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Vaccines and Remembrance of Things Past
Pew polling indicates that about 40% of African Americans are vaccine-hesitant or resistant. These individuals cite various reasons for their hesitancy, among which are discomfort regarding how quickly the vaccines were developed and how limited the testing of the vaccines was before they were authorized, on an emergency basis, for use. Many are concerned about possible side effects. Reasonable concerns. The FDA has yet to release its risk-benefit analysis of the Pfizer vaccine despite full approval of the vaccine. Such a circumstance is contrary to all prior FDA practice, adding to concern about the vaccines.
Joe Biden’s imposition of mandates, and anger at those unvaccinated, jogged my memory regarding events that occurred around the time I started Medical School almost 50 years ago. I started Medical School at UCLA in 1973. At that time genetic screening for various genetic disorders was a hot topic. In Southern California with, at the time, the largest Jewish population (Ashkenazi Jews are particularly afflicted with Tay Sachs) on the planet outside of Tel Aviv, prenatal screening for Tay Sachs was de rigeur. If a child was born with Tay Sachs, (an untreatable, incurable recessive genetic disorder that resulted in the birth of a perfectly healthy baby that, nevertheless underwent deterioration and decline over months to a couple of years and died), a medical malpractice suit for “wrongful life” was sure to follow.
Screening for Trisomy 21 was routine. Abortion of Trisomy 21 fetuses was routine.
There was a major push to screen for Sickle Cell trait. The African American community in Southern California at that time, in contrast to the Jewish community in Southern California, was strongly resistant to genetic screening. A year before I started medical school, in 1972, an expose’ of the Tuskegee Study of syphilis in poor Black farmers in Alabama had hit the proverbial fan. Appropriate outrage ensued. That had a marked effect on the willingness of African Americans to undergo genetic screening.
Five years before I started medical school at UCLA, the UCLA Law Review had published an issue on biomedical issues in law, with a preface by Linus Pauling, the discoverer of the molecular defect causing Sickle Cell disease. In that preface, Pauling had called for what became called his “yellow star” program (after the yellow star armbands that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany a generation or more earlier). Pauling advocated placing a visible permeant brand on anyone with a single gene for Sickle Cell disease (that is, anyone who had Sickle trait, a benign entity) so that they would not marry someone else with Sickle Trait and run a 25% risk of having a child with Sickle Cell disease. He also strongly encouraged aborting any baby found to have Sickle Cell disease on prenatal screening, to limit the pain and suffering of such individuals. He vilified then Governor Reagan for failure to allow abortions for such pregnancies. Unfortunately, at about the same time, Nixon made a major effort to push research and treatment of Sickle Cell disease, but in announcing that effort, he identified Sickle Cell disease as a disease exclusively of African Americans, which is not true. It does not just occur in African Americans. It can affect Greeks, Cypriots, Asians, Spanish, Portuguese. Thus, African Americans were essentially labeled as the sole carriers of a feared genetic disorder, while the most prominent of scientists called for aborting affected Black babies and screening the entire African American community to enable that. It would be hard to think of a more effective way of alienating Blacks from the medical and scientific establishments. Much of that alienation persists, almost like memory T cell immunity.
Cal Tech, in Pasadena, where Pauling worked, was a hotbed of Eugenics enthusiasm. The Board of Cal Tech had established the Human Betterment Foundation in 1929 under the influence of E.S. Gosney and Paul Popenoe. Pretty much the entire Board, which included David Starr Jordan, backed that Foundation. As did most of the faculty, which included not only Pauling, but Robert Milliken and Thomas Hunt Morgan (who was somewhat more passive on Eugenics than his fellow colleagues). Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and the genetic code, was trained by Linus Pauling at Cal Tech, and was sent by Pauling to England to work with Francis Crick on the very promising research into nucleic acids. Later in his life, Watson was named head of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which had been the epicenter of Eugenics in the first half of the 20th Century (The Eugenics Records office, under the direction of Harry Laughlin, was housed at that laboratory–funded by the Harriman fortune and the Carnegie Foundation–and was eventually closed at the end of 1939 by Vanevar Bush, who ran the Carnegie Foundation when the nonsense that was Eugenics began to be recognized for the perverse pseudoscience that it was; Charles Davenport, arguably the most influential biologist of his time and an avid Eugenicist, headed the Laboratory). Watson eventually had to resign that post when his intensely bigoted comments, particularly demeaning to Blacks, became too much for his colleagues to stomach. Into the 21st Century, he was still under the influence of Luis Aggasiz’ vile “scientific racism” that underpinned so many attitudes among prominent scientists in the 20th Century
Cal Tech became the institution that accounted for the most forced sterilizations during the Eugenics era. The research there was funded primarily by the Rockefeller Foundation. Cal Tech was the institution at which the most forced sterilizations of the “unfit” were performed in America, somewhere around 16,000. The records of those patients are still under lock and key in the Cal Tech archives, off-limits to everyone.
