Dr. Lawrence Palevsky is a pediatrician. He is also one of the things I detest the most, an antivaccine physician, having appeared in the antivaccine propaganda film disguised as a documentary, The Greater Good; actively spread antivaccine misinformation among the orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn and Rockland County in New York; and has become an active promoter of antivaccine pseudoscience and conspiracy theories to the point where I advocate taking his license to practice medicine away. Recently, I was made aware of a video of him providing “expert” (if you can call it that) testimony before a legislative informational forum in Connecticut, which has been considering removing the religious exemption to the state school vaccine mandate, and it had so much misinformation that it set my teeth to grinding, and when my teeth start grinding my blogging hands get itchy for a keyboard to type out a rebuttal on, particularly given that his testimony is being touted by quack websites.
It also occurred to me that a rebuttal to the antivaccine pseudoscience, disinformation, and bad science is a useful exercise, because, make no mistake, Dr. Palevsky is a major asset to antivaxxers. Why? First, he’s a physician and, even better and more relevant for their purposes, a pediatrician who’s gone completely over to the Dark Side on vaccines. Second, being a later middle-aged white guy (it turns out that he started medical school one year before I did), he looks authoritative, just like the traditional cliche of what a physician should look like. Worse, he sounds authoritative when giving testimony, even when that testimony consists mainly of easily refuted antivaccine tropes and denial that there is data on certain aspects of vaccine safety when in fact there are a lot of data. As you will see, in a little over 18 minutes, Dr. Palevsky lays down a veritable barrage, a Gish gallop, of antivaccine tropes and claims that sound plausible if you don’t know a lot about the issue. This makes him a menace to public health:
Please allow me to introduce myself; I’m a man of antivaccine taste
Dr. Palevsky started his testimony by introducing himself, recounting his history working in emergency rooms, intensive care units, and later private practice. Of course, what he neglected to tell the legislators was that his private practice is an “integrative pediatrics” practice that offers rank quackery such as acupuncture and Chinese Medicine, chiropractic, osteopathy, cranial-sacral therapy, environmental medicine, homeopathy, and essential oils, along with natural healing modalities such as aromatherapy, yoga, Reiki, meditation, reflexology, and mindfulness. Worse, his philosophy towards treating children is truly horrific. No wonder since he entered the public eye, he’s “cleaned up” his website, purging it of most of its quackier elements. Unfortunately for him, though, the almighty Wayback Machine at Archive.org knows all, remembers all, and tells all:
Acute symptoms, such as fever, vomiting, diarrhea, rash, cough, runny nose, mucus production and wheezing, are all important ways in which children discharge stored accumulations of wastes or toxins from their bodies. These toxins enter and are stored in their bodies from repeated exposures to in utero, air, food, water, skin, nervous system stress, and injected materials, that for whatever reason, don’t easily exit their bodies through the normal means of detoxification. These toxins are too irritating to children’s bodies and must be removed. Eventually, a critical level of the toxins is reached, and children get sick with symptoms to purge them. Children, therefore, must be allowed to be sick, in order for them to get well.
In his practice, Dr. Palevsky encourages parents to allow children to express their symptoms when they’re sick. No one wants children to “feel” sick. Parents can learn to use remedies, however, that help children feel better and heal more effectively, without altering the important physiology which is helping them cleanse their systems. Letting children have their symptoms, without suppressing them, can be a challenging process both for parents and health care practitioners. We often come face-to-face with our own discomfort when children experience discomfort from their illnesses. It’s hard for us to watch them “suffer”, so we reflexively give them something to bring immediate relief. This reflexive response to suppress their symptoms, however, weakens them and delays their healing process.
I will continue to quote that passage every single time I write about Dr. Palevsky’s promotion of antivaccine pseudoscience. Indeed, if I were at that legislative session, I’d quote Dr. Palevsky’s words back to him and ask him if he really believes in not vaccinating because vaccines prevent children from “expressing their symptoms” and fully experiencing the gloriousness of measles, mumps, chickenpox, Haemophilus influenza type b, etc. Personally, as I said the last time I discussed Dr. Palevsky, come to the belief that Dr. Palevsky is a monster. He seems to have believed (and almost certainly still does believe) that children should suffer, that their suffering shouldn’t be relieved, that children should be “allowed to be sick” because to do otherwise would be unnatural and prevent them from “cleansing” and “healing” their systems properly. I also can’t help but note, as others have, that there is a distinct strain of germ theory denialism here. You see, it’s not so much the bacteria and viruses causing fever and disease. It’s the toxins. He’s even explicitly said it, as others have documented. Dr. Palevsky definitely deserves his entry in the Encyclopedia of American Loons.
Dr. Palevsky continued his testimony with the sort of story we commonly hear from antivaccine quacks like himself, namely that all he was taught about vaccines in medical school was that “they were safe; they were effective; and give them,” saying that he wasn’t taught the science of vaccine safety. The reason this particular narrative is effective, regardless of whether it’s true or not, relies on something that the lay person doesn’t usually know, namely that medical school is where students go to learn the basics of medicine, the common base upon which residency training builds to produce the finished product, the fully trained doctor. When we graduate medical school, we are not qualified to practice. When we finish internship, although most states will allow us to be licensed, we are not really qualified to practice, which is why someone with only one year of postgraduate training, while technically able to practice, won’t be able to get hospital privileges and won’t be able to be signed up on any insurance plans. No, the real learning how to be a physician, for instance a pediatrician, happens in residency, and I’d bet that Dr. Palevsky learned all the potential side effects of every vaccine that was on the schedule at the time. Why? Because he was being trained to administer vaccines, and if you administer vaccines you need to know how to deal with the minor side effects (e.g., fever, sore arm, etc.) and to recognize potential serious side effects..
The whole purpose of this narrative is to deceive lay people into thinking that doctors have no training in vaccines at all. It’s a profoundly dishonest narrative. Of course, it wouldn’t surprise me if, through the wonders of confirmation bias and selective memory, Dr. Palevsky has convinced himself that he didn’t get any such training in residency, either.
The next part of his testimony reveals Dr. Palevsky to be profoundly ignorant. In it, he told the story of a mother coming up to him in 1998 and asking him if he knew there was mercury in vaccines. Seriously? He didn’t know? Did he not know what thimerosal is? Didn’t he ever read the package inserts? I know I rip on how antivaxxers misuse package inserts, but package inserts do at least list vaccine ingredients, and back then thimerosal was used as a preservative in saline solutions for contact lenses as well. In any event, here is the first instance where Dr. Palevsky goes nauseatingly out of his way to convince legislators that he’s a Man of Science, saying, “As a medical student, I was trained to critically think. If you see an observation, you go after it and see if there’s a question to ask.” Given the quality of Dr. Palevsky’s testimony, I would very much dispute whether he was ever taught to be a critical thinker, in medical school or anywhere else. If he was, his medical school clearly failed.
