06 Jan 2011 Anderson Cooper’s Andrew Wakefield Takedown

Ex-Doctor Andrew Wakefield, author of a since-withdrawn study in the British medical journal Lancet that claimed a link between vaccines and autism, is confronted by CNN’s Anderson Cooper in light of a new study in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) by journalist Brian Deer claiming that Wakefield’s study was not just wrong, but intentionally fraudulent.

Wakefield’s study resulted in the misdirection of autism research funding away from scientifically valid leads. While this fact infuriates me as the mother of a severely autistic son, tragically, the harm that has been done here to autistic individuals not the worst result. Children have died needlessly because their parents, frightened by Wakefield’s study, did not allow them to be vaccinated.

These are innocent children who should and could have been alive today.

If an indirect cause of these deaths was intentional wrong-doing, there should be significant legal consequences for anyone who knowingly participated in this fraud. This also should be a wake-up call for all these supposedly “peer-reviewed” journals out there and anyone who trusts them. They almost never are actually “peer-reviewed” in any meaningful way. We’ve seen this in climate science, in which billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted thanks to “scientific” cluster****s designed to bring money and glory on a small number of self-interested cronies, but in this case of alleged autism fraud, babies and children have been killed. As in dead.

I’m going to stop typing now before I say something too strong about this.

P.S. Here’s a link to the editorial in the British Medical Journal.