James Lyons-Weiler challenges Professor Martin Kulldorff on vaccines and autism

Here's a private email between JLW and MK. Quoted with permission. I thought you'd find it enlightening to see how science works.

Professor Martin Kulldorff claims the MMR vaccine doesn’t cause autism. Why doesn’t he double his net worth by betting I’m wrong?

Executive summary

Martin Kulldorff believes it is settled science that the MMR vaccine doesn’t cause autism. He’s wrong.

Here’s an email that fellow scientists James Lyons-Weiler sent him. JLW is an expert on autism. For example, he wrote this book on autism.

In his email, JLW points out that MK got it wrong.

Kulldorff believes it is settled science that the MMR vaccine doesn’t cause autism

He cites very flawed studies by untrustable authors. I reached out to the first author of the study he cites and asked to see the data and he went on Twitter to ask how he could block me. I never got any data and nobody else has been able to see the data either.

Nobody seems to be confident that Kulldorff got it right

I have a $5M pool of money reserved to match anyone who wants to bet against me on this issue. See this article for details.

To date, not a single person is willing to risk their money on this.

In short, nobody is buying the bullshit.

In other words, talk is cheap, but nobody will risk their money that they are right. Not Kulldorff, not Offit, and not even the vaccine manufacturers themselves.

What does that tell you?

Kulldorff refused to debate me

I made a statement:

Sadly, Hotez, nor any other "expert" will not debate any "misinformation superspreader." They are all afraid of things like facts and data.

Kulldorff declined to debate me citing the following:

That is dishonest. Not respectful.

So JLW sent Kulldorff an email…

Here is the email JLW sent to Kulldorff

Re: Autism debate per your twitter post

Martin,

There is no debate because there is insufficient valid science.

As a biostatistician, you know association does not test causality.

But you should know that the IOM rejected the vast majority of studies on the question and were left with five studies, four of which were too small to be considered reliable.

If the bolus of studies available for any other question were as weak: cancer association with artificial sweeteners, for example - no one would say "Artificial Sweeteners Do Not Cause Cancer".

If you have read the IOM reports, you must realize that the insufficiency of the available studies let Pharma win via stalemate; that the chair of the last NAS IOM committee, Marie McCormick lied in a presser about what the IOM actually concluded; that they said a tiny underpowered study should have been considered valid because the conclusions matched the other four (three of which were underpowered and one which had no real control over temporal confounding)

Rather than debate, as you are woefully unprepared to do so, please read the entirety of the IOM reports and then present a case defending what they did.

And please address why, for example, the CDC website reads "Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism" when not all pediatric vaccines have been studied?

And why are there some studies that did find associations that are ignored by those who choose to claim "vaccines do not cause autism"?

How do they know?

MAGIC?

Those of us who have actually read the IOM reports - all of them - and bothered to read the entire literature on the question know precisely what is known and what is not.

We know that vaccines are not exonerated for neurodevelopmental disorders, and that there is likely a heterogeneous subset of people with different genetic reasons for their sensitivity/intolerance.  They are sponges for toxins... 

Here's a fairly comprehensive causal model to debunk, but you need some cellular & molecular biology, not merely "association". 

https://ipaknowledge.org/ASD-Causality-Model.php

Do you think epidemiologic association studies that cook the data to exonerate vaccines are sufficient?

We owe much to Dr. Russell Blaylock for recognizing the importance of chronic microglial activation.

Autopsies have shown 25 years of CMA in people w/autism.

People w/autism are primed for autoimmunity... kids w/autism & their moms have anti-brain protein antibodies... 

See 2,000 references.

I'll be happy to send you the book.

There's no reason for you not to read every last one of those references, if you're a scientist and you claim that you know something, there's a lot of knowledge that needs to be explained away.

It's not just autism.  It's autoimmunity. It's tics. It's ADHD.  It's speech delay.  The mechanisms are plausible, the studies finding otherwise were cooked.  Can you defend "adjusting" for mother's age, mother's income, gestational age, and birthweight all in the same correlational study when they are so highly collinear and functionally redundant? Can you defend the use of covariates as assumed confounders when the functional relationships w/the outcome is unknown?  Can you defend why these studies never once tested for the interaction term between vaccines & genetics, and why the vaccine studies did informal model selection over and over until they found a combination that made the association go away - when there are FORMAL model selection criteria?

Did you know that mice and rat studies are used to "routinely and reliably" induce a wide array of autoimmune disorders using aluminum hydroxide in per body weight doses that amount to only 1/3 of the childhood vaccine schedule?

Martin, I did the hard work. You have not.  You cannot rely on association to infer causality, and you cannot rely on a negative result to make a knowledge claim.  You know this.

Do the right thing and take the issue seriously for yourself.  Let it get under your skin.  What if we're right?  What if vaccines cause autoimmunity in kids to the point of altered brain development?  Immune development?  Endocrine system development?

What if the vaccine manufacturers in fact have captured HHS (clearly they have)?  How much damage do vaccines have to do before the public has to take matters into their own hands, and shut down CDC/FDA/NIH?

I'm not joking, not even slightly.  

CDC/NIH/FDA have abandoned science. That's the rhetoric. It's a plain and simple fact.

And we will be taking steps to reverse this, immediately.

You perhaps have a cushy golden parachute waiting for you.  Good for you.

The epidemic will end, but you'll have nothing more to say about it.

JLW

Summary

To his credit, Martin Kulldorff seems to be the only respectable scientist in the world willing to be challenged on his beliefs regarding vaccines and autism. The rest decline to be questioned.

But Kulldorff is wrong on this issue and it’s impacting hundreds of kids every day that we delay having an open debate on the topic.

I gave Kulldorff a list of people willing to debate him, but he won’t tell me who he will and won’t debate. He told me that each person must reach out to him individually and ask. I’ve told my autism friends this and recommended they contact him directly.

JLW would be the best person to debate. Even better would a small group on each side. We are willing. I doubt they would be willing.

We’ll see what happens.

If a debate happens, this will be an important breakthrough.

I’m not holding my breath that it will happen.