Atlas Monitor | 16 July 2016

Siouxsie Wiles is a glow-worm studying microbiologist whose wailing dogmatic scientism  can be read from time to time at the website The Spinoff. From her attack dog-bullhorn column she sics on anyone who dares question conventional scientific wisdom particularly when it comes to so-called “medical orthodoxy” i.e. the vaccine-pharmaceutical model for medicine. She seems to have a practiced tone for self-righteous and indignant sarcasm. She writes with the ultimate word of authority as if ‘the trash heap has spoken … nyrrrrrrr …’

Wiles recently had a go at the National Party’s new MP Maureen Pugh for ‘not believing in pharmaceutical drugs’. However, nowhere in the article that Wiles refers to does Pugh explicitly state that. Instead Pugh calls for a ‘more holistic approach’ which by definition would include pharmaceuticals along with other non-pharmaceutical medicines.

It is clear from reading the article that Pugh certainly has some reservations about pharmaceutical drugs. It is also clear that Pugh promotes healthy lifestyle choices such as exercise, healthy eating and a clean environment and would like to see such things prioritized.

Pugh’s skepticism of the medical profession is understandable when one considers that there is far less money to be made in a cure or in addressing the causes of illness and far more in the treatment.

The tendency for treating the symptoms rather than the cause has persuaded many to view the allopathic medical profession as having become the lap dog of the pharmaceutical industry which defines disease as a market place from which massive profits are generated. In 2015 the cancer treatment industry earned $US 100 billion in annual sales and is set to increase to $US 147 billion by 2018. This has spawned an investment industry built on the business model of disease and survives on the continuation of current diseases and the launching of new ones.

This industry fights a propaganda war to give the impression that it is making progress with the eradication of disease. It has also benefitted from the intervention of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations to secure a monopoly by eliminating competition such as naturopathy, homeopathy, chiropractic and eclectic herbal medicine.

Incidentally, the New York City health commissioner during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, Royal S. Copeland was a practicing homeopath. This demonstrates the mainstream orthodoxy of this so-called ‘alternative’ medicine at the time. New York emerged from the epidemic better than any other city in the country.

The Flexner Report

For the industrial giants such as Rockefeller and Carnegie patented chemical based drugs are a source of huge profits unlike natural medicines which you cannot patent. In order to maximize profits these industry giants needed to come up with a plan to eliminate their competition and establish a medical monopoly. This was done through the American Medical Association (AMA) whose primary motivation is to advance the financial interests of its members.

The history of the ascendency of the allopathic model can be traced back to 1906 when the AMA established the Council on Medical Education (CME) that commissioned the Carnegie foundation to survey the medical industry. Abraham Flexner was charged ostensibly with reviewing the workings of the various schools of medical education in the US. Strangely, Flexner was in no way qualified for the task. He was neither a physician, scientist nor an educator. He had a BA.

The result was the Flexner Report (published in 1910). By implementing the recommendations made in the Flexner report the Carnegie Foundation was able to reform medical education and engineer, through large funding grants, consolidated control over medical schools including their protocols; the curricula and admission standards, to the effect that only physicians trained in patented chemical based pharmacology from colleges pushing drug intensive medicine were licensed to practice.

Those medical institutions that conformed to the new standard would get enormous funding grants from the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations. Those that did not would not receive foundation money. The result was the elimination of half of these institutions. By 1919 the number of medical training facilities had fallen from 161 to 81. Colleges teaching natural medicine were almost completely wiped out. Another result was women being shut out of medical practice as places in medical training colleges were drastically reduced.

Evidence Based Medicine versus Quackery

With the Flexner Report as a weapon, Big Pharma industry  worked aggressively to demonize and ultimately take down any alternative therapies. It created memes such as “evidence based medicine” which constituted patented synthetic chemical drugs and “quackery” which included everything natural and non-synthetic that was not patentable. Chiropractic was one of the targets for the designation of quackery.

