Wakefield creamed by MSNBC
In the continuing epic fall from grace Dr. Andrew Wakefield got creamed, this time by MSNBC.
A dozen years ago, a British physician named Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a paper in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet that did immeasurable harm to children.
At a press conference shortly after the paper came out, Wakefield urged parents not to give their children the combination vaccine.The British press went crazy over the report. The word and the fear quickly spread around the world.
The language was probably not strong enough. The Wakefield paper killed children and left others deaf and disabled from preventable diseases as their parents, in an effort to avoid autism, left them unvaccinated.
And Wakefield himself, supported by a fanatical anti-vaccine lobby that to this day cannot let go of the vaccine-autism connection, continued to spread fear of vaccines right up to the time of his disciplinary hearing.
Wakefield is no martyr. He is a scientist who would not give up on his theory no matter how much evidence accumulated that vaccines are not linked to autism. And that makes him guilty of letting his zealotry blind him to the harm avoiding effective vaccines did to many vulnerable children.
I sometimes write a post that collates blog responses, both positive and negative, to a given issue.
I’m keeping one now on responses to the Lancet retraction of the Wakefield’s paper.
I’ve added your post to the list.
The post is at
http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/2010/02/on-the-lancets-retraction-of-wakefields-1998-paper-alleging-a-connection-between-the-mmr-vaccine-and.html
Nice thanks, but can you change the reference to say “Skepdude writing at Skepfeeds” please?
I almost want to buy ad space, and scream this from the rooftops: “Wakefield was WRONG, vaccines are SAFE, that is ALL!”
The kooks would probably say “There goes Big Pharma”. LOL
(pardon the pseudo-psychotic random capitalisation….)