andrew wakefield

I must admit that I never saw it coming. At least, I never saw it coming this fast and this dramatically. After all, this is a saga that has been going on for twelve solid years now, and it's an investigation that has been going on at least since 2004. I'm referring, of course, to that (possibly former) hero of the anti-vaccine movement, the man who is arguably the most responsible for suffering and death due to the resurgence of measles in the U.K. because of his role in frightening parents about the MMR vaccine. I'm referring to the fall of Andrew Wakefield Wakefield has shown an incredible…
Last night, it came to light from a posting on the Thoughtful House Yahoo! discussion group that Andrew Wakefield has apparently resigned from Thoughtful House. I have yet to see confirmation anywhere, although Brian Deer has chimed in that this comes as no surprise to him and that he suspects that Dr. Arthur Krigsman, Anyssa Ryland, and Jane Johnson are behind Wakefield's ouster. However, more interesting is this comment from Liz Ditz. In it, she points out a couple of interesting bits of background. Tidbit #1 from 2008: In 2007 alone, Thoughtful House saw 1,500 new patient requests -- or…
I realize that Chris Mooney is a polarizing figure here on the ol' ScienceBlogs, but I have to give him props for doing a damned fine job handling questions about vaccines, autism, and Andrew Wakefield's utterly discredited 1998 Lancet study, which was retracted by the Lancet's editors last week: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy I wish I could say the same thing for Nancy Snyderman. Although she was mostly right, I cringed--big time--when she insisted that there are no studies that show a link between vaccines and autism. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!…
I feel really, really good today. The reason? Simple Orac has annoyed Jim Carrey enough to ban him on Twitter. The exchange went something like this. For the first time in a while, I was perusing Twitter (I have a really hard time keeping my Insolence to 140 characters; so I only check my Twitter account maybe once or twice a week) when I saw someone mention a couple of Tweets by Jim Carrey that went like this: Dr. Andrew Wakefield's studies r being unfairly supressed. His newest vacs vs unvacs study MUST BE PUBLISHED. RT "Show Me The Monkeys!" ;^) Folks, it's a REAL STUDY of chimps subjected…
The utter discrediting and disgrace of Andrew Wakefield, first by the judgment of the General Medical Council against him and then by the retraction of the crown jewel of his respectability his 1998 Lancet paper that sparked the modern anti-vaccine movement and launched a thousand autism quacks. The reaction of the anti-vaccine loons was very predictable, with Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey producing a hilariously paranoid conspiracy theory and J.B. Handley following suit with more monkey business. Truly, the downfall of their hero, which has been a long time in coming but has finally arrived…
"Would you like to touch my monkey? Touch him! Love him!" J. B. Handley wants to touch see Andrew Wakefield's monkeys. How do I know this? Well, there's just the little matter of his entitling his most recent excretion of flaming stupidity Show me the monkeys! and repeating "Show me the monkeys!" eleven times in the course of his post. My guess is that J.B. was trying to get a vibe going, perhaps like a preacher giving a sermon with cadences leading up to repeating the same phrase over and over again, with the intended effect of getting the audence to repeat the phrase when he says it, with…
It looks as though Generation Rescue's bubble-brained spokescelebrities Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey have finally found their niche. Can you guess where it is? Come on, take two guesses! That's right. They've made it into NaturalNews.com, crossposted from a post they had their handlers make to Age of Autism, entitled A Statement from Jenny McCarthy & Jim Carrey: Andrew Wakefield, Scientific Censorship, and Fourteen Monkeys. Truly, it is one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen on AoA or NaturalNews.com. You'll see why in a moment. Suffice it to say that Jenny and Jim have the most…
Thanks to Andrew Wakefield, it's been pretty much vaccine week for me. Well, mostly anyway, I did manage to have some fun with Mike Adams and the immune system, but otherwise it's been all vaccines all the time this week. As I mentioned yesterday, at the risk of dwelling on one topic so long that I start driving away readers, I've just decided to ride the wave and go with it until it's over. Unless something blows up over the weekend, I rather suspect that, for all intents and purposes, it'll be over as of today and I can move on to other topics starting Monday. At least I hope so. But there'…
Here we go again (rest of the post below the fold because there is a video that autostarts): "Irreprehensible"? "One in nine" are being diagnosed with autism? Where on earth did he get that figure? Can't CNN find more intelligent people to feature when it comes to reporting about the Wakefield retraction? Someone capable of putting together a rational argument, rather than a nearly incoherent bunch of conspiracy mongering strung together in seemingly random order? His arguments are painfully obtuse, and thus far there's only one skeptical voice in the comments. On the other hand, this is…
I realize I complain periodically about when I get into what seems to me to be a rut in which I'm writing pretty much only about anti-vaccine lunacy. This is just such a week, when the news on the vaccine front has been coming fast and furious, first with Andrew Wakefield's being found to have behaved unethically and dishonestly by the British General Medical Council, only to be followed up a few days later with the news that the editors of The Lancet had retracted his 1998 paper, the paper that started the MMR scare in the U.K. and launched a thousand autism quacks. Meanwhile, the cranks…
If I am wrong I will be a bad person because I will have raised this spectre. Andrew Wakefield, March 3, 1998. Interview in The Independent. The martyrdom of brave maverick Saint Andy continues apace, it would appear. As you recall, last week, after an interminable proceeding that stretched out over two and a half years, the General Medical Council in the U.K. finally ruled on the question of whether Andrew Wakefield, the man whose incompetently performed, trial lawyer-backed study published in the Lancet in 1998, acted unethically. The answer, not surprisingly, was a resounding yes, or,…
...from, of all places, a Daily Kos diary. Although the post itself is quite good, some of the comments make baby Jesus cry. There's even one repeating the old myth about H. pylori and how Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were supposedly "ostracized" for their "heresy" back in the 1980s. Still, it's good to see that the GMC ruling is having an effect as far as spreading the message about Andrew Wakefield.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue. Well, not really. Maybe it looks more like I picked the wrong NIH grant cycle to be submitting an R01. After all, the deadline for my getting my grant to my university's grant's office coincided very closely with the announcement of the General Medical Council's ruling in the Andrew Wakefield case on Thursday. As I pointed out in a brief post yesterday, the complete 143-page ruling can be found here (if you want to avoid AoA or Generation Rescue) or here (if you want to annoy J.B. Handley by showing traffic coming from this blog…
Thanks to having been up all night Thursday night and most of the night a couple of days before that working on a grant, I know I haven't had a chance to write about the GMC's ruling on Andrew Wakefield's unethical conduct in conducting his "clinical research" that according to him linked the MMR vaccine to autism. That dubious and possibly even fraudulent research ultimately fueled the anti-vaccine movement in the U.K. and, aided and abetted by the sensationalistic and credulous U.K. media, Wakefield started an MMR scare that persists to this day, having led to vaccination uptake rates…
I may have been deluding myself when I talked about 2009 shaping up to be a bad year for antivaccinationists. It turns out that the antivaccine movement is succeeding. That's right, a cadre of upper middle class, scientifically illiterate parents, either full of the arrogance of ignorance or frightened by leaders of the antivaccine movement, such as J.B. Handley, Barbara Loe Fisher, Jenny McCarthy, or the rest of the crew at the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, are succeeding in endangering your children. Although the U.K. got a head start in bringing back the measles and mumps,…
Two days ago, I deconstructed Andrew Wakefield's clumsy attack on Brian Deer, the investigative journalist whose investigations uncovered Wakefield's massive conflicts of interest and, most recently, his scientific fraud. Now, right here in the very comments of this blog, Brian Deer has responded: Obviously, because Our Andy's statement purports to be a complaint to the UK Press Complaints Commission, I can't yet comment on the substance (although I have mentioned just a couple of generic Wakefield claims right up at the top, here: http://briandeer.com/solved/wakefield-veracity.htm). But, in…
The antivaccine counterattack against Brian Deer continues. As you recall, about a month ago British reporter Brian Deer published an exposé, a tour de force of investigative journalism that led him to discover that Andre Wakefield had not only had incredibly blatant undisclosed conflicts of interest (his having been in the pocket of trial lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers and his forgetting to mention the little fact that he had been developing a competing version of a measles vaccine that he had been hoping to market) when he published his infamous 1998 Lancet paper linking MMR to…
Alright, I know that, after yesterday's epic post (which was long even by Orac-ian standards), I said that I was going to try to get away from vaccine blogging for a while. I lied. Well, not really. At that time I really did mean it. But then I came across something that I just couldn't leave alone. Regular readers of this blog know my opinion of Andrew Wakefield, namely that he is a fraud, a quack, a charlatan, and a danger to the health of autistic children and public health in general. There is, as documented in my post and elsewhere, abundant evidence to support my opinion. But apparently…
One thing that's become apparent to me so far in 2009 is that, while 2008 was the year of the antivaccinationist, 2009 is already shaping up to be a very bad year for antivaccinationists. A very bad year indeed, and this is a very, very good thing--if it can be sustained. But first, let's take a look at last year. In 2008, Jenny McCarthy was the new and fresh celebrity face of the movement that believes that autism and all manner of other neurodevelopmental disorders are caused by vaccines and that the government and big pharma are suppressing The Truth. She had emerged in the fall of 2007…
I don't know what "scuzz-wo" means, but I agree that Andrew Wakefield is one. My only nit to pick is that the puppet flirts a little too close to conflating the thimerosal scare with the MMR scare. There never was any thimerosal in the MMR vaccine. But that's just a nit, and as a blogger it's my job to pick it. First Stephen Colbert takes on Jenny McCarthy. Now, a puppet eviscerates Andrew Wakefield. He is nothing but a joke now. You know, though, the puppet Stephen Colbert's description of Jenny McCarthy reminds me of her son's doctor, if you know what I mean: "Now sure, she's not the kind…