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Whilst Mother Warrior McCarthy Oprahed…

25 Sep

David Kirby, who recently had a puzzling and somewhat inexplicable spat with Dr Rahul Parikh was carrying the torch for the male contingent of the autism/antivax crusaders along with Mother Fu…sorry..Worrier Dad…sorry…chief of the quackosphere (term not coined by me but too good not to use) Mark Blaxill at a meeting set up by a political person called Maloney in Washington.

It reminded me quite a lot of the meeting David tried to have with MP’s and Lords over here in June. Then, nobody showed except my MP who I asked to attend to protest on my behalf. What would happen this time?

Well, according to David himself 135 people showed up including 2 US Reps in person (these are the people David wanted to speak to. If I’m right, the event organiser, Carolyn Maloney is a Congresswoman in the House of Reps so, if thats true, there was really 1 US rep other than her) 58 Reps sent staffers (staffers are bottom feeders sent by people who can’t – or don’t really want to – make it. Like glorified gophers.) and 30 Senators sent staffers. So that’s 90 politicals (of whom – lets be honest – only 2, possibly 1, actually count).

Other people there included AAP, CDC, FDA etc.

Anyway, AoA posted two images of the event:

Now, is anyone else looking at those pictures and thinking ‘135 people? Really?‘. It reminds me a little of the odd maths that resulted in an attendance of 8 – 10,000 at the green our vaccines rally.

This event is trumpeted at AoA as ‘standing room only’. Really? Because I can count quite a lot of available sitting room in those photos. Maybe a thought for next time would be to not exaggerate your claims and then post photographs that contradict them.

There was also a very interesting comment left on AoA by a guy called David Atkinson who said:

I happen to be in town on business and I just came back from this meeting. It was a pretty small room but yes it was packed. I am guessing about 50-70 were there. From the looks of it, most were staffers and there were a few parents like myself. I know there were at least 2-3 senators and I am not sure how many if any representatives. David presented very well as usual and then Mark added his piece as well. After this, there were questions taken from the staffers. There were a few pointed questions. I felt that they were quite divisive and loaded questions. This was really dissapointing to me. Mark did a great job at defending and taking these questions on. I was quite impressed with his eloquence as I would have probably killed the snotty little staffer that was quesioning Davids slides. Overall it was a useful meeting. However, for me who doesnt participate in this type of thing very often, I dont feel it was hugely impactful. It didnt seem like this meeting will be any type of game changer for our community but I am a rookie at this. Hopefully I am wrong on that. Great job to David and Mark. I am more inspired now to try to be more active and help out……I would like to help more in future.

Looking at the photos, I would agree with Atkinson that there were about 50 – 70 people there. I would also agree that this not much of a game changer.

Anyway, I guess 1 or 2 US reps is better than the zero that turned up in London. To me though its just growing evidence to support my view that the autism/vax ideas have truly jumped the shark. Anti-vaccine related deaths in the UK, hundreds of anti-vaccine related hospitalisations in the US and ever growing studies showing no association get the message across.

Jenny McCarthy's Mother Warriors

24 Sep

Jenny McCarthy’s bullshit-fest starts up again today. Look forward to her and Jim Carrey on various US talk shows.

Her new book is called ‘Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds’ which is equally amusing (mother warriors?) and, well, bollocks. A nation of parents healing autism? Really? Where? I’ve been having this conversation with the autism/antivax loons for over five years now: show me the kids who were once autistic who are now cured by biomed? And I don’t mean your sisters best friends cousins kid, I mean case studies. I keep hearing that there are _thousands_ of these kids – surely some doctor treating them somewhere thought – hey, a case study would be a good idea.

And this definitely includes Chief Mother Warrior McCarthy herself and her somewhat loose definition of what ‘healing autism’ is. I posted awhile ago about how Chief Mother Warrior McCarthy had described her son as recovered (as oppose to recover_ing_) in April this year and then go on to describe how she was planning to chelate Evan in June 2008. Why? If he’s recovered, why is the poor lad being subjected to chelation?

