I’d Like to Play a Game

…But I can’t. I can’t play a game with anti-vaccine people because Game Theory assumes that you’re dealing with rational players. When it comes to the people who peddle in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, you’re not dealing with rational people. You’re dealing, for the most part, with some incredibly irrational individuals who believe any and all conspiracy theories put forth to them by the people they worship.

They’re kind of like a cult, or a loose federation of cults. They have one or two (or three) high priests in the forms of Andrew Jeremy Wakefield, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. or Del Bigtree. Those three men could sacrifice a virgin at an altar streaming live on social media, and it’s a safe bet that their anti-vaccine followers would find a way to justify the ritual. “It had to be done to stop the vaccine holocaust,” they would probably say. And the people would swallow it up hook, line and sinker.

Look at how they see vaccine package inserts. Package inserts are legal documents required by regulatory agencies to accompany medications. When it comes to vaccines, the package inserts name the ingredients in the vaccines, how the vaccine works, when it should be administered, to whom it should be administered and what kinds of side-effects (if any) were seen during the clinical trials of the vaccination.

Mind you, anti-vaccine people claim that there have been no clinical trials of any of these vaccines. Then, when you point out that it’s in the package inserts — the very same goddamned inserts they want you to read because they contain the truth — they flip it around and say that the package inserts are full of lies. If your head is spinning, wait for it. There’s more.

A few weeks ago, some dude who is a hardcore anti-vaccine advocate/activist/loon physically assaulted a California State Senator. The dude has a following on social media, and he ran unsuccessfully for the senator’s seat. Anti-vaccine luminaries followed the dude and praised him. Ah, but the minute the dude gets violent, they all turned on him and started the conspiracy theory that the dude was in cahoots with the senator in order to make anti-vaccine people look violent and nutty.

Then, just last week, some woman woke up in the morning, went to the state capitol in Sacramento, sat in the gallery of the senate, reached down into her vagina, pulled out a menstrual cup that had blood in it and threw the damned thing on to the senate floor, striking several of the legislators. As she was detained by police, she stood there and screamed to whomever could listen that she did it for the dead babies that vaccines caused.

Well, that is what happened in reality. In nutty-land, she was not an anti-vaccine activist and no one had ever heard of her. She wasn’t there to protest vaccines, either. She was there to protest abortion. And what she threw at the senators was not blood, it was paint, a cup of fruit or nothing at all, depending on which anti-vaccine lunatic you’re listening to.

Of course, there is the grand delusion that anything bad that happens to a person after getting a vaccine is the direct result of the vaccine. Car accident? The vaccine did it. Blood clot when you’re morbidly obese, a smoker and on birth control, months after a vaccine? The vaccine did it. Stroke when you’re in your 90s, have had high blood pressure all your life and are on anticoagulants? The vaccine did it. Suffocated to death under the weight of your high-as-fuck mother? The vaccine did it. Trump? The vaccine did it. Hillary Clinton? The vaccine did it.

Don’t even get me started on health care people who decided that they are going to be anti-vaccine. When you spend years of your life studying the sciences, and then you decide to deny the evidence and make some money off of lies… That’s psychopathic. That’s someone who cannot be trusted to be licensed to take care of a dog, let alone a human being. (With all due respect to veterinarians who do take care of dogs.) These so-called physicians and nurses who decide to peddle anti-vaccine nonsense should not be licensed to practice anything even remotely related to caring for the health of people.

And that’s why, as much as I want to play games with anti-vaccine people and get them all riled up in order to have them see the error of their ways, I cannot. They’re not rational. They don’t play by the rules of society, let alone reality. They live in either Crosby’s Labyrinth or something eerily similar to it. Up is down. Left is right. What you are seeing is not what your eyes are witnessing but some gummed up version of reality put in front of you by people who control the world and do not allow a shred of truth to get out except through their websites, blogs and social media channels… Channels to which you can subscribe and donate your money since they are not being paid millions. (Not by pharma, anyway.)

