The Arrow #127

Hello everyone.

Greetings from Montecito.

From a bleak, dreary, rainy Montecito, where the sun is barely peeping through the clouds today.

Where the sorting and shredding of boxes continues apace.

The weather is not helping. Normally, this time of year is dry as a bone. In fact, most of the time here it is dry as a bone. Typically, it rains sporadically in this part of California in January and February and is dry the rest of the year. It will occasionally—and I mean occasionally—sprinkle during the other ten months. This year it has been rainy for the first five months. There is a weather phenomenon here in the Santa Barbara-Montecito area called June gloom. Almost every morning it is overcast to the point that visitors here would swear rain was imminent. But it doesn’t rain. At about noon, the sky clears and it’s beautiful for the rest of the day. This June, so far, it has rained every day off and on. And likewise for May, which was also gloomy.

We’ve had countless boxes under a tarp, and, of course, we’ve been shredding the contents of those that we figured were out of date and of no use. The ones we planned on meticulously going through, also under a tarp, we haven’t touched. We noticed a couple of days ago that the box labeled “Protein Power misc docs” was wet on the bottom and up the side. I opened it.

As they say in the movie biz, here is the back story.

Back in 1989 I wrote a book called Thin So Fast about the protein-sparing, modified fast. In that book, I speculated that insulin was a major culprit in many of the health problems my patients were experiencing. One day I went through my old med school biochemistry text and looked up every pathological pathway I could find involving insulin. I traced them all out on a piece of scrap paper.

We started treating patients then based on trying to lower their insulin levels. And we began to look at any medical condition through the lens of how insulin might affect it. Which, in the end, inspired us to write the book that became Protein Power. When we submitted our book proposal to various publishers, its original working title was The Insulin Control Plan.

Publishers were keen on the ideas in the proposal, but not the title. “Everyone will think it’s a book about diabetes,” they told us. When Bantam Books bought the book, they changed the title to Protein Power, which we kind of hated. We came up with seven pages of prospective titles all of which Bantam rejected. (We found this document in the box, too. And it was a little wet.) We had no choice. The publisher gets to pick the title. Now I’m glad they did.

So, the founding document—the Magna Carta, if you will—of our practice and the many books and articles we’ve written since was that scratched out diagram of insulin and all its effects. I took a photo of it and made a slide from the photo back in the days when slide shows were done with slides in carousels. And the photo was on film, back in the days before digital cameras. MD made a scan of it years ago with a scanner. So, we have the actual physical slide and we have MD’s scan. But the document itself had been lost for years.

When I noticed the water seeping into the Protein Power box, I jerked it out from under the tarp and opened it. And there, on the side that was wet, was the long lost document. About two thirds of it was water logged. The rest of the box contained the original proposal for the book, a bunch of edited manuscript copies, a couple of galley copies from the publisher, and a handful of letters back and forth between us and our editor. All those items—all totally disposable—were dry. Only the insulin doc was soaked.

I took a photo of it.

I hadn’t looked at this in years, and right off the bat, I noticed an error. Back in those days, I was a believer in the lipid hypothesis. I thought elevated LDL was a driving force for the development of heart disease. I no longer believe that to be true, but at the time we wrote Protein Power I did. You can see one of the pathways above in which I wrote “Increas Cholest” with an arrow pointing to a box that says “heart dz.”

In our practice, we almost uniformly found that patients who had elevated LDL levels normalized them on a low-carb diet. Which makes sense since LDL is generated in the liver primarily from carbohydrate. Reduce the carbohydrate; reduce the LDL.

I know there are lean mass hyper-responders, but we had no lean people seeking our services. So we had no patients in whom LDL levels skyrocketed.

When the document above finally dried out, it looked a lot better. But you can still see where the water had soaked in. Once I spread it out to dry, I noticed the top had been folded under. It had the date on it: 4/15/92.

I’m at least glad I’ve got it now, water-stained though it is.

On another personal note…

The Tesla Is Not a Touring Car

There was a Broken Science Initiative meeting in Aromas, CA this past weekend that MD and I decided to drive up for. The meeting was great. Got to catch up with Gary Taubes and some other old friends. Jay Bhattacharya was there, as was William Briggs, who gave a talk.

We drove up there and took the Tesla. Which demonstrated to me for the first time its major shortcoming. We charged it fully before we left. The indicator said we had 306 miles. The indicator was wrong.

