The post-2000 coverage on circulating OPV is always a bit "rain is wet!" Before the West stopped using OPV, any sewage surveillance program would tell you that OPV spreads around. Big spikes if you have timed OPV administration. It isn't a big deal because the flip side of having an OPV program is that almost everyone has high levels of what is essentially natural immunity.
If it's true that some polio vaccine campaigns, such as the ones of Bill Gates, caused some polio, it would also be odd if they did not contain DDT, or, assuming they also have only typical adjuvants, why other vaccines containing the latter don't seem to produce polio (enough to be noticed).
Right, Turtles is a bit have-cake+eat-cake here, suggesting that excessive doses of OPV might have increased polio incidence after 20k words about how polio virus doesn't cause polio...
I haven't read the book yet and don't know in what style they present it.
Laying different "odd things about what we thought we knew" on the table, without claiming that one has the perfectly consistent picture of it all, can be legitimate, I guess.
He announced being over it (it being, I guess you could say, the credibility crisis in media and science) about five posts back. You can't force interest...
Forgive my lack of specifics here as it’s a while since I read about polio, but isn’t the explanation for the effectiveness of polio vaccines put down to a change in diagnostic criteria. I thought it changed from something like ‘any paralysis for any time as short as a few hours/ a day’ to something like ‘paralysis for over a month’. I’m presuming I read this either in Dissolving Illusions or The Moth in the Iron Lung.
What is your guess as to why infections seemed to surge in the last graph? Was that a change in diagnostic criteria?
On a separate note, if cats haven’t been proven, then what exactly are the four furry things that patrol my house day and night making objects fly off surfaces onto the floor poltergeist-like, and who is it that keeps depositing dead mice in my hallway?
I am rather pointedly side-stepping this kind of quibbling over the 1950s reversal by looking at the Brodie-Park vaccine trial.
But regarding the reversal itself, the 'reclassification' claim isn't plausible. Did polio wards just start turning away stick-limbed kids because they didn't get lab confirmation? Where did those kids go? Or did the kids still fill up the wards, but no one bothered to come take pictures anymore?
You had a push for better classification around the same time as the vaccine because the polio response wasn't being handled by omniscient gods - obviously everyone wanted to know 'is it just polio virus causing this, as we have said, or a whole host of things'? So Dissolving Illusions in particular makes this very lazy, disappointing claim that merely asking the question is proof that the answer was 'whole host of things.' It was almost entirely polio virus.
I am not in the US, but didn’t kids go back to school in September in early 20th century New England ? If they were getting poisoned by pesticides on apples then this would have been the August windfalls (which I presume you get in New England like we do in England). My apple tree has edible apples from mid August until now. The last few are blowing off in the storms.
Not saying I have a strong view on either theory, but there is some oddness to polio that neither a virus or pesticides can explain fully.
Sorry I didn’t read it all. Your articles are interesting but I find the style impenetrable at times.
As for the style, it is what it is. There's probably a reason that most replies to conspiracy and outsider theories take the form of just listing different things experts said they were totally sure about. Actually presenting the case to the reader, suddenly you have to show the sausage being made.
Polio paralysis victims were +75% pre-school age children (0-5 years old) in urban areas and about 50% pre-school age children in rural areas in 1910-1931.
The point about late harvests is if early apples are poisonous, how can the apples begin to stop poisoning kids in September and not poison them at all in October.
I need to reread this a few times, but something I've been thinking about is that there appears to have been a large era where misdiagnosis was occurring and that scientific evidence was heavily muddied, but rather than consider that there's so much information out there that may not be accurate given limitations at the time, it seems like we're milking hypotheses out of whatever we can draw.
I mean, even when writing about my black widow post there were comments that the abdominal pain and symptoms following a bite led to unnecessary surgeries. There's a ton about medicine that was not known at the time, and even now there's a ton that's still not known. It's sort of weird that we consider that we have reached some precipice in medicine/science and that we know all there is to know.
What makes you think that misdiagnosis is finished or historical?
For sport, consider "Long Covid" vs "Vaxx Injury."
We likely have the analytical tools to discriminate now, look for pseudouridine in spike proteins from the mRNA shots, vs variant spikes in serum samples. Note the paucity of autopsies in the "sudden and unexpected" deaths and the dearth of full chemical assessment of specimens.
"It's sort of weird that we consider that we have reached some precipice in medicine/science and that we know all there is to know"
Where have I smelt that sentiment before...
"it can't be that a bunch of loonies with a god complex are staging a world takeover and (un-)health tyranny - because we live in such an enlightened era! We may look back on concpiracy stuff happening in the _past,_ which educated 'us', and total corruption also only exists in Mombasa, not here!" - smells vaguely similar.
It seems "we" are _always_ in times and places where most stuff has been figured out and we can be absolutely sure about stuff, and things that remain to be researched are only some icing on the cake. And, given how big "research happening" is today, there is a plausible feeling justification, although the psyche effects doing their thing to make people so convinced are probably no different than in he moustached dudes applying leeches to remove bad blood from a sick person.
