Letter on vaccination in Globe and Mail

[This letter was published in the Globe and Mail newspaper in a condensed 150 word format. It must have caused some concern, because the letters editor first asked me to condense it, then sent back their 150 word version which I approved, and it did not appear in the newspaper until 1 week after the original article. Normally letters appear the next day.]

I certainly support everyone making their own health decisions, so an article [in the Globe and Mail] on Alice Fleerackers who, after 27 healthy unvaccinated years, decided to defy her parents and get vaccinated, is certainly interesting, and a valid perspective.

But if the newspaper is not to be pharmaceutical propaganda, the other side should be covered, people who changed their minds and turned against vaccines. When I graduated at the top of the science faculty, with a degree in biology, I fervently believed in vaccines. It was only years later, when investigating a completely different area of medicine, that I was challenged on my beliefs and had to admit I had no scientific knowledge about vaccines. What I gradually found, as I started to read the science, shocked me, and turned me completely against vaccines. I discovered that true placebos are rarely used to test vaccines, but that most of the problematic additives are included in the comparison injection. That reduction of disease is almost never an endpoint in vaccine trials, but antibodies or other surrogate markers that aren’t guaranteed to correlate with protection from disease. I discovered the multi-billion dollar vaccine compensation court in the United States, and the VAERS database of adverse reactions, some very severe, including deaths. I became concerned about the ingredients in vaccines, particularly mercury (still used, although less than in the past) and aluminum (increasingly being used, in novel, poorly tested chemical formulations). I discovered that historical statistics generally showed massive declines in deaths from infectious diseases before a vaccine was available, and a relatively puny decline afterwards.

Regarding measles, which so scared Alice, I discovered that Canada stopped counting cases in the 1950s and early 60s because it was considered so minor, and only re-started when a vaccine became available. Maybe because measles statistics are useful to scare people into compliance. I also discovered, in the United States, that the risk of death from measles declined 50-fold from 1912 through 1962, before any vaccine was available, and 1000-fold by the time the first vaccine now believed to have been effective was launched, in 1968.

150 word published version

I certainly support everyone making their own health decisions, so an article [in the Globe and Mail] by someone who decided to get vaccinated for the first time, at 27, is certainly interesting.

But I also believe that the other side should be covered - people who changed their minds and turned against vaccines, such as myself.

When I graduated at the top of my class in biology, I fervently believed in vaccines until, years later, I was challenged on my beliefs and admitted I had no scientific knowledge on the subject. As I started to read the science, I gradually turned against vaccines. I discovered that true placebos are rarely used and that trials are designed to show the development of antibodies, not prevention of disease.

Billions of dollars have been spent on compensating for vaccine damage in the United States. Potentially toxic ingredients are used in some vaccines, particularly the metals mercury and aluminum. And my research into historical statistics showed that the greatest decline in deaths from infectious diseases occurred before a vaccine was available.

Summary

While I am not entirely happy with the reduced version, I am slightly amazed that an anti-vaccine letter could be published in a major newspaper at all. This is the first time that a letters editor has worked with me on the text, normally letters are taken, edited as the newspaper sees fit, and then published, or not. And, I have never seen a letter of mine appear more than 2 days after the original article. So I suspect there were some internal discussions. I do not want to read too much into this, but perhaps the complete silencing of vaccine critics will eventually end.

Letter on Vaccination in Alberta Views magazine

[I am pleased that Alberta Views magazine, a progressive voice in Alberta, has chosen to publish my critique of current vaccine panic. This is the text of the letter before it was cut down to fit within their word limit for letters]



One of the problems with a dogma is that it makes people intellectually lazy. Even if the core idea is true, it leads to people making absurd arguments if it gets them applause from the echo chamber the dogma creates, and because it encourages the acceptance, as an absolute truth, of every new addition to the dogma.

In the case of “Immune to Evidence”, reprinted from The Tyee, the authors make an argument that contradicts their support of the dogma, and they don’t even realize it. 

