Mercola RePost: Bad Science / Bad Medicine Pedaled as Good Deeds

From time to time, I like to offer these reprints from the mercola.com website because I agree with Dr. Mercola's analyses of health, fitness, and medical politics. His articles are well-researched and logical. And, like me, Dr. Mercola doesn't simply take the word of the "powers that be" concerning what constitutes good and bad science and medicine. 

Ghost in the Machine, Part 5 — Lies, Denial, Deceit and Manipulative ‘Research’

Turmeric, Coconut Cream and Ginger

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• December 31, 2017 

Have You Ever Wondered Why Your Blood Is Red?

Nourishing Beef Broth With 

Story at-a-glance

• Vaccines are Big Pharma's new profit center, which has caused an onslaught of manipulative, dishonest “research”
• The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation enriches pharmaceutical corporations and wealthy institutions with its questionable overseas vaccination agenda
• To fight a growing number of people questioning the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, the drug industry discredits vaccine injury statistics and has rolled out an aggressive and shocking ad campaign

By Dr. Mercola

In the last decade, vaccines have become Big Pharma's biggest profit center. A report published by MarketsandMarkets estimates the global vaccine market, currently valued at $34.30 billion a year, will grow to an astounding $49.27 billion by 2022.1

Why the boom? As blockbuster drugs like Lipitor, Viagra, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Singular and Concerta have gone off patent, vaccines prove a lucrative replacement. Not only are they priced much higher than pills, governments and NGOs shamelessly help market vaccines to huge swaths of the world's population.

These unethical partnerships, using taxpayer or NGO money, advance misleading research intended to frighten the public. Worse, they discredit vaccine critics who raise legitimate safety and efficacy questions and even discredit the families and victims of vaccine injuries themselves. To cash in on vaccine profits Big Pharma, governments and NGOs have characterized all vaccines as "life-saving." One of the clearest examples is the attempt to present vaccines against the HPV virus as vaccines "against cancer."

"Science" articles warn that as many as 90 percent of adults, especially baby boomers, silently harbor the HPV virus much like articles that warn many baby boomers are infected with the Hepatitis C virus.

In both cases, the drug industry is trying to "grow" the market for its products by inflating the amount of estimated sufferers. Reporters either wittingly or unwittingly help in the effort by repeating the drug industry supplied "facts." The truth is more than 90 percent of HPV infections are cleared by the body2 without symptoms and only 20 percent of HPV infections are the high-risk type that could develop into cancer if not identified and treated.3

Big Pharma's misleading advertising is not working, though. Many families of adolescent boys and girls targeted by HPV vaccine marketing by drug companies and government health officials are refusing the vaccine.4

Reacting to the HPV vaccine dropouts, Big Pharma launched an offensive "shame" campaign last year in which young adults with cancer blame their parents for not vaccinating them when they were adolescents. The ads were so over-the-top even supporters of the vaccine complained. Twitter remarks accused the company of trying to guilt-trip parents to bolster corporate profits.5

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Promotes Vaccines and Their Profits

One of the world's leading funders of vaccine development and promotion is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (B&MGF).6 In 2002, it began buying billions in drug stocks7 and subsequently added huge amounts of Monsanto stock.8 Two of the B&MGF's research heads were hired right out of Pharma — one from GlaxoSmithKline, with whom the B&MGF had a long-standing collaboration, and the other from Novartis.9

Even more shocking, it hired the former president of product development at Genentech to serve as its current CEO, Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann.10 This is how health writer Ruben Rosenberg Colorni describes the true nature of the foundation:11

"The Bill & Melinda Gates 'Foundation' is essentially a huge tax-avoidance scheme for enormously-wealthy capitalists who have made billions from exploiting the world’s people. The foundation invests, tax free, money from Gates and the 'donations' from others, in the very companies in which Gates owns millions in stocks, thus guaranteeing returns through both sales as well as intellectual-property rights.

To add insult to injury, the system perpetuates the spread of disease rather than aids in their eradication, thus perpetually justifying his endeavors to “eradicate” them (solving a problem they are creating)."

In a 2011 Forbes interview, Bill Gates admitted the new profitability of vaccines.12 "Ten or 15 years ago, nobody in the drug business would have held up vaccines as profit centers," he said, conceding that "vaccines are so tough, particularly because of liability issues." But now, "people are making money in the vaccine business," he noted.