Meh, cup and ball trick much?

So, I thought – given that Chief Mother Warrior McCarthy is doing it – that we might take a closer look at chelation in the form of quotes from Mother Warrior’s on the CK2 (Chelating Kids 2) Yahoo group. I’ll say up front, it makes pretty grim reading but I think people need to know what exactly being a Mother Warrior entails. These are all from different people.

It just takes time. My twins (almost 8 now) have been doing IV CaEDTA roughly every 2 weeks for over 3 years (71 and 78 IVs). The first half-dozen or so were really traumatic, then the kids started realizing it really wasn’t so bad after all and got to the point where they didn’t need to be held anymore, then they didn’t cry anymore, etc.

My son is 6 and I have to hold him down for the IVs – we’ve done 10. Today he got poked 3 times and has purple hands from blowing veins. As I’m lying on him, both of us sweating with 2 nurses trying to do the IV, I’m thinking is is worth it?

I used to give my son a valium before the IV’s when we first started. We had to give him 15 mgs when he was about 90 pounds.

We give my son 300 mg of L-Theanine 90 minutes prior to the IV…

We are considering IV chelation with our almost 7yr old. We started with nutritional IV’s just to see how he would do. THe first one was rough the second was a piece of cake. My Mom instinct tell me they made him feel better…

We do IV chelation on experienced regression during the first 3 or 4 months. I would consider them “healing” regressions, though because he didn’t stay in a regressed state and always came out of the regression….

Now these are bad. Blown veins, chelation over periods of years, kids being medicated to calm them down from their obvious terror. But these next are worse.

Any thoughts or experiences with chelation on children under 16 months? The child in question was tested moderately mercury toxic….

My 15 month old son had a porphyns test by Phillipe Auguste labs that showed very high lead and mercury that spiked off the page, so our DAN is starting him on DMSA suppositories once his OAT test comes back demonstrating that he’s medically stable enough to chelate…

We actually began chelating our son at age 2

And the absolute crowning horror. There aren’t words for this last one so I’m just going to quote it. Remember – this is an example of McCarthy’s Mother Warriors in action describing a process she was going to try on her own son.

I started chelating my son at 13 months of age w/ IVs. Dr Bradstreet’s office chelates little kids. It was actually easier to give him the IVs before he turned 2. My DAN, Scott Smith, says that kids under 3 chelate much faster and it is a good idea to start early.

David, I am not embarrased but puzzled

23 Sep

I just read David Kirby’s short post dig on Age of Autism at the review Dr. Rahul K. Parikh made yesterday on Salon.com. I am quite puzzled by David’s post I have to say.

In his overly simplistic way, this pediatrician from Northern California, who has repeatedly ignored third-party invitations to debate me in an open forum, praises Dr. Paul Offit for his attacks on groups like DAN! and Generation Rescue, while holding up Autism Speaks as a bastion of rational scientific thinking, one that does not succumb to what this doctor calls the “slanted science” of thimerosal research:

While Offit focuses on those groups (like Defeat Autism Now! and Generation Rescue) that have been very confrontational and that support slanted science, there are many … groups (like Autism Speaks) that have been broader in their search for autism’s causes and cure.

Overly simplistic is not a fair or polite way to describe Dr. Parikh or the review at Salon. The quote David chooses to single out is precise and accurate. DAN! and GR _are_ confrontational. Several of their members have expressed themselves in terms that are aggressive and violent. They _do_ support slanted science. Generation Rescue once published an ad in (I think) the NYT that thanked researchers for their work on mercury. Several of the named researchers immediately sent an (unpublished) letter to the editor to protest that their work was misrepresented. How much more slanted can you get?

And David, if you’re going to take Dr Parikh to task for ignoring invitations to debate you in an open forum, should I take you to task for refusing to participate in a debate with me in an open forum? Because you did.

