Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Undertoad
Less corruptible than in almost every other institution, but yes.
|
I don't buy it. Just as corruptible, no more no less. What would make it less corruptible? Scientists are just better people than all the rest of us? They have morals that the rest of us simply don't? Bullshit. Science is a good process overall, just like capitalism is a good process, and both weed out the bad folks in the long run. But we still have Enron, and we still have Wyeth getting caught paying ghostwriters to publish "research" studies with no evidence to back them up.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Undertoad
Why doesn't the CDC operate in the way you'd prefer? Dunno. Your explanation seems to tend towards "The organization is involved in an unlawful, multi-decade conspiracy to maintain the status quo at all costs." I doubt this.
|
Well, in a literal sense it is indeed unlawful. Congress ordered them to do something and they have not. They don't get to decide if the Amish are a reasonable population to study or not. They get to follow the orders of Congress just like the rest of us.
I don't believe it is a conspiracy so much as it is bull-headed denial, just like all the people who denied the stomach ulcer guy, and the MRI guy--except in this case there's a lot more money involved (both pharmaceutical money and government money, since as we have discussed the government has already accepted default monetary liability for anyone they find to have been injured by a vaccine,) so the denial is inherently going to be stronger. How long did it take the stomach ulcer guy to prevail? More than a few years, I'd imagine. And it only happened because he fought. So we fight.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Undertoad
The explanation that you desire requires more and more extraordinary narratives over time. This makes me more skeptical. The underlying mechanisms change - it's specifically MMR! No? Then, it's surely mercury! No? Well then it's squalene, or density! It's gut-related, no, it's brain-related as vaccines cause encephalitis! This makes me more skeptical.
|
You are confusing me with other anti-vaccine proponents. I have not moved from one problem to the next; there are problems with all of the above and they combine to create a host of very different autistic conditions. My main concern is, as I have said before, the use of adjuvants in vaccinations. Squalene is just one type of adjuvant, but it does seem in some studies to be worse than others. The MMR contains triple the amount of adjuvants as single-dose vaccines, so it's going to cause more of a problem in this regard. It is widely documented that autistic patients have a reduced--or complete lack of--ability to detoxify, thus, adding more mercury (thimerosal) to their systems does not trigger the disease, but it does make their symptoms worse.
Autism is an extremely complex disease, because it's not really a disease, it's a set of neurological symptoms. If you sneeze, you might have a cold, you might have the flu, you might have allergies, or you might have some rare form of nose cancer. The smoker with lung cancer and the woman with cervical cancer had very different causes for their apparently similar symptoms, and they will require different treatments. But still we say they both have cancer. I could, incidentally, run a study of cancer patients that concluded there was absolutely no link between smoking and cancer, because look at all these people with cervical cancer who didn't smoke!
Some autistic children have an underlying mitochondrial disorder, many do not. Most have underlying digestive problems, some do not. Some are verbal, go to school, and live relatively normal lives. Some sit in the corner banging their head on the wall and wearing diapers when they're teenagers. When you take chelation drugs, they measure the output of metals in your urine: some kids could put their pee straight into thermometers, so much mercury comes out. Others don't really have any mercury, but they are full of lead. Some have their biggest problem with aluminum. Each of these is eliminated by a different metabolic process, but if any of the processes is messed up then you end up with the same symptoms of heavy-metal poisoning, which overlap considerably with autistic symptoms.
Here is a reasonably laid-out chart showing all the relationships we've found so far: