
Okay America, this is exactly why you don’t take health care advice from a Playboy Bunny. There have been a couple of news items recently that I felt warranted a follow-up to my vaccine rant. First up, the work of Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor who pretty much started the whole “vaccines = autism” bunk, has been completely and utterly discredited. Like to the point that The Lancet has withdrawn his paper that first suggested a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The Lancet editors (quoted by way of Bad Astronomer) had this to say;
Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al. are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation. In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were “consecutively referred” and that investigations were “approved” by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.
The General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel’s findings referred to in the quote are the results of an investigation which showed Wakefield acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” when doing the research that went on to be published in The Lancet.
So there’s that. The sole scientific foundation for the antivax movement has been yanked. There is not even a scrap of a hint of validity to any of their arguments anymore.
As if that wasn’t enough, it turns out that Jenny McCarthy’s son, the one that she has spent YEARS trotting out as the poster-child for the vaccine-autism link, DIDN’T HAVE F&(*ING AUTISM IN THE FIRST PLACE!
An article in Time, for which Ms. McCarthy was interviewed, now suggest that her son has Landau-Kleffner syndrome which, if you will excuse the descent into Wikipedia,
is characterized by the sudden or gradual development of aphasia (the inability to understand or express language) and an abnormal electroencephalogram (EEG). LKS affects the parts of the brain that control comprehension and speech. The disorder usually occurs in children between the ages of 5 and 7 years. Typically, children with LKS develop normally but then lose their language skills. While many of the affected individuals have clinical seizures, some only have electrographic seizures, including electrographic status epilepticus of sleep (ESES)
Ms. McCarthy has now apparently accepted this new diagnosis and has reversed her position on vaccines, saying that she wants to see them researched more rather than getting rid of them all together and that, although her son does not and never did have autism, she will still act as a spokesperson for the disease. This after she has spent the last 7 years or so preaching the antivax gospel and even writing a book about how through the power of her love as a mother and her faith in non-traditional treatments she “cured” her son’s autism.
So the antivaxers don’t even really have their celebrity spokesperson anymore. Their entire position has been shown to have derived from a deliberate lie (from Wakefield) and wild speculation based on a flawed initial premise (from McCarthy).
The worst part of this whole fiasco is that it won’t make any difference. The antivax crowd is already in full-on tinfoil hat mode. The Lancet pulling the article and the Practise Board’s condemnation of Wakefield’s work will just be seen as the big evil drug companies flexing their muscle to silence their critics. I’m not sure what spin they’ll put on Jenny McCarthy backing away from touting the evils of vaccines but I’m sure they’ll think of something. This, to me, is the surest sign of the irrationality of the anitvaxers (or the 9/11 truthers or the Obama birth certificate people or the moon-landing-was-fake crowd for that matter). There is no amount of contrary evidence that will convince these people that they are wrong. Anything that reinforces their beliefs is immediately given iron-clad credence no matter how flimsy or anecdotal it might be, but anything contrary is discarded out of hand because it is clearly just part of the conspiracy/cover-up.
So how about you do us all a favor, Jenny, and just shut the fuck up. You’ve done enough damage already.