Before I got sidetracked with a certain topic that’s consumed the blog, another topic that had popped up (albeit nowhere near as frequently) was the latest Ebola virus disease outbreak in Africa, the largest in history thus far. Indeed, as horrific as this outbreak is and as terrible a disease as Ebola is, with close to a 60% mortality even with the best treatment, it did produce one amusing bit of clownishness, and that’s that it revealed that there really is something too quacky even for Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com to tolerate.
I’m referring to an incident four weeks ago where a truly deluded Norwegian homeopath named Kjetill Oftedal posted on NaturalNews.com a recipe for a homeopathic remedy for Ebola that actually took the precepts of homeopathy seriously. What do I mean by that? Whereas previously discussed homeopathic remedies for Ebola used various snake venom that caused bleeding (you know, using something that causes one Ebola symptom in the healthy) as its starting material, Oftedal went one step farther and actually recommended getting blood or other bodily fluid from an Ebola victim as the starting material and then homeopathically diluting it away to nothing. He then recommended using it to prevent and treat Ebola virus disease. So quacky was this that Mike Adams, in an unprecedented bit of seeming responsibility, took it down. Still, it’s not too quacky for Oftedal, who promptly republished the post on his own blog. So it ever was with the unsinkable rubber duck of quackery that is homeopathy.
Although news about Ebola had faded to a dull roar in the background, the quackery for Ebola continues unabated, including colloidal silver, herbal remedies, and lots more. One feels for those poor leaders of west African nations who, in addition to having an outbreak of a highly lethal infectious disease within their borders to contend with, no doubt also have to contend with well-meaning quacks sending them letters about the glories of some nonsense or other that is touted as being able to save their people.
Take high dose vitamin C (please).
I don’t know how I missed this particularly irresponsible bit of quackery promotion, given that it’s in a blog in the Windsor Star, which is just across the river, but I did. About a week ago, there appeared a blog post entitled Dr. Gifford-Jones: Are West Africans needlessly dying from the Ebola virus? I don’t know if it also appeared in the Star print edition, but sincerely hope that it did not, although I do know that it apparently first appeared on Dr. W. Gifford-Jones’ website a couple of weeks before, a site that, not unexpectedly, contains a quack Miranda warning in Gifford-Jones’ bio page. One wonders what docs across the Detroit River are thinking, but I know a few and bet that they think this post is every bit as irresponsible as I think it is. For shame, Windsor Star!
I mean, get a load of what Dr. W. Gifford-Jones has to say:
But the great tragedy is that by failing to read history, researchers and doctors have, in the past, condemned millions to die from viral disease. Now it is happening again in West Africa. So what will happen if a case of Ebola disease occurs in this country?
Currently, Canada and other nations are scrambling to send untested drugs and vaccines to West Africa. Yet, in all the headlines and media stories surrounding this epidemic, not one word is spoken of the proven intravenous use of vitamin C as a cure.
One wonders why “not one word” is spoken of the “proven” intravenous use of vitamin C as a cure for Ebola. Could it be because it’s neither “proven” nor a “cure”? Nahhh. Couldn’t possibly be, could it? It couldn’t be because doctors generally don’t speak of quack cures in anything other than dismissive tones; that is, when they bother to mention them at all. It must be because physicians are ignorant or in the pocket of big pharma or both, right? Send those untested drugs over to Africa because the biotech company wants to make money. Oh, wait. There was a great deal of consternation among the CDC and the biotech company that makes the drug about using ZMapp, an experimental drug that was tried last month on two Americans who contracted Ebola, was reluctant to use it because it’s hard to make and because it had not even passed phase I trials yet.
But Dr. Gifford-Jones is just getting warmed up:
Medical history shows that ignorance, or arrogance, a better word, has been a common human trait of the medical community. One of the most flagrant examples is how Dr. Frederick R. Klenner was treated by his colleagues after saving polio patients from paralysis.
Klenner was a virtually unknown family doctor, in a small North Carolina town. He had no training in virology, no research grants and no experimental laboratory. But he had an open mind to new ideas.
In 1942 his wife suffered from bleeding gums and the local dentist suggested removing all of her teeth. Klenner justifiably considered this a Draconian solution. He recalled research that vitamin C had cured this problem in chimpanzees. Klenner gave his wife several injections of vitamin C. Her bleeding stopped.
Lovely. So apparently a dentist misdiagnosed scurvy. Or something. But this was only the start. Like all quacks with delusions of grandeur, for Klenner curing something as prosaic as bleeding gums wasn’t enough (although I must admit that removing all the teeth seems a rather radical treatment for bleeding gums). Too boring. Too…unimportant. Klenner moved on to viral pneumonia, allegedly curing a patient who was “near death” from the disease. But even that wasn’t enough. Oh, no. Klenner then went on to cure…polio! Of course! here’s the account:
During the polio epidemic of 1948, Dr. Klenner was placed in charge of 60 polio patients. He decided to prescribe large injections of vitamin C. None of his patients developed paralysis.
In 1949, Klenner related his findings at the Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association, and asked doctors to comment. One authority on polio ignored his monumental finding, instead promoting the need for tracheotomy in polio patients. Other polio specialists commented, but none referred to the use of vitamin C. It is almost unbelievable that this happened.
Has anyone ever noticed how quack claims are so difficult to track down. Many of them tend to involve events that happened many decades ago that have, over the many retellings, evolved into legends. Think Max Gerson and his “50 cases.” Think Cantron/Entelev/Procell. The list goes on.
