Lies, Damned Lies and (Autism) Statistics

Giving a little help to a friend.

Many of you will already be aware of my seminal paper comparing aluminium in brain tissue from neurodevelopmentally normal individuals with aluminium in brain tissue in autism, Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis.

My co-author on that paper is Dr Elizabeth Clarkson an experienced statistician. Dr Clarkson has asked me to bring to your attention her new paper on obfuscation in autism statistics. Dr Clarkson has written a commentary on her paper and I urge you to read this, copied below, to put her new paper in context.

Eschew Obfuscation

I wrote the article “The Obfuscation of the Confounded Relationship between Vaccines and Autism” published in the Public Health Policy Journal.

Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a retired professional statistician. I started college at Wichita State University fall semester 1976. I was 17. My parents paid my tuition until I graduated, but I supported myself after the age of 21. I worked at a variety of jobs while attending college classes such waitress, nurse’s aide, and office clerk. After graduating with an M.S. in math, I started work at Boeing as a Quality Engineer. I got my M.S. in Math while I worked full time there. Boeing reimbursed tuition and expenses for that endeavor.

After 4 years at Boeing, I took the test and was certified as a Quality Engineer by the American Society for Quality from Dec 1987 to Dec 2023. I was laid off in 1998 and gave birth to my youngest in 1999. I started work at Wichita State University fall semester 2000, teaching math full time and began taking graduate math classes. I moved to the National Center for Aviation Research (NIAR) in 2005. While working full time there, I completed my Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, concentrated in Statistics, from Wichita State University in 2010. When I got my Ph.D. I was over 50 years old, working full time at NIAR, and raising two children alongside my husband. I retired from NIAR in 2024.

I give my credentials, because it is this professional background that primarily shapes my views about the accuracy of the public information regarding vaccine risks and benefits. You don’t have to agree with my conclusions, but I hope you will consider that my opinion regarding this matter is based on my professional expertise, not any inherent bias regarding vaccinations in a general way. I vaccinate myself, but not with every recommended vaccine. I vaccinated my children when they were young, but not with every recommended vaccine.

I give my history of pursuing education part-time while working full-time because many people with my background are never able to achieve the credentials I have. Life intervenes. People die, get sick, take on other responsibilities like children. Without the benefits and good fortune I had regarding tuition assistance, adequate income, adequate health, and most importantly a supportive family, employers, and university, I would not have succeeded. I want to acknowledge all those that worked and struggled but didn’t succeed at such lofty educational goals despite their talent, intelligence, and effort. I worked hard, but I was also lucky.

I want to amplify that without degrees or even formal education, people can and do correctly suss out that the published science supporting the safety of the vaccines routines recommended to all parents is not what has been claimed.

When people without degrees question vaccination policy, they are often intimidated by those working in the field with professional credentials telling them they just don’t understand the scientific evidence and often admonishing them that they should not try to read scientific papers without adequate educational background. That simply isn’t true! I wrote my article hoping it will help convince people who have the drive to ask questions after reading studies on vaccination to continue to ask questions until satisfactory answers with adequate evidence are provided by some individual or organization they trust.

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics. Numbers don’t lie, but liars sure can figure.

Have you ever heard of Harry Markopolos? How about Bernie Madoff? Mr. Markopolos spotted Madoff’s fraud years before the scandal broke. Wikipedia says:

From 1999 to 2008, Markopolos uncovered evidence that suggested that Bernie Madoff‘s wealth management business was a huge Ponzi scheme. In 2000, 2001, and 2005, Markopolos alerted the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of his views, supplying supporting documents, but each time the SEC ignored him or gave his evidence only a cursory investigation.

I ask about Markopolos, not Madoff, because he, like me, was a statistician. When people make up data rather than reporting it honestly, there are often telltale signs and patterns that statisticians can learn to spot. Harry realized the data was too perfect to have come from the imperfect reality we live in. Too close to perfect is a common mistake in creating data that dishonest people make. It is a sign of manipulation in numbers.

Mr. Markopolos found such evidence when he looked at Madoff’s data. He reported it. His findings were ignored. Madoff’s ponsi scheme did not merit concern from the government employees charged with acting on such frauds until the stock problems of 2008 made it impossible to him to continue it. He ruined many of his clients financially by stealing their money and then lying to them with false numbers.

The people I have interacted with in federal agency roles throughout my professional career were sincerely trying to do their best. I was never asked to alter data throughout my career, not when I worked in Industry and not when I was in Academia. If asked, I would have refused. I suspect my co-workers all realized that and would not have approached me for such favors.

However, I was perfectly willing to discuss alternative analysis approaches in an effort to provide them honest information that better suited their needs, which could impact what was reported. And I did occasionally detect truthfulness issues in data I was provided in both settings, but that was rare. More often, lies were hidden in the things that weren’t said and weren’t researched than in the findings of the research that was published. Dishonesty, whether by deliberate lying or via evasion and obfuscation, is a human problem that quality professionals have been grappling with since the field began.

Scientists can be expected to be about as honest as any other group of humans. Most humans don’t tell deliberate lies. Deliberate lies can lead to catastrophic outcomes, such as Madoff’s victims experienced. Instead, people prefer to obfuscate and distract, avoiding direct lies and direct responsibility for the outcomes of lies.

Scientists working in public health and vaccine science are the minions, not the villains of corporate take-over. They are simply producing the science their corporate funders have asked for. This is because the public isn’t funding much of the research. Industry is. And even when public dollars are used, that research is directed by those at the top of the captured regulatory agencies, who are working hard to produce a regulatory environment that satisfies the industry.

The result is that vaccine safety research reads like people are trying very hard to not see the elephant in the room. Studies touch on this aspect or that, but the whole may be completely different from each isolated and examined detail, none of which shed any light on just how big the elephant is. The study recently released via Senate hearing Impact of Childhood Vaccination on Short and Long-Term Chronic Health Outcomes in Children gives us a glimmer though.

My experiences as a quality engineer have led me to coin the following axiom: Where the obfuscation is, there lies the root cause that needs to be illuminated and acknowledged before it can be dealt with.

Or, put another way, sunlight disinfects.

Industry capture of regulatory agencies

The problem – and the consequences - of government regulators failing to recognize problems and take action in a timely manner is all around us. Bernie Madoff’s crime is just one that become famous. There’s even academic terminology to study it: industry capture of regulatory agencies.

Here are few relatively recent consequences I attribute to failure of regulatory agencies

FAA: Boeing planes crashing or bits falling off.

DOT: The Palestine railcar disaster

CDC: Covid19 Response

FDA: Infant formula shortage

In my opinion, all of these failures occurred due to the weakening of regulations, both formally and informally, due to corruption from industry funding of regulatory agencies. While it’s not possible to predict exactly which scenarios will happen or when, catastrophes of that size and impact were foreseeable. They happened because regulations were tweaked over time to lessen the costs to the industry of meeting those regulations. Quality assessment work takes time and effort, which is always expensive! Not to mention that excessive regulation has its own shortcomings. The regulatory burden can easily become so excessive it stifles innovation.

The root cause of all those catastrophes is industry capture of regulatory agencies. When the industry supplies a high proportion of the funding for the regulatory agencies they deal with, as in the U.S. currently, the agencies deal with them as customers, clients who are inherently more important than the public. My understanding is that this started when President Reagan changed policy to allow industry funding of regulatory agencies in the 1980’s. The outcome of that change, decades later, are regulatory agencies that have adapted to serve the industries they are charged to regulate. As a result, regulatory agencies publish scientific research geared to provide the information that the industry kings want, not the information the plebes want.

Vaccine safety studies routinely run tests and publish conclusions with the null hypothesis assuming that there is no increase in adverse events. They are presuming the vaccine is safe, and unless evidence is found to the contrary, that presumption prevails. This is a formulation of the null hypothesis that favors the vaccine industry over the health of the general public.

When it takes a professional statistician to recognize that formulation of the null hypothesis and what it means, the general public is forced to decide who they believe – the official government agency or some Ph.D. who disagrees with their conclusions for arcane theoretical reasons.

Whatever someone’s background level of education and knowledge, they must decide who to trust, who is telling the truth. Scientific credentials are not needed to recognize conflicts of interest, obfuscation, lack of direct answers to questions, etc. inherent in the decision making process. To decide to withhold compliance regarding vaccine recommendations on that basis is understandable. This social problem will not be solved through science. It can only be solved through politics, revamping our laws governing regulatory agencies to remove corruption and restore trust by funding them only via taxes.

Further Discussion

Many members of my family do not support or agree with my views on vaccines. Because of this, and because I am not looking forward to the hate I will receive for having published this paper, I do not want to court publicity regarding the paper. On the other hand, I do want to make myself available to those who have read it and have questions or other concerns to make known to me.

I am planning to only discuss this paper in this facebook group: Alternative Vaccine Talk: A CIVIL Evidence Based Discussion Group

This group was set up when I was banned from the facebook group “Vaccine Talk” (VT). I was quite upset when that happened. I expressed my sadness on a private chat with some internet friends I had made while posting there. A few of us had become friends and we vented privately about the moderation at VT. On the whole, VT wasn’t kind to posters who didn’t agree with their pro-vaccine stance regarding the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, but they did moderate for civility unlike the comments on most other forums. I find the venom routinely directed at anyone considered anti-vax to be too abrasive and require moderated spaces for discussion about vaccines.

After I was banned from VT, the other participants in our private chat decided that they would create a safe space for people who weren’t pro-vaccines to discuss the pros and cons and ask questions. There would be no shaming directed at those who decided against vaccination. It will be a safe space for me to answer questions and receive feedback on my article without being subject to the verbal (written?) abuse so common in other forums.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this musing on Dr’ Newsletter and specifically Dr Clarkson’s new published paper. Like many in the field of truth and freedom Dr Clarkson is one of the brave few and her efforts are to be applauded. I find myself at the front of the line celebrating her work.