According to Waze, it is 202 miles from our driveway to our destination. With 306 miles worth of battery, we figured we would make it there and halfway back before we had to recharge. Wrong.

We have driven the Tesla to Los Angeles and back multiple times on a single charge. LA is about 95 miles from our doorstep. We can drive there and back on a full charge with about 25 percent of the battery charge left over.

I don’t know how the calculators of the mileage figures on the Tesla work, but it isn’t based on long, non-stop drives at 80 mph. Those speeds flat out chew up the battery capacity. The Tesla is designed to charge whenever the brake is pushed and even when one’s foot is removed from the accelerator pedal. And when coasting down hill. So, unlike internal combustion engine cars, which get their worst mileage in stop and go traffic, the Tesla does great under those circumstances. And if there was ever a stop-and-go trip, it is the one between Montecito and LA. ICE cars get their best mileage on the open road while running at a constant speed. That’s when the Tesla gets its worst mileage. The battery is being drained constantly.

When we drive between Montecito and anywhere north, we always stop at the Starbucks in San Luis Obispo, which is just about 100 miles away. When we stopped on this trip, the battery level had fallen to 143 miles. Given its starting figure of 306 miles, it should have shown 206 miles of capacity left. There is a charging station almost across the street from the Starbucks, so we went there and charged it up to almost 200 miles. We would have charged it all the way, but we would have been late to the meeting.

By the time we arrived, we had 23 miles left on the battery, and the nearest charging station was 9 miles away. I asked Greg Glassman, a Tesla owner, if he thought we had enough to get to the charging station. He said he wouldn’t try it and asked someone to help us. We ended up charging it to 40 miles of capacity from the electrical outlet there. After the meeting, we made it to the charging station and filled it to 99 percent. We drove around maybe ten miles after that, went to the hotel, and headed back to Montecito the next morning.

We stopped again at the Starbucks then went across the street and charged the car to 80 percent, then drove home.

While we were getting charged at the meeting place (more about which in a bit), we talked about our plight with a few people, some of whom had their own Tesla long-trip nightmare tales. They, too, had discovered the Tesla isn’t a touring car.

The meeting place was the CrossFit Ranch, which I didn’t appreciate was such a revered and iconic place. In the world of CrossFit it’s like Mecca. It was where the first CrossFit Games were held. MD and I had been there many, many times over the years, so I didn’t think much about it. I learned that CrossFitters from all over the world make pilgrimages there and pay $100 per hour to work out. Who knew?

The take home lesson for me re the Tesla is that it is the perfect car for driving around Montecito-Santa Barbara (which is a small area) and, really, anywhere in southern California, where the clotted up traffic is always a challenge. We can and have made it all the way to San Diego on a single charge. But there’s always a lot of stop and go along the way. So, unless you have a lot of time (and plan to stop for a nice leisurely lunch while you charge) don’t count on it for two hundred mile plus trips without a lot of traffic.

Who Blew Up the Nova Kakhovka Dam?

The short answer is, who knows? I’m sure the people who did the deed know, but aside from them…? Like everything else today, the destruction of this dam and the downstream carnage have been politicized. If you’re of one persuasion, you probably believe the Russians did it. If you’re of another, then you’re sure the Ukrainians did it.

I’ll give you two different points of view.

First, Tucker Carlson is back. At least on Twitter. Yesterday he posted his first monologue on the social media site, and it started with his speculation about the Nova Kakhovka Dam, which, he posits, was blown up by the Ukrainians.

The above is a screenshot I took from Twitter. It isn’t clickable. The API situation is still an issue, so you’ll have to click the link below to watch it.

https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1666203439146172419

Below is a video from yesterday by Pony Tail Guy, who is convinced the Russians blew it up and lays out the reasons he believes this.

This one you can click on to play.

Two diametrically opposed views in under 24 hours.

Apparently a ton of people (or bots) hit PTG’s account after the video above, so today he came out with a more complete argument for why he is convinced it was the Russians. It’s worth watching if for no other reason than at the end he gives a great tip on how you can deal with bots and/or trolls on your Twitter feed without blocking them.

PTG makes a strong argument, but it makes more sense to me that the Ukrainians did it. All but the part about the destruction of their agricultural land. I’m certainly no expert in geopolitics. But I do recall when the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up, the first reports in all the mainstream media were that the Russians did it. Which seemed insane to me then. Now, everyone seems to be of the opinion that either the US or the Ukrainians destroyed Nord Stream. If I had to bet, I would say it was the Ukrainians with US help who blew up this dam. But, again, what do I know?

