I watched the PBS Frontline on the Vaccine Wars and they still don't get it, five years on.
In 2010 I blogged about their first "Vaccine Wars"for Psychology Today. Five years later they're still ignoring both of the 500lb gorillas in the room. And refusing to admit what should be blindingly obvious to any unbiased observer--the main cause of the belief that vaccines cause autism lies not with parents' hysterical fears or ignorance of 'REAL science' but with the medical establishment's gross stupidity (if it's no worse than that) in dealing with autism.
Look, John, see the gorillas! Gorilla Number One is something that Frontline admitted in a quick screen flash that was over, wholly without comment, in a couple of seconds--that autism has increased by a whopping 6000% over the last few decades. Gorilla Number Two is the fact that they and the medical establishment continue to completely ignore: that there are two kinds of autism, one clearly genetic and unvarying from the start, the other occurring in previously normal children and triggering rapid regression to an autistic state. Obviously something in the environment is implicated in these cases. But what?
Clearly the two gorillas are related. Evil twins. If autism has soared and if a lot of it (how much, nobody knows--talk about that for neglect of responsibility!) consists of late-onset, regressive autism, part of the cause has to be something in the environment that wasn't present before. The obvious move for any responsible medical establishment is to start looking for the new factor(s).
Did they? Not for one second. They blandly told us that the increase was due to broader diagnostic criteria, better diagnosis, wider public awareness. The regressive autism cases? Well, that was just that the parents were in denial until they were eventually forced to face the truth--their "kids" had been autistic all along but they hadn't recognized it.
I don't like it when people insult my intelligence. I get apoplectic when those people masquerade as the voice of REAL science. What the medical establishment offers is not even junk science. It's nothing more than the face-saving reaction of any large human organization, which is always self-protective and always strives to pass itself off as omniscient. If doctors are the all-knowing guardians of our health that they think they are, how can they say that they don't have a clue about what's causing the staggering increase in autism?
So they pretend that the causes are what they've always been--strictly genetic--and that therefore there hasn't REALLY been an increase, and that if you think there has, you're an ignorant idiot. Which is absolute self-serving crap, as anyone with half a brain can see. Can you imagine how a parent feels who has just seen a bright and promising toddler with a whole fruitful and happy life ahead of him or her suddenly regress to a prelingual presocial state, maybe just days or weeks after a vaccination (or more likely, with today's protocols in place, a whole batch of vaccinations, some against diseases you're unlikely ever to see, but Big Medicine's mantra is CAN DO, WILL DO). What would you think? Oh no it can't be the vaccine because a man in a white coat told me it wasn't?
So the anti-vaccine movement is the natural and inevitable reaction of any normal human to the cretinous obstructionism of the medical establishment. You broke it, you doctors--now go fix it!
The medical establishment could fix the anti-vax movement by simply telling the truth. By saying, loud and clear: yes, we're sorry, we dropped the ball on this one, but clearly there's something new at work here, and it's almost certainly something in the environment, so we're going to work our butts off finding out what it is, no holds barred--and, parents of autistic children, we welcome any input you can give us!
Will they? Come on, what world are you living in?
A funny world indeed, where police work is more scientific than science. I kid you not. Faced with a crime where there's no obvious suspect, a good detective doesn't say, "Oh well, maybe it didn't happen". A good detective suspects everyone until s/he has a prime suspect (or at least a "person of interest") in sight. A good detective doesn't rule out any possible suspect unless that suspect can supply an unbreakable alibi. Even if s/he can't solve the case, a good detective never, ever gives up--sometimes, not even after retirement. Those are just the things that a good scientist should always do. And what a frightening number of self-described scientists today wouldn't even dream of doing.
Me, I don't rule out anything. Vaccines are relatively low on my list of suspects. PCBs somewhere in the middle. Pride of place: pesticides, and genetically engineered foods that have been exposed to pesticides. Of course, now we are realizing there are wide differences in individual reactions, it could be multi-causal. But pesticides are the prime suspects, because the UC Davis study showed that pregnant women in sprayed areas were 60% likelier to have autistic children and because the Swanson et al. paper showed an R = 0.989 for the autism-GMO/glyphosate connection.
It's high time to get the show on the road. I'm already preparing a list of all the leading U.S. science writers and editors who will shortly receive an open letter asking them why they have abdicated their responsibility to the American public and failed to publicize the great and growing threat that the monstrous increase in the use of glyphosate and other pesticides poses to us all.
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Saturday, March 21, 2015
HOT, HOT BREAKING NEWS! The Lancet Declares Glyphosate “Probably Carcinogenic to Humans”!!!
Talk about smoking guns! This is more like a fusillade from an AK-47!
Yesterday, the prestigious, ultra-conservative
medical journal The Lancet reported, pre-publication,
on a study produced by 17 experts from 11 countries on the carcinogenicity of
five leading pesticides, scheduled to appear as Volume 112 of a series of
monographs produced by IARC (the International Agency for Research on Cancer,
Lyon, France). Herewith, complete and
unexpurgated, is The Lancet’s summary
of what the monograph says about glyphosate.