David then goes on to suggest that Autism Speaks are just as slanted as GR or DAN! by citing the fact that they have sanctioned three studies that concentrate on vaccines.

Dr. Parikh – Please get your rhetorical ducks in a row, or refrain from participating in this discussion altogether. Misinformation is a dangerous thing. If Autism Speaks is not “slanted,” then how do you explain their support for thimerosal-autism research?

If we look back at what Dr Parikh actually _said_ we can see the picture is clear. Dr Parikh said:

….there are many … groups (like Autism Speaks) that have been broader in their search for autism’s causes and cure.

Autism Speaks have funded three out of twelve studies that concentrate on vaccines. I would not describe a 25% hit rate as supporting thiomersal-autism research. I would describe it exactly as Dr Parikh – ‘broader in their search’. In other words, 75% of their research is _not_ about vaccines. That’s pretty broad.

Its a puzzle. I can only think David didn’t understand Dr Parikh’s rhetoric. I’ll close with an echo of David’s challenge to Dr Parikh. If you ever do change your mind about the debate – a debate in the most open arena of all – a weblog – just let me know. There’ll be no money in it at all but you’ll be able to say you did what Dr Parikh didn’t and accepted the challenge.

Dr Parikh responds.

Scientology and HBOT

23 Sep

At the start of the month I read a post about HBOT on the OC Register. Standard fare but something about it nagged away at me.

I realised it was the sidebar where the author had listed two purveyors of HBOT in Orange County. One of them was called Whitaker Wellness. The name rang a bell so I found the website and lo and behold, found the connection – Julian Whitaker, MD.

Whitaker Wellness in Costa Mesa was the first hyperbaric oxygen therapy clinic in Orange County to treat a large number of autistic patients.

I first blogged about Whitaker two years ago. It turns out that he has some interesting friends:

[Whitaker]….is with the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, established by the Church of Scientology to expose what the church calls psychiatric violations of human rights and who pushes a variety of CAM treatments including chelation.

My goodness these Scientologists get about.

Julian Whitaker is – like all DAN! docs and Scientologists down on toxins and big on how to get rid of them all but intriguingly the word ‘autism’ is not used once on his website, although a web search for Dr Whitaker and autism reveals lots of results.

I was concerned two years ago at the prospect of Scientologists being so involved with the autism/antivax movement and I still am. I hope Dr Whitaker is totally upfront with all his patients regarding his beliefs.

Salon – Inside the vaccine scare

22 Sep

Salon redeems itself from producing what Orac at the time called biggest, steamingest, drippiest turd ever dropped on the web.

Three years ago Salon published the notoriously innacurate ramblings of RFK Jr. After uproar in the web science community and numerous fixes and amends to the original piece, what was left was still an awful piece of credulous rubbish.

It seems that Salon learnt their lesson. This time, they have ensured that the person talking about vaccines and autism is a _scientist_ as oppose to a crowd-pleasing politician.

Rahul Parikh has published a review of Paul Offit’s Autism’s False Prophets which differs so wildly from the RFK Jr debacle that its almost impossible to think of them being in the same publication.

I don’t want to do a review of a review as that would be bizarre and unnecessary but Parikh makes some key points that I want to address. The first one is the way the book starts.

Early in Dr. Paul A. Offit’s new book, “Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure,” he describes a threatening letter he received from a man in Seattle. “I will hang you by you neck until you are dead!” it read. The FBI deemed the threat credible, assigning Offit a protective officer who, for the next few months, followed him “to and from lunch, a gun hanging at his side.” He then recalls a suspicious phone call from a man who recited the names of Offit’s two children and where they went to school: “His implication was clear. He knew where my children went to school. The he hung up.” These days, the hospital he works in regularly screens his mail for suspicious packages.

