Part the First: Unintended Side Effects of Vaccines. From Science-Based Medicine this week: Unintended Side Effects HPV and Shingles Vaccines—Reason for Concern. This headline is genius in its indirection:
Emerging trends in the peer-reviewed scientific literature show new evidence of unintended effects of two popular vaccines—the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) and shingles vaccines. Surprising findings clearly indicate a relationship between these vaccines and various cancers, cardiovascular disease and dementia. This should raise concern for you and your family, and you should contact your physician as soon as possible—and make an appointment to get vaccinated.
While many in the upper echelons of public health rage on about claims of unintended negative side effects of vaccines, several recent reports refute popular online assertions of unanticipated risk. Quite to the opposite, several solid peer-reviewed reports reveal unexpected benefits of vaccination—results nobody anticipated yet are crystal clear as a vial of thimerosal.
A collection of recent scientific reports illustrates these effects. These unforeseen trends emerged from stepping back and taking a hard look at epidemiological data, unveiling reduced incidence of traditionally non-related pathologies in vaccinated populations. When large data sets from decades of tests and surveys are analyzed, vaccination for HPV appears to have protective effects against cancers beyond the human body’s nether regions, while the shingles vaccines protect against the onset of dementia, ophthalmic cancers, and also cardiovascular disease. The findings speak to an increasing role for viral infection as a cause of, or accelerant of, a broader set of debilitating human diseases than previously anticipated.
Yes, viruses cause and exacerbate human disease. Viruses hijack normal cellular processes during infection, replication, maturation, and transmission to begin the cycle anew. This dysregulates many pathways in the target cell during the entire process. These results are entirely unsurprising, especially about the shingles vaccine connection to dementia. Chicken pox and its sequela shingles are caused by varicella zoster virus (human herpes virus-3, HHV-3). A possible connection between herpes and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) was suggested forty years ago. But as covered here in Alzheimer’s: Or, How Not to Study a Disease, the amyloid hypothesis has taken up all the air in the room and essentially all AD research funding. If a herpes virus contributes to AD, a vaccine against a herpes virus might make disease progression less likely. This is not hard to understand.
Reactions to the HPV vaccine data will be interesting. A common refrain when Gardasil was approved was, “My kids will not do what I did,” so they won’t need the vaccine. An acquaintance at the time was adamant that his three boys would never get the vaccine, because they can’t get cervical cancer. He had nothing much in response when I asked him if it was okay if his three boys became spreaders of cervical cancer. We can expect the recrudescence of that kind of denialism if these results get a wide hearing. Talking about sex is icky, in the United States especially…where gun violence is a welcome part of the air we breathe.
Part the Second: Terrain, It’s Not Only the Setting for “Sport Vehicle” Ads. Perhaps the main tenet of MAHA holy scripture is that only sick people get sick. If this sounds circular, that’s because it is. This is also unbearably stupid – at least since Louis Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation of microorganisms and he and many other scientists developed the Germ Theory of Disease. Science-Based Medicine, again, is on the case with Denial of germ theory and the genetic basis of disease: Two pillars of MAHA.
The basic argument the Terrain Theory of Disease is that pathogenic microorganisms (bacteria, viruses, and protozoa such as the Plasmodium species that cause malaria) cannot make you sick if your terrain is “clean.” The theory is most closely linked to Antoine Béchamp (1816-1908). His hypothesis is naturally a pillar of Alternative Medicine. Here is a relevant quote from the great man:
“These microorganisms (germs) feed upon the poisonous material which they find in the sick organism and prepare it for excretion. These tiny organisms are derived from still tinier organisms called microzyma (turtles all the way down; sorry, couldn’t resist). These microzyma (the diagram is an example of Florence Nightingale’s contribution of the polar area diagram to statistics) are present in the tissues and blood of all living organisms where they remain normally quiescent and harmless. When the welfare of the human body is threatened by the presence of potentially harmful material, a transmutation takes place. The microzyma changes into a bacterium or virus which immediately goes to work to rid the body of this harmful material. When the bacteria or viruses have completed their task of consuming the harmful material they automatically revert to the microzyma stage”
This was complete and utter nonsense during Béchamp’s lifetime, but it lives still and several “scientists” have claimed to have found evidence of microzyma (link). No. But this high-sounding gibberish is a pillar of the MAHA approach to health and disease. Which is not to say that the old (yours truly) or unhealthy (not so much but that did not prevent me from getting cancer) are more likely to get sick than the young and robust. Of course, this is true! But this tendency in no way invalidates the Germ Theory. The stronger you are, the better. Not unlike the smarter you make yourself, the better. As the saying goes, “Life is hard, but it is a lot harder if you are stupid.”
As for the genetic basis of many diseases. the evidence is overwhelming and has been since the first inborn (i.e., genetic, like traits such as eye or hair color) were described by Sir Archibald Garrod (1857-1936) before we even had a clear conception of the gene. The first edition of The Metabolic Basis of Inherited Disease was published in 1960. It was an immediate classic. The eighth and final edition, four large (9”x11”) volumes comprising 6,338 pages, was published in 2001. The hard copy of this essential publication has been supplanted by Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (Link; if a window asks for a contribution, I have already done that).
It is mid-September and RFKJr has less than a month to announce his findings on the causes of autism. There are undoubtedly genetic variants and environmental insults that affect the presentation and penetrance of autism, as well as thousands of other genetic diseases. But OMIM contains 957 entries related to autism and the neurological divergencies of autism that range from unnoticeable to profound developmental disability. Thimerosal, which has been removed from MMR while autism diagnoses have increased (due to better recognition and changing definitions), is not an environmental insult that causes autism. Nor is the delivery of multiple vaccines together.
Pro tip: Don’t go long on the tenure of RFKJr as Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Wall Street Journal is on his case, and if they stay there he will eventually return to one of his side gigs.
Part the Third: Risk of Dying from a Noncommunicable Disease Drops. But not so much in the United States. Otherwise, good news. From Nature:
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are the leading cause of death globally. The United Nations has set the goal of reducing deaths from these diseases by one-third by 2030.
The latest study is the first to investigate the change in NCD mortality across countries. It finds that, from 2010 to 2019, the probability of dying from an NCD before the age of 80 fell in 152 countries for women and in 147 countries for men.
Despite these gains, more than half of the countries saw slower declines in the 2010s compared with the previous decade. “Around the beginning of the millennium, we saw significantly lowered mortality rates, but despite political attention suddenly over the last decade, things are not doing as well as before,” says Majid Ezzati, a co-author and global-health researcher at Imperial College London.
The underlying paper from The Lancet is here. I wonder what the rates will be after another ten years of Libertarian joy interfering with public health. No, I don’t really.
Part the Fourth: AI versus LLM. An AI tool has been developed that detects LLM-generated texts in research papers and peer reviews. Or, in other news, scientists can be just as lazy as the next person. Or maybe as pressed for time, which is an excuse their mothers would not have accepted.
An analysis of tens of thousands of research-paper submissions has shown a dramatic increase in the presence of text generated using artificial intelligence (AI) in the past few years, an academic publisher has found.
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) found that 23% of abstracts in manuscripts and 5% of peer-review reports submitted to its journals in 2024 contained text that was probably generated by large language models (LLMs). The publishers also found that less than 25% of authors disclosed their use of AI to prepare manuscripts, despite the publisher mandating disclosure for submission.
To screen manuscripts for signs of AI use, the AACR used an AI tool that was developed by Pangram Labs, based in New York City. When applied to 46,500 abstracts, 46,021 methods sections and 29,544 peer-review comments submitted to 10 AACR journals between 2021 and 2024, the tool flagged a rise in suspected AI-generated text in submissions and review reports since the public release of OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, in November 2022.
“We were shocked when we saw the Pangram results,” says Daniel Evanko, the AACR’s director of journal operations and systems, who presented the findings at the 10th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publications in Chicago, Illinois, on 3 September.
Daniel Evanko of the American Association of Cancer Research needs to get out more. The underlying paper is a preprint but seems sound after a first reading. Whatever happens in the end, this is just one more siren song presaging the death of scientific research. Sometimes shortcuts lead to a cul de sac of no return. This is one of those. But even though AI is new, the lazy approach to research, writing, and peer reviewing is old. I have seen pristine proposals trashed and those held together with bubble gum and Elmer’s glue funded on the first try (my introduction to the process began with a grant proposal was strung together virtually overnight based on a few months of my work as a Research Coordinator; it was funded based solely on the name of the principal investigator, who now has nearly 500 entries in PubMed and is still not a member of the National Academy of Sciences). If the minions in the Current Administration were serious in their desire to reform basic and clinical research, they would improve review and distribution of awards and break up the club. Instead, they just want to tear down the entire edifice, which is 90-95% sound. But just as with medical students, it is those 5% who cause 95% of your trouble.
Nevertheless, AI properly understood and used as in AlphaFold, is an astonishing advance in the practice of scientific research. But the training set of known three-dimensional protein structures and other publicly available data used for AlphaFold was “designed” ex ante for the purpose. And the predicted structure still must be confirmed.
Part the Fifth: Life on Mars. But not the little green men who dug the canals Percival Lowell could see through his telescope. Perhaps something like very little blue-green algae that were among the earliest living things on planet Earth. This Rock May Hold Proof of Life on Mars:
The most enthralling rock yet found on Mars—a speckled hunk of mudstone that just may contain evidence of ancient alien life—is still worth getting excited about.
Teased last year in a preliminary announcement from NASA, that’s the official conclusion of a peer-reviewed paper, published today in Nature, that reports a deeper analysis of the curious outcrop. Were it found on Earth instead of Mars, the rock’s speckles would likely be interpreted as evidence for a microbial feeding frenzy that occurred long ago. But getting certainty about what this rock truly contains likely requires hauling it off the Red Planet and delivering it back to Earth—an ambitious multiphase mission that NASA calls Mars Sample Return.
The Nature study correspondingly details further analyses that suggest a low-temperature origin for the speckles—that is, they seem to have arisen in relatively clement conditions near the surface, where life could possibly thrive, rather than the inhospitably hot depths of the Martian subsurface. “We believe that these features happened early in the life of the sediment, shortly after it was deposited and likely before it had been ‘lithified’ to form hard rock,” Hurowitz says.
The team stops short of calling the speckles a sign of life, however, preferring the more prudent label of “potential biosignature.” Further evidence for or against a possibly biological origin, they say, is unlikely to arrive unless and until NASA brings a sample of the rock back to Earth for more thorough studies. In July 2024 Perseverance gathered just such a specimen from the rock—a core sample dubbed “Sapphire Canyon”—but NASA’s beleaguered, multibillion-dollar plan to bring this and other samples back to Earth is far from a sure thing, given that it was targeted for cancellation in the White House’s proposed budget earlier this year.
This is definitely a project for Elon Musk! We can send him to bring back the rock. His upcoming trillion dollar payment from Tesla is more than enough to fund his trip! While he’s there he can begin building a home for his large family that will seed the galaxy as Earth becomes uninhabitable. Musk does seem to see himself as Adam II.
Part the Sixth: More on Liberalism in the 21st Century. Naked Capitalism exists to start the conversation, not end it. Thank you all for reading, commenters and non-commenters, and for the kind words and thoughtful criticism during the discussion earlier this week. I have known personally one Harvard graduate who took a class with John Rawls and he says the same thing Henry Moon Pie wrote (I can also imagine Daniel Patrick Moynihan – Senator Clinton’s predecessor in the US Senate – sounding like fingernails on the chalkboard, to many).
The title of the post ended with a question mark, which indicates what I believe are the prospects for Liberalism, as practiced, to improve human life. An old friend, in both senses of the word, and I have been calling them “Liverals” since Jimmy Carter was President. The founders of Liberalism as political economy and virtually all their successors never grasped that Liberalism could work only for those in the small minority who had the preconception foresight to choose their parents wisely. These people are no different from the Liberals described as “moderates” by Martin Luther King, Jr. in Letter from Birmingham Jail. The veil of ignorance seems to exist among Liberals only in the mind of Aaron Sorkin or his successors and discussed only by characters in The West Wing, although Joshua Malina’s delivery is perfect and on point.
But what is more important, particularly this day after Utah, is the lesson from John Rawls that all men and women of good will – whatever their religion or creed – must be reasonable and decent with their fellow human beings. This is the only way we can back out of the crack in which we find ourselves. This is one of Alexandre Lefebvre’s messages in his book. It is a good message. The screeching of the unserious but seriously effective Right and the bleating of the supercilious, completely ineffective “Left Liberal” will get us nowhere (there has been no significant Left, much less a Radical Left, in the US since Eugene V. Debs was sent to prison and then received 3.4% of the vote, nearly one million votes, in the 1920 presidential election…even if might be written as RADICAL LEFT on Truth Social).
As this is written, the last twenty-four hours have been scarier than usual for too many reasons to count. We would do well going forward to channel John Rawls in both of his great books, A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, even if few are willing to listen, now. Slow, steady pressure, it’s the only way to success in politics and society and much like being a good parent. Alexandre Lefebvre is a good guide for that. Plus, his appreciation of Pierre Hadot reminds us, among other things, that the abject presentism of today (both sides do it) is no way to be reasonable and effective in politics or society.
See you next week!
