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“Vaccine Awareness Week,” misinformed consent, and, of course, Nazis and eugenics

Orac is back, and what does he encounter upon his return? Barbara Loe Fisher, founder of the Orwellian-named antivaccine propaganda organization, the National Vaccine Information Center, pontificating about “informed consent” and vaccines. What she really means is misinformed consent to refuse vaccines, as in consent based on misinformation, pseudoscience, and fear mongering about vaccines. Naturally, she can’t resist bringing in Nazis as well.

I’m ba-ack.

Yes, as hard as it is to believe, thanks to the forced migration of this blog from its old home on ScienceBlogs to its brand spanking happy shiny new home right here, it’s been nearly four weeks since last I laid down a heaping helping of that Insolence, Respectful or not-so-Respectful, that my readers crave. In the interim, I’ve been frantically transferring content from the old blog to the new, with help from Alain and a couple of others whose advice has been appreciated. For better or worse, here I am. Contrary to what some rather silly antivaxers are saying, I’m not going anywhere for the foreseeable future.

This is a good thing, because what should appear to my eyes the other day, as I emerged from the whole process of transition and thought, Hey, enough sitting around. It’s time to get back into the fray and test the new blog, but a nice, juicy bit of antivaccine nonsense from the grande dame of the antivaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher. Yes, I thought, this is a particularly appropriate way to dip my toes back into the blogosphere again, given that vaccines are probably the most frequent blogging topic here and that Fisher is one of the longest-distorting antivaccine activists out there, having been spreading antivaccine pseudoscience since the early 1980s (and being regularly featured here for at least a decade). And there are Nazis, too, because antivaccine activists can’t discuss vaccine policy without invoking Nazis and eugenics. Or so it seems.

Vaccine Awareness Week, or: How I kept worrying about nonexistent harms from vaccines

The occasion for Fisher’s rant is a made up week that she and über-quack Joe Mercola have dubbed “Vaccine Awareness Week,” which this year runs from November 5-12. In reality, it should be called “Antivaccine Pseudoscience Awareness Week,” because what Fisher and Mercola try to use this week to frighten parents out of vaccinating and, of course, to liken any sort of school vaccine mandate to fascism, because freedom, I guess. In any case, Fisher has laid down a heaping helping of nonsense, as she does every year in November, this year entitled From Nuremberg to California: Why Informed Consent Matters in the 21st Century. That’s right. As I mentioned above, she went there. As you can tell from the title, she will liken vaccines to the unethical and horrific human experimentation carried out by the Nazis during World War II. You can either watch her claims in video form (below, that is, if you can stand it) or read along with me. It’s a 44 minute video; so I recommend the latter:

Fisher begins, fairly predictably, invoking the concept of informed consent and pointedly referring to it in the context of the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg in 1947, which is where Nazi doctors who carried out horrifically unethical human experimentation on Jews and others whom they viewed as inferior were tried for their crimes. Informed consent, of course, is the principle that, before any person agrees to be part of a human experiment (or to receive any medical treatment, for that matter), that person has a right to be fully informed of the potential risks and benefits of the medical treatment being proposed and to be able to chose to accept or refuse that treatment. Even more predictably, Fisher then launches into a frequent claim made by antivaxers:

Today, when a person publicly advocates for informed consent protections in vaccine laws, an “anti-vaccine” label is usually immediately applied to shut down any further conversation.6,7 Perhaps because a conversation about ethics opens up a wider conversation about freedom. The right and responsibility for making a decision about risk-taking rightly belongs to the person taking the risk.

When you become informed and think rationally about a risk that you or your minor child may take — and then follow your conscience — you own that decision. And when you own it, you can defend it. And once you can defend it, you will be ready to do whatever it takes to fight for your freedom to make it, no matter who tries to prevent you from doing that.

I find it amusing that one of Fisher’s references is to one of her own blog posts whining about how the Disneyland measles outbreak of 2015 unleashed what she called a “media hatefest attacking parents and civil liberties.” Not exactly. What it did do was to direct the media’s attention to the antivaccine misinformation being spread by the likes of people like Barbara Loe Fisher. In the post, Fisher tried to claim the mantle of the victim and accuse those who want to protect children from infectious disease and parents from the pseudoscience and misinformation spread by Fisher as “race and class baiting.” Her other reference is to a NYT article about a woman named Elena Conis, who wrote a book Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization. She appears to fall for the sort of “tell both sides” fallacies and doesn’t think the word “antivaxer” is appropriate to describe many people. That is, of course, a statement with which few of us who advocate for vaccines would disagree, but it also ignores the fact that there is demonstrably a subset of the vaccine hesitant who are in actuality antivaccine, people like Barbara Loe Fisher. Coney is also quoted as saying:

>We reflexively blame outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases on supposedly irrational anti-vaccinationists. In doing so, we often neglect to consider the shortcomings of vaccination and the many reasons children lack vaccinations: age, religious beliefs, medical contraindications, poverty, challenges accessing healthcare, and more. It’s not just about philosophical objections.

Which is a well, duh! statement that ignores the fact that public health officials do look at all causes. However, the evidence is quite overwhelming that many of the recent outbreaks that we’ve experienced in the US, particularly measles outbreaks, are directly as a result of low vaccine uptake and that even relatively small decreases in vaccine uptake can lead to outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease. The most recent (and largest) example is the measles outbreak among Somali immigrants in Minnesota, which is directly attributable to the belief that the MMR vaccine causes autism, a belief that white, affluent antivaxers, inspired by Andrew Wakefield, actively promoted—and still promote.

From there, Fisher dives into a claim frequently made by antivaxers, that vaccines are dangerous to certain children and that they sometimes don’t work:

The act of vaccination involves the deliberate introduction of killed, live attenuated or genetically engineered microbes into the body of a healthy person, along with varying amounts of chemicals, metals, human and animal RNA and DNA and other ingredients13 that atypically manipulate the immune system to mount an inflammatory response that stimulates artificial immunity.14

There is no guarantee that vaccination will not compromise biological integrity or cause the death of a healthy or vaccine vulnerable person either immediately or in the future. There is also no guarantee that vaccination will protect a person from getting an infection with or without symptoms and transmitting it to others.15

Note the clever phrasing. Yes, strictly speaking, it is true that there is no guarantee that vaccination will not cause harm. No responsible physician says otherwise. Also note the even cleverer wording about causing harm “immediately or in the future.” This is clearly meant to reference something that a casual reader might not be aware of, namely how Fisher and other antivaxers think that vaccines cause autism and all sorts of chronic health problems, like diabetes and autoimmune diseases, as long term complications from their use. Of course, as I’ve discussed here many times, the evidence is overwhelming that there is no correlation between vaccination and the development of autism, nor is there any compelling evidence that vaccines cause diabetes, autoimmune diseases, or other chronic diseases. Indeed, vaccines are remarkably safe, as any intervention intended to be administered to millions of healthy children in order to prevent disease should be.

Similarly, strictly speaking, there is no guarantee that any given vaccine will prevent disease. As we know, even very effective vaccines, like the measles vaccine, have measurable failure rates. The measles vaccine might well be greater than 90% effective, but that means that in a single digit percentage of children it will fail to provide immunity. The influenza vaccine is of variable effectiveness from year to year, because scientists and infectious disease specialists have to predict which strains of the flu will predominate every year, and sometimes they get it wrong.

