Naked Science Forum
On the Lighter Side => That CAN'T be true! => Topic started by: profound on 16/10/2013 07:52:11
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I have just been studying the safety studies and they just don't make any sense.
It seems they they don;t use placebo at all as the control.
Further research lead me to this shocking piece of info.
Big Pharma routinely 'safety tests' vaccines against other vaccines to declare them safe
In a recent piece for VacTruth.com, Markus Heinze takes a closer look at the faulty methodology behind vaccine safety studies, explaining to his readers using simple analogies why the prevailing vaccine dogma is so preposterous. Using several vaccine package inserts as evidence, Heinze divulges the truth about how vaccine companies literally "safety test" their vaccines against other vaccines rather than placebos, which completely compromises their outcomes.
GlaxoSmithKline's (GSK) ENGERIX-B hepatitis B vaccine for children, for instance, is his first example, as the package insert for this vaccine reveals that it was safety tested against a different vaccine rather than a saline-based placebo. Since both vaccines used in this study likely produced adverse events -- GSK chose the "control" vaccine, after all -- its manufacturer was able to arrive at the pre-determined conclusion that ENGERIX-B does not come with an elevated risk of harmful side effects.
"What the pharmaceutical company should have done is inject one group with the vaccine and the other group with a non-vaccine placebo (i.e., saline)," writes Heinze. "What the pharmaceutical company did, instead, was inject one group with the hepatitis B vaccine, and the other group with a different vaccine. Then they monitored both groups and found that the recipients of their vaccine had 'no significant difference in the frequency or severity of adverse experiences' as compared to the recipients of other vaccines."
To illustrate the absurdity of this study design, Heinze compares it to a hypothetical safety test on a McDonald's Big Mac that uses a Burger King Whopper as the "control." Obviously, the outcomes are going to be similar, as the products in question are similar -- the Big Mac is "no more lethal than the Whopper" would be the ludicrous conclusion of this study, if it were ever to be conducted.
GlaxoSmithKline is currently in the News for fraud,bribery and research corruption of up up to £300 million.Further research indicates they have a history of criminal wrong doing.They were even investigated by the BBC panorama.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/11/18/drug-companies-are-ranked-in-the-top-100-corporate-criminals-of-the-1990s.aspx
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Wrong. Read Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science" for a complete explanation, but here's a quick answer.
Because vaccines are known to be effective, it is unethical to test a new vaccine against a placebo: you are intentionally condemning half of your sample to die from smallpox or whatever - google "Tuskeegee" for a fine example of how not to do it. The ethical scientific question is (a) is the new product at least as effective as the existing standard product and (b) are its side effects, including toxicity, any worse than the standard product?
If you want to pursue your analogy, you should be testing Big Macs against a placebo with no nutritional value at all. To nobody's surprise you will find that the people who ate nothing all died from starvation, but none from food poisoning. Not a useful test at all.
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Because vaccines are known to be effective, it is unethical to test a new vaccine against a placebo
Vaccines, of course, have to be tested for effectiveness, usually first in animals, and then later in humans. Typically one can use the current "standard of care" as the control group.
If, however, there is a current vaccine that has been previously tested, and one wishes to introduce a new formulation, then the comparison would be made with the current "standard of care".
The risk of a pre-teen child acquiring Hep B would be reasonably low if both parents are also sero-negative for the virus, and that information would be good to know. However, the long term risk of a chronic Hep-B infection, especially one acquired in childhood may preclude sham vaccination.
So, after testing close family members, one could potentially delay Heb B vaccination.
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Demonstrating that people not exposed to HepB don't acquire it, is not particularly interesting.
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Demonstrating that people not exposed to HepB don't acquire it, is not particularly interesting.
Hep B seems to be transmitted in a number of ways requiring very close contact including:
- At Birth
- Sexually Transmitted Disease
- Blood Borne & IV Drug use
It should be possible to determine a group of individuals at low risk of acquiring the disease in early childhood.
Then there would be no ethical dilemma of running a placebo controlled experiment of the long term side effects of dosing the vaccine at birth.
Of course there are high risk infants that require dosing at birth, as well as many other highly communicable diseases that one should vaccinate for.
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Your experiment is not clear. As I see it, if you take a group with an abnormally low risk of infection, you will need a heck of a lot of trials to detect the effect above placebo since the expected incidence of disease is zero for both the treatment and control groups. If you start with a population with average or high risk, it would be unethical to withhold standard and proven effective prophylaxis from the controls.
And what is the point anyway? The safety and effectiveness of vaccine A having already been demonstrated, the only scientific or commercial reason for a clinical trial is to determine whether vaccine B is better or worse than A, not better than placebo. You still get an absolute measure of contraindications and sideffects, and this value will be even "cleaner" than a comparison with placebo, which is not entirely risk-free, so the risk/benefit ratio is calculable.
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Fraudulent probably wouldn't be the best word. Biased or Skewed would be more appropriate.
There is a scientific Dogma that says vaccines are fine. And by fine they mean generally safe or safe enough. There are of course adverse reactions and those very depending on vaccine.
Dogma - "a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true"
So since Science knows "incontrovertibly" that vaccines are generally safe why would we test vaccines against a control group of children who don't get vaccinated?
