Corrupt Medical Publishing – Journal of Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology

Corruption in medical journal publishing is rife. This case is different. Here you can see first hand the financial conflicts of interest of medical professionals in action as an incentive to suppress information about what is causing the pandemic exponential increases in serious and sometimes fatal killer diseases like asthma and allergy.

In the UK the annual death toll from asthma alone is a minimum of 12 times the risk from measles in the pre-vaccine era and is comparatively much higher today.  The figures for hospital admissions and the numbers debilitated for life by severe chronic asthma are a public scandal.  Vaccines are known to be implicated as a causal factor in asthma and allergy.

We show the example of the Journal of Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology making knowingly false claims about – guess what? The ChildHealthSafety website and we see a positively false trail being laid away from known causal agents of asthma and allergy.  AACI is the official journal of the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (CSACI). The Editor of the Journal and CSACI were each separately approached for comment on this article and have remained silent.

CSACI is a society of medical professionals with conflicting financial interests.   Identifying and alerting parents to the most likely causes of their childrens’ conditions would be like sawing off the money-making branch they are sitting on.  Some of CSACI’s members will be making hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from treating people who have contracted asthma and allergy. CSACI is also currently receiving funding from numerous vaccine manufacturers and other drug companies: Merck Frosst, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, CSL Behring, Nycomed, AstraZeneca, King Pharmaceuticals [now part of Pfizer], Graceway, Talecris Biotherapeutics.  

In a paper published in AACI by their author Jason Behrmann [Montreal University], Behrmann acknowledges:

The growing epidemic of allergic disease [76] is posing a significant challenge for public health…”

But one place we are not going to find any of the real causes of that epidemic is at the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.   The financial lure for these medical men and women is given away in Behrmann’s paper that the epidemic:

… indicates that a multitude of treatment strategies for allergy will play an increasingly important role in securing population health.”

The actions of CSACI and its Journal condemns the Editors and Editorial Board and CSACI.  Their journal claims to be:

an open access journal that aims to further the understanding and treatment of allergic and immunologic disease“: [About AACI].

The Editors of the Journal permitted the publication of a paper which makes clearly intentionally false claims in an attempt to attack the reputations of those who express medically and scientifically justifiable concerns about vaccine safety. You can tell immediately just from the label-libel in the title what the general thrust of the paper is going to be: “The anti-vaccination movement and resistance to allergen-immunotherapy: a guide for clinical allergists“: Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology 2010, 6:26doi:10.1186/1710-1492-6-26.

These appear to be people of such a calibre that they cannot allow sensible informed open public debate on matters of vaccination safety but instead intentionally publish false information which will mislead the medical professionals who treat all our children.  This kind of conduct is literally a threat to the health and safety of children worldwide. As the Journal is published worldwide on the internet that is more true now than ever before.

CHS is therefore calling Behrmann, the Editors of the Journal, the Editorial Board of Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology out and the Board of CSACI to retract Behrman’s false paper and condemn it.

If you cannot trust Behrmann on one clear fact then which of the “facts” Behrmann alleges are true? No one knows without careful checking – which defeats any object of laying claim to the paper as being “peer reviewed”. No one can rely on it as “peer reviewed” so it should not be published by a journal claiming to publish “peer reviewed” papers.

We are also calling on the Journal Editors to publish the names of the peer reviewers to name and shame them for falling down on the job. It is perfectly obvious from checking Behrmann’s reference that his claims are false.

The clearly false claim Behrmann made is in the following extract of his paper:

Another blog entry [71] from the website, http://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com webcite, demonstrates similar convoluted and mistaken associations between vaccines and allergenic extracts (skin prick tests are clinical assays using allergenic extracts [e.g., peanut extract] in order to diagnose allergen sensitivities [e.g., peanut allergy]; the underline emphasis was added by this author):

“Vaccines are the direct cause of the food allergy epidemic. Why are the manufacturers of vaccines allowed trade secret protection for vaccine ingredients? Why is peanut oil considered safe to inject along with aluminum based on studies where children eat the oil or based on the skin prick test? IT ISN’T THE SAME!! The fatal food allergies are directly caused by vaccines!! The evidence is there.”

But what Behrmann falsely claims is a “blog entry” which he falsely attributes to CHS is in fact a comment by an anonymous poster in a comments section of a CHS page and is not from a blog posting. This is a false attribution of authorship and is illegal in some jurisdictions – apart from being potentially defamatory.

What is of course remarkable about this is that of all the information published by CHS, Jason Behrmann can only criticise what an anonymous poster has written and nothing on the CHS website written and published by CHS.

Worse still for Behrmann is that it is obviously so for anyone visiting the site. Here is the link and name of the anonymous poster on CHS as it appears to this day on the CHS website:

bfg, on May 29, 2009 at 2:31 pm said:”

What is of course worse for Behrmann is that to cover up his deceit he did not include the link to the anonymous comment but cited the URL in his paper for the ChildHealthSafety website: http://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com.

And even worse of course to further cover up his deceit in his footnote he still fails to give the proper attribution to the comment but attributes it so a CHS article thus:-

71. Child Health Safety [http:/ / childhealthsafety.wordpress.com/ 2009/ 05/ 29/ there-is-no-anti-vaccine-movement/ ]

So it is clear Behrmann deliberately hid the truth in order to defame the true authors of the CHS site and to attack its credibility with this base form of ad hominem attack. To achieve this kind of attack Behrmann relies on and puts in issue the credibility of a purported “peer reviewed” journal and that of a purported “learned” medical society.

