The View of Jenny McCarthy

Jenny McCarthy, well known to those following anti-vaccine issues, is vying for a full-time position on ABC's The View in light of departing hosts.  Ms. McCarthy should not be given a platform that can potentially legitimise her and garner a wider audience to spread her anti-vaccine propaganda as Phil Plait writes about.  But even more insidious than her anti-vaccine activities, which she has tried to back away from in an attempt to re-vamp her failing image, is her role as organiser, spokesperson and sponsor of AutismOne.

AutismOne is the crank conference for all manner of quack "cures", "treatments" and "causes" (namely vaccines) for autism spectrum disorders.  The speakers and nostrums being touted at AutismOne are nothing short of child abuse of special needs children.  I have compiled a short list of the most notable "doctors" who Ms. McCarthy signs on to present at AutismOne year after year:

Andrew Wakefield has been named by TIME magazine, one of the great science frauds.  Dr. Wakefield has been struck of the UK's General Medical Council (analogous to the U.S.'s American Medical Association) for over 40 counts of unethical behaviours regarding his treatment of special needs children and others. Dr. Wakefield has also committed fraud regarding his findings that autism was caused by the MMR vaccine by fabricating data.  These studies were subsequently retracted.

Arthur Krigsman is a gastroenterologist who supports Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent science regarding MMR and autism.  He has been disciplined in numerous states for his own unethical behaviour.

Anjum Usman is being sued along with Dr. Dan Rossignol by a parent of an autistic child for unethical medical treatment of his child with chelation.  Dr. Rossignol didn't even examine the child yet prescribed chelation based upon bogus tests performed by Dr. Usman.  The father charges that his child has suffered harm as a result.  Illinois regulators are also seeking charges against Dr. Usman for, "“unprofessional, unethical and/or dishonorable conduct.”

Jeffrey Bradstreet has been lambasted by OAP Special Masters for his unethical and unsubstantiated treatment of autistic children with dangerous and unproven therapies including chelation, HBOT and potent prescription medications. Dr. Bradstreet also recommends exorcism for the "treatment" of autism.  Additionally, Dr. Bradstreet recommends stem cell therapy which is a potentially dangerous and completely untested therapy for autism.  Dr. Bradstreet even recommends unscrupulous, unregulated off-shore clinics.  Dr. Bradstreet also recommends "fecal transplants" for autistic children which is every bit as dreadful as it sounds.  Dr. Bradstreet tries to medicalise the procedure and provides instructions for laypeople, however parents' "biomed" discussion boards convey do-it-yourself "fecal transplants" based upon Dr. Bradstreet's advice that don't involve "donor" testing and amount to having a family member defecate in a bucket, mix it with some water, put the faecal slurry in a pastry bag and force the contents into the rectum of the autistic child.

Dr. Mark Geier and his son David Geier regularly present at AutismOne conferences.  Dr. Mark Geier's medical licence has been either suspended or revoked in all thirteen states he was licensed.   Additional charges against Dr. Geier are pending.  David Geier has been charged with practising medicine without a license.  The reason that the Geier's have faced these charges is for using a powerful chemical-castration drug, Lupron in larger-than-adult-doses on autistic children and then chelating them.  This practise is extremely dangerous, cruel and has no medical basis whatsoever.  The Geier's also justify their use of Lupron to insurance companies by coding for "precocious puberty" even in teenage patients.  A fuller explanation of the Geier's gruesome experimentation on autistic children can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Geier and here: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-05-21/news/chi-autism-lupron-geiers-may21_1_vaccines-and-autism-mark-geier-autism-research

Mayer Eisenstein has also had actions brought against him for insurance fraud and several civil malpractice and fraud suits; this is just one of the doctors that work for Eisenstein.   Dr. Eisenstein proudly announces his anti-vaccine stance and is in business with the Geier's injecting autistic children with Lupron and chelating them.  Dr. Eisenstein is a regular fixture of AutismOne.

