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| Infectious Disease Research Gets a Boost from Websites, Blogs, and Social Media (Photo credit: pennstatenews) |
Progressive Radio Network, December 16, 2013
Population cohort and ecologic studies have become today’s norm for determining vaccine efficacy and support the belief that vaccination has safely reduced the spread of infectious diseases and saved millions of lives. Never a gold standard for scientific inquiry, population studies now make up the bulk of vaccine advocates’ clinical arsenal to discredit more factual biological research favoring the arguments of vaccine opponents. A recent paper published in the November 2013 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, “Contagious Diseases in the United States from 1988 to the Present,” is the first of what will inevitably turn into a flurry of future studies to persuade legislators and the public that vaccination should be mandatory for assuring the health of the nation.[1] The study was spawned from a new project launched at the University of Pittsburgh, Project Tycho, named after the renowned 16th century astronomer and mathematician Tycho Brahe and mentor of Johannes Kepler. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, the Project is an enormous multi-tiered undertaking to store mortality data for 56 infectious diseases between 1888 and the present for future data-mining and analysis, and to strategize future policies to increase vaccination rates.
The paper’s authors make the extraordinary claim that “103 million cases of childhood diseases (95% of those that would otherwise have occurred) have been prevented since 1924; in the past decade alone, 26 million cases (99% of those that would otherwise occurred) were prevented” from vaccination. Always the obedient slave to CDC and Big Pharm demands, the New York Times chimed in, stating that this is “one of the kind of analysis that can be done when enormous data sets are built and mined.”[2] If this analysis is factual, it can be heralded as one of the most significant achievements to support the miracles and benefits of vaccines. On the other hand, if the University of Pittsburgh researchers’ analysis is scientifically unreliable and perhaps even found deceptive under sound empirical review, then the paper is one of the most misleading propaganda scams published in a peer-reviewed medical literature in recent years. This wouldn’t be the first time the NEJM failed to perform diligent and satisfactory peer-review of papers submitted for publication. In the past, the prestigious journal has been rife with publishing duplicitous science articles that are best described as medical racketeering.
What is most important is to review the data that the Pittsburgh scientists depended upon in order to reach their conclusions. A review of the Project Tycho website and its database reveals an absence of the most critical information necessary for making any historical determination about a vaccine’s effectiveness let alone how many deaths were prevented.[3] The Projects sole accomplishment is to store vast amounts of data (200 million keystrokes) of mortality statistics, including time and location, for 56 infectious diseases over a 125 year period. Scientific data pertaining to vaccination statistics for eight vaccine-specific contagious diseases noted in the NEJM paper is nonexistent. There is no record for the number of people vaccinated for any of the targeted diseases in any given year or location. There are no records for the number of deaths among unvaccinated persons. Nor are there any records of deaths caused by an infectious disease that may have been caused by a vaccine’s infectious agent or in a data set of the population where the vaccine was ineffective and did not provide protection. In fact, the Project contains no data regarding vaccination data at all!!
In addition, the data makes the a priori assumption that the cause of reported deaths due to the infectious diseases that are tracked over the course of 125 years is accurate. Of course, for the majority of this period accurate biological diagnostic technologies to determine an infectious cause of death were either not in existence or were not routinely performed.
So how did the Pittsburgh scientists derive their conclusions? To understand their modus operandi, the reader is asked to lay aside the most basic principles of the scientific method and critical thought. Rather it would be better to cast our minds back 500 years and adopt an irrational bias that finds more in common with alchemical and magical beliefs than modern science.
Without the crucial data for making even rough estimates for the number of vaccinated and non-vaccinated individuals for any given year in order to make an appropriate calculation, the study’s method is really quite simple. “We estimated the numbers of cases of polio, measles, rubella, mumps, hepatitis A, diphtheria and pertussis that were prevented by vaccines,” the paper states, “by subtracting the reported number of weekly cases after the introduction of vaccines from a simulated counterfactual number of cases that would have occurred in the absence of vaccination” (italics our emphasis). A dictionary’s definition for “counterfactual numbers” would be a number that relates to something that has not happened or a case that doesn’t exist. In other words, it is a magically conjured number relying upon mathematical algorithms with no genuine correspondence to the reality of infection rates. Moreover, the paper states it relies on a “quantitative history,” which translates merely into simple plain numbers of death counts without qualifying what those numbers actually represent in any significant, qualitative way (eg., vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated, margin of errors for misdiagnosing causes of death, the rising number of cases of people contracting infections they have been vaccinated against, etc).
The fact that mortality rates for most of the eight “preventable” infectious diseases under investigation were already declining rapidly before the introduction of vaccines is also ignored categorically. What the Pittsburgh team overlooks is the rapid declining numbers of deaths before the release of specific vaccines.
