Mark Hansen wrote:

clocker bob wrote:

wood goblin wrote:And as far as parents determining an acceptable level of risk: what do you think about the global effort to eliminate polio, as we did with smallpox several decades ago? We are damn close to eliminiating this debilitating disease. Do you know where it still exists? It exits in the pockets of the world that either lack access to vaccines or have refused them.

The history of the polio vaccine does not prove or disprove the safety of Thimerosal in vaccines. Typical ploy by you. It's like using the victory at Normandy to say that the Iraq War is noble and just.

Bob, why would you read this as anything other than a couple of examples of situations where vaccines have had proven benefits?

Can you read? If I had started a thread with the title "All Vaccines Are Bad", then I would be happy to read positive reporting on any and all vaccines. I didn't start that thread, did I? I started a thread that argued that a link exists between Thimerosal and autism. Do you see polio fitting anywhere into that argument? The history of the polio vaccine is not pertinent to the debate over vaccines and autism. Wood Goblin is suggesting that because the polio vaccine has an acceptable level of risk , then any vaccine offered to us with government approval should not be scrutinized. That's dumb. Every vaccine is different, number one, and number two, we aren't even arguing about the medicinal part of the vaccines, we're arguing about mercury used as a preservative in the vaccines.

wood goblin wrote:Why does Wood Goblin's familiarity with and knowledge of the literature and studies involving vaccines count against him?

Count against him? Where did I say that? I said that he is not the final arbiter of what is or isn't worthwhile research regarding vaccines and autism, which is a good thing, because he makes baseless smears against anyone who isn't on the Big Pharm-approved roster of researchers and doctors. Wood Goblin is a bitter egomaniac who thinks that he should be able to end the vaccine=autism thread, mostly with bluster, lies and biased dismissals of any evidence he doesn't personally like. He's a thread fascist. It burns him up that he can't be the unimpeachable authority he thinks he is. He can keep slamming his gavel down until his arm falls off. I don't hear it.

wood goblin wrote:Are you saying someone with no background in any of this stuff is a better judge of the findings than someone who has no such background?

He's one person. If you want to line up behind whatever he says and take it as gospel, knock yourself out. I'll make up my own mind.

.[/quote]

Although I promised to drop this thread, I should specify that my background is publishing, and I work on the publishing end--not the research end--of a medical journal. I certainly have better access to and understanding of medical literature than most people, but I'm not a scientist.[/quote]


How can anyone be so niave as to believe everything in a medical journal when a good part of their revenue is from drug companies?http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/332/7555/1444

A friend of my family is a neuroscientist and she was involved in an anitdepressant drug trial at my local university. She said that as soon as the volunteers got side-effects they didn't like they were DROPPED from the study. She said the amount of corruption in the industry would shock people if they knew.

So forgive me if I don't buy into all those "damage contol" studies on autism.

As far as your kids protecting mine - I think its incredily arrogant of you to think such a thing but it IS a prevailing belief out there. Are YOU up to date in all your shots? I mean people are so quick to blame unvaccinated kids but what about all the adults who have neither natural immunity nor are up to date on shots.

And if the vaccines work so well you have nothing to worry about. Personally I have done my research on the diseases and you will find most unvaxing parents are not so naive as to think their children will not get the normal diseases of childhood that my parents and grandparents got. If you do your research you will find there is far less to fear than you think. The medical textbooks change their descriptions of disease before and after a vaccine is available. I will try and find an example. I am not denying that the diseases can be devastating for children in third world countries, in poor and malnourished children, and immune compromised children. Not usually in healthy kids.

Furthermore, each time a new vaccine comes out there is a rise in other *new* diseases. Such as Hib. Also, here in Australia since the meningoccol C vaccine came out, there has been a corresponding rise in meningoccocal B cases. So what do we gain, really?

As for polio the epidemic, as i understand it was the first in history and it was at a time of post-war malnutrition. I have also read it had something to do with DDT exposure; and declined as DDT was phased out. http://www.whale.to/vaccine/polio4.html
It is also associated with all the tosillectomy that went on on that era.

