A week later, the article began to surface from the sea of my subconscious and I grew increasingly irked. I gradually came to realise that it was a much more frustrating article than I had initially given it credit for. The article basically accuses scientists and the government of effectively making up the scale of the swine flu threat in order to scare and distract the public, for reasons seemingly pulled from Jenkins’ nether-regions. At first, I thought: ‘So what? It’s just his opinion’. The whole point of an opinion piece is that it is an opinion, and if people disagree they can leave a comment. But I couldn’t shake it off. What good is an opinion if it’s not informed? Surely if a newspaper is going to print an opinion, it should be more than a knee-jerk reaction? Jenkins was basically using facts to support an already formed opinion. For me, journalism should be a bit more thoughtful than that. Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore and felt that I had to respond in some way. I’m not the only one. Tom Sheldon responded with his own piece, “Swine Flu Wasn’t Overhyped – Research Meant We Had to Play It Safe”, in the same section of The Guardian a week later. But here’s my belated tuppence-worth anyhow.

Let’s go through it piece by piece (don’t worry, I’ll leave out the boring bits so you won’t abandon me). The secondary headline reads:

“Remember the warnings of 65,000 dead? Health chiefs should admit they were wrong – yet again – about a global pandemic”

Then, in the first paragraph, we get:

“Six months ago… Swine flu was allegedly ravaging the nation. The BBC was intoning nightly statistics on what “could” happen as “the deadly virus” took hold. The chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, bandied about any figure that came into his head, settling on “65,000 could die”, peaking at 350 corpses a day.”

The inverted commas are Jenkins’ own.

Ok, first things first: health chiefs should admit they were wrong about a global pandemic. Already, Jenkins is misrepresenting the issue as well as just being plain wrong. Swine flu ‘is’ a pandemic. It ‘is’ global. What exactly is he wanting the apology for? That not enough people died? He then goes on to complain about the BBC and the chief medical officer telling us what could happen due to the Swine flu outbreak, as if informing the public of possibilities is somehow dishonest. I for one want to know how serious Swine flu could be. If it turned out to be extremely deadly, like some flu epidemics throughout history have been (to a terrifying degree), I would be very angry and upset if the government had not informed me of this very real possibility. Knowing the potential threat means we can prepare for that eventuality. If it doesn’t happen, that’s a cause for rejoicing, not attacking government language. Plus, Jenkins seems to forget the grilling the government took when they didn’t respond thoroughly and quickly enough for a BSE outbreak several years ago. A few years later, there was another outbreak of BSE and this time the government responded immediately and comprehensively, with plans already in place. Maybe the outbreak wouldn’t have spread far this time, but they couldn’t take the risk again. Governments prefer to have as easy a ride as possible at the hands of the voters. Of course, they were lambasted for a supposedly disproportionate response, but for them it was a case of choosing the lesser of two evils. One can’t help but think Jenkins would have slammed them either way.

Misusing language seems to be Jenkins’ secret weapon in this article too.  Aswell as the constant inverted commas implying dishonesty without any qualification, we have phrases such as allegedly ravaging, which instantly implies deceit; we have the BBC intoning nightly statistics, which gives them an aura of some kind of street preacher preaching the end of the world, or of the Grim Reaper himself pointing his finger at us through the TV screen and saying “Come with me…”. Sir Liam Donaldson apparently bandied about any figure that came into his head, although how Jenkins managed to get access to the inside of Donaldson’s head, I don’t know. Maybe he has a journalist’s pass? It’s enough to make a Daily Mail columnist blush, let alone a Guardian one. Take away all of Jenkins’ assumptions and emotive language and we’re left with no trace of an argument: it exists only in what Jenkins himself suggests, not in the reality he claims to convey.

The whole article is written in the same way. Paragraph two:

“Donaldson knew exactly what would happen. The media went beserk. The World Health Organisation declared a “six-level alert” so as to “prepare the world for an imminent attack”. The happy-go-lucky virologist, John Oxford, said half the population could be infected, and that his lowest estimate was 6,000 dead.”

Donaldson knew exactly what would happen. Implying what? That Donaldson was lying? That the government deliberately created the scare? Grand claims, especially as Jenkins never once provides any evidence to support them throughout the entire article. His description of John Oxford as happy-go-lucky is simply an attempt to malign him in the minds of the readers. Warning of the potential risk is hardly happy-go-lucky, but courtesy of Simon Jenkins we now imagine John Oxford as this glib monster, casually terrifying the public with offhand comments without caring of the consequences. Cheers, Simon. Nice to know you’re treating us like adults.

What is starting to come through quite clearly by this point is the conspiracy theory mentality behind Jenkins’ thinking. He has quite obviously already decided that the BBC and the government have worked together to create the Swine flu ‘scare’, and doesn’t seem remotely interested in providing any proof. He even complains that:

“If anyone dared question this drivel, they were dismissed by Donaldson as extremists.”

So: what the government is saying is drivel, and the good, concerned public are being misleadingly labelled as extremists. No argument or proof here, just assertions; Jenkins is unconcerned with persuasion, preferring instead to hoodwink us with rhetoric. How closely the government and the BBC are supposed to be working together is left a bit vague, as Jenkins often seems to confuse the two as one organisation. They have become the faceless ‘them’ pulling the strings from behind the scenes to scare the public. Maybe it’s just anyone who wears a suit and appears on television that fits the bill for Jenkins. Look out, it’s an authority figure! Beware! Scientists, on the other hand, seem to confuse Jenkins; it is never quite clear whether he blames them as well, or sees them as duped by the same rhetoric. Certainly Jenkins is not a fan of scientists, as he spends most of his articles in the Guardian slagging them off; but he seems to be leaning more toward a buffoonish caricature of them in this one. At one point, he says:

“The “Andromeda Strain” was stalking the Earth, and its first victims were clearly scientists.”

For an article about the government trying to scare people with language, Jenkins certainly loves trying to do it himself. He’s the one referencing science fiction novels about killer viruses, not the Chief Medical Officer. Only a few paragraphs in and we’re already in a state of fear that the government, the BBC and maybe scientists are all out to terrify us to death. Who else can we throw into the mix?

“The government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies sails gaily on, still graced by the presence of Sir Roy Anderson, who happens also to draw a six-figure salary as a non-executive director of GlaxoSmithKline, which made hundreds of millions from the government’s panic.”

Heeeeeeeere’s Big Pharma!

So why all this paranoia and accusations? Does Jenkins just hate everyone? Of course not…

“I accept that anyone can make a mistake, and authority has some duty to err on the side of caution. As Alastair Campbell implied on Tuesday, Iraq might have had weapons of mass destruction, so Blair was right to go to war just in case. But it is reasonable to ask, as the Chilcot inquiry is doing, why precaution on such a colossal and potentially destructive scale was justified when those who questioned the need for it have since been proved right. Is anyone asking about flu?”

I had to grit my teeth to write that. It is probably the most idiotic part of the entire article. So it’s okay to overreact when bombing unseen foreigners, but scaring the public by giving them information on the ‘potential risk’ of Swine flu is somehow out of order? Jenkins’ linking of the two is inane and offensive. Thousands of innocent civilians died because of the Iraq war. No-one died because they got a little frightened about a potential pandemic. Reality seems to have seeped out of the article at this point, and I’ve said all I have to say on this particular piece of stupidity.

After all this scaremongering – on Jenkins’ part, not anyone else’s – we are left to wonder: why? Why would it benefit the government/BBC/big pharma/the lizard people to scare the public? Jenkins references the BSE and SARS outbreaks and implies that the government likes to regularly scare its people in order to distract from other issues:

“The Blair government, and now Brown’s, have proved adept at using scare politics to divert attention from other troubles.”

Okay, cool, Jenkins has stopped preaching and is now putting forward a hypothesis. Great, now we can get to the meat. I wonder what troubles he means, and what his evidence is? Let’s find out…

Ah. It’s just that one sentence. That’s it. That’s the whole argument there. Sorry, I got excited for a moment.

