FORUMula1.com - F1 Forum

[What's Burning?]

PT Barnum's law at work here.... to think there are parents that ate this poo up and are now incensed that their kids got sick with measles or some other easily preventable illness.

Reuters
Thursday, January 6, 2011

The British Medical Journal on Wednesday accused a disgraced British doctor of committing an "elaborate fraud" by faking data in his studies linking vaccines with autism.

Andrew Wakefield's work convinced thousands of parents that vaccines are dangerous. Such fears have not only caused parents to skip vaccinations for their children, which critics say has led to ongoing outbreaks of measles and mumps, but have forced costly reformulations of many vaccines.

The journal's editors said it was not possible that Wakefield made a mistake and that he must have faked the data. They supported their position with a series of articles by a journalist who used medical records and interviews to show that Wakefield falsified data.

For instance, the reports found that Wakefield, who included data from only 12 children in his report, studied at least 13 and that several showed symptoms of autism before they were vaccinated.
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"Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield," journal editor Fiona Godlee, deputy editor Jane Smith and associate editor Harvey Marcovitch wrote in a commentary.

They said the work "was based not on bad science but on a deliberate fraud."

Wakefield denied the allegations. "The study is not a lie. The findings that we have made have been replicated in five countries around the world," he told CNN on Wednesday.

In 1998, the Lancet medical journal, a rival to the British Medical Journal, published a study by Wakefield and colleagues linking the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism.

The other researchers withdrew their names from the study, and the Lancet formally retracted the paper in February.

A disciplinary panel of Britain's General Medical Council said in February that Wakefield had presented his research in an "irresponsible and dishonest" way and had brought the medical profession into disrepute.

No study has shown any clear link between vaccines and autism.

[madbrad]

This is very old news. Andrew Wakefield is my hero.

[vaptin]

This was in 1998, the hysteria still floats around, there have been rises in measles in the UK, and rates are still lower than ideal. People would much rather listen to the gossip at the playground gates, than academics.

It's pretty damn obvious how many people do not understand that correlation does not equal causation.

This report is just saying he deliberately misled people. That he knew what he was doing.

I think your actually more likely to get ill as a direct consequence of not getting the vaccine against having the vaccine and risking the side effects. My memories hazy on that though.

This "new style science teaching", that was introduced into the UK (or England at least) a few years ago, thankfully focused on this, it focused on understanding scientific practice and method.

[SennaVille]

I was a nanny to an autistic boy for eleven years, so I've looked into this a bit.

This is where the confusion arises. The MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination is given at around thirteen-fifteen months of age. This is also the age when signs of autism become apparent.

A child with autism usually progresses normally, meeting all the milestones until the age cited above. I've seen this in home videos of the child I looked after. It was almost like a switch was pulled at fifteen months, and a completely different child popped up. So, because of the coincidence of the MMR vaccine and the onset age of autistic symptoms, the two have somehow been melded together in pop science and *voila* vaccines cause autism.

Tests and studies have been done that prove that there is no link (non-immunised children developing signs of autism), it's all just a correlation between age of onset, and age of immunisation.

So silly

[JackMaster]

Why did he it? He committed a deliberate fraud.
Correlation does not equal causation, could also be said: Correlation does not always equal causation?

[texasmr2]

I was a nanny to an autistic boy for eleven years, so I've looked into this a bit.

This is where the confusion arises. The MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination is given at around thirteen-fifteen months of age. This is also the age when signs of autism become apparent.

A child with autism usually progresses normally, meeting all the milestones until the age cited above. I've seen this in home videos of the child I looked after. It was almost like a switch was pulled at fifteen months, and a completely different child popped up. So, because of the coincidence of the MMR vaccine and the onset age of autistic symptoms, the two have somehow been melded together in pop science and *voila* vaccines cause autism.

Tests and studies have been done that prove that there is no link (non-immunised children developing signs of autism), it's all just a correlation between age of onset, and age of immunisation.

So silly

I guees it has been a month or more but that subject was all over the news here and I failed to see any correlation between the two aswell.

[What's Burning?]

The spectrum of autism is so broad, and I can understand parent looking/grasping and cause and effect type of correlation, but to focus on a very narrow piece of anything this broad and then to directly associate it to a vaccine with junk data. More than junk data, falsified data. It's puzzling what the motivation was to do it.

[SennaVille]

I was a nanny to an autistic boy for eleven years, so I've looked into this a bit.

This is where the confusion arises. The MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination is given at around thirteen-fifteen months of age. This is also the age when signs of autism become apparent.

A child with autism usually progresses normally, meeting all the milestones until the age cited above. I've seen this in home videos of the child I looked after. It was almost like a switch was pulled at fifteen months, and a completely different child popped up. So, because of the coincidence of the MMR vaccine and the onset age of autistic symptoms, the two have somehow been melded together in pop science and *voila* vaccines cause autism.

Tests and studies have been done that prove that there is no link (non-immunised children developing signs of autism), it's all just a correlation between age of onset, and age of immunisation.

So silly

I guees it has been a month or more but that subject was all over the news here and I failed to see any correlation between the two aswell.

*clamping hand over mouth* as well *can't help self*

Sorry Tex, I know I'm really annoying

[texasmr2]

Basically imo autism and the reference to a vaccine causing it is just plain silly. Autism's conception begins in the womb via etc etc etc not from a highly successful vaccine used for decades.

Wait hold on I just had a thought, I've been called autistic at times so maybe I have grounds for a lawsuit!!

[vaptin]

Why did he it? He committed a deliberate fraud.
Correlation does not equal causation, could also be said: Correlation does not always equal causation?

Well yeah, although I think your suggestion deflects from the point, which is just because you have a correlation that isn't enough to assume the two are connected.

The example they gave us in school was - there's a correlation between ice-cream sales and hayfever, does that mean eating ice-cream causes hayfever?