Won’t Someone Think of the Antivaxxers?

Is it bad that I turn on the news on the radio on the way to work hoping and praying that the President of the United States hasn’t done something to collectively embarrass us as a nation? Now, is it bad that I keep doing it knowing full well that it’s not going to happen? You know what they say about what the definition of insanity is…

Speaking of the insane, it seems that antivaxxers have taken their charade about being persecuted one step too far. Well, too far if you’re a reasonable person. They seem to think that nothing is “too far” when it comes to defending their skewed view of the world and attacking those they despise for trying to save lives of children. This time, they decided to compare themselves to Jews and other minorities who were systematically hunted down and killed during the Holocaust.

As Helene Sinnreich, PhD, put it in the Washington Post:

“It is not the first time the anti-vaccination movement has appropriated the Holocaust. Anti-vaccination advocates have called the side effects of vaccinations a modern-day Holocaust. They compare the criticism directed toward parents who choose not to vaccinate their children to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust and label those who advocate for stringent laws around vaccines as Nazis. But this misuse of history distorts and undermines the actual horrors of the Holocaust. It also ignores that so many Holocaust victims died of infectious diseases — the same ones that vaccines could prevent today.”

Indeed. They keep playing the “I’m being persecuted” card all the time. They call themselves victims when they are not. They claim they are “toxic” or “diseased” from having “too many” vaccinations. And, of course, anything and everything is to be blamed on vaccines.

Dr. Sinnreich continued:

“The death toll from infectious disease was so high because Jews were stripped of basic resources including medical equipment, medicine and food. They were even denied quality soap. Doctors and other care providers helped fight disease in terrible conditions with scant supplies, many succumbing to disease themselves. Starving people traded food for medicine to help family members survive.

Vaccines emerged as a powerful, if expensive, tool for resistance. Smugglers found ways to bring medicine and even nascent vaccines into the ghetto. Those few who could obtain a vial of vaccine on the black market paid more than 100 times their weight in gold to obtain them. The going rate for a vaccine in the Warsaw ghetto could buy 30,000 bowls of soup — an astronomical amount in a place where people perished of hunger in the streets.”

So, yeah… Privileged (predominantly) white people in the United States, all very much free to do as they wish, are comparing themselves to the Holocaust victims who were forcibly removed from their homes and put into ghettos without basic supplies needed to be alive. They are comparing themselves to people who would pay with their lives for having the protection that vaccines provided. Antivaxxers are so persecuted.

Won’t someone think of the antivaxxers?

Look at this image:

Dead bodies being pulled from a train carrying Romanian Jews toward prison and death camps. (Source)

Ignorant anti-vaccine activists want you to believe that they are being treated in the same way. They want you to believe that a requirement to vaccinate so that we’re all safe — especially those too young or too sick to be vaccinated — is the same thing as between 12 and 17 million people experienced during the Holocaust. Nothing could be further from the truth, but antivaxxers are not exactly known for their firm grasp of the truth.

Or this image:

Bodies of dead children from the Warsaw ghetto. (Source)

Antivaxxers will have you believe that they are suffering a holocaust of their own from all the “injuries” from vaccines. But where are the bodies? Are children who are immunized being hauled away like waste in carts? Where are the mass graves?

What anti-vaccine people are going through with quarantines and exclusions from schools IS NOTHING AT ALL LIKE WHAT JEWS WENT THROUGH IN THE HOLOCAUST. No, they are not being persecuted. There’s no police force searching for them and dragging them away to jail (or worse). There is no law preventing them from getting married or having children.

How much more clearer can we make it?!

This Guy Lies About Vaccines Without Even Blinking

Maybe he doesn’t blink because it’s a picture, but still..

Dr. Steven Lantier, an anesthesiologist, has penned an opinion piece for The Oklahoman, and, man, does it have some woozies in there.

You can read the whole thing here, but let me just show you one paragraph that should be enough to make you scratch your head…

“There is actually not much science behind “herd immunity.” The vaccine rates in the United States for Hepatitis A (9 percent), Hepatitis B (24.5 percent), pneumococcal (20.4 percent) and influenza (43.2 percent) are many times below their threshold, yet we haven’t had outbreaks of these diseases for decades now. Actually, vaccines often have the opposite effect. Not only can they — and often do — make people sick, it is well documented that vaccinated persons have passed on to others the same virus they were being protected from.”

