by John Stone

According to  a Sunday Telegraph report a newly appointed UK law commissioner, Prof Penney Lewis,  is considering whether the government should criminalize  posting vaccine critical information on Social Media. Lewis, who is of US origin, was appointed last August soon after the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, spoke of clamping down on vaccine criticism on social media. The report states:

"In her first interview since taking up the role, Prof Penney Lewis revealed she is considering whether laws should be amended to “lower the threshold” for posting false information online that endangers lives."

The issue is fraught with ambiguity because well-researched opinion can often conflict with government dogma. As I wrote in  a letter 'An appeal to authority is not the same  as an appeal to knowledge' to BMJ on-line last year:

"I read the article by Martin McKee and John Middleton... with dismay, and ask what sense there can be in the fundamental attitude that all opinion favorable to vaccine products is correct (apparently by virtue of being favorable) and all opinion unfavorable to vaccine products malicious. The world they describe is very far from one I am familiar with. In the world I see people share bona fide information on-line, obtained from official sources, scientific articles, Patient Information Leaflets etc. And by ordinary standards they have a right: these are materials which belong in the public domain. I have never encountered anything on the web which plausibly could be identified as state misinformation or espionage about vaccine (it may occur in some territory of cyberspace which I have never visited): what we are talking about by and large is material which is well sourced, but not necessarily favorable to the industry and its apologists. Most troubling is that it is impossible to verify McKee and Middleton's claims that people are spreading false information, let alone deliberately. As with anything there must be some level of error but I am very far from sure that this is the main problem: what I see is people pasting and linking to materials of genuine concern, and which is not being addressed by our governments or officials. However much they may want to marginalise such data under the rubric "the benefits greatly outweigh the risks" or even the grandiose "vaccines are safe" a lot of it is not trivial..."

I added in a subsequent letter: "One thing I would point out here is how slippery are such terms as “disinformation” and “misinformation”, shifting the issue of whether something is true or not (which is complex) to whether it is politically convenient". We are always being told that information is "misinformation", which is no better than Orwellian doublespeak. As Heidi Larson  of the vaccine Confidence Project argued at the WHO vaccine safety conference in December 2019 (last session around 1.35)

"There's nothing illegal about these questions but they see doubt...but the challenge for some of these tech companies and even for others who are trying to clean up the misinformation our problem is as we have heard in the last 48 hours that there's not anything a 100% and what actually legally without creating a censorship thing can we absolutely say this is misinformation because we have a lot of ambiguity in the safety field and we have to come to terms with that..."

Also relevant is the letter of a United Nations official David Kaye on the subject of censorship in his letter to David Zuckerberg (1 May 2019):

By John Stone

It was admittedly not surprising Sciblogs, New Zealand chose not to post my  irreverent comment on the post 'The WHO Vaccine  Safety Summit - from someone who was actually there' of Helen Petousis Harris, chair of the WHO's Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety:

Helen

Unfortunately you cannot do medical safety while putting your fingers in your ears and going “La-la-la”. You have to listen to people, whether they are ordinary citizens or other doctors and scientists who are critical. Vaccines can fail and vaccines can harm: it is not all clean and tidy, while both pre-market safety trialing and post market monitoring are largely inadequate.  I have been very critical of Heidi Larson but to do her justice I believe  she ventured rather more at the conference than you are acknowledging here. It is not good enough to say in effect “I’m an expert so go away and shut-up”. I am sorry, but if you are not listening you are not an expert, and you certainly should not be in medicine.

John Stone, UK and European Editor, Age of Autism

Petousis Harris's blog is essentially circular and self-referential: science is only science if she says it is and evidence is only evidence if she say says it is, or if it has been agreed by a relevant committee: this is represented in her remarkable flow diagram which is not so much about science as people who disagree with her. One of her criteria for being an "expert" is belonging to certain societies or sitting on certain committees (which let us face it may be compromised by having responsibility for the policy). According to her to be an expert you have to "adhere to the scientific method" but we do not exactly know what that is. I perhaps adhere to the statement that "vaccines are unavoidably unsafe": a statement that "vaccines are safe" seems eminently falsifiable and whatever she says many people at the summit, which is entirely viewable on-line (whether you were there or not), had serious doubts: "relatively safe" is not the same as "safe" and is too vague a hypothesis to be testable. If you are actually hostile to reports of harm or discussion of mechanisms of harm there is a problem. Committees are no guarantee of science, and often an institutional method of blocking discussion of sensitive issues.

I doubt whether the tone of her intervention is helpful. It sounds like the nursery game of "I'm the king of the castle/And you're the dirty rascal!" 

Source: The High Wire Del Bigtree

By John Stone

Some readers may recall back in August following the pronouncements of British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, about clamping down on vaccine misinformation. I tried to help by reviewing our National Health Service webpage 'Vaccines are safe and important'. It may be said the web-managers were perfectly courteous but referred my comments to "Public Health England Immunology Team" who took no less than 106 days to reply. I was expecting something really good, considered expert replies to all my criticisms. What actually arrived was nothing but links to other web-pages committing similar solecisms and evasions. Reproducing the letter could apparently open me to draconian penalties but fundamentally the taunt about the "echo-chambers of social media" turns out to be nothing but projection: all they can do when challenged is repeat the propaganda. MISINFORMATION IS INFORMATION THE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT LIKE

Review of the United Kingdom National Health Service webpage ‘Why vaccination is safe and important’ (media reviewed 30 July 2019).

I am responding to claims or statements in this web-document ' Why vaccination is safe and important' [1] (not following the original order of presentation). 

I begin with the statement:

“(Vaccines) do not overload or weaken the immune system - it's safe to give children several vaccines at a time and this reduces the amount of injections they need”

It is not clear what the evidential basis is for this statement. Formerly, at least, British health officials were keen to cite a paper by Offit et al (2002) which suggested absurdly an infant could withstand 10,000 vaccines at a time. However far-fetched, this was based on a theoretical claim about routine exposure to environmental antigens. Evidently some environmental exposures are more dangerous than others, otherwise people would not be at risk from infectious diseases at all, but the basis of exposure through vaccination is different (injected), and involves adjuvants so it is perhaps not relevant at all to talk about the number of antigens (as in Offit). In August 2004 Dr Salisbury distinguished in an e-letter to me between the increased risk of adverse reactions in an extended schedule and “overload”, which begs the question what is meant by “overload” and what people are supposed to understand by such a statement. A paper by Aaby et al (2012) was entitled “Vaccine programmes must consider their effect on general resistance”, which is evidently a warning that there is no such blank cheque for expanding the schedule. I covered this ground in my published submission to the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee inquiry into anti-microbial resistance last year [2]. The NHS need to clarify what they mean, but also state what the evidential basis is for this claim.

Another statement apparently contradicts the proposition that there is anything inherently safe about vaccinating:

“(Vaccines) get safety tested for years before being introduced - they're also monitored for any side effects”

By John Stone

These days history happens by stealth: the big shifts in power are often only incidentally reported in our mainstream news-media and can be hard to detect even by experienced watchers. Until a year ago almost no one had heard of the Global Health Security Agenda, although the project started in 2014 under the Obama administration and has already destabilised nations: something which is neither conjecture or “conspiracy theory” but easily established from public documents [1, 2] . Late last year I highlighted a column in electronic BMJ by J Stephen Morrison “senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of its Global Health Policy Center" [3]:

“The term "smart power" was new to me when I encountered it recently in a British Medical Journal blog as part of the new-speak vocabulary of J Stephen Morrison 'senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of its Global Health Policy Center".  Morrison's article is interesting both because it discloses explicitly how 9/11 was made an opportunity  to draw health into the global security agenda of the United States while failing to understand how such a move might result in the shattering of "consensus" and the post war "Western post-war liberal order": "smart power" even if it is smart is not "liberal" and will not lead to consensus. But it also spells out that the global vaccine program has become a covert instrument of US power. If Morrison by any chance laments the passing of the centre-left government in Italy, then perhaps the White House putting Italy and its health minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, in charge of global vaccine strategy was an error. 

“Morrison thinks it is a paradox but it is scarcely so if a government is seen to pursue coercive health measures over its citizens at the behest of a foreign power - even those who favor vaccination could be concerned at the state's new found powers over their bodies (which might also be indefinitely extended). If that was not so smart a political move perhaps the technology is not so smart either - as I remarked  to Steven Salzberg a few years ago: "The unwelcome news is that the “cruise missiles and drone helicopters” of the war on disease often hit the wrong target, and the more cruise missiles and drone helicopters you unleash the greater the risk".

“Frankly, no one knows what they are going to be injected with next. Smart bombs become too easily the agents of international chaos and mistrust: just so the smart bombs of the war on disease, both for what they can do to your body and what they can do to the political landscape, including destabilizing friendly governments. “Smart power” is also duplicitous: Italy is just the surrogate of the US. Why could the citizens of the world not have it directly from the mouth of Obama saying in effect ‘your bodies are not your own and we inject into them what we like?’.”

But the heat was turned up again at the beginning of 2019 when the World Health Organization declared “the vaccine hesitant” to be a threat to world health [2], and the Global health terror over measles was launched despite inadequate evidence either for the spread, or the casualties[1,4-6]. Also, of course, pinned to the tails of the largely artificial measles scare, was the demand for compliance with a host of other products to combat other diseases. Implausibly, health officials continue to stick to the baseless proposition that a two-month old infant can benefit from unlimited barrage of biological products without risk of harm, and never seem to have heard of the concept of “over-medication” [7].

This evening the BBC screens its documentary The Conspiracy Files: Vaccination Wars.  While vaccine program critics on both sides of the Atlantic have cooperated with this production do not expect any fair reporting: in fact the BBC long ago committed itself to the doctrine of false equivalence i.e. it does not matter how strong or rational the evidence is they will defer to the government-industry consensus. Even the use of the term "conspiracy" has slid into innuendo. Meanwhile, the documentary has been shared with the media but not the participants. Betrayal is their watchword.

Age of Autism's British editor, John Stone, writes:

Pre-publicity suggest the program makers will try to make out that commercial conflict is not an issue. Given such preposterous stance it is very hard to know where to begin or end.  Nevertheless, it might be instructive to post three submissions to UK Parliamentary bodies published by them.

PB 1584 John Stone’s response to letters from the Scottish Government and the JCVI

I hope it is in order for me individually to respond to the letters from the Scottish government and the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation as supporting witness in Angus File’s petition.

The JCVI Secretariat (1) have now responded with a defence of Prof Pollard’s appointment which I would like briefly to answer from public documents.

The code of practice of 2013 (cited by Mr Earnshaw as current in his letter) states in section 42 (2):

If a member has in the last 12 months received, or plans to receive a financial payment or other benefit from a business or representative body relating to vaccines or any other product or service that could be under consideration by JCVI...including... holding a directorship or other paid position...the member must declare this interest... If this interest is specific to an agenda item and the payment or other benefit is connected specifically with the product under consideration, the member will be required to absent him/herself from the discussion and any subsequent vote.

Tomorrow evening the BBC screens its documentary The Conspiracy Files: Vaccination Wars.  While vaccine program critics on both sides of the Atlantic have cooperated with this production do not expect any fair reporting: in fact the BBC long ago committed itself to the doctrine of false equivalence i.e. it does not matter how strong or rational the evidence is they will defer to the government-industry consensus. Even the use of the term "conspiracy" has slid into innuendo. Meanwhile, the documentary has been shared with the media but not the participants. Betrayal is their watchword.

Age of Autism's British editor, John Stone, writes:

According to a preview in the Dundee Courier by Paul Whitelaw:

"This depressing report canvases the opinions of people who believe that the authorities are hiding the truth about vaccines. We also meet scientists who know for a fact that immunisation saves lives. Harmful side-effects are extremely rare. The conspiracy theorists refuse to accept this. Why? Widespread online misinformation and alarmist media coverage, all of which dates back to a thoroughly discredited study of whooping cough vaccines in the 1970s."

This is a story, of course, about gullible journalists. The "thoroughly discredited study" is no doubt the one by that good and honorable man Prof Gordon Stewart - later, Bill Inman, one of the founders of the UK yellow card reporting scheme reported in his memoirs 'Don't tell the patient'  the he had never seen anyone worse treated than Stewart was by the UK Department of Health. Inman himself commented how very few of the severe injuries from the old DPT vaccine ever got recorded. He states that from his data analysis it was at least ten times higher than the 1 in 300,000 that the Department of Health “was clinging to”. He noted:

Children who had developed a temperature or had screamed repeatedly or had muscular spasms or convulsions after the first injection, had sometimes been given further doses of the vaccine with catastrophic results.