Here’s the thing, though, that Fisher intentionally obfuscates. She presents the choice as that of the Nirvana fallacy. Either vaccines are perfectly safe, or they are worthless. Either vaccines work 100% of the time, or they are pointless. The real world doesn’t work like that. Medicine doesn’t work like that. No medical intervention is 100% effective, nor is any intervention 100% safe. It is the balance between risks and benefits that is important, and there vaccines win. Not only are they incredibly safe, having saved more lives than any other medical intervention devised by the human mind, but they are remarkably safe. Fisher knows this, as do most of the more savvy antivaxers. However, she gets around the safety of vaccines by trying to imply that there are these children for whom vaccines are deadly but whom science can’t identify:

Despite large gaps in scientific knowledge, government health officials direct physicians to vaccinate 99.99 percent of children regardless of known or unknown risks.16,17 Reports published by physician committees at the Institute of Medicine confirm that vaccines, like infections, can injure and kill people, and that:

  • Very little is known about how vaccines or microbes act at the cellular and molecular level in the human body18,19,20
  • The Institute of Medicine confirms that an unknown number of us have certain genetic, biological and environmental susceptibilities that make us more vulnerable to being harmed by vaccines, but doctors cannot accurately predict who we are21,22
  • Clinical trials of experimental vaccines are too small to detect serious reactions before they are licensed23,24
  • The U.S. recommended child vaccine schedule through age 6 has not been adequately studied to rule out an association with allergies, autoimmunity, learning and behavior disorders, seizures, autism and other brain and immune dysfunction25

It is not true that “very little” is known about how vaccines or microbes work at the cellular and molecular level. Quite a lot is known, actually. The references cited by Fisher describe the gaps in our understanding, but having gaps in our understanding of how microbes and vaccines work is not the same thing as there being “very little known” about how they work. Similarly her second bullet point is a bit of an overreading (to put it mildly!) of the Institute of Medicine reports that she’s cited. Let’s just say that it’s a bit of a—shall we say? creative interpretation of the IOM report. For instance, it’s funny (actually, no it’s not) how she neglected this conclusion of the IOM:

The committee’s efforts to identify priorities for recommended research studies did not reveal a base of evidence suggesting that the childhood immunization schedule is linked to autoimmune diseases, asthma, hypersensitivity, seizures or epilepsy, child developmental disorders, learning disorders or developmental disorders, or attention deficit or disruptive behavior disorders. While the committee found that there is no scientific evidence to justify the majority of safety concerns, perceptions dictate parental support and actions. Therefore further study of the full immunization schedule as well as further study to understand stakeholder perceptions and how they are formed may help improve awareness and education efforts. Stakeholder concerns should be one of the elements used to drive searches for scientific evidence, but these concerns alone, absent epidemiological or biological evidence, do not warrant the initiation of new high-cost randomized controlled trials. The committee concludes that data from existing data systems may be used to conduct observational studies and offer the best means for ongoing research efforts of the immunization schedule’s safety.

The committee found no significant evidence to imply that the recommended immunization schedule is not safe. Furthermore, existing surveillance and response systems have identified adverse events known to be associated with vaccination. The federal immunization research infrastructure is strong. A key component is the VSD project, which with ongoing support will be able to feasibly address the committee’s identified key research questions. Although the committee concludes that protection of children from vaccine-preventable diseases is of higher importance than testing of alternative immunization schedules without epidemiological or biological evidence indicating a safety problem, VSD should continue to examine the health outcomes of people who choose alternative schedules.

This is hardly an endorsement of Fisher’s claims. Indeed, one recommendation of the IOM very explicitly rejects antivaccine recommendations:

The Department of Health and Human Services should refrain from initiating randomized controlled trials of the childhood immunization schedule that compare safety outcomes in fully vaccinated children with those in unvaccinated children or those vaccinated by use of an alternative schedule.

Indeed, the IOM concluded that the current Vaccine Safety Datalink database is adequate to study the current vaccine schedule and detect adverse outcomes that might be associated with specific vaccines.

Now, here’s where a real contortion of logic follows:

For these reasons, vaccination is a medical procedure that can be termed experimental each time it is performed on a person. By extension, “no exceptions” mandatory vaccination laws create a de facto uncontrolled, population-based scientific experiment that enrolls every child at birth and never ends, sacrificing an unknown number of vaccine vulnerable children.

Further, the U.S. Congress and Supreme Court have declared federally licensed vaccines to be “unavoidably unsafe,” removing civil liability from doctors who give vaccines and drug companies that sell vaccines in what has become a very lucrative multibillion-dollar business in the U.S.26,27

The only part of what Fisher writes here that can be said to be accurate is that vaccination is a medical procedure. As for vaccines being “unavoidably unsafe,” well, explaining why that claim is a distortion and misinformation would take as long as what I’ve written already; so I’ll just refer you to posts written before by yours truly and, of course, Dorit Reiss.

Nazis, Nazis, everywhere, all wanting to vaccinate your child

Fisher devotes a lot of verbiage to her belief that the DPT vaccine injured her son. This vaccine covered diptheria, pertussis, and tetanus, and used a whole cell-derived pertussis vaccine, from there she moves on to philosophy and, of course, likening current vaccine mandates to unethical human experimentation carried out by the Nazis. To understand what she’s referring with respect to the DPT vaccine, you need to be aware of an old documentary known as DPT: Vaccine Roulette, which first aired on a local NBC affiliate in Washington DC on April 19, 1982, and then ultimately was aired nationally on The Today Show. This particular bit of muckraking was arguably the spark that resulted in the big bang of the modern anti-vaccine movement. In particular, it launched the anti-vaccine career of, yes, Barbara Loe Fisher. Charismatic and media-savvy, in the 1980s Fisher became the go-to woman for any story about vaccines, although later she was supplanted by even more charismatic antivaccine spokespeople, such as Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy. She even did some good, being instrumental in the creation by Congress of the Vaccine Court through the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. As the decades wore on, though, she became more clearly antivaccine. Be that as it may, it was thought that the whole cell pertussis vaccine (abbreviated DTwP, for diptheria-tetanus-whole cell pertussis, as opposed to the DTaP, which is now used and in which the “a” stands for “acellular”) was responsible for encephalitis and brain damage in children, based on sensational case reports in the media, like the ones in Vaccine Roulette. Early studies suggested that there might be an association between the whole cell pertussis vaccine and the encephalopathy attributed in the media to it, but, as Steve Novella pointed out, later studies did not support his association. It is actually very unlikely that DPT actually caused Barbara Loe Fisher’s son’s health problems.

Even though it is unlikely that the DPT actually injured Fisher’s child in the way that she thinks it did, none of that stops her from invoking the dreaded specter of “scientism” and blaming current vaccine policy on pure utilitarianism:

But, the stark reality is that the scientification of every branch of philosophy has elevated prominent scientists and physicians promoting “consensus science” into positions of authority, whose judgment should never be questioned. Long held cultural values, such as respect for freedom of thought, speech, conscience and religious belief are being called into question, which in turn affects court decisions and the making of laws.