I wish our press weren’t so politicized. There are countless great reporters who could dig into this and figure it out. These are folks who are equipped to get past or disregard all the barriers government might throw in their way to distract them from the real story. Unfortunately, most of these same reporters now flack for the government.

Speaking of Twitter trolls as PTG did above, here is a hilarious Twitter interaction posted by the Bad Cat a few days ago.

And concerning flacking for the government…

More Big Tech Censorship

The Twitter files that have been released by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger and others made it pretty clear the government had a heavy hand in deciding what should and shouldn’t be allowed to be disseminated. As I’m sure everyone familiar with the US Constitution knows, the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights prevents the government from hindering free speech, free assembly and a free press. In other words, you and I and anyone in the press can say whatever we want, whenever we want. If we say something scandalous, we can get sued for it. If the press libels someone, they can get sued for it. But in neither case can the government stop the speech or the press report.

The government has figured out that though it can’t inhibit speech directly, it can do it at arm’s length by leaning on various platforms to prevent people from reaching an audience. Which is also a constitutional no no. The Twitter files demonstrated that a number of branches of the government, including the CIA and the FBI, were arm twisting the folks at Twitter to ban people whose opinions they didn’t want spread about. As the record shows, Twitter was all too happy to comply.

I hope no one reading this newsletter is so naive as to believe that Twitter was the only social media platform the government had its tentacles in. It’s just the only one that got purchased by someone not involved in the chicanery who was willing to open the company’s records to scrutiny. I’m sure Uncle Sam has clawed his way into all of them just like he did with Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg has more or less admitted it. And we know YouTube has demonetized and banned people right and left who put up videos that didn’t parrot the government narrative on Covid, the vaccines, and even the idea that there was maybe some hanky panky with the 2020 election.

Speaking of Zuckerberg, yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a huge and devastating exposé on how Instagram (owned by Facebook) isn’t all that eager to take down child porn. It will ban you in a trice if you issue a warning about the mRNA vaccines, but will roll out the carpet for you if what you have in mind is child porn. A long article, but well worth your time to read..

Just a day or two ago, YouTube (owned by Google) finally said, Okay, you can put up videos declaring the 2020 election was stolen. Prior to that, they were all taken down.

Let’s think about this for a second. Does this mean YouTube has uncovered information showing the election was rigged or that there were irregularities?

I don’t think so.

The entirety of mainstream media ridiculed anyone who voiced the notion that the election might have been stolen or rigged or diddled with or whatever word you want to use for not entirely on the up and up. And when I say the mainstream media, I mean everyone with one exception, which we’ll get to in a minute. Even the Wall Street Journal pooh poohed the idea. The WSJ was/is no fan of Trump’s. If you read it every day as I do, it won’t take you long to figure that out.

The WSJ represents Wall Street, not Main Street. Trump was/is America first and all for Main Street. The WSJ is the paper for the slightly to the right of middle connected class; the New York Times represents the left wing of the connected class. Their readers by and large are globalists, and Trump certainly wasn’t/isn’t a globalist. So the WSJ was/is definitely not in Camp Trump. And the writers there continuously ridiculed Trump’s claim that the election was stolen.

And Big Tech, at the government’s urging I’m sure, saw to it that no one could get info on how the election might not have been on the up and up.

The only person who had significant reach and regularly voiced the notion that the election might not have been as it should have been was Tucker Carlson, who voiced it repeatedly. And we all know what happened to him. Fox was willing to take a major financial hit just to get him off the air.

But now that the media, both mainstream and social, has made a mockery of anyone who is an ‘election denier’, it’s okay if you want to try to make that point on YouTube. You’ll just come off as one of ‘those’ people.

MD and I have experienced this in terms of our nutritional opinions. I don’t know how many readers of The Arrow have read Protein Power, but I suspect a number of you have. In it, we recommend all kinds of low-sugar fruits and vegetables as part of the program. Along with these fruits and vegetables, we recommended eating plenty of quality protein, including eggs and red meat. And we made the case for why we thought this was the best diet in terms of both variety and keeping insulin levels low.