Jesus Christ, where to begin?

“…(Y)et we haven’t had outbreaks of these diseases for decades now.” Oh, really? When it comes to Hepatitis A: We have had three in the last two years, according to CDC. When it comes to Hepatitis B: There are many, according to CDC. And those are just in healthcare. 

And, influenza… WE HAVE YEARLY EPIDEMICS. Hence, “THE GODDAMNED FLU SEASON.”

Who gave this guy his medical degree? What kind of Mickey Mouse institution taught him medicine?

I’m too mad to write anything else. That up there should be enough. Go to hell, Dr. Lantier, and say hello to Art Briles while you’re down there.

Bless Your Heart, JB. Bless Your Heart.

You guys remember JB Handley? He’s the guy who can’t seem to get his story straight about the vaccine injury he claims his child received. He’s basically claimed that vaccines hurt his child to the point of causing autism, but he can’t quite nail the timeline. Anyway, he’s always lurking in the anti-vaccine recesses of society, the places where aliens, Bigfoot, and ghosts exist. And he’s back.

He’s written some book about ending the “autism epidemic.” (Note: To our knowledge, Joe Blow Handley [as we assume his real name is Joe Blow] is not an epidemiologist. How he intends to end an epidemic without knowledge of epidemiology is beyond us. Better yet, there is no autism epidemic. Seriously, there isn’t. Nope, there’s not.)  Come on, Joe Blow. When you don’t know the difference between incidence and prevalence of autism, you probably shouldn’t be jumping into the deep end of the scientific pool.

As it turns out, he wasn’t anti-vaccine enough for his friends, and he took to Facebook to whine about it like a three-year-old. Since he didn’t post his screed to the public, only to his friends, one of his friends took it upon themselves to stab Joe Blow in the back and posted a screenshot for the rest of us to see. Ready for some whine with anti-vaccine tear-flavored cheese?

Vaccine abolitionists? Seriously, these “freedom fighters” think that they’re being oppressed to the point of calling themselves abolitionists. This as they endanger African American children by lying to them about vaccination. We’ve never seen a bigger collection of privileged people be so self-aggrandizing. (Except maybe for the Trump Administration.)

True to form, Joe Blow has decided to tone down his anti-vaccine rhetoric and recommend a “reduced vaccine schedule, with many screening tools, delays, etc. rather than an elimination of vaccines.” By now you should know that alternative vaccine schedules are not scientifically nor medically sound, and the douchebag who made alternative vaccine schedules a thing has publicly admitted to making it up out of nowhere:

No, there is no evidence alternative schedules encourage vaccination, either. If people think vaccines are poison, they’re not going to want a little bit of poison, would they?

In the past, Joe Blow “JB” Handley has stated that he wants to bring the US vaccine program to its knees, but here we see his “softening” about vaccines in the name of convincing more people to come to his side. The health and safety of children, protecting them from deadly vaccine-preventable diseases, you see, is some sort of a game for Joe Blow “JB” Handley.

There is no reliable evidence that 5%-10% of children should “NEVER” be vaccinated. There is no reliable evidence that a lower “vaccine load” would do anything to reduce the number of autistic children… BECAUSE VACCINES DON’T CAUSE AUTISM. In fact, we’d wager that you would get better vaccine advice from Miss Cleo, from the grave, than you would from Joe “Self-Righteous” Blowhard “JB” Handley.

Of course, he closes by mentioning his appearance on a television show. If that’s the standard by which we’re measuring someone’s expertise on something, then you need to remember that Charlie Manson was interviewed by Geraldo, so…

At the end of the day Joe Blow “JB” Handley is just another privileged guy with a ton of cash with a chip on his shoulder about his child. It seems that he sees his child as lost or stolen or dead from autism when nothing could be further from the truth. He uses that privilege and that cash to promote his ideas and get people on his side all riled-up. And then, as you see above, he seems to get all riled-up himself when someone dare criticize him. He’s such a big, fat snowflake.

Folks, get your vaccine advice from your personal healthcare provider, someone who is licensed in your state to deliver care, someone who went to school for a very long time and had his knowledge tested by people who know better, and someone who is not out to be popular and/or on television for the hell of it… Someone who isn’t a self-righteous douchebag.