A search for Klenner and his polio “cure” yields hits that nearly all come from pro-quackery sites, such as Whale.to and Orthomolecular.org. There’s also a chapter in a free book in which he describes his beliefs and evidence that vitamin C can cure polio. It is basically identical to this publication, represented as his actual presentation to the AMA in 1949. One aspect of his treatment that amazed me was that this was some truly high dose vitamin C. I mean, seriously. Klenner administered 2,000 mg (that’s 2 g, people) of ascorbate every six hours (8 g/day) supplemented with 1,000 to 2,000 mg by mouth every two hours (that’s 12 to 24 g). So basically, Klenner treated polio with 20 to 32 g per day of ascorbate. for the prototypical 70 kg man used in medical school as a teaching reference for drug doses, that’s nearly half a gram per kg body weight. In the Wikipedia entry on Klenner, which is remarkably skepticism-free, he is described as having administered up to 300,000 mg (300 g!) of ascorbate per day. For those who aren’t scientists in the US and therefore might be metric system-challenged, that’s 0.66 lb of ascorbate.
A search of Pubmed on F. R. Klenner reveals five publications, ranging from 1948 to 1952, all of them in the same journal, which doesn’t appear to be a particularly prominent journal, and unfortunately no abstracts available for any of them. (Whatever his other publications, I’m guessing, they must not be indexed in PubMed.) A review of the titles of the articles match the titles of chapters in a book, Injectable Vitamin C: Effective Treatment for Viral and Other Diseases. It includes titles such as: The Vitamin and Massage Treatment for Acute Poliomyelitis and Massive Doses of Vitamin C and the Virus Diseases, among others, all with the same theme, namely that massive doses of vitamin C will cure pretty much any viral disease that ails you. The other theme running through this is that there are no clinical trials. All there are are case reports and case series, all uncontrolled.
The biggest of these is the 60 patients with polio whom Klenner allegedly cured with his massive doses of vitamin C. Given how long ago this is and how little detail was given, coupled with the lack of any control group, we have no way of knowing whether his combined intravenous/oral vitamin C regimen did anything whatsoever. In any case, it’s not hard to figure out the reason why we don’t use megadose vitamin C for polio or other viral diseases now. In the case of polio, publications about vitamin C and polio petered out over the next couple of decades, at least as far as a search of PubMed indicates. In any case, in a review article about the use of megadose vitamin C in “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), it is noted:
Soon after its discovery and synthesis in 1932, parenteral vitamin C was shown to significantly decrease polio virus infections in primates [31], [32]. Although these findings were not repeatable [33], [34], one practitioner treated thousands of patients with parenteral vitamin C, primarily for infections, and popularized its use [2], [3], [5]. Such reports probably were a basis for continued use of parenteral vitamin C by other CAM practitioners [6], [7], [35].
The abstract of one of these early positive papers is particularly amusing to read:
The experimental evidence presented in this paper shows that multiple paralytic doses of poliomyelitis virus, when mixed with very small amounts of crystalline vitamin C (ascorbic acid), are rendered non-infectious as determined by intracerebral injection of such mixtures into rhesus monkeys.
In other words, crystalline ascorbic acid rendered viruses noninfectious? Who knew? Actually, what was done in this paper was to mix 0.1 ml of the supernatant of a 10 per cent poliomyelitis cord suspension (basically, they ground up spinal cords of monkeys with polio, centrifuged the, and used the supernatant containing the virus) with varying amounts of ascorbate neutralized to pH 6.6 to 6.8. This mixture was then injected intracerebrally. This mixture, with varying amounts of ascorbate, was then injected intracerebrally into rhesus monkey brains and the results checked. My guess here is that the virus was inactivated because the concentration of vitamin C in the actual mixture injected was very high (up to 100 mg/ml), and the virus/vitamin C mixtures were incubated overnight at 37° C. In other words, this study really didn’t tell us much.
It should also be noted that, contrary to Klenner’s claims, high dose vitamin C can indeed cause complications, such as oxalate nephropathy. In any case, Klenner became one of the “originators” of the quackery known as orthomolecular medicine, which has been discussed here many times and was popularized in the 1970s by Linus Pauling with his use of high dose vitamin C to treat the common cold and cancer. The central dogma of orthomolecular medicine seems to be that if some nutrient is good, megadoses of that nutrient are much better and can cure anything. Orthomolecular medicine has also been “integrated” into the quackery known as functional medicine.
That’s why it’s so depressing to see Dr. Gifford-Jones conclude:
What is appalling is that researchers and doctors should know that vitamin C has cured viral diseases like Yellow Fever, Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Dengue Fever and other viral diseases. But no expert has mentioned the possibility of using large doses of vitamin C to cure Ebola infection.
Klenner and Dr. Robert F Cathcart, an expert in viral diseases, have stressed that it’s the proper dosage that cures all viral diseases. This means giving massive doses of both oral and intravenous vitamin C. Cathcart estimates it would take 240,000 milligrams every 24 hours to beat the Ebola virus.
No. Cathcart was not an expert in infectious disease. He was an orthopedic surgeon who turned to the dark side of orthomolecular medicine and who now has his own page of praise on Whale.to. Vitamin C does not “cure all viral diseases” if only you give a dose high enough. And the Windsor Star should be ashamed for publishing this tripe, even on its blog.
381 replies on “High dose vitamin C can cure Ebola virus disease? Not so fast…”
@ORAC
Re: Colloidal silver
should probably read nano silver.
