Excuse me, can I FLAY THIS PERSON ALIVE?!?!!

[drwex]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article5683671.ece
makes me unspeakably angry. We're talking about fraud and lying on a scale that affected millions. Millions of parents who did nothing more than care about their childrens' health and the children themselves.

If he really did fake those data there is not a hell deep enough for him.

Comments

[mrw42.livejournal.com]

I agree. Wakefield has apparently been charged with ethical misconduct, when what he should be charged with is manslaughter. Unvaccinated kids have _died_ because of his fraudulent behaviour.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

Well, there's always hope for civil suits, although those can't put him in jail, sadly (I never thought I'd be sad that pauper's prisons didn't exist anymore!).

[drwex]

Actually nobody dies of measles anymore. It's unpleasant and can have some side effect, but in the educated, Western-medicine world, measles is pretty much a non-issue.

(Note, I'm not talking about measles in general because the people affected by this are the upper-class generally white elite who can read and reason about things like associations between vaccines and autism. That's a comparatively small population.)

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

In the article you linked to it said two children had died of measles because of not being vaccinated.

[drwex]

Err, not quite.

It said two children died of measles. It did not say whether or not they had been vaccinated. One of the dirty secrets of the pro-vacc side is that sometimes the vaccine CAUSES the disease it's supposed to prevent. This is a particularly sensitive issue for me because of the cases of polio that have been caused by the live-virus vaccine.

THAT said, your basic point is correct. A few people do die from these diseases. But the disease is generally treatable and not highly life-threatening in the upper-class educated population. The question is what are you preventing versus what risks are you introducing. The varicella (commonly called "chicken pox") vaccine is a prime example here.

[c1.livejournal.com]

You have idiots in the UK making it a crime to photograph "members of armed forces", yet people pulling this kind of crap get a free pass.

[tigira.livejournal.com]

I've written a few things and deleted them, now. I'll leave that I would like to see him adequately punished for the deaths that this misinformation caused.

[drwex]

It's not at all clear to me that anyone died - see the comment above.

What I was mostly referring to was the heartbreak of parents trying to figure out how to keep their children healthy, and even worse those parents whose apparently healthy child suddenly reverts, loses verbal skills/abilities and develops autism. As I'm sure you know, such things cause parents to go frantic searching for explanations and for someone to LIE to those people about such a thing... unspeakable.

[docorion.livejournal.com]

Well.

Thanks for passing that along. Now I have all manner of ranty material just *welling* up.

Wait for it......rant in 5, 4, 3, 2, [well, once I write it, which will likely be sometime tonight).

[halleyscomet.livejournal.com]

It gets better. The lying, murdering sack of garbage (http://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/sunday-times-sinks-to-new-low-with-yet-more-mmr-junk-journalism/) has written a response. (Warning, the linked text will only make thinking people angry)

[drwex]

See above about murdering.

Also, people do get the benefit of the doubt. As I said - IF he faked these data.

Accusations of forging data are serious and can take years to resolve (remember the David Baltimore case?) and don't always come out the way you'd think at the start.

[quezz.livejournal.com]

I almost laughed at this -- anyone who has lived with autistic people or is autistic themselves knows this study was bullshit. I feel badly that children may have died because of this stupidity, but I also point a finger at alarmist parents who desperately want their children to be "normal" and who stop thinking. What's worse? Having a child with autism, or having them die of diseases that could have been prevented with a vaccine? If being autistic is a death sentence, then I understand, but I</> don't feel that way.

It's sad that these parents listened to what was utter crap if they'd actually thought about it. It's sad that autism is so scary to them...but I say that's because the victims of autism tend to be the parents who are convinced their children don't love them. That's about ego, not love.

[drwex]

Nobody dies of measles, mumps, or rubella in the population in question here. Really. There are some potentially serious side effects (e.g. sterility) of these diseases but we're talking about white western well-off populations. Even without vaccines these are treatable diseases.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

It's been pretty obvious for a while now that Wakefield -- and by extension, a fair bit of the anti-vax movement in the US and UK -- was a fraud, but it's nice to have it confirmed in black and white. I suppose it's too much to hope he could catch a negligent homicide charge for some of the kids who've died unnecessarily of measles in the last 15 years, but it'll be nice at least to see him stripped of his license.

[drwex]

It was not obvious to me. I spent close to two years doing as much research as I could when trying to make decisions about vaccinations for my kids.

What was obvious was that the anti-vacc crowd had attracted a whole lot of idiots and mystics but not that there was no basis for concern. By contrast, the pro-vacc side is strident and dictatorial (go read the CDC advice to pediatricians sometime) and really typifies some of the worst parts of Western medicine. Also, they've got a very bad history of covering up their own failures (see for example Rotashield).

Getting real, good, honest scientific information was way the hell harder than it ought to have been.

[gsh]

I can't believe no one replicated the study. Only 12 patients? Way to small to draw firm conclusions.

[darkrosetiger.livejournal.com]

THIS.

I can't believe anyone took him seriously with that small a sample size. I almost failed Statistics in college, and even I know that doesn't work.

[drwex]

Small-scale studies in clinical settings are not uncommon.

First of all, you're looking for a small-scale phenomenon. Second, you have to recruit post-facto because there's no way to set up a controlled double-blind study because that would involve giving a non-vaccine to a large population, deliberately. No board of ethics would ever approve that.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

If you're looking for a small-scale phenomenon, then logically you need a lot of subjects in order to catch its effects. Longitudinal studies like this with hundreds or thousands of subjects are done all the time, and are all the easier in countries with socialized medicine and central, computerized records. It wouldn't be hard to track kids from before until after they got vaccinated (or didn't, as thousands of parents chose).

[drwex]

Correct. And there have been various attempts to do these studies but they're extremely contaminated.

You're looking for a causative effect here. It's not enough to say "my child was vaccinated and now he has autism." You need detailed intervention and close tracking in order to establish proximity and even begin to build a causative case. Peoples' memories are notoriously bad for this. In addition, particularly in cases of late-onset autism, the early symptoms may not be noticed or reported for months after they first appear. At which point you're depending on the fallible months-old memories of distraught parents. That's not science, and it's not something I'd trust in a study.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

But you could very easily compare the rates of autism in vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated children.

[drwex]

You can and people have, but that's not really helpful, if you're trying to establish a specific link with causative weight.

It's doubly difficult if you wish to claim that it's not just "the vaccine" that causes autism but a specific formulation (specifically the MMR triple with thimerosol stabilizer). It's quite clear that there's no 1:1 correlation. Nobody but the true lunatic fringe is claiming that.

What's not clear is whether there are cofactors or indications against the vaccine. Again, having read the CDC reports on this, the science shows that three individual vaccines are as effective as the MMR triple. The ONLY reason it's given as a triple is because the Medical Establishment is afraid people will forget or won't come back because the vaccines are painful and shockingly parents don't like having to put their kids in pain repeatedly. So the MMR triple is purely a convenience for the vaccine givers. Balance that against the potential that it might be a risk, however small, and you can see why people get nuts.

Can I Hold Him For You?

[daurdabla.livejournal.com]

And, amazingly, no one replicated this study. You'd think something with this kind of consequences would have people saying "Really? Hey, let's do that research again (with a sample size larger than twelve) and see if we can reproduce his results.

Grr.

Re: Can I Hold Him For You?

[drwex]

See above - it's incredibly hard to do these kinds of studies.

For extra bonus points, go find the studies showing the safety and efficacy of the vaccines we DO use. (Hint: they're mostly not there. The DECADES that it took to establish that the dead-virus polio vaccine was as safe and effective as the live-virus is a sad case study in itself.)