Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. accepts the scientific consensus on climate change but rejects the conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism. Why? He has been fooled by fraud
I take no position on vaccination safety because I do not have enough information to take one. And I do not think anyone else has either. As far as I know, all the ''information'' available comes from official government sources and the orthodox medical establishment, neither of which is unbiased and reliable and neither of vwhich should be trusted any more than their opponants. I know of no independent sources of information.
All I know is that some people are saying vaccination is safe and some others are saying it is not. If one disregards the official position of the ones who happen to be employed by the government or the orthodox medical / scientific industry, there is no way short of conducting one's own study to decide between them.
Lacking any sources of reliable and unbiased information, I would advise anyone who asked me not to allow themselves to be pushed or coerced into being vaccinated or allowing their children to be vaccinated. As soon as any form of presure is applied by employers, schools, business, or governments, the whole matter ceases to be a medical or scientific issue and becomes a civil liberties issue.
The right of an individual to decide on hiis or her own medical matters is an absolute one and takes precidence over any claims of potential public harm. It is my responsibility to look after my own health and the responsibility of other people to take care of theirs.
I do not accept responsibility for other people's health. My current policy is to refuse vaccination on civil libertiies grounds regardless of if it is safe or not. The imposition of a medical dictatorship is a far worse menace than any disease could ever be. To fight it, I am willing to take my chances with any disease.
The unprecidented presure in recent years to coerce unwilling people into accepting vaccination against covid, regardless of if covid is a serious menace or not, is an intolerable attack on civil liberties and must be fought on all fronts.
You, and your “thinking” is a muddled mess of misunderstanding immunization, vaccines/immunity, and the Constitution. Please, don’t show up to my hospital-Take care of yourself when you get sick… let your disease run it’s natural course, you civil liberties intact.
My understanding is that RFK, Jr. does not only cite Wakefield. Supposedly he cites hundreds of papers that allegedly show a connection between childhood vaccines and autism. I believe all of the citations are in his book _Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak_. Please let me know if I'm misunderstanding, or if you've somehow addressed this point and I missed it.
I'm sure he cites beyond Wakefield. The problem Michael faces (and anyone debating this subject) is you face the "Gish Gallop" - being buried in countless individually weak studies which as a whole are too time consuming to individually refute. Named after Duane Gish, a young earth creationist who loved to drown his interlocutors in dozens of studies showing the earth was 6,000 years old. It's an application of Brandolini's Law.
The problem is that this technique cuts both ways. Covid Science employed an identical technique during the pandemic - uncritically producing hundreds of weak papers to support whichever theory was popular at the time - never applying careful skepticism to the individual claims, instead relying on the sum-of-the-parts to argue "the science was settled".
Consider for a moment how rapidly the premise that wearing cloth masks could end the pandemic, with studies immediately appearing showing 50%, 70%, and 100% reductions in Covid cases merely by the adoption of cloth masks.
No one stopped to ask the obvious "how could cloth masks so easily stop the common cold and we never thought to use them before?". "How did we do ~70 studies pre 2020 and failed to find efficacy of mask but now everyone seems to find massive effect?"
Then, experts, seeing so many studies showing masks worked argued the Science was Settled, and would promote the totality of mask evidence without ever having taken the time to actually read and pick through the terrible individual studies this claim rested upon.
Same thing happens to most (traditional) antivaxxers - they hand you 50 studies showing the Vaccine Autism connection and claim victory while you spend months going through the individual papers.
Yes but RFK, Jr. cited 2 or 3 other studies besides Wakefield (one of them allegedly from the CDC) in his recent Rogan and Weiss interviews. If Michael were to respond what has been happening recently, I would expect a counter argument to at least acknowledge those studies, if not to refute them. But instead it seems to me that Michael has cherry picked the most cited study from the pro-vax side due to all the fraud around it. The other studies get ignored. So it comes across as a straw man piece. I understand there can be weak studies but unfortunately one cannot say any particular study is weak without looking at it. So it seems there is just an assumption that the hundreds of other studies are all weak and Michael can rest his case with one study.
My thoughts on this piece by Michael, and I could be completely wrong - he isn't offering a complete refutation of the vaccine-autism link in this piece, rather, he is highlighting that the primary source of this claim was the result of deliberate and repeated fraud. (Highly recommend Deer's book "The Doctor who Fooled the World").
Michael has been a vocal supporter of debate, and I am sure would be happy to go through a detailed point-by-point rebuttal with RFK if the offer was extended to him instead of Peter Hotez (more likely, Shermer might work with someone like Paul Offit and organize the debate). This puts Michael at contrast with practitioners of "scientism" like David Gorski who believe their ideas are beyond reproach.
In the case of the additional 2 or 3 studies RFK pointed to, do you have them on hand?
I don't but I'm pretty sure he referenced them in the Bari Weiss interview if not also the Rogan one. I don't think he cited exactly by title, journal, month, year, etc. though.
If I get time I will look through the transcript and post them here too.
I've followed the Vaccine-Autism story for decades, prior to reading Deer's book I granted Wakefield more charity/benefit of the doubt. I assumed that because he was also working on a competitor to the MMR vaccine, he unintentionally was seeing a link that wasn't there - which could be as simple as not apply the "no holds barred skepticism" that Sagan called for when he was gathering data.
I had no idea the level of intentional fraud he employed in making his claims. I have also not seen a rebuttal from him confronting the evidence Deer presents over his decade+ long investigation.
The other book Michael referenced - Stuart Ritchie's "Science Fictions" (not to be confused with Shermers own book "Science Friction") is a great read if interested in The Replication Crisis and want some background into how bad papers go mainstream and how to spot them.
It's interesting though, because Stuart Ritchie himself appears to have been duped by bad papers almost immediately after publishing his book - he has repeatedly cited poor studies on cloth masks as evidence they work [1].
I guess that just shows the challenges all of us face confronting pseudoscience and making our skepticism is applied dispassionately.
__________
[1] Note he is only skeptical of an RCT, while citing much poorer studies by "Masks4all"s Jeremy Howard, and two studies which failed replication by Leffler and Lyu et al.
There is ample undeniable evidence to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that vaccination and clean water have been the greatest medical/scientific boon to the human race. The problem is that not sufficient of our numbers are well educated, or intelligent enough appreciate that, although even Kennedy is perhaps just about smart enough to drink clean water.
In the 60's there was an uproar over the possibility of the US requiring everyone to wear a seatbelt in the car. The same arguments about civil liberties used during COVID were used then too. Nonetheless, the data showed the benefits of wearing a seatbelt far outweighed the costs of not wearing one, not to mention the potentials for injuring other people in the car or local transportation having to scrape your smeared carcass off the road (which in turn held up daily traffic even more than necessary).
Should one person's right not to vaccinate infringe upon the rights of people not to get sick from easily preventable diseases? Should one person's right not to vaccinate infringe upon the rights of those that are immunocompromised who could easily die from such diseases? Should one person's ignorance about vaccines be equal to another person's knowledge? These are the questions that many, like seatbelts, would typically answer "no" to.
I'm all for liberty, but we also can't have liberty without collective responsibility. We have the freedom to drive so long as we all obey the traffic laws. We have the freedom to purchase goods and services so long as we all agree to pay taxes. The argument here was we'd all have the freedom to go about our lives again if we all agreed (and were medically capable) to be vaccinated.
All of these arguments I used to support until our Government forced the population at gunpoint to take the fastest vaccine created in history which wound up making you more likely to get Covid (at worst case scenario) or simply have no impact on transmission (at best case).
They sacrificed decades of credibility over the Covid vaccine, and that's why people like RFK Jr are suddenly getting a national platform. RFK has spouted his claims for 18 years (at least). Joe Rogan has had his podcast for 14 years. Why do you think all the sudden he now gets on Rogans show and his (largely) debunked claims are having everyone from Paul Offit to Oprah weighing in?
Could you provide the evidence (referenced source) for the comment that vaccines made you more likely to get COVID? Out of interest. I think it's very important to show that comments have a solid foundation.
Of course. My claim that the vaccine may make you more likely to get Covid is based on 4 pieces of evidence:
1) It was the challenge of SARS vaccines for decades Ralph Baric and colleagues hadn't solved. Here is screenshot from "The Invisible Siege' - a very pro covid vaccine book based on extensive interviews with Ralph Baric.
2) Pair of Cleveland Clinic studies found that vaccinated employees had more covid infections than unvaccinated - more boosters translated to more cases. I am posting the "Fact Check" on this claim because it does raise fair criticisms of the study, but at the same time, I find it odd how the last 3 years, any study - no matter how poor in quality - as long as it found masks, vaccines, school closures, etc worked - there was no interest in the study design, lack of controls, sample size, author affiliations , etc - it's only when studies appear which don't show us what we like we suddenly care about p-values and paper quality. Consider how widely shared the laughable Kansas Mask Study was shared back in 2020 which was borderline fraud.
3) Every single country in the world had covid cases increase *after* the vaccine program reached 80-99%. In many countries covid cases exploded post vaccination, even those who had early success like New Zealand, South Korea, and Australia. I'm not aware of any previous vaccine where we saw the target infection increase rather than decrease once we vaccinated the population. This indicates to me that the vaccine may have made the population more prone to variants, as Baric kept finding with his mice. Consider Denmark which had extensive testing throughout the pandemic and largely relaxed mitigation relative to the world (low mask use, schools open, brief lockdowns) - they had 340K cases the first 18 months of the pandemic. By August 2021 they hade one of the highest vax rates in the world. Within 6 months they would have another 2 mllion cases. How could this be?
