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Antivax physician Dr. Rashid Buttar “died suddenly” and antivaxxers are contorting reality to blame vaccines

Dr. Rashid Buttar, one of the first quacks I ever wrote about, died suddenly last week. Antivaxxers are contorting reality to blame vaccines.

A couple of days ago, I came across a Tweet by Sayer Ji, who, some of you might remember, was husband to Dr. Kelly Brogan, the anti psychiatry, antivax physician and germ theory denier who rose to greater prominence after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, to the point where she was named one of the Disinformation Dozen. The two of them ultimately divorced, but both continued down their previous paths of spreading misinformation. In any event, I must admit to my shock over seeing that Sayer Ji announce the death of Dr. Rashid Buttar:

We’ll get to what Dr. Buttar thought was causing him harm in a moment. I had no idea he had been sick, and, as always, empathize with his family and friends, regardless of what he had done during his life. Also, I hadn’t realized that he was a couple of years younger than I am, and it always bothers me to see people my age or younger die prematurely.

Basically Dr. Buttar “died suddenly,” which, tragically, sometimes happens even to apparently healthy 57-year-olds, and it is always a tragic shock when that happens. The reason why I am writing about this is not to attack him after death but to point out how his apparently sudden passing is causing some serious cognitive dissonance in the antivaccine movement, as well as to put his life into some context. Of course, I realize that it is often considered very offensive to speak ill of the dead soon after their death. However, I also realize that, no matter how I discuss Dr. Buttar’s life and how antivaxxers are reacting to his death, I will be attacked.

For example:

I note that I was not celebrating. I was pointing ot that Dr. Buttar’s legacy is not a favorable one.

To be honest, I hadn’t paid much attention to Dr. Buttar in a while. The last time I mentioned him was last fall, when he featured in a post about the ongoing assault by antivaxxers and promoters of unproven (and disproven) attacks on science-based medical regulation. In the post, I featured Dr. Buttar as an example of how promoters of quackery had been chipping away at science-based regulation of medical practice. Way back in 2007, Dr. Rashid Buttar made the news for calling the North Carolina Medical Board a “rabid dog” when it tried to discipline him for “unprofessional conduct” related to his cancer and antivaccine autism quackery. Let me just go back and quote what Dr. Buttar said in 2007, quoted by The Charlotte Observer and other newspapers:

Armed with complaints from Kenny and three others, the state board accuses Buttar of unprofessional conduct for departing from prevailing medical practice by treating patients with experimental, ineffective therapies and charging “exorbitant” fees. A public hearing is set for Feb. 20, after which the board could reprimand the doctor or revoke, suspend or put limits on his license. Buttar, 41, who has tangled with the board before, denies wrongdoing and vows to retaliate. “I’ve been itching for a fight,” he said. “I’m going to make this into a huge thing. … I told the (state) legislature that the medical board was a rabid dog, and they needed to put it down.”

Here was the sort of quackery that Dr. Buttar practiced up until his sudden demise last week:

But Buttar believes most patients with cancer also have high levels of heavy metals, such as mercury, and other toxins, such as pesticides, because of environmental exposure. “Chelation works for the right things,” he said. “It’s not a panacea. But it works phenomenally well for chronic disease.” Buttar’s practice also has two hyperbaric oxygen chambers — and more on the way. The treatment, which floods the body with oxygen, is commonly used to accelerate wound healing. But Buttar uses it to fight cancer because, he says, cancer cells can’t thrive in an oxygen-rich environment. He acknowledges most of his treatments have not been proven by standard means, such as controlled clinical trials. But he said they have been effective in his practice over 10 years.

The story noted that Dr. Buttar’s therapy for cancer patients ranged from $40,000-60,000 for two months, and, of course, he didn’t take insurance. (Like Sayer Ji and his ex-wife, Buttar, too, was also one of the “Disinformation Dozen“.) As I noted at the time, unfortunately, Dr. Buttar’s practice and his war against the North Carolina Medical Board (which he mostly won) was a precursor of what we are seeing today. Basically, he got a slap on the wrist, being temporarily restricted from treating cancer patients and children. The medical board did not do what was really warranted, strip him of his medical license, or, as I described what I thought that he deserved at the time in 2008, ‘having his medical license stripped from him, cut up in front of his face, and then the fragments ritually burned.” I stand by those words 15 years later.

Truth be told, I’ve been writing about Dr. Buttar intermittently since 2005, when I first discussed his use of chelation therapy to treat autism. As you might recall, chelation therapy uses what are called chelators, chemicals that bind to metals to better solubilize them and (supposedly) be excreted in the urine. As you might recall, one of the mainstays of autism biomed quackery back then was the use of chelation therapy to remove the mercury from the thimerosal preservative that had been in several childhood vaccines until around 2002 and was blamed for causing autism. Like many quack remedies, chelation therapy is an all-purpose treatment, falsely claimed to be useful for treating cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, autism, and even cancer. It is also not a benign treatment. Calcium and magnesium are metals that can be chelated too. If their levels drop too low, it can cause cardiac arrhythmias and arrest, and autistic children have died as a result.

What made Dr. Buttar unique back then, so that he stood out from all the other antivax autism biomed quacks, was his “transdermal chelation therapy,” or, as we used to call it, Buttar’s butter. Of course, even if you accept that chelation therapy has any value whatsoever for treating anything other than acute toxicity due to excessive blood levels of certain heavy metals, there was no evidence that Buttar’s butter could even be absorbed through the skin, much less chelate anything. That was probably a good thing because, even if Buttar’s butter was utterly ineffective at treating autism, at least, unlike the case for intravenous chelation therapy, Buttar’s butter couldn’t kill anyone.

Those were seemingly simpler days. Dr. Buttar was definitely a cancer and autism quack, but he was also a significant “pioneer” of what became an all-too-common and distressing tactic among quacks since COVID-19: Attacking state medical boards and any other medical authority trying to rein in quacks and misinformation. His was the template that COVID-19 disinformation spreading doctors followed. Most people combatting disinformation now don’t appreciate just how influential Dr. Buttar was in terms of taking the war straight to state medical boards. The only one who did it more publicly was cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, but Dr. Rashid Buttar was the one who actually got North Carolina state law altered to make it more quack-friendly by mobilizing public support to neuter the North Carolina Medical Board and prevent it from disciplining doctors who practice quackery associated with “integrative medicine.”

So what are Dr. Buttar’s fans saying about him? Sayer Ji is clearly an admirer:

It is with sadness, yet great appreciation, that we pay tribute to my friend and colleague Dr. Rashid Buttar, who passed away on May 18th.  

Rashid was a fearless and tireless advocate of health freedom and speaking truth to power, and he had an immense impact on helping the world understand the power of their bodies to heal, from literally anything.

We were less than a month awayfrom his 5th Annual Advanced Medicine Conference, which we are now uncertain will proceed.

Interestingly, before Ji’s announcement, I had no idea that Buttar had died, much less been ill. His illness and sudden passing appear to have resulted in conspiracy theories:

Due to rumors circulating and the many questions I have received as to the cause of his passing, I wish to share the last publicly recorded discussion we had, where Rashid wanted the world to know the details surrounding the sudden decline of his health.

For the record, Rashid reached out to me on Feb. 18th, and explained that only a few weeks before, he was in the ICU for 6 days, with a diagnosis of both stroke and myocarditis, with symptoms and biomarkers consistent with adverse effects from the mRNA jabs (which he did not have). As you will see in the video, he believed that he was experiencing the result of shedding (aka, “self-amplifying” properties) from the transgenic mRNA jabs. 

Rashid shares his story starting at the hour marker of an interview I conducted on March 13th with Dr. Joel Bohemier, Rashid, Ty Bollinger (another “hit list” member) and titled The Censorship Industrial Establishment Exposed.

Here’s the video, which I can’t seem to embed but will get back to in a moment. First, though, here’s Dr. Paul Alexander with one of his long rambling Substack titles Was Buttar killed? ‘Dr Rashid Buttar died in mysterious circumstances just days after claiming he had been poisoned following a controversial interview with CNN about his Covid pandemic disinformation, in which he asks:

Covid conspiracy doctor claimed he was ‘poisoned after interview’ just days before death; IMO, I don’t put anything past the ‘dark unseen hand’, those behind COVID fraud; where is his autopsy?

Alexander cites this story, in which Buttar claims:

A notorious conspiracy theorist doctor, known for his wild takes on the Coronavirus pandemic, claimed he had been poisoned just a few days before he died. 

Dr Rashid Buttar, who was part of the group nicknamed the “Disinformation dozen”, died suddenly yesterday (Saturday, May 20) at the age of 57.

He was known for being a huge anti-vaxxer and became a cult figure during the pandemic.

Joe Mercola’s girlfriend Erin Elizabeth was also devastated and echoed the conspiracy theory:

I note that Erin Elizabeth has long been peddling a conspiracy theory in which “They” (big pharma, of course) are hiring hit men to kill “holistic doctors” like Dr. Buttar for assassination, starting with Jeffrey Bradstreet (who killed himself), continuing to Nicholas Gonzalez (who died of an obvious heart attack), including other physicians who committed suicide, and ultimately totaling over 80 “holistic practitioners” whose deaths she blamed on pharma, whether the deaths were even plausibly suspicious. So of course she thinks that someone killed Dr. Buttar.

It turns out that Buttar had been ill since late last year, but got very ill in January, landing in the ICU:

Given the reported sudden passing of Dr Rashid Buttar, many questions about what led to his death have been raised. An exact cause of death has not yet been confirmed, but Buttar battled a number of health problems since the start of the year.

Sayer Ji explained in a blog post on Green Med Co that recent months saw Buttar diagnosed with both a stroke and myocarditis.

