Why CDC whistleblower revelations about vaccines and autism never made headlines, and what that mean

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Why CDC whistleblower revelations about vaccines and autism never made headlines, and what that means for science |292|
by Alex Tsakiris | Nov 3 | Skepticism

Investigative reporter Jon Rappoport explains why the media intentionally ignored whistleblower revelations about vaccines and autism.

photo by: Art Writ
My wife is the medical expert in our family. She has a PhD in psychology, works with doctors, and performed medical rounds as part of her training. I, on the other hand, can’t stand to drive by hospital. So I was surprised when on a ride home from the movies Joni launched into a bit of a rant about a recent measles measles and accompanying media reports on the public’s lack of confidence in vaccines. “But what about that whistleblower from the CDC who revealed that there really was a link between the measles vaccine and autism,” I said. Joni looked at me with incredulity. She smart, well informed, watches the Today Show, reads medical journals and even blogs for Psychology Today; how could she not know about this large-scale medical fraud that destroyed the lives of thousands of children?
 
Seems like a microcosm of science in general, this particular quote could be applied to so many branches that its frustrating:

"They’re incurious people. They don’t have that kind of independent curiosity that leads them to go where they will on their own. They attach themselves to what they consider to be the establishment, the best version of science. And they roll the dice on that for the rest of their lives."
 
Alex's questions at the end of the interview:

Did you know about the CDC whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson? If so, when? How? What do you make of the fact that most of the people you know probably don't know about it?

How is something like this hidden in plain sight?
 
Did you know about the CDC whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson? If so, when? How? What do you make of the fact that most of the people you know probably don't know about it?

How is something like this hidden in plain sight?
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I found out about it on skeptiko-forum.com
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/cdc-autism-whistleblower-admits-vaccine-study-fraud.1217

The problem is not just science journalism. Journalism in general has sunk to a very sorry state. I posted about this in another thread:

Jim_Smith said:
Jim_Smith said:
The difference between the NYT and the National Enquirer is merely a matter of subtlety.
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It only took me 30 minutes before I found an illustration just by chance:

http://scottgrannis.blogspot.com/2015/09/de-sensationalizing-chinas-reserve.html
De-sensationalizing China's reserve losses

Here's how the NY Times today described what is going on with China's currency and foreign exchange reserves (emphasis mine):

HONG KONG — China is burning through its huge stockpile of foreign exchange reserves at the fastest pace yet as it seeks to prop up its currency and stem a rising tide of money flowing out of the country.

Even after a record monthly decrease of nearly $100 billion, China still has the world’s biggest cache of foreign reserves, standing at $3.56 trillion at the end of last month, government data showed on Monday.

The total has declined steadily from a peak of nearly $4 trillion in June of last year, as slowing economic growth caused investors to move money out of the country in search of better returns elsewhere. As a result, the Chinese central bank has had to sell huge amounts from its foreign reserves to maintain the strength of the nation’s currency, the renminbi.
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In reality, the news out of China is not nearly as breathless.

In August, China sold about $100 billion of its foreign exchange reserves, for a decline of 2.6%. China's reserves have now fallen by 11% from their all-time high just over a year ago. Since its all-time high early last year, the yuan has declined by about 5% vis a vis the dollar. The Chinese central bank is not seeking to "prop up" its currency; it is responding to what to date have been modest outflows of capital by lowering the yuan's peg to the dollar.

This marks a reversal of the yuan's trend over the previous 20 years, to be sure, but it does not represent a radical policy departure.
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Even after its recent declines, the yuan's value is still almost double, in real terms, what it was against a large basket of currencies 20 years ago (the chart above reflects data through July '15). Remember how China's critics for many years have charged that China was artificially depressing the value of its currency in order to boost its exports? Now those same critics say the sky is falling because China is trying to keep its currency from weakening. In reality, the yuan has been and continues to be one of the world's strongest currencies, and China's foreign exchange reserves still tower over those of the world's developed economies.
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UPDATE: more illustrations...
Jim_Smith said:
I have a distrust of all journalists
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https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-timothy-hunt-witch-hunt/
The Timothy Hunt affair represents more than the gratuitous eye-blink ruination of a great man’s reputation and career. It demonstrates the danger of the extraordinary, almost worshipful deference that academia, government institutions, and above all the mainstream media now accord to social media.
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The BBC played an especially important role in turning Hunt into a hated figure. Anyone who still thinks that the BBC’s reportorial standards have not precipitately declined should read Mensch’s detailed accounting of the various misquotes and falsehoods about Hunt that the network came out with in various radio and television broadcasts across the world. This was especially true and especially damaging in the case of the flagship Radio 4 Today program, the All Things Considered of Great Britain.
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It is telling that none of these mainstream organizations reported or seem to have known that, on the day after Hunt’s talk, the president of the European Research Commission (the delightfully named Jean-Pierre Bourguignon) had issued a statement in defense of Hunt and his record as a supporter of gender balance. He would have been an obvious person to ask for a comment.
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St. Louis also went on the offensive. This included an article for the Guardian entitled “Stop Defending Tim Hunt.”
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The coup de grâce came in July with Mensch’s release of a short recording from the luncheon. One can clearly hear applause and laughter in the room as Hunt ends his speech. Apparently out of a hundred guests from around the world, most of them women, the only people who were offended by Hunt’s remarks were a handful of British and American science writers, all of whom happen to be diversity obsessives.
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Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/sep/27/nation/na-rumors27