And is still gets worse. Can the medical “experts” at CSACI be entirely ignorant of any role for vaccines in the causation of asthma and allergy?  There is medical and scientific evidence, documented in part from official publications from bodies like the EMEA [European Medicines Agency] implicating vaccines in the increase in asthma and allergies. It is well-known in the vaccine industry that adjuvants in vaccines are sensitisation agents [they cause people to become allergic who were not before].

Behrmann however, is also incompetent. And the editors of the journal either have not noticed or do not care. Behrmann singles out as an “anti-vaccination” website a site which is nothing of the sort. That has got to be scraping the bottom of the barrel. He writes of the general online newspaper Digital Journal:

One notable example is blog entries 70] from the site, http://m.digitaljournal.com webcite. What appears to be a blog entry from a member of the general public whose child received IT demonstrates that vaccine ADRs and related fears are being mistakenly associated with allergenic extracts–this entry relates to bacterial contamination of vaccines and the possible link with Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS):

“… after reading this report and reading there might have been bacterial contaminant in the H1N1 vaccine makes me wonder if there could have been bacterial contaminant in the allergy shots.”

A subsequent entry on the same blog employs scientific jargon and claims that allergenic extracts contain the notorious “autism-causing” preservative, thimerosal:

“… if your son received an allergy shot from a multi dose vial, he(sic) more than likely had thimerosal in it. By weight thimerosal is 40.7% mercury. Mercury is a neurotoxin and can affect many areas of your body.”

There is in fact nothing notable about the exchange, which you can read yourselves here: Teenager suffers Guillain-Barre syndrome after swine flu shot Nov 12, 2009.  The comments to which Behrmann refers are comments between two readers about the main news article which is all about swine flu vaccine.  The first reader, a mother who wonders if her son might have received a flu vaccine with mercury in it wonders if her son might have received the mercury from another source.  Another reader suggests that if the allergy shot was from a multi-dose vial it might have contained thiomersal [a preservative commonly used in multi-dose vaccine vials].  The exchange otherwise has nothing whatsoever to do with the safety of allergy shots and no one is discussing them.  But Behrmann in a totally misleading manner implies that is what 1) The Digital Journal was discussing and 2) that this was a deliberate attempt to discredit allergy shots.  

What Behrmann also fails to comment on is whether allergy shots can be supplied in multi-dose vials containing thiomersal.  In fact Behrmann provides no evidence whatsover as to whether that may or may not be true.  So again, completely misleading by him in a “peer reviewed” article.  And Behrmann is using this exchange between two readers speculating about where the mercury might have come from as his evidence that 1) the readers are part of an “anti-vaccine” movement and 2) they are intentionally attacking allergy therapy shots.

What a pile of drivel.  And it is certainly not evidence to support Behrmann’s totally improbable hypothesis.  But the Journal published regardless and the “peer reviewers” seem not to have cared this was wholly misleading.

Thiomersal is also a known sensitisation agent [it causes people who did not previously have an allergy to develop one]. It is also toxic and neurotoxic in parts per billion. For a dose of a drop of 1 gramme on a teaspoon to be within the US FDA reference dose of 0.1 microgrammes per kilo body weight per day for a baby, the baby would have to weigh 10,000 metric tonnes.

Behrmann seems not to know or if he does know, he is not saying.

The worst part of all of course is probably that Behrmann blames in this paper the “anti-vaccine movement” for the unpopularity of allergen-immunotherapy. We doubt whether most of the people who express concern about vaccine safety have even heard of it. Behrmann is conjuring up invented facts from nothing and blaming the only people around who are looking out for the interests and health and safety of children. This is in the context of the zealotic desire of some in the medical professions to inject vaccines into anything that moves as much and as often as possible, making as much money as they can in the process.

In the light of all of this we are also calling Behrmann out personally as a fraud, cheat, liar and publisher of fraudulent claims in a medical journal paper. Behrmann can be found here:

Correspondence: jason.behrmann@umontreal.ca
Programmes de bioéthique & Département de médecine sociale et préventive Faculté de médecine, Université de Montréal Pav. Margeurite d’Youville (7e étage) C.P. 6128, succursale centre-villeMontréal (Québec), H3C 3J7, Canada

Just so your all know who is whom, the Editors and Editorial Board of the Journal are:

Editor-in-Chief: Richard Warrington (Canada)

Associate Editors

Tom Bowen (Canada)

Harold Kim (Canada)

Wade Watson (Canada)

Editorial Board

Adelle Atkinson (Canada)

Don Cockcroft (Canada)

Linda Cox (United States)

Pascal Demoly (France)

Anthony Dubois (Netherlands)

Paul A Greenberger (United States)

Paul K Keith (Canada)

Kevin Kelly (United States)

Marek Kowalski (Poland)

Rajesh Kumar (United States)

Bruce Mazer (Canada)

Keith Payton (Canada)

Robert Reisman (United States)

Chaim Roifman (Canada)

Robert Schellenberg (Canada)

W A Sewell (United Kingdom)

Gordon Sussman (Canada)

Susan Tarlo (Canada)

Susan Waserman (Canada)