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Day 22 September, 2008

Entries 2 Total

Capitalism’s true colours

Sep 22, ’08 10:31 PM

U.S. Sen­ator Bernie Sanders:

For years now, they’ve told us that we can’t afford — that the gov­ern­ment provid­ing health­care to all people is just unima­gin­able; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infra­struc­ture. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sud­den, yeah, we do have $700 bil­lion for a bail­out of Wall Street.

Schnews:

For years we heard the same old story about how there’s never any money for a live­able bene­fits sys­tem or a decent min­imum wage, but some­how UK plc finds bil­lions of spare cash to sup­port cor­rupt busi­nesses that are in a mess only because of a greed that has benefited no one but their share­hold­ers. For years we’ve heard the man­tra that the free mar­ket must be allowed to run unfettered – yet the most ‘cap­it­al­ist’ gov­ern­ments are nation­al­ising huge com­pan­ies left, right and centre. It just goes to show that cap­it­al­ism is a myth and the sooner we stop wast­ing money prop­ping up a failed sys­tem that will never work — the better.

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Inside the vaccine-and-autism scare

Sep 22, ’08 7:58 PM

A pedi­at­ri­cian traces the rise of the anti-vaccine move­ment that falsely linked thi­merosal with aut­ism and turned par­ents away from the most lifesav­ing medi­cine in history.

Wakefield’s research was secretly bank­rolled by a per­sonal injury law­yer whose cli­ents were suing MMR makers. Wake­field him­self was given close to a mil­lion dol­lars to prove that the MMR caused aut­ism. He had filed a pat­ent for a new MMR vac­cine at the same time he was doing his research. Upon learn­ing this, Lan­cet retrac­ted his paper, and he was charged with pro­fes­sional mis­con­duct in 2005. If he is found guilty of mis­con­duct, he will never prac­tice medi­cine in the U.K. again.

The last nail in the coffin came in 2007 … Wakefield’s former research assist­ant test­i­fied that his dis­cov­ery about the MMR vac­cine was, in real­ity, the res­ult of con­tam­in­ated lab equip­ment and that Wake­field knew this about but ignored it. In other words, as Offit writes, “Wake­field had crossed the line from ill-conceived, poorly per­formed sci­ence to fraud.”

Eleven stud­ies now show that the MMR vac­cine doesn’t cause aut­ism (the most recent just came out). Six have shown that thi­merosal doesn’t cause aut­ism; three have shown thi­merosal doesn’t cause neur­o­lo­gical prob­lems. Stud­ies show­ing the oppos­ite, like Wakefield’s, use flawed meth­ods, have ser­i­ous con­flicts of interest or have been con­duc­ted in anim­als whose res­ults can’t be extra­pol­ated to humans.

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