The next part of the video shows just how ignorant Dr. Palevsky is. He related how he had started looking into vaccine ingredients and found “many animal studies” showing that these ingredients were “very dangerous to animals” and said, “I didn’t understand why these ingredients were in vaccines.” Dude, just ask. What you were doing in that testimony was nothing other than parroting the “toxins gambit.” There are people who can tell you why various ingredients are in vaccines. Thimerosal, when it was in vaccines, was used as a preservative for multidose vials. Formaldehyde is used to inactivate virus, and traces are left behind, traces too small to cause any harm given that formaldehyde is a normal product of metabolism and an infant’s body has far more of it than any vaccine. I realize that the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania Vaccine Education Center website probably wasn’t around, but even at this late date Dr. Palevsky could, if he so chooses, to easily educate himself about exactly why each vaccine ingredient is in vaccines and how none of them are dangerous at the concentrations/doses present.
Naturally, Dr. Palevsky is very much into confusing correlation with causation and demonstrated it by relating stories of “thousands” of parents who thought vaccines had injured their children, indignantly telling how “every one of these parents” was told that vaccines “had nothing to do with” their children’s health problems, autoimmune disease, regression into autism, and the like. He listed a bunch of statistics, straight out of the “sickest generation” myth promulgated by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Full of false confidence, Dr. Palevsky said that, looking at vaccine ingredients, he had The Science to explain what had happened to these children. (Spoiler: He didn’t and doesn’t.) In fact, he went on to claim that vaccine ingredients can “be seen to be responsible for every single one of these cases.”
Nanoparticles, emulsifiers, and vaccines, oh, my!
Here’s where things get bizarre. Dr. Palevsky went on an expanded riff about the blood-brain barrier, as structural feature of blood vessels in the brain and central nervous system that keeps certain compounds and drugs from getting into the brain tissue. Having exercised his vast Dunning-Kruger skills reading the animal literature, he pontificated about how, if you want to get a drug into the brain, you can attach it to a nanoparticle and, if you want to get even more of a drug into the brain, you combine the drug attached to a nanoparticle with an emulsifier. (Emulsifiers are compounds, like detergents, that can dissolve in both water and fat, stabilizing something that’s fat soluble in an emulsion in water.) I bet the chemists can see where this is going.
According to Dr. Palevsky, guess what? That’s exactly how vaccines are made! The nanoparticle is the aluminum salt in the vaccine, and the emulsifier is something like polysorbate 80, which is in some vaccines. Naturally, this leads Dr. Palevsky to ask if that means that the nanoparticles and emulsifiers in vaccines can bypass the blood-brain barrier and get the antigens used in the vaccines into the brain and explain why so many children allegedly deteriorate after vaccines, even though the doctors, the media, the government, etc., say that it’s not the vaccine. Those of you familiar with Yehuda Shoefeld’s autoimmunity pseudoscience will now see where this is going.
At this point, Dr. Palevsky made the first of multiple annoying “no study” assertions, “You cannot find a single study in the literature that addresses whether the injection of aluminum into the body penetrates the brain, whether any vaccine ingredients enters the brain, and whether polysorbate 80 enhances the delivery of any of those ingredients into the brain.” Of course, he then claimed that these vaccine antigens get into the brain and cause inflammation.
At this point I can only say that Dr. Palevsky must not have looked very hard, and I can’t help but note that good blog bud Skeptical Raptor recently published a discussion of this very topic, complete with listing studies, of the pharmacokinetic distribution of aluminum, as did an actual blood brain barrier scientist and yours truly. He also wrote a very good deconstruction of the claim that polysorbate 80 breaks down the blood-brain barrier, complete with a list of many studies. As for studies, I like what he said here:
Keep in mind that polysorbate 80 is good at dissolving lipid in water solutions but it is not good to let charged molecules across the BBB, just in case someone comes with the claims that it conjugates with aluminum. Thats some high-school chemistry level.
Precisely. When a claim contradicts chemistry 101 (at best) knowledge, all it does is to show that the person making the claim is a clueless twit about the science behind the claim. Another error made by Dr. Palevsky, the aluminum particles used as an adjuvant in vaccines are not nanoparticles. As Blood Brain Scientists pointed out in her post, they range between 2-10 μM in diameter, with a median diameter of around 3 μM. (That’s micrometers, not nanometers.) True, there have been efforts to reformulate the aluminum salt particles as nanoparticles in order to increase the immunogenicity of vaccines, but they are still experimental. Right now, aluminum nanoparticles are not used in commercially available vaccines. Even more importantly, being microparticles, aluminum salt particles in vaccines tend to remain localized at the site of injection. Polysorbate 80 can form nanoparticles, but not in the way that Dr. Palevsky claims and not with aluminum, which is present at much larger particle sizes, and, again, we already know that it doesn’t “break down” the blood-brain barrier to allow vaccine antigens to get into the brain.
I could go on and on and on and on. It’s not as though the distribution of formaldehyde after injection or after its production by normal metabolism isn’t known. Seriously, Dr. Palevsky needs to go back to school to learn some chemistry, biochemistry, and pharmacology, in particular pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. If he did, he might also figure out that we already know the pharmacodynamics of polysorbate 80 and aluminum, and that the doses present in vaccines are way too small to do what antivaxxers like him claim.
Oh, no! No saline placebo!
The less said on this issue, the better, but damn if Dr. Palevsky didn’t next pivot to the most brain dead, ignorant, easily refuted antivaccine trope of all, the “no randomized studies of vaccines versus saline placebo” gambit. It’s a trope so divorced from reality, a trope that just takes a quick perusal of PubMed to refute, that I really don’t want to waste a lot of time on it other than to refer you, my readers, to previous discussions by Dr. Vincent Ianelli (also here); Helen Petousis Harris; and Skeptical Raptor. I’ll also point out that, contrary to antivaccine myths, from a scientific standpoint a saline placebo is not always the most appropriate placebo, as anyone who designs clinical trials of vaccines (i.e., not Dr. Palevsky) knows.
Oh, no! No safety studies!
Dr. Palevsky is a veritable font of antivaccine claims, and he kept going, next diving into the claim that there are no good vaccine safety studies. This is, of course, utterly untrue. Safety testing of vaccines is, in actuality, very rigorous. None of that stopped Dr. Palevsky from claiming that human subjects in vaccine trials are only followed for four or five days (although he “conceded” that it’s now up to ten days). Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! That’s another antivaccine myth. There are lots of long term studies on vaccine safety. Dr. Ianelli has even listed quite a few of them for Dr. Palevsky’s convenience. He should read this post. (No, really, he should.) There’s even one study that followed children out for 20 years. So when Dr. Palevsky made the claim that if your child has a seizure 5 months after a vaccine, there are “no studies” (that idiotic trope again!) to show one way or the other if vaccines could have caused his seizure, he’s revealing nothing more than his profound ignorance. No, we have lots and lots of studies that tell us if an event years later is likely to have been caused by vaccines.
