My posts on Andreas Moritz get a fair number of hits, both here and at other blogs, even though I haven’t really written about him in awhile. That makes me happy because it means I still show up high enough in search results for people to notice my warnings. As a result, it is without exaggeration that I can say there is a good chance I have indirectly saved a life, perhaps several. Of course, this isn’t something that can easily be measured, but anyone who has had a life-threatening disease and decided to get real medical help instead of reading Moritz’s horseshit in hope of a cure has been saved. (Those who have had normal aches and pains have at least had their wallets saved.)
One might think that getting people to a point where they can be helped would be praised by all. Not that I’m looking for praise, especially since I’m acting as little more than a helpful road sign that points people to the hospital, but my actions are far from bad. Unfortunately, Moritz’s supporters don’t see it that way. That’s why they show up in the Recent Comment widget from time to time. In fact, even though I never use the blog, they show up on Without Apology quite frequently. They never say anything remotely intelligent, which is why I generally ignore them bar the occasional trolling, but one recent comment was especially unintelligent. Let’s take a looksie:
You guys who put down an outside opinion on health matters must also be Christians…
After all, before Jesus Christ fell on the scene 2,000 years ago, by their belief, every single human being went to “hell”. Now, there have been humans on Earth for many, MANY more years than Christianity, and I seriously doubt they all went to this fictitious (My Opinion) “hell”.
It is ok to believe what you like. That’s what makes us all learn and grow. But to put others down for their beliefs in this life, especially those well intentioned to helping others, even slightly skewed as you may view it, is a mark of your own character. History remembers these types for what they were, bitter.
Not only is this commenter, Justan Observer, under the incorrect impression that a whole slew of atheists must be Christians, but he has caused the irony alerts in my head to go crazy. “How dare you silly, gullible Christians insult my precious quack! I question your character for putting others down on the basis of their beliefs.” Gold. Absolute gold.
Isn’t it funny how adherents to a cause can be so telling of the cause sometimes?
If someone randomly asked me what I thought of the idea of injecting silver into the body, I would say I presume it’s toxic, but I don’t know. I would then do a 30 second search on the effects of the stuff and discover that it offers no medical benefits and, in fact, can lead to the condition known as argyria. This is when the skin turns a grey/blue color for life. Apparently it’s only cosmetic, but so are many other disfigurements:
Now, if someone asked the same question to a naturopath or any other quack, the result might be this, especially in Vermont: “Oh, sure, it’s great stuff. Really great stuff. Do you want an injection? I’m legally allowed to put this poison into your body, after all.” They would say this because Vermont, like several other states, allows naturopaths to prescribe certain things for ‘patients’. One of these things is colloidal silver, which is just silver suspended in a solution. My hope is the Green Mountain State is unique in its allowance to naturopaths to poison people, but I’m not sure.
If NDs had known as much about medicine as I, an educated consumer, do, they would have searched the medical literature before including anything in their formulary. If they had done that, they would have seen that: there are no studies showing that ingesting silver in any form or amount offers benefits; colloidal silver does not treat eye infections; taking silver internally or putting it in your eye can result in permanent discoloration.
If NDs had checked common toxicology reference books, they would have seen that silver causes argyria. If they had looked at old pharmacology books, they would have found warnings about the uselessness and danger of taking it internally. If they had checked current ones, they would have discovered that those practicing scientific medicine discarded silver long ago.
If NDs followed notices published by NCCAM, the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, or the FDA, they would have seen consumer warnings as well as the FDA rule in the Federal Register stating that silver cannot be used as a drug because ingesting it offers no benefits and is dangerous.
If NDs had googled “silver” or “colloidal silver”, they would have learned all of the above.
If they followed the mainstream media, they would have seen Paul Karason or me. The local, national and international media has covered our stories extensively. Paul was on Oprah. Consumers Reports listed “colloidal silver” among its latest list of “dirty dozen” supplements to be avoided. The Wall Street Journal said, “federal regulators say it a total scam”.
