I’ve been saying for a long time now that when it comes to antivaccine misinformation among COVID-19 antivaxxers, everything old is new again in antivax. Whether it’s claiming that COVID-19 vaccines sterilize our womenfolk, contain “fetal cells,” cause cancer, are resulting in global “depopulation,” are loaded with “toxins,” cause Alzheimer’s disease, permanently alter your DNA, or worse, old antivax claims have been, predictably, applied to COVID-19 vaccines. (Indeed, I used to joke that the only reason antivaxxers hadn’t claimed that COVID-19 vaccines cause autism was because the vaccines hadn’t been authorized for children under 5 years of age.) Then, as I had been predicting, increasingly the “new school” antivaxxers started circling back around to “old school” antivax claims about not just COVID-19 vaccines but all vaccines, such as the oldest of old school claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism. All of this is why, increasingly, I’ve been saying on Twitter that, sooner or later, COVID-19 antivaxxers generalize their antivax beliefs about one vaccine to all vaccines and become just antivaxxers. While it’s true that some “new school” COVID-19 antivaxxers (e.g., Geert Vanden Bossche) have shown acute discomfort at the “old school” antivax rhetoric that they’ve found themselves associated with, most seem to be jumping right in, head first.
Sometimes I even quote Yoda from The Empire Strikes Back:
Dr. Peter McCullough: All-in on vaccines causing autism and “transgenderism”
This brings me to Dr. Peter McCullough. I first encountered Dr. McCullough when he started repeating the old antivaccine narrative about global “depopulation” as applied to COVID-19 vaccines. Since then, he’s gone full antivax quack, glomming onto NFL player Damar Hamlin’s on-field collapse as evidence that vaccines were causing young people to “die suddenly” co-authoring dubious scientific review articles full of antivax disinformation, and even selling an “anti-spike protein supplement” to cleanse you of COVID-19 vaccine damage. Meanwhile, he’s rejecting accusations of having become a conspiracy theorist by asking, in essence, “I know you are, but what am I?“
If you want to get an idea of what I mean, his appearance on May 12 as part of the cavalcade of right wing, Christian nationalist, and antivax grifters known as Reawaken America will show you what I mean:
In the beautiful setting of the Trump Doral Resort in Miami, I had the privilege of addressing a huge engaged audience who were ready to take the next steps in restoring our great nation. I crafted speech that called out a mental contagion that has set down upon the earth driven by insecurity, fear, resulting in greater tribalism and division. In the backdrop has been a >50 year meteoric rise in autism spectrum disorder from 1:10,000 in the 1970’s to 1:36 children born today. I outlined the major theories of why this is happening.
I swear, Dr. McCullough is partying as though it’s 1999—OK, maybe as though it’s 2005 or 2009. That message, that there has been a “meteoric rise” in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder over the last several decades. Dr. McCullough actually goes a bit further back than old school antivaxxers used to. You’ll recall that they usually target the time that the increase in autism prevalence began as being 30 years ago, when there was an expansion of the childhood vaccine schedule. Be that as it may, it’s the same message. The rest of that article, being from Dr. McCullough’s Substack, is behind a paywall, but it wasn’t hard to find video of his appearance on—where else?—Rumble, Bitchute, and SoundCloud. Here’s the video:
The first thing you’ll notice is the two-minute video shown to introduce Dr. McCullough, after which Clay Clark introduces him as though he were a professional wrestler at WWE SummerSlam. (I’m not kidding. Clark sounds like Vince McMahon announcing a match four decades ago, which was probably the last time I ever watched professional wrestling.)
Another useful bit of information in this introduction is that Dr. McCullough first became a COVID-19 “contrarian” through his support of “early treatment protocols.” It’s a term that should sound familiar to anyone who was paying attention during the early days of the pandemic, when bad scientists like Didier Raoult and quack groups like America’s Frontline Doctors and the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) were promoting hydroxychloroquine (and continued to do so long after it was shown not to work). Of course, if you believe that COVID-19 isn’t as deadly as advertised and that inexpensive, “nontoxic” repurposed drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (and/or various permutations of these drugs with supplements, antibiotics such as azithromycin, and other ineffective interventions) are miracle cures for it, then of course you will believe that vaccines are unnecessary. So it was not the least bit surprising that when COVID-19 vaccines arrived in December 2020—much sooner than expected—Dr. McCullough quickly pivoted to blaming them for mass death and started saying that they were part of a “depopulation agenda.” Still, at least initially, Dr. McCullough seemed to be anti-COVID-19 vaccine only and not more generally antivax.
After an introduction like that, Dr. McCullough is surprisingly diffident approaching the microphone, but he soon starts feeling the crank energy of the audience and becomes more confident feeding it exactly what it what it wants to hear, referring to the “crimes” of COVID-19 and how SARS-CoV-2 definitely escaped from the Wuhan lab after having been created by the current CEO of Moderna—I kid you not—who supposedly created a COVID-19 vaccine years before the pandemic and thus before anyone even knew what SARS-CoV-2 was. He trots out the old (as in 2020) lie that most people died “with COVID” rather than “of COVID” (not true) and brags how he and his fellow quacks “saved as many people as possible”—millions of people in America and tens of millions of people worldwide—with their “early treatment protocols.” He also claims that we’re all “safe” now because we all have “natural immunity.” This leads him into reiterating his claims that the vaccines have resulted in a wave of deaths and to brag about his testifying in December 2022 before Congress to stop all COVID-19 vaccination.
Let me just interject right here that I don’t plan on addressing in detail the many, many lies and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines that Dr. McCullough lays down in his talk (although I might mention some in passing), for the simple reason that I’ve addressed many of them before over the last three years and doing so would balloon this post beyond even Orac standards of logorrhea. More importantly, the purpose of this post is to examine how Dr. McCullough has gone beyond COVID-19 antivax conspiracy theories into very old school “vaccines-cause-autism” pseudoscience and conspiracy theories and how he has gone from anti-COVID-19 vaccination to just plain antivax.
The “old school” antivax began at around 10:00, when Dr. McCullough talks about there being a drive—by the usual suspects cited by the antivax movement, of course, whom he describes as a “biopharmaceutical syndicate” made up of “powerful entities” —for the “worldwide mass vaccination”of children” against “disease after disease after disease” (as if that were a bad thing!) and “not just COVID-19,” after which he notes that when he started out as a doctor autism prevalence was only 1:10,000. Those of you who’ve been following this blog almost certainly know what’s coming next. If you don’t, well, here it comes: He reveals to the crowd that autism prevalence is now 1:36. Of course, I recently discussed the likely reasons for the increasing prevalence of autism over the last three decades or so, as I have done periodically over the years whenever the CDC releases updated statistics on autism prevalence, none of them involving vaccines. The details are in the posts that I just linked to, but a short version is that widening of the diagnostic criteria, diagnostic substitution, increased screening and support, and increased awareness probably account for the increase in diagnoses of autism without there having to be a dramatic change in its underlying “true” prevalence.
Yes, to him it’s the vaccines. Quelle surprise. In fairness, he does say that “no one knows for sure the cause,” before pivoting to saying that there are “many, many theories.” He even mentions genetic associations, the observation that older fathers are associated with an increased risk of autism in the offspring. However, he dismisses them as insufficient to explain the increase in prevalence, instead claiming that it “must be an exposure” from the environment. Guess which “exposure” he favors as the cause: “One theory is that it’s hypervaccination from an accelerating childhood vaccine schedule.” He then calls for an “all hands on deck,” “Manhattan Project”-like effort to determine the causes of the autism “epidemic.”
Gee, where have we heard nearly this exact sort of patter before? I swear, I’m having flashbacks to 2005.
Consistent with antivax narratives portraying autism as horrific brain damage, Dr. McCullough also describes autism as a “terrible, emotionally draining, heart wrenching neuropsychiatric disorder.” (Word to Dr. McCullough: Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder.) He also claims that he has “these patients” in his practice as an adult cardiology/internal medicine doctor, and he calls it the “single greatest childhood epidemic of public health proportions that exists in society today” that is “very difficult to treat.” Oh, really? What about gun violence, which is the number one cause of childhood death in the US now? Or what about obesity, which affects far more children, with the potential to shave years off of their life expectancy through chronic disease? I could go on. None of this is to suggest that autism isn’t important, just to point out how Dr. McCullough has adopted some very “old school” antivax descriptions of autism as a horrifying public health problem, never mind that most autistic people live perfectly fine, productive, and satisfying lives. Also, Dr. McCullough is treating autism now? It wouldn’t surprise me, but it’s not clear to me from the talk if he is.
Then, at around the 14 minute mark, consistent with how increasingly the antivax movement has been embracing transphobia, Dr. McCullough also claims that large numbers of these autistic children are “coming out as transgender,” thus laying down the claim that vaccines are causing autism which is then causing kids to become trans. No doubt he is riffing on studies that have found that trans and non-binary adolescents are up to six times more likely also to have autism. Nor is this a new finding, as the neurodivergent, trans, and nonbinary communities have been discussing research results that have found an association between autism spectrum disorder and gender dysphoria. This association is an area of active research, in particular into how to develop more tailored approaches to gender dysphoria that take into account that there is a higher prevalence of ASD in trans people. Leave it to antivaxxers, however, to use this observation not only to portray trans people as “brain damaged” (as they long portrayed autistic people before the latest wave of transphobia) but to blame vaccines for turning kids trans.
Either that, or “groomers,” apparently.
Dr. McCullough warns, darkly, that prepubertal autistic children are perfectly set up to be “preyed upon” by a counsellor or a peer or relative and “have it put in their mind that they should make a gender journey and change from a boy to a girl or a girl to a boy.” He then proceeds to lie to his audience about the horrors of being transgender and how gender-affirming care leads supposedly leads to more suicide and worse psychiatric outcomes and how any physician, counsellor, parent, or peer who has influenced a child to “change their gender” has “caused harm.” None of this is accurate. Gender-affirming care is not experimental and results in better, not worse, psychiatric outcomes. Dr. McCullough also echoes Abigail Shrier’s conspiracy theory about how the increased number of adolescents coming out as trans is due to “social contagion” and “hypersexuality.” Indeed, he even calls it a “plague of immorality.”
If you manage to suffer through all 30 minutes of Dr. McCullough’s presentation, you might reasonably note that he spends a lot more time ranting about “transgenderism,” “social contagion,” and demonizing gender-affirming care than he does about the nonexistent vaccine-autism link that “old school” antivaxxers used to use as part of their central narrative demonizing the childhood vaccine schedule. That is undeniably true. However, he used the “old school” antivax narrative blaming vaccines for an “autism tsunami” or “autism epidemic” as the introduction and as the “in” to blame not just this “epidemic” of autism on vaccines, but the increasing number of children identifying as a gender other than the one to which they were assigned at birth. Moreover, he tied it all together in a way that we’ve seen many times before, by labeling gender-affirming care, vaccines, and all the public health interventions against COVID-19 as “unnatural” and “not what it was like when you were a kid.” He links the “wave of autism” with the “wave of transgenderism” to both vaccines and “mental contagion,” thus linking two conspiracy theories that have long resembled each other: Antivax conspiracy theories and transphobic conspiracy theories demonizing gender-affirming care.
Meanwhile, just over the last couple of days, Dr. McCullough has been active on Twitter:
Basically, Dr. McCullough has gone from denying the severity of COVID-19 and promoting “early treatment protocols,” to anti-COVID-19 vaccine, to more generally antivaccine and echoing old antivax conspiracy theories and pseudoscience about vaccines and autism. Whether he believes them or not is unclear, but he is definitely using them as a way to link general antivaccine sentiment to the sort of culture war fear mongering, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories about “transgenderism.” Other “new school” antivaxxers, in contrast, appear to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for “old school” vaccines-cause-autism pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, which brings us to Steve Kirsch.
Steve Kirsch: Citing old school antivax figures Brian Hooker, the Geiers, Stephanie Seneff, and Andrew Wakefield
I realize that when Elon Musk took over Twitter I said that I was going to try to back away. However, somehow over the last few days I’ve found myself in exchanges with Steve Kirsch. You remember Steve Kirsch, right? He’s the tech bro turned COVID-19 crank, turned full-on antivax conspiracy theorist issuing ridiculous “challenges” to “debate” while claiming that autopsies of everyone who “died suddenly” will demonstrate whether COVID-19 vaccines were the cause while touting a “secret plan to end the vaccine madness.” What this exchange showed me is that, more and more, not only is everything old new again in antivax messaging—albeit with updates to tie “old school” antivax lies into the latest moral panic, as Dr. McCullough did—but increasingly “new school” antivaxxers are resurrecting bogus studies done by antivax physicians and scientists long before the pandemic.
By way of introducing this concept, let’s look at a Tweet from him form yesterday:
Regular readers know that the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database is a system to which anyone can report anything. It cannot accurately assess the prevalence of any given adverse event after vaccination and was always intended to serve as a “canary in the coalmine” early warning system to draw the CDC’s attention to adverse events that should be investigated using more rigorous systems. It’s a system that antivaxxers had misused and abused long before the pandemic, and, predictably, antivaxxers weaponized it as soon as the first COVID-19 mRNA vaccines started rolling out.
In any event, what got my attention was this Tweet four days ago:
I immediately recognized that study. It was a study by Brian Hooker and Neil Miller done before the pandemic and published in May 2020. I’ll leave this link explaining why it was such a horrible study to those of you who are interested. The point is that Kirsch had resurrected bad studies from very “old school” antivaxxers. Remember, Brian Hooker and Andrew Wakefield were behind the 2014 “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory that led to the 2016 antivax conspiracy film disguised as a “documentary” called VAXXED.
Later—not much later—Kirsch was citing the Hannah Poling case from 2008 as evidence that the government had “admitted” that vaccines cause autism:
Hannah Poling was, of course, not evidence that vaccines cause autism, as I wrote about in 2008 and have written about periodically since, and as Dorit Reiss explained:
Not satisfied to resurrect 15 year old antivax talking points, Kirsch then cited Stephanie Seneff. I kid you not, he cited Stephanie Seneff to claim that autism was being driven by a combination of vaccines and GMOs:
There was only one response:
Seneff, of course, has no relevant qualifications in infectious disease, epidemiology, or any other scientific discipline relevant to vaccines, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), or vaccines. She’s a computer scientist at MIT, and her sole qualification (if you can call it that) is an undergraduate biophysics degree from the late 1960s. She has, however, made some mind numbingly stupid proclamations over the last several years, including her prediction in 2014 that by 2025 half of all children born that year will be autistic, risibly also stating that “side effects of autism closely mimic those of glyphosate toxicity.” She’s also been known to “dumpster dive” in the VAERS database to blame vaccines for autism. Truly, Kirsch’s bringing her up was a blast from the past.
And then:
This should have come as no surprise to me, as Kirsch had been cozying up to the granddaddy of the modern antivax movement, Andrew Wakefield.
There is no difference between “new school” and “old school” antivax anymore
I’ve long been saying that, in terms of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, there is nothing new under the antivax sun, at least substantively. Indeed, I would argue that even Dr. McCullough’s co-optation of the vaccines-cause-autism lie in service of the current moral panic and fear mongering over transgender adolescents and gender-affirming care isn’t truly new. Rather, it is merely an update of the old homophobic conspiracy theories dating back to the 1990s claiming that vaccines turn kids gay and even older conspiracy theories dating back to the 1970s (at least) that a combination of “grooming” by adult gay “activists” and, yes, “social contagion” had led to more kids “coming out” as gay. Dr. McCullough and Mr. Kirsch are excellent examples of this adage. They are “new school” antivaxxers who are now discovering the deep well of bad antivax studies from years—and even decades—past to use to support their evolution from anti-COVID-19 vaccine to just antivaccine. Yoda was right.
111 replies on ““New school” anti-(COVID-19)-vaxxers are all-in on “old school” vaccines-cause-autism antivax”
It is 2023.
Maybe Mr. Kirsch should consider that in the context of Dr. Senneff.
Do people think McCullough is responding to audience capture (which a person familiar to our readers has discussed this week on another blog), grift, or simply really got deeper into the rabbit hole? (And I hope the next time he serves as an expert witness in a court, someone raises this).
I suspect that audience capture definitely has something to do with his full embrace of old school vaccines-cause-autism antivax views plus transphobic conspiracy theories, but with him it’s hard to tell how much is grift versus how much is audience capture and/or true belief.
I have an audience. It is true that audience capture is real.
And also there is a tendency to become more extreme in views.
All of this gets in the way of being truthful and introduces a thinking bias.
Clearly. You’ve never been truthful, and you’ve convinced yourself that the things you say, despite them being 100% bogus, are true.
Modus ponens this isn’t.
Is that why so much of the stories you write are basically the same thing, are poorly researched and full of plot holes? Because you have an audience that doesn’t care about internally consistent logic, or even if the plot makes sense, as long as there’s a clear villain (with an appropriately evil motivation – even if their villainous plot makes no sense in the grand scheme of things and seems ripped from Southpark’s underwear gnomes complete with the step before profit! being missing), and the promise that the evildoers will get theirs in the end as a large number of generic every-man characters become aware of their nefarious scheme and take action to stop it?