Tdap vaccine is not linked to autism, just like any other vaccine (including the flu vaccine)

I remember when my dad told me that there was no such thing as Santa Claus. He sat me down and told me that it had been him all these years who had been buying me gifts and placing them under the tree. It was quite a shock to have this revealed to me; it shook my world. I did everything in my power to reason it through. In my head, dad was a liar. Dad wanted to take the credit for the big jolly guy who’d given me all the gifts I’d ask for in the letters I sent him through my dad.

I was 27 years old.

Soon enough, I came to accept the truth. All the evidence was there in the form of my dad’s receipts for the gifts he had gotten me. People had seen him buy me those gifts. Mom swore to having helped him wrap them. The evidence was compelling, substantial, tangible, credible… Santa Claus was no more.

I’m sad to say that this is not the case with the anti-vaccine crowd. You can tell them all you want that vaccines do not cause autism, and that vaccines actually protect from diseases that are deadly and/or disabling. But they will refuse to believe it because their entire ecosystem depends on the belief that vaccines cause autism. Anything short of that sucks away their life, their reason for living.

One such anti-vaccine zealot is everyone’s favorite “kid.” Even with a master of public health degree in epidemiology, he seems to remain convinced that vaccines cause autism. He’s stated on his blog that evidence he saw in school to the contrary is all a conspiracy from the pharmaceutical industry. It seems that, to him, the lies he has been exposed to over and over from a very young age have made up his mind. To him, Santa Claus (i.e. vaccines cause autism) still exists, and it will continue to exist because anything short of that eliminates his reason for living.

Seriously, he doesn’t seem to live for anything other than that. The primary example is a recent blog post of his where he takes a study that clearly shows that the Tdap (Tetanus, Diphtheria, and acellular Pertussis) vaccine doesn’t cause autism, and then he states that the study confirms that the influenza vaccine does cause autism.

Yeah, I was confused too.

His whole argument hinges on one table in the Prenatal Tetanus, Diphtheria, Acellular Pertussis Vaccination and Autism Spectrum Disorder by Becerra-Culqui et al.

This is table 3:

Table 3 states that women who were vaccinated with Tdap during pregnancy had a similar incidence rate per 100,000 person-years of having an autistic child. Vaccinated women had an incidence rate of 3.78 autistic children per 100,000 person-years while un-vaccinated women had an incidence rate of 4.05. The ratio between the two was 0.98, meaning that vaccinated women had a lower incidence rate than vaccinated. Anything over 1.0 would indicate that vaccination leads to more autistic children being born.

Because this is one study with a limited number of people, and not a study looking at the entire universe of children born, scientists also report the 95% confidence interval (0.98 – 1.09). The 95% confidence interval is a way of us saying, “We are 95% confident that the true hazard ratio in the entire population (the whole of the population) is between 0.88 and 1.09.” Because it includes 1.0, we cannot say that this observation is not by random chance.

But look at how the kid displays the table on his blog:

Only point out the things that seem to support your argument.

He points out that the adjusted hazard ratio of 0.85 (with a 95% confidence interval of 0.77 to 0.95) is adjusted for, among other things, influenza vaccination during pregnancy. In epidemiology and biostatistics, “adjusted for” means taking it into consideration. Let me give you an example:

Suppose that there are a group of people from Texas and a group of people from Alabama, and that we look at their test scores in biology. The group from Texas had an average test score of 77% while the people from Alabama had an average test score of 89%. You would conclude that being from Alabama leads you to having a better test score, right?

But what if we told you that they don’t teach biology in all schools in Texas? What if we told you that they only teach it in private schools in Texas, and that only 30% of schools in Texas are private schools? And then we told you that they teach biology in both types of schools in Alabama, and that there is a 50-50 split in the proportion of private to public schools in Alabama? How does this change your conclusion?

To reach the proper conclusion, you have to compare apples to apples, and oranges to oranges. You would compare the private school scores in each state to each other, and likewise with the public school scores. This is an adjustment. This is taking into account the differences in the distributions of a characteristic between the two groups being studied.

As it turns out, in the study in question, women who get their Tdap were much more likely to get their influenza vaccine. It makes sense, right? Women who vaccinate in general are more likely to vaccinate in particular. So, in order to compare apples to apples, the researchers adjusted for influenza vaccination. That is, they compared flu-vaccinated women who got the Tdap and flu-vaccinated women who did not get the Tdap, AND non-flu-vaccinated women who got the Tdap and non-flu-vaccinated women who did not get the Tdap.

