MMR scare doctor ‘acted unethically’
“Acted unethically” might be just the tip of the iceberg. How about homicide?
The doctor who first suggested a link between MMR vaccinations and autism acted unethically, the official medical regulator has found. BBC News
The MMR is the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. The UK’s General Medical Council also ruled that Dr. Andrew Wakefield
…acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in doing his research…
Get this: the guy is a gastroenterologist and he was doing spinal taps on kids. He paid kids and his son’s birthday party £5 each for blood. His so-called research was published in 1998 in the respected journal The Lancet, but he neglected to mention that he was being paid to advise the lawyers for parents who believed their children had been harmed by the MMR.
The board said he had acted with “callous disregard for the distress and pain the children might suffer”.
The Lancet has admitted that it never should have published Wakefield. The fallout was serious. As the false belief spread that the vaccine was causing autism, parents refused to have their children immunized. The result was, as the graph shows, a dramatic rise in the number of measles cases.
In 2006 it was catastrophic for one 13-year-old boy: he died.
He had other conditions that may have contributed to his death, but he wouldn’t have caught the disease in the first place if he’d been immunized.
I don’t know if he’d gone unprotected because of the autism scare, but if so…Wakefield’s got more to answer for than junk science and a breach of ethics.
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What makes me mad about this is all the children who have not had vaccinations because of fears of autism. If a child has been harmed by this man’s irrespnsible reporting of poor research he should have to pay the price in the form (lawsuit’s or any appropriate methoid).
People have spent time money and much emotion on this man’s incredible lack of disregard for the truth. Children have been put at risk for diseases that was have had almost eliminated.
Thank you for the graph. I’m a big devotee of Edward Tufte on the art & science of ‘visual display’ and making numbers come alive.
Tufte preaches that numbers tell their own story with no elaboration or decoration needed if you just show them the right way.
It’s hard to find a more dramatic and inarguable story than that graph.
As for the MMR/Autism people, I have great sympathy for the parents struggling to find some reason for it all, but none at all for the promulgators that have enough education and information to know better. Can we bring back public stocks? I have some aging vegetables in the fridge.