The hamberger analogy doesn’t work very well because people are always eating and we need to eat in order to survive we don’t need to be vaccinated in order to survive. So we need a different analogy.
Perhaps something like dressing warm when it’s cold helps us stay warm. Well we know that dressing warm helps us stay warm. Testing green wool vs blue wool may answer the question of which color keeps us warmer or that there is no significant difference in adverse reactions between the two. But a test between wools won’t reveal whether wool is the cause of hives, alzheimer's or other life long effects. It may show a correlation but not a cause. The only way to know that for sure would be to test wool against no clothing. Which isn’t really ethical to send someone into the cold knowing that cloths are better than being naked.
However this analogy isn’t perfect, but it is certainly better.
The real underlying “dogma” is having antibodies against these viruses is better than not having them. The question is how do we get these antibodies get into people, how quickly, at what age, with what additives, etc.
So really in order to know whether vaccines like wool cause issues we have to have a control group. So since they aren’t doing this in their testing the results are skewed and in some ways biased. :o
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A good starting point to assess the credibility of stories is to look at their source, VacTruth is an antivax site and can not be considered to have any credibility. mercola is another untrustworthy site that pushes quackery.
They are a all part of the multimillion dollar Supplements, Complementary and Alternative Medicine industry.
I would not expect the sellers of quack treatments to understand the finer points of clinical trial design. herbal treatments ans supplements are generally untested for effectiveness.
A new vaccine could be tested against an existing vaccine to compare them for Equivalency, Non-inferiority or Superiority.
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There's no dogma that vaccines are risk-free. At least there shouldn't be, because we know it isn't true. What everyone except sensationmongering journalists, politicians, quacks, and other professional liars knows, is that an effective vaccine reduces the incidence of a disease among the vaccinated population. Once you have an effective vaccine A it's worthwhile assessing candidate vaccine B to see whether it is more effective and/or causes less harm than A.
The ethical dilemma arises if B is, say, more effective than A but has more undesirable sideffects. In the extreme, suppose it confers 100% immunity on the survivors but kills 0.01% of the population. You have to weigh this against the prevalence and severity of the target disease to decide whether it should be licensed. Then just to make matters more complicated, if you vaccinated only a proportion of the population, what would be the probability of the remainder contracting the disease? Can you identify an optimum risk group?
The eradication of smallpox was a good example of targeting high-risk groups with a vaccine that occasionally provoked an unpleasant reaction, in a campaign that reduced the incidence from 15,000,000 cases in 1967 to zero in 1979.
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Another example where you would trial one vaccine against another.
Say you have a new version of a vaccine that is produced in a dry form that is more heat stable. The advantages would be that a cold chain would not be required for its transport. Now in the developing world that could be a major concern but in developed countries not so significant.
So you would run trials to show equivalence or non-inferiority. The efficacy of a new therapeutic agent would be established if its treatment effects are proven to be at least equivalent to those observed from a standard treatment, which itself has a well established and substantial level of efficacy.
If a new agent not only demonstrates its equivalence with standard therapy, but also offers advantages in terms of either toxicity, ease of administration, or cost, the new agent may provide an important advance in clinical care.
The terms equivalence and non-inferiority are related but they are not the same thing.
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Now supposing your dry vaccine turns out to be less effective but more tolerant. What do you do? Common sense says "market it in countries where transport and electricity are unreliable" but some smartarse journalist will then accuse you of offloading substandard stuff to the third world, profiteering, and so on.....
Face it, a lot of useless people make a living by criticising the successful.
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Vaccines don't work at all!!
and they haven't 'removed' diseases at all!
it is all propaganda.and vaccines are very very dangerous.
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There really is so much evidence that vaccines don't work and even that they are very very dangerous. by design!
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There really is so much evidence that vaccines don't work and even that they are very very dangerous. by design!
Oh yes, in fact, important findings about the dangers of vaccines were released just the other day by scientist Donald Trump.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/03/28/trump-weighs-in-on-vaccine-autism-controversy/
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Oh well, there is so much that can prove that they don't work at all, that it is even ridiculous that people still think they work.
They are really very dangerous and they are ment to cull the population
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"They are really very dangerous and they are ment to cull the population"
Ah you are a conspiracy crank.
Back in the real world.
Vaccines are one of the most effective health interventions that has ever been developed. Inexpensive and low risk while offering a high level of protection. India, which once had the highest number of polio cases in the world, is now marking three years since its last reported polio case. That would indicate that vaccines have been very effective.
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Vaccines don't work at all!!
and they haven't 'removed' diseases at all!
it is all propaganda.and vaccines are very very dangerous.
you are correct with the possible exception of the polio vaccine and others of which only a very microscopic amount is required.
However vaccines which are mixed with a toxic landfill chemicals renamed as"preservatives" and are injected are dangerous.
Also the death rate was declining way before vaccines but the vaccine propagandists always try to cover up this fact.
Here is the proof:-
https://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com/graphs/
The death rate is reduced not by vaccines but by better living standards like housing,sanitation,food,equality,welfare,medical care,hygiene,clean water.
clean water alone makes a HUGE difference.
These are the key things.Most vaccines are a huge money making scam orchestrated by big pharma and their friends in Crookgress.
Have you noticed how nearly every regulatory body has been infiltrated by big pharma foot soldiers.