In 1987 a US federal judge presiding over the Wilk v AMA case, which involved a group of chiropractors, found the American Medical Association (AMA) guilty of conspiracy to attempt to destroy chiropractic. Judge Getzendanner found that during the 1960s and 1970s the AMA had embarked on a sophisticated propaganda campaign to discredit chiropractic.

This was certainly not the first time the AMA had come under scrutiny. In 1953 a Congressional investigation concluded that

Behind this is the weirdest conglomeration of corrupt motives, intrigues, jealousy, selfishness, obstruction, and conspiracy I have ever seen.

Even editors of reputable medical journals have expressed their skepticism of the medical research used to support so-called evidence based medicine. The former editor-in-chief of the Lancet, Richard Horton, said

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

After she was fired, for complaining in an editorial about Big Pharma’s increasing control over medical research, the former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, Marcia Angell wrote  that

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

Iatrogenesis (Injury & Death by Medicine)

So how has this “evidence based medicine” performed? According to the FDA’s own data every year there are 2 million serious adverse reactions to properly prescribed and administered pharmaceutical drugs; including over 100,000 deaths in America. It is estimated that barely over one percent of all adverse reactions are reported.

A 2013 study “A new, evidence-based estimate of patient harms associated with hospital care,” by JT James (J Patient Saf, Sept. 9, 2013). Found that

… the true number of premature deaths [in US hospitals] associated with preventable harm to patients was estimated at more than 400,000 per year.

The study also found that

Serious harm seems to be 10- to 20-fold more common than lethal harm.

The historical legacy of the pharmaceutical industry can be traced back to World War II. During the Nuremberg trials it was revealed that the chemical cartel IG Farben, which included pharmaceutical companies such Bayer, BASF and Hoechst, commissioned the construction of Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps as a source of slave labour for this chemical conglomerate.

Henrich Mückter, the lead doctor in the development of Thalidomide, was a doctor in the Nazi regime who experimented with Typhus vaccinations on people in occupied Poland. Charged with war crimes he managed to escape to Germany where he landed a senior position at Grünenthal (the manufacturer of Thalidomide) alongside other Nazi war criminals including Otto Ambros, a convicted and jailed mass murderer at Auschwitz, who served as the company’s chairman of the board.

The Flu

Let us return to Wiles critique of Pugh’s dissenting views on illness and medicine. Wiles chastises Pugh for not taking an alarmist position towards the flu. Don’t be ridiculous and get your flu shot is the upshot from Wiles. With her trotters in a twist she squeals:

Remember “swine” flu? The H1N1 version of the influenza virus that emerged in 2009 caused pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) even in healthy people, and killed thousands.

According to Dr Marc Lipsitch of Harvard University the seasonal flu has a death rate of less than 0.1 percent. Lipsitch’s analysis of the swine flu put the mortality rate at a range from 0.007 percent to 0.045 percent.

The media hype behind the 2009 swine flu was such that it persuaded governments around the world to stockpile the drug Tamiflu. The New Zealand Ministry of health bought 1 million doses.

However, a Cochrane review found that there was no evidence to support the claims that Tamiflu was effective. Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford said

You can’t find any benefits that warrant treatment with Tamiflu. Any treatment is a ratio of the benefits to the harm – and if you don’t find any benefits, then any harms are accentuated. In addition if you see harms in healthy people, it means if you look at more complicated people you’re likely to find them [sic] harms are worse

The harms associated with drugs administered for the flu are certainly real for those who have suffered them. In 2014 the UK government admitted that swine flu drug Pandermix had caused the brain damage in 60 British children and adversely affected around 800 children across Europe. The UK government was expected to pay £60 million in compensation.

Some 80 Irish teenagers were left with narcolepsy, an incurable sleeping disorder, after receiving the  H1N1 swine flu vaccine in 2009. The Department of Health in Ireland said in a statement:

The Health Products Regulatory Authority has received a number of reports with clinical information confirming a diagnosis of narcolepsy in individuals who were vaccinated with pandemic influenza vaccine.

