The belief that vaccines cause autism got its start in 1998 with a paper in the Lancet authored by Andrew Wakefield. We've known for a long time that it was a piece of crap: it used a nonrandom sample of 12 children, it depended largely on observations by parents, it was marred by egregious conflicts of interest, and in 2004 it was renounced by 10 of its co-authors and retracted by the magazine. That's all bad enough. But it turns out that it was even worse: the paper was an outright fraud from start to finish.
ok-cleek
Man I had a dreadful flight
Wha?
whassa matter? so i had some HTML issues. your mind reader broke this AM?
sheesh!
Yet still there are people in this country who demand separate injections instead of the combined MMR and others fail to get their children vaccinated at all (measles isn’t a very pleasant disease to catch).
The fact that the initial Lancet report was seized by certain UK newspapers as ‘proof’ that the MMR jab can lead to autism has caused damage that will take a generation to heal. Scaremongering pure and simple and not one of these newspapers has apologised for urging parents to avoid the jab. Japan did an in-depth study of the MMR jab in the 90s that sampled something like a million children and didn’t find any links to autism – yet some quack fakes the results of a tiny study and the newspapers lapped it up. Oh and of course, at the time, it was all the governments fault for not offering separate (and much more expensive) injections.
“After the controversy began, the MMR vaccination compliance dropped sharply in the United Kingdom, from 92% in 1996 to 84% in 2002. In some parts of London, it was as low as 61% in 2003, far below the rate needed to avoid an epidemic of measles.”
Fuck Andrew Wakefield. The bastard put lives at risk.