Is Polio a disease with one cause, or is it a symptom with several causes? Maybe even including a virus or two, along with heavy metal poisoning, insecticides, etc.
Other infections can cause paralysis. Polio from 1894 - 1954 was a story of epidemics, typically in the summer, typically regionally located. So in one county or city you have a wave of very young children getting stomach illness, stiffness, then becoming paralyzed as well as family members having just stomach illnesses, but without paralysis. (Multiple cases of paralysis in one home almost unheard of until the 1940s.) Many or most of the paralysis, in a given epidemic, is of the 'wasting'/sporadic type, where you have paralysis in one or several limbs followed by replacement of muscle with fibrotic tissue, this is very distinct from paralysis of any other etiology. But other cases during an epidemic (ie when this limb wasting is happening in a region) are of types that might resemble other infections, ie bulbar paralysis, respiratory paralysis.
By whatever technology would be used to look at the specific agent behind these epidemic cases, be it monkey brain inoculation+serology (you take a the nerve tissue from a fatal case or even just mucous from digestive tract of a living patient or some percentage of their contacts or just non-related people during epidemic, see if it paralyzes a monkey, or then mix a positive sample with blood of patient or other donors to see if a monkey gets paralyzed or not to look for antibodies) or in the 1950s stool sample monkey inoculation or cell cultures, throughout 1909-1954, findings are consistent for a narrow set of viruses with a handful of serotypes (finally pinned to three during the Foundation's typing project which involved 10,000s of monkeys). You also know that this is only affecting kids (at first), by age 5 in cities and age 10 in rural areas there aren't many cases - this speaks to a childhood illness that almost everyone builds immunity to. Adults are almost all demonstrably immune - their blood stops monkeys from being infected. Most kids are demonstrably immune by the same age that paralysis cases become rare (for urban or rural). You can do these blood neutralization tests for a fresh infected nerve sample or for the classic Flexner strain from 1909 and if the new case is the type 1 strain get the same effect, over and over, same donor's blood protects or doesn't - aside from the other two types, there are no new viruses showing up.
Coxsackie is found to be sometimes also present once cell cultures are developed, but during epidemics always with polio virus, not alone. Later Coxsackie is understood to cause paralysis too, but it doesn't have the same features (epidemic and pathological) that characterized polio. So you have distinct epidemiology (cases blooming in various regions in various summers), pathology (the wasting), and one agent - affirmed again when the polio vaccine stops the pathology form from being observed epidemically (but also replicates the symptoms in rare cases).
If polio epidemics were at any point being caused by toxins then you would have reverse age pattern. Youngest would be harmed too, sure, but the harm would compound as they got older anyway - because of repeat yearly exposure. You wouldn't have adults just walking around fine.
I found this document that mentions paralysis in animals associated with the outbreaks of Infantile Paralysis in Vermont. This link includes the search term:
All the chemical/pesticide theories are impotent to explain why adults are generally hunky dory. Why wouldn't old, malnourished, overworked, be paralyzed by mercury, if it was used to cure everything? Because they didn't take it for their teeth coming in? This is the same problem in reverse when the virus is new, children fare better. But polio virus was never new, only the coincidental injection of it when medicine entered the age of the needle.
That does not seem correct. The chapter about Polio from Turtles all the way down points out some insteresting aspects that occurred during WWII and with British soldiers stationed in India, where adults contracted the disease and there were interesting differences between officers and enlisted me with officers contracting it more frequently (sometimes an order of magnitude more frequently). Officers in the British army usually had experience with horses and played Rugby so they had plenty of exposure to dirt and conditions where they could have contracted the polio virus and thus should have been immune.
Also, the first effective hypodermic syringe seems to have been invented in 1841, but in 1835, Badham reported a cluster of four children under 3 years old in Worksop, England who contracted Infantile Paralysis, and Heine reported 14 cases (mostly children) in Europe in 1840.
Further, there were curious cases reported, including by a British doctor who spent 20+ years in Tianjin, China, to Sabin, that in overseas postings (eg, China) the local children rarely got paralysis and that he (the doctor) had to attend to more such cases among the expats than to local children.
On the other hand, there are viruses that are known to cause paralysis.
On the gripping hand, I went and looked up the symptoms of poisoning with lead arsenate products and it does not mention paralysis, perhaps because such would be regarded as polio. In addition, we also have to account for the occasional alleged vaccine caused paralysis, although the only diagnostic we have, it seems, is the paralysis.
So, I am undecided. I have to dig out my copy of Turtles all the way down on my Kindle and read the rest of the chapter on Polio :-)
My theory does not allege anything about infantile paralysis before 1881 and especially hinges on the increase after 1894. Diphtheria anti-toxin is the technological prisoner in the prison yard spotlight here, and needles as medicine are just the footprints leading up to 1894. Moving the spotlight to a different year with a handful of cases can certainly lead to not seeing needles and diphtheria anti-toxin, but that's the point. The past is full of plagues of interesting character, but polio epidemics striking children are a novelty of the needle era.
Adults in the 20s-40s would have been children in the new needle era. FDR is a prototypical adult onset. Especially when it comes to troops serving abroad, this fits my theory better than it fits any chemical theory, because we know polio virus has three serotypes and at any given point one of them could be lacking in local circulation for a long time. But diphtheria anti-toxin isn't produced locally. So a kid can be primed with polio virus abortive infection from a non-local serotype and not experience enteric infection until traveling far abroad, and then the autoimmune attack destroys the nerve and surrounding muscle.
Chemical theories really can't explain why limbs would waste away.
Polio, the disease, seemed to arise after Lead Arsinate started to be used as a pesticide and declined after we switched to DDT.
Also, Turtles all the way down documents this:
"For instance, in 1900 a mysterious epidemic broke in the city of Manchester, England, which paralyzed thousands of people and killed several dozens. After long months of uncertainty, the cause of the disease was identified: high arsenic concentration in the sulfuric acid used to process sugar in beer production at several of the area's breweries. (ref 119). Ending the use of toxic sulfuric acid stopped the outbreak in its tracks. Moreover, a subsequent inquiry revealed that the beer brewing process in central and northern England had been contaminating barley kernels with arsenic for decades (albeit at lower levels than those associated with the contaminated sulfuric acid during the 1900 Manchester epidemic). This long-term contamination apparently led to another paralytic disease known as alcohol neuritis, dozens of cases which were recorded each year in the northwest regions of England in the last third of the 19th century. For years doctors had mistakenly believed the disease was caused by high alcohol consumption, but once the arsenic was removed from the beer's production process, it vanished into thin air. (ref 120).
I am glad that alcohol does not cause neuritis. On a different topic, when I was young they sprayed DDT most nights to keep mosquitos down. Apart from the hunch back and crossed-eyes, I do not have any symptoms of DDT poisoning.
I realized afterwards that the polio virus could have been introduced into those children by a clumsy doctor trying to inoculate them against smallpox.
However, the claim with respect to lead arsenate is that it kills nerve cells in the spine, which seems to lead to exactly the sort of wasting you mention.
In addition, now that I have read more of the chapter in Turtles and recalling the work of of Charles Caverly, there needs to be an explanation for why most of the cases in Vermont reported by Caverly occur during apple picking season and why domestic animals (which at that time would never have been vaccinated for diphtheria or anything else) came down with cases of paralysis.
Of course, there might be alternative explanations and it might be that the animals were poisoned by lead arsenate while the humans contracted the polio virus which lead to similar symptoms ...
The foundational myth of the 'Vaccine Era' is that Edward Jenner noticed that milk maids did not get small-pox and concluded that it had to do with them contracting cow-pox and thus developing cross-over immunity.
He had no idea of the involvement of Vitamin D3 in the immune system (and didn't even know it existed at that time), so how could he eliminate the possibility that milk maids were also consuming fresh cows milk and thus had better serum D3 levels than lots of others in the population.
OK, seems I was mistaken about Jenner's story being the foundational myth, at least according to Turtles all the way down:
"The epic tale of science’s victory over polio—more than any other account of a fight against disease, even the fable-like story of Edward Jenner and his smallpox vaccine—is the foundational myth of vaccination."
