- Re: No question Andrew Wakefield has a good case, no he hasn't.... Archived Message
Posted by John Monro
on May 24, 2019, 10:13 pm, in reply to "No question Andrew Wakefield has a good case, Blue. But he can't get justice, having been designated"
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...I have not followed this case in detail so I'm reading up quickly from some reliable sources. First against this man is his character. His only actual claim to anything important was his paper on the supposed link between MMR vaccine, autism and bowel disease. This paper is thoroughly discredited, by well qualified researchers, around the world. Now, you'd think a bona fide physician would, in the face of this criticism, be prepared to re-visit his findings, to respond to expert criticism by presenting some other factual alternative, in other words, be as humble and self-critical as any true scientist and physician should be. We can all make mistakes, and should be willing to admit them. It's the denial or cover up that brings people down. But no, not willing to take a milligram of criticism, unable to answer in any way the reality of these adverse professional opinions, many rather better qualified then him, he ploughs on totally undeterred and with the certainty of the truly ignorant, continues his tirade against the medical establishment and his self-promotion as the vaccination guru to beat all previous vaccination gurus. Sorry, neglecting all other aspects of this case, this is the classic behaviour of a quack, a particularly egregious and damaging one too. I don't wish to re-examine all the evidence against him, because you have already discarded this, and nothing I can write will convince you otherwise. But the most obviously concerning thing to me about this story is this. For some reason, Andrew Wakefield has convinced himself the MMR is dangerous and causes bowel inflammation and Autism. So how does he investigate it? He gets a legal entity some of whose clients are pursuing claims against Merck for its MMR vaccine, gives them the requirements he's looking for (MMR vaccine, Autism and bowel problems) and they basically refer some of these cases to him. Just 12 cases. This legal entity provides him with funds from Legal Aid (a fact he does not declare in his paper, which was another major breach of medical research rules.) So just think about this. 90-95% of UK children get the MMR vaccine. Autism is not that uncommon, perhaps 1% of chidden, and some form of bowel disorder would be much more common than this. Autism often first becomes apparent from the age of 12 to 18 months, milder forms rather later. So you have this normal temporal association between MMR and the first signs of Autism. It's so easy to say, my child got the MMR vaccination at 15 months, he shortly after showed signs of behaviour disturbance, ergo the MMR vaccine caused his autism. That's much the same logic as blaming the rise in television in causing criminality in children. They are temporal coincidences, not necessarily cause and effect. What would have been the best way to suggest a link between MMR vaccine and Autism? Most likely an epidemiological study. You'd find out, first and most obviously. whether autism was commoner in those children that had had the MMR vaccine, vs those that had not. That would be a difficult but not impossible study, requiring a large number of subjects, in the thousands, to come up with a statistically significant figure. This has been done and shows no such problem. But Wakefield didn't do this, he deliberately selected the cases to prove the thesis. But you can't do this. It's a total scientific and statistical nonsense. Its so distorting as to be absurd to anyone who knows anything about research. He only got away with it in his first paper because he didn't reveal any of this in his paper, not even to those professionals he collaborated with. Because Andrew Wakefield was and remains a quack. Subsequently, ten of the contributors to the paper retracted the opinion expressed in the paper and stated emphatically that the paper failed to show an association between MMR vaccine and autism and bowel disorder, there were too few cases and no statistical threshold was reached. Only Prof. J. A. Walker-Smith didn't do this (along with Andrew Wakefield of course). Subsequently he was struck off. He appealed this and eventually, after he'd retired, had this GMC decision reversed. To say that Prof J. A. Walker-Smith was "exonerated" is to exaggerate this success, he was still guilty of poor research practice and the claims he made, but not to such an extent as that required him to be struck off, he'd "just" made a mistake, and wasn't party to much of the fraud conducted by Andrew Wakefield. To then extrapolate this partial exculpation of Prof J. A. Walker-Smith to then suggest that this also exonerates Andrew Wakefield as you do, Rhisiart, is then patently absurd. I won't go on, because this MMR matter is just part of your wider cynicism in regard to childhood immunisation and immunisation in general. I put you in regard to this as part of the growing anti-science and anti-academic traits in modern society. The internet has given some great boons, but very few predicted its capacity for the dissemination of lies and fake news as now pertains. And as I intimated in my prior posting, even if drug companies are guilty of profiteering from mass immunisation, that is an entirely separate matter from whether or not such immunisations are effective and safe. That corporate matter could well be investigated, but for the moment governments are in thrall to corporatist interests, and the neoliberal economic system we presently run. But I shall restate it, it's dangerous nonsense to attempt to deal with this supposed corporate malfeasance (you call them "rackets") by denying children their right to a healthy future. I will discuss this matter no further. Every few years I feel compelled to right to try and correct the sheer nonsense I read here but why? I don't know. |