A Rebuttal To Rootclaim
Daily Beagle gets pruning
Rootclaim declares, based on 10 pieces of ‘evidence’, that the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine does not cause autism, and offers a $100k bet to anyone willing to take them up on their challenge. The Daily Beagle doesn’t have $100k, but we do have the truth.
Brian Deer Isn’t An Impartial Source
Our first port of call is to pick through Rootclaim’s evidence. The first refutation occurs in the opening paragraph:
Beginning in 2004, British investigative journalist Brian Deer wrote several articles accusing Wakefield of concealing conflicts of interest
Calling Brian Deer an “investigative journalist” is being charitable, and fails to disclose Brian Deer’s financial conflicts of interest. Which is hypocritical given the context.
Brian Deer attended the “See Re-invigorating Immunisation Policy Implementation and Success: From Parent to Partner and from Broadcast to Engagement” conference, where he held a keynote (read: featured) lecture “MMR-Money, Media and Retrospection. What drove the MMR crisis and what lessons should we learn for the future?”
The conference was hosted by the Merieux foundation (as evident on the first page)…
“Fondation Mérieux Conference Centre” translates as Mérieux Foundation Conference Centre. It makes no bones about their pro-vaccine bias, literally celebrating ‘vaccinology’, with the organisation regularly hosting “Annual Vaccine Acceptance Meetings”, where the goal is to increase vaccine adoption.
They hold such meetings in partnership with vaccine manufacturer Sanofi Pasteur, which is convenient from a profit standpoint. Sanofi were part of a collection of vaccine manufacturers sued back in 2006 following the Wakefield papers:
The decision was issued on Wednesday in relation to the case of a Frenchman known as Mr. J.W., who was immunized against hepatitis B in late 1998-99. About a year later, Mr. J.W. was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In 2006, he and his family sued vaccine-maker Sanofi Pasteur in an attempt to be compensated for the damage they claim he suffered due to the vaccine. Mr. J.W. died in 2011.
This is the same Sanofi Pasteur with a history of fraud.
This means, as opposed to being an “investigative journalist”, Brian Deer, is in-fact, a non-neutral third party who accepts vaccine industry finances to write vaccine industry favourable hitpieces.
By Brian Deer’s own admittance he tries to dig dirt on victims in order to “expose” them, essentially doing the vaccine industry’s legal legwork of digging dirt on claimants for them.
At no point has he tried to investigate the multi-billion dollar vaccine industry (except to attend their conferences to talk), and is clearly not neutral, and ergo, neither “investigative”, nor a “journalist”. He’s what people would call a “pharmaceutical shill”.
It’s unclear why he feels grieving mothers should be subject to “investigation” (would he have reported genuine victims with that major financial tie on the line?), and not his glaring financial ties to the likes of vaccine manufacturers.
Besides, even if we were charitible with the mischaracterisation, an investigative journalist isn’t medically credentialled, and thus isn’t fit to assess a peer reviewed paper anyway. So his personal attacks on Dr Andrew Wakefield would be baseless anyway, and it isn’t how you evaluate peer-reviewed papers regardless.
Brian Deer was hosted by the BMJ (British Medical Journal), giving the credibility of medical journal outlet to a hitpiece writer. The BMJ’s editor-in-chief, Fiona Godlee, in a rapid response was forced to admit the BMJ had a conflict of interest in relation to the MMR vaccines, but refused to extend the coverage to Brian Deer himself:
We have been asked by two readers to extend the correction about the BMJ's conflicts of interest in relation to its MMR coverage [1] to Brian Deer's articles. We have no plans to do this. The conflict of interest statements attached to Brian Deer's articles were correct. The conflicts of interest listed in the correction apply to the BMJ Group and not to authors who write in our journals.
It is particularly ironic because the justification for removing Dr Andrew Wakefield’s paper was a failure to declare a conflict of interest (a mere £55,000 for a legal consulting fee for a completely different study). And yet, Brian Deer has failed to mention his financial conflicts of interest and ties to pharmaceutical companies for over a decade.
Rootclaim goes on to declare that:
This conclusion is a strong indication that parents should vaccinate their children.
It really isn’t, especially not when citing Brian Deer without knowing his back history. You might as well be quoting the CEO of GlaxoSmithKline.
Continuing to the other pieces thrown in…
The Retraction
In 2010 The Lancet retracted Wakefield's study after several elements in the study were found to be "incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation."
