Dr. Deckoff-Jones on CROI

[floydguy]

It's a very interesting article, but I do worry about these claims being made loudly, because of the billions of dollars that the US government could invest in order to 'disprove' them. If the US government gets to hear that the WPI might have proof that vaccines might contain harmful retroviruses, then we're not going to see any more investment dollars in XMRV, and worse than that, there might be an orchestrated smear campaign against the WPI. It could be disastrous. Of course, if I believed that governments only ever acted in the best interests of the citizens, then I wouldn't be worried about it. But there's a lot of scientists, a lot of careers, a lot of companies, and a lot of money involved in producing vaccines. And a lot of US politicians are probably closely linked to big-pharma companies. Personally, I don't think that this is a theory that our community should be making much noise about until we have many more positive research papers published about XMRV.

I would tend to agree. However, I think it's possible that the WPI already believes they are under vicious attack so they aren't holding back.

 

[cigana]

I think that the fact that this applies to prostate cancer too is another factor on our side (apart from some very well-regarded scientists and drug companies). People don't give a crap about a bunch of psychotic women faking tiredness, but they will surely get scared and demand action when it comes to a link between vaccines and cancer. That's the line we have to push if we want to alert the public. And there are some influential scientists with a vested interest in XMRV's link to prostate cancer.

 

[SOC]

SickofCFS,

Do you remember the UK Minister John Gummer at the height of the BSE problem in the UK? Look at the way in which he used his 4 year old daugher to try and convince us all was OK

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/369625.stm

We simply do not know how all very powerful people treat their children.

No, I don't. Possibly news of his daughter-feeding event didn't make it to my little corner of the US. Nothing like using your kids to forward your message, regardless of the impact on them. Politicians are famous for it.

Politicians are also famous for self-delusion. Gummer probably had convinced himself the hamburger was safe. He was eating one, too, I see. Could all these politicians, virologists, and retrovirologists be deluding themselves that they and their family members couldn't be among those infected by contaminated vaccines? Seems a bit of a stretch. That's a lot of people with a lot of family willing to sacrifice themselves, their children, and probably their children's children, to.... what, play CYA for the CDC?

This thing raises a lot of questions, doesn't it?

 

[Bob]

No, I don't. Possibly news of his daughter-feeding event didn't make it to my little corner of the US. Nothing like using your kids to forward your message, regardless of the impact on them. Politicians are famous for it.

Politicians are also famous for self-delusion. Gummer probably had convinced himself the hamburger was safe. He was eating one, too, I see. Could all these politicians, virologists, and retrovirologists be deluding themselves that they and their family members couldn't be among those infected by contaminated vaccines? Seems a bit of a stretch. That's a lot of people with a lot of family willing to sacrifice themselves, their children, and probably their children's children, to.... what, play CYA for the CDC?

This thing raises a lot of questions, doesn't it?

Yes, the trouble is that the politicians don't look at the evidence themselves... They only get to hear an interpretation of selected evidence, as presented to them by their advisers, such as Wessely (Hence the politician feeding his daughter meat on TV)... So if a scientific advisor tells them that vaccines are safe, then that's what the politician will believe, and will repeat to the public.

Yes, this does raise lots of questions, and issues, doesn't it!

 

[jenbooks]

This was the best piece she ever wrote--it's a great piece. It should be published elsewhere. It isn't about WPI at all. It's a worthy theory and should be considered by science. It's so intuitively obvious anyway, how could it be denied?

 

[SilverbladeTE]

AH more "conspiracy theory" stuff for you to chew into if wish folks

http://www.rawfoodsupport.com/read.php?11,131246,131246
http://www.socialistalternative.org/publications/globalwarning/ch10.html
http://www.oprus2001.co.uk/testing.htm

BSE came from...sheep dipping? perhaps
what, you expect our Lords & Masters to tell us any part of the truth? pfft, get real...
alas I can't find out exaclty which minister it was who brought in the compulsory dipping ..and then went to work for company who sold it!! I do recall it though from that time, think "Spitting Image" lampooned it, lol

 

[Cloud]

This was the best piece she ever wrote--it's a great piece. It should be published elsewhere. It isn't about WPI at all. It's a worthy theory and should be considered by science. It's so intuitively obvious anyway, how could it be denied?

I have to agree Jen. And, I like your use of the word "intuitive" because the probability of a vaccine link has been my feeling for a very long time. Having had a vaccine trigger onset ME/CFS, I knew full well that could happen....but that only shows vaccine as a trigger, rather than cause. After the xmrv news came out in October 2009, I became more open to the possibility of more significant vaccine involvement in neuroimmune disease. Somewhere between contributing factor, and full on cause, is the reality of the vaccine link to neuroimmune disease...but there is a link. I'm thrilled to see growing interest and studies in this area.

 

[leaves]

Hmm I'm not sure about the xmrv anymore, I think a herv can Also explain everything: including permanent setback after immune activation

 

[alex3619]

Hi, on the vaccine threat there a number of issues. It is far from certain that vaccines carry this virus. On the other hand, we know that they have the potential to do so, and none have been screened. This has been debated many times on this forum.