One night, maybe a year or so after Protein Power was published, Tom Brokaw had a section on his show about the huge number of diet books that were on sale. He said something along the lines of many of these books provide sound nutritional advice while others don’t. He picked up a few of the low-fat, high-carb ones and said good things about them. Then he picked up Protein Power and said, with a disgusted look on his face and an eye roll, “Some recommend eating a lot of eggs and red meat.” Then he flipped it away onto a table. His message was clear. This was just one of the many outrageous blows we were subject to, but it was painful to the max, because the Bantam PR department had called us earlier in the day to tell us Tom Brokaw was going to feature our book.

Granted, this all happened in the days during which the low-fat, high-carb diet reigned supreme. And when everyone was scared shitless by cholesterol. But, still…

So we know what it’s like to come off as ‘one of those people.’ Even when you’re right and have the evidence to back up your statements.

Which gets me back to the 2020 election.

Was it stolen? Is anyone who even thinks it might have been worthy of ridicule?

I guess it depends on your definition of stolen.

Do I think the ballot count was correct? Yep, probably so. From what I understand, in those places that underwent witnessed recounts, the ballot tallies were a little off—as they always are—but still came out showing Biden won.

But there are other ways than rigging the voting machines to alter the outcome of an election.

And I’m not the only one who thinks so. A Rasmussen poll before the 2022 midterm elections showed a majority of Americans thought cheating was involved in the 2020 election. (Here is a link to the results. Rasmussen has them behind a paywall now. This was the only site I could find that showed the totals.)

Even if this poll is off by several percentage points, it still represents an enormous number of people who think the election wasn’t on the up and up. The vast majority of these people are afraid to say anything about it because of the ridicule they would be exposed to.

Now it’s easy for YouTube to allow people to talk about it.

The implication that the election was rigged seems to follow the idea that the only way to rig an election is to somehow fiddle with the voting machines or bring in stacks of ballots in the middle of the night. There are other ways.

How about a total mainstream media and social media blackout on the Hunter Biden laptop story in the weeks leading up to the election? Even people trying to send the story via instant message were blocked. That’s how granular it was. A large number of folks polled after the election and after the mainstream media finally admitted the story was true said they would have voted differently had they known. I’m not sure I have much faith in these kinds of after-the-fact polls, but that’s what they showed.

How about the 51 current and former intelligence officials reporting that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation promulgated to interfere with the election? Was that election interference? I suspect so since the Durham report showed that Team Biden, who were aware of the implications (the FBI had had the laptop in its possession for some time), approached the intelligence people who hated Trump to recruit them to help. Which ended up as the report signed by the 51 agents.

Think about this. Do you think if some smallish paper (the New York Post, which broke the Hunter Biden laptop story is not a small paper) had reported that there was a laptop abandoned by, say, Eric Trump containing photos of all kinds of dope taking and consorting with prostitutes along with seriously compromising emails to and from his father that the mainstream media and social media would have shut it down? Of course not. There would have been a feeding frenzy. It would have led every news show. And everyone knows it.

So, was The Donald treated fairly? Might he have won had all this info on the laptop been made public? Probably so.

Leading up to the election, people across the country were scared to death of Covid. Mainly because the press had whipped the situation into a frenzy, what with the fake death count tickers on the various cable networks clicking away furiously. At the time, the big hope to stop the slaughter was a vaccine. Which Trump had in the works. And that was ready before the election. But the people in the FDA held off the EUA until after the election, so the revelation that Trump had, via his Operation Warp Speed, come through with a vaccine didn’t materialize until after the election.

We now know that the vaccines were pretty much worthless and came with a high price tag in terms of cost to the taxpayer and cost in multiple vaccine-related injuries and many deaths. But no one knew that at the time. And everyone was frightened. So had Trump unveiled the vaccine and started vaccinating people, would that have made a difference? Probably so, since it would have happened in the week or two before the election, and Trump would have gotten the benefit of the glow.

Was that election rigging? Some would think so.

Also, think about what would have happened over the long run.

Had Trump been re-elected, imagine what would have happened. Democrats would have refused to take the jabs. All the network and cable TV channels would have been crawling with reports on one vaccine-related injury after another. Instead of all the social media outlets blocking people who thought the vaccines were bad, they would be promoting their tweets and posts. And probably censoring people who proclaimed the vaccines were safe and effective. They would have justified their censorship by saying that so many people have been harmed and so many people got Covid after they had been vaccinated, that their censoring was a public service to keep even more people from taking these deadly experimental gene therapies. People would have realized early on that the mRNA vaccines were problematic, and the vaccination rates would probably be a fraction of what they are now. And we would all be better off for it.

And all the while The Donald would have been telling anyone who would listen how wonderful the vaccines are and how he was the only person who ever lived who could have gotten them brought to market in only eight months.

Sorry, I got carried away. I love alternative histories.

You may think from all this that I am a Trump fan. I’m not particularly, but I am a realist. Trump is an indefatigable campaigner; he is the Energizer Bunny of campaigners, and he has a base that absolutely loves him. (Strangely, most of his base is probably unvaccinated, but they love him anyway.) A year and a half is an eternity in politics, so a lot can happen in that time. But if I had to bet right now, I would bet that Trump will be the GOP nominee. And if Biden ends up as the Democratic nominee, I suspect Trump will beat him. And, for good or ill and there would likely be some of both, that’s who I think we’re going to be stuck with for another four years. Had he been re-elected, he would be gone forever in about a year and a half. But…

As I say, I got carried away. The title of this section is More Big Tech Censorship, but, so far, all I’ve written about is past Big Tech Censorship.

What I intended to write about is what I think is a major story, that, of course, no one will investigate.

I was alive when Robert Kennedy was assassinated a little over 55 years ago to the day. It happened in Los Angeles, and I was living in the greater LA area at the time. Even though at that stage of my life I wasn’t particularly interested in politics, the shooting was such a sensation that coverage of it was impossible to avoid. I’ve always assumed Sirhan Sirhan shot him. He plead guilty to it and went to prison. The press reported it as multiple witnesses saying Sirhan did the deed.

But now comes the son, Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, Jr., saying it didn’t go down as it was reported. And that he thinks the CIA was involved. In fact, he believes the CIA did it.

He was on a podcast with Mike Tyson when he described the situation in detail. YouTube carried the podcast, then suddenly blocked it. Given what we know about the government’s involvement with social media, it seems probable that the CIA had a talk with the good folks at Google and said, Take that shit down.

Why else would YouTube take it down? Other than his views on the vaccine, Robert Kennedy, Jr. is a pretty classic member of the connected class. He’s all in on climate change. In fact, he’s advocated that climate change deniers be thrown in jail. He’s his Uncle Teddy on steroids as far as every leftist cause is concerned. Other than the vaccines and Big Pharma. So why censor his ramblings about his father’s assassination?

Fortunately, we all have the chance to hear what he says thanks to Elon Musk.

Here is his interview on Twitter. It’s well worth watching. And as you do, ask yourself why YouTube and Google would shut it down.

Don’t click on the image. It’s just a screenshot of the podcast. Click the link below to watch the video.

https://twitter.com/CollinRugg/status/1665813518279491592

You’ve got to admit, it sounds pretty believable.

Which brings me to another most interesting video I saw yesterday.

Two Anti-Vax Presidential Candidates?

We know that Robert Kennedy, Jr. has major issues with the endless line up of vaccines children in the US get today. And we know, he’s going to get hammered by Big Pharma for it. And by all the mainstream media, which would be bowing before him based on the rest of his agenda. But since they all get so much money from Big Pharma, they can’t afford to support him.

But did you know there is another major candidate in the race who promises to go after Big Pharma and appoint a commission to look into autism and all the issues many people feel are caused by vaccines? Yep.

Here he is.

That’s right. None other than The Donald himself. Watch this short announcement to see what he’s talking about.

(Substack has a new feature that allows videos to be embedded directly into a post. However, like all things with Substack, the documentation isn’t very good. So it took me about two hours to get this two minute video embedded. I had to use an app to pull it from Rumble as an MP4 file, then it took forever to download it into Substack. I’m much less inclined to click on a link than I am a video, so I figure everyone else is, too. If they are all as tough and time consuming as this one, I may reconsider. For some reason Substack is acting up today. Maybe they’re fooling with it. Or the coding for the video embed screwed up the coding for other things and they’re debugging. Whatever it is, a bunch of other features aren’t working correctly, so I’m in a constant state of dread that this post is going to suddenly vanish. Fingers crossed.)

Anyway, Trump has promised to create a commission to look into all the vaccine injuries and the fears of many parents that the alarming rise in autism and a host of other childhood disorders may have been caused by vaccines.

I wonder if the commission Trump appoints (should he get elected) will look into the mRNA jabs he promoted so heavily?

It is an interesting development that we have two candidates—one on each side of the political divide—who could be considered anti-vaxxers. I don’t think that’s what Big Pharma and their captured governmental agencies had in mind when they censored any and all who criticized the mRNA vaccines.

Speaking of childhood vaccines and their potential for injury…

Vaccines and Autism

As I’ve written before, I am ashamed of myself for accepting childhood vaccines so uncritically throughout most of my medical career, when I am by nature so skeptical of all other medical and pharmaceutical treatments. I am no longer so gullible, in great part due to the mRNA vaccines and all the hype about them that has turned out to be absolutely bogus. In reading about these vaccines, I have ended up being educated on vaccines in general. Turtles All the Way Down and Dissolving Illusions made me realize just how misinformed I had been.

I remember when Andrew Wakefield, a physician from the UK, had his paper yanked from The Lancet for putting forward the idea that vaccines might cause autism. Here is how Wikipedia describes him. He is

a British anti-vaccine activist, former physician, and discredited academic who was struck off the medical register for his involvement in The Lancet MMR autism fraud, a 1998 study that falsely claimed a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. [My bold emphasis]

Notice how loaded the words are here.

If you read the entire Wikipedia entry, it should raise some real questions in your mind.

Wakefield and a group of physicians jointly published an article in The Lancet saying that there might be a link between the MMR vaccine, given as one shot instead of three separate ones, and developmental disorders.

Let’s unpack this a bit.

When researchers say a link, what they mean is a correlation. If I say people who wear large belts are vastly more likely to be obese, that doesn’t mean large belts cause obesity. About the best I could say is that large belts are linked to obesity. Or large belts are correlated with obesity. Or large belts are associated with obesity. All these constructions mean the same thing. They don’t prove causality. They say only that there is an association between large belts and obesity.

Thousands and thousands of scientific papers are published each year showing that some Factor A is associated with some other Factor B. The press picks up on these papers and says: Factor A causes Factor B. That’s not what “associated with” means. Those are observational studies, which don’t prove causality.

I wrote a long article on my blog about these kinds of studies and why they don’t prove causality.

The whole notion that LDL-cholesterol causes heart disease is an association. It’s still a hypothesis because no one has ever proven that LDL-C actually causes heart disease. It’s simply an association. (And actually not a particularly robust one.) Yet the most profitable drugs in the history of pharmaceuticals—statins—were approved based on nothing more than an association.

So don’t let the fact that Wakefield’s study didn’t show causality put you off of it. Rare is the study that does show causality. Yet they almost always imply it. Many authors are clever in their discussions. They say, Of course, this is merely an association, which doesn’t prove causation, but the fact that Factor A is so often found with Factor B implies strongly that Factor A is causal. In other words, our work doesn’t prove causality, but it really does. No, it doesn’t. Remember: large belts and obesity.

If the powers that be came down on every researcher who published a paper showing an association between two factors, the number of papers published would decline exponentially.

So why was Wakefield picked on when so many others aren’t? And why was Wakefield’s article retracted when tens of thousands of other articles showing various associations are not retracted? That’s a question I don’t know the answer to.

Not only was Wakefield’s paper retracted, Wakefield himself was struck off the medical registrar. Which means, in US terms, the government took away his license to practice. People publish papers all the time showing associations. Why aren’t they struck off?

Later, it was discovered that Wakefield supposedly had an undisclosed conflict. Back in those days just about everyone had a conflict of interest. The drug companies paid researchers huge sums of money to do studies on their drugs. If the studies were positive, they got published. If not, they got thrown in a drawer somewhere. Now a conflict of interest statement is required. It wasn’t back then. Wakefield was no different than countless other researchers.

According to Wikipedia,

Although the paper said that no causal connection had been proven, before it was published, Wakefield made statements at a press conference and in a video news release issued by the hospital, calling for suspension of the triple MMR vaccine until more research could be done.

This is nothing out of the ordinary. Not only do many researchers do this in press conferences, they even do it in the abstracts of their papers. Which is why I tell everyone to read the frigging paper and not just the abstract.

The Lancet published a retraction of the paper. Here is the section that was retracted:

Interpretation. We identified associated gastrointestinal disease and developmental regression in a group of previously normal children, which was generally associated in time with possible environmental triggers. [My bold for emphasis]

See bolded above. Have you ever seen more weasel words in such a small paragraph? This is typical of epidemiological studies. They are all clotted with weasel words like these.

What did they replace this paragraph with?

We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between (the) vaccine and autism, as the data were insufficient. However the possibility of such a link was raised, and consequent events have had major implications for public health. In view of this, we consider now is the appropriate time that we should together formally retract the interpretation placed upon these findings in the paper, according to precedent.

Wakefield didn’t say there was a causal link. Look at the paragraph quoted above. This is insane.

Look at the sentence I bolded. Apply that to statins. LDL-C has never been shown to be causal in the development of heart disease. It’s still a hypothesis. Apply that bolded sentence to statins. It did have major implications for public health. Literally, hundreds of millions of people went on a drug that basically treated a lab value, not a disease. And not without serious adverse consequences for some of them. There were huge public health implications there, yet no one batted an eye.

Of course, the pharmaceutical industry stood to make billions of dollars on the association of LDL-C and heart disease, whereas they stood to lose billions of dollars if people began to worry about the association of the MMR vaccines and autism.

Wakefield gets struck off the role while Big Pharma rolls on. Funny how that happens.

Shortly after Wakefield’s 1998The Lancet paper gets retracted and Wakefield himself gets thrown to the wolves, a Danish paper came out in 2002 in the New England Journal of Medicine ‘proving’ that vaccines don’t cause autism.

Everyone gushed over this paper, basically because it said what they wanted it to say. Compare that paper to the Danish mask paper published early in the pandemic showing no reduction in Covid in those who routinely wore masks and those who didn’t. The paper’s findings didn’t support the narrative at the time, so the paper was trashed by multiple sources.

The vaccine-autism paper did support the narrative, especially that of Big Pharma, so it was accepted without so much as a by your leave. That’s just the way these things go.

After my shame of falling hook, line, and sinker for the whole there-is-a-vaccine-for-everything mantra, and they all should be given, I decided to look into the Danish paper.

It looked pretty straightforward. Denmark has a medical registry for the entire (small) country that allows all kinds of medical and health data to be easily accessed by researchers.

The researchers evaluated the records of all the children born in Denmark between 1991 and 1998. The total number of children born in that period was 537,303. Of that total, 440,655 (82%) had received the MMR vaccine, which leaves 96,648 who were not vaccinated. They then looked at the number of children in each group (the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated) to determine if there was a difference in cases of autism.

Seems simple enough. What did they find?

Out of this group of children, they found 316 who had autistic spectrum disorder evenly divided percentage-wise between the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups.

When I read this number, I thought WTF? It had to be way more than 316 kids out of 537,303. I went to the CDC stats and found the chart below:

As you can see in the section I put the red rectangle around, in essentially the same period as the Danish study (1991-1998 vs 1992-2000 in the CDC data) the prevalence of autism in that birth group was about 1 in 150 kids.

If you divide the 537,303 kids born in Denmark in roughly that same time period by 150, it calculates to 3,582 kids who should have had autism, at least in accordance with the US statistics. That’s over 10 times the number of the 316 kids they found with autism.

Dare I say it? There is something rotten in the state of Denmark. At least in this study. A factor of two or three times more, I might buy, but over ten times more? I don’t think so.

After I saw these numbers, I read on down in the paper and came across this paragraph.

In Denmark, children are referred to specialists in child psychiatry by general practitioners, schools, and psychologists if autism is suspected. Only specialists in child psychiatry diagnose autism and assign a diagnostic code, and all diagnoses are recorded in the Danish Psychiatric Central Register. We identified all children given a diagnosis of autistic disorder (ICD-10 code F84.0 and DSM-IV code 299.00) or another autistic-spectrum disorder (ICD-10 codes F84.1 through F84.9 and DSM-IV codes 299.10 and 299.80). When a child was given diagnoses of both autistic disorder and one or more other autistic-spectrum disorders, we classified the diagnosis as autistic disorder.

I’m going out on a limb here, but I suspect most kids in the US are diagnosed by their pediatricians. In these days in which a kid on the autistic spectrum is born once in about every 50-60 live births, it’s common enough that it’s a fairly easy diagnosis. And all pediatricians are on the lookout for it. Many parents refuse to believe their autistic kid has autism, and these kids are often punished for behavior they can’t help. Which is tragic. But they also may not make it into the statistics. They end up being considered quirky kids with behavior problems.

In the study above, only kids referred to a child psychiatrist were counted. And only those with two separate autistic disorder diagnoses made the cut. Unless the prevalence of autism is lower by an order of magnitude in Denmark as compared to the United States, this study is bogus.

People and the media believed it because they wanted to believe it. Just like they didn’t believe the Danish mask study—which, compared to the autism one, was much better done—because they didn’t want to believe it.