Such stories usually come from pro-choice physicians on the front lines of the abortion debate. But Offit is no obstetrician. Rather, he is a baby doctor — the chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The threats against him and his family have come not from antiabortion advocates, but rather from anti-vaccine crusaders who believe that vaccines cause autism. Offit, it turns out, has been targeted by them because he helped to develop a vaccine that prevents rotavirus, a serious gastrointestinal infection in children, and because he has been staunchly pro-vaccine in a time when there are many doubts about their safety.

It is amazing that we should be in a situation where a doctor who is actively saving lives is being targeted for that very fact. What is even more amazing is the fact that the very antivaxers who hate Offit so much simply don’t believe he _is_ being targeted. A few comments from Lisa Jo Rudy’s piece on Offit’s book illustrate this perfectly:

It’s very hard to judge the seriousness claims like Offit’s….

Mark Blaxill, Safe Minds.

I have heard Dr. Offitt make his claims of threats, etc. on more than one occasion. But I have never seen any real evidence of those alleged threats.

Wade Rankin, autism/antivax blogger

I would suggest that a reference to the possibility that some agency or company would harm one’s children in the future could be construed and repeated as a “threat” to one’s children if that threat would help to garner sympathy and label an opposing side as nuts.

Mike B

An amazing reaction. They genuinely hate Paul Offit so much that they think he is making up threats made to his children. And they think he’s doing it to ‘garner sympathy and label an opposing side as nuts’. This is the type of denial and refusal to see their own shortcomings that has led to the sorry state of autism/vaccine science in the first place.

Parikh also documents the reality of the science today and the reality of how the wider world views the autism/anti-vaccine community.

Despite what Wakefield claimed in his paper, his hospital’s ethics committee never approved his experiments to put children to sleep under general anesthesia, do spinal taps on them, take biopsies of their intestines (one of the children was hospitalized after his colon perforated in several places) and take volumes of blood from their veins. Deer also discovered serious conflicts of interest: Wakefield’s research was secretly bankrolled by a personal injury lawyer whose clients were suing MMR makers. Wakefield himself was given close to a million dollars to prove that the MMR caused autism. He had filed a patent for a new MMR vaccine at the same time he was doing his research. Upon learning this, Lancet retracted his paper, and he was charged with professional misconduct in 2005. If he is found guilty of misconduct, he will never practice medicine in the U.K. again.

The people in the autism/anti-vaccine community see Wakefield as a persecuted hero. Everyone else in the entire world who takes an interest in the matter sees him as a weak man who tried to game people – and did. Possibly he still is.

This level of disconnect between what those in the autism/antivax community see as the reality and the _actual_ reality is sometimes shocking. Even for me who has been in the front line of this debate for five years now, some of the things I read about and see from these people make my jaw drop.

I blogged about an example of this not long ago when Safe Minds Board Member Heidi Roger stated that Polio could be preferable to autism – and even that death could be better than autism.

This is a sadly far from uncommon opinion amongst a certain type of autism/antivax believer. To sum up their personality type would, I think, bring a sizeable minority of them very close to Munchausen syndrome by proxy/ Fabricated or induced illness , the indications of which seem very familiar to me from reading the Yahoo groups over the last few years:

* A child who has one or more medical problems that do not respond to treatment or that follow an unusual course that is persistent, puzzling and unexplained.
* Physical or laboratory findings that are highly unusual, discrepant with history, or physically or clinically impossible.
* A parent who appears to be medically knowledgeable and/or fascinated with medical details and hospital gossip, appears to enjoy the hospital environment, and expresses interest in the details of other patients’ problems.
* A highly attentive parent who is reluctant to leave their child’s side and who themselves seem to require constant attention.
* A parent who appears to be unusually calm in the face of serious difficulties in their child’s medical course while being highly supportive and encouraging of the physician, or one who is angry, devalues staff, and demands further intervention, more procedures, second opinions, and transfers to other, more sophisticated, facilities.
* The suspected parent may work in the health care field themselves or profess interest in a health-related job.
* The signs and symptoms of a child’s illness do not occur in the parent’s absence (hospitalization and careful monitoring may be necessary to establish this causal relationship).
* A family history of similar or unexplained illness or death in a sibling.
* A parent with symptoms similar to their child’s own medical problems or an illness history that itself is puzzling and unusual.
* A suspected emotionally distant relationship between parents; the spouse often fails to visit the patient and has little contact with physicians even when the child is hospitalized with serious illness.
* A parent who reports dramatic, negative events, such as house fires, burglaries, or car accidents, that affect them and their family while their child is undergoing treatment.
* A parent who seems to have an insatiable need for adulation or who makes self-serving efforts for public acknowledgment of their abilities.

I might catch some flak for making this comparison but whilst I am not suggesting that everyone autism/antivax adherent is MSbP or FII, I do think – as I say – a sizeable minority are. In the list above I have emboldened the characteristics I personally have seen lots of evidence of.

At any rate, whether there is genuine evidence of MSbP or FII or not, there is definitely an ongoing unreality to a certain group of peoples lives with autism. Why? To pretend to themselves they have total control over something that they do not understand? To medicalise something in order to keep alive the hope of a medical cure? To fuel their pre-existing lust for conspiracy theories? All of the above? None? Something else?

It gets to a point when it starts to not matter. When autistic children are literally being experimented on with absolutely no control in place like they are being with chelation, like they are being with Lupron and like they now are being with OSR we have to do something. When children in the UK are dying of vaccine preventable disease and children in the US are being hospitalised then we need to do something.

Paul Offit did something.

Age of Autism on chelation cancellation

18 Sep

I posted yesterday on the cancellation of the NIH study that was going to be examining chelation’s efficacy as an autism treatment.

What I said was that it was a good idea and it is. The simple facts are that autistic children are not toxic. The only labs that consistently find autistic children to be toxic are the labs Dr Jeffrey Brent identified as ‘these ‘doctor’s data’ type of laboratories’. In fact, its probably worth repeating his testimony about these labs:

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?

A: 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.

The standard way of chelating autistic kids is to do a provoked challenge test. As Dr Brent says – you’re supposed to have increased levels with provoked examples.

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

A: 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.

To sum up, the labs that consistently find a need to chelate autistic kids use the wrong sort of tests. When expert Toxicologists such as Brent do the proper ‘gold standard’ testing, the results are normal 100% of the time.

Its as simple as pie. You use the wrong test, you’re going to get the wrong results.

And yet, over on the Age of Autism website, they’re getting very angry about this cancellation. The angry opening paragraph to a recent post highlights the lack of logic in their stance:

So who canned the NIMH chelation study as “too dangerous?” Children are given huge doses of chemotherapy and radiation in a desperate effort to save them from cancer – fully knowing the side effects themselves can be deadly. It’s a fair risk most parents are willing to take to help a sick child.

Chemo is a standard treatment for cancer. It is medically indicated. Chelation is not a standard treatment for autism. It is not medically indicated. The reason it is not medically indicated is because there is no evidence metals are linked with autism.

There is a chain of logic that must be followed. If you want a type of treatment to be assessed for its efficacy, then your first step is surely to establish that there is a medical necessity for that treatment. If there isn’t then what you are doing is inflicting a completely unnecessary procedure on a child. In this case, a procedure that has been known to cause lasting brain injury in animals (rats).

The comments on AoA go from the bizarre:

So, why do I sense Pauly PrOffit’s grubby, greedy little fingers on this? This smells like something that he would do

To the paranoid:

THIS HAS BULLSH*T WRITTEN ALL OVER IT!!!

To the conspiracy-esque:

Notice the studies they WON’T do:
Studies on the effects of chelation.
Studies comparing unvaxed and vaxed children for autism.
Studies to find the misdiagnosed adults with autism to prove there’s been no increase.