Buttar was in an intensive care unit for six days in January, he explained on a video call interview. Speaking on the call, Buttar explained that throughout winter, he had experienced significant limb swelling and shortness of breath. “I thought I was dying,” Buttar tells the others on the call, including Sayer Ji.

“On January 18, I was admitted to the hospital at 260 lbs, all fluid weight,” Buttar said. He dropped to just over 180 lbs after being discharged from hospital.

To me this sounds very much like severe heart failure, but that didn’t stop Stew Peters, the “mind” behind Died Suddenly, a quack documentary that claims that COVID-19 vaccines are causing huge numbers of young people, including elite athletes, to “die suddenly,” from posting this video:

Right at the beginning of the video, Peters notes that Buttar was one of the believers in the “snake venom theory,” the “belief that COVID-19 was caused by snake venom rather than the virus” and that COVID-19 vaccines contain snake venom as well. You can almost hear the cognitive dissonance in his voice as he points out that last week Buttar “died suddenly,” adding that we know that he hadn’t been vaccinated and asking what could explain this. And it is true that Buttar claimed that he had been “poisoned” by “200x what’s in the vaccine.” How this happened, he didn’t say. Peters then went on about the existence of CIA assassination techniques that make deaths look like heart attacks. Next up is an interview with Dr. Tau Braun, a quack whom I had never heard before (and whom I might have to look into more in the future), who repeats the narrative that whatever landed Dr. Buttar in the ICU for six days in January must have been poison and that, when a man says he has been poisoned, he’s probably been poisoned. A South African, he references targeted assassinations during apartheid as having “shaped him” so that he believes that Buttar had been killed, whether by the CIA or something else. He even claims that the Center for Countering Digital Hate, by placing Dr. Buttar on its Disinformation Dozen list, had actually put him on a hit list.

Again, because the idea that healthy-appearing people (whether they were truly healthy or, as Dr. Buttar appeared to be, not) almost never “died suddenly” before COVID-19 vaccines, Braun simply can’t accept the possibility that Buttar had died of natural causes. So to Braun, Buttar must have been intentionally poisoned or, alternatively, “shedding” of spike protein (which is the same thing as the snake venom that COVID-19 supposedly is, according to this conspiracy theory) must have been the cause. I’ve written about antivax resurrection of the old shedding trope to claim that those vaccinated with COVID-19 vaccines “shed” spike protein that can make others sick; more specifically, I’ve written about what utter nonsense it is from a scientific standpoint. Braun even goes on to say that this toxin, conveniently enough for his narrative, is now “everywhere,” thanks to the vaccine, meaning that you can’t avoid it.

I did laugh out loud when Braun said:

…when you introduce a toxin into the body, the body produces other toxins, and those toxins can leave the body and make other sick.

As if this weren’t utter nonsense enough by itself, it’s especially utter nonsense applied to COVID-19 vaccines, which make such minuscule quantities of spike protein as to make this narrative risible in the extreme. You know what does make a lot of spike protein? COVID-19 infection. It can also cause the body to release more virus (toxin, if you will, just to be sarcastic) that makes others sick. Of course, if this “toxin” is everywhere as Braun claims, then no one can avoid it and everyone needs quackery to “detox” themselves, including—surprise!—EDTA, which is a common chelator used by autism biomed quacks back in the day. At the end of the interview, Peters couldn’t resist interjecting that any doctors still giving COVID-19 shots are actively killing their patients, because of course he couldn’t.

But what about Buttar himself? Going back to the video referenced by Sayer Ji, where Buttar notes that he first felt ill back in September at the Reawaken America tour, where he started feeling short of breath on stage, to the point where he couldn’t “properly give” his presentations and fell back on showing videos. Buttar then relates how he then also developed increasing swelling of his legs that got worse, lasted several days, resolved, and then came back. On Thanksgiving, he couldn’t get his boots on, and between Thanksgiving and January he put on 50 lbs of edema fluid. He said that by the time he was admitted to the hospital he couldn’t lie flat and still breathe and even had to stand up to breathe. These are absolutely classic symptoms of congestive heart failure, so much so that we teach them to first and second year medical students as part of cardiac physiology and pathophysiology.

Now, remember this. Dr. Buttar is a physician. He knows—or should know—all of this. What was he doing during the months that he was putting on so much water weight and finding it increasingly difficult to breathe without being in an upright position? Why did he not see a doctor, particularly a cardiologist but at least an internist of family practice doc? He mentioned that he had thought about taking a diuretic, but obviously he never did. Did it not occur to him that his symptoms sure seemed consistent with right-sided heart failure, possibly biventricular failure? In any case, they alternated Lasix and Bumex, two powerful diuretics, and got a lot of fluid off of him. He also then relates having a mid-thalamic stroke confirmed by MRI that resolved. By the time he was released from the hospital he had lost 60 lbs of fluid and lost nearly 20 more after going home. At just before 1:09, he relates having had elevated troponin levels, which he said were consistent with myocarditis and symptoms consistent with pericarditis. Ultimately, after his discharge from the ICU and hospital in January, Buttar blamed his illness on “secondary inoculation” by the COVID-19 vaccine shedding; indeed, he doubled down, claiming that the goal was to get half the population vaccinated, after which shedding would expose the rest of the population to the “toxin.” He concludes that he “thinks that’s what happened to me.”

Sadly, a far more likely explanation for Dr. Buttar’s illness is that he had developed congestive heart failure, most likely from chronic ischemia due to cardiovascular disease, and that’s what caused him to develop the edema and difficulty breathing. Alternatively, maybe he had a silent myocardial infarction (or one with only mild symptoms that he ignored) and developed progressive heart failure afteward. He might even have had COVID-19, which caused a case of myocarditis. Who knows? The story as related by him and his followers lacks sufficient detail to allow for more than educated speculation about what happened to him. Basically, being in the ICU with congestive heart failure, for whatever reason, tells me that (1) you are not healthy, regardless of how healthy you think you are, and (2) you are at high risk of sudden cardiac death, which is very likely what happened to Dr. Buttar. Again, we can’t know for sure. There are not enough details provided.

Unfortunately, because the “died suddenly” conspiracy theory demands that healthy people do not just “die suddenly” and that only the COVID-19 vaccine is causing people do “die suddenly” (even though there has been a small but consistent incidence of sudden arrhythmic deaths for a very long time, a phenomenon first described in the 1970s, when someone who is unvaccinated, particularly as famous an antivaxxer as Dr. Buttar, dies, antivaxxers cannot accept it. Indeed, Dr. Buttar himself couldn’t accept that he had just gotten sick. Instead, he had to find a way to blame vaccine “shedding” for his illness, because he was unvaccinated and couldn’t possibly have had congestive heart failure or a small stroke without the vaccine somehow having been involved. .Then, because the antivaccine movement is at its heart a conspiracy theory like all science denial, people like Stew Peters and Erin Johnson show up to bring in conspiracy theories about the CIA or big pharma hit squads having “poisoned” him—with the “toxin” from the vaccine, of course!

To conspiracy theorists like Dr. Buttar, the COVID-19 vaccine is the source of all evil in his conspiracy theory, the weapon by which “They” are poisoning everyone. Because he had kept himself “pure” by not getting the vaccine, he simply could not accept getting seriously ill for the same reasons that we all can become ill and had to blame it on the vaccine. If that wasn’t enough, then his fans had to find a way to turn his having “died suddenly” into an assassination. Again, this is not unexpected. Antivax is, at its heart, a conspiracy theory, and grief will bring out its more paranoid elements. Unfortunately for him and his family, it turns out that Dr. Buttar was just as much a victim of his own quackery as his patients have been over the last quarter century.

By Orac

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski.

That this particular surgeon has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 35 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER:: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: [email protected]

140 replies on “Antivax physician Dr. Rashid Buttar “died suddenly” and antivaxxers are contorting reality to blame vaccines”

It’s the same as Aseem Malhotra becoming a COVID vaccine conspiracy theorist after the death of his father. He, and Buttar’s supporters, can’t get their heads around the fact that people sometimes just die.
It seems to me, as others have said before, that they believe that if you live healthily (eat right, exercise regularly, manage your stress correctly) you won’t just keel over dead. Well, it can and does happen. As I mentioned a few weeks back, it happened to one of my parents’ neighbours.

Where’s the autopsy? For an in hospital death, the next of kin must give permission. Perhaps they didn’t.

For an out of hospital death, it’s up to the medical examiner. If it looks like an obvious natural death, they often won’t do one. It’s their job to investigate unnatural deaths.

The way this case sounds, no ME would do an autopsy.

I didn’t go into it, but in the Stew Peters video, Tau Braun goes on and on about doing “toxicology,” all to prove that the spike protein/snake venom “toxin” is what killed Dr. Buttar.

I don’t see how “toxicology” could have shown that.

Some people think that toxicology is magic. There’s a list of things that are usually looked for. In order to screen for other things, first there must be an index of suspicion, because these tests cost money and there can be both false positives and false negatives. Second, there must be an FDA approved kit or the ME must have a lab capable of validating tests for unusual things. You can’t just go off half cocked and test for just anything.

I might add that it sounds like that this case would not meet any reasonable person’s definition of a sudden death. This fellow was sick for a significant period of time, and he apparently didn’t seek medical attention until he had accumulated a large amount of edema fluid.

He didn’t die during his hospitalization in January, though. He was in the ICU for 6 days, got what sounds like 20-25 L of fluid diuresed, and then went home. Four months later, he died, apparently suddenly, from what sounds as though it might have been an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, although it’s not clear from the accounts I’ve read.

