The ridiculous “anti-vaccination” panic that has seized the attention and devotion of uninformed Hollywood celebrities – and thus of the planet – has culminated, for rational people, with the latest findings just published by the British Medical Journal [BMJ]. A short history:
Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the author of the paper in the Lancet medical journal which started the brouhaha, had his medical license revoked in May of 2010 when it became clear that he had misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all of the dozen patients whose cases formed the basis of the study. Five of them had already shown developmental problems before they received the vaccine, and three of them never had autism at all. This was a purposeful fraud, and we now know – thanks to the new BMJ report that looked into it – that Wakefield received more than £435,000 pounds (US$675,000) paid to him by a UK law firm that intended to sue vaccine manufacturers. This was a serious conflict of interest that Wakefield failed to disclose in his article. And, obviously, the intent of that law firm must now be brought up for examination, as well. The damage to public health systems around the world, happily fueled by biased media reporting and ineffectual response from government agencies, researchers, and journals, panicked many parents and led to a sharp drop in the number of children being inoculated against measles, mumps and rubella.
In the USA, the MMR [measles, mumps, rubella] combination vaccine was introduced in 1971, and immediately proved highly effective. Then the fraudulent Lancet “research” paper was published in 1998, and subsequently in 2008 the US Center for Disease Control reported more cases of measles than in any other year since 1997. More than 90 percent of those who were found to be infected had not been vaccinated, or their vaccination status was unknown. Since the MMR is such a dependable medication, that status was very probably, “unvaccinated.” This was a direct result of Wakefield's paper.
The medical profession itself was also slow to react; taking a respected MD to task for possible fraud, is not easily done in the academic world. And as the BMJ reported:
…perhaps as important as the scare's effect on infectious disease is the energy, emotion and money that have been diverted away from efforts to understand the real causes of autism and how to help children and families who live with it.
Wakefield has been unable to reproduce his results, as have other independent researchers who tried. The Lancet dragged its feet, too; they only officially -- and reluctantly -- withdrew the Wakefield paper last February.
But, as we could have expected, the fanatical supporters of the fiction are not going to let the facts dissuade them from their delusion that the MMR vaccine causes autism. This latest news will have little effect on parents who still blame vaccines for their children's conditions; celebrities, to them, still know better. We are a populace easily dazzled by screen credits and titles.
It’s difficult to know just why Dr. Wakefield committed this fraud against our generation. Surely the amount of money involved could not have been the motive – unless he’d anticipated more than he got. And, he just might have decided via some notion of “inner wisdom” or another nutty philosophy, that he’d done the right thing. We may never know, but he certainly knew that he was falsifying the data and – literally – lying to the world…