The FDA recognizes ‘colloidal silver’ as a supplement. The beef EPA has been given over nano silver is the particle size and if it will self replicate and consume the planet.
A distinction without a real difference, as far as I’m concerned. It’s all silver in a suspension, the only difference being size, and it’s all quackery. Silver’s antimicrobial properties are only evident on topical application because the concentrations needed are too high to be demonstrated when taken internally. Not that that stops the Nanosilver quacks from saying:
(From: http://www.nano-silver.com)
Let’s just put it this way. “Nano-silver” is the latest quack rebranding of colloidal silver. Same old wine in a new skin, as they say.
But, hey, if you want to be pedantic, go right ahead. Just realize what Orac thinks of pedants. (Just ask around.)
Then, if it’s already FDA approved as a supplement why was it blocked (quackery, or not) and an <untested ZMapp used on a couple of Americans. Is it just that the US is so liberal in allowing the use of an untested treatment on/in humans??
Aug 18, 2014
Ebola: FG withdraws approval of Nano Silva for treatment
This post is not primarily about silver, nano or colloidal. It is about high dose vitamin C. Got it? I get very irritated when pedants try to hijack a thread right out of the box.
Got it. Sorry.
———————————-
vitamin C has cured viral diseases like Yellow Fever, Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Dengue Fever and other viral diseases
[citation needed]
Dr. Gifford-Jones, or Clifford-Jones, or whatever (s)he is calling him(her)self, needs to get a clue. Before doctors will recommend a treatment of this sort for Ebola, they will want some assurance that it actually works. Expansive claims that vitamin C will actually do something about generic viral infections do not constitute assurance, no matter how widespread those claims are. Show us some refereed papers that supposedly support these claims, and we might take the claims seriously enough to check whether the papers actually do support the claims.
The folks running the Windsor Star are laymen, so they may not know better. Are medical licensing authorities in Ontario, or Canada generally, any better about disciplining quacks than their US counterparts? Because those are the people who should be policing their ranks.
Tim — because the FDA doesn’t really have much power to regulate supplements, that’s why. You can thank legislators in the 90s, though there is a grand old tradition of quackery in the US that goes way back.
Vitamin C megadosing is another good example of this. It’s quackery. It’s nonsense. But the FDA can’t really do anything about it. It’s not like Vitamin C is *bad* for you; the worst side effect is generally a lightening of the wallet, since the body is very good at dumping surplus vitamin C, and certainly there are valid indications for using it. Scurvy is a terrible disease that is very easily treated with vitamin C, so it certainly must remain on the market. Though rare, scurvy does occur from time to time in our modern society, generally in people with a lousy diet. I mean *really* lousy, like nothing but ramen noodles or rice. Vitamin C is ridiculously easy to get via the diet, which is of course precisely why it took so long for the problem to be identified. The fact that vitamin studies were being done primarily on pigeons, which don’t suffer scurvy, didn’t help.
I’m sure when they found when the specific chemical was isolated and shown to not only prevent but even reverse scurvy, it must have seemed almost magical. I can excuse doctors in those early days for getting over-enthusiastic about its properties. But it’s been a long time since then. More than enough time for the other possibilities to play out and reveal themselves to be just pipe dreams. It amazes me that it still grabs even some professionals today.
Ebola attacks the vascular endothelium, which causes the blood vessels to leak, which in turn causes the problems characteristic of this disease. Vitamin C has been shown to reverse endothelial dysfunction in several in vivo studies. Even though endothelial dysfunction and having your endothelium attacked by Ebola are two different things, it seems reasonable to try vitamin C against Ebola. Certainly, the risk is very low (unless you’re using the insanely high doses Klenner did). 5-methyltetrahydrofolate (the form of folate in vegetables) also has been demonstrated to reverse endothelial dysfunction in vivo, so that also seems like something worth trying which has very low risk. They’re just vitamins, and there is at least some basis for suggesting they might be useful. About half of the people who get Ebola survive, and these vitamins may have something to do with that.
“Currently, Canada and other nations are scrambling to send untested drugs and vaccines to West Africa” Smart move if it should leave it’s confines. Serious science, but also a human laboratory
Aren’t guinea pigs something like the only non-primate animal to suffer from scurvy due to inability to create their own vitamin C? Most animals manage to create their own vitamin C just fine.
*checks Wikipedia*
Okay, guinea pigs and capybaras (and possibly all other Cavis); bats; only one of the two major suborders of primates; and apparently some freshwater ray-finned fishes. Interestingly, they’ve found the non-functioning gene that would otherwise normally produce vitamin C in humans.
Of course, part of the problem with scurvy and made it so difficult to track down is that humans are very good at recycling vitamin C in the body, with the result that you don’t start seeing symptoms until weeks after intake of vitamin C stops. Which is another reason why megadoses are not necessarily useful: the only reason you would need more is because the body is dumping all the excess at that point.
Although much you’ve said rings true, and I’m no advocate of untested treatments, there is a danger of mistakenly discarding a useful therapeutic measure through “guilt by association” rather than review of the facts.
It has recently been established that high dose parenteral ascorbate does enhance chemosensitivity of ovarian cancer and reduce toxicity of chemotherapy (Ma et al Sci Transl Med 5 February 2014: 6: 222, 222ra18; stm.sciencemag.org).