4) It matches what I suspect we have all seen around us, passing "the smell test". Anecdotally, my friends who got vaccinated got Covid at least once or twice anyway. It spread throughout our kids school among the teachers (but not the students) Fall of 2021. My wife's hospital had a lot of staff come down with Covid (including her) December of 2021.
Beyond my anecdotes, we can see this with notable public figures. Fauci, Bourla, Biden(s), Wallensky, and even Stephen Colbert had notable infections post vaccination (some of them more than once). Social Media Scientists like the girls from Unbiased Science Podcast came down with it twice each, as did Michael Mina, Peter Hotez, and everyone else - all after the vaccines rolled out.
Now, I would love to have more evidence than 1) The words of the "Titan of Coronavirology" Ralph Baric, 2) Observational Studies, 3) High level data at country level and 4) anecdotes of public officials. Unfortunately I don't think the government, Moderna, or Pfizer is going to fund disinterested studies. Maybe I'm a pessimist though.
Thank you for taking the time to respond. The one COVID vaccine fact that stuck was that the vaccines had only limited impact on transmission. I can't recall the data, but as far as I remember none of them had a significant impact on that effect. Indeed, as I think your first point says, the vaccines aimed at other coronaviruses did not prevent cell-cell transmission. I remember from my undergrad days studying virology, that many of the vaccines aimed at RNA viruses of the paramyxoviridae had the unintentional effect of increasing chronic infection. Coronaviruses are not in this group, but it was a concern of vaccines aimed at surface viral antigens. Indeed, I was (and remain) confused why the vaccines were targeted at the most variable part of the viral structure. It seemed logical to me to use more conserved internal antigens. Yes, these would not be hit by antibodies in quite the same way, but they would be subject to cellular immunity, which is more protective overall. Anyway, I am sure there is a biological reason - and I can suggest some if anyone is interested.
However, the main impact of the vaccines (and they varied widely) was on the severity of infection. Those vaccinated had milder infections, on average. Thus the impact was on mortality, not transmission, for which, as I say they have little impact.
Which then leads to the trials you mentioned - and I am not directly familiar with them, but I can make a general point. Although the vaccines do not reduce transmission (at least not in a large way), I wouldn't expect them to increase it. That makes no direct sense. However, there are two, indirect ways in which transmission would increase following vaccination (hopefully this doesn't sound oxymoronic). The first is that people feel more confident to go out and about, following vaccination, so increase population-wide transmission. Remember there is little reduction in transmissibility following vaccination: so, more people being out and about means more transmission. Secondly, there was an increase in testing, so more people were being identified who were positive. I can't comment on the testing regime in the US, but in the UK we were supposed to test regularly, initially; then only when we had likely symptoms; then, finally, voluntarily, as restrictions were relaxed.
With regard to your third point, as I mention above, having a vaccine won't make you more prone to being infected: that's entirely pot-luck. Given that most people are asymptomatic/weakly symptomatic, the only way you are going to detect that increase in transmission is through testing. Other than more transmission, there is no reason why a vaccine would lead to more infection. Vaccines may alter symptoms (indeed that's fairly likely) but it should have no direct effect on infection, other than through changes in behaviour, which lead to more transmission.
I am pro-vaccine (as you can tell). However, I was not in favour of extended lock-downs, because of the impact on mental health (particularly in children) and on the economic impact. I also remain highly skeptical of the impact of masks. I don't know if you had them in the US, but we did have people wearing face shields. I really do not know what the benefit of these could possibly be. They don't really block airflow.
If you have a virus that primarily causes mortality in a particular group, that group should remain isolated until appropriate measures are in place to protect them. (Personal choice, aside, in terms of their behaviours, of course; and also assuming that there are suitable support measures available for those at risk.) However, if the pathogen has limited health impact on other groups, then I would prefer that these groups could continue to be able to live "normal" lives and build up immunity through standard exposure to antigens. However, that's a choice, on my part.
We do have to remember that ahead of the first lock-down, there was very little information available, and mortality could have been a few percent of those infected, from the early reports. That would be a lot of people. Only later did we get a fuller picture where most people were asymptomatic.
1) >>"I wouldn't expect them (vaccines) to increase it. That makes no direct sense."
Not sure if you clicked on my screenshot (via Twitter) of the quotes from Ralph Baric, but I do trust him that his attempts developing SARS vaccines over the last 2 decades ended in failure because his mice would wind up getting even sicker from variants. I see no reason why he would lie about this, and it is an astonishing admission to make given what transpired after we rolled out the vaccines.
There is also the theory of "original antigenic sin" that goes back 60 years, proposing that immune imprinting can make our immune systems prone to infections, and it could be that the Covid primed our immune system to be prepared for one specific form of attack from Covid19, which slight mutations bypassed easily.
I honestly don't know - this is not my area of expertise.
What is troubling to me is how politicized this vaccine became (because it was a campaign point). You aren't allowed to suggest it failed which is antithetical to the pursuit of science. There is no rigorous skepticism, no dispassionate review of conflicting data.
Bottom line, I do disagree with the premise that it wouldn't "make sense" for a ILI vaccine to potentially make you more prone to ILI, as, pre pandemic, it was already declared a high risk by experts including the top mind in Coronavirology - that seems like a possible outcome we should have been prepared for and studying. Instead we stuck our heads in the sand and declared it wasn't possible to get Covid once vaccinated.
2) >>" Thus the impact was on mortality, not transmission, for which, as I say they have little impact."
There is a strong counter to this claim - all cause mortality actually increased after the vaccines in all but 4 countries around the world. [1]
Like you, I am generally pro-vaccine, and I am not saying the vaccine is why countries like South Korea had excess mortality of +11% (that's a lot) - it's more likely it simply didn't do anything, and confounders are why deaths increased.
3) >>"The first is that people feel more confident to go out and about, following vaccination, so increase population-wide transmission"
There is enough places in the world which lived life close to normal throughout the pandemic which can serve as controls and reject this hypothesis. Sweden, half of the US (Dakotas, Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas), Africa, Mexico.
They also had the same curves as the places reopening - don't you agree?
4) >>"Secondly, there was an increase in testing, so more people were being identified who were positive"
I thought of that too, but when looked at the data I found enough examples to falsify in my mind that hypothesis. Yes, countries like South Korea, Japan, and Vietnam did seem to only have cases and mortality spike once they finally started mass testing in 2021 and 2022.
But there's plenty of countries which had comprehensive testing programs in place throughout 2020 and early 2021. Notably Denmark had one of the highest testing rates pre pandemic, had one of the highest vaccinate rates in the world, only to see Covid absolutely explode in fall 2021. And this is a country which had kids in school by spring 2020 and one of the lowest mask use in the world.
5) >> "We do have to remember that ahead of the first lock-down, there was very little information available, and mortality could have been a few percent of those infected, from the early reports. "
For 100 years, "Early reports" of nearly every "new" pathogen we discover have an alarming fatality rate (I saw "new" in parentheses to point out they are just new to us, as we finally developed the cataloguing skills necessary to even see the after 300 million years. SARS03, MERS, Zika, Ebola, H1N1, various bird flus - and they are always magnitudes lower once we stop relying on availability bias.
By the time governments acted we had enough data to see the IFR and CFR were far lower than the early reports. Ioaniddis showed this with wastewater and was blasted by the media, science comms, and politicians who seemed eager (for reasons I still can't explain) to make this a bigger deal than it really was.
Yet, it turned out he was right.
6. You said a lot of things I agreed with there's not enough space to quote and commiserate :)
Sorry for the delay in replaying. I haven't had time to go through the data on one of your links, but I will do so, in the next couple of weeks. Quite a lot of work at the moment.
To address a couple of your points, in no particular order. The SARS2 virus was new. Phylogeny supports an origin in China in 2019 - and I won't get drawn on whether it was a lab escape or not. No real evidence either way - at least not at the moment. SAR1 was also a novel coronavirus, while HIV appears to have emerged in the late 19th century. Each, has evolved from a pre-existing virus. The genetics is pretty sound and not an effect of sampling bias, for example.
That leads to one issue with the use of the mortality figures. You aren't really looking at a single viral target, rather an evolving cloud of viruses. Mortality was far higher in the autumn to winter of 2020 than spring 2020 in the UK and that did come down with vaccination - and the second lock-down. The virus variant in the second wave was far more transmissible than the first.
I'm not sure what you mean by "ILI vaccines", however, I would make a distinction between the study where vaccines increased sickness in mice and your earlier statement that vaccines increase infectivity. These are not the same thing. The early paramixovirus vaccines that caused chronic illness in mice vaccine trials didn't increase infectivity; they caused chronic infection, in part because they didn't illicit an effective cytotoxic response - as I recall, but would need to check that. The antibody response increased cell-to-cell infection within the mice. In the case of the mRNA vaccines, the cell produces antigen and a cytotoxic response is engaged, as well as an antibody response, so a rather different vaccine.
Certainly, I would need to look at the data, but I suspect that there are a few confounding effects going on. I'll look at your data as soon as I can and see if I can provide a more nuanced response.
Are these individuals opinion the best evidence you have to offer ?Vaccination is without one iota of doubt amongst the most beneficial medical interventions ever devises. Where the hell do you and your ilk suppose diseases like polio, smallpox & others went and why, also why did diseases like chickenpox and others become common once again ? Too much thinking for your diminished intellectual capacity perhaps ?