And let’s not get into the way your protagonists do the same thing that you say make the antagonists evil (pushing untested and potentially dangerous treatments with unknown long term side effects, manipulating people’s emotions, taking advantage of widespread fear, creating paranoia and setting people against each other, being literal ghouls and stealing samples and body parts from morgues, turning death and suffering into talking points, and not caring who is harmed as a result of it all as long as they win in the end), but it’s fine because they’re the good guys and what they do works because you’re the one writing the story.
It’s all in the name of keeping the readers happy, and I totally get that. I just think it’s funny that so many of your readers don’t realize what you’re writing is basically porn, more about emotion that eroticism, but it’s still about getting a form of satisfaction.
My stories are consistent. However, do not get overtaken by the desire to be perfectly consistent, the world is complicated and is often inconsistent and resists simple explanations. My readers are amazing people, critical thinkers and many are very informed.
@ Silex:
Amongst mis-informers I survey, I notice striking similarities in their stories that follow particular templates:
–a person is very ill and SBM doesn’t help or actually harms them but altie treatments/ supplements/ diets fix the problem
–a small child was advanced, received vaccines and became autistic, seriously ill or died almost immediately
–a societal problem is addressed by government and it gets worse UNTIL an intrepid reporter/ rabble rouser REVEALS all!
— substitute a noble scientist who reveals SBM corruption and cures serious illness with simple treatments/ meds
I imagine that the underlying theme reflects a belief that intervention by SBM is harmful/ deadly
BUT natural substances in herbs, untampered foods and CHI itself heal all ills because Nature itself was created by G-d
The pure of heart ( altie providers, CHI managers, rabble rousers etc) direct the unenlightened towards prayer, humility, truth and G-d rather than trusting in SBM and news outlets.
Igor, you may be believe in the abilities of your readers, and I’m sure that they agree with you, but I hope that your understand if I don’t accept your statement. Considering how rare it is o find any comment disagreeing with your post, the claim of your readers being “critical thinkers and many are very informed” seems wishful thinking, to say the least…
David, I would also like to see more people disagreeing with me in comments, and unfortunately it’s not happening. However, we have a nice company regardless. I never delete replies disagreeing with me. Only thing I delete is spam.
I am thankful to Orac for allowing dissenting opinions here.
Once again you claim to ‘like to see more people disagreeing with me in comments’, but I hope you’ll understand if I don’t believe you. Maybe it’s not happening because you have shown little willingness or ability to engage with views that differ from yours on your blog? If that’s the case, what’s the use in presenting a conflicting view? I stopped. I would expect want-to-be ‘critical thinker’ to pay less attention to those readers who thank you for confirming their view and more with those challenge you.
As for having ‘a nice company regardless’, I would be interested in your view of the anti-Semitic comments posted. Do you think that they are ‘nice’ as well?
You are aware of the reason they read your blog, and it’s not to challenge their world view. I can understand your fear of offending your audience, but that comes at a price – one you seem more than willing to pay.
I’d say yes, but “audience capture” is a more broad a category than what’s up with McCullough and Kirsch. The first serious academic paper I ever wrote (48 years ago!) was about how what now would be called audience capture altered the career of a national Republican political figure (though there wasn’t a term for it then). Howver, while that pol’s rhetoric became more extreme once he entered the feedback loop, it didn’t go INSANE! I’d posit most occurrences of audience capture over-time similarly fall short of gross WTF. I doubt grift is a major factor for either McCullough or (especially) Kirsch. [If McCullough had a lucrative side-hustle as an expert witness, I’d guess he just burned that bridge…] They’re in if for the ego trip. But that has apparently driven them beyond Limbaugh-esque sh!t-stirring, into a very deep, very sick rabbit hole.
Perhaps, though, audience capture is a different thing now than it was in 1975, especially on the right. When I complain about Orac’s ‘everything old is new again’ trope, one aspect of antivax conspiracy theory that has changed from 2005, in addition to the social formation in which antivax messages circulate, is the larger context of conspiracy theory more generally attendant to Trumpism (which is chicken or egg, i shall not claim to know.) In short, if we’re going to talk about anti-vax, we ought to acknowledge that some >30% of the adult population is all in on ideas that are truly insane, the election denial, anti-trans/’grooming’ stuff only seeming mild stacked against Q-Anon.
The ReAwaken America tour isn’t get a lot of press commentary, but I see something “new” and troubling in it: unlike the 2016 Conspira-Sea Cruise, which was a smorgasbord of discombobulated nuttery, with something special for everybooby, the ReAwaken Thing has a narrower range: Christian Nationalism, election denial, antivax (more or less in that order…) But these previously more-or-less distinct obsessions have combined into something like a new alt-right orthodoxy. Orac has probably seen some of this close up since Kristina Karamo, the new chair of the Michigan GOP, hits the trifecta. This interrelation threatens to be with more power than any of the components individually, and there are speakers who have held important, high status government positions — Ken Paxton, Matt Whitaker, Peter Navarro, Devin Nunes, Kash Patel — sharing the stage with the likes of Stella Immanuel. We can debate exactly hows antivax fits into this CT-supergroup and it’s mental mechanics (Is the Christian Nationalism bolstering the antivax, or vice versa?), but It’s all ominous one way or another.
I guess it never occurred to the participants at Conspiracy Fest 2023, ( the Reawaken America tour), that their Idol, President Trump’s administration initiated Operation Warp Speed, with Trump repeatedly taking credit for the arrival of Covid Vaccines and at one point even referring to himself as “The Father of Covid Vaccines.”
The selective memory of these people is stunning, there is truly no level of mental gymnastics that the conservative conspiracy crowd will not try in order to justify their easily disproven worldview.
Seems like more and more conspiracy theories are becoming conspiracy realities today and by a larger margin than theorists even imagined.
I do not know any conspiracy that have become reality. Can you give an example.
There are these things the covid conspiracy theorists glom onto in order to claim that they were right all along.
Like Pfizer’s claim when the FOIA came out that with available staff it would take 75 years to remove confidential medical files from the trial data, that was taken to mean Pfizer was trying to hide proof that covid shots don’t work.
Or mainstream media articles about myocarditis from covid shots supposedly proving that it’s so serious and so much worse than covid itself that the liberal sheeple-herding media couldn’t ignore it anymore.
Or the FBI/DOE support for lab leak supposedly overturning the scientific evidence for natural zoonosis from the bushmeat industry.
Probably one of those or something similar I haven’t heard yet, or something older I don’t hear as much anymore (like the Pfizer trial whistleblower).
Unless, like Igor, LaBarge is referring to real conspiracies and genocides from history and claiming that the very existence of such things should make us more credulous of almost any unproven conspiracy theory as long as it has something in common with one of those historical cases.
These people have been wrong so often (think of all the quack cures for covid), it must really have bruised their egos. Instead of admitting error, they double down on the crazy. It may be the easier path in the short term, but over time it forces them to become more and more detached from reality.
McCullough also took time out in February to make presentations at “conferences” in Australia hosted by the United Australia Party, which has an anti-COVID vaccine and pro- (you’d never guess) hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin position.
https://www.unitedaustraliaparty.org.au/conferences-expose-wilful-concealment-of-vaccine-induced-deaths/
[you need to click on Next Post a few times to get to the page with McCullough’s presentation on it]
Alas, they got about 4% of primary vote in our House of Representatives election and 3.5% in our Senate election in 2022, and won one senate seat in our federal parliament.
Note: if you go looking for information about them, they are completely unrelated to the earlier party of the same name that existed 1931-45, even though the new UAP tries to link themselves to it.
Re: the autism-transgender link.
One explanation I’ve come across is that autistics are less affected by peer pressure and societal expectations, and are thus less likely to be closeted or in denial of their true gender identity, and so more likely to come out as transgender. It makes sense to me, but I’m cishet, albeit autistic.
Sounds like an interesting theory.
Not sure if I have some form of autism. Someone thought I might have, because I don’t have friends, or much contacts.
People can be hard work.
Never really been good with it. Had some friends with the same musical interests, but in the end lost them all.
“Remember, Brian Hooker and Andrew Wakefield were behind the 2014 “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory that led to the 2016 antivax conspiracy film disguised as a “documentary” called VAXXED.” (Orac)
Can we expect more of the same in the newly advertised Wakefield/Rossio film ?
Steve Kirsch’s tactics in dealing with those with whom he disagrees are turning nastier again.
Kirsch appeared to have learned from the incident in which he, outraged at having his e-mails to ACIP chair Grace Lee ignored, showed up repeatedly at her house to ring her doorbell in hopes of a confrontation (the second time he did this, he hung around at her door for 20 minutes, until the police showed up).