Nowhere is this more visible than in public health law using the materialist philosophy of utilitarianism to legally require all Americans to use an increasing number of vaccines without their voluntary informed consent. So how did we get here? How did science come to dominate how we define what is true and good for the individual and society in the 21st century?

I’m always amused when antivaxers claim that scientists and “consensus science” should “never be questioned,” even as they question scientists and consensus science. In any case, whenever someone makes an argument like this, I like to respond: Well, if we aren’t going to make health policy decisions based primarily in science, then on what basis do we make health policy decisions? Religion? Whatever the current administration happens to think?

Fisher makes a lot of explicit analogies between current vaccine policies and Nazi eugenics programs, which weren’t exactly utilitarian. They were, rather, driven by an ideology of racial superiority in which a whole class of human beings, Jews, was viewed as an enemy to the “body” of the German volk that must be exterminated in order to preserve the health of the volk. The Holocaust was arguably not a utilitarian genocide. Rather, it was an ideologically-motivated genocide. Indeed, the Nazi Reich did things that were clearly against its own interest in order to pursue this genocide, things that were not very utilitarian at all, such as diverting trains that could have been better utilized sending troops and supplies to the Eastern Front to the purpose of shuttling Jews to Auschwitz. Why? Ideology. Yes, it was more complicated than that (everything in history is), but blaming the Holocaust strictly on utilitarianism is a distortion. It was the Nazi ideology that the state and the volk were the most important considerations in medicine that drove the view that Jews and other hated races were not only expendable but enemies to be exterminated.

And, no, this doesn’t help:

When doctors were charged with crimes against humanity at the Doctor’s Trial at Nuremberg for carrying out horrific scientific experiments on captive children and adults in the concentration camps, including vaccine experiments, they pointed to U.S. eugenics laws and invoked a utilitarian defense, claiming it was moral to sacrifice the health and lives of individuals to advance scientific knowledge that could save the lives of many more.94,95

I love how Fisher slipped “including vaccine experiments” into her description of the horrors of the concentration and death camps. Her attempt to associate in the minds of her readers vaccines and the Holocaust isn’t even the least bit subtle. Neither is her invocation of the slippery slope fallacy:

It is for this reason that the debate about vaccination transcends vaccination. It is the tip of the spear in a much larger war that is being waged on cultural values and beliefs in America, which is why I call it The Vaccine Culture War. Because if the state can tag, track down and force citizens against their will to be injected with biologicals of known and unknown toxicity today, there will be no limit on which individual freedoms the state can take away in the name of the greater good tomorrow.

Today the battlefield of the 200-year war on microbes is littered with human casualties far too numerous to count while, in a natural fight to survive, the microbes have evolved to evade the vaccines. And the scientists and physicians in leadership positions determined to win that war continue to fire away, stepping around the bodies of vaccine-damaged children lying on the ground.

Do I think that public health officials flying the science flag with a utilitarian star on it wake up every day and say to themselves, “I want to hurt a child today?” Of course not. Most doctors and scientists want to help, not harm people. Do I think they have lost their way, blinded by a utilitarian pseudo-ethic that makes it easy to ignore the bodies lying on the ground so they can allow themselves to believe that human sacrifice is ethical when it serves the greater good? Yes, I do.

Antivaxers often like to invoke visions of secret vaccine police breaking down parents’ doors in the middle of the night in order to inject their children with horrible, toxic vaccines, all in the name of the “greater good,” and that’s exactly what Fisher is doing here. Of course, school vaccine mandates are nothing like this. All that they say is that, in order for a child to attend school or day care, the child must be vaccinated, and they allow for medical and, in most states, personal belief exemptions to that mandate. Antivaxers like Fisher like to paint these mandates as doctors walking over the bodies of dead children sacrificed on an “altar reminiscent of the one that a 19th century August Comte built for his Religion of Humanity,” as Fisher puts it rather histrionically in her post, but that’s not what they are.

Which brings us back to informed consent.

Informed consent versus misinformed consent

The very principles behind informed consent is that the patient has a right to know the risks and benefits, as well as the uncertainty surrounding the magnitude of those risks and benefits, of any medical intervention before deciding whether to undergo that intervention and that the patient has a right to refuse. Accuracy of the assessment of the magnitude and particulars of the risks and benefits of an intervention is key to proper informed consent, which is why I coined the term “misinformed consent” to describe what Fisher advocates. (At least, I think I coined it; it’s quite possible that someone thought of it before I did.) The reason, as I’ve explained many times, is that what Fisher is advocating is that physicians misinform parents about the risks and benefits of vaccines, just as she does, such that the risks are vastly exaggerated (or, as in the case of the vaccine-autism link, made up and not supported by science), and the benefits hugely downplayed or even completely denied. It’s something that Fisher has been doing for at least seven years and probably a hell of a lot longer. (Seven years ago is when I first started writing about her doing it.)

Indeed, true informed consent is anathema to antivaxers. I can provide two examples easily, both of which simply involved requiring parents to be counseled about the potential consequences of failing to vaccinate. In California, for instance, before passing SB 277 in 2015, the bill that eliminated nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates in California, California tried passing AB 2109. All AB 2109 did was to require parents to visit a physician or other enumerated health care provider for counseling before the state would grant a personal belief exemption to school vaccine mandates. You’d think that if Barbara Loe Fisher and other antivaxers were in favor of informed consent, they’d be all for this law. Surprise! Surprise! They weren’t.

There was a similar incident in my state. A couple of years ago, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services passed a rule that required parents wishing a personal belief exemption to school vaccine mandates to go to their local county health office for an educational program on vaccines and the potential consequences of not vaccinating. Antivaxers in the state howled, and the Republican legislature tried to pass an incredibly ill-advised package of bills that would have reversed the rule, barred the MDHSS from making rules like it in the future, and made it more difficult for public health officials to keep unvaccinated children out of school in the event of an outbreak. I kid you not.

No, the claim by Barbara Loe Fisher that she wants informed consent with respect to vaccines is either a self-delusion or a lie, as it is for all die-hard antivaccine activists. What she really wants is misinformed consent, even if she has to invoke eugenics and Nazis to try to convince you otherwise—not to mention to try to hit you up for money for the NVIC as well, with Joe Mercola matching every contribution.

By Orac

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski.

That this particular surgeon has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 35 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER:: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: [email protected]

113 replies on ““Vaccine Awareness Week,” misinformed consent, and, of course, Nazis and eugenics”

Welcome Back Orac. It’s been too long since we got a whole heap of insolence.

Despite all the argumentum ad Hitleram that Ms. Fisher et al. engage in, I have never heard them even attempt to offer evidence that the allegedly evil vaccine pushers are targeting people of any particular ancestry. That was one of the Nazis’ particular evils: they went after anyone deemed to be of non-Aryan ancestry, and while the definition of Aryan had some internal inconsistencies, there was a definition of the term. (They went after Slavs and Roma as well as Jews, and you are considered a Jew if your mother is/was Jewish.) Whereas ISTM that the risks of vaccinating or not vaccinating do not depend significantly on one’s ancestry.

Welcome back, and good to see you in your traditional form.

It’s really embarrassing to live in a state where driving down a major toll road brings you to the vision of a board with NVIC blather on it. If I could, I’d paint clarification: NVIC stands for NOT VERY INFORMATIVE CRAP.