My opening comment in this thread I point out that RFKs "largely debunked claims" are only gaining traction 20 years later because PH oversold, overpromised, and underdelivered the Covid vaccines - I'm unclear how in that opening you could "deduce" anything negative coming from me on Smallpox or polio.
Criticizing one failed vaccine has no relation on any other successful vaccination campaign. As skeptics we should be able to remark on medical interventions which fail without having someone "reasonably deduce" ill intent. Did you assume Dr Offit was anti-vaccine when he criticized RotaShield in the 90's?
Prior to Covid Hysteria, as I pointed out, it was perfectly acceptable to reflect on the failures of ILI vaccines by esteemed scientists in esteemed publications. [1] It would be great if we could return to being dispassionate rather than tribalist, which I suspect you are guilty of - taking offense to the "sin" of pointing out Covid vaccines didn't work.
To the question of why certain celebs are performing yet another pile-on is that they are just famous, & it would appear without a jot of critical thinking to their names. One can always opt out of something because of a demand for yet more data, but isn’t that just kicking the proverbial can down the road. By and large and for most of their history, vaccines have been useful servants to man & beast, so I for one am convinced and take them when offered. I wonder how many people who refuse vaccines for some reason or other, question all the medical equipment when in hospital, or nit pick about the historical data on the particular aircraft they have just booked to fly in ?
" I wonder how many people who refuse vaccines for some reason or other, question all the medical equipment when in hospital, or nit pick about the historical data on the particular aircraft they have just booked to fly in?"
That has been my strongest counter point when debating antivaxxers, science deniers, or simply people unfamiliar with the scientific method and were being swayed by pseudoscience the last 25 years.
However, the corollary to this same argument, does apply to the Covid vaccine.
If planes were falling out of the sky, you would have the right to question aircraft safety.
If you took a vaccine promised to make you immune from a disease and still got that disease, you'd have the right to question the vaccine.
This is why RFKs 20 year old schtick is going mainstream.
The president of the united states, Anthony Fauci, the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna, political pundits, Donald Trump, late night hosts, and the head of the CDC, likely your PCP, all said this vaccine made you immune, a "dead end".
That is obviously false. They were wrong.
Now the public seems to have the appetite for "what else was wrong these people told me?".
The proper response would be to admit error, explain how science captured the error and won't make the same mistake again. Use this as a learning moment.
Would you be in favor of slavery if there was solid scientific evidence that it would benefit the national economy? After all, should the right of the minority of slaves to freedom outweigh the rights of the majority to prosperity?
If an individual is immunocompromised I would prefer to let nature take it's course and let such a defective die and stop trying to make others pay the cost of his misfortune. I would not allow his bad luck to infringe on my right to decide for myself what medical procedures to employ.
If a begger come up to me on the street and asks for money, it is my choice to either give it to him or not. But if he pulls a gun and demands that I give him money, he is a robber and I would be justied in fighting back against an armed robber to defend myself and my property.
We do not ''agree' to pay taxes; most of us are FORCED to pay taxes under threat of punishment if we refuse. Saying we ''agree' to pay taxes is like saying you agreed to give the robber pointing a gun at you your money, so the transfer of money from your wallet to his was voluntary.
We could all have had the freedom to go about our lives without any need for vaccination if the government had only decided not to interfere with that freedom. The loss of freedom was not caused by a virus; it was caused by the government deciding to take that freedom away. In Sweden the government made a different choice; they decided to respect the rights of the people and trust the people to decide for themselves what measures were needed.
Ultimately, the argument is not about science or facts; it is about values and what kind of a world we want to live in.
''Colective responsibiliy'' was the ideology of a certain group of people around 80 years ago. You may have heard of them. They called it ''sippenhaft''. Look up that term in German and see if you agree with them. I suspect you do. You certainly sound like it.
Regardless of Wakefield’s actions, there has been an astounding increase in the number of children with autism… From something like one in 10,000 to a current one in 34 in the US… This understandably leads to people looking for a culprits, and it explains the strength of the anti-VAX movement, and that there are correlations Which appear to be quite powerful. Diagnostic changes to the definition of autism do not explain this profound increase, and other than some thoughts about neonicotinoids and other herbicides there does not seem to be any other explanation as powerful as vaccines.
For a different perspective on the possible link between vaccines and autism, see articles by Sharyl Attkinsson [1] in which she briefly reviews some of the studies [2-4] that Shermer and the mainstream media ignore or censor.
Shermer and the media reflexively try to smear and silence people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [5], calling him a kooky "conspiracy theorist" and "anti-vaxxer" who is spreading "dangerous misinformation." Actually, like Sharyl Attkinsson, RFK Jr. is pro-vaccine [6] but believes that people should be free to question vaccine safety without being bullied, smeared, or censored.
Good reading , only one thing to say. The difference between the MMR vaccine and the covid vaccine is that the MMR vaccine stopped the spread of the diseases and prevented one from getting infected, can we say that about the the vaccination for covid?
Kennedy seems like a very trustworthy, honest, open-minded, and patriotic person. I think his personal virtues—more than his dubious arguments—are what convince people that vaccines are "dangerous." It's amazing what people will believe if they hear it from trusted sources.
You write, "The evidence for the link is not only nonexistent, it never existed". Leat you believe RFK Jr is accepting anecdotes wholesale as scientific proof, I daresay you have not examined the "ecvdence" he cites.
Likewise, the evidence of anthropogenic global warming skeptics I believe has gone unexamined by you. I hope, at minimum, you have examined the fraud perpetuated by the world leading climate scientist in "Climategate"* and "Climategate 2" to, as Mann wrote, that they needed to find a way to "hide the decline" in temperatures, declines that poked holes in his theories and models - and that they did indeed find a way to do so. Even the current outlandish claims recently labeled "global boiling"* are resultant from largely non-measured data but hypothetical estimates for weather stations; stations that have been taken down rn-masse by NOAA, but somehow are still providing temperatures**.
And contrary to what you seem to be claiming,,l the evidence for the latter is far more compelling than the evidence for vaccine induced autism. I would request that you watch Tony Heller's (of realclimateacience dot com notoriety) recent "Climate Fakery" Youtubr & Rumble series (and not just one or two videos, but all 22 - as some are quite cursory).
So before expressing certainty that no exists for these topics, that consensus exists, or that consensus is anyway related to truth, that you actually review the data and evidence put forth by the claimants of these theories you readily dismiss.
Before attributing RFK Jr's belief in in vaccine-induced Autism to susceptibility to fraud, and his belief in Anthropogenic climate change to alleged "consesnus" (a consensus which objectively does not exist - again I beg that you watch Tony Hellers's latest entries in his recent "climate fakery" series, in one of which he goes over the a subject that he (and sites such as wattsupwiththat dot com) frequently debunk.
And I would note that "consensus" is irrelevant to the scientific method, and oft its results directly contradicts with what turns out to be truth.
Please read/watch the evidence, particularly on Anthropogenic climate-change, that those who do not follow the orthodoxy.
RFK and the like, who are critics of "the consensus" are not unintelligent, nor suggestible people who have had the wool pulled over their eyes - but rather those who are willing to peak through the gaps in then wool.
Please humor me, at least on the climate change front, and watch/read the counter-narrative.
In 1971 we were told of impending ice age.
In 1989 we were told of imlendong disaster by 2000 of sea level rise.
In 2000 we were told of impending disaster of sea level rise that would affect our shores by 2023.
Most people don't even know how the climate models have been "adjusted" to claim the it was actually cooler than recorded in early 20th century...
**Most don't know that we are using less than half of number of actual NOAA/NASA thermometers for ocean temrpatures than we used 40 years ago, and that instead of removing those from the data set, they instead estimate what that data should be. Conveniently the estimates prop up the new "global boiling" claims.
And mark the their claims well that this would be the worst Hurricane/Tropical-Storm season on record, when the reality is that it will another typical year.
*Most don't know that the heat wave of the early 1930's was removed from climate models. Most are unaware of Climategate, where Mann intentionally found a way "hide the decline" in temperatures in the historical record that would hurt his now famous / infamous "hockey stock" graph.
Most don't know that all historical measures of thermometer-recorded temperatures in the USA were decreased in the record prior to the year 1940 (the year could be wrong), woth the ludicrous claim that there was some kind of universal reason that all of those recorded temperatures were recorded as too warm.
Anyways I the above is a scratch, on a scratch, on the surface of the massive failuea and fraud involved in the climate modeling.
Not one climate model has been accurate 10 years later - nor even close. Unless you consider models made by mathematicians/statisticians/engineers who have made their own models that do not exclude inconvenient data or include data that was not actually measured aliterally the current climate models are models based largely upon already moddeled-data, and exclude any data that hurts their desired outcome for their models.
Be it from the UN's IPCC or The USA's NOAA/NASA, you will only get the BILLIONS of dollars in funding if you predict scenarios that support the doomsday belief/religion of Anthropogenic-climate-cuange's acolytes, and provide rationale for the expansion of Governmental powers and tje expansion if Tran-National bodies' powers'.
He’s uneducated on a number of topics he holds forth on.. like Rogan. In his case, virtually no one would bother listening to him, about anything, but for his namesake. It is telling, and depressing, that know-nothings like he, Rogan, and more importantly Trump, have such a ‘following’.
I totally agree with you and am 100 % pro vaccine. Now that RFK is running for president and people are "liking" him, I have a big problem: I can't reconcile his long standing position on vaccines and then believe he could be president. If he is unable to change his mind on vaccines after talking to so many experts (who should have more credibility than the average Joe or discredited scientists or Jenny McCarthy), then how could anyone think of him as Presidential material??
Ah, another shill talking head. We will remember all of you fraud pushers who are breaking the law. The science linking autism to vaccines is far more compelling than the clearly corrupt few studies saying the opposite. Suggesting the same companies that have paid 10 billion in criminal fines in the last decade are not going to be corrupt for vaccines where they have complete legal immunity is something only a complete moron would accept
It is estimated that 1 in 100 people in Australia have Autism. In 2018 there were 205,200 Australians with Autism, a 25.1% increase from the 164,000 in 2015 (Source: ABS SDAC 2018– Autism in Australia). What is the problem with the US? Okay I could answer that, but really, there are lots of reasons that autism might exist in a population, vaccinations are but one of them.
Thanks for this. I know several people who are gravitating to Kennedy and away from Trump. That's hard to figure, The only similarity I can perceive is that they both peddle conspiracy theories.
Question: have you looked into Kennedy's allegations against Tony Fauci and the administration of the COVID response? I believe he accuses Fauci of funding research for the virus and maintains that COVID was all a plot by the US military.
Hey Shermer - why dont you round up Deer and any other so-called vaxx professional and have them debate RFK directly; you know why they wont....ego, cowardice, embarrassment and they are paid not to debate. Im for medical freedom NOT medical dictatorship - if the vaxx was healthy and safe it would sell itself...........BUT instead they had to lock down the entire globe for the f..king FLU and force people to take an experimental jab that rolled out in 18 months and if they didnt they risked losing their job (newsflash Mike - There is high probability they had the C-shot already made before the pandemic rolled out) - There has never been a safe and effective vaxx for the purposes of preventing anything plus why do Pharma manufacturers receive FULL INDEMNITY against vaxx health damages while raking in billions!! Why dont you look into Ed Dowd's research - better yet read "The Truth About Vaccines" by Dr Richard Halvorsen, Thomas Cowan, Sayer Ji's Green Med Info research, or Andrew Kaufmann?? instead Wakefield is a fraud because the a**hole health czar Bill Gates & MSM said so??.......... or you can just keep lining up like a good docile servant taking the shot / boosters and see how you do......herd immunity is a joke, germ theory is a joke ALL Fear mongering by those in power who want total control. Divide and conquer is the game right down to every cell in your body; we live in a war-based economy; war on everything from agriculture, climate, energy, race, sex, gender, economy, health, the sun, you name it, there is war for everything......even debating is a war because its deductive NOT inductive.............I practice holistic / orthomolecular therapy / medicine on myself and I didnt get COVID, never got the shot and never took a PCR test and Im doing better than everyone that took the shot(s) - Have fun boosting up Mike - Yours truly - Anti-Vaxxer
I think you should consider what sources of information you use to make choices. We all do, for everyday issues, such as what food to buy, what clothes to wear etc. What scientists do, irrespective of their political persuasion, is analyse data. In the short-term mistakes are definitely made. Wakefield had his article in one of the top medical journals of its day, for example. However, soon thereafter, more data came in which showed he was a petty crook and his data was false. That rebuttal has stayed the course of time - simply because there was no evidence to support Wakefield's claims, but plenty to show that they were patently false. Vast studies in Sweden and Japan, already showed that there was no link between the use of MMR and Autism. Moreover, there is a wealth of data showing that 98% of autistic traits are genetic. Feel free to Google. Over 60 alleles for autistic traits have been found. There is no link between vaccination and autism - as Michael's article states.
That you didn't get COVID is a blessing. However, if we consider massive pandemics, such as the 1346 Black Death, 25% of the population died. Of the 75% that survived, some had lucky genetics, but most avoided contact - and in Europe, the 75% pretty much inherited the Earth. That you didn't get COVID - well you may have done but had no symptoms - or you may have been one of the many who were never infected. If you never tested, how do you know you weren't infected? Most children, for example, were asymptomatic.
While "Big Pharma for example, makes a lot of money and it's definitely in their interests to do so - pay workers, sell product, etc, in the longer term, is it in their interests to kill people? I'm always reminded of a Bill Hicks sketch from 1991 about rock bands planting Satanic messages in their listener's heads that would get them to kill themselves. As Bill shouted, "What band wants their audience dead?" If you want to keep making a pretty Dollar or two, don't kill the market.
Im a fan of Bill Hicks......Show me Autism and a genetic relationship before 1980, 1970, 1900?? nowadays the numbers are staggering in terms of children who get autism thats not genetic?? People also like to cite "polio" when in fact the polio vaxx contributed more to polio than polio itself......genetics is always used a scapegoat, same with cancer, our bodies don't naturally produce autism or cancer that doesn't mean the parents dont transfer genes but your lifestyle, diet / poor nutrition, environmental toxic load, lack of proper sanitary infrastructure etc will dictate (in most cases) what happens to your body BUT no one wants to be accountable for their choices - they just want to go to their doctor and get a shot / prescription for the symptom and resort right back to dysfunctional lifestyles because all they are forced to care about is making money, paying the bills and going vacation (if they can)........what's next Transgenderism is genetic?? Amongst many other medical scams is statin drugs for cholesterol - your body naturally makes and needs cholesterol - there is no such thing as good or bad; you either have too much or too little and it can be corrected with the right diet and water intake NOT synthetic crap the medical establishments pushes. So, as I stated I practice preventive medicine to prop my immune system (everything the gov't tells you not to do - I do) and I'm healthy, no I wasn't "asymptomatic" during COVID another farce - explain the sudden deaths during & after the pandemic (Ed Dowd's research)?? This idea that life is better thru CDC approved chemistry is nonsense - how many people have holistic, naturopathic, functional doctors killed?? answer is 0 - how many deaths can be attributed to people themselves for poor choices and the Rockefeller created AMA medical establishments; a shit ton!! Why did Pfizer withhold clinical data related COVID shot effects; people are still buying the nonsense of mask wearing; tell me why big PHARM has FULL INDEMNITY against vaccine damages if their shots are safe and effective? Are you aware of what a virus actually is - its basically wave frequency that all living species are encoded with.........(listen to Tom Cowan and Zach Bush) - Why are we supposed to only listen to CDC / AMA medical establishments, that is the antithesis of the scientific method?? My life is 1000 times better based on my holistic / naturopathic practices not allopathic medicine - Im not saying the medical establishment at large has not done any good in many areas - but if everyone was walking around healthy, how much money would the establishment lose? So, its in their best interest to keep everyone run down, sick, misguided and reliant on them and death is collateral damage; Psychopathic Bill Gates who controls the WHO and wants everyone on the c-shot has come right out and said we need to lower the global population (Georgia Guidestones). Im also not a registered voter, Im 50yrs old and haven't voted for a president since I was 18 because that too is a charade - people need to start waking up to hard truths of Totalitarianism as it relates to the central banking system, paying taxes, geopolitics, toxic chemicals, the BS climate scare narrative and much more - these aren't random; its all orchestrated - the only thing that remains constant is the enormous gap between wealth and poverty which is growing wider by the day where the few control the many - did you ever ask yourself why media outlets across the globe say exactly the same thing - I mean how did they get the entire globe on lockdown for the FLU; please don't tell me that every country completely agreed (that has never happened in history - the only explanation is Global Imperialism); if you want to keep buying the Gov't propaganda feel free but maybe you should re-think your sources and understand the pyramid of power! - I dont want any of what our gov't is selling; also beware of another pandemic rolling out this decade (they are not done yet - they want everyone boosted up on big pharma needle poison not to mention they are using CRISPR technology to genetically modify food, living things etc) - And if they get the WHO Pandemic Treaty signed (and US joins) more restrictions are to follow because the Treaty will give them global medical power which will supersede all govts (NWO) hence, digital health ID / vaxx passports, social credit scoring, not allowed to eat meat blah blah - This is the largest attack on humanity in the last 5000 years
Just a quick point about seeing the role of genetics in the 1980s or 1990s: there was no way of testing/genetically-identifying these conditions at a population level until relatively recently. The technology didn't exist and the cost was prohibitively high. Remember the first human genome sequence took almost a decade to do and cost over $1 billion. Nowadays, it takes a few weeks to sequence an entire human genome and costs a few hundred bucks. You can screen a population for multiple conditions at (relatively) low cost. Autistic traits are one of those conditions for which the genetics is pretty sound - albeit incomplete.
With regard to vaccines and autism, there is no evidence to support that at all.
I take no position on vaccination safety because I do not have enough information to take one. And I do not think anyone else has either. As far as I know, all the ''information'' available comes from official government sources and the orthodox medical establishment, neither of which is unbiased and reliable and neither of vwhich should be trusted any more than their opponants. I know of no independent sources of information.
All I know is that some people are saying vaccination is safe and some others are saying it is not. If one disregards the official position of the ones who happen to be employed by the government or the orthodox medical / scientific industry, there is no way short of conducting one's own study to decide between them.
Lacking any sources of reliable and unbiased information, I would advise anyone who asked me not to allow themselves to be pushed or coerced into being vaccinated or allowing their children to be vaccinated. As soon as any form of presure is applied by employers, schools, business, or governments, the whole matter ceases to be a medical or scientific issue and becomes a civil liberties issue.