(Paul Karason is the guy pictured above.)
I find it just deplorable that we license these people at all, but to allow them prescription rights is actively dangerous. Even if they manage to not prescribe contraindicated drugs – something I doubt most of them are even aware should be a concern – they still have the right to effectively give people poison. It’s awful.
EDIT: See the comments for an update on the near-exoneration of Vincent Dammai.
I’ve been thinking about it. When I first wrote about scam-artist Lawrence Stowe, I called him “a horrible human being”. I now regret that. Allowing him the title of “human” is far too generous. Far, far too generous. Just look at what he did:
Stowe told [CBS’s “60 Minutes”] MS patient that he can reverse her disease with his program of herbs and vitamins to boost the immune system, custom vaccines and stem cell injections. Medical experts say it’s nonsense but it’s the same pitch that we secretly recorded again and again as Stowe claimed to reverse cancer, ALS, MS, Parkinson’s disease and more.
He did this sort of thing to desperate person after desperate person. He scammed people out of their life savings, sometimes putting them into debt and convincing them to sell their homes. He promised cures where there are no cures. He ruined the lives of real humans nearly as much as nature herself was in the process of already doing.
Three men have been arrested for their participation in a scheme to manufacture, distribute and sell to the public stem cells and stem cell procedures that were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), United States Attorney Kenneth Magidson announced today along with Assistant Attorney General Tony West of the Department of Justice’s Civil Division, Special Agent in Charge Patrick J. Holland of the FDA—Office of Criminal Investigations (OCI) and Special Agent in Charge Cory B. Nelson of the FBI.
Francisco Morales, 52, of Brownsville, Texas, was arrested by Customs and Border Protection agents pursuant to a arrest warrant late Dec. 22, 2011. He made his initial appearance the following morning at which time he was ordered held without bond. Alberto Ramon, 48, of Del Rio, Texas, and Vincent Dammai, 40, of Mount Pleasant, S.C., were arrested yesterday. Ramon was arrested as he was about to enter his clinic and has already made his initial appearance in Del Rio, while Dammai was arrested in Florence, S.C., and is expected to make his initial appearance in Charleston, S.C., this morning. Lawrence Stowe, 58, of Dallas, Texas, also charged in relation to this case, is considered a fugitive and a warrant remains outstanding for his arrest. The two indictments in this matter, returned Nov. 9 and 10, 2011, have been unsealed by order of the court.
Given the terrible nature of Stowe, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he has already packed up his stuff and moved his operation to another part of the world. Fortunately, the thing with criminals is that they almost always slip up. If he is out of the country, he will return at some point. He can’t hide from his lies and crimes forever.
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, or NCCAM, has been causing harm in one form or another for a dozen years now. We have Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) to thank for that because he was the one who inserted a few paragraphs in a budget bill back in the 90’s which created this monstrosity. His basis? Not science:
In a 1998 speech, Harkin described watching acupuncture and acupressure ease the pain and violent hiccups of a brother dying of thyroid cancer.
“These are things I have seen with my own eyes,” said Harkin, who also lost three other siblings to cancer. “When I see things like this I ask, ‘Why? Why aren’t these things being researched?'”
In other words, he used anecdotal evidence to come to his conclusion. This is standard for supporters of woo, or even just idiots in general.
So what have we learned from NCCAM, a relatively small but well-funded branch of the NIH? Let’s take a look:
Thanks to a $374,000 taxpayer-funded grant, we now know that inhaling lemon and lavender scents doesn’t do a lot for our ability to heal a wound. With $666,000 in federal research money, scientists examined whether distant prayer could heal AIDS. It could not.
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine also helped pay scientists to study whether squirting brewed coffee into someone’s intestines can help treat pancreatic cancer (a $406,000 grant) and whether massage makes people with advanced cancer feel better ($1.25 million). The coffee enemas did not help. The massage did.