Clearly, there are some  questions over the efficacy and safety of the flu vaccine.

The NZ National Influenza Centre director Sue Huang admits that developing the seasonal flu vaccine is not as scientific as one might be led to believe by a gullible mainstream media and its self-proclaimed expert apparatchiks.

Flu vaccine development is effectively guess-work analogous, but even less accurate, to weather forecasting. Vaccine developers try to predict what the next dominant flu strain will be and develop the vaccine accordingly.

The 2014 flu vaccine was ostensibly designed to protect against the H1N1 A strain. However, it left people vulnerable to the H3N2 which mutates so frequently vaccine developers cannot keep pace given the six month lead in time for vaccine development.

Huang acknowledges that often times the flu strain vaccines are developed for do not match the circulating strain due to such mutations thereby reducing protection.

Vaccine effectiveness (VE) sits between 50 and 80 per cent according to Huang. The 2014 season’s effectiveness was 60 per cent. However, “effectiveness” is defined in terms of whether or not someone is hospitalized or is compelled to visit their GP; not whether or not someone exhibits flu symptoms. So a vaccinated person who caught the flu but did not visit their doctor will have contributed to the positive “effectiveness” rate.

Data from Public Health England for the 2015-2016 flu season vaccine shows the VE rate is 52.4% across all ages. For ages 65+ years the VE is 29.1%. The most effective VE sits at 57.6% for age group 2-17 years. This puts the overall VE rate in the UK for the current flu season at between 29.1 and 57.6 percent. Compared to the 2014 season in NZ; VE has dropped 20 percent. Considering that planning for seasonal flu vaccine development is coordinated centrally through the World Health Organization (WHO) the comparison is relevant and useful.

Dr. Danuta Skowronski of the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control in Canada presented data at the recent Global Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness meeting at the World Health Organization revealed that VE was at around 45 to 50 percent. Dr Skowronski notes that vaccine manufacturers’ VE estimates of 70 to 90 percent were based on flawed assumptions that failed to account for ‘variability in influenza vaccine protection — by season, by subtype, by age group, by vaccine product’.

Another problem is that most flu diagnoses are in fact misdiagnosis by GPs. Of the thousands of flu samples taken by doctors and sent to labs every year in the US only a fraction turn out to be the influenza virus. This has been argued by Dr Peter Doshi, writing in 2013 for the British Medical Journal (BMJ). In his review, “Influenza: marketing vaccines by marketing disease” (BMJ 2013; 346:f3037): Dr Doshi noted that

… even the ideal influenza vaccine, matched perfectly to circulating strains of wild influenza and capable of stopping all influenza viruses, can only deal with a small part of the ‘flu’ problem because most ‘flu’ appears to have nothing to do with influenza. Every year, hundreds of thousands of respiratory specimens are tested across the US. Of those tested, on average 16% are found to be influenza positive.

… It’s no wonder so many people feel that ‘flu shots’ don’t work: for most flus, they can’t.

Writing for the BMJ in 2005 Doshi also discovered that the mortality rate for the flu put out by the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) had been drastically inflated. The CDC has been telling the media that the flu kills 36,000 Americans every year. However, as Doshi reports in his article “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?” (BMJ 2005; 331:1412):

[According to CDC statistics], ‘influenza and pneumonia’ took 62,034 lives in 2001—61,777 of which were attributable to pneumonia and 257 to flu, and in only 18 cases was the flu virus positively identified.

Read the Vaccine Inserts

The safety and effectiveness of the flu vaccine is hidden in plain view. One need only read the vaccine inserts.

Above is an image of the insert for the 2013-2014 season FLULAVAL vaccine marketed by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). It reads:

…there have been no controlled trials adequately demonstrating a decrease in influenza disease after vaccination with FLULAVAL.

That is a remarkable admission. But there is more. See below for the known side effects admitted by the manufacturers and marketers of the flu shot.

Yes you read it correctly in black and white. Symptoms for adverse reactions or “postmarketing experience” – a glorious euphemism if there ever was one; includes:

• Eye pain and chest pain
• Arthritis
• Dizziness, tremors and losing consciousness (syncope)
• Convulsions and seizures
• Guillain-Barré Syndrome
• Cranial nerve paralysis or limb paralysis
• Swelling of the brain
• Partial facial paralysis

Sounds nasty does it not? The insert also says that the vaccine contains toxic mercury. See below.

The insert also says:

“FLULAVAL has not been evaluated for carcinogenic or mutagenic, or impairment of fertility.“

This is despite the fact that the vaccine contains a known carcinogen.

Another remarkable admission is that:

“Safety and effectiveness of FLULAVAL QUADRIVALENT have not been established in pregnant women …”

Yet pregnant women are encouraged through public health campaigns to do exactly what the insert suggests is risky.

Understand that these vaccine inserts are directly stating that the vaccine isn’t supported by clinical evidence of safety or efficacy.

To be clear:

• Flu shot vaccine inserts openly admit there is no evidence that flu shots work.

• Flu shots still contain toxic mercury, a potent neurotoxin.

• Flu shot vaccine inserts openly admit flu shots caused seizures, paralysis and other neurological disorders, which is not surprising given that they still contain mercury, a potent neurotoxin.

Canadian scientists and the U.S. Navy have both proven in separate studies that the flu shot is not effective.

Measles

Wiles’ rant about Pugh is not the first time this petri dish pusher has torn her lab coat. She went bioluminescent, like a glow-worm, with rage when Radio NZ had the audacity to interview Katherine Smith; a herbalist and journalist of 25 years experience about her contrarian views on measles during the recent “outbreak”. Her column entitled A herbalist anti-vaxxer on Morning Report? I’d laugh if I weren’t so bloody furious was another gloriously absurd call for censorship. She wrote

RNZ needs to do some serious soul-searching about its decision to give a platform to non-scientific nonsense … As I write my blood is boiling. I’m in a rage … naturopaths aren’t doctors, or indeed trained medical practitioners … Smith is a herbalist, which anyone can become by “training” online for two hours a week for a year, with no examination, but after paying $575 in tuition and administration fees.

Wild Wiles might be surprised to learn that the so-called father of the smallpox vaccine Edward Jenner never passed a medical examination in his life. After 20 years of practice with “Surgeon, apothecary” above his door he decided to get a qualification by simply buying a Doctor of Medicine degree from a University. More about smallpox soon.

Smith was attacked for suggesting that a course of vitamin therapy can be effective in treating the flu. Her critics claimed that there is no treatment for the flu and that her suggestion was pure pseudo-science. They maintained that the measles vaccine was the only safe and effective option. However, this is not entirely true as RNZ reported, Waikato hospital patients might have been exposed to measles after a vaccinated staff member was diagnosed with the disease. According to the DHB

the staff member had been fully vaccinated against measles …

Regarding treatment, Starship Hospital pediatrician Dr. Cameron Grant states quite clearly that

If a child is admitted to hospital with measles, we give them a treatment of vitamin A.

The BMJ as far back as 1932 reported that vitamin A is effective in saving the lives of children hospitalised with measles. These findings are supported by a 2005 Cochrane review. The scientific literature tells us that Vitamin A deficiency is a major problem with regards to infectious diseases.

Another study conducted in the 1930s concluded that children hospitalised with measles were less likely to develop complications such as pneumonia when treated with vitamin D which is regarded as an effective antibiotic.

Vitamin C has been used as an effective treatment for children suffering from measles encephalitis (inflammation of the brain).

But all that be damned and on and on “Dr” Wiles went about how important it is to get vaccinated and that the MMR-autism link did not exist according to ‘actual, real, scientists’.

She was of course alluding to Andrew Wakefield who had his medical practice license revoked by the UK General Medical Council (GMC) in 2010 after he was accused of having concocted a fraudulent study on the MMR-autism link in 1998. That was the story that was reported around the world.

The story that was considerably underreported was that Dr. Wakefield’s co-author, Dr John Walker-Smith was fully exonerated on all charges of professional misconduct after an appeal before the High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division, Administrative Court.

Justice Mitting was heavily critical of the GMC’s conduct of the trial. He noted that the GMC’s conclusions were “based on inadequate and superficial reasoning” and that “the finding of serious professional misconduct and the sanction of erasure are both quashed.” See full text of the decision.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u55MNglDkos&w=560&h=315]

Dr. Walker-Smith’s insurance coverage funded his appeal; however, Dr. Wakefield’s insurance would not cover him.

The Court’s ruling, by implication, vindicates Wakefield and he has started defamation proceedings against the BMJ editor in chief Dr. Fiona Godlee as well as journalist Brian Deer who lobbied for the GMC’s prosecution.

There were alleged connections between Deer; the BMJ and the Rupert Murdoch media empire which carried the stories Deer wrote about the study; and GlaxoSmithKline. These have not been fully investigated by the mainstream media.

CDC Whistleblower

This saga took an interesting twist in August 2014 when CDC scientist Dr. William W. Thompson put out  a press release [AM editor’s note: the page can no longer be found; however, has been archived here and reproduced below] through his lawyer confessing they he and his co-authors of a 2004 study, published in the journal Pediatrics, deliberately omitted statistically significant data that suggested an MMR-austism link. This study was used as the central piece of evidence in the attempt to discredit Wakefield.

Dr Thompson also admitted that he and his colleagues at the CDC scheduled a meeting to destroy vaccine-autism study documents. Thompson said

The…co-authors…brought a big garbage can into the meeting room… [and put the documents]…into a huge garbage can … The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism …

Wakefield’s critics in the mainstream media have claimed that none of his findings are supported by other researchers and that none of his studies have ever been replicated. In fact there have been at  least 28 studies conducted in Canada, the US, Venezuela and Italy that support Wakefield’s conclusions, both previous to and subsequent to his 1998 study.

First-Ever Peer-Reviewed Study of Vaccinated vs Unvaccinated Children Shows Vaccinated Kids Have a Higher Rate of Sickness, 470% Increase in Autism

The Inconvenient Data

Unfortunately for vaccine-vixen Dr. Wiles, the inconvenient reality is that vaccines cannot take any credit for the reduction in childhood mortality.

UK government data below which shows that the mortality rate from certain diseases had in some cases been reduced to zero BEFORE vaccines were introduced into the schedule. Data showing the same trend can be found for Australia, New Zealand, the US and France.

The data above clearly shows that by the mid to late 1940s the mortality rate for measles had fallen zero before the vaccine was introduced in 1968. One can see similar falling trends with other illnesses including scarlet fever – for which there is no vaccine.

For smallpox there is a discernible spike in cases immediately after legislation was passed making vaccination mandatory.

“Dr” Jenner’s Coxpox-Smallpox

The putative eradication of smallpox has been attributed to the smallpox vaccine and is held up as the pièce de résistance of modern medical science. Discovery of the vaccine has been credited to the work of Edward Jenner. He is regarded as the pioneer of vaccination and was elected to the Royal Society in 1788 for a paper he wrote called Observations on the Natural History of the Cuckoo rather than anything to do with smallpox or vaccines. Indeed a booklet he produced on his experiments with small pox was turned down by the Royal Society.

According to Dr. Walter Hawden (MD MRCS MRCP) Jenner was no medical genius. Hawden noted that Jenner never passed a medical examination nor possessed a medical qualification. His acquisition of MD degrees came about by questionable means several years after his work with vaccines.

Contrary to popular myth, smallpox was for most people neither serious nor deadly. Many people including children had been immunized against it by having encountered it naturally but without necessarily developing a case of it.

Jenner experimented on his son with smallpox vaccine. His son later died of tuberculosis. Researchers have made a causative link with between the vaccine and tuberculosis (Favez, G, “Tuberculous Superinfection Following a Smallpox Re-Vaccination”, Praxis, July 21, 1960; 49:698-699). It has been reported that Dr. A. Wilder, Professor of Pathology and former editor of The New York Medical Times, went so far as to say, ‘Consumption (TB) follows in the wake of vaccination as surely as effect follows cause’.

Jenner’s smallpox experiments involved using coxpox. His theory was that cowpox is smallpox of the cow. This is a scientific inaccuracy; cowpox is an infection of the teat that only female cows experience when they are milking and is not infectious. Smallpox on the other hand is not limited to the teat nor females and is highly infectious. As Hawden noted:

… the course and symptoms of the two diseases are totally different. Therefore there is no analogy between the two.

Yet he persisted and tested this theory with one set of unreliable experiments without any clinical trials or the years of research as would be routine today. Jenner duped the medical profession into believing in his heresy and eventually swindled  the British government out of thousands of pounds. Jenner’s questionable vaccine was then mandated across the British Empire.

Compulsory vaccination was mandated in England in 1853 by an Act of Parliament. Prior to 1853 smallpox killed about 1000 people per year on average. Between 1870 and 1886 there were 53,579 cases of smallpox and out of that number there were 43,919 who had been vaccinated. British biologist and member of the Royal Society Alfred R. Russell noted that mandatory vaccinations for smallpox

has actually increased susceptibility to the disease. … the conclusion is in every case the same: that vaccination is a gigantic delusion; that it has never saved a single life; but that it has been the cause of so much disease, so many deaths, such a vast amount of utterly needless and altogether undeserved suffering, that it will be classed by the coming generation among the greatest errors of an ignorant and prejudiced age, the foulest blot on … our century.

The British Empire was not the only place where such folly prevailed. The Prussians were also fans of mandatory vaccination and passed a law in 1834 – almost 20 years before the British. Prussia had a near 100 percent vaccination rate and during 34 years of compulsory vaccination one million cases of smallpox killed 124,978 people.

Polio

According to Dr Suzanne Humphries an examination of the official documents and ignored literature on the polio vaccine debunks the very notion that the vaccine was responsible for its eradication. Furthermore it questions the validity of the widely held assumption that the medical science supporting polio vaccines is synonymous with established fact.

Polio is asymptomatic in 95-98% of people and is indistinguishable from the common cold for most people who do exhibit symptoms. Paralysis has always been comparatively rare; therefore, the necessity and expected benefit of a vaccine is questionable. This is well documented in Dr Humphries book Dissolving Illusions. However, there was a discernible change that occurred which caused polio to break out in epidemics.

Spikes in the incidence and severity of polio correlated with Rockefeller Foundation funded polio weaponization experiments; a rise in tonsillectomies; an increase in the consumption of processed food; a shift away from breast feeding to bowel flora disrupting and immunosuppressant formula feeding (exclusively breast fed babies were exempt from polio during epidemics in the US); the prevalence of arsenic in medical (Tryparsamide), household and agricultural products that was claimed to be effective and safe espeically for children; and DDT contaminated cow’s milk as well as the overall prevalence of DDT. It has been noted that DDT can be a sole cause and contributing factor to poliomyelitis insofar as DDT toxicity can induce symptoms indistinguishable from polio.

Prior to 1954 a wide diagnostic net was cast to define polio. The criterion used was partial or complete paralysis of one more muscle groups detected on two medical examinations at least 24 hours apart. Laboratory confirmation and presence of residual paralysis was not required.

In 1956, the year the Salk polio vaccine was licensed after only two hours of deliberation (the fastest approval for any medication in history), the new criterion was switched to stipulate two exams 60 days apart with paralysis. The definition of a polio epidemic was also changed from 20 cases per 100,000 population to 35 per 100,000 after the release of the Salk vaccine. Another change was that any case of polio reported within 30 days of polio vaccination was automatically registered as pre-existing and not vaccine induced. Then in July 1957 non-paralytic poliomyelitis with meningeal signs was removed from the polio category altogether and reclassified as aseptic meningitis, thereby eradicating a significant portion of non-paralytic polio. It was then decreed that polio would be defined by diagnostic testing which had not been required pre-Salk vaccine.

These changes effectively meant that doctors were reporting new diseases and with the stroke of a pen polio began to decline. However, paralysis actually increased by 50 percent between 1957 and 1958; and 80 percent between 1958 and 1959. The new criterion helped hide that increase. In other words, US health authorities manipulated the definition in order to give the opposite impression of what was really happening.

The Salk vaccine was flawed and this was identified early on by a Swedish virologist Dr. Sven Gard who noted that the formaldehyde used to inactivate the live virus would not work as expected because of the method Salk was using. This inherent flaw was exposed during the Cutter incident in 1955 where over 200,000 people were infected with a live polio virus of a virulent strain. Around 70,000 people developed muscle weakness; 164 were severely paralyzed; and ten were killed. Around 40,000 cases of abortive polio were recorded.

In brief, the polio of the late 1800s to the 1950s was not a single virus; therefore, a vaccine would have been of little use. Polio caused by toxic exposure has never been investigated by government health authorities even though it most likely contributed to the recorded epidemics.

Zika

MPs and naturopaths are not the only folks Dr. Siouxsie Wiles has a crack at. Indeed TV One’s Seven Sharp host Mike Hosking has also come to the attention of the Wiles Inquisition for his comments about the Rio Olympic games and the so-called Zika virus outbreak. In her article Who needs scientists when Mike Hosking is here to teach us how things are? Wiles was furious that Hosking balked at the suggestion that the Olympics be postponed and relocated due to the Zika outbreak as was demanded by a group of some 120 doctors and scientists. The mainstream media has been claiming that Zika is being spread by mosquitos and is the cause of reported birth defects in children in Brazil. Hosking astutely noted that

You don’t just move the Olympics, it’s not a dinner party’.  … Thank God the scientists aren’t running things!

That was enough for glow-worm girl to light up again. Sparks flew:

we scientists might know a lot more about the reality of the world we live in and the challenges humanity faces … That Hosking is given a national platform to be smug about his ignorance is a disgrace.

Wiles did not even articulate a coherent rebuttal let alone mount a logical argument. She appealed to her own authority; a logical fallacy. To be fair Hosking’s analysis was not terribly sophisticated either.

What Wiles does not understand and what journalist Jon Rappoport has eruditely pointed out is that there is no proof that Zika is causing birth defects in babies. Much of the hype over Zika is the putative and unconfirmed link to microcephaly.

In February a New York Times article suggested that birth defects were being overreported amid the hype. It noted that out of 4,783 reported cases since October last year only 404 have been confirmed as having microcephaly and only 17 of them tested positive for the Zika virus.

Rappoport reported that Brazilian researchers were able to confirm 854 cases of microcephaly and Zika was found to be present in only 97 cases. In June Science Daily observed that researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute (ECSI) had expressed doubts about Zika as cause of microcephaly. The ECSI researchers noted that

in Colombia, a recent study of nearly 12,000 pregnant women infected with Zika found zero microcephaly cases. If Zika is to blame for microcephaly, where are the missing cases?

In fact a review of medical records in Brazil has noted the higher incidence of microcephaly before the outbreak of the Zika virus.

What has been underreported is the fact that 35 other countries have reported outbreaks of Zika but no reports of microcephaly. In the US alone there are 25,000 cases of microcephaly reported every year without a Zika epidemic.

All this suggests that there is little scientific evidence to support the notion that Zika is the principal cause of microcephaly.

