Evan Burton

Six myths about vaccination – and why they’re wrong Recently released government figures show levels of childhood vaccination have fallen to dangerously low levels in some areas of Australia, resulting in some corners of the media claiming re-ignition of “the vaccine debate”. You can check how your postcode rates here. Well, scientifically, there’s no debate. In combination with clean water and sanitation, vaccines are one of the most effective public health measures ever introduced, saving millions of lives every year. Those who claim there is a “debate” will cite a series of canards designed to scare people away from vaccinating, but, if you’re not familiar with their claims, you could easily be convinced by anti-vaccine rhetoric. So what is true and what is not? Let’s address just a few of the common vaccine myths and explain why they’re wrong. 1. Vaccines cause autism The myth that vaccines are somehow linked to autism is an unsinkable rubber duck. Initiated in 1998 following the publication of the now notorious Lancet paper, (not-a-Dr) Andrew Wakefield was the first to suggest that the measles mumps rubella (MMR) vaccine might be linked to autism. What he didn’t reveal was that he had multiple conflicts of interest including that he was being paid by lawyers assembling a class action against the manufacturers of MMR, and that he himself had submitted an application for a patent for a single measles vaccine. It eventually unravelled for Wakefield when the paper was retracted in 2010. He was struck from the medical register for behaviour classified as “dishonest, unethical and callous” and the British Medical Journal accused him of deliberate fraud. But once the idea was floated, scientists were compelled to investigate, particularly when it stood to impact public health so dramatically. One of the most powerful pieces of evidence to show that there is no link between vaccines and autism comes from Japan where the MMR was replaced with single vaccines mid-1993. Guess what happened? Autism continued to rise. We currently don’t know what causes autism. But we do know what doesn’t: vaccines. Image from shutterstock.com After this door closed, anti-vaxers shifted the blame to thiomersal, a mercury-containing component (not beconfused with the scary type that accumulates in the body). Small amounts of thiomersal were used as a preservative in some vaccines, but this never included MMR. Thiomersal or ethyl-mercury was removed from all scheduled childhood vaccines in 2000, so if it were contributing to rising cases of autism, you would expect a dramatic drop following its removal. Instead, like the MMR in Japan, the opposite happened, and autism continues to rise. Further evidence comes from a recently published exhaustive review examining 12,000 research articles covering eight different vaccines which also concluded there was no link between vaccines and autism. Yet the myth persists and probably for several reasons, one being that the time of diagnosis for autism coincides with kids receiving several vaccinations and also, we currently don’t know what causes autism. But we do know what doesn’t, and that’s vaccines. 2. Smallpox and polio have disappeared so there’s no need to vaccinate anymore It’s precisely because of vaccines that diseases such as smallpox have disappeared. India recently experienced two years without a single case of polio because of a concerted vaccination campaign. Australia was declared measles-free in 2005 by the World Health Organization (WHO) – before we stopped being so vigilant about vaccinating and outbreaks began to reappear. The impact of vaccine complacency can be observed in the current measles epidemic in Wales where there are now over 800 cases and one death, and many people presenting are of the age who missed out on MMR vaccination following the Wakefield scare. In many ways, vaccines are a victim of their own success, leading us to forget just how debilitating preventable diseases can be – not seeing kids in calipers or hospital wards full of iron lungs means we forget just how serious these diseases can be. 3. More vaccinated people get the disease than the unvaccinated Although this sounds counter-intuitive, it’s actually true, but it doesn’t mean that vaccines don’t work as anti-vaxers will conflate. Remember that no vaccine is 100% effective and vaccines are not a force field. So while it’s still possible to get the disease you’ve been vaccinated against, disease severity and duration will be reduced. Those who are vaccinated have fewer complications than people who aren’t. Image from shutterstock.com With pertussis (whooping cough), for example, severe complications such as pneumonia and encephalitis (brain inflammation) occur almost exclusively in the unvaccinated. So since the majority of the population is vaccinated, it follows that most people who get a particular disease will be vaccinated, but critically, they will suffer fewer complications and long-term effects than those who are completely unprotected. 4. My unvaccinated child should be of no concern to your vaccinated one Vaccination is not just a personal issue, it’s a community responsibility, largely because of a concept known as “community immunity”. This describes a level of vaccination that prevents epidemics or outbreaks from taking hold and spreading. Some people question the validity of this concept, sometimes referred to as herd immunity, but the impact of it breaking down can be easily observed in places where vaccination levels fall dangerously low – take the current measles outbreak in Wales, for example. The other important factor about community immunity is it protects those who, for whatever reason, can’t be vaccinated or are not fully vaccinated. This includes very young children, immunocompromised people (such as cancer sufferers) and elderly people. 5. Vaccines contain toxins A cursory search of Google for vaccine ingredients pulls up a mishmash of scary-sounding ingredients that to the uninitiated can sound like “franken-science”. Some of these claims are patently untrue (there is no anti-freeze in vaccines), or are simple scaremongering (aborted foetuses – in the 1960s some cells were extracted from a foetus to establish a cell line that is still used in labs today). Some of the claimed chemicals (and remember everything is made of chemicals) are present, but are at such low levels as to never reach toxicity. A pear has 600 times more formaldehyde than a vaccine. Image from shutterstock.com The simple thing to remember is the poison is in the dose – in high enough doses even water can kill you. And there’s 600 times more formaldehyde in a pear than a vaccine. Also, if you ever read the claim that “vaccines are injected directly into the blood stream” (they’re not), be sceptical of any other claims made. 6. Vaccines will overwhelm kids’ undeveloped immune systems The concept of “too many too soon” was recently examined in a detailed analysis of the US childhood immunisation schedule by The Institute of Medicine. Experts specifically looked for evidence that vaccination was linked to “autoimmune diseases, asthma, hypersensitivity, seizures, child developmental disorders, learning or developmental disorders, or attention deficit or disruptive disorders”, including autism. The researchers confirmed that the childhood vaccination schedule was safe. The amount of immune challenges that children fight every day (between 2,000 to 6,000) in the environment is significantly greater than the number of antigens or reactive particles in all their vaccinations combined (about 150 for the entire vaccination schedule). So the next time you hear these myths about vaccination, hopefully you’ll have some evidence up your sleeve to debunk them. http://theconversation.com/six-myths-about-vaccination-and-why-theyre-wrong-13556