Over more than a decade what we have learned is that it is not at all difficult to waste a total of $1.4 billion on quackery. That’s it.
What we have here is an organization which is well-funded but which carries out irresponsible studies. We don’t need research about coffee enemas and distant prayer when there is zero scientific evidence to support even the most vague of hypotheses.
What I really don’t find at all surprising in any of this is the reaction the history of failure at NCCAM gets from its supporters:
Researchers published their dramatic [coffee enema] results in 2010 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Patients receiving standard chemotherapy had lived an average of 14 months. The [Dr. Nicholas] Gonzalez patients [who received coffee enemas] lived an average of four months, and were in significantly more pain.
But some experts questioned the study’s findings, saying it lacked a clear question and had a flawed design. For example, the volunteers were allowed to pick whether they received chemotherapy or the other regimen. Originally, they were to be randomly assigned to a group, but few patients were willing to volunteer under those conditions.
That final line would normally be a significant compounding factor in any study, but these results are far from normal. People following a normal course of treatment lived nearly 4 times longer than those using the woo. Anyone who looks at these results and decides to carry out a completely random, double-blind study on coffee enemas ought to be tried for negligent homicide once their experimental group patients begin dropping dead.
“One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short,” Harkin said.
The senator went on to lament that, since its inception in 1998, the focus of NCCAM has been “disproving things rather than seeking out and approving things.”
Methinks someone knows not a thing about science.
The point of any scientific endeavor is to always prove what does not work and what is not true. Do that enough and what does work and what is true becomes apparent. While it is certainly disappointing that coffee enemas don’t cure cancer, Harkin ought to be happy to know that that is the case (minus the wasted time, money, and human lives, of course). Anyone actually interested in science would view these results as such. Of course, I am assuming that people interested in science would actually let things get this out of hand. They wouldn’t. But fortunately for the supporters of woo – and unfortunately for the supporters of useful expenditures – that is a void NCCAM is more than willing to fill.
We all know Christopher Maloney by now. He is the quack who, in conjunction with Andreas Moritz, worked to get my site shut down in February 2010. They were both upset that I had called them quacks, among a variety of other derogatory names, so they put forth their best efforts and succeeded in quieting FTSOS for 6 days. Of course, the Internet came to the rescue, worsening their lives while making the world a safer place. Once FTSOS came back online, things should have died down given a little bit of time. But of course, that didn’t happen. And it was their fault.
Moritz had little chirps here and there, but he eventually slunk away. Maloney, on the other hand, went on a crusade. He created a series of pages on his site well after the fact, responded to every critical post he could find in the world, and even started stirring the pot in threads on PZ’s site that had nothing to do with him. Then, eight months after the fact, he sent PZ a cease and desist notice. Of course, that just made things worse for him. A few months later, I got a similar notice. Following PZ’s lead, I uploaded the notice, called Maloney a quack, and went on with my day.
What did I mean then, and what do I mean now, by saying Christopher Maloney is a quack? Simply this: I mean that Christopher Maloney openly and aggressively promotes naturopathy, a bogus and unscientific ‘discipline’. Regrettably, it’s a bogus and unscientific discipline that the State of Maine sees fit to license. That’s as embarrassing as if Maine licensed astrologers. I’ve repeatedly written about why naturopathy is bunk, and why Christopher Maloney’s advocacy of it is quackery. As I’ve specifically said before, I’m sure Christopher Maloney is qualified in the eyes of the State of Maine to practice naturopathy – it’s just appalling that the state endorses such things, and appalling that Maloney promotes such bunk.
Move forward several more months and I get a second letter delivered to me. This one is actually threatening a lawsuit. (In fact, its vague wording led me to believe that it had actually been filed, but that was not the case. See a pdf of the lawsuit here.) I needed a lawyer.
Like the call for Batman but with fewer gadgets and more resultant paperwork. Neat, though.
