He may very well have believed in the initial hypothesis, but carelessness and unethical behavior corrupted his effort.
“…not only was Wakefield paid big bucks by trial lawyers seeking to sue vaccine manufacturers for “vaccine injury” to do his studies on autistic children (it’s been documented that Wakefield received over 400,000 pounds from lawyers), a conflict of interest he never revealed and that had to be exposed through Deer’s investigations, but months before he published his Lancet paper Wakefield had applied for a patent on a an allegedly safer single measles vaccine that could succeed best if the safety of the MMR were called into doubt.”
Bizarrely, many proponents of the debunked autism-vaccine connection still regard Wakefield as a persecuted hero, despite the payoffs and ethical misbehavior. These supporters are the same people who dismiss the huge amounts of scientific research vindicating vaccines as being a plot by Big Pharma.
More on the latest twist in the Wakefield scandal here.
This is absolute nonsense - the thimerosal-containing vaccines manufactured in the past were discarded both to follow the new recommendations against using this preservative, and because the vaccines would have expired years ago and not been suitable for use anyway.
These sorts of claims have long been a staple of the antivax crowd, but even they have been recognizing the inevitable and discarding the thimerosal bogeyman in favor of aluminum and various other “toxins” they claim to have found in vaccines.
It’s probably superfluous to point this out, but if not everyone wandering around in public wearing a surgical scrub top is an unimpeachable source of information on health. Unless of course the scrub top wearers I see pushing around carts of junk in run-down neighborhoods are actually working second jobs to make up for low residency pay. :dubious:
That’s the problem with you basically nice people, dear. When faced with a person who obviously needs killing, you can’t quit make yourself say “Hmm. This person needs to be shot in the knees and then fed alive to pigs,” even though that is obviously the case.
Goddammit, this makes me absolutely blind-with-rage seething-with-fury batshit insanely crazy mad. We’ve wasted YEARS of our time, MILLIONS of dollars, hundreds of thousands of man-hours of research, trying to continuously disprove this guy to a handful of utterly maniacal imbeciles. We’ve allowed the utterly lowest common denominator of irrational thought to influence where our already-precious and limited research dollars go, to continuously disprove a myth.
And now, the patron saint of the anti-vax crowd, the myth-maker extraordinaire, is a liar. Do you think that Jenny McCarthy and the other highly-visible vocal morons will take notice? Will they issue retractions? Will they apologize to the hundreds of thousands of parents of autistic children, who already feel guilty enough about the situation?
Of course not.
Fuckers. All of them.
And Andrew Wakefield needs to be staked down over a red ant hill and drowned in honey.
Well, tarred and feathered was the first step. I was going to suggest drawing and quartering, or making him personally visit each and every family of a non-vaccinated child and explain himself, or breaking every one of his fingers and setting them badly without anesthesia, so he can never write or type again. Might as well pour battery acid on his tongue too, so he can’t talk.
But, I’ll settle for a public condemnation and a long long life with the wreck of his reputation as his only comfort.
And may he never find a decent parking space again.
Wonder how the antivaccinationists at Age of Autism are going to respond to this. After all, this is the group that recently gave its 2008 Galileo Award to Wakefield, and regards him as an unjustly persecuted Man of Science.
“…the central charges (against Wakefield) are “trumped-up” fabrications which should never have been brought. I would particularly like to highlight the horrific manipulation of the truth, which has a vile ideological tinge to it”
Hot tip: buy stock in irony meter manufacturers - exploded devices will have to be replaced en masse.
This is just absolutely insane. My daughter’s close to a year now and for her entire life so far I’ve been battling other moms and getting harassed about my choices because of this asshole. The looks of shock when it should come up that yes, I got my child vaccinated and yes, I opted for the all in one shot. The mothers trying to convince me that my child would be better off without vaccines and how could I possibly risk causing her to end up autistic? Implying that I was a bad parent for doing so.
And what’s worse…this isn’t going to change shit. These anti-vaccine people are so set in their ways and so convinced that their beliefs are right, something as trivial as finding out the studies were falsified won’t change their minds. Like someone already mentioned, they’ll find other excuses. Because of these yahoos, diseases that have been pretty much nonexistent in recent history are popping up again.
I realise that Ben Goldacre’s outstanding site has already been linked to twice, and while it may seem strange to link to him defending Wakefield (before the latest revelations), it’s very important to remember that even if Wakefield falsified data, at no point did his published work support a link between MMR and autism. Wakefield may very well be a highly dishonest scientist (at the very least, he appears to be recklessly incompetent), but the MMR scare would not and could not have existed without the completely craven and one-eyed complicity of the media, who report only headline-grabbing results and frequently present articles as fact with no expertise nor even a balanced layman’s view.
Only now, when the sensational story is available (“Dodgy Scientist Fakes Data!”, “Wakefield a Fraud!”), is the story seriously revisited; only if Wakefield was deliberately mendacious is it considered publishable. Yet in the eleven years since Wakefield’s original publication, there has been an absolute wealth of counter-evidence for his claims. It has gone almost entirely unremarked; disproven theories aren’t news, it seems. We’re only interested in things that cure or cause cancer (and especially in things that do both).
So while it’s all very well to congratulate the Times if indeed they’ve uncovered wrongdoing on the part of Wakefield, one has to question why it requires this sort of revelation for a national newspaper to weigh in seriously on one of the biggest public health fuckups in decades. Wakefield’s original research, even if it had been meticulously carried out, should never have endangered the nation’s health in the way it has been allowed to, and identifying the reasons it did are far more important than rooting out one dodgy character.
What’s really aggravating is the po-faced sanctimony with which the self-same media reports on the unprecedented increase in measles cases. For some the reason the phrase “following a wilfully ignorant scare campaign by ratings-chasing editors with less social responsibility than a stray dog shitting on a baby” never seems to crop up in those reports.
Quite. As Goldacre convincingly argues, the media is now in a frantic phase of self-exoneration. “Nothing to do with us, ma’am. Just the facts; just the facts.”
I’m following this thread because I’m curious if anyone will drop in to defend the autism-vaccine link. Given that this is a board devoted to fighting ignorance, it’s hard to believe anyone would. But I do sometimes see people defending positions that surprise me.
Oh, and tarring and feathering will do nicely. I hear that’s actually quite a vicious punishment.
I had an M.Ed. class this weekend and the professor, who is the Director of Special Education at a large urban school district, made sure to explain to the class the she felt MMR and autism were linked… I almost fell out of my chair. I mean, here is an authority figure, a teacher (and PHD) for christ’s sake, who is spewing this nonsense. I explained, as politely as I could, that she was wrong, but she has experience with this (she said), and I am just a lowly student. Oh well, I tried.
There is now a class full of M.Ed. students (all with a concentration in Special Education) who believe this crap. This hoax will be kicking around for YEARS!
We’ve had a couple of anti-vaccination nuts. They fail badly as they are used to just throwing out copy & paste stuff from whale.to or other crap sites. When they get confronted with reality and facts, which this board has in spades, they melt.
A quick search shows the last one was foresam back in 2007. Liked to think of himself as a ‘free helper’. He got pounded, but never would admit it.
She was wearing tops and bottoms, and had the name of the hospital near my apartment embroidered on her scrub top. I don’t take medical advice from people at laundromats, but there are two things that bother me about her anti-vaccination beliefs.
One is that although I do not have kids and wouldn’t take medical advice from a stranger in a laundromat, this area is full of people of lower income and lower education who would.
The other is, if this chick really is a nurse at the local hospital, what’s she telling patients while she is on the job?
catsix, I personally wouldn’t believe it’s likely that she’s a nurse. It’s not impossible that she’s actually a nurse, mind you, but she could be an aide, or even a housekeeper. Or she could be wearing secondhand scrubs. Not taking medical advice from strangers in a laundromat, however, is probably a very good rule for living.
And your worries are valid.
Every time I hear about fraud and stupidity, I keep wondering how these people live with themselves. I am gobsmacked by this news, and I don’t doubt that many folks will CONTINUE to believe in this discredited study.
If anyone needs me, I’ll be outside, banging my head against our brick walls.
It’s true that people wearing full scrubs, not to mention white coats and pins that say “Trust me, I’m a doctor/nurse” are not necessarily who they purport to be.
It’s a sad fact that a very small minority of health “professionals” are antivaccine, and as such are in great demand by antivaxers who trumpet them as experts (when they are anything but) to give a tinge of credibility to their rantings. A case in point: Jenny McCarthy’s pediatrician, Jay Gordon, who claims not to be an antivaxer, but supports the discredited vaccine-autism link and speaks at antivaxer rallies.
Whoever the mysterious figure in scrubs at catsix’s laundromat was, they’re violating hospital policy against wearing these garments outside the facility. Should’ve threatened to call the scrub police on 'em.