Taking flu vaccination into account, and the bias that would creep in because women who vaccinate against influenza seem to be more likely to vaccinated with the Tdap vaccine, vaccinating with Tdap is not associated with having a child diagnosed with autism.

So why does the kid think this proves that influenza vaccine causes autism?

It beats me. All they did was make the adjustment to make things equal between the two groups, something every epidemiologist worth their salt should do… Unless you want to misinform the public?

Hmmmm?

He then takes a table from a different, unrelated study and points out to just one result on it as evidence that influenza vaccine causes autism:

The red circle seems to be his way of saying, “Only this matters! Pay no attention to the whole of the evidence!”

This is another misrepresentation of the findings, and I kind of blame the authors of the study for making the table so busy. Look at the “Variable” column on the left. All that the data circled in red are saying is this:

“Of the 13,477 children whose mothers were vaccinated in the first trimester, 258 (1.91%) of them were diagnosed with autism. Their hazard was 26% higher for an autism diagnosis when compared to children whose moms were vaccinated in other trimesters. However, when adjusting for maternal allergy, asthma, autoimmune conditions, gestational diabetes, hypertension, age, education, race/ethnicity, child conception year, conception season, sex, and gestational age, the hazard of autism diagnosis went down to 20% over children whose moms were vaccinated in other trimesters.”

The fact that the hazard ratio went down after adjusting tells us that there is something else explaining the elevated hazard (risk). Look at what happened in the adjustment in the other trimester groups… Nothing changed. Look at what happened in the adjustment in the “Anytime During Pregnancy” group… Nothing changed. So what could that “something else” be? I’m not an obstetrician, but it’s reasonable to conclude that outcomes measured in the first trimester are different than outcomes measured in the other trimesters.

Finally, look at the reasoning that the kid used. In the first table, because numbers were adjusted for influenza vaccination, then it must mean that influenza vaccination causes autism. In the second, he doesn’t say that all the factors adjusted for cause autism… Because that would tear down his narrative.

I’m not surprised at all by his misunderstanding of all this. After all, to my knowledge, he doesn’t work as an epidemiologist anywhere. Like any good muscle, lack of practice of your epidemiology skills leads you to lose them. Being unpublished, not working as an epidemiologist, and a staunch defender of the so-called autism-vaccine risk leads the reasoning muscle to atrophy.

When your math doesn’t make sense

I’m just going to leave this here. It’s a comment published on The Kid’s blog. One of his friends posts a link to another anti-vaccine website and perpetuates a lie. Then he realizes that the math doesn’t work out. So then he pleads that his comment not be published. The Kid publishes it anyway.

“But, what happened in Kenya, uncovered by 27 Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church, is, to me, the signpost for “The Plan.” There, in Kenya, just three months ago, vaccines were used to permanently, and without their knowledge or permission, sterilize forty-two million (42 million) young Kenyan women. The World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF, were caught, by the Catholic Church leadership, lacing what they described as “Tetanus Vaccine” with Beta-HCG, a hormone that, when combined with the ingredients in the Tetanus vaccine, leads to sterility.”

Then this (with my link to show you who Tim Bolen is):

“Tim Bolens story of 42M Kenyans doesn’t make sense given the total Kenyan pop is 45M – so please don’t publish that comment .”

Comedy gold. Here’s a tip, weirdos: FACT. CHECK.

The mental contortions of The Kid

Last time, I told you all about how The Kid wrote that Hillary Clinton’s pneumonia was the result of a failure of the pneumococcal vaccine. He wrote:

“Despite her proclaiming that “#vaccineswork”, the pneumonia vaccine obviously did not work for her in that instance assuming she even followed the CDC’s advice as she wanted everybody else to do.”

From his blog post.

Then, on Twitter, he doubles down on his conspiracy theory:

@doritmi @ThePoxesStory The fact that you have an infectious disease but came into contact with children.

— Jake Crosby, MPH (@JakeLCrosby) September 14, 2016

“The fact that you have an infectious disease but came into contact with children.”