I contacted Ken because, while I could amply respond to the logical mistakes and factual errors that were strewn throughout the lawsuit for the sake of a blog post, I am not a lawyer. I don’t know the actual legal procedures involved, nor would it be prudent for me to defend myself alone anyway. Originally I was only seeking Ken’s help to put me in touch with people who could help me at reduced rates – I’m responsible with my money, but that doesn’t mean I have it laying around for lawyer fees – but to my delight, he offered his services pro bono.
Ken also recruited prominent First Amendment lawyer MarcRandazza. (I dare say, the man has more than a little kick and a little zest to his words. I love it.) I also sought out local counsel in case push came to shove and Maloney actually filed suit; Ken and Marc are both located out of state, so a Maine-based lawyer was necessary. I found and secured the help of Jed Davis, a Princeton and Yale man, of Mitchell & Davis. Needless to say, I had a heck of a team.
So let’s get the heart of the matter. Maloney and his lawyer/wife/state representative Maeghan Maloney sent me a lawsuit, ready to be filed with the courts, claiming I had committed libel and defamed Christopher. When I saw this, I thought the heart of the matter would be that either 1) I have called him a quack or 2) I have said he is not a doctor by scientific standards, but that there have been times when I haven’t explicitly spelled every bit of that out (i.e., I just left it at saying he isn’t a doctor). Number one is obviously a false premise for a libel suit. As Ken wrote in a post about Maloney’s threat to PZ, the term “quack” is protected opinion under the First Amendment in the way I used it. Number two, which I suppose would have been their strongest route, would have been dismissible on grounds that it ignores the context of FTSOS and the fact that I have acknowledged that Maloney is a “doctor” by Maine state standards in plenty of places.
No Habla Español
So which was it? Well, the first one. Sort of. See, the Maloneys were confused. While Maeghan did display a tremendously awful understanding of the law, arguing that the term “quack” is not protected because it implies her husband is unqualified to be a naturopath (it doesn’t, and I’m sure he is qualified to be a naturopath; it doesn’t take much to be a quack, after all), she and her husband also argued that I had been harassing the guy for 2 years. Two straight years. How is that, you ask? Well, first we need to get a fundamental misunderstanding of the Internet under our belts.
They were under the impression that the Tag Cloud widget I had on the side of FTSOS was something I maintained and tended to every day. They believed it was something I was actively messing with in order to manipulate Google searches for “Christopher Maloney Maine” under 24 hour searches. (It took forever to get them to specify that they were talking about 24 hour searches, not regular searches.) Of course, this is silly. A Tag Cloud is an automated feature common to virtually all blogs, including Maloney’s. (I checked his theme and it is an option for him.) Moreover, with or without the widget, a regular Google search showed a whole host of sites, some with and some without it, before mine.
It seems serendipitous that this happens to be a duck.
As it turns out, the widget was probably affecting 24 hour searches. But not in the way the Maloneys thought. If I made a post and someone searched “Christopher Maloney Maine” with the quotations, my blog with that new post would show up. But of course, that post had nothing to do with Maloney. In fact, a search of his name will show that I have only written about him three times this entire year before today. It was delusional of them to believe I was obsessing over the quack every day for two years straight. They simply did not understand the technology at hand. And despite this, it was the primary premise for their lawsuit (making their case more about harassment than defamation, but whatever – they were wrong either way).