Polio was mostly on its way out here is Australia well before the vaccine. 95% of people with the polio virus have mild symptoms or are asymptomatic. Perhaps the money would be better spent on discovering WHY 5% die or develop paralysis.

Whoever discredited the guy who wrote about antibody titres. Well who cares about his background so much as the content of his discussion? Even immunologists say no-one understands the complexities of the immune system so its fair to say there is probably more to it than antibody titres.

As far as Mercola goes, no not everyone likes him. I admire his critical thinking of the medical establishment and its unholy alliance with drug companies. I don't like the way he tries to sell things but I do like the information on his webiste.

BTW, if every thing in my post is "nonsense" and "flat-out wrong" I would like to know why. I have read around 500 hours on this stuff since my youngest was born - and that is on both sides of the fence. My doctor certainly couldn't answer many of my questions. But please enlighten me!

Wood Goblin wrote: I should specify that my background is publishing, and I work on the publishing end--not the research end--of a medical journal.

And certainly, more of your salary can be traced back to pharmaceutical companies and corporate medicine than most people, other than people directly employed by a pharmaceutical company or by corporate medicine.

And the conflicts of interest go way beyond obedience to advertisers. It's outright fraud on occasion.

observer UK, 12-7-2003 wrote:Revealed: how drug firms 'hoodwink' medical journals

Pharmaceutical giants hire ghostwriters to produce articles - then put doctors' names on them

Hundreds of articles in medical journals claiming to be written by academics or doctors have been penned by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies, an Observer inquiry reveals.

The journals, bibles of the profession, have huge influence on which drugs doctors prescribe and the treatment hospitals provide. But The Observer has uncovered evidence that many articles written by so-called independent academics may have been penned by writers working for agencies which receive huge sums from drug companies to plug their products.

Estimates suggest that almost half of all articles published in journals are by ghostwriters. While doctors who have put their names to the papers can be paid handsomely for 'lending' their reputations, the ghostwriters remain hidden. They, and the involvement of the pharmaceutical firms, are rarely revealed.

These papers endorsing certain drugs are paraded in front of GPs as independent research to persuade them to prescribe the drugs.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/ ... 80,00.html

Oh, and Woodgoblin, before you accuse me of taking advantage of the risk your son has been through..my eldest daughter developed febrile convulsions and behavioural issues after her MMR shot. Thankfully, this has resolved, though if I had continued vaccinating it may not have (or gotten worse).

I will not take that risk with my younger daughter; nor any other children I have. Especially after all I have learned. It is said "we have to lose some soldiers in the fight against disease" - well my children will not be going to that war.

Also, I would not conclude that your son has escaped any risk. How do you know any later health problems he may have are not a result of his vaccines?

I repeat, until the LONG TERM studies comparing the vaccinated and unvaccinated children are done (independantly) I have no reason to think that vaccines are as safe as we are told. Where are all these new childhood chronic diseases coming from? They weren't around when my parents were young. You say I cannot prove anything - well can you *disprove* a link?

Do you know that when Japan raised their vaccination age to 2 years; their child mortality rate dropped dramatically? From 17th to 1st place?

http://www.vaccination.inoz.com/jsids.html

clocker bob wrote:

Wood Goblin wrote:
This is incredibly ill-informed nonsense. The long-term safety of vaccines has been well established.Seriously, nearly every sentence of your post is flat-out wrong.

The long term safety of vaccines has not been established. To make such a broadbrush statement about *all* vaccines only establishes that your bias knows no bounds. The long-term safety of the Thimerosal preservative in vaccines cannot *possibly* be established, because there is still vaccination stock that contains it, and only a couple of years have passed since new vaccines without mercury have been used. You totally lie about how long it takes to measure the effects of removing mercury from vaccines.

Wood Goblin wrote:If your kids don't get sick, it's because they're being protected by the herd immunity offered by my son.