In a recent letter to BMJ Rapid Responses 'The Benefits of DPT' I wrote recently:

Later this week the BBC screens its documentary The Conspiracy Files: Vaccination Wars.  While vaccine program critics on both sides of the Atlantic have cooperated with this production do not expect any fair reporting: in fact the BBC long ago committed itself to the doctrine of false equivalence i.e. it does not matter how strong or rational the evidence is they will defer to the government-industry consensus. Even the use of the term "conspiracy" has slid into innuendo. Meanwhile, the documentary has been shared with the media but not the participants. Betrayal is their watchword.

Age of Autism's British editor, John Stone, writes:

Last month I wrote to the National Health Service website about inaccuracies in their webpage 'Vaccines are safe and important'. The dispiriting truth is that their reassurance about the toughness of the infant immune system - if so why vaccinate at all? - and the minimal toxicity of vaccine ingredients dated back nearly two decades to articles by Paul Offit (pictured). This information was both naive and without foundation. Meanwhile, autism incidence in schools continues to spiral out of control. The National Health Service website tell me that they have forwarded my concern to the Immunology department of Public Health England and I have yet to receive their reply. I have also forwarded Christopher Exley's new article An aluminium adjuvant in a vaccine is an acute exposure to aluminium. This for reference was my review:-

by John Stone 

As Britain's new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, calls for reassuring messaging about vaccination on the web, AoA's British editor looks at an NHS web-page on vaccination safety and finds it full of holes. Unfortunately, the problems with the vaccine program do not lie with its critics. A copy of this review will be sent to the NHS web editors.

I am responding to claims or statements in this web-document ' Why vaccination is safe and important' [1] (not following the original order of presentation). 

I begin with the statement:

“(Vaccines) do not overload or weaken the immune system - it's safe to give children several vaccines at a time and this reduces the amount of injections they need”

It is not clear what the evidential basis is for this statement. Formerly, at least, British health officials were keen to cite a paper by Offit et al (2002) which suggested absurdly an infant could withstand 10,000 vaccines at a time. However far-fetched, this was based on a theoretical claim about routine exposure to environmental antigens. Evidently some environmental exposures are more dangerous than others, otherwise people would not be at risk from infectious diseases at all, but the basis of exposure through vaccination is different (injected), and involves adjuvants so it is perhaps not relevant at all to talk about the number of antigens (as in Offit). In August 2004 Dr Salisbury distinguished in an e-letter to me between the increased risk of adverse reactions in an extended schedule and “overload”, which begs the question what is meant by “overload” and what people are supposed to understand by such a statement. A paper by Aaby et al (2012) was entitled “Vaccine programmes must consider their effect on general resistance”, which is evidently a warning that there is no such blank cheque for expanding the schedule. I covered this ground in my published submission to the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee inquiry into anti-microbial resistance last year [2]. The NHS need to clarify what they mean, but also state what the evidential basis is for this claim.

Another statement apparently contradicts the proposition that there is anything inherently safe about vaccinating:

“(Vaccines) get safety tested for years before being introduced - they're also monitored for any side effects”

By John Stone

This is a follow up to my brief article at the end of February British MPs are Front for Gates and the Pharmaceutical Industry

The deadly charade continues. British television viewers were told on ITV NEWS on Thursday night that an All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) was to investigate "the  resurgence of the anti-vaccination movement".  They should not be deceived into thinking however that the APPG  "Vaccinations For All is the equivalent of a parliamentary committee. The secretariat for the group - which itself  consists of five little known members of the House of Commons and two of the House of Lords - is listed as an organisation  called Results UK, which is in turn a satellite of GAVI, which we all know is a partnership of  the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the WHO,  Unicef, the World Bank and the Pharmaceutical Industry etc. Every single vaccine manufacturer is represented within GAVI.

The strategy has been apparent since the summer of 2017 when the director of GAVI, Seth Berkley, had an article published in the on-line Spectator - a British news journal - calling for "anti-vaxxers" to be banned from the web, when what he was really setting out to do was ban all criticism of vaccines from the web while simultaneously indulging in hate rhetoric. In the British context it might perhaps be a modestly hopeful sign that the present move comes from an undistinguished ad hoc group of parliamentarians rather than a standing committee: less helpful is the continuing treachery of the mainstream media which cannot any longer report anything without a having devious agenda behind it.

The deadline for submissions to this inquiry is 30 August. Many people from the vaccine injury/vaccine critical community are apparently writing but if they do they should be aware that the group is an industry lobby organization and not one of the standing parliamentary committees which regularly hold inquiries as part of their remit - there may be some point in trying to embarrass them but their standpoint is essentially hostile, and their avowed concern is to silence families of the injured not listen to them.

Age of Autism's John Stone submitted a rapid response to an article on BMJ: Social care: are the autistic dependent becoming more numerous than the aged?   Read the full RR as British Medical Journal here.

###

Have we sounded the true depth of the problem [1]? Recent reports suggest not. This is from an article about parents suing the government over Special Educational Needs Funding (SEND) [2]:

"Jenni Richards QC, for the families, told the court during a hearing on Wednesday that there was “clear and incontrovertible evidence” of a “substantial national shortfall” in funding...She said the figures showed there were 25,540 young people aged 16-25 in January 2015 with a statement or Education, Health and Care (EHC) plan, which had increased to 84,260 by January 2018...Government lawyers said the increase in demand was recognised by the ministers and that Mr Hinds had “made it clear” that High Needs would be one of his priorities ahead of the 2019 Spending Review."

Another report in the Independent states [3]:

"Analysis from the National Education Union this week revealed that more than 8,000 young people with SEND are awaiting provision for a school place."

by John Stone

Seth Berkley, the director Gavi, who led the call for a clamp down on vaccine criticism in social media two years ago in the British mainstream journal the Spectator had a few months before been named in the Mail on Sunday as the worst charity fat cat. Ian Birrell had written  an article entitled 'The fattest charity fat cat of them all: Foreign aid boss made Millions out £1.5  billion handed to his charity by British taxpayers' (actually nearly £2.5 million, heading for $4million). He reports:

"Seth Berkley has taken home more than £2 million over the past four years as chief executive officer of Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi), which has been given £1.5 billion by Britain...Another official at the Geneva-based group collects a pay package of more than £500,000 a year...Incredibly, Dr Berkley was given a housing allowance on top of his £623,370 pay package... Like others at Gavi, he is also offered help with school fees and is exempt from paying Swiss income taxes under a deal struck by the organisation."

In November 2017 I wrote in evidence to the UK House of Commons media committee (DCMS) inquiry into Fake News: 

"In this regard it is disquieting to look at the global campaign by vaccine lobbyists which reached these shores this summer advocating compulsory vaccination, having scored recent successes in Australia, Italy, France and parts of the United States. The British Medical Association jettisoned its traditional opposition to compulsory vaccination... – dismissed only a few years ago by a former chairman, Hamish Meldrum, as “Stalinist” ... -   and called for the matter to be discussed. Just a few days before an article appeared in the on-line Spectator by the CEO of GAVI, a global agency promoting vaccination, calling for “anti-vaxxers” to be excluded from “social media”... It must be emphasised that anyone remotely critical or informed about the vaccine lobby and its products, is placed under the general pejorative label “anti-vaxxer”: it is the vaccine/pharmaceutical lobby that polarises the debate – anyone who is not in favour of their entire open-ended agenda is subject to opprobrium and ad hominem attack. Complex health issues are being reduced in the mainstream arena to “Four legs good, two legs bad” type arguments."

Gavi's partners include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, the WHO, the World Bank and the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (notably Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co., Novartis, Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of Sanofi-Aventis and Pfizer), a network which surely leads back to the Global Health Security Agenda launched in the White House by Barack Obama in September 2014 in the wake of the William Thompson affair.

We have to ask whether it was ever the welfare of humanity which was at stake, or just the welfare of a certain class?

John Stone is UK Editor for Age of Autism.

Jon Ashworth

By John Stone

"Jonathan Ashworth in his one specific example of social media misinformation has almost certainly misunderstood what he is reading. The cases he was reading about were almost certainly in the US where the Hep B vaccine is administered on the day of birth. Given that he himself seems horrified by the idea should not people be allowed to talk about it?"

(My comment in The Times, London)

Jonathan Ashworth, British Labour Party Spokesman on Health and Social Care, finds the idea of vaccinating an infant on the day of birth repugnant. He wrote in a Times of London editorial yesterday:

"The anti-vaccination content I’ve been able to find on Facebook in just a matter of minutes has been eye-opening. There appears to be a deep distrust in these closed groups of both the medical community and governments.

"I’ve found posts from terrified parents asking for advice on how to make sure their newborn babies aren’t taken away from them shortly after birth to be vaccinated.

"Other posts completely misinform the public about the science behind vaccinations. It’s why Tom Watson has called for a legally enforceable duty of care to be placed on these firms backed by hefty fines."

It is of course impossible know whether the other posts he read and felt challenged by were genuinely misinforming or whether he was just briefed to find them so, but in this instance what is almost certainly being referred to is the US practice of administering the Hepatis B vaccine to infants at birth, and it is quite interesting that he finds the idea - this does not happen in British hospitals - repugnant.

On a similar note I wrote to André Spicer, professor of organisational behaviour, Cass Business School (University of London)

Prof Andre Spicer

about his article last Friday in the Guardian(so far no reply):

by John Stone

An attack on leading aluminium toxicity expert Christopher Exley in the Sunday Times yesterday begins with the false claim in the title that his funding has been halted. This seems like a blatant attempt to mislead: what was halted the week before last after political pressure was a Go Fund Me page for supporting his research, while the Keele University website has remained open for donations. Another false claim is that there were no controls for his autism brain study. While there were no "normal" brains in the study there were comparisons:

"The aluminium content of brain tissues from donors with a diagnosis of ASD was extremely high (Table 1). While there was significant inter-tissue, inter-lobe and inter-subject variability the mean aluminium content for each lobe across all 5 individuals was towards the higher end of all previous (historical) measurements of brain aluminium content, including iatrogenic disorders such as dialysis encephalopathy [13], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19]. All 4 male donors had significantly higher concentrations of brain aluminium than the single female donor. We recorded some of the highest values for brain aluminium content ever measured in healthy or diseased tissues in these male ASD donors including values of 17.10, 18.57 and 22.11 μg/g dry wt. (Table 1). What discriminates these data from other analyses of brain aluminium in other diseases is the age of the ASD donors. Why, for example would a 15 year old boy have such a high content of aluminium in their brain tissues? There are no comparative data in the scientific literature, the closest being similarly high data for a 42 year old male with familial Alzheimer’s disease (fAD) [19]."

Professional concerns about the use of aluminium adjuvants in vaccine products are by no means unique to Prof Exley and colleagues.

The professional attack in the report is led by Andrew Pollard who is said to be a professor of "paediatric infection": it does not mention Pollard's manifold roles as leader of Oxford Vaccine Group, which develops vaccines with the industry (mostly containing aluminium), as chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation which recommends vaccines to the British schedule, as leading adviser to the British and European licensing agencies, and board member of the Jenner Vaccine Foundation. In July 2017 he also called in the Guardian newspaper for compulsory vaccination without disclosing any of these roles. Real investigative journalists might be asking what research Pollard has ever undertaken into the safety of aluminium adjuvants in vaccine products which he helps develop, recommend and license?

John Stone is British editor of Age of Autism

April 8, 2019: Professor Exley has been attacked and his work disparaged in the British media.  See our post today by John Stone titled, Scurrilous, Misleading Attack On Prof Christopher Exley By The Sunday Times He is being "Wakefielded" because he research on aluminum brain toxicity crosses the vaccine profit barrier. Here is an article he wrote in 2018, just 15 months ago. I shouldn't help but wonder if he would prefer the din of silence today.  We are so sorry to see the media boot on his neck. Here is the paper being discussed: Aluminium in brain tissue in autism

"I was aware of the emotive nature of our research and especially as I knew that it would bring into focus a possible link between aluminium adjuvants in vaccines and autism, though this link was not discussed in the paper. However, I am not sure that I was prepared for the nature of the response to our research. Perhaps the most deafening response has been the tsunami of silence perpetuated by all mainstream media, almost globally!" Professor Exley

January 16, 2018

Note: Chris Exley Professor in Bioinorganic Chemistry Keele University Honorary Professor, UHI Millennium Institute Group Leader - Bioinorganic Chemistry Laboratory at Keelepublished expresses what so many brave scientists before him have encountered when their results challenge the status quo.  He calls the refusal to cover his science "the din of silence." We know it's a playbook straight out of the age of Big Tobacco. Cover up. Shut up. Shut down.  Thank you, Professor Exley.

###

By Professor Chris Exley

Sometimes silence can speak volumes. In December 2017, we published in a highly reputable journal our research suggesting a link between human exposure to aluminium and the aetiology of autism.

