The British Medical Journal has devoted an editorial to stating that an article published in popular medical journal The Lancet in 1998 linking childhood vaccination with autism “was in fact an elaborate fraud.”
The Lancet had already retracted the article by Andrew Wakefield early last year, but BMJ now sought to totally discredit the “study”, which led to a decline in the triple vaccination of measles, mumps and rubella in Britain as well as in the United States and Australia.
Sadly, despite the strength of the BMJ articles - brought on by the work of Sunday Times investigative journalist Brian Deer - there will still be people who will not only ignore it but view it as further evidence of the conspiracy.
You can read more about Wakefield’s fraud here. It also goes without saying that The Lancet has a responsibility for the Wakefield paper (he’s no longer a doctor by the way, barred from medical practice on the basis of financial conflict and unethical treatment of children) because it made the serious mistake of publishing this quackery in the first place.
The decline in childhood vaccination as a result of Wakefield’s article is as much the fraudster’s fault as The Lancet’s because it cloaked him in scientific integrity.
Once a mistake is made, however, all you can do is correct it - and the bigger the mistake the more pronounced the correction should be. This is has been BMJ’s aim in publishing its editorial, along with another article by journalist Brian Deer, which found Wakefield’s article “was a fraud, moreover, of more than academic vanity. It unleashed fear, parental guilt, costly government intervention and outbreaks of infectious disease.”.
But the anti-vaccination movement is unlikely to be diminished by Deer’s findings or BMJ’s. Once you’ve fertilised a conspiracy theory it is not easy to snuff it out, especially in an age where people pick and choose sources that merely confirm their biases from a buffet of dodgy information.
To be fair to the anti-vaccination bunch in the United States, they appear to have chosen a figure head that embodies their idiocy pretty accurately. Scientologists, PETA and other wacky semi-religious groups have mildly recognisable celebrities - the anti-vaccination crew have Jenny McCarthy.
The former Playmate of the year, WWF wrestler valet and “actress” (do you remember the Jenny show?) is the face of those linking autism and vaccination in America with her Generation Rescue foundation. Apparently the fact her son has autism qualifies her to espouse unfounded and totally discredited theories on its cause (to her further eternal shame she’s dragged her ex-boyfriend and actually talented comedian Jim Carrey into this cause).
Lacking a figurehead of McCarthy’s stature for the cause in Australia we simply have to make do with the idiocy. Espousing theories that my colleague Joe Hildebrand accurately described as “almost homicidally idiotic”, the anti-vaccination lobby are based on the NSW north coast where up to 30 per cent of children are not vaccinated, and not surprisingly has led to the area having the highest rate of vaccine preventable disease.
The Australian Vaccination Network, which states that it is a parental group “advocating parental choice in whether children should be vaccinated”, takes shelter in the same language as most nutter organisations the world over: that they are martyrs to the cause of liberty. Posing clichéd rhetorical questions about freedom and posting poorly written responses to criticism seems to take up most of their time.
The fact that not vaccinating can result in the deaths of other children and the proliferation of diseases like measles and whooping cough, is apparently dwarfed by the freedom of what you might call ‘medical expression’ (on their website the AVN have been forced by the Health Care Complaints Commission to post a warning that their information should not be taken as medical advice, so what the hell is it?).
Still, banning a group like the AVN would only play into paranoid theories about governmental interest in the vaccination process (well, governments probably do have a crazy interest in kids not dying), but the broader point is that the crazy horse has already bolted with this one.
BMJ’s attempt to rectify what they know to be a catastrophic editorial decision by The Lancet are very worthy, but unfortunately almost naïve in their aims to wholly discredit Wakefield’s work. In a world where people go to the internet and ask Jenny McCarthy for advice on their children’s health, medical evidence is no vaccination to the proliferation of stupidity.
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