Being a 'conspiracy theorist' per se does not mean you are nuts; everyone knows that there ARE conspiracies out there. It is more what conspiracies you subscribe to and what you base your belief on. I posted this in another thread; the more your conspiracy has these attributes, the less likely it is to be true: Proof of the conspiracy supposedly emerges from a pattern of “connecting the dots” between events that need not be causally connected. When no evidence supports these connections except the allegation of the conspiracy or when the evidence fits equally well to other causal connections—or to randomness—the conspiracy theory is likely to be false. The agents behind the pattern of the conspiracy would need nearly superhuman power to pull it off. People are usually not nearly so powerful as we think they are. The conspiracy is complex, and its successful completion demands a large number of elements. Similarly, the conspiracy involves large numbers of people who would all need to keep silent about their secrets. The more people involved, the less realistic it becomes. The conspiracy encompasses a grand ambition for control over a nation, economy or political system. If it suggests world domination, the theory is even less likely to be true. The conspiracy theory ratchets up from small events that might be true to much larger, much less probable events. The conspiracy theory assigns portentous, sinister meanings to what are most likely innocuous, insignificant events. The theory tends to commingle facts and speculations without distinguishing between the two and without assigning degrees of probability or of factuality. The theorist is indiscriminately suspicious of all government agencies or private groups, which suggests an inability to nuance differences between true and false conspiracies. The conspiracy theorist refuses to consider alternative explanations, rejecting all disconfirming evidence and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence to support what he or she has a priori determined to be the truth.

Homeopathy Plus “misleading and deceptive” on whooping cough vaccine PUBLISHED ON TUESDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2014 The Federal Court of Australia has found that Homeopathy Plus! Australia P/L and Fran Sheffield, who runs the organisation, “engaged in conduct that was misleading and deceptive or was likely to mislead and deceive” when it declared on its website that the currently available vaccine against whooping cough was unreliable and ineffective. In a judgement handed down on December 22, the Court found that, in contrast to a series of articles published on the site, “in fact, the [whooping cough] vaccine is effective in treating a significant majority of people who are exposed to the whooping cough infection”. The judgement also found that Homeopathy Plus and Sheffield made “false or misleading representations that the homeopathic treatments are of a particular standard or quality”, in contravention of Australian Consumer Law. The case was brought against Homeopathy Plus and Sheffield by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Sheffield won the Australian Skeptics Bent Spoon in 2012 for the same claims as were the subject of the Federal Court decision. Sheffield, who originated a petition to the UN to use homeopathy in the Liberian Ebola outbreak, has previously made claims that homeopathy can treat domestic abuse behaviour. The court decision adds: “There is no reasonable basis, in the sense of an adequate foundation, in medical science to enable the [Respondents] to state that homeopathic treatments are safe and effective as an alternative to the [vaccine publicly available in Australia] for the prevention of whooping cough. “The [publicly available vaccine] is the only treatment currently approved for the use and accepted by medical practitioners in Australia for the prevention of whooping cough.” There was no immediate response by Sheffield or Homeopathy Plus, but in an earlier statement she had written in response to the case, which had been underway in various forms since 2012, that: “It is my firm belief that it had nothing to do with ‘deceptive and misleading information’ or ‘trade and commerce’ but was the culmination of an 8-year struggle by certain groups to remove information on homeoprophylaxis (homeopathy’s ability to protect against epidemic disease) from our website and newsletters and out of the public eye.” The matter is now listed for directions on February 4, 2015, in order to set a timetable for any further evidence on the question of penalties and submissions. The ACCC says it is seeking injunctions and pecuniary penalties, in addition to the declarations already made by the Court. http://www.skeptics.com.au/latest/announcements/featured-announcement/homeopathy-plus-misleading-and-deceptive-on-whooping-cough-vaccine/