It’s a baseless claim. It’s also worth pointing out that these ‘scares’ Jenkins refers to happened at the time of actual infectious outbreaks. There’s nothing suspicious about them on their own. You have an outbreak, you have a response. The absence of responses would have been much more of a concern. I also can’t imagine what things Jenkins thinks the government was distracting from – and judging by his omission of them in the article I doubt he does either. Governments are always mired in controversy, and there was nothing specific to the times of these outbreaks that needed to be distracted from then than at any other time. Maybe he’s suggesting that the government just responds to whatever’s there at any one time in order to just distract from government in general? If he is suggesting that, maybe he should have let the readers know. What I think he actually is suggesting, however, is that these scares are completely engineered. He constantly quotes statistics throughout the article in an attempt to downplay the severity of the various infectious outbreaks we’ve had over the years, comparing them to government statistics regarding how severe they ‘may’ have been, and pointing out how less severe the reality was. Every time, he seems to forget that the government figures represent the ‘potential’ possibility. The point isn’t that the figures in reality should end up being the same as the prediction. The point is that the prediction COULD have come true, and we need to know these things.

I mentioned earlier about how the government was criticised for not reacting swiftly to the first BSE outbreak. I don’t blame the government for acting differently from then on. It is better that we are scared and live, than the government reacts poorly and people die, leaving a government mired in shame. Lives are at stake. The government cannot afford to understate risk to the public. These are decisions that have to be made regarding risks. They are not nice decisions, but we have a government precisely so that those kinds of decisions CAN be made.

The consequences of understatement can be disastrous. We know what epidemics and pandemics can do from history. Jenkins is simply making stuff up that isn’t there in order to attack the government, the BBC and whoever else grabbed his goat that week. It is pure conspiracy theory mentality. In reality, this isn’t about Blair or Brown, or the BBC: this is about practical decision making. He’s criticising the government for doing their job.

The article ends with:

“This is why people are ever more sceptical of scientists. Why should they believe what “experts” say when they can be so wrong and with such impunity? Weapons of mass destruction, lethal viruses, nuclear radiation, global warming … why should we believe a word of it? And it is a short step from don’t believe to don’t care.”

The problem, Simon, is that the “experts” weren’t wrong with such impunity. They weren’t even wrong. This is all in your head. You don’t seem to understand the nature of risk, and of caution based upon that risk. Just because things did not turn out to be as bad as they could have been, does not mean that the wrong decision was made. That is the basic error at the heart of your article.

I can only hope that most of Jenkins’ readers are more discerning than he is.

Today’s headline: newspaper accuses pharmaceutical companies of manufacturing the panic about the swine flu pandemic to sell more drugs.

This, of course, is the same newspaper that did its best at the time to report the facts and not create panic with articles such as this, this, this and this. I can’t bring myself to look at the articles that the Daily Express was putting out at the time: if the Mail is the malicious kid at school who spread nasty rumours about people, the Express is the gullible, panicky person he talks to first.

The article, in its rush to expose how Big Pharma leaned on the World Health Organisation to get swine flu bumped up to pandemic status, ignores the fact that swine flu met the WHO’s very basic criteria for a pandemic. Like any good conspiracy theory, it starts to unravel when you actually look at the facts. If there was any pressure from some Tamiflu-selling corporate mastermind it was fairly pointless, since swine flu far and away fit the bill for a pandemic anyway. Avian flu didn’t, and neither did SARS – two glitzy media diseases that you’d think would be ripe for making money.

The real spleen-buster is the Mail complaining that in the UK there have been “just 251 deaths overall”. They sound terribly disappointed by this. Poor show, swine flu. There is, of course, no mention of the UK’s excellent free healthcare services and the fact that worldwide about 13,000 people have died, but that’s not even the important bit.

The real danger of swine flu – as told to us by actual scientists at the time – was not that it was particularly more lethal than flu, but that it was particularly virulent and seemed to be predominantly striking young healthy individuals rather than the young, elderly and infirm. The Mail seems to miss this point completely despite the fact that even a cursory search on the WHO’s website throws up this press release which notes:

“Globally, we have good reason to believe that this pandemic, at least in its early days, will be of moderate severity… Worldwide, the number of deaths is small. Each and every one of these deaths is tragic, and we have to brace ourselves to see more. However, we do not expect to see a sudden and dramatic jump in the number of severe or fatal infections.”

This is fairly typical of science articles in the tabloids: scientists are amazing boffins who create wonderful treatments that evaporate fat and boost our ‘friendly bacteria’ until they make a public health warning, at which point it’s time to panic. When the imagined scare turns out to be fairly minor – just as the scientists initially suggested it would be – the papers take umbrage, puffing up their feathers and squawking loudly about how horrible it was to trick them. I prefer to think that all tabloid journalists have some kind of brain defect that renders them without short-term memory, but in truth they just know that nothing sells papers and breeds loyalty to a newspaper than the panic -blame cycle. They whip people up into a state and then when no threat materialises they cast themselves as great truth-seeking heroes, rooting out the responsible parties and making their readers feel so protected that they forget who it was who got them agitated in the first place.

It’s hard to see how anyone other than the papers could emerge victorious from this. Had the government been blasé about the whole thing and not stocked up on flu medication that would have been an even worse blunder. Raging aporkalypse just around the corner, but the government won’t give you the medicine you need! Practically every line about this story I read, I want to grab the person who wrote it and shake them, shouting “but it was you who created the ‘atmosphere of panic’ in the first place!”

Just like the MMR hoax, swine flu was turned from a moderate, legitimate health concern into a raging apocalyptic panic-fest by the newspapers, who will now proceed to lambast the people who “lied” and talked it up. As ever scientists get the blame, initially because the reality of the situation wasn’t jazzy enough for panic coverage and now because the panic coverage doesn’t match the reality. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the British press. They aren’t the worst though. While that article is a depressing example of today’s ‘quality’ journalism, nothing quite beats the heart-shrivelling horror of the comments below. The worst-rated comment?

“The pandemic was real under the definitions as set down by international scientific standards and vaccination can only be a good thing. Drugs companies are businesses so they are bound to make money but I don’t believe they engineered or influenced the decision making processes.”

Sorry, Phil from Edinburgh. This isn’t the right place for a rational run-through of the facts. This is a newspaper.

In 1995, another phone call from Russel introduced me to Westwood Studios new RTS game – Command & Conquer – which I came to love more than I loved Warcraft.  One of its distinguishing features, setting it apart from the Warcraft series was the inclusion of full-motion video sequences (with real actors!) introducing each mission.  After making free with Russel’s copy of C&C, I bought my own copy in early 1996, followed by its sequels as they were released, including the games from the C&C spin-off series Red Alert.

That was until 2008, and the publication of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3.  By then Westwood Studios had been bought up by gaming giants Electronic Arts, and with more money behind them (and much more money in the video game market than in 1995), EA were able to cast Hollywood stars for Red Alert 3‘s full motion video segments.  The cast included Tim Curry as Soviet Premier Antony Cherdenko;  J. K. Simmons as US President Howard T. Ackerman; Jonathan Pryce as Field Marshall Robert Bingham; George Takei as Japanese Emperor Yoshiro; and one Jenny McCarthy as Special Agent Tanya.

Yeah, that Jenny McCarthy.

My heart sank as I read her name on the back of the box in the Rock Ferry branch of PC World, prompting a brief email to EA:

Dear EA,

Although I’m a fan of the RTS genre in general and of the “Command & Conquer” series in particular, the involvement of Jenny McCarthy in “Red Alert 3″ means that it will be the first C&C game I won’t be buying.

McCarthy’s anti-scientific propaganda war against vaccination is endangering the lives of children around the world and I can’t bring myself to put money toward any project in which she is involved.

I appreciate my message is unlikely to affect casting decisions at EA, I’m sure there are wider issues, but I live in hope that you will consider re-casting Tanya in time for Red Alert 4.

Thanks for taking the time to read my email.

Best wishes to you all

Mike Hall

I never received a reply, nor did I really expect to.  So why am I boring you with this, over a year later?

In the dying weeks of 2009, the French video game studio Ubisoft released a new fitness title for Wii and PC entitled Your Shape featuring Jenny McCarthy.

