Documents emerge proving Dr Andrew Wakefield innocent

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Here's the story.

Any thoughts??

The accusations against Wakefield were about methodology, not necessarily about the individual diagnoses of those in his study. As he was studying autism, he would certainly want people in his study that were autistic. It is how he determined their autism and how he conflated the facts as he knew them that is at issue. This paper proves nothing other than some of his patients were autistic according to another set of eyes. Did he know of this paper? Is THIS paper worth anything?

I'd take anything from that website with a pinch of salt.

1. This belongs in the politics section

2. Even if the Wakefield study wasn't outright fraudulent (which this website doesn't adequately address), it doesn't change the scientific relevance of such a small study, even if you accept everything thing he claims as truth.

3. All of the other evidence gathered in study after study that contradicts the link between vaccines and autism vastly outweighs this one small study.

4. Going even further, even if you were willing to close your eyes to all of the evidence, you would have to weigh "# of cases of autism caused (assuming this number isn't 0)" vs. "# of children who died due to lack of vaccination". This number includes children who, for other medical reason, can't be vaccinated.

This issue is personal to me, as I came within an eyelash of dieing from measels. I spent a week in the hospital, contracted pneumonia, and had a fever above 105.

The nature of the web site suggests that it is some sort of site associated with an organisation which is trying to sell you something. It looks like a web site for some sort of "fringe doctors" rather than mainstream medicine or an academic site.

I am not of the view that Andrew Wakefield is off the hook, I think he is still in trouble. I think he should be banned from working as a medical doctor for life in all parts of the world.

It is a side issue precisely who falsified the facts, or when. Three of the team were censured by the GMC, but Wakefield was struck off.

Wakefield received many hundreds of thousands in secret fees for creating publications to support his legal sponsors, and attempted to create a panic-driven market for products that he (also secretly) patented. "Innocent" is a huge stretch when Wakefield was wrong, probably knew he was wrong and certainly benefited from promoting his falsehoods.

It seems quite likely that Wakefield continues to benefit financially from the die-hard vaccine deniers, although his name has been erased from places like the Thoughtful House website.

I'm going to go a step further and say that he should be in prison. He has a lot of blood on his hands.

There are two ways to see this.

First, there is a lot of money in mainstream medicine. People who buck the trend are often ostracized and discredited.

True story....bacteria causes most cases of ulcers. A simple bismuth solution (like Pepto-Bismol) will CURE most cases of ulcers.

The doctor who discovered this and promoted it was practically driven out of the health care profession because his discovery ran contrary to the commonly accepted (and lucrative) methods of treatment for ulcers at that time.

Many years later, mainstream medicine came to recognize his discovery was correct.

So, the medical community WAS NOT motivated by the public good, and they are willing to discredit sound findings to defend existing beliefs.

Second, when an "authority" tries to crucify one person but turns a blind eye to more egregious wrongs that are well-documented, they are hypocrites.

Clearly, the anti-vaccine message is getting around. You might believe it. You might reject it, but it is indisputable that there's a lot of nasty garbage being put in vaccines, people are being hurt by them, and more vaccines are being pushed every year as if all are ultra-critical for our health...chiefly because there are huge money interests backing their development and sale.

I'm amazed how people are so willing to trust supposedly "established" sources as infallible but are incredibly skeptical of others who can just as well document their case.

1. I think this quote applies here: "But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan
2. The fact of the matter is that lots of scientists have looked for a connection between vaccines and autism, and haven't found a thing.
3. Do you eat seafood? You ingest more mercury when eating seafood than from vaccines.

There are more than two ways to see this. That you selected two that support your view and implied that these are the only two means you are unable to develop an unbiased argument.



There is big money in alternative medicine as well. If fact medical "alternatives" are often (not always) nothing but scams whose sole purpose is the generation of profit. So this assertion means nothing. Connecting profit motivations to "maverick persecution" is weak argument. It is possible to find mavericks that were accepted, just as it is possible to find mavericks that were persecuted. Einstein's theories were resisted. Does that make all of physics suspect?




Therefore it must be true that all ideas not accepted by the mainstream are correct and simply suppressed by monied interests. You conflate one incident into a universal generality.



And this happened because the science supported it. Eventually the science won out. What does the SCIENCE say about vaccines?



You again conflate a specific series of events and apply them to an entire field without any supporting evidence. While it is true that there are those in the medical industry that are ONLY concerned with profits, there are many that are motivated by more altruistic ideals.



And hypocrisy invalidates the science in what way? This is a Red Herring. By attaching the emotional content of hypocrisy to your argument you are hoping to invoke a negative reaction that would override a rational response.




Do you know how much DIRT you eat every year as part of your normal diet?

Better yet, maybe you would find it a good health regime.
http://www.aboutclay.com/info/Articles/eat_my_dirt.htm



Show me the science. Drop the alarmist rhetoric. I already distrust big business. But you offer nothing but fear and platitudes.

The point I was driving at is that Wakefield was crucified by the mainstream establishment because they don't like the message he supports, and they seemingly twisted what he did publish to imply it said something he did not.

His "disgrace" was done very publicly...there was an agenda behind it.

Whether you believe vaccines are good, bad, or somewhere in between, the effort to discredit Wakefield was not based on any black and white wrong he did. Rather, it was political and money-based more than anything else.

Can you offer anything that would suggest his science is correct?

Can you PROVE that what he published is absolutely false or that he knowingly published false information?

I don't need to. He has made the claim. It is up to HIM to demonstrate its veracity. That is the nature of science. His work has not held up to scientific scrutiny. If I make a claim that I have found an unlimited energy source, I must show this claim to be true. I can't sit back and tell the world "prove that it is not".

Besides, if you followed the other links in this thread, the proof you ask for is right in front of you.

I guess that you have not read the GMC report, which is a public document. There is plenty of "black and white wrong he did" documented in great detail:

http://www.gmc-uk.org/Wakefield_SPM_and ... 595267.pdf
http://www.gmc-uk.org/static/documents/ ... _Murch.pdf

Hahaha, there was absolutely NOTHING wrong with the Wakefield study. The only reason he's being villified is because he actually ran an honest study. All the studies that supposedly "disprove" the vaccine-autism link are disgraceful. Please actually read one before you quote them.

For example: "Lack of Association between Measles Virus Vaccine and Autism with Enteropathy: A Case-Control Study" (available online)

First of all, this study isn’t that big—only 25 participants. Wakefield et al. conducted a much larger study in 2002 (Uhlmann V., Martin C, Shiels, Wakefield AJ, O.Leary JJ. Possible viral pathogenesis of a novel paediatric inflammatory bowel disease. Molecular Pathology 2002;55:84-90), which found measles in 75 of 91 biopsies from autistic children with GI inflammation, and in only 5 of 70 samples from non-autistic children. The Hornig et al. study also uses Professor O’Leary’s laboratory to obtain its results, confirming it with two other labs, thus verifying its validity in the 2002 study.

Why the different results? For one, this study is looking for *persistent* measles virus infection, and all but one of the subjects were given a biopsy more than six months after receipt of MMR. (“Children reported by parents to have received MV immunization within 6 months of planned biopsy [in accord with pediatric provider immunization charts] were excluded.”) Inability to find measles virus thus only indicates that the infection is not persistent, and in no way rules out the possibility that the virus had a ‘hit-and-run’ effect, causing damage and then being excreted, which is how many pathogens and toxins have their effect.

Also, the study uses nonparametric statistical methods, which are far less robust than parametric models. Why it does so is unclear, but it should be noted that using nonparametric standards could be used to weaken an association that is apparent using parametric methods. I’m not saying this DID happen—it’s impossible to tell—but it is really curious that the authors would choose to use the weaker methodology.

Also, this study only looks at five children who were specifically noted to have regressed following MMR vaccination—even less than the eight of Wakefield’s original 1998 study. Incidentally, this was the main grounds for dismissal of Wakefield’s study, that it relied on “unquantifiable things like parent recollection”. (it is also claimed that “his accounts in the paper not match the original patient records”, which comes from Brian Deer, a presstitute who seems to have no other job but to try to discredit Wakefield, and should have had no legal way to even access the patient records he claims to possess).

First of all, most of these cases were confirmed by a qualified professional. But anyways, nobody is really more qualified to assess their own child’s development than the parents, who spend more time with them than anyone else.

And don’t any of you find it the TINIEST bit strange that children can be developing normally, passing all their milestones, and then suddenly they start to regress, sometimes almost immediately after receipt of MMR or DPT, etc.? For a child to *regress* is VERY abnormal… even though we’ve become somewhat used to the idea, since it happens so often these days.

And we have re-challenge in many of these cases too—parents note regression after the first vaccine, but they either don’t immediately jump to conclusions, or else they are coerced to give boosters by overzealous health authorities, and they note further deterioration after the booster. These are very strong indications that the vaccine is causally related. These parents aren’t stupid, or hysterical, or any of the other condescending labels given to them by people like you who have a knee-jerk reaction to dismiss their testimony.

This reminds me of a quote by Dr Irwin Bross: “By science and common sense, when epidemiological studies of humans are positive and laboratory studies of animals are negative, it is prudent public health practice to accept the human evidence as a guide. My employer, the New York State Health Department, not only disregarded the human evidence of the dumpsite hazards, it harassed me into early retirement from the state service.”

Yes, anecdotal evidence should be taken with a grain of salt, which is why we need PROPERLY CONDUCTED epidemiological and clinical studies to assess what these reports mean. Hornig et al.’s study does not provide enough evidence to draw any solid conclusions. But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that it is sufficient.

It states: “If MMR is causally related to either GI disturbances or AUT it should precede their onset. Similarly, if GI disturbances contribute to AUT they should precede onset of AUT. We approached temporal relationships in the following manner: subjects with MMR administration and GI onset in the same month were considered to have MMR administration before the onset of GI episodes; subjects with GI episode and AUT onset within the same month were considered to have GI onset before AUT onset; and subjects with MMR and AUT onset within the same month were considered to have MMR onset before the onset of AUT.”

Note that this refers to the use of nonparametric standards; under parametric standards, we could have looked at data spanning a longer time period than a month, which would have given us a more complete interpretation of the data.

Anyways, “Only 5 of 25 subjects (20%) had received MMR before the onset of GI complaints and had also had onset of GI episodes before the onset of AUT (P = 0.03).” So, if these results can be extrapolated to the general population, can we then conclude that “only” 20% of children are at risk from developing autism after MMR?

In reality, this study is inadequate to conclude much of ANYTHING—it certainly does nothing to disprove Wakefield et al.’s findings. The real criminals re in the GMC, the CDC< the FDA, the AAP, etc. Wake up.