Thursday, January 06, 2011

Honey Dipped Flim Flam

Although I thought this was already done, Andrew Wakefield's autism study has been declared a fraud. Not just mistaken; out-and-out fraud. Anderson Cooper interviews him and gets to the point. Wakefield sees a conspiricy against him and is standing by his work, facts be damned. He also keeps pitching his book, which is standard scientific procedure, I'm told. Cooper has a golden line when Wakefield tells him to read the book for more information; "If you're lying, the book is also a lie." Anyway, it's a good takedown. (Edit: Link to the actual article)

Of course, the anti-Vax folks continue to support Wakefield, despite the medicine being against them, because they don't care about facts. The folks at Science Based Medicine, as well as Elyse Anders of SkepChick and Parenting Within Reason have been wonderful about countering anti-Vaccination claims and showing them to be false. Make no mistake. There is no evidence that vaccines cause autism, and there is evidence that they save lives by lowering the incidence of disease.

Now Wakefield is peddling his bullshit to the Minnesota Somali community. Hopefully they will understand that Wakefield is a fraud and a charlatan and will tell him to go to hell.

Well, I'm off to go over my finances and see if we can afford to keep the Spinoff and still survive. Seeing how hard it is to make it on $250,000 a year, I'm not sure how we can possibly get by on 1/2 of that. Anyone know if I can sell my spleen?

Your Two Posts in One Week? Must Be Bored leader

2 comments:

dog gone said...

I was just reading yesterday that in areas where vaccination rates have declined in Europe the increase in previously rare illnesses, such as measles, had reached endemic levels.

So, while Wakefield's position does not do anything positive or useful or constructive - it does do real harm. It's not like there is some worthwhile tradeoff here.

I'm assuming eventually the spinoff will be vaccinated, at the appropriate age levels?

There have been some similar movements among animal fanciers - like those who breed or show dogs for a hobby - that vaccinations might be bad. There is some indication that there are optimum ages for those vaccinations, and even possibly given the rate of immune system development a benefit to staggering animal vaccinations instead of using the combo vaccines. I haven't seen as successful a debunking of those anti-vaccine ideas yet, but this leads me to think that a similar development may be on the horizon... there can be some surprising overlaps in animal and human medical research.

DiscordianStooge said...

He's already started on the Hep B vaccine.

There is a vaccine schedule for babies. I don't know if it's optimized for when the different shots are received, vs. set to the baby doctor visit schedule.