Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History Paperback – July 27, 2013

This book hardly needs any more 5-star reviews, so rather than reiterate what others have said positively about it, I thought I’d take the time to address a couple of the 1-star reviews which, unlike the vast majority of other negative comments, actually contained what appeared to be substantive and thoughtful responses to the point that, in reading them, I was almost dissuaded from purchasing and reading this book.TL;DR -- the book is still very much worth reading, and while some of the objections have more merit than others, none suffice to dismiss the central ideas or history presented in the book, which you should definitely still get and read for yourself.One more note before the details -- I'm forced to cut substantial portions of thisreview due to Amazon's character count limit, not because I didn't (or couldn't) addresssome of the objections. Perhaps I'll publish the full version elsewhere at some point.The first negative review is titled “Pseudoscience Classic” by David Rintoul, which was the more measured and articulate of the two. Professor Rintoul argues that the authors have constructed a textbook example of pseudoscience, manipulating facts and twisting narratives to present a simplistic and false worldview which is used to arrive at predetermined and "dangerous" conclusions. Each of these is addressed in more detail next, but a general comment at the outset is that quite a few of these are interconnected and apply just as appropriately within the arguments that Rintoul makes, and the the broader medical and scientific establishment are also just as (if not more) guilty of the same "pseudoscientific" cognitive traps.I found it interesting going back to re-read this review after completing the book, as the very first complaint (“A search for a simple answer”) came across as not just wrong, but an inversion of reality which the authors specifically addressed repeatedly throughout the book. Vaccination as developed and practiced in the Western world is a textbook example of a search for a simple answer to a very complex problem. One particularly relevant quote cited in the book is worth reproducing in full:"..'the immune system remains a black box' says Garry Fathman, MD, a professor of immunology and rheumatology and associate director of the Institute for Immunology, Transplantation, and Infection...It's staggeringly complex, comprising at least 15 different interacting cell types that spew dozens of different molecules into the blood to communicate with one another and to do battle. Within each of those cells sit tens of thousands of genes whose activity can be altered by age, exercise, infection, vaccination status, diet, stress, you name it... That's an awful lot of moving parts. And we don't really know what the vast majority of them do, or should be doing... We can't even be sure how to tell when the immune system's not working right, let alone why not, because we don't have good metrics of what a healthy immune system looks like. Despite billions spent on immune stimulants in supermarkets and drugstores last year, we don't know what -- if anything -- those really do, or what 'immune stimulant' even means" [p.330-331, B. Goldman, Stanford Medicine, 2011].The idea that vaccination is the universal answer to the problem of infectious disease is no less a simple minded than the simplified argument “vaccines are bad” as attacked in this objection. Raising the boogeyman of “vaccines cause autism” is not appropriate either here, as the book mentions the disease only in passing on a couple occasions. This book is clearly not concerned with autism, and casting it in that light is yet another example of oversimplification and imputing the intent of concerned parents who might read the book (which is the exact kind of faulty argumentation employed in his "boogeyman" objection -- see below).The first of the "lies of omission" is a study on an epidemic outbreak in St. Petersburg, from which the authors of the book selectively quote the abstract and disregard a sentence which Rintoul claims should be included. While the two sentences are found in the abstract and it is true that the authors of the book only included the latter, the devil is in the details here. In the Mortality section and associated table in the cited study, we learn that only a single patient under the age of 30 died during the epidemic outbreak, and that for the purposes of the study, "vaccinated" refers to "[p]atients who had got the basic diphtheria vaccination in childhood and one or more booster doses of toxoid vaccine during the last 5 years." In the discussion section of this paper, we learn that the "mortality (2.3%) was much lower than in the recent out-breaks [sic] in the Western countries (about 10%) Only 16 of the 42 patients who died were non-alcoholics...There may be many explanations for the low mortality." Among these "many" explanations for low mortality, the vaccination rate, cited as "unsatisfactorily" low later in the paper, is conspicuously missing. Furthermore, the "underestimation" of the efficacy of vaccination refers to prevention of the more toxic forms of infection, not mortality. I personally think it's probably safe to infer this is because the actual mortality-correlated data did not support the same finding regarding vaccination (or else they would have included it), but even being charitable on this point, the authors "arrived" at underestimated vaccine efficacy as follows: "Vaccination data were especially lacking for male alcoholics and persons who died soon after admission. These patients may have had a lower incidence of vaccination. Thus, our results may underestimate the protective efficacy of vaccination." This is the full extent of their reasoning, which I hardly need to point out is pure conjecture. So while yes, the authors could and perhaps should have included a more detailed citation of the paper than the limited quote from the abstract, the full story isn't nearly as close to a full about-face that would amount to intentional mischaracterization.The second "lie of omission" is the alleged requirement of Leicester medical staff to have been vaccinated against smallpox. Here, once again, Rintoul is guilty of that which he accuses the authors, which are clear from the very first page of the chapter that vaccination rates in Leicester never dropped to zero, but rather to around 10 percent which is far below the standard messaging from the medical community about vaccination coverage and "herd immunity", and can hardly qualify as "many people [who] remained in the population". Presumably, the hospital and medical staff throughout the rest of England was also required to be vaccinated, and yet throughout there continued to be epidemic smallpox outbreaks the same time during which the experts were wringing their hands about Leicester.Even if it is true that all medical staff in Leicester received the smallpox vaccine (and presumably continued to receive the boosters which were also required), the truth still holds that the massive epidemic of smallpox, which for decades all of the wisest doctors predicted would descend upon it, never occurred. Given the thoroughly well-established adverse effects of the smallpox vaccine, the Leicester example would still demonstrate that the concept of herd immunity through vaccination only is not based in reality, and that it would be in the interest of both health and freedom to not compel vaccination. Instead, in a throwback to the first objection, the simple and unifying answer of vaccination is thrust forward regardless of the evidence.Regarding gish-gallop: just because Rintoul disagrees with the purpose of the picture of the mosquito treated with DDT (or with any of the "irrelevant graphs and images") does not mean that they do not contribute to the story the authors are trying to tell. It's clear that, in example after example, any alternative potential explanation related to infectious diseases and their associated vaccines lack a substantial body of peer-reviewed research to establish a clear mechanism. In a sense, what this book outlines is just why that is the case; namely, that the conceptual biases and monetary (among other) conflicts of interest come together, making it effectively impossible to break though this establishment blockade of information and research.To round out the response to this objection, it's absurd to complain that the citation list is too extensive and full of irrelevant information, and that "the authors might have produced a book less than 10% the length", as if the authors had done so, the objection of course would have been rather that the narrative was not sufficiently documented or based in the scientific literature. The story of the history of vaccines in relation to diseases necessarily requires a narrative form as the people, places, and conditions involved span several continents and centuries. As such, the book is not presented as a rigorous scientific text on the same level as journal articles. Between the two options of not citing enough and over-citing, both of which establishment-minded individuals would attack, the authors made the correct choice in opting to include more the primary source material and extended quotations rather than sticking to the bare minimum which, again, would have been criticized as incomplete and amateur.The authors make it clear in numerous places throughout the book that correlation does not equal causation. This is a cheap and low-hanging criticism which does not find merit when reading the book.Now moving on to "False Dichotomies". But so what that "medical doctors could have prevented lots of deaths by washing their hands"? The so what is that doctors are not some special class of people with perfect knowledge or practices, as evidenced throughout history not just with