The database contains three levels of data. Level 1 data were the basis of the NEJMarticle, and “include different types of counts that have been standardized into a common format for a specific analysis published recently in the NEJM.” Level 2 data are defined thusly: Level 2 data only includes counts that have been reported in a common format, e.g. diseases reported for a one week period and without disease subcategories. These data can be used immediately for analysis, includes a wide range of diseases and locations but this level does not include data that have not been standardized yet. While Level 3 data are defined: Level 3 data include all the different types of counts ever reported. Although this is the most complete data, the large number of different counts requires extensive standardization and various judgment calls before they can be used for analysis. All of these data are broken down into diseases, states, and cities, as well as time periods. Level 1 data include eight diseases, 50 states and 122 cities from 1916-2009; Level 2, 47 diseases, 50 states, 1,287 cities from 1888-2013; and Level 3, 56 diseases, 72 disease subcategories, 3,000 cities, etc. from 1888-2013. Any investigator can establish an account to look at Level 1 and Level 2 data, although the University of Pittsburgh won’t give out Level 3 data to anyone, because the database contains “substantial number of counts for which the disease name, time period, or location has not yet been identified from contextual information.” To get an idea of the power of this database, it’s useful to take a look at a couple of short videos: And: As you can see, this is a fantastic resource that is likely only to get better with time as raw data are curated, organized, and put into a form that can be mined for correlations. Epidemiologists, vaccinologists, and infectious disease researchers will be able to use this resource to ask questions and look at historical comparisons in a way that they haven’t been able to do before because of the difficulty in reconstructing old disease patterns. No wonder the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded this work! There is one concern I have about the project, although it does not in any way outweigh the potential usefulness of this database. That concern derives from what I know of bad science generated by antivaccinationists. I can easily see antivaccine “scientists” mining this database in ways to look for correlations to support their agenda, particularly if they get their hands on the raw data, which, according to the authors, needs a lot of cleaning: These data have not been filtered or standardized and cannot be used for analysis. These data include a large variety of data counts and often varying types of information. In this level, multiple types of data counts are often available for one location, disease, and week. In some cases, different counts provide conflicting information on a location and disease. The use of data from this level requires extensive knowledge of the historical U.S. disease surveillance system and data digitization and quality control procedures. We continue to standardize data and will include newly standardized data in the level 2 data section of this website at regular intervals. These level 3 data are provided for those that are interested in contributing to the data standardization process. Can you imagine what Jake Crosby might do with such a data set? Or Mark and David Geier? Just take what they’ve tried to do with the VAERS database and the Vaccine Safety Datalink and put it on steroids. I rather expect that various antivaccine “scientists” have already registered accounts for Project Tycho™ and are furiously mining ever smaller slices of data trying to see if they can “prove” that vaccines don’t work or linking their work with other databases to try to correlate vaccine uptake with autism. Still, any database can be abused, as can any scientific tool. If the database is truly open source, then its creators are obligated to provide access to everyone who requests it. The benefits of such a resource far outweigh the risk that Jake Crosby, Mark Geier, Gary Goldman, or other epidemiologist wannabes might use it to produce nonsense. Besides, the correlations between the introduction of various vaccines and plunges in the incidence of the diseases being vaccinated against are so robust that I doubt the antivaccinationists can do any real serious harm, other than producing studies to use to preach to the choir with. Meanwhile, real scientists will be using the database to do real science and ask important questions about infectious disease and how it can be prevented with vaccines.