After that debacle, he appeared to confine himself to e-mailing public health figures with vaccine-related harangues and churning out Substack pieces about how they were ignoring him and whining about the opposition refusing to debate him (as opposed to posting articles and comments refuting his drivel).
Now Kirsch has taken aim at the associate dean of the University of Toronto medical school, family medicine prof Marcus Law, urging his followers to contact the school in an effort to get Law fired from his job. Why? Steve is upset that Law supports using adherence to evidence-based practice guidelines to evaluate physicians.
Note the contrast with RI, where our host has explicitly come out against the idea of trying to get opponents in trouble at work or school.
The vaccine schedule may have expanded around 30 years ago but I’ve always felt that the early 1990s included a confluence of events that contributed mightily to the growth of the anti-vaccine movement:
the ( new) DSM-IV included changes in diagnoses of autism, the growth of the internet and Andy Wakefeld’s quest for fame. Wakefield worked in other areas of research ( small intestine transplantation, liver transplantation )
before he became interested in the “connections” between vaccines, the GI tract and autism . And lawyers. ( Wikipedia)
They’ve got it exactly backwards: autism causes vaccines.
In theme here, anti-covid-19 vaccine/”medical freedom” wack-a-doodle Shannon Kroner has just published a book (via Skyhorse of course) titled “I’m unvaccinated and that’s ok!” I guess the world just wasn’t complete with only “Melanie’s marvelous measles” from the pre-covid days.
What’s shameful to me is all the major online retailers are carrying this book, making them complicit in the injury and death of unvaccinated children in the years to come from vaccine-preventable diseases.
The scheduled publication date for Kroner’s book is July 18th, 2023.
So there’s time for Amazon and similar outlets to come to their senses and not sell the book (Amazon belatedly removed “Melanie’s Marvelous Measles” fronm its offerings).
I wrote the American academy of Pediatrics and told them it’s time they actually stood up against garbage like this. I’m not, however optimistic they will actually summon the courage to protect children’s health. They’ve been cowardly lions for the last 12 years and none of their yearly elected leaders seems to have vaccines anywhere on their radar. It’s a shame because they could bring actual pressure upon online retailers or at least shame them for it.
No reviews on Amazon yet. I might drop into a real book store later this summer to see how bad it really is. It’s hard to imagine a young kid really wanting their parent to read something like that to them more than once.
Write negative reviews on the book. Not sure how much they will help, but perhaps it’s worth a try to make the public know the ideas spread in this book might really be a danger for children’s health.
“Everything old [is] new again in antivax messaging,”
Woot! There it is! “Messaging” is a excellent object-noun for this trope, and I’m somewhat embarrassed that seems to have escaped me in my prior complaints.
I still think Orac can be clearer about why “old is new” is a bad thing, especially because newbie and/or general audience readers are unlikely to take that as res ipsa loquitor. The primary point, yes?, is not that the messages are recycled, but that they are false. The secondary point is that this falseness has been thoroughly demonstrated before. That’s what make the oldness significant. Thus, to rephrase: the problem is not that the rhetoric is old, but that it should be dead. The metaphor to horror movie mythos reflects that this recycling is dangerous.
Orac already has simple prose devices in his quiver to communicate this: the use of “zombie” or “slasher” as adjectives. I know he prefers “slasher” because these ‘monstrous’ propaganda points keep coming back in an apparently endless parade of sequels, but I will argue that “zombie” is a much better metaphor over-all. Slashers cannot be killed: the narratives surrounding them are inherently fatalistic, even nihilistic. They are unique individual entities whose unstoppable superhuman malice is reflected in their formidable physical presence. Zombies, on the other hand, look like they should be dead: fetid, rotting, falling apart, icky. They are not up and walking around thanks to some cosmic force of avenging Evil, but some kind of mistake — typically of human origin, and viral. They spread their disease to the unsuspecting. They do not have personalities like Freddy Krueger or Leatherface, nor do they dispatch victims with cleverly grotesque methods. They’re robotic, interchangeable, “stupid”. Individually, they’re pretty easy to dispatch; the threat comes from how many of them there are (with the viral aspect, offering metaphor to contagion via social media…).
If antivax talking points and other propaganda are zombies, the slashers – the recurrent and unchanging evil figures – may be the propaganda machines, the types of movements that diffuse propaganda to promote their agenda and recruit supporters. I’ve noticed the anti-trans movement, in particular, loves borrowing talking points from previous anti-something movements. Obviously anti-gay (grooming/recruiting, social contagion, it’s just mental illness, it confuses the children, it’s just unnatural, it’s a cover for rapists and especially child rapists, accept it and you have to accept absurdities that break human society) but also anti-abortion (you’ll regret it) and, perhaps not too surprisingly insofar as it affects youth, anti-neurodiversity (it’s caused by bad parenting, medical treatment for it will ruin your kid, it stole your real kid, it’s just made up by greedy companies, people are massively faking it to cheat, you need to treat it with coercive behavioral therapy or there’s no hope, and now, it’s caused by vaccines). And the anti-trans movement seems to be, as part of the greater reactionary populist movement, a response to anxieties about changing times and unstable economies. (Old school elitist antivax also was, but from a more bourgeois perspective: neurodiversity was seen as a threat to well-off families’ social standing, if their kid could not hack the path to the same kind of cushy job as their parents. Now it seems neurodiversity is feared more indirectly via its odds of making your kid trans and ruining the social order via abolishing sex roles.) All these slasher anti-something movements are rooted in fear, and trying to tie that fear to an enemy that seems different and defeatible enough…a zombie you can shoot in the noggin. But there are too many zombies.
Makes sense to me. Fox News, the Heartland Institute (Koch), etc. etc. as Michael Myers. The only problem I see is that Leatherface and even Freddy Krueger are more sympathetic than the progenitors of such propaganda. Leatherface could be a metaphor for the middle-men of propaganda, the people who actually face some social threat and are misled to re-direct angst against some subordinate Other. (See Robin Wood’s classic analysis of Texas Chainsaw Massacre as “progressive horror”. There’s something still human in the slasher.
But then, you said propaganda “machines”, and there are no shortage of evil corporate-generated actual machines in our mythos.
But for the most cutting metaphor for such movements, it’s hard to beat “Alien”, (the original, not the sequels).
Great post!
Objectively speaking, we are living through a period of depopulation, like it or not.
Addressing the specific period from 2022, deaths are up, variously at 15-20% above normal in highly COVID-vaccinated nations. It is not COVID, our authorities say, insisting on success of the safe and effective COVID vaccines in preventing COVID deaths. It is not the vaccines, they say, while refusing to investigate the causes of mysterious mortality NOT caused by COVID nor (as they say) by the mystery novel vaccines.
Births are typically not reported monthly, but some places that report them show a consistent reduction in births of about 10-13% since about Feb-Mar of 2022, approximately 9 months after vaccines started being given out to young people in 2021. The reduction in live births is likely due to reduced fertility and mostly not miscarriages.
An increase in deaths, and a reduction in births, is depopulation by definition.
Is this ongoing depopulation a pure accident, or was there someone’s intent behind it? That’s a question that is not easy to answer definitively, without forensic investigations, following the money, search warrants, raiding scientific institutes and foundations, obtaining secret emails, and so on.
I have written extensively about depopulation on my substack for the last year or so. Lately, however, I have been having doubts as to whether depopulation is all bad, or perhaps it is mostly bad but has some good sides? Does the planet need so many people? Is there a specific category of people we’d benefit from having fewer of? These are the questions I am asking – and I do not have answers.
Lastly, consider this. Imagine yourself in a new role. You are a super billionaire who is worried about limited planetary resources. Somehow, you decided that you want to reduce the world’s population, especially among countries with highest per-capita consumption. How would you do it? How can you affect people’s reproductive abilities and preferences?
Accomplishing that would obviously be a difficult task. But doable.
You would need to find ways to decrease fertility, and increase mortality, right?
As for fertility, start by thinking about the basics of human reproduction. To reproduce, a fertile male needs to attract and have unprotected sex with a fertile female, and then the female would need to carry the fetus to term.
How can you disrupt that? In very many ways. You could, for example, maye 1 out of 20 people autistic so they are socially incapable of attracting a mate. You would encourage others to change their sexual preferences so as to take them out of the reproductive path. Make “family planning” tools widely available. That’s easy.
Two problems remain:
1) Most people still remain fertile
2) Making young people infertile would lead to excess numbers of old people and associated economic problems.
How can you solve the above two problems?
Simple.
You could design a virus such that
1) It kills old people
2) The designer spike protein, given in vaccines or from infections, would make young people infertile.
3) The vaccines and virus design ensure endless reinfections
4) It destroys human brains (the well-known “brain fog”, aka brain damage) so people would not notice anything
As a result of that, population decline will be greatly sped up and yet young and old people’s numbers will remain in balance. The planet would be saved from overpopulation, without anyone even realizing what happened, aside from a few conspiracy theorists.