http://pjmedia.com/blog/no-first-amendment-here-french-court-finds-me-guilty-in-al-dura-affair/
On June 26, the Paris Court of Appeals found me guilty of defamation against television station France 2 and broadcaster Charles Enderlin.

After waiting one long week following the verdict, I was finally able to get the written arguments of the judges. The arguments state that — despite the hoax eventually becoming obvious to all who looked at the case — I was found guilty for having said that the al-Dura news report was a hoax … too early, in November 2004.
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The most problematic issue is that the verdict grants French journalists the privilege of being free from criticism regardless of their work’s authenticity. Indeed, the French authorities which should have forced France 2 to correct their fake report refused to act. The high authority which controls TV broadcasts — along with most of the French media outlets, French politicians, and the French judges — circled the wagons to protect a hoax which looks more and more like a state lie.
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New York Magazine Apologizes for Article That Was a Hoax
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/b...logizes-for-article-that-was-a-hoax.html?_r=0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair
Jayson Thomas Blair (born March 23, 1976) is an American journalist formerly with The New York Times. He resigned from the newspaper in May 2003 in the wake of the discovery of plagiarism and fabrication in his stories.
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Jim_Smith said:
Jim_Smith said:
I have a distrust of all journalists ...
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Jim_Smith said:
http://boingboing.net/2014/01/03/lies-of-the-daily-mail.html

Lies of the Daily Mail

By Cory Doctorow at 7:00 am Fri, Jan 3, 2014

Yesterday's New Statesman published a long, nuanced profile of Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of the despicable Daily Mail. Dacre's a remarkable and contradictory character, profiled with some sympathy but no white-washing by Peter Wilby, but the most striking moment of the piece comes in the first third, when Wilby lays out all the admitted falsehoods and libels published by the Daily Mail -- a list that is incomplete because it only consists of those where retractions, legal action, or other visible signals of falsehood were raised. There's a much longer list of smears and lies about people who couldn't afford to defend themselves from the paper (or couldn't bear to). Still, it's a hell of a list:

This year, the Mail reported that disabled people are exempt from the bedroom tax; that asylum-seekers had “targeted” Scotland; that disabled babies were being euthanised under the Liverpool Care Pathway; that a Kenyan asylum-seeker had committed murders in his home country; that 878,000 recipients of Employment Support Allowance had stopped claiming “rather than face a fresh medical”; that a Portsmouth primary school had denied pupils water on the hottest day of the year because it was Ramadan; that wolves would soon return to Britain; that nearly half the electricity produced by windfarms was discarded. All these reports were false.

Mail executives argue that it gets more complaints than its rivals because it reaches more readers (particularly online, where the paper’s stories are repeated and others originate), prints more pages and tackles more serious and politically challenging issues. They point out that only six complaints were upheld after going through all the PCC’s stages and that the Sun and Telegraph, despite fewer complaints, had more upheld. But the PCC list, though it contains some of the Mail’s favourite targets such as asylum-seekers and “scroungers”, merely scratches the surface. Other complainants turned to the law. In the past ten years, the Mail has reported that the dean of RAF College Cranwell showed undue favouritism to Muslim students (false); the film producer Steve Bing hired a private investigator to destroy the reputation of his former lover Liz Hurley (false); the actress Sharon Stone left her four-year-old child alone in a car while she dined at a restaurant (false); the actor Rowan Atkinson needed five weeks’ treatment at a clinic for depression (false); a Tamil refugee, on hunger strike in Parliament Square, was secretly eating McDonald’s burgers (false); the actor Kate Winslet lied over her exercise regime (false); the singer Elton John ordered guests at his Aids charity ball to speak to him only if spoken to (false); Amama Mbabazi, the prime minister of Uganda, benefited personally from the theft of £10m in foreign aid (false). In all these cases, the Mail paid damages.