But let’s get down to the actual law aspects. As I said, they were claiming that by calling Maloney a quack, I was implying that he was unfit to practice naturopathy under his licensure. Since the state of Maine says otherwise, and since I don’t have any basis for disagreeing, that would be a false statement on my part. If the law worked in weird and inconsistent ways like this, they might have a case. But as a simple Google search would have shown them, they didn’t know what they were talking about. From Ken’s post:
I wonder whether, before sending her feckless and thuggish missive, Meaghan Maloney researched how courts have treated the word “quack” in defamation cases. I did. It took me about five minutes to learn that multiple courts in multiple states in multiple decades have found that calling someone a “quack” is protected opinion and not subject to a defamation suit, particularly when the context shows that it is hyperbole. Yiamouyiannis v. Thompson, 764 S.W.2d 338 (TX 1989) (calling an opponent of flouridation and vaccines a “quack” was pure opinion protected by the First Amendment); Dowling v. Livingstone, 108 Mich. 321 (1896) (it was opinion, not defamation, to refer to an anti-immigration scheme as a “quack remedy”); Gonzalez v Gray, 69 F.Supp.2d 561 (S.D.N.Y. 1999) (husband’s claim that his wife had been having “sex with a quack” was opinion, not defamation against the doctor); Spelson v. CBS, INC., 581 F.Supp. 1195 (N.D. IL 1984) (statement that “nutritionist” treating cancer patients with “vitamins, minerals, and extracts of raw animal organs” was a “cancer quack” was protected opinion). In the rare cases where courts have not protected terms like “quack,” they were used in a context specifically suggesting untrue facts. See, e.g., Nasr v. Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, 632 F.Supp.1024 (E.D. IL 1986) (though calling a doctor a “quack” has been found to be protected opinion, when used in manner suggesting false underlying facts, it was actionable). Courts have made similar findings regarding other epithets, including “charlatan.” Ernst v. Basset, 521 So.2d 414 (La. 1988) (“charlatan” was non-actionable statement of opinion).
In other words, there is at least 125 years worth of case law on not merely libel/defamation cases, but on libel/defamation cases specifically dealing with the word “quack”.
I gather some might consider it bad form to quote any of the communications had amongst the lawyers involved, so I will only paraphrase the wonderfulness of our response. Essentially, it was 10 pages of this: “No, fuck you, and if you sue, we’ll file an Anti-SLAPP motion, seeking attorney fees, and maybe sue you and your lawyer for malicious prosecution.” And while the lawyers were at it, I was ready to make this a public spectacle all over again. I had already secured a promise of help from Simon Singh. It would only have been a matter of hours before the Internet was once again buzzing with “Christopher Maloney is a quack”.
So the result? Well, Maloney wanted a settlement which stipulated that I would remove all tags of him from FTSOS, that I wouldn’t speak of him again in practically any writing, that I would delete all my past writings about him, and that I would pay his attorney fees incurred to this point. There was never any chance of me signing away my rights like that. In fact, there was a deadline placed on the attached agreement which I fully ignored before I was even able to obtain legal assistance. I may not know all the procedures involved, but I know I like my First Amendment rights. (I admit, though, it was tempting to find out just what it was Maloney’s wife had charged him for fees.) But once I did obtain assistance, I realized the value of throwing out a minor gesture of good will to avoid the nuisance of litigation. I know, I know. It’s so unlike me. Actually, I did try to just completely say no to the idea. A man who threatens me with a frivolous lawsuit deserves nothing.
But as I said, I am not a lawyer.
The best course of action, I came to understand, would be to avoid litigation all together. While all the case law and common sense is on my side, and while we would almost certainly prevail in both fighting the lawsuit and our subsequent malicious prosecution suit, the law is an uncertain thing. A judge unimpressed by a young-looking 20-something who has a couple of high-priced out of state lawyers may decide a (lawless) lesson needs to be taught. It’s unlikely, but certainly possible. Moreover, while these lawyers are generally high priced (at least in my world), they were doing the work pro-bono. They were there to assist me whatever my decision, but if a gesture of good will would get all of this put behind me while I still retained all my rights, then it would save everyone a lot of trouble.
I find it entertaining that this image even exists.
So the gesture of good will. Well, as I said, the Maloneys believed the Tag Cloud was something I was messing around with every day for the sake of tormenting some guy I’d never met (despite his invitation and subsequent refusal to actually meet in person). It wasn’t, but if that’s what they believed, then I decided to just offer to take it down. But nothing more. The thing really meant nothing to me, frankly, so it was no loss, and it was actually a reasonable offer. I clean up my site a bit and retain every single one of my rights. If that’s all it was going to take to make this nuisance go away, then great.