One bizarre claim made by Dr. Palevsky was that the pharmaceutical companies determine what will and will not be considered adverse reactions for purposes of reporting in the clinical trials. This claim reveals a profound lack of understanding how clinical trials are regulated and run in the US. While it is true that preapproval studies are funded and run by the pharmaceutical company seeking to license their vaccine—who else would fund them?—they are overseen by the FDA, which, thanks to regulations regarding the protection of human research subjects, requires that the trial be approved and overseen by an institutional review board (IRB). IRBs are tasked not only with making sure that the study design is ethical, but with reviewing all reports of adverse reactions in the trial, whatever they might be. The law requires reporting all adverse reactions. True, there is an assessment of whether a given observed adverse event is due to the vaccine or not, but it’s not just the investigators or the pharmaceutical company that gets to make that determination. The FDA is involved, as is the IRB overseeing the clinical trial. Dr. Palevsky made it sound as though the pharmaceutical company could just decide however it wants which adverse events are and are not due to a given vaccine in a clinical trial.
Also, doesn’t he know that many vaccine safety studies done postlicensure aren’t carried out by pharmaceutical companies? They’re carried out by governments, independent researchers, and the like.
Oh, no! Unvaccinated children can’t cause outbreaks!
I’m sorry, but this claim deserves a mega-facepalm. Dr. Palevsky actually said in his testimony that there are no studies that show that the unvaccinated can start an epidemic. First, I wish I could have stopped Dr. Palevsky right there and told him that the word he was looking for was “outbreak,” not “epidemic.” In epidemiology and infectious disease, the word “epidemic,” although often used interchangeably with the word “outbreak,” does not connote the same thing. “Outbreak” connotes a rapid increase in the number of cases of infectious disease (as does “epidemic) but over a smaller geographic area than “epidemic.” Still, I’ll let it slide.
In any event, here we see Dr. Palevsky using the “just show me one paper” fallacy. It’s also profoundly deceptive, as often we come to scientific conclusions based on the confluence of data and studies from different sources and disciplines. It’s also silly. We know the attack rate of a pathogen during an epidemic is much higher among the unvaccinated than the vaccinated. For instance, during a pertussis outbreak, the risk of being infected with pertussis is 23-fold higher among the unvaccinated than among the vaccinated. For measles, the increased risk is between 22- and 35-fold higher. I’ve seen even seen one study that estimates that the unvaccinated are as high as 200-fold more likely to catch the measles during an outbreak.
As for “no studies,” it’s often difficult to determine with certainty who “patient zero” is in any given outbreak, and the scientific literature can only identify the most likely candidates for “patient zero.” What we do know is that when vaccine coverage for a given pathogen falls below a certain level in a population, outbreaks become much more likely, and the pathogen can spread much faster because there are so many more susceptible individuals. We do know that in the most recent measles outbreaks in the US the vast majority of those who came down with the measles were unvaccinated. We know that in the most recent measles outbreak among orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, because so many were unvaccinated, one student infected at least 21 other people because parents ignored warnings not to send their unvaccinated children to school during the outbreak.
Time and time and time again, when measles outbreaks (and outbreaks of other infectious diseases) are studied, it’s found that the attack rate in the unvaccinated is much higher and that usually most of those who become ill are unvaccinated. Time and time and time again, these outbreaks are found to have started with an unvaccinated individual, often returning after traveling to an area where there are ongoing outbreaks, bringing the disease back and spreading it to other unvaccinated people.
Of course, Dr. Palevsky then claimed that vaccines don’t eliminate the pathogen from the body, that the vaccinated can still be carriers. First of all, that’s not true of most pathogens; Dr. Palevsky appears to be referring mainly to pertussis, where it’s controversial whether vaccinated children can still be asymptomatic carriers, because certainly there aren’t other examples that I’m aware of. What we do know is that the vaccine against pertussis does prevent disease and interrupt the spread of pertussis; so vaccinating is the safe thing to do. (Yes, I do know about waning immunity due to the vaccine, but that’s taken care of with appropriately timed boosters.) In other words, this is not a reason not to vaccinate and not a reason to conclude that the unvaccinated don’t cause and perpetuate outbreaks.
If you want to get an idea of how ignorant Dr. Palevsky is, near the end of his testimonay he even made the claim that 38% of the measles cases in the Disneyland measles outbreak were due to vaccine strain measles. Nope. This is an antivaccine talking point that, like many others, has been refuted thousands of times but just won’t die.
No vaxxed/unvaxxed studies!
Dr. Palevsky does love to play the “confuse correlation with causation” card when he once again trotted out the “sickest generation” trope, repeated his disinformation claiming that there are no saline placebo-controlled studies of individual vaccines, and then claimed that there are no health outcome studies comparing the health of vaccinated children with those of unvaccinated children. Again, that last claim is a myth. There are several such studies. No, really, there are. Seriously, can Dr. Palevsky stop repeating the lie that there are no studies comparing health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children when there are? Of course, what these studies show is not what Dr. Palevsky wants you to think. Contrary to showing that unvaccinated children are healthier than vaccinated children, at minimum, they show that vaccinated children are just as healthy as unvaccinated children, with some studies suggesting them to be in general healthier. Of course, we know they’re healthier in one area, namely being at a much lower risk of acquiring a serious vaccine-preventable disease.
Dr. Palevsky is clearly unaware of the phenomenon of confirmation bias. It’s a bias to which all humans are prone in which we remember things that support our beliefs and biases. Skeptics and scientists try to account for it when examining evidence. Most people, like Dr. Palevsky, do not, which explains why he said things like this about unvaccinated children during his testimony:
They are the healthiest children I have ever seen.
No, Dr. Palevsky only thinks his unvaccinated patients are the healthiest children he’s ever seen because he primarily remembers the healthy ones and most of the children in his practice are unvaccinated or undervaccinated anyway.
Hubris, thy name is Dr. Larry Palevsky.
The last five minutes or so of Dr. Palevsky’s testimony is truly something to behold, and I don’t mean that in a good way. The display of hubris demonstrated by Dr. Palevsky in his assertions beggars the imagination. For instance, he pointed out that vaccines don’t always produce an antibody response and—shock of shocks—that sometimes antibody titers don’t correlate with immunity as though this were some great discovery that scientists have been hiding from the public. Seriously, the only people shocked to learn that there are people who don’t develop an antibody response to vaccines and even those who are not immune despite an antibody response are people who know nothing about the immune system but what they’re fed by antivaccine cranks. It’s not as though immunologists haven’t been discussing and studying this phenomenon for…oh…forever, looking for better correlates of immunity and how to make vaccines more immunogenic. Seriously, if, like Dr. Palevsky did, you’re going to lay down nonsense like claiming that vaccinating stops the spread of disease is an assumption that’s never been “solidified in science,” get thee to an introductory course in immunology forthwith and shut up until you’ve passed the course!