@MI Dawn: There used to be one on the NJ Turnpike. My wife even noticed how my jaw would clench anytime we drove past it. But it was replaced a month or two ago.

@SteveJ: that’s the one I meant. It’s gone? I’m very happy to know that. (haven’t been on the Turnpike in a few months)

I think just adding “(Mis)” is sufficient: National Vaccine (Mis)Information Center.

Invoking Nazis and the Holocaust is profoundly insulting to the memory of its victims, and to their descendants. And making ridiculous comparisons to vaccination (or whatever the Nazi-shouters cause du jour is, not only makes them look ridiculous but cheapens history.

To use an Orac-ism (welcome back): same as it ever was.

Indeed. Or how measles results in immunosuppression for three years, such that vaccinating against measles has a more marked effect on mortality than would be expected from its prevention of measles alone….

Also, I wanted to thank you for all the work done on the migration. I expect it was incredibly hard, and it’s such a great thing to have all the treasure of previous RI articles still available easily to use.

Thanks you very much 🙂

There’s still work to be done for links conversions and posts which will occur as time allow but key to the effort was retaining the whole archive of posts and comments.

Stay tuned.

Alain

Dude, there is no guarantee that the glass of water I’m drinking right now isn’t going to kill me now or in the future. What an abuse of the word ‘experimental’. Not even going to touch the holocaust nonsense.

It’s an appeal to emotion, the refuge of someone with nothing of substance to say.

It’s great to have Orac back on the job: defending Humanity from Unencumbered Raging Stupid.

Oddly enough, over the past week, two of the woo-meisters I survey have jumped on the very same bandwagon: vaccines
( and other aspects of SBM) are attempted genocide. Adams rants that Black people are indeed the focus of this effort via vaccines, meds and GMOs because… you know, Tuskegee and the Whistleblower Thompson.

Of course I read or hear nonsensical histrionics from attention seeking entrepreneurs and want to laugh, as I do at Jake**
BUT we do live in an era when there are REAL N-zis carrying outdoor store torches and chanting slogans.

While alties are ratcheting up fear about vaccines and other SB, there are actual horrors afoot

** and needless to say, he has a new project..
.

BUT we do live in an era when there are REAL N-zis carrying outdoor store torches and chanting slogans.

Indeed we do, and while I do not necessarily approve of Elwood Blues’s method of dealing with Illinois Nazis (or Nazis from anywhere else), I understand the sentiment.

I do approve of making both actual Nazis and people who use inappropriate Nazi analogies look ridiculous. Most of the time, however, both groups manage to do this without my help.

…and needless to say, he has a new project..

About that project – I will note that Jake is just as good a graphic artist as he is an epidemiologist. He uses the term ‘photo-shopped image’, but his work looks more like a blind, concussed lemur with Parkinson’s messing about with MS Paint.

http://www.autisminvestigated.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/t-shirt2.jpg
http://www.autisminvestigated.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/57609df2d90a9de1684de21a_Science-Blogs-1.jpg
http://www.autisminvestigated.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/kirchmeyerkimberly-7501.jpg
http://www.autisminvestigated.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/merlantheuglylizard.png

BUT we do live in an era when there are REAL N-zis carrying outdoor store torches and chanting slogans.

My ‘from the gut’ response to a collection of Nazis in the open is to call in the 101th Airborne.

Jake’s new project is pretty childish.

But even more fun is Jake’s post about the retraction of Brian Hooker’s paper by Translational Neurodegeneration. Jake has put in a complaint via COPE and has an answer. The way Jake tells it: BioMed Central retracted the paper because it criticized vaccines and then made up policies afterward. Unfortunately, Jake has posted a copy of the email, which has the following highlights:

A reader flagged that there were undeclared competing interests related to the article: the author, Dr Hooker, was on the Board of Directors for Focus Autism which supports the belief that MMR vaccine causes autism.

Our investigation concluded that the author did have an undeclared competing interest. We also found that the peer reviewers were also likely to have undeclared competing interests.

So in contrast to Jake’s narrative, the Journal determined that all of Hooker and the peer reviewers had conflicts of interest. So the editor did this:

We obtained a further, independent expert peer review of the article because we were concerned about the original peer reviewers’ potential competing interests. That further peer reviewer reported concerns about the statistical methods used.

The new peer-reviewer torpedoed the paper by pointing out the very obvious problems in the statistical approach Hooker chose. As Hooker’s results and conclusions came crashing down around him, there was nothing left for the editor to do, but retract. I should point out that Hooker was informed of each step in the process, and given opportunity to respond.

This is all very normal behaviour on the part of a journal editor if they are alerted to serious concerns about a published article. But then Jake would not know anything about this, having never bothered engaging with the scientific literature.

Great to have you back Orac.

On a personal note my stepdaughter, Baiboon, begins her journey down the evil road of vaccinations when she turns 2 months old on the 14th. I’ll get to hold for the first time on the 20th.

To Ms Fisher: May you be hoist by your own petard.

Welcome back, Orac! and a sideways thanks to NVIC for giving you a topic (target?) for your return.

using the materialist philosophy

So, is Babs invoking supernaturalism, idealism, or straight-up philosophical nihilism?

Shush! You don’t want to make her have to think about her words and her understanding of them. She’ll just get upset, and then where will we be?

Why doesn’t NVIC offer any suggestions for testing of these “vaccine-vulnerable” children? What vaccines do they approve of? If anyone has thought I’ve gone daft, mine are purely rhetorical questions since we all know NVIC is nothing more than an anti-vaxx organisation with a misleading name just like the crank Meryl Dorey’s site.

On a side note – actually Nazi work on vaccines saved lives of quite a lot of people from inferior races, including some Polish intellectuals of note. If you’re interested in details (not very pleasant), you can read more about feeders of lice here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeder_of_lice

And glad to see you’re back, Orac.

Good news….Orac is back!

The NVIC has never shown to have saved or benefited a single person’s life during their whole execrable existence.

Vaccines have been shown to have saved millions of lives.

Anti-vaxxers have been shown (as you note) prime contributors to vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks.

And still Fisher has the nerve to say physicians have “lost their way, blinded by a utilitarian pseudo-ethic that makes it easy to ignore the bodies lying on the ground so they can allow themselves to believe that human sacrifice is ethical when it serves the greater good? ”

There are so many words I want to use to describe the complete and utter loathing I have for BLF, but I’ll refrain, mostly because I’ve no idea the level you’ve set your curse word filters.

I’m just posting to:

A): Say “Welcome bsck!”. and

2): To see if I still get “Invalid Security Token”.

“Bsck”. Perfect for my first post in the new place, but at least I’m not blocked.

I wonder if anyone who had to suffer from smallpox is still around today to tell us what it was like. That was a disease which killed and maimed billions since at least 10,000 BC and it has been all but eradicated since 1977 thanks to vaccines. And this Barbara Loe Fisher character looks a lot like those detractors of Edward Jenner back in the early 1800s, and she seems to still use a lot of those tropes that were already current in his day. That people such as her are getting even more ears to listen to the same old tired nonsense despite the eradication of smallpox and near-eradication of polio thanks to vaccines is a rather sad reflection on our current age.