So I’ll have to look to another theory that is not Game Theory in order to better understand these nuts and continue to fight them. Because you should not have a shred of doubt that I will fight them until I cannot fight them anymore. And, even then, even when I cannot fight them anymore, someone else will. We’ve been doing it since Jenner, and we’ll do it beyond the age of Offit.

Your move, mother Hubbards. Your move.

Andrew Jeremy Wakefield wants rabies back

Known fraud and former physician, Andrew Jeremy Wakefield, recently had a picture taken of himself with a dog and a sign. Here it is:

Tip of the hat to Ren, who found the picture on Facebook.

Andrew Wakefield seems to be the kind of person who has gone so far off the deep end in his anti-vaccine crusade that he is willing to do almost anything to continue the conspiracy. The man has used race baiting in the past. He’s spliced audio for his latest faux documentary. So why not pose with a “vaccine injured” dog to get a couple more bucks?

As if making children sick wasn’t bad enough, anti-vaccine zealots have been on a campaign of spreading their nonsense to pet owners. They claim all sorts of things about vaccines for pets like they do with vaccines for children. No, seriously, they claim dogs can be “brain damaged” and become aggressive if they are vaccinated. And now, Andrew Wakefield, the one quack to rule them all, is buying into the con.

Seriously, the man doesn’t know a con he doesn’t like, I bet.

But what if rabies came back? How bad could it be, really? After all, water sanitation and proper hygiene should hold it back, right?

Not quite. Rabies is transmitted through the bite of warm-blooded mammals. In North America, raccoons and bats make up most of the transmissions in animals. Because we do a bang-up job of vaccinating dogs and cats, and identifying exposures in the wild, human rabies is unheard of in the United States, Canada and Mexico. In places in the world where the resources are not there for veterinary public health, rabies still kills a lot of people.

When you hear these anti-vaccine loons clamor for no more vaccines for pets, please remind them what rabies looks like on a dog:

(Caution. Graphic content.)

And that’s just the first stages before the dog completely loses it and becomes violent. Here’s a violent cat with rabies:

(Again, graphic.)

But this next video is why I applaud vaccine manufacturers and veterinary public health workers. Because of their efforts, you can take your pet outdoors and not have to worry about them coming back and biting you, infecting you, with rabies. And, if they do catch rabies and they do bite you, there’s a vaccine that stops the infection in its tracks and keeps you from dying. Because death is certain without vaccines.

(Graphic, of course.)

Look, maybe some vaccine-preventable diseases are not as deadly as others. Maybe. They still cause disability and physical sequelae. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say that we as a society are okay with children being out of school and miserable with measles or chickenpox, and that we don’t care if children are born with deformities due to things like German measles.

But do you really want to gamble rabies? Do you really want your dog or cat to die from it like that? And do you want a person to die from it like that?

It looks like Andrew Wakefield does, and it doesn’t surprise me. He’ll do anything for glory and adulation from his followers.

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

— Tanners Dad Tim Welsh (@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.

Andrew Wakefield’s biggest mistake (this month)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably missed all the commotion over ex-Doctor Andrew Jeremy Wakefield’s anti-vaccine film being utterly rejected from the Tribeca Film Festival. Seriously, his 1998 case study of a handful of children which concluded that vaccines do not cause autism should have been rejected just as quickly. But beggars can’t be choosers.

 

So much for Anti-Vax Jesus.

“To our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one.” – JB Handley

While Wakefield and his followers are almost literally crying over this hell of a setback, and crying about violations of their First Amendment right to freely express themselves as if YouTube wasn’t a thing, Andrew Jeremy has no one to blame but himself. Had he been a little more humble about the film being accepted into the Tribeca Film Festival, had he just put his ego aside and let the film be screened first before he went yelling from the mountaintop that it was accepted… Had he just kept his goddamned trap shut, he would have avoided this embarrassment of monumental proportions.

Seriously, Andy, if you’re reading this, I hope this is a lesson to you. Had you just stayed quiet, you could have been boasting today that your student AV club of a movie (with all of its lies and inconsistencies) was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. You could have had the movie seen by thousands (maybe) and then raise interest in distribution companies. You could have made a lot of cash, and it looks like you need it.