One question that I have (and alluded to in the post) is: What did he do after his discharge from the ICU and hospital in January and the time of his death. He claims he lost another 20 lbs of edema after losing the 60 lbs in the ICU. To me that implies that he must have been continuing to take diuretics and other pharmaceutical drugs used to manage congestive heart failure, because if he wasn’t I don’t see how he could have avoided slowly reaccumulating all that edema fluid again after he was discharged from the hospital.

Anti-vaxxers never realise that there’s a very good reason why anti-vax luminaries are never assassinated. Their conspiracies distract from the existence of very real problems. Like the existence of the lizard overlords.

Excuse me. That’s the doorbell…

Buttar’s symptoms as described are identical (although more extreme) to what my father had after his heart attack and before he died. My father spent a day in ICU after Itook him in while having the heart attack. However afterwards he saw a doctor regularly and his symptoms were kept under control and he never accumulated 80 lbs of fluid. Buttar was a medical practitioner, so I don’t know what he was thinking allowing himself to get in such poor shape.

The whole shedding argument makes me laugh. When live viruses are used as vaccines, there is indeed a risk of shedding. However, when proteins are used? The spike protein ends up in the cell membrane, so unless you are eating someone who has been vaccinated, I am struggling to see how exposure would happen.

As long as you can’t avoid the covid vaccine because of all the shedding, you may as well get it!

How do trained professionals go this far off the rails? Grift? Ideology?

With either grift or ideology you’re looking for a cause that makes some sense in terms of cognitive process in the derailed professional. Something like a “rational” motive, even if it’s bad reasoning. I don’t think people go THAT far off the rails by anything so close to logical. In crude language: they’re acting crazy, because they’ve gone crazy, and crazy doesn’t make sense by definition. In more refined terms, there’s some sort of aberrant psychological at work – perhaps a personality disorder, perhaps a trauma disturbance buried deep in the subconscious – and these kinds of thing can indeed befall anyone, and overwhelm whatever is happening in the cognitive realm including the products of professional education.

If only Buttar had (1) worn a mask, (2) socially distanced, (3) avoided large gatherings and (4) washed his hands, he might have protected himself from vaccine shedding. ( I’d like to claim credit for this, but I got this from brittlestar’s 2021 shedding takedown on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IlGcwi8jsw)

Maybe now the North Carolina Medical Board will finally find the spine to terminate his medical license.

I was thinking Margulis would be the first to claim it was spike protein shedding that gave her cancer, but never underestimate the power of the farce amongst anti-vaxx grifters (FYI, enucleation was recommended for her ocular melanoma, suggestive that she ignored her failed vision for way too long; however I’m not paying $5 to read more about it on her scambstack), as I’m sure her story will write itself.

If only Buttar had (1) worn a mask, (2) socially distanced, (3) avoided large gatherings and (4) washed his hands, he might have protected himself from vaccine shedding.

But if those things don’t prevent getting Covid (according to anti-vaxxers, freedom-fighters and disease promotors), how could they protect someone against vaccine shedding?

I suppose Dr. Buttar should have hided in an airtight environment.

Buttar’s reportedly citing his increased troponin level as due to myocarditis (and thus, presumably to vaccine “shedding”) reflects tunnel vision to say the least, as elevated troponin can be seen in a number of clinical settings, including congestive heart failure (which his signs and symptoms made likely) and acute MI.

I’m surprised that Steve Kirsch hasn’t jumped on the bandwagon to demand that Buttar’s family consent to an autopsy, so that Magical Histologic Stains can prove that Covid-19 vaccines were the culprit. Instead, Steve continues to recapitulate the antivax movement’s Greatest Hits. His latest Substack attempts to show that only a “handful” of Amish in one particular community died of Covid-19, therefore vaccination was proved to be unnecessary. Reality: the Amish were hit hard by Covid-19 like the rest of us. And if low vaccination rates were supposedly protective, Steve should explain to us excess deaths among the Amish.

http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8195242/

Maybe it wasn’t the COVID vaccines. I’m just asking questions, but that seems too obvious. A false flag maybe? Are we sure, for instance, that Demon possession wasn’t involved? Since Dr. Stella Emmanuel has been on the ReAwaken America tour with Buttar, maybe the real question is why she didn’t diagnose him properly and perform the needed exorcism. Could it have been possible that the two of them were having a last tango with Buttar Butter? Steve Kirsch doesn’t have a clue, obviously, but my new Twitter channel is going to stay on this story, so hit my Patreon and subscribe to my Substack!
— Cucker Tarlson

Not sure where to put this…

Bad news:
via twitter and Substack ( Vibrant LIfe)
Jennifer Margulis wrote about Dr Buttar
and unfortunately, it looks like she will have to lose her eye

That sucks. Here’s hoping that her melanoma hasn’t metastasized to the liver. Uveal melanomas have a very high propensity for doing just that, unfortunately.

Thinking about Dr Buttar, it seems strange to me that he didn’t notice such a large weight gain – it doesn’t happen over night – as well as other symptoms, he is after all, trained as a physician. Aren’t CHF patients supposed to monitor changes in themselves like weight gain, swelling, shortness of breath? Wouldn’t those symptoms be especially alarming to a doctor?

Perhaps he reasoned it away. I do that as well if I feel something, I tend to think it is something psychological and it just will go away, nothing to worry about.

It seems stranger to me that he didn’t seek immediate medical care last September after becoming so short of breath that he basically cut his talk at Reawaken America short. (If I ever became that short of breath and noticed that much ankle edema I’d be in the emergency room STAT.) Instead he apparently waited several days until it went away. Then, when it happened again a month later, he did the same thing even though the edema and shortness of breath lasted a week and a half! Then it happened again on Thanksgiving, after which he slowly put on 60+ lbs of edema fluid until his admission to the hospital in January. I mean, WTF was he thinking? He said he couldn’t lie flat and still breathe. He had to sit or stand up. That’s a classic symptom of congestive heart failure, particularly when coupled with his ankle and lower extremity edema.

One thing I picked up on from reading these blogs many years ago was that being short of breath was a sign of possible heart attack. When my spouse got short of breath walking down the hall, I took them to the urgent care where they got a cat scan (?) and were quickly sent to the ICU. Then we had to convalesce for a few weeks working on clearing up a skin problem before they could do the bypass surgery. But we had a good recovery and many more good years together.

SBM works!

I am still grappling with the fact that a doctor, who should have at least basic understanding, is willing to repeat the claim that an mRNA vaccine, with no living material, can shed. Did he really believe that? Wouldn’t it be obvious to him that it’s, well, impossible? Or is he just willing to continue the charade to the beyond?

And really, do they seriously think heart attacks did not exist before COVID-19 mRNA vaccines?

The usual antivax claim is that the vaccinated cause havoc by shedding spike protein cooties onto the unvaccinated. For awhile there I thought I could use this belief to my advantage in restaurants, by wearing my T-shirt which proclaims my Covid-19 vaccination status. But I haven’t noticed anyone being seated near me who looked at the shirt and demanded a new table.

Something puzzling: word has it that Buttar was poisoned after being interviewed on CNN. Shouldn’t our Evil Pharma Overlords have arranged to slip him the toxins before he was interviewed? We need smarter hit men.

If one is unaware of the shedding – there are 2 sources to research (Pfizer’s own research papers and exosomes

He probably has a practiced actual real medicine for decades.

mRNA vaccines DO shed.

They shed via breast milk and also via household contact.

Breast milk:

In the study “Analysis of Vaccine Reactions After COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Doses Among Pregnant and Lactating Individuals”, 121 infants were foud to have “issues” after maternal vaccination. 121 of 10 278 [infants] (1.2%) reported any issues with their breastmilk-fed infant after vaccination.

This study directly proved breast milk shedding: Detection of Messenger RNA COVID-19 Vaccines in Human Breast Milk

Pfizer postmarketing reports one neonatal death out of 270 reported pregnancy outcomes. This death is also reported in VAERS as death occurring on 2021-03-20.

“Patient received second dose of Pfizer vaccine on March 17, 2020 while at work. March 18, 2020 her 5 month old breastfed infant developed a rash and within 24 hours was unconsolable, refusing to eat, and developed a fever. Patient brought baby to ER where assessments were performed, blood analysis revealed elevated liver enzymes. Infant was hospitalized but continued to decline and passed away. Diagnosis of TTP. No known allergies. No new exposures aside from the mother’s vaccination the previous day”.

General shedding:

Evidence for Aerosol Transfer of SARS-CoV2-specific Humoral Immunity.

I do not believe the Buttar story, it seems outlandish and made up, but Covid vaccine shedding is totally real and scientifically proven.

Egad opines “This study directly proved breast milk shedding: Detection of Messenger RNA COVID-19 Vaccines in Human Breast Milk”

You didn’t read the study, did you? Gtfooh moron

A. Breastfeeding: note that there is no actual evidence of mRNA vaccines causing harm through breastmilk. This completely implausible VAERS report does not change that.

Here is the study you refer to: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2795998

Usually, if an anti-vaccine activist does not link to a study, there’s a reason. In this case, it’s that the study found no issues in pregnant or lactating women, and it concluded that most reported no concern. In other words, you are misusing the study to make the opposite claim than what it found. The fact that a small percentage of women reported “any issues with their breastmilk-fed infant after vaccination” does not mean the vaccines did anything. The study does not suggest any causal connection to any specific problem. In other words, when you suggest it shows a problem, you are either misreading it or making it up.

B. Re general shedding: this is a preprint hypothesizing that maybe there may be mRNA in saliva or mucus that may at some point be transferred. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.28.22274443v1.full-text

This looked at 34 parent-child pairs and at antibodies to COVID-19. It does not show much – it cannot even show that the antibodies are related to the vaccine; the parents’ high nasal IgG could also be telling us that both parents and children were exposed to COVID.