The research showed that individuals who died with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) had very high levels of aluminium in their brain tissue. However, the standout observation was not necessarily the amount of aluminium but its predominant location in non-neuronal cells and especially microglia.

In an interview immediately following presentation of this research, I expressed my opinion that these new data had forced me to change my mind about a putative role for aluminium in autism.

I was aware of the emotive nature of our research and especially as I knew that it would bring into focus a possible link between aluminium adjuvants in vaccines and autism, though this link was not discussed in the paper. However, I am not sure that I was prepared for the nature of the response to our research. Perhaps the most deafening response has been the tsunami of silence perpetuated by all mainstream media, almost globally! Compliant with this has been my own University that did not even deem the research ‘worthy’ of a mention in its own weekly news outlet. When one considers the nature of much of the science that makes headline news one is left wondering what it is about a link between aluminium and autism that is not deemed newsworthy. Perhaps mainstream media were unaware of the research.

Our John Stone works tirelessly to keep a voice of reason in the BMJ rapid responses.  This week, he was able to comment on the Rockland County Quarantine of healthy children during a measles outbreak. The Monty Python troupe could not have created a more bizarre skit than the Rockland County Inquisition currently underway. Thank you, John.

Re: US county bars unvaccinated children from public spaces amid measles emergency

Measles is not identified by the US government as a disease which requires quarantining [1], yet now Rockland County are quarantining children and young people who do not have measles to protect other children who are supposed to be protected anyway [2]. No evidence is presented about the vaccination status of either those who have caught or passed on the disease. There was a time when almost everyone had natural immunity because they had caught the diseases as a child, but now many will have waning or failed immunity because of the inefficacy of the vaccine [3], and all we can do is vaccinate more with the inevitability that measles will still keep popping up. This is at least very good news for the manufacturers.

[1] https://www.hhs.gov/answers/public-health-and-safety/what-diseases-are-s...

[2] Janice Hopkins Tanne, ' US county bars unvaccinated children from public spaces amid measles emergency'
BMJ 2019; 364 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l1481 (Published 28 March 2019)

[3] Rosen JB, Rota JS, Hickman CJ, Sowers SB, Mercader S, Rota PA, Bellini WJ, Huang AJ, Doll MK, Zucker JR, Zimmerman CM., 'Outbreak of measles among persons with prior evidence of immunity, New York City, 2011', Clin Infect Dis. 2014 May;58(9):1205-10. doi: 10.1093/cid/ciu105. Epub 2014 Feb 27.

By John Stone

The intervention of  the British Health and Social Care Secretary, Matt Hancock (pictured) to censor social media sites follows on similar calls by the Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, and the Head of UK National Health Service, Simon Stevens. According to the BBC report:

Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock wants new legislation to force social media companies to remove content promoting false information about vaccines.

He said the government is working with internet companies to identify misleading material on jabs, including Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR).

Artificial intelligence programmes could root out bad science.

It seems very unlikely that Hancock understands anything about vaccine data at all, or that he can have been very well advised. As we have seen Dame Sally did poorly when challenged in recent months to make good her claim that we know the MMR vaccine "is safe". The MMR arrived in the UK in 1988, without any significant safety data - no double-blind placebo controlled trials, or anything so exotic - and two brands had to be removed from the market four years after introduction, precipitately by the manufacturers and not by the British government (whose advisers looked blankly on).

When these people talk about misinformation or fake news what they are perhaps really worried about is data sharing: information about what goes on on government committees, what is in the published studies, even what is in the Package Information Leaflets  (PILs), which they will not show you. Anything might be more informative than the director of the Vaccine Confidence Project whose BBC television interview we recently excerpted:

Well, I think the main thing is there most incredibly extensive safety around vaccines - the processes that go around vaccines,  the reasons there is quite a while between when vaccines are developed and when children actually get them is because the system has become more and more and more robust around safety. Frankly, partly because of the public cry  for this,  but it has always been that way from a safety perspective because the government frankly is accountable and if it is recommending and requiring in some senses these vaccines in some senses it is not in the interest of the governments or the producer to be recommending something which is going to cause any damage..

by John Stone

Since November I have been writing, on and and off about my correspondence with Dame Sally Davies, the out going Chief Medical Officer of England, and to the British Government. This correspondence is now published under Freedom of Information (barring my address and telephone number). It began when I asked Dame Sally to support her comment on the BBC about MMR "It's a a safe vaccine - we know that". 

Recently, I made this list of points which I believe emerged from the exchange:

-          ASD in schools is at least 15 times the level of 25 years ago

-          1.74% of all schoolchildren in the recent Northern Ireland census (the most complete data we have at the present time) had a severe/complex level of ASD disablement (education Stage 5)

-          The overall rate is 2.9% for the province but 4.7% for Belfast

-          Epidemiologists trying to explain the rise in ASD at the beginning of the millennium were still only talking about a rate of 0.2%

-          1999 National Statistics for schools’ mental health showed a rate of 0.2% for ASD/PDD for those born between 1984 and 88 but by the 2004 survey the overall rate was 1%

-          The rate appears to have risen 5 times during the years following the introduction of MMR and 3 times since, and the majority of cases are not fringe diagnoses

-          There is still no robust or adequate evidence of a large ASD population over the age of 35 and Dame Sally was unable to cite any

-          Our schools, and their finances, are breaking down under the burden of disablement, with ASD being frequently mentioned as the major cause

-          The social cost of ASD, once almost invisible, is set to outstrip old-age in the near future and is only likely to keep rising

-          There is no robust or adequate evidence base for MMR safety: the six studies in the single review cited by Dame Sally were flawed and inadequate

-          The first of these studies was only published 14 years after the products were introduced in the UK, and Dame Sally failed to cite any pre-marketing data, so the question also arises what the evidence base was for safety before they were introduced?

-          The MHRA yellow card scheme would be incapable picking up long term neurological effects of vaccination

-          The government has no coherent or convincing explanation of these events which are set to engulf everybody

A pdf of the correspondence can be read and downloaded here.

John Stone is UK editor of Age of Autism.

by John Stone

The Guardian has been attacking charitable donations made to Age of Autism through the Amazon. Julia Carrie Wong, the journalist, seems to think she knows something about it.

"Age of Autism, for example, styles itself as the “daily web newspaper of the autism epidemic”. The site publishes a steady stream of content emphasizing the dangers of vaccination and promoting the discredited idea that autism is caused by “excessive vaccinations”. "

Well, Julia, perhaps you ought to take note that it was not Andrew Wakefield that said vaccines cause autism, it was the US government. Following the Hannah Poling award in 2008 Julie Gerberding, at the time Director for the centers for Disease Control, told Sanjay Gupta on CNN:

"Now, we all know that vaccines can occasionally cause fevers in kids. So if a child was immunized, got a fever, had other complications from the vaccines. And if you’re predisposed with the mitochondrial disorder, it can certainly set off some damage. Some of the symptoms can be symptoms that have characteristics of autism."

On separate occasions the Health and Human Services Health Resources and Services Administration told journalists Sharyl Atkisson and David Kirby:

"The government has never compensated, nor has it ever been ordered to compensate, any case based on a determination that autism was actually caused by vaccines. We have compensated cases in which children exhibited an encephalopathy, or general brain disease. Encephalopathy may be accompanied by a medical progression of an array of symptoms including autistic behavior, autism, or seizures."

But while autism spins out of control and is now approaching unsustainable 3% of children in the UK, and the cost of autism to the community is beginning to outstrip that of old age it becomes ever more difficult to get any serious or sensible answers out of our health officials. I recently had an  exchange with the outgoing government Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davis, asking her what the evidence base for MMR safety was and she could not cite anything more convincing than the new paper from the Danish State Serum Institute: a review of six weak and flawed papers the first of which was published 14 years after the MMR was added the schedule in the UK. She was unable to mention any pre-marketing studies, or studies against placebo - it was a very poor answer. The full correspondence has now been published under freedom of information.The new paper like three of the six papers in the review, shows a protective effect against autism,indicative of bias. It sets the autism rate at 1% when in the UK is near three times higher. It is hopelessly conflicted with vaccine industry and CDC attachments, just as the Guardian is.

So, Julia, what do you think your opinion is really worth?

John Stone is UK editor of Age of Autism.

by John Stone

The deadly charade continues. British television viewers were told on ITV NEWS on Thursday night that an All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) was to investigate "the  resurgence of the anti-vaccination movement".  They should not be deceived into thinking however that the APPG on Vaccination is the equivalent of a parliamentary committee. The secretariat for the group - which itself  consists of five little known members of the House of Commons and two of the House of Lords - is listed as an organisation  called Results UK, which is in turn a satellite of GAVI, which we all know is a partnership of  the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the WHO,  Unicef, the World Bank and the Pharmaceutical Industry etc. Every single vaccine manufacturer is represented within GAVI.

The strategy has been apparent since the summer of 2017 when the director of GAVI, Seth Berkley,  had an article published in the on-line Spectator - a British news journal - calling for "anti-vaxxers" to be banned from the web, when what he was really setting out to do was ban all criticism of vaccines from the web while simultaneously indulging in hate rhetoric. In the British context it might perhaps be a modestly hopeful sign that the present move comes from an undistinguished ad hoc group of parliamentarians rather than a standing committee: less helpful is the continuing treachery of the mainstream media which cannot any longer report anything without a having devious agenda behind it.

John Stone is UK editor of Age of Autism

By John Stone

Having raised the issue of Heidi Larson's intervention in the vaccine debate on the BBC last week, it is worth considering - given her global status as vaccine confidence chief - how much she actually knows, but also her lack of professional accountability. Indeed, the first time she came to the attention of Age of Autism was when she wrote an article in New Scientist helping to lobby the United Nations (successfully as it turned out)  not to place a ban on mercury in vaccines under the title: "Poison pill: Not all mercury is toxic". Troubling perhaps in retrospect apart from the very poor argument is that the case was not being made by a medical doctor or toxicologist, but someone who was not professionally accountable for such an opinion. We met the same problem with her recent broadcast:

Well, I think the main thing is there most incredibly extensive safety around vaccines - the processes that go around vaccines,  the reasons there is quite a while between when vaccines are developed and when children actually get them is because the system has become more and more and more robust around safety. Frankly, partly because of the public cry  for this,  but it has always been that way from a safety perspective because the government frankly is accountable and if it is recommending and requiring in some senses these vaccines in some senses it is not in the interest of the governments or the producer to be recommending something which is going to cause any damage. 

You could say this sounds like a satirical parody of someone defending vaccine safety. It is not merely that we find ourselves in disagreement over facts, it is actually that the language is vague and she does not seem to remotely know what she is talking about. Of course, it would be much easier to advocate that vaccine are safe, carefully trialed and monitored, if you really did not know anything much about it beyond your own propaganda.

Previously, Larson has pronounced herself concerned about vaccine safety. She told Johnson & Johnson website in 2017:

Yes, there are potential risks—there will always be potential risks with any medical treatment. And we don’t talk enough about that.

Which is all very well perhaps until you accuse the people who are talking about it of the equivalent of "hate crime". Adriana Gamondes reported in these columns last month:

The corporation was so uninterested in Brabant’s adverse reaction [to a yellow fever vaccine] that even Dr. Heidi Larson—lead researcher for the Gates Foundation’s Vaccine Confidence Project—called the company’s response “inadequate” and suggested that the vaccine formulation—which has not changed since the 1960’s—is not only outdated but being given in too large a dose. Interestingly, Larson holds up Sanofi-Pasteur’s conduct in this case as an example of the damage corporations do to public confidence in vaccination.

But is it going too far to suggest that Brabant's injuries seem real to Larson because she and he had both worked for UNICEF: they are part of the same class - the rest of us can apparently go hang. And you become credible because you move in the right circles:

By John Stone

Heidi Larson, the director of Vaccine Confidence Project, was seen and heard on the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire Show on Friday morning. Here is an extract:

HL: Well, I think the main thing is there most incredibly extensive safety around vaccines - the processes that go around vaccines,  the reasons there is quite a while between when vaccines are developed and when children actually get them is because the system has become more and more and more robust around safety. Frankly, partly because of the public cry  for this,  but it has always been that way from a safety perspective because the government frankly is accountable and if it is recommending and requiring in some senses these vaccines in some senses it is not in the interest of the governments or the producer to be recommending something which is going to cause any damage. 

 VD: Should Facebook  take these private groups down?
 
HL: I think the issue with Facebook is a difficult one because on the one hand they are asked not to dig into  people's personal areas and on the other hand being asked to go and take things down so I think from a Facebook perspective its difficult to do that. From a public health perspective as we saw in the letter from Andrew Schifft (sic) to Mark Zuckerberg that this is something in the league of like hate crime....

