More deaths because of anti-vax crowd

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Michael

Good job, assholes:

Europe, especially France, has been hit by a major outbreak of measles, which the U.N. health agency is blaming on the failure to vaccinate all children.

The World Health Organization said Thursday that France had 4,937 reported cases of measles between January and March — compared with 5,090 cases during all of 2010. In all, more than 6,500 cases have been reported in 33 European nations…

WHO has found that young people between 10 and 19 have not been getting immunized as they should, she said.

To prevent measles outbreaks, officials need to vaccinate about 90 percent of the population. But vaccination rates across Europe have been patchy in recent years and have never fully recovered from a discredited 1998 British study linking the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella to autism. Parents abandoned the vaccine in droves and vaccination rates for parts of the U.K. dropped to about 50 percent.

That discredited 1998 study comes from fraud Andrew Wakefield. His honesty in science is at about the level of a global warming denier and creationists. Yet despite that – and despite all the deaths he has caused – he is still viewed as some great savior.

Of course, we can’t blame him 100%. Maybe 97.4%, but not 100%. The media has a hand in all this, too. Whenever any outlet talks about vaccines, they almost always allow kooks to have a place at the table. It’s outrageous. These kooks present highly selective statistics, distort tiny, inconclusive studies, and scaremonger. I’ve seen it locally and nationally. In fact, the only news organization of note that I ever see take these liars to task is CNN, and even then not always. Anderson Cooper seems to be the only person around who has any balls on the matter.

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An elaborate fraud

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Michael

Andrew Wakefield is the disgraced research who claimed to have found a link between vaccines and autism in a 1998 study. This resulted in many deaths, increased illness, and his removal from the medical register in the U.K. Now a little investigative journalism has found that Wakefield outright made up a lot of his data.

A new examination found, by comparing the reported diagnoses in the paper to hospital records, that Wakefield and colleagues altered facts about patients in their study.

The analysis, by British journalist Brian Deer, found that despite the claim in Wakefield’s paper that the 12 children studied were normal until they had the MMR shot, five had previously documented developmental problems. Deer also found that all the cases were somehow misrepresented when he compared data from medical records and the children’s parents.

And then children died because of Andrew Wakefield. I wonder when the public will get an apology from the media for promoting this pure horseshit? I’m not holding my breath.

In an accompanying editorial, BMJ editor Fiona Godlee and colleagues called Wakefield’s study “an elaborate fraud.” They said Wakefield’s work in other journals should be examined to see if it should be retracted.

I only include this because I had a different original source, so I hadn’t read this part of the article when I made the title to this post. I guess it’s just the most accurate way of describing the work of Andrew Wakefield.

Update: via PZ, watch Anderson Cooper engage in some responsible journalism by not letting Wakefield off the hook.

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