Two weeks ago, the open-access Journal of Translational Science published two unprecedented peer-reviewed studies that are long overdue and what followed is absurd, but not entirely unpredictable.
To sum up the background, the first pilot study compared 261 homeschooled American children who had never received a vaccine to 405 vaccinated homeschooled American children and reported some startling differences in the incidences of disorders between the two groups. The odds risk ratios of neurodevelopmental disorders, allergies, hay fever and other immune system-mediated conditions which are currently soaring among American children without explanation were much higher among vaccinated children. For an in-depth analysis of the study, go here.
A second study, based on a subset of the first, and by the same authors, examined neurodevelopmental outcomes in premature babies who were vaccinated compared to those who were not. Both studies were epidemiological surveys of mothers' recall of "doctor diagnosed" conditions, prescriptions, and surgeries, not of their opinions. Many studies are conducted this way, including many conducted and cited by public health agencies.
The media were silent. No surprise there. There was a complete mainstream blackout of the story as they pretended there wasn't any unusual research about the health of American children and an article about it going viral in the space of a few days. Public health appeared to be employing the same political tactic: better to hunker down and wait for the storm to pass rather than feed interest.
The scientific community was quiet, except for a small fraction of self-appointed science warriors known as Skeptics, with a capital 'S,' who were beside themselves with rage.
Mob censorship
What was this study that had been "retracted" before doing here again? "Infuriating...spread of vaccine bunk" tweeted one. How DARE this offense be allowed in their blessed published scientific literature? "Didn't we deal with this outrage already?" Retract! Retract! Retract!
It didn't matter that the study led by Anthony Mawson a professor in the School of Public Health at Jackson State University had never been published or retracted before. A study that has not been published cannot be retracted. What had happened previously was only the same thing that is happening now, only prior to publication. A band of skeptic bullies had seen an abstract of the study pop up on the website of another journal Frontiers, while it was still under review there in 2016. The study hadn't seen the light of day. But the all-seeing eye of the Skeptics which searches and searches tirelessly for anything that offends, had seen it.
There was no thought or delay in the Skeptic response. They did not waste time with letters of inquiry or professional concern. They did not wait to consider the methodology or the data or its interpretation or to read the full discussion.
They jeered and screamed "anti-vaxx" - which is the equivalent of 'racist' or 'sexist' and thrown like a bludgeon at anyone, even a credible professor and researcher with a 30-year career, who questions the safety of the expanding use of this particular type of pharmaceutical product for children. "Anti-vaxx" is a silencer.
A fumbling editor at Frontiers tweeted in haste that the study had only been provisionally accepted and the review would be re-opened "in response to concerns raised."
One skeptic is gloating that he is solely responsible for blighting the entire study consideration process:
"I pride myself to have caused the Frontiers anti-vaxx retraction with one tweet!" Leonid Schneider tweeted this week. "The anti-vaxx paper was published as abstract, a reader alerted me, I tweeted, Frontiers got scared, pulled the paper."Even Retraction Watch reported the story that way. After receiving criticism on Twitter, Frontiers released a public statement, noting that the study was only "provisionally accepted but not published," and is being re-reviewed. "
Their links are to two tweets, including the achievement of Leonid Schneider. And that was that.
"Which raises questions in itself: that's not a proper retraction process," somebody called Neuroskeptic commented on Retraction Watch, as though that too was the fault of the beleaguered researchers. No accusations. No responses. No professional ethics or inquiry. No protocol. Not even a fake kangaroo court to justify this one. Just a mob "scaring" a scientific journal out of publishing.
The mainstream media misreported the basic facts of the story at the time and claimed without basis that a study that had never been published had been "retracted," repeating the bizarre claim of the Skeptics and catering to its own overlords at the pharmaceutical industry.
Now, an editor at the Journal of Translational Science has bowed to these forces again. Retraction Watch reports that the study has been "retracted - again." But there has been no formal statement issued by the journal. I emailed the Editor in Chief, Terry Lichtor, a professor at Arkansas State University, twice. When I didn't hear from him I called the London office and was told they would telephone him to make sure he got my questions. The person on the phone seemed to know about my emails. I've had no reply.