When is everyone going to wake up to what’s happening?

NB – a study to find adults in Scotland is being planned if I recall correctly.

No-one considers the most likely reason for this cancellation:

a) There is no evidence metals cause autism
b) There is evidence chelation can cause injury
c) There is therefore what any rational person would see as an unacceptable amount of risk to children.

And of course we have the usual ‘my child recovered’ stories. Why do these stories never seem to get written up as case studies I wonder? We’re told there are thousands of them – where? Where in the medical literature are they? Apparently there are lots of rogue paediatricians who believe the antivaxxers so why aren’t they doing case studies on the multitudes of autistic children who are now totally recovered?

Personally I think that is what has bullshit written all over it.

Chelation study 'called off'

17 Sep

CHICAGO – A government agency has dropped plans to test a controversial treatment for autism that critics had called an unethical experiment on children.

The National Institute of Mental Health said in a statement Wednesday that the study of chelation (kee-LAY’-shun) has been discontinued. The statement says the agency decided the money would be better used testing other potential therapies for autism and related disorders.

The study had been on hold because of safety concerns . A study published last year linked a chemical used in the treatment to lasting brain problems in rats.

The treatment removes heavy metals from the body and is based on the fringe theory that mercury in vaccines triggers autism — a theory never proved and rejected by mainstream science.

Yahoo News

Back in June, I blogged about the possibility of the delayed chelation study being released. It had been delayed due to the same ethical concerns that now seem to have scuppered it. I can only view this development with relief. As I said at the time:

Lets be clear. This study is being touted about for one reason and one reason only – to appease the anti-vaccine/autism groups. In the mainstream medical/scientific community (and notably in the toxicology community) it is well known that autistic kids aren’t toxic.

Click on the link above to see some quoted testimony from Dr Jeffery Brent, world renowned Toxicologist. His opinion on the need for chelation of autisitic children is thoroughly discussed. Basically, when you do the provoked, non-standard tests from labs that make a good living from charging for these tests, they come back positive. When experts like Dr Brent do the gold standard tests, 100% of the time they come back normal.

There is no reason to chelate autistic children.

The most bizarre conspiracy theories yet

17 Sep

Two new conspiracy theories this week. The first one is an eye-roller. The second is an eye-popper.

The first one is the alleged hacking of Ray Gallup’s Vaccine Autoimmunity Project. I came across this email from JABS regular John Stone:

Unincidentally, I was appalled to hear today that VAP website has been hacked into and is likely to be down for an extended period.

If this is how people like Offit, not to mention Berners-Lee [more on this later – Kev] and Ghosh (see my previous post) think the future should be, our politicians ought to consider what is tolerable in an alleged free society.

As the poet Heinrich Heine noted in 1823: “Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people”.

“Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.”

These people already have the advantage of media domination, but they will not allow a word of dissent. If their science is so perfect, why cannot they discuss it?

So, following Stone’s train of thought, he seems to be stating that Paul Offit thinks that its OK that websites are hacked? I really doubt that.

But the really pointed allusion is in his last paragraph. He seems to be suggesting that ‘they’ (Offit et al) ‘will not allow’ oppositional views.

Did Paul Offit put out a contract on VAP? Somehow I really, really doubt it.

Ray Gallup’s reply was even more paranoid.

John,

Thank you very much.

I suspect that certain people had a hired gun to do this virus thing to VAP like I’m sure you have the same suspicions. Lots of PharmaMafia people out there that want to silence VAP by screwing up the VAP website with a virus including their surogates at such sites as Neurodiversity.com, etc.

Ray Gallup

My, my. Ray thinks someone from Neurodiversity.com (i.e. Kathleen or Dave) trojaned the VAP website.

