MMR
tsmith | April 15, 2013Temple Grandin is undoubtedly one of the most famous women with autism of our time. Trained in animal science, Dr. Grandin is a widely read author and noted speaker on autism. April is National Autism Awareness Month, and Dr. Grandin has a new book out, "The Autistic Brain." Together, this must have seemed like a good time for the New York Times to interview her. Unfortunately, the interview is superficial and not very illuminating, and what Dr. Grandin does say is disappointing. Her take on vaccines and autism, which apparently is elaborated upon in her new book:
Q: In your new book, “The…
oracknows | April 11, 2013I suppose that while I'm on another roll writing about the antivaccine movement I should just embrace it. I was going to start this post out again with one of my periodic laments about how blogging about the antivaccine movement has taken over and crowded out other topics that I like to write about. I realize it's become one of my go-to cliche beginnings, to the point where I sometimes feel lazy when I use it. It is, however, an honest sentiment, and I hide nothing with respect to my opinion of the antivaccine movement and how it endangers public health through the promotion of pseudoscience…
gregladen | October 6, 2011A study incorporating over 12,000 prior peer reviewed publications, addressing the question of vaccine safety, is due for release by the National Academies of Science. The study attempts to understand adverse effects of vaccines and to assign causality to supposed negative outcomes. The 667 page study covers a large number of vaccines. And yes, it addresses autism.
The study cataloged about 60 distinct adverse effects across 8 categories of vaccine treatments, two of which contain multiple vaccines, for a total of 12 distinct vaccines, as well as more general injection-related events (…
tlambert | January 5, 2011The detailed examination of the Wakefiled fraud is by Brian Deer: How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed. The British Medical Journal editorial summarises:
Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children's cases accurately? No. A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was…
oracknows | May 23, 2010Andrew Wakefield's back, and he's sure trying to come back big.
I knew when I last wrote about his utter humiliation and disrepute that he wouldn't stay away for long. In fact, he stayed away longer than I thought--a whole three months. Unfortunately, though, he appears to be on a full media blitz to try to rehabilitate his image in the wake of his having been found to have committed research misconduct, leading to The Lancet retracting his article that started the anti=vaccine MMR scare back in 1998, which further led to NeuroToxicology withdrawing his execrably bad "monkey business" study…
oracknows | February 4, 2010I 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…
oracknows | February 3, 2010If 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,…
oracknows | February 1, 2010...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.
oracknows | January 31, 2010
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…
oracknows | March 18, 2009Two 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…
oracknows | February 26, 2009"Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in."
At least, that's what Michael Corleone said in The Godfather, Part 3, and even though I'm not a mafia don, I can sort of relate to where he's coming from, if you know what I mean. It seems that whenever I try to get away from blogging about the nigh infinite level of stupidity and pseudoscience that emanates from the disease promotion movement (i.e., the antivaccine movement), it seems as though they somehow find a way to pull me back in. Of course, I'd rather like to think of myself as the reluctant gunslinger pulled out of retirement…
palmd | February 25, 2009The Autism Omnibus Trial is a conundrum for the infectious disease promotion movement. Still, their ability to pick up the goalposts and run is unmatched, and that is just what David Kirby and Robert Kennedy, Jr. have done in today's Huffington Post.
To review, the recent Omnibus decision looked at a few test cases for the "vaccine causes autism" hypothesis, and tossed them for being inconsistent with reality. This correlates well with what science has to say about the issue.
But of course the overwhelming evidence isn't going to deter these superheroes. They know the answer, and they're…
oracknows | February 21, 2009I 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…
palmd | February 19, 2009It seems the same questions keep coming up when looking at the cult leaders of the infectious disease promotion movement. When you listen to them preach or read their liturgy you can't help thinking, "dumb, evil, or both?" I think I'm going to vote for "both" when it comes to Deirdre Imus. Her sermon last week in the Huffington Post was so far over the top that my nose is still bleeding from climbing her tower of intellectual excrement.
Her title advises health consumers, "On Vaccinations: Consider the Source and Follow the Money."
I don't know what that means, but Deirdre explains, "…
oracknows | February 12, 2009Last night, I lambasted Countdown host Keith Olbermann for having been played by the antivaccine movement and having unjustly slimed British journalist Brian Deer. Clearly, Olbermann was so blinded by his hatred of Rupert Murdoch that all chief apologist for the antivaccine movement, former freelance journalist David Kirby, had to do was mention that The Times of London, the newspaper that published Brian Deer's excellent investigative report nailing anti-MMR guru Andrew Wakefield to the wall for falsifying data, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and it was like waving the proverbial red cape in…
amillikan | February 10, 2009The author of the 1998 paper that fueld the anti-vaccination movement by asserting a link between MMR vaccinations and autism was recently found to have falsified his original data. The Sunday Times reports that the study's author Andrew Wakefield "changed and misreported results in his research" which was originally published in The Lancet medical journal in 1998. "He is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain," wrote ScienceBlogger Orac from respectful Insolence in his coverage of this revelation.
Related ScienceBlogs Posts:
Scientific…
oracknows | February 10, 2009Poor Jeni Barnett.
You remember Jeni Barnett, don't you? She's the U.K. radio host whose ill-informed rants against vaccines Ben Goldacre exposed so gloriously last week. Unfortunately, the price Ben paid consisted of threats of legal action for "copyright infringement" in the form of his having posted audio of the relevant segment of Barnett's show. Yes, LBC, the radio station on which Barnett's show runs, threatened to sue, forcing Ben to take down the audio. However, as almost always happens when a blogger is threatened in such a manner, the specter of legal action led to the audio files…
oracknows | February 7, 2009Pity Andrew Wakefield.
Actually, on second thought, Wakefield deserves no pity. After all, he is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain when he published his infamous Lancet paper in 1998 in which he claimed to have linked the MMR vaccine to regressive autism and inflammation of the colon, a study that was followed up four years later with a paper that claimed to have found the strain of attenuated measles virus in the MMR in the colons of autistic children by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). It would be one thing if these studies were sound…
gregladen | February 7, 2009An investigation by the Sunday Times (UK) indicates that the doctor who reported information suggesting a link between MMR vaccine and autism may have "misreproted results in his research." The investigation purpots to show that ...
...Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients' data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.
The research [originally] claimed that the families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on…
palmd | February 7, 2009The movement against vaccination is old---very old. All medical interventions require scrutiny. Like any medical intervention, vaccines require systematic investigation before deployment, and monitoring during their use. Still, vaccines have done more for public health than most Westerners under the age of fifty can imagine.
Inoculation and vaccination have been vilified in many ways, from interfering with the will of God, to being a vast conspiracy to infect [insert ethnic group here] with [insert disease here], to a cause of autism.
There have been "bad" vaccines, and when this has…