The mechanism is thought to be due to increasing tissue concentrations of ascorbate to the millimolar range, with consequent production of hydrogen peroxide, the ultimate agent that kills tumor cells.
These authors point out that the improper comingling of results from oral and parenteral administration of ascorbate seem largely responsible for the rejection of the “vitamin C hypothesis”.
Could local H2O2 from parentaral ascorbate also prove antiviral? Given the size of the threat from ebola, the general safety of parenteral ascorbate, and the large number of infected patients, it would seem imprudent not to test it and make the results available to all. Even a smalll effect might prove beneficial, even life saving, in supportive care of infected patients.
Thanks for your ongoing efforts in seperating truth from truthiness.
An aquaintance who takes C vitamin supplements recently remarked on the oddity that they contain 1250% of RDI per pill – shouldn’t it be more like 100%? I remarked that he doubtlessly gets 100+% of RDI before any supplements, but I rather doubt he’ll quit.
I note incidentally that the FDA recommended maximum daily intake is 2000 mg, or 3333% percent of RDI.
@jotter:
Not quite. That study does not show what you think it shows.
http://respectfulinsolence.com/2014/02/10/vitamin-c-for-cancer-trying-to-rise-from-the-grave-once-again/
Seriously, any study you can throw at me, there’s at least an 80% chance I’ve looked at it in detail before. Maybe a 90% chance.
But no expert has mentioned the possibility of using large doses of vitamin C to cure Ebola infection.
I think there’s an important clue in the third word.
You can’t absorb more than about half a gram of vitamin C into the bloodstream via the oral route. See:
http://www.pnas.org/content/93/8/3704.full.pdf
The rest gets metabolized to oxalate, which raises the risk of developing a kidney stone. If you want a higher level of vitamin C in the bloodstream, you have to get it intravenously.
Please pardon me for a moment.
It’s not.
“The beef EPA has been given over nano silver is the particle size and if it will self replicate and consume the planet.”
The element silver can self-replicate?
” Though rare, scurvy does occur from time to time in our modern society, generally in people with a lousy diet. I mean *really* lousy, like nothing but ramen noodles or rice.”
Oh it doesn’t have to be quite that lousy, but does need to scrupulously avoid all fruits and veggies. If you are willing to limit your diet to a very small portion of the McDonald’s menu you can cause scurvy in about 6 months even if some people consider ketchup a vegetable.
We had a kid do that his freshman year of college. Took the student services a fair while to figure out what was wrong with him as even the most ardent of ramen noodle only eaters you expect at an institution of higher learning usually slip up and drink a glass of OJ often enough to prevent scurvy.
@Narad
Colloidal silver can cause serious side effects. The most common is argyria, a bluish-gray discoloration of the skin, which is usually not treatable or reversible.
I always knew Intel (blue man group) was sick–
https://youtube.com/watch?v=azOE3S_pYGg
That’s a lot of ramen KayMarie. I really wish these people would stop with the nonsense. Please. You are only causing suffering to people who live in suffering. To have the arrogance to say you know a cure for Ebola (which isn’t) and berate people for not using it is totally shamless.
Someone needs to create and fund a corollary to the Randi prize, where we call quacks on their bluff.
It would be great to call Dr Gifford-Jones up and offer a roundtrip airline ticket to Sierra Leone with a couple of 5 gallon buckets of vitamin C and let her have at it. An all expense paid trip where they would have a free platform to wow the world with their proprietary knowledge.
Willing to bet many excuses would be given and Dr Gifford-Jones would remain firmly planted on the North American continent.
Lets just assume this dude’s fairy god-mother granted his wish and he was somehow allowed total control of an ebola victim’s medication and treatment. Seriously; what would he do when, despite practically force feeding the the Vitamin C his erstwhile patient still died. In that moment of corrupted silence, when all the arrogance of ignorance and misplaced self-belief fell away – what would he do?
Would he accept he was wrong? Somehow I doubt it.
Somehow I doubt even if some billionaire totally funded his mission to bring the ascorbate gospel to the suffering in Africa he would even go. Not until a suspiciously NON-Vitamin C vaccination become available.
I *think*, Mark Thorson, that this effect may be mitigated somewhat by ingesting roughly a tblspoon of sodium bicarbonate a day…
Though, in the interest of full disclosure, I also thought Jannis Joplin was female.
@Gemman Aster #21
This topic was addressed in a Dr. House episode, S04 ep06: “Whatever it takes” where a guy faked polio with thallium and treated with vita C after removing the thallium — for research funding, or some such shit…
Has anyone suspected that “Tim” is out former Cannabis Troll?
Lawrence,
Quite. You got it. Dead on. Bingo. go fuck yourself.
@Tim – I seem to have that effect on a lot of nasty trolls…..glad I’ve managed to get under your skin with such a simple post.
You know, I hand you something on a silver platter and you still manage to completely screw it up.
It’s all good, Lawrence. *grins*
Meanwhile, I’m left feeling the WHO is throwing scientific caution to the wind when it says to now use the blood of Ebola survivors to treat those with Ebola. http://tucson.com/news/science/health-med-fit/who-use-ebola-survivors-blood-to-treat-patients/article_2a93ae48-40a9-5d78-9015-ceb3a769600b.html
@LW #17:
The element silver can self-replicate?
In some circumstances, yes.
So you don’t believe that survivors have antibodies to Ebola?
Using the antibodies of survivors isn’t a new never done before idea.
