RE: Investigating the truth behind @steemtruth’s “truth” - Part 2: Vaccines Increase Your Chances of Catching Infectious Disease?
Thank you for your mindful answer.
a) I did so far not argue that vaccines are perfectly healthy, as this would be rubbish, there are possible side effects, just as with any other medication. This post is simply an answer to the completely untrue statements in last week's post from steemtruth.
b) Yes, I can completely see why the ingredients scare people - there ARE known toxins in there (I am a research toxicologist from profession, so I know them). Like aluminium, for example, which is a known inducer of oxidative stress and can cause neurodegenerative diseases, or sometimes formaldehyde.
But there is the anicient saying from paracelsus: "The dose makes the poison." If the amount of formaldehyde or aluminium or whatever is low enough, and the exposure to it is short enough, it is not toxic.
It's all a matter of concentration and the time you're exposed to it. The exposure time with the stuff in vaccines is very low, as you usually get one shot and then your body excretes the toxin. Food contamination, for example, where you may continously eat small doses of e.g. aluminium, is a much bigger problem in that regard.
Toxins in vaccines are generally dosed in a matter that they are not toxic, or at least nearly untoxic.
c) why are they there? That has several reasons:
- Aluminium is a so-called adjuvant that stimulates the reaction of the immune system - in other words, it potentiates the effect of a vaccine. How that works exactly is too long for a comment, it is described quite well in wiki
- Formaldehyde really is a virus killer. Some vaccines work by giving the human body inactivated forms of a virus. In other words, the virus has to be killed first. This cannot be done by cooking, as a virus consists of pure DNA and DNA is quite stable at high temperatures, so it has to be done chemically, for example with formaldehyde. As formaldehyde is toxic, there are treshhold values that have to be respected in vaccines (and they are controlled by the FDA), which are considered untoxic based on loads of studies (mainly animal studies, as you can't test a toxin on humans).
d)
Not to mention to this day, the US gov refuses to do a study between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
I honestly do not know anything about that (I'm European), but I know there are studies that compared the health of vaccinated to unvaccinated people from other countries (germany, canada,...), and found vaccinated people to be as healthy or healthier as unvaccinated. Examples: 1, 2
I was only able to read the abstract of the second article (it was requesting me to pay to read the whole thing), but I did go over the first article. I found it interesting that the study found low parental education to be helpful (pg 983) and exposure to tobacco smoke (985). Probably discrepancies .
Correct me if I'm reading the graphs wrong.
I agree with you on dosage and exposure. Nightshade for example can be used as a pain reliever if the right dosage is used. Perhaps vaccines in Europe are different than the ones from the US. But Mike Adams (the director of an independent lab called CWC) did an ICP-MS analysis of a flu shot made by GlaxoSmithKline and found the mercury level to be 51 parts per million or 25000 times higher than the maximum water contamination level by EPA. He's widely known for exposing corruptions in the food and health industry, and his lab is certified by the FDA so I trust him.
https://www.naturalnews.com/045418_flu_shots_influenza_vaccines_mercury.html
ah, the advantages of working for a university^^
you have to consider the error margins. both factors are not significantly different from the average if you consider them, if I read the graphs correct.
this is like comparing apples to peaches. How much water do you drink? up to 3-5l every day of your life?
And the injection volume of the vaccine is maybe 0.5 ml (I didn't check on this, but that's common for many vaccines), but only once.
So you have a factor of 5000-10000 for the volume, and another big factor for long-term vs short-term exposure, plus a smaller factor in the other direction for the different way of uptake (oral vs. intravenous)
And thus, there are completely different treshold values of what is considered safe for food/water and vaccines. If the lab found the mercury levels above the treshhold for vaccines, this woul probably lead to a recall of the vaccine. But finding it above levels accepted for drinking water is not very meaningful.
Btw, a result from my quick-search: there's an a US-government-funded study that found mercury levels in infant blood after vaccinations "well below those considered safe"
Edit: upvoted it with 1% to be better visible
I read it. I'm confused why the paper says it has 21 controls but the findings says it used only 15 blood samples out of 21.
The article reminded me of something though. Babies mostly receive their antibodies from their mother. Why is it necessary to forcefully vaccinate babies when their baby immune systems aren't fully developed yet? Especially when it's proven mercury is a neurotoxin.
Don't you also find it also find it strange how the US gov ( I know you're European) was denying there was mercury in vaccines at first and they finally admit it now? The CDC avoids the word "mercury", it calls it thiomersal.
Because there is a huge difference between receiving antibodies and being triggered to produce them yourself.
The received antibodies from the mother help the baby to be mostly immune to anything during the first months, which is incredibly important considering they come from a quite sterile environment (the womb) into our world without a trained immune system.
But if you are triggered to produce antibodies yourself (by infection or vaccination), you not only produce antibodies, but also, a part of the antibody-producing cells will change and become "memory immune cells". They are the memory of our immune system and will trigger a much faster and stronger immune reaction if they see the virus/bacteria they are trained against again, which is why and how a vaccination works.
And on contrary to antibodies, they can only be trained by your own body, not transferred from the mother.
I honestly don't know anything about that.
Mike Adams is beyond dishonest; he's blatantly fraudulent.
Nature News (the journal) is valid; NaturalNews is not. The exploit fear to market supplements by appealing to naturalistic fallacies, chemophobia, and lying by omission. Be careful about sources, as there any many that capitalize on the exploitation of scientific ignorance to hawk their own "health" supplements at inflated costs.
Mike Adams may have an independent lab, but his results do not go through independent 3rd party validation, peer review and has serious methodological flaws in analysis. On top of that, he does not start with a hypothesis -- he attempts to sensationalize his findings by omitting crucial details, selecting the "wow-factor" ones, and seeks to validate a confirmation bias with "experimental proof", which is a breach of scientific ethics. Bear in mind FDA approval isn't best metric for establishment of trust or transparency.
Just out of curiosity what's the best metric for establishment of trust in your opinion?
In the beginning I thought they were a joke too because I read their page on wiki. But I started to realized that the main stream media were publishing were published way- earlier on natural news and so I started reading them. Your opinion about Mike Adams sounds similar to the intro on wikipedia and I just want to warn you that anybody can edit articles on wiki therefore politicians can have a lot of influence over how people should think and act.
I assure you, I am not basing my opinion from a Wikipedia intro, and haven't even looked at that wiki page.
A better metric for establishment of trust is scientific consensus, as scientists rarely just agree with one another without nitpicking unless there is overwhelming evidence from multiple sources converging on an emergent truth. Scientific consensus is important because often the statistical stringency used in studies has a fairly low threshold for statistical significance (p<0.05), which implies that if the experiments were flawless, the data has a 1/20 chance of reaching that significance threshold due to chance. If you have one paper that supports a hypothesis that has a 1/20 chance it was chance results, that's not the strongest evidence; however, if you have hundreds of papers meeting that statistical threshold it is now far lower than 1/20 that all of these papers and methods collectively are flawed and getting their results due to chance. This is the importance of consensus.
This is why I ask people to use multiple sources, if possible, to convey a message; there is a lower probability that the information is erroneous if there are multiple sources corroborating the same results and converging on the same conclusions with empirical backing.
Unfortunately, Mike Adams uses his own data points that frequently have selective information cherry picked to posture a compelling narrative, even if it means hacking his way to a statistically significant value (otherwise known as "p-hacking"). For more on data manipulation, and why science isn't broken, see this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/#part1
That link comes with an interactive exercise where you can include, or omit data point to try and make compelling looking trends in data that would appear to "prove" a particular point, but that is "proven" by data manipulation and cherry picking. So, it is less likely that hundreds of studies were all flawed than just picking one and running with it (unless it was exceptionally scientifically rigorous).
Hope this clarifies a few things. It's a wild world out there, and I don't want to see people be unwittingly duped, as I have been before by these charlatans.
As a final note, another red flag is someones demand to appeal to emotion when their data cannot speak for itself. If someone needs to appeal to a perceived morality because their data is dodgy, than it might be that the entire argument is on a dodgy foundation, as the reasoning and rationale cannot stand on it's own without sensationalism. Scientists attempt to sensationalize their information as little as possible, as to keep it objective and as free from human/researcher bias. This is critical.
Then please give me an example of an actual report given by Mike Adams that is an example of him picking data points. Scientists do peer reviews, yet only one third of the studies are able to be replicated. The article you gave also did a good job pointing it out that most of the misconducts were deliberate.
Here's Mike Adams being adorable and trying to talk about Bitcoin back in 2013: https://www.naturalnews.com/039865_bitcoin_crash_prediction_Mike_Adams.html
Here's him trying to rap about genetically modified foods and get everyone worked up into a lather by omission of data on "GMOs": https://www.naturalnews.com/030044_No_GMO_song.html
The guy goes on the Alex Jones show and attends conferences with swindlers like David Wolfe. Has no problem exploiting scientific ignorance and drumming up fear to market the massive amount up supplements in the banner ads on the page. He's making a killing by appealing to fear and mistrust, while simultaneously perpetuating it. That represents many "researcher" biases, as well as competing financial conflicts of interest; why would you trust that?
Recall that NaturalNews is an online store. You're being duped by marketers who are marketing you fear and mistrust to sell you shit you don't need.