Lancet

10 Dec (WASHINGTON) – At first glance, the US Dept. of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) “Healthy People 2020” seems like an excellent idea.  After all, what could be better than helping Americans live healthier lives?  Unfortunately, the initiative has – like many government programs – a much darker side. (more…)

12 Nov (WAKING TIMES) – The most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the world are having less influence amongst scientists, according to a paper co-authored by Vincent Lariviere, a professor at the University of Montreal’s School of Library and Information Sciences. (more…)

09 Oct (AGE OF AUTISM) – On Friday, October 5, UK reporter Brian Deer gave his second presentation at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, on “Stiletto Journalism: Busting the Vaccine Scare.” Ostensibly a primer on his coverage of the fallout from the 1998 Lancet MMR case series of Andrew Wakefield et al., in reality the presentation was part vanity schtick (more…)

5 June (SACRAMENTO) — The re-emergence of some vaccine-preventable diseases has prompted the California legislature to consider a bill that would make it more difficult for parents to opt out of vaccinating their kids.  The legislation would require that parents get (more…)

28 Mar – Unless your child was injured, disabled or killed by a vaccine, you probably don’t know who Andrew Wakefield MD is or why Lancet retracted his report.  If you friends and family are not touched by children who suffered vaccine injuries, you probably won’t care why the (more…)

Two years ago, a group of Boston researchers published a study describing how they had destroyed cancer tumors by targeting a protein called STK33.  Scientists at biotechnology firm Amgen Inc. quickly pounced on the idea and assigned two dozen researchers to try to repeat the experiment with a goal of turning the findings into a drug. (more…)

10 Nov-Gaia Health – In a rather dramatic development, Dr. Andrew Wakefield has been shown to be innocent of a significant charge levied by Brian Deer and the British Medical Journal. Because this is documented by the pretigious journal Nature, the BMJ has doubled-down on their attack.  (more…)

10 May|Washington DC – For over 20 years,  the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has quietly awarded millions of dollars in damages for vaccine injury to children where their brain damage results in autism.  At the same time, the US government has publicly denied (more…)

16 Mar – In BMJ, Bob Roehr wrote about a report published by German researchers in the Canadian Medical Association Journal describing an apparent tendency for journals that accept pharmaceutical advertising to publish more positive drug-related articles than those that (more…)

In a recent article in the Lancet Infectious Diseases, experts warned that a forensics technique called HIV phylogenetic analysis, sometimes called HIV fingerprinting, cannot definitively establish whether a specific individual transmitted HIV to another person.  The authors also stressed the need for scientists to recognize the limitations of the technique as a basis for proving HIV criminal transmission. (more…)

14 Feb AHRP – Why did the BMJ fail to disclose its partnership agreement with Merck, major vaccine manufacturer–13 vaccines, including the controversial MMR vaccine? (more…)

14 Feb – Today the world is so big and the miasma of information about it so opaque that even experts have to be constantly in touch 24/7, as they say. Take your eye of the ball for a second and you might regret it for a life-time. Some information, however, slips through the fog almost unnoticed; (more…)

3 Feb – There’s a sucker born every minute.  Although this remark is widely attributed to the showman PT Barnum, RJ Brown reports that it was actually said by a banker named David Hannum, who sued Barnum in 1869 for promoting a fake exhibit.  When Hannum (more…)

Dr. Andrew Wakefield has been a lightening rod for attacks by vaccine promoters ever since he published an article (Lancet, 1998) raising the possibility– though not claiming a finding of a causal link–between the onset of children’s chronic intestinal inflammation and pervasive developmental disorder following vaccination (more…)