Of course, it is hard to know where to begin. Heidi may pronounce herself satisfied with vaccine technology but frankly she is just emoting - and she has no right to take the matter out of the public's hands. To the best of my knowledge since I have been involved in these matters, the only attempts I have seen to reassure the public have been socially repressive. Obviously, we are in a situation of accelerating unpleasantness with every last measles case being hyped as if it was Ebola. But as readers will be aware when I quizzed the UK's outgoing Chief Medical Officer about the evidence basis for MMR safety she came out only with generalities and only named the very weak Luke Taylor "meta-analysis" for the safety of the products. Dame Sally could not cite pre-marketing trials against placebo (or any pre-marketing trials at all), she could only cite a paper published 26 years after the products were introduced in the U.K. 1988, while the earliest of the papers reviewed in it was published no earlier than 2002. It may be that this is what Larson had in mind: that before the public concern there had been no proper studies, and then there were the studies our governments did produce when they were in a corner - and these studies were anything but "more and more and more  robust".  As I wrote to Dame Sally:

by John Stone

In November we published an extract from a letter to myself from the British Government's chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, and the full text of her letter has now been published by the British Government under Freedom of Information. However, the timing is somewhat interesting. While the text was apparently released by her department on 21 Dec last year it was not actually published to the web till two days before she announced her retirement on 8 February. Clearly you would expect someone in her position to present the best evidence available.Here is the full text of her letter below with my original article underneath (with thank to Angus Files for pursuing this matter). I had asked Dame Sally to support her statement "It's a safe vaccine -we know that". This was her reply:

Vaccine safety is extremely important and taken seriously, and the safety of MMR vaccines has remained under continual review. As with any vaccine, MMR vaccines can have side effects in some people, and these are listed in the product literature. The potential for side effects has to be balanced against the benefits of protection against what can be very serious and potentially life threatening infections. When safety issues have been confirmed in the past these have been acted upon. Your e-mail refers to the action taken with Urabe mumps-containing vaccines, and another example includes the identification and precautions around the risk of immune thrombocytopenic purpura with MMR vaccines. Should emerging evidence confirm any new risks, I can assure you that appropriate action would be taken.

Specifically in relation to whether MMR vaccines may be a cause of autism, a substantial body of population-based research has found no evidence to suggest a causal association. This ev-idence (not just for MMR, but other types of vaccine) is available for review in the published medical literature, and was summarised in a meta-analysis in 2014 which is free to download (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X14006367?via%3Dihub).

In relation to vaccine safety monitoring more generally, I can assure you that systems are in place to keep safety under review. This includes continual review of suspected adverse reac-tion reports (such as those submitted through the Yellow Card Scheme), evaluation of GP and hospital-based health records linked to immunisations, review of worldwide data and close collaboration with international health authorities. 

We know that confidence in the UK vaccine programme is at very high levels and the vast ma-jority of parents choose to have their children protected by vaccination. Vaccines are one of the best public health interventions we have - saving lives and preventing millions of people from getting life-threatening diseases.

Our John Stone puts measles hysteria in perspective in his response in BMJ:

The WHO and the Little Boy Who Cried Wolf
Re: Measles cases in Europe tripled from 2017 to 2018 Jacqui Thornton. 364:doi 10.1136/bmj.l634

Let us get a handle on this. I just looked up the population of Europe for 2018 on Google and discovered a figure of 738 million, so the chances of dying of measles last year in Europe was less than 1 in 10 million. While it seems unlikely that vaccination can ever eliminate measles - notably because the vaccine sheds - could this just possibly be a distortion of policy?

A couple of other observation regarding Jacqui Thornton's article [1]: (a) the number of cases is likely be an artefact of the drive to identify them; (b) 61% hospitalisation does not sound credible.

[1] Jacqui Thornton, 'Measles cases in Europe tripled from 2017 to 2018', BMJ 2019; 364 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l634 (Published 07 February 2019)

Measles cases in Europe tripled from 2017 to 2018
BMJ 2019; 364 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l634 (Published 07 February 2019)

Cite this as: BMJ 2019;364:l634

More than 80 000 people in 47 of 53 European countries contracted measles in 2018, with 61% hospitalised and 72 deaths, the World Health Organization has said.

The total number of people infected with the virus in 2018 was the highest this decade—three times the total reported in 2017 (23 927 cases) and 15 times the record low recorded in 2016 (5273 cases).1

Despite more children in the WHO European region being vaccinated against the disease than ever before, progress on vaccination is uneven between and within countries. This leaves clusters of susceptible people unprotected, particularly in middle income countries, WHO said.

1. By John Stone

A special tribute to Del Bigtree (pictured) and his team at ICAN for his stunning 88 page letter to the HHS regarding vaccine safety. As Del reported - in the latest edition of Highwire - the letter, in response to an earlier reply from the then acting Director National Vaccine Program Office, Melinda Wharton, took virtually a year to compile, and is a meticulous piece of research. Most sensationally they researched the HHS claim through US government archives that at least some pediatric vaccines had been trialed against genuine placebo, and came to a negative conclusion. Not only that, they established that none of the vaccines those vaccines had been trialed against had ever been trialed against genuine placebo either. At the end of the line the toxic products were only being compared with other toxic products, rather than against saline.

Leave aside the sceptics, for any believer in the vaccine program as a necessary intervention in public health, this should be a devastating finding. Fundamentally, the research into the safety of any of the products before marketing was simply not there. The manufacturers apparently had no faith that their proto-products could withstand this scrutiny, and for the rest they just did not care: under the alleged imperative of protecting the population it seems anything went. So even before all the sham monitoring procedures and reviews which Del and his team dismantle in forensic detail we are left with the proposition that none of the present products being given to US children – and frequently  other children across most of the developed world – have any meaningful pre-marketing safety data all. If you are believer in the program you have been let down: if you wanted a program with any pretensions to safety - supposing such a thing to be possible - it looks like you would have to start from scratch. The manufacturers did this: the governments, the politicians and the regulators (internationally) let it happen.

This damning document is published simultaneously with a demand in the UK  from the Royal Society for Public Health (which I had never heard of) to shut down comment about vaccines on the web. It echoes calls from Seth Berkley of GAVI, Heidi Larson of the Vaccine Confidence Project and the European Parliament. The pamphlet airily dismisses concerns that vaccines have side effects or that you could possibly have too many. It is pure public relations, and if the RSPH claims to be "independent" it also admits that the publication was paid for by Merck, a detail which was reported by British Medical Journal and the Guardian, but not true to form by the BBC. We have, in truth, been building to this moment for two decades: as the evidence piles up that every single aspect of the program lacks integrity or is simply rotten to the core all the perpetrators can do is call for the silencing of their critics, and maintain the products are safe because they say so. 

Watch Del introduce the letter on Highwire January 24, 2019:

Please help give the ICAN letter the widest possible distribution, particularly to politicians.

The full correspondence can be found here.

John Stone is UK Editor for Age of Autism.

By John Stone

Below is the text of my recent letter to Dame Sally Davies (pictured), Chief Medical Officer since 2010 to the British government. Davies has now replied twice to my original challenge to substantiate her comment on the BBC regarding the MMR: ""It's a safe vaccination - we know that". My original reply was published last November. It is evident that if she had a strong reply to make she ought to have made it the first time around, and the second reply was only an amplification of the first, to which I have in turn responded in more comprehensive detail. I believe it demonstrates how a government department had come to justify its choices made originally on weak evidence, and how as the decades went by the resulting decisions got worse and more desperate: and as the problems got more drastic the denial - even if believed - got more implausible.

It is interesting and likely significant that when I asked about MMR safety it was Davies who brought up the issue of autism (which I had not mentioned). This mirrors the situation two decades ago when I tried to raise the subject with the department of the rising autism numbers and they brought up Andrew Wakefield (though I had mentioned neither Wakefield or vaccines). The message is that they make the connection as a reflex, the safety of MMR and the claimed stability of the autism figures are inextricably entwined and in both instances the department are making a “leap of faith”.

My title refers to “the Department of Health", but to clarify at the beginning of this period when the original decisions were being made it was part of the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS), and since January last year it has been called the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), but for the three decades during which most of this happened it was the DoH or DH.

Dear Dame Sally,

Re: MMR Safety and Autism Numbers

Thank you for your further courteous reply (20 December), however I must point to a host of anomalies (apologies for the length and detail of my reply). The MMR programme was introduced to the UK in 1988 but the earliest of the autism safety studies included in the Cochrane review 2005 [1] was published only 11 years after this (and apparently based on illegally obtained children’s records, which cannot be cross checked [2]), while the first listed in the review by Luke Taylor (2014), which you cited, comes from 14 years after the introduction of the products [3]. Indeed, in 1988 the DH recklessly favoured SKB’s Pluserix MMR vaccine although it was already withdrawn in Canada [4] and contrary to your first letter it never made an attempt to withdraw the product until the decision was made to do so unilaterally by the manufacturers in 1992 [5].

The safety of the products had not been established at the time of introduction (quite the reverse as the main one in use was known to be hazardous), and the featured studies only began when, following the intervention of Andrew Wakefield, health officials came under pressure to justify the policy. The picture became further complicated in 1999 when the problem of mercury in other vaccine products, previously unacknowledged, came to light in the US. The problem of the Cochrane paper of 2005 is that the bland reassurance it gave regarding MMR and autism is in stark contrast to the cool to scathing comments about the six autism related studies it reviewed (three of which overlap with the Luke Taylor review of 2014 which you previously gave as your evidence for MMR safety and MMR not causing autism) [6]. The manifest contradiction in the review should in itself raise red flags.

by John Stone

The term "smart power" was new to me when I encountered it recently in a British Medical Journal blog as part of the new-speak vocabulary of J Stephen Morrison 'senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of its Global Health Policy Center".  Morrison's article is interesting both because it discloses explicitly how 9/11 was made an opportunity  to draw health into the global security agenda of the United States while failing to understand how such a move might result in the shattering of "consensus" and the post war "Western post-war liberal order": "smart power" even if it is smart is not "liberal" and will not lead to consensus. But it also spells out that the global vaccine program has become a covert instrument of US power. If Morrison by any chance laments the passing of the centre-left government in Italy, then perhaps the White House putting Italy and its health minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, in charge of global vaccine strategy was an error.  

Morrison thinks it is a paradox but it is scarcely so if a government is seen to pursue coercive health measures over its citizens at the behest of a foreign power - even those who favor vaccination could be concerned at the state's new found powers over their bodies (which might also be indefinitely extended). If that was not so smart a political move perhaps the technology is not so smart either - as I remarked  to Steven Salzberg a few years ago: "The unwelcome news is that the “cruise missiles and drone helicopters” of the war on disease often hit the wrong target, and the more cruise missiles and drone helicopters you unleash the greater the risk".

Frankly, no one knows what they are going to be injected with next. Smart bombs become too easily the agents of international chaos and mistrust: just so the smart bombs of the war on disease, both for what they can do to your body and what they can do the political landscape, including destabilizing friendly governments. “Smart power” is also duplicitous: Italy is just the surrogate of the US. Why could the citizens of the world not have it directly from the mouth of Obama saying in effect your bodies are not your own and we inject into them what we like?

To make measles a key issue in global security is an unforgivable distortion of policy. It really is not clear why we are at more risk from disease now (apart from by the sinister development of viral technology) than at any time since the end of the Second World War, we are simply being gripped by a new manipulative rhetoric. Nor could we be further from the consensus that gave rise to the Nuremberg Code 70 years ago. Everything we have learnt has been stood on its head.

*            *            *

Below is a letter I recently wrote to British Medical Journal (unfortunately not so far published):

"Smart power": reasons for disaffection in Italy, and the destruction of the post-war liberal order and consensus

Owen Dyer presents a rather incomplete background to recent political events in Italy [1]. The is is not to say that I have any insight into what Giulia Grillo - the Italian Health Minister - intends, but there are  some gaps in the narrative regarding the defeat earlier this year of the  governing centre-left coalition, in which Grillo's predecessor - Beatrice Lorenzin - was a key player over several years. This is to say that there are reasons for discontent which apart from anything else fall well short of outright rejection of vaccination.

In the first place we seldom if ever hear mention in mainstream reports of the appointment of Lorenzin, and Italy, to head global vaccine strategy by the Obama administration in September 2014. An Italian government press release states [2]:

"Washington, 29 September 2014 - Italy will lead vaccination strategies and campaigns in the world over the next five years. This was decided by the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) held last Friday at the White House. Our country, represented by the Minister of Health Beatrice Lorenzin, accompanied by the President of the Italian Medicines Agency (AIFA) prof. Sergio Pecorelli, has been commissioned by the Summit of 40 Countries, at which also spoke US President Barack Obama...."

