How anti-vaccine figures abuse data to trick you
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The anti-vaccine movement is nearly as old as vaccines themselves. For as long as humans have sought to harness our immune system’s incredible ability to recognize and fight infectious invaders, critics and conspiracy theorists have opposed these efforts.
Anti-vaccine tactics have advanced since the early days of protesting “unnatural” smallpox inoculation, and the rampant abuse of scientific data may be the most effective strategy yet.
Here’s how vaccine opponents misuse data to deceive people, plus how you can avoid being manipulated.
Misappropriating raw and unverified safety data
Perhaps the oldest and most well-established anti-vaccine tactic is the abuse of data from the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration maintain VAERS as a tool for researchers to detect early warning signs of potential vaccine side effects.
Anyone can submit a VAERS report about any symptom experienced at any point after vaccination. That does not mean that these symptoms are vaccine side effects.
VAERS was not designed to determine if a specific vaccine caused a specific adverse event. But for decades, vaccine opponents have misinterpreted, misrepresented, and manipulated VAERS data to convince people that vaccines are dangerous.
Anyone relying on VAERS to draw conclusions about vaccine safety is probably trying to trick you. It isn’t possible to determine from VAERS data alone if a vaccine caused a specific health condition.
VAERS isn’t the only federal data that vaccine opponents abuse. Originally created for COVID-19 vaccines, V-safe is a vaccine safety monitoring system that allows users to report—via text message surveys—how they feel and any health issues they experience up to a year after vaccination. Anti-vaccine groups have misrepresented data in the system, which tracks all health experiences, whether or not they are vaccine-related.
The U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) has also become a target of anti-vaccine misinformation. Vaccine opponents have falsely claimed that DMED data reveals massive spikes in strokes, heart attacks, HIV, cancer, and blood clots among military service members since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. The spike was due to an updated policy that corrected underreporting in the previous years
Misrepresenting legitimate studies
A common tactic vaccine opponents use is misrepresenting data from legitimate sources such as national health databases and peer-reviewed studies. For example, COVID-19 vaccines have repeatedly been blamed for rising cancer and heart attack rates, based on data that predates the pandemic by decades.
A prime example of this strategy is a preliminary FDA study that detected a slight increase in stroke risk in older adults after a high-dose flu vaccine alone or in combination with the bivalent COVID-19 vaccine. The study found no “increased risk of stroke following administration of the COVID-19 bivalent vaccines.”
Yet vaccine opponents used the study to falsely claim that COVID-19 vaccines were uniquely harmful, despite the data indicating that the increased risk was almost certainly driven by the high-dose flu vaccine. The final peer-reviewed study confirmed that there was no elevated stroke risk following COVID-19 vaccination. But the false narrative that COVID-19 vaccines cause strokes persists.
Similarly, the largest COVID-19 vaccine safety study to date confirmed the extreme rarity of a few previously identified risks. For weeks, vaccine opponents overstated these rare risks and falsely claimed that the study proves that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe.
Citing preprint and retracted studies
When a study has been retracted, it is no longer considered a credible source. A study’s retraction doesn’t deter vaccine opponents from promoting it—it may even be an incentive because retracted papers can be held up as examples of the medical establishment censoring so-called “truthtellers.” For example, anti-vaccine groups still herald Andrew Wakefield nearly 15 years after his study falsely linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism was retracted for data fraud.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought the lasting impact of retracted studies into sharp focus. The rush to understand a novel disease that was infecting millions brought a wave of scientific publications, some more legitimate than others.
Over time, the weaker studies were reassessed and retracted, but their damage lingers. A 2023 study found that retracted and withdrawn COVID-19 studies were cited significantly more frequently than valid published COVID-19 studies in the same journals.
In one example, a widely cited abstract that found that ivermectin—an antiparasitic drug proven to not treat COVID-19—dramatically reduced mortality in COVID-19 patients exemplifies this phenomenon. The abstract, which was never peer reviewed, was retracted at the request of its authors, who felt the study’s evidence was weak and was being misrepresented.
Despite this, the study—along with the many other retracted ivermectin studies—remains a touchstone for proponents of the drug that has shown no effectiveness against COVID-19.
In a more recent example, a group of COVID-19 vaccine opponents uploaded a paper to The Lancet’s preprint server, a repository for papers that have not yet been peer reviewed or published by the prestigious journal. The paper claimed to have analyzed 325 deaths after COVID-19 vaccination, finding COVID-19 vaccines were linked to 74 percent of the deaths.
The paper was promptly removed because its conclusions were unsupported, leading vaccine opponents to cry censorship.
Applying animal research to humans
Animals are vital to medical research, allowing scientists to better understand diseases that affect humans and develop and screen potential treatments before they are tested in humans. Animal research is a starting point that should never be generalized to humans, but vaccine opponents do just that.
Several animal studies are frequently cited to support the claim that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous during pregnancy. These studies found that pregnant rats had adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines. The results are unsurprising given that they were injected with doses equal to or many times larger than the dose given to humans rather than a dose that is proportional to the animal’s size.
Similarly, a German study on rat heart cells found abnormalities after exposure to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccine opponents falsely insinuated that this study proves COVID-19 vaccines cause heart damage in humans and was so universally misrepresented that the study’s author felt compelled to dispute the claims.
The author noted that the study used vaccine doses significantly higher than those administered to humans and was conducted in cultured rat cells, a dramatically different environment than a functioning human heart.
How to avoid being misled
The internet has empowered vaccine opponents to spread false information with an efficiency and expediency that was previously impossible. Anti-vaccine narratives have advanced rapidly due to the rampant exploitation of valid sources and the promotion of unvetted, non-credible sources.
You can avoid being tricked by using multiple trusted sources to verify claims that you encounter online. Some examples of credible sources are reputable public health entities like the CDC and World Health Organization, personal health care providers, and peer-reviewed research from experts in fields relevant to COVID-19 and the pandemic.
Read more about anti-vaccine tactics:
- How vaccine opponents spread misinformation
- How misinformation tricks our brains
- How vaccine opponents use kids to spread misinformation
This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Sprout Your Seeds, Grains, Beans, Etc
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Good Things Come In Small Packages
“Sprouting” grains and seeds—that is, allowing them to germinate and begin to grow—enhances their nutritional qualities, boosting their available vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and even antioxidants.
You may be thinking: surely whatever nutrients are in there, are in there already; how can it be increased?
Well, the grand sweeping miracle of life itself is beyond the scope of what we have room to cover today, but in few words: there are processes that allow plants to transform stuff into other stuff, and that is part of what is happening.
Additionally, in the cases of some nutrients, they were there already, but the sprouting process allows them to become more available to us. Think about the later example of how it’s easier to eat and digest a ripe fruit than an unripe one, and now scale that back to a seed and a sprouted seed.
A third way that sprouting benefits us is by reducing“antinutrients”, such as phytic acid.
Let’s drop a few examples of the “what”, before we press on to the “how”:
- Enhancement of attributes of cereals by germination and fermentation: a review
- Sprouting characteristics and associated changes in nutritional composition of cowpea (Vigna unguiculata)
- Phytic acid, in vitro protein digestibility, dietary fiber, and minerals of pulses as influenced by processing methods
- Effects of germination on the nutritional properties, phenolic profiles, and antioxidant activities of buckwheat
- Effect of several germination treatments on phosphatases activities and degradation of phytate in faba bean (Vicia faba L.) and azuki bean (Vigna angularis L.)
Sounds great! How do we do it?
First, take the seeds, grains, nuts, beans, etc that you’re going to sprout. Fine examples to try for a first sprouting session include:
- Grains: buckwheat, brown rice, quinoa
- Legumes: soy beans, black beans, kidney beans
- Greens: broccoli, mustard greens, radish
- Nuts/seeds: almonds, pumpkin seeds, chia seeds
Note: whatever you use should be as unprocessed as possible to start with:
- On the one hand, you’d be surprised how often “life finds a way” when it comes to sprouting ridiculous choices
- On the other hand, it’s usually easier if you’re not trying to sprout blanched almonds, split lentils, rolled oats, or toasted hulled buckwheat.
Second, you will need clean water, a jar with a lid, muslin cloth or similar, and a rubber band.
Next, take an amount of the plants you’ll be sprouting. Let’s say beans of some kind. Try it with ¼ cup to start with; you can do bigger batches once you’re more confident of your setup and the process.
Rinse and soak them for at least 24 hours. Take care to add more water than it looks like you’ll need, because those beans are thirsty, and sprouting is thirsty work.
Drain, rinse, and put them in a clean glass jar, covering with just the muslin cloth in place of the lid, held in place by the rubber band. No extra water in it this time, and you’re going to be storing the jar upside down (with ventilation underneath, so for example on some sort of wire rack is ideal) in a dark moderately warm place (e.g. 80℉ / 25℃ is often ideal, but it doesn’t have to be exact, you have wiggle-room, and some things will enjoy a few degrees cooler or warmer than that)
Each day, rinse and replace until you see that they are sprouting. When they’re sprouting, they’re ready to eat!
Unless you want to grow a whole plant, in which case, go for it (we recommend looking for a gardening guide in that case).
But watch out!
That 80℉ / 25℃ temperature at which our sprouting seeds, beans, grains etc thrive? There are other things that thrive at that temperature too! Things like:
- E. coli
- Salmonella
- Listeria
…amongst others.
So, some things to keep you safe:
- If it looks or smells bad, throw it out
- If in doubt, throw it out
- Even if it looks perfect, blanch it (by boiling it in water for 30 seconds, before rinsing it in cold water to take it back to a colder temperature) before eating it or refrigerating it for later.
- When you come back to get it from the fridge, see once again points 1 and 2 above.
- Ideally you should enjoy sprouted things within 5 days.
Want to know more about sprouting?
You’ll love this book that we reviewed recently:
The Sprout Book – by Doug Evans
Enjoy!
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Fitness Freedom for Seniors – by Jackie Jacobs
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Exercise books often assume that either we are training for the Olympics, and most likely also that we are 20 years old. This one doesn’t.
Instead, we see a well-researched, well-organized, clearly-illustrated fitness plan with age in mind. Author Jackie Jacobs offers tips and advice for all levels, and a progressive week-by-week plan of 15-minute sessions. This way, we’re neither overdoing it nor slacking off; it’s a perfect balance.
The exercises are aimed at “all areas”, that is to say, improving cardiovascular fitness, balance, flexibility, and strength. It also gives some supplementary advice with regard to diet and suchlike, but the workouts are the real meat of the book.
Bottom line: if you’d like a robust, science-based exercise regime that’s tailored to seniors, this is the book for you.
Click here to check out Fitness Freedom for Seniors, and get yours!
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Cherries’ Very Healthy Wealth Of Benefits!
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Cherry’s Health Benefits Simply Pop
We wrote recently about some of the health benefits of cherries, in our “This or That” challenge, pitting them against strawberries:
Strawberries vs Cherries – Which is Healthier?
We said there that we’d do a main feature on cherries sometime soon, so here it is!
Sweet & Sour
Cherries can be divided into sweet vs sour. These are mostly nutritionally similar, though sour ones do have some extra benefits.
Sweet and sour cherries are closely related but botanically different plants; it’s not simply a matter of ripeness (or preparation).
These can mostly be sorted into varieties of Prunus avium and Prunus cerasus, respectively:
Cherry Antioxidants: From Farm to Table
Sour cherry varieties include morello and montmorency, so look out for those names in particular when doing your grocery-shopping.
You may remember that it’s a good rule of thumb that foods that are more “bitter, astringent, or pungent” will tend to have a higher polyphenol content (that’s good):
Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain
Juiced up
Almost certainly for reasons of budget and convenience, as much as for standardization, most studies into the benefits of cherries have been conducted using concentrated cherry juice as a supplement.
At home, we need not worry so much about standardization, and our budget and convenience are ours to manage. To this end, as a general rule of thumb, whole fruits are pretty much always better than juice:
Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
Antioxidant & anti-inflammatory!