This is a weird response from The Lancet. Many studies make contradictory findings (Rootclaim even quotes several in their argument), this isn’t a valid grounds for a retraction. It says “incorrect”, but it doesn’t say compared to what? What is it incorrect compared to? Insufficient information to evaluate.
Rootclaim conveniently omits the fact that the senior author for the paper, Dr John Walker-Smith was exonerated by the British High Court in 2012, which rebuts the Lancet’s claim (emphasis added):
For the reasons given above, both on general issues and the Lancet paper and in relation to individual children, the panel's overall conclusion that Professor Walker-Smith was guilty of serious professional misconduct was flawed, in two respects: inadequate and superficial reasoning and, in a number of instances, a wrong conclusion.
Whoops. This criticism was aimed at the General Medical Council, and if they could maliciously use “superficial reasoning” and “a wrong conclusion” to fire one man, then they could have very much done so with Dr Andrew Wakefield. If the study author did not commit “serious professional misconduct” (I.E. his conduct was sound and proper), it means so was his work on the MMR paper.
It is evidence GMC’s superficial decision making was an attempt to protect the status quo, a kneejerk reaction, and not proper scientific inquiry. The Lancet itself is often mired in conflicts-of-interest it has great trouble removing. If EcoHealth Alliance can skewer Lancet reporting, why can’t multi-billion dollar vaccine industries?
‘Key Evidence’ Study
The first study Rootclaim references is “Autism Occurrence by MMR Vaccine Status Among US Children With Older Siblings With and Without Autism”.
Even a cursory examination, this study has an eyewateringly high number of flaws.
Conflates Trivalent And Monovalent Shots
It lumps trivalent (tri - meaning ‘three’, an ‘all three-in-one’ shot) MMR (what you’d call an actual MMR shot), together with monovalent (mono - meaning ‘one’, only one per shot, meaning the child took three shots separately; one for mumps, one for measles, one for rubella):
The date of administration of the trivalent MMR (or the last-administered component of monovalent vaccines) […]
This is seriously flawed because a monovalent shot isn’t what people mean when they say “MMR shot” (notice the singular). It dilutes the dataset of the three-in-one shot and conflates it with the three separate shots.
It Relies On Insurance Claims To Determine Autism
ASD status in index children and older siblings was determined using a claims-based algorithm […]
Autism is a spectrum of development disorders, it can be mild - manageable with day-to-day care, not requiring any specialist treatment, or it range to severe, requiring medical intervention and mental health support. Typically it impacts education and social development, and milder cases aren’t really something you’d treat using healthcare, but with educational support.
This means, if a child’s autism needs are sufficiently low enough, they won’t appear on the insurance claims, but even if we do go by that system…
It Excludes Claims Anyway
Emphasis added:
ASD status defined as 2 claims with a diagnosis code in any position for autistic disorder
Why ‘2 claims’? Why not 1? If it’s serious enough to warrant a healthcare ICD code (which is an official medical classification, meaning a doctor has gone out of their way to register it), surely 1 claim would suffice?
In-fact, this would likely exclude any of the mild-moderate autism cases that are detected, but do not require further inventional treatment. And before you say ‘well it’s not that serious’ - the whole point is to see if there’s a correlation between MMR shots and autism. You can’t just exclude claims willy-nilly because they don’t have a sufficiently high enough counter.
It Conflates Dose Receipt Numbers And Times
Emphasis added:
[…] relative risks (RRs) were estimated to compare ASD status in children receiving 1 dose of MMR at ages 2, 3, 4, and 5 years and 2 doses at age 5 years vs those who were unvaccinated at those ages (2-dose RRs at age 4 years would only include those children who received the second dose by their fourth birthday).
This is a lot of statistical jiggery pokery to unpack.
It conflates 1 dose MMR shot receivers with 2 dose MMR shot receivers (bearing in mind this also includes monovalent or one-shot-per-disease receivers), in a general lumped together group.
This means you cannot see if an increase in the number of shots correlates with an increase in autism rates.
The Time-Series Is Dubious Too: They’re Not Truly Unvaccinated
What’s also curious is there is this very weird cut-off point in time (emphasis added):
[…] vs those who were unvaccinated at those ages (2-dose RRs at age 4 years would only include those children who received the second dose by their fourth birthday).
Why would you arbitrarily cut-off at the age of 4 for the second dose? It’s completely unnecessary. Weirdly, they admit they accept single-shots up to age 5 in the single dose category (emphasis added):
[…] estimated to compare ASD status in children receiving 1 dose of MMR at ages 2, 3, 4, and 5 years
If they get the two shots at the age of 5 onwards and then go on to develop autism after, this study wouldn’t pick that up. And it’s not an unreasonable objection, because online materials say the second dose is typically given as late as 6 years old. The CDC remarks the MMR shots in general can be given as late as 13 years of age.