I contacted two editors at Retraction Watch and asked if they weren't using the term "retracted" rather loosely for the study, considering the professional ethics and implications. No reply.
"With millions of views, the concerns that this study raises will not be easily wiped away from the public consciousness," says Claire Dwoskin, founder of the Children's Medical Safety Research Institute, which contributed to funding for the study.
"It would more greatly serve the interests of public health and science to replicate the study on a larger scale and determine the accuracy of the results, rather than harkening back to a time where book burning and persecution of scientists reigned the day. If the study is not restored on the journal's website, it may be fair to conclude that some of the lessons of the past have not been learned after all."
No scientific misconduct
For the record, there have never been allegations of scientific misconduct against Mawson's study. Retraction of a study is serious business which sometimes has grave consequences for the publishing researchers' careers, depending on whether there is deliberate fraud involved or simple human error. There are generally accepted retraction guidelines within the publishing industry which state that retraction may be considered only in the case of serious scientific misconduct such as fraud, plagiarism, duplicate publication or errors.
Though publishers are independent, there are also generally recognized retraction protocols which suggest that if there were an investigation for misconduct, it should begin with the editors of both journals in this saga. The Committee on Publication Ethics laid out a code of conduct for editors of biomedical journals in 1994 which states that "Editors should not reverse decisions when authors have been told that their papers will be published unless serious problems are identified with the papers."
Regarding legitimate complaints, it states:
Editors should first seek a response from those accused. If the editors are not satisfied with the response, they should ask the employers of the authors, reviewers, or editors, or some other appropriate body (perhaps a regulatory body) to investigate. (In the case of their own editorial staff, they must conduct the investigation themselves.) Editors should make all reasonable efforts to ensure that a proper investigation is conducted; if this is not possible, or does not happen for whatever reason, editors should make all reasonable attempts to persist in obtaining a resolution to the problem and a correction of the record if it is needed. This is an onerous but important duty.Don't ask
There are plenty of criticisms of the study methodology in the Twitter world of skeptics. Some may be legitimate. The discussion section of studies is where researchers note the weaknesses of their methodology and qualify the data as Mawson et al did. Criticisms and corrections take place in published letters and subsequent, better research. It is the faults of an early study design that make possible improvement in the next.
The first word of the study titled, "Pilot comparative study on the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated 6- to 12-year-old U.S. children" is "pilot." A pilot study is defined as a "small scale preliminary study conducted in order to evaluate feasibility, time, cost, adverse events, and effect size (statistical variability) in an attempt to predict an appropriate sample size and improve upon the study design prior to performance of a full-scale research project."
A pilot study asks a question. What sets this pilot study apart from all of the thousands of preliminary pilot studies on PubMed is not its methodology. It is the question it asks. Mawson and his colleagues dare to consider if the current CDC-approved vaccine schedule of 50 doses of 15 vaccines before age six might have unintended effects on the overall health of children. We know they have serious adverse events and that some children are particularly susceptible to damage. A whole field of vaccinomics and adversomics is emerging to determine which children are particularly at risk from these adverse events and how to "improve" vaccines eventually so they do not kill and maim so frequently. But scientific inquiry outside of the realm of unequivocal acceptance of the status quo is not permitted.
What Mawson and his colleagues concluded, which is probably the most common conclusion in all of PubMed's millions of studies, is that there is a need for more research. Hardly revolutionary anti-scientific rhetoric from radical anti-vaxxers. Just a conservative discussion that this particular environmental exposure which has increased exponentially (from three vaccines to 15) in a generation has never been looked at for its impact on general health, rather than specific infectious disease
Skeptics bang their fists and claim there is nothing left to learn. They tell those who wonder if maybe the idea of scientific controls in a study of drugs for children is a good idea that the research has been done already. But they are lying. The studies they cite look at girls who got the HPV vaccine compared to girls who got the Hepatitis B vaccine. They cite studies that compare girls who got all their previous vaccines plus an HPV vaccine to girls who got all their previous vaccines plus a "placebo" that contains an aluminum adjuvant - an ingredient implicated in disease in hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and an entire 2015 medical textbook. They cite studies that conclude that a new vaccine "may reduce the burden of the disease" caused by the particular strain of virus it was designed for.
