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That’s the way StatNews.com describes their own journalism. Fast. Deep. Tough-minded.
I had found myself on the StatNews website, reading an article about a new Danish study, looking at the connection between MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccinations in children with subsequent diagnoses of Autism or Autism Spectrum Disorder.There’s an active political movement of people, internationally, questioning whether intense vaccination schedules, imposed by governments, are actually contributing to chronic illnesses like autism, childhood diabetes, asthma, childhood cancers and other contemporary chronic disease epidemics.
From the StatNews article “It’s old news that vaccines don’t cause autism. But a major new study aims to refute skeptics again” by reporter Helen Branswell:
A massive new study from Denmark found no association between being vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella and developing autism.
In science and public health circles, that issue has long since been considered settled, with multiple studies over many years discounting the findings of a small study published more than 20 years ago that has since been expunged from the medical literature.
But the size of this study — involving 657,461 Danish children born between 1999 and 2010 — should, in theory, bolster the argument that doctors and public health professionals still find themselves forced to make in the face of entrenched and growing resistance to vaccination in some quarters.
“…in theory…”
Just to be clear, the aforementioned study did not actually involve Danish children, per se. Rather, it involved data (of some type) derived from the Danish Civil Registration System. Certainly, the study sounds like a massive effort, even if the researchers did not review a single individual medical chart, as is stated in the abstract of the 2019 report..
One thing that reporter Branswell neglected to share in her article, however, was that the funding for the study came from Novo Nordisk, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Denmark, with 43,000 employees and production facilities in eight countries… and annual revenues of about $8 billion.
Here we have an example of a curious problem that plagues us in our search for the truth — be it scientific truth, or medical truth, or political truth. The people most likely to fund massive studies of Danish children and make sure the results of their studies (whether valid or fraudulent) are widely published by media outlets, are people with access to massive amounts of wealth, and with a vested interest in protecting the pharmaceutical industry.
According to IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, as quoted in ‘Pharmaceutical Commerce’, the global revenues for the pharmaceutical industry will reach $1.5 trillion by 2023.
Enough money to fund an occasional Danish study, to refute the skeptics?
So it’s really somewhat remarkable that we have a lively (and growing?) grassroots movement that is questioning the wisdom of mass vaccination, especially the enforced vaccination of children. These critics of unmitigated vaccination have nothing to gain financially by challenging the medical status quo. What they do have to gain — or rather, retain — is their right to control which ‘medicines’ get injected into their own bodies and into the bodies of their young children.
The anti-vaccine movement leaders may have their work cut out for them, however, as the world struggles with the current COVID-19 pandemic… because, as we’ve been warned, a vaccine is on its way, very soon, and when it arrives, it will finally solve all our problems… if we will simply roll up our sleeve and take the needle.
Until then, stay at home, and wait?
Self-quarantine has often been the preferred approach to lessening the risk of infection for viruses such as influenza and coronavirus that spread through casual contact. But occasionally, pharmaceutical companies are able to develop profitable vaccines. Often, they are not able.
Dengue fever is a mildly dangerous viral infection that has been increasing its spread globally since about 1970. 50 years later, we still have no vaccine.
The SARS cornonavirus pandemic (2002-2003) was another worldwide event, but only moderately deadly. 18 years later, we still have no vaccine.
The MERS coronavirus pandemic (2012-present) is ongoing, but once again has resulted in few fatalities. 8 years later, we still have no vaccine.
But the most deadly pandemic in recent memory, still ongoing, has been HIV/AIDS — which spreads only via “intimate” contact. 40 years after the AIDS virus was first identified, and after perhaps 35 million people worldwide have died from the infection, there is still no vaccine available.
The 1918-19 influenza pandemic killed an estimated 40-70 million people worldwide. Other, less severe, pandemic influenzas emerged in 1957-58, 1968, and 2009. In the latter three cases, researchers developed influenza vaccines targeted specifically to the circulating virus, though experts disagree about how effectively the vaccines curtailed disease spread.
Influenza pandemics often last one or two years, and then disappear without any need for vaccines, soon to be replaced by yet another strain. Even the incredibly deadly Spanish flu disappeared all on its own after two years. No vaccine was ever developed.
But our current pandemic is not a flu virus; rather, it’s a coronavirus.
From the ABCNewsAustralia web article titled, “We’ve never made a successful vaccine for a coronavirus before. This is why it’s so difficult”:
“One of the problems with corona vaccines in the past has been that when the immune response does cross over to where the virus-infected cells are, it actually increases the pathology rather than reducing it,” Professor Frazer said. “So that immunization with [experimental] SARS corona vaccine caused, in animals, inflammation in the lungs which wouldn’t otherwise have been there if the vaccine hadn’t been given.”
Apparently, past attempts to produce a vaccine targeting other coronaviruses have ended up creating a medicine that actually made the problem worse.
But we’ve recently been promised by the Trump administration that we can expect a COVID-19 vaccine by January.