Why “unvaccinated at those ages” (if you get a shot after that arbitrarily short time period are you still “unvaccinated”), and not ‘unvaccinated their entire life’?
This does not strike me as being truly unvaccinated, as the normal definition as any person would understand it, and seems to be statistical jiggery pokery in relation to the study design. Why have any cut-off point for MMR shot receipt?
The Study “Adjusts” The Causes Anyway
The study goes on to alarmingly remark that they’re separating any adverse reactions or events in relation to the vaccine, lest they are “potentially associated with ASD”, and puts them into a “Separate claims-based indicator”:
Separate claims-based indicators of the presence of seizures and vaccine-related allergies in the index child were included as time-varying covariates because they are possible contraindications to vaccines and are potentially associated with ASD status.
Isn’t the whole point of the study to find vaccine causes like this that then go on to cause Autism?
The Study Tries To Guess Ethnicity By Algorithm As A Variable
Yes, you read that right. It’s a weird thing to do. To work out this is happening, you have to read an earlier statement in the study:
The database consists of proprietary, deidentified health claims data […]
“Deidentified” means it has no identifying information, like race, background, appearance etc. The researchers then proceed to… ‘reverse engineer’ their own dataset (rather than asking for more accurate data) using a blackbox algorithm on ethnicity, which guesses based on, wait for it… ZIP codes and first/last name (how is this possible if the data is “deidentified”?), emphasis added:
Approximately 30% of the race/ethnicity data in this study were collected directly from public records (eg, driver’s license records), while the remaining data were imputed using commercial software (E-Tech by Ethnic Technologies) that uses algorithms developed with US Census data zip codes (zip + 4) and first and last names.
So basically they ran an algorithm asking ‘how White, Black, Hispanic or Asian or Other is this name and ZIP code?’, which not only reeks of racial profiling, but is completely unscientific and highly questionable.
They go on to remark how accurate it is at profiling just black people:
This imputation method has been validated and demonstrates 97% specificity, 48% sensitivity, and 71% positive predictive value for estimating the race of black individuals […]
48% sensitivity and 71% are not good values to see. That suggests it’s not very sensitive (52%) and has an error margin of 29% (almost 1/3rd wrong). And that’s just for black people. The researchers are cagey about the other demographics:
Individuals categorized as other/unknown for race/ethnicity were those whose race/ethnicity could not be assigned by the imputation algorithm […]
So basically anyone ‘not black’ got categorised as “other/unknown” is my interpretation of this reading.
They Re-ran The End Test Again Ignoring Anyone With Incomplete Data
Which should read as: ‘they re-ran this on just blacks’, because of the false attribution error rate of the above study.
An additional sensitivity analysis was also performed rerunning final models on the subset of children with no missing data on any covariates.
So essentially, after gathering all that data on all those children, they dropped any that hadn’t been completely filled in. In an intentionally selected “deidentified” dataset.
That’s like saying you hired 10 men to wear bags over their head, guessed the race of 7 of them, read the driving licence of 3 of them, then anyone who you hadn’t guessed anything for you asked to leave due to insufficient evidence of who they were.
I am very confused by this study’s definition of “deidentified” dataset. How were they finding first names/last names, driving licences and more, despite not having approval to identify the patients?
The New England Institutional Review Board waived the need for informed consent and deemed the study exempt based on its use of existing, deidentified data […]
It sounds like a consent breach because they turned the ‘deidentified data’ into identified data:
[…] data in this study were collected directly from public records (eg, driver’s license records) […]
And it seems more like they wanted to start with a blank dataset and then ‘fill in the blanks’ using whatever methodology they pleased. This is a red flag for data rigging, especially with the weird circumvention on consent rules.
