Anti-Vaccine Nonsense on Facebook

An anti-vaxx post is circulating on Facebook that is completely unoriginal but is being disseminated by someone unknown to me and the content is humorously paranoid and wrong.

 This information is by a man who calls himself Dr. Michael Gaeta and fancies himself "a visionary educator, clinician, writer and publisher in the field of natural healthcare." He calls himself doctor, no doubt to pad his credentials but he is really an acupuncturist who "graduated" from a woo college in New York.  There is no recognised profession as "Doctor of Acupuncture" from any accredited institution or recognised organisation.  As such, Mr. Gaeta has not undertaken the requisite studies to allow him to be competent in matters surrounding vaccinology, considerably more complicated and attested than poking needles into "meridians".  Nothing more than a certification squatter really.

Of particular interest with regards to Mr. Gaeta and his "seminars" is his invocation of "an impeccably-credentialed, pro-vaccine PhD immunologist."  Who, of course, "confirmed what I and others have been saying for years."  She can be heard on an audio file but here is the text of her statements:

Q. So the science seems fairly clear that for the first year of life, probably, that the immunization is not stimulating the kind of response we expect it to stimulate.
A. True.
Q. So what’s the rationale for continuing to do that if it’s not doing what it’s supposed to be [doing]?
A. The vaccines are given at pediatric wellness visits, and the idea is that you are training the parent to bring their child in at all the pediatric wellness visits, and that it’s only the year visit that actually is truly important. But that for most parents you are not going to get them to bring their kid in if they don’t come in at two months, four months, and six months. And so it’s actually more of a training thing.
It’s interesting, I was on the phone with [?] county public health last week, with one of their vaccine nurses. She was like, ‘Oh, you’re talking about vaccines? Make sure you tell them they have to do that year shot because the first three [the 2, 4 and 6 month shots] don’t work.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I know.’ [laughter].

This is Mr. Gaeta's summary of her talk:

The first was that it is pointless to administer drugs intended to stimulate antibody production to babies who are too young to produce antibodies. Infants in their first year mostly depend on generalized, non-specific immunity, including (hopefully) immunoglobulins from breast milk, to protect their young bodies from infection. They do not produce antibodies of their own until about age one. Despite this basic fact, the medical establishment insists administering a total of 19 shots, containing 24 vaccines, to infants on the 2, 4 and 6 month pediatric visits (Source: cdc.gov). Somehow, the basic facts of human physiology and development do not apply to vaccines.

Of course it is demonstrably false that,  "So the science seems fairly clear that for the first year of life, probably, that the immunization is not stimulating the kind of response we expect it to stimulate." and , "The first was that it is pointless to administer drugs intended to stimulate antibody production to babies who are too young to produce antibodies. Infants in their first year mostly depend on generalized, non-specific immunity, including (hopefully) immunoglobulins from breast milk, to protect their young bodies from infection. They do not produce antibodies of their own until about age one."

These statements alone should be a glaring tip-off that the speakers don't know what they are talking about.  Mr. Gaeta is an acupuncturist so it is a given he is clueless about immunology and his "impeccably-credentialed, pro-vaccine PhD immunologist" either is not so impeccably-credentialed and/or has tired of languishing in obscurity and ineptness and jumped onto the anti-vaxx bandwagon for attention.  It is demonstrably false that infants don't produce antibodies until one year old.  All a layperson needs to do is look at a package insert for clinical trial summaries on infants less than one year old to see that there is antibody response.

It is well-known, although not to Mr. Gaeta and Mizz Impeccably-Credentialed PhD Immunologist, that:

Neonates develop the capacity to respond to foreign antigens before they are born. B and T cells are present by 14 weeks’ gestation and express an enormous array of antigen-specific receptors.5 Although the fetal immune system has the potential to respond to large numbers of foreign antigens, few foreign antigens are present in utero, and cells of the immune system are, therefore, primarily “naıve” at birth.