The “Practice Parameter: Evaluation of the child with microcephaly (an evidence-based review)”; Neurology 2009 Sep 15; 73(11) 887-897; Report of the Quality Standards Subcommittee of the American Academy of Neurology and the Practice Committee of the Child Neurology Society noted that

Microcephaly may result from any insult that disturbs early brain growth…Annually, approximately 25,000 infants in the United States will be diagnosed with microcephaly…

There are studies that have made the connection between microcephaly and pesticides such as Roundup ans Atrazine. A study entitled: “Glyphosate-Based Herbicides (GBH) Produce Teratogenic Effects on Vertebrates by Impairing Retinoic Acid Signalling”  noted the following:

The direct effect of glyphosate [on the embryos]… opens concerns about the clinical findings from human offspring in populations exposed to GBH [glyphosate-based herbicides] in agricultural fields … There is growing evidence raising concerns about the effects of GBH [glyphosate-based herbicides] on people living in areas where herbicides are intensely used. Women exposed during pregnancy to herbicides delivered offspring with congenital malformations, including microcephaly [small heads], anencephaly [missing major parts of brain and skull in embryos], and cranial malformations.

Physicians in Argentina published a report that also made the connection between chemical exposure and biological malformations in children. The report noted

Malformations detected in thousands of children from pregnant women living in areas where the Brazilian state added pyriproxyfen to drinking water is not a coincidence, even though the Ministry of Health places direct blame on Zika virus for this damage, while trying to ignore its responsibility and ruling out the hypothesis of direct and cumulative chemical damage caused by years of endocrine and immunological disruption of the affected population.

Brazil is the world’s largest user of pesticides and the use of these agro-chemicals in Brazil has grown by more than 162 percent from 2000 to 2012. So it is possible that Monsanto is more likely to be causing microcephaly rather than Zika.

An interesting factoid is that the Zika virus was discovered by researchers at the Rockefeller Foundation which patented the virus in 1947. This is the same foundation that played around with the pathogenicity of polio before the 1916 epidemic.

The virus is also marketed by two companies, LGC Standards (headquartered in the UK) and ATCC (headquartered in the US). It was presumably licensed to them by the Rockefeller Foundation. So it seems that Zika is not just a virus – it is also a commodity to be traded on the world’s markets.

Conclusion

Dr Siouxsie Wiles bleats on about science but she never shows us any. That is perhaps because the science she speaks of so fondly can’t be used to back up her unscientific assertions. Not only is it evident that she is seriously underinformed but she also wants to attack anyone and everyone that comes onto her radar, accusing them of ignorance in an attempt to discredit their often dissenting view. She presents no structured argument let alone any evidence nor any detail and nuance to her “articles”.

Wiles attack on National MP Maureen Pugh views about modern medicine demonstrate very little understanding of the history behind the model of today’s so-called medical orthodoxy. Heaven forbid the suggestion that certain interested parties might have had an undue and insidious influence. Wiles apoplectic rant about Radio NZ interviewing Katherine Smith, about her dissenting view of the current uptick in reported measles cases in NZ, exposes the massive blind spots in Wiles knowledge base. Her knee-jerk reaction to Mike Hosking’s comments reveals her default setting locked firmly into logical fallacy. Her attitude is that experts are right and you are not an expert. Well, we recently saw how sustainable that argument is after the Brexit referendum. ‘Britain has had enough of experts’ was the Financial Times headline.

This is quite extraordinary because what we have here in someone, that has been awarded prizes for science as well as tenure at the University of Auckland, acting like a seasoned propagandist that would make Edward Bernays apologise. 

Now it has been announced that The Spinoff will be scrapping the comments section from articles. This follows the recent announcement by Radio NZ that it too is implementing the same policy. The Spinoff editor Duncan Grieve explained that he is ‘following Bloomberg, CNN and others into the comment-free future’.

Grieve suggests we go to Facebook for comment. This is the same Facebook that censors conservative views.

It should be duly noted that these are all “liberal” media outlets we are talking about.

The irony cannot be overstated.