Needless to say, there was a considerable lack of trust among African Americans regarding the Medical and Scientific establishments, in Southern California. One could hardly blame the African American community for its hesitancy to participate in genetic screening for Sickle Cell trait. While life span was short, and life hazardous and painful for Sickle Cell disease patients in the 1970s, marked progress in managing the disease has been achieved. The use of penicillin prophylactically during the first three years of life, to prevent pneumococcal pneumonia, to which patients with Sickle Cell disease are particularly susceptible, with high infant and childhood mortality from this one bacteria, markedly reduced infant mortality, which overall greatly increased the average longevity of patients with Sickle Cell disease. Another great advance was the discovery that hydroxyurea reduced the sickling episodes that are so painful, debilitating, and damaging, by 50%. The expected longevity of a patient with Sickle Cell disease has risen from about 25 years in the 1960s to now over 60 years. Sickle Cell disease has become a more or less manageable chronic disease. We are into the era now of monoclonal antibody treatment that can further reduce the impact of sickling events; bone marrow transplants that can potentially cure the disease, and potential gene therapy for cure. The Sickle Cell disease baby that Pauling wanted to abort in 1970 might have survived to see his or her disease become a manageable chronic disease with far less suffering and much higher quality of life and longevity. Scientists like Linus Pauling actually had little confidence in Science.
Then of course, Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, the year that I started medical school. Now there was no longer a legal barrier to the genetic screening and abortion of babies affected with severe genetic traits. Even Ruth Bader Ginsberg thought that Medicaid should cover abortions to allow preventing the births of babies to poor parents, regardless of genetic screening or disease status, rather, aborting such infants of poor parents was a means to reducing the numbers of poor, among which, disproportionately were African Americans. Eugenics based on income. Which was one of the same arguments made for the Eugenics of forced sterilization earlier in the Century. Of course, there was the tension for abortion advocates (Democrats) between limiting the Black population, and getting the Black vote. A politician wouldn’t want to abort too many of his constituents, one would think.
In fact, Joe Biden seems to think that he politically owns the Black population, that to not support him politically is tantamount to not being Black. Joe Biden’s campaign wasn’t so much about the “soul of America” as it was about owning the souls of Americans, particularly Black Americans, in the sense of 16 tons(the Merle Travis sense). Joe Biden seems to think Blacks owe him politically. Why? Those Souls of Black Folks that W.E.B. Dubois labored hard to convince White Folk actually existed, are now fair game for ownership by Joe Biden, he seems to think. How could forcing a vaccine on them that might, as Nicki Minaj has alleged, cause orchitis, with impotence and sterility, not reduce confidence in his diktats? There is evidence that COVID itself can cause testicular damage. But that information is not likely to get the kind of attention that Nicki Minaj’s tweets have received. And the risks of the vaccine seem to be under wraps at the FDA. There is very little information on the effects of the COVID vaccine on testicular function. One study from Urologists at the University of Miami showed no testicular effects of the vaccine in 45 men studied (too small a sample to have any import). Whom to believe? Biden or Nicki Minaj?
Published in Healthcare
I’m not sure anything can prove anything.
There are no control groups so there will not be any data.
For this question, I’d be quite satisfied with data from 2018 or 2019 about how common this condition is.
We can’t know anything with absolute certainty without proving a cause. But there’s enough anecdotal evidence that is backed up by biomolecular theory that the vaccines are doing some things, such as causing blood clots.
But to wholly dismiss swollen testicles after getting the vaccine to gonorrhea is preposterous.
No objection, although I don’t know enough even to confirm that. Definitely myocarditis.
I wholly dismiss the hypothesis that the vaccine caused this. This is the rational move based on what I know. It’s called Ockham’s Razor. All I know is that it’s happened after the vaccine at least one time, and that it normally happens sometimes anyway from gonhorrhea and mumps. For me, to believe anything else would be preposterous.
