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Green This

11 Jun

OK, so here’s the back of the t-shirt:
Green our vaccines

(click for bigger – I want you to read the ingredients list).

First of all – who’s decision was it to use Impact as a font? Whoever it was shoot them, they’re uncreative and uninspired. It looks shit. Seriously. it looks like you stepped back in a time machine to 1999 and decided it looked ‘kewl’. It doesn’t.

Anyway, as you can see, plenty of scare mongering went on. I think they forgot to include Eye of Newt though.

So lets actually go through what’s on that list and how true it actually is.

Aluminium

Yeah, there’s Aluminium in vaccines.

There’s also Aluminium in breast milk so lets compare the two.

According to this paper (which is from 1990 – any more up to date papers welcomed) the amount of Aluminium in breast milk is 49 μg/L. The average amount of breast milk expressed per day is 0.85 liters.

This means that 41.65μg Aluminium per day is in breast milk.

Now, according to this paper, there is between 125 – 850μg of Aluminium per dose in a vaccine.

Using this page and this page I estimated (and I’m welcome to correction) that by the time a child reaches 6 years old they will have received 17 Aluminium containing vaccines.

So, for a 6 year old, total Aluminium is between 2,125 – 14,450μg.

In real terms this means that after between 51 and 346 days breast feeding, a 6 year old will have taken onboard the same amount of Aluminium as from the total US vaccine schedule.

Now I couldn’t find out what vaccines contained the lower amount or which contained the higher amount. Even so, this means that if every vaccine a 6 year old has that contains Aluminium contains the highest possible amount, within a year of breast feeding they will have matched that.

Or to put it another way, an anti-vax tree-hugger soccer mom who doesn’t vaccinate her baby will have given him the same amount of Aluminium he would’ve had in six years after one year of breast feeding.

And thats of course, not even touched on the fact that:

In the Earth’s crust, aluminium is the most abundant (8.13%) metallic element, and the third most abundant of all elements (after oxygen and silicon)

And is found naturally occurring in sea water, fresh water, the human body etc etc.

Formaldehyde

Yeah, there’s Formaldehyde in vaccines.

There’s also Formaldehyde in Apples, Apricots, Banana’s and….ah, I lost interest. Lots of stuff. Including the human body.

So – how much is in vaccines?

According to this and using it in combination with the US vaccine schedule referenced above, we can see that the total amount of Formaldehyde in vaccines from the vaccine schedule for a 6 year old child is 1.2016mg (again, do your own maths, correct me if I’m wrong).

For comparison to that 1.2mg in all vaccines for a 6 year old, 1 (one) banana contains 16.3mg Formaldehyde.

So, what I’m saying is that nanaslices this is a picture of 3x the amount of Formaldehyde you’ll find in the entire vaccine schedule of a 0 – 6 year old US child.

Anti-Freeze

There’s no anti-freeze in vaccines. A single component of antifreeze – polyethylene glycol – is used to inactivate the flu virus in one brand of that vaccine; it is also used in the purification of certain vaccines. Its also used in some skin creams and toothpastes.

Thats all I can be bothered to do. If anyone wants to tackle the rest, be my guest in the comments.

Competition Time

11 Jun

Icon Books sent me a review copy of the UK release of Unstrange Minds which is how I was able to review it so promptly.

However, this means I now have (count ’em) _three_ copies of Unstrange Minds – the galley Professor Grinker sent me, the US edition (never read it) and the UK edition.

Now I don’t need three copies so I’m going to give away the US edition (which is also personally signed by Professor Grinker – as evidenced by my pointing digit) to one lucky person (willing to post anywhere in the world).

grinker

So how to choose who to give it to?

Here’s a photo of the Green our Vaccines brightest lights. What I want you to do is caption it. The rules:

1) Nothing defamatory!
2) No swear words that begin with c or f
3) No reference to Evan McCarthy
4) Do as many as you like
5) Funny = good
6) No photoshopping the image
7) Post your entry either in the comment section of this post or in a separate post on your own blog and post the link to that here.

Go!

(click for bigger version).

The Art of Green Our Vaccines

9 Jun

Before the “Green our Vaccines” rally (already much discussed–such as here, here, here, here, here), I spent a lot of time thinking about what sort of questions I would ask Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey if I had the chance.

I don’t know how much time Arthur Allen put into thinking about the problem, but I do know he nailed it with two succinct questions.

As part of his story on the rally, he recounts his brief opportunity to pose questions to the couple. Ms. McCarthy and Mr. Carrey passed near him at the same time that they were allowing an opportunity for “sound bites”. Art saw an opportunity and got a few quick questions in, as he recounts:

At which point I saw my opportunity and after checking for rally monitors, asked, “How many vaccines, exactly, is too many?”

“Too Many, Too Soon” is the slogan. It’s on the back of about 500 T-Shirts (with one each on Jenny and Jim). Given that, you’d think they’d have a damned good answer. At the very least, a reasonable, on-topic “sound bite”. Instead they answered (again as recounted by Art):

“In 1983,” McCarthy said, “our kids only got 10 vaccines. Now it’s 36” (actually, it’s 28, max, by age 2). I asked, “So should they only be getting 10? Which ones shouldn’t they get?” I saw McCarthy turning and asking someone, “Who is this guy?” Carrey responded, gamely. “Kids aren’t a bottomless pit you can pour toxins into, there has to be a limit,” he said.

Was that a sound bite or were they just caught flat-footed? Thankfully, Art had a great followup question which shows us the answer:

“So what’s a vaccine they shouldn’t get?” I asked. “A lot of parents of autistic children would have opted not to get the tetanus shot,” he said.

Huh?!? Tetanus? Wow, did I miss the Andy Wakefield study on Tetanus in the guts of autistic kids? Or, was it the Mady Hornig rats with Tetanus study? No, wait, isn’t the Generation Rescue motto, “It’s the tetanus, stupid”?

The answers are “no” to all of the above.

Generation Rescue (who have Jenny as their board-member/spokesperson) doesn’t mention “tetanus” at all on their vaccine page. As in, no “tetanus vaccines cause autism” statements. However, in the link to their “favorite” vaccine schedule (which is a recipe for disaster in this person’s eye), they include tetanus. Yep, they “recommend” kids get tetanus shots. In their number II recommended schedule, they include tetanus 5 times, starting at 2 months (is that “too soon”? as in “too many too soon”?). Their number III (and final) schedule has tetanus 3 times.

Is it possble the Generation Rescue spokespeople don’t know about their own recommended vaccine schedules? Is it possible that in months of planning, Jim and Jenny never prepared for what is one of the most obvious questions?

Jenny. McCarthy has awarded herself an honorary doctorate from Google U in vaccines and autism. From the above exchange with Arthur Allen, it looks like she and Mr. Carrey just failed their “Google SAT” in the “alt-med” view of autism and vaccines. (Let’s not even go down the path of how badly they would fail the entrance exam to Google kindergarden on the actual science of autism and vaccines.)

Don’t look for them to get caught like this by a journalist again. First, don’t expect real journalists to get access often. If they do, all future questions will likely be met with “Generation Rescue has some alternate schedules on their website”. (without noting that “alternate schedule” means “measles outbreaks are Jim-Dandy”).

This time, however, there was a real journalist and he caught them unprepared. Now we know that Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey have basically no depth to their understanding of even the alt-med version of vaccines and autism. Anyone surprised?

But, hey, the day wasn’t a complete waste for Jenny. Access Hollywood named Jim and her the “Green Couple of the Week”. Can someone find this Grand Award on the Access Hollywood website? I admit I didn’t try hard (I’m not trying for a Google Ph.D. in “Access Hollywood”), but is this a…dare we say it….fake award? Sorta like Dr. Corbier and the “Rock Award”? (OK, that one is kinda obscure–tossed in for those who followed the Omnibus too closely.)

Which leads me to the last thought–Jenny has a Google Ph.D. and a fake award…heck, if she could just use the library and go to a couple parties at UCSF, she could be an expert witness for the Autism Omnibus. (Think Vera Byers).

Art, should you read this, I (without consultation with anyone) award you the “LeftBrainRightBrain” Award for Excellence in Journalism. For those who will accuse me of making it up right now–ha!, I made it up a few weeks ago and secretly gave it to AutismNewsBeat.

Autism Recovery

8 Jun

I don’t get autism recovery. I don’t get what its supposed to be. I’ve been told (as has the world) that chelation can offer a 100% recovery, leaving the child indistinguishable from their peers.

I’ve been told that recovery means that a child no longer carries a diagnosis of autism.

I’ve been told that recovery simply means a previously non-vocal child now speaks.

I’ve been told that recovery is not the same as cure, but nobody gave me a cogent reason as to why not.

I’ve been told that recovery means a child can attend a mainstream scholastic setting.

There are so many ‘recovery’ merchants on the web (and also in Washington DC last Wednesday) who all want to tell the world that ‘recovery is possible’ and that their child is ‘recovered’.

On a popular biomed site for example there is a section where parents have sent in stories of their kids recovery. Oddly however, only 7% of those stories recount a child no longer having a diagnosis of autism.