the example of puerperal disease. Mentioning nutrition is defeating the purpose here as well, as the authors make clear that it was not just sanitation but also an evolution of nutritional understanding which lead to the overall drop in infant mortality during the 19th and 20th centuries. It is rather the doctors and medical research establishment (funded of course by the same companies who are lobbying congress to make their very products mandatory, for which, incidentally, they also have lobbied congress to bear no legal liability) who fall back to simple answers as opposed to complicated ones -- the simple answer being that vaccines are responsible for the eradication of infectious diseases, with little to no attention given at all to the compounding factors which are laid out in historical detail throughout this book. The authors do in fact give consideration to the idea that both advances in sanitation practices and infrastructure and vaccines were responsible for the drop in disease-related deaths, but the conclusion that they draw is that the contribution from the vaccine part of that analysis is highly dubious to say the least. Just because they examine the historical facts and come to a conclusion that one of the factors is not nearly as important as claimed by establishment orthodoxy doesn't mean that they are presenting a false dichotomy or reducing the question to a univariate analysis.I'm honestly surprised objection on "personal subjective anecdotes" is even included, as it adds no substantive critique of the book. Leaving it in and mentioning that anecdotal stories are "not as obvious" within the book, it sounds as though he couldn't find any beyond the author's personal introductions, which are, by definition, a more informal avenue of discussion between the readers and the authors. One can hardly expect an author's introduction to consist of an immediate dive into the data, nor to be a sterile accounting of objective facts about the authors. This is ridiculous grasping at straws, and if there were further examples from within the book they would have been included.Finally, we'll look at the "conspiracy theorist" and "boogymen" objections together. Rintoul says tat "If a scientist figured out a way to overturn a paradigm, or, even better, advance human health, he/she would immediately do so, and the notion that some vague international cabal could keep them from that is not only dubious, it is insulting to very real scientist on the planet". Well I happen to be a real scientist on this planet, and the treatment of Wakefield in the book, which I think was no longer than a paragraph, can hardly be characterized (honestly) as belief that some international cabal pulling all of the strings is disingenuous at best. While I am not familiar with Wakefield or any of the controversy surrounding him, this objection really belies a naive and historically uninformed perspective on precisely how scientific ideas which challenge and overturn existing paradigms evolve conceptually and socially within the broader scientific community. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions gives a detailed accounting of how, necessarily, radical shifts in scientific paradigms and foundational assumptions are not simply a matter of "immediately doing so" (publishing), but are invariably met with bitter resistance and bias against the change. This objection is really yet another example of an observation that scientists today are not sufficiently trained in any appreciable manner in the history and development of scientific thought, nor in philosophy or epistemology. Both Kuhn and Whitehead were ahead of their time in warning that such one-sided and hyper-specialized training of the mind could have disastrous consequences for the further development of science.Furthermore, there is a growing trend in our society to stick an other-ing label on those we disagree with rather than engage in honest debate about the disagreement. Certainly that is not all that Rintoul is doing with his objections, but throwing around charged categorical classifications to elicit a conditioned response at the group level is not appropriate for thinking people. The fantastical idea that those in positions of power will never work with others to further their own interests, which is what a categorical dismissal of "conspiracy theories" constitutes, is a far more untenable position to maintain than even some of the kookier theories floating out there on the internet.The anti-vaxxer is the quintessential boogeyman -- a terror which plagues reasonable and responsible parents everywhere throughout civilized society. Using labels such as anti-vaxxer (and others which reduce disagreement to a categorical error equivalent to Orwellian wrongthink) does the exact opposite of engender objective and reasoned analysis between two camps who have a disagreement. But of course, that is not the goal of mainstream establishmentarians -- they seek instead to impose their orthodoxy upon the uneducated masses who lack the same kind of credentialed expertise of they and their peers in the ivory towers (built with research money from big pharma). Once again, even if this were to be a totally valid criticism, it applies just as equally to the arguments made from the other side.I'll spend significantly less time addressing Isabella B.'s review titled "Fine, make a case against vaccines, but why use deception?" for reasons that will quickly become obvious. These are similar arguments as addressed under "lies of omission" above. But who indeed is "deliberately trying to confuse and mislead readers"? Directly before the quoted sentence from her first "claim", the authors make the point explicitly that this was an early form of the measles vaccine which used a whole "killed" virus approach. The point of bringing this up is yet another example of how patients were injuring by following the established best medical practices of the day, not that the early measles vaccine is the same that is currently in use, nor that the same potential side-effects still apply to a vaccine which is structural and functionally different. On the very next page, the authors are again explicit: "The killed vaccines were quickly abandoned"; to present the quote as a deliberate attempt to mislead is to either not have read the full context or to be willfully deceptive. The quote in the second claim is not found on the page given in the citation, nor anywhere else in the chapter (although I'll admit I didn't re-read the entire chapter to hunt down this quotation -- the point is, it isn't where she said it is).Isabella also intentionally misquotes the passage in claim 7 by changing "significant impact on on lowering measles risk when compared to non-breastfeeding" to "far larger impact on measles risk than vaccinating". As with Rintoul, she is guilty of the same kind of unconscionable lies and mischaracterizations for which she attacks the authors. The full quote from p.389 is included here: "When Silfverdale evaluated thousands of vaccinated and unvaccinated breastfed and non-breastfed children looking at the risk of measles, breastfeeding had a significant impact on lowering measles risk when compared to non-breastfeeding, independent of vaccination." While the cited journal article does assert that vaccination offers a larger risk reduction for measles than breastfeeding by itself, the only intellectually honest criticism which can be leveled against the authors is that they don't mention this statistic which is a long way from claiming that the authors intentionally obfuscated and mischaracterized the paper by claiming breastfed babies were on the whole less likely to contract measles than vaccinated babies. The authors of the book quote the article in length right after these claims, which state: "The inverse association of measles diagnosis with breast-feeding was found also in children vaccinated against measles with an odds ratio (and 95% confidence interval) of 0.74 (0.60–0.90) for those breast-fed for more than three months compared with those who were never breast-fed. Among children not vaccinated against measles the odds ratio for breast-feeding for more than three months was 0.63 (0.50–0.79) compared with those who were never breast-fed." Contrary to the Isabella consulting the actual study and finding that "it did not claim that breastfeeding protection lasted up to 10 years", the very first sentence of the conclusion states "Breast-feeding may be associated with a modest reduced risk for clinical measles infection up to the age of ten years".In summary, almost every objection that is made against this book and these authors applies just as strongly if not more so to those in the mainstream who level such objections. In a sense, this review is probably only preaching to the choir. Those who, for whatever reason, have accepted as part of their worldview that mega-corporations inherently are motivated by greed which leads to corruption will have no objection with this review or the fundamental thesis of the book -- that this is exactly what has happened over the past 100+ years in the West with the pharmaceutical industry. Those who accept "scientific truths" (as defined by the mainstream consensus) as they are presented will probably still feel as though my arguments here are guilty of the same kind of "pseudoscience" which is attacked in the book itself. My purpose here however is not to move the needle for those who already know in which camp they reside, but rather to provide a hopefully well-reasoned response to (what appeared to me at the time I purchased the book) a set of cogently constructed criticisms. Certainly some of these criticisms are valid, but they are by no means so pervasive or the errors so egregious as to negate the significance or worthiness of the book as whole, which, again, you should certainly get and read for yourself.

Dr. Suzanne Humphries deserves an award for bringing the load of vaccine record and history to a finely orchestrated; and lengthy, book.The parent of 4 children, I had never questioned vaccines before 2 of our children had a severe reaction to their shots at a joint appointment in which my daughter received her Kindergarten shots and our son (then not yet 3) received the shots required between 18m-3years, which was the DTaP & Hep A.Our son had immediate symptoms he wasn’t well but I was pregnant with our 4th child and thought he was just being a normal attention seeking kid. He kept complaining, “my legs.” And wouldn’t Assist when I carried him out and looked zoned out. When I put him down to walk himself he flopped and said he couldn’t and I assumed he was just babying it.He slept for three days straight which I called Abbie worried and they said it was Normal and then began a zoned out period in which he also lost control of his bowels, wouldn’t talk, seemed confused when asked anything and began to wAil and whine at every response. At the same time our daughter began to have manic behavioral symptoms, everything touching her she was frantic, couldn’t explain her thoughts before loosing her point and becoming irrational and angry, lost control of her Bowels and began complaining of back and leg pain so much she’d wake in the night screaming it hurt.Her reactions merited a few visits to the ER; one 4 days after the vaccine, in which each time they reasoned her symptoms away as a flu like symptom and didn’t think she had meningitis because she lacked some of the symptoms. I mentioned she had the MMR vaccine 4 days prior, so how could she have meningitis and they didn’t really answer me. It made me curious so upon a follow up the next morning my doctor didn’t really answer my question either, so I asked for some papers to take home to read on it and the shots, since Our son was still in lethargic/sick mode after his and she was very animated about his symptoms being normal. So much so it was overkill and I wasn’t incinerating his was abnormal, (he hadn’t lost his bowels or began any other behavior aside fromSleeping and being generally quiet and zoned out yet at that point).We began reading packet inserts online and I was appalled to see how many adverse reactions there could be. We decided to ask our doc again for information so we could make a rational choice seeing how our 4th son was to be born very soon ( he was born 14 days after their reaction), and one nurse said they had a nurse who dealt strictly with vaccine and medicine questions she’d send in to talk to me, but no one came. The next nurse I asked to remind them to get her looked confused like she had no clue who I was talking about. When my doc came in I asked her and she didn’t confirm there was any nurse and said she had papers I could have. When she came back she said the papers were from a book she forgot she loaned to another patient and hadn’t gotten back, but wasn’t able to tell me the name of it.It was way to many weird situations for us not to thing there was something there. As each kid got worse visits became shorter and no one Brothered to suggest we test anything, they just said it was normal and it happens at the age our son was at. He has since been diagnosed with Autism.Luckily for our newest son he has never been vaccinated and truly is healthy. He hasn’t had ear infections, respiratory issues like our other 3 children had. We read all the way through his first year, saying to ourselves, “ we’ll keep reading a little more then we can always get his vaccines next month after we know everything and can feel comfortable”The more we read the more we had to read more and more, and time just flew by, the literature we read along the way deterring us from vaccinating each time. He is now a year and a half old and runs, jumps off things, says over 40 words and has no allergies.We are happy with our decision and continue to learn as we are recovering our son from Autism with great success using diet, Dr Andy Cutlers Chelation Therapy Protocol and boosting his immune system so far and still weighing opinions for our daughter, who is still being looked at for issues that arose. So far she’s diagnosed with Emotional Disturbance Disorder, has a lot of set backs in her abilities in reading, so much so she’s in the lowest group now in school despite our nightly practice and teachers support. She has had several MRI’s, one of which we were refered to a neurosurgeon to correct nerve damage in her spine from the vaccine; although no one will admit it’s from the vaccine, not on paper anyways. It’s infuriating.Parents should all be informed of their doctors education on vaccine ingredients, reactions, law and vaccine approval processes.If they choose to vaccinate that is their choice, just like it is ours to no longer.Free from bullying, free from judgement, free from ignorance.Attached are images of some of the many books I’ve read that you may also find enjoyable. Emords book is extremely detailed, depressing in explaining specific laws and cases by which they were governed and very eloquent.

This book has the receipts. Charts clearly show the human race overcoming disease before the injections began. (But the media credits the injections.) Plumbing did us more good than doctors. I'd like to credit refrigeration also, but it wasn't mentioned. We've got to trust what God has given us, innate immunity, and stop mucking with it. Antibodies are not the holy grail, in fact, synthetic stimulation with injections can turn antibodies against our innate immunity and leave us sicker.

I'm not completely finished with this book yet, but my husband and I listened during a road trip. We were both enlightened about so many things. The early part of this book goes into the history of epidemics and the filth people lived in that contributed to such large loss of life. Then shows how the improvement of sanitation in cities did a lot to prevent the spread of epidemics and diseases all by itself. And how this alone had nearly eliminated most of the communicable diseases before any other intervention was tried.I wish more people would listen and dig into the facts rather than just going along with things uneducated.