Of course, it wasn’t quite that straight forward.
At our offering of the removal, Maloney and Maloney came back with settlements that included ridiculous things like the effective silencing I mentioned (removing all tags, never writing of him again, etc). At one point they wanted to create a system where a third party arbitrator would be used to settle any future disagreements – and the costs of all that would be split. We refused each time. Eventually things came to a clear impasse. This was all being done under a tolling agreement in the first place, and that was about to expire. The Maloneys wanted to extend the agreement and continue negotiations, but there was no point. I would do no more than remove an inconsequential widget from my blog. If that wasn’t good enough, they were more than welcomed to sue. It would have been a delight to watch the Internet light up over an alt-med ‘doctor’ and his elected wife suing a college student over what amounted to a little name calling. My attorneys made it plain that we were locked and loaded and ready to fight.
So the Maloneys caved.
I agreed to take down the widget, but every single post about Christopher Maloney, every single tag of Christopher Maloney, and every single opinion I have ever expressed about Christopher Maloney remains. And none of it is going anywhere.
Ultimately, this is a good outcome. Sure, the ideal would be a big middle finger and nothing more, but this has all taken a bigger toll on me and my time than I thought it would. I work overnights and go to school full-time. My sleep schedule is just awful and my courses are not simple. The spring is shaping up to be even more difficult. My instincts tell me to be as pugnacious as always, but my preference for doing well in organic chemistry is stronger. I’m happy with the result, and I can’t thank Ken, Marc, and Jed enough.
More parents are opting out of school shots for their kids. In eight states now, more than 1 in 20 public school kindergartners aren’t getting all the vaccines required for attendance, an Associated Press analysis found.
That growing trend among parents seeking vaccine exemptions has health officials worried about outbreaks of diseases that once were all but stamped out.
If this trend continues and gets bad enough, people will begin to die. We’ve already seen that in England as well as throughout pockets in the US. It happens. Really, you anti-vax nuts. It god damn happens.
Some states are worse than others, Alaska being the biggest offender at a 9% exemption rate. Here is my prediction: We will see increased deaths over time in parts of Alaska, and likely even more deaths in more densely populated areas with high rates, such as Colorado (7%). Places like Mississippi, where the exemption rate is basically 0%, will continue to be healthy in regard to these preventable diseases of the past.
And why are people making these bad decisions? Well:
Exemption seekers are often middle-class, college-educated white people, but there are often a mix of views and philosophies. Exemption hot spots like Sedona, Ariz., and rural northeast Washington have concentrations of both alternative medicine-preferring as well as government-fearing libertarians.
If these people were science-preferring and woo-fearing instead, we wouldn’t be heading toward this guaranteed problem.
Unfortunately, the treatment they want to give her is antineoplaston therapy: it’s pure bunk. The clinic that is trying to suck large sums of money away from the family of a dying child is the Burzynski clinic. So in addition to being a quack, Burzynski is now a vampire, exploiting sick children for profit.
The total sum of money this quackery clinic is seeking to get from this family is around $310,000. What a waste. I find it awful when any amount of money is spent on false hope, but this is abhorrent. This constitutes a massive loss of cash which could otherwise be used on what narrow chances of survival do exist. Nothing the Burzynski clinic does with this bunk therapy is going to help. Like with all quackery, they lack evidence.
What’s more, the people from this clinic took to responding to critical articles out on the Interwebblings by threatening libel suits, proving once again how amazing it is that so many quacks don’t seem to know about the Streisand Effect. Look, quacks, the Internet does not take kindly to sham medicine. Just wait. A current Google search yields favorable results for the clinic, but give it a day. I promise Burzynski isn’t going to like what he sees. (Though I’m sure he is used to seeing plenty of negative results.)
