More evidence that Andrew Wakefield is still anti-vaccine

Check out the latest Andrew Wakefield tweet. Yep, that's him Tweeting out a link to the infamously intellectually dishonest post by Dr. Raymond Obomsawin entitled Proof That Vaccines Didn't Save Us, just as Australian anti-vaccine loon Meryl Dorey posted the same link on her blog about a month ago and Obomsawin himself is continuing to promote the same intellectually dishonest, graphs of cherry-picked data. To me, that puts Wakefield in the same low league as Dorey herself.

Once again, Andrew Wakefield, meet Orac and his deconstruction of Obomsawin's tour de force of anti-vaccine misdirection. Please Tweet the link to @DrWakefield. It's the least we can do. After all, I'm sure he would want to know when an information source he is touting is not only deceptive but intellectually dishonest.

On the other hand, Wakefield is Tweeting links to Autism Recovery With Homeopathy. He's clearly hopeless. Still, he might just have given me a nice bit of blogging material for the near future.

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Oh Corina, you japester you... Wakefield and facts, coexisting?? *ROFL* :-)

By Scottynuke (not verified) on 11 Nov 2010 #permalink

If this doesn't show Wakefield's true character (anti-vaccine) to other people, almost nothing else will.

If a lack of mercury in Vaccines causes autism, maybe a lack of medicine in homeopathic remedies can cure it?

But what do you expect? He has no credibility left to protect, so why should he bother pretending?

Considering some of what the quacks do to autistic children, maybe we should be grateful if they're moving on to homeopathy.

@Scottynuke, well, I figure "might as well be polite even if he doesn't listen" and that was the politest thing I could think of.

and "japester"? I don't think I'm too familiar with that word...

Wakers is supporting this due to the homeopathic remuneration scheme. As facts are succussed away, the money just rolls in. The fewer facts, the more cash.

@Corina:

Jape and joke are synonymous, I was just saying you were being very humorous at putting Wakers and "facts" in the same sentence. :-)

By Scottynuke (not verified) on 11 Nov 2010 #permalink

- SarniaSkeptic

Considering the honorific title of "doctor" relates to licensure in the UK, I think his use of the title is highly inappropriate, as I don't believe Wakers has a doctoral degree or a licence to practice - Just a BM or BS. Also, interestingly, in the UK, surgeons (like Wakefield) don't traditionally use the title of Doctor.

Quacks and cranks do tend to be obsessed with credentialism, so none of this really surprises me in the slightest.

And yet he still has a patent on a measles vaccine.

By Matthew Cline (not verified) on 12 Nov 2010 #permalink

I dusted off my Twitter account. I chose to go with dripping sarcasm: "Have you seen this?".

Andrew Wakefield has burnt all his bridges. He has nowhere left to go except full blown woo.

The funny thing is looking how the anti-vaccination idiots fete him, conveniently ignoring a major reason he got himself in a mess in the first place. Aside from his breach of ethics, he was trying to patent a single dose vaccine on the one hand while discrediting a multi dose on the other.

Wakers isn't anti-vaccine, he's pro money. Fawning sycophants aren't bad either, but cash is king.

Speaking of people that are anti-vaccine and proudly show it, Dan Olmsted has a new article up over at AoA whining about Progressives not "getting" autism. One bit he said jumped out at me, and I decided to deconstruct it over at Silenced.

Todd,
Nice deconstruct. Near the beginning you wrote 'vaccines cause mercury'. I'm sure that isn't quite what you meant but otherwise, nicely done.

Olmstead must be smarting over the slow sales as there is ample evidence for pre-1930s autism, especially with the wider definition in use this century.

@SarniaSkeptic, HadrOn:

For info:

"MBBS" (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery, typically a 5-yr undergrad degree) is the basic medical qualification in England, and the one with which students finish UK medical school. To be licensed to practise as a physician you then have to complete 1 or 2 years supervised practise in hospital, following which you get on the General Medical Council list (the "Medical Register"). Any "specialist training" (cf. US residency) comes after that.

It is this medical register (the list of those licensed to practise as medical doctors in the UK) that Wakefield's name was erased from by the GMC. He still has his MBBS degrees.

Though the UK medical degree is not formally a doctoral degree, in the way that a PhD or an MD is, people with an MBBS are almost invariably addressed as "Doctor", at least in the UK. So one could debate whether "Saint Andy" is still entitled to the title "Dr". As I said, the GMC didn't have the power to revoke his MBBS.

Whether his continued use of the title "Dr" is misleading would depend on the context. If he started up a "holistic detox" clinic and billed himself on the letterhead as "Dr", then it would arguably be highly misleading. This is because it would imply to most people - prospective customers - that be was a licensed physician, which he no longer is. Just calling himself "Dr" on a book jacket - less clear-cut.

Re. UK surgeons going by "Mister", this is a relic of the days of the barber-surgeons, and has a kind of inverted snobbery attached to it. You would only call youself "Mr" if you were a consultant surgeon (i.e. an attending, in US parlance, having completed all your general and specialist surgical residency training). Wakefield never did complete surgical training. So he wouldn't, under British medical custom, be entitled to call himself "Mr" in that surgical sense.

All a bit confusing, I know. But it is a fact that Wakefield never completed medical or surgical training in any speciality - including GI surgery. And he didn't train as a gastroenterologist either. In the UK he would have been classified as a junior doctor - one who never had formal "named" responsibility for a patient, since this rests with the attendings/consultants - who went into full-time research in his mid-to-late 20s.

