MMR Doctor Struck Off

[mystictiger]

Is it a conspiracy to silence a brave maverick doctor? Maybe but unlikely. Read what he did. Read how he lied.

If he has a worthywhile message, he destroyed it by lying.

http://www.gmc-uk.org/static/documents/content/Wakefield__Smith_Murch.pdf
BBC News - MMR doctor struck from register

[Torch]

Is it a conspiracy to silence a brave maverick doctor?

Hardly.

The vaccination/autism link is specious at best and has never been proven.

All he really managed to do was scare a lot of parents into not vaccinating their children, thus opening the doors to case after case of infectious disease outbreaks, plus the health costs of the diseases themselves.

[Vekseid]

Children have suffered and died because of this fraud.

This could not come too soon -_-

[Zakharra]

Children have suffered and died because of this fraud.

This could not come too soon -_-

Agreed.

[Trieste]

Yeahno, he's scum who deserves what he got.

Am I the only one who is starting to associate the word 'maverick' with 'scumbag'? *mutters about election hyperbole*

[DarklingAlice]

Certainly took them long enough. Although, from my understanding, he has only been stripped of his right to practice medicine. Which is a good start, but I believe he had already retired from practice anyway. Does anyone know if the long overdue criminal charges will be brought?

Also I think I have a few things on this subject bookmarked, will post links when I get to my computer.

[Jude]

From the very beginning, back in 1998 when he started his original study, there were plenty of reasons (undisclosed of course) which made his research dubious.  Suuuch as this:

The investigation has found that when he warned parents to avoid MMR, and published research claiming a link with autism, he did not disclose he was being funded through solicitors seeking evidence to use against vaccine manufacturers.

The Sunday Times has now established that four, probably five, of these children were covered by the legal aid study. And Wakefield himself had been awarded up to £55,000 to assist their case by finding scientific evidence of the link.

Wakefield did not tell his colleagues or medical authorities of this conflict of interest either during or after the research.

The children were subjected to a battery of invasive procedures, including colonoscopies and lumbar punctures.

Another of Wakefield's 12 co-workers in the study said: "I am very, very angry. I would never have put my name to the study if I had known there was this conflict of interest, and had I not done so it would never have got published."

I've heard, though I can't back this up at all, that the loss of his medical license in the UK isn't that debilitating because he's moved most of his damaging operations to America and is still extremely influential here.  I guess time will tell what happens to him--it would certainly be ironic if he suffered a lawsuit as a result of all of this given the conflict of interest exposed in his initial findings.

[mystictiger]

I don't think that you can say that kids have died from measels as a result of this arsehat (we simply don't have the data and correlation doesn't imply causation) but I think that the GMC should have poked his eyes out with blunt test-tubes.

I particularly liked this site. If anything, Mr Deer deserves an award for his work on this.

[Vekseid]

People specifically following his advice have had their children die. People specifically following his advice have had their children spread their illness to other children whose immune system depends on other kids being immunized.

Besides, read the hovertext.

[DarklingAlice]

Mystictiger has already posted the links I had on this topic.

And notably, I wasn't advocating prosecuting him for causing death, but rather for fraud. Also a number of his research practices need to be looked into as to whether or not they constitute prosecutable child endangerment.

Further, I am not so sure that we don't have the data to actually link him to deaths. As Veks said we can specifically link him to certain deaths, and depending on the thoroughness of the record keeping of the official antivac groups and his own record keeping, it might be possible to form a causative rather than correlative link to the drop in MMR coverage and the resulting deaths. Now, it is another topic entirely as to whether or not you actually want to prosecute Wakefield for that, especially considering potential ramifications to the vast majority of the scientific community that do sometimes make mistakes in good faith. But I think it is pessimistic to say that it is impossible to make the causative link without careful review of the data.

[mystictiger]

The crucial question is: did Wakefield cause the drop in vaccination, or was his popularity a symptom of some underlying cause?

A single observation is not enough even to establish correlation. The only way you could build a case is with Bayesian statistics. Bayesian statistics (as opposed to frequentist statistics as used in clinical trials) is really a calculus of belief, saying "If you used to believe the state of nature was X, and you observed Y, then you should now believe X'". The answers depend massively on what exactly X is, and what you believe the relationship is between the state of nature and the observation.

In the cot death case, or in DNA testing, there is a fair amount of measurement to tell us what a sensible prior belief is, and how to change it in the light of evidence. But there aren't enough parallels to the Wakefield case to be at all certain.

[Blitzy]

Remember also that parents who choose to not get their children vaccinated (as is their choice, for whatever reason) risk spreading the diseases that older children can tolerate and survive to babies whose parents have not yet had the choose to vaccinate their kids. Babies have to be a certain age to get certain vaccines. Just being in a daycare with one child who's parents have not chosen to vaccinate can spread that illness to the other kids who have not yet been able to have those vaccinations.

It's a scary thing for a parent. You never know which parents have chosen to do so and which have not. I worried about that when my daughter was a baby, but thankfully I was able to stay at home with her and the risk of her contracting something was minimal as I was cautious. But the parents who don't have a choice, who have to put their children in daycare? I feel for their fear.

I think he's getting just what he deserves.