Over on Kristina’s blog, a discussion regarding Jenny McCarthys latest interview turned up this nugget:

Jenny was jumping all over the board last night in the interview with Greta. She used “recovered” and “recovering”, then seemed to say that he was still autistic, but didn’t have any symptoms at all any more.

She stated that Evan had been diagnosed as autistic in the past, but that his current neurologist says that he never had autism. She reconciles this discrepancy as proof that Evan has been cured by her interventions.

McCarthy (who maybe concidentally was apparently still smoking in 2003/04 – two years after her sons birth) related an incident from May 2007 at the recent Autism One event:

Evan still suffers from seizures, the last one, he just had last May that no one kind of knows about yet, was horrible. He seized on and off for seven hours and then we had to put him in a coma for four days to make him brain dead to stop the seizing because he’d previously gone into cardiac arrest, and there’s so many kids out there with seizures had passed because of that reason. We had to induce a coma, it took him another month to walk again or talk again.

First off that is terrible. My heart went out to McCarthy when I was sent this. I cannot imagine how terrifying that must have been for her – and of course for young Evan too.

But does this sound like a recovered child to you? A child indistinguishable from his peers?

Thank goodness those (no doubt AAP members) mainstream doctors were there to help this poor little boy.

So what is recovery? To me, in all the YouTube videos I’ve seen posted by people convinced their child has recovered it seems most commonly to mean a clearly autistic child who has improved in certain key areas over time and has learnt a variety of coping mechanisms. Beyond that I have no idea.

Green Our Vaccines – the reality

4 Jun

Green our vaccines at 09:15

Contrary to the press reports and the frenzied claims of Jenny McCarthy of rally participants numbering between 8 to 10,000 it seems according to police who accompanied the rally that there were between 500 – 1,000 participants. I cannot source that quote, for which I am sorry. I hope to be able to source it very soon but where I got it from is not available just yet.

The above photo was taken at 09:15. The below photo was taken at the end of the rally.

Green our vaccines crowd

It certainly doesn’t seem to be a very imposing crowd.

People who watched the start of the rally via webcams (my ISP decided to go down today of all days) say that a very loose straggly crowd walking very slowly took about 20 mins to pass a fixed point.

Someone else attending the rally said (again, in confidence):

There were about 500 people at the rally today, about half of whom were children. The press conference lasted for about an hour and a half. The speakers were, in order: Dr. Jay Gordon, Boyd Haley, Dr. Jerry Kartzinel, RFK Jr., Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy. RFK Jr. spoke at length about the science disproving a link between vaccines and autism. He said that all that science is paid for by the pharmaceutical industry and that top vaccine advocates such as Renee Jenkins and Paul Offit are in the pockets of these companies.

Other notables in the crowd included JB Handley, Scott and Laura Bono, the Hazlehursts and Jim Moody.

Update: seems the media are cottoning on to the low turnout. As noted by Catherina in the comments, News Channel 10 say:

Hundreds rally against child vaccinations

Seems like the saw through the pretence this wasn’t an anti-vaccine rally too. Well done them.

Apparently, the stupidest quote of the day comes from Jim Carrey:

If fire engines were running over people on the way to a fire, we wouldn’t say there shouldn’t be fire engines. We would ask the fire engines to slow down. That’s our message to the CDC – that we need to slow down the vaccination schedule.

There you have it, fire engines should slow down on their way to a fire. Jim Carrey’s other invaluable contribution was apparently taunting ‘big pharma’ for not finding a cure for autism whilst at the same time:

finding cures for “that great scourge restless legs syndrome, also known as lazy ass disease.”

Thats the same ‘lazy ass syndrome‘ that is associated with pregnancy, varicose vein or venous reflux, folate deficiency, sleep apnea, uremia, diabetes, thyroid disease, peripheral neuropathy, Parkinson’s disease and certain auto-immune disorders such as Sjögren’s syndrome, celiac disease, and rheumatoid arthritis.

Oh and ADHD of course. The same ADHD that is included on the front page blurb of Groups Jenny McCarthy is on the board of.

Update II: If anyone would like to pass on Carrey’s kind words to the RLS community, you can do that at their website.

Later on Carrey apparently asked the rhetorical question ‘how stupid do you think we are‘. Heh.

Here is Jim Carrey’s quotes in the full context of his speech, courtesy of Autism News Beat – once again, venturing into the heart of woo-land.

Green Our Vaccines Coverage Elsewhere

Me
Kristina
PalMD
Kristina (again)
Ginny Hughes
Mike Stanton
Orac
Liz Ditz
Orac (again)
and again!
and again!!!
Kristina (once more)
Stifled Mind
Sharon
Seeing Beauty
S.L.
S.L. (again)
Mike Stanton (again)
Steve
Clotted Cognition

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