Jacob Crosby Censoring Correction of his Information

Jacob Crosby is an up and coming vaccination opponent. He's currently a university student. He writes a lot of garbage for Age of Autism.

In 1999, a controversial decision was taken by the Americans to phase out the use of thimerosal as a preservative in routine recommended infant and childhood vaccines because of concerns that the thimerosal  was causing autism.  The official story is that this took two or three years to complete.

David Kirby of Age of Autism predicted that the removal of thimerosal would result in a drop in the rate of autism in the United States.  This didn't happen.  So vaccination opponents have been hunting up reasons to explain this failed prediction. One approach is to argue that thimerosal continued to be used after about 2002.

That's the purpose of Crosby's Do Reliable Thimerosal Estimates Exist? The purpose of which is to show that there was a lot of use of vaccines containing thimerosal, a preservative added to multi-dose vials of vaccine, after the CDC and others says it stopped around the end of 2002. In particular, he stated:

Of course, Gorski’s “correction” wasn’t any better, claiming it was “the end of 2001/early 2002.” That’s funny, not even the CDC has used that date. The government has provided many conflicting dates for when thimerosal was removed: as early as 1999 and as late as 2005, and individual reports reveal thimerosal-preserved vaccines with expiration dates that stretch even beyond that, not counting flu shots which continue to be preserved in thimerosal.

There's a problem with claims of expiry dates of vaccines beyond the early 2000s. They are  false.   How do we know?   Because the FDA responded to a request for information from a US Congressman in 2003 with a 5 page letter.  The letter goes vaccine by vaccine and gives the expiry dates of the last lots of  each thimerosal containing vaccine distributed in the United States.  The latest were in 2002.

So I decided to see if Crosby cared more for the conclusion (thimerosal use continued and that explains why autism rates didn't drop) or the facts (when did vaccine makers stop supplying thimerosal containing vaccines to the United States).  Because according to Age of Autism:  "Comments are moderated, and will not appear until the author has approved them."

Here's the screen shot of the comment I posted at Age of Autism.  It never appeared.  Judge for yourself if there was any reason, except a desire to censor views they don't like, for not having it appear.

California Pertussis Recommendation - Dr. Bob is Wrong

There is an outbreak of Pertussis in California.   Those dying are infants under 3 months because they are not old enough to be successfully immunized through vaccination.

To protect them, the usual recommendation is that teens and older  those who come into close contact with infants have a recent Pertussis vaccination (booster dose of Tdap).  Women planning to be pregnant should be vaccinated and women who haven't been recently vaccinated should be vaccinated when there child is born.  The tricky issue is the vaccination of pregnant women.  The normal recommendation is that pregnant women not get vaccinated with Tdap.

The California Department of Health, because of the community outbreak, is now recommending that pregnant women get vaccinated.  Here's the death toll as of August 24, 2010. 

This got Dr. Bob Sears (of the ridiculous alternate vaccination) upset. He vomited forth at Huffington-Post in an article titled:  Government Okays Untested Vaccine for Pregnant Women  If Dr. Bob had merely stated that there wasn't good testing of the effects of Tdap vaccines on pregnant women, I wouldn't have anything to complain about.

But Dr. Bob makes it appear as if the California Department of Public Health recommendations   are something new and that

The vaccine product insert, as well as the letter I got from the pharmaceutical company, states very clearly that the vaccine is not indicated  CONTRAINDICATED]  for pregnant women.

That's not true.  The current ACIP recommendations, the CDC and the vaccine product inserts recognize that there are special circumstances in which Tdap vaccination during pregnancy is appropriate. Pregnancy is NOT listed as a contraindication of Tdap vaccination.

Lepto in Cuba - A great piece of writing

A plug for a great piece of work that answers the claim that a homeopathic vaccine prevents the infectious disease Leptospirosis.

A couple of years ago, there was a presentation at a conference in Cuba on the effectiveness of a homeopathic vaccine to prevent the lepto disease.

I thought it was garbage because the homeopathic vaccine was given to practically everyone in an area, so how could you tell if it was the vaccine or other factors that mattered. This is particularly  true of diseases where the physical environment matters.  For example, if you go from filthy water to clean water or from clean water to filthy water you can make a huge difference in the number of cases of typhoid or cholera.  These are disease where the physical environment matters.

Measles is a disease where the physical environment really doesn't matter.  Before vaccination, pretty much all children get infected sometime in childhood.  So any intervention, such as a measles vaccine, is great evidence that the vaccine works even if you haven't done a proper double blinded study.

Lepto is an environmentally controllable disease.  If you can keep out of contact with the animals that have it and distribute it in their urine, you won't get infected.  For this reason alone, any study that isn't double blinded and is supposed to be evidence that a vaccine works is pretty much worthless.

I wrote about lepto in this blog at Homeopathy - Water and Magic and Not Tested and Proper Testing Minimizes Differences.


Those who did the Cuban research have now published their paper. It ended up in Homeopathy apparently because it got rejected by better quality journal.


Apgaylard over at A canna’ change the laws of physics has done a great job of critiquing the published paper in Much ado about nothing.  Apgaylard demonstrates what can be done in critiquing a paper when someone has the necessary background and skills. Go and take a look.

Hepatitis and Liver Cancer: A National Strategy for Prevention and Control of Hepatitis B and C

I'm on the email list of the National Academies Press. Subscribe here.

Every now and then they offer complete versions of new publications in PDF format or you can read it online. Their latest is Hepatitis and Liver Cancer: A National Strategy for Prevention and Control of Hepatitis B and C. 

Like other childhood vaccinations, hepatitis B vaccination is sometimes refused because patients or parents of children have concerns about the safety of a vaccine (Allred et al., 2005; Gust et al., 2008; Smith et al., 2006a). The committee is unaware of credible evidence of serious harms caused by the hepatitis B vaccine in its many forms. In a 2002 scientific review by the Institute of Medicine, the hepatitis B vaccine was not found to be associated with adverse health outcomes (IOM, 2002). The committee believes that it is one of the safest vaccines available. The efforts of groups opposed to vaccination present a serious obstacle to comprehensive vaccination coverage, which is essential for the prevention and control of hepatitis B in the United States. Mistrust of vaccination (page 127-128)

Anyone interested in the effectiveness and importance of vaccination against Hepatitis B should read this.