Yes, that Jenny McCarthy.

Fortunately, 14 months is a long time in skepticism and we have a much tighter knit community in 2010 than we had when Red Alert 3 was published in October 2008.  An excellent post on the Depleted Cranium blog has been hurtling around Twitter for the last few days, urging those of us who feel strongly about the damage McCarthy is doing to boycott Ubisoft products.  Not only that, we should let Ubisoft know what we’re doing and why.

When a company selects a person to endorse a product, they try to avoid anyone who cast their product in a bad light or might be seen in a negative way to the consumer.  The absolute last thing they want is to find someone who is going to hurt their image or sales.  By refusing to patronize this company you can send them a message indicating you are dissatisfied with their choice of spokesperson and feel strongly that Jenny McCarthy is not someone who you associate with a good product or company.

Your Shape featuring Jenny McCarthy has yet to be released in the UK, but when it is I urge you not to buy it.  Or anything produced by Ubisoft.  Yes, I’m sorry, even the new Tom Clancy game.

We can do something about this.  Sure, Ubisoft are unlikely to withdraw, recast, reshoot and re-release the game they’re already published.  But maybe, just maybe, we can make enough noise so that Ubisoft, EA and any other games developer paying enough attention will more carefully consider their casting decisions in the future.

The oral hearings take the form of witnesses with relevant backgrounds being quizzed by committee members.  Witnesses for the first of these sessions included the legendary Ben Goldacre, Edzard Ernst from the University of Exeter, and Tracey Brown from the charity Sense About Science.  Speakers in favour of homeopathy included Paul Bennett from Boots, Peter Fisher from the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, and Robert Wilson from the British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers.

The big thing that came out of this hearing, from a rhetorical point of view, was the admission by Paul Bennett that Boots did not believe homeopathy to be effective – but they sell it anyway because of consumer demand.  This lead to us here at Merseyside Skeptics drafting An Open Letter to Alliance Boots, calling upon them to withdraw the product.  If you haven’t done so already, or even if you have, please check out the letter.  Digg it, tweet it, repost it, write about it.  Help up make some noise!

Ahem.

The pro-homeopathy witnesses, when challenged, mentioned a number of studies which they claimed supported the idea that homeopathy has strong effects beyond placebo.  So I thought I’d look up a few of the studies mentioned and see what those studies actually say.

The first study mentioned in the oral evidence was what Robert Wilson referred to as the “Witt Trial”.  When challenged to give a single homeopathic product for which there is good evidence to support efficacy, Wilson said:

Arnica, which is for bruising, and is extremely useful in post-operative care. There was a major trial done on arnica and, indeed, there is one that has just been published, the Witt Trial, which was done by the Charity Hospital in Berlin. It was a large trial - 3,700 patients involved - and that has shown clearly that there is a strong benefit in homeopathic use to these patients with long-term chronic conditions. One of the subjects of that trial was arnica.

For a kick off, the so-called Witt Trial is not a clinical trial.  It was a cohort study, published in December 2008, in the journal BMC Public Health.  3709 consecutive patients who were referred to a predefined selection of homeopaths for a consultation were recorded. Eight years later, they went back to the same 3709 and people. And guess what had happened?

Some of them had got better. Therefore, homeopathy works.  Makes sense to me!

On top of that, their criteria for “better” was based upon asking the patient “do you feel better?”, rather than any objective measure.  It was actually more standardised than that (please rate your condition today on a scale of 0 to 10 where 0 means you are 100% better, etc) but ultimately that’s what it came down to.

There was no control over what else the patients did in that time.  Many of them could have, and likely did, take other medicinal products during that time, be they complementary or evidence-based.  This lead to the study’s authors commenting:

As patients were allowed to use conventional therapies and other complementary therapies during the study period, the observed improvements cannot be attributed to homeopathic treatment alone.

There is no mention in the study, that I could see, of arnica, which is what Wilson claimed that the study showed effectiveness for.  There is no mention of any specific treatments actually, so although Arnica may well have been studied, I have no idea what for.

At the end of the eight year study, only 33% of the patients were still taking homeopathy.  29% had stopped taking homeopathy because they had recovered and 26% stopped taking homeopathy because they thought it wasn’t working.  Interestingly, twice as many children than adults had stopped treatment because they thought their condition had improved.  Adults were more likely to have stopped because they thought the treatment was ineffective.

The same patients were also quizzed two years after their visit to the homeopath.  The study says that there was practically no difference between the figures after two years and after eight years; and that in children, no relevant difference was found between those who stopped homeopathy and those who continued.

the differences in the outcome between those patients who stopped treatment and those who still continued were small

This seems to have been taken as a sign that the effects of homeopathy are long-lasting, rather than the arguably more sensible view that they’re non-existant.

I don’t claim to have any special expertise in reading clinical trials.  At best, I have a layman’s understanding.  Perhaps the data presented here is actually very interesting and relevant for a hundred different reasons.  But what this study certainly doesn’t do is provide strong support for the efficacy of homeopathic arnica, which is how Robert Wilson presented it in his evidence.  On the contrary, the study actually says:

The aim of this study […] was not to test the effectiveness of homeopathic drug treatment

The next study Wilson mentions was referred to as the Möllinger Trial.  This was published in the German journal “Research in Complementary Medicine”, edited by the psychologist Harald Walach.  This is some cause for concern, as Walach is also listed as co-author of the study.  That’s doesn’t have to be a reason to suspect foul play, but it is a red flag.

I couldn’t find the full text of this trial freely available online so there is a limit to what I can talk about, but I was fortunate enough to find some skeptical commentary from people who have read the full study; and of course we have the abstract.

This was described as a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial.  Which is a good start.  The participants – all healthy individuals – were divided into three treatment groups and studied over four days.

The first group was given 30C Arsenicum Album (which is the fancy-shmancy homeopathy way of saying Arsenic); the second group was given 30C Natrum muriaticum (a fancier-shmancier way to say table salt).  A third group was given placebo.

The idea is that, if homeopathy is true, because the patients are all healthy, then those in the Arsenic group should develop the same symptoms that homeopathic arsenic is used to treat.  Similarly, the patients in the salt group should develop the symptoms that homeopathic salt is used to treat.  And the people in the placebo group wouldn’t develop anything at all, or at least what they do develop would be unrelated.

There is another name for this type of study: a homeopathic proving.  Back to Robert Wilson for a moment:

a homeopathic proving is a technical term for when homeopathic medicines are assessed. It is not a way of doing a trial.

Sorry – why are you citing this paper then?  Arguably, citing provings only makes sense if the mechanism of action for homeopathy was plausible. Which is it not.  Leaving that aside for a moment, let’s look at the data.

The data seems very clear cut… perhaps too clear cut.  What about the trial’s methodology?  The number of participants is very important because, as Robert Wilson said in his evidence:

Any sample of fewer than 500 is not going to be statistically relevant.

If Wilson believes this, when why is he citing the Möllinger trial?  This trial included – wait for it – no fewer than twenty-five patients.  I’ll give that to you again – twenty five patients only.  By Wilson’s own flawed view of statistics, this trial is not statistically relevant.  I say flawed view because, as Evan Harris MP pointed out Wilson during the hearing:

whether the sample size is statistically significant depends on the frequency of the outcome you are measuring

And after the hearing, Ben Goldacre made a similar comment on his blog:

if you have a pill that cures everyone from an incurable condition then 40 people is fine, hell, a dozen would do

Another red flag is that all twenty-five subjects were actually trainee homeopaths, not that that has to make a difference.  As I say, just another red flag.  Though there does seem to be an increasing number of them!

Looking at the data itself – no non-specific symptoms in the two homeopathy groups, but eleven in placebo?  Surely you would expect to get similar numbers of non-specific symptoms across all groups?  This being the very point of the control group.  Absolutely no non-specific symptoms in the homeopathy groups? That is very suspicious.

Worse than that, they don’t just say an average of zero symptoms.  They say 0±2.  How can you get a deviation of ±2 without at least one patient having a negative symptom?  I don’t understand.  Genuinely!  Have I missed some subtle feature of statistics?  Answers on a postcard, please.

