So the MMR scandal was all based on a lie. Time article here.
Money quote here:
Damn you Dr Wakefield! You seriously scared a great many people into putting their children at real risk.
There shouldn’t be anything ‘mild’ about this pitting whatsoever. Wakefield has children’s blood on his hands and should be held responsible for that.
I’m sorry, but I just don’t have a mastery of creative vitriol. I’m just really mild mannered. Most of the time.
Oh my God.
Losing his medical license is too good. He needs to be publicly tarred and feathered.
Check out the Bad Science blog for info on how this is still rumbling on…
That utter asshole. I work in medical research and falsified research leads some people to smear all research, distrust studies. Plenty of people who believed the original study will stick to their guns, disbelieving this information; others will just go rabidly anti-Medicine in other ways. He has done immense harm to the reputation of researchers and vaccinations both.
Here is a little more of the article for those of us who didn’t make the connection right away.
I have a question…why? Why would he want to prove a link between MMR vaccines and autism?
What’s really depressing about this is Ferret Herder’s right…showing Wakefield to have been a fraud won’t cool the anti-vaxers at all - it’ll just be ‘proof’ for them that the medical establishment is corrupt.
Short version: He was in the pocket of a lawyer who wanted to sue the MMR vaccine makers over an autism link.
My uinderstanding was that he was getting funding from a lawyers group who were hired by parents to sue vaccine manufactures for damages. He was trying to ‘prove’ the link to bolster the damages claim.
Congrats to the Times for investigating this. I am stunned.
I know exactly how this is going to play out on the TV news:
"A study linking vaccinations to autism has been shown to be fraudulent, blah blah blah…But IS there a real link? many parents still believe in the link. (Cut to some sound bites from about 20 of these parents):rolleyes:
The thread title confused me. I had no idea why you were pitting a Philadelphia rock station.
Unfortunately this is not the first or last time something like this has happened when doctors were in the pockets of lawyers.
At least it should convince the politicians who have been trying to score points over it.
It won’t do that, either. Politicians love to wrap themselves in the pro-family flag and don’t let reason get in the way of that.
Robin
Now, what Google ads am I getting in this thread? Just one, advertising a clinic’s special ‘separate vaccines for M, M and R’ service.
No links to, for instance, Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog. :smack: times infinity plus one.
Gresham’s Law appears to apply to information as well as coinage. 
The autism/vaccine/thimerosal thing was on the news one day at the laundromat. A woman dressed in scrubs embroidered with the name of one of the local hospitals told me how vaccines with thimerosal in them absolutely do cause autism and she knows this because she is a nurse. Then she went on to say that even though thimerosal is not put into vaccinations anymore, it’s still not safe to get your kids vaccinated because most doctors are using their stock of old vaccines that still have it in there from years and years ago.
I really hope she’s not working in pediatrics.
In the U.K., the affair was very badly handled. The government forbade doctors from using the old, separate, vaccines and just flatly denied any problem. It would have been over in 3 months if they’d said something along the lines of, “Okay, let’s look at your data. In the mean time, concerned parents can opt for the old vaccines.” And he would have been found to be a fraud very quickly.
But he’s now been well and truly kebabbed.
He wanted to impress hot model and autism activist Jenny McCarthy.