That is from: http://www.pediatrics.org/cgi/content/full/109/1/124 One can always look it up the references in the literature for that statement or even look it up in the many textbooks available.  I guess Mizz Impeccably-Credentialed PhD Immunologist slept during that portion of her education.  It is also untrue that paediatric well visits are "to train" parents.  If that is the case then every public health programme in the world is in on this great hoax.  Many infant vaccines are not fully effective until the full series are given, infants are particularly susceptible to complications from some of the vaccine preventable diseases thus are generally given from two to six months old.

Mizz Impeccably-Credentialed PhD Immunologist then invokes a nameless "public health vaccine nurse" in an appeal to authority and popularity.  This somehow induces laughter with the audience of "health professionals" which Mr. Gaeta claims he gives his seminars to.  But a glance at his testimonials reveals that the "health professionals" in attendance are also primarily sCAM practitioners such as chiropractors, naturopaths and nutritionists.  It is no small wonder that such a group would lap up unqualified, completely fallacious statements because they are notoriously anti-vaccine and such claims massages their confirmation bias.

What good is a great vaccine hoax messenger without the whiff of intrigue:

You can listen to an audio file of an exchange between an attendee and the immunologist about this question. She declined to be identified in my presentations, including this post, perhaps because she knows that anyone who speaks the truth about vaccines is savaged by the medical establishment and their compliant lapdogs in the mainstream media. It is professional suicide for anyone in conventional medicine to question the unquestionable (yet unproven) assumptions about vaccines: that they are effective, safe and necessary. I have stopped lecturing publicly on this subject for the same reason, because the attacks in recent years have become particularly vicious; and because my main message in my teachings is about personal responsibility, innate wholeness and opening to the largeness of who we are, not just vaccines.

I guess it has become fashionable to be persecuted by The Man™ and lends believability to the poor down-trodden speaker-of-the-truth.  But no, Mr. Gaeta and Mizz  Impeccably-Credentialed PhD Immunologist are free to make fools of themselves in any venue that will have them without any fear of retribution from the New World Order.

Of course it won't go unnoticed the response to this tosh that Dr. Bob Sears had:

This is interesting info. I agree that the general medical teaching on immunology is that infants don’t have much of their own immune system during the first year of life, and they rely heavily on the immunity they gain from mom through th...e placenta and from breastmilk. I don’t know whether babies actually don’t make ANY antibodies during this time, OR if they simply have a lower capability to do so. This immunologist seems to say that they don’t make any? My understanding is that it isn’t that they don’t have any immune system or can’t make any antibodies, but rather that these abilities are immature and lower than what it will eventually be, but that there is still some capability there.
What seems to contradict what this immunologist is saying is that the vaccine product inserts do provide data on antibody responses to vaccines, showing that infants do generate antibodies in response to the vaccines, and that the response increases after each dose.
Do you know if this immunologist addresses that specific issue? I’d be curious.

He almost gets it right but blunders with, " I agree that the general medical teaching on immunology is that infants don’t have much of their own immune system during the first year of life, and they rely heavily on the immunity they gain from mom through the placenta and from breastmilk."  What is so profoundly laughable, if not frightening about his response is that he wrote two books about paediatric vaccines and touts himself as a "vaccine expert" and doesn't really know how to answer the question.  I attribute this to part incompetence and part insecurity to disagree with a fellow anti-vaxxer.  It is a fringe science variant of "honour among thieves" and to quote Dr. James Laidler,  "Utter nonsense treated like scientific data, people nodding in sage agreement with blatant contradictions, and theories made out of thin air and unrelated facts—"

Dr. Bob is Really Only Doing it for the Worried Parents

not because of any own concerns over vaccine safety. The Sears' website has been modified again, and here is Dr. Bob himself, explaining the origin of his alternative vaccination schedule. It is really all about parental concerns (not about his own flirtations with the anti-vaccine crowd, or the fact that his "alternative" schedule almost doubles the number of office visits for vaccine purposes at $75 to $200 dollar a pop). Good to know, right?