The fantasies of the anti-vaccine crowd

I really feel bad for people who are deep into the anti-vaccine cult. It has got to be a horrible existence to have to explain away reality day after day. Vaccines do not cause autism, but they have to go to enormous lengths to try and convince themselves (and others) that vaccines do cause autism. They make really weird movies with really bad reviews. Then they show up in the comments section of the reviews to ask the reviewer how much they got paid by Big Bad Pharma to write the review. Because a mockumentary directed by a disgraced former physician who uses spliced audio as evidence of ultimate evil could not possibly get bad reviews.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, they try to convince themselves that Robert De Niro is still a supporter of the mockumentary. For example, “Tanner’s Dad” (aka “Tim”) sent out a tweet stating that Robert De Niro and his wife went to the premiere of the mockumentary:

Robert De Niro / Wife came to #VaxXed Premiere with the Wrights? Whoa & Wow @AutismSpeaks https://t.co/g33xIuDvMl pic.twitter.com/d08xp8AXDp

— TannersDad Tim (@TannersDad) April 2, 2016

If you can’t tell it’s a photoshopped picture, here’s a picture from the original event:

The original event was a gala for Autism Speaks. After it was explained to Tim that the photograph was photoshopped, he claimed it was a “cruel” April Fool’s joke… One sent on April 2. Again, you have someone trying to explain away reality.

This is par for the course for the anti-vax crowd. Reality: De Niro took back his support for the quackumentary. Anti-vax Fantasy: De Niro showed up at the quackumentary’s premiere. Reality: The picture is fake. Anti-vax Fantasy: It was a cruel joke. (The equivalent to “my account’s been hacked!”)

Reality: Andrew Wakefield lost his medical license and was struck off the register. Anti-vax Fantasy: Big Pharma did it. Reality: Wakefield was trying to patent his own vaccine and discredit the existing one. AV Fantasy: Nah-nah-nah, I can’t hear you!

Seriously, pay close attention to everything the anti-vaccine cult members write or do or say. They’re constantly trying to explain away reality any way they can. I can’t imagine it’s an easy thing to do. They must be exhausted, and it must be a very scary world. At every turn, reality pops up and slaps them across the face, and they find themselves having to explain it away all over again.

Let me tell you a story…

Spoiler alert: This story does not have a happy ending.

Back in 1932, the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) decided that it would be a good idea to understand the natural history of syphilis infections. They wanted to know what happened to a human body when the infection took place, from beginning to tragic end. To that end, they “enrolled” 600 African-American men from Tuskegee, Alabama, into a study where the men would be given free medical exams, free meals, and burial insurance.

Over the course of the next 40 years or so, this would become one of the most shameful episodes in the history of my profession. It was shameful for several reasons. First, the men in the study were not fully told what the study was about. They were not told that scientists would observe their bodies succumb to a disease. Second, when penicillin became widely available in the 1940’s (especially after World War II), the very effective antibiotic treatment that penicillin offered against syphilis was withheld from the study participants. Third, by the time the “study” was concluded in 1972, an untold number of men had died or been hurt by syphilis unnecessarily. Their wives were infected as well.

Some good did come from this, however. Because of this embarrassment, this abomination to science that was eclipsed only by the Nazi human experiments during the Holocaust, protections of human subjects in research studies (private and public) was finally codified into law. Today, you cannot have someone participate in a research study without their complete and fully informed consent, without the study benefiting the subject in some way, and without doing all that is possible to keep the subject from any harm. If you do something that violates these principles, the consequences can be very grave.

The story did not end with the class-action lawsuit that the Tuskegee participants launched against the US Government. It didn’t end when President Clinton apologized on behalf of the nation for that horrible crime. Oh, no. Thanks to the wild imaginations of people like Brian Hooker and Andrew Jeremy Wakefield, the story continues today. Although, today, the perpetrators of the lies and deceit of the African-American community are not in the employ of the US Government. Today, it’s the anti-vaccine groups that are lying through their teeth so that Hooker wins his court case (and the sweet, sweet cash that comes with it), and Andrew Jeremy Wakefield gets some sweet cash donations for his next film.

After all, Andrew Jeremy Wakefield is now a filmmaker, don’t you know?

Yes, these two sorry excuses for human beings are telling the African-American community that the so-called “CDC Whistleblower” has “revealed” that a study by staff from the Immunization Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention clearly shows that there is an association between the MMR vaccine and autism, and that this association is more pronounced in African-American male children than in any other group.

This is a bunch of baloney, as several people have explained here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Oh, and here.

