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Autism-Vax Doc Scandal Was Pharma Business Scam
Sockatume writes "In his second report, Brian Deer exposes how MMR-autism prophet Andrew Wakefield aimed to profit from the vaccine scare. Two years before the research that 'discovered' the MMR-autism link, Wakefield began courting interest in a hundred-million-dollar diagnostics firm. The doctor hoped to seed the company with government legal aid money and profit by charging 'premium prices' for new diagnostic tests to be used in vaccine injury lawsuits. By the time Wakefield published, the proposals had expanded into producing new 'safe' vaccines, two businesses to gather legal aid funding, and interest from partners including Wakefield's own hospital. The scheme ultimately disintegrated with the arrival of new leadership at Wakefield's hospital and ongoing scrutiny into his research."
I know it's not the same thing, but this sorta reminds me of that TNG episode where two planets were suffering from a plague, and the cure was on one planet...but the cure was also a narcotic. One planet cured themselves of the addiction, but kept selling it to the other planet under the false pretense they would die if they didn't continue consuming it (their symptoms were withdrawal, not plague death.) I love how at the end of it, Piccard is like "Let's get as far away from this system as we can. Screw these loonies, let them duke it out." Can't remember the name of the episode, but I know it was in the first season.
Living With a Nerd
And he will probably suffer no repercussions.
Dave
Now, I know RISC is cool these days and the VAX was pretty much the embodiment of CISC, but calling it autistic is a bit uncalled for.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...I don't think that's egg.
Being a new parent right around the height of the Autism/Vaccination scare, this is a Big Deal. This was huge! We had lots of talking heads on TV telling people not to vaccinate their kids. Famously, Jenny McCarthy went on Oprah and told parents not to vaccinate their kids. Many doctors and parents LISTENED! If you read the articles, you'll see that as a result children died of easily preventable childhood diseases because parents were too scared to get the proper vaccinations.
I am frankly amazed that this turned out to be a scam and not just sloppy science research. I just cannot fathom the depths of this man's conscience.
The sad part is, the repercussions will continue to last for years and years. Even after this has all been revealed as malicious, willful fraud, I bet dollars to doughnuts that many parents will still believe it, and won't get their kids vaccinations, putting them at risk.
I'm normally a laid back guy but this one just makes me fired up.
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
"You know what I can't figure out? How is it that all these stupid neanderthal mafia guys can be so good at crime, and smart guys like us can suck so badly at it."
There are so many parents who believed (the media interpretation of) the first study that they kept their kids from getting vaccinated. As a result, it has been more common to see childhood illnesses which had been virtual eradicated with the help of vaccination, particularly measles, as well as some other more dangerous diseases. Lives have been put at risk because this guy gambled (correctly) that new parents are easy to freak out and take advantage of. Now there is the daunting task of convincing those same parents, who aren't going to want to admit they were basically taken in a huge scam and put their kids at risk because they were dumb, which means a large number of people are going to convince themselves the retraction is a scam/conspiracy/etc and that the original study was right.
Is there a degree of felony high enough to cover this?
Maybe, just maybe, so much power over life and death shouldn't be given to for-profit organisations?
Because then you end up with crap like this.
Hi, speaking on behalf of the medical field, we've known a bunch of this for years. Which is why the accusations from the Anti-Vax mob about "Pushing Poison" on behalf of "Big Pharma" was so infuriating. This asshole lied about MMR and other vaccines because he was pushing his own vaccine. He's done incalculable harm, for his OWN profit, and his supporters accused *us* of being immoral profit slaves.
And this includes all you soft-spined assholes who would take the stance of "Well, I'm not saying they're right, but maybe they have something, there are a lot of concerns right? What harm is there to letting the parents decide if they're uncomfortable?"
Hope the truth burns, folks.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, nice fallacy.
There is one issue I have had since the beginning.
Assume it were true.
Assume all the autism is caused by vaccination (it can't be worse than that).
The autism percentage in the US in 2007 was 0.7%.