Next up is the randomisation code for this study.  This is the secret code used to blind the patients and clinicians from knowing which group is which.  The code for this trial was created by Rainer Schneider, though worryingly Scheider is also the person who did the analysis of the data, even though he knows (because he wrote the code) what the codes refer to.  This represents a flaw in the blinding.  I’m not accusing Schneider of deliberately introducing bias, but it’s another red flag to add to the list.

The results of this study do seem to be too good to be true.  One co-author is the editor of the journal which published the study, another co-author generated the blinding codes then performed supposedly-blind analysis of the data.  The result set itself doesn’t make any sense, with its ±2 symptoms and zero non-specific symptoms on the homeopathic groups.  It all seems very fishy.

Even if it were all above board, the study would still need to be repeated, with tighter protocols and more participants before it can overturn the mountain of evidence which suggests homeopathy doesn’t work.  Moreover, as mentioned earlier, this was never a test of efficacy, but a homeopathic proving!

The last paper I’m going to look at was referred to by Peter Fisher, who talked about an Italian trial done comparing homeopathy for the prevention of flu against placebo for the prevention of flu. He says:

quite a lot of people who actually got the homeopathic medicine got flu-like symptoms but did not actually get flu.

This was cited as a situation where homeopathy was known to have side effects.  If homeopathy was merely a placebo, then you wouldn’t expect to find side effects, says Fisher.

Except that’s bullshit.

I wasn’t able to locate this paper.  I did find a paper called “A randomized trial in the prevention of influenza-like syndromes by homeopathic management“, which was published in France, but the lead author was Italian.  This may or may not have been the paper to which Fisher was referring, but as I can’t find even an abstract for this paper online, there really isn’t much I can say about it.

What I can do, however, is query Fisher’s assertion that placebos do not have side effects.  Placebos can have side effects as much as they can have effects – it’s all down to the patients expectations.  If they expect a tablet to make them nauseous, then there is a good chance they will feel nauseous!

After the hearing, Ben Goldacre posted a note up on his website, which I think very accurately summarises the hearing.  Over to you, Ben:

One thing that will never get old for the homeopaths, it seems, is the old practise of pulling out a single trial and saying “ah, but look, pish to your meta-analyses, here is a trial where homeopathy works”. No matter how many times you point out why this is foolish and wrong, they will always think you’re just being picky, and that is why they will always give us joy.

Last Monday, actor Patrick Swayze lost a long fight with pancreatic cancer and passed away. Having been diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer in late January 2008, Swayze died on September 14th.

The news was met with a sadness from his fans, mostly girls I’ll needlessly add, but certain sections of the pseudomedical community have taken his death with an altogether different message. In an item posted to NaturalNews.com by editor Mike Adams, the self-proclaimed Health Ranger, Swayze’s death is in fact a chilling warning as to the dangers of Chemotherapy.

Quoting the article:

“Having put his faith in conventional chemotherapy, he largely dismissed ideas that nutrition, superfoods or “alternative medicine” might save him, instead betting his life on the chemotherapy approach which seeks to poison the body into a state of remission instead of nourishing it into a state of health.”

The article then goes on to put is death into the context of other celebrity deaths of late:

“He will be deeply missed, and in his death, he joins many other celebrities who have been recently killed by pharmaceuticals or chemotherapy.”

Killed by pharmaceuticals or chemotherapy. Killed. So, who are these other celebrity victims of western medecine?

“Peter Jennings died following chemotherapy for lung cancer”

No, he died of lung cancer, he was not killed by his lung cancer treatment.

Heath Ledger died following an accidental overdose of prescription medications

Well, yes, he overdosed. He took too much of these safe medications, exceeding the safe dosage. Had Heath drowned, would Mike Adams blame it water? Had he hung himself with a leather belt, would Mike Adams, Health Ranger, blame cows? Sorry for the macabre analogy, but I can’t help it – Mike Adams, Power Ranger clearly doesn’t understand logic or reason.

“Michael Jackson was killed by a doctor-administered injection of lethal painkillers”

No, he was killed by a lethal dosage of painkillers, not a dosage of  lethal painkillers. For whatever reason, Michael was given too much, and it killed him. Had he died from a stab wound, would Mike Adams be decrying steel?

“Famed newscaster Tim Russert most likely died from the fatal side effects of cholesterol medications”

This is news to a lot of people, I guess, including his coroner – who wrote in his report:

“…His history of coronary artery disease led to a myocardial infarction (heart attack) with the immediate cause being an occlusive coronary thrombus in the left anterior descending artery resulting from a ruptured cholesterol plaque.”

Still, far be it for Mike Adams, Glasgow Ranger, to let that detail spoil his story-telling.

“Former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow died after receiving chemotherapy for colon cancer”

Again, he died from colon cancer, he was not killed by his cancer treatment. There’s a diference.

“Bernie Mac was most likely killed by pharmaceutical side effects”

Only Mike Adams thinks this is the mostly likely cause –  everyone else is content to believe the physicians who asserted that he died of pneumonia caused by his Sarcoidosis. Still, Mike goes on:

“The list of celebrities killed by western medicine is seemingly endless. And now, sadly, Patrick Swayze joins that ever-growing list of famous, endearing people who paid the ultimate price for their misplaced faith in slash-and-burn medicine and “conventional” chemotherapy treatments.”

So he’s straw-manning modern medicine as ‘slash-and-burn’, and throwing rabbit-ears-quote-marks around “conventional” to somehow shadily imply that modern medicine and chemotherapy is not radical or effective. Well done, Mike Adams, with your amazing wordplay you completely negate the need to back up anything you say with proof. No, wait a minute – that’s bullshit, you still need to prove it.

How about the list of people who didn’t die of cancer, because western conventional medicines saved them? Far too numerous to list, and that’s even accepting the ridiculous assertion that anyone who isn’t saved by chemotherapy is therefore killed by it. Although, at least Mike Adams has a retort to that:

“Had Patrick Swayze’s pancreatic cancer gone away, doctors would have hailed chemotherapy as the genius treatment that saved Swayze’s life. But chemotherapy has never healed anyone of cancer. Not once in the history of medicine.”

Again, at best Mike Adams is indulging in semantics and wordplay – sure, nobody is ‘healed’ of cancer, because cancer doesn’t get ‘healed’ as such, it gets put into a state of remission. If you’re lucky, like an increasing number of patients are each year, as medical practice and techniques get even more effective than they currently are (which is amazingly effective, most of the time), your cancer goes into long-term remission, and doesn’t reoccur. Tell that to the Lone Ranger, though.

So, how would Mike Adams, Park Ranger, have saved Patrick Swayze? Unsurprisingly, he has his own health advice for cancer patients to take on board. Even more unsurprisingly, it’s sheer unadulterated bollocks:

“Could Patrick Swayze have saved his own life with natural medicine? Absolutely. Without question. Even late-stage pancreatic cancer can be reversed (yes, reversed) with full-on naturopathic treatments involving Chinese herbal medicine, deep body detoxification that includes sweat saunas and colon cleansing, radical changes in diet from “dead” foods to “live” foods, a healthy dose of vitamin D and the daily consumption of raw anti-cancer living juices made from fresh, organic produce like cabbage, broccoli and garlic.”

Forget chemotherapy, here’s a sunday roast and an enema, that’ll cure what ails you. Mike Adams here is guilty of some dangerous, mendacious levels of ignorance and complete disrespect – not just for Patrick Swayze (who was barely passed away when this quack was spouting his bullshit), but also disrespect for medicine, doctors, and above all cancer sufferers. Fortunately, the level of evil, twisted crap he’s peddling is so patently, blatantly, evilly bullshit that it will most likely have no more ill effect than to turn the stomach of anyone who comes across it, and will persuade almost nobody to his cause. At least, that’s what we have to hope.

