The Infectious Myth

David has been investigating measles. He cannot solve the mystery of who is behind the strenuous effort to turn measles from a benign childhood illness into a deadly killer, but he can guess that it has dollar signs attached to it. What David can do is discuss some of the facts about measles statistics, which are quite surprising. Which is that 97% of the death rate from measles disappeared by 1962, the last year without a vaccine. Until recently even David didn’t know that Canada simply stopped counting measles cases in the late 1950s, presumably because it was considered so insignificant, and didn’t start again until 1968, the year when the measles vaccine still in use today, was first used. He ends with the mystery of the mystery man trying to remain anonymous behind the @VaccineUK account. 

 

For more information, and to see the historical graphs David was able to find, see http://theinfectiousmyth.com/measles.php

Keith Findley is a law professor from the University of Wisconsin who has spent many years fighting injustices in the US justice system. One of them is convictions based on the Shaken Baby Syndrome hypothesis, sometimes treated as a dogma, now often called Abusive Head Trauma. Responding to an article in a pediatric journal, Findley and colleagues made a couple of major points in their responding paper. First, that the controversy over SBS/AHT is alive and well. In fact, a recent Swedish government panel reviewed the evidence and found that there’s no good evidence that the so called triad of internal symptoms in a baby are convincing evidence of abuse. Secondly, they assert that doctors are really going beyond a diagnosis of brain injury, and claiming that they can determine the cause of the damage, which is a legal finding (and often simply poor differential diagnosis, as many possible causes of the symptoms are ignored). David and Keith discuss these points, and also the biomechanical evidence which does not support the SBS theory, how those who testify as experts against SBS are treated (such as former guest Waney Squier), and some of the situations where convictions have been overturned after some people have spent years in jail. Even the godfather of Shaken Baby Syndrome, Dr. Norman Guthkelch, has spoken against the misuse of his tentative theory, that he proposed in 1971, so the times, they are a changing.

 

The article by Findley and colleagues is freely available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3328996

David Mivasair is a Canadian rabbi who is part of a petition to remove charitable status from the Jewish National Fund, a major landowner in Israel that has a mission to provide land to Jews, but not to people of our groups, such as Palestinians, a bias that even the Israeli state is not allowed to enforce. Reasons for the complaint is that the JNF has never identified purpose, supports the Israeli military (clearly illegal for a Canadian charity), is discriminatory and has assisted the Israeli state in annexing occupied terrority. This discussion of the JNF is within the context of the historical Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so the two David’s also take a historical journey back before the first major conflict of 1948. 

 

You can learn about the petition to end charitable status for the JNF in Canada, and sign it if you wish here: http://www.stopthejnf.ca

Libby Emmons is an award-winning playwright who was member of a theater group called the Puss Collective, but got ejected because of her views on transgender issues. This was not the first time she had addressed these issues, they were also part of her rather provocatively named play, “How to sell your gang rape baby for parts”. In that play, there was controversy, but not over transgender issues. Now, however it was different. Her response was to write about her experiences in Quillette, the Federalist and the Post Millenial. David and Libby talk about the schism between feminists and transgender activists in a world where progressives have perhaps too quickly sided with those who say that a man can become a woman (or vice-versa) simply by saying so. They talk about what Libby calls the ‘erasure’ of women, the invasion of women-only spaces by biological men calling themselves women, and the effects of chemical and surgical interventions on young children.

David discusses polygraphs, also known as lie detectors, with George Maschke. He makes the case that they are merely pseudoscience in fancy packaging designed to make gullible people confess to their sins based on the belief that the devices are infallible. Not only are they fallible, but George believes that they can be reliably fooled by your response to the control question, if you are applying for a job that needs one, or are in some other situation where it is hard to refuse one.

If you want to learn more, see Maschke’s site, which contains a lot of useful information, including the free e-book, “The Lie Behind the Lie Detector”: https://antipolygraph.org

David discusses medical integrity with David Healy, a psychiatric researcher who is not afraid to speak his mind, such as in his books, “Let them eat Prozac” and “Pharmageddon”. They discuss the dismissal of Peter Gotzsche from the Cochrane Institute, that he helped found. This dismissal was partly due to Gotzsche’s insistence that meta-analyses of drugs, vaccines or other interventions, take all clinical trials into account, including the negative ones that pharmaceutical companies would rather were forgotten. The removal of Gotzsche was triggered when he criticized an HPV vaccine meta-analysis that included only about half the available data, and that concluded there were no problems with the vaccine.

 

You can find out more about David Healy and his work at http://davidhealy.org 

 

He is also involved with medical side effect reporting at http://rxisk.org and reports of antidepressant nightmares at http://ssristories.org

Jenn Smith is a transgender person, born into a male body, but often living with his feminine side. And yes, Jenn does not deny his biological maleness, and prefers the pronoun ‘he’, even when all glammed up. Jenn has a more nuanced view between the dogmatism of transgender activists, who object to statements, such as that a man can never fully become a woman, and feminists like previous guest Meghan Murphy who are concerned with the encroachment of people claiming to be women, but are still biologically male, into previously women-only spaces.

 

Jenn blogs at https://transanityca.wordpress.com

Cynthia Garrett is a lawyer in California who is involved with the organization FACE, Families Advocating for Campus Equality. She discusses with David the problems with the existing Title IX procedures to investigate allegations of sexual assault by students at US colleges and universities, such as the use of a single investigator, pressure on colleges to increase the rate of sanctions, lack of access to evidence, and lack of cross-examination. They also how misunderstandings between young people, and misunderstandings of sexual consent can stimulate investigations when nobody is really at fault. The impact of campus sanctions on students and their families is also discussed. Garrett’s knowledge is derived from the 1500 cases that FACE has been involved with.

 

You can find more out at their website: https://www.facecampusequality.org

 

Or on their facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/familiesadvocatingforcampusequality/

David discusses conspiracy theories with Kurtis Hagen, a former professor, who has written papers, books, and now a pamphlet, on the subject. He believes in “particularism”, that simply states that every theory that is tarred as a “conspiracy theory” needs to be evaluated individually on its merits, it’s logically absurd to a priori assume that all conspiracy theories are false, especially since we know that some (such as Watergate and absence of WMDs in Iraq) were belittled as conspiracy theories before being shown to be true.