The above, of course is pure fantasy! Right?
But it might make you go hmmmm, if you have an open mind, some imagination and understanding of human nature.
“Is this ongoing depopulation a pure accident, or was there someone’s intent behind it?”
Such revelations of our nefarious plan cannot be tolerated.
Our globalist masters have been notified.
That asinine conspiracy rant wouldn’t have made it as an idea for a Syfy movie back when they were running movies about shark/octopus hybrids and radioactive ice spiders — it would have been rejected for its stupidity.
We get that you’re too lazy to actually study things, and you’re only ability with statistics is to misinterpret them. As someone else suggested about your latest work of fiction wherein someone very ill responded “immediately” to one of the scams you push: get a new template for your BS
@ Igor:
As you might know, I survey alt med/ anti-vax writers for many years. Generally, they cobble together lies, half truths and realistic information to conjure fear in their readers on which they capitalise by suggesting frightening scenarios, economic devastation, death, destruction and misery. Kids’ brains will be damaged by vaccines. So will women’s fertility and men’s vitality or virility. They cultivate a captive audience by engendering fear and then, provide relief through their advice, products and services.
Doesn’t that sound unfair to you? It manipulates readers whilst it inflates the writer’s social power disproportionately. One of these dis-informers calls his work self-empowerment of his audience when it is the exact opposite: he makes them thralls of his own business plan and will to power.
Educating or counselling people should involve making them more independent and self-reliant and closer to the truth than they were before they met you. If you garner an army of fans who hang upon your every word and you simultaneously cater to their worst instincts and greatest fears, are you really serving their needs or your own? Would you rather be like those anti-vax fear mongers or like Orac et al?
@ Denise
You write addressing Igor: “Would you rather be like those anti-vax fear mongers or like Orac et al?”
To be like Orac, Igor would have to actually learn at least the basics of science, immunology, etc and he would then be just like the majority of people who accept science, lost in the crowd. On the other hand, being an anti-vax fear monger lets him standout among other scientifically illiterates and those who may understand some science; but reject it.
Orac, you, me and a number of others on this blog have over and over refuted each and every one of his comments without him budging an inch. So, your question is at best amusing.
And he refuses to acknowledge that he and others like him may actually bear some responsibility for people suffering, being hospitalized, and even dying.
@ Joel PhD, MPH:
Obviously I don’t expect a straightforward answer but more details about the Master Plan he has uncovered and how he happened upon it.
Video games? Superhero movie plots? Pulp fiction c.1960?
Denice, good question. I only post things that I believe to be true. I have an audience that is in general agreement with what I write, even though I have dissenting voices in comments on every post.
In any case, we do have depopulation going on, defined as reduced births accompanied by increased mortality. It bothers me that it is happening. If it does not bother you, as yourself why.
What bothers me even more is that this excess mortality is not being investigated properly and is instead being swept under the rug.
I believe that I know why it is not being investigated and the newspapers and the BBC refuse to cover it. The reason is that they are afraid of what they will find out and they know what they will find out.
We do not know, down to the details, why exactly people die in excess numbers. All we know is that this is going on – but not the exact mechanism.
BBC knows about age adjustmentt, and that birth rates rose during COVID pandemic.
Why age adjustment is so difficult concept to you ?
“I only post things that I believe to be true. ”
oh, the irony. it is soo huge.
” ..the newspapers and the BBC refuse to cover it… they are afraid of what they might find and they know what they will find out.”
Do you mean to tell me that the media are sitting on the biggest story of the century? Come on.
As if the media have not covered horrendous stories, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Bopal, famines, earthquakes, fires, floods, complete with photographic essays and looked into governmental malfeasance-wars, coups, rebellions, civil wars, assassinations and corporate fraud, business greed and criminal investigations around the world.
The news business which often relishes the gory details or delights in ratcheting up fear in order to gain followers and money now suddenly
goes dark and is careful not to upset people?
Even if decent, fact-based news companies were being careful, don’t you think that someone else would leak the story?
Are you Naomi Wolf, Mike Adams, RFK jr and Del Bigtree the only
trustworthy outlets?
If Naomi Wolf, Mike Adams, RFK jr and Del Bigtree told me the sky is blue, I still would want to check this for myself. They are probably the people I never would trust a word from what they were saying.
The 2022-2023 depopulation IS the story of the century.
The data is all there – available to anyone with a web browser. The depopulation is real.
It is not covered by a number of outlets.
If that surprises you, ask yourself , why it is not covered?
Very simple, because they are scared of consequences of the public realizing that it is being depopped and the media shares the blame. They are scared.
@Igor Chudov I spell it for you: A-G-E A-D-J-U-S-T-M-E-N-T
You just do not get it. Older people has higher mortality rate, as you do not know.
Igor, I’m glad that you only ‘post things that I believe to be true’, because the alternative would make them lies or fraud, instead of simply incorrect or misleading.
I have also observed how your audience is in almost total agreement with your (although they took issue with your views on the new CEO of Twitter), but have not noticed the ‘dissenting voices’ you refer to. I would estimate comments that dissent from your COVID narrative to be <1%.
As for depopulation, most also factor Migration, in addition to changes in birthrate and/or mortality. Some countries, such as the USA have used immigration to enable it to grow it’s population, in spite of slowing birth rates. Most countries have had a drop in birthrate over the last few decades, but it is still above replacement in most developing contrives. The causes are identical in different countries. Your desire to present this as a new phenomenon is untrue and misleading.
I’m sure that COVID had an effect on birth rates (as do most economic, health and/or natural disasters), as well as on mortality. But we don’t really know what’s going on, or how society will be end up being changed by these last few years.
My additional thought on why I do not have many dissenting voices is that I try to be persuasive and think of ways to fact check my posts, and I try to make sure they would stand up to that.
Thank you for acknowledging that interesting things are happening with mortality and birth rates. If you look into them deeply and quantitatively, you would realize that they are extremely unusual. They are not a continuation of previous trends. They are several standard deviations away from normal.
I understand that we do not have the explanation yet. However, what bothers me is that nobody is looking for such an explanation. We Need scientific institutes of the highest caliber to understand what is happening and why exactly people are dying in excess numbers. Do not just concoct simple explanations as this is a complicated problem, requiring a systematic look.
It’s not surprising that you repeatedly select an explanation that fits with your negative. I personally stopped commenting as none of your readers have any interests in view that differed from their own and pointing issues with your posts was a waste of time. But unsurprisingly, you seem to have once again come to the opposite concussion, one that confirms your bias.
As with your depopulation theory, you consistently cherry pick your data points to fit with your preselected explanation. Many factors are influencing growth rates, but you seem to have already come to a conclusion. You seem to have no need for data when you have already decided who is to blame.
Considering that birthrates have been dropping worldwide for decades, that birthrates drop in times of economic and/or natural uncertainty, that we have only partial data of the last few years, and that we don’t know how we will come out of this period, we will have to see. But I know that the uncertainty will not keep you from coming to your desired conclusion.
@igor:
The problems with this;
a) As has been noted, your “depopulation” claim is false — it isn’t happening
b) You have shown that you never believe “scientific institutes of the highest caliber” that do “systematic looks” on issues because their results reflect reality, not your predetermined false storylines
Stop whinging here about things that don’t exist as though they are real problems: the suckers who pay for your crapstack blogs might be too lazy to debunk your blatherings, but that isn’t the case here.
@David, I am sorry you quit commenting. I think that your explanation that my readers do not want to debate posts that totally contradict their worldview has some merit. But I cannot force them to do that either. All I can is allow people to post anything.
If I debate dissenting views too vigorously myself, that might come across intimidating (because I am the blog owner) so I try not to do that, unless people question my calculations or some such where a response is warranted.
From the U.S. Census Bureau:
“The projected world population on Jan. 1, 2023, is 7,942,645,086, an increase of 73,772,634, or 0.94%, from New Year’s Day 2022. During January 2023, 4.3 births and 2.0 deaths are expected worldwide every 1 second.”
That doesn’t sound like “depopulation” to me. Despite Covid-19 and deaths caused by it and lack of medical care for serious health problems during the pandemic, humans are still doing a pretty good job of reproducing.
Meanwhile, Igor and his pack of obedient sheeple are milling about in fear, convinced that shadowy Conspirators and “psyops” are concealing the impending extinction of mankind – because as we all know, globalists and giant corporations profit immensely when there are no longer any customers to sell to.
Citations you idiot
And this is the outcome of a painfully stupid screed — bee noises.
Gates is indeed worrying about overpopulation. He promotes contraception.Have you heard about it ? It works very well in US.