Dr. Palevsky also engaged in some amazing projection, characterizing the current faith in vaccines is based on “belief” and “opinion” instead of “actual science,” adding, “and beliefs go a long way.” Having listened to Dr. Palevsky’s misbegotten and deceptive testimony, I can only conclude that he wouldn’t recognize “actual science” if it were a bear biting him on his gluteus maximus. As for “beliefs going a long way,” no kidding. That explains how Dr. Palevsky can spew such utter nonsense divorced from science and cite without naming the investigators animal experiments carried out by the likes of Christopher Shaw that accomplish nothing other than the unnecessary torture of mice with such utter certainty that he knows what he’s talking about when anyone who actually knows the subject recognizes what an ignoramus he is. (If he’s not an ignoramus, he’s a lying propagandist. There is no third option.)
He even made the ridiculous assertion that, in order to provide herd immunity we have to be able to prove that the children vaccinated are immune. What? I know what he was trying to say. He was trying to claim that because antibody titers don’t always correlate with immunity you can never demonstrate herd immunity. (At least I think that’s what he was driving at.) Guess what? We can demonstrate herd immunity by the observation that when greater than a certain percentage of the population is vaccinated against a pathogen outbreaks of the disease caused by that pathogen become much less likely. We can demonstrate it with examples such as the measles outbreak in Samoa, which didn’t start to subside until MMR uptake passed 90%. Dr. Palevsky even parroted Andrew Wakefield’s lie that measles virus is mutating in response to the vaccine to become more virulent. It’s not.
Dr. Palevsky is ignorant. He is spreading antivaccine misinformation. He is also dangerous because of his status as a pediatrician and also because he knows how to look and sound authoritative and convincing. Unsurprisingly, as I mentioned before, he is also an “integrative pediatrics” practitioner, which, sadly, goes along with pseudoscience, bad science, and antivaccine nonsense. Once again, I will say that any doctor who not only uses quackery like homeopathy but actively endangers public health should not be a doctor. It’s a travesty that doctors like Dr. Palevsky continue to hold medical licenses and treat patients.
76 replies on “Dr. Lawrence Palevsky: An antivaccine pediatrician who’s an endless font of misinformation”
The myth that the vaccinated can be both asymptomatic and still infectious is one I find particularly annoying. If it were true, herd immunity would not exist, and those too young to be vaccinated would catch these diseases. This seldom happens, and when babies (like Dana McCaffrey) do come down with them, it’s in areas with high rates of vaccine refusal.
@ Julian Frost
Wrong, one can be asymptomatic and infectious at the same time. A few vaccinated because the vaccine didn’t take may get the disease, usually a mild case; but the overwhelming majority of those vaccinated will be protected, so herd immunity still works.
God, you are all as bad as each other. This article is riddled with disingenuous information and the same boring rhetoric. Ah the use of language as a weapon.
Anti-vaxxers and Anti-Anti-vaxxers should all be banned from public debate, discourse and legislation.
Nice necromancy.
I was an unvaccinated child when I had whooping cough. I was also unvaccinated when I contracted measles. The first did have a vaccine available, but I hadn’t yet received it. There was no vaccine available for the second. I don’t believe my mother thought I was healthy during those periods. In fact, when I had whooping cough as an infant, she was very much afraid I was going to die. Any doctor who would prefer to see a child suffer through whooping cough, rather than be vaccinated for it, IS a sadist.
My daughter (who had the vaccine) contracted whooping cough in her 20s, because we didn’t know she needed a booster. It was horrible seeing my ADULT child suffer like that. I can’t imagine what it was like for my mother seeing me unable to breathe because of the coughing, at age 9 months. Of course, she always loved me more than any Grand Idea. That is not true for all parents, and certainly not true for sadistic pediatricians.
I can second that. I had most of the then-common childhood illnesses, and the symptoms were pretty much intolerable. Maybe the good doctor can explain which toxins I was expelling when I had neurological damage from poliomyelitis.
But then can someone explain how a rash or wheezing expels “toxins” (Oh, noes, not the dreaded eevul toxins!) from the body? When they occur in anaphylaxis, should we just wait for the “toxins” to be expelled? If someone has a chronic cough from COPD or black lung why are the toxins taking so much time to get out?
If all of this is just the laudable efforts of the body to get those terrible toxins out, then why treat anything at all? Fever of 106 F? Just working hard expelling the toxins. Dislocated rib from coughing? Getting those toxins out big time. Diarrhea with hypokalemia and dehydration? Gotta get the toxins out!
It’s the most primitive superstitious thinking. Substitute demons or evil spirits for toxins and it reads surprisingly much the same.
Old Rockin’ Dave, as a COPD patient, I think that’s an excellent question. And yes, there is no difference between evil spirits and “toxins,” in this wonky thinking.
Old Rockin Dave-without disclaiming anything you have written apparently intracellular toxins are eliminated in the catalytic cellular process of autophagy, which is stimulated by fasting of varying duration ( and other physiological stress conditions),
now back in fashion.
I was just now wondering what else might be an expulsion of those demoniacal toxins. Could it include the sloughing of leprous tissue? What about a miscarriage? Is the fetus actually also loaded with toxins? How about hemorrhage? Toxins, anyone?
Thank you for posting this rebuttal. I was on the panel as well and while I tried to insert myself and refute his (and other panelists) lies it was an incredibly frustrating experience as we were asked not to turn it into a debate! Amy Pisani, Vaccinate Your Family – CT Resident
Hope you keep fighting the good fight, Ms Pisani.
Thanks for the good work you do, Ms Pisani.
Thank you for nicely summarizing what a dangerous quack Palevsky is. I think, since he’s lost his ability to destroy public health in NY, that he’s taking his anti-vax propaganda on the road–Connecticut as reviewed here and a few weeks ago he was in Hawaii with RFKjr and Bigtree at an anti-vax event there.
Also, there’s another really egregious video of Palevsky speaking on 8/19 at the “New York Alliance for Vaccine Rights and First Freedoms Community Gathering”. Here he outright accuses the NY Dept of Public Health of lying about measles cases (around 1:50-3:00) which he then uses as his excuse for saying that the Brooklyn and Rockland County outbreaks weren’t really measles or if they were it was vaccine-caused measles (b/c he claims there’s some paper somewhere claiming measles vaccine can cause outbreaks).
This is truly a horrible doctor. It is disgraceful his state medical board won’t take his license.
“This is truly a horrible doctor. It is disgraceful his state medical board won’t take his license.”
Merely hurting kids year after year is unlikely to do it; just look at Larry Nassar. Perhaps if he buggered the bursar?
The Connecticut legislature is debating whether to remove their religious exemption. Didn’t Palevsky just telegraph anti-vaxxers true use of religious vaccine exemptions? There is an upside to such an overtly dishonest and ignorant quack like Palevsky testifying on behalf of anti-vaxxers,
IIRC, he showed up as a speaker at the recent NJ protests about removing the religious exemptions. He’s a frequent guest on PRN.
Thanks for the Palevsky update.
I tend to forget him when compiling the Pediatrician Roll Call of Dumbass.