What a Bizarro World statement. And a really vicious insinuation, too. You are unable to accept that individual parents have the right to research vaccines and to decide for themselves whether they will risk them for their kids. You think you deserve to present yourself as some kind of hero for being a robot who says 'Yes, Master' to every needle pointed at your kid?? It's sick for you to lash out at others with open minds, even insinuating that *your* kid's vaccination is what is keeping their kids safe. You psycho. You are so angry that other kids may follow a different vaccine schedule that you think your kid's vaccination deserves the credit for their health?! Maybe the fucking different vaccine schedule might deserve some credit for those other kids' good health!

Thank you, Bob. I also think this is quite amusing in the light of the fact that my daughter's friend started a case of chicken pox at her school because she got it FROM THE VACCINE.

Also RE thimerosal, I understand it is still in the Heb B shot - correct me if I'm wrong. Thimerosal is still used in the manufactoring process and trace amounts remain after the processing.

The aluminium remains, however.

Mark Hansen wrote:Yes, lets go back to the days when we had to worry about polio epidemics every summer. I know a few older folks who had polio, and they still suffer, to a certain extent, from it's effects.

I know I'm being kind of snotty, but I think the overall risk to benefit ratio is heavily weighted towards the benefits.

I do think it's a good idea to remove thimerosol from vaccinces, just on the general principal that you should reduce your exposure to mercury, or toxins in general.

I'm sure I've absorbed more mercury from eating fish than from probably any other source, including vaccines. I am paying attention to what kinds of fish I eat nowadays, and tend to stay away from tuna and swordfish, even though I love both, because mercury tends to accumulate in these top end predators from the oceans.

Some facts on Polio and the vaccine. You have to ask yourself WHY it was epidemic at only one time in history. It is fair to say it would have declined on its own just like scarlet fever and similar -

. Polio has been painted as some natural scourge of humanity. Yet, epidemics and outbreaks of polio in Europe go back to only less than 100 years. The 1949-50 and later outbreaks of polio were demonstrably caused by intensified diphtheria and whooping cough vaccination, tonsillectomies, other injections (painkillers) and a variety of traumas. They invented a name for it: provocation poliomyelitis. Even though this has not been discussed in literature, the earliest outbreaks were no doubt triggered by intensified smallpox vaccination. The evidence for this connection comes from Egyptian excavations: some mummies had withered limbs; but of course, variolation (a crude form of smallpox inoculation) has been practised thousands of years ago, and most particularly, in Egypt.

When the first, injectable, polio vaccine was tested on 1.8 million American children, within a few days they had a huge epidemic of paralytic polio: in the vaccinated, their parents and other contacts. They called it the Cutter incident and claimed that some of the vaccines (produced by the Cutter Laboratories) contained live polio virus. So, the company withdrew their vaccines despite polio vaccines produced by other manufacturers also causing paralysis in this outbreak.

The OP vaccines are officially causing paralysis, allegedly only 10-12 reported cases per year in the USA. The word 'reported' is the key word here. With the mass use of the polio vaccines and continuing occurrence of polio in the vaccinated, the necessity arose to redefine the disease polio. The classical definition of polio is a disease with residual paralysis which resolves within 2 months (usually within days). The new definition of polio now is 'a disease with residual paralysis persisting for more than 60 days.' This is the secret formula of 'eradication' of polio. Children are still getting polio, but those cases which resolve within 60 days (which represent some 90% of cases) are not diagnosed as polio. A new disease emerged: viral meningitis and as the incidence of polio plummeted, so did the incidence of viral meningitis sky rocketed.

The best (and perhaps most frightening) example of these "elegant administrative moves" is how they allegedly eliminated polio in the Americas (meaning South America). The Journal of Infectious Diseases published in 1991 the results of a major vaccination drive between 1985 and 1989 to eliminate polio. Within 4 months they had a huge outbreak of paralytic polio (350 cases). They decided to reformulate the vaccine. Now if this outbreak had occurred in the unvaccinated they would not have had to reformulate the vaccine. The outbreak occurred in the vaccinated.