Killling people in industrialized world to stop overpopulation? Birth rate is declining there
US birth rate actually grew during COVID pandemic:
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2022/05/24/us-birth-rate
You,of course forget age adjustment
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/monthlymortalityanalysisenglandandwales/march2022,
ONS have deaths by vaccination status. Still no comments.
Have you considered writing horror film scenarios ? Try some new ideas.
No it is intentional. I know from personal experience.
Back in the day when everyone was a lot younger, Mrs P decided that 2 children were quite enough.* Apparently, this having children thing was all my fault, because Mrs P booked me into the vet to be de-knackered (or at least de-functionally knackered).
*Population replacement is 2.1 children per female, so Mrs P is by her actions contributing to depopulation.
I notice elsewhere on this thread a poster has called you an idiot, Igor. All I can say about that is that you are doing your damned best to live up to the name.
Well, my mom only had one child, me. I hink she once lost a child pre-birth, but I don’t know the full story. She contributed to depopulation and with me having no children, nor having been able to get them, I contribute even more to depopulation. My aunt made up for that with 4 children. I think 3 of them are married and have children of their own.
You’re trans and possibly on the spectrum, and your mom had a stillbirth, so surely They ™ got to your mother.
Real eugenics programs aimed at “reducing crime and poverty” by sterilizing random (poor and/or minority) people on the street when they went to the doctor for something else were a thing about 100 years ago, continuing into the middle of last century. But we don’t understand enough about the causes of queerness and neurodivergence to deliberately cause them as population control…and the eugenicists of 100 years ago were trying to to eliminate such things, and many people still wish to do so!
Yes I know all that. Eugenitics haven’t stopped after WWII.
On a bit different subject:
Some days ago I read an interview with a Dutch scientist and Nobel prize winner, who argued that people who were anti-science, should try to do without it.
Someone reacted with a letter to the editor, arguing that science also has it’s downsides, like overpopulation, destrucion of social structures and environmental problems. Mankind haven’t got happier during the ages.
To me all this sounded a bit weird. I wonder if any mother or father would really want to go back to the ages that losing a child was pretty common. And who wants to go back to the times with a much lower live-expectancy? Yes, we have environmental problems, but living in the cities in the 19th century wasn’t really healthy as well, because I think environmental problems where a thing then, only not mentioned. Smog, horseshit, smoke from burning coal. I don’t think there was ever a paradise, where everything was nice and easy. And in those happy ages in the past, people who didn’t fit in, became outcasts. So much for those great social structures. And happiness is hard to measure. In the end it is always people comparing themselves with others they know.
My father was born in 1908, one of the middle of his family. Three older siblings died before the age of 10 from various diseases. He always made damn sure we (my siblings and I) got whatever vaccines we could.
I have a great-niece (married my niece’s son) who, despite having a biology degree, doesn’t like vaccines, modern medicine, etc. She told me once she wished she’d been born in the 1500s so she could live a natural life of the time. When I said “yeah, you’d be married by 16, have 10 kids by your mid 20s, and probably die by 40” she got pissed at me. [Yes, I admit I probably exaggerated, so no feedback please.]
@ldw56old
Well, your niece in 1500 could also die in childbed.
And I’m not sure she would like all the smells of that time.
@Renate:
It seems everyone thinks their problems are the worst, just like they think their pets are the best. Scale and context in assessing the things that provoke strong emotions just do not come to us naturally. I have trouble accessing these things when I have an unexpected daily life problem. But when it comes to the end of the world, I’ve seen enough false alarms between the mid 1990s and 2012 that I’m like, nah. Conspiracy theories? Meh. Not since Zeitgeist went over the top and talked about microchips implanted by Jewish bankers. Political corruption and dusappointment? No politician is 100% clean and achieves everything their voters hope for, so I vote for platform and avoid authoritarians. Food, medicine, disability, chronic disease? I think it’s precisely these kinds of fears, which used to affect me a lot, that got me into medical skepticism in the first place in search of perspective. (Though I also found general conspiracy theory debunking interesting in the light of Zeitgeist and the continuing popularity of these ideas in superhero movies.) I embrace Skepticism to stay sane. But even before that, the past was not appealing. As an ADHD woman with little interest in beauty and domesticity, so-so people skills, and lots of interest in science, what prospects would I have had in earlier times? Not getting my “dream job” of an astronomy career, unlikely marrying another nerd with mild gender-role conformity problems and having a single quirky kid in early middle age with no miscarriages, stillbirths, or “surprises” beforehand. And many people I know would have had worse prospects.
@ Renate
Nah, the weirdo is the “science, love it or leave it” dude. It’s so obviously a false dichotomy, and built on a false premise. If I complain about smog, you might as well deride me by saying, “If you don’t like the air, try doing without it.” This is just reification.
The question is not which time period we might chose to live in, but how science as a method, is employed as a tool, by science as a social institution, enmeshed with other social institutions, some of which are noble, some ignoble, some just dangerously ignorant along one axis or another. IOW, the results of science are not inevitable, they are the products of human affairs that could have been different and could change in the future.
The dynamics of who fits in, who is outcast, and why, have varied widely across human cultures and time periods. If parents would indeed prefer conditions of lower infant mortality, that has never been just a question of the state of medical science overall, but the availability of care attendant to class, location, social resources, etc. Life expectancy, I assume you know, is an average heavily weighted by infant mortality. If they made it to adolescence, most people of means even in the 18th Century lived into “old age” (TB not withstanding). As for happiness, that’s obviously hard to measure, and subject to all kinds of “grass is greener elsewhere” bias, but again, if we compare apples to apples, there’s evidence to suggest a twenty-year old working on a family farm in 1800, engaged with both the benefits and pitfalls of the natural world, would be happier than twenty-year-olds in American suburbs are now, under threat of all sorts of man made terrors.
To put it in a synecdoche, we may not yet be beset by evil AIs like Skynet, but science has to own up for it’s role in creating the social media hellscape if it’s going to claim credit for the benefits of computerization.
@ sadmar
I don’t think the man said: “Science, love it or leave it. ”
But he considered science as an important human endeavor. Of cause that doesn’t mean science is without mistakes, but I think those mistakes are mostly not the problem of science, but the problem of how we humans function. His words were aimed at the people who only seem to think science is bad and who reject all medical science, like vaccines, that made our lives better.
Yes, science gave birth to the atomic bomb. But before that people already were killing eachother. They didn’t need science for that.
So thinking that the world would be better without science and we wouldn’t have all the problems we are dealing with, is a big mistake. Yes, we didn’t have overpopulation, but at what price?
People dying young, or from some nasty disease. And there was enough polution as well. And a lot of people were poor and lived in very poor conditions, in unheathy circumstances.
“yet young and old people’s numbers will remain in balance.”
That’s an unwarranted assumption.
Old age kills the elderly fairly effectively and they aren’t breeding anyway. Plus a fertility reduction would have to be temporary if the goal was to reduce the population to a ‘more sustainable’ level. Plus about a million other things that you haven’t bothered thinking about.
Frankly, launching giant land sharks with lasers into every highly populated area would complete the task rapidly and the sharks could eat the bodies. You could probably create the sharks in a single super-villain laboratory rather than multiple giant corporations around the world. They could breed up to the required numbers in one of those hollow islands before deployment. In fact, add a bit of Pterodactyl DNA and they could fly on their own.
I think I watched a SyFy movie with that very theme about 12 years ago, when SyFy was good.
Okay, hell with it, I’m just going to say it because someone has to.
Igor, you just explained Albert Wesker’s evil plan from Resident Evil 5 to the people here. You have stood up, metaphorically, in front of a bunch of doctors and scientists here and told them about a freaking video game bad guy as though he was real and an actual threat to us.
Take a deep breath, calm down and sit down. Umbrella Corporation isn’t real, Gentek isn’t real, Abstergo Industries isn’t real, neither are Weyland-Yutani Corporation, Fontaine Futuristics or any of the others.
Albert Wesker is not real and he cannot hurt you.
Yeah, but They Live is a documentary.
Chat GPT10 is not real, and it will hurt you.
COI: I do have stock in the Tyrell Corporation.
;- )
I have never heard of Resident Evil 5, would you say it is worth watching?
Playing.
And yet the world population continues to grow. Africa has an approx. 2.5% growth rate. I don’t have the exact number for Asia, but I believe it’s a little larger (except for Japan and China). South America’s growth rate is around 1%.
Exactly whose population are you worried about?