Interesting. The original Jenner paper (or letter or book, writing was weird back then) describes lots of episodes besides milk maids. Regardless of the original or eventual reception it was pretty meticulous
Having read it is does not, it seems to me, offer scientific proof that inoculation with cow-pox reduces the incidence of small pox since it is simply a set of anecdotes. Of course, they could not distinguish between viruses or bacteria at that time, but there is simply no data in his booklet on the number who were reliably inoculated with cow pox (or whatever crap they used) and who went on to contract small pox or didn't etc vs those who never contracted cowpox who went on to contract small pox or not.
However, it is pretty clear that my thoughts on the matter were wrong as well because Jenner was claiming support from more than just milk-maids and people milking cows.
As to the decline of small pox in the 20th century, it might simply be that genes for susceptibility were removed from the population. AF Wallace's book provide stats showing that the CFR was around 18.5% in the second half of the 19th century (1800s) which seems like a large decline from the 30% IFR I have seen quoted in other places (Wikipedia comes to mind, I think.)
Both were probably inflated by not counting asymptomatic infections. If not Vitamin D, then it was still possibly dependent on some sort of malnutrition factor that gradually became rare after the 19th Century. But as with polio the answer probably isn’t that simple.
I guess I will have to find it to judge for my self. Since no one knew about the immune system or viruses why would you think that exposure to one would result in developing immunity to another. I suspect he didn't do any RCTs either.
Found this statement that looks very much like what we are being told today:
'In the tract on "Small-Pox and vaccination" issued by the National Health Society, and now being widely circulated at the expense of ratepayers, with the sanction of the Local Government Board, we find this statement :-- '"Every soldier and sailor is re-vaccinated; the result is that Small-Pox is almost unknown in the Army and Navy, even amid surrounding epidemics"
Page 19, footnote.
Curious that they use the word 'almost' and that boosting was a thing back then as well.
Have been too busy to be on the internet. To clarify, I wasn't claiming that the smallpox vaccine works. The WHO eradication program depended on track and trace and isolation more than the vaccine. Overall the history of smallpox is mysterious and puzzling; like why it suddenly stops being an issue in the West in the early 20th century. Interesting catch about the blacksmiths (other comment).
On page 3 (book page numbers), in a footnote it mentions: "Those who attend sick cattle in this country find a speedy remedy for stopping the progress of this complaint in those applications which act chemically upon the morbid matter, such as the solutions of the Vitriolum Zinci, Vitriolum Cupri, etc."
I found the first one interesting.
On page 17 (book page numbers), in another footnote it mentions: "It is a remarkable fact, and well known to many, that we are frequently foiled in our endeavours to communicate the Small Pox by inoculation to blacksmiths, whin the country are farriers. They often, as in the above instance, either resist the contagion entirely, or have the disease anomalously. ..." (Spelling as in the original.)
A real work of science would endeavor to get more information from people about their life histories ... and might follow their lives after inoculation for longer.
Also, I was shocked at the callous way that he treated the 8-yo boy in case XVII on page 19.
A week or so ago I was like, I managed to go through all this weird, basic but weird, legal crap I was hit with this year with a fine-toothed comb maybe I can figure this virus or whatever stuff out, I'll start with the people that say germs do not cause disease because that seems crazy. So I started with stuff in that arena and was interested in finding something a little more middle ground, noticed that Deusberger was getting footnoted a lot, then found that his book (which someone had gotten me to give to my mother in undergrad for some reason) really did have an authoritative middle ground survey, ran into eugyppius, which articulated a lot of what I was mulling over, a couple days ago and now I'm here!
I seem to be really interested in this stuff, could you provide any good nuts and bolts intros on whatever it is I'm reading (virology or something?) and I'd be curious about any personal inspiration.
The above post grabbed me immediately because right away you address the DDT stuff. I also had a friend get really mad at me because I started a conversation with "I'm reading this book and these people are saying the Spanish flu was caused by electricity"... I never even made it to the cool bit about the comets! But I was thinking about it and I was like I guess the spanish flu really is sacrosanct because it seems to be one of the very few examples of modern really bad very infectious diseases. And I had also been wondering about the timeline of polio, and just my encounter with the historical feel of it from movies and books really lines up with what you've outlined above.
I also kept on coming back to the Edward Jenner wikipedia, because it showed me that there was a folk history of inoculation leading up to vaccination (oh yeah that's what convinced me germs cause disease!) and leads to the interesting contradiction that what Jenner observed that lead to the invention of the vaccine (I suspect that deserves quotes, or I'm just not saying that right at all), the famous milkmaid story, or variolation, was outlawed under the Vaccine Act of 1840 (that's a bit of a rhetorical abstraction, but I think there's the beginning of some kind of pattern there).
So I'd been chewing on what to make of that, and boom, the IPV and OPV claim your making here seems to strongly resonant with whatever is going on in the back of my mind about that!
Was a busy weekend. Hm, I haven't got any good recommendation for an intro on viruses. It's too big a subject, and at the same time we basically have no idea what the deal is. The more we know the more we know we don't know. After the 90s virology becomes a microcosm of biology as a whole, with everyone working in their little silo and trying to drum up funding even if it means fudging the truth.
Spanish flu wasn't really the plague in most places. It killed "a lot" of young adults (whereas older adults had pre-existing immunity) in the West but these were often malnourished, vagabonds, etc. India and other countries are what really jack up the overall death count. I write about it here https://unglossed.substack.com/p/1918-i-love-you
Dec 21, 2022·edited Dec 21, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey
Thank you for that little overview of the field, I can kind of see the origins of that in Deusberger, or more broadly in like say an Adam Curtis documentary, but I'm not sure that story has been told yet, not even in science fiction.
I found the 1918 post right after I commented. I had been thinking that it's pretty self-evident that World War 1 is the most perfect storm of disease factors as we know them, that the world has ever seen, so the influenza wouldn't necessarily have to be particularly special.
I've been wondering about the power of novelty in infectious diseases, because the titan prior to the spanish flu was small pox (the 1916 polio surge is interesting). This article, https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/sites/default/files/vol28_3.1_10.pdf that I found on the Edward Jenner wikipedia tells the interesting story of "Johnny Notions" who inoculated hundreds on the Shetland Islands for years after it had been ravaged by the uncanny 20 year pox cycles of 1700, 1720, and 1740.
Somewhere I stumbled over blankets as an early mode of inoculation, so that set off the alarm bells regarding the prevailing account of the small pox devastation of the Native Americans (Cowan, meanwhile, pins it on bed bugs) which initially got me thinking, but it strikes me that the article on Shetland just straight up backs up your emphasis on island mortality.
I've been chatting about with this stuff my mom, who is a doctor that holds to the typical account of COVID. The cascading failure that leads to high island mortality (also in the Shetland account) as a result of a novel outbreak, seems to align soundly with the the initial overflow the hospitals/"flatten the curve" idea of COVID response. The flipside of that, of course, is that if novelty is a significant, perhaps the primary, factor in the pathogenicity and transmissibility of an epidemic, i.e. the specific death toll by which it may be measured, then the trick is to attenuate the novelty. Which seems to to take care of itself really...
But I'm getting the impression there may be some nuance to novelty, i.e., there may be degrees, or there may be simply familial degrees and something like absolutely novel.
Yes, there must be nuance, because you have California where seropositivity was already 2% in December 2019 because of so much travel with China, and yet no one was flooding any hospitals; but I have read anecdotes of students getting sick at UC Davis at the time. And later mortality in CA, after B.1 strains arrived, was in areas most insulated from the UC system (with all the students from China). So you could propose that when people are mixing as normal the virus probably is encountered gradually, lots of small viral dose infections for everyone to “train” on. The lockdowns mess that up. On the other hand it could just be confounding factors in that the UC-adjacent areas were work from home types with goof env. air quality and the insulated areas were Hispanic, working class, and lower env. air quality.
Whereas with flu it doesn’t seem to matter as much; only protective adaptive immunity matters.
Yeah interesting; I'm just reading something this morning about how public health in China could be even poorer than one might expect from a massive rapidly industrialized society. So COVID morbidity could be an indicator of public health that we can't dismiss as easily, if we are willing to acknowledge it. One could splice eugyppius and Senger together to argue the lockdowns were orchestrated to go global by China to cover up their own public health crisis.
