TBR News April 3, 2019

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8

Washington, D.C. April  3, 2019:”A new serious health issue is emerging that will affect millions of Americans.

Recent scientific study has proven that the domestic cat is a carrier of the Chinese Fall-Apart disease that has been spreading throughout America for some years.

When advised of this by his medical staff, President Trump reacted immediately and is now pressing to have a Congressional bill drawn up ordering the put-down of all domestic cats in America.

Drs Benjamin Dova and Michael Hunt, working closely with the President are assisting in this vitally important issue.

“It is known, and scientists have proven,” the President said at a press conference Tuesday,”that cats are creatures of Satan and as a True Christian, I am compelled to order their eradication from our country.”

Rumors that witches will also be burnt at the stake have been firmly denied by the White House press people.”

The Table of Contents

• The true dollar cost of the anti-vaccine movement
• Judge won’t let unvaccinated kids return to school during measles
• More Anti-Vaccine Nonsense from Trump and Kennedy
• Donald Trump Spouts Dangerous Anti-Vaccine Nonsense. Ben Carson’s Response Is Worse.
• America’s vaccination crisis is a symptom of our broken society
• Encyclopedia of American Loon
  • -Robert Kennedy Jr.
  • David KirbyRebecca
  • Rex & Dawn Richardson

• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
• ‘Asian female’ with malware arrested at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago

The true dollar cost of the anti-vaccine movement

Necessary bills for unnecessary outbreaks are being paid by all of us.

March 31, 2019

by Maryn McKenna,

Wired.com

Two years ago, a 6-year-old boy playing on his family’s farm in Oregon cut himself. His parents cleaned the wound and stitched it, and everything seemed fine—until, six days later, he began having muscle spasms, arching his back, and clenching his jaw. The boy had tetanus, the first case in a child to occur in Oregon in more than 30 years.

Tetanus is rare because a routine childhood vaccine prevents it. The boy’s parents had elected not to vaccinate him. A case report written by a physician who treated him along with staff members at the state health department and published this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relates what happened next.

The boy was airlifted to a university medical center and given immunotherapy and the first dose of the vaccine regimen he had missed. His spasms were so severe he could not open his mouth or breathe, so he was admitted to an intensive care unit, placed in a medical coma, and put on a ventilator. His body couldn’t regulate itself; his heart rate sped up and his temperature soared and dipped, so he had to be pumped full of IV drugs to keep his vital signs under control.

Eventually he recovered, but only after 57 days in the hospital and 17 days in a rehab center learning to speak again once his tracheostomy healed and relearning to walk when his muscle tone came back. His parents took him back to the family farm. Before they left, they refused to allow him to receive any other vaccinations, including the second dose of vaccine that would have cemented his immunity to the infection that almost killed him

There’s a coda to the story of the boy’s unnecessary endangerment and unlikely survival. The CDC reports that his care, just in the hospital—exclusive of the air ambulance or the more than two weeks in rehab—cost more than $800,000.

When we talk about vaccines, we tend to talk about the clinical impact of refusing them, the potentially deadly danger that vaccine-preventable diseases pose to the unvaccinated or the immunocompromised when herd immunity breaks down. Every grave illness and death is an individual tragedy, but the cost of vaccine hesitancy also enforces a shared public toll.

Consider the ongoing measles outbreak in Washington State, which is centered in Clark County, on the Oregon border. In January, when it had racked up 26 cases, the state governor declared a public health emergency. Since then, the case count has almost tripled, to 74.

To figure out who might have been put at risk, the state health department has interviewed 4,652 people and closely monitored 812 of them. It has reassigned staff from across its divisions, borrowed public health workers from other states, sent people who would normally be at desks out into the field, performed hundreds of lab tests that would not normally be necessary. So far, it has spent $1.6 million.

“It is extremely frustrating,” says John Wiesman, an epidemiologist and the state secretary of health. “To know the financial cost of this but also to know all the work that is not getting done, or getting backlogged.”

In coverage of the dangers of vaccine hesitancy, cost doesn’t get discussed much. But it’s not unusual for a preventable disease outbreak to rack up a bill as high as Washington’s.

In 2005, a 17-year-old girl whose family belonged to a church that discouraged vaccination went on a mission trip to Europe. The day after the group arrived home, the church threw a party; 34 attendees caught measles from the teen or from someone she infected. Not including medical care, containing that outbreak cost $167,685. When they analyzed the spending, the CDC and the state health department calculated it had taken 3,650 work hours, 4,800 phone calls, and 5,500 miles of car trips to track the victims down. In 2008, an unvaccinated infected traveler brought measles to a hospital in Tucson; the cost of containing the outbreak, which spread to a second hospital, was almost $800,000.

The numbers can grow much bigger still. Researchers at the CDC estimated that handling 107 cases of measles that occurred in 2011 cost state and local health departments between $2.7 million and $5.3 million. In 2014, 42 people came down with the disease after passing through Disneyland at the same time as a never-identified person with measles—and subsequently infected 90 additional people in California, 14 more in other states, and a further 159 people in Canada. The cost of controlling the outbreak, just in California, totaled almost $4 million. And in 2017, a five-month outbreak of measles in Minnesota infected 79 people and cost the state $2.3 million.

The funding to support that work isn’t being conjured out of the air. It’s coming from the budgets of public agencies, which have already been facing years of cuts and have no secret stashes of discretionary money to spend.

“There are substantial public health responses that go into mitigating an outbreak, and we should pursue those, because they prevent larger outbreaks or broader social disruption,” says Saad Omer, a physician and epidemiologist at Emory University and the senior author of a recent paper on the “true cost” of measles outbreaks. “But it does result in a lot of costs that can be pretty substantial. And we don’t measure the further indirect costs to the community.”

In Washington State, those indirect costs include the other work that doesn’t get done while the outbreak proceeds. The state health department was forced to appropriate a portion of its poison control center’s work hours to handle the calls made by people worried they had been exposed to measles. In Clark County, the local health department reassigned to measles the home-visit nurses who take care of risky pregnancies, and also the investigators who track down victims of sexually transmitted diseases and foodborne illnesses.

Most of the havoc wreaked by outbreaks of otherwise preventable diseases can only be measured qualitatively: a parent’s terror; a child’s loss of weeks at school; a neighborhood or city’s frayed social bonds. (In Clark County, Wiesman says, “People are staying home, afraid to go out, cancelling birthday parties.”)

But we can quantify the medical and public health response. It is the bottom lines on hospital bills, for medical care that would not otherwise have been necessary. (In the tetanus case, the hospital has declined to say whether the parents or their insurance will pay, or whether the hospital will eat the cost as charity care.) It’s lab work that was never budgeted for, hotel charges and gas for investigators sent out on the road, overtime hours for state police rushing emergency doses of immunotherapy across the state.

Those costs are being paid by state governments, and by federal agencies such as the CDC that give states grants and loan them personnel. State and federal budgets are public money—which means those necessary bills for unnecessary outbreaks are being paid by all of us. The toll of illness may be confined to individuals, but the cost of responding to outbreaks related to vaccine refusal is a bill that we are all being compelled to pay.

Judge won’t let unvaccinated kids return to school during measles outbreak 

March 14, 2019

by Amanda Woods

New York Post

Judge won’t let unvaccinated kids return to school during measles outbreakJudge won’t let unvaccinated kids return to school during measles outbreakJudge won’t let unvaccinated kids return to school during measles outbreakJudge won’t let unvaccinated kids return to school during measles outbreakJudge won’t let unvaccinated kids return to school during measles outbreak

A Rockland County federal judge has denied a request that would have allowed 44 unvaccinated children to return to school amid an “unprecedented measles outbreak,” according to a report.

US District Judge Vincent Briccetti declined to issue a temporary injunction in White Plains federal court Tuesday — preventing the students from attending the Green Meadow Waldorf School in Chestnut Ridge for at least three weeks, CBS News reported.

“The plaintiffs have not demonstrated that public interest weighs in favor of granting an injunction,” Briccetti argued, according to the Journal News.

Briccetti made his ruling during a court appearance by Michael Sussman, the lawyer representing the students’ parents — who have filed a lawsuit against the Rockland Health Department and its commissioner to challenge an order that restricts the unvaccinated children from attending school, the outlet reported.

The lawsuit declares that Rockland County Health Commissioner Dr. Patricia Schnabel Ruppert’s order both violates the families’ religious objections to vaccinations, and is unnecessary because the measles cases, for the most part, have been confined to insular Hasidic Jewish communities.

But the judge told Sussman his case might be better received in state court — and no future court date was set.

“It’s a tough situation and I feel bad about it … but I don’t feel I have the authority to do this,” Briccetti said.

“There is a degree of parochialism that exists with elected judges,” Sussman replied.

One parent, Beatrice Burgis, told CBS she agreed with the judge’s ruling.

“I believe that he’s trying to mitigate a potential further outbreak and he’s trying to keep everybody safe,” Burgis said.

But the affected parents were distraught.

“Preventing my child from being with his class, his teacher, his classroom, has had a significant social and psychological impact,” one mom of a 4-year old preschooler told the Journal News, her voice shaky. “He is confused, given his young age, about why he isn’t allowed on his campus.”

Rockland County is in the midst of the longest measles outbreak in the state since the virus was eliminated from the US in 2000 — with 145 cases reported since October and three more suspected cases under investigation, according to the report.

The outbreak has mostly affected the Orthodox Jewish community in Spring Valley, Monsey and New Square, prompting Ruppert to impose an early December order that schools in those ZIP codes with vaccination rates under 95 percent must keep unvaccinated students from attending.

Sussman filed court papers that indicate that Green Meadow’s students are “97 percent immune from the disease by all accounts” — but the county’s law department said the school’s vaccination rate was around 33 percent at the time of the December order, the paper reported. Since then, it reportedly has risen to about 56 percent.

“We have had success, but this case is not over,” Rockland County Attorney Thomas Humbach said in a statement issued to the Journal News. “While no one enjoys the fact that these kids are out of school, these orders have worked; they have helped prevent the measles outbreak from spreading to this school population.”

 

More Anti-Vaccine Nonsense from Trump and Kennedy

by Steven Novella

Science and Medicine

We have an anti-vaccine president. One of my concerns about Trump the candidate was that one of his most consistent positions over the years was blaming vaccines for the alleged autism epidemic (there isn’t one, by the way). Once elected it did not take long for this to manifest as a policy priority. In January Trump met with RFK Jr. to discuss him heading an Orwellian commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity.

At a recent meeting with educators, Trump continued to express his false belief in a “tremendous increase” in autism:

“Have you seen a big increase in the autism with the children?” Trump asked Jane Quenneville, the principle of a Virginia public school that specializes in special education. Quenneville responded that she had.

Trump continued: “So what’s going on with autism? When you look at the tremendous increase, it’s really such an incredible — it’s really a horrible thing to watch, the tremendous amount of increase. Do you have any idea?

“The autism?” Really?

As I have discussed many times before, scientists have actually looked carefully at autism incidence and prevalence and found that there is little evidence for any real increase.  The apparent increase is due to broadening the definition, increased surveillance, and diagnostic substitution. The problem here is that Trump has a fixed idea and he does not correct that idea when confronted with scientific evidence and expert opinion. That in itself is a scary thought.

We have not heard much since Kennedy announced that the president had spoken to him about forming a vaccine commission. Recently, however, Kennedy held a press conference with Robert DeNiro (also anti-vaccine) and other anti-vaxxers to once again fearmonger about the dangers of thimerosal and vaccines.

Kennedy is now pulling the “show me one study” gambit, with a $100,000 reward for anyone who can point to a single peer-reviewed study that shows thimerosal as currently included in flu vaccines is safe. There is no proof in one study. Consensus emerges from many studies repeatedly showing the same finding.

This is a classic denialist strategy – try to seem reasonable by just asking for evidence. But the implication is that the evidence which already exists is insufficient. You can always ask for more evidence, or find some reason to dismiss the evidence that exists.

It would be more appropriate to have a panel of independent scientists evaluate all the scientific literature on thimerosal and determine if the evidence is sufficient to conclude that the doses of thimerosal currently in some vaccines is safe. Oh, wait. That has already happened. Multiple times.

Here is a compilation of 10 studies I put together for SBM all showing no association between thimerosal and autism. There have been more studies since then showing no association.  Perhaps most telling is the fact that in 2001 thimerosal was removed from the routine childhood vaccine schedule. At the time anti-vaxxers predicted that autism rates would plummet. They never did. Here we are 16 years later and the removal of thimerosal had zero effect on autism incidence. There is no way to avoid the implications of this clear fact – thimerosal never had any measurable effect on autism.

Kennedy is also now misrepresenting a CDC study on the relative toxicity of ethylmercury (the form in thimerosal) and methylmercury (the form found in seafood, for example). He writes:

The CDC has long answered that nettlesome question with the controversial claim that ethylmercury in vaccines is not toxic to humans. Now, two CDC scientists have published research decisively debunking that assertion. As it turns out, there is no “good mercury” and “bad mercury.” Both forms are equally poisonous to the brain.

First, he misrepresents the CDC position on ethylmercury, then he misrepresents the study. Toxicity is all about dose. Ethylmercury is toxic to the brain, but it appears to be much less toxic than methylmercury. Further, ethylmercury is rapidly removed from the body and does not accumulate, which is very different from methylmercury. The reason to avoid eating fish with mercury is the concern that it will accumulate in the tissue. Small doses will therefore build up. This does not happen with ethylmercury, therefore tiny doses below the toxicity threshold are safe.

What does the study he is touting actually show? The researchers looked at the mechanisms of toxicity in ethylmercury and methylmercury (collectively called alkyl mercury) and found that there is some overlap in their mechanisms.

“This paper represents a summary of some of the studies regarding these mechanisms of action in order to facilitate the understanding of the many varied effects of alkylmercurials in the human body. The similarities in mechanisms of toxicity for MeHg and EtHg are presented and compared. The difference in manifested toxicity of MeHg and EtHg are likely the result of the differences in exposure, metabolism, and elimination from the body, rather than differences in mechanisms of action between the two.”

The mechanisms are similar, not identical. But, even if we take the extreme position that ethylmercury is as inherently toxic as methylmercury, the authors conclude from this that the actual difference in toxicity is therefore due to differences in metabolism and elimination – which was the CDC position all along.

In order to understand toxicity research you need to realize that a lot of the research involves directly exposing tissue in vitro to the chemical in question. If you directly drip alkyl mercury onto brain cells in a petri dish, it is very toxic. This does not necessarily mean, however, that exposure of an organism to the compound will have the same toxicity. Organisms evolved natural defenses against toxins. The substance may be rapidly metabolized or removed, or may never get to the target tissue in significant concentrations.

In this study the authors are not saying that  ethylmercury is as toxic as methylmercury, as Kennedy falsely claims. They are only saying that both share similar mechanisms of toxicity, and therefore the very clear difference in toxicity that other research has established is likely due to other factors, such as the more rapid elimination of ethylmercury.

Kennedy’s article is an excellent example of distortion and propaganda. This is partly because he is an activist and not a scientist. The idea that Trump wants and extremist ideologue who can’t properly interpret a scientific study to head a commission on scientific integrity is extremely telling.

 

Donald Trump Spouts Dangerous Anti-Vaccine Nonsense. Ben Carson’s Response Is Worse.

by Steven Salzberg

Pharma & Healthcare

Donald Trump used the latest Republican debate as an opportunity to express wildly inaccurate anti-vaccine claims, embracing the thoroughly discredited position that vaccines cause autism. This claim has been exhaustively debunked, by countless scientific studies and by reports from the Institute of Medicine and the CDC. It started with a now-retracted 1998 study by one of the great villains in medicine, Andrew Wakefield, who continues to push his fraudulent views despite having lost his medical license.

Trump’s comments were nutty and dangerous, but Ben Carson’s response was, in some ways, worse. Carson had the chance to set the record straight, and because of his medical credentials, he could have been effective. He failed.

Trump has been an anti-vaxxer for years, so his comments were not surprising. Science blogger Orac posted a 2007 Trump quote that almost exactly mirrors what he said in the debate.

What was much more surprising, and deeply disappointing, was the response of candidate Ben Carson, who until last year was a pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. (Note that although I too work at Hopkins Medicine, I’ve never met Dr. Carson.) Carson did point out vaccines don’t cause autism, but then he made a series of false claims that come right out of the anti-vax playbook.

When the moderator asked Carson to respond to Trump’s anti-vaccine rant, Carson had a golden opportunity to do some real good: he could have corrected the record and pointed out the real harm that comes from anti-vaccination misinformation. Instead, he said things like this:

“ Vaccines are very important, certain ones, the ones that would prevent death or crippling. There are others, a multitude of vaccines that don’t fit in that category, and there should be some discretion in those cases.

Forbes contributor Tara Haelle has already explained the grievous error here: all our vaccines prevent death. Carson’s claim is simply false, and it’s shocking that a highly trained physician would make this statement, on a national stage, without knowing the facts. What Carson should have said–but didn’t–was this, from the Every Child By Two organization:

“ Each and every vaccine added to the list of recommended immunizations will save the lives and/or reduce the number of disabilities of children in the United States. With the introduction of every new vaccine, rates of both disease and deaths have fallen across the country.

Carson then dug himself even deeper into the anti-vaccine camp with this claim:

“ But it is true that we are probably giving way too many in too short a period of time.

This claim is right out of the anti-vaccine playbook: it was the basis of the “too many, too soon” campaign launched by Jenny McCarthy’s Generation Rescue, the country’s leading anti-vaccine activist group. In fact, the vaccine schedule is very safe, and misinformation like this trope leads to parents withholding vaccines from their children, which in turn can cause sickness, disabilityand death.

Let me show you what Carson could have done. Six years ago, Bill Maher–one of the most left-wing talk show hosts in the media, and an anti-vaxxer himself–was interviewing former Republican Senate majority leader Bill Frist, who is also an M.D. Here’s what happened (it’s worth watching the whole thing):

Dr. Frist interrupted Maher and said “wait, this is important,” and proceeded to school Maher on how vaccines save lives. I wasn’t a big fan of Frist, but he did a fantastic job here. Carson, in contrast, just pandered to the audience, and to Trump.

The moderator also asked Rand Paul, the other M.D. among the candidates, to respond to Trump’s anti-vax claims. He too repeated the anti-vaccine trope that he “ought to have the right to spread my vaccines out a little bit.” This is nonsense as well: Paul does have that right, and no one has ever proposed taking it away. It’s bad medicine, though, and as a doctor, Paul should know better. He failed as well.

It’s far more harmful to the public when a high-profile doctor makes anti-vaccine statements than when a blowhard like Trump makes them. Dr. Ben Carson and Dr. Rand Paul should both know better

 

America’s vaccination crisis is a symptom of our broken society

How can we join together to defeat measles when we don’t share a reality?

April 2, 2019

by Meghan O’Rourke

The Guardian

The other day, during a visit to Portland, I hit my head badly enough to need stitches; I went to the ER only to pause, at the door, where an enormous sign asked patients with measles to don a mask. Although I was still bleeding, I considered turning away. I had a seven-month-old at home, who was not yet eligible for his vaccine. Could I carry measles home with me? I didn’t want to know.

And so as of 21 March, 15 states had reported measles cases, for a total of 314 confirmed cases so far this year, several of them in Washington state, where I was visiting, and New York state, where I live. CNN reported on 1 April that the number of measles cases in just these first three months of the year already total the second-highest number of cases since 2000, when measles was eradicated. Darla Shine, the wife of Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for communications, epitomized a line of thinking shared by many American anti-vaxxers when she called for us to “bring back” childhood diseases because “they keep you healthy & fight cancer”.(!)

It is slightly ironic that vaccinations, the mechanisms that protect our children from the mortal illnesses that once swept them out of their parents’ hands, are now the focus of our fears, while the once-devastating illnesses are themselves seen as somehow reassuring.

But vaccinations have long been a kind of locus of cultural fear, revealing the nature of our fears. Vaccinations, after all, only work if everyone is in it together. You need to have a herd for herd immunity. Our body politic is splintering and fragmenting, and it is reflected in our vaccination rates. To make a herd, you need to believe in the imagined collective: to be concerned not only about yourself, but the others in the polity.

This fear isn’t new, though our particular iteration of it is modern. Although vaccinations were actually folk medicine in their earliest form (farmers knew that milkmaids exposed to cowpox rarely got smallpox), as the writer Eula Biss points out in On Immunity, people have almost always distrusted them. During an 18th-century smallpox epidemic, citizens in France contested their use, leading Voltaire to inveigh that “twenty thousand persons whom the small-pox swept away at Paris in 1723 [c]ould have been alive at this time.”

Our vaccination debate doesn’t map tidily on to national politics – indeed, anti-vaxxers seem to be spread almost equally across political parties. But our divided politics and the anti-vaxxer movement share three things: distrust of authority, divisive cherry-picking of evidence on both sides, and the fundamental erosion of trust among stakeholders. How can we join together to defeat measles when we don’t share a reality?

Given rising levels of distrust across political parties, it is no surprise that we also can’t agree on the social value of immunity, in which my child’s vaccination will help your grandfather live, or my own vaccination will help your infant survive before she is eligible for her own vaccinations.

In this sense, the debate over vaccination isn’t just about distrust of medicine or a false nostalgia for our “natural” past. It’s also an expression of the limits of American individualism: a natural (if you will) manifestation of a culture that believes realizing one’s own destiny is the apogee of freedom. Our national narrative privileges Thoreau’s prickly but soaring individualism over, say, Jane Addams’s progressive vision of collective service.

Biss points out in On Immunity that data from the Centers for Disease Control, released in 2014, showed that unvaccinated children are more likely “to be white, to have an older married mother with a college education, and to live in a household with an income of $75,000 or more”. By contrast, under-vaccinated children – children who for various reasons are behind on their vaccinations – “are more likely to be black, to have a younger unmarried mother, to have moved across state lines, and to live in poverty”. Not vaccinating, in other words, moves risk from one group to another – and in this sense is another version of the exercising of inequality and privilege that contribute to national divisiveness in the first place. One has the sense from this data that the well-off believe the risks of illness don’t apply to them, and are willing to let it fall on others. (In a way, vaccination is a victim of its own success: we’ve forgotten how bad infectious disease is.)

Vaccination does carry risks, if small ones – something that doctors like to minimize rather than underscore. But it’s also true that not vaccinating carries risks. (There’s a reason childhood mortality rates are significantly down.) The decision to vaccinate requires a weighing of personal risk against a weighing of benefits to the group – and especially to those most vulnerable within the group, including babies and the elderly. Like many people, I had moments of feeling nervous about vaccines and their effects on developing immune systems. Yet I couldn’t live with myself if one of my children’s bodies caused harm to the vulnerable among us

Vaccination, like American politics, is polarized and polarizing. The irony is that it is through its pursuit of ultimate individualism – the exercising of the right not to follow recommendations – that it becomes a dangerous reminder that our bodies, like the body politic, are fatefully interconnected.

Encyclopedia of American Loons

• Robert Kennedy Jr.

Since James Kennedy has been an ex-fanatic since his death in 2007, we’ll move on to one of the more famous (though probably not for his woo) people in the Encyclopedia. Robert Kennedy Jr. is the son of Robert Kennedy. He’s a lawyer and a staunch environmentalist who has actually done a lot of good in that respect (kudos for that, but doing something right does not mean that you’re not a loon). Lately he has made himself notorious for his anti-vaccinationism and for propagating the thoroughly debunked vaccine-autism connection myth – together with the shitload of paranoid conspiracy theories that follow in its wake.

He has been working closely with the repugnant David Kirby, and has published opinion pieces devoid of fact or critical thinking in several places, including (unsurprisingly) the Huffington Post. See him peddling half-truths and paranoia here, as well as displaying a complete misunderstanding of scientific evidence when lamenting the fact that court cases on the purported vaccine/autism link is based on evidence rather than opinion: “vaccine court gives overwhelming weight to written medical records which are often inaccurate — over all other forms of testimony and evidence. Observations by parents and other caretakers are given little weight.” A typical, willful failure to see why anecdotal evidence is disregarded in science and why science-based categorizations of ailments are preferred to untrained observer’s diagnostizations.

He also emphasizes that the fact that science disagree with caring mothers’ conviction that their children’s autism was caused by vaccines, means just that scientists and professionals hate mothers. He also recommends chelation therapy for children with autism.

More insane paranoia and conspiracy mongering here, here, and here (and as a follow up to that last post, see here). You get the idea.

Diagnosis: Kennedy is a traditional crank and deluded conspiracy theorist who is thoroughly anti-science (even on the topics on which he is right, he relies almost exclusively on non-scientific arguments); a typical crank and crackpot with little aptitude for actual evidence (as opposed to twisting any fact to look like evidence to lay people). He is enormously influential, and must be considered one of the more dangerous people in the US today..

• David Kirby

Not the poet David Kirby; this guy is a journalist with no medical background who wrote “Evidence of Harm – Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy” (“controversy” being a mistake for “manufactroversy”). He has since worked relatively tirelessly against vaccines. In later years he downplayed the absolutely unsupportable mercury link, although certainly not the purported vaccine-autism link. Naturally, he uses every fallacy in the book to uphold that argument; in particular, he seems to enjoy skewering strawmen (and who doesn’t?) and moving goalposts.

The basic argument in the book is that since each side of the autism-mercury debate finds the other side blind to evidence, biased and entrenched, there must be scientific disagreement. Therefore vaccines are dangerous and thimerosal leads to autism. He conveniently misses the fact that science clearly favors the no-link side – or rather, he explains it away as a conspiracy, coming up with stories about pharmaceutical conspiracies wire-tapping their opponents and paying off governments. Among the more interesting attempts is his Osama bin Laden gambit. As a result, Kirby now has his own blog at Huffington post (i.e. where every non-rightwing-fundie-wingnut loon seems to end up), in company with other anti-vaxxers such as Jay Gordon and Janet Grilo and with the blessings of HuffPo’s wellness editor, the bizarre, newage woo-purveyor Patricia Fizgerald.

Kirby has worked closely with Robert Kennedy Jr (on this, among other things), but Kirby is generally somewhat subtler (and frankly more intelligent) than the other dolt. For instance, Kirby (together with the insidious executive vice-president of Autism Speaks, Peter Bell) works here to drum up the respectability of (not evidence behind) the idea that vaccines cause autism.

Diagnosis: Devious and ardent fallacy-monger and strawmanslayer, Kirby is a shameless threat to public health and has influence enough to be considered dangerous.

• Rebecca Rex & Dawn Richardson

Antivaxxers are very active in Texas, and antivaccine groups like Texans for Vaccine Choice have been quite effective in blocking commonsense measures and legislation, such as legislation that would have required school-level reporting of vaccine exemption rates so that parents interested in not sending their children to a school with high exemption rates could choose. No, Texans for Vaccine Choice isn’t really about choice; it’s just against vaccines.

Well, spineless major antivaccine groups like the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) (shades of Badger’s Law here: don’t peruse the NVIC site if you actually seek information) know to exploit the situation in Texas. For instance, in connection with the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, antivaccine advocates Rebecca Rex and Dawn Richardson jumped in with the post “Texas Parents: Know Your Vaccine Choice Rights During Hurricane Harvey Flood Emergency” (discussed here) encouraging antivaccine parents to take advantage of the disaster to “stand up for their right” not to vaccinate their children and to wreak havoc in general, for instance by urging parents to take advantage of a law designed for what is normally a small number of homeless children to be enrolled in school immediately, to enroll their own children without the requirement for documentation of vaccine status.

Rex and Richardson are the founders of PROVE – Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education – which does not request vaccine education but that denialist talking points and conspiracy theories be given equal time in discussions of vaccine-related issues. Here is Rex trying on the Nirvana fallacy. Richardson, meanwhile, is also the NVIC Director of Advocacy, and has been in the antivaccine game for a while. She must for instance be credited with managing to get a personal belief exemption added to Texas law in 2003, and has been heavily involved in blocking efforts to restrict exemptions in a number of states.

Diagnosis: They seemingly try their hardest to avoid looking like complete and utter loons. They fail. But they have already been frighteningly successful in blocking efforts that would actually save lives, so it’s not just a matter of laughs.

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

April 3,, 2019

by Dr. Peter Janney

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.

Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks. ”

Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publication.

Conversation No. 9

Date: Wednesday, April 17, 1996

Commenced: 8:45 AM CST

Concluded: 9:21 AM CST

 

RTC: Hello?

GD: Robert…

RTC: Good morning, Gregory. You’re a bit early today.

GD: I was talking with Corson about ten minutes ago. He started talking to me about Kennedy and said he had the whole story in his safe deposit box. Is that true?

RTC: Did he tell you anything else?

GD: He acted cute with me and said when he died, Plato would have the whole story. Why not Aristotle?

RTC: Plato is a local fix lawyer Bill uses from time to time. They all eat from the same trough. Was Bill specific?

GD: No, just that he had a big secret that he bet I’d just like to lay my hands on.

RTC: I’ll have to have a little talk with him. Bill gets it into his head that he’s an important person and has to be brought down a peg. Plato is a Greek and I never trusted him.

GD: I recall a newspaper headline. It said: ‘If Russia attacks Turkey from the rear, will Greece help?’

RTC: And so early in the morning, Gregory. This whole town is a moral whorehouse. They all hang out together, lie together, steal together and generally know nothing. I wouldn’t worry about Bill and his secret information. What he has is a DIA report that I gave him a copy of.

GD: You mentioned this before.

RTC: Yes and when the box comes and it works, then we can talk about a copy for you.

GD: I’m not poking but did you hate Kennedy?

RTC: You are poking, Gregory, but no, I did not hate Kennedy. Kennedy came from a family that was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. His father was a rum-runner and a whore monger and vicious as hell. Jack wasn’t so bad but he couldn’t keep it in his pants and used drugs in the White House. And enough of him for the time being. Besides, maybe I can entertain you discussing the downfall of Richard Nixon.

GD: That would be interesting. You should have the box in a week or so and then we can discuss other matters. What about Nixon?

RTC: The Company brought Nixon down but of course he made it easy to do.

GD: Watergate

RTC: And other matters. Yes, Watergate. Shall I continue?

GD: Go right ahead.

RTC: Nixon’s problem is that he was a jealous outsider and never fit into the political or intelligence community. But a smart man, Gregory, very smart, and very ambitious.

GD: I met him once. My step-mother, who had big money, was a strong supporter of Nixon and when he was running for Governor of California, she dragged me to a rubber chicken affair and I got to talk with him.

RTC: What did you think of him?

GD: He had come across badly on the idiot box but in person, he was taller than I thought and very sharp. I liked him as a person because he knew I was nobody but had no problem having a very good conversation with me.

RTC: No doubt your step-mother’s money helped.

GD: True, but you can tell when someone is being pleasant to you for politic reasons and when he is being genuinely communicative. He had the left wing press after him and he hated them, believe me.

RTC: That’s one of the factors that brought him down. Nixon’s downfall started in early ’72 when he went to China. It was a bold move and it had an effect everywhere. It also had an effect in Taiwan. Old Chaing Kai-shek had a bloody fit when he saw this. I mean a bloody fit. He saw this as the beginning of the end of U.S. support for him and he wanted desperately to stop the slide. His intelligence chief and a couple of bigwigs came to see our DCI and wept in his office. If Nixon normalized relations with the PRC, it would spell the end of a mutual special relationship, just like our special relationship with Israel. The long and the short of it, Gregory, is that they wanted Nixon out of power before he went any further. And, the pleasant part of this is that they were more than willing to pay us very, very well for accommodating them.

GD: They wanted you to kill him?

RTC: No, just removed so he couldn’t do them any more damage. We later did discuss killing him but two dead presidents in ten years was a bit much, so we hit on another ploy. We would discredit him. Our main man in all of this was Howard Hunt, who had wonderful ideas of his importance and, besides writing bad books, he had been very helpful in the Kennedy business in ’63. He was our station chief in Mexico between August and September of that year and set up the fake ‘Oswald’ visit to Mexico City.

GD: Wasn’t Oswald there? Getting a visa for Cuba?

RTC: No, that was bullshit. Anyway, Howard arranged for faked pictures, testimony that Oswald had been there at the Russian embassy, and so on. Useful. Now let’s move ahead a few years. Nixon had won his last election in a landslide and you know he was never too well wrapped. He had a huge inferiority complex and the press did not like him. Herblock the cartoonist with the Post really made some ugly cartoons of him and Nixon was overly sensitive about that sort of thing. So with his victory at the polls, he got a swelled head and began to get even with his opponents by turning the FBI and the IRS loose on them. Things like that. Remember the enemies list? Fine. So Hunt was connected with the Nixon people as a trouble-shooter and got involved with going after Nixon’s perceived enemies. He planted the idea that McGovern, a raging liberal twit, was in contact with Castro and getting Cuban money. The next thing was to suggest that they bug the DNC offices to get proof of this and ruin McGovern. A break-in, and they had been breaking into offices and homes for some time, a break-in was planned but it was planned to fail. They taped a self-locking door open, someone tipped off Watergate security and you know the rest.

GD: But there was no guarantee that Nixon would do what he did. I mean the stonewalling.

RTC: We could read Tricky Dick like a dime novel. True to form, he believed he was an imperial figure and acted that way right up to the end. Hunt played his part and I’m sure you watched the thing unfold, right on the five o’clock news every night. For a smart man, Nixon was very stupid and played right into our hands.

GD: But Hunt was destined for the big house…

RTC: Of course. He had to fall on his sword but Howard didn’t like the idea and he began to whine about this. We had to show him the light and after that, he went right along with the schedule.

GD: A serious talk?

RTC: No, we had to kill his wife as a serious warning to follow the game plan.

GD: More killing. Someone shoot her from an office building?

RTC: No, we arranged for an accident when she was flying west. Dorothy was helping Howard with some little project he thought would help him so we sabotaged her plane in DC.

GD: Put a bomb on it?

RTC: No tampered with the equipment. Plane came in for a stopover at Midway, suddenly lost altitude and smashed into some local houses. Midway is a terrible field, believe me. Right in the middle of an urban area and the runways are far too short. Anyway, down it came on top of people and the wife was dead. The local authorities found ten thousand in cash in her purse by the way. But it had an effect on Howard…..

GD: I can imagine. How many people died?

RTC: A few on the ground and forty or so in the plane. But the point is, Howard kept to his end of things or he would have been next or perhaps a close relative. He knew the score, Howard did.

GD: And Nixon left office in disgrace.

RTC: Well, yes, he did. Remember Al Haig? The General? Yes. Well we were afraid that Nixon wouldn’t leave peacefully and might turn to the military for help so we put Al in to keep Nixon on the straight and narrow and limit his actions in that area. Worked out fine. And the chinks were happy as a clam with the results.

GD: Forty people, probably innocent at that, is a bit much, don’t you think?

RTC: Well, Lenin said you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs first. And Gregory, you surely can’t believe that there any really innocent people in this world? We are born in original sin as you know.

GD: That’s the Catholic view. Well, I suppose that’s water under the bridge now.

RTC: I think Teddy Kennedy said that after Chappaquiddick.

GD: Is it possible I could write about this?

RTC: Actually, I would rather you didn’t. Hunt is still alive and there’s no point pushing him. He’s fallen from grace and is in decline so he might not be too receptive to having all of this aired.

GD: No problem. Anyway, who would publish it? It’s bad enough that I am writing about the CIA hiring the head of the Gestapo without adding insult to injury. Does Nixon know about this?

RTC: I don’t really know and I don’t really care. He knows enough to keep quiet and count his money. I don’t think he wants his twilight years terminated with prejudice. He might be paranoid but he is a pragmatist in the end. That ought to hold you until we move on to other presidential removals.

GD: It sounds like a Mayflower moving van ad.

RTC: If it works, don’t knock it.

GD: Well, the chinks are not that happy. Look at all the money they spent and look at our relations with the PRC.

RTC: Some things are destined to happen and all they did was to prolong the final act. Jerry Ford was no threat. A wonderfully cooperative man, Jerry was. During the Warren Commission, he called up old Hoover every night with the latest confidential dirt. No, Jerry was no problem. And the peanut farmer was too self-righteous to bother with and harmless. Actually, Nixon was lucky. If the Watergate thing hadn’t worked, we would have found something a little more permanent.

GD: Nixon didn’t know anything about the Kennedy business, did he?

RTC: No. Nixon was a Quaker and God knows what he would have thought about that. Nixon wasn’t into what our Russian friends call wet actions.

GD: I’m not fishing here but did you people have anything to with Bobby’s ascension to heaven?

RTC: No, that was Hoover. The Colonel   hated Bobby for calling him an old faggot and harassing him. And King too. He hated King because he was having an affair with a white woman and, on top of this, had gone to the Lenin school in Russia. Bobby was a quid pro quo for his brother in our eyes.

GD: It sounds like the Borgias.

RTC: Gregory, these are matters of state, not an exercise in morality. We have to do unpleasant things from time to time…I recall our man driving around in Africa with the rotting body of Lumumba stuffed into his trunk back in ’61 after we killed him. People go off fast in that climate. He said he was sick for days trying to get the stench out of his nose. Feel sorry for the poor man, why not? That sort of work is never easy. There are often sleepless nights.

GD: Speaking of that, let me leave you now and I’ll call up my construction expert and see how the blessed Swiss bell ringing box is coming along.

RTC: You just do that, Gregory, and I will be very, very happy if and when.

 

(Concluded at 9:21 AM CST)

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Conversations+with+the+Crow+by+Gregory+Douglas

‘Asian female’ with malware arrested at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago

April 3, 2019

BBC News

A woman carrying two Chinese passports and a device with computer malware allegedly lied to enter US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.

The woman, Yujing Zhang, 32, told security she was at the Florida club to go to the pool, according to a criminal complaint filed in US District Court.

“Due to a potential language barrier issue,” staff believed she was related to a club member and let her in.

Mr Trump was in Palm Beach at the time of the incident on Saturday 30 March

Ms Zhang – who was described in the affidavit as an “Asian female” – is charged with making false statements to a federal officer and illegally entering a restricted area.

According to the court documents, upon entry to the club Ms Zhang changed her story, telling a front-desk receptionist she was there to attend a “United Nations Chinese American Association” event.

The receptionist, who knew that such an event had been scheduled, became suspicious of Ms Zhang.

The suspect was transported off the property for further questioning.

She told agents she had been instructed by a friend, identified only as “Charles”, to travel from Shanghai, China, to Palm Beach to attend the purported United Nations event, but did not provide any more details, according to court documents.

She said “Charles” had encouraged her to attempt to speak to a member of the president’s family about Chinese-American economic relations, said the affidavit.

Secret service agent Samuel Ivanovich said Ms Zhang carried four mobile phones, a laptop, an external hard drive and a thumb drive containing a computer virus, but no swim suit.

In the court document, Mr Ivanovich notes that Ms Zhang “freely and without difficulty conversed” in English, becoming “verbally aggressive” with authorities as the investigation progressed.

The Secret Service said in a statement that it “does not determine who is invited or welcome at Mar-a-Lago; this is the responsibility of the host entity.

“The Mar-a-Lago club management determines which members and guests are granted access to the property.”

Ms Zhang’s lawyer has so far declined comment.

She will remain in custody until a hearing next week.

If convicted, she could face a maximum of five years in prison