The publication by Australian Doctor of a controversial public lecture given earlier this year by Sydney chiropractor, Nimrod Weiner, has created a flurry of criticism about the lecture, particularly regarding claims about vaccinations.
We asked Professor Robert Booy to respond to some of the alleged errors in Nimrod Weiner’s speech:
I’ve benefited enormously from the expertise of chiropractors and osteopaths for a very troublesome back, and have consulted them hundreds of times. So it’s not the professional integrity of this health practice that I am questioning
What I’m saying is that this chiropractor is outside his area of expertise – immunisation is not his field.
Nimrod Weiner may indeed have studied immunisation for “hundreds of hours”, but an expert in a field is someone who has spent at least 10,000 hours.
I respect chiropractors for what they’re good at but immunisation is not their field and several points that Weiner makes need to be refuted.
And the truth is there will be some elements of truth in some of what Nimrod Weiner says.
Vaccine-preservative thimerosal has mercury in it
Nimrod Weiner quotes a claim that a child given all the vaccines on the schedule would receive 2370 times the accepted toxic dose.
Mercury has, in the past, been contained in many vaccines including those for children. But in recent years, it’s been removed from most of children’s vaccines.
Its removal was based the precautionary principle, which may have been overplayed because mercury had an important role in ensuring the sterility and safety of vaccines.
And there was no evidence whatsoever that it resulted in any side effects.
There’s mercury in the food chain and it bio-magnifies (increases in concentration) as its moves up. In fact, you may be exposed to more mercury from eating tuna than you do from getting vaccines.
So the mercury story is a furphy. If you look at autism diagnoses over the last couple of decades, the incidence of autism since mercury was taken out of the vaccines has actually increased.
If you thought mercury was causing autism, you’d have expected the incidence of autism to go down but the actual observation has been of an ongoing increase of autism.
Vaccine makers grow chicken pox virus on aborted fetuses and these viruses are used in vaccines
Some vaccines may have been developed from fetus cells a long time ago but that doesn’t happen any more.
We neither propagate vaccines nor develop vaccines using human fetuses. It’s not part of the story.
We use HUVEC cells which are human cells from someone who had a cancer a long time ago for research quite a lot, but we don’t use cells from fetuses.
Most importantly, we no longer see pregnant mothers or newborn babies dying of chicken pox because the vaccine has stopped transmission of the virus. It’s a tremendous advance.
But there are some children aged between 7 and 11 who haven’t had the vaccine. And there are children in Australia right now between 8 and 11 who haven’t had the catch-up dose. One of these children died about 18 months ago on the Central Coast of New South Wales.
Andrew Wakefield’s research is scientifically good
It’s been at least 18 months since Wakefield’s paper, which linked the MMR vaccine to autism was retracted by The Lancet.
It’s important to know that Nimrod Weiner didn’t even know the journal in which the paper was published.
The General Medical Council (GMC) in the United Kingdom did an extensive review of Wakefield’s research and found him to be both unethical and unreliable. The GMC is a very even-handed body that respects scientists and doctors who come before it. It’s not a board that sets out to harass and throw people out.
The herd immunity theory doesn’t make sense
Weiner doesn’t actually seem to understand herd immunity at all.
Individual immunity is where a person is protected because they’re vaccinated and this is extended to another person because the vaccinated one doesn’t catch or transmit the infection.
So if a baby in a family is only exposed to vaccinated people, even though that baby isn’t vaccinated against whooping cough for instance, they remain cocooned and protected by the herd immunity provided by the other members of the family.
Some people who are against vaccination take advantage of herd immunity because they know that so many other people are vaccinated that they are unlikely to catch the infection because it won’t transmit in a highly vaccinated population.
Homeopathic vaccines are safer because they use smaller doses
Vaccines work by exposing a human to a small dose of a germ which evokes an immune response. There are cells in the body that react to provide to protection in the form of chemicals called antibodies.
If we used substantially lower doses than we currently do, then people won’t be able to produce enough antibody to protect themselves.
Homeopathic “vaccines” are not vaccines.
An effective vaccine always involves using the smallest dose possible.
In developing new vaccines we use the lowest dose necessary to protect 80% to 90% of people.
Were we to reduce the vaccine dose by one-hundredth, the vaccine wouldn’t work. We know this from the work we do in developing vaccines.
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Comments (13)
Jon Wardle
(NHMRC Research Scholar, School of Population Health at University of Queensland)
Hi Robert.