Kerri Rivera was a speaker at AutismOne this year and last year and presented her "cure" of autism with Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS) which is an industrial bleach.  Ms. Rivera is not a doctor and promotes the use of MMS as an enema, drink and bath to "cure" autism ( http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/bleaching-away-what-ails-you/ ).  Jenny McCarthy through AutismOne gave this woman a stage to disseminate this repulsive "treatment" to parents of autistic children who are desperate and vulnerable.  MMS has been banned in numerous countries and the FDA has issued a warning against it.

I urge you to write to ABC here and/or please sign the Change.org petition to let ABC know just who they are courting for one of their shows.   For the sake of brevity, you can link to this post to highlight Ms. McCarthy's dissemination of abusive "treatments" of special needs children.

Meanwhile, measles break out in the Dutch Bible Belt...

The Netherlands do have a "Bible belt" - an area which has a high density of fundamentalist protestants, characterised by their vaccine refusal (and a generally conservative attitude amongst the very liberal Dutch). This has, over the years, given rise to serious outbreaks of vaccine preventable diseases, extending far beyond the belt region. For example, in 1978, a polio outbreak in the Netherlands, totalling over a 100 cases, of which 80 (all unvaccinated) were paralytic and one was fatal, spread to Canada and the United States leading to 14 cases of paralytic polio in unvaccinated Amish, and a further 2 non-paralytic cases in unvaccinated non Mennonite in the area. Apart from the molecular analysis of the virus, showing that the cases were related, the infection chain was also clear:

During the 1978 outbreak, members of the affected religious group traveled from the Netherlands to Canada, where cases subsequently appeared. An Amish family from an Ontario town 15 miles from the affected area moved in late summer 1978 to the Pennsylvania town where the first U.S. Amish case subsequently occurred, in January 1979.

Another polio outbreak struck the area in 1992/3, most of the 71 cases amongst the unvaccinated Bible belt inhabitants. This outbreak also spread to Canada.

In 1999/2000, a measles epidemic struck the Bible belt and neighbouring regions, totalling just under 3300 cases, of which 94% were entirely unvaccinated, and only one patient had had both MMRs. 16% had complications, over 150 were hospitalised, and 3 patients died. Importantly No association was observed between preexisting illness and either reason for admission (P = 0.5) or residual symptoms at discharge (P = 0.5) contradicting the notion that measles are a generally "harmless" disease in "healthy" children.

More recently, in 2004/5, rubella (the "r" in the MMR) swept through in the Bible belt, also spreading to Canada. The consequences were devastating:

In The Netherlands and Canada, 387 and 309 rubella cases were reported, respectively. Of these, 97% were in unvaccinated individuals of orthodox protestant denomination. Reported consequences of rubella in pregnancy were 2 fetal deaths and 14 infants with congenital infection. Of the latter, 11 had clinical defects including deafness in all but eye defects in none. 

The reason should be crystal clear - low vaccination uptake. The Dutch equivalent of the CDC, the RIVM publishes the numbers in handy maps - see the MMR vaccination coverage in the 1998 cohort (as school children, the baby chart was not available) vs measles cases:

The darker, the bad

Now, 13 years after the last big outbreak (enough time for the next generation of unvaccinated Bible belters), the next outbreak has started, with one protestant primary school boasting an impressive 1 in 5 pupils infected:

the "belt" even more visible in infant vaccination gaps

This is an impressive illustration how vaccine refusal (in religious and quasi-religious groupings) leads to large national and international disease outbreaks, causing significant illness, disability and death. These communities effective provide CPR to diseases that should have long been eradicated by providing a "renewable" population of susceptible individuals. Since it may not be possible to change the attitude of certain groups, it is even more important to uphold vaccination coverage around them, to reduce the potential for spread as much as possible.

Micha is dead

13 years after catching measles from an unvaccinated pre-teen in his pediatrician's waiting room and almost 9 years after the onset of SSPE, Micha has passed away. My heart goes out to his parents, Oxana and Peter, to his three brothers and to the countless people who loved Micha and whose hearts he touched!

ETA: you may leave condolences. I will not tolerate discussion in this thread.