Equally, demonstrators against mandated vaccinations in Summer 2017 will likely have been aware of the statement by GSK's Italian administrator - Daniele Finocchiaro in 2015 [3]:

 "Recently I accompanied our global CEO, Andrew Witty, to Matteo Renzi. The premier told us clearly that he considers - and rightly so - the pharmaceutical sector as strategic for Italy. Further, he said that the pharmaceutical is precisely the future of our country ... I then met also Minister Lorenzin and other members of the government who reiterated the sensitivity of the government to those who invest, create jobs and opportunities for young people. So we started on the right foot. To find such sensitivity in Roman palaces is not to be discounted. As for us, Andrew Witty asked few things: certain rules and stability in the face of very strong investments in advanced research and production equipment. We understood each other."

Citizens may also have been sceptical of Lorenzin's claim that 270 children had died in a recent outbreak of measles in London [3,4], and they may have wondered why ten vaccines had to be mandated to protect against one disease.

It is interesting in this light to view the complaint of  J Stephen Morrison (senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of its Global Health Policy Center) in BMJ Opinion that post-war consensus has broken down [5]:

"Global health is a product of the Western postwar liberal international order—an order that is today besieged, says Stephen Morrison"

"In the past two decades, we have witnessed an expansion of investments into global health that have been rooted in humanitarianism, the rule of law, and democracy. Underlying this action have been the principles of multilateralism, alliances, and partnerships. It has been consistently argued that investments outside home borders will not only save and improve lives but also promote economic growth and the stability of communities.

"In surprising and unforeseen ways, global health also benefited enormously from the post 9/11 counter terror doctrine that came to dominate the security strategies of the major Western powers. That doctrine aggressively advanced the argument that uncontrolled infectious diseases pose major transnational threats. It put a spotlight on smaller countries beset by weaker governance and fragile infrastructure, where grave health challenges can fuel armed, internal violence. Counter terror gave rise to the belief that focused investments—“smart power”—would achieve concrete results in improving lives while also winning hearts and minds in a global struggle."

But there is a paradox here that "smart power" is necessarily what everyone wants, or that the consensus is any longer "liberal". The Italian people were in effect being told that they must cede rights over their bodies and those of their children to the state because of the demands of global security strategy (starting apparently in the White House). Even if they accepted ten vaccines where would this end in principle? Could it be that the global strategists are themselves smashing the consensus, by  arrogating extraordinary rights over ordinary people? Morrison assumes this is a benefit of 9/11, but if so it was not one that the citizens of the world were consulted about, it was something which happened within US and global hierarchies and we were all just supposed to do as we were told.

[1] Owen Dyer, 'Italy’s health minister fires country’s top health board', BMJ 2018; 363 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k5158 (Published 05 December 2018)

[2] John Stone, 'Re: MEPs devise strategy to tackle vaccine hesitancy among public -Echoes of WMD', 26 March 2018, https://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k1378/rr

[3] John Stone, 'Re: Too many vaccine mandates subvert measles vaccine update', 24 August 2018, https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3596/rr-6

[4] John Stone, 'Re: Compulsory vaccination and growing measles threat - Prof Melegaro's response', 21 October 2017, https://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j3429/rr-7

[5] J Stephen Morrison,  'Global health disruptors: Decay of the postwar multilateral Western order', BMJ Opinion 29 November 2018, https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2018/11/29/stephen-morrison-decay-of-the-postwar-multilateral-western-order/

John Stone is UK and European editor of Age of Autism

by John Stone

The BBC was at it again on Friday running a report hinting that 50,000 people had died from flu in the England and Wales during the the 2017-18 season based on newly published data from the Office for National Statistics:

"There were around 50,100 excess winter deaths in England and Wales in 2017-18 - the highest since the winter of 1975-76, figures from the Office for National Statistics show...The increase is thought to be down to the flu, the ineffectiveness of the flu vaccine in older people and spells of very cold weather last winter."

One fundamental problem with this is that the government had already published the influenza death toll for the season in May - it was indeed an exceptionally  bad year but it still only meant 320 deaths in England and 372 in the United Kingdom as a whole (which includes Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland):

"Through the USISS mandatory scheme, a total of 3,454 ICU/HDU admissions of
confirmed influenza were reported across the UK from week 40 2017 to week 15 2018,
including 372 deaths, based on combined data from England, Scotland and Northern
Ireland. In England, the total number of influenza confirmed admissions to ICU/HDU
was 3,175 (rate of 0.22 per 100, 000 population) and 320 deaths during the same
period...

"The cumulative number of cases and deaths were higher compared to the 2016 to 2017
season (992 cases (rate of 0.06) and 112 deaths) and to the 2015 to 2016 season
(2,173 cases (rate of 0.14 per 100, 000) and 166 deaths) in England. This season
represents the highest number and rate observed since the beginning of the scheme
..."

Public Health England, 'Surveillance of influenza and other respiratory viruses in the UK:Winter 2017 to 2018' p. 21

It is also interesting to note that the issue of high mortality for the period came to light early on and was even reported in some national newspapers. In the British Medical Journal Hiam and Dorling wrote in March:

"Within the first seven weeks of 2018, some 93 990 people died in England and Wales.1 Over the same weeks in the previous five years, an average of 83 615 people died..This rise of 12.4%, or 10 375 additional deaths, was not due to the ageing of the population. Ageing is a slow process and leads to slow, not sudden, rises in mortality...An additional person died every seven minutes during the first 49 days of 2018 compared with what had been usual in the previous five years. Why?

By John Stone

AoA revisits UK and European Editor, John Stone's, exposé from last November of the bogus European Health Parliament, an industry lobby organization supported by POLITICO. POLITICO's credentials for attacking vaccine critics for spreading FAKE NEWS in France are rendered farcical by their sponsorship of this FAKE POLITICAL INSTITUTION.

The European Health Parliament: Bogus Institution Is Industry Front

Our elected politicians may not be a class I collectively respect, but at least they bother to get themselves elected. Recently our friends at the British based journal and group The Informed Parent received a letter announcing:

“My name is Alice Pignacca, Member of the European Vaccine Committee of the European Health Parliament, a platform of 55 young professionals and students with the goal of shaping the future of healthcare in Europe. We work in 5 committees around various topics. Specifically, our committee intends to provide recommendations on vaccination plans, taking into account the reasons for not trusting vaccines.”

What Ms Pignacca – who is requesting information -  does not mention is that the European Health Parliament (which no one had heard of before) but which sounds vaguely plausible, is no more a parliament than you or I are a parliament. It does not have representatives elected by citizens, and it is not an institution of the European Union: it is an unelected body affiliated to Johnson and Johnson, Google, POLITICO, the College of Europe, the European Patients Forum (a group which receives significant funding from most of the major pharmaceutical manufacturers)and Euro40 (a group of Euro MPs under the age of 40). The letter is copied to Matteo Pedralli, who like Pignacca seems to be a student at the 'the College of Europe', an independent educational institution situated in Brussels (one of the two homes of the real European Parliament) and to Chiara Danelli, who works for Johnson and Johnson .

By John Stone

In my letter to the British government's leading medical adviser, Dame Sally Davies, published in these columns two days ago I commented:

"When the DHSC last surveyed this problem in 2004-5 the overall ASD rate among school children was ~1% which was 5 times higher than the rate for those young people born between 1984-8 mostly before MMR was introduced, as reported in the equivalent 1999 survey. Since then your department has neglected to look at the issue (apart from a couple of failed adult autism surveys) as everything manifestly got worse, year on year."

By a strange coincidence the government published its first survey of child and adolescent mental health (including autism) in 13 years the day after my letter to Davies was dispatched, placing the overall prevalence of autism in English schools at 1.2%, completely out of line with the situation engulfing our schools. My criticisms of the new data have now been published in British Medical Journal Rapid Responses:-

Scepticism regarding the NHS survey 'Mental Health of Children and Young People, 2017' and ASD/PDD

By John Stone

I recently wrote to Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer of England and to the British government, asking her for the basis of her statement to the BBC regarding MMR: "It's a safe vaccination - we know that", and was a lucky enough to receive a reply (letter of 12 November, from which I extract):

Specifically in relation to whether MMR vaccines may be a cause of autism, a substantial body of population-based research has found no evidence to suggest a causal association. This evidence (not just for MMR, but other types of vaccine) is available for review in the published medical literature, and was summarised in a meta-analysis in 2014 which is free to download (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X14006367?via%3Dihub).

In relation to vaccine safety monitoring more generally, I can assure you that systems are in place to keep safety under review. This includes continual review of suspected adverse reaction reports (such as those submitted through the Yellow Card Scheme), evaluation of GP and hospital-based health records linked to immunisations, review of worldwide data and close collaboration with international health authorities.

It is noteworthy that the "meta-analysis" by Luke E Taylor is identical to the one cited by Thomas Insel to a US Congressional committee in 2014, but it constitutes no more than a bureaucratic fig-leaf. Dame Sally - who is the UK's leading government adviser on medical matters - ought to be able to do a lot better than this if every child is to be subjected to these products. It is, if anything, a rather naive response citing a shallow collection of studies which were published under political pressure decades after the policy was introduced. I have since attempted a conscientious and detailed reply:

21 November 2018

Dear Dame Sally,

Thank you for your letter of 12 November. I would point out that though you are quite right I am concerned about the rise in autism I specifically asked about the evidence base for MMR safety. That said it is reasonable to point out autism for a whole host of reasons is a much more serious problem in modern Britain (and elsewhere) than measles. When the DHSC last surveyed this problem in 2004-5 the overall ASD rate among school children was ~1% which was 5 times higher than the rate for those young people born between 1984-8 mostly before MMR was introduced, as reported in the equivalent 1999 survey. Since then your department has neglected to look at the issue (apart from a couple of failed adult autism surveys) as everything manifestly got worse, year on year [1,2].

As it is, a recent survey carried out by the Department of Health in Northern Ireland showed that the rate had risen from 1.2% in 2009 to 2.9%, while in Belfast it was as high as 4.7%. Moreover, 60% are educational Stage 5 [3], ie the most severe level of disability, so these are not cases that could previously have been missed because somehow subliminal. Educational data from across the nation and reports of collapse in educational services in the media testify that Northern Ireland is not an isolated case, but just better documented [4].

Regarding the meta-review by Taylor 'Vaccines are not associated with autism' [5] which you cited I note that there are just six MMR related studies included all of which have major problems. Three of the studies show apparent protective effect of MMR vaccines against autism (Madsen 8% [6], Smeeth 14% or 22% [7] and Mrozek-Budzyn 83%!!! [8]) which suggests bias. Of the Madsen paper Cochrane 2005 warned [9]:

"The follow up of diagnostic records ends one year (31 Dec 1999) after the last day of admission to the cohort. Because of the length of time from birth to diagnosis, it becomes increasingly unlikely that those born later in the cohort could have a diagnosis"

It remains troubling that as with a number of studies from this Danish group the co-ordinator on behalf of US Centers for Diseases Control, Poul Thorsen, is wanted for financial fraud from the CDC, though not extradited to the US now after nearly 8 years [10].

Of the De Stefano paper Cochrane commented [9]:

“The conclusion, however, implied bias in the enrollment of cases which may not be representative of the rest of the autistic population of the city of Atlanta, USA where the study was set.”

And indeed in 2014 the paper was repudiated by one of the leading authors, William Thompson [11]:

“I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.”

The study by Smeeth [7] is compromised by its patchy data source, the General Practice Research Database where the autism rate represented is perhaps only one tenth of cases diagnosed [12]. Cochrane commented [9]:

“In the GPRD - based studies (Black 2003; Smeeth 2004) the precise nature of controlled unexposed to MMR and their generalisability was impossible to determine…”

It remains problematic whether the unvaccinated in this study were genuinely unvaccinated.

Of the Uchiyama study [13] Cochrane commented [14]:

“The cohort study of Uchiyama 2007 was potentially affected by a different type of bias, considering that the participants were from a private clinic and that definitions of applied Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) diagnosis and of methods used for ASD regression ascertainment were not clearly reported.”

And the Uno study [15] will suffer from similar issues since the cases came from the same clinic. Moreover, in both instances the studies were far too small (904 persons and 413) to necessarily provide any clear result even if they had been better controlled.

Nor can the Taylor meta-analysis [5] cover up the entire absence of pre-marketing studies. In 1988-9 when the British government was persuaded to introduce Pluserix, MMR2 and Imravax there were no safety studies at all, and successive governments have been forced into the defence of a policy which they had embarked on without safety evidence.

As to the robustness of the yellow card reporting system I note the recent correspondence in the columns of BMJ On-Line regarding monitoring of Pandemrix vaccine from Wendy E Stephen and Clifford G Miller [16], which has serious implications for how the MHRA monitor all products. The MHRA has, of course, the ultimate conflict of being entirely funded by the manufacturers. It may be mentioned that in 1992 the Pluserix and Imravax vaccines were withdrawn not apparently by the British Government concerned about patient safety but by the manufacturers catching the government on the hop [17].