Instead, as is the case with everything that Andrew Jeremy Wakefield touches, his documentary film is now toxic. Only a fringe distribution company would pick it up at this point. (You know the kind, a distribution company that hires $1 theaters to show films to true believers.) Not only is Andrew Jeremy Wakefield not a doctor and not a film director, but he seems to be a horrible businessman as well.

Anyway, Andrew Jeremy Wakefield went and told the loonies to go and support the film. When Robert De Niro posted on Facebook that he supported the movie because, get this, he wanted a dialogue or something, the anti-vaccine weirdos showed up in force to counter the reasonable comments of scientists, skeptics, and bloggers. And, boy, did the antivaxxers make a spectacle of themselves.

There was everything in those comments. From claiming that everyone who supports vaccines and opposes Wakefield’s movie is in league with Big Bad Voodoo Pharma, to claiming that someone or some group threatened De Niro in order to get the film withdrawn. And the anti-vax bingo you can play with their comments. Jesus!

So it’s no wonder that even after talking to a US Representative for an hour (or so they claim), and after desperately trying to save his AV club film, Andrew Jeremy Wakefield failed to have the film screened. Seriously, how many more things does former doctor Wakefield need retracted for him to throw in the towel and go sell perfume at a mall in Egypt or something?

Poor Lord and Saviour Andy. He should have kept his mouth shut.

The dangerous game played by Hooker and Wakefield

When Brian S. Hooker and Andrew Jeremy Wakefield decided that they were going to play the “CDC Whistleblower” game, they and their minions decided to lie and misinform African Americans with the idea that the MMR vaccine was causing more autism in African American children than in other groups. They have gone so far so as to line themselves up with the Nation of Islam, and so we have these statements from NoI leaders saying that CDC “poisoned” Black and Hispanic children.

This is a very dangerous game that the anti-vaccine high priests are playing. The United States is very charged with racial tensions right now. From the “Black Lives Matter” movement to police unions circling the wagons around cops involved in unjustified homicides, there is a lot of mistrust from minority groups toward the authorities and back. To add more oxygen to that fire by using the outright lie that MMR causes autism is Machiavellian in the most extreme. I have no doubt that Hooker and Wakefield will play the “vaccines cause autism” violin while Rome burns, so to speak.

Those two jerks can’t possibly admit that they’re wrong. If they were to do so, you see, they would miss out on the adoration of all those people who have been fooled into believing that vaccines are the Devil’s piss. Brian would not be able to move his claim in the Vaccine Court any further. Andrew Jeremy would have no place left to go since he’s already pretty much hated in Great Britain. But continuing to play this game is going to have consequences, and I’m worried about what those consequences will be.

The whackos that are against abortion have done some pretty bad things. There have been plenty of death threats against legislators in California who helped make SB277 a reality. What can they possibly expect will happen in riling up people who have been victims of institutionalized racism with vile lies about vaccines?

Ten dollars says that Hooker and Wakefield, and possibly the Weirdo John Stone, all have prepared statements washing their hands of anything that happens because of their lies. They won’t be happy until they have their way. Since their way requires a complete rejection of the laws of known reality, they’re not going to be happy… Well, they might dance a jig if a pro-vaccine person gets hurt. That I can see them doing. I can see them toasting to the death of one of their enemies, laughing all the way to the bank to deposit the money given to them by their devout followers.

Working in the quote mine

If you’ve ever watched a politician speak, you might have noticed that they tend to be very, very careful with what they say. Most of them, anyway. They’re very careful with what they say because their opponents are quick to jump on the first little thing that doesn’t quite make sense. Remember John Kerry, our current Secretary of State and former Democratic candidate for President? He said that he voted for something before he voted against it. In the abstract, that sounds like a ludicrous statement. He sounded like a “flip-flopper” and the Republicans let him have it. When you look at what he did, you see that it was a procedural move to kill a bill. He voted for the bill in committee to then vote against it in the full Senate and kill it.