But for polio it is the same as SARS-CoV-2 and 1918 flu. You don't really have to care about misdiagnosis because your big spikes are contributing almost all of the AUC and total cases. Having a polio epidemic makes it more likely that random paralysis is misdiagnosed as polio, but it doesn't make random paralysis more likely - most paralysis you see even of the more generic bulbar type (cerebral/bulbar/respiratory, as opposed to "spinal" which was wasting of specific limbs) is polio. Even if you call everything polio during an epidemic, your false positive rate isn't too grisly. And generally when it comes to the Virus Theory, the bigger story is that non-paralytic infections aren't being counted at all unless an investigator interviews every house in town.
Ultimately, close to every description of polio epidemics finds that most cases are 'sporadic'/'spinal', which is to say limb paralysis, often unilateral, and intellectual facilities are remarkably preserved, as in the Willard Parker tour from 1916 -- this isn't common for everyday neurotoxicity or neuritis, in which the highest-order functions fail first. So you only have to "worry" about misdiagnosis with the lesser subset of bulbar cases.
But the misdiagnosis problem isn't even as bad as that, because there were still clinical features that could distinguish polio bulbar cases from other post-viral paralysis, whether by mononuclear cells in spinal taps or the rapid timing after the initial flu-like symptoms. As long as some portion of physicians understood these criteria, a good amount of false positives were being proactively sieved out of the record books. The standard for a case in 1931 was paralysis and/or bunch of cells in LP during an epidemic period; this is adequate to filter out false positives. Once again if the designation of 'polio' were substantially muddy in practice then reinfection/re-paralysis would have been a lot more commonly observed than it was.
It's great to see all theories be challenged. But the virus theory is also being challenged. You're not exactly saying it WAS a virus I understand that. Let's just keep asking questions and seeing what pans out.
Well viruses have not been proven. There is more to it than meets the eye. We need to do more research that's what I see needs to happen. But the medical "industry" doesn't allow anyone to dissent from their belief system and do not want any other ideas to be known let alone discussed. But it means everyone is learning information that is obsolete.
Maybe we can learn something from this:
https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-health-middle-east-africa-united-nations-619efb65b9eeec5650f011b960a152e9
BTW, is there a "tame" version of Polio? Why do the keep talking about "wild" polio?
The post-2000 coverage on circulating OPV is always a bit "rain is wet!" Before the West stopped using OPV, any sewage surveillance program would tell you that OPV spreads around. Big spikes if you have timed OPV administration. It isn't a big deal because the flip side of having an OPV program is that almost everyone has high levels of what is essentially natural immunity.
My point was that we seem to continue to have polio cases so maybe they could do biopsies to get samples to determine exact mechanisms ...
If it's true that some polio vaccine campaigns, such as the ones of Bill Gates, caused some polio, it would also be odd if they did not contain DDT, or, assuming they also have only typical adjuvants, why other vaccines containing the latter don't seem to produce polio (enough to be noticed).
Right, Turtles is a bit have-cake+eat-cake here, suggesting that excessive doses of OPV might have increased polio incidence after 20k words about how polio virus doesn't cause polio...
I haven't read the book yet and don't know in what style they present it.
Laying different "odd things about what we thought we knew" on the table, without claiming that one has the perfectly consistent picture of it all, can be legitimate, I guess.
Nice ...
Can I digress a little bit - what happened to Jon The Cynic, he is not on Substack anymore? Do you maybe know something?
He announced being over it (it being, I guess you could say, the credibility crisis in media and science) about five posts back. You can't force interest...
Forgive my lack of specifics here as it’s a while since I read about polio, but isn’t the explanation for the effectiveness of polio vaccines put down to a change in diagnostic criteria. I thought it changed from something like ‘any paralysis for any time as short as a few hours/ a day’ to something like ‘paralysis for over a month’. I’m presuming I read this either in Dissolving Illusions or The Moth in the Iron Lung.
What is your guess as to why infections seemed to surge in the last graph? Was that a change in diagnostic criteria?
On a separate note, if cats haven’t been proven, then what exactly are the four furry things that patrol my house day and night making objects fly off surfaces onto the floor poltergeist-like, and who is it that keeps depositing dead mice in my hallway?
I am rather pointedly side-stepping this kind of quibbling over the 1950s reversal by looking at the Brodie-Park vaccine trial.
But regarding the reversal itself, the 'reclassification' claim isn't plausible. Did polio wards just start turning away stick-limbed kids because they didn't get lab confirmation? Where did those kids go? Or did the kids still fill up the wards, but no one bothered to come take pictures anymore?
You had a push for better classification around the same time as the vaccine because the polio response wasn't being handled by omniscient gods - obviously everyone wanted to know 'is it just polio virus causing this, as we have said, or a whole host of things'? So Dissolving Illusions in particular makes this very lazy, disappointing claim that merely asking the question is proof that the answer was 'whole host of things.' It was almost entirely polio virus.
viruses have not been proven? you can't be serious. What is measles, flu, small pox, covid, common colds caused by?