The right of an individual to decide on hiis or her own medical matters is an absolute one and takes precidence over any claims of potential public harm. It is my responsibility to look after my own health and the responsibility of other people to take care of theirs.
I do not accept responsibility for other people's health. My current policy is to refuse vaccination on civil libertiies grounds regardless of if it is safe or not. The imposition of a medical dictatorship is a far worse menace than any disease could ever be. To fight it, I am willing to take my chances with any disease.
The unprecidented presure in recent years to coerce unwilling people into accepting vaccination against covid, regardless of if covid is a serious menace or not, is an intolerable attack on civil liberties and must be fought on all fronts.
You, and your “thinking” is a muddled mess of misunderstanding immunization, vaccines/immunity, and the Constitution. Please, don’t show up to my hospital-Take care of yourself when you get sick… let your disease run it’s natural course, you civil liberties intact.
My understanding is that RFK, Jr. does not only cite Wakefield. Supposedly he cites hundreds of papers that allegedly show a connection between childhood vaccines and autism. I believe all of the citations are in his book _Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak_. Please let me know if I'm misunderstanding, or if you've somehow addressed this point and I missed it.
I'm sure he cites beyond Wakefield. The problem Michael faces (and anyone debating this subject) is you face the "Gish Gallop" - being buried in countless individually weak studies which as a whole are too time consuming to individually refute. Named after Duane Gish, a young earth creationist who loved to drown his interlocutors in dozens of studies showing the earth was 6,000 years old. It's an application of Brandolini's Law.
The problem is that this technique cuts both ways. Covid Science employed an identical technique during the pandemic - uncritically producing hundreds of weak papers to support whichever theory was popular at the time - never applying careful skepticism to the individual claims, instead relying on the sum-of-the-parts to argue "the science was settled".
Consider for a moment how rapidly the premise that wearing cloth masks could end the pandemic, with studies immediately appearing showing 50%, 70%, and 100% reductions in Covid cases merely by the adoption of cloth masks.
No one stopped to ask the obvious "how could cloth masks so easily stop the common cold and we never thought to use them before?". "How did we do ~70 studies pre 2020 and failed to find efficacy of mask but now everyone seems to find massive effect?"
Then, experts, seeing so many studies showing masks worked argued the Science was Settled, and would promote the totality of mask evidence without ever having taken the time to actually read and pick through the terrible individual studies this claim rested upon.
See for example, Your Local Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina 2020 post https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=202002698114314&id=101805971467321
Same thing happens to most (traditional) antivaxxers - they hand you 50 studies showing the Vaccine Autism connection and claim victory while you spend months going through the individual papers.
Yes but RFK, Jr. cited 2 or 3 other studies besides Wakefield (one of them allegedly from the CDC) in his recent Rogan and Weiss interviews. If Michael were to respond what has been happening recently, I would expect a counter argument to at least acknowledge those studies, if not to refute them. But instead it seems to me that Michael has cherry picked the most cited study from the pro-vax side due to all the fraud around it. The other studies get ignored. So it comes across as a straw man piece. I understand there can be weak studies but unfortunately one cannot say any particular study is weak without looking at it. So it seems there is just an assumption that the hundreds of other studies are all weak and Michael can rest his case with one study.
My thoughts on this piece by Michael, and I could be completely wrong - he isn't offering a complete refutation of the vaccine-autism link in this piece, rather, he is highlighting that the primary source of this claim was the result of deliberate and repeated fraud. (Highly recommend Deer's book "The Doctor who Fooled the World").
Michael has been a vocal supporter of debate, and I am sure would be happy to go through a detailed point-by-point rebuttal with RFK if the offer was extended to him instead of Peter Hotez (more likely, Shermer might work with someone like Paul Offit and organize the debate). This puts Michael at contrast with practitioners of "scientism" like David Gorski who believe their ideas are beyond reproach.
In the case of the additional 2 or 3 studies RFK pointed to, do you have them on hand?
This is a great response. Thank you.
I don't but I'm pretty sure he referenced them in the Bari Weiss interview if not also the Rogan one. I don't think he cited exactly by title, journal, month, year, etc. though.
And I've ordered Deer's book!
If I get time I will look through the transcript and post them here too.
I've followed the Vaccine-Autism story for decades, prior to reading Deer's book I granted Wakefield more charity/benefit of the doubt. I assumed that because he was also working on a competitor to the MMR vaccine, he unintentionally was seeing a link that wasn't there - which could be as simple as not apply the "no holds barred skepticism" that Sagan called for when he was gathering data.
I had no idea the level of intentional fraud he employed in making his claims. I have also not seen a rebuttal from him confronting the evidence Deer presents over his decade+ long investigation.
The other book Michael referenced - Stuart Ritchie's "Science Fictions" (not to be confused with Shermers own book "Science Friction") is a great read if interested in The Replication Crisis and want some background into how bad papers go mainstream and how to spot them.
It's interesting though, because Stuart Ritchie himself appears to have been duped by bad papers almost immediately after publishing his book - he has repeatedly cited poor studies on cloth masks as evidence they work [1].
I guess that just shows the challenges all of us face confronting pseudoscience and making our skepticism is applied dispassionately.
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[1] Note he is only skeptical of an RCT, while citing much poorer studies by "Masks4all"s Jeremy Howard, and two studies which failed replication by Leffler and Lyu et al.
https://www.covidfaq.co/Claim-A-Danish-study-shows-masks-don-t-work-e2bb579390ea4fed9802d8b2106ad7cd
There is ample undeniable evidence to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that vaccination and clean water have been the greatest medical/scientific boon to the human race. The problem is that not sufficient of our numbers are well educated, or intelligent enough appreciate that, although even Kennedy is perhaps just about smart enough to drink clean water.
In the 60's there was an uproar over the possibility of the US requiring everyone to wear a seatbelt in the car. The same arguments about civil liberties used during COVID were used then too. Nonetheless, the data showed the benefits of wearing a seatbelt far outweighed the costs of not wearing one, not to mention the potentials for injuring other people in the car or local transportation having to scrape your smeared carcass off the road (which in turn held up daily traffic even more than necessary).
Should one person's right not to vaccinate infringe upon the rights of people not to get sick from easily preventable diseases? Should one person's right not to vaccinate infringe upon the rights of those that are immunocompromised who could easily die from such diseases? Should one person's ignorance about vaccines be equal to another person's knowledge? These are the questions that many, like seatbelts, would typically answer "no" to.
I'm all for liberty, but we also can't have liberty without collective responsibility. We have the freedom to drive so long as we all obey the traffic laws. We have the freedom to purchase goods and services so long as we all agree to pay taxes. The argument here was we'd all have the freedom to go about our lives again if we all agreed (and were medically capable) to be vaccinated.
All of these arguments I used to support until our Government forced the population at gunpoint to take the fastest vaccine created in history which wound up making you more likely to get Covid (at worst case scenario) or simply have no impact on transmission (at best case).
They sacrificed decades of credibility over the Covid vaccine, and that's why people like RFK Jr are suddenly getting a national platform. RFK has spouted his claims for 18 years (at least). Joe Rogan has had his podcast for 14 years. Why do you think all the sudden he now gets on Rogans show and his (largely) debunked claims are having everyone from Paul Offit to Oprah weighing in?
Could you provide the evidence (referenced source) for the comment that vaccines made you more likely to get COVID? Out of interest. I think it's very important to show that comments have a solid foundation.
Of course. My claim that the vaccine may make you more likely to get Covid is based on 4 pieces of evidence:
1) It was the challenge of SARS vaccines for decades Ralph Baric and colleagues hadn't solved. Here is screenshot from "The Invisible Siege' - a very pro covid vaccine book based on extensive interviews with Ralph Baric.
https://twitter.com/MichaelDAmbro17/status/1670901225506721796
2) Pair of Cleveland Clinic studies found that vaccinated employees had more covid infections than unvaccinated - more boosters translated to more cases. I am posting the "Fact Check" on this claim because it does raise fair criticisms of the study, but at the same time, I find it odd how the last 3 years, any study - no matter how poor in quality - as long as it found masks, vaccines, school closures, etc worked - there was no interest in the study design, lack of controls, sample size, author affiliations , etc - it's only when studies appear which don't show us what we like we suddenly care about p-values and paper quality. Consider how widely shared the laughable Kansas Mask Study was shared back in 2020 which was borderline fraud.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/06/scicheck-cleveland-clinic-study-did-not-show-vaccines-increase-covid-19-risk/
3) Every single country in the world had covid cases increase *after* the vaccine program reached 80-99%. In many countries covid cases exploded post vaccination, even those who had early success like New Zealand, South Korea, and Australia. I'm not aware of any previous vaccine where we saw the target infection increase rather than decrease once we vaccinated the population. This indicates to me that the vaccine may have made the population more prone to variants, as Baric kept finding with his mice. Consider Denmark which had extensive testing throughout the pandemic and largely relaxed mitigation relative to the world (low mask use, schools open, brief lockdowns) - they had 340K cases the first 18 months of the pandemic. By August 2021 they hade one of the highest vax rates in the world. Within 6 months they would have another 2 mllion cases. How could this be?