If things are any different for you, that can only be because you know more than I do. So, once again, please tell me what you know that I don’t.
I know that diagnosing gonorrhea from a report of swollen testicles is nonsense.
No one’s even diagnosing it. All I know is that it happened after the vaccine at least one time, and that it normally happens sometimes anyway from gonhorrhea or from mumps. What more do you know?
I think it was already presented as a diagnosis. I know that for what a year now testicular swelling and gonadal problems have been reported as a theoretical adverse reaction to the vaccine, and that they have been reported to VAERS as occurring directly after vaccination. I also know that all anyone can say with any degree of certainty is that this man got testicular swelling after getting the vaccine.
He may have taken a football directly to the gonads. He may have had unusually large testicles all his life and just noticed it now. More seriously, the story may be confusing testicular swelling with scrotal swelling, which is a completely different thing. And I repeat my first paragraph, particularly that this man got testicular swelling after getting the vaccine.
You are conservative in not thinking anything may be unusual or amiss, and this makes sense. I am conservative in considering all the complaints and possibilities may be vaccine related, and this too makes sense. We have different views.
I think not. I think it was presented as a possible explanation that doesn’t involve vaccines.
But so what? I didn’t present it as a diagnosis. I don’t know anything except the logic. You don’t conclude a thing was caused by a vaccine based on the above information alone.
Much better. Now you’re giving me some more information. Not enough to blame any vaccine, but it is more information.
Now if you had some numbers or some clarity on what precisely “directly after” means, maybe we could make some progress.
[Sigh.] You’re wrong. We agree on that.
There are hardly ever any true control groups at this stage, but one can still control for other variables that might confound the issue.
I think the next frontier will be when there are some reliable genetic predictors of high IQ, good looks, and skill in the preppier kinds of sports. Then parents will be offered the option of using their own sperm and eggs to make 50 embryos and the one with the best genetic combo gets implanted and his/her 49 brothers and sisters get flushed. If it works and social advancement is at stake, yuppie America will discard any and all moral reservations about this technology in a flash. China will likely make it mandatory. Dating apps will require DNA records….
@annefy
Pardon me for indulging in remote and ex post facto diagnostic speculation, but the description you give raises a possibility that your father may have had Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, of which there are about 30 genetic variants. Have you or any of your siblings been affected?
Actually, have recently just returned from the future, Demolition Man is a documentary smuggled backwards in time to alert and inform us, and sex is socially distanced, and there are no more dating apps but instead the Homeland Department decides who will share a home with whom, based on the latest genomic science and the prevailing socio-economic conditions.
And the national motto also will be changed from E Pluribus Unum to More Cow Bell.
Flicker, you are fined one credit for violation of anti-sarcasm statutes…
Pseudoscience is something that takes the form of science, but does not actually work in practice. Phrenology, the Four Humors, astrology, homeopathy, perpetual motion machines, etc. You confuse scientific ethics with being actual science. Let’s say I have a well-planned study that involves painful, ultimately fatal experiments on research animals to study the mechanism of learning and its relation to brain structure. This is accepted science. Would performing the same action on humans stop being scientific because it is horrendously evil? Similarly, selective breeding works on all animals, including humans. If we prevent any carriers of sickle cell trait from breeding, sickle cell disease would all but vanish. This could go for other diseases or even physical traits. That does not make such an atrocity justified, but it does mean it is part of genetic science.
Why do you think Charles Murray is into Eugenics? Do you think there are no genetic differences between racial groups? He never advocates selection or sterilization or any kind of supremacist belief.
The question is whether you can identify the genes that cause a given trait. It’s relatively easy to find the gene for something like Sickle Cell or Tay-Sachs, but personality quirks are another story.
So I’ll switch to satire. Same thing.
@NanoceltTheContrarian: Whoa. I am impressed. After many years, Charcot-Marie-Tooth is what he was diagnosed with. I have two brothers and two sisters. We are all well beyond the age where my dad was having problems, and none of us have been affected. I remember at some point him getting in touch with relatives to see if anyone had similar symptoms. No one on his mother’s side of the family;his father died very young and no one knew his family, so the trail ran cold there.
I’ve always wondered if it was environmental; he worked in shipyards and was exposed to asbestos and God knows what else from a very young age.