I am not in the US, but didn’t kids go back to school in September in early 20th century New England ? If they were getting poisoned by pesticides on apples then this would have been the August windfalls (which I presume you get in New England like we do in England). My apple tree has edible apples from mid August until now. The last few are blowing off in the storms.
Not saying I have a strong view on either theory, but there is some oddness to polio that neither a virus or pesticides can explain fully.
Sorry I didn’t read it all. Your articles are interesting but I find the style impenetrable at times.
As for the style, it is what it is. There's probably a reason that most replies to conspiracy and outsider theories take the form of just listing different things experts said they were totally sure about. Actually presenting the case to the reader, suddenly you have to show the sausage being made.
Polio paralysis victims were +75% pre-school age children (0-5 years old) in urban areas and about 50% pre-school age children in rural areas in 1910-1931.
The point about late harvests is if early apples are poisonous, how can the apples begin to stop poisoning kids in September and not poison them at all in October.
I need to reread this a few times, but something I've been thinking about is that there appears to have been a large era where misdiagnosis was occurring and that scientific evidence was heavily muddied, but rather than consider that there's so much information out there that may not be accurate given limitations at the time, it seems like we're milking hypotheses out of whatever we can draw.
I mean, even when writing about my black widow post there were comments that the abdominal pain and symptoms following a bite led to unnecessary surgeries. There's a ton about medicine that was not known at the time, and even now there's a ton that's still not known. It's sort of weird that we consider that we have reached some precipice in medicine/science and that we know all there is to know.
What makes you think that misdiagnosis is finished or historical?
For sport, consider "Long Covid" vs "Vaxx Injury."
We likely have the analytical tools to discriminate now, look for pseudouridine in spike proteins from the mRNA shots, vs variant spikes in serum samples. Note the paucity of autopsies in the "sudden and unexpected" deaths and the dearth of full chemical assessment of specimens.
"It's sort of weird that we consider that we have reached some precipice in medicine/science and that we know all there is to know"
Where have I smelt that sentiment before...
"it can't be that a bunch of loonies with a god complex are staging a world takeover and (un-)health tyranny - because we live in such an enlightened era! We may look back on concpiracy stuff happening in the _past,_ which educated 'us', and total corruption also only exists in Mombasa, not here!" - smells vaguely similar.
It seems "we" are _always_ in times and places where most stuff has been figured out and we can be absolutely sure about stuff, and things that remain to be researched are only some icing on the cake. And, given how big "research happening" is today, there is a plausible feeling justification, although the psyche effects doing their thing to make people so convinced are probably no different than in he moustached dudes applying leeches to remove bad blood from a sick person.
But for polio it is the same as SARS-CoV-2 and 1918 flu. You don't really have to care about misdiagnosis because your big spikes are contributing almost all of the AUC and total cases. Having a polio epidemic makes it more likely that random paralysis is misdiagnosed as polio, but it doesn't make random paralysis more likely - most paralysis you see even of the more generic bulbar type (cerebral/bulbar/respiratory, as opposed to "spinal" which was wasting of specific limbs) is polio. Even if you call everything polio during an epidemic, your false positive rate isn't too grisly. And generally when it comes to the Virus Theory, the bigger story is that non-paralytic infections aren't being counted at all unless an investigator interviews every house in town.
Ultimately, close to every description of polio epidemics finds that most cases are 'sporadic'/'spinal', which is to say limb paralysis, often unilateral, and intellectual facilities are remarkably preserved, as in the Willard Parker tour from 1916 -- this isn't common for everyday neurotoxicity or neuritis, in which the highest-order functions fail first. So you only have to "worry" about misdiagnosis with the lesser subset of bulbar cases.
But the misdiagnosis problem isn't even as bad as that, because there were still clinical features that could distinguish polio bulbar cases from other post-viral paralysis, whether by mononuclear cells in spinal taps or the rapid timing after the initial flu-like symptoms. As long as some portion of physicians understood these criteria, a good amount of false positives were being proactively sieved out of the record books. The standard for a case in 1931 was paralysis and/or bunch of cells in LP during an epidemic period; this is adequate to filter out false positives. Once again if the designation of 'polio' were substantially muddy in practice then reinfection/re-paralysis would have been a lot more commonly observed than it was.
It's great to see all theories be challenged. But the virus theory is also being challenged. You're not exactly saying it WAS a virus I understand that. Let's just keep asking questions and seeing what pans out.
Yeah, it looks like virus, smells like a virus, tracks like a virus therefore it must be DDT. Makes perfect sense to me.
Well viruses have not been proven. There is more to it than meets the eye. We need to do more research that's what I see needs to happen. But the medical "industry" doesn't allow anyone to dissent from their belief system and do not want any other ideas to be known let alone discussed. But it means everyone is learning information that is obsolete.
Please replace "viruses" with "cats." I insist on emphasizing that cats have n0t been proven.
Cat bloggers with a bad cattitude certainly exist.