Wakefield’s 1998 article
I read Wakefield’s article right after it came out. First, we know that he lied about the 12 kids being regular referrals, lied about what was in their doctor’s case files, etc. However, let’s assume that the study was completely legitimate. He writes: “Intestinal and behavioural pathologies may have occurred together by chance, reflecting a selection bias in a self-referred group; however, the uniformity of the intestinal pathological changes and the fact that previous studies have found intestinal dysfunction in children with autism-spectrum disorders, suggests that the connection is real and reflects a unique disease process.” “Chance, selection bias, suggests. . . real.”
AJ Wakefield et. al. (1998 Feb 28). Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive development disorder in children. Lancet; Vol. 351, pp. 637-641
However, at his press conference he intimated the connection was valid. So, on reading the article for the first time, my reaction included:
(1) at best, 12 kids is an anecdotal case series, not even a cohort study comparing non-vaccinated with vaccinated.
(2) I did a search for percentage of British kids who received the MMR vaccine. Don’t remember exact number; but was over 90%, so either the association was serendipitous or a subset of kids with a genetic predisposition.
(3) I did a search for any papers associating actual measles with ASD.
And I found several papers that refuted Wakefield’s paper, e.g.:
Robert T Chen, Frank DeStefano (1998 Feb 28). Vaccine adverse events – causal or coincidental? The Lancet; Vol. 351, pp. 611-612. [in the same issue as Wakefield’s paper]
Keith J Lindley, Peter J Milla (1998 Mar 21). Autism, IBD & MMR Vaccine. The Lancet; Vol. 351, pp. 907.
Even if the paper was completely honest, as I wrote, at best it was a case series with a very small number of kids. At best it called for scientifically valid research; e.g., at least a large cohort study. So, why did it result in an extreme increase in antivaxxers? Simple. The press. The press, obviously, did NOT consult vaccine scientists and ignored the rebuttal in the same issue. As the old saying goes, with the press, “if it bleeds, it leads.” So, the irresponsible press is the main culprit. Obviously Wakefield was and is dishonest; but had the press done due diligence, I doubt there would have been such an explosion of antivaxxers.
Other papers both by Wakefield and others followed and were over and over refuted, shown to be fraudulent or just plain poor methodology; but it was the press coverage of the original that led to the explosion in antivaxxers. And this isn’t the first time by far that the press has not done its homework and led to medical, economic, political, etc. problems.
@ Igor Chudov
You write: “Addressing the specific period from 2022, deaths are up, variously at 15-20% above normal in highly COVID-vaccinated nations. It is not COVID, our authorities say, insisting on success of the safe and effective COVID vaccines in preventing COVID deaths.”
First, as usual, you ignore that the rates of deaths from COVID on a per capita basis are much much higher in areas of the US with the lowest vaccination rates. So, it is COVID. However, in areas with low vaccination rates, since the COVID vaccines are NOT perfect, people who are seniors, with comorbidites, or just exposed over periods of time to a number of asymptomatic s(e.g., at an indoor party, church services, etc) can become infected.
You write: “but some places that report them show a consistent reduction in births of about 10-13% since about Feb-Mar of 2022, approximately 9 months after vaccines started being given out to young people in 2021. The reduction in live births is likely due to reduced fertility and mostly not miscarriages.”
And you ignore that during the pandemic many decided it was NOT the right time to have children and others simply had fewer opportunities due to various physical distancing, lockdowns, etc
You write: “An increase in deaths, and a reduction in births, is depopulation by definition.”
Yep; but the question is what is causing it. Extreme examples include smallpox pandemics, the 1918 flu pandemic which also led to a serious decrease in life-expectancy.
You write: “Is this ongoing depopulation a pure accident, or was there someone’s intent behind it? That’s a question that is not easy to answer definitively, without forensic investigations, following the money, search warrants, raiding scientific institutes and foundations, obtaining secret emails, and so on.”
Of course ignoring what I wrote above and playing up your paranoid idiotic conspiracy theories.
Basically Igor you are an extremely stupid antivax conspiracy theorist who no matter how many times Orac, myself, and others have torn to shreds your comments you JUST KEEP MAKING A FOOL OF YOURSELF.
So, one simple question: Do you believe the depopulation following smallpox pandemics, following the 1918 flu pandemic, etc. were all planned and carried out? And actually MORON, the current population stats are NOT all that bad.
I could recommend a number of good historical books on epidemics and pandemics; but it would be a waste of time with you.
Depopulations via smallpox pandemics were planned on SOME occasions. The conquistadores who invaded South America, and North American settlers, faced tens of millions of Native Americans, who they could kill but not in sufficient numbers to make a difference.
So they brought smallpox infested blankets and gifted them to Native Americans, which killed 90% of them as they were not ever exposed to that disease, so they had no population immunity or benefits of prior natural selection.
Or so the story goes. Lots of stuff written about it.
The Japanese, during occupation of China, also had a “problem” of not being able to kill off hundreds of millions of Chinese people in occupied territories, so their Unit 731 dropped canisters with fleas carrying diseases, including the plague.
As gruesome as their activities were, they did not work because the Japenese, at the time, were ignorant a-holes and did not have a sufficient grasp of science to accomplish what they wanted.
During WWII, in Russia, the Germans intentionally infected people with typhus and left them in the areas where Soviet troops advanced, in hopes of slowing down the advance. The Soviets simply treated the sick people and the idea fizzled for the same reason the Japanese failed with their Unit 731.
So, depopulations using pathogens is not exactly a very novel idea. It is, in fact, a very sensible (but evil) starting point for someone wanting to depopulate certain populations.
Can a modern lab-designed sarbecovirus be used for the same purpose? Sure. It is a possibility that we cannot dismiss outright.
Instead of getting hysterical and insulting me, try to think instead.
People here do. It’s your turn to try thinking.
As I said before, why invent new bioweapons when existing pathogens are effective enough. (Tough you may want to check the blanket story:
https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smallpox-blankets).
Have you yourself thought contraception ? It does reduce birth rate, you know.
@ Igor Chudov
You write: “The reduction in live births is likely due to reduced fertility”
In your immense lack of knowledge of immunology, medicine, etc. explain how a vaccine affects fertility???
@ EVERYONE
Today is National Vaccine Awareness Day. Check out NIH Statement on HIV Vaccine Awareness Day 2023 at: https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/nih-statement-hiv-vaccine-awareness-day-2023?utm_campaign=+56315496&utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term=
@ Igor Chudov
There is one additional reason for lower rates of children. Numerous studies have found that people in poor nations with high infant mortality and poverty have more chlldren to ensure some will survive and can work to help the family. Of course, not something you, in your immense ignorance, would be aware of. Of course, even in wealthy nations there are some subgroups; e.g., religious, who still have many children.
Right. Birth rates are low in well-off countries thanks to low infant and child mortality rates, creeping and sometimes jumping inflation, wage stagnation, and laws against child labor. Not to mention loosening of sex roles, but I heard the stagflation of the 1970s actually pushed forward job options for women because single income households had trouble making ends meet. I think historian Stephanie Coontz was where I heard this.
But surely They ™ caused all these things precisely to cause birth rates to drop, and so the Good Guys ™ have to fix all this by reversing feminism and queer rights, banning abortion, putting us back on the gold standard to undo inflation, putting children back to work on family farms so we can’t say we can’t afford them, and bringing back the measles, whooping cough, and polio in full force so we have more children out of fear of losing one.
Among Igor Chudov’s Greatest Hits is a recent Substack article in which he explains the real reason why so many of his fellow Covidiots are into germ theory denial, for instance claiming that SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses don’t exist.
According to Igor, such weird beliefs aren’t due to a revival of 19th-century ignorance and superstition. No, the upsurge in germ theory denial is due to a single obscure Substack that Igor says is running a “psyops” campaign to ensnare the unwary.
Igor’s article on this dastardly deception tries to let down germ theory denialists gently, rather than advising them to knock off the crazy. He evidently doesn’t want to offend a sizable chunk of his subscriber base.
There are not very many people who deny existence of viruses. They are, however, highly vocal.
They say that “no virus was ever isolated” despite many labs selling viruses, for example.
Anyway, yes, you are right, I do try to let down virus denialists gently.
Come to think about it, I try to let vaccine advocates down gently also. I am a very nice person and never respond to verbal abuse etc, and gently make people question their beliefs.
That’s because verbal abuse does not change minds – what does is gentle questioning of false beliefs (such as the belief in Covid vaccine)
Many people here finally see my point, for example about the virus having come from a lab. Soon they will see that Covid vaccines do not work and were a scam from the beginning. When that happens, I will offer a supportive way to deal with your cognitive dissonance.
Once you work through that cognitive dissonance, you will discover several more very interesting truths, that will set your mind free. You will start enjoying life, secure in your knowledge that you know important things that they tried to hide from you.
About virus coming from lab: https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/congress-clears-bill-to-declassify-wuhan-institute-of-virology-intel/
Any news ?
