Vaccines Archives
Cal. study gets vaccines off hook again for autism
By Michael Fumento
Grant the anti-childhood vaccine fanatics this; they are dogged. As I write in The American Spectator Online, "Absolutely no amount of data and no number of studies from any array of sources will sway them from their beliefs - or claimed beliefs - that thimerosal, a mercury-containing vaccine preservative once used in many such injections, is causing the so-called "autism epidemic."
Therefore a California Department of Public Health study in the current Archives of General Psychiatry hasn't either. It shows absolutely no decrease in the rate of increased autism diagnoses, notwithstanding that thimerosal was discontinued in childhood vaccines in 2001. (I include a graph that makes the point abundantly clear.) Yet not only did the nut cases claim the California data would eventually prove their case, they even claimed it already had.
For the rest of us there are two valuable lessons. First, the lack of a thimerosal connection to the developmental disorder has once again been reaffirmed. And second, those fanatics really and truly are fanatical - as a British Medical Journal book reviewer put it, an "angry and paranoid universe."
I've already gotten a barge-load of nasty e-mail from this paranoid universe. See what's made them so incredibly angry.
January 22, 2008 05:21 PM · Permalink
Hysteria, not illness or death, drives gov't disease spending
By Michael Fumento
You've heard that the highly-drug resistant germ MRSA causes 94,000 U.S. invasive infections each year, with about 19,000 deaths. Here's what you haven't heard. As I write in the New York Sun, the government is doing practically nothing about it.
Meanwhile it's working mightily and spending the bank on three diseases that have yet to kill a single American and probably never will: Ebola virus, SARS, and avian flu. Federally-funded Ebola and SARS vaccines are in human trials and the government is already stockpiling FDA-approved avian flu vaccine. Yet government-funded MRSA vaccine research is still in mice.
One spending comparison: Congress has specifically earmarked $5.8 billion for avian flu, the threat of which continually recedes. Yet, although the CDC lists in addition to MRSA 8 important diseases connected to antibiotic resistance, the total annual budget for these is merely $221 million.
I conclude: "We need a government that pays more attention to medical statistics than to headlines. The one we have now is killing us."
November 8, 2007 12:26 PM · Permalink
Another blow against anti-vaccine hysteria -- or is it?
By Michael Fumento
The vaccine preservative thimerosal has jumped the safety hurdle. Again. So indicates the Sept. 27, 2007 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. But as I write in my TCS Daily piece, "again" is the problem. One huge study after another has cleared thimerosal as a cause of child developmental disorders, but there is a powerful lobby that couldn't care less.
 | You can see why Jenny
McCarthy is treated as an expert
on childhood vaccines and autism. |
There are over 150 anti-vaccine web sites. None will disappear as a result of the new findings. After all, who cares what a multitude of huge epidemiological studies from all over the world say when former Playboy Playmate Jenny McCarthy, with her 38 C IQ, claims on Oprah and in the new book she's hawking that her son got autism from a vaccine?
The major problem with this hysteria? It scares parents away from vaccination programs, even mandatory ones. And only mandatory programs can confer "herd immunity," meaning that immunization rates in the wider population are high enough (for example, 85 percent for diphtheria) to protect those not immunized.
Those who encourage parents to avoid vaccinating their kids are telling them to become free riders, relying on those parents who do vaccinate. But if enough people try to free ride, then herd immunity is lost and what follows is the return of childhood diseases we hardly think about anymore. Diseases like pertussis have made comebacks in countries as diverse as Australia, Japan, and Sweden after anti-vaccinationist scares.
Better known as "whooping cough," pertussis is a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes uncontrollable, violent coughing. Pertussis cases went from fewer than 8,000 in the U.S. in 2001 to over 25,000 in 2005.
Reaching parents who have already been practically brain-washed is hard, but for the sake of our children we must do so.
October 24, 2007 02:25 PM · Permalink
The case against HPV vaccine mandates
By Michael Fumento
To hear the politicians say it, Merck's new HPV vaccine is the greatest health advance since penicillin. Hence, like Polio shots, it should be mandatory for all 11 to 12-year-old girls. Only those "nut cases" on the religious right could oppose a miracle like this, right? Wrong. Indeed, as I write in The Weekly Standard some of those politicians and allegedly neutral groups lobbying them are being paid off by Merck. The reality is that this vaccine provides protection 70% of the time against the HPV strains that causes about 1 in 75 U.S. female cancer deaths a year. Moreover the incidence and death rate of that cancer, that of the cervix, has been steadily dropping for decades. It also takes about 30 years on average for those few HPV infections that do cause cancer to reach the point where they are life-threatening, during which time all of those women should be receiving regular Pap smears that would catch the cancer from HPV - or other causes - in its tracks. Yet for this we're going to mandate a series of three injections costing $360 total? And we're in such a hurry to do it that we can't wait for the almost inevitable approval of a competitor vaccine later this year? Hey, you can't blame Merck for trying - but you can blame our elected officials.