In their long-winded speeches about what the “whistleblower” may or may not have said, neither BS Hooker nor Andrew Jeremy Wakefield mention how much money they stand to make from the whole thing. They don’t mention the mountains of evidence against them, either. Andrew Jeremy Wakefield never mentions how he is no longer a licensed physician anywhere in the world because of his elaborate fraud to try and link the MMR vaccine to autism when he was getting paid by lawyers to find that link (by any means necessary?) and how he was planning to patent a vaccine of his own to compete with the vaccine he was trying to destroy.

BS Hooker doesn’t tell people about his current case in the Vaccine Court and how he stands to get money if he wins it. It even seems that he goes one step further and not tell even the people he’s suckered into working with him about this, citing no conflicts of interests in his papers and being an “independent” researcher according to hack reporters he’s using to spread the “whistleblower” mythos. But, somehow, a study of children in Georgia done with full institutional review, adhering to the Belmont Principles, and whose results are clear and verifiable, somehow that study is the big lie being told to the African-American community?

Brian S. Hooker and Andrew Jeremy Wakefield (and RFK Jr. and company) must think that African-Americans are stupid in general. There’s no other explanation for why they are proudly and openly lying about the “whistleblower.” If you look at the documents that the “whistleblower” passed on to Congress at the behest of Hooker and Wakefield (in the expectation that Congressional hearings would be called and someone would have a Perry Mason moment on the stand) there is nothing of substance in any of those documents. Even Ben Swann, the orange-colored not-so-super reporter who was fooled into making a YouTube video about this, kind of put out his video and then walked away.

But you know what is really the worst part of this? Hooker and Wakefield and friends do not tell African-Americans the very real consequences of not getting vaccinated. They are two fat, happy White men who have the resources available to get care if they get sick who are going around to communities of people whose access to care is less-than-appropriate telling people in those communities to forgo one of the most important ways of staying healthy. And, should it come to pass that any of those unvaccinated children are harmed by a vaccine-preventable disease, I bet you good money that both of these very privileged men will wash their hands of the whole thing.

Heck, I’ll even go one step further and predict that they will distance themselves from the Nation of Islam and other African-American-centric groups the minute they feel that they are not getting their money’s worth. Andrew Jeremy Wakefield already did it with the Somali community in Minnesota. He went up there and scared them away from the MMR vaccine, triggering a measles outbreak, and has not been back since. He might as well have mooned them when he heard there was a measles outbreak.

Yes, I’m blaming you, Andrew Jeremy, for the measles outbreak that hurt African-American children in Minnesota. And I’m not the only one. And now, I’m blaming you and your friend, BS Hooker, of scaring away an even wider audience of African-Americans from the one public health intervention that has not failed them, of trying to break the trust that we in public health have been trying to rebuild since Tuskegee, and of me, personally, being physically threatened over something that happened before my time and that you two despicable jerks are bringing up as if it is happening again.

Remember how I wrote up there that this story doesn’t have a happy ending? It really doesn’t. We all lose when lies and greed seed so much doubt and fear that people, even one person, gets hurt. Last time there was this much mistrust toward my profession was for a very good reason. This time, it’s because BS Hooker and Andrew Jeremy Wakefield seem to can’t do without that sweet, sweet, motherf*cking cash.

I hope they’re happy.

If you can’t sell your journalism, sell controversy

I’m in the nation’s capital, as I am from time to time when the rigorous requirements of my job demand it, and I picked up a copy of the Baltimore Sun. (I like to see what’s up in the city where my alma matter is located.) It was the usual bit of this and that, with the mayor resigning, a ton of people coming out of the woodwork to try and replace her, and more violence in the streets. Then I saw that someone had tweeted an article from the Baltimore Sun to a friend of mine… And then my blood boiled.

To call it an “article” is too much. It was an opinion piece by William Reichel and Emily Tarsell from Timonium, Maryland. It has a ton of misinformation about the HPV vaccine. The usual tropes about how the vaccine is not safe, is not effective, causes too many deaths and disabilities. If they had the space to write it, these two would have probably blamed the Kennedy assassination on it.

Dr. Jen Gunter (an awesome, brilliant medical writer and physician) wrote a lengthy rebuttal of Reichel and Tarsell’s nonsense. In it, she goes point-by-motherf*cking-point over the whole thing and demolishes it. The opinion piece is so full of inconsistencies that I’m beginning to wonder if William Reichel really is a doctor. Because, he’s a doctor.

