If the IACC had Met It would Have to Consider the CDC Whistleblower
As Thomas Insel leaves the National Institutes of Mental Health in a surreal move to join "Google Life Sciences" AoA recalls how Insel prevaricated a year ago over William Thompson's revelations about how the CDC altered data on autism and the MMR. Insel has had a year to find out the answers to his questions during which time the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee have not met.
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Dangling by a Thread in Washington: Insel Prevaricates Over the CDC Whistleblower (25 September 2014)
By John Stone
"I wish I knew more about that particular instance."
The excuses are wearing thin. Here is a transcript of the remarks of Thomas Insel, National Institute of Mental Health director, regarding the whistleblowing activities of Centers for Disease Control employee William Thompson at the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee meeting two days ago (view video here.):
“Again this is not for the IACC since that committee is not here in full. This is not a meeting to decide anything we are going to do in regard to policy and I wish I knew more about that particular instance. I don’t. I can tell you that the 2004 PEDIATRICS paper was one of about fourteen papers in the IOM [Institute of Medicine] review and there have been another multiple papers since then that have weighed in on this all of which the IOM have said in 2011 are consistent with not finding a relationship between vaccination and autism. What the IOM doesn’t say and what nobody has said in a way that I find intelligible (?) is that there could still be the rare cases in which that could occur and what we need to think about is how one would investigate that if that were the case.”
What, of course, Insel does is respond as a bureaucrat, not a scientist. He tells you the IOM have rubber stamped 14 epidemiological studies, therefore the matter is decided. Apart from anything else even if the studies were not corrupt (and they all have a very similar line of patronage to the DeStefano study) it would not be enough to say that vaccines only rarely cause autism. It is not only because correlation does not equal causation - as they keep on reminding us - but because you could have tens of thousands of cases and they might not register as statistically significant. However, if you look at the way in which these studies were botched together it is apparent that the effects were so gross that they could only disguise them by fraud. DeStefano 2004 is only exceptional in that it has been admitted by Thompson and not denied by DeStefano (the latter in two interviews with Sharyl Attkisson ), but actually it is just typical of what they were doing in all of them as Lyn Redwood told Insel at the meeting.
It could not be a more perfect example of how policy and the bureaucratic process defy hard reality. In this case Insel is waving around the fourteen year old stitch up (well documented) in which the CDC hires the IOM and IOM hires the CDC back, the package having already been agreed (the ultimate back-scratching operation). To quote from the transcript the IOM closed door meeting of January 2001 in preparation for the review:
Dr. McCormick: ...[CDC] wants us to declare, well, these things are pretty safe on a population basis.
Dr. Stratton: ...The point of no return, the line we will not cross in public policy is pull the vaccine, change the schedule. We could say it is time to revisit this, but we would never recommend that level. Even recommending research is recommendations for policy. We wouldn't say compensate, we wouldn't say pull the vaccine, we wouldn't say stop the program.
Dr. McCormick: ...we are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect...
It was a cold-blooded (and blatant) fraud from its inception but even today Insel presents it as the prime support for the policy. He is playing the idiot, although I doubt that that is what he is.
We have all sorts of different narratives going on but this is the simplest. In 2000-2001 the agencies all got their heads together, they knew already that they had screwed up big time over vaccines and brain injury – it was only a matter of how they were going to cover up, and they worked assiduously at it. After that they just had to string everyone along on the basis of authority till doomsday, and beyond (like all good frauds).
However, when Insel reverts to the IOM review he demonstrates his weakness.
John Stone is UK Editor for Age of Autism.
From what I am reading Dr. Francis Collins says that they will be look'in for a good person to take Tom Insel's place but this could take till next summer -- Hmmmmm the longer the take - the longer the delay -- and a bunch more might make it to retirement.
Posted by: Benedetta | September 17, 2015 at 11:51 PM
Can't hold an IACC meeting with out having to bring up Dr. William Thompson and the answer was to to quite. I wonder if he was helped to arrive at this decision all on his own?
OHHHH, how horrible all that loyalty he displayed- all that ability to heartless deflect.
Just don't seem fair to do a man that a way.
Posted by: Benedetta | September 17, 2015 at 11:31 PM
Ed
Thank so much for your meticulous documentation. The farce of Dr Insel's misdirection of policy and statements that make you wonder about his mental health know no bounds.