We are confronting a catastrophic situation among our young people with chronic illness replacing infectious illness as the main issue and cost to the state, and laying the emphasis on infectious diseases (with endless hate campaigns in the media against critics labelled “anti-vaxxers”) is a distraction, and a distortion of policy. It would be unfortunate if ministers were being advised about the safety of the programme on such a threadbare and inadequate basis. Re-examining the policy is both essential and urgent.

[1] John Stone,  ‘Response to David Oliver I (The Indisputable Rise in Autism)’, BMJ Rapid Responses 28 August 2018, https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3596/rr-12

[2] John Stone, ‘What about autism?’ BMJ Rapid Responses, 21 August 2018, https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3596/rr-0

[3] Information Analysis Directorate 'The Prevalence of Autism (including Asperger Syndrome) in School Age Children in Northern Ireland 2018', published 10 May 2018, https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/sites/default/files/publications/health/asd-children-ni-2018.pdf

[4] Responses to Viner RM, 'NHS must prioritise health of children and young people', https://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k1116/rapid-responses

[5] Luke E Taylor et al, ‘Vaccines are not associated with autism: An evidence-based meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies’, Vaccine 2014, https://autismoevaccini.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/vaccines-are-not-associated-with-autism.pdf

[6] Madsen et al, ‘A Population-Based Study of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Autism’, NEMJ 2002, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa021134

[7] Smeeth et al, ‘MMR vaccination and pervasive developmental disorders: a case-control study.’ Lance 2004, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15364187

[8] Mrozek-Budzyn et al, ‘Lack of association between measles-mumps-rubella vaccination and autism in children: a case-control study.’ Pediatric Infectious Diseases Journal 2010, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19952979

[9] Demicheli et al, ‘Vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella in children.’, Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2005 Oct 19;(4):CD004407.

[10]  Office of Inspector General, US Department of Health and Human Services, Fugitive Profiles, https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/fugitives/profiles.asp

[11] https://legislature.vermont.gov/assets/Documents/2016/WorkGroups/House%20Health%20Care/Bills/H.98/Witness%20Testimony/H.98~Jennifer%20Stella~William%20Thompson%20Statement~5-6-2015.pdf

[12] John Stone, ‘An old story: the GPRD does not provide credible autism data’ 11 February 2014 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/10/e003219.responses

[13] Uchiyama et al, ‘MMR-vaccine and regression in autism spectrum disorders: negative results presented from Japan.’ J Autism Dev Disord. 2007 Feb;37(2):210-7.

[14] Demicheli et al, ‘Vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella in children.’, Cochrane Systematic Review - Intervention Version published: 15 February 2012, https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD004407.pub3/full

[15] Uno et al, ‘The combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines and the total number of vaccines are not associated with development of autism spectrum disorder: the first case-control study in Asia’, Vaccine. 2012 Jun 13;30(28):4292-8. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2012.01.093. Epub 2012 Apr 20.

[16] Responses to Godlee, ‘A tale of two vaccines’ BMJ 2018, https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4152/rapid-responses

[17] Report, BMJ 26 September 1992, https://www.bmj.com/content/305/6856/777

When your government, the BBC or the mainstream media tell you that MMR is safe,  this the best that the British government can do. After three decades of pure bluster they need to go back to the drawing board.

Note: We would like to acknowledge the suffering in California is reaching many friends and families of AofA, including Del Bigtree, who lost his home to the blaze. We are very sorry.  Below John's introduction are the complaint by Professor Exley and the response from Newsnight.  The language used to vilify those who question vaccine safety is becoming more chilling by the moment, as civility and discourse seems to have diminished on both sides of the pond.

By John Stone

Only the other day Del Bigtree* was commenting on HighWire that the United States had become country with news services that the populace could not take seriously like China or Iran: the same is undoubtedly true of the United Kingdom and particularly its increasingly embarrassing BBC news service. This was highlighted in a recent exchange of letters between Prof Chris Exley and BBC complaints director Colin Tregear, following a toe-curling Newsnight presentation about measles and vaccine safety. Exley complained about bias in the presentation and simply pointed out that the claim that vaccines were safe was unfounded. The manufacturers acknowledged significant levels of serious adverse effects, the scientific literature does not support safety, the problems are real. It is simply not telling the truth to say vaccines are safe.

The tenor of Tregear’s reply was essentially that the BBC only has to listen to health officials, the WHO etc.: in other words they have bureaucratic concept of truth.  He defends the reporter who declared the doubts expressed in social media as being a "virus". Fundamentally this is hate talk. It is not to be condoned if people who have different experiences want to talk about it, if people - many of them well educated - want to read and comment: these people are themselves apparently a disease to be eradicated.

Professor Exley's Letter:

BBC Newsnight Comments

The clear and unambiguous message that Newsnight appears to wish to put across in this piece is that all vaccines are 100% safe and only ill-informed individuals think otherwise. The view that not all vaccines are 100% safe is portrayed as only being held by individuals who are not sufficiently educated to know otherwise. They are somehow slaves to internet scare stories. The message is given that doctors are aware of ‘facts’ which demonstrate that all vaccines are 100% safe. No ‘facts’ of any sort are given or discussed. The three chosen experts have no background in either science or vaccine safety. The two in the studio are charged in their everyday lives (jobs) with the responsibility of assuring individuals that vaccines are 100% safe. The third guest appears to have no relevant expertise in vaccine safety beyond the opinion that vaccines are safe and only individuals that believe in conspiracy theories think otherwise. The only other individual interviewed (by Grossman) is the discredited ‘journalist’ Brian Dear.

This piece of reporting is clearly stating the message that all vaccines are 100% safe and that anyone who might question this is at best ‘uninformed’ and at worst a dangerous anti-vaxxer.

The case of Dr Andrew Wakefield is yet again brought to the fore as if all research on vaccine safety in the 20 years following this episode can and should be discounted.

I am the world’s leading expert on human exposure to aluminium. I have been working in this field since 1984. The majority of vaccines include an aluminium salt as an adjuvant. We have been researching the mechanism of action of aluminium adjuvants for about 10 years. Our research along with that of many other reputable scientists across the world has highlighted the toxicity of aluminium in vaccines and its role in many of the serious adverse events reported in individuals following vaccination. The frequency of such adverse events (data from the vaccine manufacturers) is acknowledged to be as high as 2.5% which for vaccines which are given to millions of individuals equates to 25000 well people per 1 million recipients becoming ill following vaccination. Fears about vaccines are well-founded. They are not fabrications of the so-called anti-vax movement, they are medical facts based upon hard science. We who are working to improve the safety and efficacy of vaccines are doing what we can to reduce collateral damage from vaccines and we very much resent the suggestion by your programme, its presenter, reporter and guests that we are somehow ill-informed conspiracy theorists who are trying to scare individuals into refusing vaccines.

The facts about vaccine safety are what are influencing individual’s decisions about vaccination and not scare stories being spread ‘like a virus’ through the internet.

Displays of lies or at best ignorance as occurred throughout this Newsnight piece are not what is needed to improve the safety and success of vital vaccines.

I have noted a few specific points of contention in the piece below using the timing from the video.

00:39

876 cases of measles. How many of these new cases were in individuals who had been vaccinated against measles? This number was given as a ‘fact’ in support of a decline in the number of individuals being vaccinated against measles. Give the full information underlying this number and then allow individuals to decide if such could be a factor or not. 

By John Stone

I am publishing this brief correspondence to highlight how our higher educational institutions are becoming the enemies of freedom of speech and intellectual curiosity, not to mention purveyors of falsehood. I am not suggesting that Exeter University is particularly unusual: there are lots of publications of this kind from many academic sources, arguing how to limit and close down debate while using ad hominem tactics posing as hard science. It is interesting to note how the university dealt with this matter. The vice-chancellor and CEO, Sir Steve Smith - who is an expert in the politics of globalisation - handed the matter on to the provost, Prof Janice Kay, a cognitive neuropsychologist, who does not really tell us what she thinks, but passes the buck to the politics department, the publishers and the peer reviewers. She must however know that our schools are by now drowning in unprecedented and unexplained neurological impairment. It seems that the university's coat of arms with the motto  lucem sequimur 'we follow the light' has fallen into disuse, and frankly the spirit of enlightenment is dead as GSK and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation take over the world.

From: John Stone .....
Sent: 24 October 2018 16:20
To: Vice Chancellor.....
Subject: Harassment and silencing of vaccine and GM critics

To Prof Sir Steve Smith, Vice-Chancellor and CEO University of Exeter

Dear Sir Steve,

I would like to express grave disquiet regarding the paper by Lyons et al and the additional publicity given to it by your university. It really will do no good to target people while not addressing their arguments - it is to say the least an open question who is indulging in "innuendo" as your publicity department put it.

A case in point would be the paper's attack on the competence and integrity of Robert F Kennedy Jnr. The article does not address any specifics of Kennedy's argument in his article while labelling him as "a conspiracy theorist". In this regard it is worth noting that by 2004 the British government, without of course admitting any error, had removed mercury from vaccines - the subject of Kennedy's article - and it was only to make a return to doing so in the highly unfortunate and still unaccounted Pandemrix episode. The safety of using the mercury salt preservative thimerosal/thiomersal has been criticised in many scientific publications.

A further problem is that if people are not allowed to express their concerns - or even their unpleasant experiences - a class of product becomes protected and the hazards to the public increase. There can be no automatic assumption that products are safe, and what is proposed is the intellectual and social suppression of views, experience and knowledge inconvenient to global interests and governments. This does not mean that all opinions are equally valid but it does mean that public debate should be tolerated. The very failure to tolerate debate places a question mark of the motives of the people trying to deny it, and it leaves the public in a dangerous position. It is always possible that this or that product has been slandered, but it does not mean that all products or all public bodies meet the standard, and we cannot proceed on this basis.

I believe by promoting "research" of this kind the University of Exeter is placing itself in an invidious historical position, and I look forward to your views.

Yours sincerely,

John Stone, UK and European Editor, AgeofAutism.com

###

On 26 Oct 2018, at 15:18,

Dear Mr Stone, (if I may?)

Age of Autism re-posts its submission authored by its UK editor, John Stone, to the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee inquiry into antimicrobial resistance. The resulting committee report only mentions vaccines once,  and not as a major strategy against antimicrobial resistance. This is in contrast to a British government report of 2016 in which the lead author Jim (Lord) O'Neill saw vaccines as the major tool in combatting the problem, which had occasioned the AoA evidence to the parliamentary committee. Whatever the prospect for creating new antibiotic products the committee - perhaps in a new spirit of realism - appear to have abandoned expanding the vaccine program as a substitute.

by John Stone

After months of infighting and latterly outright war in the scientific community - and particularly within the Cochrane Group, formerly Collaboration - British Medical Journal have finally published  a paper questioning the safety of HPV vaccines. This represents a major step forward, because they had previously backed away from publishing a review by the same authors of European Medical Agency data, preferring in May to report the official Cochrane whitewash of the products by Aubyn et al, and only reluctantly reported the paper in July by three of the present authors in its cadet journal BMJ Evidence Based Medicine criticising their Cochrane colleagues - also now defended. All the present authors are historically associated with Cochrane but matters came to a head the weekend before last when the Group sacked one of the co-authors, a founder member board member of Cochrane - Peter  Gøtzsche -  on the basis of  vague and unsubstantiated allegations of bad behaviour, followed by the resignation of four other board members.

While the Cochrane Group is now widely considered to be a sinking ship, it has been frustrating to see weeks of politics overshadowing the incredibly serious criticisms of HPV vaccine safety made in BMJ EBM in July, and this is now somewhat rectified by the new paper which documents the painful and unsatisfactory process of extracting vaccine data from the European Medicines Agency: -

Challenges of independent assessment of potential harms of HPV vaccines

After three years of trying to access trial data for HPV vaccines, Lars Jørgensen and colleagues find current transparency policies unfit for their purpose

Lars Jørgensen, Peter Doshi, Peter Gøtzsche, Tom Jefferson 

by  John Stone

"If the contents of either of the papers became widely known it would surely have sounded the global death knell for the products and also called twelve years of government policy into question. When balancing the welfare of British children against the interests of industry and state it seems in the end the children barely weighed."