Skeptics say children can't be deprived of vaccines so there is no way to ethically do the tests that ought to be required of them. Bring them all on, they say. Untested against controls. To your children.
Thought police
Skeptics operate groups like The Good Thinking Society whose hero and financial patron is the Skeptic supreme, Richard Dawkins. They claim, as their title suggests, to have been ordained (by something that is not God because they are also Atheists with a capital 'A' and Rationalists with a capital 'R') to be able to discern good thoughts from bad thoughts. And these self-appointed Thought Police busy themselves harassing practitioners - naturopaths, homeopaths and chiropractors - and belittling the growing numbers of patients who seek 'alternative treatments.' The skeptics see it as their duty to uphold the orthodoxy of mainstream medicine and to ensure that bad thinkers are punished and that good thoughts promulgated to us by the great and wondrous pharmaceutical industry are upheld.
But people who say "vaccine science is settled" are being dishonest. Science is never settled. By its very nature, science questions orthodoxies and constantly seeks and discovers new things. Just last year, scientists discovered a microscopic system of lymphatic vessels linking the brain to the immune system and said they'd have to rewrite the textbooks. It astonished some researchers and embarrassed others - how could they have missed anatomical structures in the human body until now?
How could medicine have overlooked the importance of the microbiome for so long - basically an organ weighing a kilogram, as important as the immune system and influencing every single aspect of human physiology? But "that is the current situation in which we find ourselves," Julian Marchesi humbly wrote in the British Medical Journal in 2015.
Scientific discovery requires an open mind. And humility. Skeptics have neither. They do what the "scientific men" did to Ignaz Semelweiss in his day. Semelweiss did research and posted that doctors who were delivering women's babies were carrying some unseen agents of disease on their unwashed hands after they had been examining corpses. Death from sepsis after childbirth was common. Women whose babies were delivered by midwives who washed their hands rarely died from infections. Semelweiss paid a price for pointing the finger at his own profession for inducing disease. He was ridiculed and demoted and eventually some of his opponents conspired to trick him into an asylum where he was beaten and died of infection. Today he is among the giants in medical history, but the delay in following his line of inquiry cost tens of thousands of women the hell of sepsis and death.
We don't know what is causing the current health crisis among children or the rising tide of neurodevelopmental and immune system disorders. But everything has to go on the table until we find out. Injected immune-modulating medicines given to healthy children, whatever their sacrosanct reputation and our beliefs about them, should not be shielded from scientific scrutiny. Vaccines are a human invention begun when doctors described the immune system in terms of "miasmas" and "humors" and they are not infallible. There are huge gaps in our understanding of how they work and in the evidence base on their effects. There has never been a study like Mawson's of the entire current vaccine schedule and its long-term impact on children's overall health.
Skeptics have closed ranks against this one line of inquiry. We don't know how important that line is. But we can be pretty sure that history repeats itself and when medical history textbooks are rewritten a long time from now, there will be names of medical heroes like Semelweiss in there, people who challenged orthodoxy and went where no one wanted to go. And there will be brief allusions to the hordes of nameless scientific fools who impeded medical progress while countless children suffered.
About the author
Celeste McGovern is an award-winning independent journalist in Scotland. She reports on medical news, drug scandals, alternative health and more at www.ghostshipmedia.com.
About this issue being A ‘big taboo’, I agree. However, it is far from THE last taboo subject. Indeed there are many, many others, some of which I self- censor, even when on SOTT, because of the likely overreaction and association of my point (which is generally, “I may not agree with what someone says or believes, but will defend to the death their right to say it - without exceptions! Voltaire.) All I would be doing is defending free speech, but I would be accused of aggreeing with the message, despite my valid claims to the contrary.