Vaccines work. Period. Posted by David Gorski on December 2, 2013 (134 Comments) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/vaccines-work-period/ Over my blogging “career,” which now stretches back nearly nine years, and my hobby before that of engaging in online “debates” on Usenet newsgroups back before 2004, I developed an interest in the antivaccine movement. Antivaccinationism, “antivax,” or whatever you want to call it, represents a particularly insidious and dangerous form of quackery because it doesn’t just endanger the children whose parents don’t vaccinate them. It also endangers children who are vaccinated, because vaccines are not 100% effective. The best vaccines have effectiveness rates in the 90%-plus range, but that still leaves somewhere up to 10% of children unprotected. Worse, because herd immunity requires in general approximately 90% of the population and above to be vaccinated against a vaccine-preventable disease to put the damper on outbreaks, it doesn’t take much of a degradation of vaccination rates to put a population in danger of outbreaks. That’s why, even though overall vaccine uptake is high in the US, we still see outbreaks, because there are areas with pockets of nonvaccinators and antivaccinationists who drive vaccine uptake down to dangerous levels. We’ve seen this in California and elsewhere. Other countries have observed even more dramatic examples, the most well-known being the way that fear of the MMR vaccine stoked by Andrew Wakefield’s bad science and the fear mongering of the British press led MMR uptake to plummet. The result? Measles came roaring back in the UK and Europe, from having been considered under control in the 1990s to being endemic again by 2008. As much as I get chastised by concern trolls for saying this, to antivaccinationists it really is all about the vaccines. Always. They blame autism, other neurodevelopmental conditions, and a wide variety of chronic diseases on vaccines, without evidence that there is even a correlation. They even falsely blame sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) on vaccines, even though there is no evidence of an association and, indeed, existing evidence suggests that vaccines likely have a protective effect against SIDS more thananything else. No matter what happens, no matter what the evidence says, antivaccinationists will always find a way to blame bad things on vaccines, even going so far as to claim at times that shaken baby syndrome is a misdiagnosis for vaccine injury. One thing, however, that is often forgotten, is that they also do their utmost to downplay the beneficial effects of vaccines. One such tactic is for antivaccinationists to claim that the pertussis vaccine doesn’t work because we are seeing resurgences of pertussis even in the face of high vaccine uptake. For example, another common trope is what I like to refer to as the “vaccines didn’t save us” or the “vaccines don’t work” gambit, in which it is pointed out that the introduction of vaccines doesn’t correlate tightly with drops in mortality from various diseases. Julian Whitaker even used this gambit when he debated Steve Novella. The fundamental flaw in this trope neglects the contribution of better medical care to the survival of more victims of disease, which decreased mortality. If you look at graphs of disease incidence you will see a profound and powerful effect of the introduction of vaccines on specific vaccine-preventable diseases. In other words, vaccines work. Over the Thanksgiving long weekend here in the US, there appeared a study that simply emphasizes once again that vaccines work. More importantly, it estimates how well they work. I’ve frequently said that vaccines are the medical intervention that have saved more lives than any other, and this study by investigators at the University of Pittsburgh’s graduate school of public health, published on Thanksgiving Day in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and showing up on the news the day before provides yet more evidence to support my assertion. In one way, it’s a shame that it was published over a long holiday weekend here in the US, where it was unlikely to garner as much attention as it normally might have at another time. On the other hand, it was Thanksgiving, and if there is anything we should be thankful for it’s that so few children die of vaccine-preventable diseases anymore. This study simply underlines this. What the authors did was a massive undertaking that involved going back over case reports from before and after times when specific vaccines became commercially available. Boiled down to its essence, the study examined these reports and came up with estimates for cases of a disease prevented based on the drop in cases after the vaccine for that disease came into widespread use, and they did it all the way back to 1888. From the Methods section of the paper: In an effort to overcome these limitations, we digitized all weekly surveillance reports of nationally notifiable diseases for U.S. cities and states published between 1888 and 2011. This data set, which we have made publicly available (www.tycho.pitt.edu), consists of 87,950,807 reported individual cases, each localized in space and time. We used these data to derive a quantitative history of disease reduction in the United States over the past century, focusing particularly on the effect of vaccination programs. We obtained all tables containing weekly surveillance data on nationally notifiable diseases that were published between 1888 and 2011 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report and its precursor journals from various online and hard-copy sources.21-24 We digitized all data available in tabular format that listed etiologically defined cases or deaths according to week for locations in the United States. Reported counts (weekly tallies) of cases or deaths and the reporting locations, periods, and diseases were extracted from these data and standardized. Then we selected eight vaccine-preventable