Posted by: John Stone | September 17, 2015 at 10:10 AM
In his blog of September 16, 2013 titled "In Vitro Veritas", Dr. Insell wrote jubilantly: "Over the past 6 months we have turned a corner in our studies of the genetic basis of schizophrenia and autism. For years the field of psychiatric genetics has struggled: family and twin studies demonstrated that these disorders were heritable, but findings from small studies reporting specific risk genes could not be replicated. With larger samples and better tools, we have gone from famine to feast, with almost too many genetic findings to follow up..."
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/in-vitro-veritas.shtml
I responded to each of Dr. Insell's claims in "An Autism-Gene in a Dish v In Vivo Veritas" less than a month later
http://www.vaccinationnews.org/2013-10-15-Autism-Gene-in-a-Dish-v-In-Vivo-Veritas-YazbakFE
As I stated then, millions of dollars had been spent on research aimed at finding “purely” genetic causes for autism and quite evidently "that research has not resulted in the discovery of any convincing evidence that autism is primarily a genetic disorder."
Two years later, it still does not seem that we have discovered much more in small glass dishes in big glass buildings.
Maybe it is still time to ask the parents in the trenches ?
Posted by: Ed Yazbak | September 17, 2015 at 09:44 AM
@Tim Lundeen
Thank you for your suggestion to add voiceover to my YouTube presentation. I now use apple Keynote, which has voiceover capability. I may ask one of my sons to do the narration.
As for Google, as a former software systems engineer, I myself may explore the possibility of a retirement connection with Google in Cambridge MA, which is just down the street from where I now live. Brain function should, like a time-sharing computer server, be analyzed in terms of interacting external devices (auditory, visual, touch, ...) and internal parallel processing procedures.
Posted by: Patience (Eileen Nicole) Simon | September 17, 2015 at 05:55 AM
Beth
Thanks for the clarification, although I don't think it changes the position - a bureaucracy implicated in maintaining the status quo, which no doubt took advice from Insel if needed, expediently chose not to reconvene the committee, and we won't be surprised if the new committee when it is reconvened will be even more biased in its membership than the previous one (no Lyn Redwood obviously). This article, originally posted a year ago pointed out that Insel's response to the Whistleblower affair was pathetically inadequate even by his standards.
Insel's retirement also coincides with publication of a damning paper in BMJ on the the ill-effects of anti-depressants on children.
http://study329.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Study-329-Final.pdf
I don't know whether his disappearance is part of a the backlash but it certainly deserves to be. I note in one of the editorial's accompanying the new BMJ publication the statement:
"Notably, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which strongly encourage NIH funded investigators to share their
data, provide secure data repositories for both clinical
data and biological samples."
http://study329.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/BMJ-Liberating-the-data-from-clinical-trials.pdf
The reference is to:
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/NIHbmic/nih_data_sharing_repositories.html
But the spirit of openness was scarcely manifest in Insel's contribution.
Posted by: John Stone | September 17, 2015 at 04:01 AM
Linda , I would imagine you are absolutely correct .
That is a very real possibility and not in the least far fetched at all.
Insel will likely be in charge of the GoogleCIA's "knowledge vault" , with specific responsibility of protecting vaccination reputation across the www . The censorship of key inflammatory stories such as KenyaHCG , and narcolepsy in Scandinavia , and Gardakil in France . That sort of thing .
Posted by: Sophie Scholl | September 17, 2015 at 03:17 AM
Insel is qualified to fill only one role at Google.
He will be Google's chief of thought police.
Posted by: Linda1 | September 16, 2015 at 11:00 PM
It should also not be neglected that we tend to focus here on autism but Insel is a catastrophe in relation to every aspect of mental health: things have never been worse.
Posted by: John Stone | September 16, 2015 at 05:31 PM
I feel an obligation to bring some clarification to the IACC meeting issue. Tom Insel has no legal authority to call a meeting of the IACC as it expired a year ago. The IACC technically expired a year ago and until the Secretary of Health and Human Services formally appoints the members, and the Chair is established, no meeting can be called. That IACC has expired 3 times and had to wait for the reappointment process has proven to be a very inefficient use of government resources. Typically committees don't expire, and have rolling appointments, so that there is always a quorum of members available to meet - and the expired members stay on until their replacements are confirmed. Because of these technical flaws in the law, the autism community has had NO advisory body addressing any of the issues for a year. It is likely that a new IACC will be announced this fall and hopefully a meeting before year's end.
