Posted on 03/27/2016 9:18:00 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
“My intent in screening this film was to provide an opportunity for conversation"
Robert De Niro on Saturday pulled a controversial documentary from his Tribeca Film Festival after facing backlash about the movie’s controversial and widely-debunked anti-vaccination message.
The actor, who has a child with autism, said in a statement that he had “concerns” with Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe after consulting with experts in the science field about the movie’s focus on the debunked link between vaccines and autism. It’s a reversal from his original stance amid mounting criticism that the film would be important in the ongoing conversation about the surrounding causes of autism.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
My late mother in law had polio as a child, and was permanently crippled because of it. One of her legs was smaller than the other, and she had to wear a brace and special shoe. She was one of the lucky ones--she never needed assistance breathing.
Good post. I wonder how they got DeNiro to drop his movie. What or how much did it require?
Yes, I have a particular interest in this topic. However, I do appreciate the pings, because I can and do miss interesting topics when I don't get pinged.
Within this situation, however, is nothing that implicates vaccines--even given the association of low vitamin D and autoimmune disorders. Any particular vaccine only contains a handful of antigens--contrast that with the thousands of antigens babies encounter every day. Who has not seen babies pick up filthy objects from the ground or floor and pop them in their mouth? How many millions of bacteria, fungi, and viruses do they thus ingest every day? If exposure to those thousands or millions of antigens (with the resulting immune system activation) does not cause neurological disease, then the estimated 350 antigens total that a child receives throughout the vaccine schedule are not going to cause a problem.
It would certainly be nice if autism could be traced back to some flaw in the vitamin D system. Certainly, it would be a simple matter to test for vitamin D levels in pregnant women and newborn babies and supplement them if necessary. It would be like the discovery that folic acid prevents certain birth defects. Plus, it would take away one of the favorite scare tactics of the anti-vaxxers and force them to come up with some other way to scare parents into willingly exposing their children to dangerous brain-damaging and even lethal diseases.
Oh, my.
First of all, neither "age of autism" nor "vaccination news" are reputable sites. The first article you linked, at "vaccination news," describes absolutely NO mechanism that would plausibly link vaccines to any kind of brain damage. Sure, it mentions demyelination and it mentions vaccines, then it goes into some nonsensical mumbo jumbo containing sciency words like "proteins" and so forth, and then it talks about some really old experiments and draws completely wrong conclusions about them. However, nothing it says actually corresponds with what is known about neurology or about immunology. Being a medical researcher with several years of experience with vaccines, I am quite able to recognize nonsense, even if it contains sciency-sounding words. But the target audience of such websites is not knowledgeable people like me--it is people that have no science education and thus cannot evaluate the validity of the "information."
The "age of autism" article also contains a lot of sciency-sounding mishmash, which I can't help but notice was written by Kent Heckenlively, Esq--a lawyer??? He apparently considers himself qualified to speak on vaccines since he spent 8 whole weeks investigating the expression of micro-RNAs in a monkey model of Ebola infection at Lawrence Livermore National Labs (which do not, as far as I know, have containment sufficient to study live Ebola). He mentioned a book chapter about autism written by Patricia Kane, Ph.D, Annette Cartaxo, M.D., and Richard Deth, Ph.D and even claims to have spoken with Dr. Kane--but all he does is relate information from the book chapter without actually tying it to vaccines. The book chapter does mention that the immune system seems to be activated in autistic brains--but immune system involvement does NOT mean that vaccines are connected. All children, unless they live in a sterile bubble, are exposed to countless thousands of antigens every single day that stimulate their immune systems. The roughly 350 antigens that a child is exposed to from vaccinations are insignificant in quantity next to children's typical daily exposures to antigens. The only difference between vaccine antigens and other antigens is that the antigens contained in vaccines come from organisms that can seriously injure or even kill a child who becomes infected from them.
The last article you linked appears to be a legitimate medical journal article. I cannot access the entire article, since it is behind a pay wall, but the abstract tells me that it discusses vaccination strategies for patients with metabolic disorders--a FAR cry from implicating vaccines in autism.
I do not know what disorder killed your son, so I cannot discuss it, beyond saying that it sounds like it was a genetic disorder (which are not uncommon). I am sorry for your loss.
It makes you appreciate medical technology, having something like that for experience. I’m not saying we shouldn’t make the vaccines as safe as possible, but I think vaccination is overall a good thing.
Don’t you find it strange that vaccinations fall under “settled science”, instead of actual studies?
Where in the world do you get the idea that vaccines are not tested in humans? Oh, nevermind--I know. Those anti-vax websites, whose knowledge of how drugs (including vaccines) are tested pre-clinically and clinically is as non-existent as their knowledge of the basic science of immunology, microbiology, biochemistry, physiology, etc. I'm guessing that your notion that vaccines are "settled science" rather than a topic that is under active study also comes from those shady anti-vax websites.
If you want to see the results of vaccine studies that have been completed, go to www.pubmed.org and type in your search phrases--disease name, vaccine, countermeasure, etc. If you want to see studies that are underway, or see how past studies were designed, go to www.clinicaltrials.gov and type in search phrases. You can often find data on how the studies are going at the clinical trials website. You notice that I do not tell you specific search phrases--because if I say to look for something specific, I am trying to control which information you see, and I don't want to do that.