The New Hampshire House recently had before it a measure to require health insurers to cover patients using naturopaths as primary physicians. (I don’t know how NH defines naturopaths, but in Maine they are not physicians.) The NH House did not pass that measure, though they have passed something which isn’t much better:
Instead, the requirement will be limited to the individual market, where people already had the option to use a naturopath, since consumers in that market pay a percentage of the cost of each visit, unlike an HMO-type system in which a physician acts as a gatekeeper to prevent the over-utilization of specialists…
Committee Chair Rep. John Hunt, R-Rindge, said insurers are upset because under current contracts, physicians are supposed to be able to refer patients to a specialist, not naturopaths.
Rep. Donna Schlachman, D-Exeter, argued that it was good public policy not to discriminate. Besides, she said, naturopaths are less likely to refer patients to specialists, meaning lower costs.
What’s really unfortunate here is that Schlachman does not understand the reason naturopaths are less likely to refer patients to specialists: they do not have the requisite knowledge needed to make a proper determination for what the best course of medical action is for an individual. Go take a look at the few accredited naturopathic schools around the country – the course loads include a bunch of homeopathy, acupuncture, something known as cupping, and other forms of malarkey. Hardly any of it is science. People would be better offer finding a first semester pre-med student than going to a naturopath. (The same goes for people who seek any form of alternative medicine. After all, if it was medicine, it would just be called that: medicine.)
The end result of this measure in NH will be less cost for insurers, more business for naturopaths, and less health for consumers. It’s a bad deal.
PZ has a post about Steve Jobs and woo. In it he summarizes the conclusions everyone on the side of science has been giving. However, he does make one error:
So the final result is that real science kept him alive and healthy as long as possible, and that an early flirtation with ‘alternative’ medicine might have contributed somewhat to lowering the odds of survival, but that what killed him is cancer. And cancer is a bastard.
No, there is no “might” about it. There is a direct correlation between when one treats cancer and how long one is likely to survive. By looking at ‘alternatives’, Jobs’ odds of survival lowered. Think about Huntington’s Disease. It’s a neurodegenerative disease which is passed on genetically. In the average situation where this disease is involved in a family, one parent has a single defective gene whereas the other parent is fine. Any child those two people have has a 50% chance of getting the disease. Those are the odds. Period. Even if the child gets tested and is found to not have the disease, the odds of contracting it will still always be 50% (as just described).
When we talk about the odds of this or the stats on that, we are not referring to a single individual. Even if Jobs’ time of survival remained the same – or even, against all the evidence, it increased because of the woo – his odds were absolutely decreased. Odds refer to the numbers we have on either a sample or population. The only way a person can change his odds is by doing something which has statistical significance. Jobs’, for instance, did just that by engaging in woo instead of treating his cancer.
It should be no surprise that an anti-vaccine group is willing to play games and pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. Individuals in the movement are doing it allthetime. Usually the tactic is to take some minor result and extrapolate wildly from it. A study has 29 test subjects? Black elderberry must be a viable alternative to getting H1N1 vaccines! But there are other methods.
The Sane Vax Mission is to promote Safe, Affordable, Necessary & Effective vaccines and vaccination practices through education and information. We believe in science-based medicine. Our primary goal is to provide the information necessary for you to make informed decisions regarding your health and well-being. We also provide referrals to helpful resources for those unfortunate enough to have experienced vaccine-related injuries.
No, no, no. They believe vaccines are the devil and they want to promote as much fear and uncertainty as they possibly can. Right now they have a series of articles about recombinant DNA in HPV vaccines where they are attempting to drum up boatloads of hysteria. Here’s an excerpt from just one:
Dr. Sin Hang Lee, a pathologist at the Milford Hospital pathology laboratory well-known for using cutting-edge DNA sequencing for molecular diagnoses,[i] was initially contracted to examine a single sample of Gardasil for possible contamination. This sample tested positive for recombinant viral HPV-11 and viral HPV-18 residues, both of which were firmly attached to the aluminum adjuvant.
