing up new stuff, new ideas, new papers at the very last minute, which is just not done.

And … I have to ask, if the PSC lawyers were confident in what they were presenting, would they really need to be insulting to the experts for the DoJ? Seriously. Dr. Jones started to get impatient with the way Mr. Williams was badgering him on the cross examination and acting as if he, Jones, should already know what was in a paper that Mr. Williams just handed to him a minute previously, one of those last minute introductions of “evidence” that is totally out of bounds, normally. What I keep hearing on and off from the PSC lawyers, is a tone of voice that implies, “You’re just an idiot, aren’t you? You don’t know this???” Maybe that’s how lawyers are supposed to talk, but I didn’t hear it coming from the DoJ lawyers on cross examination of the PSC experts. The Special Masters have been very generous. I hope the Special Masters can see what a flimsy structure the arguments are that the PSC has constructed.It's just sleeping!

I hope parents who buy into the whole vaccine/heavy metal causation hypothesis and its accompanying “biomed” insanity are listening to these hearings because they will see how they’ve been led around by the nose by “experts” using big words and “healers” making big promises. I also hope that people don’t ever avoid vaccinating their children just out of fear of autism or vague fears of “toxicity.” The stuff to fear is not the vaccines. The stuff to fear is the sometimes deadly germs that vaccines can help protect their children from.

Tags: ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →