The Iowa Standard is a free online news source so we can reach as many people as possible. But we need to raise money! We are asking our readers to help support us as a news alternative entering 2020. If you could, please consider showing a sign of support to The Iowa Standard by making a contribution here. Or, you can use Venmo and make a contribution to @Iowa-Standard-2018.
You could also send a check to:
PO Box 112
Sioux Center, IA 51250
Dr. Brian Hooker is the science adviser of Focus for Health. He’s been involved in the autism community since 2002. He is a biologist and chemist. And he opened Saturday’s Empowered to Action 2019 Conference hosted by Informed Choice Iowa sharing his perspective of the science.
Hooker’s wife, he said, has a three-feet, 30-second rule.
“If somebody’s within three feet of her for 30 seconds or more then she starts to talk about vaccines with them,” he said. “We’re gaining traction, we’re gaining ground. She’ll bring names and emails of people back from the grocery store that I’m supposed to engage with and contact.”
Hooker told the audience that anyone who is an ex-vaxxer or a non-vaxxer is public enemy No. 1.
He discussed the outcry over the measles outbreak last season. He pointed to mayor Bill DeBlasio, who implored people not to wait, vaccinate.
“Actually making it illegal to exist in certain portions of Brooklyn without having the MMR vaccine,” he said.
Ed Day in Rocklyn County did something similar. Legislation was introduced by Rep. Paul Harris of Washington state to mandate the MMR vaccine and remove all types of exemptions from the MMR vaccine. A picture of Richard Pan of California elicited a lot of boos from the crowd, so there wasn’t much added about him.
Hooker took exception to the term “flu season.”
“Flu is a response to a virus and there is no such thing as flu season,” he said. “The long and short of it is, keep your immune system boosted not by vaccinating, but by living a healthy lifestyle.”
Due to clusters of measles in three different counties in the U.S. in 2019, Hooker said a flurry of bills were introduced and will be again during the 2020 legislative sessions in order to mandate vaccinations while getting rid of personal belief exemptions, religious exemptions and tidying up medical exemptions.
He said in California, the state public health officer has to approve of exemptions.
“MMR sales soared because they were telling people to get multiple MMR vaccines,” Hooker said. “If one is good, then two must be better. This is a triple-live virus vaccine that you’re receiving. It’s a full wallop to your immune system that is unlike anything you would see in nature, but we’re telling people to get this vaccine multiple times.”
The CDC, Hooker added, is standing opposed to the Constitution. They’re going to state legislatures and telling them they oppose any type of personal belief or religious exemption. They’re manipulating parents in order to make sure they vaccinate their children.
“We have to threaten them with CPS. We have to threaten them with loss of school attendance. We have to threaten them through their medical practitioners in order to get them to vaccinate,” Hooker said. “It’s a distinct violation of the Constitution and separation of powers. The CDC has no business doing this.”
Hooker touched on what he called a new term — immune amnesia. In a 2019 paper, it was claimed that those who contract the measles virus have preexisting antibodies diminished.
“They tell people that if you get the measles, you will die from something else,” he said. “Your immune system will no longer work and you will have what’s called immune amnesia and you will die from some other infectious disease.”
However, Hooker encourages everyone to carefully read the paper and the study.
First, they’re looking at unvaccinated individuals who contracted measles and they’re saying they are unprotected against other infectious diseases. If you have the measles, they’re saying after you recover from the measles you’re much more susceptible to some type of infectious disease.
The new term is intended to scare, Hooker said.
“It’s purely a scare tactic in order to get people to vaccinate for the MMR vaccine in order to get profits for Merck to soar,” he said. “Merck has the exclusive license on the MMR vaccine.”
He noted that the paper states the measles virus could have caused as much as 50 percent of all childhood deaths due to infectious disease in the pre-vaccine era.
“If you look at the publication they’re talking about, it doesn’t say that,” Hooker said. “So basically, what they’re saying and the propaganda that they’re pushing and will push, is that measles is a killer and get ready because that is going to be the marketing campaign when you start to see these mandate bills.”
The paper was funded by the Association Value of Vaccine Research, which is funded entirely by the Gates Foundation.
“Bill Gates wants to vaccinate every living creature,” Hooker said. “If it moves, it should be vaccinated.”
The lead author is an employee of a vaccine developer. Other authors also work for vaccine companies.
“Would they be biased,” Hooker asked. “Oh, of course not. We should publish this in the Journal Science. They’re looking at increasing vaccination sales overall and they’re looking at, more importantly, increasing vaccination mandates from a state to state perspective.”
According to the paper, people with the measles virus lost 11-73 percent of their antibody repertoire. That information is taken from blood samples and tested for a variety of antibodies.
However, an antibody snapshot doesn’t mean much.
“It means absolutely nothing,” Hooker said. “It is just a snapshot of what they may have been exposed to recently.”
In fact, the paper seems to work against itself in some ways.
“Antibodies were restored after natural exposure to pathogens. They didn’t get sick,” Hooker said of the paper’s additional findings. “They just had normal exposure to pathogens. The paper itself says these people had fully functional, active immune systems.”
Another line Hooker highlighted talked about how vaccines may have prevented measles.
“Isn’t it weird that when they about vaccination they say ‘Oh vaccines may have prevented measles,'” he asked. “They can’t even say that vaccines have prevented measles. Because you know what, in reality, it hasn’t.”
The immune system, Hooker said, is based on B cells and T cells.
“They remember the infections that you have been exposed to and have geared up and had natural immunity to,” Hooker said. “These are always circulating in your body. They looked at the circulating antibodies, which at a snapshot of any point in time are relatively meaningless.”
Vaccines only elicit B cells.
“If you looked at vaccinated populations, they don’t even necessarily have antibody protection against measles,” Hooker said.
Patients with a genetic condition called Agammaglobulinemia, which produces no antibodies, recovered from measles naturally.
“You don’t need antibodies,” he said. “They were producing no antibodies whatsoever and all eyes were on them back in the 1940s to see if measles was going to kill them, but no, they responded appropriately.”
One final point Hooker brought up was natural measles infections showed a lower level of mortality against those who were vaccinated against measles in Senegal and Guinea-Bissau.
Hooker said he’s asked a lot if the CDC monitors vaccine safety on a closed market basis.
“I get that question a lot,” he said.
Hooker said the CDC spends $4.6 billion a year purchasing, promoting and distributing vaccines. Almost half of their budget is for purchasing vaccinations.
“They spend approximately $30 million — not billion — $30 million on vaccine safety exercises,” Hooker said. “So we’re looking at a fraction of it.”
ACIP members, (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices), do have financial entanglements.
“Up to 97 percent of individuals who serve on ACIP have what’s called a conflict of interest waiver,” he said. “And that basically allows them to have a competing interest, so if they vote for a particular vaccine on the schedule they can vote themselves rich.
“And they’re incentivized not to find vaccine as causation for adverse events. They’re given awards. If they receive patents they can receive royalties. CDC employees can receive royalties to the tune of $150,000 a year over their government salary if they have a vaccine patent. So, wouldn’t that incentivize you not to find causation? Wouldn’t you want vaccine sales to skyrocket?”
Hooker asked if vaccines cause autism.
“And I’m very, very comforted by this, no, vaccines do not cause autism, the CDC said so,” Hooker said. “But do they? Really? OK.”
The Institute of Medicine convened committees in 2004 and 2011. They said there was no correlation between the MMR vaccine and autism.
The NVICP found in all the test cases, which represented over 5,000 vaccine/autism claims, in no case did vaccines cause autism…except for when it did.
“The NVICP then conceded in the Hannah Poling case and made an award of about $28 million that the MMR vaccine specifically was a causal factor in Hannah Poling’s regression, aggravated by an underlying mitochondrial defect, did result in autism. So, it doesn’t cause autism, unless it does. And it has to cause autism for the right people at the right time in the right circumstance.”
Hooker talked about the CDC whistle-blower and the paper that the movie VAX was based on.
“You’ll see that the relative risk of receiving an autism diagnosis was 1.49, that means that you’re 49 percent more likely to receive an autism diagnosis if you’ve gotten the MMR before 36 months versus if you got the MMR after 36 months of age,” Hooker said.
Looking at the numbers afterward, he said that if the lower confidence interval stays above 1, which it did at 1.04, then it is a significant finding.
“The thing that is even more compelling is the relationship strengthened with boys,” he said. “So the odds ratio or the risk of receiving an autism diagnosis goes up to 67 percent. But yet, the CDC claims that’s somehow not true, even though their data does show it is true.”
The study, he pointed out, didn’t compare to unvaccinated children, just children who received the MMR vaccine to children vaccinated after 36 months.
“The relationship was blamed on special education requirements for those individuals who were diagnosed with autism,” Hooker said. “And they said that, ‘Oh, if you got an autism diagnosis and somehow you got it before the MMR vaccine and were required to get the MMR vaccine before you went to a special preschool.’ Bull crap. It doesn’t work that way. Sorry. If that were the case, then you would see in all demographics the same result.”
He said the children in the study were too young to get an autism diagnosis, which is on average diagnosed at 42 months.
“If this was true, then you would see the effect with boys, who had the same special education requirement, with girls, with whites, with blacks…but you didn’t see that. You only saw it in boys and you only saw it in African American boys most profoundly,” Hooker said.
Hooker went into the CDC to receive data. The same data used in the DeStefano paper.
Autism without mental retardation (regressive autism), there was a stronger likelihood of those who received the MMR on time versus those who received the MMR after 36 months had a strong statistically significant relationship.
“And that’s very important. That perhaps is more important than the African American effect because it involves all races, it involves both genders and fully 80 percent of all autism diagnosed in the United States is regressive autism. If you analyze those data correctly, CDC data shows that autism is associated with the MMR vaccine.”
In order to get rid of the increased risk for African American children, they only considered children with a valid state of Georgia birth certificate. They had children from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee.
“They eliminated all the children who were born out of state or didn’t have a birth certificate at all,” Hooker said.
The CDC saw the data on Nov. 7, 2001.
“They saw strong statistically significant effect when they looked at the black model versus the white model,” he said. “They definitely saw an effect. And so, they got rid of all the individuals who didn’t have a valid state of Georgia birth certificate when they were considering race.”
In statistics, power is everything. Lots of individuals in a study increase statistical power.
“If you want to make a relationship go away, kick out individuals in your study,” Hooker said. “They were doing this intentionally to make the relationship go away.”
The results were trash canned in September 2002. The only reason it exists is because Bill Thompson left it on his hard drive.
This study was the only MMR autism study conducted on U.S. soil using the U.S. vaccination schedule.
“They had a huge problem,” Hooker said. “They had statistically significant results and they had basically what was called the Institute of Medicine and Immunization Safety Review meeting that was going to convene in February of 2004.
“A positive association of African American males then, that would fully decimate the National Vaccine Injury Composition Program. If they would’ve released these results, they would have bankrupted the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program dozens and dozens of times over because they would’ve had to award autism claims for those children who received the MMR.”
Dr. Thompson reached out to Hooker in 2013. He was supposed to present the results but found them troubling. He didn’t know what to due to pressure from Dr. Frank DeStefano to not present the real African American results.
He tried to warn Julie Gerberding, the director of the CDC at the time, about the problematic results.
“Subsequently, Thompson was put under discipline,” Hooker said. “He jumped over three levels of management. He was replaced by DeStefano at the 2004 meeting. He was reprimanded, he was replaced with DeStefano. DeStefano presented the fraudulent results, and the rest is history.”
It was reported there were no biological mechanisms for a relationship between vaccines and autism.
“Even though it was just the MMR, somehow they were able to extrapolate it to all vaccines,” Hooker said. “Interesting.”
Thompson was threatened with firing. He was put on administrative leave of absence for two weeks.
“This particular result was the basis for denying claims in test cases,” Hooker said. “The CDC indeed committed fraud. And they also presented fraudulent results regarding Thimerosal.”
Hooker filed a complaint to the office of research and integrity of DHS after the story of the whistle-blower broke.
The Office of Research Integrity responded.
“‘The way we handle these things is we allow the agency that’s under accusation to investigate themselves,'” Hooker said. “Guess what, every time I investigate myself, I rock. If I was doing my report card, I wouldn’t get A’s, I would get Y’s for yummy. Because I am just that good.
“So guess what, CDC investigated itself and four and a half years later I received this memo from the CDC and it says ‘the findings are no scientific research misconduct.’ So guess what, the CDC is yummy and they found that there was no misconduct.”
Hooker said he is still pursuing this with the Office of Research Integrity.
Finally, he talked about a paper detailing the risk between spontaneous abortion and the flu shot.
“This was done by CDC scientists as well as scientists from insurance giants like Kaiser Permanente,” Hooker said.
In this instance, no relationship between the flu shot and spontaneous abortion (any miscarriage between 6-20 weeks gestational age). It included individuals who got a flu shot during that window or up to 42 days prior to conception to see if there was an increased risk.
“A previous study by the CDC showed that when the swine flu vaccine was included in formulations, there was a two-fold increase in spontaneous abortion, especially within the window of 1-28 days post-vaccination within the first trimester of pregnancy,” Hooker said. “This follow-up study was basically to indemnify the season flu vaccine. ‘OK, we can’t have women going around knowing that they’re increasing their risk of spontaneous abortion by getting the flu shot.’
“Again, you have to take these studies with a grain of salt. I like to pick apart studies, yeah I can talk about my studies, that’s fine. But I like to pick apart studies that are claiming there’s no effect and actually show that if you really treat the data correctly, there is an effect.”
The investigation of spontaneous abortions in flu shot seasons (2012-13, 2013-14, 2014-15) took place. Each year, though, the flu shot is different. This year, for example, it is only 9 percent effective according to the CDC.
Hooker said the study was designed poorly from the beginning.
“Whenever CDC wants to hide something, they reduce statistical power,” he said. “They don’t include sufficient numbers of individuals in order to get valid statistics. So they basically kick out people.”
They were looking at people from their own database with nine million people in it and selected 600 people who had spontaneous abortions out of one million.
“And they were actually editing the cases as they went,” Hooker said. “They would look at the chart records and decide if they were adequate for the study. So there was data cherry-picking from the very beginning.”
The power to see some sort of risk, the minimum risk, was 3.6 times. If the relative risk of having a spontaneous abortion after the flue shot was 3.6 times or 360 percent, then they could detect it.
“If it was below that, if it was 260 percent or 160 percent, this paper was powerless,” Hooker said.
they took a sampling of 250 matched pairs, spontaneous abortions who did get hte flu shot and spontaneous abortions who did not get the flu shot.
“They determined that they would need an association of 3.6 or 360 percent in order to see an association with 80 percent certainty mind you,” Hooker said. “Earth speak — OK, that means that if the risk was 360 percent or higher, in vaccinated patients that would see that effect with 82 percent certainty. If the risk was lower, the certainty would be lower.
“What they’re saying is a risk of spontaneous abortion that is 350 percent or lower is an acceptable risk. OK, so if you take the flu shot and you have a 350 percent increase risk of spontaneous abortion, that’s still better than getting the flu during pregnancy. That doesn’t make any sense.”
Hooker said the data showed a risk of 2.1, or 210 percent. The confidence rate was 0.8, which means it is statistically insignificant. That allows the CDC to dismiss it.
“Now, buried in what’s called the paper’s supplement, which is not published with the paper, you have to click a separate link and look at the data, which you have to be a data nerd in order to do. This data nerd looked at this and when you increased the window of spontaneous abortions to include 5 weeks, not six weeks, but five weeks, then the relationship strengthens to 2.3. And the significance strengthens from .8 to .9. So you’re starting to see a trend,” Hooker said.
He said it’s likely there is an increased risk here. But, he said, he would not make that claim with certainty.
“Nobody would get a flu shot with 2.1 or 2.3 times risk of spontaneous abortion,” Hooker said. “Trust me. My wife’s been pregnant. When I told her she got pregnant, I wanted her to stay home and cross her legs for nine months. Just stay put. We were older when my son was conceived. I was 33, she was 35. We knew we weren’t going to get a whole lot of chances. So if somebody came to me and said we don’t want your wife to get the flu but we could increase 200 percent her risk of spontaneous abortion – hell no. You’re not going to do that. But CDC has deemed this an acceptable risk.”
Hooker added the risk was higher for those individuals who had received the flu shot during previous flu seasons.
“Out of those 9 million patients, they came up with 302 cases and 285 controls,” he said. “Less than 600 abortions out of the vaccine safety datalink, which includes over 9 million individuals. They could’ve done better. They did talk about editing the data before they did the analysis. They said that they were essentially looking for the right cases in these instances.
“So here we are. And we’re participating in the great unknown — the vaccine safety schedule. And I want you to know, if I was talking about these instances and these infractions and these instances of fraud for the CDC, we’d be here for days. OK. Hours and hours worth of presentation materials. The instances are varied, they’re huge. And what they haven’t studied is about 10 times larger than what they have studied. So when we are participating in the vaccination schedule as infants, children, adults, seniors, then we are participating in a grand medical experiment. The vast majority of the vaccine schedule is woefully understudied.”
Out of 154 adverse events that the U.S. Institute of Medicine considered in 2011, they could not determine causation. There was insufficient data to say whether it did cause or didn’t cause in 138 cases.
“So we’re talking 90 percent of all the adverse events, there’s just not sufficient study to say whether there’s a linkage there. One of these things was the DTaP vaccine and autism,” Hooker said. “And you’re like, ‘well wait a minute, the CDC just told me several slides before that vaccines don’t cause autism.’
“They’re basically lying on their website because the great unknown is what happens when you’re child receives the DTaP vaccine. There were just not sufficient numbers of studies and the CDC has not studied this either to say whether there’s a relationship between the DTaP vaccine and autism. So when you see that CDC website, along with a lot of the other CDC website, you’re going to see lie after lie after lie.”
Hooker said all of that information is just the tip of the iceberg.
“As bad as you think the government is, it’s that much worse,” he said. “Vaccines are not adequately safety tested, even during clinical trials. There’s no placebo controls. And when there are placebo controls, they’re basically verbiage.”
Ultimately, Hooker said the CDC is not trustworthy.
“The CDC cannot be trusted to tell you what to put into your child’s body. They simply cannot be trusted,” he said. “In light of the epidemic of neurodevelopment disabilities, when one in six children in classrooms has some type of neurodevelopment disability and 54 percent of all children have a chronic disease, this vaccinate schedule is woefully understudied. We’re participating in a grand medical experiment.”
****If you like what The Iowa Standard does, please consider supporting us with a sign of financial support. You can sign up for monthly payments, or you can just do a one-time show of support! Please feel free to show that support at this link or Venmo @Iowa-Standard-2018****