Anti-Vax Propaganda from the AVN

A couple of weeks ago, I reported on the Australian Skeptics and their battle with the Australian Vaccination Network.  The AVN are a ‘pro-choice’ organisation which promotes the spread of information and debate on vaccines. No, wait, sorry, I’ve got that completely wrong – they’re a deceitful, weaselly organisation spreading misinformation, rumour and lies when it comes to vaccination. Led by Meryl Dorey, the AVN have made dangerous and deceitful claims that nobody dies of whooping cough, that the swine flu pandemic was planned and deliberate and that  the MMR vaccine causes autism.

The latest ignorant and dangerous pseudomedical crap from AVN’s website is this presentation, a 46-page PDF of hateful anti-vax propaganda. It’s so blood-boilingly, insultingly and pathetically manipulative it really has to be taken piece-by-piece, so permit me to do so.

Page 1 declares, in gaudy, sensationalist, fear-mongeringly red block capitals:

Compulsory Vaccination: IT’S HERE!

Erm, yes, true enough. It is here, admittedly in some very specific circumstances, but I’m with you so far. What next, Meryl?

February 2007, NSW became the first state to mandate full vaccination (10 required vaccines) for all medical staff and allied health students. Failure to comply will result in expulsion from school or loss of employment/transfer to another area of the facility if that area exists.

July 2007 – jump on the bandwagon
All other Australian states and territories have now introduced similar policies for their health students. Hospital policies will follow shortly

OK, so far so innocuous – although a successful scheme to raise vaccination rates and therefore lower rates of infection, injury and death from some very nasty diseases is somewhat flippantly dismissed as a ‘bandwagon’. And if it is a bandwagon – fuck it, it’s precisely the kind of bandwagon there should be more of. If there were a pro-condom bandwagon in South Africa, I’d welcome that too.

What does this mean?
- 5 out of the 10 required vaccines contain live viruses which will put vulnerable hospital patients at risk.- Staff and students who can think for themselves and who question authority will no longer be in the health system.
- The list of required vaccines is sure to increase – just as the childhood vaccination schedule is increasing. How many vaccines will be enough?

Ah, here we go, now begins the weasel-wording and the utter utter bullshit. Vaccines containing live viruses putting hospital patients at risk? Nope – where live viruses are used, they’re only given in extremely small degree to healthy subjects. Most commonly, inactive viruses are used for vaccination purposes, the immune system reacting to the dead virus, causing an immune response without risk of infection. No patients who are at risk are given a live vaccine – this is the whole point, in fact of herd immunity. Without vaccinating at-risk patients, the best way to prevent spread of the virus to them is to vaccinate everyone else, leaving the virus with no hosts to ride to the at-risk patients. Herd immunity protects.

Staff and students who can think for themselves and who question authority will no longer be in the health system? Nonsense. The only people who will be kept out of the health system are those who don’t believe in the efficacy of vaccinations – people who, therefore, have no business being in the health system. Similarly, staff who would ‘think for themselves’ and decide not to wash their hands between patients, or who would ‘question the authority’ of CPR techniques and make things up as they go along – those guys are also bounced right out of the hospital and onto the dole to. It’s not a question of authority, it’s a question of what we have proven works – like vaccinations.

The list of required vaccines is sure to increase – just as the childhood vaccination schedule is increasing? I damn well hope so. Let’s find a vaccine for everything we can, I say – AIDS, cancer, heart disease, MS, alzheimer’s, parkinson’s and every other thing out there that we could possibly vaccinate for. Vaccines save lives. It’s proven, it’s real, and no amount of hand-waving and weasel-wording will change that.

Who’s next?

- This policy was introduced to supposedly protect patients from infection from nurses and doctors.
- This despite the fact that there have never been any cases notified where unvaccinated hospital staff have spread infection.
- There have however been several cases where fully vaccinated staff have!

OK, a) Never a case of an unvaccinated hospital staff member having spread infection? Really? I’d put money on someone having caught swine flu from a hospital staff member, at least. It depends what infections you’re talking about. Maybe the case wasn’t notified, but we catch stuff from people all the time, and you can’t vaccinate everything (yet).

And b) most people of the age to work in hospitals will have been vaccinated – there was a time when people vaccinated their kids to try and keep them from dying of something preventable, a time before Meryl Dorey and the AVN did their best to plant seeds of doubt in parents’ minds, and did their best to see children go un-vaccinated. What’s more, someone who decides to go into health-care is far more likely to have grown up in a household where health-care is respected – and therefore far more likely to have been vaccinated in the first place. If most people are vaccinated, then of course you’re going to find it easier to cherry-pick cases that support your argument, especially if you’re just making things up out of whole cloth like the AVN are here.

Follow this to its logical conclusion…

- First we require hospital staff to be vaccinated to protect the patients.
- Then, we have to vaccinate the patients to protect the fully vaccinated staff.
- Next, teachers will have to be vaccinated to protect vulnerable vaccinated students.
- Then, the students to protect the teachers

WHO WILL BE NEXT?

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY!

Ignoring the fact that this is IN NO WAY A LOGICAL ARGUMENT (see steps one and two, for example), the level of scare-mongering going on here is really sickening. Just because certain at-risk areas (hospitals, which by definition deal with the sick and infirm – one of the sections of society which are the most likely casualties of viruses) vaccinate compulsorily, does not in any way logically lead to mandatory vaccination across the board. That’s not how logic works, that’s how scare-mongering works. What’s more, compulsory across-the-board vaccinations could never be introduced for the simple reason that not everyone can be vaccinated – some people are too ill or infirm, which is again why the need for herd immunity is so vital.

Death from compulsory vaccination

- A nursing sister from northern NSW contacted us after being forced to receive the MMR vaccine under threat of losing her job.
- She had been injured by a previous dose of Hep B.
- Was suffering from Chronic Fatigue and was not recovered.
- Immediately, she suffered a relapse and spent weeks off of work.
- Within 3 months, was diagnosed with cancer and had her lymph nodes removed. Biopsies showed measles virus in the tissue.
- Several weeks later, she passed away.

Oh noes! So this mysteriously-unnamed-and-therefore-non-confirmable-and-purely-anecdotal-nurse died after being injected with a vaccine? After. Not ‘due to’, please note. She was ill, she had a vaccine, she ‘immediately’ re-lapsed with a pre-existing condition, and months later developed cancer? The measles virus could be in the tissue, sure, I guess – the measles virus is in the vaccine (de-activated and dead, of course) so I could see how that could happen (if it did – note we don’t have a source). But the measles vaccine doesn’t cause cancer. At all. Nothing has ever suggested there’s even the merest hint of a causal link. At all. It’s just hand-waving and weasel-wording with a story that doesn’t even have a source, a victim who isn’t even named. If the nurse even existed, if Meryl Dorey isn’t lying, then it’s still 100% safe to say the vaccine did not cause the cancer.

Successful Workers’ Compensation Claims

- There have been several successful claims in NSW by nurses who have been permanently injured as a result of vaccinations they were told to have for their jobs
- Now that vaccination is compulsory, we will see a flood of these claims and an avalanche of injured workers – in an already overstretched and understaffed sickness system.

Again, no sources. Let’s, for the sake of argument, say this is true (I could go either way on this, the presentation is so filled with lies). Sure, there may be cases where nurses were left with permanent injury after having been vaccinated – if there was a pre-existing condition which reacted badly to a fever, which in this case was caused by the virus. We’ve seen that before, it’s rare in the extreme, but it can happen. Measles isn’t rare in the extreme, and permanent injury from infection definitely does happen. Note how we’re not told what the permanent injuries of the nurses who won their cases were. Measles has some really clear permanent injuries – death being one of them.

The second bulletpoint is even better – not only does it speculate un-foundedly on the future, but it then tries to push a point that to stop people getting preventable diseases will put strain on an understaffed system. But, of course, allowing them to go ahead and get these preventable ailments and to take unnecessary sick days off while they fight for their lives is totally fine for the system?

OK, I’m getting tired now, so I’ll shoot through the main points of the rest:

Page 10: Even if this is true, note the dates involved are 1994-1998. So, even if this case does go ahead, and even if there is any kind of positive outcome for the French authorities (and the lack of shockwaves throughout the international pharmaceutical industry and the lack of media coverage suggest it won’t), the AVN thinks we should throw out our babies with the bathwater and allow needless deaths from curable illnesses, based on side effects one particular Hep B vaccine that’s not been used in over a decade?