Not really support.

I do not provide links because links somehow interfere with approval and look like spam. That’s why I provide titles.

The study set out to prove that “mRNA vaccines are safe for pregnant women” but proved instead that they are not safe, with women missing work and unable to perform household tasks massively due to being sick due to the vaccines.

They are also not safe for the infants.

The VAERS report is about the same child who died in the Pfizer postmarketing report.

Igor, this

This study suggests that the COVID-19 vaccine booster or third dose was well tolerated among pregnant and lactating individuals.

and this

Only 64 of 17 014 participants (0.4%) sought medical care after the booster or third dose. Nearly half (7683 of 16 913 [45.4%]) of participants were at work or planned to go to work on the day of the booster or third dose, and only 5.7% (434 of 7672) either left work or called out of work because of vaccine reactions. Among those who did not work on the day of vaccination, 6327 of 9212 (68.7%) scheduled it on a nonworkday or were on leave. Of those who did work, most (6659 of 7672 [86.8%]) reported minimal or no effect of the vaccine on work. Only 6.3% (1067 of 16 989) reported that the vaccine reactions significantly affected their ability to perform activities of daily living.

contradict your “interpretation” of the study. Did you not read it and simply make more shit up, or think nobody else would read it, or are you referencing a different study? [My opinion is that it’s just another of your lies, but there’s the off chance that you simply weren’t clear about which thing you’re referencing.]

I do not provide links because links somehow interfere with approval and look like spam.

You can use two links without being shunted into the mod queue. I don’t know what “look like spam” is supposed to mean here.

@Aarno Sylvanen:

“We show here that the mRNA from anti-COVID BNT162b2 (Pfizer) and mRNA-1273 (Moderna) vaccines is not detected in human breast milk samples collected 4-48 hours post-vaccine.”

You are referring to a JAMA research letter titled: “Evaluation of Messenger RNA From COVID-19 BTN162b2 and mRNA-1273 Vaccines in Human Milk”

This is a study by Bill Gates and CDC-funded scientists. It was designed from the get go to NOT find mRNA in breast milk. To nobody’s surprise, they did not find it.

The other study (which I mentioned), cast a wider net and designed to look deeper, take more samples at varied times, looked at extracellular vesicles etc, did find the MRNA nanoparticles.

I wrote a long post about it last September.

The Gaw/Flaherman study is a perfect example of bad “Covid science” and is a perfect illustration as to why “Covid science” needs to be distrusted.

@Igor Chudov
From methods
Human breast milk samples were collected fresh or frozen (immediately after milk was pumped). Total RNA was isolated from milk components (cells, milk supernatant and/or fat layer) using the RNeasy Mini Kit (Qiagen) according to manufacturer’ s protocol. We performed RT-qPCR in triplicate using specific primers (supplementary materials) targeting the vaccines mRNA for SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. mRNA-1273 (Moderna) vaccine was spiked into pre-vaccine milk sample before RNA isolation and served as a positive control for this assay. Pre-vaccine samples served as negative controls.
How this is to planned not to detect spike mRNA ?
Funding:
Yarden Golan is an Awardee of the Weizmann Institute of Science -National Postdoctoral Award Program for Advancing Women in Science, of the International Society for Research In Human Milk and Lactation (ISRHML) Trainee Bridge Fund, and of the Human Frontier Science Program.
Gates is not mentioned.
If you claim that something is planned to fail. you should explain the problem with methods. Or you mean that you do not like he result?

“Evidence for Aerosol Transfer of SARS-CoV2-specific Humoral Immunity.”
You donot understand differeence beween a pahoen an antibody against it. It is immunity, not SARS CoV 2. There are mucosal antibodies to prevent pathogens entering.

As I replied to Matt G above, a medical education is not a prophylactic against going nuts. Maybe he started his practice as a kind of charade, but fell to Vonnegut’s warning about being careful what we pretend to be, because that’s what we become.

We are surrounded by evidence of the fragility of the human psyche. An apparent majority of citizens identifying with one of our major political parties are devoted to one or more bonkers conspiracy theory. Buttar shared the stage on the ReAwaken America tour with no less than six former high officials in the Trump administration, including an acting Attorney General.
Sadly, the level of WTF in the Buttar case is closer to endemic than a remarkable anomaly.

I have a question. I was reading something from Siri referencing study titled ==> The Introduction of Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis and Oral Polio Vaccine Among Young Infants in an Urban African Community: A Natural Experiment

It stated that DTP vaccine increases total infant mortality by 5 times compared to not receiving it.

Is there something incorrect about that study? Thanks

It was inconsistent with similar studies.
https://www.who.int/groups/global-advisory-committee-on-vaccine-safety/topics/diphtheria-tetanus-and-pertussis-vaccines#:~:text=Increased%20mortality%20was%20reported%20in%20children%20vaccinated%20with%20DTP%20in,likely%20to%20suffer%20increased%20mortality.
Also, it’s DTP – the whooping cough component is whole cell – and oral (live) polio. These two vaccines are not used in wealthy countries with very low rates of pertussis and polio, given that they are less safe (albeit more effective, so not needing as many doses) than the acellular pertussis and killed polio vaccines.
So, the obvious solution is that, once disease rates get low enough and kids can go back to the clinic for boosters, they switch to DTaP and killed polio like they’ve done here in intermediate-economy areas of South America, rather than stop vaccinating and let nature take its course.

It looks like that was in response to one of the Aaby studies in Guinea-Bissau, a country with bad health infrastructure. I read through several of those but not this one AFAIK.

The general methodology was that women from surrounding villages would travel into town to get their babies checked and vaccinated at 6 months of age. Then they would come back at 12 months for follow-up and booster shots.

Aaby has used these vaccine introduction programs to do a sort of generalized preliminary research. Let’s look at overall results when a new vaccine like MMR, BCG, or DTP is started and see if there is anything that merits further research. This was one of the first clues about measles impacting the immune system in general.

But the studies all have a small number of subjects which gives a lot of statistical uncertainty. And the methodology was based on comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated person-months. There may have been a bit of survivor bias in that the six months before a baby was first vaccinated were counted as unvaccinated person-months. But there didn’t seem to be good methodology for counting deaths of babies who didn’t survive those first six months.

Also the DPT was introduced after a major pertussis outbreak. So, there was probably a fair amount of remaining immunity in those villages which cancelled out the protective benefit of the vaccine.

I saw a chart (can’t remember the source) that Covid was the #1 cause of death in the US for 45-54 year olds in 2021, after vaccination started. It makes intuitive sense to me … old enough to be more vulnerable to health problems but still young enough to embrace denial about them. Still much less death rate than Covid for seniors but for this age cohort it was higher than deaths from heart disease, cancers, etc.

I’m about the same age that Buttar reached and had my own experience of not paying as closely to health issues a few years ago (and avoiding doctors during the start of Covid to reduce exposure risk, especially pre-vaccine) and ended up with an urgent diagnosis that has been fixed now, thanks to expert surgery. Yes, eating well, etc. is better than eating junk “food”, but it’s not a guarantee of invincibility. Entropy is not a good idea, it’s the law.

Also that age bracket was too young to be first in line with the vaccine rollout.

Also old enough to have been obese for a long time and/ or undiagnosed, uncontrolled diabetic who has yet to have turned up in the hospital as a result forcing treatment. Both of those things were risk factors for severe covid.

There’s a chilling article at the impeccable “Before It’s News” website by Celia Farber, detailing how Buttar foresaw his death.

“(In a posted interview) Dr. Buttar speaks of mysterious deaths, including Kary Mullis and Luc Montagnier, and addresses his own targeting for potential assassination. He also spoke of both a remedy that reverses cancer, that he’d worked in for many years, a remedy that he said could stop deaths from covid shots.”

“It’s going to save hundreds of thousands of lives of those who have already taken the vaccine,” he says.”

Obviously Big Pharma couldn’t allow that to happen.

I was unaware that Mullis and Montagnier were among victims of the Holistic Doctor Murder Conspiracy. Mullis died at 74 of complications of pneumonia (ha!), And They waited a hell of a long time to get Montagnier, who died at 89.

Another stunning revelation according to the U.K.’s Daily Star, which is like the Daily Mail, only more so:

It reports that Rashid Buttar appeared in a live stream shortly before his death to warn of a false flag alien invasion:

“During the stream, shown on social media on May 17, a skinny-looking Buttar who was also almost bald in the video, said: “If you look at…how this whole thing with Covid had been planned and how the currency issue had all been planned and the stuff with the vaccinations, I think there’s going to be a false flag event.”

“There will be some type of an event and an introduction where there’s talk of life outside of planet Earth – and we will be propagated and propelled with all of this information that is not true about how this is an invasion.”

“He went on a rant about how “nobody would have believed” the Covid pandemic would have happened, except he repeated his claim that it was “mass murder”.”

“He added: “These are very sane thoughts.”

So, watch out for fake alien invasion talk. Biden will do anything to distract us from the specter of government default and mass depopulation through vaccines.

Nevermind, I missed the date on that video so it’s unconnected unless Buttar was having psychic revelations three years ago.

From the website Igor posted

‘Rashid was a fearless and tireless advocate of health freedom and speaking truth to power, and he had an immense impact on helping the world understand the power of their bodies to heal, from literally anything’

Yet he died!!!

My opinion, it is a major karma violation to publicly predict someone’s death, or to claim that one “cannot die” from something.

Buttar was interviewed for a CNN program. The reporter Drew Griffin asked Buttar, will I die from the Covid vaccine. Buttar answered yes – and Griffin died in a year.

https://twitter.com/AimHardoi/status/1660914548277391364

And so did Buttar.