The facts are that the syptoms of Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP) are the symptoms of polio – the distinction is that the virus is not found. The World Health Organization monitors AFP and is now counting more than 100,000 cases a year [1]. But the argument that antagonism towards vaccines is preventing the elimination of this scourge is nonsense, because WHO itself admitted, back in the early 1990s, that there probably is no single cause, and the causes might be environmental, not infectious, such as exposure to pesticides [2]. 

We have to ask whether the “March of Dimes" was trying to eliminate juvenile paralysis in the 1950s or whether it was an academic exercise to eliminate a virus. The world has almost accomplished the latter, but what I believe was the obvious original goal is slipping away, with far more cases of juvenile paralysis occuring now, than in the early 1990s when WHO started to monitor AFP. 

Although it is an article of faith for vaccine dogmatists that the polio vaccine is one of the clearest successes of vaccination, the simple historical evidence belies this. The last major polio epidemic in the United States (which has the best statistics), was in 1952 when the rate was 37 (cases per 100,000). That had fallen to less than half (18) by the time the vaccine was approved in 1955. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1961 complained that, in the previous year, less than half of the vulnerable population (young children, pregnant women) was vaccinated. But at the same time the epidemic had fallen by more than 95% to a rate of 1.8. So polio disappeared without the vaccine even being half of the explanation. In fact, in the first couple of years after vaccination started, the rate of polio increased, before dropping again.

It is quite possible that many of the cases of so-called polio in the 1950s were actually environmental, caused by the post-war love affair with DDT and other organochlorines that, during WWII, were state secrets, used only on military bases (that did have some polio outbreaks). Canada also had an upsurge in cases in 1959, in the midst of the vaccination campaign [4]. The environmental theory is bolstered by the recognition in the 1930s, and possibly earlier, that polio has a dramatic seasonality that corresponds with the fruit harvest season in countries all around the world [4][5]. I am not overusing the word ‘dramatic’.  In 1943, in Utah, cases were between 2 and 5 in January through June, but peaked at 211 in the middle of the apple harvest season in September. The same year, in New York State, there were between 3 and 5 cases in each of January through June and 300 during apple and pear harvest in September.

The focus on a polio vaccine forced a focus on a virus. The focus on a virus changed the goal from eliminating juvenile paralysis to eliminating a virus. When paralysis was not eliminated, it was redefined, except under very strict conditions, as Guillain-Barré Syndrome, Meningitis, AFP, etc.

Today there is more focus on measles than on the opioid epidemic (or AFP). The years before any vaccine was available, the US rate of deaths from measles had already fallen 97% from the high rates in the early 1900s. And I use US statistics because Canada stopped counting measles cases from 1959 until the modern vaccine was approved in 1968, probably because it was considered such a trivial health problem. But all we care about today is the last 3% of deaths, which might not all be due to the measles vaccine, and without considering that vaccinating millions of people to prevent a few hundred deaths could cause more problems than it solves. What else are we missing by eliminating vaccine critics from the debate?

- David Crowe

  Calgary

  403-861-2225

References

[1] AFP (Acute Flaccid Paralysis)/Polio case count. WHO. 2019 Jan [accessed]. https://extranet.who.int/polis/public/CaseCount.aspx

[2] Acute onset flaccid paralysis. WHO, AIREN. 1993. http://whqlibdoc.who.int/hq/1993/WHO_MNH_EPI_93.3.pdf

[3] Alexander ER. The extent of the poliomyelitis problem. JAMA. 1961 Mar 11; 175(10): 837-40. http://davidcrowe.ca/SciHealthEnv/papers/6125-TheExtentOfThePolioProblem.pdf

[4] Kubryk D. Paralytic poliomyelitis in Canada, 1950. Can J Public Health. 1960 Oct; 51: 389-99. http://davidcrowe.ca/SciHealthEnv/papers/5428-ParalyticPolioCanada1959.pdf

[5] Toomey JA. Poliomyelitis: Comparison between the epidemic peak and the harvest peak. Am J Dis Child. 1933 Aug; 46: 262-79. http://davidcrowe.ca/SciHealthEnv/papers/6454-toomey1933-polio_seasons.pdf

[6] Gebhardt LP et al. Epidemic poliomyelitis. J Pediatr. 1946 Jan; 28: 1-13. http://davidcrowe.ca/SciHealthEnv/papers/6043-EpidemicPolio.pdf

[7] Measles – Canada, 1924-1975. MMWR. 1976 Dec17; 25(49). https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/1123

SNC Lavalin - They are all wrong. They are all right.

The SNC-Lavalin affair, distilled into a nugget, involves the Prime Minister of Canada, and his close political and bureaucratic allies, pressuring the Attorney General to institute a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) against SNC-Lavalin for bribery, rather than prosecuting this Canada-based but global engineering giant. This would mean large fines and supervision for years, to try to prevent the corruption from recurring, but minimal impact on day-to-day operations of the company. Prosecution, on the other hand, could result in  one of Canada's largest companies being banned from working in Canada for years, and could see it move its headquarters, and its best jobs, to another country. Since it is based in Quebec this would have enormous negative political consequences for the Liberal party.

Canada didn't used to have DPAs, they were created for SNC-Lavalin and the Prime Minister clearly wanted one used to prevent damage to the Liberal brand in Canada.

Jody Wilson-Raybould decided to stick with the prosecution despite immense pressure from the Prime Minister's Office.

The normal instinct of people when faced with a crime in theory is to want to vigorously punish the perpetrators. This instinct doesn't work. Centuries of the death penalty did not eliminate the crimes that were punished in this way. And when it is time to use the legal system that was developed in theory, in practice we get unintended consequences such as much larger fractions of the poor and of cultural and racial minorities in jail (maybe this is partly intentional). Or, with corporate crime, we are faced with destroying a company on principle, when the damage to the punishers will be great, and all it will mean is that American and European companies, that have governments that somehow manage to not put their companies out of business when they do bad things, will fill the void.

Trudeau was right to recognize the damage caused by prosecution of a corporation, to thousands of workers who did nothing wrong. Ironically, it was politicians like him who created the laws on prosecution which, in theory, seemed harsh enough to prevent corporate crime. Jody Wilson-Raybould was right to say that SNC-Lavalin did not qualify for a DPA.

So, what is the magic solution? Well, it seems quite simple to me: Prosecute the executives, throw them in jail, fine the company, and let new people take the helm. SNC-Lavalin will easily survive having to bring in a new management team (and if it doesn't, it has much bigger problems).

Why don't western countries prosecute executives for corporate crimes? There probably are lots of legal arguments, but I'm going to guess that the major reason is that the elites in any country are all friends, and prosecuting the executives of a major corporation based in that country, means prosecuting the friends of the elites that run the political parties that have power. Trudeau will have socialized with the leaders of SNC-Lavalin, Bombardier and other powerful Canadian corporations, and will not want to see his friends in jail.  Especially as they are also generous donors to the Liberal party.

Letter in 2600 Magazine, "Free flow of (false) information?"

Published in 2600 Magazine, Autumn 2018

[ 2600 Magazine is known as "The Hacker Quarterly", and appeals to readers who are interested in understanding telecom, computer, physical and other types of systems, especially their exploitable flaws. It is named after the 2600 Hz tone that, once upon a time, allowed 'hackers' or 'phreakers' to make free phone calls in North America]

Dear editors;

I have to respond to the article “Free Flow of Information” by Daelphinux, because his choice of Ebola and Polio as examples of the “essential function” of researchers in our society inadvertently makes the case for the opposite.