Immunity

I came across this on Ratbags.com - a very short movie by Jasmine Marosvary - this made me think of Nelyn. I met his mum Lynne on ivillage some years ago. The first mother my age, who had lost a child to a vaccine preventable disease. Lynne was lobbying for the licensing of pertussis vaccine for adults, which has since happened. Vaccination saves lives:

And another SSPE case: Angelina is dying

I had seen girl previously on a board, but the parents had not gone public until now, after Natalie's death.

Angelina caught measles in 2006 from an adult, when she was 7 months old. She recovered well - this is her before SSPE broke out:



This is her now:



Gina, Angelina's mum says (my translation):

"In February of this year, we noticed pronounced problems with our daughter. She kept falling off her bike, and had speech blockades. When this was getting worse, we went to the clinic. The diagnosis SSPE was a shock for us. Our child became dependent on care within 8 weeks. She cannot walk nor speak and needs to be tube fed. She would have entered school this year. This blow of fate is very hard for us all."

According to Sean Monks, spokesperson of the German Association of Pediatricians, this is the third case of SSPE from measles infection in infants in 2006 - in 2006 a total of 313 infants with measles were reported to the RKI (German CDC equivalent) in Berlin. One of these children died in 2007, another has been suffering from SSPE since 2009, and now Angelina is the third victim from that year.

Importantly, this shows that the risk of SSPE is much higher than previously thought. Overall risk for SSPE had recently been adjusted to about 1 in 11'000 notified cases of all ages, and "at least" 1 in 2'000 for infants (German pdf). From 2005 to 2010, 27 patients died of SSPE in Germany, although measles incidence had been sinking to reported numbers under 2000/year for some time. The current cluster of SSPE cases indicates that the risk of SSPE for infants who contract measles lies closer to 1 in 200.

Research has not yet identified the causative mutation for SSPE (see for example here) nor found strains with a particularly high risk of causing SSPE which could explain this high incidence. What is clear is that all cases in which measles virus has been amplified from the brain of SSPE victims, it was the wild type rather than the vaccine virus, and that with increasing vaccination coverage, SSPE incidence sank (see for example here and here, for review here).

The only way to prevent more SSPE cases is to vaccinate your child against measles (2xMMR) and to check your own immunity if you are unsure of your history of measles/measles vaccination. Your immunity protects those too young or too sick to be vaccinated. Your decision not to vaccine could cost lives, not necessarily yours.

Testing Anthrax vaccines in children?!

I came across this piece in the Washington Post today:

Possible study of anthrax vaccine’s effectiveness in children stirs debate

Apparently, a "key working group of federal advisers" endorsed testing in September, to see whether the anthrax vaccine would safely protect healthy children against a bioterrorism attack.

What bioterrorism attack? The possibility of the use of anthrax by (foreign) terrorists was one of the fears addressed post 9/11. However, the only documented use of anthrax in the United States with the intention to harm in the past 10 years happened a week after the 9/11 attacks, when "letters containing anthrax spores arrived at several media offices and two Senate offices, killing five people and sickening 17 others. The FBI eventually concluded that the letters were mailed by Bruce Ivins, a disgruntled scientist at Fort Detrick in Maryland who committed suicide in 2008, although some experts question the FBI’s findings."

As a consequence of the anthrax bioterrorism fears, 2.6 million US military personnel were vaccinated with the anthrax vaccine, and the federal government has spent $1.1 billion to stockpile the vaccine to protect Americans in the event of an attack. This is in addition to treatment option by antibiotics.

The Washington Post reports:

Unlike with measles, mumps and other diseases, the chance that children will be exposed to anthrax is theoretical, making the risk-benefit calculus of testing a vaccine on them much more questionable.

“It’s hard to believe that it’s something that makes a great deal of sense,” said Joel Frader, a pediatrician and bioethicist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “It would be difficult to justify testing it on kids simply on the hypothetical possibility that there might be an attack.”