And a hearty welcome back to Orac!

In the US, smallpox was declared eradicated in 1954, and that wasn’t that long ago. Someone 80 or 85 well may remember having seen a case back in the day. I still have the scar from the vaccination – they made a big, ugly scab, and the scar is about a 1/2 inch across. It’s a common thing amongst those of us of a certain age.

Polio is also in my memory. It was still common when I was a kid to warn each other to stay away from any standing water. It was a high point if polio was included in any series of shots we were getting – a coupla drops of pink liquid on a sugar cube.

The last smallpox epidemics in Poland was in 1963 – 99 people had it and 7 died – and 2000 were quarantined. Some of my older friends still remember the panic surrounding it.
Also, the creator and leader of one of our best-recognized charity organisations is a polio survivor, although I’m not sure how many people know the reason of her mobility impairment. And it would be good, since she is an important media figure.

My mother, born in 1916, had the small pox vaccination scar. I’m 72, but while I had all the normal vaccines for a child born in 1945, I don’t think small pox was among them. I certainly don’t have any scar. I got both the polio shot, and a couple of years later, the sugar cube. Not vaccinations, but your comment about standing water reminded me: In my area, I’m always flipping over pots and bowls of water that people leave out for feral cats, or passing dogs and the like. I’ve asked them to refill them fresh daily, but they leave them for days and days, so I flip them – I don’t need to live around mosquito breeding pens! Particularly with reference to West Nile virus.

The great google tells me that the US gave smallpox vaccines until 1972, so someone born in ’45, at least in the US, should have received the vaccine (I didn’t realize it ended that late). Of course, not every smallpox shot caused a scar, or I’d have 3 or 4 of them. Also, some scars faded over time. My sister had one, but you have to look really close to see it now.

Just imagine if smallpox was still a thing – the antivaxers would be saying ‘my child was scared for life because of vaccines’, and, well, they’d be right.

Evidence free anecdote:

Both my spouse and I were born in 1957, and I remember early in our relationship that we compared our smallpox scars. That is because we were total engineering college nerds in 1976.

He was a naturalized American from Canada and I was a US Army brat. I had my last smallpox vaccine in 1974 in Ft. Clayton while there was still a Panama Canal Zone. Which is the only reason I received it after it was removed from the standard American pediatric schedule. A schedule that also did not include yellow fever and a few other vaccines I got for being born in a military family. (yeah, standing water is a big thing with me, I got dengue fever in Venezuela in the late 1960s).

Now that we are both sixty years old, the smallpox scars have faded away. I have actually looked for mine, and it is gone. Because I am of the freckled clan, one thing that happened at my scar were more freckles concentrated on the scar… and even that is gone. Proof that our bodies recycle themselves… though usually not in the ways we want it to happen! (and I don’t want get into why my hourglass figure turned into an apple shape without any change in mass… it is just unreal!)

Of course, not every smallpox shot caused a scar

I had one, but time seems to have washed it away, while bringing a myriad of weird-ass dermatological crap in exchange.

Narad: “I had one, but time seems to have washed it away,..”

It is like a bit of our youth has just disappeared. It was a symbol of a certain risk and time period… and now it is gone. Along with much of the detritus of time.

I, too, was a brat, Chris, and went overseas with dad to the Philippines in the late ‘60s. But where I really got shot up was when I was in the Air Force. We were required to be ready to go anywhere, any time. Yellow fever, sure, but I think that was good for 10 years. Cholera was only good for 6 months, so we always were getting that one. The worst was gamma globulin – you’d get that on the way out to the airplane, then you had to sit on it for a few hours – like 8 or 10 or more. I’ve had both the old and new formulas, and there is a world of difference between the two. Fortunately I only had to get that 4 times – 3 in the AF, and once as a civilian years later. But as bad as that was, the worst was in Basic Military Training – they used the squirt gun. Those hurt. It was the only time i’ve ever seen one, and don’t want to see another.

Chris,

That is because we were total engineering college nerds in 1976.

Apparently, you were in college the year I was born 🙂

Alain

I received the smallpox vaccination as a child. Here vaccination for smallpox didn’t cease until after eradication, although I got my scar almost a couple of decades before that. The scar is still there.

The probability that one is anti-vaccine is inversely related to the probability that one will have the responsibility for treating someone who contracts a vaccine-preventable illness. For Barbara and her ilk, the 21 Somali kids in Minnesota who had to be hospitalized because of the measles are a mere abstraction. They are someone else’s problem. Anti-vaccine doctors like Mercola who sell untested supplements and products to the masses are the ones who really disregard informed consent. Of course, their motive is profit and ego. I just wish that Mercola and anti-vaccine doctor scum like him had to work a week in a pediatric ICU to see the harms of their lies.

I just wish Mercola and other anti-vaccine scum would be publicly de-licensed and shamed. They couldn’t handle an ICU-level patient and would probably kill that patient through gross incompetence.

The new RI blog states:

Want to respond to Orac? Here’s your chance. Leave a reply!

MJD says,

I’m a little apprehensive and nervous about making comments on vaccine-safety issues in this new forum.

@Orac,

I’d like to submit a full-length guest post on this exciting blog. Are you open-minded to such a proposition?

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? – Wicked Witch

I’m a little apprehensive and nervous about making comments on vaccine-safety issues in this new forum.

No wonder, given that you have demonstrated no understanding of or qualifications regarding vaccine safety issues whatsoever.

Although the new layout is worse for desktop PCs – the plague of touch-optimisation.

MJD: Get your own blog! It’s not hard to set up, and you’d be killing less trees. Don’t whine for Orac’s space.

I always find it hilarious when anti-vaxxers try to appropriate the Holocaust, given how very many of them are whiter than snow and anti-semitic and racist to boot.

@ PGP:

I guess MJD didn’t read the appropriate material about guest bloggers ( Orac’s policy statement)
What else is new?

re whiteys**:

Throughout my travels around anti-vax blogs, facebook pages, twitter accounts and films ((shudder)), I’ve come across very few non-whites, in fact I can count them easily: there is a parent, Ms Ealey, a Dr Banks, a few from Nation of Islam and a Somali mother from MN. That’s about it. ( Oh and possibly, that Dr in Trump’s cabinet)

TMR has a Hispanic woman from Panama who lives in TX, ‘Tex’, and a native of Malaysia who is Moslem, ‘Dragonslayer’.
Louise Kuo Habakus is Chinese American ( Fearless Parent).

Research has shown this trend. More importantly is the affluence factor: they’re mostly suburban with money thus having time to spend on the internet spreading misinformation and money to attend Autism One and similar events.
In fact I think a few from AoA and TMR have lots of money.

** since I am whiter than almost anyone I can make fun of them. I think.

@Denice:

I’m so white (ok, so Norwegian) that I infuse my own akevitt (OMG so good, like Norwegian absinthe) and I make copious fun of (wealthy, mainly) white people. I also make the occasional “white trash” joke, but that is one of those things where you should be it to make fun of it.

Everyone should make fun of boozhie white people. We should do it until “whiteness” is no longer a thing, in fact. Equal opportunity.

For instance:

“Why has there never been a murder solved in Klickitat County?”

“I dunno, why?”