Any italics in the summary are mine.
“Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum herbicide, currently with the highest production
volumes of all herbicides. It is
used in more than 750 different products for agriculture, forestry, urban, and
home applications. Its use has increased
sharply with the development of genetically modified glyphosate-resistant crop
varieties. Glyphosate has been
detected in air during spraying, in water, and in food. There was limited evidence in humans for the
carcinogenicity of glyphosate. Case-control studies of occupational exposure in
the USA, Canada, and Sweden reported increased risks for non-Hodgkin lymphoma
that persisted after adjustment for other pesticides. The AHS cohort did not show
a significantly increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In male CD-1 mice,
glyphosate induced a positive trend in the incidence of a rare tumour, renal
tubule carcinoma. A second study reported a positive trend for haemangiosarcoma
in male mice. Glyphosate increased
pancreatic islet-cell adenoma in male rats in two studies. A glyphosate
formulation promoted skin tumours in an initiation-promotion study in mice.
“Glyphosate has been detected in the blood and urine
of agricultural workers, indicating absorption. Soil microbes degrade
glyphosate to aminomethylphosphoric acid (AMPA). Blood AMPA detection after
poisonings suggests intestinal microbial metabolism in humans. Glyphosate and glyphosate formulations induced DNA and chromosomal damage in
mammals, and in human and animal cells in vitro. One study reported
increases in blood markers of chromosomal
damage (micronuclei) in residents of several communities after spraying of glyphosate formulations. Bacterial mutagenesis tests were negative.
Glyphosate, glyphosate formulations, and AMPA induced oxidative stress in
rodents and in vitro. The Working Group classified glyphosate as
“probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A).”
All right, all you guys who have scoffed at Nancy
Swanson and her colleagues. Let’s see
what you have to say to THAT!
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
ITSS (It's The Science, Stupid!)
Checking out visits to this blog, I made
the depressing discovery that my latest post “Real Science 1” has had only
about one-fifteenth of the readership of two “hot-button-issue” posts, “Unsafe
at Any Dose?” and “Causation IS Correlation”.
Why
is it depressing? Because winning minor
skirmishes over particular issues, useful though it is, is not going to tackle
the core belief of GMO supporters. Which
is, that they have the Science and we don’t.
And this is their key claim, the claim that that guarantees them
legitimacy, the one that gets trumpeted and re-trumpeted on pro-GMO sites, that
is believed and reinforced by the mass media, and that opponents of the whole
GMO/pesticide nexus have so far done no more than snipe at. We can point to individual papers that
contradict their claims and they trash those papers by subjecting them to
criteria that no pro-GMO piece ever had to undergo. There are fewer scholarly papers finding
problems with GMOs than there are scholarly papers enthusiastically endorsing
them, and there are more scientists, at any rate more people who are called and
who call themselves “scientists”—88% more, if you believe the latest polls--who
believe that GMOs and pesticides are perfectly safe than scientists who are
skeptical of those claims.
Small
wonder then that many anti-GMOers become anti-science, become exactly what
pro-GMOers portray them as being, while others are in denial, refusing to
accept the situation, latching on to anything that seems prejudicial to GMOs
regardless of its provenance or reliability.
But such responses are not just futile—they’re unnecessary. All you have to do is put the conflict in a
broader context. Once you do that, you
will understand what is happening, why it is happening, why it had to happen,
and why the picture is already changing and will change even more. In our favor.
It may not be quick, but we can speed it up by five, ten, fifteen years,
once we realize that GMOers are weakest where they feel themselves
strongest. We can challenge them on
their most basic assumptions, provided we are willing to raise our heads out of
the trenches and survey the battlefield we’re fighting on from a longer and
broader perspective.
In the post series entitled “Real
Science”, I’ll first examine the sociology, psychology and history of science,
with particular reference to its most recent 200 years. Then I’ll talk about what’s been happening in
the biological sciences over the last fifty or so years, culminating in changes
to some basic assumptions that GMO advocates seem not to have noticed. Finally I’ll survey the economic forces that
have sought to control and direct science and why those forces have been
initially so successful, but also why they cannot remain so.
Boring, abstract stuff of no conceivable
interest to people who are trying to get labeling laws passed, or put folk with
placards round City Hall, or host informational seminars, or do any of all the countless
things activists must do? No way! Don’t think for one moment that I want in any
way to depreciate those things. Quite
the contrary. I myself am actively
involved in them, here at ground zero in Hawaii, so I know they have to be done. But, and a very big “but”…
It’s on the high ground of pure science
that the decisive battle will be fought—and won! Never
mind the “pro-science” rhetoric on the GMO side. Once you see the Big Picture, you can see how
much (or how little) that’s worth. Because
that’s what it is, sheer rhetoric, the endless repetition of the same mantras:
GMOs have been proven safe, no-one has ever gotten sick from them, pesticides
are harmless to humans below the government-certified “low dose”, if anyone
says different it’s junk science, farmers have been doing this for millennia, opposition
to any of this is anti-science, and on and on.
Words. I’m going to give you
facts. Facts you can use to put an end
to all this who’s pro and who’s anti-science.