contagious diseases for more detailed analysis and computed weekly incidence rates, deriving a quantitative history of each disease. We estimated the number of cases that have been prevented since the introduction of vaccines for seven of the eight diseases. (Since there were no data from the era before the introduction of the smallpox vaccine in 1800, we could not quantify the number of smallpox cases that were prevented by the vaccine.) We estimated the numbers of cases of polio, measles, rubella, mumps, hepatitis A, diphtheria, and pertussis that were prevented by vaccines by subtracting the reported number of weekly cases after the introduction of vaccines from a simulated counterfactual number of cases that would have occurred in the absence of vaccination, assuming that there were no other changes that would have affected incidence rates. We used the year of vaccine licensure as the cutoff year to separate the prevaccine period from the vaccination period. Counterfactual numbers were estimated by multiplying the median weekly incidence rate from prevaccine years with population estimates for vaccination years. Yes, you read that right: nearly 88 million reported individual cases. The New York Timesnews report on the study points out that this massive digitization of data was performed byDigital Divide Data, described as “a social enterprise that provides jobs and technology training to young people in Cambodia, Laos and Kenya.” However, getting the data digitized and organized into spreadsheets was only the first step. Massive databases and spreadsheets are not particularly useful if they aren’t in a form that can be queried to answer research questions. The data thus had to be standardized and sorted in order to allow for that. Once that was done, the investigators were able to conclude since 1924: Assuming that the difference between incidence rates before and after vaccine licensure for these diseases was attributable solely to vaccination programs, we estimated that a total of 103.1 million cases of these contagious diseases have been prevented since 1924 on the basis of median weekly prevaccine incidence rates. Estimates based on the 10th and 90th percentile of weekly prevaccine incidence rates were 72.3 million and 147.8 million cases, respectively. Of those hypothetical cases, approximately 26 million were prevented in the past decade. Sensitivity analyses that used different methods for imputing missing data and for simulating counterfactual cases resulted in estimates ranging from about 75 million to 106 million prevented cases. The number of cases that were prevented per disease depended on the incidence rate before vaccination and the duration of the vaccination program. If you delve into the paper, you’ll find a really cool interactive graphic about disease elimination in the US, specifically hepatitis A, measles, mumps, pertussis, polio, rubella, and smallpox. As you move your cursor to different points of the graph, different facts and statistics pop up. You can look at state level data. If you click on different lines indicating when a specific vaccine was first licensed, all the other lines representing the other diseases disappear, and you see the data only for that disease. For instance, if you look at when the measles vaccine was first licensed in 1963, you’ll see a brief blip upward in measles incidence well within the range of random variation followed by a drop to almost zero by 1968, a mere five years after the vaccine was licensed. The pertussis vaccine took a bit longer; after it was licensed in 1948 it took around 8 years before the disease incidence hit bottom. Particularly cool is a set of graphs in Figure 2 that show snapshots of disease elimination in the US for different diseases and the entire country divided up into ten different areas. It’s particularly striking and an effective way of demonstrating the effect of vaccines on infectious disease: The investigators were very conservative about their assumptions, as well. The authors point out in the discussion that their estimate of number of cases of diseases prevented is probably an underestimate. The reasons include an inability to include all vaccine-preventable diseases and to correct for underreporting of cases. They note that the underreporting rate was higher in the era before specific vaccines came into use and that they don’t always have the detailed historical demographic data, such as birth rates and age-specific disease incidence rates, that would enable them to make such adjustments. Unfortunately, such data are only available for a small number of locations and for limited periods of time. One weakness of the study is that the authors could not examine death rates in nearly as much detail as they could study incidence. They could only estimate the effect of various vaccines on death rates. Hence, they did not report death rates in the NEJM article because, according to the NYT article, death certificate data became sufficiently reliable and consistent only in the 1960s. They could, however, make a reasonable estimate of three or four million deaths prevented based on the known mortality rates of the diseases studied in the database. The real accomplishment of this project is not so much the first publication, but rather the open-source Project Tycho™ database, named after Danish scientist Tycho Brahe (1546—1601), who was known for his detailed astronomical and planetary observations. The reason for choosing Tycho Brahe becomes obvious if you know that Tycho could not use all of his data during his lifetime. However, his assistant Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) used his data to derive the laws of planetary motion. As the authors put it: Similarly, this project aims to advance the availability of large scale public health data to the worldwide community to accelerate advancements in scientific discovery and technological progress. And: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQAOJ4GyNMc (Continued next post)