Page 11: Lovely leaflet, that. While you’re taking it in, it’s good to know that the ‘a donation is suggested but not required’. Well, I went to their website, and I urge you to try and download/obtain cards, addresses and labels without donating – you can’t. Instead, they have a regular checkout-payment system in place, with the word ‘donation’ liberally sprinkled within. Another lie, Meryl?

Pages 13-26: Here we have the AVN’s 10 reasons why vaccines are ineffective and harmful. There’s a lot to take apart here, including the standard list of ‘bad stuff’ that’s in vaccines – which is in equal parts wrong or irrelevant. I’ll leave more medically-trained minds to pick over what is and isn’t in vaccines, but my question is this – even if all of those additives (and worse) were in vaccines (and that’s not to say they are), so what? Vaccines have been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to prevent illness, and have never at any point been shown in the slightest to be unsafe. Those facts are the ones that matter.

Page 16: Robert got vaccinated, then Robert got ill. Today I put on socks, and later my laptop crashed. Putting on socks did not crash my laptop; nothing in the wording of the page suggests Robert’s illness was caused by his vaccination. If the AVN could have gotten away with claiming it, they would have. Correlation does not equal causation. Ditto for page 18 with Joshua. Ditto page 19 with Luke. What’s more, without case notes and sources cited, these are nothing more than meaningless (yet tragic, if at all true) anecdotes, manipulatively included to tug at the heart strings. The AVN are using these children (if these children exist, and are ill) to guilt parents into decisions based on no data and no science. With such purposeful provocation and manipulation, mommy instincts are killing children the world over.

Pages 20 & 21: Note that the graphs are of mortality rates, not infection rates. Even if the graphs depict realistic and true numbers (and the overall credibility of this whole presentation is so low I wouldn’t assume that’s the case), the figures that show vaccination’s effects on infection rates clearly show that when vaccines came in, infections dropped dramatically.

Page 22: Doctors make money from vaccinations. Even if these figures are real, so what? Even if doctors were really being paid to give our children injections that prevent them from catching diseases, so what? Isn’t that their job? Isn’t that precisely what a doctor is – someone who gets paid to stop people dying of treatable ailments? Stop people catching the viruses and diseases, and you’ll stop the need for treating them – saving the health system a whole lot of money in the long run.

Page 23: Pharmaceutical companies have paid for almost all vaccine research to date. Sure. Tyre manufacturers have paid for all studies into tyre technology to date, too – but we still have safer and safer tyres, because if you stop people dying, your tyres tend to be seen in a favourable light, and more people will buy them. It’s in a pharmaceutical company’s best interest to produce a vaccine that works – the tyre company that produces a poor tyre that leads to a rash of road deaths isn’t going to do very well as a tyre company in the future.

Page 25: Selection bias. Anyone who phones an anti-vaccination hot-line, especially one that’s not advertised in mainstream media, is self-selected for their belief in the anti-vaccination cause. And note there’s no definition of what a ‘reaction’ is. Most vaccines have a mild reaction – a reddening around the injection site for a few days, a slight fever, soreness – but these are minor, and therefore wouldn’t need to be reported. These, most likely, make up the 90% of unreported reactions. Also, how the hell do you measure the reactions that don’t get reported?! If they’re not reported… they’re not reported.

Page 26: So horrific, evil and sickening I have to print it in full. I’m sorry:

Some childhood illnesses have beneficial aspects and therefore, prevention may not necessarily be in the best interests of the child.
- Measles- Called ‘Gift from a Goddess’ in Sanskrit, measles can help to mature the immune system, may help prevent auto-immune illnesses such as cancer, asthma and allergies in later life.
- Rubella- An extremely mild disease of childhood. If a woman gets rubella as a child, she develops life-long immunity which will protect her unborn child from the adverse effects of congenital rubella syndrome.

That’s right – measles is good for your child. The ancients say so, and they were experts in cutting-edge health-care. Forget the deaths from measles, rubella, pertussis – some of these dangerous viruses that lead to brain damage and death are gifts. The AVN are sick, manipulative motherfuckers, plain and simple, and it’s a wonder Meryl Dorey can sleep at night.

Next (Pages 27-30) we have the usual, trumped-up, debunked and generally walking-dead claim that vaccines cause autism. They don’t.

Pages 31-34 are even weirder – rather than suggest that vaccines cause cancer, the AVN instead intimate that vaccines contain known carcinogens (again, even if this were true, nothing to suggest it is, can’t trust this lying piece of shit presentation as far as you can throw it, etc etc). Then, and this is truly astounding, the AVN use some kind of simple wordplay to suggest that the vaccines themselves actually are cancer. Follow this, if you can:

Immortal Cells

When viral vaccines were first being produced, the process was extremely time-consuming and expensive. Viruses require living tissue to reproduce and therefore, a steady supply of live animals was required whose organs could be used to ‘grow’ the virus needed for the vaccine.

Once the supply of these animals began to dry up, a new method needed to be found. What the drug companies devised is a way to make cells ‘immortal’. In other words, they don’t go through the normal process of apoptosis which is a time of death and renewal/replacement by new cells. Immortal cells will never die and therefore, the same cell lines can be used over and over again to produce vaccines, making the production process cheaper and easier.

When a living being has cells which reproduce without dying, we call that CANCER

OK. So the vaccines have ‘cancer’? But not actual cancer, the disease, that grows inside of people and can kill them – no, the vaccines just have this version of cancer that the AVN has pulled out of Meryl Dorey’s weaselly, manipulative arse. At no point is the claim made that vaccines cause cancer, because they don’t. This is just hand-waving of the weirdest and most surreal kind, with the aim to stop children being vaccinated. Like a kind of semantic magic show, where the trick ends with lots of dead kids. Cheers, Meryl.

The presentation ends with a call to arms:

- Be informed – Be confident
- Know your facts and you can stand your ground.
- Believe in what you know to be true and nobody can budge you or make you feel guilty.
- Stand for something – or you will fall for everything!

If only people did know their facts – vaccines save lives, what the AVN are saying will cost lives. Lots of lives. And no amount of standing firm with the AVN will change those facts.

I’ll let that sink in.

So, the story goes – workshy slob Will Palmer hated housework. Then, due to a condition called Fuchs’ Dystrophy – where cells lining the inner surface of the cornea to begin to die – his eyesight rapidly decreased to a point where he needed a cornea operation. Once he got his shiny new sight, he found he suddenly loves to clean. Which, apparently, can only be due to the new cornea and it’s previous owner. Because that’s how transplants work, obviously.

On top of scientifically-nonsensical, there’s an obscenely sexist angle to the story, which is expressed in the quote:

In fact, so profound is Mr Palmer’s new-found devotion to housework that he believes his transplanted cornea must have been donated by a woman.

‘It started as a joke that I must have been given the cornea of a woman but I really do think it’s true,’ Will said, ‘There’s a reason why men don’t clean like this and I think it’s because we just don’t see the dirt, but I see it everywhere I go.’

So housework is a woman’s job then? This is massively offensive to women (marginalising their role and enforcing age-old stereotypes) and to men (suggesting all men are workshy, lazy slobs). Which to my mind, therefore offends all of the potential readership of the story, barring the androgynous community. Which, and correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t the usual demographic for the Daily Mail. This is 2009 – it’s staggering that this level of sexist bullshit still goes on.

This whole thing reads like a standard nonsense donor-organ-characteristics stories that crop up from time to time. Like “My new kidney makes me like country music”, “my liver transplant turned me gay”, and there was even a shockingly poor film with Jessica Alba had a cornea transplant and began seeing visions of murder witnessed by the cornea’s previous owner.  In fact, research from Professor Bruce Hood, author of Supersense and regular Skeptics in the Pub speaker, suggests that one in three transplant patients believe they have taken on something of the donor’s personality.