I appreciate how this stuff questions the assumption that within a globalized world you are going to have waves of pandemic infectious diseases that run up and down the network. From our discussion, it seems like the more global you are the less fragile you are to a devastating novel outbreak. History would appear to suggest the same. It's like we are living in speculative dangers that were dreamed up decades ago, when what's happening on the ground is simply keep your house clean. That was the big lesson of modernity.
It's a complicated puzzle. Without globalism you could probably imagine that most people just had to deal with their home-town bugs. With pre-globalism you definitely had signs of tension between nearby "home towns," like the English Sweating Sickness era, where something that didn't make continental Europe sick kept making people in England sick. With globalism, everyone is in one big "home town" - but do individuals ever really fully learn the landscape? And there might still be surprising levels of containment, like how we just recently started looking at human coronaviruses in China and they turn out to be different from ones previously found in the West https://unglossed.substack.com/i/88081442/no-one-knows-if-human-coronaviruses-adapt-to-evade-immunity
Interesting theory about the public health thing. Certainly there's no way to go back in time for people born before 1990 and give them a more well-nourished childhood.
I find your theory on a "needle-borne plague" more compelling than my own thoughts about it.
I has thinking along the lines that when infant formula became available lots of mothers stopped breast feeding, but of course that doesn't work too well now that I think about it because getting antibodies from your mother doesn't help you establish your own antibodies. You need your own t-cells and b-cells to spring into action. I also vaguely thought it might have to do with the fact that kids have fewer opportunties to play where they can pick up polio from the environment and pass it through their GI tract and develop immunity that way.
I have known two people who had polio-derived paralysis. My Uncle got it some time between 1940 and 1950 but survived into his early 70s I believe. Also, a guy I knew from Hong Kong got it probably around 1960 or a bit before. They were probably still administering penicillin via needles back then.
The danger is only if the first introduction to replicating polio is injection. OPV protects by making the first introduction a normal enteric infection. It essentially just gives kids the live virus and the attenuation might not even be very relevant as far as safety, we don't know. The attenuation is real but deattenuation happens right there on the spot, within a day (https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/190/2/409/1746725). Then the kid has gotten antibodies but without the immune system going crazy at seeing some virus proteins in nerves along the way. And you inject live polio later, no problem, either antibodies protect nerves or the immune response to infected nerves is no longer as extreme due either to it not being the first time infection level of response or to non-involvement of IgM complement complexes, who can say.
IPV *may* also protect against later injection just as well as OPV. But since widespread IPV use tends to banish polio from a given region it may just be that now polio isn't going to be accidentally injected later. So the IPV's protection isn't really clear. OPV was better, proven to work for decades.
"The attenuation is real but deattenuation happens right there on the spot, within a day ..."
OK, I think I understand what you are saying here.
They are injected with an attenuated virus that is not competent in some way. However, most kids still develop antibodies to the various serotypes by the time some of the virions mutate back to being competent. Is that it? Perhaps it is only the unfortunate few who get VAPP.
The oral vaccine is supposedly "attenuated." But the deattenuation mutants, aka not-defective version, can be spotted on the first day after you administer it. Basically the attenuation only works in a lab, when you give it to a kid the defective version can't replicate so the not-defective versions, which are already there in the OPV, replicate. Instant deattenuation.
The injected version is formaldehyde-deactivated.
Both of them could cause paralysis if they are not encountered "first" - before live virus is injected riding along on some other injection. So I don't remember if I mention it here but there actually were multiple cases of paralysis during the Salk trial that Francis didn't mention in the review meeting. That is what you would expect because some kids in the trial, being I think 4th graders, were already primed by a previous "first" injected encounter. It was too late for them.
The trick with both vaccines is they cause network effects. So for OPV, you get very seasonal shedding of the virus and so even kids who don't get OPV early are going to get a second-hand infection during OPV season. So this fixes the problem of, ok natural polio season might have gaps like we had for flu and RSV for a year, and now you have these un-immune kids who are in danger of being injected with polio accidentally. And then they will be primed so when the next natural season comes around, there goes their leg/lung/etc. But the OPV makes it regular, no gaps, first encounter is enteric infection.
On the opposite spectrum, when IPV is in widespread use, there is low danger of ever encountering the virus at all. So even if you get primed by being "first" injected with the live virus riding on some other injection then it doesn't matter because there is no second encounter. However, at this point, by definition, IPV and OPV would be the second encounter and so you'd be in trouble. And hence VAPP. But in the US at least since we hit kids with IPV at 2 months there's not much of a danger window. And again there just isn't going to be a lot of accidental polio injection in IPV areas.
I remember being given the OPV in about 1963 or so, but I likely already had immunity because I had spent many years playing in the dirt by then anyway.
I wonder if children who are not breast fed are at higher risk ...
I’m trying to remember where I read about “polio provocation,” but I do recall that it was a known factor by health authorities in New York during the late 1940s. It was for that reason that other immunizations (diphtheria) were purposely put on hold during polio epidemics.
Interesting. I wonder why that wouldn't be reflected in more literature from the time about penicillin. It has been difficult to piece together a picture of just how much it was used -- I relied on newspaper reports to even learn that it was injected at first.
I have posted a main link of mine earlier but perhaps I may add the following.
When I looked at viruses and became suspicious of current viral theory I saw a picture of a polio victim. It was the classic bow legs of rickets, vitamin D deficiency.
Having looked in detail at the virus theory and based on my general knowledge over 60 years of life on this earth, I realised that we had been hoodwinked by the medical establishment/big pharma.
Polio is primarily rickets reinvented. However, I am sure that other factors such as vaccines and neuro-toxic chemicals come into play. These will affect the body in various ways. These sub-links extracted from my main link.
The furin cleavage site is crammed full of alternate "meanings." My inclination has always been that these alternate meanings are just a brag or signature of synthetic construction. Or say rather than just have one "sign" that shows synthetic origin, put in as many signs as you can so that there is no coherent way for anyone to present the evidence.
So, someone could have just looked in advance of ways to spell an FCS (usually nRnRR but in this case nRRnR) that would drop all sorts of leads, including matching "Moderna patents" which themselves were just products of Moderna farming out the task of "listing everything we might do" to some "deep in molecular bio" hires.
Moreover, 1) the same sequence already appeared in a DOW patent from 2001 2) The overlap between Moderna's "codon optimization" fetish, which consists of cramming lots of G's into every sequence in favor of alternate spellings that would result in coding for the same amino acids, and a similar G-preference in whoever designed the FCS means that the sequence match could, in fact, be a not-that-big coincidence.
Thank you for your piece. Perhaps you may care to see my research. It cover vaccines as a whole. My site's approach is unusual in general as I will use humour to lighten the mood an to help make the points.
Title of letter: Injections and acute flaccid myelitis: the dog that hasn't barked
The editorial and review of the US outbreaks of acute flaccid myelitis/AFM is timely, but it fails to mention a potentially important co-factor in the cause of this “mystery illness”—intramuscular injections and provocation paralysis. (Stelzer-Braid, BMJ, 19 Dec 2018)
I venture to say that few clinicians today are aware that injections are strong risk factors for paralytic polio: recent injections (e.g. antibiotics, vaccinations) have accounted for 66% to 86% of attributable risk of paralysis when polioviruses are circulating. (Hill and Knowelden, BMJ, 1 July 1950. Strebel et al, NEJM 1995;332:500. Kohler et al, Int J Epidem, 2002;32:272) Even fewer clinicians are likely to know about poliovirus receptors, which are not expressed in normal human muscle fibers but are rapidly up-regulated in muscle damaged by injections. (Dalakas et al, NEJM 1995;333:62) This enables circulating polioviruses to bind to motor end plates from where they are transported along motor nerves to the spinal cord. (Gromeier and Wimmer, J Virol 1998;72:5056. Ren and Racaniello, J Infect Dis 1992;166:747) 99% of poliovirus infections are benign and self-limited, but of the 1% of paralytic cases a substantial proportion are provoked by injections. There is a dose-response effect: in Strebel’s report of vaccine-associated paralytic polio/VAPP in Romania, a single injection within 30 days of paralysis onset increased VAPP risk 8-fold; 2 to 9 injections increase VAPP risk 27-fold; and 10 or more injections increased VAPP risk 182-fold! For the contacts of OPV recipients the peak risk occurred when injections were given 8 to 21 days before onset of paralysis, similar to Hill’s observations from the 1949 polio epidemic in the UK........