I tend to disagree. There are conflicting reports about the projected casualties of a Japanese invasion but we do know a lot of allied personnel thought it saved many lives. We also know that the Japanese people were prepared for a bloody guerrilla war in case of invasion. I don't think there can ever be a definitive answer, only opinions.

Hi Ros! If you can say, what sort of work took place at HMS Vernon?

It’s happened to all of us. Some friend we had in elementary school or from an old job is all of a sudden making super weird comments on Facebook, or you’re in a bar and some random is trying to talk to you about fluoride for some reason. It’s not always immediately clear. Like, I realized one day that people saying crazy things were always following it up with “Do your own research!” and then finally discovered that it was sort of a “buzzphrase” for conspiracy theorists. So, I thought I’d compile a list of the ways to know that someone in your life is starting to head down to tin foil hat alley. 1. Says insane thing (probably about chemtrails), and if you dispute, insists that you “Do your own research!” This is one of the earliest signs of this type of crazy- and it’s also a major Glenn Beck-ism. I don’t know about you, but when I state a fact, I’m usually able to explain that fact. Especially if it’s something that may be controversial. For instance, I do not so much believe that Joan Crawford beat her children. This is a thing that most people believe, because of the movie “Mommie Dearest”– however, when asked to explain, I don’t yell “Do your own research!” at people, I explain that all of the other children (save for Christopher) have refuted Christina’s book, as well as Crawford’s actual personal assistant, and Myrna Loy, and pretty much anyone else who was around during that time. I’m not saying I’m 100% definitely correct on this, but I err on the side of “probably not.” Still, I don’t throw out something weird, get mad at people for not immediately taking me at my word, and then yell at them to do their own research. I mean, if they want to, that’s fine, but I’m usually quite able to support my arguments. 2. Freaking Flouride UGH. These people and their fluoride. They love to make up crap about how the government puts fluoride in the water to keep us dumb and rebellion-resistant, like no one has ever seen “Dr. Strangelove” before or something. This is usually what they start with, probably because it sounds slightly more realistic than like, Lizard People. It is not, however, true. At all. And yes, I’ve “done my research.” But don’t tell that to these people, especially if they are drunk at a bar, because they will, in fact, start screaming at you about it. Fluoride and the “vaccinations cause autism” thing are like the gateway drugs into tin-foil hat land. 3. Rejecting the tyranny of paragraph breaks I swear to god, this is a thing. Whenever I see a comment that’s just a giant block of text with no breaks in it, I immediately just go “Welp, this one’s gonna be crazy” and I am pretty much always right. I don’t know why this is a thing, it just is. 4. When a person who you already kinda know isn’t too swift starts trying to pretend that they are some kind of intellectual who is totally going to school you on “how things are in the world.” I hate to say this, but it’s true. It’s always the dumb ones. I feel bad, because like, they’re usually just coming across this stuff for the first time and it istotally blowing their minds. Like, I already know that some people think that the Rothschilds control the world and that there are Mason things on the dollar bill and also THE MOON LANDING WAS FAKED or whatever. I’ve known for years, and I’ve already figured out that it’s all bullxxxx. The more you read about history, the more you realize that people are so not getting it together to form a whole “New World Order” anytime soon. While there have been “conspiracy” type things throughout history (MKUltra, Tuskeegee, Project Paperclip, the COINTELPRO that actually existed and not the one people pretend still exists), they have been discovered fairly quickly. Because someone always has a big mouth. 5. They use the term term Big Pharma (or Big Anything) in all seriousness There are about a 1000 problems with the pharmaceutical industry, for sure. However, when your friend is talking about “Big Pharma” they are not usually talking so much about overpriced cancer medication as they are like, vaccines causing autism and things like that. Also, sane people, when discussing the problems with the pharmaceutical industry just do not say things like “Big Pharma” because they like being taken seriously. 6. “Wake up, Sheeple!” Being awake or being asleep is like, tin-foil hat code for being hep to all kinds of nonsense. Which is why on those weird personal ads for Infowars everyone was like “I’ve been awake for 4 months” and things. Sheeple is what they call people who do not go along with them. See, usually, these people are kind of “new.” Like, they think that the information they are about to rock you with is A) Nothing you have ever heard before or Something you are going to buy wholesale, immediately, because their “evidence” is so vastly compelling. If you do not believe them, you are obviously a sheep of a person. 7. You lose! Um, just some weird thing that they always seem to say when they think they’ve trumped your logic. Because they are very mature. 8. They say things about ZOG or “Zionist Occupied Government” or “The Rothschilds are controlling the world!” without understanding that that xxxx is pretty anti-Semitic I have actually had to explain, on several occasions that, yes, the term “ZOG” is an anti-Semitic “the Jews are controlling the government!” thing. And also like, a Randy Weaver/ Ruby Ridge thing. I imagine they just hear the term a bunch around the Infowars type sites and think is a real thing? I don’t know. Like I said, not the swiftest bunch of humans. At this point, however, it is probably best to start avoiding these people. Not much you can do to help. Next step after this is Lizard People, and I’m not sure there’s much hope after that. http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/198326/8-clues-your-friend-is-becoming-a-crazy-conspiracy-theorist/

Nevertheless, we cannot just dismiss all such theories out of hand, because real conspiracies do sometimes happen. Instead we should look for signs that indicate a conspiracy theory is likely to be untrue. The more that it manifests the following characteristics, the less probable that the theory is grounded in reality: Proof of the conspiracy supposedly emerges from a pattern of “connecting the dots” between events that need not be causally connected. When no evidence supports these connections except the allegation of the conspiracy or when the evidence fits equally well to other causal connections—or to randomness—the conspiracy theory is likely to be false. The agents behind the pattern of the conspiracy would need nearly superhuman power to pull it off. People are usually not nearly so powerful as we think they are. The conspiracy is complex, and its successful completion demands a large number of elements. Similarly, the conspiracy involves large numbers of people who would all need to keep silent about their secrets. The more people involved, the less realistic it becomes. The conspiracy encompasses a grand ambition for control over a nation, economy or political system. If it suggests world domination, the theory is even less likely to be true. The conspiracy theory ratchets up from small events that might be true to much larger, much less probable events. The conspiracy theory assigns portentous, sinister meanings to what are most likely innocuous, insignificant events. The theory tends to commingle facts and speculations without distinguishing between the two and without assigning degrees of probability or of factuality. The theorist is indiscriminately suspicious of all government agencies or private groups, which suggests an inability to nuance differences between true and false conspiracies. The conspiracy theorist refuses to consider alternative explanations, rejecting all disconfirming evidence and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence to support what he or she has a priori determined to be the truth. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-conspiracy-theory-director/

