Life's little aluminiumies

Antivaccine agitators are all about their concern for full informed consent, so it is one of life's little ironies when they enlist people to join their Board of Directors or Scientific Advisory Panels while neglecting to inform these enlistees of their new advisory role. Like "spending one's time in looking for the sacred Emperor in the low-class tea-shops", like dubbing a group "Alliance for Human Research Protection" to distance its members from their actual goal of enabling vaccine avoidance, it is a mark of insincerity of purpose.

Bonus ironies

Now the swiftness with which the AHRP amended their website to expunge the membership of Jennifer Lang supports Dr Lang's assertion that she never joined, and her image was used without permission.* Other members have disappeared as well [here Dr David Egilmann]; it is a veritable holocaust of clones. If the website fell into the hands of the Apostrophe Police, they might conclude that there was only a single board-member, but I am not that pedantic.

I am happy to believe that John Noble Jnr. and Meryl Nass are bona-fide members who genuinely signed up, sparing some time from their hobby of puke-funneling brainfarts into the comparative respectability of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics.

The list of Distinguished Scientific Advisors is like a reunion of old friends. Skipping over a few genuine well-regarded researchers who are there because they ill-advisedly replied to an AHRP e-mail, I'll just call out a few names while you complete your Respectful Insolence bingo cards:

1. Antonietta M. Gatti
2. Christopher Exley
3. James Lyons-Weiler
4. Sin Hang Lee
5. Stephanie Seneff
6. Toni Bark
7. Christopher Shaw
8. Jacob Puliyel
9. John Oller Jnr...

Not to forget Jim Meehan, who's has most recently been in the news for advising faith-healing charlatans in Samoa that MMR vaccines caused the measles outbreak there, while the 70 dead kids really died of Vitamin-A deficiency and paracetamol poisoning. Nor Gayle DeLong, who suffered the recent loss of a paper exercise in antivax propaganda, retracted from a previously-sympathetic journal for statistical malpractice and general mendacity.

Drawings of spirals are conclusive proof

All this is a roundabout way of sneaking up on our real topic: the research oeuvre of Dr Oller Jnr. Oller's views in his chosen specialty of speech therapy / communicative disorders are not entirely mainstream, much as Tyburn Stream is not entirely in the mainstream of the Orinoco River. These views are determined more by pictorial neatness than by empirical evidence.

"Normal infants can read ... printed words and phrases well before their first birthday and even before they are able to say them out loud" **

Tower Kebabel

All the same, if you delve far enough back into Oller's CV, no doubt you'll find papers in real journals, i.e. not published by anonymous grifters. He seems to have an actual academic career, with tenure and textbook contracts and an Endowed Professorship...*** though all this may be a statement more about the educational recruitment pressures in Louisiana than about Oller's intellectual calibre. It may also reflect the fact that he is that rara avis, a Bible-Literalist Young-Earth-Creation Linguist, who holds that the few thousand years since the fall of the Tower of Babel are long enough for the language-family diversity we observe today to have diverged. His essay on that theme in 'Answers in Genesis' is the jewel in the crown of his CV.

Readers may recall some of Oller's contributions to the gaiety of nations triumphant onward march of Science. His collaboration with a pair of episcopal Kenyan scoundrels stands out, extruded as it was through a journal-shaped toxic-waste spigot from SCIRP (even within the hellscape of predatory publishing there is an awfulness hierarchy, with lower circles of notoriety for especially avaricious trash). It furthered Bishops Karanja and Ngare's theocratic campaign against a tetanus-vaccination program that had been organised without paying them a bribe, and was therefore really a weapon of mass sterility. If the unreadable convolution and robotic parenthetical pedantry of the prose is any guide, Oller did most of the writing.

Language is a virus. Meet the vaccine

So that you don't have to, I read his latest paper on Biosemiotic Fritillary Condamine Headbone, but it was hard work. Evidently one key requirement for becoming a Professor of Communicative Disorders at UL Lafayette is a complete inability to communicate -- not improved by the neologasmic spasms that afflict the author every few pages (and there are a lot of pages).

This International Journal of Sciences is edited by a Dr Abraham of Huma Block, Allama Iqbal Town, Lahore (Pakistan), trading as 'Alkhaer Publications' from behind layers of concealment and misdirection and bogus maildrops in London. Jeffrey Beall was unable to recommend that particular publisher as a home for one's research efforts.

As for the paper itself, the underlying theme is an analogy between linguistic channels for communication of meaning, and the cellular mechanisms of gene expression -- both are Natural Language Systems, with TNRs (true narrative representations); for Oller, this is not a metaphor but a formal mathematical identity. Also I have some bamboo to sell him so he can construct aeroplanes to bring the Cargo. An example of a TNR is that time when Galileo disproved Aristotelian physics and accidentally killed a pedestrian by dropping a nickel, a feather and a bowling-ball from the top of the Tower of Babel.

For multiple simultaneous ball-dropping

Here and there one spots the tropes and dog-whistles of Creationism. It seems that genetic information and human communicative capacity have both been in steady decline across generations (because natural selection of mutations and chromosomal recombination can only degrade the Logos, they cannot create) and were therefore at their zenith when God created them in the Garden of Eden.

Early dog-whistle

The co-author's name seems familiar from two years ago...

[Chris] Shaw said he's likely finished working on papers concerning vaccines after this retraction.
"I'm honestly not sure at this point that I want to dabble in [vaccines] anymore," he said. "We have some projects that are ongoing that have been funded that we feel duty-bound to complete that are on this topic. Frankly, I doubt if I will do it again after that."

Just when Chris Shaw thought he was out, they pull him back in and force him to sign another antivax paper! His main contribution here might be the section on the evils of aluminium adjuvants in vaccines (they disrupt the biosemiotic conversation, in the manner of a lisp or a stutter).

Shaw and Oller explored some of these biosemiotic concepts in an a 2014 paper, which sticks in my mind for the amount of waterbending bafflegab from Seneff and for its use of the "argumentum ad cross-section-through-an-M&M". The paper on hand is in the way of a sequel.



Anyway, Oller's munificence with his university's money extended to funneling it into the pockets of those embarrassing cockwombles at PeerTechz (celebrated in parasite-publishing circles for the shamelessness of their importunate, lordosis-postured spammograms) in return for putting another of his opuscules on line.

I have not read it in depth for there are limits to the Riddled eleemosynary services to our readership. Also my attempts to skim through the 86 pages in search of Seneff waterbending hilarity foundered on the authors' old-school purity-of-body-fluids concerns about fluoride in chemtrails children's ice-cream. Oller et al. have gone full John Birch Society and they are one step away from blaming the fluoride conspiracy on the Elders of Zion.

I did learn that glyphosate is bad. Glyphosate is always bad, but this time because it's a chelator. Not the good kind of chelator like BDTH₂, which leaches lead and mercury out of the body, but the bad kind which dissolves environmental aluminium and allows it into the body. There the Al joins forces with the fluoride from children's ice-cream and the mercury from vaccines and dental amalgams to become the Voltron of neurotoxins. I did not know that, but authors Kennedy and Boyd Haley are the experts... their relevant expertise is in curing vaccine-caused autism with an industrial chelator, and in rebranding that chelator as an Oxidative-Stress-Relieving food supplement to exempt it from the unreasonable safety / efficacy expectations imposed on drug treatments. Haley is trying to bring BDTH₂ / OSR#1 back onto the market as an orphan drug (this time labeled as Irminix® / Emeramide), obliging him to create the orphan disease that it can treat.

LBRB provides good coverage of Haley's previous attempts to market BDTH₂. I am surprised and saddened to find that "Alliance for Human Research Protection" haven't invited him to join their Board of Directors or their Distinguished Scientific Advisors.

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* The broader context was the publication and later de-publication of an attack on Dr Jen Gunter, and whether Lang should have been cited in that attack, but that is noncupatory here.

Both Lemonick and Gunter also took issue with the quotes from Lang, the OB-GYN who criticized Gunter on Facebook, because she was listed as an advisory board member of the anti-vaxx organization Alliance for Human Research Protection.
Lang, however, told The Daily Beast she had no such association with the group and that they had stolen her photo and bio from another website. The group took down the listing shortly after Lang contacted them. She called the removal of Block’s piece “unfortunate.”

** Source here is "Autism: The Diagnosis, Treatment, & Etiology Of The Undeniable Epidemic", available from Amazon for $44 - $49, or you can just download each chapter free from ResearchGate because the publisher wasn't interested in retaining the rights for a 2nd edition.

Oller really needs to go through it with a global search-&-replace, changing "mercury in vaccines (because oxidative stress)" to "aluminium in vaccines" throughout.

*** H/t iXeno.

UPDATE: Thx Christian Liljedahl for referring me to Education Liberty Watch. This is a group devoted to Academic Freedom, in the special sense of forcing US schools and colleges to adopt a right-wing 1950s curriculum dominated by white superiority, state religion.and parental ownership of children.

ELW President Karen Effrem is listed as a director of AHRP. It remains possible that she didn't join, and was enlisted without her knowledge because of the appeal of her totalitarian politics.