I do believe in science but I also have some things I avoid, like saying I cannot die from XXXX or bragging about good things that did not happen yet

My opinion, it is a major karma violation to publicly predict someone’s death

Is there anything you fail to misunderstand?

Drew Griffin of CNN died at age 60 in December of 2022 after what was described as a “long battle” with cancer. Blaming his death on Covid vaccination is moronic.

Igor’s posts are a known side effect of being an ignorant and thoughtless ghoul.

The Daily Star reports does it?

One of the few rags to make the National Inquirer look like studied journalism.

@ Igor Chudov

You write: “Is there something incorrect about that study? Thanks”

As usual, you search the internet and find studies that confirm your ignorant, non-scientific, lack of understanding of immunology, and of various research designs. So, what is wrong with the study? First, kids not randomized, some getting placebo, some getting vaccine, so various factors, including age, different times of exposure to the infections (diphtheria infections fluctuate over time), etc. However, DTP vaccines have not been used in US since 1996 on children younger than 7 when DTaP vaccines were approved. I won’t bother explaining the difference since, given your previous comments, you will ignore.

The bottom line is I went to National Library of Medicine’s online database and typed in search bar: “dtp vaccine clinical trials” with 871 results. Main point is not a bad study; but even a good study, a “correct” study subject to random variables NOT measured, which is why serious scientists look at number of independent studies.

So, Igor, no matter how many times you have been shown to be wrong, you just keep posting comments based on finding one or a small number of studies. I love science fiction. I wish one could transport you into a parallel universe where everything the same, except vaccines never developed. The population would be much much smaller and many would have various defects from infectious diseases; e.g., crippled, brain damaged, pockmarked faces, etc. And I would bet that even after you had seen such, it would NOT change your stupid, unscientific, ignorant, antivax bias. I will repeat what I have written before: all vaccines do is present to our immune systems parts of a microbe (virus or bacteria) that our immune cells would recognized and react to. The only difference is that from the actual disease we would suffer, maybe hospitalized, maybe die, maybe develop long-term disabilities because takes around 10 days for antibodies, etc. to build up and defeat infection, if not too late. And along with antibodies, etc. defeating intruder, memory cells are created that recognize and quickly stop next invasion of same intruder. Vaccines create same memory cells ready to act as infection; but without infection.

I realize that you will ignore this given just how stupidly biased you are.

The study I mentioned WAS randomized, because children received vaccines at different ages based on their LAST NAMES.

And the 5 times difference in mortality is shocking.

I received the DTP vaccine in the USSR and had a very bad reaction, according to my mom.

The study I mentioned WAS randomized, because children received vaccines at different ages based on their LAST NAMES.

Was there a subgroup analysis to determine the most dangerous letters?

Even more disturbing, vaccine recipients were asked to line up alphabetically according to height.

@ Igor Chudov

You write: “The study I mentioned WAS randomized, because children received vaccines at different ages based on their LAST NAMES.”

JUST HOW STUPID ARE YOU. NOPE NOT EVEN CLOSE TO RANDOMIZED AND I WON’T BOTHER EXPLAINING WHY BECAUSE YOU ARE TOO TOO STUPID TO UNDERSTAND

@ Igor Chudov

Diphtheria: in United States Before vaccines cases = 21,000 deaths = 1800 After vaccines those getting vaccinated, cases = 0 deaths = 0
Keep in mind that the above stats were when US population less than half today’s, so without vaccines number of cases and deaths would be higher.

Sandra W. Roush et al. (2007 Nov 14). Historical Comparisons of Morbidity and Mortality for Vaccine-Preventable Diseases in the United States. JAMA; Vol. 298, No. 18, pp. 2155 – 2163.

@ Vicintheshed

YEP! For first 6 – 9 months until their own immune system revs up

Breast milk feeding better in multiple ways than bottle feeding.

Yeah, she was in an exelent health. I didn’t think so.
But to anti-vaxxers everyone who dies was in exelent health, unless they die from covid. When that happens the victim didn’t eat right, was overweight, or otherwise unhealthy. But anyone else who dies, was in exelent health and of cause vaccinated. Unless, they are anti-vaxxers, in that case they died because the vaccine can shed and thus also kill people who are not vaccinated.

RIP Tina Turner. As a fellow musician, I mourn the loss of an incredible singer, an icon of rock music. Unfortunately for her, she battled against intestinal cancer since 2013, kidney failure and hypertension. She was also trying homeopathic remedies for hypertension, her husband and relatives confirmed cause of death as natural causes. Nowhere was her vaccination status discussed or made public, she lived her final years in Switzerland where vaccination was not mandated. She considered assisted dying, so her final months was most probably very depressing so it is quite possible she opted to forego the vaccine, she was giving up.

Simply the best.

Of course its the vaccine, its always the vaccine.

No one dies of anything else any more.

It is also not a benign treatment. Calcium and magnesium are metals that can be chelated too.

Absolutely not benign; cyanide kills because it chelates the iron in hemoglobin and prevents oxygen from binding. The molecule is different because of its size, but it’s the same process.

Occasionally, we gain insight into why anti-vaxxers might have turned to that dark path:
@ highwire talk, today: Pierre Kory shills his ivermectin book and mentions that he vaccinated his children but after Covid vaccines started their destruction ( my words, not his /s) he began to think that all vaccines caused damage such as what his 2 children suffered with PANDAS.
Quite a few of the most vocal anti-vaxxers have children with autism and other conditions.
Rossi, Wright, Heckenlively, Blaxill, Larson, Handley, O’Toole, McCarthy

Similarly, RFK jr ( days ago @TheChiefNerd interview) said that after reading an AEs page for a legal suit, he began to believe that his spasmodic dysphonia was caused by a flu vaccine.

Del and his children are unvaccinated so no worry there.

In a public apology, I apologized to my grown up children about not giving enough thought to their childhood vaccinations.

@ Igor:

Did you ever think that your writing could frighten people away from vaccinating which could actually hurt people?

-btw- Aaby is not a meaningful source for many reasons which Orac has exhaustively discussed including the general economic situation in the country being surveyed.

Let me put in another way:
suppose I wrote publicly that
** I feel sorry that I helped my father to acquire and use heart meds because they have serious side effects and have caused death. There are superior natural herbal formulae and supplements that work better and improve daily living. I was wrong .**

In reality, a simple drug, Diltiazem, enabled him to live quite well for nearly 10 years with an arrhythmia and CHF. He needed more sophisticated meds and Lasix in the last year of his life.

If i wrote that ( I wouldn’t without a warning that it’s not true) might readers follow this advice or perhaps put off their worries about cardiac issues? Many people avoid care and shrug off worrisome symptoms. Without a medical education, they are usually not able to evaluate the mountains of studies that show that heart medications work, prolong life and enable patients to live relatively normal lives.
THINK about it.

** THIS SECTION IS NOT TRUE

Denice, as you may have noticed I am not much into, for example, alternative meds or quack cancer treatments.

Two of my relatives died of cancer, during the first one’s cancer I read a 5 lb cancer textbook from A to Z. At the end stage quack doctors were involved too. Neither “science-based” nor quack medicine helped either and it was a sad, unfortunate, but also educational experience.

In any case, vaccines are very complicated. (this was one of the main reason why I was against the insta-made Covid vaccine). So I try to discuss things within a circle of things that can somewhat understand.

So, vaccines, as incredibly complicated as they are, should not be all treated the same, and I try to keep my writings somewhat specific.

I read a 5 lb cancer textbook from A to Z.

You can’t make this shit up.

“his 2 children suffered with PANDAS.”

Make a fortune renting them out to zoos and breeding programs.

My thought was they had difficulties with data analysis in Python.

@ Igor:

“.. vaccines are very complicated..”

Exactly.
However, many writers- including you- discuss potential problems or possible issues whilst not being well versed in vaccine science or related immunology. Do you think that you can read a few papers or listen to a few podcasts and understand all of the many complicated questions involved. Yet you dismiss expert opinion so easily.

Self study work but vaccines, physiology, biology and immunology are vast subjects that experts study for years. I’ve seen anti-vaxxers hop and skip around the literature to find items that interest them or seem to prove their pet ideas and disregard the rest. Yet they postulate elaborate theories of autism caused by vaccines when all of the research points to pre-natal origins– as I’ve written for other commenters: for over 40 years, research has been investigating how the brain develops differently in people with autism, how autism is indeed a spectrum and how many different areas of research coalesce to produce the current picture of genetic influence, pre-natal events and post-natal signs of the condition. There are hundreds of studies about how the architecture of specific brain structures develops and how they differ from the average AND how autistic people are not all the same.

Covid vaccines are based upon decades of research AND they have been tested/ used since 2020. Safety studies have progressed all around the world from different countries and different companies that show how overwhelmingly safe they are.
When a particular vaccine- J&J, which I received- revealed possible problems, it was studied and eventually only used for specific purposes. It may now be unavailable in general. Other vaccines may have been associated with problems in certain populations which has been publicised and studied intensely. Research about the efficacy and safety of these several vaccines is public and available YET many people have a hard time comprehending their meaning. No vaccine is 100% effective or 100% safe, Neither is anything else in the real world.

Denice, I am glad we both agree that vaccines are complicated.

It would be crazy for me to, say, try to attempt to develop a novel vaccine. I am completely unqualified for that. Right?

(none of the participants of this venue could develop a good new vaccine, so I am in a good company)

But at the same time it is perfectly reasonable to note that

An insta-made vaccine
Made against a coronavirus
Which may be a bioweapon of unknown purpose, made by people adjacent to the vaccine program itself
When no coronavirus vaccine ever worked
and no application of mRNA technology was ever successful

Would be unlikely to be a success. I do not need to own a research institute to figure that out, you see? I figured that out in 2021 and did not get vaccinated, thankfully. I saved my spouse and one minor child from the Covid vaccine also.