The reality--which does not match the conspiracies pushed by anti-vax websites--is that it takes a minimum of ten years for a drug to be tested in clinical trials and for the company developing the drug to amass sufficient data to present to the FDA in support of marketing approval. Before the drug can be tested in humans, it has to have solid animal data supporting further testing in humans. Phase 1 testing tests safety by administering the drug to a few dozen up to a hundred or so patients to determine its safety. Phase 2 is the dose-finding stage, where different formulations of the drug are administered and the results compared. This phase tests the drug in a few hundred patients. Phase 3, the efficacy phase, tests the drug in thousands of patients to determine how well it works. In order to seek approval for use in specific patients, the drug must be tested in those patients. For example, a vaccine meant for pediatric use must be tested in children in the appropriate age group. Etc. Bringing a new vaccine to market is a complicated, time-consuming process--very unlike the bilge the anti-vax websites tell you to try to convince you to not vaccinate your children.
People who actually understand how vaccines work get themselves and their children vaccinated.
Just keep in mind that anti-vaxxery is an invention of the left--the people who do not want children to receive vaccines or medical care because their fear of overpopulation is greater than any compassion they might have towards other human beings. They want children to die.
You misunderstood me, I poorly stated my position. As I was citing a study done on monkeys directly looking for a link between autism and vaccine dosages, I assumed it was clear that I meant human autism studies. The core of the video, the subject of this thread, is a leading researcher in the study that is cited to prove that there is no link, confessing that he was part of a cover-up of the link they found.
This is the hockey stick exposure of the “settled science”.
The vaccine industry is knowingly responsible for maiming 1 in 62 people, the biggest medical tort case in history. Must be why they lobbied for and got immunity for their malpractice.
But they must me addicted to their profits, for they have doubled down on hawking their poison, just like the tobacco industry did in their day
No, nothing you said was clear. That "monkey study" sounds like a typical urban legend, one that can be debunked easily by anyone who understands science and has critical thinking skills. Just a couple of problems with that story are that research monkeys are quite expensive--from a couple of thousand up to tens of thousands of dollars. The number of monkeys needed to conduct a statistically robust study--for example, looking for a disease with an incidence of 1 in 60--would be cost-prohibitive, since you would need hundreds of monkeys...so, at $4000 a monkey, you could be talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on a single study. And that is just for the monkeys, not counting the other costs of research. That cost presumes that a researcher would even be able to purchase that many monkeys, since monkeys breed slowly. Doing research with monkeys is not like doing research with fish or mice, which reproduce rapidly and abundantly. Most experiments with monkeys only use a few--typically less than 20--and those experiments only take place once every bit of information can be extracted from studies done in cells and small animals. Another problem with that story is that monkeys do not get autism. Some researchers in China genetically engineered monkeys to show some signs of autism, but they still have to validate that model--and even then, it will always be understood that it is just a model, and not a mirror of human autism.
This is the hockey stick exposure of the “settled science”.
The term "settled science" is not used by scientists. It seems to be a phrase made up by Al Gore and his ilk to try to browbeat people into accepting an idea about which they continue to show well-founded skepticism. Real scientists know that you can never say anything is settled in science; someone can always come up with a better explanation of the data. If scientific investigation were so straightforward and easy that it would only take a couple of experiments to get to the basic facts about a subject, we wouldn't need scientists any more because we would already know everything. But science is not that easy--someone can spend years on a single problem and find nothing more than tantalizing hints about what is actually going on. That actually describes my PhD work--I had a question that I tried to answer but could not. It is now 16 years since I turned in my dissertation to get my degree, and that question still has not been answered. On the plus side, it remains a perfectly good question for PhD students to use to get their doctorates.
The vaccine industry is knowingly responsible for maiming 1 in 62 people, the biggest medical tort case in history. Must be why they lobbied for and got immunity for their malpractice.
Where is the evidence that vaccines maim people? By "maiming" people, I assume you are referring to that discredited "study" that "showed" that measles vaccine causes autism. That "study" was extremely poorly designed and conducted. For starters, it never went through an independent review board (IRB) who would have primarily looked at the ethical issues with the study, but would also have examined its scientific validity. It would have failed IRB review on both counts. So that guy was doing invasive, non-approved experiments on babies in order to "prove" that the combination MMR vaccine is dangerous--and his motive was to get people to use a measles monovaccine instead, since he had financial interest in such a vaccine. He also had a financial interest in filing lawsuits and padding his pockets; publishing an article (of his own, non-validated and uncorroborated data) supposedly showing a link between MMR and autism would have given him the scientific "proof" he would have needed to present to courts to win such cases. I do not know how the article survived the peer-review process, since the "science" in it was so horrifically bad. It has since been retracted, and that doctor no longer can practice medicine. Unfortunately, that article caused a big waste of precious research dollars and time as researchers scrambled to replicate and/or validate those results.
The fact is that autism is a genetic disease. No vaccine can affect a person's genes, since a vaccine cannot travel backwards in time to when that person was a tiny embryo or before that person was conceived.
Furthermore, given that all drugs (vaccines are drugs) are tested in thousands or even tens of thousands of volunteers before they can get FDA approval--don't you think that the several dozens of researchers would notice severe side-effects from them--given that they are specifically looking for side-effects from the drugs? FYI, for every drug that makes it to market, over 200 are rejected--the people conducting clinical trials and the FDA are very serious about making sure the drugs we use are safe and effective. The lie that vaccines are not tested before being sold is just that--a lie. You can find out the truth for yourself if you learn how to dig through the databases I mentioned in a previous post--www.pubmed.org and www.clinicaltrials.gov. These databases are used extensively by scientists (it is how we find out about the latest research in our fields), but they are open to public use.
BTW, that film that was pulled from the film festival is not worth the tape it was recorded on. Many people like to make propaganda/conspiracy films--my son watches them on youtube all the time--but that doesn't make them true. My son finds them highly amusing, while I spend time attempting to correct the many untruths in those films. Do you believe the global warming propaganda films like "An Inconvenient Truth" or "The Day After Tomorrow"? If you can accept that those are propaganda, then why do you unquestionably believe that a similar, non-scientific, film about a (debunked) vaccine-autism link is true?
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