Insolent demands and reality

There is a measles outbreak in Wales. 1181 cases of measles have been reported since 1 November 2012. Quite impressive for a small country (Wales has about 3 million inhabitants). Public Health Wales have done a stellar job in reporting numbers, breaking them down into the different Welsh regions and they run a Facebook page on which you can ask questions and will get them answered. Countless weekend and in-school clinics were run to get the Welsh youth protected (a lot of teens did not get their MMRs/or MMR booster in the wake of Wakefield's manufactuversy).

Despite PHW's fabulous work, the pro-disease faction have been up in arms. First of all, they abused the fact that not all cases were laboratory confirmed to claim that there is no outbreak, it is fabricated, all to cause panic to increase vaccine uptake (like good vaccination uptake was a bad thing). Never mind that laboratory confirmed cases are catching up with the reported numbers (like they should, those tests take some time to come back); that is part of the conspiracy, too (lowers voice "they noticed that numbers don't match, so they are making new numbers up" - really).

Equally suspicious, according to the anti-vaccine-critical, is that the vaccination status of reported cases is not reported in real time. PHW quite clearly stated on their web site that they'll publish a full report after the outbreak:

and explained on their Facebook page (multiple times) which cases were tested:

many anti-vaccine posters still insist that the delayed publication of numbers was fishy (after all, GPs should know whether their patient has been vaccinated or not) and continually allege that real time reporting was somehow important for their decision.

I call bullshit - there is nothing unique about the Wales outbreak. Last year, just north east of Wales, the Merseyside measles outbreak saw 359 confirmed measles cases, of which, not surprisingly, only 12 (3.3%) had received 2 MMRs. Those hugely relevant numbers (the two outbreaks within a year and 150 miles of each other) are convincing truly hesitant parents:

Meanwhile, I received the following letter from my Health Board:

It seems that although we have been registered with the same GP for many years, and said GP should have all of our children's vaccination records, and I have in writing that they are up to date, their Child Health System has our son down as "not [having] completed the full course of 2 doses of MMR". Obviously, ascertaining vaccine coverage is not quite as trivial as some think.

Thank you PHW for checking before publishing data on vaccine coverage without verification.

Now if you or your child really have not had 2 MMRs - go get them now. MMR is highly effective in protecting you and your loved ones from measles.

Bad Times for Australian Anti-Vaxxers

Meryl Dorey of the Australian anti-vaxx group (although they hate being called that) Australian Vaccination Network or AVN has lost her bid to silence some of her critics via Apprehended Violence Orders (AVO).  Ms. Dorey sought AVOs against Peter Bowditch, founder of the Millenium Project, Daniel Raffaele, founder of the Stop the AVN Facebook page and Daniel Buzzard, a sceptical blogger and outspoken opponent of Meryl Dorey and the AVN.  Ms. Dorey's AVO petition against Mr. Bowditch was thrown out and apparently she cried about it.

But she suffered a setback last month when her AVO was thrown out against one critic, Peter Bowditch, who she claimed posted harassing and abusive messages online.

Unfortunately, Dan Raffaele agreed to the order for lack of will to fight it:

Mr Raffaele, who denied making any threatening calls, said he eventually agreed to the order because he was "sick of dealing with it", although he made sure her "gag order" was struck out.
"The only thing I was never going to agree to was being silenced on the internet," Mr Raffaele said. "The information (the AVN) spread is dangerous and it's not based on anything other than lies - and it costs lives."

All Ms. Dorey succeeded in doing was ensuring that Mr. Raffaele wasn't doing to begin with, which was personally harassing her.  She couldn't silence him though.

Mr. Buzzard is defending his complaint:

Western Australia-based Dan Buzzard, another AVN opponent, said Ms Dorey probably saw taking out the AVOs as a "quick and easy" way to silence her critics.

He will defend the application today.

It is obvious that Ms. Dorey is abusing the laws of her land to silence her critics, a play out of the book that other anti-vaccinationists have done because they want to spread their fear and lies uncontested.  Barbara Loe Fisher, Meryl Dorey's American counterpart and head of the also misleadingly named National Vaccination Information Network (NVIC) tried to sue one of her critics Dr. Paul Offit. The suit was dismissed before even being heard and she whined miserably about it.  JB Handley also tried to sue Dr. Offit and was unsuccessful (correction for the actual settlement here).