It makes sense to me, but it didn’t make sense to the masses of Republicans who brought flip-flops with them to Kerry’s rallies. They didn’t want to listen to reason, either. When people tried to explain to them why he did that, they basically covered their ears and ran away while screaming.

Anti-vaccine advocates are the same way. They’ll take something out of context and run with it, feeding it to the unsuspecting minds. The unsuspecting minds will then parrot what they’ve been fed without going to the source to make sure they’re not being fooled.

Take as a prime example the public statement by Dr. William Thompson from yesterday. Here is the full text:

“FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—AUGUST 27, 2014

STATEMENT OF WILLIAM W. THOMPSON, Ph. D., REGARDING THE 2004 ARTICLE EXAMINING THE POSSIBILITY OF A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MMR VACCINE AND AUTISM

My name is William Thompson. I am a Senior Scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention where I have worked since 1998.

I regret my co-authors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data was collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.

I want to be absolutely clear that I believe vaccines have saved and continue to save countless lives. I would never suggest that any parent avoid vaccinating children of any race. Vaccines prevent serious diseases, and the risks associated with their administration are vastly outweighed by their individual and societal benefits.

My concern has been the decision to omit relevant findings in a particular study for a particular sub-group for a particular vaccine. There have always been recognized risks for vaccination and I believe it is the responsibility of the CDC to properly convey the risks associated with the receipt of those vaccines.

I have had many discussions with Dr. Brian Hooker over the last 10 months regarding studies the CDC has carried out regarding vaccines and neurodevelopmental outcomes including autism spectrum disorders. I share his belief that CDC decision-making analyses should be transparent. I was not, however, aware that he was recording any of our conversations, nor was I given any choice regarding whether my name would be made public or my voice would be put on the Internet.

I am grateful for the many supportive emails that I have received over the last several days. I will not be answering questions at this time. I am providing information to Congressman William Posey, and of course will continue to cooperate with Congress. I have also offered to assist with reanalysis of the study data of development of further studies. For the time being, however, I am focused on my job and my family.

Reasonable scientists can and do differ in their interpretation of information. I will do everything I can to assist any unbiased and objective scientists outside of the CDC to analyze data collected by the CDC or other public organizations for the purpose of understanding whether vaccines are associated with an increased risk of autism. There are still more questions than answers, and I appreciate that so many families are looking for answers from the scientific community.

My colleagues and supervisors at the CDC have been entirely professional since this matter became public. In fact, I received a performance-based award after this story came out. I have experienced no pressure or retaliation and certainly was not escorted out of the building as some have stated.

Dr. Thompson is represented by Frederick M. Morgan, Jr., Morgan Verkamp, LLC, Cincinnati, Ohio.”

And here’s what the anti-vaccine people are saying about it:

Note how none of them mention this from Dr. Thompson:

“I want to be absolutely clear that I believe vaccines have saved and continue to save countless lives. I would never suggest that any parent avoid vaccinating children of any race. Vaccines prevent serious diseases, and the risks associated with their administration are vastly outweighed by their individual and societal benefits.”

Of course they don’t disseminate that because it goes against everything they believe. They also don’t mention this:

“I was not, however, aware that he was recording any of our conversations, nor was I given any choice regarding whether my name would be made public or my voice would be put on the Internet.”

That is, no mention of the betrayal of trust (and possible criminal action in recording someone without their knowledge) of Wakefield and BS Hooker.

The Drinking Thinking Moms also don’t mention that the findings were only statistically significant for African American boys. Most, if not all, of the children they claim were “lost” or “dead” or “stolen” by autism are white boys and white girls.

Of course, the moms are not the only ones lying by omission about this whole thing. Plenty of anti-vaccine people online have been flooding comments sections of blogs with falsehoods. They say that data were omitted when they weren’t. Others said that Dr. Thompson was escorted off the CDC campus when was not. And, of course, the loonier of the loons are blaming everything from the Illuminati to the Reptilians for this.

The worst of the worst, however, keep using racially-charged language over this, and they keep stoking something that I’m sure not even they want to see catch on fire.