Study Criticisms Summary
Conflates trivalent and monovalent shots
Relies on insurance claims to determine autism, ignoring unclaimed cases
Arbitarily dismisses autism insurance claims not above an unjustified threshold
Conflates the dose numbers of MMR (fallaciously assumes they’re equal)
Conflates receipt timings to arbitrarily declare vaccinated/unvaccinated based on arbitrary time thresholds that aren't justified ('unvaccinated at the time' implying they got vaccinated later)
Contradicts those time thresholds (accepts single shots up to 5 years of age, only accepts double shots up to 4 years of age; CDC limit is 13 years of age)
Used a questionable algorithm to do racial profiling based on names and ZIP code which skewers the dataset
Re-ran the test and ignored any "incomplete" data they hadn't filled in, despite intentionally starting with "incomplete" (deidentified) data to begin with
Circumvented consent laws by re-identifying the “deidentified” data after approval (‘public records’, ‘driving licence’)
The Dr. Bernadine Healy Quote
Rootclaim’s endeavours here are particularly weird. Firstly they use two different, inconsistent, arbitrary percentages for Healy’s quote. The Daily Beagle doesn’t put much stock in either of them, but it’s worth highlighting they can’t even keep their own arbitrary figures straight, which calls into question how well they’ve actually done their research:
Rootclaim’s presentation of Dr. Bernadine Healy is a laudible attempt on their behalf to try to present what they think a ‘neutral’ voice sounds like. They seem to think that neutrality is someone who wavers indecisively on a subject, but this is an ‘Appeal to Moderation’ fallacy. Someone who is neutral is someone who follows the facts.
The doctor here, does not present any evidence, and before Rootclaim can attempt an ‘appeal to authority’ fallacy, the person even insists they don’t know “[…] vaccines could be damaging to a small subset of children, hasn’t been completely answered yet”. This is not an impartial source, this is quoting someone who admits they don’t know and haven’t studied.
Weirdly, Rootclaim attributes her admission of ignorance as evidence that vaccines don’t cause autism, but this is an appeal to silence fallacy: absence of evidence, is not evidence of absence. Indian police will report rapes aren’t happening, because rapes aren’t reported: that is because they don’t investigate reports of rapes, so women don’t bother reporting it.
Likewise, Healy has tried to suggest the shots are ‘safe’, despite admitting that researchers “don't want to study the hypothesis”. Well, if they haven’t studied the hypothesis, then they can’t claim it is safe. Safety has to be proven, not assumed. Here is my cyanide shot, there has been no evidence this shot is unsafe, therefore it is safe, is really bad logic.
Oddly, Rootclaim labels the conspiracy rating of a cover-up, with this statement from a government worker saying they “don't want to study the hypothesis”, is labelled at a mere 5% (or 3.5%, depending on which inconsistent Rootclaim source you’re using), even though this is evidence to the contrary: she is de facto admitting there is a cover up and a refusal to investigate.
That said, it is worthwhile debunking the ‘authority’ source. Dr. Bernadine Healy was working for the National Institutes of Health (cursory research that even Rootclaim should be able to find). NIH often own patents on vaccines, so her remarks are a direct conflict of interest.
Quoting, ironically, from the NIH itself in 2007, in the study titled “Public-private knowledge transfer and access to medicines: a systematic review and qualitative study of perceptions and roles of scientists involved in HPV vaccine research”:
As part of the dispute settlement the non-exclusive licenses provided by the NIH were turned into co-exclusive licenses in 2007.
In 2015, Public Citizen, a rights advocacy group, called on the NIH to use their HPV vaccine patents responsibly.
The World Trade Organisation said the NIH had “many patents” when it came to vaccines:
NIH has obtained many patents but not filed in developing countries
This means, anyone working for or with the NIH has a direct financial conflict of interest when it comes to vaccines. Healy, therefore, is not an ‘impartial source’, as Rootclaim tries to suggest, and is actually reinforcement of the very conspiracy theory Rootclaim rejects of government collusion.
The NIH regularly sell their vaccine patents, so they have a financial vested interest in making sure not to scare away any customers. Healy’s testimony can, therefore, be largely disregarded.
Continuing, Rootclaim tries to suggest CBS has a 99.9% reliability, but offers no evidence to back up this percentage claim.
Hopefully they’re not trying a combination of Appeal to Popularity fallacy. Just because a corporate media outlet is well known, doesn’t make it reliable, nor an appeal to authority fallacy without establishing the authority - hopefully not through any shady ‘NewsGuard’ type setups where the main financeers are the media outlets themselves. After all, CBS is the flagship property of the CBS Entertainment Group division: their first priority isn’t the truth, it is entertainment.
Rootclaim proceed to ‘bumrush’ a slew of other pieces without detailing, so likewise we will bumrush our rebuttals.
Japanese Study
Rootclaim quotes:
“The incidence of autism in Japan gradually increased from 1988 to 1992, as MMR vaccination rates gradually decreased. The incidence of autism significantly increased after 1993 when the use of the MMR vaccine was discontinued.”