I’m going to go out on a limb and go for user error. The server error (Directory Listing Denied) does not speak of a hack to me. Hacks are usually defacements of the original page which are non-destructive. This looks more to me like ahem, ‘someone’ has accidentally deleted the root file. If that is the case, simply asking the host (ixwebhosting.com) to restore the page from a backup (assuming they take them) would sort the problem out immediately. You can thank me later Ray.

So, thats the eye-roller. The eye-popper is way better.

On Monday, inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee said:

Talking to BBC News Sir Tim Berners-Lee said he was increasingly worried about the way the web has been used to spread disinformation.

……..

The use of the web to spread fears that flicking the switch on the LHC could create a Black Hole that could swallow up the Earth particularly concerned him, he said. In a similar vein was the spread of rumours that the MMR vaccine given to children in Britain was harmful. Sir Tim told BBC News that there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources.

Ooooh, you can imagine how well _that_ went down in certain quarters, right? A few hours later, the following was posted to EoH:

Group With Big Pharma Ties Wants to Shut Down Vaccine “Conspiracy Theories”

So, first inaccuracy: Sir Tim didn’t mention ‘shutting down’. He mentioned providing a label for trustworthiness.

But anyway, I was intrigued as to who this ‘group with Big Pharma ties’ were. So I read on:

Kingpins of Military-Industrial complex say they will “brand” websites they consider “trustworthy and reliable sources of information” A foundation populated by the giants of business, banking, government and military wants to “vet” websites and limit the spread of information that it says creates “conspiracy theories”. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), fronted by Internet creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee, says it is worried about the way the web has been “used to spread disinformation”.

Wait…what? W3C??? Kingpin of Military-Industrial complex???

For those that don’t know W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is:

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C’s mission is:

To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.

In my job as a web developer I have a lot of dealings with the standards developed by W3C. They helped develop the code that that is used in _all_ websites and they helped develop the ‘rules’ that allow web browsers such as the one you are using right now to view those websites.

Those ‘rules’ help make sure that code is used responsibly. It made Microsoft behave and develop the vastly improved browser of IE7. Its code is responsible for the fact that many, many more websites are accessible to people with disabilities than they used to be.

In a nutshell, what they do is draw up standards for code use for people like me and people like software developers. The idea of them being a ‘Kingpin of Military-Industrial complex’ is hilarious.

Here’s the full member list. Being a member ensures you one thing and one thing only: a say in how the standards of the future are shaped. I assure you there are no Illuminati lizards running around in Black Helicopters.

In all of the utterly crazy conspiracy theories I’ve seen so far, this one is right up there at the top of the tree.

Better dead than autistic

15 Sep

This is Heidi Roger who is the Treasurer and a founding member of SafeMinds.

Heidi is a firm, firm believer that vaccines cause autism. No shock seeing as she’s a member of SafeMinds.

What is a shock though is her attitude to human life. In an online debate regarding the book Autism’s False Prophets Rogers made the following astounding claim:

…AUTISM is no joke, it is not “oh well” so their kid will work at McDonalds instead of Trump tower, it is a nightmare without end, it is post traumatic stress disorder every day, it is not better than measles, mumps or rubella and maybe even not better than polio.

That’s right, autism is worse than Polio which can leave some kids needing an iron lung is better than autism.

Measles which has left two teenagers in the UK dead in the last two years and still kills hudreds of thousands worldwide is better than autism.

I beg to differ. Its my opinion that my autistic child is in a much better place than some poor child in an iron lung.

But then, later on, Roger topped even this heartless statement with one so heartless and chilling it made me catch my breath:

Death may be better than autism in some cases….

Is that an official position of SafeMinds I wonder? That death ‘may’ be better than autism. If anyone has any doubts about why I and others feel it necessary to devote so much time blogging against these peoples beliefs you have it encapsulated right there. Death is not better than autism.

On the homepage of this site is a pink ribbon. If you click on that ribbon you will see some photos of Katie McCarron. Katie was murdered by her mother. Her mothers defence was that death was better than autism.