 

Even the bottom-feeding journals seem to have some sense

Thanks to a reader by the moniker of “Lawrence,” I’ve come to find out that “Translational Neurodegeneration” has taken down the article by BS Hooker on MMR and autism. Now, we have this:

http://www.translationalneurodegeneration.com/content/3/1/16/abstract

The page where the article used to be now links to a PDF version of it with this message:

“This article has been removed from the public domain because of serious concerns about the validity of its conclusions. The journal and publisher believe that its continued availability may not be in the public interest. Definitive editorial action will be pending further investigation.”

I call this journal a “bottom feeder” because, in my humble opinion, it has a lot of questionable articles in it and the impact factor of the journal is lacking. But the editorial board has done the right thing in wanting to take another look at the article.

I’m still left wondering how this paper got through peer review, or who did the peer review. They seem to not have bothered with checking the biostatistics or with looking back at the DeStefano paper.

How to end a scientist’s career with some fancy editing

I’ve been taking extra strength exedrin today, all day. I have this nagging headache. See, I get these headaches when I hear people lying. It’s like a superpower, except that it hurts worse as I hear more stupidity. The “Thinking Moms” decided that they were going to have a “Twitter Party.” Well, they don’t know how twitter works. They thought that creating an echo chamber of anti-vaccine people repeating the same hashtag (#CDCwhistleblower) would make said hashtag trend and attract regular Twitter users to their message of anti-vaccine madness. That’s not how it works. For something to trend and be featured on Twitter, you need to have a lot of individual people using that hashtag in their conversation. A dozen people writing it a thousand times has an impact factor of 12, whereas twelve-thousand people tweeting it just once has an impact factor of 12,000.

My headache only got stronger when I was directed to this video from who else but the “Autism Media Channel”:

(I wonder how many autistics work at the Autism Media Channel?)

Anyway, the video is more fancy editing from Andrew Jeremy Wakefield and his team. This time, we get to hear more snips and soundbites attributed to one Dr. William Thompson. As much as the anti-vaccine activists have been demanding that Dr. Thompson come out into the open and make some sort of a statement, no one seems to demand that Andrew Jeremy Wakefield and his team publish the entire recorded conversation between Brian Hooker and Dr. Thompson. All we get are lies and innuendo. We have operatives like Ginger Taylor writing on Twitter that CDC deliberately didn’t look at birth certificates for African-American babies in the DeStefano study. Others keep repeating that the DeStefano study is like the Tuskegee study, where African-American men were deliberately denied penicillin when they had syphilis. It’s not.

Still others are saying that this is yet another form of abuse of African-Americans by the government, then they compare it to the unrest happening in Missouri. The even use imagery from the riots and of the teenager killed in Ferguson by a police officer. Again, autism to the anti-vaccine crowd is just like murder, just like death.

Yet none of them demand that Andrew Jeremy Wakefield release all the tapes. If I were running his public relations machine, I would probably do the same. Release little bits, edited ones, ones taken out of context, all to feed the masses who clamor for evidence where there is none, all to keep them worshipping their god. And it wouldn’t matter to me if I destroyed a scientist’s career, as long as the donations kept coming in and the sheeple kept up their deification and sanctification of Andrew Jeremy Wakefield, the godhead, and Brian S. Hooker, the priest.

Andrew Jeremy Wakefield plays video director while African-American Babies die, or something

Let’s say that I have a secret. Well, not that I have the secret but more like I discovered a secret. Let’s say that it is a secret so heinous that telling it to the world may change the world or, at the very least, save a lot of lives. And let’s say that I’ve vetted the information contained in that secret and I have found it to be true. Do I…

1. Go to the media with the secret and the evidence and make the news?
2. Bury the secret in a bunch of convoluted science-speak in a paper that I want to publish in a bottom-feeding journal that no one with any real credentials has heard about while I make a video, edit the video, narrate the video, edit some more and post the video online only to take it down, edit some more, and then post it again?