Daily Beagle retorts:
The study plays fast and loose with timelines and events, using a ‘correlation implies causation fallacy’, and omits the fact that Autism wasn’t identified as a spectrum disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, until publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), in 1994, which is 1 year after the study claims that the “incidence of autism significantly increased”.
Also, we’d like to point out Japan has other vaccines besides MMR, and still gave the measles, mumps and rubella shots individually, so it isn’t quite as big as a “gotcha” as Rootclaim thinks.
Oxford “Study”
Rootclaim writes:
Dozens of studies, performed in multiple countries by numerous researchers and including more than a million subjects, failed to support an association between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Daily Beagle retorts:
The source is from Oxford University, who are known to manufacture vaccines (Oxford-AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 shot being the most well known currently). Also, I find it hard to trust a source that arrogantly says, in the title that it is “authoritarive information for all”, because it screams narcissistic arrogance, and not the rigour of scientific practice which knows fallibility:
It is odd that Rootclaim would quote vaccine-manufacturing Oxford rather than the study directly. The study is conveniently hidden behind a paywall which means it must be dismissed, because the authors should not need to hide the specifics of their methodology behind a paywall. Rootclaim failed to claim the citations the meta-study used, and ergo it cannot be scrutinised. If they were that worried about saving lives with vaccines they would have made the dataset free and public.
Wakefield Report
Rootclaim writes:
Rootclaim seems to flipflop here, (image below) so we’re not sure what point they’re trying to make (so there isn’t a tidy quotation here). They alternate between two possible scenarios of Wakefield fabricating his study data versus not fabricating his study data.
Daily Beagle retorts:
This is a rehashing of the Wakefield retraction claim which has been refuted earlier in this article. This isn’t new evidence and looks like bloat, which looks like an appeal to repetition fallacy, and a fallacy of ambiguity.
Thames Report
Rootclaim writes:
Reported data from 1979 to 1999 on the incidence of Autistic Spectrum Disorder in the North East Thames region in England, indicates that there was a steady increase in the incidence of autistic spectrum disorders each year and no sudden change in the trend after the MMR vaccine was introduced in 1988.
Daily Beagle retorts:
Now readers know Autism wasn’t found in the psychiatric diagnostic manual DSM-IV until 1994, they can see the flaw with the claim that there was ‘no sudden change’ with autism in 1988, which is prior to 1994. How would they have diagnosed it prior to 1994, Rootclaim?
Older Siblings “Study”
Daily Beagle retorts:
This is an appeal to repetition. The study was refuted above.
Significant Increase In London Study
Rootclaim writes:
According to the paper Incidence of autism spectrum disorders: Changes over time and their meaning, there was a significant increase of autism in England from the 1960s to the 2000s.
Daily Beagle retorts:
This would refute your earlier study from the Thames report (which is in London, a part of England) that says there was a “steady increase” and “no sudden change in the trend”, where-as this study contradicts and says there was a “significant increase”.
There’s a flaw in the paper because it admits since the 1960s there were ‘changing concepts of Autism’ (it is image-only so no text quotations can be made):
This would mean the study cannot argue there is a “significant increase” in Autism because it fails to clearly define what Autism is, and uses a subjective set of changing standards, and therefore is worthless as a dataset.
Abnormal Immune Reaction Studies
Rootclaim writes:
Four studies conducted from 2006-2013 indicate that an abnormal immune reaction to the measles virus does not have a causal role in autism, while a fifth study done in 2003 points towards the existence of such a role.
Daily Beagle retorts:
Rootclaim appear to be scraping the barrel here, because no longer are the studies related to the vaccines, but the measles virus itself. Even as Rootclaim seem to be reaching pretty hard for the ‘autism must occur naturally’ card, the studies don’t even support that hypothesis, with four to one against.
Even if their point was to try to suggest the measles virus from a vaccine does not cause autism (of which the last study leaves the door open on), MMR vaccines do not just contain a virus and nothing else; they often consist of many variable ingredients that differ by make and manufacturer, as well as batch and time period. It’s unclear what argument Rootclaim are trying to make here.
MMR Contains Thimerosal
Rootclaim writes:
Nothing at all. This one is particularly odd, and Rootclaim seems to have sloppily left this one incomplete. No percentages, no quotations, nothing:
Daily Beagle writes:
Perhaps it is because Rootclaim found it was factually true and therefore just didn’t bother to flesh out evidence that would have undermined their position. Thimerosal is an Organomercury.