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How have we gotten here? Once one exception to individual freedom is created, the door has been opened, the dike begins to burst, and the PR salesman has his foot in your hourse. (See, e.g., just today!, the article on the efforts to outlaw SOTT et al, as ‘fake news’ by the fake news makers! "The War against 'Fake News' " at
SOTT Focus:The War against 'Fake News': The Rise of the Orwellian Ministry of Truth
The battle-lines in the information war are drawn. The mainstream media, which the people increasingly see as unreliable, believes that the free flow of ideas and information on the Internet is a...Most of our parents revered the US Constitution and would never have allowed same to have even been considered! And that is but one example of how a slippery slope begins and shows just how far such tactics have gone to take away our ever-diminishing rights of individuals.
Likewise, back as of the the Nixonian proclamation of a (new) War on Drugs - now proven as merely an effort to distract from Watergate - with its subsequent spiking penalties, and 'Mothers for Mandatory Minimums', et al., - back then, (and, I guess/know, still) I would - and still do - always and too often (I'm sure) explain this to all I knew, and how and why that this "War" was illegal and unconstitutional. (One point I would make was: When they outlawed alcohol, it took a Constitutional Amendment - where is the Constitutional Amendment allowing ‘our’ government to pick and choose other drugs to outlaw. What’s the effective difference? Answer: the other drugs are far less lethal than alcohol,, but that only strengthens my point. )
And so I proclaimed back when that escalation was starting, that the US was nearing a final and irretrievable step to an OVERT Police-State. Folks back then (say 40 years ago), would say, “Oh, but the pendulum will swing back, this is just a swing to the right, and it will swing back the other way.” I would reply that such attempts at swinging back will from that point on be uphill, while the swings against individual freedom will be ever steeper against the individual and in favor of the police state. (Nowadays, those same folks admit the point, and say, but what can I do? My answer: Well, a lot more than you have been doing.)
So, again, there remain many, many taboo subjects above and beyond the inanity and wrongness of overdosing little children with vaccines for the purpose of profit making.
Some of those other taboo subjects:
The insane over prosecution of drunk drugged driving. (As we know, texting causes more injuries and deaths, but we aren’t seeing folks go to jail for ten years when such causes an accident.) (Again, the driving war has also followed the standard slippery slope protocol.)
The ENTIRE DRUG WAR, WITHOUT EXCEPTION . (he part people have problems with is that “without exception” . ) Why? Because they’ve been programmed to believe that a single dose of heroin will ‘hook you’ for life, or that crack will, etc. Meanwhile, all real (per se/truly evil and malevolent criminals) who are busted for their evil acts, always blame the drugs they were using rather than owning up to their own personal responsibility.
Meanwhile, during this period, supposedly competent adults, made up over 98% of the voting populace. And who knows how best to take care of those persons’/ your! bodies? You know the answer: They each, and you, do; NOT the government, or some government subsidized (taxpayer paid for ‘program’. Etc.)
People should be able to buy at the pharmacy, OTC, or elsewhere, any and all things they could have bought before the beginning of the drug war, which started around 1900 with truth in labeling laws which quickly expanded into a giant, bribable bureaucracy, and ultimately the FDA, and its subsequent acolytes: the ATF, DEA, et al. (And anything invented more recently/ since then, too.)
Again, I mean NO exceptions. Idiotic people should be free to snort drano! - just don’t expect for taxpayers to pay for the stupidity of such. There are too many drugs out there. After all, what is a drug? Well....
A kid once did a school project about a drug, and asked fellow students about “dioxy hydrogen” (or such) and said these truths:
- That if an average person consumes more than 100 mg per kilogram of body weight, they will most likely die (i.e., the calculation of an LD50 which is a lethal dose for 50 % of partakers of that quantity.)
- X, Y, (I forget all the others he came up with; except the last one); and,
- “It is responsible for well over 99% of drownings.”
He asked his school mates should it be made illegal, punishments, etc. They almost all fell for it and were all for the death penalty, etc. The drug he referred to was water.
