Posted on 02/08/2009 7:53:58 AM PST by jalisco555
THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.
Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established 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 was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet medical journal. It 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 within days of the jab. The team also claimed to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease underlying the children’s conditions.
However, our investigation, confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Not only that. It shows how the media took a single scary report, created an entire movement around it, and the scientific community completely failed to discover or correct it.
Global Warming, anyone?
the problem is the mercury preservative. you don’t inject children with mercury - that is a dumb thing to be doing.
I don’t care what the latest fad/study says. Injecting with mercury = bad.
Which is not much different than how all the global warming hullabaloo is propagated either.
We've known for a long time that no additional studies have corroborated the supposed vaccine-autism link. What we didn't know until now was that it was a fraud from the beginning.
Exactly. The media has become a vehicle of deception for meeting political ends.
—as an aside to this, IMHO, childhood vaccination was about the last government program to be a success-—
No data whatsoever has linked thimerosol to autism. None.
I’m not an expert on autism but I suspect that changing definitions of the disease play a big role.
The Lancet has been repeatedly exposed as a sham journal with these high-profile studies of high-energy subjects (they are the ones who did the bogus Iraqi civilian death study, where the media further misrepresented the results because J-school doesn’t teach basic statistics).
The problem is that they did away with dispassionate scientific skepticism and replaced it with activist study. As American universities have shown, when you commit to studying socially-aware projects you’ll surely find something to support the outrage.
Many observers note that the “enormous increase in the number of Autistic children” coincided with the enormous expansion of the definition of “autism,” which now means, “any behavior an observer finds peculiar or annoying.”
Responsible scientists have been discrediting this mumbo-jumbo for some time. But as with AGW, the press made up its mind, cares nothing about the facts, and ethical voices can't get a hearing.
This bogus vaccine link will continue to be bandied about on the internet and in the press for years to come, long after scientists have moved on to other things.
I know. It's getting harder and harder to trust anything in The Lancet. And the MSM does an atrocious job when it comes to medical reporting, although in general I'd except the WSJ from that criticism.
Western society today is far more hygienic, kids spend a lot more time looking at screens of one type or another and probably more time indoors, buildings are better-insulated, kids as a whole are far more chaperoned by their parents, there’s more sugar in our food, less fat in our meat, and more processed snack foods available.
Any or all or none of these things could have a bearing on autism development. The problem is that if autism incidence is truly going up, any change in society over that period will be correlated with a rise in autism. So any amateur speculation or sham study will show correlation even if they have nothing to do with one another.
I suspect that comparing, say, autism rates from the fifties to rates today would be meaningless since we’re probably not even talking about the same thing.
“the problem is the mercury preservative. you don’t inject children with mercury - that is a dumb thing to be doing.
No data whatsoever has linked thimerosol to autism. None.”
As I said, I don’t give 2 hoots what fads or studies say. Live by real principles and you won’t go far wrong. Injecting children with mercury is d-u-m-b
Just like with ADD, this expansion makes money for counselors, doctors and drug companies,as well as researchers whose main talent is writing grant proposals.
I think professional activist RFK Jr started the preservative-autism link hysteria. That should tell everyone something about the quality of the speculation.
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