Where to start? Well, with Ebola, three articles [1] [2] [3] in the March 12, 1977 issue of Lancet are the obvious place, because this is where Ebola was created. The science was terrible. One, for example, used one poorly preserved liver sample to draw the unwarranted conclusion that not only the woman from which it came had died from this new virus, but everyone else in this outbreak of hemorrhagic fever. Since then the definition of Ebola has morphed, so that all that is needed for a definitive diagnosis is (A) one symptom that is most likely not bleeding, (B) contact with an Ebola patient and (C) a positive Ebola test. Bleeding is now a rare symptom. In a study of 44 patients from Sierra Leone, only 1 had this symptom.[4] And the tests are shockingly unreliable. In one study of healthy Africans, in places where there was no current Ebola outbreak (and in some places where there never had been) scientists found that over 15% of people tested positive. In a paper that I recently had published, I showed that the symptoms of Ebola are so vague that they mostly overlap with the adverse reactions to an Ebola vaccine being tested in another really shoddy piece of research.[5]

Polio, by comparison, seems like a slam dunk, but it isn’t. The last great US epidemic was in 1952 when America suffered 37 cases per 100,000. The vaccine was tested on almost 2 million American children in 1954 [6], of which less than one quarter were actually vaccinated. By then the rate was down to 24 per 100,000, without the vaccine possibly being the cause of the decline. By the time vaccination started, in 1955, the rate was down to 18, less than half the epidemic peak. Complaints were made that even by 1960 less than half the target population had been vaccinated[7], but by now the rate of polio was down to 1.8, less than 5% of the epidemic peak. 

But I known you’re going to say that, at least polio was eliminated, except in some ‘shithole’ countries as a certain President might say. Unfortunately that’s not true. Consider that another name for what we know of as polio is Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP), which is only known as polio when the virus is detected, and otherwise just called AFP. But to a paralyzed child, it doesn’t make any difference what type of AFP caused their life to be destroyed. The World Health Organization collects statistics on both polio and AFP. And while they proudly note that the number of cases of polio have sunk to very close to zero, the number of cases of AFP have rocketed from 13,857 in 1996 (the first year they started counting) to over 100,000 in 2011, and has stayed above 100,000 ever since.[8] And nobody seems to care, including almost all scientific researchers. Probably because other causes of AFP are things like pesticide poisoning that are not likely to jump on an airplane and paralyze us westerners.

Scientific researchers do perform some important functions, and have radically changed our society, in some ways for the better (communications technology, for example) and in some ways for the worse (nuclear bombs and other weapons of war). But Ebola and Polio are certainly not good examples of the former.

- David Crowe

References

[1] Johnson KM et al. Isolation and partial characterisation of a new virus causing acute haemorrhagic fever in Zaire. Lancet. 1977 Mar 12; 1(8011): 569–71. 

[2] Bowen ET et al. Viral haemorrhagic fever in southern Sudan and northern Zaire. Preliminary studies on the aetiological agent. Lancet. 1977 Mar 12; 1(8011): 571–3. 

[3] Pattyn S et al. Isolation of Marburg-like virus from a case of haemorrhagic fever in Zaire. Lancet. 1977 Mar 12; 1(8011): 573–4. 

[4] Schieffelin JS et al. Clinical Illness and Outcomes in Patients with Ebola in Sierra Leone. N Engl J Med. 2014 Oct 29.

[5] Crowe D. “Ebola Ça Suffit!” is not enough to Prove Efficacy of an Ebola Vaccine. American Journal of Immunology. 2017 Jul 4; 13(3): 165–72. http://thescipub.com/abstract/10.3844/ofsp.11329

[6] Francis Jr T et al. Evaluation of the 1954 Field Trial of Poliomyelitis Vaccine. Final Report. University of Michigan. 1957 Apr. 

[7] Alexander ER. The extent of the poliomyelitis problem. JAMA. 1961 Mar 11; 175(10): 837–40. 

[8] AFP (Acute Flaccid Paralysis)/Polio case count. WHO. https://extranet.who.int/polis/public/CaseCount.aspx

Note added by editors:

It's great to see our readers lend their fields of expertise to ongoing discussions. This may also be the first letter in our pages ever to have used footnotes!

