Saturday, December 17, 2016

VACCINE-AUTISM STUDY “DEPUBLISHED”

The news this past few days hasn't been all geopolitical. If you've been following the increasingly controversial issue of the relationship between vaccination and autism over the years, an important story emerged on Dec. 5 that once again demonstrates the utter uselessness of corporate controlled media and the dangers of big pharma. This article was shared by Mr. V.T.:
The abstract of this study demonstrating a relationship between the cocktails of vaccinations now given to young children, and autism, says it all:
Results: A total of 415 mothers provided data on 666 children, of which 261 (39%) were unvaccinated. Vaccinated children were significantly less likely than the unvaccinated to have been diagnosed with chickenpox and pertussis, but significantly more likely to have been diagnosed with pneumonia, otitis media, allergies and NDDs(defined as Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and/or a learning disability). After adjustment, the factors that remained significantly associated with NDD were vacvcination… male gender… and preterm birth. In a final adjusted model, vcaccination but not preterm birth remained associated with HDD, while the interaction of preterm birt and vaccination was associated with a 6.6-fold increased odds of NDD….
Conclusions: In this study based on mothers’ reports, the vaccinated had a higher rate of allergies and NDD than the unvaccinated. Vaccination, but not preterm birth, remained significantly associated with NDD after controlling for other factors. However, preterm birth combined with vaccination was associated with an apparent synergistic increase in the odds of NDD.
The article adds that this study was peer-reviewed:
The paper was peer-reviewed by Linda Mullin Elkins, a chiropractor at Life University, and Kelly Hsieh from the University of Illinois at Chicago. It was edited by Amit Agrawal at Gandhi Medical College in India.
 There was the usual backlash about shoddy methodology and "fake science":
The initial backlash was significant. Public comments included, “this study is of poor design, though not impossible results. Study relies of self-report of moms, inducing bias,” and threats of commercial sabotage, “Another garbage vaccine study in Frontiers journal. Scientists, stop reviewing/publishing there.
Science Blogs also weighed in to discredit the results of the study, quickly posted an article titled, “Antivaccinationists promote a bogus internet “survey.” Hilarity ensues as it’s retracted.
This was followed by scrubbing the paper from the internet, but not before a screen shot of the abstract - which appears in the article - was saved:
Not only has the first study into vaccinated versus unvaccinated children been unpublished by Frontiers In Public Health, but a cached version available on internet archives has also been removed, suggesting there is a serious campaign to stop members of the public from viewing the study. However a screenshot of the abstract was saved before it was scrubbed from the internet.
What is amazing to me here is the duplicitous nature of "big medicine" itself. Doctors rely on a day-to-day basis of the reports of their clients, or their clients' parents, on the nature of symptoms, and through careful question and answer, arrive at diagnoses. In other words, in the daily practice of medicine, doctors rely on the anecdotal testimony of their patients. Most patients won't walk into their doctors' offices and relate that they need an x-ray because they suspect they have a crack in their right femur that is causing them pain, or announce that their headaches are due to the beginnings of a glioblastoma multiform. But they will relay information of an informal nature, and that informal nature of the information is not dismissed simply because it is relayed by a "non-professional" without medical credentials or peer review.
But "big medicine" and "big pharma" would have us believe that when several such stories are relayed - by mothers whose children were vaccinated and who ended up on the autism spectrum - that this is merely anecdotal and of no evidentiary value at all. Merely to collect and publish such information is now apparently "fake science" and to be "scrubbed" from people's ability to scrutinze and evaluate the evidence from themselves, thus removing one key component- the patient him- or herself - from the entire process, making 'big medicine's" own pronouncements rather moot.
There's another criticism that can be leveled here as well, for big medicine and big pharma, by so brazenly scrubbing such reports, open themselves and their own studies to the criticism of a "conflict of interest." The fact that this study was initially peer-reviewed and then subsequently withdrawn speaks volumes about that conflict of interest. When the peers of ultimate censure are the big corporations and their controlled media, then actual free flow of ideas is stopped, and with it, all science and all medicine. What has happened here is that big pharma and big medicine have gone in front of families struggling to care for autistic children, as if they were all gathered in a room together to share their experience and stories, and told them there's no relationship between their vaccines and their suffering children, "and we don't care what you think to the contrary."
That's how brazen - and illogical and irrational - they have become. (The greed was always there.)
We'll see how long that story lasts when the first class action suits start to hit them, and juries, rather than bought-and-paid for "science" in journals, have to decide the question.

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