And as far as I’m concerned, the MMR (and all other vaccines, for that matter) need serious scrutiny. Vaccines ought to not only have to prove their benefit and true efficacy, but prove they do no other harm. First, do no harm!

On one final note re this Danish vaccine study, it said that there were 96,648 kids who hadn’t been given the MMR jab. Given the health registry in that country, it would seem that group of almost 100 thousand kids could act as a control group to the study group of the kids who were vaccinated. Following their health over the next few decades might make for some surprises.

I, for one, would love to know how many of the 100K kids got measles, mumps, and/or rubella. It would seem like that would be valuable information for the public health people to have. But it also might show things they would rather not have seen.

More Conspiracy Theories

I’ve got almost 11,000 subscribers to The Arrow. Apparently that is the tipping point. It’s a sample size large enough to encompass every conspiracy theory known to man.

I could write something about, say, black holes (about which I know very little), and I can guarantee that someone will write me, sending multiple links to articles debunking black holes.

For example, a few weeks ago, in the Video of the Week section, I posted an article about and a video of the sunken Titanic. In short order, I received an email from a reader telling me the ship in the video is probably not the Titanic, but a sister ship instead. He included the following link from an entity called Brasscheck TV. In the link was a Rumble video, linked below:

https://rumble.com/vzten9-the-story-behind-the-titanic.html

The story line is believable. But all conspiracy story lines are believable, otherwise no one would be taken in by them. I can’t help but think that after all these years if what this video purports to have happened really happened, it would have been discovered.

I spent a half day once at the shipyard in Belfast where the Titanic was built. No mention of any of this at all during the tour. You would think if it were true, they’d have told it; it would make an even better story.

It’s a fun video to watch, so I recommend you give it a look.

I’m putting it up not because I’ve bought into it, but just to show that no matter how uncontroversial you think a topic may be, somewhere out there exists a controversy.

The Titanic was a one off, but I’ve gotten a number of emails from various people inundating me with links showing that viruses don’t exist. There is a large group of people—including physicians and PhD scientists—who claim viruses are non-existent. Or at least have never been isolated.

If there were just one or two people making this claim, I wouldn’t give it a second’s notice. But there are enough people all over the world who are credentialed and believe this to give me a bit of a pause.

If there are no viruses, how are they sequenced? Early on in the vaccine days, I was reading everything I could get my hands on about how the mRNA vaccines were developed. The authors of those books describe the sequencing of viruses as an everyday event. I’ve looked up YouTube videos of it, and it does appear to be pretty simple if you have the tools. If there are no viruses, what are these people sequencing?

When labs run a PCR test looking for fragments of particular sequences to determine if someone has been infected with Covid, what are they looking for if not a specific virus or some part of one?

The measles virus has been grown in a medium and then attenuated to make vaccines. Forgetting any ill effects from the vaccine, how did they pretty much completely prevent infection with measles, an extremely contagious disease, if the virus grown in the medium was imaginary?

I could go on and on, but you get the picture.

These people saying there are no viruses could be correct, I suppose, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I can’t imagine an entire field of science—virology—that has been around forever could be a fraud. All those extremely bright people studying something that doesn’t exist?

As I said, it could be true, but I have much more interesting things to read and study than the existence of viruses. If it does turn out to be true that there are no such things, then I’ll be the first to admit I was a moron for not looking at it more deeply. But there are too many other things that I know exist requiring my attention than the idea that viruses aren’t real.

Okay, let’s get to the video of the week.

I’ve got a ton more stuff to post on, but I’m over my word limit as it is right now. Plus, a gremlin of some kind got into the Substack platform and somehow glitched this very post. What you are reading now had to be copied piecemeal and transferred from where I started. I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden the formatting menu went away. I had to scroll back to the top every time I had to insert a link or a headline or a graphic. The words on the screen would suddenly become tiny. When I tried to enlarge them, they would go from tiny to gigantic in about a half a second. The word count wouldn’t show up. I couldn’t use other features. I finally gave up and copied everything to a new post template and started over.

Video of the Week

One of my readers sent me this video this week. It’s just the tip of the iceberg of idiocy we’re all having routinely having inflicted on us in these times. It’s nice to see those who fight the ridiculous with ridicule. Enjoy!

That’s about it for today. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday with the rest of the stuff I had for today and more.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. This post is public, so feel free to share it as you like.

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