Canada and Saudi Arabia

Dear Prime Minister Justin Trudeau;

I am outraged that you still will not cancel the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia.

If you cancel the sale now, you will look moral and a hero in the future. If you wait until the grisly truth comes out about the Saudi government, you will look hypocritical.

For your own public image, you must act now.

You are supporting a government that is more barbaric, in Yemen, against its own people, against diplomatic conventions, against the practice of journalism, that most medieval states.

- David Crowe

Canada's Dismal Transportation system

[This letter was submitted to the Globe and Mail as follows]

Dear editor;

Since the 1980s Canada has cancelled about half its train service, and now about half its bus service (if we include both Greyhound and Saskatchewan’s government bus service). In that time China has built about 20,000 km of high speed rail (average speed with stops 200km/hr, top speed 300 km/hr) and an uncountable number of subway lines. China is a developing country, while Canada obviously is not developing anything but further means to worship the automobile.


[and published, with changes highlighted]

Since the 1980s Canada has cancelled much of its train service, and now about half its bus service (if we include both Greyhound and Saskatchewan’s government bus service). In that time China has built thousands of km [actually it is about 20,000km as I wrote] of high speed rail (average speed with stops 200km/hr [they omitted the top speed of 300km/hr]) and dozens of subway lines. China is a developing country, while Canada obviously is not developing anything but further means to worship the automobile.

Vaccines

The Globe and Mail published a completely pro-vaccine article in October, 2017 (similar to an article they published in June of this year) that appeared to be denying that adverse reactions are even possible, let alone questions about efficacy. Of course I had to write, and of course my letter didn't get published. The newspaper did accept two letters. One just echoed the absolutist position, making absolutely false statements about historical infectious disease statistics. The other said that we should try to understand why people have anti-vaccine views, which the author implied were irrational.

Why do I write, when it's futile? Well it feels better to put my thoughts in writing, and I can always post them here.


For the record, here is my unpublished letter.

Letter to Globe and Mail (October 23, 2017)

Pro-vax dogmatists want to have us believe that all critics of vaccines are either flat-earthers or discredited scientists. When I graduated from university with a degree in science I also was a firm believer in vaccines. But when I was finally challenged on my views about 20 years later, I was forced to confront the fact that I had no direct knowledge in this area, and I had just accepted the assertions of people like Timothy Caulfield (“Silencing anti-vax noise will not be easy”). Gradually I realized that there were many critics of aspects of vaccines who were highly credentialled scientists and even MDs who had changed their views when confronted with evidence.

When I finally started reviewing evidence about vaccines I was shocked to discover that some widely accepted dogmas were false.  For example, for most infectious diseases death rates were declining for decades before the first vaccine was available. Vaccine dogmatists love to just show the chart starting with the year of the start of vaccination. But the decline in deaths after vaccination may well have been just a continuation of the other factors that were improving before vaccination (such as better sanitation and diet). I discovered that the well documented timeline of polio cases and vaccination in the United States did not support the belief that the polio vaccine ended the epidemic. By 1960 the Journal of the American Medical association reported that less than half the vulnerable population had been vaccinated, yet the epidemic had petered out to about 5% of the 1952 peak.

Another undeniable source of information is that the United States has paid out more than $3.6 billion in compensation for vaccine damage since the government took over payment for vaccine damage in 1988.

It is futile to argue about whether vaccines cause autism, because autism is poorly defined (although there actually are many scientific papers that do note such an association). However, sudden mental and physical regression following vaccines is well documented, whatever you want to call it. While rare, each time it occurs, the cost is massive, both to the vaccine recipient, but also to their family, who are now responsible for the care of a severely disabled person.

Let’s have an honest discussion about vaccination, recognizing that there are costs to any vaccination program, in terms of adverse effects, and that the benefits are often exaggerated by pharmaceutical companies that stand to make billions of dollars from each new vaccine added to the recommended vaccine schedule.

- David Crowe