“Mark Thorson
September 5, 2014
You can’t absorb more than about half a gram of vitamin C into the bloodstream via the oral route. See:
http://www.pnas.org/content/93/8/3704.full.pdf
The rest gets metabolized to oxalate, which raises the risk of developing a kidney stone. If you want a higher level of vitamin C in the bloodstream, you have to get it intravenously.”
Read these 4 items: http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/safety/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8126804
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9429689
https://www.academia.edu/1274864/Pharmacokinetics_of_vitamin_C_insights_into_the_oral_and_intravenous_administration_of_ascorbate
Regarding the other typical safety objections, not directly related to this (a safety objection would be interference with chemotherapy – purportedly it is unsafe for cancer patients in that regard, but that claim is refutable), see the following three items in succession:
http://m.cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/69/22/8830.1.long
then see particularly this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21402145
And see this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22021693
The cure claims may be overblown based on current evidence, but the concerns about safety are based on fantasy. The review quoted in this blog stated that in general, “high dose intravenous vitamin C appears to be remarkably safe.”: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0011414#pone-0011414-g002
I have no desire to get into a debate on this, and will not be returning to this discussion. I see no reason why anybody would object to anything I presented, or see it as anything other than positive news.
Riddle me this, Orac man…nothing to do with ebola, but PBS special on vaccines supposedly says only one in one million kids are harmed by vaccines. That’s a bullshit sundae with cat crap cream on top! Beings as 3,000+ has successfully sued the gov’t through NVICP, that means we have 3 billion kids in America.
Aw, swweeeet Jesus, the stupid we are expected to swallow burns,burns.
@ Kaymarie #32–Agreed, it’s not a new idea, and it’s been done before. However, as noted in the article cited
“Blood transfusions are done in many African countries so this should really not be a problem,” said Oyewale Tomori, a professor of virology at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria, who participated in the meeting. He noted that survivor’s blood was first used to treat Ebola patients in a 1995 outbreak in rural conditions.
“Conceptually, this makes sense,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, from Washington. “Can it be pulled off? We don’t know.”
He said the blood from survivors would have to be screened for HIV, malaria and other diseases before being used as a treatment.
That’s something we can take for granted here, but not so easy to be sure of in many parts of Africa.
The number HAS to come from the qualified or “compensible” awards paid through VAERS. If one takes the number of babies born per year (~4,000,000) and multiplies them by the number of years the program has been in effect–26, and then I just multiplied the present number of vaccines per child over 18 years, which I heard was sum total 55…and you divide it by the 3535 kids who have been compensated by VAERS or NVICP or whatever it is, you get 1 in 1,618,104. Because I used the present total # of vaccines (55) this has to be high. I can’t find the sums by year. At first I think the lifetime was like 25 o so. I had never even heard, as most people, of the Vaccine Injury program until my son was 7 years old, 4 years too late to sue! That’s just a mess, if you ask me. No wonder it’s the “ejukated” people who call B.S. They are the only ones who’ve even heard of the NVICP. I think they need to change their emphasis….instead of cynically depending on ignorance and putting out false memes….”One in a million…” why in the hell don’t they just say you are taking a much greater chance by not vaccinating. That just tics me off. (Sorry, cynical…)
It’s like the BS I heard here (or somewhere) that Offit didn’t say 10 000 vaccines (“…then each infant would have the theoretical capacity to
respond to about 10 000 vaccines at any one time” https://www2.aap.org/immunization/families/overwhelm.pdf
I’m dumber than shinola, and I can figure it out. But there is a knee jerk reaction, and it has always been so, even 40 years ago, that only crazy people blamed vaccines. I don’t think that is true. And I think the CDC is being deceptive, for good reason…but still, being deceptive. We can’t handle the truth that some children are hurt for the greater good. So instead, some belittle and distance from people whose children are hurt, using their superior ability to baffle them. But they don’t go away like they should, because they don’t think they are crazy. As the person here who pretty much implied they were probably victims of shadow syndromes of autism…yeah..good science….
Why do I post here? Because I know you are good people, and have a greater good in mind. But you need something beside your minion’s bobble headed reasoning and superfluous conflagrations (…if those words mean what I think they mean, otherwise, ignore that comment.)
My ignorance is my secret power. It makes me aware I don’t know everything, and that I am seldom the smartest person in the room….but my Dad, a bartender, had an expression. You can’t bullshit a bullshitter. Maybe that applies.
If both statements are true (and I cannot attest to that or deny it) then that says that they are measuring different things even though they appear related. Speculating, the NVICP may compensate for reactions that fall below the threshold used by (the supposed) PBS documentary statement about injury.
usethebrainsgodgiveyou,
I suggest you take your comments about vaccines this to ann on-topic thread, instead of one about vitamin C and ebola. I have a reply, but I don’t want to swamp this thread with it (it’s long).
“Why do I post here? Because I know you are good people, and have a greater good in mind.”
Actually I (and others who post here) have both individual and greater good in mind, which is why we support immunization as an important part of quality evidence-based health care.
Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever
I cannot find the Crimean Congo on Google Map.
Klenner was a virtually unknown family doctor, in a small North Carolina town. He had no training in virology, no research grants and no experimental laboratory. […]
During the polio epidemic of 1948, Dr. Klenner was placed in charge of 60 polio patients.
“Basic plausibility” was not an issue for Cathcart when he was making this story up.
@herr doktor bimler
It should be hyphenated: Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever. Despite the weird name, it is a real thing.