Super! Wyatt has done similar work but this is a much better collection of the evidence for acute polio injection paralysis (rather than priming) than I had encountered before.
I copped out on the reading that would be required to fully integrate acute injection into my model; the mystery of epidemic polio (not preceded by a recent injection) being my focus. But it's actually a very valuable supplement to the mystery - polio vaccination should actually act like infection in causing immune attack of previously injected innate-suppressed polio per my theory. I planned to add a section covering this question and Strebel et al seems to confirm what my theory predicts!
So if I understand correctly there are three complementary trains of thought here:
1) Vaccinations cause polio to be introduced due to non-sterile needles. When polio was endemic, this would often cause polio to be introduced directly into the body as opposed to the digestive route, bypassing some immune responses.
2) Vaccinations trigger human muscle fibers to express relevant receptors, allowing of transport of the virus along the nerves. (Regardless of how the polio ended up in the bloodstream/muscle.)
3) Polio when ending up in the spinal cord (regardless of route) is triggering a form of auto-immune response it normally typically doesn't, when introduced through the digestive route.
1) it's injections of any kind. This is why diphtheria anti-toxin and penicillin drive the historic waves. Even given the delay between injection (winter) and paralysis it's amazing no one noticed the significance of 1894 / anti-toxin before.
3) Injected polio is either nerfed by pre-existing antibodies or innately suppressed. Innately suppressed means it gets in some nerve cells, maybe muscle but that can be considered a superfluous element of the model, and the nerve cells firewall it with amyloid. There's no or virtually no adaptive immune response because the antigen dose never ramps up.
Now the person is in a position where future adaptive immune response to this strain of polio (strain-specific-vulnerability is important for explaining adult onset) will potentially or definitely necessitate an immune attack of the cells that the virus was firewalled in. So either natural infection in the next summer wave or a future polio vaccine. There were kids who got paralyzed in the actual Salk vaccine trial; Francis just buried that detail when it was being reviewed for rush approval. These ones were already primed from a previous injection for something else.
The only way to avoid priming is never to be injected with anything ever, or front-load humoral immunity so the virus is nerfed during future accidental injection. That's what the OPV was great at and IPV, eh, well see
Well, OPV *was* great in that context. Now polio is almost eradicated, and we use sterile needles, IPV should be fine. Better in fact, as OPV-strain induced polio is now one of the largest causes of remaining polio.
I like your theory though. I'm not totally sold on the priming though. That seems like a non-necessary (be it possibly complementary) component?
A more simpler variant where we state that polio ending up in nerve cells causes paralytic cases, where cases where the virus stays outside are typically mild, would suffice as well in explaining why we saw a huge wave of polio cases at the turn of the century. After all that is when we started injecting kids.
So, what is the added benefit of the priming component? Is it to explain a delay between onset of paralytic events vs previous injection?
I'd assume polio always caused some paralytic events, and so would the Salk vaccine. So not every paralytic events needs an injection to be explained perse.
It may also be and and-and factor, where priming plays a role as well as just direct post-injection paralytic events. The "Outbreaks of acute flaccid myelitis in the US" seems to suggest the sequential events were common enough, right?
I'm not saying you are wrong, just trying to be clear on what the purpose of that angle is.
Either way this seems way more plausible than the Dissolving Illusions and 'Pesticides Theory' explanations that I've seen before.
Funny - in fact the whole purpose of generating a model that solves the mystery was so I could parse the consequences of the IPV switch which is ultimately going to fail. We'll have to go back to OPV if paralytic cases return; the experts already acknowledge that: It will mean that the IPV doesn't generate mucosal immunity. But my model suggests that we may not have a return of paralytic cases even if IPV doesn't generate mucosal immunity. Or it may be a delay. There's a few possibilities. But IPV isn't sustainable. The only reason the OPV strains are a "threat" is because they effectively displace wild strains. Without OPV we would just blame the failure of IPV on wild polio. But the failure is IPV.
The "epidemiology" of polio after 1881 demands priming for various reasons, but as I admit I don't lay out the case - the "mystery" - in my post. But in short the epi isn't consistent with paralysis as a result of infection. RE "I'd assume polio always caused some paralytic events, and so would the Salk vaccine," adults were universally seropositive pre-vaccine, though not always to every strain, so natural polio encounter simply doesn't cause paralysis even without attenuation from OPV. The rates of "polio" were so low in the pre-injection-of-kids-eras that there's no reason to suppose they were caused by polio virus as opposed to anything else. The virus just doesn't paralyze. True neurotropic strains had to be created from serial passage as with Flexner's MV strain, and all the early work based on that had to be scrapped when tissue culturing was developed.
Instead it's consistent with infection-prompted auto-immune attack. "Sporadic" polio wouldn't happen at all because the there's no way to get the virus to arms or legs without hitting the CNS first. Instead, virus is in the CNS, maybe some immune damage, but this is incidental to what happens in the limbs -- exactly as Kenny suggested, but her model was before auto-immunity was recognized as an etiology of disease. This isn't (bulbar or cerebral) paralysis *until* additional virus is injected by lumbar puncture or further needle use, as in the amplification pathway in my model.
But, I call it a "pseudo-auto-immune" attack because the antibodies and T Cells are targeted to polio antigens in previously "firewalled" polio-infected cells. This also is consistent with the exercise link - when you cross acute phase inflammatory response of exercise (immune cells and cytokines in muscles) with the peak of acute novel memory immune response to enteric polio (loads of polio-specific antibodies, B and T Cells) you totally explain the otherwise mysterious exercise link (ugh, I lost the link to the classic pre-vaccine-era exercise link study). It is an accelerant on the fire, leading to an explosion -- complete destruction of the motor neuron, ennervation. This alone gets to muscle destruction but there could also be collateral or direct immune attack of muscles, the model doesn't care which.
An alternate model would have to say what else it is that the immune system is attacking in the legs and arm motor nerves. That makes no sense -- if it is polio-virus-incited-auto-immunity to auto-antigens in nerves or muscles, it would be all over the body. Only priming with polio antigens makes sense.
I see, so your theory depends on both wild type and OPV never causing paralytic cases, but they are purely driven by live polio being driven into the spine as primer.
That is a 'dangerous' theory though, as it depends on almost every paralytic cases pre-injection era to be non-polio. But I guess we cannot know, as we have no samples from that era.
But is polio in those few 3rd world countries still endemic enough? After all it requires injecting with a dirty needle to prime. Does that still happen in Pakistan/Indonesia/etc? I have my doubts here ...
Nevertheless, it is possible I agree. I'd - for now - settle for the softer variant where polio always caused some events, but injections made it explode casewise. But either way, that would not look good for IPV indeed.
Is Polio a disease with one cause, or is it a symptom with several causes? Maybe even including a virus or two, along with heavy metal poisoning, insecticides, etc.
Other infections can cause paralysis. Polio from 1894 - 1954 was a story of epidemics, typically in the summer, typically regionally located. So in one county or city you have a wave of very young children getting stomach illness, stiffness, then becoming paralyzed as well as family members having just stomach illnesses, but without paralysis. (Multiple cases of paralysis in one home almost unheard of until the 1940s.) Many or most of the paralysis, in a given epidemic, is of the 'wasting'/sporadic type, where you have paralysis in one or several limbs followed by replacement of muscle with fibrotic tissue, this is very distinct from paralysis of any other etiology. But other cases during an epidemic (ie when this limb wasting is happening in a region) are of types that might resemble other infections, ie bulbar paralysis, respiratory paralysis.
By whatever technology would be used to look at the specific agent behind these epidemic cases, be it monkey brain inoculation+serology (you take a the nerve tissue from a fatal case or even just mucous from digestive tract of a living patient or some percentage of their contacts or just non-related people during epidemic, see if it paralyzes a monkey, or then mix a positive sample with blood of patient or other donors to see if a monkey gets paralyzed or not to look for antibodies) or in the 1950s stool sample monkey inoculation or cell cultures, throughout 1909-1954, findings are consistent for a narrow set of viruses with a handful of serotypes (finally pinned to three during the Foundation's typing project which involved 10,000s of monkeys). You also know that this is only affecting kids (at first), by age 5 in cities and age 10 in rural areas there aren't many cases - this speaks to a childhood illness that almost everyone builds immunity to. Adults are almost all demonstrably immune - their blood stops monkeys from being infected. Most kids are demonstrably immune by the same age that paralysis cases become rare (for urban or rural). You can do these blood neutralization tests for a fresh infected nerve sample or for the classic Flexner strain from 1909 and if the new case is the type 1 strain get the same effect, over and over, same donor's blood protects or doesn't - aside from the other two types, there are no new viruses showing up.
Coxsackie is found to be sometimes also present once cell cultures are developed, but during epidemics always with polio virus, not alone. Later Coxsackie is understood to cause paralysis too, but it doesn't have the same features (epidemic and pathological) that characterized polio. So you have distinct epidemiology (cases blooming in various regions in various summers), pathology (the wasting), and one agent - affirmed again when the polio vaccine stops the pathology form from being observed epidemically (but also replicates the symptoms in rare cases).
If polio epidemics were at any point being caused by toxins then you would have reverse age pattern. Youngest would be harmed too, sure, but the harm would compound as they got older anyway - because of repeat yearly exposure. You wouldn't have adults just walking around fine.
An alternative theory on polio from Turtles all the way down:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14N6IgJDr3A8E7gRL4PdqpQs7ePthfRRB/view?pli=1
And a long thread that predates the publication of that book but proposes the same mechanism: https://twitter.com/forrestmaready/status/1005127713848463361
I found this document that mentions paralysis in animals associated with the outbreaks of Infantile Paralysis in Vermont. This link includes the search term:
https://archive.org/details/infantileparalys00cave/page/110/mode/2up?view=theater&q=animals
All the chemical/pesticide theories are impotent to explain why adults are generally hunky dory. Why wouldn't old, malnourished, overworked, be paralyzed by mercury, if it was used to cure everything? Because they didn't take it for their teeth coming in? This is the same problem in reverse when the virus is new, children fare better. But polio virus was never new, only the coincidental injection of it when medicine entered the age of the needle.
That does not seem correct. The chapter about Polio from Turtles all the way down points out some insteresting aspects that occurred during WWII and with British soldiers stationed in India, where adults contracted the disease and there were interesting differences between officers and enlisted me with officers contracting it more frequently (sometimes an order of magnitude more frequently). Officers in the British army usually had experience with horses and played Rugby so they had plenty of exposure to dirt and conditions where they could have contracted the polio virus and thus should have been immune.
Also, the first effective hypodermic syringe seems to have been invented in 1841, but in 1835, Badham reported a cluster of four children under 3 years old in Worksop, England who contracted Infantile Paralysis, and Heine reported 14 cases (mostly children) in Europe in 1840.
Further, there were curious cases reported, including by a British doctor who spent 20+ years in Tianjin, China, to Sabin, that in overseas postings (eg, China) the local children rarely got paralysis and that he (the doctor) had to attend to more such cases among the expats than to local children.
On the other hand, there are viruses that are known to cause paralysis.
On the gripping hand, I went and looked up the symptoms of poisoning with lead arsenate products and it does not mention paralysis, perhaps because such would be regarded as polio. In addition, we also have to account for the occasional alleged vaccine caused paralysis, although the only diagnostic we have, it seems, is the paralysis.
So, I am undecided. I have to dig out my copy of Turtles all the way down on my Kindle and read the rest of the chapter on Polio :-)
My theory does not allege anything about infantile paralysis before 1881 and especially hinges on the increase after 1894. Diphtheria anti-toxin is the technological prisoner in the prison yard spotlight here, and needles as medicine are just the footprints leading up to 1894. Moving the spotlight to a different year with a handful of cases can certainly lead to not seeing needles and diphtheria anti-toxin, but that's the point. The past is full of plagues of interesting character, but polio epidemics striking children are a novelty of the needle era.
Adults in the 20s-40s would have been children in the new needle era. FDR is a prototypical adult onset. Especially when it comes to troops serving abroad, this fits my theory better than it fits any chemical theory, because we know polio virus has three serotypes and at any given point one of them could be lacking in local circulation for a long time. But diphtheria anti-toxin isn't produced locally. So a kid can be primed with polio virus abortive infection from a non-local serotype and not experience enteric infection until traveling far abroad, and then the autoimmune attack destroys the nerve and surrounding muscle.
Chemical theories really can't explain why limbs would waste away.
There are some curious coincidents.
Polio, the disease, seemed to arise after Lead Arsinate started to be used as a pesticide and declined after we switched to DDT.
Also, Turtles all the way down documents this:
"For instance, in 1900 a mysterious epidemic broke in the city of Manchester, England, which paralyzed thousands of people and killed several dozens. After long months of uncertainty, the cause of the disease was identified: high arsenic concentration in the sulfuric acid used to process sugar in beer production at several of the area's breweries. (ref 119). Ending the use of toxic sulfuric acid stopped the outbreak in its tracks. Moreover, a subsequent inquiry revealed that the beer brewing process in central and northern England had been contaminating barley kernels with arsenic for decades (albeit at lower levels than those associated with the contaminated sulfuric acid during the 1900 Manchester epidemic). This long-term contamination apparently led to another paralytic disease known as alcohol neuritis, dozens of cases which were recorded each year in the northwest regions of England in the last third of the 19th century. For years doctors had mistakenly believed the disease was caused by high alcohol consumption, but once the arsenic was removed from the beer's production process, it vanished into thin air. (ref 120).
I am glad that alcohol does not cause neuritis. On a different topic, when I was young they sprayed DDT most nights to keep mosquitos down. Apart from the hunch back and crossed-eyes, I do not have any symptoms of DDT poisoning.
I realized afterwards that the polio virus could have been introduced into those children by a clumsy doctor trying to inoculate them against smallpox.
However, the claim with respect to lead arsenate is that it kills nerve cells in the spine, which seems to lead to exactly the sort of wasting you mention.
In addition, now that I have read more of the chapter in Turtles and recalling the work of of Charles Caverly, there needs to be an explanation for why most of the cases in Vermont reported by Caverly occur during apple picking season and why domestic animals (which at that time would never have been vaccinated for diphtheria or anything else) came down with cases of paralysis.
Of course, there might be alternative explanations and it might be that the animals were poisoned by lead arsenate while the humans contracted the polio virus which lead to similar symptoms ...
From here: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/csem/arsenic/docs/arsenic.pdf
"In studies that support an association, arsenic-exposed patients may
develop destruction of axonal cylinders, leading to peripheral
neuropathy. This has been reported at acute high doses (>2 milligram
(mg) arsenic (As)/kilogram (kg)/day) as well as from repeated exposures
to lower levels (.03 – 0.1 mg As/kg/day) [Chakraborti et al. 2003a,
2003b; ATSDR 2007]. "
I returned to this to make sure I understood the mechanism you proposed and then went looking for the paper by HV Wyatt but it's paywalled.
However, I did find this:
Polio provocation: solving a mystery with the help of history
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)61251-4/fulltext
Another thought I had is this.
The foundational myth of the 'Vaccine Era' is that Edward Jenner noticed that milk maids did not get small-pox and concluded that it had to do with them contracting cow-pox and thus developing cross-over immunity.
He had no idea of the involvement of Vitamin D3 in the immune system (and didn't even know it existed at that time), so how could he eliminate the possibility that milk maids were also consuming fresh cows milk and thus had better serum D3 levels than lots of others in the population.
We may never know.
OK, seems I was mistaken about Jenner's story being the foundational myth, at least according to Turtles all the way down:
"The epic tale of science’s victory over polio—more than any other account of a fight against disease, even the fable-like story of Edward Jenner and his smallpox vaccine—is the foundational myth of vaccination."
Quoted in https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-vaccines-and-the-mystery-of-polio/.
At least Jenner gets a cameo.
Interesting. The original Jenner paper (or letter or book, writing was weird back then) describes lots of episodes besides milk maids. Regardless of the original or eventual reception it was pretty meticulous
Again, thank you for pointing that out.
Having read it is does not, it seems to me, offer scientific proof that inoculation with cow-pox reduces the incidence of small pox since it is simply a set of anecdotes. Of course, they could not distinguish between viruses or bacteria at that time, but there is simply no data in his booklet on the number who were reliably inoculated with cow pox (or whatever crap they used) and who went on to contract small pox or didn't etc vs those who never contracted cowpox who went on to contract small pox or not.
However, it is pretty clear that my thoughts on the matter were wrong as well because Jenner was claiming support from more than just milk-maids and people milking cows.
As to the decline of small pox in the 20th century, it might simply be that genes for susceptibility were removed from the population. AF Wallace's book provide stats showing that the CFR was around 18.5% in the second half of the 19th century (1800s) which seems like a large decline from the 30% IFR I have seen quoted in other places (Wikipedia comes to mind, I think.)
Both were probably inflated by not counting asymptomatic infections. If not Vitamin D, then it was still possibly dependent on some sort of malnutrition factor that gradually became rare after the 19th Century. But as with polio the answer probably isn’t that simple.
I guess I will have to find it to judge for my self. Since no one knew about the immune system or viruses why would you think that exposure to one would result in developing immunity to another. I suspect he didn't do any RCTs either.
It’s here https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/bookviewer?PID=nlm:nlmuid-2559001R-bk
I also came across this by Alfred Russel Wallace:
https://ia801009.us.archive.org/4/items/b2136140x_201805/b2136140x.pdf
Still reading it.
Found this statement that looks very much like what we are being told today:
'In the tract on "Small-Pox and vaccination" issued by the National Health Society, and now being widely circulated at the expense of ratepayers, with the sanction of the Local Government Board, we find this statement :-- '"Every soldier and sailor is re-vaccinated; the result is that Small-Pox is almost unknown in the Army and Navy, even amid surrounding epidemics"
Page 19, footnote.
Curious that they use the word 'almost' and that boosting was a thing back then as well.
Have been too busy to be on the internet. To clarify, I wasn't claiming that the smallpox vaccine works. The WHO eradication program depended on track and trace and isolation more than the vaccine. Overall the history of smallpox is mysterious and puzzling; like why it suddenly stops being an issue in the West in the early 20th century. Interesting catch about the blacksmiths (other comment).
Couple of strange things in the document.
On page 3 (book page numbers), in a footnote it mentions: "Those who attend sick cattle in this country find a speedy remedy for stopping the progress of this complaint in those applications which act chemically upon the morbid matter, such as the solutions of the Vitriolum Zinci, Vitriolum Cupri, etc."
I found the first one interesting.
On page 17 (book page numbers), in another footnote it mentions: "It is a remarkable fact, and well known to many, that we are frequently foiled in our endeavours to communicate the Small Pox by inoculation to blacksmiths, whin the country are farriers. They often, as in the above instance, either resist the contagion entirely, or have the disease anomalously. ..." (Spelling as in the original.)
A real work of science would endeavor to get more information from people about their life histories ... and might follow their lives after inoculation for longer.
Also, I was shocked at the callous way that he treated the 8-yo boy in case XVII on page 19.
Thank you for that. I have read the first part and started on the second.
Maybe I am weird but I suspect Dr Mengele must have studied Jenner's little book.
I was also amused at his claims of 'spurious cow-pox' when it suited him.
Hi!
A week or so ago I was like, I managed to go through all this weird, basic but weird, legal crap I was hit with this year with a fine-toothed comb maybe I can figure this virus or whatever stuff out, I'll start with the people that say germs do not cause disease because that seems crazy. So I started with stuff in that arena and was interested in finding something a little more middle ground, noticed that Deusberger was getting footnoted a lot, then found that his book (which someone had gotten me to give to my mother in undergrad for some reason) really did have an authoritative middle ground survey, ran into eugyppius, which articulated a lot of what I was mulling over, a couple days ago and now I'm here!
I seem to be really interested in this stuff, could you provide any good nuts and bolts intros on whatever it is I'm reading (virology or something?) and I'd be curious about any personal inspiration.
The above post grabbed me immediately because right away you address the DDT stuff. I also had a friend get really mad at me because I started a conversation with "I'm reading this book and these people are saying the Spanish flu was caused by electricity"... I never even made it to the cool bit about the comets! But I was thinking about it and I was like I guess the spanish flu really is sacrosanct because it seems to be one of the very few examples of modern really bad very infectious diseases. And I had also been wondering about the timeline of polio, and just my encounter with the historical feel of it from movies and books really lines up with what you've outlined above.
I also kept on coming back to the Edward Jenner wikipedia, because it showed me that there was a folk history of inoculation leading up to vaccination (oh yeah that's what convinced me germs cause disease!) and leads to the interesting contradiction that what Jenner observed that lead to the invention of the vaccine (I suspect that deserves quotes, or I'm just not saying that right at all), the famous milkmaid story, or variolation, was outlawed under the Vaccine Act of 1840 (that's a bit of a rhetorical abstraction, but I think there's the beginning of some kind of pattern there).
So I'd been chewing on what to make of that, and boom, the IPV and OPV claim your making here seems to strongly resonant with whatever is going on in the back of my mind about that!
Was a busy weekend. Hm, I haven't got any good recommendation for an intro on viruses. It's too big a subject, and at the same time we basically have no idea what the deal is. The more we know the more we know we don't know. After the 90s virology becomes a microcosm of biology as a whole, with everyone working in their little silo and trying to drum up funding even if it means fudging the truth.
Spanish flu wasn't really the plague in most places. It killed "a lot" of young adults (whereas older adults had pre-existing immunity) in the West but these were often malnourished, vagabonds, etc. India and other countries are what really jack up the overall death count. I write about it here https://unglossed.substack.com/p/1918-i-love-you
Thank you for that little overview of the field, I can kind of see the origins of that in Deusberger, or more broadly in like say an Adam Curtis documentary, but I'm not sure that story has been told yet, not even in science fiction.
I found the 1918 post right after I commented. I had been thinking that it's pretty self-evident that World War 1 is the most perfect storm of disease factors as we know them, that the world has ever seen, so the influenza wouldn't necessarily have to be particularly special.
I've been wondering about the power of novelty in infectious diseases, because the titan prior to the spanish flu was small pox (the 1916 polio surge is interesting). This article, https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/sites/default/files/vol28_3.1_10.pdf that I found on the Edward Jenner wikipedia tells the interesting story of "Johnny Notions" who inoculated hundreds on the Shetland Islands for years after it had been ravaged by the uncanny 20 year pox cycles of 1700, 1720, and 1740.
Somewhere I stumbled over blankets as an early mode of inoculation, so that set off the alarm bells regarding the prevailing account of the small pox devastation of the Native Americans (Cowan, meanwhile, pins it on bed bugs) which initially got me thinking, but it strikes me that the article on Shetland just straight up backs up your emphasis on island mortality.
I've been chatting about with this stuff my mom, who is a doctor that holds to the typical account of COVID. The cascading failure that leads to high island mortality (also in the Shetland account) as a result of a novel outbreak, seems to align soundly with the the initial overflow the hospitals/"flatten the curve" idea of COVID response. The flipside of that, of course, is that if novelty is a significant, perhaps the primary, factor in the pathogenicity and transmissibility of an epidemic, i.e. the specific death toll by which it may be measured, then the trick is to attenuate the novelty. Which seems to to take care of itself really...
But I'm getting the impression there may be some nuance to novelty, i.e., there may be degrees, or there may be simply familial degrees and something like absolutely novel.
Yes, there must be nuance, because you have California where seropositivity was already 2% in December 2019 because of so much travel with China, and yet no one was flooding any hospitals; but I have read anecdotes of students getting sick at UC Davis at the time. And later mortality in CA, after B.1 strains arrived, was in areas most insulated from the UC system (with all the students from China). So you could propose that when people are mixing as normal the virus probably is encountered gradually, lots of small viral dose infections for everyone to “train” on. The lockdowns mess that up. On the other hand it could just be confounding factors in that the UC-adjacent areas were work from home types with goof env. air quality and the insulated areas were Hispanic, working class, and lower env. air quality.
Whereas with flu it doesn’t seem to matter as much; only protective adaptive immunity matters.
Yeah interesting; I'm just reading something this morning about how public health in China could be even poorer than one might expect from a massive rapidly industrialized society. So COVID morbidity could be an indicator of public health that we can't dismiss as easily, if we are willing to acknowledge it. One could splice eugyppius and Senger together to argue the lockdowns were orchestrated to go global by China to cover up their own public health crisis.