Katie’s family didn’t feel that way. Her Dad, her grandma and her grandpa didn’t feel that way. I have had the pleasure of meeting her dad and grandpa and I know that they loved Katie just as she was and that what was done to Katie was a violation. To even discuss the idea that death is better than autism is a violation. How someone who is parent to an autistic child can even suggest that death is better than autism is quite frankly beyond me.

Arthur Allen – vaccine skeptics vs your kids

11 Sep

Whilst, I’m not sure that the people Arthur is writing about are skeptics as I understand the term (having a scientifically valid basis for not accepting an argument or position), I know what he means. And he’s right that it is this group of people vs the health of people everywhere.

The sub-header is even more accurate ‘immune to reason’. One only has to take a look over at the recent rantings on a certain blog we all know about where the latest themes are:

1) Presidential candidate Barack Obama is now a big pharma shill because he told one of them: “I am not for selective vaccination, I believe that it will bring back deadly diseases, like polio.”.

2) The latest study in a long line of studies that show once more there is no link between MMR and autism is both flawed and exonerates one of their heroes.

3) Kathleen Seidel is wrong because….uh….well, no one knows why but she must be. Apparently.

Immune to reason indeed.

As Arthur points out, there is a great deal at stake:

…in the last trimester of her pregnancy, Helena Moran caught a cough that she couldn’t get rid of. She figured she’d picked up the germ—whatever it was—from one of her patients at a Boulder dentist’s office. But the real nightmare began after her daughter, Evelina, was born: The baby began to cough and cough, and then she’d curl up in a little ball and turn blue. At the emergency room, she was diagnosed with whooping cough. She spent the next five weeks in intensive care and suffered permanent lung damage.

Now, this isn’t *all* the fault of the so-called autism community, but as I’ve discussed before, I’m ashamed to say that a lot of it is.

….the movement got a huge boost from the controversy over the mercury-laden preservative thimerosal, which some theorized might be linked to autism. That link has been disproven—by, if nothing else, the fact that autism rates remained steady after pediatricians and public health authorities told manufacturers to stop making thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines in 1999. But the anti-vaccine movement has kept going, finding ever new reasons to distrust immunization.

The are a lot of zealots out there who have fed upon the autism community. A parent who might not believe vaccines case autism listens to horror stories and reads links sent to them from such places of quackery as whale.to who are nothing to do with the autism community but who market their own brand of ridiculousness (the owner of whale.to believes dolphins can manipulate gravity and has the pictures to prove it!) regarding vaccines and the autism parent greedily sucks it down.

Arthur discuss the practice of abusing ‘religious exemption’ by these people:

Right now, in many states, all it takes to get an exemption from vaccine requirements is signing a form. Some, including a group of doctors at Johns Hopkins University, have proposed making it harder—allowing a philosophical exemption only after parents demonstrate a good-faith effort to educate themselves.

But an article I read in yesterdays ‘Edmond Sun’ stated:

….a person “who has reached the age of majority and is mentally competent to do so may justifiably refuse immunizations for himself or herself, but may not impose this refusal on a child, who has no choice in the matter.” Courts have consistently upheld this principle.

That makes sense to me. Who would want to refuse such a simple thing that has no link of any kind to autism?

Arthur closes with the following:

But while questioning authority is healthy, facts are facts. If vaccines really were responsible for autism, it would be too much to ask parents to do the altruistic thing. But more than a dozen studies have failed to discover such a link—and not a single legitimate study has shown that one exists.

He’s spot on. All the celebs and all the money in the world cannot change that simple fact. We need to get past this. Those who believe autism is caused by vaccines need to put up or shut up. They are holding up progress on autism research and causing the health of our societies to suffer.

I urge readers to visit Arthur’s piece and read the comments. The first few demonstrate exactly the sort of mindset Arthur is talking about – the one’s who bring shame on the autism community. They truly are immune to reason.

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