Regarding nanoparticles. A part of the reason there’s a size that really counts is that, if you get too big, ambient thermal energy is no longer enough to keep them dispersed in solution. They start to sediment by gravity. Nanoparticles don’t sediment spontaneously unless they are starting to degrade. For larger particles, even a surfactant rendering them hydrophilic isn’t enough to circumvent spontaneous gravitational sedimentation. That’s a part of why nano matters –not like there’s this automatic size cut-off to particle behavior the instant your scale is bigger than a micron;-)
Moreover, nanoparticles are different from small molecules and don’t obey quite the same absorption mechanics in vivo. Because they are often appreciably more massive than small molecules –some small nanoparticles (~5 nm) are on the same size scale of moderately sized molecules, but this is the small end– they require greater electrostatic forces to stabilize them in solution than a smaller molecule would. Nanoparticles solvated by a highly charged or highly polar surfactant coating are incompatible with the hydrophobic core of a membrane; they usually don’t go through cell walls unaided (ones that can, like buckyball, are incompatible with water). With a small molecule, because of the smaller size, it’s possible to balance hydrophobic portions of the molecule with select polar or charged regions, creating something that can move between hydrophobic and hydrophilic environments, allowing a molecule to move through cell membranes. Getting a nanoparticle across a membrane, like through the blood-brain barrier, requires some specific engineering. If you tune the surfactant toward being more hydrophobic, you also decrease the life time of the nanoparticle because they no longer remain as readily soluble and will start to aggregate. I have read about attempts to exploit cellular machineries to get nanoparticles across membranes; induced pinocytosis and use of viral receptors adorning the surface of the nanoparticle and so on. It can be done, but this isn’t spontaneous and requires a great deal of careful engineering. Random combinations of chemicals, like alum and polysorbate 80, don’t just make stable nanoparticles out of the ether. Nanoparticle formation is very conditional.
And, alum is held together by a purely ionic interaction and a solubility equilibrium. This means it comes apart in water despite being highly insoluble. The adjuvant is subject to entropy as it comes apart; as aluminum hydroxide leaves an adjuvant particle and diffuses away elsewhere in the body, the sheer volume to occupy in the body and the resulting steepness of the alum concentration gradient makes the aluminum hydroxide number density drop very quickly, making it impossible for free complexes to achieve the solubility equilibrium necessary to precipitate again… meaning it can’t just accumulate somewhere else to make new particles. As long as you excrete free alum in your urine or sweat, there’s no chance you can get alum particles (even nano-sized ones) forming in your brain, whether an emulsifier is present or not.
The interested observer can try the calculation: the whole body concentration of dissolved alum must be greater than the ksp of alum in order for particles to spontaneously reform anywhere….solubility is 1/10 of a mg per 100 mL of water… so 5 mg alum capacity in 5L of blood where a single 1 mL adult dose of ENGERIX, for example, contains 0.5 mg… this is ten-fold too low of a lowball capacity counting only blood volume. You would need ten injections to even hit the ksp if all the alum dissolved immediately (which it doesn’t) and nobody would claim that’s standard of care.
Very Informative. However, if I ever use what you wrote I could use some references. Unfortunately referring to a comment on a blog won’t work. Can you supply a few short articles, book chapters . . .?, including author, date, title, journal or . . ., pages, and URL?
Even an article on a blog which includes references would be helpful.
I’ll see if I can find something useful in the way you wish. I’ve been working in nanoscience, including with nanoparticles, for a long time.
Here is a fairly well cited review that touches on some of the issues of nanoparticles, particularly as a drug delivery vector. Here is another review which talks about the issue of targeting in some detail, which is literally the usage of nanoparticle surface activation to cause the particle to interface with biology in a certain way.
I’m trying to think of some good papers that touch on the physics of nanoparticle solubility; there’s a tiny reference to it in that review regarding the required surface charge, but not a huge amount. There are some particle types mentioned in the first review that I don’t have much experience with, like hydrogel particles and mycelles. Most of my work has been with magnetic nanoparticles and gold nanoparticles and a lot of what we talk about in the lab is empirical common sense (wow, that sure didn’t work) rather than specifically citing an article. In that first review also, they mention that it is possible for these particles to cross the blood-brain barrier, but they specifically cite doing it in the presence of “hyperosmotic mannitol” to help actively disrupt the membrane… demonstrating some of the lengths you have to go to to get these particles to move through membranes.
Most of what I’m saying you can pull out of a simple molecular biology book. The particles require charge to stay dissolved… no charge, no polarity and objects precipitate in water, period. The cellular membrane is amphiphilic with charges on the surface and 10nm of hydrophobic core. Charges don’t just cross this, or else biology would never be able to establish the chemical potential gradients by which life operates… potassium, sodium, calcium, phosphate, all of these have to be ported through membranes (and most types of nanoparticle too). Nanoparticles stay dissolved by a surface charge or polarity, and that can’t just cross the membrane leaflet without some special help. Getting nanoparticles into cells and across membranes usually requires some creative hackery; not impossible, but physically nontrivial.
Most of the last section I wrote about alum as not a good nanoparticle is a freshman chemistry 101 calculation with the numbers pulled from active descriptions of vaccines and direct descriptions of the material –just follow the links in the first comment. The point of an adjuvant is that it isn’t that mobile; it doesn’t matter if it’s nano-sized or micro-sized particularly. You can get a good primer on Ksp and solubility in any freshman chemistry book. I wish I had a bit more time to write, but I’ve got stuff to do…
@ foolish physicist
I clicked on your links and they went to University of Colorado, requiring sign in, which I couldn’t. Could you please give the complete references to the two articles, e.g.,
Jones A (1998 Jun 3). Nanoparticles and crossing the blood brain barrier. Journal of Make Believe; Vol 6, Number 3: pages 17 – 37.
If I have a complete reference, I have friends around U.S. who may have access and can download as pdf and e-mail to me. Others monitoring this website may also wish to try to get them.
Yes, thank you for the breakdown. I would love to see your references for all of the studies you seem to be pulling this information from.
At six months’ remove, it might help if you clarified who you were replying to.
Thank you for going through this.
This might be useful to people – the Immunization Action Coalition has a PDF they update that collects the many studies that show that non-vaccinating is linked to more outbreaks and has specific examples of the unvaccinated starting outbreaks.
https://www.immunize.org/catg.d/p2069.pdf
For those who think such doctors should lose their license, which I agree with, unfortunately as documented by Public Citizen, regardless of how bad a doctor is, State Boards seldom discipline them. Check out:
https://www.citizen.org/topic/health-care/provider-discipline-oversight/
I sympathize with whomever was Larry’s advisor in medical school now that he has embarrassed the profession (again). Psst, advisor, it’s not your fault that you were randomly assigned to (gulp) “Dr” Palevsky.
Medical boards seemingly are, either by design or incompetence (or a combo), anemic to call doctors like Larry to account for disinformation campaigns. Call me crazy (OK, Boomer, as the kids would say): doctors should be accountable when they spread health disinformation. Maybe his medical school had a different interpretation of the Greek, though my school didn’t include a clause in the Hippocratic Oath we took indicating that lying about vaccination was optional. Even in Hippo’s day (converted to original Drachmas, of course) $6 million USD and 654 cases of measles would be considered harm. In case the Board worries about being too harsh, just like Andy, Larry can continue to lie about vaccines without the advantage of an active medical license because, well, it’s free speech and not incompetence when you are no longer a licensed physician. It’s the thought that counts Board member, you’re really not causing him significant inconvenience (and certainly not harming an already MIA professional reputation).
