California has raised its vaccine coverage by enacting stronger vaccination policies to curtail such exemptions. Finally, in an age of social media, frequent distrust of authorities and increasing epidemic threats, parents and educators have a vital role in helping children from an early age learn the skills of critical thinking and informed skepticism to discern life-saving facts from fatal fictions. In a world in which fabricated science is plentiful and spreads rapidly, we must be vigilant if we are to avert epidemics that would have been prevented were it not for vaccine denial.
Too much is at stake for ourselves and our children to not apply the lessons from the vaccine-autism debacle to avert the dangerous long-term consequences when fake science gains traction and threatens the health and lives of everyone. Contact us at letters time. By Jonathan D. Related Stories. Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. Need help?
An awful lot of us, it turns out. In March 7 per cent of Britons expressed serious reservations. Subscription Notification. We have noticed that there is an issue with your subscription billing details. Please update your billing details here. Please update your billing information.
To be sure, these reports can be useful, but they are certainly not the evidence on which you want to make bold claims about something like the vaccine-autism link. Many children have autism and nearly all take the MMR vaccine. Finding in this case that among a group of a dozen children most of them happen to have both is not at all surprising.
And it in no way proves the MMR vaccine causes autism. See the pop-up chart in this report for details. Wakefield also had major financial conflicts of interest. Among them, while he was discrediting the combination MMR vaccine and suggesting parents should give their children single shots over a longer period of time, he was conveniently filing patents for single-disease vaccines.
Finally, Wakefield never replicated his findings. At the very bedrock of science is the concept of falsification: A scientist runs a test, gathers his findings, and tries to disprove himself by replicating his experiment in other contexts. He has declined to do either. In the most recent analysis, published March 5 in the Annals of Internal Medicine , researchers at the Statens Serum Institut in Denmark linked vaccine information to autism diagnoses, sibling histories of autism, and autism risk factors in more than , children born in Denmark between to Before that, researchers writing in JAMA looked at nearly , children who got the shot and their family histories of autism.
The researchers again found the MMR vaccine was not associated with an increased risk of autism, even with children who had older siblings with the disorder. All together, the idea that the MMR vaccine may cause autism has been debunked by large-scale studies involving thousands of participants in several countries. So how did such a shoddy idea gain such outsized influence? One of my favorite writings on the Wakefield debacle comes from the British journalist-researcher Ben Goldacre.
In a column for the Guardian and in his book Bad Science , Goldacre pointed out that journalists were complicit in helping perpetuate the notion that vaccines cause autism:.
Wakefield was at the centre of a media storm about the MMR vaccine, and is now being blamed by journalists as if he were the only one at fault. In reality, the media are equally guilty. But the media repeatedly reported the concerns of this one man, generally without giving methodological details of the research, either because they found it too complicated, inexplicably, or because to do so would have undermined their story.
We journalists are still doing this today on myriad health topics. We also focus a lot more on the anti-vaccine movement and their concerns than on the astounding progress made against vaccine-preventable diseases. Part of this has to do with how newsrooms work: Reporters favor anomalies and novelty instead of slow and plodding progress, as Steven Pinker points out in his recent book, Enlightenment Now.
But in doing so, we lose sight of the big picture.
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