RE #20 by Dr.Aust.

I just checked again, Andrew Wakefield is still on the register of the UK GMC. The GMC has decided to erase his name from the register, but it is not in force, presumably because Wakefield filed an appeal to the High Court. His precise status is "registered without a license to practice." I don't think that Wakefield has had a license for a few years in the UK. Amongst other reasons would be paying for malpractice insurance which he wouldn't need as he wasn't practicing.

Interestingly, there is no longer a real register used by the GMC. I emailed them and asked if they would have a ceremony where is name is erased. Sadly, I learned that they would merely change a value on the database.

I am surprised that you have Wakefield never having any surgical specialization I thought that was what he did for some time. I know that at the Royal Free he was not allowed to have patients.

scottynuke @ 10
Ah, thanks. I wasn't entirely sure about what it meant, and so didn't want to jump to conclusions. Thanks for explaining to me!

And yes, yes it is funny.

I suppose that Dr. Obamsawin will be able to come up with some sort of correlational proof that vaccines cause mercury. Most likely the number of papers written about mercury has increased as the number of vaccines given has increased.

This must be distressing for those using the periodic table of elements.

Clearly this is a conspiracy almost as great as the conspiracy that prevents anti-vaxers from being rational.

Sheldon101: It's an understandable confusion. He used to prowl the autism conference circuit being reported talking about "my patients" and telling parents that concern over vaccination was grounds to give their child a colonscopy. eg:

http://briandeer.com/wakefield/andi-interview.htm

However, it's a fascinating fact that he has never had lawful care of a patient at any time in his career. He was once a trainee surgeon (and around that sprang the myth that he was a transplant surgeon, when in fact he was a student in the department of people cutting up dogs and rodents), but, as Dr A points out, he never became a consultant surgeon.

And, as for his claims to be a histopathologist, he insisted under oath before the GMC that he never did that either. What he mostly did at the Royal Free was suck up drug industry and lawyers' money. His colleagues point out that he never wore a white coat unless a TV crew came round.

It's all a bit academic now, because he's finished, but he never really was anything in the first place but a lying, greedy buffoon.

speaking of lying greedy buffoons being outed...here's some real justice...

âThis is absolutely precedent-setting â this is really going to set peopleâs hair on fire,â said Douglas B. Farquhar, a Washington lawyer who recently presided at a panel on law enforcement during a drug industry conference where federal officials warned they were focusing on individuals. âThis is indicative of the F.D.A. and Justice strategy to go after the very top-ranking managing officials at regulated companies.â
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/health/10glaxo.html?_r=1&ref=drugspha…

one more woohoo! a great day for patient/consumer safety is upon us.

re: mikema, "The fewer facts, the more cash."

you must have your head buried in the sand or in your ass to not know reality. it's the more "facts" (not the quotation marks...they're intended), the more the cash (thanks to sally for this quote):

"Novartis joins a growing list of pharmaceutical companies that have settled government investigations into health care fraud in the last few years, including Pfizer, which paid $2.3 billion; Eli Lilly, $1.4 billion; Allergan, $600 million; AstraZeneca, $520 million; Bristol-Myers Squibb, $515 million; and Forest Laboratories, $313 million. Pfizer, Lilly, Allergan and Forest pleaded guilty to crimes in the cases."

Wakefield, once again showing that he's not up with the times, tweeted a link to an article about Generation Rescue's 2007 phone survey. I sent replied with a link to Orac's dissection of the survey.

@Dr Aust

Thanks for clearing that up for me.

Todd W.
I keep seeing that people reply to Wakefield's tweets but I was wondering if he ever responds to them in any way. Or does he just ignore it?

@Travis

Well, I only just tweeted to him, but looking at his tweets, it seems he mostly just posts links to anti-vaccine stuff: articles, youtube vids, etc.

re: mikema, "The fewer facts, the more cash."

you must have your head buried in the sand or in your ass to not know reality. it's the more "facts" (not the quotation marks...they're intended), the more the cash (thanks to sally for this quote):

"Novartis joins a growing list of pharmaceutical companies that have settled government investigations into health care fraud in the last few years, including Pfizer, which paid $2.3 billion; Eli Lilly, $1.4 billion; Allergan, $600 million; AstraZeneca, $520 million; Bristol-Myers Squibb, $515 million; and Forest Laboratories, $313 million. Pfizer, Lilly, Allergan and Forest pleaded guilty to crimes in the cases."

@ VD, such an apropos name by the way. I'm afraid that you not only missed MikeMa's homeopathy pun but you don't seem to understand that you are engaging in a Tu Quoque fallacy. The fact that federal regulators are tightening their oversight (and punishment) on pharmaceutical companies is welcome news and a sign that the system is working better. Their (pharma) unethical misdeeds don't exonerate the malfeasance of someone like Wakefield or any other charlatan that preys upon desperate people and visa versa. They are both worthy of criticism.

So you have no problems with him subjecting children to unnecessary procedures to collect data of dubious significance that was erroneously interpreted?

By Mephistopheles… (not verified) on 17 Nov 2010 #permalink

Can you imagine anything more pathetic than a group of Wakefield's acolytes and sexual partners gathering together and pretending to be the European parliament?

How low and rediculous can the Wakefield/Tommey alliance get?

By Passing thru (not verified) on 17 Nov 2010 #permalink