Just one of numerous takes on this finding about the already discredited and retracted study linking vaccines to autism. To me the most important quote is this: "But perhaps as important as the scare’s effect on infectious disease is the energy, emotion, and money that have been diverted away from efforts to understand the real causes of autism and how to help children and families who live with it."
The outrage, though, is the last sentence. Wakefield is now a rock star with a permanent megaphone; the fact that he is a confirmed fraud will have no bearing at all, the damage is (and continues to be) done.
Yesterday, after the news broke of an extensive investigative report by Brian Deer, a British journalist, CNN’s Anderson Cooper took it from there and completed the evisceration of huckster Andrew Wakefield, whose infamous 1998 study supposedly linking autism to the MMR vaccine was retracted last year by the journal Lancet.
Additionally, the editorial chastises the media for “unbalanced” reporting on the bogus vaccine-autism link, and also blames the continuing vaccine scare on
an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals, and the medical profession.
There’s also this that seems to get lost in all the controversy:
But perhaps as important as the scare’s effect on infectious disease is the energy, emotion, and money that have been diverted away from efforts to understand the real causes of autism and how to help children and families who live with it.
So will this news of “elaborate fraud” by a champion of the debunked vaccine-autism connection give pause to the the anti-vaxxers, who regard Wakefield as their hero? Of course not.
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