Cherries are a very good source of antioxidants, and as such they also reduce inflammation, which in turn means ameliorating autoimmune diseases, from common things like arthritis…
…to less common things like gout:
Cherry Consumption and the Risk of Recurrent Gout Attacks
This can also be measured by monitoring uric acid metabolites:
Consumption of cherries lowers plasma urate in healthy women
Anti-diabetic effect
Most of the studies on this have been rat studies, and the human studies have been less “the effect of cherry consumption on diabetes” and more a matter of separate studies adding up to this conclusion in, the manner of “cherries have this substance, this substance has this effect, therefore cherries will have this effect”. You can see an example of this discussed over the course of 15 studies, here:
A Review of the Health Benefits of Cherries ← skip to section 2.2.1: “Cherry Intake And Diabetes”
In short, the jury is out on cherry juice, but eating cherries themselves (much like getting plenty of fruit in general) is considered good against diabetes.
Good for healthy sleep
For this one, the juice suffices (actual cherries are still recommended, but the juice gave clear significant positive results):
Pilot Study of the Tart Cherry Juice for the Treatment of Insomnia and Investigation of Mechanisms ← this was specifically in people over the age of 50
Importantly, it’s not that cherries have a sedative effect, but rather they support the body’s ability to produce melatonin adequately when the time comes:
Effect of tart cherry juice (Prunus cerasus) on melatonin levels and enhanced sleep quality
Post-exercise recovery
Cherries are well-known for boosting post-exercise recovery, though they may actually improve performance during exercise too, if eaten beforehand/
For example, these marathon-runners who averaged 13% compared to placebo control:
As for its recovery benefits, we wrote about this before:
How To Speed Up Recovery After A Workout (According To Actual Science)
Want to get some?
We recommend your local supermarket (or farmer’s market!), but if for any reason you prefer to take a supplement, here’s an example product on Amazon
Enjoy!
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Breadfruit vs Custard Apple – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing breadfruit to custard apple, we picked the breadfruit.
Why?
Today in “fruits pretending to be less healthy things than they are”, both are great, but one of these fruits just edges out the other in all categories. This is quite simple today:
In terms of macros, being fruits they’re both fairly high in carbs and fiber, however the carbs are close to equal and breadfruit has nearly 2x the fiber.
This also means that breadfruit has the lower glycemic index, but they’re both medium-low GI foods with a low insulin index.
When it comes to vitamins, breadfruit has more of vitamins B1, B3, B5, and C, while custard apple has more of vitamins A, B2, and B6. So, a 4:3 win for breadfruit.
In the category of minerals, breadfruit has more copper, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc, while custard apple has more calcium and iron.
In short, enjoy both, but if you’re going just for one, breadfruit is the healthiest.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
Take care!
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Why You Can’t Skimp On Amino Acids
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Our body requires 20 amino acids (the building blocks of protein), 9 of which it can’t synthesize (thus called: “essential”) and absolutely must get from food. Normally, we get these amino acids from protein in our diet, and we can also supplement them by taking amino acid supplements if we wish.
Specifically, we require (per kg of bodyweight) a daily average of:
- Histidine: 10 mg
- Isoleucine: 20 mg
- Leucine: 39 mg
- Lysine: 30 mg
- Methionine: 10.4 mg
- Phenylalanine*: 25 mg
- Threonine: 15 mg
- Tryptophan: 4 mg
- Valine: 26 mg
*combined with the non-essential amino acid tyrosine
Source: Protein and Amino Acid Requirements In Human Nutrition: WHO Technical Report
Why this matters
A lot of attention is given to protein, and making sure we get enough of it, especially as we get older, because the risk of sarcopenia (muscle mass loss) increases with age:
However, not every protein comes with a complete set of essential amino acids, and/or have only trace amounts of of some amino acids, meaning that a dietary deficiency can arrive if one’s diet is too restrictive.