Thimerosal is an organomercurial compound
Multiple dictionaries will tell you organomercurial will mean something that contains mercury:
“an organic compound or a pharmaceutical preparation containing mercury” - Merriam-Webster
“any mercury-containing organic compound.” - Free dictionary
A study, called “Comparison of Blood and Brain Mercury Levels in Infant Monkeys Exposed to Methylmercury or Vaccines Containing Thimerosal”, which involved thimerosal experiments on monkeys, remarked that:
[…] Data from the present study support the prediction that, although little accumulation of Hg in the blood occurs over time with repeated vaccinations, accumulation of Hg in the brain of infants will occur. Thus, conclusion regarding the safety of thimerosal drawn from blood Hg clearance data in human infants receiving vaccines may not be valid, given the significantly slower half-life of Hg in the brain as observed in the infant macaques.
Hg stands for the element symbol for Mercury, which shows Mercury accumulates in infant monkeys when repeatedly injected.
In the study “Activation of methionine synthase by insulin-like growth factor-1 and dopamine: a target for neurodevelopmental toxins and thimerosal”, it remarks:
[…] Our findings outline a novel growth factor signaling pathway that regulates MS activity and thereby modulates methylation reactions, including DNA methylation. The potent inhibition of this pathway by ethanol, lead, mercury, aluminum and thimerosal suggests that it may be an important target of neurodevelopmental toxins.
Which shows that thimerosal interferes with DNA methylation, essentially interfering with gene expression and development as well, which is noticeably awkward when one notes that genes seem to be related to autism.
In another study, titled “Thimerosal induces DNA breaks, caspase-3 activation, membrane damage, and cell death in cultured human neurons and fibroblasts”, it details - even in the title - that Thimerosal damages DNA, damages the membrane, causes cell death (which makes sense, as it is used as an anti-microbial agent) in neurons - that is brain tissue (read: neurological development issues) and fibroblasts (which is used in wound healing), quoting:
[…] Cortical neurons demonstrated higher sensitivity to thimerosal compared to fibroblasts. The first sign of toxicity was an increase in membrane permeability to DAPI after 2 h of incubation with 250 microM thimerosal. A 6-h incubation resulted in failure to exclude DAPI, generation of DNA breaks, caspase-3 activation, and development of morphological signs of apoptosis. […]
Apoptosis is another word for ‘cell death’. Cortical relates to the cortex, which is the outer layer of the brain. Interestingly enough, symptology of autism shares similar symptology with Dysexecutive Syndrome, of which the syndrome is caused by frontal physical brain damage.
Despite the US government insisting the safety of thimerosal, the evidence was such California ultimately made a great show to “ban” it, although they only banned ‘more than a trace’, which implies a trace is permissible (and the amount of a trace wasn’t defined, suggesting the pre-existing amounts could scoot under that limbo threshold, so a token ban at best). Odd move to make for a ‘safe’ chemical.
The FDA Approved The Shot
Rootclaim writes:
The MMR vaccine is approved by the FDA
Daily Beagle retorts:
This is a circular logic. ‘It is safe because it is declared safe’, seems to be a striking ‘appeal to authority’ fallacy. In 2016, the BMJ raised concerns of seeing what’s called “regulatory capture” (where a group being regulated - E.G. pharmaceutical companies - infiltrate and gain control over a regulator, ultimately capturing it). In 2022 they raised a similar alarm again.
The BMJ are peer reviewed journal ‘British Medical Journal’, who are a formerly pro-vaccine group who, ironically, hosted the uncredible Brian Deer, and they are the ones informing you that the FDA has been captured by pharmaceutical companies. ScienceMag also wrote of this problem.
Statnews (quoting a BMJ study) wrote:
[…] researchers who studied the careers of FDA medical reviewers found that more than half of the hematology-oncology assessors who reviewed drugs between 2001 and 2010 went on to work for the biopharmaceutical industry."
Indeed, we can see this is blatantly true because former FDA head Scot Gottlieb, not only was a former CEO of a pharmaceutical company when he was hired, but joined Pfizer’s board of directors, showing the FDA has an overwhelming conflict-of-interest. Scott Gottlieb became head of the FDA, not just once (under Bush), but twice (under Trump).
In Conclusion
Rootclaim seriously need to do their homework, perform appropriate background checks and conflict-of-interest checks on quoted sources, not parrot common talking points that have been refuted (unawareness of the refutation does not mean absence of it), and actually speak with critics of the industry - which include former workers.
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