Hear this story and more on Skeptics with a K

Now, just to be clear to anyone who hadn’t realised – transplants do not change the personality of the new owner. It’s superstitious nonsense, and it’s ridiculous that the Mail would even consider running a story so shoddy and unscientific. No, wait, sorry – this is the Mail we’re talking about: this is exactly the kind of scientifically-ignorant, superstitious and ridiculous story we expect of them. Maybe one of their writers could get a cornea transplant from someone science-literate…

Unfortunately, the vaccination program has attracted the attention of Internet crackpot and former son-of-god David Icke, who contends that the swine flu vaccine is a conspiracy by the Illuminati to cull vast portions of the human population.

Oh dear.

Ignoring the comically absurd hyperbole of his introduction, let’s start with his first, real, scientific claim.

The swine flu virus was created in a laboratory to generate mass panic with the specific intention of forcing everyone to have the vaccine. Problem-Reaction-Solution. This ‘natural’ swine flu virus apparently contains genes from humans, birds and pigs from several continents.

Okay, that’s quite a big claim, so I’m going to split it into two parts. Claim 1 is that the swine flu virus was created in a lab. Claim 2, presented as evidence to support Claim 1, is that the swine flu virus contains genes from humans, birds and pigs.  No evidence is presented to back up either claim, which appear to have been pulled right out of Icke’s backside.

Being charitable, I’m going to assume that what Icke meant to say is that the swine flu virus contains genes from human flu, bird flu, and pig flu from several continents.  This claim makes slightly more sense and, to my understanding, is indeed true.  That fact in itself is in no way sinister, nor does it support Icke’s claim that the virus was engineered in a laboratory. In fact it serves only to demonstrate Icke’s ignorance of how Influenza reproduces.

Most viruses have a genetic code made up of a single piece of RNA or DNA.  Influenza, however, has a segmented genome, which means it can quite freely mix and match segments. Generally speaking, viruses target specific receptors in the host organism, which makes it difficult for them to cross species.  So pigs catch pig flu, birds catch bird flu and humans catch human flu.  Unfortunately for the pigs, however, they are very occasionally susceptible to the human and bird varieties of flu as well as their own.  If an unlucky pig catches bird flu, human flu and pig flu, all at the same time, then the viruses are free to swap genetic segments between themselves, creating new strains featuring aspects from each.  No laboratory or Illuminati conspiracy required.

Icke’s inference that the swine flu must have been engineered because it contains aspects from three different varieties of flu falls at the first.

We are told that the drug companies and the World Health Organisation have been working at fever pitch to develop a vaccine for the ‘new’ swine flu strain known as H1N1, but … wait for it … Baxter International filed a patent for the H1N1 vaccine on August 28th 2008 [...] The patent was published in March 2009, a month before the virus was released in Mexico in April, but it was filed seven months before this ‘new strain’ was officially known about. It is the most blatant set-up you could ever see.

Bzzzz. Wrong.  Icke seems to think that Influenza A called H1N1 is some new-fangled thing, when actually it’s been around forever.  The H and N refer to haemagglutinin and neuraminidase, the two large proteins on the outside of the influenza virus.  The numbers refer to different subtypes of those proteins.  There are sixteen subtypes of haemagglutinin and nine of neuraminidase, although only a handful of those are commonly found in human influenza.  H1 and N1 are two of those commonly found proteins.

If Icke had taken some time to research his diatribe, he would have discovered that the Spanish Flu of 1918 was also an H1N1 strain; quite possibly the direct ancestor of the H1N1 which is now spreading under the name “swine flu”.  The virus has simply been hiding out in the pig population for the last 90 years, until it had mutated enough to jump back into the human population.

H1N1 has been endemic in humans for decades; and is frequently responsible for the seasonal flu. It is no surprise that Baxter filed a patent for a vaccination against such a common type of flu.

Wayne Madsen, a former US Naval Intelligence officer [...] writes: “Past swine flu outbreaks have been spread from pigs to humans, who then passed the flu on to other humans. However, with A-H1N1, there have been no reported infections of pigs.”

This appears to be a Red Herring.  As I’ve already indicated, it is uncommon for a virus to be able to jump species.  In the rare circumstance that it happens, there is no reason to think it’s going to be readily able to jump back again.  I don’t know if the swine flu strain that infects humans is also endemic in pigs.  Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.  It doesn’t really matter either way, because it lends no weight to the idea of a conspiracy at all.

The fake swine flu scare of 1976 was a trial-run for what is happening now. These events are planned way in advance and these sick people are extremely thorough in their preparations.

The 1976 swine flu scare was a government over-reaction to an outbreak of H1N1 (yes, David, it was around in the 70s too) in Fort Dix, New Jersey.  No confirmed cases were recorded outside Fort Dix, and the outbreak lasted only a couple of weeks.  In no way is it comparable to the current pandemic, which has already killed hundreds and hospitalised thousands worldwide.

If Icke’s claims were true, then at best the 1976 swine flu scare could be said to have tested how well the American public would react to a mass vaccination programme.  This information is, of course, completely useless outside of the United States.  Where were the disease hoaxes perpetrated by the Illuminati to see how the British public would react to mass vaccination? Or the Chinese? Or the Indians?  Indeed, how did they even know that the US public of 2009 would react in the same way as their 1976 counterparts?

The “dry run” idea just doesn’t make any sense.  It is the usual social paranoia you expect from Icke, who likes to make wild assertions about some grand conspiracy, with nothing offered to back them up besides accusations of naivety if you don’t believe him.

Most people will line up with their children like good little sheep. They will accept the blatant lies without question and the authorities will use those people to target others who refuse. You will hear nonsense like ‘You are putting my children at risk’. In fact, it is the programmed people who stand in line who are putting all children at risk. The authorities will claim that those who decline are preventing ‘herd immunity’ when all they have done is withdraw from the herd mentality.

This is the comment that makes me sick to my stomach, because this is the comment that is going to lead real people really dying because they listened to this wingnut.  To link “herd immunity” with “herd mentality” is an association fallacy.  Herd immunity is a real phenomenon, which genuinely helps protect vulnerable people (who often can’t be vaccinated themselves) from falling ill and possibly dying of a preventable disease.  When you refuse to vaccinate, you are putting other people’s children at risk, as well as your own.  For Icke to decry vaccination based upon his own absurd paranoid delusions about what is “really going on” is just obscene.

Demonstrate what you’re saying is true first, David, then you can start telling people that vaccination will hurt their kids.  If you can prove that vaccination is an elaborate Illuminati conspiracy to cull the population, please do so.  If you can’t, then shut your mouth before you get someone killed.

I think I preferred you when you were pretending to be the son of god.

“Just found my labour preparation bottle of caulophyllum 200c Homeopathic remedy open on the floor with several of the little tablets lying next to it. Saw him chewing/sucking a few mins earlier but assumed it was the remains of our sushi. Am not panicking but wondering if anyone can advise if we should expect a level of disturbance/ill effects esp as 200c is such a high dose” – Source: Mumsnet.com

Clearly, the forum user is worried her dear child may be at risk of an overdose on her super-strength, 200c tablets. Of course, an overdose is clearly not possible. Even a homeopath will tell you that! In fact, homeopaths deny the possibility of an overdose because of the fact that homeopathy is ‘non-toxic’ and that ‘if you take fifteen tablets or five tablets (or 100 tablets for that matter) AT ONE TIME it is one dose. You will stimulate your curative response one time‘.

Cool, well that’s put my fears to rest. Except of course, that that’s clearly utter nonsense. Curative response? Non-toxic? One tablet has the same effect as one hundred tablets? Do they really think anyone is going to buy that?!

The real reason why an overdose is impossible is that there’s absolutely, completely and utterly nothing in a homeopathic tablet. It’s just water. The only way to overdose on homeopathy is if you drown.

I was a little bored, and I had the entire internet at my disposal, so I thought I’d do the maths a little – her caulophyllum solution was at 200c strength, which means one drop of caulophyllum in 99 drops of water, then a drop of that into another 99 drops of water… and so on, 200 times. Expressed mathematically, that’s:

1 in 100²⁰⁰ or

1 in 10⁴⁰⁰ or

1 drop of caulophyllum in a body of drops of water which number 1 followed by 400 zeroes or

1 drop of caulophyllum in 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 drops of water.