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases
4) It matches what I suspect we have all seen around us, passing "the smell test". Anecdotally, my friends who got vaccinated got Covid at least once or twice anyway. It spread throughout our kids school among the teachers (but not the students) Fall of 2021. My wife's hospital had a lot of staff come down with Covid (including her) December of 2021.
Beyond my anecdotes, we can see this with notable public figures. Fauci, Bourla, Biden(s), Wallensky, and even Stephen Colbert had notable infections post vaccination (some of them more than once). Social Media Scientists like the girls from Unbiased Science Podcast came down with it twice each, as did Michael Mina, Peter Hotez, and everyone else - all after the vaccines rolled out.
Now, I would love to have more evidence than 1) The words of the "Titan of Coronavirology" Ralph Baric, 2) Observational Studies, 3) High level data at country level and 4) anecdotes of public officials. Unfortunately I don't think the government, Moderna, or Pfizer is going to fund disinterested studies. Maybe I'm a pessimist though.
Thank you for taking the time to respond. The one COVID vaccine fact that stuck was that the vaccines had only limited impact on transmission. I can't recall the data, but as far as I remember none of them had a significant impact on that effect. Indeed, as I think your first point says, the vaccines aimed at other coronaviruses did not prevent cell-cell transmission. I remember from my undergrad days studying virology, that many of the vaccines aimed at RNA viruses of the paramyxoviridae had the unintentional effect of increasing chronic infection. Coronaviruses are not in this group, but it was a concern of vaccines aimed at surface viral antigens. Indeed, I was (and remain) confused why the vaccines were targeted at the most variable part of the viral structure. It seemed logical to me to use more conserved internal antigens. Yes, these would not be hit by antibodies in quite the same way, but they would be subject to cellular immunity, which is more protective overall. Anyway, I am sure there is a biological reason - and I can suggest some if anyone is interested.
However, the main impact of the vaccines (and they varied widely) was on the severity of infection. Those vaccinated had milder infections, on average. Thus the impact was on mortality, not transmission, for which, as I say they have little impact.
Which then leads to the trials you mentioned - and I am not directly familiar with them, but I can make a general point. Although the vaccines do not reduce transmission (at least not in a large way), I wouldn't expect them to increase it. That makes no direct sense. However, there are two, indirect ways in which transmission would increase following vaccination (hopefully this doesn't sound oxymoronic). The first is that people feel more confident to go out and about, following vaccination, so increase population-wide transmission. Remember there is little reduction in transmissibility following vaccination: so, more people being out and about means more transmission. Secondly, there was an increase in testing, so more people were being identified who were positive. I can't comment on the testing regime in the US, but in the UK we were supposed to test regularly, initially; then only when we had likely symptoms; then, finally, voluntarily, as restrictions were relaxed.
With regard to your third point, as I mention above, having a vaccine won't make you more prone to being infected: that's entirely pot-luck. Given that most people are asymptomatic/weakly symptomatic, the only way you are going to detect that increase in transmission is through testing. Other than more transmission, there is no reason why a vaccine would lead to more infection. Vaccines may alter symptoms (indeed that's fairly likely) but it should have no direct effect on infection, other than through changes in behaviour, which lead to more transmission.
I am pro-vaccine (as you can tell). However, I was not in favour of extended lock-downs, because of the impact on mental health (particularly in children) and on the economic impact. I also remain highly skeptical of the impact of masks. I don't know if you had them in the US, but we did have people wearing face shields. I really do not know what the benefit of these could possibly be. They don't really block airflow.
If you have a virus that primarily causes mortality in a particular group, that group should remain isolated until appropriate measures are in place to protect them. (Personal choice, aside, in terms of their behaviours, of course; and also assuming that there are suitable support measures available for those at risk.) However, if the pathogen has limited health impact on other groups, then I would prefer that these groups could continue to be able to live "normal" lives and build up immunity through standard exposure to antigens. However, that's a choice, on my part.
We do have to remember that ahead of the first lock-down, there was very little information available, and mortality could have been a few percent of those infected, from the early reports. That would be a lot of people. Only later did we get a fuller picture where most people were asymptomatic.
Good feedback, a few additional thoughts:
1) >>"I wouldn't expect them (vaccines) to increase it. That makes no direct sense."
Not sure if you clicked on my screenshot (via Twitter) of the quotes from Ralph Baric, but I do trust him that his attempts developing SARS vaccines over the last 2 decades ended in failure because his mice would wind up getting even sicker from variants. I see no reason why he would lie about this, and it is an astonishing admission to make given what transpired after we rolled out the vaccines.
There is also the theory of "original antigenic sin" that goes back 60 years, proposing that immune imprinting can make our immune systems prone to infections, and it could be that the Covid primed our immune system to be prepared for one specific form of attack from Covid19, which slight mutations bypassed easily.
I honestly don't know - this is not my area of expertise.
What is troubling to me is how politicized this vaccine became (because it was a campaign point). You aren't allowed to suggest it failed which is antithetical to the pursuit of science. There is no rigorous skepticism, no dispassionate review of conflicting data.
Bottom line, I do disagree with the premise that it wouldn't "make sense" for a ILI vaccine to potentially make you more prone to ILI, as, pre pandemic, it was already declared a high risk by experts including the top mind in Coronavirology - that seems like a possible outcome we should have been prepared for and studying. Instead we stuck our heads in the sand and declared it wasn't possible to get Covid once vaccinated.
2) >>" Thus the impact was on mortality, not transmission, for which, as I say they have little impact."
There is a strong counter to this claim - all cause mortality actually increased after the vaccines in all but 4 countries around the world. [1]
Like you, I am generally pro-vaccine, and I am not saying the vaccine is why countries like South Korea had excess mortality of +11% (that's a lot) - it's more likely it simply didn't do anything, and confounders are why deaths increased.
3) >>"The first is that people feel more confident to go out and about, following vaccination, so increase population-wide transmission"
There is enough places in the world which lived life close to normal throughout the pandemic which can serve as controls and reject this hypothesis. Sweden, half of the US (Dakotas, Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas), Africa, Mexico.
They also had the same curves as the places reopening - don't you agree?
4) >>"Secondly, there was an increase in testing, so more people were being identified who were positive"
I thought of that too, but when looked at the data I found enough examples to falsify in my mind that hypothesis. Yes, countries like South Korea, Japan, and Vietnam did seem to only have cases and mortality spike once they finally started mass testing in 2021 and 2022.
But there's plenty of countries which had comprehensive testing programs in place throughout 2020 and early 2021. Notably Denmark had one of the highest testing rates pre pandemic, had one of the highest vaccinate rates in the world, only to see Covid absolutely explode in fall 2021. And this is a country which had kids in school by spring 2020 and one of the lowest mask use in the world.
5) >> "We do have to remember that ahead of the first lock-down, there was very little information available, and mortality could have been a few percent of those infected, from the early reports. "
For 100 years, "Early reports" of nearly every "new" pathogen we discover have an alarming fatality rate (I saw "new" in parentheses to point out they are just new to us, as we finally developed the cataloguing skills necessary to even see the after 300 million years. SARS03, MERS, Zika, Ebola, H1N1, various bird flus - and they are always magnitudes lower once we stop relying on availability bias.
By the time governments acted we had enough data to see the IFR and CFR were far lower than the early reports. Ioaniddis showed this with wastewater and was blasted by the media, science comms, and politicians who seemed eager (for reasons I still can't explain) to make this a bigger deal than it really was.
Yet, it turned out he was right.
6. You said a lot of things I agreed with there's not enough space to quote and commiserate :)
[1] As I explained here: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/when-and-how-do-we-debate-vaccine/comment/17592971
Sorry for the delay in replaying. I haven't had time to go through the data on one of your links, but I will do so, in the next couple of weeks. Quite a lot of work at the moment.
To address a couple of your points, in no particular order. The SARS2 virus was new. Phylogeny supports an origin in China in 2019 - and I won't get drawn on whether it was a lab escape or not. No real evidence either way - at least not at the moment. SAR1 was also a novel coronavirus, while HIV appears to have emerged in the late 19th century. Each, has evolved from a pre-existing virus. The genetics is pretty sound and not an effect of sampling bias, for example.
That leads to one issue with the use of the mortality figures. You aren't really looking at a single viral target, rather an evolving cloud of viruses. Mortality was far higher in the autumn to winter of 2020 than spring 2020 in the UK and that did come down with vaccination - and the second lock-down. The virus variant in the second wave was far more transmissible than the first.
I'm not sure what you mean by "ILI vaccines", however, I would make a distinction between the study where vaccines increased sickness in mice and your earlier statement that vaccines increase infectivity. These are not the same thing. The early paramixovirus vaccines that caused chronic illness in mice vaccine trials didn't increase infectivity; they caused chronic infection, in part because they didn't illicit an effective cytotoxic response - as I recall, but would need to check that. The antibody response increased cell-to-cell infection within the mice. In the case of the mRNA vaccines, the cell produces antigen and a cytotoxic response is engaged, as well as an antibody response, so a rather different vaccine.
Certainly, I would need to look at the data, but I suspect that there are a few confounding effects going on. I'll look at your data as soon as I can and see if I can provide a more nuanced response.
Are these individuals opinion the best evidence you have to offer ?Vaccination is without one iota of doubt amongst the most beneficial medical interventions ever devises. Where the hell do you and your ilk suppose diseases like polio, smallpox & others went and why, also why did diseases like chickenpox and others become common once again ? Too much thinking for your diminished intellectual capacity perhaps ?
