MIke Adams Inadvertently Reassures Me That the CDC Does Not Listen To Feeble Antivax Cranks

My father is an OB/GYN and, I'll say it, new mothers-to-be are often a very nervous group of people. Don't get me wrong, it might just be the parasite talking, but they ask questions like, "Is shampoo bad while I'm pregnant?" (Answer: Not if you don't drink gallons of it.) So, what about pregnancy and vaccinations? I mean, there you are actually injecting something into a woman. (Needles + pregnancy + fear)^ignorance = catnip for predatory fear-mongers like Mike Adams.

He can't help himself, I suppose. He is ruthlessly exploitive. He uses people's fears to sell them their dreams. There is no more simple marketing strategy, though that does not make it ethical. So, what is this grass-eating glob of monkey mucus saying? It came in an email to me this morning entitled:

H1N1 vaccine linked to 700 percent increase in miscarriages

Mike, you are a menace to women, children, and public health. But you are also an ass-clown.

The article is especially feeble, and once you start digging into it, it falls apart like a corpse being dragged along the highway, only more grotesque.

Recent data presented to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Advisory Committee on Children's Vaccines has revealed some shocking information about the effects of the H1N1 / swine flu vaccine on pregnant women. According to the report, the rate of miscarriage among pregnant women during the 2009 H1N1 / swine flu pandemic soared by over 700 percent compared to previous years, pointing directly to the vaccine as the culprit -- but the CDC denies the truth and continues to insist nobody has been harmed.

OK, so it was not, technically, a study designed by scientists or epidemiologists. It was presented to the CDC by Eileen Dannemann, who runs the National Coalition of Organized Women (those disorganized women could never present anything to the CDC!). Adams makes the mistake of giving the woman's name and the name of her organization, because even the most cursory look their website reveals that they are merely a faulty CAPS LOCK button away from being Time-Cube guy. Across the top of their website is the headline:

National Coalition Of Organized Women Looking For Those Who Have Had Adverse Reactions To Flu Shots

Why do I think that they might have an agenda? Hm. And you look at their website, and it is a testament to the post hoc fallacy and the deservedly beaten redheaded stepchild of scientific evidence, the anecdote.

Take for instance the compilation of anecdotes included in the report to the CDC. You can't discern anything like causality in these stories because they don't have a control. They simply don't. I also failed to see anywhere in the assembled materials that the spontaneous abortion rate in the HEALTHY population is somewhere around 20%. 1-in-five. That's not at all an unlikely outcome of pregnancy!

They go to the VAERS database, which, as Bill Atkinson of the CDC told the Atlanta Skeptics, accumulates a massive amount of information about vaccines, including adverse events (not the same as adverse reactions, mind you). As far as I can tell, they have pulled 222 anecdotes of miscarriages following vaccines from the data. That's 222 cases of so-the-fuck-whats? It looks like it was compiled on behalf of some sort of legal action, but I don't know which. I can only imagine that it failed fucking miserably.

Even though I looked everywhere on the website for a single controlled study--anything with a control group, really-- that illustrated...anything. None is present. That means, by necessity, that this wacky activist group is fundamentally incapable of establishing causality.

The Health Retard fails again! Keep it up, Mike!

HJ