Then there are the subjects that the Mail and other right-wing papers will never drop. One is the EU, which, the Mail reported last year, proposed to ban books such as Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series that portray “traditional” families. Another is local authorities, forever plotting to expel Christmas from public life and replace it with the secular festival of Winterval. It does not matter how often these reports are denied and their flimsy provenance exposed; the Mail keeps on running them and its columnists cite them as though they were accepted wisdom.

The paper gets away with publishing libels and falsehoods and with invasions of privacy because the penalties are insignificant.​
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Jim_Smith said:
Jim_Smith said:
The difference between the NYT and the National Enquirer is merely a matter of subtlety.
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https://reason.com/blog/2015/10/27/new-york-times-nail-salon-unvarnished

The New York Times’ Nail Salons Series Was Filled with Misquotes and Factual Errors. Here’s Why That Matters.

Reporter Sarah Maslin Nir's investigative series violated the standards of responsible journalism.

Jim Epstein|Oct. 27, 2015 12:01 am

A two-part series in The New York Times on nail salons has brought sweeping changes to an industry dominated by Korean and Chinese immigrants.
...
Not only did Nir's coverage broadly mischaracterize the nail salon industry, several of the men and women she spoke with say she misquoted or misrepresented them. In some cases, she interviewed sources without translators despite their poor English skills. When her sources' testimonies ran counter to her narrative, she omitted them altogether.
...
The second article lent the Times' imprimatur to unproven theories, while committing science journalism's cardinal sin of highlighting alarmist anecdotes that aren't representative of systematic research.
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The rush to legislate based solely on the Times' shoddy reporting has hurt the industry.
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Bernstein charged that Nir's story focused on a small segment of the industry while ignoring the vast majority of nail salons, which pay above the minimum wage and hire only licensed manicurists.
...​
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Also see my posts in the thread on the politicization of science:
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/video-on-the-politicization-of-science.2072/

People don't know what to believe. They don't trust "science" and they are right not to.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/p/62014-...erlife.html#articles_by_subject_bogus_science
Most published research findings are false:
http://www.economist.com/news/scien...w-institute-has-you-its-sights-metaphysicians

Bad Science Muckrakers Question the Big Science Status Quo: "... inherent biases and the flawed statistical analyses built into most 'hypothesis driven' research, resulting in publications that largely represent 'accurate measures of the prevailing bias.'"
http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfre...ckrakers-question-the-big-science-status-quo/

Linus Pauling: "Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud and that the major cancer research organizations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them." -Linus Pauling PhD (Two-time Nobel Prize winner)."
http://nationalpress.org/images/uploads/programs/CAN2009_Marshall.pdf

"The Lancet": The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness."
http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1.pdf

"Nature": "Ridding science of shoddy statistics will require scrutiny of every step, not merely the last one, say Jeffrey T. Leek and Roger D. Peng."
http://www.nature.com/news/statistics-p-values-are-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-1.17412

Retraction Watch
http://retractionwatch.com/

I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here's How.
http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800

Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers: "The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense."
http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763

"Der Spiegel protested all of this discussion with the statement, that what they hear is that 'journalists want to earn money, whereas scientists are only seeking the truth.' This brought loud guffaws from all three [professors]. 'Scientists,' answered Dr. Fischer, 'want success; they want a wife, a hotel room, an invitation, or perhaps a car!'"
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/der-spiegel-discovers-the-truth-from-science/

The History of Important Scientific Discoveries Initially Rejected and Ridiculed.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-history-of-scientific-discoveries.html
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Did you know about the CDC whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson? If so, when? How? What do you make of the fact that most of the people you know probably don't know about it?

How is something like this hidden in plain sight?

I can remember reading something about it fairly recently, can't remember exactly when, but it was on the Web.

Jon Rappoport has his own ideas about how it is hidden in plain sight, and a quick glance at his site seems to point at some kind of conspiracy. He's selling a number of items, namely The matrix revealed, Exit from the matrix, and Power outside the matrix, which comprise large amounts (gigabytes) of written and audio information that one can download. I'm not sure at first blush whether his use of the term "matrix" is literal or figurative or something in between.

I don't know how much is cock-up and how much is conspiracy, but I'd agree that in many areas, science has become corrupted: moreover, a lot of that is in plain enough sight and is being tackled head-on on the Internet in areas such as climate change, AIDS, vaccines, the electric universe theory, neo-Darwinism, and so on.

Despite the explosion of interest on the Web, and despite these kinds of things being openly discussed there, they have yet to gain the kind of traction they deserve, precisely because of the vested interests found in the media, which still control the flow of information to the public at large. However, I'm optimistic that the grip of these interests is waning and that at some point in the not-too-distant future, there'll be a seismic shift of that control to the Web, which can't be dominated so easily by special interest groups, although they are fighting a rearguard action all the way.