See, the opinion piece omits the titles of the people who wrote it, but they submitted it to an anti-vaccine website a month ago and clearly show the titles of the two people. Furthermore, in the antivaccine site, they post links and “references” to articles about cervical cancer and vaccines from three years ago (or longer). Just their first claim, that the vaccine has “never” been shown to prevent cervical cancer is an enormous lie. (Or it’s a lack of researching more recent findings about the vaccine’s ability to reduce the rate of cervical cancer precursors in women who were vaccinated compared to women who were not, which they’ll probably chalk up to better vaginal sanitation or something.)

First, who is Emily Tarsell? She’s a board member of an anti-vaccine organization and has stated that her child died from an HPV vaccine reaction. She also published “research” in the form of data analysis of a questionnaire and outright dumpster-diving of the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System. She was even interviewed by Katie Couric because, you know, ratings. Something happened to her child, sadly, and she has swallowed the anti-vaccine hook, line and sinker.

And William Reichel? He’s thanked in the “paper” published by Emily that I mentioned previously. (Seriously, they interviewed about 40 people who were not selected at random for any kind of adverse event after the vaccine and, surprise, found that the vaccine is made from Satan’s sperm is dangerous.) Anyway, he’s been a darling of the anti-vaccine legions for a while. Back in 2011, he apparently sent Senator Barbara Mikulski a letter about his concerns with the HPV vaccine. In it, he states that he is personally concerned about the vaccine. He signs the letter by identifying himself as an affiliated scholar of a center for bioethics. I guess ethics don’t apply if you’re anti-vaccine.

Oh, have no doubt in your head that these two are anti-vaccine. They’re collaborating with anti-vaccine activists. They ignore some very good, very solid research on the safety and effectiveness of the HPV vaccine. And they play the anti-vaccine card of finding causation between vaccine administration and severe effects (like death) when, at worst, there is an association and, at best, there is nothing there. (See what I did there with the whole worst/best thing?)

What really grinds my gears is the Baltimore Sun’s willingness to publish this nonsense. I’m sure that they’ll say that it’s an opinion piece, and that it wasn’t written by a journalist. (It wasn’t written by an objective person, that’s for damned sure.) But why publish dangerous misinformation? If I were the parent of a teen, and I didn’t know anything about the vaccine, I’d be thinking twice about whether or not to give my teen the vaccine. I’d be wondering if there is any truth to what these two have written. I’d probably Google them and then go down a dark path that would end in my teen getting, at best, genital warts one day or, at worst, cervical/penile/anorectal/throat cancer.

It’s not the first time that the Baltimore Sun has published an anti-vaccine piece. I guess that, if you can’t sell your journalism, you gotta sell controversy.

Grasping at straws to blame vaccines for an infant’s death

I will never, ever be happy that a child dies. You will never hear me say that they are in a “better place” or that there is some grander plan behind said death. And I can only imagine how tough it must be for a parent to lose a child.

What really grinds my gears is when a parent who loses a child goes to great lengths to blame vaccines. It’s one thing to grieve and want to blame something, but it’s another to waste money and resources in order to blame vaccines. This is the story of such a story:

“Rachel French did what most parents do: she took her baby to the doctor to get vaccinated. She was unaware of the associated risks that come along with these drugs and learned the hard way. She lost her adorable son less than three days after he was given eight routine vaccines.”

Of course, anything that happens after vaccination is directly a result of the vaccination, no matter what. At least that’s how anti-vaccine nuts operate in Crosby’s Labyrinth. The story gets really weird further down, but look at this part first:

“Her son’s autopsy report stated he died from asphyxiation from an undetermined cause. There was nothing obstructing his airways, nor did he have any physical signs of trauma at the time of his death.

The medical examiner and detective handling the case did not provide a good enough explanation for Rachel to understand what had happened to her baby. This led Rachel on her own journey to find out the truth. Rachel was told by the doctors that the vaccines had nothing to do with what had happened.

Years later, her lost son came through to her in a dream and eventually helped her uncover the truth. Her own investigation involving a child death investigator and pathologists proved the vaccines were responsible. This is their family’s harrowing story.”

