Sam Iles's Blog

Vaccines are an odd topic. I’ve briefly expressed some views before but thought I should write a blog post to explain them further.

Vaccines – basically – are good. They can eradicate disease and save lives.

They are also rather dangerous and are where drug companies make most of their money.

Therein lies the problem. Vaccines are for making money and many companies will stop at nothing to make that money.

There are some crazy conspiracy theories out there. My favourite has to be that the government puts RFID chips into vaccines and uses it to track humans. This is entirely within the realms of the scientifically possible. But I don’t believe it.

What I do know, however, is that vaccines are unlike any other product in existence. If I plan to buy something, I research first and make an informed decision. Vaccines are different. Parents get their children jabs because they are told to by doctors (who in turn tell the government (or, vice-versa, a cynic might say…)).

It is so easy to pay a doctor to say something. Very easy. This is well documented as happening within every industry, because people always blindly trust science.

(A few months ago, for example, a group of scientists released a report saying chocolate was healthier for you than fruit. The mainstream media ate this up (pardon the pun) and all ran stories on it. A few days later, it was discovered that said report was financed by Hershey’s – the world’s largest chocolate manufacturer. Needless to say the media didn’t report this revelation at all.)

If science says you need a vaccine – you get a vaccine. Study after study (all financed by the companies who made the vaccine) conclude the vaccine is essential and safe. The government blindly agrees.

We also know that vaccines are the most important product to drug companies. They all openly admit in their investor information that this is the case. Take Alzheimer’s. 500,000 people in the UK have it. So, if I make a drug to cure it 500,000 people buy it from me. If, however, I make a vaccine – then all 65 million people in the UK buy it. This is obvious. And, it’s not a bad thing. It’s just worth understanding why vaccines are so important.

Vaccines safety is also dubious at best. There are many reports of vaccines making people very ill (such as the recent emergence that the miracle vaccine for the dreaded swine flu plague causes narcolepsy).

Vaccines don’t require anywhere near the same safety testing rigmarole regular drugs experience. A normal drug takes years of testing before it’s approved but vaccines take just months.

And – perhaps my favourite facet of vaccines – by decree of the Supreme Courts of the United States of America (and, soon the United States of Europe, I’ll wager) companies can’t be sued if the vaccine kills you or doesn’t work. Literally, they can’t be sued.

Imagine the protection this offers them: the can literally fill a vaccine with water or arsenic and nothing will go wrong for them.

My point is simply this: vaccines are not inherently a scam or evil. Just think about this: vaccines are perhaps the only product in the world which has a potential customer base of six billion, people blindly buy without knowing what it is and a product which carries complete legal immunity (pun, sorry). I just find it fascinating that a product can command such a high number of users because the company who makes it tells you to. Vaccines are literally the best product in the world – from the company’s point of view.

Our climate is changing. Perhaps, irrevocably.

Life has a habit of adapting to meet changes in environment. This has happened again and again. Not everyone died when the dinosaurs did. As Ian Malcolm would say, ‘life finds a way’. That’s what’s great about evolution.

Right now, we are faced with a similar change in our environment and we need to adjust. But, all of these previous adaptations have a lot in common: lots of creatures die before evolution happens. But, it doesn’t have to kill us. You see, humans can evolve differently. We have the unique ability to think and predict and plan ahead.

People will be forced to adapt to changes like severe drought and flooding. Permanent flooding of coastal areas. Worsening access to food and water. In some places (countries around the foothills of the Himalayas) millions and millions of people will be without water.

Most adaptation will happen on a private level. People will move house, install solar panels to cope with energy cost rises, plant crops in their gardens to subsidise the increasing cost of food. But, ultimately in my view, this is the entire reason that one has a government.

The government needs to look at sea levels and make plan a for defences (as the Dutch and the Dutch alone already are). They need to look at how peak temperatures will affect their cities. They need to look at rainfall and flooding (do any major cities really have to sewage systems to cope with huge amount of rainfall?). They need to focus on energy and ensure it will always be available.

But, these are tasks that a developed government can do. It’s easy for the government of the UK to ensure food security for its people. Easy. It’s easy for the USA government to build defences around lower Manhattan (which is in danger of being submerged any minute now). The people who need most to do these things are, sadly, the ones least able to do it: developing countless. Developing countless are at the greatest threat from these changes, because they can’t make huge changes to infrastructure or create alternate sources of food and water. And the entire problem of global warming was caused by us in the west.

So, what can we do to help? Well, the immediate answer seems to develop them, right? A developed country can cope with these changes, so that’s all we need to do, right? Sure, but there are a few problems with this method. Firstly, when a country develops quickly, it will consume more of the resources that make climate change worse. It will mean more fossil fuels burnt in Africa, more meat consumed in Asia.

Instead, we need to evolve our behaviour and help evolve theirs. We need to teach them that they need to use green energy sources. To continue eating as they do now and not switch to a destructive, impossible western diet. Of course, this brings up a further problem: we would have to do these too. It’s no good telling other countries to do something and ignoring it ourselves. (This is, of course, actually a very good thing.)

The second problem with developing a country is that it isn’t that easy. As much as I’d like to click my fingers and say, ‘hey, look at that: Africa looks like Europe!’, it doesn’t work. Corruption, fraud, lack of money all play a part. I won’t get into a discussion of how to develop a country (that’s for another blog post), suffice to say: it’s hard.

So, is it all this simple to adapt our behaviour? Make a few personal and government decisions? Yes, I think so. But, the problem is, it isn’t happening. The USA government still subsidises insurance costs around the previous flooding occurrences in New Orleans. By making it cheaper to live there, you’re completely missing the point. You need to be helping people move away from doomed areas, not move into them.

But, who am I to inform government policy? (I just hope they’re all reading this…)

In the next fifty years or so there is going to be a big problem with food, where we will run out of it. This is for a few reasons. These include, but are certainly not limited to: third world development and Africa needing more food; climate change and it being harder to grow food, with entire crops being wiped; a rising population; and changing diets. It is likely that food prices will rise hugely and people will have to adapt to meet certain changes.

Now, I’m not going to get into all the causes (meat, et al) and problems and potential solutions (veganism, et al), just something which may be a result of all this.

During World War Two, food supplies were low and people in the UK were issued ration books to exchange for food. They were also encouraged to ‘Dig For Victory’, growing food in their gardens to supplement their rations. During this time, if you didn’t grow your own food then you went hungry. This made a whole generation of people who knew how to grow food and even how to grow it indefinitely without the need of ever buying seeds (which really is awesome).

This has fallen out of fashion nowadays (people of this generation, regrettably, die). But, I’d like to encourage you to give it a go, for the reasons that follow:

1) Reducing carbon dioxide emissions. This is for two reasons. Firstly, digging up a bit of your grass and replacing it with vegetable yielding plants soaks carbon dioxide out of the air and also makes that rather wonderful gas oxygen. Secondly, the less food you have to get shipped from South America, the less carbon dioxide you make – yay!

2) Mo’ food, less money. You get more cheaper food! I don’t need to say more…

3) More space for wildlife. Wildlife much prefers nice plants than boring grass. It’s also great fun to farm organically – avoiding the use of chemicals and slug pellets (think of the hedgehogs). It’s great knowing what is on your food. It’s also great for little endangered insects like bees.

4) Help the global food crisis. Every single potato or bulb of garlic you grow means that one less has to be grown in some far off country and shipped to you. That’s fantastic.

5) Learning. You should probably get into the habit of it now. Some people predict a future within our lifetimes of ration books for everyone, all the time. If you grow food in your garden, and know how to know, then you really are one step ahead.

6) That warm feeling of doing something good. OK, so this one is rather subjective, but if helping global warms, the food crisis and animals is something you’re into, then growing food could be for you.

Also, this really isn’t a hard thing to do. I don’t have a garden, but I still grow vegetables in pots. A lot of vegetables work great grown in pots, and you easily do the same. Anything helps, even if you just commit to pushing some garlic into the mud and seeing if it grows.

This brings me to my final point: allotments. There are currently 300,000 allotments in the UK with 100,000 people waiting for one. Yeah, that’s 100,000 waiting to grow lots of food. That’s bad and perhaps you could write to your MP asking them to help provision more land for allotments.

But, even if you are still waiting for an allotment, you can probably find some room in your garden and I’m certain you can find a room to put a plant pot… Maybe, you can make it your New Year’s Resolution to grow just a little food for yourself.

I started writing a list of key points and laws that I believe in for a blog post, and a few hours later I had written what looked like a mini-manifesto. This is by no means exhaustive, and is entirely off the top of my head, with the issues that matter to me most. You can ask in comments if you want me to elaborate on any of the points, and I will probably start expanding on some of them in blog posts.

Work and jobs

• Raise minimum wage to Living Wage (currently £8.10) over a few years. Reduce small business corporation tax rate to make up for this.
• Work towards reducing hours worked each work significantly. It’s way above EU average at the moment.
• Increase pension from the current amount of roughly £100 to the ‘Living Wage Pension’ of around £170 week.

Taxation

• Significantly increase tax on higher earners (around 50% over £100,000 salary).
• Swap around how Inheritance tax works so that it is based on the wealth of the recipient, not the deceased.
• Reform council tax so that it is charged based on size of house, not where you live. Total receipt will remain the same.
• Abolish VAT, increasing income and carbon taxes to make up for shortfall.
• Close numerous legal tax loopholes, raising £10b.
• Tax new home builds, offer tax breaks for redeveloping old houses.
• Increase alcohol and tobacco to meet NHS spending caused by these. Introduce a meat tax with similar purpose.
• Increase fuel duty, while offering tax breaks for electric and hydrogen cars.
• Introduce plastic bag tax, increase landfill tax.

Health

• Abolish prescription fees.
• Free eye-tests for all.
• Free dentistry for all.
• Free social care for the elderly, costing £8b per year.
• Provide right to assisted death.

Local living

• Promote local living.
• Tax breaks for local shops and cooperatives.
• Continue to provision land for personal allotments so that they current 100,000 people waiting for one can have one.

Welfare

• Implement a ‘Citizen’s Income’ to end the ‘welfare state’.
• Significantly increase the Career’s Allowance, to reflect the money they save the NHS.

Housing

• There are 1 million empty homes in the UK. Reduce this through tax breaks for redevelopment and home use orders.

Education

• Reduce class sizes to 20, costing £500 million.
• Aim to end private schools by offering easy assimilation and removing charity status, forcing them to pay tax as a normal company.
• Replace standard A, B, C grades with a percentile system.
• Abolish SATS. Decentralise curriculum.
• Abolish university fees. Pay for this by raising corporation tax main rate to G7 average (whilst still remaining competitive).

Crime

• Legalise cannabis, with the view to legalise all drugs eventually.
• To combat illegal trade, focus on import, large gangs and production – not small street dealers.
• Educate prisoners in reading and writing.

Foreign policy and defence

• Do not renew Trident.
• Withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
• End Government arms trade support.
• Outlaw use of torture.
• Do not adopt Euro.

Waste

• Ban incinerators.
• Ban new landfills.
• Hugely increase spending on recycling.
• Introduce recycling laws.
• Collect recycling each week, other waste every other week, with a view to increasing to every third week.
• Introduce packaging laws.

Government

• Release all public information, except where it would affect an individuals privacy or national security.
• Change voting system to PR.
• Make it compulsory to vote. Allow option to abstain at ballot. Non voters will be fined, with compulsory non voters facing community service/prison time.
• Allow prisoners jailed for less than ten years to vote.
• Make House of Lords completely elected.
• Introduce right to vote at age 16.
• Introduce a written constitution and Bill of Rights, subject to final approval by referendum.

Farming, food and animal protection

• Require that all packaging show if food is vegetarian and vegan.
• Ban factory/caged animal farming.
• Ban animal testing.
• Ban import of seal products.
• Continue ban on blood sports, such as fox hunting.
• Regulate animal testing. Work toward a ban on animal testing. Invest heavily in alternatives.
• Tax non-organic food. Aim for total organic production within 20 years.
• Realise that there will be no fish at all in the ocean within 40 years and fix that. Introduce very low quotas.
• Work toward a total EU ban of GM crops.