And what’s the big deal about that?
‘Recombinant DNA’ is a DNA that has been artificially attached to DNA from another species or a man-made DNA construct, in other words, genetically modified. ‘Recombinant DNA,’ also known as genetically modified DNA, is considered a biohazard. This is what states, drug companies, doctors and other medical professionals what (sic) you to inject into your children.
Recombinant DNA is not considered a biohazard. For something to be biohazardous, it must be known to be dangerous to humans. Strict guidelines prevent this from happening, at least as a result of human tinkering (something already hazardous to human health which has been modified for whatever very particular reasons in a lab is not being counted here). It is true that there is some deal of mystery about what could happen if a genetically modified organism spreads into the environment, but little evidence exists to suggest that human laboratory work can have a big impact in the face of nearly 4 billion years worth of evolution.
But let’s get back to SANE Vax’s issue here. The claim is that HPV recombinant DNA is being found in blood. (Go here for more specific links to everything.)
According to Dr. Lee, “‘Natural HPV DNA does not remain in the bloodstream for very long. However, the HPV DNA in Gardasil™ is not ‘natural’ DNA. It is a recombinant HPV DNA (rDNA) – genetically engineered – to be inserted into yeast cells for VLP (virus-like-particle) protein production. rDNA is known to behave differently from natural DNA. It may enter a human cell, especially in an inflammatory lesion caused by the effects of the aluminum adjuvant, via poorly understood mechanisms.
“Once a segment of recombinant DNA is inserted into a human cell, the consequences are hard to predict. It may be in the cell temporarily or stay there forever, with or without causing a mutation. Now the host cell contains human DNA as well as genetically engineered viral DNA.”
This is what one might call full-blown bullshit. The likelihood of this DNA becoming expressed in humans is virtually nil. It is a minute amount, it is not simple to insert new DNA so it can be expressed, and the vaccine is not infectious in the first place.
This is all fear-mongering, of course, but there’s something I find so much more interesting. SANE Vax sent this to the FDA:
The SANE Vax Inc. data, including the electropherograms of short target sequencing used to validate the HPV DNA detected in the thirteen (13) Gardasil samples, each with a different lot number, are available for your review, provided appropriate safeguards are in place to protect the proprietary processes and information utilized by our laboratory to test the samples.
One only need the right undergraduate studies to know this is nonsense. Dr. Lee used PCR techniques to come up with his results. It’s basic stuff. The only point where he has done anything specific to his lab is when he came up with the correct primers. Any biologist willing to devote half a day to a project could come up with the right products. There is nothing proprietary here which is not also insignificant. Neither SANE Vax nor Dr. Lee stand to gain from keeping this stuff secret.
And then there’s this:
The HPV DNA testing was performed by Dr. Sin Hang Lee, a pathologist at the Milford Hospital pathology laboratory known in using cutting-edge DNA sequencing for molecular diagnoses. This methodology was first reported to the FDA in 2006 and has been published in various peer-reviewed scientific journals, stated Erickson.
In other words, his general methodology has been published, but he is refusing to freely publish this specific methodology out of concern that…well, I don’t know. If he has already shown his work to the FDA, then there is definitely no reason to withhold these specific results. Not that there was any justification in the first place anyway.
What we have here is a known anti-vaccine group which has purported unlikely results which cannot be duplicated because it refuses to publish its findings, even though those findings come with zero financial incentive for either it or Dr. Lee. Oh, and the methodology has already been published anyway. It’s utterly transparent what’s going on here: SANE Vax is attempting to establish Dr. Lee as a legitimate source by virtue of his previous work, but then they are turning around and claiming that that same work is proprietary and cannot be seen by just anyone, thereby ensuring that no external source can take a look at the actual data.
The anti-vax movement would be a joke if it didn’t kill so many people every year.
For the Sake of Science 