Again, losing a child is horrible, so I’m sure that “Rachel” wanted some evidence that something else, like vaccines, killed her child. It’s not that she was anti-vaccine, per se. After all, the child was vaccinated. But everything just goes flying off the rails after that dream she had:

“It wasn’t until more than a few years after Danny passed, that I had a weird dream of my son. He came to me in my dream and it is the only dream I know of him being in.

He was just sitting in his bouncy seat and a man’s voice said, “It was the ‘site-o-kin’ storm that killed me.”

I decided to Google the term and found the term cytokine storm.”

And this is where I call bullshit. Our dreams are these very impressive constructs of fantasy and reality created by our brains in order to help us file away memories in a proper manner. Dream help us sort things out that are in our heads bothering us. Without dreams, we’d go crazy in a most literal sense. This statement by Rachel tells us all we need to know. She had more than likely looked up “cytokine storm” in relation to her son’s death, or she read about the cytokine storm somewhere and associated it with her son’s death. In either case, the dream tells us that her brain was in the process of filing the information away. However, because the death of her child was so meaningful, her brain instead associated the two things, leading her to hire “experts” who must have taken her for a chump:

“Danny had blood samples taken when he was twelve months old. On the day of Danny’s well-baby visit two months later, just before he passed, the day he was given that last set of shots, they had to take his blood again because of a previous lab mix-up.

I wasn’t comfortable with the way things were going so I had requested that the samples be sent to a facility for storing.

I had kept a locket of Danny’s hair after he had passed away, some slides requested after his autopsy, and decided to send some teeth and bone fragments from his ashes to the pathologist, along with the stored blood samples I had requested be saved. I then made arrangements to have the evidence reviewed.

Everything was reviewed by three separate pathologists. All three confirmed the same findings. The pathologists stated vaccine-induced hypercytokinemia as the cause of my son’s asphyxiation.”

First, routine blood samples are kept for no more than a week after they are collected. So we’re expected to believe that they were kept for years after his death. Next, based on this likely inexistent blood, some slides, and some bone fragments, these “experts” came up with “vaccine-induced hypercytokinemia”?

I’ll give you one guess and one guess only as to who uses that term? Yep, anti-vaccine nuts.

What’s more puzzling? This:

“They were able to determine this in large part to the blood panel taken prior to Danny receiving his vaccines, in contrast with the samples I had stored.”

So the blood that was mixed up at the lab at twelve months, and the blood that was likely not available after, all helped in determining this? I repeat, Rachel states that blood was drawn at twelve months but re-drawn because of a mix-up. The re-draw she states was stored in a facility, which explains the availability of the blood. But how did she find the mixed-up blood drawn at twelve months?

The whole thing has more questions than answers.

According to Google, the child died on July 4, 2008. There was one record that matches his in VAERS (ID 573366-1). I don’t know if it is his or not, but it bares many similarities to the story on the above mentioned anti-vaccine blog. There is no information on the investigation, and there likely won’t be. VAERS doesn’t work like that.

So how did Rachel even start wondering if vaccines caused her child’s death? A friend lost a child, too:

“A friend I had met before learning the truth about what happened to Danny went through something similar with her baby. The coroner called her and said her baby’s death was a SIDS case related to the DTaP vaccine he received at two months of age.

She called the next day, got a new medical examiner who said the other medical examiner was gone, she waited eight months for the autopsy report that was filled out by a different person and it stated accidental suffocation or something along those lines.”

Once that little seed of doubt got planted, it was only a matter of time until Rachel went looking for an answer, like a hammer looking for a nail.

The rest of the blog post is the usual dreck of anti-vaccine nuttery. In their pea brains, there is a cover-up and SIDS deaths are deaths from vaccines, accidental asphyxiations are deaths from vaccines, package inserts are confessions from pharmaceuticals about the evils of vaccines, and so on and so forth. You know the drill.

All in all, I really feel bad for Rachel. Here is a mother who lost her child and apparently wanted answers. When the answers were not enough, and when someone planted the idea that it was the vaccines, it seems that Rachel went looking for definitive proof of vaccines doing something to her child. And it seems that “experts” with some sort of anti-vaccine agenda took her for a ride and sold her the idea of “vaccine-induced cytokine storm.”

We do wonder who these “pathologists” are that confirmed this diagnosis. Are they board-certified, and, if so, does the medical board of the state where they practice know of these shenanigans?