Vaccines: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Only in recent years have I begun to wonder whether there are reasons not to follow official recommendations about vaccination. In the 1930s, I had the then-usual vaccinations, including (in Austria, perhaps Europe) against smallpox. A few others in later years when I traveled quite a bit.

But the Andrew Wakefield affair *, and the introduction of Gardasil **, showed me that official sources had become as untrustworethy about vaccines as they have become about prescription drugs.

It seems that Big Pharma had just about run out of new diseases to invent against which to create drugs and had turned to snake-oil-marketing of vaccines. We are told, for example, that 1 in 3 people will experience shingles in their lifetime and should get vaccinated against it. Have one in three of your aged friends ever had shingles? Not among my family and friends. One of my buddies got himself vaccinated, and came down with shingles a couple of weeks later. His physician asserted that the attack would have been more severe if he hadn’t been vaccinated — no need for a control experiment, or any need to doubt official claims.

So it’s remarkable that the Swedish Government has resisted attempts to make vaccinations compulsory (“Sweden bans mandatory vaccinations over ‘serious health concerns’” by Baxter Dmitry, 12 May 2017).

That article includes extracts from an interview of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on the Tucker Carlson Show, which included such tidbits as the continued presence of thimerosal (organic mercury compound) in many vaccines including the seasonal flu vaccines that everyone is urged to get; and the huge increase in number of things against which vaccination is being recommended:

“I got three vaccines and I was fully compliant. I’m 63 years old. My children got 69 doses of 16 vaccines to be compliant. And a lot of these vaccines aren’t even for communicable diseases. Like Hepatitis B, which comes from unprotected sex, or using or sharing needles – why do we give that to a child on the first day of their life? And it was loaded with mercury.”

 

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* “Autism and Vaccines: Can there be a final unequivocal answer?”
      “YES: Thimerosal CAN induce autism”

** See “Gardasil and Cervarix: Vaccination insanity” and many other posts recovered with SEARCH for “Gardasil” on my blogs: https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/?s=gardasil and https://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/?s=gardasil

Intestinal dysbiosis hypothesis goes mainstream

It seems that the idea of recommending probiotics for “HIV+” people has become downright mainstream now. The following links were sent me by Tony Lance; they mention among other things dysbiosis and microbial translocation, which Tony had pointed to in his essay, cited on this blog nearly a decade ago (What really caused aids: slicing through the Gordian Knot).

“Impact of probiotic Saccharomyces boulardii on the gut microbiome composition in HIV-treated patients: A double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial” by Judit Villar-García et al.

“Microbes & HIV” by Jeannie Wraight

“STUDY: Probiotic could help prevent disorders in people with HIV” by Jeannie Wraight.
This mentions “A new study reported in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences”, presumably “Probiotics differently affect gut-associated lymphoid tissue indolamine-2,3-dioxygenase mRNA and cerebrospinal fluid neopterin levels in antiretroviral-treated HIV-1 infected patients: A pilot study” by Carolina Scagnolari et al. [Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2016, 17(10), 1639; doi:10.3390/ijms17101639] .
This article was in a special issue of IJMS, “Immuno- and Neuropathogenesis of HIV Disease: Mechanisms, Prevention, Treatment, and Cure” which included another pertinent piece:

“Impact of HIV infection and anti-retroviral therapy on the Immune profile of and microbial translocation in HIV-infected children in Vietnam” by Xiuqiong Bi et al. [Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2016, 17(8), 1245; doi:10.3390/ijms17081245] .

Neither of those sources mentions the probiotic Visbiome, referred to in Wraight’s article. However, the Visbiome website  cites “Probiotic supplementation promotes a reduction in T-cell activation, an increase in Th17 frequencies, and a recovery of intestinal epithelium integrity and mitochondrial morphology in ART-treated HIV-1-positive patients” by Gabriella d’Ettorre et al. [Immunity, Inflammation and Disease, 2017; doi: 10.1002/iid3.160]  whose Conclusions are worth quoting:
“These findings highlight the potential beneficial effects of probiotic supplementation for the reconstitution of physical and immunological integrity of the mucosal intestinal barrier in ART-treated HIV-1-positive patients”.

 

Quality of life when diagnosed HIV+ or AIDS

An obscure publication from Universidad Juan Agustín Maza (in Argentina) came to my attention via Research Gate:

“Iniciativas para mejorar la calidad de vida de personas con VIH positivo y SIDA: Revisión del Diagnóstico, el Pronóstico y la Terapéutica a la luz de la Ciencia y de la Ética” by M. E. Molina, J. Abou Medelej, S. Perez Daffunchio, D. E. Crisafulli & J. Álvarez.
[Initiatives to improve the quality of life of HIV-positive and AIDS-diagnosed patients: A review of diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy from viewpoints of science and ethics]