Now, in 2023, when I see almost all Covid-vaccinated people get Covid, I do not need to have a vaccinology degree to see that the Covid vaccine was a scam and a flop.

In other words, it takes incredible intelligence, resources, education, luck, effort and TIME to develop good vaccines. They cannot be made without all of the above.

It takes significantly less than the above, to understand a negative – that a particular vaccine is ineffective or unsafe.

Now about autism.

I made a significant effort looking at vaccines vs. autism, in hopes of making a viral, fact-based, hard-hitting post about it. While researching this subject I realized that there is not enough “facts” to go by. It is likely an intentional result of not properly evaluating vaccine safety, but unfortunately there is a dearth of facts.

I also realized that most likely, autism is one thing (people are born with it), and vaccine-related brain damage that is being discussed, is something else and is not really autism (because the infants in those stories were perfectly fine until they received their vaccine dose).

That said, I do not just post bullshit for which I do not have evidence, so I stay quiet on vaccines vs autism.

@ Igor Chudov

You are one sick delusional idiot. Myself, Orac, Diane and others have refuted everything you write; but you ignore and just keep posting. YOU ARE REALLY SICK

“the infants in those stories were perfectly fine until they received their vaccine dose”

Except the ones who, when later investigated, turned out to have been showing signs of autism all along but it hadn’t been seen as significant by the parents or doctors.

In general, you seem to have little use for actual research. And while I am unaware of any vaccine researchers posting on this blog, this seems a strange comment, as I doubt that their comments would have any effect on you. You have an impressive ability to convince yourself of your own reasoning, which you seem to be able to do without any actual data.
It may be true that a successful mRNA-based SARS-COV-2 vaccine should not have been expected, the same can be said for most drug leads that do not make it to the market for a variety of reasons.

To come to any conclusion based on different research project seems theoretical to anyone who has actually conducted any scientific research, and many here have been involved different types of research. So while It’s true that “it takes incredible intelligence, resources, education, luck, effort and TIME to develop good vaccines”, past failure is not always a accurate predictor of future success.

So your statement that you “do not just post bullshit for which I do not have evidence” seems comical, as your posts and comments are filled with cherry-picking and confirmation-bias.

Do Google Scholar search for mrna vaccine, You will noticr development indeed took some time and there are mRNA vacines, among ohter agains cancer.
SARS CoV 2 is assuredly not a bioweapon (do you envision sneezing corps to infect enemy)
COVID vaccine was a scam ? This is would mean 0% efficacy. Actually it was originally 95%. Remember papers posted.
Did you simply look Google Scholar for vaccines and autism ? How evidence do you need ?

Igor, it seems that you have an inability to admit you were wrong. If you think that NOT doing that is important, your opinions are worthless, just like your research. Tell us, remind us, what, exactly are your qualifications in regard to the related medical science subjects. Let me guess, fuck all.

Re: babies being “perfectly fine” until they get a certain vaccine: Human memory and perception are full of holes and flaws. I didn’t start worrying much about my kid until she was 21 months (1 3/4), and I was shocked when autism came up just after she turned 3, because I was monitoring her for obvious signs, and, well, she really had only two: never responding when we called her name, even though at that point she knew it, and not using pronouns yet, calling herself by her name instead of “I.” I blew the former off as the beginnings of the ADHD that runs in my family and the latter off as bilingualism. So I think most parents are just unaware of the subtle signs the husband and I started to notice in retrospect after her diagnostic process started. Things like, say, not pointing much (I thought they had to never point at all), not making consistent eye contact (my husband noticed that since as early as 6 or 7 months, but I thought it had to be no eye contact), fascination with age-inappropriate objects (I thought her love of phones at 12-19 months was so adorable and modern, except, well, she liked old-fashioned ones with buttons and/or receivers, not the ones that show cartoons), echolalias (I didn’t know repeating phrases from cartoons counted), stims (yeah, we noticed the spinning and head shaking but she didn’t flap, rock, finger flick, or tiptoe), mostly solitary pretend play (I thought it had to be no pretend play). When these parents see their first obvious and concerning sign and then start to notice a few others, especially after a kid got a shot with side effects or a bad reputation, they may misremember it as sudden. (And I don’t think most people know about the psych research findings on how we BS ourselves via memory.) So most if not all of the alleged vaccine injury cases may well have been born autistic, but the parents blew off subtle early signs (perhaps their kid smiled and babbled pre-MMR but didn’t point or look and was already compulsively flipping objects over before they started playing with light switches all day) and didn’t start worrying until the kid’s babbling and smiling started to diminish and they tiptoed when they learned to walk.

Re: covid shots: I’ve had covid 3 times. All after shots. If I were a logical thinker, I’d agree with you, right? Sure, but then I wouldn’t be a critical thinker. A critical thinker critiques their own thinking, and looks for a broader and more robust evidence base. Like, covid levels having dropped locally from the time healthy young adults got vaccinated until Omnicron came out, and local hospitalization and death with Omnicron being no worse than with Gamma and Lambda (the South American Alpha analogues) in spite of 4 times as many reported cases. There was even a time before the case drop when there were more under 40s (just starting to get their shots) than over 60s (who had their shots already) in the hospital. Maybe the vaccine didn’t work for me (though, no long covid after 3 cases, so maybe it did), but on a population level there was evidence for the flu-shot-like partial protection that realists predicted.

@ Igor:

Where do I begin?

You speak so authoritatively- as many anti-vaxxers do- in order to convince followers BUT it doesn’t mean that you know enough to criticise vaccines OR to know which sources are trustworthy .

I notice that anti-vaxxers/ alt med proselytisers frequently give themselves away by illustrating the poor quality and small amount of their knowledge. I used to collect examples for comedy such as:
an “expert” on bio/ physio who can’t pronounce parts of the brain
or who tells women that they should all have a fat percentage of 12%
or a PhD who mispronounces most non-English names ( lots more examples).
RFK jr speaks ex cathedra but knows little.

Autism is not brain damage. Vaccines are not dangerous. Other commenters show you places where you can start to learn but you persist.

I understand that you like to write articles and get followers BUT is it fair to mislead people about health issues? Do you want to encourage poor decisions? Like scaring them about Covis vaccines?
-btw- I
had 4 vaccines ( J&J, Moderna booster, Pfizer booster, bivalent Pfizer)
and had virtually no side effects and NO Covid! Fancy that!

You advocate mistrust of experts by relying upon suspicions about big government or big corporations misleading the public which may be true in some cases BUT what are the alternatives? Dismiss SBM altogether and tell Orac et al to take a collective hike? Follow alt med/ anti-vax “thought leaders” who advocate against SBM and governmental surveillance of medicine relying upon natural solutions instead?

Would you prefer a “go-it-alone” libertarian paradise where anyone can
teach, treat illness, advise people or play newscaster? “Censoring” is dangerous say many alt med / anti-vax advocates while they promote bad ideas knowing that they probably won’t be sued or held responsible if anyone is harmed following their suggestions.

My question to anti-vaxxers:
are your theories, ideas and research taught at any standard, credentialled universities in the US, UK, Canada, AUS, NZ, RSA?

You’re better than this.

Their ideas are not taught at universities because the Illuminati Freemason Jewish Banker WEF Spale Aliens fund the universities and pay the provosts not to hire people who are on to Them ™. 😉

I just drank a bottle of beer, and I get drunk easily, so I will keep this reply brief.

==> are your theories, ideas and research taught at any standard, credentialled universities in the US, UK, Canada, AUS, NZ, RSA?

Our science and evidence-based theories will soon be taught everywhere. Classes such as “conspiracy detection 201”, “history of medical quackery 1600-2023”, etc would be taught at elite colleges.

On a serious note…

It is utterly ridiculous that private citizens such as myself need to question medicine, science, and public health. Personally, until 2020, if someone told me that I would be one of people questioning the above, I would laugh and dismiss that as impossible.

(the only exception to the above was my knowledge that flu vaccine was a scam, something I thought was an oddity and an exception to the general rule)

Then the COVID pandemic started and it unraveled my previous beliefs about vaccines, biomedical science, our health and other authorities etc. I realized that a crime was in progress and that I have a moral imperative to speak up, which is what I did.

Ever since I was a little kid I was a fan of science. I still am. I want science to return back to its rules of rigor, skepticism, and independence. I hope that scientists will find strength to resist perverse monetary incentives.

“It is utterly ridiculous that private citizens such as myself need to question medicine, science”

Gotta have something to stop you leading a productive life eh?

@ Igor:

Since the 1990s, alt med proselytisers and anti-vaxxers have predicted a vast paradigm shift, a virtual tsunami that would sweep away SBM and replace it with their own theories, research findings and curriculum BUT
it hasn’t happened.
How do I know? Because I’ve followed trends since then, more intensely since 2000. They ALL say that vaccines and meds are on the way out, making way for natural foods, herbals and spirituality.

Meanwhile , SBM has been burnishing its armamentarium.

I use the vaccines/autism imbroglio as an example because unlike many of its supporters, I actually studied cognitive development, testing and neurological BUT other areas hold as well. ( e.g. cancer therapies, CVD, vaccines for infection etc).

Much of the research they rely upon to support their ideas does not stand up to peer review and/ or scrutiny. You can’t find accredited schools teaching their theories because they are totally contradicted by data from around the world in many diverse areas of inquiry. I’m sure you can find an alt med/ naturopathy school that endorses some of it but they may also endorse Qi, meridians and healing at a distance.