Except Nicki is involved…..
I think Nicki is wrong on this one but with only one BS statement about COVID on her record, she still ranks higher on the credibility scale than Fauci who is way ahead on the BS statement count.
Don’t be ridiculous. She’s four thousand miles away. And she didn’t get the shot, he did. Talk about slanderous guilt-by-association.
Do you think climate science is science? Can we control the climate?
What “racial group” is Barack Obama? Irish/Celtic/Caucasian or African-American? There are fewer isolated “racial groups” (genetically isolated populations) as time goes on.
If you correct Sickle Trait you worsen susceptibility to malaria. Any genetic trait you change has repercussions that may not be known. The Chinese researcher who made babies resistant to AIDS made the more susceptible to Hepatitis C. Genetics is in its infancy.
But eugenics is not.
@omegapaladin
If you think genetics is a well understood “science” I would say you are fooling yourself. The phenotypic expression of a given gene often is completely inexplicable, and the predicted phenotype just doesn’t occur. Why? Most often no one knows. It is coming to light that large sections of DNA for which no function is known have marked effects on gene expression, in totally different parts of the genome, that are unexpected and hard to study. There are simple examples, many monogenic disorders that are well understood, with the potential to correct them but those are virtually the few exceptions.
Altering Germline cells with CRSPR technology is likely to produce unexpected results that may be beneficial, disastrous, or somewhere in between.
The neurosciences are pseudosciences. Psychology is a pseudoscience. Sociology is a pseudoscience. Climate “science” is pseudo science. Epidemiology has some core basic principles but as COVID has shown, Epidemiology is hardly a science. Same for Public Health. Economics is a pseudoscience. All fields of inquiry that make a pretense as science but can hardly be called such. Biology is almost a pseudoscience. Evolutionary biology is also something of a pseudoscience. Anything in which we delude ourselves into thinking we know something that we don’t and trying to make predictions that are far off the mark is a pseudoscience. Unless you believe those projections on the 2.2 million deaths that were imminent in the US based on models out of England. Anything that uses models to try to make predictions is a pseudo science.
Was Mengele performing science? In my view, science is an approach to understanding, rather than something with which to create atrocities. And if scientists feel they are above ordinary mortals and empowered to harm them, that is beyond pseudoscience. That is a crime against humanity. The German doctors that performed forced sterilizations for eugenics purposes in the Third Reich got off by citing Olver Wendell Holmes’ opinion in Buck v. Bell. Eugenics was not then, and is not now a science.
Murray is a sociologist. Good for him. That is clearly a pseudoscience. But he bases his approach on something that grew directly out of Eugenics, psychometrics, which is bosh, humbug. A single number cannot capture the essence of a human being or that person’s cognitive abilities. And the nature of being human is damaged by believing so, and Murray certainly believes so. His perspective is sterile. He is an agnostic who now thinks religious belief is a good thing for us inferior beings. Give me a break.
Experiments to study how the mind learns? No one knows what mind or consciousness is. But they want to fool around with it? If Paul Dirac were around today, he would neve go to college and would be consigned to some ignominious life because he had limited (very limited) social skills. Poincare’ seemed to believe in a revelatory process of discovery in mathematics and science.
Science is dehumanizing. Pseudoscience, even more so.
Nice rant. Ben Carson seems to imply that the understanding of the human brain is sophisticated enough to be incomprehensible, and he’s worked on them. But consciousness and an awareness of consciousness? These are the mind. And best left to the science of philosophy. :)
#humor #serious
Most mutations don’t survive.
@omegapaladin
I would add that physics has become a pseudoscience, what with string theorists trying to study the cosmic background radiation like the entrails of a sacrificial beast looking for those 10 to the 500th power other universes that just have to be out there for ours to exist. And postulating an undetectable and indescribable “inflaton field” (with it’s fundamental “inflaton” particle?) in which the Big Bang and Inflation occurred…only to require another field as the ground for that field, and so on ad infinitum. I would say “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Greene, or Mr. Feynmann,” but that is not the case. “Science” has come a cropper, and pseudoscience is predominantly what we have in our benighted age. We had the Age of Faith. Then the Age of Reason. What is our Age? I would say the Age of Nihilism. Perhaps you have a better moniker for such a depraved time as ours.
The Age of Fancy.
I was talking STDs not COVID….
I know you were. That’s what I was talking about, too.