March 4, 2007 07:59 PM · Permalink
Bad News for Vaccination Conspiracy Mongers
By Michael Fumento
The only serious harm associated with the mumps-measles-rubella (MMR) vaccine is the risk to the health of children who don't receive it, an international team of investigators announced today.
"In particular we conclude that all the major unintended events, such as triggering Crohn's disease or autism, were suspected on the basis of unreliable evidence," said Vittorio Demicheli, M.D., of the Servizo Sovrazonale di Epidemiologia here and his colleagues in a systematic review from the Cochrane Collaboration. The Cochrane Collaboration is an international non-profit and independent organization, dedicated to making up-to-date, accurate information about the effects of healthcare readily available worldwide. It produces systematic reviews of healthcare interventions that are considered the gold standard in the business.
On the other hand, said the Cochrane group, "Mumps, measles and rubella are serious diseases that can lead to potentially fatal illness, disability and death."
As I wrote early last year, the idiocy over autism and the MMR probably wouldn't exist but for a tiny yet massively-publicized British study that turned out to have been paid for by trial lawyers who -- you got it -- were suing vaccine makers. In fact, some of the children in the study were their clients! When the news got out, the chief author was fired (he now works for the vaccine conspiracy nuts), the medical journal disavowed the study, and the co-authors also disavowed their participation. None of which mattered a bit to the conspiracy-theorists, who prize "real life" X-Files episodes over children's health and blasted me with more hate mail than I'd received on any subject to date.
November 1, 2005 01:52 PM · Permalink
Vaccines and the luck o' the Amish
By Michael Fumento
After I wrote recently about the lack of evidence connecting childhood vaccines preserved with thimerosal to autism, here and here, I received a slew of nasty letters from angry parents. Several cited "studies" showing that while the autism rate is 1 in 166 among the general public, there is no autism among the Amish who refuse vaccinations. Actually not all Amish do refuse vaccinations and there were no such studies. That assertion came from a single UPI story in which reporter Dan Olmsted pretended to have done his own survey. Muy scientifico. In the event, an Amish community has now suffered from the first U.S. polio outbreak in five years. That's what you get from not vaccinating your kids.
October 14, 2005 06:07 PM · Permalink
Vaccine fearmongering and "intellectual prostitution"
By Michael Fumento
Mark Sircus, head of something called the International Medical Veritas Association, needs to learn a bit about the meaning of "Veritas." In a commentary titled "Intellectual Prostitution," he calls a whore anybody who disagrees with the proposition that childhood vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal (half of which is ethyl mercury) cause autism. They're all on the take; that's the only possible explanation for their positions no matter how authoritative and detailed their arguments may be. I am one of the named prostitutes. Commenting on a column of mine that appeared in Townhall and another piece in the Wall Street Journal, our three-ring Sircus says, "Mr. Fumento's [sic], of the Hudson Institute, recently published essays on thimerosal, [which] like many of the others, were bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical industry so one should read his and many of the current articles proclaiming the safety of known poisons with salt."
Does he have the least evidence that I was actually paid? No. It's supposed to be guilt by association, but it turns out to not even fit that.
"When it comes to the Thimerosal [sic] debate and Fumento's opinion it is not a coincidence that the Hudson Institute [where I'm a senior fellow] is based in Indianapolis, home of Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant that holds the patent on Thimerosal [sic]," he writes. He also ties Dan Quayle and former OMB Director Mitch Daniels to both Lilly and Hudson.
Aside from not being able to spell "thimerosal," Sircus seems ignorant that Lilly patented the preservative in 1930 and therefore must have its rights half a century ago. Hudson is not based in Indy, but Washington, D.C. It moved a year ago, which is to say a year before I wrote my pieces. Hudson formerly received major funding not from Lilly the pharmaceutical company but from the Lilly Endowment, which truly has a Chinese wall between it and its drug company donors. In any event, the Endowment focuses heavily on Indiana projects and stopped funding Hudson when it moved.
But this isn't to say Sircus knows nothing about intellectual prostition. He makes his living running a clinic in Brazil that uses "chelation therapy," a fraud denounced by many medical organizations. Far from extracting "toxins" as claimed it merely extracts green material from the pockets of gullible parents of autistic children (and sufferers of countless other illnesses). It is the money trail behind the "vaccines cause autism" hysteria, the conspiracy behind the conspiracy theory if you will.
July 10, 2005 08:17 PM · Permalink
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