We wish Mr. Buzzard defeat over Ms. Dorey's frivolous complaint and hopes she cries again.

But that is not all. New South Wales (NSW), Australia's legislation is submitting a bill that would prevent unvaccinated children from entering pre-school and childcare centres.

Labor leader John Robertson will introduce amendments to the public health act which would give early childhood centres the right to refuse kids who haven't had their shots.

The move comes amid concern about high rates of unvaccinated children in some parts of
 NSW as well as the emergence of so-called "anti-vaxxers" who refuse vaccination.

Some parts of NSW had lower vaccination rates than Rwanda, Mr Robertson said.

In other words, no jabs-no school.  Congratulations AVN!  And another inadvertent action due to Meryl Dorey and her misnamed AVN is the unanimous denunciation of Meryl Dorey by parliament and her deceptive work along with greater scrutiny of dubious healthcare practitioners.  Keep up the great work Meryl, you're your own worst enemy.

Fear mongering and responsibilties - UK private vaccine clinic fuels MMR fears

Wales is currently heading the leader board, unfortunately not in a good way (like for rugby), but for measles infections in the Western hemisphere. Since February, Wales has had nearly 900 reported measles cases, 80 of them hospitalised, and, as feared, now the first suspected death, 25 year old Gareth Colfer-Williams. A lot has been written about responsibility. Obviously, Andrew Wakefield came up as the main culprit, who in turn blamed the government for the outbreak, which they rejected. To be honest, to solely blame Wakefield for the MMR mess would be too much credit to the man. The MMR mess is a media manufactuversy as beautifully summarised by Ben Goldacre. And the greed for the headlines has not stopped, and Wakefield is still given front page coverage by irresponsible papers.

Meanwhile, clinics providing single vaccines for measles and rubella are having a field day. Under the guise of "we are just responding to parental fears" one private provider of single measles vaccines, the Children's Immunisation Clinic (CIC), is advertising their services (£ 50/~US$ 75 registration plus £ 110/US$ 165) playing on the MMR-autism lie, while making totally untenable claims. This starts off with:

A high percentage of the children we vaccinate also have allergies and excema which indicate they may not have a perfectly functioning immune system – and even so we have no recorded adverse reactions.

Wow - that is impressive. I wonder how they do that, given that the Rouvax for example, one of the vaccines that CIC is offering, has the following adverse effects (my bold):

The most common side effects (in more than 1 in 10 subjects vaccinated) seen in clinical trials were irritability/agitation and rhinopharyngeal catarrh.
Other side effects that occurred in more than 1 in 100 subjects vaccinated in clinical trials were fever >38°C, injection site reaction, rash/cutaneous eruptions, conjunctivitis, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea.

They then post a google link to Hannah Poling:

In October 2008 Hannah Poling an autistic child won a huge payout from a triple vaccine manufacturer, who said that she had a DNA genetic predisposition to become autistic given the MMR vaccine More Info…

 and concluding with this beauty:

In 2009 a Dr Walker in the USA has studied 275 autistic children and found in a large percentage of the cases that these children had the live Measles virus living in their gut after vaccination with the triple MMR .You can see more about this on the Daily Mail online. We do not use the same MMR or Measles virus vaccine in the vaccine we have chosen to use.

At this point already, I know I am never going to entrust my child to this clinic. The Daily Mail as a source for medical information? Honestly? The article they mean is the one previously bemoaned by Liz Ditz to have been posted without time stamp. Everything else is false, too.

Steven Walker's work was presented as a poster at the IMFAR conference in 2006, so no "study", not in 2009 either.

The abstract reports on results of 82 kids, 70 of them supposedly had measles vaccine virus in the gut. They tell us they have samples of >275, but have not analysed them all. Also, we know since Dr Bustin's testimony to the Autism Omnibus proceedings and Hornig et al that measles virus has not and cannot been found in the guts of > 80% of autistic children.