However, the outbreaks with ever increasing number of reported cases of 'flaccid paralysis' in the vaccinated continued. So what did they do? They started discarding most of the reported cases of flaccid paralysis. Out of 2094 reported cases they only 'confirmed' 130, the rest (1964) were discarded. They published a graph which shows ever increasing number of reported cases as shadowy columns in the background and the ever decreasing numbers of confirmed cases as black columns in the forefront. I praise them for publishing it this way: any discerning and unbrainwashed reader can see very clearly what happened in the Americas between 1985 - 1989: mass vaccination caused sustained outbreaks of paralytic polio and they tried to camouflage it by discarding the vast majority of cases. When they finally stopped the program in 1989, even the number of reported cases (shown as those shadowy columns in the background) went down.

The same happened in other countries: huge epidemics of paralysis followed mass-vaccination drives.http://www.vaccination.inoz.com/tetanuspolio.html


From what I understand, the only cases of polio in the West these days are those contracted from the vaccine itself. So you are more at risk of getting it from a recently vaccinated person, than an unvaccinated person.

Mark Hansen wrote:I do think it's a good idea to remove thimerosol from vaccinces, just on the general principal that you should reduce your exposure to mercury, or toxins in general.

Hey, Mark, can I point something out to you? If you accept on general principle that it is a good idea to remove mercury from vaccines, then the same general principle should tell you that it is a bad idea to put mercury in vaccines! I think you know that, but I'm just pointing out that there are two sides to every principle- what they make you do, and what they make you not do.

mark hansen wrote:I'm sure I've absorbed more mercury from eating fish than from probably any other source, including vaccines.

I don't quite know how you can be sure about that, but either way, you should also recognize that mercury absorbed through digestion cannot be compared to mercury injected directly into the blood stream. You cannot compare the two, quantity vs. quantity.

scarlettrose wrote: Also RE thimerosal, I understand it is still in the Heb B shot - correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm not sure. The fda.gov's vaccine data page says it is being phased out of Hep B vaccines, but unbelievably, the FDA page here:
http://www.fda.gov/cber/vaccine/thimerosal.htm
says that it was last updated in July 2005. Tax dollars at work. I've read that the influenza vaccine is the one that is still likely to contain Thimerosal.

We will probably live to find out ( unless the research is suppressed )that environmental mercury, mercury in vaccines, andmany other absorbed metals and toxins all played a role in autism and many other neurological diseases. It would completely not surprise me to learn that metal toxification is a contributor to alzheimers and parkinsons and ADD and depression and a long list of other illnesses. There's a whole field of research called metallobiochemistry studying this.

clocker bob wrote:

scarlettrose wrote: Also RE thimerosal, I understand it is still in the Heb B shot - correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm not sure. The fda.gov's vaccine data page says it is being phased out of Hep B vaccines, but unbelievably, the FDA page here:
http://www.fda.gov/cber/vaccine/thimerosal.htm
says that it was last updated in July 2005. Tax dollars at work. I've read that the influenza vaccine is the one that is still likely to contain Thimerosal.

We will probably live to find out ( unless the research is suppressed )that environmental mercury, mercury in vaccines, andmany other absorbed metals and toxins all played a role in autism and many other neurological diseases. It would completely not surprise me to learn that metal toxification is a contributor to alzheimers and parkinsons and ADD and depression and a long list of other illnesses. There's a whole field of research called metallobiochemistry studying this.

Well, I wouldn't be suprised either. But you wonder why anyone would think it WOULD be safe to inject that into a body - particularly a child's body.

And as much as this thread is specifically about thimerosal - that's far from the only worrying adjunct. And that's not even getting into the subject of injecting viruses and bacteria into the bloodstream; and how this bypasses all the body's natural mechanisms for dealing with them.

There was a mention of smallpox. IS the vaccine really responsible for having rid us of it?

A reality check -

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-97994374.html

A sample -

Four factors have contributed to skepticism of smallpox vaccine's effectiveness. First is the dubious notion that lesions from cowpox, a disease of cattle, could prevent smallpox, a related but different human disease. Second, during the 19th century, which preceded modern bacteriology and the age of refrigeration, it was impossible to know exactly what was in any given dose of vaccine. Third, the reported increase of smallpox disease in communities following the introduction of vaccination seemed to contradict the claims of vaccination proponents. A fourth disturbing fact is the total absence of any carefully controlled efficacy studies of the smallpox vaccine.