An excellent example is the mortality rates due to measles. Before the advent of the measles vaccine in 1963, death rates had already dropped 98.6 percent for the period while mortality records were kept. This steady decline started to plateau to less than 1 per 100,000 in 1944 and gradually diminished during the remaining years, aside from an abnormal spike in 1990 after the measles vaccine became part of the standard vaccination schedule. In 1959, the rate was approximately 1 in half a million, approaching zero, before the vaccine’s 1963 release.[4] Since the study ignores any potential reason for the 98.6 percent drop in measles mortality before 1963, there is no rationale to conclude the measles vaccine prevented any deaths whatsoever. Given the many decades of decline prior to the vaccine, whatever the cause(s) for this downward movement, it very likely would have continued to where measles mortality rates are today without a vaccine ever being developed. For example, there was never a vaccine developed for Scarlet Fever, however, in the UK it declined from being one of the more deadly infectious diseases with a mortality rate of 160 per 100,000 around 1860 to almost zero by 1940. Likewise, pertussis was already rapidly declining before the vaccine became widely used in the late 1940s.[5]
In what has now become a standardized assault against parents who either delay or withhold vaccinating their children, the Pittsburgh authors want us to believe that non-vaccinated children were responsible for the recent increase in pertussis cases. However, putting aside the pertussis vaccine’s litany of serious and life-threatening risks, data regarding its efficacy is gradually revealing this vaccine as one medicine’s major debacles. What the authors fail to question is whether the vaccine itself might be responsible for this escalation. Dr. Ruiting Lan and his colleagues at the University of New South Wales have identified a new vaccine-resistant genotype of pertussis (ptxP3) that has increased dramatically. It was responsible for about 30 percent of whooping cough cases before the 2008 epidemic to 84 percent of whooping cough cases in Australia today.[6,7] This new and more deadly strain according to the CDC is now being reported in the US and there is a growing body of research pointing to recent whooping cough outbreaks being directly linked to the vaccine.[8,9] This alone may account for the increase of whooping cough cases being referred to in the NEJM paper and a reason why vaccinated children are coming down with the infection as well. The foremost question scientists should be concerning themselves, rather than investing millions of dollars to play computer games with Magical Numbers, is to determine whether the DPT vaccine is responsible for the emergence of a vaccine-resistant pertussis outbreaks.
Yet there is even more damning research against the pertussis vaccine and its failures. In 2009, the CDC determined that 99.94 percent of American children were vaccinated against pertussis; therefore, the herd immunity threshold was surpassed and according to this unproven theory there should be no transmission. A recent FDA biological study performed on young baboons discovered that the pertussis vaccine, while possibly protecting against wild infection, in fact doesn’t eliminate infection; rather, the study found, that vaccinated baboons are colonizing the virus and transmitting it to others.[10] If this research holds up, it debunks any credibility that may be given to the belief in herd immunity.
The article also makes reference to the large 2010 pertussis outbreak but fails to mention that according to a study published in the December 2012 issue of the Journal of Pediatrics, among the 9000-plus cases in California (the largest among the states), 91 percent were fully “vaccinated according to national recommendations.”[11] During the 1986 pertussis outbreak in Kansas, 90 percent of the confirmed cases were vaccinated. This high percentage of outbreaks among vaccinated children is common during recent pertussis spikes in different locations. So who is truly endangering society? The pertussis vaccine is one instance where widespread vaccination is backfiring and increasing the incidences of infection, hospitalization and death. However, none of these hard historical and qualitative statistics are factored into the Project Tychos calculations.
The University of Pittsburgh’ NEJM article is a grand alchemical illusion of misinformation. The researchers either lack or ignore the most critical data and statistics necessary to arrive at medically valid conclusions about the causes behind deaths attributed to viral and bacterial infectious disease. Therefore, the report is best viewed as an archaic and pseudo-scientific attempt to discredit vaccine opponents and advance Bill Gates’ and his cohorts’ ambitions to legally mandate vaccination and decimate health freedom for individuals and parents to make their own decisions regarding medical interventions for themselves and their children. Wherever Bill Gates’ funding footprint is found in vaccine-related endeavors, we can be certain it is to advance his departing legacy as the foremost leader to vaccinate every infant and child on the planet irrespective of vaccines’ dangers and whether or not they are as effective as the CDC and vaccine makers allege.
Finally, there is a telling aftermath to the NEJM article and the New York Time’s introducing Project Tycho to the public. Why would a project, aimed at increasing vaccination rates, name their initiative after an astronomer credited with laying out the foundation for the Keplerian laws of planetary motion?