Thanks for the article. I hope that many CAM practitioners read it and take something away from it. I often think that opposition in CAM users is more about being 'anti-medical' than based on the facts, and well informed pieces such as yours (that avoid ad-hominem attacks) can help immensely. Ideally the preventive, low-dose and "triggering the body's own mechanisms" principles of vaccination and immunisation are something that ought to be embraced by CAM practitioners. I often feel that…
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Peter Bowditch
Computer consultant and teacher (logged in via email @ratbags.com)
I'm afraid Professor Booy was far too polite. I sat through one of Mr Weiner's anti-vaccination seminars recently and it was atrocious.
I gave a presentation last night in which I went through the PowerPoint for the seminar and pointed out the errors and deceptions. The number of things he got wrong exceeded the number of slides, and what made it worse was that the truth about many of the pieces of misinformation has been pointed out to Mr Weiner and his anti-vaccination ilk on multiple occasions. What is surprising is how quickly the falsehoods can be uncovered, an example being comments about information being withheld from Australian parents despite that information being in brochures from Immunise Australia that are given out freely at hospitals, doctors surgeries and daycare centres.
I used to try to be polite to anti-vaccination campaigners. I am rapidly reaching the point where politeness needs to be abandoned because of the danger they present to children's health.
Peter Miller
(logged in via email @perpetualocean.com)
Homeopathic 'vaccines' are in fact water.
wilma western
(logged in via email @bigpond.com)
I was amazed at an article recently published in The Age opinion section that claimed diptheria vaccinations caused polio in the 50's. There was absolutely no reaction, and in a way that is understandable because there is always the problem that a reaction magnifies the importance of the original wild claims. It's important that experts do reply when the attacks on procedures such as vaccination take the form of public campaigning , and that for instance, even a local GP takes the time to challenge such campaigns when they surface locally. In the end the new legislation might have to be used by representative professional groups because such campaigns are often headed up by zealots who also have vested interests of their own to promote ( alternative treatments, etc) and are not deterred by well informed polite critiques of their outrageous claims.
Reema Rattan
(Editor, The Conversation)
Hi Wilma,
Professor Robert Booy has asked me to note this in response to your post:
"Curiously it was observed in the 1950s and early 1960s that vaccinations with DTP, which includes diphtheria but the mechanism is probably not specifically related, could in rare cases lead to paralysis of the limb that was injected when a child had already been brewing polio.
Rare and sometimes not so rare nasty things have happened with vaccines."
Clive A Marks
(logged in via email @attglobal.net)
A very positive and generous article and a good template for how to approach the issues. But why do we have so many receptive and uncritical hosts of pseudoscience? Isn't this the greater failing and question? If so, what has failed? I get the impression that Nimrod Weiner's claims are symptoms of a much wider disease.
Wil B
Environmental Planner (logged in via email @gmail.com)
You were far far too polite to this fellow. He doesn't deserve to be dignified in this way, he is killing people.
Michael Bending
Student (logged in via email @gmail.com)
The vaccine industry claimed that they took Thimerosal out of childhood vaccines but they didn't, this is just a myth that keeps getting peddled around without anyone doing any research. But efficacy or dangers don't seem to be a big concern in the allopathic medical field. It is now recognized that 90% of prescribed drugs approved for public use have failed clinical trials and have toxic side-effects (The Lancet, June 2011).
The drug companies actually did just a show removal, taking Thimerosal…
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Sue Ieraci
Emergency physician (logged in via email @ozemail.com.au)
Michael Bending - I'm not sure whether you are disingenuous or deliberately deceptive. Quite apart from mercury being removed from vaccines for precautionary reasons, there is no evidence of the proposed harms anyway. Here are some relevant references from major international medical journals:
http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/290/13/1763.short
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/112/3/604.short
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673602116825
The third paper, which directly measured merccury levels in children, concluded:
"Administration of vaccines containing thiomersal does not seem to raise blood concentrations of mercury above safe values in infants. Ethylmercury seems to be eliminated from blood rapidly via the stools after parenteral administration of thiomersal in vaccines."
Grendels
(logged in via Twitter)
Actually this is fairly simple to research, get a vaccine that is claimed to have no Thimerosal in it and test it. Why peddle conspiracy theories when they are so easy to debunk?
Stuart McMillen
Brisbane (logged in via email @hotmail.com)
I read this great comic strip about the history of chiropractic on the weekend. I thought readers in this thread would be interested in seeing it: http://darryl-cunningham.blogspot.com/2011/08/chiropractic.html
stephen prowse
(logged in via Twitter)
How can we get this response to those who need to see it and more importantly need to act on it?
Reema Rattan
(Editor, The Conversation)
That's a good question, Stephen and one that I have considered at great length. Sadly, we can only present this kind of information and hope that it's read by people who need to see it and act on it, as you say.
I think the problem is that this becomes an emotional issue and reason is trumped by good sense.