Vaccines and Autism

I couldn't put it better than Sydnee McElroy put it in this episode of Sawbones.

That joker Andrew Wakefield wrote a book based on his lies, in order to cash in. He called it "Callous Disregard", and bizarrely enough, he wasn't referring to his own behavior. I came across a pirated copy and attempted to read it. It is a book written by a fellow who wants to defend himself, and not with the rigor of a peer-reviewed essay, but with the fervor of a manifesto, eagerly twisting whatever facts and history he can gather together that show him as the persecuted and beleaguered David against the Goliath of "big pharma".

(As an aside, if you want to read about the evils of "big pharma", I suggest you read another much more approachable and amusing book, called "Bad Pharma", written by a fellow called Ben Goldacre.)

A fair way into "Callous Disregard", when the one-sidedness of Wakefield's narrative was too obvious to ignore, I got curious and did some digging around. Turns out this book was released on the same day he attended his final hearing in front of the UK General Medical Council, and the conclusion of that hearing was the following:

Wakefield's infamous study in the Lancet linking the MMR vaccine to autism was a written-for-hire work. He was paid to conduct the study in the paper, by attorneys who were trying to drum up evidence that their clients' children had been harmed by the MMR vaccine, so they could sue the big pharmaceutical company that manufactured it. He never told the Lancet about this extreme conflict of interest, and he falsified the data in the paper to give the attorneys ammunition in their lawsuit.

That is an absolutely incredible violation of ethics.

The way he went about gathering his "data" in the paper was extremely callous as well. He used questionable tactics to recruit children for the study. He ordered procedures on them that were medically unnecessary, such as colonoscopies, colon biopsies and lumbar punctures, without consulting a pediatrician and without the approval of his department's ethics board.

That's not the conduct of a person who claims to love children as stridently as Wakefield does in this book.

On May 24, 2010, he was struck off the United Kingdom medical register. But that just fueled his narrative as a persecuted whistleblower. Caught with his hand in the falsification cookie jar, he doubled-down and crammed the other hand in, then two legs and most of his face. In the meantime, eight years after his faked paper ignited the media fire that he has been gleefully fanning ever since, cases of measles in Britain rose from 56 in 1998 to nearly 1,400 in 2008.

In 2006, a 13-year-old boy became the first person in more than a decade to die of the disease in Britain. This fool Wakefield has blood on his hands.

It's clear why the book is so quick to make accusations and counter-accusations, and so eager to shout "conspiracy". Wakefield wrote it during a time when he needed to convince himself that he was a good person, despite willfully committing fraud. This book is a call to gather conspiracy theorists and fearful parents around him in a protective circle, and ditch his career as a scientist before it ditched him.

Negative ten stars out of five. (And the book sucks, too.)