Safeminds: Why Aren’t I Surprised that the Media Got it Wrong AGAIN?
From our friends at Safeminds:
Wednesday afternoon we got a voicemail from a reporter at Newsweek asking SafeMinds how much money we spent on a primate vaccine safety study that was just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We weren’t sure why Newsweek wanted this dollar figure, and what relevance it had in the endless mudslinging in the vaccine-autism debates.
We sent the reporter this following statement:
“The epidemic of autism is expected to cost the country $1 trillion by 2025 if prevalence trends continue. In a recent study, over 40 percent of parents agree or strongly agree that vaccines played a part in the development of their children’s autism. The vaccine primate study in question consisted of multiple phases. The initial phase found a series of negative effects in infant reflexes and brain growth among those exposed to vaccines. The second, recent phase purported to find no effect. SafeMinds has concerns about changes in the study design protocol and analysis that may have led to these contradictory results. We are in the process of collecting and reviewing additional information regarding this study.”
The reporter, Jessica Firger, told us she was delaying her article until she could speak with us directly about the statement. We thought this was a good sign, so Thursday afternoon my colleague and SafeMinds Board President, Sallie Bernard, and I spoke with Firger for about 20 minutes by phone.
We explained that we had no preconceived notion of what the outcome of the study should have been but that we were quite perplexed that the recently published findings—that show no correlation between vaccines administered to primates and autism-like neuroanatomy and behaviors—are at such great odds with the scientific findings that have been reported from this study, both in published literature and in a poster presentation at a scientific conference in 2013, using the same monkeys that were reported on in the study.
Earlier findings of phase one of this study, which SafeMinds has been funding since 2003, were published in 2010 in Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis and the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health. Researchers then reported that the infant primates exposed to the vaccines displayed a different pattern of maturational changes in the brain and also evidence of greater total brain volume compared to the control group. And in the second publication that a single dose of hepatitis B vaccine routinely administered to human infants at birth resulted in significant delays in the development of root, snout, and suck reflexes compared to unexposed animals.
Disturbing indeed. Read the full article at Safeminds.
We live in Nassau County, N.Y., and have been fighting for over a month, with the runaround, to get our son's records from birth in Feb, 1999 to 4 years old. They finally admitted that the records were destroyed. We are thinking about what steps to take next.
Posted by: Patricia Dodge Taveras | October 06, 2015 at 10:53 PM
Big pharma is at work censoring any comment that post SafeMinds article. You know this is orchestrated because most of the website trolls are putting in their comments not only this bogus study but also mentiong the Wakefield study. I will continue to post "truth" regardless of how many times I'm censored and that has been at least 7 times today.
Posted by: Danchi | October 06, 2015 at 08:13 PM
It isn't only human infants who need to have safe minds. I can't understand why people who know the pain and suffering of autism would intentionally poison infant monkeys in an attempt to cause that same suffering, and then slaughter and dissect them, depriving them of their 25 year life span. Maybe that's why G-D allowed this study to get the evil DeStephano/Boyle/Yeargin-Allsopp/Thompson treatment.
Thou Shalt Not Kill.
Posted by: Linda1 | October 06, 2015 at 03:27 PM
The brain structures chosen for examination in the recent report by Gadad et al. (PNAS 2015, Sep 28) did not include the superior olive. Lukose and Kulesza in 2011 reported malformation of this relay nucleus in the auditory pathway in 9 brains from people diagnosed in childhood as autistic. Lukose and Kulesza then subjected laboratory rats to valproic acid (Depakote) during gestation, and found the same neuropathology.
Why did they look at the superior olive? Patricia Rodier et al. (1996) reported malformation of the superior olive in a 21-year-old woman whose autism was attributed in part to prenatal exposure to alcohol and other drugs.
Autism can be caused by many different etiologic factors. Complications at birth and low Apgar scores have been reported more frequently than any other cause. Some abnormality of mother or infant is then often blamed for difficult childbirth.
I will continue to point out the research of WF Windle on brain damage caused by asphyxia at birth. Severe damage was found in the inferior colliculus, in the midbrain auditory pathway. But this was only found after Seymour Kety pointed out that the inferior colliculus has higher blood flow than any other site in the brain.
Blood flow in the superior olive is only slightly less than in the inferior colliculus. Blood flow in the brain is highest throughout the auditory pathway. The auditory sense is the alerting system of the brain, and the reason we use alarm clocks.
The auditory system may be largely responsible (1) for general awareness, which is often diminished in autism. The auditory pathway is essential also for (2) learning to speak, and for maturation of the language circuits in the cerebral cortex. The auditory system is where the effects of vaccine components should be looked for first.
Posted by: Patience (Eileen Nicole) Simon | October 06, 2015 at 03:27 PM
Attention media: CHRIS HARPER MERCER, AGE 26=FULL MERCURY VACCINE SCHEDULE
Posted by: Attention media: | October 06, 2015 at 02:28 PM
I'm starting to think the solution is to buy ads and put the info out there in large page spreads.
That way we state the facts, and people can read them.
Make sure all the facts are easy to document for accuracy, because so many people don't know what is going on, and once they are told about it, it is hard to unlearn it.
Also, Imo we need to push to take away vaccine manufacturers protection from liability.
They can't have it both ways; if their product is "so safe' then there is no need for special protections.
I'm betting if people can sue for side effects suddenly identifying people who will get side effects and screening to prevent them getting vaccinated will become a priority.