Serious ethical questions arise over the role of British Medical Journal and the promotion of Human Papillomavirus vaccines. Back in May BMJ published a news report of the Cochrane Review of HPV vaccines by former London Times journalist Nigel Hawkes “HPV vaccines are effective and safe and work best in young women, review finds”. It has come to light in the blog of Prof David Healy (author Pharmageddon and Let Them Eat Prozac ) that the BMJ knew the reasons for this confidence were at best extremely controversial, and that the journal itself had turned down an earlier paper by members of Nordic Cochrane (including leading scientists Peter Gøtzsche and Tom Jefferson) highlighting major flaws in the science surrounding the products. Healy states:

“ Some months back, the Nordic Cochrane Center, one of the centres in the Cochrane Collaboration, sent a review of studies done on the HPV vaccine to the BMJ.  Much to their surprise, BMJ turned down this article which contained all studies done on HPV and a serious attempt to flag up the limitations of the trials and accordingly the limitations of what we could confidently say.”

This paper is still unpublished but two weeks ago BMJ Evidenced Based Medicine published a second paper by the Nordic Cochrane group, Lars Jørgensen, Peter Gøtzsche and Tom Jefferson attacking the foundations of the Cochrane Review, as reported on Age of Autism last week and now available in full from Prof Healy’s site. Despite the BMJ Group publication the main journal chose not to publicise this extraordinarily newsworthy event. (It might be said that news is not what it was and this is one of the most blatant suppressions of  the news in modern medicine - the "Fake" comes in not reporting.)

While there is no doubt that the BMJ Group is commercially conflicted, not only accepting advertising from all the manufacturers – GSK, Merck and Sanofi - but also being in historic partnership with Merck, perhaps the real reasons are even more disturbing and relate BMJ’s peculiar relationship as the journal of the British Medical Association (the doctors’ trade union) with the British medical profession. If the contents of either of the papers became widely known it would surely have sounded the global death knell for the products and also called twelve years of government policy into question. When balancing the welfare of British children against the interests of industry and state it seems in the end the children barely weighed.

Last week the present writer tried to challenge a senior BMA member - Dr Peter English, Chair of its Public Health Medicines Committee - in the on-line columns of BMJ:

“As a “Public Health Physician” Peter English seems to express a breath-taking disdain for the public, while also apparently eliding any critical view of vaccines at all with being “anti-science”… I wonder what he thinks the public, particularly prospective vaccinees and their families, should be allowed to know about the recent paper by Jørgensen regarding the inadequacies in the trialing of HPV vaccines?”.

Naturally, it was not published.

 PostScript: In a 2008 letter to BMJ regarding HPV vaccine, co-signed by Prof Keith Neal, Peter English discloses:

"Competing interests: Between them the authors have given occasional lectures for, received expenses for professional conferences from, and participated in advisory boards for various pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Pasteur MSD, and others."

John Stone is UK and European editor of Age of Autism

by John Stone

An astonishing attack by three members of the Nordic Cochrane group in BMJ Evidenced Based Medicine on the recent Cochrane review of HPV vaccines, Arbyn et al Prophylactactic vaccination against human papillomaviruses to prevent cervical cancer and its precursors  calls not only the integrity and competence of the review into question, but poses by implication the most serious questions about how the products themselves were designed, trialed, licensed and marketed. The authors of the present of review of the review have been associated with a series of complaints against the European Medicines Agency concerning the vaccines and their safety. The Arbyn paper concludes:

There is high-certainty evidence that HPV vaccines protect against cervical precancer in adolescent girls and young women aged 15 to 26. The effect is higher for lesions associated with HPV16/18 than for lesions irrespective of HPV type. The effect is greater in those who are negative for hrHPV or HPV16/18 DNA at enrolment than those unselected for HPV DNA status. There is moderate-certainty evidence that HPV vaccines reduce CIN2+ in older women who are HPV16/18 negative, but not when they are unselected by HPV DNA status.

We did not find an increased risk of serious adverse effects. Although the number of deaths is low overall, there were more deaths among women older than 25 years who received the vaccine. The deaths reported in the studies have been judged not to be related to the vaccine. Increased risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes after HPV vaccination cannot be excluded, although the risk of miscarriage and termination are similar between trial arms. Long-term of follow-up is needed to monitor the impact on cervical cancer, occurrence of rare harms and pregnancy outcomes.

The key findings new paper by Jørgensen, Gøtzsche and Jefferson are:

-The Cochrane human papillomavirus (HPV)
vaccine review missed nearly half of the eligible
trials.
-The review was influenced by reporting bias
and biased trial designs.
-Authors of Cochrane reviews should make
every effort to identify all trials and the trials’
limitations

They found that the authors had included in the review only 26 of 46 eligible trials and state for this reason alone the conclusion "'that the risk of reporting bias may be small' was inappropriate" and they warn that none of the trials included were anyway for the new product Gardasil 9 which many countries are switching to. They further castigate the Cochrane review for using misleading language, referring to trials against placebo when all those included in the review were against "active comparators: adjuvants (aluminium hydroxide (Al[OH]3) or amorphous aluminium hydroxyphosphate sulfate [AAHS]) or hepatitis vaccines". They identify this as a bias in the original design of the trials masking the harm of the vaccines, and they note that women were excluded from trials if they had received adjuvants before or a history of immunological or nervous disorders. They say that this lowered the validity of trials and suggested that the manufacturers were concerned about the harms of the product in these groups, although no packet warnings are included.

They further complain that Arbyn failed to mention cases of cervical cancer in the trial groups but also that the relationship CIN2 lesions and cancer was uncertain since they regressed spontaneously in women under 30 who were mostly the subjects of the trial. They also say that the review misreported trials. In the so called PATRICIA trial where Cochrane reported 701 vs 699 from the trial publication, and 835 vs 829 in its "Clinical trial.gov" entry the Nordic Cochrane group found 1046 vs 982. Some trials recorded no adverse events at all and had very short follow up periods. While the original review could detect no pattern to the greater risk of death in the vaccinate vs comparator groups (51 vs 39) the Nordic Cochrane point out:

A death may be coded in a way that does not raise suspicion that the vaccine caused it; for example,a ‘traumatic head injury’ or ‘drowning’ could have been caused by a ‘syncope’, which is a recognised harm.

A meta-analysis which sought determine funding bias was flawed because the one trial which was deemed to be not funded by manufacturers was in fact funded by GSK by a circuitous route, and they failed to mention a report by the WHO Uppsala Monitoring Centre which found:

that found serious harms following HPV vaccination overlapping with two syndromes: postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) and complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS).

Instead they had relied on assurances from the European Medicines Agency handed down from the manufacturers. They note that in contravention of Cochrane guidelines 14 of the authors on the original protocol for the review had significant conflicts, as did three of the four authors of the final paper. While the main thrust of the paper is that Cochrane - to which the authors are affiliated -  needs to clean up its act, we all may wonder at how the governments of the world have allowed pharmaceutical companies to subject young women to these ill-tested and dangerous products for the last dozen years, and even at how the pre-marketing trials in the format described were ever allowed. We shudder over the fact that in the last week the recommendation for Gardasil 9 has extended to boys and young men in the United Kingdom, and that in France the vaccine is about to be made compulsory. We know we cannot trust the pharmaceutical industry but how can we ever trust our governments?

John Stone is UK and European Editor of Age of Autism

The reports have always been upside down.

By John Stone

I am publishing my notes on the "at a glance" history of the MMR controversy from Charles Hymas article Facebook putting children's lives at risk by reviving spurious MMR claims, say UK healthchiefs (27 July).While Hymas is a former Sunday Times journalist, he possibly has a good record in investigating corruption but he is missing the mark here. For more detail reader's are referred to Vera Sharav's annotated account at AHRP L'affaire Wakefield.

By John Stone

Earlier this month, I was contacted by Rosa Silverman, feature writer of the Daily Telegraph, who wanted to discuss with me the anti-vaccine movement in America in the light of that great public issue of the moment, the friendship of Andrew Wakefield with Elle Macpherson. As far as could tell our discussions were respectful, and when the article was published the following day to my surprise she did me the honor of quoting me several times. Personally, I was not particularly unhappy or surprised but in the end I decided that the way she had reduced people to types while ultimately ignoring all the information and data I had made available to her both by word of mouth and by email was unacceptable. I think our valued correspondent Annie got the idea when she remarked under an earlier article: "I really wasn't sure if there was a causal relationship between vaccines and autism until Dr. Wakefield started dating Elle McPherson. Now it's for real! Thanks guys! My "celebrity obsessed" American brain can now rest assured!" So, I wrote to her and her newspaper, gave them time to reply and then filed a complaint with IPSO the Independent Press Standards Organization- which I now publish below.

1 Accuracy

The core charges (which had been made collectively) against all three doctors in the Wakefield case (ie Profs Walker-Smith and Murch as well) at the GMC were set aside when Prof Walker-Smith appealed in the High Court in 2012 and was completely exonerated, leaving Wakefield and Murch technically guilty of things which had never been shown to have happened, or even had been shown not to have happened. In particular, Sir John Mitting dismissed the claim that the doctors were executing a protocol for a Legal Aid Board funded study upon which lay may other discrepancies and subsidiary charges, none of which could be true once this was found to be false. I had drawn Ms Silverman's attention to this major anomaly and provided documentation, which she evidently ignored. http://ahrp.org/laffaire-wakefield-shades-of-dreyfus-bmjs-descent-into-tabloid-science/ 

Anyone seriously interested in the facts of the Wakefield case needs to address the High Court finding of 2012, otherwise they are just repeating malicious rumours. I put the issue to Ms Silverman in my email unresponded to (19 July): "I posed the question whether Wakefield had had fair treatment, and produced chapter and verse on why he did not - which you seem to have completely ignored. The central issue of the Legal Aid Board protocol at the GMC which Sir John Mitting dismissed was laid collectively against all three doctors, and was simple wrong. It was historically wrong, and Mitting's findings were unappealed, though very inconvenient to the official narrative. To write a proper article about Wakefield you need to address this, and you manifestly have not: re-cycling shibboleths and appeals to authority I am afraid fail the standard." 

By John Stone

"Perhaps the most fundamental point is that having established this uninterrupted global pipeline for the industry’s products to the world’s children they have failed to ensure manufacturing standards even according to their own criteria."

An experienced pharma watcher has said to me repeatedly in the past few days: "There is something going on". He is not looking directly at pharma he is watching the prolonged and hostile media coverage of the friendship of Andrew Wakefield and Elle Macpherson as revealed to the public by the Daily Mail: something which to most people - except those who might know them personally - might be of only momentary interest, if any: but also the source of a great swirling mist of unprincipled junk journalism which has now be going on for a week. I was drawn into this maelstrom  myself last week by a Daily Telegraph feature writer, Rosa Silverman, who wanted to interview me about this non-issue (certainly not a public one) and the "anti-vaccine movement in the US". Rosa quoted me a number of times, which I barely expected (that was the one thing which surprised me). Nevertheless, having thought about the article  "Whatever happened to Andrew Wakefield: the curious rehabilitation of the doctor behind the MMR scare" (18 July)" for a day I felt obliged to complain about both the stereo-typing and failure to address the information  I had passed to her (my letters to her and the Telegraph with information I emailed her are published below).

But the big question is “Why?”. The answer is surely with all bathetic baying and shrieking from the press about nothing in particular that the global vaccine government complex could not be in more trouble. What would happen if anyone outside our sphere started to put together the stories we have seen in recent days? Perhaps the most fundamental point is that having established this uninterrupted global pipeline for the industry’s products to the world’s children they have failed to ensure manufacturing standards even according to their own criteria. So, now we have had  in a matter of  days the China scandal, we have RFKjnr’s revelation that the HHS has shirked its responsibility to inspect and report on vaccine safety every two years for the last three decades, and we have the Italian CORVELVA group saying that 5 out 7 schedule vaccines  they had independently inspected failed to meet biological standards.

Also running are stories about MMR in Samoa and  oral polio vaccine in Kenya. We have the long running saga of Gatti and Montanari in Italy.  Even before you get to the issue of whether the products could be considered safe by design, we have the great unlikelihood in many parts of the world, or possibly any part of the world, that they are routinely manufactured and delivered correctly. And rather than admit that the products are faulty the powers that be just prefer that they go on being injected into everybody’s children without saying anything, because the only important thing for them is that everyone goes on believing in the infallibility of the program.

 I do not mention in this context other important stories like Dengvaxia in the Philippines , Christopher Exley's revelations about aluminium in autistic brains or Gayle DeLong’s about HPV vaccines and infertility - things beginning to impinge on the reputation of the vaccine complex.

The point at this juncture is that the global industry is in monumental trouble, acting in such a way as to strain the faith of  persons normally much less sceptical of the aims of the program than the traditional readers of this column, and it needs to create a distraction - and what we have from at least the  British media in Orwellian terms is this pathetic chant of “Four legs good, two legs bad”. They are attempting to drum out the very possibility of thought: all anyone needs to know now is that Andrew Wakefield - who once dared to question the vaccine project in some way - was/is a very bad man. But I would point out another possibility that most onlookers will be completely perplexed: they will just be saying like my pharma watcher as they get daily more fed up with the feeble-mindedness and illogical antics of the mainstream media: “There is something going on”.

