I think the point was McCarthy’s repeating Wakefield’s own weak point: the article indeed merely suggested a causation. It’s not his fault that the public did not understand that such a suggestion is not proof. And the fact that he went around for years publicly claiming that it was proof is immaterial since the article did not claim so. BMJ made plenty of mistakes in not seeing the problems with this study and the warning signs that it was faked to begin with and very flawed even if not faked; but a claim that such a small sample “proved” something would never have been allowed in any mainstream journal.
I think there is a special level of hell for anti-vaxxers - it’s one thing to endanger yourself with your stupidity (i.e. feel free - take yourself out as you like), but a whole ‘nother thing to endanger other people who had no say in your stupidity, and that includes the anti-vaxxers’ kids and other people in their community who can’t get vaccinations or are susceptible to diseases due to their own medical conditions (i.e. the people who depend on herd immunity).
Journalism certainly has its own share of the blame in this clusterfuck. “Vaccinations cause autism!” sells airtime/papers - “Small study shows possible but not very likely relationship between vaccination and autism” followed by “Sorry, it looks like that was just a red herring” doesn’t.
I think you mean it’s the Lancet (where the Wakefield MMR paper was published) that’s partially culpable. The British Medical Journal (with a certain amount of glee, I’d assume) is highlighting and showing the way to cleaning up the Lancet’s mess. The BMJ is also calling for reviews of Wakefield’s previously published papers. It’s an excellent question as to whether Wakefield committed fraud in earlier work, since it’d be odd for him to have suddenly gone off the tracks with his MMR study.
The idea that Wakefield gets somewhat of a pass because he didn’t declare in the Lancet that the MMR vaccine was definitely linked to autism doesn’t hold water. He got about $750,000 beforehand from trial lawyers hoping to collect for alleged vaccine damage and was also positioned to financially clean up from his own (competing) vaccine (he’d applied for a patent months before the MMR study was published). When the storm broke in Great Britain and parents began withholding MMR from their kids, we didn’t see Wakefield urging them to continue vaccine protection. Wakefield never repudiated support from antivax groups like Generation Rescue; he became their darling and has been strongly associated with them over the years.
Antivaxers are not victims of this in any sense. They’ve created victims - kids who’ve been sickened and killed unnecessarily by preventable infectious diseases, and fearful parents who’ll suffer for this in the future.
No, the true victims are their children.
Parents killing their kids!
Parents who refuse to have their children vaccinated are condemning them to an uncertain future. While the alleged link between vaccinations and autism have been thoroughly disproved, and Andrew Wakefield has been exposed as a fraud who intentionally falsified the assertion in order to enrich himself, many parents are still refusing to have their children immunized against serious disease. Many children have already died from illnesses that could have been prevented by a simple inoculation. Children who are not immunized may suffer blindness, sterility, scarring, and death. Thousands of children are expected to die, as infection rates for diseases once under control continue to climb. Parents are not only risking the lives of their own children, they are intentionally aiding the spread of disease to others who may not have been immunized as yet. Some parents have decided it’s better for their children to die than to not suffer the non-existent side-effects of inoculation.
The Media have to ramp up the scare-mongering.
Yes, my error and apologies. And of course I agree with the rest of your points.
You’re right, Johnny. It was really interesting to see this story breaking on our local news last week, and see the newscasters pussy-footing around the issue. It seems like the music has stopped and no one wants to be left holding the bag.
The media thinks that giving equal weight to any two sides, whether they be anti-vaxers vs the entire medical community or moon hoaxers vs Neil Armstring, is “fair”. They are fucking institutionally stupid.
That’s definitely part of the problem, too - one crackpot shouldn’t be given the same weight as an entire scientific community on this issue or any other.
Personally I don’t care if the anti vaxers all die from some horrible shit, due to their own choices. But how dare they force their bullshit on others.
“feel free - take yourself out as you like” - exactly.
Anderson Cooper’s interview with Wakefield was actually pretty good: Video News - CNN
Hopefully, that’s the right link.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Are you suggesting there’s a lunatic fringe of anti-fax people backed up by a powerful secret cabal of intelligent anti-vax business interests? Who would they be? Sure a few personal injury lawyers paid Wakefield, but it’s not clear the they paid him to commit fraud. It’s just as likely the he did it on his own, knowing that if they like his results they would keep funding his “studies”.
Wakefield is not the whole basis of the anti-vax movement, and even if he was, his dethronement will make only a marginal difference. You know the scene where Brian tries to stop his rabid followers from worshipping him? Same thing. The last thing the core anti-vaxers will do is admit to themselves they have been child killing fucksticks who have been mislead by a charlatan. Now more than ever will hold the line. The best you can hope for is that people who were uneasy about vaccinations as a consequence of the anti-vax movement but who never committed to it will turn away from it.
How did you get that from what I said? 
By “good at P.R. manipulation” I mean that antivaxers have had success at framing the debate as being between cold ivory tower scientists and brave parents fighting for their children (supported by maverick doctors risking their careers to expose the Pharma Vaccine conspiracy). Too many in the news media have bought into this scenario for too long.
By “shifting the goalposts”, I’m talking about how antivaxers keep coming up with new theories about the evils of vaccines every time their claims get debunked. First it was the bogeyman thimerosal (preservative). When it became clear that reported increases in autism rates were not affected by removal of thimerosal, they moved on to other theories. MMR, “too much too soon”, “other vaccine toxins” etc.
Demonstrate one claim has no foundation, and they’ll demand you disprove some other nonsense.
Again, I can’t figure how you thought I was postulating “a powerful secret cabal of intelligent anti-vax business interests”. What we’ve seen in Wakefield’s case is that he hauled in a lot of cash from trial lawyers (themselves hoping for big bucks) and anticipated making money from his competing vaccine formula. No secret “cabal” there, just a greedy man who failed to reveal obvious conflicts of interest. What’s also reprehensible are the number of pseudo-professionals who’ve battened on to the parents of autistic children, peddling useless and potentially dangerous supplements, diagnostic tests and treatments (like chelation to remove imaginary heavy metal burdens, a treatment that is not indicated and can cause serious injury and death).
There’s an entire industry of quack medical practitioners, chiropractors, homeopaths, authors of books on natural healing, magazines on alternative health, companies that sell herbal and homeopathic remedies, lecturers, new age gurus, new age retreats, and on and on.
Check out this link, it’s pretty intense.