Me? I’d go to the media immediately. I’d take all the money I’ve been given by fearful parents and call a press conference ASAP. What Andrew Jeremy Wakefield decided to do is, well, you’ll see.

If you remember correctly, there’s a PhD biochemist by the name of Brian Hooker. Dr. Hooker has actively sought legal relief for his son’s autism. In his mind — as that of others — it was the vaccines his child received that caused the autism. So Dr. Hooker has time and again tried to play epidemiologist and biostatistician and try to debunk studies that have debunked the autism-vaccine myth.

Hooker’s latest “research” dealt with a study by CDC epidemiologists where children with autism and children without autism were compared to see when they got the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine. That study (DeStefano et al) found no difference in the odds of receiving the MMR shot between groups of autistic and neurotypical children of the same age all living in the Atlanta, Georgia, metropolitan area. Hooker has come along and claims that data left out from the DeStefano paper shows that there is an increased risk of autism in African-American children receiving the vaccine at 36 months.

I read Hooker’s paper, and it is rife with problems. First, he uses as his references papers written by the Geier father-and-son team. The Geiers were involved in some shady treatment of autistic children by using chemicals typically used to chemically castrate people. They contended that, because mercury binds with testosterone in a petri dish at high temperatures, then the same must be true in a human being. In their mind, mercury in thimerosal binds with testosterone and triggers autism. Their solution? Chemically castrate male children by giving them chemicals that reduce their testosterone. For that, the father lost his medical license in just about every state he had one. The son faced charges for practicing medicine without a license.

Next, Hooker cites Andrew Jeremy Wakefield’s paper, a paper that has been retracted for being an “elaborate fraud.” So, right off the bat, the Hooker paper is not looking too good. Next come the statistics. Hooker uses Pearson’s chi squared test to see if there is a significant association between MMR and autism in children at different ages. DeStefano et al used conditional logistic regression. For the non-biostatisticians out there, the technique that DeStefano et al used accounts for confounders and effect modifiers, different traits in their population that could skew the results. Hooker’s technique doesn’t really do that, unless you stratify results and use very, very large datasets. Hooker’s approach is more “conservative,” meaning that it will detect small effects and amplify them, and those effects can come from anything.

Even with that approach, Hooker found that the risk of autism associated with getting the MMR vaccine was not there or it was negligible, except in one population: African-American male babies. He found that African-American male babies at 36 months had a higher than 3-fold risk of autism if they had received the MMR vaccine. Pretty damning, right?

Well, as is the case with most anti-vaccine activities, there is more than meets the eye. I’ll explain that in a second. First, I want to show you what Andrew Jeremy Wakefield and Hooker did with this information:

Yes, instead of calling a press conference or otherwise going to the media with this information, thereby maybe halting all MMR vaccination of African American babies at 36 months, Andrew Jeremy Wakefield decided to create a video, edit it, narrate it, edit it some more, and then post it online. This is not the first version of the video, mind you. There is another version where the “whistleblower” is not named by name. If you want to believe another anti-vaccine activist (The Kid), Hooker never wanted to reveal the identity of the whistleblower. I guess Andrew Jeremy Wakefield just did it because the internet, or something.

So, just so we’re clear before I go into why Hooker is wrong in his assertions, we have Wakefield admitting he was wrong (as we all knew) and we have Hooker on the phone with a researcher of a well-known paper, on video, but the whistleblower’s identity was supposed to be kept secret. Right.

Hooker is wrong in his assertions because the DeStefano paper did not leave out African-American children on purpose. Children were excluded from the analysis because of very legitimate and scientific reasons. They either were not the right age, did not have autism but some other neurodevelopment disorder, or were born outside of Georgia. Even if they were tossed into the analysis, DeStefano et al used a statistical analysis that took into account things like birth weight and mother’s age when analysing the data. They wanted to make sure that what they were seeing was most likely because of the MMR vaccine and not because of some other factor associated with autism.