There is a perfectly good motive to name the Project after the famous 16th century Danish astronomer but it is not one that Gates nor the university want to acknowledge. Tycho’s significance for a vaccine initiative has nothing to do with the formidable scientist’s observation of the movements of celestial bodies. Rather it is Tycho the notorious alchemist we need to turn to in order to understand the Project’s patron saint. And here we find Tycho’s alchemy mirroring Bill Gate’s financial support for scientists to summon the ghosts of fallacious magical statistics conjured through algorithms to mislead the media and public.
One of the greatest fears parents express against vaccinating their children concerns vaccine’s many toxic chemicals and ingredients and vaccines’ serious and life-threatening adverse effects. For many decades, the scientific literature has documented a wide variety of neurological and physical disorders attributed to vaccines. Many of these long term reactions (development and neurological impairment, asthma and allergies, type-1 diabetes, GI disorders, etc.) are and being observed in epidemic proportions in children. As we have noted, the University of Pittsburgh researchers completely disregarded the questions concerning vaccine efficacy and safety in their study. Their methodology resides strictly in the abstract world of mathematical make-believe, removed from the hard sciences of immunology and molecular biology. Their conclusions to seduce a correspondence between infectious disease mortality rates and voodoo math in order resurrect millions of imaginary saved lives due to a “what if” vaccination has as much credibility as Tycho’s own belief that there was a direct correspondence between the individual planets, certain metals in the earth, and different bodily organs.
In 1901, and again in 2010, Tycho’s body was exhumed for medical analysis. The discoveries and causes of death uncovered the presence of severe toxic poisoning. The skull of his naval cavity was tainted green from excessive copper exposure, and high levels of mercury were detected, likely due to his extensive alchemical experiments to transform base metals into gold and silver and his life’s second endeavor to discover a universal medicine to cure all illnesses.[12]
Bill Gates and the University of Pittsburgh couldn’t have found a more fitting historical personage to honor their multi-million dollar disease surveillance and data mining project to convince legislators to make the vaccination of all Americans mandatory. Tycho’s hubris, in both of his alchemical endeavors, seems certain to have killed him. The alchemist’s drives correspond nicely with the dangers of vaccines, their dozens of toxic chemicals, and the rising epidemic of medical conditions and developmental disorders in children leading to lives of suffering and early death. Therefore dedicating this extraordinary data collection Project after Tycho is perhaps the only thing Gates and the university got correct.
NOTES
[1] Van Panhuis WG, Greenfenstette J, Jung SY, Chok NS, Cross A, Eng H, Lee BY, Zdorozhny V, Brown S, Cummings D, Burke DS. “Contagious Diseases in the United States from 1888 to the Present.” New England Journal of Medicine November 28, 2013, 369; 22.
[2] Lohr S. “The Vaccination Effect: 100 Million Cases of Contagious Disease Prevented,” New York Times. November 27, 2013 http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/27/the-vaccination-effect-100-million-cases-of-contagious-disease-prevented/?_r=0
[3] Project Tycho, University of Pittsburgh. http://www.tycho.pitt.edu
[4] Humphries, S, Bystrianyk R. Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines and the Forgotten History. Self-published. www.dissolvingillusions.com
[5] Humphries, S. Ibid.
[6] Lam, C., Octavia, S., Bahrame, Z., Sintchenko, V., Gilbert, G.L., & Lan, R. (2012) Selection and emergence of pertussis toxin promoter ptxP3 allele in the evolution of Bordetella Pertussis. Infection Genetics and Evolution. 12(2): 492-495; Octavia, S., Sintchenko, V., Gilbert, G.L., Lawrence, A.L., Keil, A.D., Hogg, G., & Lan, R. (2012) ”Newly emerging clones of bordetella Pertussis carrying prn2 and ptxP3 alleles implicated in australian pertussis epidemic in 2008-2010”. Journal of Infectious Diseases. 205(8): 1220-1224
[7] Norrie J. “Vaccine Resistant Whooping Cough Takes Epidemic to New Level,” The Conversation, March 21, 2012
[8] “New Wooping Cough Strain in US Raises Questions” Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/02/07/new-whooping-cough-strain-in-us-raises-questions/
[9] Mooi FR, van Loo I, van Gent M, He Q, Bart MJ, Heuvelman KJ, de Greeff S, Diavatopoulos D, Teunis P, Nagelkerke N, and Mertsola J, “Bordetella pertussis Strains with Increased Toxin Production Associated with Pertussis Resurgence” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/15/8/08-1511_article.htm
[10] Mercola J. “FDA Pertussis Vaccine Study Shatters Illusions of Vaccine-Induced Immunity.” Mercola.com December 10, 2013.
[11] California Pertussis Epidemic 2010, Journal of Pediatrics 2012 Dec; 161 (6): 1091http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22819634
[12] Tycho Brahe Biography. Alchemy and Alchemists. http://alchemy-and-alchemists.blogspot.com/2010/07/tycho-brahe-biography.html; Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe
