Andrew Wakefield, the MMR, and a “mother warrior’s” fabricated vaccine injury story
That’s I have to thank the ever-intrepid investigative reporter Brian Deer for providing me an alternative topic that is way more important than some self-important little quack and a compelling topic to blog about in its own right. Brian Deer, as you might recall, remains the one journalist who was able to crack the facade of seeming scientific legitimacy built up by antivaccine guru Andrew Wakefield and demonstrate that (1) Wakefield’s work concluding that the MMR vaccine was associated with “autistic enterocolitis” was bought and paid for by a solicitor named Richard Barr, who represented British parents looking to sue vaccine manufacturers, to the tune of over £400,000; (2) Wakefield expected to make over £72 million a year selling a test patent Wakefield had filed in March 1995 claiming that “Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis may be diagnosed by detecting measles virus in bowel tissue, bowel products or body fluids”; and Wakefield’s case series published in The Lancet in 1998 was fraudulent, the equivalent of what Deer correctly characterized as “Piltdown medicine.” Ultimately, these revelations led to Wakefield’s being completely discredited to the point where The Lancet retracted his paper and even Thoughtful House, the autism quackery clinic in Austin, TX where Wakefield had a cushy, well-paid position as scientific director, had to give him the boot. Yes, Wakefield is a fraud, and it’s only a shame that it took over a decade for it to be demonstrated.
As much as I hate how it took discrediting Wakefield the man as a fraud rather than just discrediting his bogus science to really begin to turn the tide against the annoying propensity of journalists to look to Wakefield or his acolytes for “equal time” and “balance” whenever stories about autism and vaccines reared their ugly heads, I can’t argue with the results. Wakefield is well and truly discredited now, so much so that, as I noted, his prominent involvement probably ruined any chance promoters of the “CDC whistleblower” scam ever had to get any traction from the mainstream press.
What is sometimes forgotten is the effect Wakefield’s message has had on parents. These are the sorts of parents who tend to congregate into groups designed to promote the idea that vaccines are dangerous and cause autism, such as the bloggers at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, the equally cranky blog The Thinking Moms’ Revolution, or groups like The Canary Party. It is Wakefield’s message and the “autism biomed” quackery that it spawned that have led to unknown numbers of autistic children being subjected to the rankest form of quackery in order to “recover” them, up to and including dubious stem cell therapies and bleach enemas.
This is the sort of parent that is the topic of Brian Deer’s story in the The Sunday Times yesterday entitled A warrior mother lost to MMR lies. (Mother warriors, remember, was the title of a book by Jenny McCarthy promoting the idea that vaccines cause autism and the biomedical quackery parents of such children use to treat autistic children.”) It is the story of a mother who became an acolyte of Andrew Wakefield and how she completely made up the link between vaccination and her child’s autism. Because of what is characterized by Deer as a “pathological conflict with his carers,” an unnamed local brought legal action against E and A to allow M to get the care he required.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/andrew-wakefield-the-mmr-and-a-mother-warriors-fabricated-vaccine-injury-story/