Realize that people have become physiologically (i.e., mortally, physically) addicted to baking soda because they liked burping and if they were forced to quit, ‘cold turkey’, they would have died from the withdrawal. Should you be forced to have a stinky refrigerator or an upset stomach because of their idiocy?
There's an old and appropriate statement about the creation of laws to match such strange occurrences: "Hard cases make bad law." (Think about it.)
(Note: If you normally drink coffee, and you skip a day and find yourself with a headache, YOU are a caffeine junkie who is physically addicted to caffeine, SO NOW, YOUR 'LOVING' GOVERNMENT JUST ABSOLUTELT MUST come into your home (in your best interest, of course, although it's going to cost you) and examine your children, or pets, or your HVAC system to make certain (we care about you!) that you are not accidentally overdosing by breathing in your own second hand smoke in your house, (You KNOW this type Ssh*t has been going on for some time!) So, if you think of yourself as consistent in your morals, and that you object to the concept of relative morality (standing motto: "our ends justify our means) , and if you’ve supported any aspect of the US drug war, (e.g., as to 'heavy' drugs - what's that? see above) then you have no moral standing to complain when they come to close your Starbucks, or prohibit Maxwell House. Likewise, if our all powerful, and all-beneficent (hah!) U.S. Government decides to outlaw it, the framework is already there along with the legal justification which came to pass when you didn’t object to the increases of the (not very) Great War on Americans/ oops, Drugs..
Of course, the first still-legal drug they are next/already ‘coming for’ - via identifying,isolating, and ostracizing users (as merely first steps) - is tobacco. (Read ‘Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State'. by historian Richard Lawrence Miller, whose immediately previous book was a well-received and realistic study of the WWII German Holocaust.) In DW&TP, Miller accurately compares 'our' Drug War to the same tactics used in Nazi Germany to identify, ostracize, isolate, castrate, punish, and euthanize folks who wouldn’t/couldn’t ‘go along with the official “just say no” -to drugs, or jews, or gypsies, or gays, etc.- program(s).’
So what drugs should people not use? The obvious answer is it’s a medical question best answered between a competent adult and their physician, and surely should have been treated as a crime (even selling it) as it is clearly not a crime ‘per se’ (like murder) but rather "labeled! " a crime* because someone wrote somewhere that it is. Crimes have long been based on the concept of a real crime is one ‘evil in itelf’ like rape of murder and which are called ‘malum in se’. In contrast, those which have become crimes "just because the PTB say it is" have been called malum prohibitum. The drug war is a war on the latter category, and really on a certain, defined, and then ‘legally’ isolated, class of people.
Another taboo is that one cannot, in most places, point out the fact that the poisoning of our water with fluoride is to help dumb down and passify the nation. (It was first suggested to Hitler for those exact purposes for concentration camps, but I believe I recall that he thought it was too evil. I forget.) Yes, it’s good for cleaning your the microbes attacking the enamel of your teeth, but it’s poison! Read the 'Poison Warning Label" on your toothpaste!
Likewise, if you get a scratch or a bite, you can use a product called Afterbite to minimize the risk of infection by putting it on the surface of your scraped or bitten skin. The product is called “Afterbite.” Do you know what it’s made of? Ammonia. So, do you think we should drink it to help with cuts and scrapes? No...(duh.) But as to fluoridated water, once Dr. Strangelove made fun of the idea, it was all downhill from there.
Another taboo subject: Chemtrails;
Another: Pornography;
Another: UFO’s;
Another: The Level of the Holocaust (TM)
And the list goes on.
R.C.
*By those same assholes who hope to outlaw fake news at places like SOTT.! Well, if you trust them or their ilk, I feel sorry for you and your apparently so-ingrained programmed ignorance that it has become integral stupidity.
And you want to trust them re what is or is not a 'drug' or a 'heavy drug'? You need to learn more.
P.s., Sorry re length. I can type fast and whatever - it's been a long Friday, also. Of course, you had the choice not to read it. ("I wish you'd told me that first' you say"? My reply, again: Sorry.)
RC