Posted by: Beth | September 16, 2015 at 05:16 PM
Thanks, John, for handing over a clue to the mostly clueless.
"Or perhaps anything goes now?" Just about. Gerberding's conflict is more easily communicated though, isn't it?
I personally think Insel's protection of the vaccine program (through his tenure on the IACC, if not in other actions) might have served to create higher demand for high tech "detection and treatment" of "mental health" issues he may be working on now, but that's pretty theoretical to put out there IMO.
If his research focus at the NIMH helped more apparently forward any agenda of Google Life Services (does the NIMH sometimes fund private corporate research perhaps?) then the COI would be more readily apparent...even to me...
Posted by: Jeannette Bishop | September 16, 2015 at 04:59 PM
So Insel bullszhitted for the IACC and now he's going to bullszhit for Google. Makes perfect sense.
Posted by: False scientists... | September 16, 2015 at 04:34 PM
It looks like Dr. Insel will spend the rest of his life looking at GOOGLE data / DNA base pairs and the endless search for the "Autism gene."
But as Dr. Insel ...ALREADY KNOWS... the "Autism gene" does not exist... he will probably often be seen riding a skateboard around the GOOGLE campus.
What is the procedure for his IACC replacement ?
Posted by: cmo | September 16, 2015 at 01:41 PM
Its the arrogance that these "leaders" are showing these days and obviously know, that they are unquestionable by anyone and no re-dress is ever going to happen so long as they tow the few at the top.
Very sad day for google, the planet would be better off without creatures like Insel never mind a search engine in everyone's home on the planet.
MMR RIP
Posted by: Angus Files | September 16, 2015 at 01:36 PM
Jeannette
The skills Google all too obviously want to acquire are his knowledge and contacts in government - as a scientist so far his credentials are buffonery. It is at least very controversial that he should be able to move without even the token gap of Gerberding when she went from from the CDC to Merck. It is a disgrace and it ought to be questioned. Or perhaps anything goes now?
Posted by: John Stone | September 16, 2015 at 01:13 PM
Thank you for pointing out the so very insubstantial foundation on which he based doing nothing. And now he's highly qualified to work for gene research at Google (Google X?)? I suppose the transfer to Google (out here in California? where everyone is supposed to be mandated to be vaccinated as fast and much as possible, so they'll be able to find out most expediently which genes make one less vulnerable to vaccine injury I'm thinking...) is supposed to make complete sense to someone with a clue?
"I wish I knew more about that particular instance."
A request for marching orders? A script to parrot? I can't help wondering if he truly has any skills Google wants to acquire or ...?
Posted by: Jeannette Bishop | September 16, 2015 at 01:04 PM
@Patience: I wonder if you could republish your youtube presentation with voice-over? Lots of good info, the impact is higher by adding voice. I'd like to share it after that...
Posted by: Tim Lundeen | September 16, 2015 at 12:49 PM
Thanks Twyla
I should possibly have entitled the article "More Inselence".
Posted by: John Stone | September 16, 2015 at 12:14 PM
Thank you so much for writing this, John. It is deplorable that the IACC has not even met for a year, that Insel says their role is (basically) not to accomplish anything, that the CDC whistleblower matter is being hushed up by the press and all govt agencies, that Congress is afraid to touch it. Thank you so much for your coverage of these issues.
Posted by: Twyla | September 16, 2015 at 11:13 AM
My disappointment dates back to 2003, when I traveled to DC for an "Autism Summit" and IACC meeting. I was required to submit my public comment ahead of time on a floppy disk, with a 5-minute time limit. By the time invited speakers droned on, way past their allotted time limit, public comments were limited to about a minute or minute and a half each. These comments are summarized online on the IACC website. See Meetings and Events ... Minutes for November 21, 2003 ... Ms. Ilene Simon.
Five years later, to the day, I made a PowerPoint presentation, which can be accessed via the link to slides. I recently put this on YouTube, which comes up with a search for eileen simon autism: Autism and Vulnerable Circuits in the Brain.
The brain, brain circuits vulnerable to all of autism's many causes, must be the primary focus of research. The new IACC will probably be dominated by neurodiversity advocates. I will continue to pressure for research on brain damage.
Posted by: Patience (Eileen Nicole) Simon | September 16, 2015 at 08:21 AM