I appreciate how this stuff questions the assumption that within a globalized world you are going to have waves of pandemic infectious diseases that run up and down the network. From our discussion, it seems like the more global you are the less fragile you are to a devastating novel outbreak. History would appear to suggest the same. It's like we are living in speculative dangers that were dreamed up decades ago, when what's happening on the ground is simply keep your house clean. That was the big lesson of modernity.
It's a complicated puzzle. Without globalism you could probably imagine that most people just had to deal with their home-town bugs. With pre-globalism you definitely had signs of tension between nearby "home towns," like the English Sweating Sickness era, where something that didn't make continental Europe sick kept making people in England sick. With globalism, everyone is in one big "home town" - but do individuals ever really fully learn the landscape? And there might still be surprising levels of containment, like how we just recently started looking at human coronaviruses in China and they turn out to be different from ones previously found in the West https://unglossed.substack.com/i/88081442/no-one-knows-if-human-coronaviruses-adapt-to-evade-immunity
Interesting theory about the public health thing. Certainly there's no way to go back in time for people born before 1990 and give them a more well-nourished childhood.
I find your theory on a "needle-borne plague" more compelling than my own thoughts about it.
I has thinking along the lines that when infant formula became available lots of mothers stopped breast feeding, but of course that doesn't work too well now that I think about it because getting antibodies from your mother doesn't help you establish your own antibodies. You need your own t-cells and b-cells to spring into action. I also vaguely thought it might have to do with the fact that kids have fewer opportunties to play where they can pick up polio from the environment and pass it through their GI tract and develop immunity that way.
I have known two people who had polio-derived paralysis. My Uncle got it some time between 1940 and 1950 but survived into his early 70s I believe. Also, a guy I knew from Hong Kong got it probably around 1960 or a bit before. They were probably still administering penicillin via needles back then.
We routinely inject infants these days with many, many vaccines.
Why are we not seeing more cases of paralysis?
That's discussed in the "why OPV and IPV protect" section. https://unglossed.substack.com/i/74277020/viii-why-some-older-children-and-adults-why-opv-and-ipv-protect
The danger is only if the first introduction to replicating polio is injection. OPV protects by making the first introduction a normal enteric infection. It essentially just gives kids the live virus and the attenuation might not even be very relevant as far as safety, we don't know. The attenuation is real but deattenuation happens right there on the spot, within a day (https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/190/2/409/1746725). Then the kid has gotten antibodies but without the immune system going crazy at seeing some virus proteins in nerves along the way. And you inject live polio later, no problem, either antibodies protect nerves or the immune response to infected nerves is no longer as extreme due either to it not being the first time infection level of response or to non-involvement of IgM complement complexes, who can say.
IPV *may* also protect against later injection just as well as OPV. But since widespread IPV use tends to banish polio from a given region it may just be that now polio isn't going to be accidentally injected later. So the IPV's protection isn't really clear. OPV was better, proven to work for decades.
"The attenuation is real but deattenuation happens right there on the spot, within a day ..."
OK, I think I understand what you are saying here.
They are injected with an attenuated virus that is not competent in some way. However, most kids still develop antibodies to the various serotypes by the time some of the virions mutate back to being competent. Is that it? Perhaps it is only the unfortunate few who get VAPP.
The oral vaccine is supposedly "attenuated." But the deattenuation mutants, aka not-defective version, can be spotted on the first day after you administer it. Basically the attenuation only works in a lab, when you give it to a kid the defective version can't replicate so the not-defective versions, which are already there in the OPV, replicate. Instant deattenuation.
The injected version is formaldehyde-deactivated.
Both of them could cause paralysis if they are not encountered "first" - before live virus is injected riding along on some other injection. So I don't remember if I mention it here but there actually were multiple cases of paralysis during the Salk trial that Francis didn't mention in the review meeting. That is what you would expect because some kids in the trial, being I think 4th graders, were already primed by a previous "first" injected encounter. It was too late for them.
The trick with both vaccines is they cause network effects. So for OPV, you get very seasonal shedding of the virus and so even kids who don't get OPV early are going to get a second-hand infection during OPV season. So this fixes the problem of, ok natural polio season might have gaps like we had for flu and RSV for a year, and now you have these un-immune kids who are in danger of being injected with polio accidentally. And then they will be primed so when the next natural season comes around, there goes their leg/lung/etc. But the OPV makes it regular, no gaps, first encounter is enteric infection.
On the opposite spectrum, when IPV is in widespread use, there is low danger of ever encountering the virus at all. So even if you get primed by being "first" injected with the live virus riding on some other injection then it doesn't matter because there is no second encounter. However, at this point, by definition, IPV and OPV would be the second encounter and so you'd be in trouble. And hence VAPP. But in the US at least since we hit kids with IPV at 2 months there's not much of a danger window. And again there just isn't going to be a lot of accidental polio injection in IPV areas.
I remember being given the OPV in about 1963 or so, but I likely already had immunity because I had spent many years playing in the dirt by then anyway.
I wonder if children who are not breast fed are at higher risk ...
Great summary that makes sense..and this line "In all three cases the faucial appearances"
Fauci is everyhere... :)
This coincidence is because he was, in fact, named after the famous King Crimson album cover.
Just found your site, now subscribed!
I’m trying to remember where I read about “polio provocation,” but I do recall that it was a known factor by health authorities in New York during the late 1940s. It was for that reason that other immunizations (diphtheria) were purposely put on hold during polio epidemics.
Interesting. I wonder why that wouldn't be reflected in more literature from the time about penicillin. It has been difficult to piece together a picture of just how much it was used -- I relied on newspaper reports to even learn that it was injected at first.
It did seem to be directed to me - hence my confusion. My sincerest apologies. 🙏
I have posted a main link of mine earlier but perhaps I may add the following.
When I looked at viruses and became suspicious of current viral theory I saw a picture of a polio victim. It was the classic bow legs of rickets, vitamin D deficiency.
Having looked in detail at the virus theory and based on my general knowledge over 60 years of life on this earth, I realised that we had been hoodwinked by the medical establishment/big pharma.
Polio is primarily rickets reinvented. However, I am sure that other factors such as vaccines and neuro-toxic chemicals come into play. These will affect the body in various ways. These sub-links extracted from my main link.
https://alphaandomegacloud.wordpress.com/v-is-for-virus/
https://alphaandomegacloud.wordpress.com/v-is-for-vaccination/
Wow this is great. Thanks
Thanks!
I'm going to read the polio article next. In this moment, I want to flag somthing to you... What is this about, please?? https://mejbcart.substack.com/p/ctcctcg-gcggg-cacgtag-and-the-five
The furin cleavage site is crammed full of alternate "meanings." My inclination has always been that these alternate meanings are just a brag or signature of synthetic construction. Or say rather than just have one "sign" that shows synthetic origin, put in as many signs as you can so that there is no coherent way for anyone to present the evidence.
So, someone could have just looked in advance of ways to spell an FCS (usually nRnRR but in this case nRRnR) that would drop all sorts of leads, including matching "Moderna patents" which themselves were just products of Moderna farming out the task of "listing everything we might do" to some "deep in molecular bio" hires.
Moreover, 1) the same sequence already appeared in a DOW patent from 2001 2) The overlap between Moderna's "codon optimization" fetish, which consists of cramming lots of G's into every sequence in favor of alternate spellings that would result in coding for the same amino acids, and a similar G-preference in whoever designed the FCS means that the sequence match could, in fact, be a not-that-big coincidence.
Dear Brian
Thank you for your piece. Perhaps you may care to see my research. It cover vaccines as a whole. My site's approach is unusual in general as I will use humour to lighten the mood an to help make the points.
https://alphaandomegacloud.wordpress.com/2022/08/17/what-is-the-flu-a-k-a-covid-19-and-why-vaccines-are-pointless-at-best/
an alternative explanation for the cutter incident https://georgiedonny.substack.com/p/anti-virals-sprays
Jo
Hello Brian, I thought of you and this piece when I ran across this letter to BMJ, written by a retired pediatrician in 2018;
https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5246/rr
Title of letter: Injections and acute flaccid myelitis: the dog that hasn't barked
The editorial and review of the US outbreaks of acute flaccid myelitis/AFM is timely, but it fails to mention a potentially important co-factor in the cause of this “mystery illness”—intramuscular injections and provocation paralysis. (Stelzer-Braid, BMJ, 19 Dec 2018)
I venture to say that few clinicians today are aware that injections are strong risk factors for paralytic polio: recent injections (e.g. antibiotics, vaccinations) have accounted for 66% to 86% of attributable risk of paralysis when polioviruses are circulating. (Hill and Knowelden, BMJ, 1 July 1950. Strebel et al, NEJM 1995;332:500. Kohler et al, Int J Epidem, 2002;32:272) Even fewer clinicians are likely to know about poliovirus receptors, which are not expressed in normal human muscle fibers but are rapidly up-regulated in muscle damaged by injections. (Dalakas et al, NEJM 1995;333:62) This enables circulating polioviruses to bind to motor end plates from where they are transported along motor nerves to the spinal cord. (Gromeier and Wimmer, J Virol 1998;72:5056. Ren and Racaniello, J Infect Dis 1992;166:747) 99% of poliovirus infections are benign and self-limited, but of the 1% of paralytic cases a substantial proportion are provoked by injections. There is a dose-response effect: in Strebel’s report of vaccine-associated paralytic polio/VAPP in Romania, a single injection within 30 days of paralysis onset increased VAPP risk 8-fold; 2 to 9 injections increase VAPP risk 27-fold; and 10 or more injections increased VAPP risk 182-fold! For the contacts of OPV recipients the peak risk occurred when injections were given 8 to 21 days before onset of paralysis, similar to Hill’s observations from the 1949 polio epidemic in the UK........
Oh, thanks for this link! I just posted a reply about “polio provocation,” but couldn’t remember the reference.
Super! Wyatt has done similar work but this is a much better collection of the evidence for acute polio injection paralysis (rather than priming) than I had encountered before.
I copped out on the reading that would be required to fully integrate acute injection into my model; the mystery of epidemic polio (not preceded by a recent injection) being my focus. But it's actually a very valuable supplement to the mystery - polio vaccination should actually act like infection in causing immune attack of previously injected innate-suppressed polio per my theory. I planned to add a section covering this question and Strebel et al seems to confirm what my theory predicts!
So if I understand correctly there are three complementary trains of thought here:
1) Vaccinations cause polio to be introduced due to non-sterile needles. When polio was endemic, this would often cause polio to be introduced directly into the body as opposed to the digestive route, bypassing some immune responses.
2) Vaccinations trigger human muscle fibers to express relevant receptors, allowing of transport of the virus along the nerves. (Regardless of how the polio ended up in the bloodstream/muscle.)
3) Polio when ending up in the spinal cord (regardless of route) is triggering a form of auto-immune response it normally typically doesn't, when introduced through the digestive route.
So, RE
1) it's injections of any kind. This is why diphtheria anti-toxin and penicillin drive the historic waves. Even given the delay between injection (winter) and paralysis it's amazing no one noticed the significance of 1894 / anti-toxin before.
3) Injected polio is either nerfed by pre-existing antibodies or innately suppressed. Innately suppressed means it gets in some nerve cells, maybe muscle but that can be considered a superfluous element of the model, and the nerve cells firewall it with amyloid. There's no or virtually no adaptive immune response because the antigen dose never ramps up.
Now the person is in a position where future adaptive immune response to this strain of polio (strain-specific-vulnerability is important for explaining adult onset) will potentially or definitely necessitate an immune attack of the cells that the virus was firewalled in. So either natural infection in the next summer wave or a future polio vaccine. There were kids who got paralyzed in the actual Salk vaccine trial; Francis just buried that detail when it was being reviewed for rush approval. These ones were already primed from a previous injection for something else.
The only way to avoid priming is never to be injected with anything ever, or front-load humoral immunity so the virus is nerfed during future accidental injection. That's what the OPV was great at and IPV, eh, well see
Well, OPV *was* great in that context. Now polio is almost eradicated, and we use sterile needles, IPV should be fine. Better in fact, as OPV-strain induced polio is now one of the largest causes of remaining polio.
I like your theory though. I'm not totally sold on the priming though. That seems like a non-necessary (be it possibly complementary) component?
A more simpler variant where we state that polio ending up in nerve cells causes paralytic cases, where cases where the virus stays outside are typically mild, would suffice as well in explaining why we saw a huge wave of polio cases at the turn of the century. After all that is when we started injecting kids.
So, what is the added benefit of the priming component? Is it to explain a delay between onset of paralytic events vs previous injection?
I'd assume polio always caused some paralytic events, and so would the Salk vaccine. So not every paralytic events needs an injection to be explained perse.
It may also be and and-and factor, where priming plays a role as well as just direct post-injection paralytic events. The "Outbreaks of acute flaccid myelitis in the US" seems to suggest the sequential events were common enough, right?
I'm not saying you are wrong, just trying to be clear on what the purpose of that angle is.
Either way this seems way more plausible than the Dissolving Illusions and 'Pesticides Theory' explanations that I've seen before.
Funny - in fact the whole purpose of generating a model that solves the mystery was so I could parse the consequences of the IPV switch which is ultimately going to fail. We'll have to go back to OPV if paralytic cases return; the experts already acknowledge that: It will mean that the IPV doesn't generate mucosal immunity. But my model suggests that we may not have a return of paralytic cases even if IPV doesn't generate mucosal immunity. Or it may be a delay. There's a few possibilities. But IPV isn't sustainable. The only reason the OPV strains are a "threat" is because they effectively displace wild strains. Without OPV we would just blame the failure of IPV on wild polio. But the failure is IPV.
The "epidemiology" of polio after 1881 demands priming for various reasons, but as I admit I don't lay out the case - the "mystery" - in my post. But in short the epi isn't consistent with paralysis as a result of infection. RE "I'd assume polio always caused some paralytic events, and so would the Salk vaccine," adults were universally seropositive pre-vaccine, though not always to every strain, so natural polio encounter simply doesn't cause paralysis even without attenuation from OPV. The rates of "polio" were so low in the pre-injection-of-kids-eras that there's no reason to suppose they were caused by polio virus as opposed to anything else. The virus just doesn't paralyze. True neurotropic strains had to be created from serial passage as with Flexner's MV strain, and all the early work based on that had to be scrapped when tissue culturing was developed.
Instead it's consistent with infection-prompted auto-immune attack. "Sporadic" polio wouldn't happen at all because the there's no way to get the virus to arms or legs without hitting the CNS first. Instead, virus is in the CNS, maybe some immune damage, but this is incidental to what happens in the limbs -- exactly as Kenny suggested, but her model was before auto-immunity was recognized as an etiology of disease. This isn't (bulbar or cerebral) paralysis *until* additional virus is injected by lumbar puncture or further needle use, as in the amplification pathway in my model.
But, I call it a "pseudo-auto-immune" attack because the antibodies and T Cells are targeted to polio antigens in previously "firewalled" polio-infected cells. This also is consistent with the exercise link - when you cross acute phase inflammatory response of exercise (immune cells and cytokines in muscles) with the peak of acute novel memory immune response to enteric polio (loads of polio-specific antibodies, B and T Cells) you totally explain the otherwise mysterious exercise link (ugh, I lost the link to the classic pre-vaccine-era exercise link study). It is an accelerant on the fire, leading to an explosion -- complete destruction of the motor neuron, ennervation. This alone gets to muscle destruction but there could also be collateral or direct immune attack of muscles, the model doesn't care which.
An alternate model would have to say what else it is that the immune system is attacking in the legs and arm motor nerves. That makes no sense -- if it is polio-virus-incited-auto-immunity to auto-antigens in nerves or muscles, it would be all over the body. Only priming with polio antigens makes sense.
I see, so your theory depends on both wild type and OPV never causing paralytic cases, but they are purely driven by live polio being driven into the spine as primer.
That is a 'dangerous' theory though, as it depends on almost every paralytic cases pre-injection era to be non-polio. But I guess we cannot know, as we have no samples from that era.
But is polio in those few 3rd world countries still endemic enough? After all it requires injecting with a dirty needle to prime. Does that still happen in Pakistan/Indonesia/etc? I have my doubts here ...
Nevertheless, it is possible I agree. I'd - for now - settle for the softer variant where polio always caused some events, but injections made it explode casewise. But either way, that would not look good for IPV indeed.