Anatomy of a Scare--Newsweek's history of antivax hysteria.

cosmik debris

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Sat Feb-21-09 04:55 PM
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Anatomy of a Scare--Newsweek's history of antivax hysteria.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/185853

Some of my favorite parts of the story:

The first cracks in the vaccine theories of autism appeared in early 2004. An investigation by British journalist Brian Deer in The Sunday Times of London revealed that the children Wakefield described in the Lancet study had not simply arrived on the doorstep of the Royal Free. At least five were clients of an attorney who was working on a case against vaccine makers alleging that the MMR caused the children's autism. In addition, two years before the Lancet paper Wakefield had received £55,000 from Britain's Legal Aid Board, which supports research related to lawsuits. After meeting with Deer, Lancet editor Richard Horton told the British press, "If we knew then what we know now, we certainly would not have published the part of the paper that related to MMR … There were fatal conflicts of interest." On March 6, 10 of Wakefield's 12 coauthors formally retracted the paper's suggestion that the MMR and autism were linked.

The charges against Wakefield were the least of what was undermining the vaccine theory of autism. What would eventually become an overwhelming body of evidence showing that childhood vaccines did not increase the risk of autism began to pile up. In 2002 scientists led by Brent Taylor of the Royal Free reported that their study of 473 children had found no difference in the rates of autism between those who had received the MMR and those who had not, providing "further evidence against involvement of MMR vaccine in the initiation of autism," they wrote. Scientists in Finland, studying 2 million children, reached the same conclusion in a 2000 paper. So did scientists at Boston University, studying the medical records of 3 million children, in 2001. In 2004 a study of the medical records of 14,000 children in Britain found that the more thimerosal the children had been exposed to through vaccines, the less likely they were to have neurological problems. Also that year, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in the United States, having reviewed 200-plus studies, rejected the vaccine-autism hypothesis. Not only did it find no evidence of a link—and, indeed, evidence against the existence of a link—but it took aim at the original 1998 Lancet paper by Wakefield's group. Because autism symptoms typically appear at the same age that children get the MMR, the panel said, it was inevitable that some children would first show symptoms of autism soon after being vaccinated. Coincidence is not causality.

On Feb. 12 Special Master George Hastings Jr. announced his decision in the Cedillo case. Every study conducted to test Wakefield's MMR hypothesis, he concluded, "found no evidence that the MMR vaccination is associated with autism." And the evidence "falls far short" of showing a thimerosal connection.

Much. much more at the link above.