Here’s to hoping that, similar to Dr Bob in California, the NY State Board reviews Larry’s practice. Not merely because they suddenly got all mavericky and actually questioned his competence to practice because he is many standard deviations away from the standard of care as regards vaccination (surely a core issue for a so-called pediatrician, even as defined by wimpy Board members in NY). Maybe they should seek further info simply because espousing antivaccine nonsense as a pediatrician in NY may be a marker of more troubling aspects of his practice (unless ignoring kids symptoms and treating illnesses via water-with-memory meets NY Board standards). I know, I know, I just don’t understand that the Board has so many other important things to do…
and
What a horrible combination of “we must destroy the village in order to save it” combined with the awful Mother Tersa’s claim that suffering is good for the soul, so offer it up to God.
It’s gross, that’s what it is. I bet you dollars to donuts that Dr Palevsky doesn’t just suffer through a headache or cold. He’s probably first in line for analgesics and decongestants.
A friend of mine was asking me why anyone should bother with the chickenpox vaccine (I offered several science-based reasons) and eventually she explained that her mother thought that kids these days don’t ever get sick so their bodies don’t learn how to fight a real illness. I said that there are plenty of germs to fight, which she agreed, saying her daughter is on her fourth cold in a month.
Where do people get these ideas that it’s good for kids to suffer? I would say it’s because they don’t remember the misery of being sick, but my mom still, 60+ years later remembers the excruciating pain of the weight of a single sheet on her skin while she had one of those “childhood illnesses”. Why on earth would you want a child to have to experience that?
Tell her to imagine taking care of a six month old baby covered in dozens of itchy open wounds due to chicken pox. I can remember her head shaking side to side, and just the crying. The child literally cried themself to sleep… which did not last that long. It was torture just watching that poor little thing.
It was a year before the vaccine and big brother brought home from preschool.
Thankfully my friend was receptive to the idea, she just needed some clarification on the chickenpox/shingles connection. She got into a bad place about vaccines a few months back (thanks Instagram!), but one of her kids has some medical issues that make anyone in the household getting sick a pretty big issue, so avoiding sickness trumps the weird things her mom says. (Oh yeah, some $%@^%$ on Instagram told her that her kid’s medical issues are because she got a flu shot while she was pregnant. Cruel and nasty, those people.)
(I also told her about my cousin who was hospitalized for chickenpox, she had them in her hair, up her nose and in her eyelids. I didn’t have it nearly that bad but I still remember being miserable and my parents not being able to do anything for me, and that terrible realization that there are some things Mom and Dad can’t fix. Everyone learns that eventually, but it doesn’t have to be so young.)
That is goodness.
Before kids I was lamenting that the old fashioned childhood diseases were mostly gone. Then I gave birth to a kid with multiple medical issues who was hospitalized multiple times before his third birthday. And then when we had three kids chicken pox made its appearance for a month.
I radically changed my mind. You may have noticed how.
“Where do people get these ideas that it’s good for kids to suffer?”
That’s the reason he’s speaking in support of a religious exemption.
I had CP when I was 5, which was 1982, and I still remember the misery. There was never a moment where I considered not protecting my kids from that experience.
See also: Munchausen’s by Proxy, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, Sadism. Cos it’s never about the children; it’s always about Them. And they wear their own kids’ suffering as their personal badge of pride.
@ has
Take it easy with that diagnostic entity. It’s hard enough to mention it publicly without adding to the confusion on that topic. If everyone gets crazy with MbP, it helps no one. Neither kids, nor doctors, nor fathers, nor mothers.
@ has:
Although it’s always possible that people who are awful have a diagnosable condition but it’s also possible that some are just crappy people who are irresponsible, misuse others, treat others badly, live in a fantasy world. These can be people who have careers, function in society, own property, look great and fit right in BUT there is something wrong at a fundamental level. Some may have NPD or another Personality Disorder but I wonder how many do not- they just fit a particular niche in society and manage to make good impressions on others. In some circles self-promotion and arrogance may be prized as measures of achievement.
No, I won’t name examples but I’m sure you can think of a few.
@ has
And I’ve looked back on quite some comments you made on this blog. I guess we should take some time to have a chat somewhere else on the net one day…
I’ll say it again. Long distance diagnoses ain’t worth a rat’s ass. They’re speculative, based on inadequate evidence, frequently biased, and so often wrong that they’re unreliable.
When they’re being candid, law enforcement people will tell you that the profiles that look so scientific on TV in reality include a lot of “by guess and by god”. The profile can only take them so far, and the legwork and luck carry them the rest of the way.
@ Old’ Rockin Dave
Yes. Long-distance diagnoses are unreliable, and worth mostly nothing. But if you take a bird’s eye view on health-related behaviours on the Internet, it’s quite accurate that you can notice something is off. Collectively, at least, if you’re afraid (and you should) of making personal assertions.
And different persons may notice different type of behaviours, and be more or less accurate in assessing these than other persons.
Isn’t this what we say about side effects though?
“He seems to have believed (and almost certainly still does believe) that children should suffer, that their suffering shouldn’t be relieved, that children should be “allowed to be sick” because to do otherwise would be unnatural and prevent them from “cleansing” and “healing” their systems properly.”
And this is why I call the anti-vax folks sadistic child haters who like to see kids suffer from high fevers, pain, pneumonia, seizures, etc.
Dr Palevsky’s office is in Northport, NY, on Long Island: the average household income is over 100K USD and the average detached house costs nearly 700K. The level of education is quite high and many professionals live there ( see city data, Northport NY)
.
If Dr P is about the same age as Orac, I wonder if he himself was vaccinated for most VPDs or did his parents just let him ride them out? Did he ever have measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis?
In other anti-vax news…
( from CT News Junkie)
Hundreds of anti-vaxxers ( photo) turned out in Hartford to protest the proposed elimination of the religious exemption. They recruited an NJ Assemblyman, Jamel Holley**, to incite the crowds to do as they did in Jersey. A Connecticut legislator, Jack Hennessey, leads the effort opposing the new law.
** anti-vaxxers from outside NJ are encouraging supporting him financially in his next election.
As I previously commented, Palevsky’s kids must be loaded with toxins, since they are so “healthy” and wouldn’t get sick. The poor things don’t have the opportunity to be cleansed and healed naturally.
Actually, I suspect that when his patients do get sick, their parents take them elsewhere, since they know Palevsky won’t do a damn thing to relieve their suffering. Besides, I don’t know how available he is to his patients, since he’s been swanning about the country agitating against vaccine mandates.
Orac you are wrong about aluminum adjuvant not being nanoparticulate. It is.