That’s a lot of water. And not a lot of caulophyllum in it.

Just to put that number into context, and bear with me here because these aren’t going to be exact figures – if you go to the level of one the smallest things we can measure, a proton for example, and you compare it to the size of the known universe, the ratio of scale between the two is a figure with less than 42 zeroes. So a dilution of 200c is many many many time bigger than the known universe.

What’s more, that’s also many many many many times the Avogadro limit – the limit at which in all probability there is nothing at all of the original substance remaining in the dilute. That limit is roughly 6 x 10²³. A homeopathic substance of 200c is more dilute than the point at which there’s nothing left in it by an order of roughly 377 magnitudes.

If anything, her son received an under-dose.

Now, I last studied maths at A level, and chemistry at GCSE, so I urge anyone in the know to check my figures. I’ve checked over them myself, not so much because I think I’m wrong in my calculations, but more because the numbers involved are so wondrously absurd. To be double the Avogadro limit is pretty damn dilute. To beat it by 377 orders of magnitude is ludicrous. And yet, it’s for sale, and people buy it. And they use it for very serious conditions.

I checked around for what caulophyllum is used for in homeopathy. I found multiple corresponding sources, including:

“Caulophyllum 30C Homeopathic Tablets x 125 – Painful labour, Prevent Miscarriage, Menstrual Pain” – Source: Amazon.co.uk

To prevent miscarriage?! A 30c dilution is still 37 orders of magnitude past the ‘nothing left’ limit, and is very sizably bigger than our whole universe, and yet there are people who sell this to stop pregnant women losing their children?! There’s a nice home truth about your friendly neighbourhood homeopath for you. What’s more, it’s not some crazy, quack, bogus website I’ve picked that from – that’s being sold on none other than Amazon.co.uk. Come for the cheap books, stay for the magic and ineffective miscarriage-prevention.

There are a few things about this story, beyond the literally-astronomic numbers in play, that trouble me. First of all, it amazes me that someone would take a purported preventative pill at so important a time as in the final stages of pregnancy, and yet have no clue as to what she’s putting into her body. Clearly, to believe in the possibility of an overdose shows a deep lack of understanding in the realities of homeopathy.

Secondly, if she was really so concerned about an overdose, why go online to write up a blog post first? Why not call a doctor, or go to A&E? If you’d found your toddling son chewing on paracetamol, that’s exactly what you’d do.

Thirdly, and most bafflingly, who the hell feeds kids sushi anyway?!

“The natural properties of magnetic hematite were known to be used by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. They produced artefacts and jewellery primarily in the belief that this mineral may relieve pain, aid blood flow, enhance energy, and calm emotions. Wearers of pacemakers and pregnant women should avoid wearing this product. Natural Therapy. Made in China”

I thought this sounded too good to be true!  ’Enhance energy‘?   Well, the most natural way to aid blood flow and enhance energy would be to just get up and move around a bit.   ’Calm emotions?’  So, no more mood swings – like kind of a mineral prozac?  I must admit, I was a bit concerned about the warnings for people with pacemakers and pregnant women… should I approach them with care while wearing this magic bracelet?  What was a safe distance and what would happen if I failed to adhere to it?!

A quick google search revealed that Hematite is a mineral form of iron oxide. (like rust, which is also iron oxide). Naturally occurring hematite isn’t magnetic, but then the ubiquitous phrase “Made in China” pops up there right at the end, giving away the fact that it’s actually a synthetic material that has been manufactured… so much for being ‘Natural’ then!

So, what are the claims for Magnet therapy?

Magnetic therapy is based on the theory that when delivered directly to the body, magnetic fields can stimulate healing for a range of health problems. Its health claims include the treatment of multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, arthritis, insomnia, inflammation, and even cancer and heart disease.

This popular self -help therapy takes many different forms. In some cases, small static magnets are applied to the illness-affected areas with the help of wraps, shoe inserts, self-adhesive strips, belts, or magnetic jewellery like bracelets, necklaces, and earrings. Other products include magnetic mattress pads and blankets, as well as magnetic-field-generating machines and even magnet-conditioned water.  Proponents maintain that magnets can stimulate circulation, relax the blood vessels, increase endorphin levels, reduce muscle tension, and normalize metabolic functioning.

Sounds fantastic! Ah but but does it work? No, of course it doesn’t… it’s a load of magnetic bollocks!

Even better, one website I found gives a brilliant description of how modern mankind is “magnetic deficient”…

“Magnetic Deficiency: Many people believe that modern day mankind may be ‘magnetic deficient’. This condition may be arising from modern life, the insulating effect of living and working in concrete and high-rise buildings. Added to this we are surrounded by a surfeit of electronic and electrical gadgetry. Both of these effects actually block our natural exposure to the Earths magnetic field. There is also a relatively recent decline in the Earth’s magnetic field. If this ‘magnetic deficiency’ is true, it may be the cause behind many recent unexplained illnesses, and why the use of magnets can have a positive effect in so many conditions.”  Source:  Magnets-4-health.co.uk

I admit I’m no geophysicist, but I can’t see what the heliosphere around the sun (which helps protect the earth from dangerous intergalactic cosmic radiation) and its interaction with the earth’s magnetosphere has to do with people wearing magnets to alleviate the pain of an arthritic joint (their interaction does lead to phenomenon like the Aurora Borealis which is cool… but I’m digressing).  If high-rise buildings and concrete actually blocked the Earth’s magnetic field, then compasses would be of limited value; clearly, they don’t.  You’d have to be in a room with fairly thick metal walls to block magnetic fields, and in such a scenario I think “magnetic deficiency” would be the least of your problems! Yes, the Earths magnetic field changes over hundreds of thousand of years, due to fluctuations of the iron in the earth’s core. Again how can this possibly be in any way relevant to people’s level of illness?

The idea of ‘magnet therapy’ has been around for a long time.  Cleopatra supposedly wore a magnet to preserve her youth, and there was a boom in its use throughout Europe in the eighteenth century.  So far, extensive research, which has mainly concentrated on the effects of magnets on pain relief, has shown no effect at all above that of placebo. That’s right… NONE.  What else would you expect when no one has put forward any reasonable hypothesis for why it would work!  The BMJ published a report in 2006, by 2 American doctors,  (BMJ  2006;332:4 7 January), that again cast doubts over any possible benefits.  They pointed out that so called controlled experiments of magnet therapy were suspect as it is difficult to blind participants to the presence of a magnet.  They, excellently, added:

“If they insist on using a magnetic device, they could be advised to buy the cheapest – this will at least alleviate the pain in their wallet.”  Source:  BMJ  2006;332:4 7 January

The World Health Organization (WHO): published a study in 1987 stating that the magnetic strengths typically used in magnetic therapy do not have any detrimental effect on the human body.  I think that’s a tactful way of saying that they don’t have ANY effect on the human body!  Interestingly, I did discover that strong magnets placed close to implanted pacemakers and defibrillators could conceivably cause problems, but most modern devices are built to be fairly resistant to electromagnetic interference in any case.

What I find interesting is that we are surrounded by magnets all the time anyway…  Small yet powerful concealed magnets are used as fasteners on clothing, bags, and laptops.  They’re found in TV’s, computers, DVD players, speakers and microphones.  Magnets are also found in motors, generators, and transformers.  I can’t imagine buying someone a novelty fridge magnet, and then telling them to “keep it in their trouser pocket to help sort out that dodgy hip”. (Actually, I feel I ought to make it clear I’ve never bought a novelty fridge magnet EVER!)

Part of me thinks that you shouldn’t believe all you read, and the bracelet packaging just mentioned magnetism as a marketing tool.  Added novelty value or extra interest if bought as a gift, and attractive to people with a vague interest in ‘alternative therapies’.  The more cynical part of me thinks that by marketing these products, the makers are preying on people who are in pain, worried about their health, and are spending money on treatments that don’t work.

So, I’ve made my decision: I will continue to wear my beautiful – yet otherwise useless – bracelet, safe in the knowledge that it won’t have any effect on my health in the slightest.