The issue with vaccines is that not every batch will be contaminated, in all probability. This intermittent contamination hypothesis actually matches ME/CFS outbreaks. Who get vaccinated the most? Children and medical workers. Where have we had a lot of epidemics? Children and medical workers. There is an historical mystery here that those of use who are talented with digging up history might like to pursue. Do many epidemics of ME/CFS follow very specific vaccination batches?

Now the implication of this line of reasoning is that most of the vaccines will be safe, or nearly so. It does not take universal vaccine contamination to spread a virus. However, there is no recovery from a retrovirus, and outbreaks can lead to a slow spread through the population. The next question that arises is how many of the population with XMRV that are not part of an epidemic are from this slow spread, and how many from vaccination?

Please understand I do not believe in the vaccination theory, but I don't disbelieve in it either. We need more evidence, and we might get that though examining the historical archives of vaccination schedules and matching them to outbreaks. I am also not convinced that XMRV causes any disease, but I still do think the evidence is very compelling. We need to know, with certainty, and that means we need to back the WPI.

Bye
Alex

 

[Bob]

The issue with vaccines is that not every batch will be contaminated, in all probability. This intermittent contamination hypothesis actually matches ME/CFS outbreaks. Who get vaccinated the most? Children and medical workers. Where have we had a lot of epidemics? Children and medical workers. There is an historical mystery here that those of use who are talented with digging up history might like to pursue. Do many epidemics of ME/CFS follow very specific vaccination batches?

Well, that made me do some thinking...
The 1955 outbreak of ME in the Royal Free hospital that they labelled 'mass hysteria' was supposed to be a polio-like illness (or an atypical-polio-like illnes?), if my memory serves me correctly.
So I just looked up some details... The Royal Free outbreak was in 1955...
And then this is what Wikipedia says about the Polio vaccine...

Polish-born virologist and immunologist Hilary Koprowski, who claims to have created the first successful polio vaccine, in 1950. His vaccine, however, being a live attenuated virus taken orally, was still in the research stage and would not be ready for use until five years after Jonas Salk's polio vaccine (a dead injectable vaccine) had reached the market.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine

So the Polio vaccine was on the mass market at around 1955. I wonder if the staff at the Royal Free were immunised at this time? All medical staff would probably be the first to receive the vaccine, probably all at the same time, in a mass immunisation drive.

And then, if you read on in the Wiki article:

Koprowski's attenuated vaccine was prepared by successive passages through the brains of Swiss albino mice.

What?!?!?!?!

Swiss albino mice! Mice!

Alarm bells!!!

This all sounds rather close to what Deckoff-Jones has said in her blog, about the successive passage of vaccines through tissues.

It goes on to say:

By the seventh passage, the vaccine strains could no longer infect nervous tissue or cause paralysis. After one to three further passages on rats, the vaccine was deemed safe for human use.[13][14] On February 27, 1950, Koprowski's live, attenuated vaccine was tested for the first time on an eight year old boy from Letchworth Village, New York. The boy suffered no side effects and Koprowski enlarged his experiment to include 19 other children

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine

And then there's a bit about contamination with Simian-Virus-40:

Contamination concerns

In 1960, it was determined that the rhesus monkey kidney cells used to prepare the poliovirus vaccines were infected with the SV40 virus (Simian Virus-40).[48] SV40 was also discovered in 1960 and is a naturally occurring virus that infects monkeys. In 1961, SV40 was found to cause tumors in rodents.[49] More recently, the virus was found in certain forms of cancer in humans, for instance brain and bone tumors, mesotheliomas, and some types of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.[50][51] However, it has not been determined that SV40 causes these cancers.[52]

SV40 was found to be present in stocks of the injected form of the polio vaccine (IPV) in use between 1955 to 1963.[48] It is not found in the OPV form.[48] Over 98 million Americans received one or more doses of polio vaccine between 1955 to 1963 when a proportion of vaccine was contaminated with SV40; it has been estimated that 10–30 million Americans may have received a dose of vaccine contaminated with SV40

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine

I've just done a bit more research, and mass inoculations were not quite ready by 1955. So unless the Royal Free was involved in a trial study, then they were unlikely to have received the polio vaccination.

Two vaccines are used throughout the world to combat polio. The first was developed by Jonas Salk, first tested in 1952, and announced to the world by Salk on April 12, 1955.[43] The Salk vaccine, or inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), consists of an injected dose of killed poliovirus. In 1954, the vaccine was tested for its ability to prevent polio; the field trials involving the Salk vaccine would grow to be the largest medical experiment in history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_poliomyelitis

hmm... I can't quite work out the dates when polio vaccines became widespread... it looks like it was in the mid-1950's:

Following the widespread use of poliovirus vaccine in the mid-1950s, the incidence of poliomyelitis declined dramatically in many industrialized countries

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis#Vaccine

This is from an NHS website:

Due to the introduction of a polio vaccine in 1955, the number of polio cases has been dramatically reduced.

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Polio-and-post-polio-syndrome-/Pages/Introduction.aspx

I can't find any more info on when the UK rolled out it's polio vaccination program, and I don't know when the Royal Free may have been trialing vaccinations.