Purpose of Z division mentioned in article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Division
To assess nuclear nuclear capabilities, it is DOE after all.
As far as I know, nothing was declassified That was of any interest . please correct me if I’m wrong
This:
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Unclassified-Summary-of-Assessment-on-COVID-19-Origins.pdf
Very thin gruel indeed
I’m glad that you are able to be nice to people. But I’m confused by your claim to have let virus deniers down gently, as I have not seen your willingness to engage with them. Robert Malone has stated clearly that viruses cause disease and that SARS-COV-2 has been isolated. Do you feel that citing this will lead to ‘cognitive dissonance’?
Or with those who express anti-Semitic views on you substack. Are you just being nice to them? Or are you afraid of loosing your audience?
I no longer engage with virus deniers in any way. On twitter I mute all of them on the spot. On my substack I do not put likes on their posts.
That sure teaches them a lesson…
Why do you avoid engaging with them? Don’t you want them to learn?
@David re: virus deniers
I do not engage with them mostly because I do not believe their activities to be organic. Engaging them is a waste of my time, of which I have a limited amount (i have a job). They are also completely harmless. Virus denial is a distraction.
As for “changing their minds”, I think that many of my posts clearly show why viruses exist and how people get infected, which is only possible with replicating pathogens that “hop from person to person to person”.
The point is that the lab theory has little to no evidence behind it. It hasn’t been ruled out, but the probability it was created and released from a lab is very low. But you’ve never been a fan of evidence, only the conspiracies you feel will get your sub stack the most hits, so…
“No, the upsurge in germ theory denial is due to a single obscure Substack that Igor says is running a “psyops” campaign to ensnare the unwary”
Otherwise known as ‘this is so mind numbingly stupid that I must look for hidden meanings’.
Is this the so-called ‘controlled oposition’? A way to make anti-vaxxers look bad, by stating things, that are so extreme, that most people won’t believe it?
[…] embraced “old school” antivax conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, particularly of the “vaccines-cause-autism” variety albeit in the case of Dr. McCullough with a lot of added transphobia. After pointing out how […]
@ Igor Chudov
You write: “So, depopulations using pathogens is not exactly a very novel idea. It is, in fact, a very sensible (but evil) starting point for someone wanting to depopulate certain populations. Can a modern lab-designed sarbecovirus be used for the same purpose? Sure. It is a possibility that we cannot dismiss outright.
Instead of getting hysterical and insulting me, try to think instead.”
First, you ignore that specific populations were targeted. COVID, wherever precautions were NOT taken, spread over the entire world. Second, you ignore that the cases you mention involved much much much more deadly microbes. And you ignore that many thousands of sequencing of the corona virus in bats, pangolins, and civet cats found genomes with 96% of current COVID virus. And being an mRNA virus which has a high rate of mutations, the current variant highly likely. from nature. Also, since more than one variant of a corona virus can be in bat, etc. can also exchange parts of genome.
The main point is NOT getting hysterical; but over and over pointing out your TOTAL lack of understanding of immune system, your total lack of understanding of microbiology, your total lack of understanding of genetics and your continued absolutely STUPID IGNORANT ANTIVAX BIAS. You tell us “try to think” but thinking depends on a certain level of knowledge; otherwise, why not blame voodoo, etc. for current pandemic?
the depopulation conspiracy theory does not think that a specific ethnic group is targeted. In addition , to all people who think that Covid is not very pathogenic, I would like to remind you that it keeps reinfecting people and weakening them. There are strange things happening on the population level that makes me suspect it is much more pathogenic than it seems on the first sight.
What about age adjustment ? Try it first. Then consider contraception.
@ Igor Chudov
Just to remind you why I and others think you are a stupid dishonest sicko:
Byram Bridle is upset at Timothy Caufield because he “won’t debate” antivaxxers
https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2023/04/19/byram-bridle-is-upset-at-timothy-caulfield-because-he-wont-debate-antivaxxers/#comments
Igor Chudov
says:
April 19, 2023 at 6:45 pm
Just like Orac, I find it odd that Dr Bridle wants to debate Covid vaccines with Dr Caulfield, but for a different reason.
Dr. Bridle is a viral immunologist, an expert in vaccinology and virology, and an author of dozens of related scientific studies.
Dr. Caulfield is a professor of law, with zero education pertaining to virology or vaccinology. His level of expertise in vaccines, virology and vaccinology is on par with my own. In other words, he is an amateur to the field of vaccines and viruses.
Joel A. Harrison, PhD, MPH
says:
April 21, 2023 at 12:10 pm
@ Igor Chudov
You write: “Dr. Caulfield is a professor of law, with zero education pertaining to virology or vaccinology. His level of expertise in vaccines, virology and vaccinology is on par with my own. In other words, he is an amateur to the field of vaccines and viruses.”
So, why don’t you follow your own advice, that is, “zero education pertaining to virology or vaccinology”, and stop posting stupidly ignorant biased unscientific antivax comments???
Thinking about it, Igor’s world where every government is out to get you with lab grown deadly viruses, harming vaccines, forever chemicals in drinking water, mass formation psychosis, elite ruling classes, depopulation programmes, brainwashing via the Internet and main stream media, brain damage via 5G, NASA money laundering in name of space exploration, convincing people the earth is spherical when it is actually flat…….Good lord, sounds like a very scary world we live in.
PS. Why do my posts take a day to show up on my devices, am I being monitored by the New World Order psy ops team ?
“Chat GPT10 is not real, and it will hurt you.”
It’s ‘4’ and you hurted me.
Orac, it’s quite obvious that your gaslighting is meant to distract from the topic at hand. Seriously though, what do you make of this post from Kirsch?
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/epic-fail-dorit-reiss-and-friends?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Easy. Kirsch has zero clue what he is talking about.
C’mon, Orac, is that all you got? Let him have it, man! And especially with him shooting off his mouth with this…
This is very old one there is no placebo tested vaccines.
Do Google Scholar Search for vaccine placebo. You will find lots of placwbo controlled trials
@ Vicintheshed
I too have experience long delays in my comments being posted. Quite frustrating as negates partly being in an ongoing exchange. I contacted Orac long time ago and he explained it has something to do with his buffer which he has NO control over how it reacts to submitted comments; but he can, if contacted, go into buffer and release them at a specific time; but he is super busy.
Great comment; but you left out one important position of people like Igor Chudov, etc. A rejection of science itself and a total reliance on ones own “genius”.
It is Orac’s blog, it is up to him how to run it. without time delay, there would possibly be hundreds of replies on many posts.
@ Igor Chudov
You write: “Come to think about it, I try to let vaccine advocates down gently also. I am a very nice person and never respond to verbal abuse etc, and gently make people question their beliefs. That’s because verbal abuse does not change minds – what does is gentle questioning of false beliefs (such as the belief in Covid vaccine) Many people here finally see my point, for example about the virus having come from a lab. Soon they will see that Covid vaccines do not work and were a scam from the beginning. ”
Over and over umpteen times Orac, myself, and others have explained mRNA vaccines, explained the large Phase 3 clinical trials of the COVID vaccines, have explained and linked to US and international data that shows CLEARLY that areas with high vaccination rates have much much lower hospitalizations and deaths and studies where vast majority of those hospitalized and dead were unvaccinated; yet, you ignore all of this and continue with you belief in your own “intuitive genius”, a belief based on a total lack of understanding of immunology, microbiology, epidemiology, history and current status of vaccine-preventable diseases, etc.
You are someone who ignores reality and lives in their own fantasy world. So, verbal abuse doesn’t change your mind; but neither does science, US and international statistics, etc. So, take it as verbal abuse or just an objective description of you: YOU ARE ONE SICK INDIVIDUAL. And, unfortunately, your comments and Substack could influence others who are scientifically illiterate and, thus, responsible for deaths from COVID if they, based on your writings, didn’t get vaccinated. Not you alone; but others like you are responsible for many unnecessary deaths from COVID.
@ Aarno Syvänen
The fact that antivaxxers claim no placebo controlled trials just perfect proof they literally don’t know what they are talking about. Clear evidence they didn’t even try to search Google, etc. I just did a quick search on PubMed, the National Library of Medicine’s online database, used search words: randomized double blind placebo controlled vaccine RESULT: 2,260 results
And the very first such trial was conducted on the Salk vaccine from 1954 to 1955. Roughly 440,000 received one or more injections of the vaccine, about 210,000 children received a placebo, consisting of harmless culture media, and 1.2 million children received no vaccination and served as a control group, who would then be observed to see if any contracted polio. Wikipedia. Polio vaccine.
This is what is so upsetting, antivaxxers who don’t do the homework and when confronted with the reality, the science and multiple studies, refuse to accept it.
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