10 characteristics of conspiracy theorists A useful guide by Donna Ferentes 1. Arrogance. They are always fact-seekers, questioners, people who are trying to discover the truth: sceptics are always "sheep", patsies for Messrs Bush and Blair etc. 2. Relentlessness. They will always go on and on about a conspiracy no matter how little evidence they have to go on or how much of what they have is simply discredited. (Moreover, as per 1. above, even if you listen to them ninety-eight times, the ninety-ninth time, when you say "no thanks", you'll be called a "sheep" again.) Additionally, they have no capacity for precis whatsoever. They go on and on at enormous length. 3. Inability to answer questions. For people who loudly advertise their determination to the principle of questioning everything, they're pretty poor at answering direct questions from sceptics about the claims that they make. 4. Fondness for certain stock phrases. These include Cicero's "cui bono?" (of which it can be said that Cicero understood the importance of having evidence to back it up) and Conan Doyle's "once we have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth". What these phrases have in common is that they are attempts to absolve themselves from any responsibility to produce positive, hard evidence themselves: you simply "eliminate the impossible" (i.e. say the official account can't stand scrutiny) which means that the wild allegation of your choice, based on "cui bono?" (which is always the government) is therefore the truth. 5. Inability to employ or understand Occam's Razor. Aided by the principle in 4. above, conspiracy theorists never notice that the small inconsistencies in the accounts which they reject are dwarfed by the enormous, gaping holes in logic, likelihood and evidence in any alternative account. 6. Inability to tell good evidence from bad. Conspiracy theorists have no place for peer-review, for scientific knowledge, for the respectability of sources. The fact that a claim has been made by anybody, anywhere, is enough for them to reproduce it and demand that the questions it raises be answered, as if intellectual enquiry were a matter of responding to every rumour. While they do this, of course, they will claim to have "open minds" and abuse the sceptics for apparently lacking same. 7. Inability to withdraw. It's a rare day indeed when a conspiracy theorist admits that a claim they have made has turned out to be without foundation, whether it be the overall claim itself or any of the evidence produced to support it. Moreover they have a liking (see 3. above) for the technique of avoiding discussion of their claims by "swamping" - piling on a whole lot more material rather than respond to the objections sceptics make to the previous lot. 8. Leaping to conclusions. Conspiracy theorists are very keen indeed to declare the "official" account totally discredited without having remotely enough cause so to do. Of course this enables them to wheel on the Conan Doyle quote as in 4. above. Small inconsistencies in the account of an event, small unanswered questions, small problems in timing of differences in procedure from previous events of the same kind are all more than adequate to declare the "official" account clearly and definitively discredited. It goes without saying that it is not necessary to prove that these inconsistencies are either relevant, or that they even definitely exist. 9. Using previous conspiracies as evidence to support their claims.This argument invokes scandals like the Birmingham Six, the Bologna station bombings, the Zinoviev letter and so on in order to try and demonstrate that their conspiracy theory should be accorded some weight (because it's “happened before”.) They do not pause to reflect that the conspiracies they are touting are almost always far more unlikely and complicated than the real-life conspiracies with which they make comparison, or that the fact that something might potentially happen does not, in and of itself, make it anything other than extremely unlikely. 10. It's always a conspiracy. And it is, isn't it? No sooner has the body been discovered, the bomb gone off, than the same people are producing the same old stuff, demanding that there are questions which need to be answered, at the same unbearable length. Because the most important thing about these people is that they are people entirely lacking in discrimination. They cannot tell a good theory from a bad one, they cannot tell good evidence from bad evidence and they cannot tell a good source from a bad one. And for that reason, they always come up with the same answer when they ask the same question. A person who always says the same thing, and says it over and over again is, of course, commonly considered to be, if not a monomaniac, then at very least, a bore.

*yawn*

Here for sharing far and wide is a collection of the most common myths and misconceptions surrounding flu vaccines, debunked point-by-point with lucid, thoroughly referenced explanations. Remember: if you're going to argue with an anti-vaxxer, it's important to know your stuff. "I could be wrong," writes science journalist Tara Haelle, who compiled the list, "but I'd venture to guess there is more nonsense and misinformation about the flu vaccine than any other vaccine out there." To limit the spread of that misinformation, Haelle decided to write a comprehensive post addressing every flu-vaccine myth she could dig up. The result was an exhaustive, point-by-point rebuttal to 25 myths, complete with over 100 citations, more than half of which link to peer-reviewed studies in medical research journals. (The others, she writes, "are to explanations of concepts such as herd immunity and ethylmercury, to other blog posts or news stories or to CDC and FDA webpages.") She then collected all 25 myths into a nice, compact reference list full of links to each myth's debunking explanation. Here, republished by kind permission, is said list in all its glory: http://io9.com/lets-just-debunk-every-flu-vaccine-myth-in-one-fell-sw-1454237689

