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The Lancet Recants Study Linking Autism To Vaccine
JamJam writes "The Lancet, a major British medical journal, has retracted a flawed study linking the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to autism and bowel disease. British surgeon and medical researcher Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues originally released their study in 1998. Since then 10 of Wakefield's 13 co-authors have renounced the study's conclusions and The Lancet has said it should never have published the research. Wakefield now faces being stripped of his right to practice medicine in Britain. The vaccine-autism debate should now end."
Yeah, right. Since when have facts ever got in the way of a 'good' conspiracy theory?
By the same principle, since you know nothing, why exactly SHOULD you believe the original study?
I think the fact that no other researchers have managed to get anything like the results Wakefield did should be influential in forming opinions about this.
suck it, Jenny McCarthy & Oprah!
That's a good way to think about it. Peer review, like the market, only works with honorable actors. Scientists are presumed to be honorable, so the way peer review is structured doesn't attempt to look for deliberate forgeries or falsehoods. Peer review is more along the lines of "this conclusion isn't backed up by your data" or "you forgot about this possibility" - that is, it catches mistakes or oversights. And it's pretty good for that.
These spates of disreputable science (this, and the ghost writers for example) is a good bit concerning. There historically hasn't been much deception at all, at least in modern science... I hope this isn't the harbinger of politics-as-science.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
True enough. The problem is that when hundreds of millions get some treatment, quite a few of those WILL (for entirely unrelated reasons) fall ill shortly after the treatment, thus the existence of these people prove nothing at all.
Like a doctor commented: If 10 million people get the H1N1 vaccine, you'll have around 8000 that die within a month after getting the vaccine. Proof that the vaccine is dangerous ? No, just the result of the fact that in a sample of 10 million, around 8000 will die EVERY month. And if you offer the vaccine first to the weakened, the elderly, those who are typically the most at risk, then the death-numbers will look even worse.
Besides, the question is never if something is entirely safe. The proper question is, is it safer than the alternative. Even if a vaccine -does- have side-effects (and all of them do, to varying degrees) it can still be totally worth it, if the total suffering from side-effects is significantly smaller than the suffering from the disease would otherwise be.