I think this claim "We do not use the same MMR or Measles virus vaccine in the vaccine we have chosen to use" is a lie. We already know that the clinic have not looked at Walker's data, since they misrepresent his findings. There is actually no way the people at the clinic can know what vaccines the children Walker looked at had received, because it is not reported in the abstract and a full paper has not been published since 2006. Given that Arthur Krigsman is the senior author of the abstract and children have been flown to him certainly at least from the UK, it is not clear which measles vaccine strain they had been vaccinated with. The French Rouvax, CIC are offering contains the Schwarz strain, which is also the measles strain used in GSK's Priorix, often used in Europe, the Indian Sii M-Vax, also on offer at CIC contains the Edmonston-Zagreb strain, also contained in the Swiss MMR-Triviraten (Berna) (CIC also import vaccines from China and Russia, if someone knows what vaccine strain is in those, email me).

Now, tell me how you can interpret the above facts and let the clinic appear in a good light. At best, their research was irresponsibly shoddy and they conveniently believed the Daily Mail. At worst, they are intentionally fuelling parental fears to sell their singles with false claims. It gets worse though - on the side bar, on the lower right, the clinic claim:




No Autism in over 10 years and amongst 18000 Patient Record Cards?! That is an outstanding record and it sounds dangerously like a "warranty" (I am not a lawyer, but a lawyer friend of mine pointed this out). Absolutely amazing, especially given that autism/ASD prevalence in the UK has been published to be 1 in 67, so they should be looking at about 282 patients on the spectrum, give or take a few. The reason for their "Clinic Highlight" might be their rather unorthodox method of assessment...  "We [the clinic] ask you [the patient] tell us if you have an adverse reaction within a few days of the vaccine."


They are obviously way out of their depth now, because it is all fine and well to make exaggerated claims when it is "only" about people's money. But now Wales is steering towards breaking the 1000 mark of measles cases (probably by next week), children and young adults are very very sick and one might have died, and the tolerance wears thin. While CIC is still keeping up appearances for the BBC, they seriously lost it in response to a short article in last week's Sunday Times and in the middle of a massive rant (which they really want you to read in its entirety and not quote out of context, so they mention it twice, probably because they know how tedious their rant is) about "offering singles will increase herd immunity" and "not politicising the issue" slip in this paragraph (all typos are [sic]):

9) CIC is not judgmental about parents’ choice of vaccine (any vaccination ,generally ,is better than none) nor does it have any preconceived ideas as to the causes, be they single trigger(s) or perhaps even several different combinations of triggers.
Anecdotally though,  that portion of the parents who tell us their stories , all confirm that there was a dramatic change in behaviour, either with their child ,from their circle of friends , neighbours or work colleagues; and these families make up a significant minority proportion  of our population,
The emotional and financial burden on the family, the limited funding of the UK’s Health sector all point to potential benefit of further timely research into those specific cases which may then be identifiable as being preventable An unencumbered choice for either single or multivalent MMR vaccine options would do less harm  than the current situation of a large portion not willing to engage in any vaccination programme.

Goodness, somebody save them from themselves. CIC are in a hole, they should stop digging. If they wanted to keep up the illusion that they are there "to help" instead of setting up shop in Swansea in the middle of an outbreak and charging full price for their services, maybe they should have offered their singles at cost? Just to maintain the illusion that they weren't hell bent on keeping the MMR autism lie alive for their own business interest? Just an idea.

Big CARma doesn't tell us about boosters

This day has been emotionally exhausting, especially for people in Wales and in the UK in general, so I thought I'd repost something that is not about measles from the brilliant Refutations to Anti-Vaccine Memes, this time taking on the "If your child is vaccinated, why are you worried about them catching anything from my child?" fallacy:

Love it: "when you purchase your first car seat, they don't tell you that boosters are required. Until they make a car sear that lasts a lifetime, I will never buy one". I can just imagine the indignant tone.
Cue someone who points out that car seats are "not injected into the blood stream".