And, if we become deficient in even just one amino acid, then bad things start to happen quite soon. We only have so much space, so we’re going to oversimplify here, but:
- Histidine: is needed to produce histamine (vital for immune responses, amongst other things), and is also important for maintaining the myelin sheaths on nerve cells.
- Isoleucine: is very involved in muscle metabolism and makes up the bulk of muscle tissue.
- Leucine: is critical for muscle synthesis and repair, as well as wound healing in general, and blood sugar regulation.
- Lysine: is also critical in muscle synthesis, as well as calcium absorption and hormone production, as well as making collagen.
- Methionine: is very important for energy metabolism, zinc absorption, and detoxification.
- Phenylalanine: is a necessary building block of a lot of neurotransmitters, as well as being a building block of some amino acids not listed here (i.e., the ones your body synthesizes, but can’t without phenylalanine).
- Threonine: is mostly about collagen and elastin production, and is also very important for your joints, as well as fat metabolism.
- Tryptophan: is the body’s primary precursor to serotonin, so good luck making the latter without the former.
- Valine: is mostly about muscle growth and regeneration.
So there you see, the ill effects of deficiency can range from “muscle atrophy” to “brain stops working” and “bones fall apart” and more. In short, any essential amino acid deficiency not remedied will ultimately result in death; we literally become non-viable as organisms without these 9 things.
What to do about it (the “life hack” part)
Firstly, if you eat a lot of animal products, those are “complete” proteins, meaning that they contain all 9 essential amino acids in sensible quantities. The reason that all animal products have these, is because they are just as essential for the other animals as they are for us, so they, just like us, must consume (and thus contain) them.
However, a lot of animal products come with other health risks:
Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy? ← this covers which animal products are definitely very health-risky, and which are probably fine according to current best science
…so many people may prefer to get more (or possibly all) dietary protein from plants.
However, plants, unlike us, do not need to consume all 9 essential amino acids, and this may or may not contain them all.
Soy is famously a “complete” protein insofar as it has all the amino acids we need.
But what if you’re allergic to soy?
Good news! Peas are also a “complete” protein and will do the job just fine. They’re also usually cheaper.
Final note
An oft-forgotten thing is that some other amino acids are “conditionally essential”, meaning that while we can technically synthesize them, sometimes we can’t synthesize enough and must get them from our diet.
The conditions that trigger this “conditionally essential” status are usually such things as fighting a serious illness, recovering from a serious injury, or pregnancy—basically, things where your body has to work at 110% efficiency if it wants to get through it in one piece, and that extra 10% has to come from somewhere outside the body.
Examples of commonly conditionally essential amino acids are arginine and glycine.
Arginine is critical for a lot of cell-signalling processes as well as mitochondrial function, as well as being a precursor to other amino acids, including creatine.
As for glycine?
Check out: The Sweet Truth About Glycine
Enjoy!
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Knee Cracking & Popping: Should You Be Worried?
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Dr. Tom Walters (Doctor of Physical Therapy) explains about what’s going on behind our musical knees, and whether or not this synovial symphony is cause for concern.
When to worry (and when not to)
If the clicking/cracking/popping/etc does not come with pain, then it is probably being caused by the harmless movement of fluid within the joints, in this case specifically the patellofemoral joint, just behind the kneecap.
As Dr. Walters says:
❝It is extremely important that people understand that noises from the knee are usually not associated with pathology and may actually be a sign of a healthy, well-lubricated joint. let’s be careful not to make people feel bad about their knee noise as it can negatively influence how they view their body!❞
On the other hand, there is also such a thing as patellofemoral joint pain syndrome (PFPS), which is very common, and involves pain behind the kneecap, especially upon over-stressing the knee(s).
In such cases, it is good to get that checked out by a doctor/physiotherapist.
Dr. Walters advises us to gradually build up strength, and not try for too much too quickly. He also advises us to take care to strengthen our glutes in particular, so our knees have adequate support. Gentle stretching of the quadriceps and soft tissue mobilization with a foam roller, are also recommended, to reduce tension on the kneecap.
For more on these things and especially about the exercises, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
How To Really Take Care Of Your Joints
Take care!
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