Because the issues we’re talking about
are empirical issues. Things that sooner
or later will be decided on the basis of indisputable fact. I don’t for one moment doubt that there are
many people on the GMO side who sincerely believe that they are on the side of
science and reason—“all paid by Monsanto” is just a pro-GMOers’ myth. Indeed I even know WHY they claim to be pro-science. Because they ARE pro-science. In a sense.
You see, the science they are pro is
basically the science they learned in college or grad-school, twenty, thirty,
forty years ago. Well, unfortunately for
them, science is always moving, at some times faster than at others, and twenty
years can be a long time in science. In
my next “Real Science” post but one, I’ll explain the two most recent major developments
in biology—evo-devo and niche construction theory—and exactly how these impact
the pro-GMO case (in a word, adversely).
First, though, I need to place these developments squarely in the context
of the Still Bigger Picture—how science has evolved over the last five hundred
years, and how much what we still call “science” has itself has been changed by
that process. So that’s what’s coming
next—stay tuned!
Monday, March 2, 2015
Real Science 1: What Science is Really Like.
I’m going to be writing a series of posts under the general
heading: REAL Science. So let’s kick off
with some full personal disclosure.
There is a stereotyped list of reasons why people
oppose genetic engineering of the food supply (GMOs is just shorthand for
this). They are supposed to oppose it
because they are over-emotional, because they are ignorant of science, because
they are actively opposed to science, because they are neophobic, because they
are irrational etc. etc. None of these
apply in my case. For a long time I didn’t
find the issue of much interest. Then I
became interested, and only then did I start to take sides.
Two things moved me.
The first was the rhetoric of GMO supporters. Frankly, this pissed me off bigtime. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s
arrogance. When I see arrogance a red
mist forms before my eyes and I want to make mayhem. Everywhere I looked was an arrogant
assumption of authority occasionally leavened with a sickening
condescension. GMO supporters were the
only ones who were rational. Everyone
else was an idiot, to be talked down to like you’d address a retarded ten-year-old. There was some sickly sniggering, like “doesn’t
pass the Seneff test, ha ha.” (Got
it? That’s a JOKE. Seneff test = sniff test. Brilliant.)
Oh ho, I thought.
Let’s see what science is really saying.
Is the stuff they call “junk science” REALLY junk? Or could it just possibly be that THEIR science
is the junk?
For openers let’s start with something a real
scientist, a truly rational person, would never say. They’d never say “A consensus of scientific
opinion shows that GMOs are perfectly safe, so the opposition to GMOs is
anti-science”. Why not? For at least three reasons. One, science is not a democracy. You don’t decide issues by vote. Two, nothing is ever final in science. Three, the last and most important reason: science
lives by overthrowing consensus and dies if consensus smothers it.
I’ll explain exactly why that is so—why the very
essence of science is rebellion, not conformity—in my next post. This one is really just a teaser for the
series, it’s a cautionary tale about why destroying consensus, not upholding it
or enforcing it, is the very life-blood of science. It’s a real life story of a true scientist,
appropriately enough from the on-line edition of The Scientist for March 2015, and it’s about Leonard Hayflick’s
discovery of the function of telomeres and the Hayflick Limit (for which he won
a Nobel Prize, btw).
“Hayflick’s study was published in Experimental Cell Research [impact
factor 3.552, DB] in 1961, after first being rejected by another
prominent journal—The Journal of Experimental Medicine [impact factor
13.912, DB]. The rejection letter came from Francis Peyton Rous who received the Nobel Prize a few years
later for his discovery of chicken tumor viruses. “I can still quote from that
letter: ‘Anyone who has worked with tissue culture knows that if the
cells are provided with the proper milieu in vitro they will replicate
indefinitely.’ He also called my suggestion that our observation suggests
something about cellular senescence and aging ‘notably rash.’ ” The
theory that all cells are generally immortal in culture was first postulated at
the birth of cell culture in the early 1900s and was well publicized by Alexis Carrel
of Rockefeller University in New York City who had developed a cell strain from
chicken heart cells that he claimed had been growing for more than 40 years. [Carrel obviously flat-out lied, because that's flat-out impossible--shows you the gatekeepers of the conventional consensus wisdom will lie like the proverbial troopers to defend the status quo--even before filthy lucre reared its ugly head, DB].
After showing that normal
cells are mortal, Hayflick also reported, for the first time, that cancer cells
were uniquely immortal—a claim that could not be made without first
establishing that normal cells are mortal. He also discovered that his normal
human fetal cells had a memory. When fetal cells frozen at different population
doublings were thawed, the cells remembered the doubling at which they had been
frozen and only divided until they reached a total of 50 divisions.
Hayflick’s work was criticized and he
was ridiculed. It took about 10
years for a more general acceptance that normal cells have a limited life span
in vitro, a phenomenon now known as the Hayflick limit. The Nobel Prize–winning discovery of telomere shortening and the
expression of telomerase explained Hayflick’s observations.”
That’s typical of how most of what we know as science came
to be. A lesson GMO supporters ought to
take to heart, because that’s exactly how real science, not junk science,
really works.
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