You bet there is!

Complaint letter to the Telegraph: Case: 17796369 - Re: Daily Telegraph feature on anti-vaccination movement (anyone wishing to  support write to [email protected])

Dear Sirs,

Below is a published "written evidence" from AofA's John Stone at data.parliament.uk.

Data.parliament (DDP) is a platform that enables us to share our data both within and outside of Parliament. The aim of data.parliament is to ensure that our data is both accessible and useable. Most of the data is already public, but this project is about ensuring that it is exposed in a better and richer way. It’s a big project, and the service will continue to develop and grow after the platform has launched.  In time, we hope that all published Parliamentary information will be available on DDP.

Written evidence from John Stone (Age of Autism)

[1] Vaccines are mentioned as one strategy against antimicrobial resistance (1) and this submission seeks to caution against the idea of substituting one kind of over-medication with another (Age of Autism is an on-line newspaper concerned with the publicly unaccounted adverse effects of vaccination).

[2] In the United Kingdom, an infant already receives by 12 months on the routine schedule (2):-

DTaP, Polio, HiB, HepB+Rotavirus+13 Strain Pneumococcal+MenB (8 weeks)

DTaP, Polio, HiB, HepB+Rotavirus (12 weeks)

DTaP, Polio, HiB,HepB+13 Strain Preumococcal+MenB (16 weeks)

13 Strain Pneumococcal+MMR+HiB, MenC

[3] In 2011 Miller and Goldman reported (3):

“The infant mortality rate (IMR) is one of the most important indicators of the socio-economic well-being and public health conditions of a country. The US childhood immunization schedule specifies 26 vaccine doses for infants aged less than 1 year—the most in the world—yet 33 nations have lower IMRs. Using linear regression, the immunization schedules of these 34 nations were examined and a correlation coefficient of r = 0.70 (p < 0.0001) was found between IMRs and the number of vaccine doses routinely given to infants. Nations were also grouped into five different vaccine dose ranges: 12–14, 15–17, 18–20, 21–23, and 24–26. The mean IMRs of all nations within each group were then calculated. Linear regression analysis of unweighted mean IMRs showed a high statistically significant correlation between increasing number of vaccine doses and increasing infant mortality rates, with r = 0.992 (p = 0.0009). Using the Tukey-Kramer test, statistically significant differences in mean IMRs were found between nations giving 12–14 vaccine doses and those giving 21–23, and 24–26 doses. A closer inspection of correlations between vaccine doses, biochemical or synergistic toxicity, and IMRs is essential.”

By John Stone

David Aaronovitch, recent chair of Index on Censorship, Orwell prize winner and Murdoch poodle (or possibly running dog) writing in the London Times wants to stop people saying things he does not like - so perhaps he will not like this article.

The problem with vaccines, is the more you are not allowed to talk about them the more dangerous they will certainly get. You can be fed lots of reassuring information by the surrogates of the people who manufacture them (the health agencies and mainstream journalists) but until ordinary citizens are listened to you will simply be engaged in an ugly strategy of social repression. It is not good enough to tell people when they have been hurt - or worse when their beloved children have been - that the agencies who did the hurting deny it. But for Aaronovitch the products are not mere fallible industrial products, they are simply beyond public criticism. 

If anybody is expressing unreasonable faith it is he. If he thinks they are safe, what body of science is he citing, and where are the independent agencies? In the UK the licensing agencies are funded by the industry (the MHRA 100%, the EMA 89%), the chair of the vaccine recommendation committee (the JCVI) is director Oxford Vaccine Group which is commercially involved in developing many of the vaccines the committee recommends. These are all perfectly acceptable arrangements to a mainstream media in advanced decline, and no doubt to our lion of free speech.

In his latest article ‘Conspiracy theorists make monkeys of us all’ (The Times 5 July 2018)  Aaronovitch employs all the old bad songs: people who doubt vaccine safety are unscientific and equivalent to those who doubt the theory of evolution; people who doubt vaccine safety are unpleasant right-wing types; people who opposed vaccine mandates in Italy (which incidentally we do not have in the United Kingdom) have caused measles to rise – when he might have focussed on government-pharmaceutical sleaze as the prime cause of their mistrust: the meeting at which Obama put Italian Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin in charge of global vaccine strategy, the secret deals she signed with GlaxoSmithKline. They probably also knew that she had made up fairy stories about 270 measles deaths among children in London. This was what last year the tens of thousands of people who filled the streets in Italy knew about, unreported by the Italian and global mainstream media, unreported almost certainly in the London Times – just to make them look like idiots. In these circumstances conspiracy was scarcely a theory. Oh yes, and to cap it all they are all “conspiracy theorists”.

 By John Stone

Largely unreported in the mainstream media the European Parliament this week, under the guidance of the European Commission, are effectively moving to shut down the web using an extension of copyright law. While it is disguised as a protection of intellectual property if it eventuates clauses 11 and 13 will be a devastating blow to intellectual freedom, preventing the use of web links on sites, and shutting them down if they are used. The web as a tool of freedom from oligarchies and corporate behemoths will be completely crippled. European readers should complain urgently to their representatives at the Parliament before it is too late through this website:

https://saveyourinternet.eu

PLEASE ALSO HELP TO CIRCULATE

I wrote individually to British members:

Dear ___,

I am writing ahead of the plenary session on 4 July to protest articles 11 and 13 of the EU's Copyright Reform Proposal. I am all in favour of artists receiving fair remuneration but these clauses are clearly intended to restrict sharing public interest data, making many sites that have always operated with due respect and caution for other people's rights virtually inoperable.

I fear MEPs are asleep or they are working on behalf of dark forces. They should remember that they were not elected by behemoth corporations, but ordinary citizens. 

Sincerely,

John Stone

Celebrations were inevitably short lived over the exoneration of Prof Henri Joyeux, the popular medic who had dared to criticize France's sacred vaccination program on a principled and informed basis. The judicial decision was immediately appealed by France's 'Order of Physicians'. Now we find that  six bodies "the Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Agriculture of France, the National Academy of Dental Surgery, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Pharmacy and the Veterinary Academy of France" have chimed in to censure Prof Joyeux:

By John Stone

In a blow to the medical absolutism  of the government of President Macron France’s governing medical body "the National Disciplinary Chamber" have overturned  a decision by the Disciplinary Chamber Languedoc-Roussillon to expel Prof Joyeux from medical practice. The original finding had denounced him for his criticisms of vaccination and being the initiator of an online petition against the use of GSK's vaccine Infanrix Hexa, a hexavalent which includes a Hepatitis B component - also recently been introduced in the United Kingdom -  despite the fact that infants are rarely at risk from Hep B. Hep B vaccination had previously been excluded from the French infant schedule after having been found to be associated with multiple-sclerosis. The petition, which was widely relayed on social networks and still online, has been signed by more than 1.1 million people.

Dr. Joyeux, who is well known on French TV, criticised the presence in Infanrix Hexa of "aluminum and formaldehyde" as two "dangerous or very dangerous substances”. The President of the National Council of the Order of Physicians, Patrick Bouet  had previously censured Joyeux for  "dangerous talk", and for "statements not supported by scientific evidence which undermine the profession". The National Disciplinary Chamber, on the other hand, found that Joyeux's views belonged within the context of an existing and legitimate scientific debate.

In 2017 Prof Joyeux gave a presentation with Nobel prize winner Prof Luc Montagnier. On that occasion Montagnier stated:" We risk poisoning little by little all the population which succeeds us, the children, the babies" and Joyeux remarked: "We are entering into a kind of vaccine dictatorship". 

Prof Joyeux: The national disciplinary chamber cancels his expulsion on appeal

Le Quotidiendumedecin.fr

06/26/2018

Article 1: "The decision of the Disciplinary Chamber of first instance of Languedoc-Roussillon of the Order of Doctors, dated July 8, 2016, imposing the sanction of the cancellation of the order of the order to Prof Joyeux, is canceled" .

Article 2: "The complaint filed by the National Council of the Order of Physicians against Prof Joyeux is rejected".

This is the decision that has just been rendered the decision that has just made the National Disciplinary Chamber after the hearing of Prof Henri Joyeux on May 24 to which the Order criticized two petitions on the dangers of vaccination, one against mandatory vaccination against HPV recommended by the High Council for Public Health (HCSP), the other for the return to market of trivalent vaccine DTP.

by John Stone

After months of negotiations Italian have finally managed to form a government based on the Five Star Movement and the Northern League both of whom were opposed to vaccine mandates piloted by Beatrice Lorenzin and the previous center left government -  the new Health Minister, Giulia Grillo, is "In favor of vaccines, but against Lorenzin's law". Protests in Italy against mandatory vaccination are set to take place in Italy in two days time (June 3) at at least five venues as part of the International Protest Against Mandatory Vaccination.

As we have seen in recent months elements within the vaccine lobby have indicated a willingness to back off pushing for  mandates and compulsion, trying to trade this in against allowing a serious public discussion about the safety of its products: that of course is the last thing they want. We rather imagine, though, at Age of Autism that the Italian public will have learned rather a lot about the lobby after five years of Lorenzin's machinations. It will also be interesting to see how Grillo, who has a medical degree, deals with the parliamentary commission report on the deaths and illnesses of Italian military personnel. Will this continue to be swept under the rug?

John Stone is British and European editor of Age of Autism.

by John Stone

Below is the most recent of a series of letters I have written posted in on-line British Medical Journal responding to an article by Prof Russell M Viner, President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. While Prof Viner was trying to challenge the British government to focus on the health of children and young people, I have been trying to get them both to focus on the tragedy unfolding in our midst: this is the sixth letter since March assembling data from official sources (with much help from Anne Dachel), without a single response. The Northern Ireland Department of Health deserve special praise because all the previous data relating to current autism prevalence in schools comes from education sources. Here at least they recognise and expose the scope of the problem, which represents in greater detail the situation across the United Kingdom. One thing this does is to lay to rest completely the better recognition and diagnosis argument because we actually have here very large numbers of children with extreme levels of disability, not with marginal traits which might have been passed over in the past. In Belfast you are dealing with approaching 3% of the school population who are autistic and with Stage 5 support (the highest level).

by John Stone

I have been looking at Scotland’s 2017 special educational needs data, published last month amid zero publicity – these days we do not even have to “bury the bad news”. It just gets published on a government website somewhere and almost no one notices...except me and Anne Dachel. On 26 March 2018 I wrote to the British Medical Journal (and they published):

The (British) government must face up to the autism pandemic, and so must the RCPCH

It is perturbing not to get a response from Prof Viner and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, after my Rapid Response last week [1]. Since I wrote I have tracked down the figures for Scottish schools for 2017 (the disability numbers were published earlier this month, though not reported in the media). The number of children with an autism diagnosis in Scottish schools rose by 11.5% in one year. Between September 2016 and 2017 one year in the fifteen year rolling cohort departed, another arrived, and the total number of children with diagnosed autism increased by 1,550: the incidence of autism in Scottish schools went up from 1 child in 51 (684,415/13,423) to 1 child in 46 (688, 959/14,973) [1,2]. But the rate among younger children will be far higher. In 2005 the Department of Health gave a figure of 1 child in 100 [1].

At what point does this catastrophic phenomenon even get to be acknowledged? People talk about pandemics of infectious disease, but what do they think this is?

[1] John Stone, 'NHS must prioritise health of children and young people -what about autism?', 19 March 2018 http://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k1116/rr

[2] Tables 1.1 and 1.8 http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/School-Education/dspupcensus

Naturally, no one answered. A friend posed me the question whether there could be substitution involved? Well it does not look like this is the main explanation. Here is the data (table 1.5)  for pupils with additional support needs comparing 2017 with 2007:

2007 Primary School  4.4% (16, 478)

2017 Primary School 23.5% (94,125)

2007 Secondary         4.3%  (13, 355)

2017 Secondary         29.3% (82,712)

Averaged out this is a present rate of 26.6% for pupils with additional support needs: a rise of 534% for primary education, and 681% for secondary education in ten years. Since this is a table presumably the criteria should be consistent. And though the autism figures are catastrophic and getting worse they exist in a new sea of other additional support needs. Also, some terrible fate is overwhelming pupils in secondary education.

When I wrote about the last set of figures in Scotland my articles were taken off Google News, probably after the intervention of Scottish government, or some pharmaceutical PR agency in London like Science Media Centre or Sense About Science. And very soon after Age of Autism was taken off Google News altogether. But the bottom line is that this is the real news: this is the Scottish government’s own data – nothing to do with me – and they cower in silence.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

John Stone is UK and European editor of Age of Autism