Where in my comments have I made any mention of Polio or Smallpox? Who are "my ilk"? Did you mean to reply to someone else?
You didn’t mention or many things, however one may reasonably deduce from your tenor the general attitude Michael.
My opening comment in this thread I point out that RFKs "largely debunked claims" are only gaining traction 20 years later because PH oversold, overpromised, and underdelivered the Covid vaccines - I'm unclear how in that opening you could "deduce" anything negative coming from me on Smallpox or polio.
Criticizing one failed vaccine has no relation on any other successful vaccination campaign. As skeptics we should be able to remark on medical interventions which fail without having someone "reasonably deduce" ill intent. Did you assume Dr Offit was anti-vaccine when he criticized RotaShield in the 90's?
Prior to Covid Hysteria, as I pointed out, it was perfectly acceptable to reflect on the failures of ILI vaccines by esteemed scientists in esteemed publications. [1] It would be great if we could return to being dispassionate rather than tribalist, which I suspect you are guilty of - taking offense to the "sin" of pointing out Covid vaccines didn't work.
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[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/why-flu-vaccines-so-often-fail
To the question of why certain celebs are performing yet another pile-on is that they are just famous, & it would appear without a jot of critical thinking to their names. One can always opt out of something because of a demand for yet more data, but isn’t that just kicking the proverbial can down the road. By and large and for most of their history, vaccines have been useful servants to man & beast, so I for one am convinced and take them when offered. I wonder how many people who refuse vaccines for some reason or other, question all the medical equipment when in hospital, or nit pick about the historical data on the particular aircraft they have just booked to fly in ?
" I wonder how many people who refuse vaccines for some reason or other, question all the medical equipment when in hospital, or nit pick about the historical data on the particular aircraft they have just booked to fly in?"
That has been my strongest counter point when debating antivaxxers, science deniers, or simply people unfamiliar with the scientific method and were being swayed by pseudoscience the last 25 years.
However, the corollary to this same argument, does apply to the Covid vaccine.
If planes were falling out of the sky, you would have the right to question aircraft safety.
If you took a vaccine promised to make you immune from a disease and still got that disease, you'd have the right to question the vaccine.
This is why RFKs 20 year old schtick is going mainstream.
The president of the united states, Anthony Fauci, the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna, political pundits, Donald Trump, late night hosts, and the head of the CDC, likely your PCP, all said this vaccine made you immune, a "dead end".
That is obviously false. They were wrong.
Now the public seems to have the appetite for "what else was wrong these people told me?".
The proper response would be to admit error, explain how science captured the error and won't make the same mistake again. Use this as a learning moment.
Would you be in favor of slavery if there was solid scientific evidence that it would benefit the national economy? After all, should the right of the minority of slaves to freedom outweigh the rights of the majority to prosperity?
If an individual is immunocompromised I would prefer to let nature take it's course and let such a defective die and stop trying to make others pay the cost of his misfortune. I would not allow his bad luck to infringe on my right to decide for myself what medical procedures to employ.
If a begger come up to me on the street and asks for money, it is my choice to either give it to him or not. But if he pulls a gun and demands that I give him money, he is a robber and I would be justied in fighting back against an armed robber to defend myself and my property.
We do not ''agree' to pay taxes; most of us are FORCED to pay taxes under threat of punishment if we refuse. Saying we ''agree' to pay taxes is like saying you agreed to give the robber pointing a gun at you your money, so the transfer of money from your wallet to his was voluntary.
We could all have had the freedom to go about our lives without any need for vaccination if the government had only decided not to interfere with that freedom. The loss of freedom was not caused by a virus; it was caused by the government deciding to take that freedom away. In Sweden the government made a different choice; they decided to respect the rights of the people and trust the people to decide for themselves what measures were needed.
Ultimately, the argument is not about science or facts; it is about values and what kind of a world we want to live in.
''Colective responsibiliy'' was the ideology of a certain group of people around 80 years ago. You may have heard of them. They called it ''sippenhaft''. Look up that term in German and see if you agree with them. I suspect you do. You certainly sound like it.
Regardless of Wakefield’s actions, there has been an astounding increase in the number of children with autism… From something like one in 10,000 to a current one in 34 in the US… This understandably leads to people looking for a culprits, and it explains the strength of the anti-VAX movement, and that there are correlations Which appear to be quite powerful. Diagnostic changes to the definition of autism do not explain this profound increase, and other than some thoughts about neonicotinoids and other herbicides there does not seem to be any other explanation as powerful as vaccines.
For a different perspective on the possible link between vaccines and autism, see articles by Sharyl Attkinsson [1] in which she briefly reviews some of the studies [2-4] that Shermer and the mainstream media ignore or censor.
Shermer and the media reflexively try to smear and silence people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [5], calling him a kooky "conspiracy theorist" and "anti-vaxxer" who is spreading "dangerous misinformation." Actually, like Sharyl Attkinsson, RFK Jr. is pro-vaccine [6] but believes that people should be free to question vaccine safety without being bullied, smeared, or censored.
1. http://sharylattkisson.com/medical-vaccine-links/#Other
2. https://sharylattkisson.com/2016/11/what-the-news-isnt-saying-about-vaccine-autism-studies/
3. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vaccines-and-autism-a-new-scientific-review/
4. https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/425061-how-a-pro-vaccine-doctor-reopened-debate-about-link-to-autism/
5. https://twitter.com/i/status/1672014260480901120
6. https://www.foxnews.com/video/5405669524001
Good reading , only one thing to say. The difference between the MMR vaccine and the covid vaccine is that the MMR vaccine stopped the spread of the diseases and prevented one from getting infected, can we say that about the the vaccination for covid?
Very interesting article. Clearly, the culture around some scientific disciplines and their publishers need their head examined.
Kennedy seems like a very trustworthy, honest, open-minded, and patriotic person. I think his personal virtues—more than his dubious arguments—are what convince people that vaccines are "dangerous." It's amazing what people will believe if they hear it from trusted sources.
You write, "The evidence for the link is not only nonexistent, it never existed". Leat you believe RFK Jr is accepting anecdotes wholesale as scientific proof, I daresay you have not examined the "ecvdence" he cites.
Likewise, the evidence of anthropogenic global warming skeptics I believe has gone unexamined by you. I hope, at minimum, you have examined the fraud perpetuated by the world leading climate scientist in "Climategate"* and "Climategate 2" to, as Mann wrote, that they needed to find a way to "hide the decline" in temperatures, declines that poked holes in his theories and models - and that they did indeed find a way to do so. Even the current outlandish claims recently labeled "global boiling"* are resultant from largely non-measured data but hypothetical estimates for weather stations; stations that have been taken down rn-masse by NOAA, but somehow are still providing temperatures**.
And contrary to what you seem to be claiming,,l the evidence for the latter is far more compelling than the evidence for vaccine induced autism. I would request that you watch Tony Heller's (of realclimateacience dot com notoriety) recent "Climate Fakery" Youtubr & Rumble series (and not just one or two videos, but all 22 - as some are quite cursory).
So before expressing certainty that no exists for these topics, that consensus exists, or that consensus is anyway related to truth, that you actually review the data and evidence put forth by the claimants of these theories you readily dismiss.
Before attributing RFK Jr's belief in in vaccine-induced Autism to susceptibility to fraud, and his belief in Anthropogenic climate change to alleged "consesnus" (a consensus which objectively does not exist - again I beg that you watch Tony Hellers's latest entries in his recent "climate fakery" series, in one of which he goes over the a subject that he (and sites such as wattsupwiththat dot com) frequently debunk.
And I would note that "consensus" is irrelevant to the scientific method, and oft its results directly contradicts with what turns out to be truth.
Please read/watch the evidence, particularly on Anthropogenic climate-change, that those who do not follow the orthodoxy.
RFK and the like, who are critics of "the consensus" are not unintelligent, nor suggestible people who have had the wool pulled over their eyes - but rather those who are willing to peak through the gaps in then wool.
Please humor me, at least on the climate change front, and watch/read the counter-narrative.
In 1971 we were told of impending ice age.
In 1989 we were told of imlendong disaster by 2000 of sea level rise.
In 2000 we were told of impending disaster of sea level rise that would affect our shores by 2023.
Most people don't even know how the climate models have been "adjusted" to claim the it was actually cooler than recorded in early 20th century...
**Most don't know that we are using less than half of number of actual NOAA/NASA thermometers for ocean temrpatures than we used 40 years ago, and that instead of removing those from the data set, they instead estimate what that data should be. Conveniently the estimates prop up the new "global boiling" claims.
And mark the their claims well that this would be the worst Hurricane/Tropical-Storm season on record, when the reality is that it will another typical year.
*Most don't know that the heat wave of the early 1930's was removed from climate models. Most are unaware of Climategate, where Mann intentionally found a way "hide the decline" in temperatures in the historical record that would hurt his now famous / infamous "hockey stock" graph.
Most don't know that all historical measures of thermometer-recorded temperatures in the USA were decreased in the record prior to the year 1940 (the year could be wrong), woth the ludicrous claim that there was some kind of universal reason that all of those recorded temperatures were recorded as too warm.
Anyways I the above is a scratch, on a scratch, on the surface of the massive failuea and fraud involved in the climate modeling.
Not one climate model has been accurate 10 years later - nor even close. Unless you consider models made by mathematicians/statisticians/engineers who have made their own models that do not exclude inconvenient data or include data that was not actually measured aliterally the current climate models are models based largely upon already moddeled-data, and exclude any data that hurts their desired outcome for their models.