The breaking point will come soon enough. I hope I'm still around to see it.
 
Michael Larkin said:
Alex's questions at the end of the interview:

Did you know about the CDC whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson? If so, when? How? What do you make of the fact that most of the people you know probably don't know about it?

How is something like this hidden in plain sight?
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Oh yeah I discussed this last year on here with Linda. That's the thread where I finally discovered just how bad her cognitive dissonance was, and thus why she's so good at spotting bias in others (but not herself).

IIRC the issue was that the researchers didn't follow their own agreed protocols, and decided not to report statistically significant data, after it had been found.

Deliberate omissions, seem just as bad as including false data to me. The data should have been included, and the researchers could have qualified it. Obviously the authors were in disagreement.

Just goes to show that those with money and power can influence things, and that the media is very good at self-censorship.

But deep down everybody knows these things anyway. It's just that most people have probably discounted these facts sometime in their past, making it enormously difficult to perform a U-turn in the present. Only a crisis is capable of precipitating any change.
 
I think that was a really fascinating interview. It touched on a problem that has puzzled me for a long time. Information is thrown up that should be headline news, and it gets ignored.

I can think of a number of examples, and I do wonder if the mechanism by which this happens is quite as obvious as simply threatening reporters and researchers that step out of line. I mean, the suppression seems to operate almost worldwide, and to cover a range of topics.

I seriously do wonder if some sort of psychic effect is used that forces most people's minds to skitter off certain facts. This would be a crazy suggestion in most places, but maybe not here.

Could this be why many of the Skeptiko guests who are supposed to be experts in consciousness, have never actually read the studies into NDE's?

David
 
E.Flowers said:
Oh, I am sure that he is a full blown conspiracy theorist, but it's not like the topic is new or even esoteric.
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He reports the facts. And if you'd bothered to check you'd have found that his reporting on these issues is far from new. He's been doing it for over thirty years. You toss around vapid cliches like "conspiracy theorist" yet fail to do due diligence and basic research on who and what you're commenting on.
 
Saiko said:
And if you'd bothered to check you'd have found that his reporting on these issues is far from new.
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Which, as you can see in the very post that you quoted, is exactly the same thing that I said when noting how the "topic is not new". I do find it curious that you singled my post, because Michael was the first to note the whole conspiracy theory element in his writing. Even you must admit that some of the posts in his blog are extrambotic.
 
I think the scale of this problem of the media simply ignoring evidence is breathtaking. Here is a list off the top of my head:

They ignore the various medical scandals where the evidence for various policies simply isn't there, and when studies are done the outcomes are spun in extraordinary ways. It isn't that they don't take the other side, it is that they seem to skitter off the evidence - almost as if they don't see it.

They ignore the fact that the West deliberately destabilised the Ukraine, and discuss the whole mess as if it was something President Putin created.

They ignore a lot of evidence that climate change is insignificant.

Then there is the evidence that HIV does not cause AIDS.

They ignore all the evidence that consciousness does not fit into the materialist model.

There are a whole range of medical scandals bubbling up, and they more or less ignore these too.

Etc etc.

It isn't just the media, lots of people with professional involvement must do the same. I find it really hard to believe that this is a conventional conspiracy - but there is unquestionably a process that saps the very concept of an open society.

Unlike a conventional conspiracy, people do expose what is going on - usually without getting bumped off, but then nobody seems to notice!

David
 
David Bailey said:
It isn't just the media, lots of people with professional involvement must do the same. I find it really hard to believe that this is a conventional conspiracy - but there is unquestionably a process that saps the very concept of an open society.
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In broad terms we don't deal with controversies very well. Information that challenges any belief generates doubt, uncertainty,anxiety... When the challenged idea is a core belief we automatically trigger natural defenses such as denial, dismission, refusal etc...Which is okay, no one is expected to take a U turn on any subject in the blink of an eye, but often times we stop there, at the subconscious defenses. Very few have the time and energy to dig mountains of documents, claims, rebuttals and rebuttals of the rebuttals etc...

Controversy doesn't allow for a clear cut answer, which is what most of us really want. Instead it generates more doubts... as with the case of vaccine safety: life is already darn complicated and we'd like a simple Yes or No, Black or White solution instead of more uncertainties.

Problem is, some topics need decades of research and vigorous discussions to reach a consensus, and often times consesus is reached and then overturned again in light of new discoveries... Unfortunately we're not well suited to deal with the staggering complexity of the world around us... and that's why Zen was invented, isn't it? :D

Cheers
 
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