@Narad #28
Gaww. Sorry. Was it because of the spoiler I dropped??
http://politedissent.com/archives/1800
Ohh. There is a main episode about Polio, isn’t there? I keep getting my ass handed to me here… But it is a nice ass, if I do say so myself. 🙂
Thanks, Grouchybeast. I have learned something new today.
I unknowingly yet stupidly conflated. I feel so like that wouldn’t have happened if I had my cannabis.
@herr doktor bimler
Let’s hope it never becomes critical information for you 🙂 Although if you do ever get bitten by an infected tick, just have some lemonade and sour candies and I’m sure that hemorrhaging will clear right up.
usethebrainsgodgiveyou: “The number HAS to come from the qualified or “compensible” awards paid through VAERS.”
While you are looking for a more appropriate thread to post this on, just click on this table. Then go to the bottom, and take the total number of vaccines given since 2006 and divide it by the total number of claims since 2006. Also, read the definitions below the table.
Okay, Chris…you win that one.
Of those that went through legal channels, one in 1,500,000 were purported to be harmed. I have no proof, but I’d bet most people, with the exception of skeptics and anti-vaccinationists have never even heard of VAERS.
VAERS & the NVICP are mentioned, specifically, on every single vaccine information sheet that doctors are required to give to parents and go over them (if they have any questions) before any vaccines are given.
To claim ignorance is foolish.
Who reads those things? We trust our doctors to do what’s right. Most of us just accept shit happens and move on, and aren’t out to sue anyone. Do you know doctors who are regarded as kind by their patients are unlikely to sue, even if they have been wronged. To call people fools is not kind.
I meant to say, doctors whose patients see them as kind are unlikely to be sued. Not everyone has a litigious mind.
VAERS & the NVICP are there specifically to handle issues of vaccine reaction…it has nothing to do about being sued (since the Doctors cannot be for a serious vaccine reaction).
usethebrains…
What, no apology for the accusations of “bullshit sundae with cat crap cream on top”, “burning stupidity” and “bobbleheaded reasoning”? It looks like your ignorance isn’t such a great secret power after all. I think you need another secret power, perhaps the power to understand and assess evidence before making foolish accusations and spreading misinformation that threatens public health.
Since the Vaccine Court table injuries can undoubtedly have causes other than vaccination, it is certain that some of the injuries compensated by the Vaccine Court were not caused by vaccination. A Table Injury within the timescale is presumed to be caused by vaccination, as I understand it (unless there is some other obvious cause). That means that these numbers are not a good way of estimating the frequency of vaccine injuries. The CDC says:
Bear in mind that anaphylactic shock is included in those figures, and there is no way of preventing some people from having allergic reactions to vaccine components.
I don’t understand your accusations that skeptics and the CDC deny vaccine injuries and ridicule those that suffer them. Yet in the same breath you talk about the Vaccine Court which has compensated thousands of people, and which I and other skeptics wholeheartedly support.
The Vaccine Court compensates for vaccine injuries that there is good (or even moderate) evidence for. Autism (ADHD, MS, allergies, asthma etc etc) is not included because the evidence tells us it isn’t caused by vaccines. Those who persist in spreading,lies about vaccines after their errors have been pointed out deserve ridicule and scorn, in my opinion. They are threatening public health – do you want to see hundreds of children hospitalized with measles, with encephalitis, pneumonia and SSPE as we have had in Europe? That is what will happen if MMR uptake falls. There will be deaths, as there have been in Europe, yet there hasn’t been a single confirmed death caused by vaccines for several decades, to my knowledge.
Also IMO, parents of disabled children deserve support from society, whatever the cause of that disability.
Because I say some kids are harmed….thousands are going to die. Wow….I am more powerful than I thought.
One in a million is still bullshit. It’s a cynical meme that has no basis in reality.
@UseBrains – you really aren’t “using the brains god gave you” are you?
As Chris pointed over, over 2 Billion (probably closer to 3 Billion now) doses of vaccines have been given in the United States – less than 4000 individuals have been compensated for vaccine injury & the way the system is set up, it is likely that a number of these people did not actually have a reaction to a vaccine – but still qualified under the established table injuries.
Vaccines are one of the most heavily regulated, tested and tracked medical treatments on the planet – so unless you buy into the Global Conspiracy Theory, your suppositions are not logical or rational.
I dare say it is more a case of one ‘injury’ per one million administrations of vaccine, not per child who has had vaccines. As opposed to three hundred thousand DEATHS per million cases of smallpox major… I’ll buy that for a dollar (pound) ANY day of the week!
But seriously – posting this after Orac has very harshly slapped down one dude for going off topic just a few posts above… You’re not using your deity’s granted brains either you know!
usethebrainsgodgaveyou,
Not just you, but if you carry on spreading lies about vaccines, some people will believe you, and if enough people stop vaccinating the diseases they could have protected against will come back. As I have related here before my son spent weeks in the hospital fighting for breath as a direct result of people believing antivaccine lies.
Don’t you care about the children that will suffer and die if your lies are believed?
BTW, where did I say thousands will die? Hopefully people in the US will come to their sense as soon as the first hospitalizations and serious sequelae start appearing, as they did in Europe.
Yet you have no evidence at all to support this claim. You just don’t want to believe it because you have already made up your mind. You can’t assume the cases compensated by the Vaccine Court are real cases of vaccine damage and work your way back from that. That’s as ridiculous as claiming the fact thimerosal was removed from most vaccines is evidence thimerosal is dangerous.