The chance a kid dies from diseases he could have been vaccinated against is higher, dunno the exact number and am to lazy to look'em up.
So these people think it's worse to have a kid with autism than to lose your child to a disease? Are these people insane?
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
I submit your son's troubles are directly causally related to exposure to you. After all, his condition declines with exposure to you.
Facetious? Yes. At the same time, people are very good at convincing themselves that they understand the "cause" of something even when they don't. This is how superstitions are born. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is called a logical fallacy for a reason, yet for some reason there's a sizable, possibly majority, portion of the population that simply cannot grasp the difference between correlation, causation, and just plain coincidence.
Famously, Jenny McCarthy went on Oprah and told parents not to vaccinate their kids. Many doctors and parents LISTENED! If you read the articles, you'll see that as a result children died of easily preventable childhood diseases because parents were too scared to get the proper vaccinations.
She's STILL DOING IT! She still says the same thing. Article in Huffington Post, dated TWO DAYS AGO:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jenny-mccarthy/vaccine-autism-debate_b_806857.html
I know children regress after vaccination because it happened to my own son. Why aren't there any tests out there on the safety of how vaccines are administered in the real world, six at a time? Why have only 2 of the 36 shots our kids receive been looked at for their relationship to autism? Why hasn't anyone ever studied completely non-vaccinated children to understand their autism rate?
These missing safety studies are causing many parents to approach vaccines with moderation. Why do other first world countries give children so many fewer vaccines than we do? What if a parent used the vaccine schedule of Denmark, Norway, Japan or Finland -- countries that give one-third the shots we do (12 shots vs. 36 in the U.S.)? Vaccines save lives, but might be harming some children -- is moderation such a terrible idea?
This debate won't end because of one dubious reporter's allegations. I have never met stronger women than the moms of children with autism. Last week, this hoopla made us a little stronger, and even more determined to fight for the truth about what's happening to our kids.
Amazing.
Is this actual fraud, or the kind of confirmation bias that goes on in science all the time? In other words, did this guy actually really believe his own results and invest accordingly, or did he fabricate his results in order to profit from the fabrication knowing it was a fabrication? There's a subtle but important difference.
The thrust of arguments seems to be that he intended fraud and a quick buck right from the start, or that he has been slandered and all will come out as he claimed once the dust settles.
But a more likely scenario is that he was convinced of the link between MMR and autism from the very early preliminary studies, so much so that he reached out for financial support and to the lawyers, expecting to not only prevent autism cases, but secondarily to make a buck from the evil pharma in the course of making them pay for their dastardly greedy mistakes. Revenge is all the sweeter when the revengee has to pay you for their mistake.
And in the end, so addicted was he to that end and his premature conclusion, that he deluded himself past the point where he could ever admit he had been wrong. When his data came out incompatible with his preconceived notion, he did not take a deep breath, count to ten, and reconsider his original position. He fudged the data to match his "reality" and passed the point of no return.
Yes, he deserves to be slapped around, but to say he planned this fraud right from the beginning is too facile an argument.
Infuriate left and right
I like the media. Everything is simple in the media. They can side with a certain viewpoint for a few years, implicitly calling everyone who doesn't agree, an idiot, selecting their guests and questions to only maintain the illusion of being neutral, while having a clear bias.
Then suddenly, something happens, new information becomes apparent and an endless stream of "it turns out that..." articles flood the public. Everything we proclaimed bad is now good, everything good, is now bad. Panic, people, for you were caught off guard again. The savior was the devil himself.
Media can repeatedly turn 180 on themselves and sell panic non-stop. They can even fabricate an issue where none exists, then as we recover, claim the opposite so we panic again. Really nice for ratings, and really suitable for pushing hidden agendas. Here's my world view: People's motives are complex. People's moral compass has more than two poles. Sometimes, good people becomes self deluded. Sometimes, bad people get things right. Sometimes, good studies fudge data, and sometimes, there is commercial interests behind a genuinely good cause.
Am I saying Andrew Wakefield was "right" and vaccines are "bad"? No. Am I saying get yourself all the vaccine shots, and all the seasonal flu ones, always because they are "good"? No. Because the world is just more complex than that. Some vaccines have helped us rid of serious conditions, and ultimately made and keep making the world a better place, while other are just peddled for profit with little or no scientific support behind them. I'm not going into details, because I'm not trying to sell you a certain viewpoint on this "scandal" as correct.
I'm only trying to bring recognition that in the media cycle we're in now, Wakefield is an evil incarnate who never even believed his own studies, who never ever had a honest thought in his life, and vaccines are as harmless as drinking purified water. You'll see one-sided "fact checks". You'll see journalist display clear dislike of Wakefield while pretending to interview him. You'll see them reiterate how wrong everyone always was.
Until the next cycle.
Did you ever give him steamed carrots? Like, the baby food with carrots in it? Or did you ever cook and mash up your own carrots? Or did your wife ever eat carrots and breastfeed your son? I don't want to cause undue alarm, but you need to search the web TODAY about carrots and developmental abnormalities. Seriously. Do it, and be careful with carrots until your child is at least in its teens.
But... but.. but... she has "mommy intuition"! How could "medical science" ever trump that?
That's like asking why people believe the earth is round. Big oil is paying billions to convince us that the world is round! We must fight this fraud!
But seriously folks... Dr. Wakefield's conclusion was wrong. His conclusion brought back diseases almost eradicated by vaccinations. Jenny McCarthy uses her "experience" over REAMS and VOLUMES of studies that PROVE NO LINK. I don't care if the BMJ gave Brian Deer a BJ to 'attack' Wakefield. That doesn't make Wakefield right. It doesn't make him more evil. I am so sick of these celebretards getting a bully pulpit to push their horseshit agendas (Oprah, I'm looking at you). STOP listening to famous people who don't know any better than you! (I'm speaking of the royal you in this case, I mean.)
I don't mind a little skepticism... but FFS, why in Jehovah's name are we giving anything like this even a MICROSECOND of our attention when vaccinations are SAFE and WORK? It boggles the mind. Wakefield has poisoned the well... it's going to take DECADES to undo what he and Jenny and Oprah have wrought... All because someone has an autistic kid and reads on the internet that MMR caused it. IT MUST BE TRUE!
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
I'm sorry to hear about your son.
I'm a Doctor (Doctor of Chiropractic). Please get your son in to a Chiropractor for immediate adjustments which can allow the nervous system to heal. If it hasn't been too long, the toxins in vaccines can be removed by chelation therapy. As a Chiropractor, I'm not allowed to make prescriptions but can recommend such treatments.
Remember:
- Proper Nutrition
- Exercise
- Regular Chiropractic treatment
- Don't visit MDs, they are quacks.
Good luck!
This is the part of the whole thing I never understood. Even if we accept that vaccines increase the risk of Autism (which they don't), the problem they solve is much more serious. People die or get permanent life altering disabilities from the diseases we vaccinate against. To employ the very over the top rhetoric of the movement itself: "Don't these people understand that they're killing babies?!?!" Sure we don't have a lot of experience with most of these diseases, but that's precisely because we are nearly immune to them as a society. Remove the herd immunity and they go right back to killing people.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
As the parent of an autistic child I always thought this one was bullshit. I witnessed my sons development. My family was convinced it was a result of the vaccines. He was normal and suddenly he stopped all the babble. Started staring into space for long periods of time. I think I'm the only one who noticed it happening before the vaccines. Its like no one looked before that. At least now when someone tells me that was the cause I can at least tell them it was a scam.
A chiropractor is a massage therapist that believes in fairy tales.
Oh please. If she even hears about this, she'll just attribute it to a conspiracy against him.
Technoli
Yeah, but even then there are different conclusions possible. If you assume autism or death was caused by a vaccine based on this fallacy why jump to the conclusion the vaccine is bad. It could just as well have been any other problem like contamination. This can of course be accidental but I would not even expect mayor manufacturers to destroy entire batches when a few are known to be polluted (after all they even shipped AIDS infected products knowingly so I don't really have their general code of ethics in high regard). So if and when jumping to conclusions based on incomplete evidence and a logical fallacy I would claim a polluted vaccine probably caused it instead of boycotting all vaccines...
Trying saying that to the mother of a son who died from whooping cough because she listened to 'experts' in the media and didn't get her children vaccinated.
I drink water every day. I'm assuming that the 500000000X dilution of adam and eve's piss should be so powerful it cures all illness.
The thing that came out recently was the outright fraud in the research. Previously, the science was assumed to just be not reproducible.
SARS, DDT, H1N5, CFC, SO2, WMD, CAGW, Y2K, MMR VAX ... the list goes on and on and on.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
It's kind of an interesting game theory problem - from the perspective of an individual parent, the risk of not vaccinating only their child is relatively low, given that they are assuming everyone else will be vaccinated. if there is even a tiny perceived danger in getting the vaccine (real or not), than the rational choice may really be to not be vaccinated. Unfortunately, this can lead to a Nash equilibrium, in that the outcome for the entire population is worse if everyone were to make this choice, similar to the prisoner's dilemma problem. From the perspective of the entire population, for example a public health official, it obviously makes sense to vaccinate everyone, even if there is some very small risk from the vaccine, as long as that risk is smaller than the risk of getting a disease without the vaccine.
90% of *everything* is crap - I keep on seeing evidence for Sturgeon's point. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Should we not spare 40% of children from DYING so that 1% doesn't get autism. That is easily worth the trade off.
Try saying that when it's your child, asshole.
Ok. Saving the lives of 40% of children is worth the risk of giving 1% of them autism including my own child. Easily worth the trade off. Your child isn't any more special than anyone else. Neither are any children of mine.
Some people are just going to be unlucky. Taking stupid risks like not vaccinating because someone hypothesizes (fraudulently as it turns out) that there might be a link between a particular vaccine and autism merely trades a theoretical risk for another well established risk. Don't get vaccinated and you might not get measles or mumps but some percentage of the population absolutely will. It's a roll of the dice. Taking a hypothetical risk over a well proven one is retarded.
Vaccines save lives. This is not in dispute. EVERY vaccine has side effects in at least some portion of the population. So does every medicine and medical treatment known to man. Unproven side effects in a few are not sufficient reason to not use a medication and certainly not reason to not be vaccinated.
Shhhhht, that is what I want *them* to believe. ;)
Worse, a chiropractor is a massage therapist that believes in fairy tales that many jurisdictions permit the use of "Doctor" in front of their names, creating the illusion of medical competency that simply does not exist.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Or worse, how about the pre-vaccination age babies who died because kids around them hadn't been vaccinated. If it was just the people who didn't get the shot by choice who were dying, then I wouldn't mind this whole thing nearly as much. The problem is that once you fuck up herd immunity, you've fucked it up for everyone, including the very young, the very old, and those with compromised immune systems. And, of course, the really horrible thing is that the people who don't get the shot, may actually survive MMR perfectly well, since by the time they or their parents have made that choice they are a bit older and more able to resist the disease, they've just made it more dangerous for everyone around them.
And (and and and...) of course, as other people have mentioned, they're putting a chunk of the population at risk of death, simply to save themselves from the (as it turns out, rather specious) chance of getting a no doubt life-changing, but absolutely non-fatal disease.
In short, and pardon my directness, but speaking as a parent, fuck those who don't get the shots for themselves and their kids right in their entitled, self-centred, arrogant asses. They and their spawn should be given the choice to get them, and then airdropped on a remote island with all the rest of the assholes who think that the chance of their precious little snowflake having a disability is more important than the life of other people's so they can't screw it up for the rest of us. /rant finished.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
I drink water every day. I'm assuming that the 500000000X dilution of adam and eve's piss should be so powerful it cures all illness.
That wouldn't work unless Adam and Eve's piss in undiluted form could cause all illness. You should really talk to a professionally licensed homeopath!
No seriously, homeopathy is even dumber than just "the more diluted the more powerful". It's also "something that causes a symptom, once diluted, cures that symptom, even if it's not what actually caused the symptom in this case." So, you know, inflammation due to the venom of a biting or stinging animal can be cured by diluting some other animal's venom, or probably just any inflammatory substance.
So I'm no expert, but I'm guessing that the diluted solution of Adam and Eve's urine that we're all drinking would cure Original Sin. Boy isn't that one going to throw the Catholic Church for a loop!
The enemies of Democracy are
It's the multi-player version of the prisoner's dilemma. It's called the "tragedy of the commons".
Learn something new.
For *every* *single* I told you so post, I want to know how many had infants at the time of the peak of the hysteria or have infants now. The issue looks a whole lot different as a parent.
In the U.S., there's a complicating factor. Vaccine manufacturers are generally shielded from liability. Where is the manufacturer's disincentive for distributing deadly product?
Not every step forward in medical anything turns out necessarily good. Read up on Pharma's invasion of Psychiatry sometime.
Finally, the choice with my kid was old-fashioned single vaccines. More shots, but essentially the same product that was given to me as a kid. For reasons I really don't get, there was a great deal of resistance to this method by a couple of pediatricians. We just found a pediatrician that had it on hand and did one at a time with time between each one.
My wife buys into this stuff regularly, so my position was not immediately accepted. But she got to the point pretty quickly where one at a time was a good compromise.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
... whether fraudulent or not, was based on 12 subjects. The innumerate media and public share some of the blame for not being highly skeptical about a study involving a 75% of the blame, but our government schools are not doing their job either.
If humans are mostly water, and beer is mostly water, then humans must be mostly beer.
Please see my other posts to this article, including these links and others:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
http://www.amazon.com/Disease-Proof-Your-Child-Feeding-Right/dp/0312338058
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html
http://www.iodine4health.com/
The first link suggests that pretty much all autism is related to various issues like you discovered in time (there are just a bunch of them from vitamin D deficiency, to iodine defiency, to lack of omega-3s, to dairy, to toxins of various sorts in processed foods or, presumably, vaccines). From there: "Most neurodevelopmental disorders have common roots. But looking at only one aspect of such conditions will not solve the problem of autism. Current autism research is based on an outdated approach -- one that is something like blind men examining the proverbial elephant. Each researcher works in his or her own silo examining different factors and coming to different conclusions. Research that integrates, synthesizes and examines all the data on causes and potential treatments is practically non-existent. The mitochondrial dysfunction identified in the JAMA study I've been talking about is ultimately only one downstream symptom of many upstream causes. Other researchers have found systemic inflammation,(ix) brain inflammation,(x) gut inflammation,(xi) elevated levels of toxins and metals, gluten and casein antibodies,(xii) nutrient deficiencies including omega-3 fats,(xiii) vitamin D,(xiv) zinc, and magnesium, and collections of metabolic dysfunction related to quirky genes that make it difficult to perform chemical reactions essential for health in the body such as methylation and sulfation.(xv)"
The second and third links show why excessive dairy is pretty harmful for most people (even ignoring how most of the world is lactose intolerant). The fourth is something I'm just learning about at the moment (iodine deficiency, where dairy is often a primary source of iodine, so watch out for it without dairy or eating seaweed or supplementing).
Your son is lucky to have you as his Dad. You might want to still monitor for the other health issues and take pro-active steps to "disease-proof" your family on a diet of mostly vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains).
As a four year old, my wife had surgeons open up her belly and take her guts out (and put them back) because they refused to listen to her mother who suggested she had a millk allergy (from an article she read) -- and it turned out, after all the trauma, yes it was an allergy to milk and lactose. Doctors (especially surgeons) seem to be trained to sound very confident even when they don't have a clue (especially about nutrition). Part of how it got that way, starting around 1910:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
For down the road:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.holtgws.com/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.