Posted by: Hera | October 06, 2015 at 01:35 PM
I have no doubt the study was under institutional pressure. How could it not be?
$250,000 is a lot of money for autism families to come up with.
The pro-vaccine marketing engine is never at a loss for finding every conceivable way to control information to further their own message. As vaccine reformers, we need to understand that being a good person does not mean we should keep acting naively. We can be persistent, honest, vocal, kind, loving, understanding, and even forgiving, while not making the same mistakes over and over and placing trust in others to follow a higher call. I'd surmise that the pro-vaccine agendists actually count on honesty and propensity to trust, indeed on our side's spirituality that humanity is inherently good, and single out unfathomable ways to use it against vaccine reformers and delay success, every extra minute of which they then use to their advantage to groom the next touchpoint into thinking vaccines are only a good and normal part of a healthy life.
And they repeat the process for cancer victims, MS patients, ALS, alzheimers, seizures, etc etc etc ad nauseum. At this point, is there a patient market that HASN'T been taken advantage of when it comes to medical/pharmaceutical research? I doubt it. It's mind boggling their success, really, when it comes to keeping us all separate from each other, when the underlying solution is the same for all markets:
stop and eliminate the toxins and improve nutrition to prevent and control epigenetic polymorphisms and use natural solutions to manage and mitigate existing damage in order to avoid medically induced physiological damage.
Posted by: Jenny | October 06, 2015 at 01:25 PM
Like some of our leaders in this community said:
It is no longer about the science; it is political.
There are some people that do have money in their hands - willing to shell it out to keep from going to prison - at this point.
Posted by: Benedetta | October 06, 2015 at 01:01 PM
Remarkably, on the evidence of what was published none of the five vaccinated groups followed the trend of the placebo group on the behavioural chart Fig.1 but the most aberrant trend (the red line) was for "1990s Pediatric" group, the very group of the missing post mortem investigations which Safeminds had funded. The data presentation is presently most unconvincing and the title a piece of cherry-picking.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/24/1500968112.long
It does not resemble an honest and transparent paper - we can see how results average out (not too convincingly) but we can't see the individual cases.
As to the shoddy report in Newsweek, Ms Firger begins by labelling Safeminds "anti-vaxxers": that shows fundamental bias - anyone publicly questioning vaccine safety is "anti-vax" undermining any rational or tolerant discussion of the subject. It is crude, stupid and deeply incompetent even if the real conflicts emerge in her report anyway, despite her.
Posted by: John Stone | October 06, 2015 at 10:51 AM
Well, this is very interesting. It looks like not just SafeMinds but all the major sponsors of this study got "screwed, blued and tatooed." The sponsors all look legit. I therefore suspect someone at the lead university, The University of Texas, got to these researchers and made it clear the university did not want to be associated with a study linking vaccines to autism, and that the researchers therefore needed to act quickly to undo the damage they had done with their previous research. Remember, the politics has greatly intensified around this issue since those original findings were reported, to the point that mainstream journalists are not routinely condemning anyone who even dares to bring up the question in a public forum, including the recent presidential debates. Suddenly no one -- and I do mean no one -- wants to touch this thing with a ten-foot pole. I strongly suspect that this is what happened. Looking for the guilty party here? Look to Dallas and the University of Texas.
Posted by: Lisa | October 06, 2015 at 10:08 AM
I'll second that, play hardball with them and be very careful with the media. In a show on psychopathy, those in the media were in the top 3 by profession.
Posted by: Reader | October 06, 2015 at 10:06 AM
Interestingly, Newsweek has published at least two articles critical of water fluoridation - that other monstrous government-and-industry-sponsored mass medication scheme - within the last year or so. One has to wonder what the underlying politics at the magazine really are.
Posted by: Rae | October 06, 2015 at 09:35 AM
Hard lesson. How many times does it have to happen? Did Safeminds include in a funding contract the freedom to have some version of a periodic independent review of the trial progress along the way? Maybe include in the contract that any change in study protocol would result in withdrawal of funding and/or legal action, or anything of that nature? I don't want to sound accusatory, but after Poul Thorsen . . .
If not, why not?
Were SB277 petition counts filmed and uploaded as they were ongoing, before the paperwork was turned in. Were petitions done with carbon copies in order to have backup paperwork in case of discrepancies?
Was nothing learned after the GMO labeling loss in California?
Very frustrating.
Posted by: Jenny | October 06, 2015 at 09:21 AM
"We thought this was a good sign, so Thursday afternoon my colleague and SafeMinds Board President, Sallie Bernard, and I spoke with Firger for about 20 minutes by phone."
Anyone read "Vaccine Whistleblower" by Kevin Barry .. pages 63-64? For the very first time .. serious allegations were made .. and .. further evidence to support those allegations should be made public if it exists.
In any event .. absent that evidence .. I will continue having the greatest respect and admiration for Sallie Bernard .. after all .. she has been in the forefront of our community from the very beginning.
Posted by: Bob Moffitt | October 06, 2015 at 08:49 AM
Safeminds or any other of OUR groups is under absolutely no obligation to cooperate on any level with the LYING MEDIA .
IGNORE THEM .
THEY IGNORE US , CENSOR US , SILENCE US .
WHY NOT SEND THAT MESSAGE BACK TO NEWSWEEK !
Posted by: Sophie Scholl | October 06, 2015 at 06:27 AM