Climate change

• Reduce CO2 emissions by 10% each year, leading to a 90% reduction by 2030, and completely zero by 2050.
• Introduce significant carbon taxes.
• Invest heavily in renewable energy.
• Introduce carbon credits.

Energy

• Cancel all nuclear power plant building programs.
• Ban building on coal power stations.
• Invest heavily (tens of billions) in Green Energy. Solar panels, wind, tidal, et al.
• Free home insulation for all.
• Oppose bio-fuels.
• Introduce Smart Meters to homes.

Transport

• Nationalise railways and buses.
• Free bus fares for children under 18 and people over 65.
• Reduce speed limits. 20 mph in built up areas, 55 mph on motorways, 45 on rural roads.
• Cancel all road building schemes, invest the money in public transport.
• Tax road freight, offer tax breaks for rail freight and improve availability of river freight.
• Abolish car tax. Introduce car purchase tax.
• Build high speed rail networks.
• Tax internal flights, shift it to rail.

Aid and debt

• Cancel all third world debt, due to ecological debt owed.
• Increase current 0.7% of GDP aid to 1%.

So, someone recently asked me on Formspring is I thought we were spending too much money on cancer research, and I replied yes. Some people got a little upset, asking why I wanted everyone to die and so on. Let me explain.

The average life expectancy for a rich country in the west is around 75, ± 5 years or so. The lowest is Swaziland, with just 31.8 years. The average for all African countries is around 45, ± 5 years or so. This huge difference is due mostly to HIV/AIDS and hunger. The United Nations has actually warned that Swaziland may not exist for much longer, and the entire population could die from AIDS. And, most people in Africa do not get enough food, and it causes them to die far earlier than in the west.

Cancer, on the other hand, is a disease of affluence. Some scientists now say that cancer is actually a man-made disease, that was virtually non-existant in the past. They say it is caused mostly by huge changes to our environment and diet. Very few people in Africa die from cancer.

Consider for a moment two lives:

First, a man in the UK who lives his whole life being able to afford what he needs, being able to buy a lot of what he wants, having shelter, a relatively pain free life and never being hungry. Imagine he dies at age 75 of cancer.

Second, a man in Africa, who never has enough food, is in constant danger, constantly getting ill, trying to provide for children and never happy. Imagine he dies of starvation aged 30.

Which life would you rather lead? The happy, safe, food-filled life of the cancer sufferer, or the man who is in constant pain and dies very young? I know my answer.

So, if we’d rather be the English man, shouldn’t we do everything we can to help the African people? If we agree that their life is far worse than ours, shouldn’t we want to help?

The amount of money we spend on cancer research to expand our lives in the west ever further seems unjustified when so many die young in Africa. (A quick search on the Charity Commission’s website will show you just how much is donated to cancer research, compared to Africa.) But, don’t get me wrong: I do think a cure for cancer would be great, and I don’t think we shouldn’t spend money on it. After all, 5 year olds in the west can still die from cancer. But, money spent on AIDS research and on eradicating poverty seems far more important to me.

Perhaps, once the life expectancy of the entire world in 75 years old, then we start focusing on the diseases of affluence like cancer and heart disease.

Let me know if you agree or disagree on Twitter or Formspring…

I’d like to introduce you to Kiva. It is awesome.

It’s a basically a charity where you can’t loose. You donate a small amount of money, say $25. Kiva’s experts then find a suitable person in need of a loan to start a business or something similar. The recipients are always in 3rd world countries like Uganda and require small amounts averaging $300 to open a small shop. When then can, they repay the loan and you get your money back.

Firstly, this is the best type of 3rd world aid. Rather than sending them a short term bag of food, you’re setting them up for life and greatly improving the local economy. As the old saying goes: “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

The other good thing is you get your money back. An impressive 98.5% of loans are paid back. Even if your loan isn’t returned, we’re only talking very small amounts like $25. You’re not loosing much. You’ve a far better chance (98%) of getting your money back than if you gave it to Oxfam (0%).

So there we go. In my opinion, the best type of 3rd world aid. I currently have around $500 of outstanding loans and take it from me: it feels great.