In addition to these ethical considerations, I have several other concerns, this paper sums one up well:

In response to the attacks on Sept 11, 2001 (9/11), and the related security concerns, the USA and its coalition partners began a war in Afghanistan and subsequently invaded Iraq. The wars caused many deaths of non-combatant civilians, further damaged the health-supporting infrastructure and the environment (already adversely affected by previous wars), forced many people to migrate, led to violations of human rights, and diverted resources away from important health needs. After 9/11 and the anthrax outbreak shortly afterwards, the USA and other countries have improved emergency preparedness and response capabilities, but these actions have often diverted attention and resources from more urgent health issues. The documentation and dissemination of information about the adverse health effects of these wars and about the diversion of resources could help to mitigate these consequences and prevent their recurrence.

Given the publicly available data, there is only a "theoretical" anthrax threat to US children. The current disease burden for them, for all we know, is zero. Anthrax vaccine trials and/or general vaccination programmes for children would be a very hard sell to the general public and would significantly support anti-vaccine sentiments. Ultimately, it would detract funds from essential health care research and provision in areas of actual need (i.e. where a measurable disease risk and burden exists), and it may erode vaccination compliance for the essential childhood vaccinations (measles, anyone? Pertussis?).

Follow up on my post about Natalie and SSPE

There were two reactions to my post about Natalie's entirely preventable death from SSPE that I had put up yesterday.

One that invariably came from pro-vaccine minded parents, which was "oh, how horrible, the poor child/parents" and sometimes included "can we go after those vaccine-refusing parents"

and one that invariably came from anti-vaccine minded parents, which was "oh, how horrible, how can you call our children potential murder weapons" and sometimes included "you must be paid to post this" pharmashill accusations.

So here are some clarifications:

I don't know much about the parents who took their unvaccinated 11 year old to that pediatrician's practice. I can say with some conviction that neither Andrew Wakefield nor Jenny McCarthy had anything to do with their decision, since this happened in Germany in 1999 and their son was 11 then, so their anti-vaccine decision must have happened 10 years earlier, when neither Wakefield nor McCarthy were a topic (and they never really became one in Germany anyway). We don't know what made them not vaccinate. I am pretty sure they did not intend this to happen.

There is no provision to sue these parents in German law. The new Infektionenschutzgesetz was passed after this all got started and it only regulates intentional transmission of reportable infectious diseases. I think it would be very difficult to prove intent here. Also, I don't know about Natalie's parents, but Micha's family are devout Christians. While they are obviously sad and burdened, they do not seek punishment for that other family.

I posted a link to this blog on Mumsnet and that caused quite an upheaval amongst non-vaccinating parents. There was a lot of profanity (seemingly caused by the -wrong- assumption that I was addressing people directly, while being fully aware of the children's medical histories), but I am accepting this:

A lot of non-vaccinating parents made their decision after careful thought and deliberation with their health professional. They are aware of the risks of their non-vaccine decision and they are not necessarily comfortable with those risks. However, for them, the risks of not vaccinating outweighs the risks of vaccinating their children. To be told that they are turning their kids into potential murder weapons and to scare them with what is certainly a) a very unlikely and b) the most catastrophic outcome of a family not vaccinating deals them an unfair blow and it is not really helpful. This was not my intention and I have apologised to one mum there and hereby do to any parent in the above situation here.

That said: if you are thinking about not vaccinating your child and you are currently weighing the pros and cons: have a look at my previous blog and previous post on this situation and weigh this into your decision.

So predictable - so sad, Natalie dies of SSPE

We had previously reported the case of Natalie, one of the children who contracted measles from an unvaccinated preteen in their pediatrician's practice in 2000. Natalie was 11 months old at the time. She came down with SSPE in 2007 (that is actually the average time lag between measles infection in infancy and the development of this fatal measles complication), she deteriorated, fell into a "wake coma" and now passed away due to organ failure.




Micha, one of the other babies infected by the same 11 year old is still dying... Measles vaccination and the resulting herd immunity for babies saves lives. Vaccine refusers turn their children into potential murder weapons.