There is some interesting information on the Hummingbird website that links ME to polio viruses (which are enteroviruses), and a suggestion that an 'infection' with ME protected people from the Polio outbreak in Iceland in the 1950's... http://www.hfme.org/topicoutbreaks.htm

Note: I know that I've just done a lot of speculation, but it's a very interesting area of discussion.

 

[currer]

Polio was a great threat in the nineteen fifties. Children were in iron lungs because they lost the ability to breathe for themselves. There were a number of outbreaks, remembered by a friend of mine who was a child at school at the time. He said you could follow the progress of the outbreak by the school desks in class which became empty as your classmates became sick or died. As the empty desks got closer he said he felt like moving out of the way to a new schooldesk in class.

I have always been interested in the early theory (before ME was psychologised) that ME was related to polio. This connection was made by doctors who could REMEMBER the polio outbreaks in the fifties and see similarities. (How expertise is lost as well as gained over time) Certainly the epidemic form of ME is similar in incubation time and spread. I have recently read a report suggesting that ME is caused by an enterovirus whioch infects the sensory (not motor as in polio) nerves, so though we are aware of our neurological symptoms, they cannot be demonstrated (by reflexes, movement etc.)

God knows how we got to the present orthodoxy that ME is a disease without a cause - you just got a virus that most recover from but YOU cannot make a normal recovery. What a load of rubbish.

 

[heapsreal]

I just read on another cfs site where they reckon they can trace HIV back to 1958, so it took them 30 years to work out what was going on, there was no references to this though so dont know how accurate it is. It seems cfs has been around alot longer, maybe not as immediately life threatening as HIV(probably our down fall) but we are only just starting to realise the higher risks of other illnesses steming from cfs like cancers etc but really modern medicine isn that old either.

cheers!!!

 

[SilverbladeTE]

God knows how we got to the present orthodoxy that ME is a disease without a cause - you just got a virus that most recover from but YOU cannot make a normal recovery. What a load of rubbish.

I suggest you read some of the Eugenic and racist lunacy from first 1/3rd of the 20th Century (if you've got the stomach for it) to see exactly how such wicked persecution and blind denial of the truth can come about.

Sane, well educated people believed completely ludiccrous crap about race, even dumb sh*t like "skull features" and...stuff I won't mention, ick...and condemned huge numbers to forced sterilization or death
and I am NOT just talking about Germany, far far from it, see sterilization by force in US states, Swiss abuse of gypsies, etc

That kind of stuff does not "go away" it was not some magical evil unique to that period in time (see prior instances of horror).
If you can make a group "different", "Not human", especially if you can "make them deserving of abuse by criminal acts or such" then abusing them becomes much, much easier
WE are merely the latest victims of such, along with Gulf War Syndrome folk, for some reason, we are "inconvenient" and are thus to be "silenced, disenfranchised and eliminated from society"

Again, go se what they did to the gays etc in ealry days of AIDs *similar crap*!

 

[Bob]

Polio was a great threat in the nineteen fifties. Children were in iron lungs because they lost the ability to breathe for themselves. There were a number of outbreaks, remembered by a friend of mine who was a child at school at the time. He said you could follow the progress of the outbreak by the school desks in class which became empty as your classmates became sick or died. As the empty desks got closer he said he felt like moving out of the way to a new schooldesk in class.

I have always been interested in the early theory (before ME was psychologised) that ME was related to polio. This connection was made by doctors who could REMEMBER the polio outbreaks in the fifties and see similarities. (How expertise is lost as well as gained over time) Certainly the epidemic form of ME is similar in incubation time and spread. I have recently read a report suggesting that ME is caused by an enterovirus whioch infects the sensory (not motor as in polio) nerves, so though we are aware of our neurological symptoms, they cannot be demonstrated (by reflexes, movement etc.)

Very interesting... Thanks for that, currer.

God knows how we got to the present orthodoxy that ME is a disease without a cause - you just got a virus that most recover from but YOU cannot make a normal recovery. What a load of rubbish.

I know that was probably just a rhetorical question, but I think Osler's Web, Hillary Johnson's book explains most of the answers for that question...
I haven't read it yet, because I can't face reading such a long book, but I think I should at least attempt it.

 

[Bob]

WE are merely the latest victims of such, along with Gulf War Syndrome folk, for some reason, we are "inconvenient" and are thus to be "silenced, disenfranchised and eliminated from society"

Our illness has no easy-to-find or obvious biomarkers, no known cause, and there are very few external 'signs' of the illness that are obviously visible to doctors or to other people...
Therefore we are a very easy target for people who wish to abuse their authority to force their own pet theories onto us, and to accuse us of being neurotic or hysterical...

As you say, it's just history repeating itself... It's been done with so many other diseases, and in so many other situations, throughout the centuries...
You'd have thought that in the 21st century, in western countries, this sort of thing wouldn't still be going on, and that a fraud such as the PACE trial would not be accepted as a legitimate piece of work.

 

[Forebearance]

This is a really sobering blog post from Dr. D-J.

If XMRV does turn out to be an accidental, man-made Frankenvirus, then wouldn't it be reasonable to think that it might behave differently than other retroviruses?