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Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality (2012) Authors Kathleen Stratton; Andrew Ford; Erin Rusch; Ellen Wright Clayton; Committee to Review Adverse Effects of Vaccines; Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice; Institute of Medicine Description In 1900, for every 1,000 babies born in the United States, 100 would die before their first birthday, often due to infectious diseases. Today, vaccines exist for many viral and bacterial diseases. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, passed in 1986, was intended to bolster vaccine research and development through the federal coordination of vaccine initiatives and to provide relief to vaccine manufacturers facing financial burdens. The legislation also intended to address concerns about the safety of vaccines by instituting a compensation program, setting up a passive surveillance system for vaccine adverse events, and by providing information to consumers. A key component of the legislation required the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to collaborate with the Institute of Medicine to assess concerns about the safety of vaccines and potential adverse events, especially in children. Adverse Effects of Vaccines reviews the epidemiological, clinical, and biological evidence regarding adverse health events associated with specific vaccines covered by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), including the varicella zoster vaccine, influenza vaccines, the hepatitis B vaccine, and the human papillomavirus vaccine, among others. For each possible adverse event, the report reviews peer-reviewed primary studies, summarizes their findings, and evaluates the epidemiological, clinical, and biological evidence. It finds that while no vaccine is 100 percent safe, very few adverse events are shown to be caused by vaccines. In addition, the evidence shows that vaccines do not cause several conditions. For example, the MMR vaccine is not associated with autism or childhood diabetes. Also, the DTaP vaccine is not associated with diabetes and the influenza vaccine given as a shot does not exacerbate asthma. Adverse Effects of Vaccines will be of special interest to the National Vaccine Program Office, the VICP, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, vaccine safety researchers and manufacturers, parents, caregivers, and health professionals in the private and public sectors. http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13164/adverse-effects-of-vaccines-evidence-and-causality

Vaccine Ingredients Some parents are concerned about the safety of ingredients found in vaccines, specifically aluminum, mercury, gelatin and antibiotics. However, parents can be reassured that ingredients in vaccines are minuscule and necessary. In this section, we address concerns related to the following vaccine ingredients: Adjuvants Aluminum Antibiotics DNA Egg Allergies Fetal Tissues Formaldehyde Gelatin Human Proteins SV40 Thimerosal Yeast Allergies http://vec.chop.edu/service/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety/vaccine-ingredients/

Steve, Judging by all he has posted, Stephen is a dyed-in-the-wool anti-vaxxer. Okay, we know he seems to take the "tin foil hat" stance on most things but the anti-vax sentiments are worrying when you consider him being in home care for invalids. Taking on such a role in the community is very commendable but Stephen is therefore in the group that needs to keep up to date with vaccines lest he inadvertently pass on a vaccine-preventable disease to a patient with a compromised immune system. He should be promoting vaccinations, not the opposite.

it's interesting - Khrushchev's son says that after the initial rejection, Khrushchev was having second thoughts: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/russia-97h.html It would have been difficult, though. Simply establishing a rendezvous mission in space was hard enough; it took several years of negotiation. The result was the ASTP (Apollo - Soyuz Test Program).

Like I said: a Private Pilot (not ATP - Air Transport Pilot) and VFR (Visual Flight Rules) only, not IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) rated. Note that his class of medical (Third Class) is not the correct class for a Commercial Pilot (Second Class) nor ATP (First Class). That is not to say he could not obtain those medicals / licences, just that the current medical class he holds is insufficient.

Yes Steven, but Mr Schofield does NOT hold an ATP / ATPL. He does NOT hold an instrument rating. Why don't you search for this yourself? Go to the FAA Airman Database: https://amsrvs.registry.faa.gov/airmeninquiry/ When you have finished, you should acknowledge your mistake.

This lady is attempting to recreate - in exact detail - the DSKY (display / keyboard) used on Apollo missions. This video log is long (about 50 mins) and very detailed but if you are a student of Apollo, it is well worth the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjcfepTdvZI

Fascinating article about some of the items that Neil Armstrong kept after the Apollo 11 mission. Most every astronaut kept souvenirs of some type or another, normally equipment that was no longer required (though there have been legal battles regarding the ownership status of such items). http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11ReturnedEagleArtifacts.html

He is being commended for maintaining the standards set by the FAA for his licence type; the article does not mention his licence type. A search of the FAA Airman Database shows that Mr Schofield holds a private pilots licence, single engine, land. It doesn't show any additional type ratings nor an instrument rating nor night VFR rating. I don't know if those certifications would show up in the database but I'll find out.