About the flu vaccine:
it decreases the chance people will get ill although
–sometimes the annual strains chosen are not the best match
— some people don’t have a strong response
HOWEVER
the perfect is forever the enemy of the good and reducing the rate of illness is important especially when millions of people are involved: less death, less suffering, less time lost from work,school, less medical expenses.

If vaccines reduce the chance of illness by 50% ( a guess) that’s improvement.
If you were offered a chance to reduce your taxes by 50%, wouldn’t you take it?

re classes on “conspiracy detection” and “medical quackery history”
Aren’t Orac and other sceptics already doing that?

Perhaps private citizens produce some proofs. Papers usually have COI and funding statements, and even statement that funders have nothing to do with research.

“It is utterly ridiculous that private citizens such as myself need to question medicine, science, and public health.”

What’s utterly ridiculous is that Igor feels qualified to challenge actual scientists with his goofy Googlings.

This attitude didn’t suddenly arise during the pandemic. You can bet Igor was into the crazy long before that.

@Igor: Your dismissal of the flu shot as a scam before the pandemic indicates that you understood less about vaccines and medicine than you originally thought. Dismissing flu shots as useless is a common misconception, given that (a) the flu mutates a lot and has many strains, (b) much of what people think is flu is actually a “bad cold” virus such as adenovirus, parainfluenza, or RSV, which can all be told apart from the flu by taking longer to get from first symptoms to worst symptons (for the flu it’s just a few hours), (c) the flu shot needs 2 weeks to take effect, so if you’re exposed to the flu in the 2-week window after getting the shot you will get sick anyway, and (d) 20-60% sounds low compared to the effectiveness of other shots (but surely people would take a vitamin that said it reduced their odds of getting the flu by 20-60%).

Given that you didn’t think a shot that didn’t have effectiveness ovef 90% for a lifetime could possibly be useful, you were kind of doomed to not take covid shots seriously. As for the V for Vendetta conspiracy theory, were you perhaps unsure about this whole global warming thing before the pandemic? That’s also a big predictor of being anti-covid vax. One relative of mine who’s anti-covid-vax did take flu shots seriously (at least while her kid was under 6) but was a global warming doubter due to libertarian sentiments. She opposed covid interventions on “they kill small business” ground and ate up conspiracy theories.

You raise an interesting moral question: Is it moral to feed your audience with partial truths and cherry picked evidence that has no function, other than to confirm their biases? I think that we all know that your answer is yes.

I’m sure that you see yourself as a moral person, but that to me to be little more than self-rationalization. It seems that your claim to be a part of the moral side is crucial to your identity and enables you to do your work. You claim to be a fan of science, but this fandom also seem to be extremely selective. What have you done to educate your readers on the scientific method? Or the uncertainty that is an intrinsic part of research?

You question science, but seem incapable of understanding the science and unable of questioning your own assumptions. The only thing your readers learn from your posts is that they are victims and who to blame.

“It is likely an intentional result of not properly evaluating vaccine safety, but unfortunately there is a dearth of facts.”

Ok then it’s easily just as “likely” that the phases of the moon affect autism by your logic. Thus really is some of the most ignorant, fever-swamp, loony bullshit you’ve posted to date.

Also-there are plenty of facts. New ones come to light almost weekly on this issue. You just choose to ignore them.

SAD.

I ran across another video featuring Nutter Buttar in which he relates being poisoned, not just at CNN while he was there for an interview, but also months before at some kind of world health conference in Barcelona. On both occasions he was deliberately given 200 times the amount of (something) present in the (Covid?) vaccine, but was cheery about it, since They took their best shot and couldn’t bring him down.

Sounds like he might have had heart failure signs/symptoms on both those occasions but recovered for awhile. Or maybe They really did lace his drinks or hors d’oeuvres with spike proteins/adjuvants/fetal parts/sucrose. It’s chilling to think about.

https://rumble.com/v2p0d60-doctor-rashid-buttar-poisoned-at-conference-r.i.p-51823.html

Always be careful never to leave your drink unattended when at a bar or nightclub. A Pfizer operative could be lurking nearby to slip you an mRNA mickey.

You might think so, but those Pharma operatives are pretty slick. Look what happened to Edmond O’Brien in D.O.A.:

He said that he was “vaccine shed” at a … drumroll … antivax conference

“200 times the amount of (something) present in the (Covid?) vaccine”

Wouldn’t that imply that you could have at least two hundred vaccine doses at once and still come through OK?

Also, how big is his portable analysis laboratory?

Continuing from yesterday:

If you observe them over time, alt med and anti-vax proponents usually resort to conspiracy theories to explain why their theories/ research have not become part of medical consensus despite being brilliant and revolutionary
— someone nefarious is suppressing it
— there is a plot to blackwash them
— Big Money is involved
— SBM, universities, the government and the media are ALL corrupt

HOWEVER their ideas are quite piecemeal and based upon suspect studies.
SB research has been developing over decades and one question intimately links to others in adjacent areas so confirmation comes not from one isolated study BUT from a network of interlocking results across several areas of inquiry: this is especially apparent in research on the origins of autism which involve animal research, imaging studies, genetics, developmental observation et al
Wakefield’s study was not tossed out because of one negative result** but by groups of studies over decades. I usually list important researchers but won’t bother here because SB people already know them and scoffers won’t read them.

Psychologists who study anti-vaxxers ( K. Douglas, M. Hornsey) show that they believe CTs and often support more than one.
I’ve discovered that this may be a way to identify them:
those who are strongly anti-vax usually also support CTs in other fields beyond SBM which may indicate a mindset or personality factor. Big money anti-vax sites usually include political and social CTs as well. ( see NN, prn, CHD). This makes sense because they can’t support their ideas with data so they need histrionic stories to upset and motivate their followers.
Orac has illustrated how certain political ideas fit into an anti-vax agenda. Studies/ polls have shown anti-vaxxers are more likely to vote in particular ways. Unfortunately, I’ve recently noticed that many of those I survey have terribly biased, or even hateful, views of transgender people, some expressed cautiously, some appallingly outrightly. They may worry about the breakdown of traditional roles and family structure as well as society in general. Libertarian and small government ideas are common. There may be narcissistic and/ or paranoid ideas ( as researchers above showed). As an illustration: two alties on the same day ( yesterday) discuss how cities are dying and people are fleeing them to the safety of the countryside.

** and great reportage

The typical pattern I see among educated and/or thoughtful people is that these people tend to start with a moral or spiritual conviction, which tends to lead to science denial if the science suggests policies that conflict with the conviction might be a good idea, which tends to lead to conspiracy theories to justify the science denialism.

From the left, it starts with “pollution and excessive dominance of big business are bad things, and we need to protect nature and small enterprise” which leads to “something’s sketchy about Roundup Ready GMOs” which leads to “Roundup and GMOs are probably less safe than conventional crops and other types of pesticides, especially organics, because pollution and nature, even if the science says otherwise” to “Monsanto must be fudging the science and bribing the scientists, and surely GMOs and Roundup are disastrous.” And as they find people who agree with them on those things, they may delve into stuff about homeopathy, chemtrails (pollution!), or adjuvants and preservatives in vaccines (pollution!) causing autism.

For my anti-covid-vax sister, the progression was something like “small business should be valued over big business, but business in general should be free to operate without undue restriction” to “carbon emission concerns are too much restriction on business and probably harder for smaller businesses to adhere to” to “there’s something fishy about this anthropogenic global warming thing, wasn’t the earth warm between the ice ages and during the age of the dinosaurs?” to “scientists are probably fudging the global warming data to push their agenda and damage business for some a-holes’ personal gain” to “holy cow, these covid restrictions are forcing small businesses to close but keeping hypermarkets open – there’s something fishy about this” to “covid shots are a moneymaking fraud to kill small medical businesses, NPIs are made for killing small businesses and warming us up to authoritarianism, and covid was probably a botched bioweapon cooked up in the Wuhan lab.”

Though some people may just start out as conspiracy nuts.

Karen Douglas ( U Kent) has reviews, studies, interviews and audios about why people believe in CTs and how this affects how they behave.

Denice, regarding migration. I live next to Chicago. It is experiencing great net migration of people out of the city. Chicago is a city in deep decline.

Regarding Covid vaccines: the Covid virus, a lab chimera containing (very functional and important) HIV genes, was financed and developed by the same people who, we were asked to believe, “developed Covid vaccine in 2 days”.

The vaccine, dangerous and obvously non-working and not preventing transmission (everything became clear when the “Barnstable county outbreak” happened) was nevertheless mandated to be administered to young people, who did not need it.

This looked, in the fall of 2021, like a crime of highest magnitude. My subsequent observations validated my conclusion.

In addition to such general observations, my loved one is a victim of Covid vaccine. (did not die but had serious health damage)

I felt compelled to speak up against this crime and I hope to see the criminals investigated and to be sanctioned appropriately.

I will not rest until that happens.

A large number of people, over 1% of population, left Chicago during just one year.

I cannot read minds and I do not know why they left – but I can guess. For many, Chicago’s nasty Covid vaccine mandates played a role.

I remember how I, an unvaccinated individual, was not allowed into restaurants, even McDonald’s.

It made me recall other countries in the past which similarly banned groups of people from entering restaurants in a similarly obnoxious manner.

The alt med/ righties I follow always claim that people are deserting liberal/ elitist enclaves. Well, as someone who lives next to one/ visits another, I see neither that nor the Mad Max scenarios described: truthfully, many people are leaving because they can’t afford housing there. A few personal examples from NY/ NJ/ CA with wild price tags:
— my uncle’s 17′ wide house is 2M+
— my grandmother’s larger house with garden ‘cabin’ 6.5M
— a nothing, old 3 floor place just around the corner here 1.2M
— c1900 small stucco wonders on RT 1 SF 2M+
They include SF/ Silicon Valley and Metro NY. see Zillow. See also crime trends over the past 50 years.

