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.

A long long time ago, a researcher fluffed some numbers and thought he’d found a heightened risk of autism from the MMR vaccine. He hadn’t, he didn’t and the errors he made were almost comical.

However, the herd-mentality OH MY GODS THE CHILDRENS caught onto this like a magnet to iron – a common theme in this blog. This is a sober, public service post, so the point is coming right at the start:

There is, never has been, never will be, any link whatsoever between vaccination and autism. If you do not vaccinate your children, you are beyond just scum, far beyond it.

However, there is a link between no-vaccinations and death. BIG WARNING: If you’re a parent or care at all for any child, this link will be very disturbing. It’s an Australian TV clip, my summary is below.

In Australia, child abusing parents (I can’t think of a better word for them) have been refusing to allow their children vaccinations. This lack of a herd-immunity (where enough members of a group are immune to make the entire population immune, it’s about 80%) has killed a four week old baby of whooping cough, a trivially preventable disease. The region recorded lower than average vaccination rates, then a baby dies.

These parents (if you are a parent, I apologise for including you with these dregs of humanity) deliberately caused the death of a newborn infant through nothing less than criminal negligence. They’re not just risking their own childrens’ lives, they’re risking the lives of other parents’ children too. Here their arrogance claimed an innocent life.

For every child who dies of easily preventable diseases, we have these people to blame. They call themselves “antivax”, but I prefer to call them “child murderers”. Children are dying because of these people.