“Because there’s no dental records and all the DNA is the same.”

It was funny, but only from another hick.

I don’t know how Klickitat County compares to other parts of Washington state, but according to US Census data, it’s more racially diverse than several states, including the one I live in. And I know it’s not the poorest county in Washington state, although it is definitely rural.

I’m not a fan of jokes that punch down like that. Make fun of alcoholic banksters all you want–they deserve it!–but be wary of hillbilly jokes. Too often, they aren’t that different from the $STUPID_ETHNIC_GROUP jokes I heard when I was a kid.

I’m not a fan of jokes that punch down like that. Make fun of alcoholic banksters all you want–they deserve it!–but be wary of hillbilly jokes. Too often, they aren’t that different from the $STUPID_ETHNIC_GROUP jokes I heard when I was a kid.

I know, which is why you shouldn’t tell them. 😉

I live in Klickitat County and at least one branch of my family has for at least a couple hundred years, I mean we’re talking real hillbillies here, and the guy who told it is the same, so haha, but it wouldn’t be funny if you told it to me.

Gads, not a fan of the nested comments, I think after this I’ll go back to my old MO.

But part of the point I was actually trying to make is about “punching up” – which is why people at the top of the pyramid are fair game, but they don’t get to make fun of other white people who are “lesser than” they are.

Hadn’t had my coffee yet.

Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, we need to level out the entire pyramid, and getting rid of whiteness – which is *only* a privilege in a caste system – is a big part of that.

(You can have Norwegian culture, English culture, American culture (which is multi-ethnic), youth culture, queer culture, and on and on, but there is no such thing as “white culture.”

One more: that’s why when you hear someone claiming to defend “white (or ‘European’) culture,” you can be pretty sure that they’re a Nazi or at least a white supremacist. What they really mean is that they want to preserve the privilege of whites in a racial caste system.

Hasn’t BLF’s position ion the antivax sphere been the ‘reasonable’ one, who frames the cause in tones that might appeal to the general public, in contrast to the more extremist rhetoric of AoA, TMR etc., who sound more like the fringe nutters they are? That she’s now ranting about Nazis in chorus with Mike Adams strikes me as desperation, the death throes of antivax as a movement with any hope of political influence, any claim on broader consciousness beyond the core “choir” on the lunatic fringe…

Not really. First, the book Shot in the Dark was rather sensationalized, and her co-writer was a Russian language translator who dabbled in homeopathy.

I have been dealing with anti-vaxers for almost twenty years, and one of the first person someone cites is Barbara Loe Fisher. Each time I looked at her website I found it was sorely cherry picked, with vast gaps of logic. I took to calling it the National Vaccine misInformation Corporation over fifteen years ago.

My most memorable incident when someone told me the check the list on her site of “vaccine damaged” kids. The story that was linked to was about a child with Down Syndrome. Uh, yeah… vaccines that child got after birth caused the chromosome disorder several months before she was conceived.

The most charitable thing I can say about her is that she is not making a bunch of money off of it, and she may have been getting more unhinged in the last decade.

Uh, yeah… vaccines that child got after birth caused the chromosome disorder several months before she was conceived.

Causality, how does it work?

Babs has been raving about jackbooted vax thugs for years. It just lives in unwatchable video segments.

Well, the point is that Nazi analogies do not play well with the public at large, and going that the AVers are going there more often shows they’re basically just shouting in their own echo chamber. I mean, I wouldn’t worry TOO much about parents who might be vax-hesitant reading this stuff because I think it’s so over the top it’s more likely to give them pause than pull them farther in, unless they already have wacko CT tendencies… I suppose a survey of the political landscape might suggest there are waay to many folks out there with wacko CT tendencies, but I doubt that many of them will take to this particular narrative, at least unless Breitbart or Michael Savage start pushing it. Not that anti-vaxers are no longer a public health danger, but clearly, I think, a lot less so than even just a few years back.

Na, she’s been down that rabbit hole for a long time now. You should hear her live speak to a devoted flock; it’s something to behold and leaves no doubt she’s left reason in the dust.

Hey JP,

This is for real, my brother-in-law has a sister/cousin depending on how you want to look at it. When you look at the genetics in an area that does not see many outside people entering the gene pool you get that closeness. I grew up in SE WA and it seemed like I was related in some way to most of the long time families. As the population has grown (influx of outsiders), I can’t say I’m related to most people anymore.

@Rich Bly:

We have a similar rectangulation in the family where my mom’s cousin is married to my mom’s childhood friend, whose sister is married to my mom’s brother. So some “double cousins” there.

Also, before my paternal grandfather married to my grandma, he was married to her older sister and they had one son, who was then my dad’s “brother/cousin.”

I still joke that I can’t date out here, because I am related to everyone. Of course that has changed some, but I am in fact related to a lot of the *Mexicans* (or Mexican-Americans) around here. So it isn’t even along racial lines, haha.

MI Dawn posted at November 8, 2017 at 11:02 am
@SteveJ: that’s the one I meant. It’s gone? I’m very happy to know that. (haven’t been on the Turnpike in a few months)
Yep, unless my eyes deceive me.

Imagine how things might have turned out if the Nazis had figured out that all they had to do to commit genocide was to vaccinate all the Jews and Socialists.

@ Eric Lund November 9, 2017 at 2:26 pm

Causality, how does it work?

Please check with Darryl Bem

Sadmar: Well, the point is that Nazi analogies do not play well with the public at large, and going that the AVers are going there more often shows they’re basically just shouting in their own echo chamber.

Uh, no the public is just fine with being nazis. Have you been asleep for the past year? Seriously, Richard Spencer is still wildly popular, and Milo still has a big following, not to mention most of Indiana, a few entire towns in Montana, and most of Washington outside of Seattle.

In other anti-vax ( not) news.. because it’s Saturday

Someone at RI wondered if Shaw and Tomljenovic would continue ..

according to Mikey ( Natural News) their latest paper confirms his recent revelation that SBM is trying to exterminate Black people- it’s “HCG Found in WHO Tetanus Vaccines…..” ( Oller, Shaw, Tomljenovic et al, Open Access Library Journal, 2017)
AND Mike details the miscarriage study, Gates’ statements about de-population and of course, the Kenyan bishops.
The comment section is amazing.

Heckenlively thinks that anti-vaxxers should recruit a guy who creates comics to get their message across to the public
( Bolen Report)

Kim ( AoA) references Angel numbers ( 11s) in her tribute to Dan. I think she’s off in Italy teaching karate or something with her Sensei.

and then there’s Jake.

it’s “HCG Found in WHO Tetanus Vaccines…..” ( Oller, Shaw, Tomljenovic et al, Open Access Library Journal, 2017)

Now there’s a moldy oldie.