I think these reports target people who live far away and don’t know the reality: we have low crime, decent services, diverse people and job opportunities. Why do they do it? To ratchet up hate for liberal, educated coastal elites and immigrants?

I cannot read minds and I do not know why they left – but I can guess. For many, Chicago’s nasty Covid vaccine mandates played a role.

Your guess on this is as worthless as your “facts” about excess deaths and the dangers of covid vaccines. I know numbers aren’t your friend, but consider that in the metro Chicago area the median price for a home is, as of this April, $320,000, and in the city of Chicago it is $340,000. Both of those are down from April 2022 (about 1.5% for metro area, 8% for the city) but still quite expensive. Instead of grasping for your usual data-free conspiracies, perhaps consider living costs as a factor for the “massive” population decline [although, as pointed out, it’s not massive at all: that’s just your lie].

I remember how I, an unvaccinated individual, was not allowed into restaurants, even McDonald’s.

You mention this “slight” quite a bit. It’s starting to seem as though your crusade of lies about covid vaccines is due to this and not at all about any understanding of the issues [not that you have any understanding of the issues, you’ve made that very clear].

“It made me recall other countries in the past which similarly banned groups of people from entering restaurants in a similarly obnoxious manner”

Yeah. I always felt it was grossly unfair that I couldn’t get into a night club wearing jeans and trainers. Not to mention the one time I forgot I had a penknife in my pocket and they confiscated it. I mean, was I was going to attack someone with a Swiss army knife?

I cannot read minds and I do not know why they left – but I can guess. For many, Chicago’s nasty Covid vaccine mandates played a role.

As far as I’m concerned, this is easily the most imbecilic thing that you’ve trotted out so far.

@ Igor:

I hope your loved one is better
but because illness followed a vaccine doesn’t mean it was caused by the vaccine:
actually, we know that very few people are harmed by the vaccine BUT that number is not zero.

Vaccines seem scary because someone injects an “unknown” substance into another person who might imagine bad intent or contamination. We have risk numbers of serious adverse events even death.

A related example is commercial flight:
people relinquish control to airline personnel/ machines and fear certain death if anything goes wrong HOWEVER
the chance of dying in a crash is 1 in 10/ 11 million. Not zero. Yet people really fear plane crashes ( I actually knew someone- vaguely- who died in a crash).

When you are not totally in control and have limited sources of information, it’s easy to become frightened or to imagine dire consequences. Unfortunately, some of the people I survey make a comfortable living scaring people to sell products, gain followers and wield social power, They manipulate their followers in order to have control over them. When you counsel people, you should try to allay unreasonable fears without negating reality. Sure, there’s a chance of negative consequences from vaccines BUT they are very small and the risk of the illness is much worse. We have numbers.

re young people and vaccines:
they can also get very sick or miss school or work or be miserable for a week or two or pass on the illness to an elderly, immune compromised person or baby or just help the virus replicate/ mutate more etc.
There are figures about the risks of myocarditis in young men but they are less than that problem arising from infection.

Igor, I thought you were a numbers guy: look up the numbers.
Also, look up Karen Douglas ( U Kent) who studies the psychology of conspiracy theories – why people use them. Many articles, interviews. Entertaining information.

Denice,

I love reading science articles on conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists.

Occasionally such articles produce amazing material for substack posts, also. (example, the “inoculation of the mind” theory)

So I will appreciate any links you would send me.

She has many studies and articles that are easy to find on the net but Why people believe in conspiracy theories with Karen Douglas, PhD at apa.org is a good start.
Another investigator is Matt Hornsey.

@Denice, thank you for naming Karen Douglas. A nice article by Karen Douglas is: “COVID-19 conspiracy theories”

It actually shows everything that is wrong with “conspiracy psychology research”, a perfect example in a small article.

In brief, what is wrong is that the psychologists researching the topic, are utterly ignorant regarding the subject matter concerning the specific conspiracies that they are discussing.

They are so ignorant that they do not even realize that 1) they are ignorant and 2) that the “facts” underlying their theories are wrong and 3) the people they are discussing as “conspiracy theorists” are the ones who were correct all along.

Thus in the end these “conspiracy researchers” are actually the blind fools operating with a wrong premise.

Are there wrong and unfounded conspiracy theories? Sure! But to know which ones are wrong or right, requires a lot of subject matter expertise.

But Karen does not even stop for a second to consider that, possibly, the conspiracy theories she discussed (that Sars-Cov-2 came from a lab and face masks used for the pandemic are useless) were true.

So Karen Douglas, a poorly informed person with wrong assumptions and unfounded beliefs, is theorizing about “conspiracy theories” that turned out to be correct.

In brief, what is wrong is that the psychologists researching the topic, are utterly ignorant regarding the subject matter concerning the specific conspiracies that they are discussing.

What a surprise: igor dismisses work that shows everything he is about is wrong. Igor, being utterly ignorant of the subject matter being discussed describes you perfectly.

@Igor, thank you for your unique viewpoint. I think that we can all agree that you are expert when it comes to conspiracy theories.
Your ability to ignore anything that doesn’t fit with your narrative is second to none, rivaled only by your ability to overestimate your own knowledge (a common thing for people who speaks in absolutes, such as your self).

Oh, Igor:
you can’t just assert that research/ researchers are “ignorant.. wrong…blind” you have to illustrate it with DATA.

A group of psychologists in the UK, US, AUS and EU have been studying conspiracy theories/ CT believers since the early 2000s: they have found who they are more likely to be, their psychological traits, how they behave etc. Researchers have assembled data that explores personality and demographic differences from the average ( non-CT believers) AND this is also demonstrable in real world “experiments” such as voting patterns/ rates of illness. ( US: CT belief, suspicion of PH measures and higher Covid rates/ deaths in red states)

Douglas discusses how CT belief serves psychological needs- people use CTs as a way to reduce uncertainty, increase feelings of security and enhance social/ self acceptance
Does she hit too close to home for you?

Orac has explained in painstakingly detailed posts ( e.g. IIRC 8/8 2022) why it is highly unlikely ( but not totally impossible) that Covid was created in a lab ( short answer: they studied sequencing and the virus looks very close to viruses at the wet market)

BUT at any rate, research about CT belief does not necessarily have to involve whether the belief is true or not:
I could study how belief in astrology or space aliens ( most likely not true) differs in women and how it reflects personality/ lifestyle or that CT belief can include contradictory items ( e.g. Princess Di was murdered/ is still alive in hiding: Ss often believe both items- is she Schroedinger’s princess?)
We can study religious ideas that can’t be proven one way or another. ( One god or many or none).

I think that what these psychologists show is unflattering to you:
you are not educated in either life science/ medicine or psychology/ social science yet you write how wrong all of the standard historical studies/ data are; you write to attract an audience. AND you don’t include data or show your work. Research is not one study but a complex network of intertwined realities explained numerically.

Your writing allows you to acquire likeminded followers who may actually take you seriously and behave in ways that follow your guidelines. As Orac writes in his latest post, misinformation has consequences especially when it can be spread at the speed of light on the net. Some misinformation** can be harmful
although NO ONE can ascribe it to any one person.

One of the alt med rockstars I follow gives pisspoor medical/ psychological “information” on a daily basis which can – and has – harmed people who take him seriously.

I’m sure Orac’s regulars will react to you as well.

** I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are sincere saving the term disinformation for deliberate mistruths.

Igor, I thought you were a numbers guy: look up the numbers.

He is in the sense that he loves to lie about them. Based on his analyses, he has no clue what to actually do with them.

The people moving out of Chicago are moving to the suburbs. Chicago’s become too damn expensive.
There’s a building boom in the suburbs, which is causing it’s own problems, but that’s another story.
I remember when Naperville was considered far west of Chicago, but now it’s just another ‘burb.

I remember when Naperville was considered far west of Chicago, but now it’s just another ‘burb.

Mutatis mutandis Westmont. There was a dairy farm immediately behind the backyard when I was a kid.

Chicago’s become too damn expensive.

Depends on what you want, I suppose. I’ve been in Hyde Park since 1985, and the most notable part over the years has been the U. of C.’s repeated attempts to be “hip.” It was a much more interesting place to live before 3rd or 4th wave of “urban renewal” was dragged out again and again.

^ The University’s bungling of what to do after Treasure Island folded is a good example — there’s now a Trader Joe’s and a Whole Foods and no general-goods grocery store within the boundaries of the neighborhood.

Thanks, Booth School.

Whales are dying and washing up on beaches in increasing numbers.

https://abc7ny.com/climate-change-dead-whale-beached-tri-state-area/12901186/

Why are the whales dying suddenly? There can only be one answer – Covid vaccines! Either teams having been going out to sea and vaccinating whales, or they’re being killed by massive amounts of spike protein shed by the vaccinated and washed into waterways and then the sea.

And yet, all the profiteering “antivaccine” Substackers have been silent. Why aren’t they demanding whale autopsies and measurement of oceanic spike proteins?

Dr. Ryan Cole, a Trained Pathologist, must volunteer to do whale autopsies. Steve Kirsch, who likes to blubber and wave his wallet around, could offer to pay him $500 an autopsy and serve as diener, weighing organs and helping operate the king-sized Stryker saw.

It’s the least they can do for Science.

Now I’m imagining 19th century sailors in a small boat harpooning a whale with vaccines in a giant hypodermic needle.

I am sorry for that. Mrs P made me go kayaking at Port Noarlunga and parts of me touched the water.

Steve Kirsch is not available to do anything resembling work. He is still smarting from having his butt handed to him in the comments over at the Raptor’s place.

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