The full article is in Spanish with an Abstract in English:
“The first cases of AIDS occurred in 1981. There are not fully appropriate therapeutic interventions for treating this medical condition yet. People who are diagnosed with positive HIV or AIDS suffer a poor quality of life and receive medication that produces severe adverse reactions. The purposes of this investigation are: * To review the existent reports on the etiology, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of HIV. * To bring the affected people updated information for healthcare and improvement of their quality of life. We have analyzed a significant number of papers published in several countries on these topics, and we have found the following inconsistencies: * HIV risk behaviors: According to the CDC in the United States, the Estimated Per-Act Probability of Acquiring HIV from an Infected Source, by Exposure Act (heterosexual) is about one in one thousand for woman, and about one on two thousands for man. Nevertheless, an investigation conducted through the University of San Francisco, California, on 442 discordant heterosexual couples no seroconversion was observed throughout the ten years the research lasted. (1985-1995). * Diagnostics methods: In Argentina, we employ the ELISA screening method, posteriorly confirmed by a western blot test, but in the United Stated this last is discouraged since 2014. * Medication: The drugs that are used to treat HIV are DNA chain terminators which interfere with the normal functioning and replication of normal cells. As a result, damage in the immune system and the mitochondrial DNA are reported. We wonder what should we inform the patients and people in general about all these. We require the experts´ opinion on the ethical management aspects. Due that the diagnostic tests employed may result in false positives, and the fact that the medication is highly toxic, we recommend that patients with HIV positive diagnosis re-test their condition at least once a year”.

This all seems quite sound, but after citing false positives, no sexual transmission, and the toxicity of ARVs the last sentence is quite a let-down.

The mention of vaccines is also a mixture of sound and doubtful:[Google translation]:
Regarding the possible development of vaccines.
The difficulty in developing vaccines due to HIV mutation has been explained: the high coding error rate produced by the reverse transcriptase enzyme and the recombination of various phenotypes of HIV in the DNA of infected cells (Montagnier L., 2008). However, other retroviruses that respond to the same replication mechanisms do not produce mutations that impede the development of vaccines. Example: Murine Leukemia Virus. Likewise, a purification of up to 20% of HIV has not been reported to date, so doubts remain about the specificity of antibodies used in diagnosis (Leung, Hans Gelderblom Extended Interview min 37.48) , 2011”

Evidently the authors accept HIV/AIDS theory but are puzzled by its internal contradictions.

 

Superstitious belief in science

Rethinkers have surely been perpetually astonished that so much clear evidence, almost all of it published in mainstream journals and reports, demonstrates that HIV is not the cause of AIDS; and yet official authorities and mainstream media, technical as well as popular, continue to uphold the myths of HIV/AIDS theory.

An underlying culprit is the unthinking obeisance paid to “science”: not to the evidence itself, the real science, but to what supposedly authoritative voices say. Few people other than academic specialists know how drastically scientific activity has changed over about the last half-a-century, making it much more an accessory of commerce and power than an independent truth-seeking enterprise, which latter remains the widespread popular view. But dramatic changes in how science is done, especially since mid-20th century, make it less trustworthy than earlier.

The hegemony of HIV/AIDS theory is unlikely to end until science as a whole is treated more skeptically and less superstitiously.

In 1987, historian John Burnham had published How Superstition Won and Science Lost, arguing that modern science had not vanquished popular superstition by inculcating scientific, evidence-based thinking; rather, science had itself become on worldly matters the accepted authority whose pronouncements are believed without question, in other words superstitiously, by society at large.

Burnham argued through detailed analysis of how science is popularized, and especially how that has changed over the decades. Some 30 years later, Burnham’s insight is perhaps even more important. Over those years, certain changes in scientific activity have also become evident that support Burnham’s conclusion from different directions: science has grown so much, and has become so specialized and bureaucratic and so dependent on outside patronage, that it has lost any ability to self-correct. As with religion in medieval times, official pronouncements about science are usually accepted without further ado, and minority voices of dissent are dismissed and denigrated.

A full discussion with source references, far too long for a blog post, is available here.

Countering the conventional wisdom

Individuals who have looked at primary evidence about HIV and AIDS have invariably concluded that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. That evidence is quite clear in the primary research literature, see for example the >900 citations in THE CASE AGAINST HIV.

Honest journalists recognize what the facts are, and some of them have written excellent books about the matter. One such book is Positively False by Joan Shenton, who has also filmed and archived a number of informative documentaries.

In the face of the facts, the official position of authoritative institutions remains that HIV causes AIDS, and the mass media help to enshrine this as the conventional wisdom. One consequence is that many individuals and many organizations who have no acquaintance with the primary evidence try to suppress those like Shenton who persist in drawing attention to the damage that HIV=AIDS dogma brings to countless people via the highly toxic, indeed quite deadly “antiretroviral” drugs.

Shenton’s latest  documentary, Positive Hell, “is a 30-minute documentary that tells the stories of five Spanish people, living in northern Spain, who tested positive for HIV in the late 80s who, defying the overwhelming medical consensus, chose not to take medication …”.  Widely praised and nominated for awards, some announced screenings were canceled because of pressure from “AIDS charities” and ignorant individuals. An outline of these acts of censorship has now been posted by the Index on Censorship.  Well worth reading.