Dear G-d, even the (292 word) abstract on this thing (PDF) is batshіt crazy:

In 1993, WHO announced a “birth-control vaccine” for “family planning”. Published research shows that by 1976 WHO researchers had conjugated tetanus toxoid (TT) with human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) producing a “birth-control” vaccine. Conjugating TT with hCG causes pregnancy hormones to be attacked by the immune system. Expected results are abortions in females already pregnant and/or infertility in recipients not yet impregnated. Repeated inoculations prolong infertility. Currently WHO researchers are working on more potent anti-fertility vaccines using recombinant DNA. WHO publications show a long-range purpose to reduce population growth in unstable “less developed countries”. By November 1993 Catholic publications appeared saying an abortifacient vaccine was being used as a tetanus prophylactic. In November 2014, the Catholic Church asserted that such a program was underway in Kenya. Three independent Nairobi accredited biochemistry laboratories tested samples from vials of the WHO tetanus vaccine being used in March 2014 and found hCG where none should be present. In October 2014, 6 additional vials were obtained by Catholic doctors and were tested in 6 accredited laboratories. Again, hCG was found in half the samples. Subsequently, Nairobi’s AgriQ Quest laboratory, in two sets of analyses, again found hCG in the same vaccine vials that tested positive earlier but found no hCG in 52 samples alleged by the WHO to be vials of the vaccine used in the Kenya campaign 40 with the same identifying batch numbers as the vials that tested positive for hCG. Given that hCG was found in at least half the WHO vaccine samples known by the doctors involved in administering the vaccines to have been used in Kenya, our opinion is that the Kenya “anti-tetanus” campaign was reasonably called into question by the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association as a front for population growth reduction.

Fun fact: Senior author Jamie Ryan Pillette received her undergraduate degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2015 and an M.S. from the same institution in 2017. Enjoy the further dots.

P.S. The Dachelbot’s review of Oller’s autism book.

I’m going to have to leave the library before I collapse into sobbing laughter:

The defense that the WHO intended only to target “maternal and neonatal tetanus” seems odd in view of the fact that males are about as likely as females to be exposed to the bacterium

I’m guessing that this paragraph in all its pedantic irrelevance is Oller’s contribution:

Our fourth method involved a “thought experiment” applying the simplest type of mathematical probative tests for a variety of Euclidean congruence [65]. The KCDA claimed that the WHO dosage schedule of five shots administered in six month increments was inconsistent with published tetanus vaccination schedules. So, our simple probative test was to compare the published vaccination schedules for TT, t , with the published schedules for TT/BhCG, B. Calling the schedule used in Kenya, k, and taking “=” to mean congruent, if t ≠ B, but B = k, and k ≠ t , it follows that k is a dosage schedule appropriate to TT/BhCG, the WHO antifertility vaccine. The simple test of congruence of dosage schedules is not conclusive proof by itself, but it is consistent with the opinion of the authors
that the WHO followed a dosage schedule appropriate for TT/Bh in Kenya but inappropriate for TT vaccine.

Not sure what Shaw & Tomljenovic’s contribution was, except to pad out the Citations with references to their previous work.

Oller is evidently very proud of this paper, and regards it as the crown of his CV, for he has already uploaded a copy to his Researchgate account. He has swallowed the entire Depopulation Agenda bolus of lies. He’s a biblical-literalist evolution-denying Young Earth creationist, and is too stupid to be allowed outside when it’s raining for fear that he’ll stare up at the sky with his mouth open until he drowns

And I can see what Ngare and Karanja get out of the publication… they’re fraudulent theocratic lying sh1tweasels and they’re getting a chance to recycle lies from three years ago without going to the trouble of making up new ones.

But really, Chris and Lucija, is this really how you want to end your careers? in bed with these extreme-right cockwombles?

I will never tire of pointing out that Oller believes in Bible-Literalist Linguistics:
https://answersingenesis.org/tower-of-babel/more-than-pie/

From Oller’s CV we learn that the working title for this new antivax fabulation was “WHO Links Tetanus Toxoid to Human Chorionic Gonadotropin and Why Are They Doing It”.
https://speechandlanguage.louisiana.edu/sites/speechandlanguage/files/Oller%20CV.pdf

I begin to think he was homeschooled.

DW: I think Kim’s off in Italy teaching karate or something with her Sensei.

Whatever she’s doing in Italy, it ain’t karate. (Unless Sensei is into really rough stuff in the bedroom.) I hope her ex takes the chance to abscond with the girls.

@ PGP:

Well, I only know what I read on twitter – she has her own @ kimrossi1111 and I surmise she manages the AoA twitfest and one from her dojo ( listed on her own).

And watch out, dude- she’s a black belt.( photos)

( funny but I recall that she and TMs always carped that they have no lives, can’t exercise, etc but we now learn about this; another mom slipped and said she had a caretaker for her son)

I will never tire of pointing out that Oller believes in Bible-Literalist Linguistics:

I… I think I lost some brain cells reading that. I needed those, too.

In their efforts to explain the multitude of languages, secular theories come up empty. They are upstaged by the biblical narrative, which credits God with the gift of language and the vast diversity of different language families. The words language, tongue, speech, and word appear in the Bible at least 1,401 times.

I… I just… no.

And our man is sufficiently proud of his Answers-in-Genesis contribution to human nescience to list it in his CV.

the vast diversity of different language families.

Most of the languages the Bible writers were familiar with were Semitic, which is a pretty close-knit group. You’d think with that “gift of language”, “God” could make one guy speak Hungarian, and the guy next to him Warlpiri, and the guy on the other side Nahuatl, and so on. Now that’s a confusion of tongues done right!

DW: Anyone can do cosplay. I’d be very interested to know what her dojo is. I suspect it’s one of the softer styles. I’m being a little catty, because Italy seems like an unlikely place for karate to have any sort of foothold. Reminds me of the Quebecois white supremacist who insisted that French people invented self-defense. Hah.(And also, I don’t like her and think she lies about everything.)
Speaking of karate, I just attended my first class in weeks and am paying the price for it today. But it’s nice to have things be back to normal.

@ PGP & Julian:

Try @ HankoRyuCT ( some photos) – their regular website ( Hanko Ryu Martial Arts) may be down- there were many photos and bios of instructors. It looks like she teaches small kids and also assists top dude at seminars.

I used to do tai chi/ other martial arts training ( grappeling, swords etc) including 2 person choreographed fight sequences for at least 7 years.
They didn’t give belts. They were hippies.

I’m a little suspicious about Kim being a Black Belt. I practiced Goju-Ryu style Karate for five years until I ruined my right knee. Kim’s learning Karate was mentioned on a thread several years ago.
From my own experience, it takes at least seven years to get a black belt, and I’m quite sure she hasn’t been practicing for that long. She may have been awarded a black belt, but I doubt she’s at black belt level.
@PGP:

Italy seems like an unlikely place for karate to have any sort of foothold.

Leaving aside the racism in your comment, that’s a very silly thing to say. Martial Arts are quite popular the world over. A google search turns up plenty of data on dojos and the like in Italy.

In other news, Jake comes clean –

It is the life’s work of Autism Investigated’s editor to dismantle the vaccine program in its entirety. Its creation was a disastrous mistake. It must be opposed and so too should vaccines in their present and only conceivable form. That is why Autism Investigated is anti-vaccine, and that is why you should be too.

Well, at least he shows his true colors.

The creation of vaccins was a disastrous mistake, because it prevented many deaths and a lot of suffering. Is Jake some kind of sadist, who likes to see people suffer from vaccine preventable diseases?
And perhaps the creation of a poliovaccine was disastrous for the makers of iron lungs.

The biggest disaster I can imagine is that, because of the success of vaccins in preventing vaccine preventable diseases, people don’t remember the negative consequences of these diseases and they can only remember comedy-shows with children who had a vaccine preventable diseases, making them more prone to anti-vaccine messages.

@ Johnny:

Hah!
Have you noticed that he’s been posting more frequently lately?
I wonder what’s fuelling that?

Now, I know that we may sound like awful people discussing anti-vaxxers’ lives and speculating BUT
like making fun of Adams and Null, I think our commentary serves as a warning to people who might LISTEN to their advice thinking that these fraudsters know something of value. Their OTHER activities and statements point to their general lacks.

One of my gentlemen has a relative who, cluelessly, said Null was a great source for health advice. I could give him hundreds of examples of how this charlatan endangers people’s lives. BUT I don’t because I have no relationship to this person and he seems to be beyond reach but I did tell my contact to refer him to Quackwatch, wikip—, lee-phillips and Orac – all of which illustrate the idiot’s lunacy.

What else is he gonna do, Denice? He can’t get a job in any field he’s studied, and at 30 with (as far as I know) zero work history, no chance of anything much other than fast food. I doubt any school other than a community college would take him, so resuming his life as a professional student is out. Mommy probably doesn’t have enough money to buy him a friend. He fancies himself a writer, but I don’t think he’s that good, and he’s a one trick pony anyway. It seems he’s living in Florida, so he could take up fishing (I really miss Florida fishing, there’s just so much, and so many different styles), but he doesn’t seem the type. You can only walk on the beach so much.

AI is probably his biggest (and only) success (for small values of success), so, in addition to not being able to do anything else, why would he want to?

JF: That came out wrong. I meant to say that a trip to Italy to look at dojos seems kind of odd. Basically it screams ‘on a boinking trip with new man.’ I share your skepticism- either she’s lying about having a black belt, or it’s really easy. (Or considering her closeness to sensei, she traded for that belt.) Most of the Ryu styles are fairly hard core.

@ PGP:

Now we don’t know that for sure. BUT….**

I hope you checked out the twitter accounts/ website I listed above.
Here’s what I saw
:
she appears to be wearing a black belt in photos.
she appears to be teaching kids/ assisting a guy in a seminar with adults
the personnel bios in the website ( which may be missing now) said she studied for several years
the sensei was born in Italy and has done seminars there
looks like she does their twitter as well as AoA’s and her own
she has a position in their karate org

**and we don’t want to gossip.

There’s nothing wrong with a caretaker studying or exercising- in fact, it’s good psychological sense and healthy BUT remember that like some other anti-vax moms, she made a big deal of her full time duties . Another mom ( nameless until I find the source) also complained that she had no life but later slipped saying that she had assistants to care for the child

Renate: Is Jake some kind of sadist, who likes to see people suffer from vaccine preventable diseases?

I think so. He doesn’t know what happiness is, so he tries to snuff it out when it’s anywhere around him. I kinda wish r/incels was still around, because it’d keep him occupied for a while.

Speaking of awareness, I just learned of a veterinary practice that boasts of going beyond “western” principles and into full-on integrative dog and cat woo. Services offered include:

Medical Ozone & UV Light Therapies
Acupuncture
Nutrition
Nutritional Medicine
Diets
Homeopathy/Homotoxicology
Spinal Manipulative Therapy
Laser Therapy
Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine
Neoplastic Index Cancer Panel
Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Therapy
Alpha-Stim Therapy

This outfit pushes a not entirely subtle vaccine-hesitant message:

http://www.lifetimepetwellness.com/services-and-benefits/titers-vaccine-reactions-and-concurrent-treatments.html

They do offer a “Free vaccines for life” promotion, which entails an upfront fee and mandatory annual “wellness” checkups, and only covers so-called “core” vaccines such as rabies and distemper.

I feel sorry for the poor beasts whose owners fall for “holistic” veterinary care.

@ Dangerous Bacon:

I take my own creature to vets who seem to be SB- no woo that I can discern- but after his initial shots, the vet asked if he’d go outdoors or live with any other cats or animals. I said, “No” and was informed that he didn’t need many shots: only distemper every few years, no rabies etc. So I did that.

When he had IBD- like symptoms, I was surprised that the other vet – the owner yet- didn’t try to talk me into many tests- quite the contrary, he said that most tests aren’t that informative and just advocated a careful diet, later special food. No big deal.

They did prescribe antibiotics for amoeba when I first brought him in and later he had minor surgery for a cyst..

So no megavitamins or bizarre diets.

Interestingly enough, there seems to be a plethora of dietary woo for cats-
raw diets, grain free, low carb, all meat etc. (Some prescribe novel proteins like rabbit, venison or duck for IBD which may not be so crazy) There are loads of cat diet woo on the internet.

I wonder if any GFCF free folk or vegans** out there also feed their cats diets congruent to their woo beliefs?

** not so easy to do healthily for cats- obligate carnivores.

I have just remembered where I had come across John W. Oller before. He was the guest editor of a special issue of Entropy back in 2013/14. Why would researcher in linguistics be invited to guest edit a special issue for a physics journal I hear you ask? Or perhaps not. Entropy is a pay to publish journal from MDPI. This predatory publisher has part of its business model where it emails all sorts of people inviting them to guest edit a special issue on a topic of their choice. This is great for predatory publishers as the guest editor does all the work encouraging their friends to provide cash to get their ramblings published.

This particular issue of Entropy was the one that broke Stephanie Seneff on the unsuspecting medical research community. Seneff co-authored 7 of the 12 articles in the special issue.

I also note that Shaw, Tomljenovic and Seneff have published together for one of the other predatory publishes and Shaw has also teamed up with Seneff and Robert M Davidson (who appeared on the 2105 Keele program) for a publication with yet another predatory publisher.

This group of nutcases are clearly self-attracting.

DW: First of all, I don’t do anything with twitter. No account, no reason to look at the ship o’fools. Secondly, if she’s doing all that, why is she whining on AOA? Does she even see her children all that often? From her blog-posts, she makes it sound like she’s at home all day, every day, except when she’s doing legal stuff or having to make a trip out for groceries and sundries. She also makes it sound like the girls can’t be left without adult supervision. So..well..hmm. Also, the divorce seems to have been initiated by HER, not her husband. So make of that what you will. I’d apologize for besmirching her character..but she’d have to have some positive qualities to besmirch.

Dangerous Bacon: Practicing acupuncture on a cat? Oh boy. Most cats and dogs practice UV therapy on themselves- why spend the money when you can just put their bed or blankie in a nice sunny spot?

@ PGP:

I also don’t have an account on twitter: I just look at stuff to make fun of. Over the past few years, I’ve learned that that’s the place where you may learn of real crap by woo-meisters and anti-vaxxers, They may show more of their true selves to their fans because it can be instant perhaps there are less filters.

Well, Jake thinks he done a great and wonderful thing by outing the father of The Lancet paper’s child 11.

He’s asking his minions to call and harass the guy, and the bright side is that we’re talking about, what, maybe 3 people? Of course, 3 times a big number is a big number. If they call several times each, and Jake admits to several calls himself, I could see that this guy might, just might, take a dim view of Jake’s posting.

Every time I think the kid reaches rock bottom, he finds a new way to blast thru the bedrock and find a way to go lower.

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