The nail in the coffin for the Hooker paper is that autism is usually diagnosed by the time a child is three years old. There was no increased risk at 18 months, higher but not by a whole lot at 24, and then the three-fold increase at 36 months. Gee, was it the MMR vaccine, mister? No, the effect is being modified by age. It’s as if I asked you if your shoe size was bigger at 36 months because you drank milk vs because you were 36 months. It’s age. It’s the way that autism is diagnosed. You’re going to have more children diagnosed as autistic at 36 months than you will at 18 months or at 24 months. Using the chi square test doesn’t tease this out, Dr. Hooker! That’s more than likely why DeStefano et al used conditional logistic regression, to take age into account in the analysis.

So why did we not see this in the other ethnic groups or in girls? The answer here is simple, again. Hooker had a limited dataset to work with when he boiled it down to African-American baby boys. In this table, for example, he tells us that he had to modify the analysis to 31 months instead of 36 because he had less than 5 children in that group. It’s the same goddamned mistake that Andrew Jeremy Wakefield wanted to pass off as legitimate science. You cannot, and must not use small numbers to make big assertions… Big, racially-charged assertions:

“Dr. Hooker stated “The CDC knew about the relationship between the age of first MMR vaccine and autism incidence in African-American boys as early as 2003, but chose to cover it up.” The whistleblower confirmed this.

When asked if there could be any scientific basis for excluding children born outside of Georgia, Hooker responded, “I know of none, and none has been provided by the authors of the DeStefano study.” He added, “The exclusion is reminiscent of tactics historically used to deprive African-Americans of the vote by requiring valid birth certificates.””

That is pure race-baiting right there. With the situation in Ferguson, MO, as it is, I am wondering if Hooker and Wakefield didn’t try to capitalize on that and bring even more racial tension into the mix. I mean, Tuskegee and autism, really?

Autism is not syphilis. It cannot be cured with a shot. It cannot be cured, period. It is also not like the Holocaust or genocide, like Wakefield claims toward the end of his little video montage. Autism is not a death sentence. It’s time that parents of autistic children and autistic adults put an end to Andrew Jeremy Wakefield’s lies and his propaganda machine by speaking out against him and by convincing his devout followers not to fund him anymore. After all, if the paper by Hooker and the assertions of the video are true, Wakefield and his “Autism Media Channel” chose to sit on the information in order to make a good video (and maybe even a good buck) while thousands upon thousands of African-American babies continued to receive the MMR vaccine the world over.

Then we’ll just have to fight, won’t we?

There’s a scene in “The Dark Knight Rises” where Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman, tells Bruce Wayne, aka Batman, that “there’s a storm coming.” The scene starts off innocently enough with the aged Bruce Wayne showing up at a high-society party. There, he ends up seeing Ms. Kyle and asking her to dance. He deduces that she is there to swindle some rich guy out of money, but she is part of a bigger plot, a more sinister plot.

I was stupid enough to email an anti-vaxxer a snarky message asking her when they were going to give up, when evidence would be enough that vaccines are perfectly safe and effective, especially when compared to what the natural diseases that they prevent can cause. She told me that I didn’t even know what was coming and that a storm would take us scientists all out to sea, signing her email with X’s and O’s, internet speak for “hugs and kisses.” It seemed odd. Realizing my stupidity and that most everything I write or say to them can be used against me, I left it alone.

Last night, a friend emailed me a link to a video where Andrew Jeremy Wakefield compares the alleged MMR-autism link to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, where African-American men were purposefully held back from receiving penicillin in order to study the natural history of syphilis. To Andrew Jeremy Wakefield, autism is like syphilis, I gather; a disease that is curable and whose cure is being held back by the government.

I’m not going to share the video with you because it’s ten minutes of your life you’ll never get back. I don’t want to do that to you. Suffice it to say that the accusations him and others make in that video would mean the downfall of a lot of epidemiologists if it were true. I have the sneaking suspicion, based on Andrew Jeremy Wakefield’s “elaborate fraud” from 1998 that not everything in his video is true.

However, I do know this… A storm is coming, and we better batten down the hatches.

When that happens, we’ll just have to fight, won’t we? Like we always do. Like we’re have to do.