The 2-10 micron measurements you cite are for particle AGGLOMERATES. They are optical. scattering measurements and therefore do not have the resolution to detect the 2x4x10nm size of the primary particles.
And no, agglomerarion to 2-10 microns does not mean they are not nanoparticles. All nanoparticles agglomerate. They are still nanoparticles because the larger agglomerates are held together by very weak van der waals forces. A pile of gravel is not a boulder. Same concept.
Here is a size measurement, by dr Hem, who should be well known by anyone familiar with aluminum adjuvant.
http://vaccinepapers.org/wp-content/uploads/Measuring-the-surface-area-of-aluminum-hydroxide-adjuvant.pdf
Dr Hems paper states:
“The X-ray diffraction pattern and the Scherrer equation were used to calculate the dimensions of the primary crystallites. The average calculated dimensions were 4.5 x 2.2 x 10 nm.“
Orac, you are ignorant about aluminum adjuvant and keep getting your facts wrong. You should lose your medical license for spreading false information.
Here is another paper proving that aluminum hydroxide adjuvant is nanoparticulate. Has pretty electron microscope pictures.
http://vaccinepapers.org/wp-content/uploads/Alhydrogel-adjuvant-ultrasonic-dispersion-and-protein-binding-A-TEM-and-analytical-study.pdf
Note that the toxicity of aluminum adjuvant is mediated by its particle properties, such as shape, size, surface chemistry, roughness etc. the particulate nature is what makes it inflammatory and effective as an adjuvant, but also what makes it toxic.
So, you cannot argue that it is safe By considering only the aluminum content, and the fact it does not dissolve. Ignorant pro-vax people love to say so, but this is wrong. Have to consider the particle properties.
@ Vaccine Papers
Orac is a cancer surgeon. His medical license depends on whether he performs in this capacity according to accepted medical norms. I have every confidence that he is an excellent surgeon. Medical license boards do not evaluate people according to what they write on blogs. However, if a doctor actually advices patients, e.g., not to vaccinate, going against overwhelming medical science, that is another question.
@ Vaccine papers
I’m not a chemist nor physicist; but I rely on the overwhelming evidence that finds no association between aluminum and ASD, etc. The fact that lab studies find something doesn’t mean one can extrapolate to the human body. One example. in the 1930s Gerhard Domagyk, a chemist developing dyes, noticed that different dyes adhered to different tissues and materials, so he thought, maybe one would attach to bacteria. He discovered that a dye, Prontosil, had antimicrobiotic properties. He was a dye maker, not a medical doctor nor microbiologist, so he just applied the dye to infected lab animals. French researchers discovered that had he first tried it on tissues and bacteria in a petri dish, it wouldn’t work. Why? Because the body metabolized it to streptomycin. So, the French got the patent. The point is, that what works in a lab doesn’t always work in a human body. Another example is thalidomide. It was studied on a number of lab animals, etc.. In some it caused problems, in others it didn’t. Not worth my looking up which animals. So, both petri dish labs and even tests on lab animals, etc. don’t always extrapolate to humans. A large body of epidemiological studies, etc. have found no problem.
In addition, foolish physicist, an actual researcher in nanoparticles, refutes your claims. I don’t know if he is still monitoring this exchange; but if he is, would love for him to address your comments.
A comment at his blog might bring him about.
@ Joel:
Orac had a good post about that showing that research in mice doesn’t always translate/ apply to humans.The title, IIRC, included “in mice”
Neither is Dan Steinberg aka Vaccine Papers. He’s not a scientist period but tries to play one on the internetz. He keeps disseminating the trope that aluminium adjuvants in vaccines and as used are nanoparticles but he’s wrong and won’t admit it or at least stop lying.
Now, now, you’ve overlooked his apotheosis, <a href=”https://vaporgenie.com/>the Vapor Genie.
Orac
I didnt really mean that about losing your medical license. Statement was rhetorical.
You don’t really know the meaning of “rhetorical,” do you?
That’s rich considering you are wrong about aluiminium adjuvants; they are microparticles in soloution. I’m not going to your site of pirated papers so just post your citations free of your website.
How is that rhetorical?
” You should lose your medical license for spreading false information”
Heh. And what exactly are his qualifications for judging what is false? Based on his track record, I’d be suspicious.
..
As I write, Richard Gale ( PRN.fm) reads his latest attack on SBM focusing on Dr DG. This will be available later in printed and spoken form. Dr DG is often quoted on Wikipedia – it is “medical fascism” based on Flexner etc.
” Walk awfay from Wikipedia” says the woo-meister whose livelihood is threatened by what the on-line encyclopedia reveals.
The amount of activity generated by N & G recently leads me to believe that they feel very endangered by SBM and sceptics.
“Just walk away…”
Yikes!
Null is the Lord Humungus – Ruler of the Wasteland. He’s lost a lot of weight and isn’t looking too healthy:
Actually, I’ve always envisioned Null as a snake oil salesman selling potions from the back of a deteriorating pickup truck outside Needles, CA** in 1935 or so, Think Grapes of Wrath characters but not as cleaned up
** and yes, I have really walked down the main street in Needles at noon and felt transported back in time..
In other anti-vax news…
( AoA today) Connecticut may soon get rid of the religious exemption: one of the leaders of this effort owns health food stores in the state; the editor mentions his businesses and one of the commenters provides 3 phone numbers for followers to bother him.
AoA congratulates “activism” like this .I also see the printed signs from Coleman’s group
I wish someone would write up how these people operate in detail. Legislators should describe what they encounter.
I don’t have the physics or oncology background to make definitive statements about adjuvants and nanoparticles (I suspect vaccinepapers may not have sufficient background to do so either, although that’s just a rhetorical statement). 😉
It does strike me that there are plenty of factors one must consider before reaching conclusions about adjuvanted vaccines. Size, shape, electrical charge, tendency to agglomerate into larger particles (including adjuvant molecules complexing with antigens) all have an effect on how substances interact with biological membranes, including those of the blood-brain barrier.
One would have to demonstrate that the molecular complexes in adjuvanted vaccines 1) cross the blood-brain barrier to a significant extent, 2) have a negative effect on brain function 3) which is sufficiently negative to cause autism or other neurologic disorder.
I haven’t seen any evidence that these criteria have been met.
@ Dangerous Bacon
As I’ve written before, aluminum is the third most ubiquitous substance of the planet. Babies get it through breast milk and formula. We all get it through food and drink, air we breath, and minor scratches in skin. Since aluminum does make it to the brain, an additional question is: Even if some of the aluminum used as an adjuvant crossed the blood-brain barrier, how could such trace amounts affect the brain compared to much larger amounts from other sources?
One of Christopher Exley’s papers that was retracted involved dissecting the brains of a handful of kids diagnosed as autistic. He found aluminum. But he didn’t use a control group of kids who died who were considered “normal”. If he had, he might have found similar amounts; but, then Exley would be a legitimate researcher, not a rabid antivaxxer. He also had another paper where he looked at effects of aluminum on cells in petri dishes. I could probably dump almost any substance of cells in a petri dish and get a response. Meaningless. Exley is an inorganic chemist.
