Usefully Useless

After being published in Lancet in 1998, Dr Andrew Wakefield caused one of the biggest health scares in years. His finding was that the MMR vaccination was closely correlated with, even caused, autism spectrum disorders.

It causes vaccination takeup rates to plummet and caused the deaths of hundreds of children from easily preventable diseases.

Dr. Wakefield failed to disclose that he was being paid by lawyers looking for someone to blame autism on, failed to disclose that he’d paid children £5 at a birthday party for blood samples (hardly clinical accuracy or professional integrity) and carried out invasive tests on children “against their best clinical interest”. The General Medical Council ruling that Wakefield had acted with “callous disregard for any pain they might suffer” and considered the case proven on both counts in a ruling made public yesterday (27th Jan).

As the medical world geared itself up for another ‘thalidomide’ type case in 1999, researchers around the world started to discover that they weren’t able to reproduce Dr. Wakefield’s results. If there was a link between MMR and autism, they couldn’t find it. Nobody could. Only Dr. Wakefield and the lawyers paying him were able to find a link. How surprising is that?

After numerous independent doctors called into question Wakefield’s study, Lancet came out and admitted it didn’t meet standards of integrity and accuracy and should never have been published. Lancet’s reputation took quite a beating in the aftermath.

Even a newspaper got in on the story, The Times of London, bringing up clinical abuses and inconsistencies in the way Wakefield had conducted the study and demanding he be held to trial for it.

The end seems in sight for the corrupt doctor’s career, as he seems certain to be struck off by the General Medical Council as the two and half year investigation draws to a close, with a verdict of “serious professional misconduct” being almost predetermined at this point.

In this case, it was greedy lawyers who bought off a corrupt doctor, but it wasn’t just the lawyers. Wakefield also had financial interest in a company who was trying to market an alternative to the MMR vaccine. However, the alternative vaccine was less effective and hadn’t been adopted anywhere. If Wakefield could discredit MMR, then he stood to make a fortune. The end result of their greed has been dead babies.

In the end, science roots out bad eggs due to its distributed, competitive and independent nature. But there’ll always be bad eggs in science or any field of human endeavour. Ill-informed or outright ignorant parents are just as much to blame, however.

Now led by B-list actress and fringe lunatic Jenny McCarthy, “Antivax” has become a spiritual movement rivalling Scientology for lawsuit hilarity and anti-truth beliefs.

It’d be easy to go light on them and point to a simple misunderstanding fifty years ago or something like that, but it’s not possible. The whole thing started, simply, as fraud.

In 1990, a crooked researcher falsified some data to publish a strong correlation between the MMR vaccine with autism. Why? Wakefield never told anyone, but the fact he was taking money from malpractice lawyers who were suing vaccine makers may be relevant.

The “autism link” just wouldn’t go away, even after numerous follow-up studies failed to find any correlation. Eventually someone pointed out that thimerosal, a preservative used in vaccine preparation, contained mercury and the whole thing went to hell. This reached a crescendo in 1999 and doctors asked the pharmaceutical industry to replace thimerosal, which they did.

This is taken as solid proof by the anitivax faithful that something, somewhere was wrong.

It breaks down into two facets. First is the mercury containing thimerosal, surely this has to be harmful in some way, right? Mercury is toxic stuff! However, toxicity is all about the chemistry. For example, chlorine was used as a poison gas in the first world war, yet you have no problem using table salt, which contains extremely high levels of chlorine – 60.7% by mass to be precise, with the other 39.3% being sodium, a flammable alkali metal which catches fire on contact with water.

With mercury again it is the chemical form of it which is important. Thimerosal contains ethyl mercury, while the toxic form is methyl mercury. The difference is that methyl mercury is soluble in fats and tends to accumulate in the body, where ethyl mercury is not soluble in fat, doesn’t accumulate and is rapidly excreted.

If thimerosal is so harmless, then, why did they remove it in 1999? This is the second facet of the antifax faithful’s argument. Doctors were scared of a health-craze meaning babies wouldn’t get their immunisations – They feared it would (and, sadly, eventually did) mean dead babies.

The antivax cult was without a leader, a charismatic high priest, until the early 2000s when Jenny McCarthy’s child was diagnosed with autism. Immediately she went, to a word, batshit insane. Not a scientist and without any healthcare background, she saw the fraudulent 1990 study and blamed anyone, everyone, who made vaccines for her kid’s autism. The cult snapped up their new messiah without delay and there you have it today, busy killing babies to further their agenda.