Be it from the UN's IPCC or The USA's NOAA/NASA, you will only get the BILLIONS of dollars in funding if you predict scenarios that support the doomsday belief/religion of Anthropogenic-climate-cuange's acolytes, and provide rationale for the expansion of Governmental powers and tje expansion if Tran-National bodies' powers'.
He’s uneducated on a number of topics he holds forth on.. like Rogan. In his case, virtually no one would bother listening to him, about anything, but for his namesake. It is telling, and depressing, that know-nothings like he, Rogan, and more importantly Trump, have such a ‘following’.
I totally agree with you and am 100 % pro vaccine. Now that RFK is running for president and people are "liking" him, I have a big problem: I can't reconcile his long standing position on vaccines and then believe he could be president. If he is unable to change his mind on vaccines after talking to so many experts (who should have more credibility than the average Joe or discredited scientists or Jenny McCarthy), then how could anyone think of him as Presidential material??
Ah, another shill talking head. We will remember all of you fraud pushers who are breaking the law. The science linking autism to vaccines is far more compelling than the clearly corrupt few studies saying the opposite. Suggesting the same companies that have paid 10 billion in criminal fines in the last decade are not going to be corrupt for vaccines where they have complete legal immunity is something only a complete moron would accept
It is estimated that 1 in 100 people in Australia have Autism. In 2018 there were 205,200 Australians with Autism, a 25.1% increase from the 164,000 in 2015 (Source: ABS SDAC 2018– Autism in Australia). What is the problem with the US? Okay I could answer that, but really, there are lots of reasons that autism might exist in a population, vaccinations are but one of them.
Thanks for this. I know several people who are gravitating to Kennedy and away from Trump. That's hard to figure, The only similarity I can perceive is that they both peddle conspiracy theories.
Question: have you looked into Kennedy's allegations against Tony Fauci and the administration of the COVID response? I believe he accuses Fauci of funding research for the virus and maintains that COVID was all a plot by the US military.
Hey Shermer - why dont you round up Deer and any other so-called vaxx professional and have them debate RFK directly; you know why they wont....ego, cowardice, embarrassment and they are paid not to debate. Im for medical freedom NOT medical dictatorship - if the vaxx was healthy and safe it would sell itself...........BUT instead they had to lock down the entire globe for the f..king FLU and force people to take an experimental jab that rolled out in 18 months and if they didnt they risked losing their job (newsflash Mike - There is high probability they had the C-shot already made before the pandemic rolled out) - There has never been a safe and effective vaxx for the purposes of preventing anything plus why do Pharma manufacturers receive FULL INDEMNITY against vaxx health damages while raking in billions!! Why dont you look into Ed Dowd's research - better yet read "The Truth About Vaccines" by Dr Richard Halvorsen, Thomas Cowan, Sayer Ji's Green Med Info research, or Andrew Kaufmann?? instead Wakefield is a fraud because the a**hole health czar Bill Gates & MSM said so??.......... or you can just keep lining up like a good docile servant taking the shot / boosters and see how you do......herd immunity is a joke, germ theory is a joke ALL Fear mongering by those in power who want total control. Divide and conquer is the game right down to every cell in your body; we live in a war-based economy; war on everything from agriculture, climate, energy, race, sex, gender, economy, health, the sun, you name it, there is war for everything......even debating is a war because its deductive NOT inductive.............I practice holistic / orthomolecular therapy / medicine on myself and I didnt get COVID, never got the shot and never took a PCR test and Im doing better than everyone that took the shot(s) - Have fun boosting up Mike - Yours truly - Anti-Vaxxer
I think you should consider what sources of information you use to make choices. We all do, for everyday issues, such as what food to buy, what clothes to wear etc. What scientists do, irrespective of their political persuasion, is analyse data. In the short-term mistakes are definitely made. Wakefield had his article in one of the top medical journals of its day, for example. However, soon thereafter, more data came in which showed he was a petty crook and his data was false. That rebuttal has stayed the course of time - simply because there was no evidence to support Wakefield's claims, but plenty to show that they were patently false. Vast studies in Sweden and Japan, already showed that there was no link between the use of MMR and Autism. Moreover, there is a wealth of data showing that 98% of autistic traits are genetic. Feel free to Google. Over 60 alleles for autistic traits have been found. There is no link between vaccination and autism - as Michael's article states.
That you didn't get COVID is a blessing. However, if we consider massive pandemics, such as the 1346 Black Death, 25% of the population died. Of the 75% that survived, some had lucky genetics, but most avoided contact - and in Europe, the 75% pretty much inherited the Earth. That you didn't get COVID - well you may have done but had no symptoms - or you may have been one of the many who were never infected. If you never tested, how do you know you weren't infected? Most children, for example, were asymptomatic.
While "Big Pharma for example, makes a lot of money and it's definitely in their interests to do so - pay workers, sell product, etc, in the longer term, is it in their interests to kill people? I'm always reminded of a Bill Hicks sketch from 1991 about rock bands planting Satanic messages in their listener's heads that would get them to kill themselves. As Bill shouted, "What band wants their audience dead?" If you want to keep making a pretty Dollar or two, don't kill the market.
Im a fan of Bill Hicks......Show me Autism and a genetic relationship before 1980, 1970, 1900?? nowadays the numbers are staggering in terms of children who get autism thats not genetic?? People also like to cite "polio" when in fact the polio vaxx contributed more to polio than polio itself......genetics is always used a scapegoat, same with cancer, our bodies don't naturally produce autism or cancer that doesn't mean the parents dont transfer genes but your lifestyle, diet / poor nutrition, environmental toxic load, lack of proper sanitary infrastructure etc will dictate (in most cases) what happens to your body BUT no one wants to be accountable for their choices - they just want to go to their doctor and get a shot / prescription for the symptom and resort right back to dysfunctional lifestyles because all they are forced to care about is making money, paying the bills and going vacation (if they can)........what's next Transgenderism is genetic?? Amongst many other medical scams is statin drugs for cholesterol - your body naturally makes and needs cholesterol - there is no such thing as good or bad; you either have too much or too little and it can be corrected with the right diet and water intake NOT synthetic crap the medical establishments pushes. So, as I stated I practice preventive medicine to prop my immune system (everything the gov't tells you not to do - I do) and I'm healthy, no I wasn't "asymptomatic" during COVID another farce - explain the sudden deaths during & after the pandemic (Ed Dowd's research)?? This idea that life is better thru CDC approved chemistry is nonsense - how many people have holistic, naturopathic, functional doctors killed?? answer is 0 - how many deaths can be attributed to people themselves for poor choices and the Rockefeller created AMA medical establishments; a shit ton!! Why did Pfizer withhold clinical data related COVID shot effects; people are still buying the nonsense of mask wearing; tell me why big PHARM has FULL INDEMNITY against vaccine damages if their shots are safe and effective? Are you aware of what a virus actually is - its basically wave frequency that all living species are encoded with.........(listen to Tom Cowan and Zach Bush) - Why are we supposed to only listen to CDC / AMA medical establishments, that is the antithesis of the scientific method?? My life is 1000 times better based on my holistic / naturopathic practices not allopathic medicine - Im not saying the medical establishment at large has not done any good in many areas - but if everyone was walking around healthy, how much money would the establishment lose? So, its in their best interest to keep everyone run down, sick, misguided and reliant on them and death is collateral damage; Psychopathic Bill Gates who controls the WHO and wants everyone on the c-shot has come right out and said we need to lower the global population (Georgia Guidestones). Im also not a registered voter, Im 50yrs old and haven't voted for a president since I was 18 because that too is a charade - people need to start waking up to hard truths of Totalitarianism as it relates to the central banking system, paying taxes, geopolitics, toxic chemicals, the BS climate scare narrative and much more - these aren't random; its all orchestrated - the only thing that remains constant is the enormous gap between wealth and poverty which is growing wider by the day where the few control the many - did you ever ask yourself why media outlets across the globe say exactly the same thing - I mean how did they get the entire globe on lockdown for the FLU; please don't tell me that every country completely agreed (that has never happened in history - the only explanation is Global Imperialism); if you want to keep buying the Gov't propaganda feel free but maybe you should re-think your sources and understand the pyramid of power! - I dont want any of what our gov't is selling; also beware of another pandemic rolling out this decade (they are not done yet - they want everyone boosted up on big pharma needle poison not to mention they are using CRISPR technology to genetically modify food, living things etc) - And if they get the WHO Pandemic Treaty signed (and US joins) more restrictions are to follow because the Treaty will give them global medical power which will supersede all govts (NWO) hence, digital health ID / vaxx passports, social credit scoring, not allowed to eat meat blah blah - This is the largest attack on humanity in the last 5000 years
Just a quick point about seeing the role of genetics in the 1980s or 1990s: there was no way of testing/genetically-identifying these conditions at a population level until relatively recently. The technology didn't exist and the cost was prohibitively high. Remember the first human genome sequence took almost a decade to do and cost over $1 billion. Nowadays, it takes a few weeks to sequence an entire human genome and costs a few hundred bucks. You can screen a population for multiple conditions at (relatively) low cost. Autistic traits are one of those conditions for which the genetics is pretty sound - albeit incomplete.
With regard to vaccines and autism, there is no evidence to support that at all.
Oh dear.