Questions About Overseas Vaccination Programs

Questions about the ethics of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's overseas vaccination programs have swirled for years, specifically a study aimed at validating a low-cost way to screen for cervical cancer in India.13 This summer, STAT News reported that "new evidence of ethical lapses" has been published.14

"Dr. Eric Suba, a pathologist at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Francisco and co-author of the paper, provided STAT with a copy and links to supporting documents. In an interview, he described the Mumbai study, which ended in 2015, in stark terms: 'catastrophic, 'monumentally unethical, and a radical departure from normal scientific procedures’ …

"Critics of the 18-year trial said that U.S.-funded Indian researchers used ineffective screening that endangered thousands of poor women in Mumbai. They were told the test could help prevent cancer, but far fewer pre-cancerous lesions were found than expected, suggesting that some lesions were missed — possibly leading to an unknown number of deaths."

In 2015, judges in India's Supreme Court heard a challenge claiming the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation failed to obtain the informed consent of the children or their parents and demanded answers about juvenile deaths from the vaccine trial.15

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Is a Big Investor in Monsanto and Promoter of GMOs

In 2012, Bill Gates announced he would try to end world hunger by growing more genetically modified (GM) crops. He had already invested $27 million into Monsanto. At the time, I said Gates was leading the pack as one of the most destructive "do-gooders" on the planet and that his views on addressing poverty and disease in poor countries were short-sighted and misinformed.

Shortly thereafter, a team of 900 scientists funded by the World Bank and United Nations determined the use of GM crops is not a meaningful solution to the complex situation of world hunger. The Seattle Times also called Bill Gates' support of GM crops as a solution for world hunger unsound science. It's an undisputed fact that the introduction of genetically engineered crops lead to diminished biodiversity — the direct opposite of what the world needs.

To save the planet and ourselves, small-scale organic and sustainable farming not only must prevail but flourish, and GM crops do not help; rather, they threaten their existence. Seeds have always been sold and swapped freely between farmers, preserving biodiversity, and without that basis, you cannot have food sovereignty. With fewer farmers, "feeding the hungry with GM crops" is nothing but a pipe dream.

A clear example of the false promise of GM crops is seen with the GM Golden Rice designed to bring beta-carotene to the diets of people in poor countries and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's donation of $20 million. The GM crop was ill conceived for two reasons. People eating the low fat, poor diets seen in poor countries generally cannot convert beta carotene to the vitamin A and it was estimated that someone would have to eat 16 pounds of Golden Rice a day to receive the benefits.

Unethical Vaccine Marketing Only Tells Half the Story

As I said earlier, marketing of the HPV vaccine relies on half-truths, scare tactics and alarmist advertising. By manipulatively presenting it as a "vaccine against cancer," which all but neglectful parents would give to their children, vaccine makers hope to occlude the real questions about safety and documented injuries.16,17 A few years after the vaccines were launched, questions about research and transparency had already arisen, according to the Huffington Post.18

"Critics ask why the primary endpoint in trials was not cervical cancer, but lesions that could become malignant and why placebo data was spun to make the vaccine look more effective ... There are also transparency questions. Why did former First Lady Laura Bush work with Merck-funded citizen front groups to promote the original vaccine and why are governors like Texas’ Rick Perry trying to mandate vaccination of all girls?

University of Queensland lecturer Dr. Andrew Gunn was silenced by his university when he dared to question the vaccine and ordered to apologize to the vaccine maker, CSL, according to the Courier Mail. Dr. Gunn expressed doubts about the vaccine’s 'marketing as a solution to cancer of the cervix when at best it’s expected to prevent about two-thirds of cases and 'the incorrect and dangerous perception that it might make Pap smears unnecessary'...

And one of Gardasil’s and Cervarix’s [two HPV vaccines] original developers, Dr. Diane Harper, a consultant to the World Health Organization, also questioned the vaccine’s lack of safety and effectiveness ... only to appear to retract her remarks later."

‘Herd Immunity’ Incorrectly Used to Sell Vaccines

Vaccine makers and the governments and NGOs that help their marketing use the concept of "herd immunity" to sell mass vaccination — the idea that the vaccination rate in a given community must be kept high so that those who have not been immunized do not endanger others.

But of course, HPV, which is a sexually transmitted disease (STD), is not spread through mere close proximity to another person like non-STD diseases. You can’t transmit or get HPV infection in a public setting, like in a classroom or crowded elevator. Maybe that is why the "cancer prevention" angle is pushed.

Purveyors of the herd immunity theory never seem to be able to explain why the majority of outbreaks of diseases targeted by vaccines occur in communities thought to have already achieved herd immunity status, i.e., where the majority of people are fully vaccinated and transmission of infection "should" not occur.

In fact, health officials appear to deliberately confuse the public. Natural herd immunity certainly exists but artificial vaccine-acquired herd immunity, which is temporary at best, is a misnomer. Vaccination and natural exposure to a given disease produce two qualitatively different types of immune responses.

Vaccine Injuries Dismissed and Downplayed

Vaccine injuries are well documented and the HPV vaccine is a case in point. Here is what the Indian Medical Journal of Medical Ethics reported in 2017.19

"The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine has been linked to a number of serious adverse reactions. The range of symptoms is diverse and they develop in a multi-layered manner over an extended period of time. The argument for the safety and effectiveness of the HPV vaccine overlooks the following flaws:

(i) no consideration is given to the genetic basis of autoimmune diseases, and arguments that do not take this into account cannot assure the safety of the vaccine; (ii) the immune evasion mechanisms of HPV, which require the HPV vaccine to maintain an extraordinarily high antibody level for a long period of time for it to be effective, are disregarded;

and (iii) the limitations of effectiveness of the vaccine. We also discuss various issues that came up in the course of developing, promoting and distributing the vaccine, as well as the pitfalls encountered in monitoring adverse events and epidemiological verification."

Yet vaccine makers, government regulatory agencies and doctors administering vaccines continue to insist the many injuries seen after vaccination are mere coincidences and not caused by the vaccines. Controlled clinical trials have found no causal association between HPV vaccination and different adverse effects, say the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.20

In addition to inflating the number of people suffering from diseases such as HPV, vaccine promoters inflate the effectiveness of their vaccines. The HPV vaccine has cut infections by up to 90 percent in the past 10 years, brags one science website, as if cutting infections and cutting the incidence of cancer were the same thing. It is especially irresponsible because the cancer rates cannot be determined until years or decades after the vaccine is given.21

Algorithms--The True Thought Police

I grew up devouring science fiction. By the time I was twelve I had digested every science fiction book in our town's library--everything written in the 1950s and '60s by futurists like Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Le Guin, Vonnegut, and Dick; all of the Science Fiction Short Story anthologies; and every fantastical classic going back to H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and more. I credit my early immersion in the imaginative waters of these prophets of culture and technology for instilling in me an ability to think for myself, independent of the cultural groupthink that characterizes the way most people see the world.  

Now I witness a long-foretold dystopian future unfolding before my very eyes, and it's not what I expected. Even as recently as 2009, when I wrote my own dystopian cyber-fiction novel, Reality Crash, I imagined a totalitarian state imposed from the top down in the classically fascistic, authoritarian hierarchy--much like the dictator known as "Big Brother" in Orwell's 1984. 

It turns out the top-down model is not imposing its dictatorship upon us. It's a grass-roots movement that is fueling our culture's own destruction. And the people who are mistaking President Trump for Orwell's Big Brother have got it all wrong. I'm chuckling as I type this because I just read a NYT article dated 1/26/17 entitled "Why '1984' Is a 2017 Must Read," and I respectfully think the writer of that article has it all wrong, too. Trump is not Big Brother--Social Media is, and the Pandora's Box out of which it sprang is the internet and its greedy, power-driven minions. 

Two days ago, a former Facebook executive went public with his "tremendous guilt" for exploiting dopamine feedback loops in human brains to make Facebook ever more addictive. Even our children are exposed to addictive snares, with teen users spending an average of three to five hours a day online with such apps as Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter rather than hanging out, face-to-face, with their actual-reality friends. A couple of months ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the way his social media platform has been used to divide people rather than bring them together. 

And only yesterday, Consumer Watchdog put out a warning concerning patent applications that will allow Google Home and Amazon Echo devices to monitor your conversations at all times in order to learn your preferences and needs for targeted advertising. Talk about an Orwellian future! And it's not Donald Trump stuffing your mantle stockings with digital assistants this holiday season; it's you! Tell me, are these new electronic conveniences really worth the cost?

Researching this blog article caused me to dip into the academic well for news of the influence of algorithms on society and personal agency. I can assure you, I am not the first person to notice the great and terrible potential of allowing personal decision-making to be given over to mathematical algorithms that sort your choices, your friendship groups, and even your politics, into neatly packaged, clickable sidebars calculated for maximum engagement. Do you really wish to be sorted? Do you want your shopping decisions, your friends, and your political candidates preselected according to some secret formula? 

One social scholar concludes his journal article thusly:

"The algorithm is now a cultural presence, perhaps even an iconic cultural presence, not just because of what they can do but also because of what the notion of the algorithm is used to project. This means that the algorithm can be part of the deployment of power, not just in terms of its function but also in terms of how it is understood as a phenomenon. Algorithmic decisions are depicted as neutral decisions, algorithmic decisions are understood to be efficient decisions, algorithmic decisions are presented as objective and trustworthy decisions, and so on. We certainly need to gain a greater view of the inside of the algorithmic systems in which we live, but we also need to develop an analysis of the cultural prominence of the notion of the algorithm, what this stands for, what it does and what it might reveal." (The social power of algorithms. David Beer, Information, Communication & SocietyVol. 20, Iss. 1, 2017)

In 1984, Orwell clearly foretold our coming age of Loss of Truth and Love. He thought Big Brother would hold the people down through continually biased information coming from a government that only serves the needs of the powerful. I see the fear now rampant in the United States, but I think a lot of worried people are pointing their fingers in the wrong direction. Our Loss is coming about by Social Media's manipulation of information combined with increasing social and economic sorting that is breaking the bonds of true, human communication and culture. And the crazy sad thing is that people are purchasing this technology willingly and giving their lives over to it without any thought to the privacy, liberty, and love they are trading away. 

A Simple Explanation of Immanence, or Inherent Consciousness

Scientists generally say that consciousness is a by-product of brains, and while organisms without brains may be reactive to stimuli, they are certainly not what you would call "conscious." The Simple Explanation, on the other hand, starts from the premise that consciousness is inherent in all matter.

The Simple Explanation proposes that our universe is fully conscious, from the tiniest material manifestations of the sub-atomic level through material aggregations of ever-increasing complexity and scope until it scales up to the most complex consciousness of all--the Very Large Universal Consciousness encompassing the sum of our universe's aggregate structures and processes. Indeed, the very ground state that forms the matrix of our universe, irrespective of material, is consciousness-without-thought. 

Each piece of material "knows how" to do its job in the niche it occupies. 

(visit the Simple Explanation blog)

As you can see from the diagram, our Universe is organized into increasingly larger and larger aggregations of objects and the processes required to arrange and maintain them. The Simple Explanation is a form of "intelligent design" in claiming that the matter and processes of our universe are driven by the consciousness inherent within it, and not by randomness or chaos. In this sense, the Simple Explanation is reminiscent of philosophies that talk about "Divine Immanence." 

According to the Simple Explanation, every unit of consciousness "knows how" to do the job it occupies. The scope of its knowledge and the breadth of its responsibilities becomes greater as it occupies niches of increasing complexity, but even the tiniest sub-atomic particles "know how" to do their jobs, just as a sunflower "knows how" to be a sunflower, a cloud "knows how" to be a cloud,  and a cat "knows how" to be a cat. From the micro level on up, particle-like waves "reach out" to others and "work together" to make larger and larger particles, atoms, molecules, and elements, forming the material bedrock of our universe. 

In this manner, inanimate material "behaves" no differently than life forms. Each of these pieces of material "knows how" to do the job slot it occupies. A hydrogen atom possesses the organizational capacity to be the hydrogen atom; it also "knows how" to reach out to other atoms to make molecules. Similarly, life forms put themselves together by building organelles and cells out of proteins and other cellular precursors, using very complicated arrangements and mechanisms for sub-cellular entities. Likewise, a stem cell mysteriously "knows how" to differentiate into just the cell needed to do the job. 

Oddly enough, while the concept of "very tiny up through very large" works well enough when applied to the amount of information needed to run a physical process, it doesn't really describe the amount of potential consciousness a material unit inherently possesses. This is because each and every unit of consciousness, no matter how tiny or large its vehicle, is a fractal of the entire overarching consciousness and, as such, inherently possesses the potential for all knowledge. 

The amount of information a piece of material can utilize and manipulate has more to do with its place in the overall structure and what it needs to know in order to do its job, not whether it is a life form or not, or whether or not it has a brain. In this Simple model, consciousness is inherent in all material, while knowledge is relative to an entity's niche and point of view, and information is valued according to its personal utility and its usefulness to the overall good.