It’s official! Brian Hooker’s “reanalysis” of MMR data is retracted.

[HuckleB]

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/10/06/its-official-brian-hookers-reanalysis-of-mmr-data-is-retracted/

"...

Remember Brian Hooker’s absolutely incompetent “reanalysis” of a paper from ten years ago, DeStefano et al, that failed to find a correlation between age at MMR vaccination and autism? I’m not going to go through just what’s wrong with Hooker’s “statistical” analysis, at least not in detail. If you want the details, I provided them a month and a half ago. In brief, the biggest foul-up Hooker did was to analyze case control data as a cohort study. That was a mistake in design that doomed his study from the very beginning, guaranteeing that its results, whatever they were, would have no validity whatsoever. The next big error is that Hooker used inappropriate statistical tests and, as I like to say, tortured the data until they confessed what he wanted them to confess, namely a correlation between MMR and autism. Even then, all he could get the data to confess to him to make the pain stop was that there was an elevated risk of autism in African American boys who received the MMR between certain ages. As I put it at the time, basically Hooker confirmed the results of DeStefano et al and proved Wakefield wrong once again, given that Hooker’s result supposedly showed a correlation between the MMR vaccine and autism in no one other than African American boys and that result was very questionable indeed. I also wondered why the antivaccine movement was so fast to jump on this “reanalysis,” given that the vast majority of the leaders of the antivaccine movement are not African-American and Hooker’s reanalysis, like the original DeStefano et al analysis, found no correlation between MMR and autism for any race other than African-American.

It was a paper so bad that even a brand new journal, like Translational Neurodegeneration, considered retracting it. Basically, less than a month after the study was published, the editor published a message: This article has been removed from the public domain because of serious concerns about the validity of its conclusions. The journal and publisher believe that its continued availability may not be in the public interest. Definitive editorial action will be pending further investigation.

Now, as I learned from Retraction Watch, the editors have finally made a decision. They’ve made it official and retracted Hooker’s paper with this message: The Editor and Publisher regretfully retract the article [1] as there were undeclared competing interests on the part of the author which compromised the peer review process. Furthermore, post-publication peer review raised concerns about the validity of the methods and statistical analysis, therefore the Editors no longer have confidence in the soundness of the findings. We apologise to all affected parties for the inconvenience caused.

..."


This really ridiculous "reanalysis" got far too much play at DU. I hope everyone will be more careful when posting things in the future.

[riqster]

1. AntiVaxxers, grasping at straws. Glad another has been yanked away.

[hedgehog]

2. "Science wins this time. For now."

[Celebration]

3. still no answer for the whistleblower's charges

The fact remains that a large group of subjects was left out of the original paper, and that decision was made AFTER the results were known. If there was a reason to leave out this group of subjects, it should have been disclosed in the discussion of the paper. It is not ethical or scientific to hide the fact from the public or the journal. What possible reason would they have for leaving this group out? They should have discussed their reasoning in the study. This really doesn't have anything to do with analyzing the results or the statistics. You cannot pick and choose who should be and should not be subjects based on criteria that you figure out after the results are unblinded. How anyone who purports to love science can defend this is ridiculous. Much easier to throw around straw men like "well the statistics on the excluded group were yada, yada". That is not the point. Raw data was hidden. Not acceptable. In fact, it is unscientific.

[HuckleB]

4. It's been answered over and over again.

[Celebration]

5. we only KNOW about this due to the whistleblower

It was LEFT OUT of the original paper. THIS IS NOT GOOD SCIENCE!

[Silent3]

6. Just like Republicans will *always* have "unanswered questions" about Benghazi. n/t