“As I’ve written before, aluminum is the third most ubiquitous substance of the planet. Babies get it through breast milk and formula. We all get it through food and drink, air we breath, and minor scratches in skin. Since aluminum does make it to the brain, an additional question is: Even if some of the aluminum used as an adjuvant crossed the blood-brain barrier, how could such trace amounts affect the brain compared to much larger amounts from other sources?”
Ha, but it’s aluminum nanoparticles (from vaccines and chemtrails) that wreak havoc in the brain. Don’t pretend you’re unaware of this.
https://ymlp.com/zhmRXS
*skeptics will argue that the Chen paper referenced on this illuminating website involved experiments in cell culture and on mice that had nanoparticulate aluminum injected directly into their carotid arteries. But the Truth will out, whatever it is. 🙁
https://xkcd.com/1217/
Almost anything kills or inactivates pathogens in vitro. Don’t bother me with the in vitro stuff. Let me know when it gets around to serious in vivo.
Meanwhile, I’ll do some research in vino.
Joel
You stated: “l but I rely on the overwhelming evidence that finds no association between aluminum and ASD, etc”
A possible association between aluminum adjuvant and autism has never been investigated in epidemiological studies. CDC researchers stated this fact in a 2015 paper.
Only MMR and thimerosal have been much studied in relation to autism. Thimerosal is the only vaccine ingredient that has been looked at in epidemiological studies.
Autism is caused by elevated IL-6 in the brain. Aluminum adjuvant travels into the brain, and induces a long term chronic inflammation that includes elevated IL-6.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26518400
Quote
“In addition to antigens, vaccines contain small amounts of preservatives, adjuvants, and residual substances from the manufacturing process. Some parents have concerns about the safety of these ingredients, yet no large epidemiological studies have specifically examined associations between health outcomes and vaccine ingredients, other than thimerosal.”
Hi joel
Here are answers to your questions.
—-“As I’ve written before, aluminum is the third most ubiquitous substance of the planet.”
This fact does not mean it is safe to inject AlOH or AlPO4 nanoparticles into infants. The body blocks the absorption of aluminum in the environment.
—-“Babies get it through breast milk and formula”
They receive far more from vaccines.
About 7mg is in breast milk in the first 6 months. absorption of ingested aluminum s about 0.1-0.3%, so you have to multiply by this factor to find the actual exposure. 99.7-99.9% passes through in the feces and is never absorbed. Infants can receive up to 175X more aluminum from adjuvant in vaccines during the first 6 months, compared to breast milk.
—-“We all get it through food and drink, air we breath, and minor scratches in skin.
Absorption of ingested water-soluble aluminum is about 0.1-0.3%.
—-“Since aluminum does make it to the brain, an additional question is: Even if some of the aluminum used as an adjuvant crossed the blood-brain barrier, how could such trace amounts affect the brain compared to much larger amounts from other sources?”
Aluminum adjuvant is engineered to cause inflammation. That is what makes it work as an adjuvant, and it is also what makes it harmful to the developing brain.
Aluminum adjuvant is picked up by macrophages, which carry it into the brain. So its not merely solubilized Al3+ that gets into the brain. It is the solid asjuvant particles, which stimulate inflammatioin.
More anti-vax health information…
( see @ brandyzadrozny. @ the real truther)
In CO, a young child died of influenza despite the fact that he was prescribed Tamiflu which his mother didn’t use because an anti-vax facebook page ( Cook’s) prescribed elderberry and other BS instead.
He is dead.
[cross-post from today’s AAPS thread]
I’ve had MSNBC on in the bg, and I just heard about this…
The print story is here:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/facebook-anti-vaxxers-pushed-mom-not-give-her-son-tamiflu-n1131936
What I caught was Ayman Mohyeldin interviewing the reporter, Brandy Zadrozny, during the 11AM EST hour,. She went into more detail than is in the printed story, including how the FB group is run by a social media grifter, how FB is dropping the ball despite their claims to the contrary etc.
I can’t find video of that online, but an earlier interview with Zadrozny (by the perhaps-overly-emotive Stephanie Ruhle) covering some of the same ground is here:
https://www.msnbc.com/stephanie-ruhle/watch/boy-dies-after-anti-vaxxers-urge-mom-not-to-give-him-tamiflu-78307909791
@ Sadmar
While I agree that parents should take advice from their pediatricians and not antivaxxers or others with no medical training, one case proves nothing. Tamiflu is not all that effective. And, more important, you are doing the same thing antivaxxers do, namely, finding one case that, at best, is an anecdote, not science.
Regardless of the efficacy of the Tamiflu prescription, the bigger problem was that the parents did not take the child back to the doctor (or urgent care or the ER) when it was clear that the child was getting much, much worse.
I only saw a few snippets of the Facebook postings and replies, but it wasn’t clear that the parents understood how sick their kid was, nor did any of the people responding to the post understand that either. Has anyone seen the whole thing? Did anyone suggest the kid be taken to the hospital?
Do you know how many children die from pharmaceuticals? I Haven’t looked it up
Far fewer than die from vaccine preventable diseases.
Oh, and if you want to take us seriously, you shouldn’t name yourself after the spider from the “Maya the Bee” anime. Yes, I’m that old.
This is just a footnote somewhere in the financials, and c’mon — it’s only Q2.
In other news: enthusiasm for high dose vitamin C to treat sepsis has taken a hit, thanks to the latest published study (in the new issue of JAMA) of a multicenter clinical trial showing no benefit.
In this randomized trial, treatment with IV hydrocortisone was compared with IV hydrocortisone plus high dose vitamin C plus thiamine (the “Marik protocol”). Survival in the two groups was not significantly different.
As noted in an accompanying JAMA editorial, there have been 8 randomized controlled trials of vitamin C in sepsis and septic shock, and 6 have shown no effect of vitamin C on mortality. Yet more studies of vitamin C in sepsis are ongoing or planned.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2759414
Seems like they’re beating a dead horse, wasting time and resources better spent on more promising research. Kind of like the repetitive studies disproving a vaccination-autism link.
At any rate, there’s less joy at the Linus Pauling Institute tonight.
<>
Just to play devil’s advocate–not to excuse the shocking incompetence of a pediatrician who advocates against lifesaving vaccines–I surmise that the above paragraph may refer to stuff like giving acetaminophen at the first sign of a low-grade fever in a healthy child, or demanding antibiotics even when an ear infection may be viral. The idea of course being that stunting the immune system’s efforts to fight the bug may actually prolong an illness (or lead to drug resistance) and cause more suffering in the long run.
Perhaps this is a naive interpretation of his approach for minor things like the common cold (not the heavy-duty diseases we have vaccines for). But as a still-learning parent, it’s taken me awhile to navigate the boundaries of when to call the pediatrician and/or use OTC meds, vs. when to let an illness play itself out and see if it goes away on its own.
Regardless, I 100% agree–there’s no way this idiot should still have an MD after his name.