You might find this paper interesting/ It presents compelling evidence that vaccine encephalopathy, a Vaccine Court table injury, is a myth, and that genetic mutation in a sodium channel or mitochondrial disorders are the cause of the seizures and regression seen in some children. Vaccination is recommended in such children, by the way.
Here are the actual risks attributed to each vaccine on the childhood schedule by the CDC based on solid evidence. Please explain which of these risks estimates are wrong, and provide evidence to support your claim.
Comment in moderation giving actual risks of several vaccines according to the CDC. Severe reactions with permanent sequelae are rarer than 1 in a million, or, “so rare it is hard to tell if they are caused by the vaccine”. I would say “impossible” rather than “hard”, as the sample size required to demonstrate causality is too large to be practical in most cases.
To be accurate, I should probably say “the sample size required to demonstrate an association is too large to be practical in most cases”.
Kreb, stop with the lack of evidence. Evidence in a court of law, yes….deductive evidence…that is the evidence the 1 in a million person uses. “We only have proof of 4000 people harmed”. In a court of law, that is sufficient, but in the real world, where most of us common people live…nothing is so cynically cut and dried. I’m sorry for you son’s harm. But it may be attributed to many things, not just AV parents. The AMA spanked the members in California who contributed to the Pertussis outbreak for their insistence on making a buck and refusal to lose money on vaccinations. It’s in writing, so litigenously, it’s true.
I gave you evidence and you called bullshit on it. I pretty much determined, by using my own tiny little brain, that the numbers were taken from successful litigation on VAERS. If you believe those are the only numbers who were harmed….I don’t know what to say.
usethebrainsgodgaveyou,
Can you please provide us the PubMed indexed studies showing the DTaP causes more harm than diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. Again I ask this because my oldest had a seizure due to an actual disease before its vaccine was available.
Also, can you explain what the NVICP statistics have to do with Ebola and vitamin C?
use thebrains….
Stop complaining you haven’t provided any evidence for the beliefs you have pulled out of thin air?
I don’t understand what you mean by this either. Those risk estimates are each derived from good quality evidence. For example, when 67 million doses of HPV vaccines are administered in the US alone,and the VSD finds the frequency of serious illnesses is the same in people who did or did not receive the vaccine, how can anyone conclude that it is dangerous? But they still do.
So how do you decide the truth? By gut feeling?
What else could it be attributed to? My son was born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus, so his doctors advised against vaccinating him (probably wrongly, in retrospect). There were hardly any cases of whooping cough in the UK until a study was published linking the pertussis vaccine to neurological complications:
Perhaps my son might have contracted pertussis anyway, but it is very likely it was because of the epidemics that were in turn undoubtedly due to the fall in vaccination uptake (though some nuts argue otherwise, of course).
I have no idea what you are referring to here.
What evidence? The successful Vaccine Court cases? Say someone claimed that Fruit Loops caused short stature, and the manufacturers admitted liability, and offered compensation to any child below average height who had eaten Fruit Loops. Would that mean that every child of below average height had been damaged by Fruit Loops? Obviously not.
You really think the CDC used your bassackwards method of risk assessment? Oh dear.
That’s because you have no rational basis for your arguments. You are railing against the 1 in a million figure purely because of your own prejudices.
Dammit, I forgot to bowdlerize usethebrains’ quoted comments again.
Something weird is going on, apologies if this appears twice.
use thebrains….
Stop complaining you haven’t provided any evidence for the beliefs you have pulled out of thin air? Why?
I don’t understand what you mean by this either. Those risk estimates are each derived from good quality evidence. For example, when 67 million doses of HPV vaccines are administered in the US alone,and the VSD finds the frequency of serious illnesses is the same in people who did or did not receive the vaccine, how can anyone conclude that it is dangerous? But they still do.
So how do you decide the truth? By gut feeling?
What else could it be attributed to? My son was born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus, so his doctors advised against vaccinating him (probably wrongly, in retrospect). There were hardly any cases of whooping cough in the UK until a study was published linking the pertussis vaccine to neurological complications:
Perhaps my son might have contracted pertussis anyway, but it is very likely it was because of the epidemics that were in turn undoubtedly due to the fall in vaccination uptake (though some nuts argue otherwise, of course).
I have no idea what you are referring to here.
What evidence? The successful Vaccine Court cases? Say someone claimed that Fruit Loops caused short stature, and the manufacturers admitted liability, and offered compensation to any child below average height who had eaten Fruit Loops. Would that mean that every child of below average height had been damaged by Fruit Loops? Obviously not.
You really think the CDC used your bassackwards method of risk assessment? Oh dear.
That’s because you have no rational basis for your arguments. You are railing against the 1 in a million figure purely because of your own prejudices.
Krebiozen: “What evidence? The successful Vaccine Court cases?”
There is some interesting information in the NVICP statistics tables. If you look at the “Claims Filed and Compensated or Dismissed by Vaccine 1 March 5, 2014” table, you will see that there have been a total of 1,269 claims compensated just for DTP, out of a total of 3,540 since 1988.
One that same table it shows a total 170 for DTaP and 69 for DTaP, plus a few smatterings of other variations.
Now if you go down to the table showing the totals from 2006 on, you will see out of 68,113,573 DTaP doses, there were just 95 compensated claims. (by the way, it is still about one out of 716985 doses, not quite one in a million, but that is why they have three separate compensation columns and definitions under the table)
There seems to have been a drop in pertussis vaccine claims overall since then. Perhaps it is the change from DTwP to DTaP, or recent research on other genetic reasons for the seizures, etc.
Chris,
Thanks, there’s some interesting information there. Do you think claims of vaccine injury due to DTaP are going out of fashion? As I recall, recent evidence doesn’t seem to show a huge difference in safety between the wP and the aP.
Do you know if the Vaccine Court changes its criteria based on current science? Do table injuries get reviewed? I see vaccine encephalopathy remains, but the scientific consensus seems to be heading towards thinking it doesn’t exist.
I bet Narad knows. I could probably Google it, but I haven’t the energy right now.
My understanding is that the table injury list has been modified due to recent scientific findings, like Dravet syndrome. As mentioned at SBM on the Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, inc. Supreme Court case:
http://www.amednews.com/article/20100726/profession/307269956/1/ payment issues.and pertussis
Now what is wrong with that?
Boosting California’s immunization rates is one goal of proposed state legislation that would require health insurers to pay physicians for the full cost of purchasing, storing and administering immunizations. Proponents say it would enable doctors, particularly those in small practices, to afford the expenses associated with vaccinating patients.
A similar measure was introduced in 2009 but died in committee due to financial reasons, said Tom Riley, director of government relations for the California Academy of Family Physicians, which co-sponsored the bill. It was crafted before the latest outbreak.
Some health insurers have spoken out against the legislation. Susan Pisano, a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, said studies indicate that the private sector already provides a fair return for doctor’s vaccine costs.
But Sumana Reddy, MD, a family physician in a four-doctor practice in Salinas, Calif., disagreed. “We’re trying to do what’s right regardless. … But in addition to not being reimbursed for the time we spend educating parents [and patients] about vaccines, we’re putting money out for the cost of vaccines that isn’t fully reimbursed. … It’s a hopeless proposition.”
Do you really think the only children who have severe reactions have been reimbursed by the VAERS. Do you really believe that?
Let’s see a show of hands.
VAERS doesn’t reimburse anybody. It’s a passive reporting system.
VAERS and the NVICP are two separate things, which is explained on every Vaccine Information Sheet. In order to get reaction claims compensated you must actually apply to the NVICP.
And the payments are to clinics to provide the vaccines, they are being shortchanged by the insurance companies. It has nothing to do with vaccine safety or the NVICP. It does point out that there needs to be more coverage of the Vaccines for Children Program.
And again: what does this have to do with Ebola and vitamin C?
Come on usethebrains! Think clearly about what you are saying. Forget the vaccine court digression for a moment. You are saying that the supposed pitfalls of vaccination as illustrated there outweigh ALL the potential – and undeniable reality – for good… And that is categorically untrue. Even going from your table; a number in the low single thousands against how many MILLIONS, no, how many BILLIONS of people who will absolutely NOT catch smallpox?
We are all here only words on the internet and I know nothing about you. However I myself HAVE lived in a world where smallpox existed AND polio and had to endure the constant threat they posed to each and every one of us. Maybe you have as well and can follow me through your own memories. If so then just think. When I was a youngster I could have been playing down the docks with my pals – like I did what felt like every day I was a child – and caught smallpox brought in from some far-off country. Easily. I could have suffered the genuine nightmare of confluent pox of septicemia. It terrified me then even as a dim, relayed and unspeakable fear from the adults around me and the memory, clarified and informed through education terrifies me now even more. Surely it must you as well – even if we disagree on matters I can tell from your posts you are an intelligent and thinking person.
Yet here we stand. We are already 14 years into the 21st century… Just that fact astonishes me and neither you nor I can possibly catch smallpox. It simply does not exist anymore in the wild. Why? Because of vaccines. We are all safe – all seven billion of us simply and PURELY because of vaccination. All that truly inconceivable, unbearable pain; a lifetime of disfigurement and a better than 1 in 3 chance of not coming out the other side to bear those disfigurements at all.
Smallpox is a perfect case study because in that one case we have won the war, but other diseases are close to similar eradication. Yet, despite all his sound and pompous fury Wakefield was wrong. He has done nothing good for this world. Nothing. Jenner on the other hand has saved us all from at least one unbearable nightmare and will inevitably go on to do so again and again in the future. THAT is true goodness, true hope, true positivity for the future of mankind.
Yes, we can quibble on the minutiae of interpreting the vanishingly small number of corner cases, but that misplaced skepticism and suspicion simply cannot weight against, cancel away the fact vaccines have helped us all. Each and every one of us. It is quite possible we are both here, able to type our opinions on to an obscure medicine board in the dusty corners of the internet purely and directly because of vaccines. THAT is the reality and everything else, all the banal arguments and pedantic picking over sometimes willfully misunderstood statistics is nothing in comparison.
usethebrainsgodgiveyou: “payment issues.and pertussis
Now what is wrong with that?”
Now that I am not rushed trying to deal with chicken on the barbecue, I go back and notice the date on that article: “Posted July 26, 2010”
Much could have changed since then. Rose, please use a different username.
Chris,
you mean like this?
http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/immunize/Documents/PertussisSummaryReport20100630.pdf
Two months later we had hit 2492 cases and 7 deaths, and by the count for the full year 2010 was 9477 and 10 deaths.
http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/immunize/Documents/PertussisReport2011-03-09.pdf
This year we’re up to 7,980 cases, but only one death
By the way, my kid got the TDap recently without any repeat of previous issues (and with the pedi’s office on high alert).