It is interesting to see people repeat the Wakefield party line.

Did you read the original statement by the PCC or did you just accept the press release from Dr. Wakefield? The Press Complaints Commission suggested that the Times remove some stories. The Times complied. Unfortunately, Dr. Wakefield shot himself in the foot and blew that out of proportion, making claims much like your own. That resulted in the Times putting the stories back online.

No scientist/doctor/epidemiologist authoring counter studies EVER charged Wakefield with fraud

I don’t know if they used the word “fraud”. I know that scientists have clearly stated that Dr. Wakefield’s studies reported methodologies that were not the same as actually used. (see, for example, page 15 of the MacDonald report, submitted to the US Court of Federal Claims as part of the Hazelhurst hearings for the Autism Omnibus Proceeding).

Here is a nice quote from Dr. Nicolas Chadwick, who did the early testing for measles virus in the samples Dr. Wakefield collected from his patients:

Dr Wakefield was not convinced that my results were actually negative and wanted someone else to repeat the work. I believe that despite my negative results, Dr Wakefield was convinced that measles virus was present in these cells.

So, he reported methodology he didn’t use (in the Uhlman paper) and ignored negative results and, instead, reported faulty data with positive results.

To my knowledge, no one outside the GMC has seen the medical records that Brian Deer used for his press reports that Dr. Wakefield “fixed” his data. Let’s wait until that becomes more public and see if people use the “fraud” word, shall we?

Oh, and don’t forget that there was testimony in an American Federal Court that detailed how Wakefield ignored false positives on the PCR results.

Two questions—do you know where Dr. Wakefield’s analysis of the DeStefano paper is?

I don’t know. (?) My thoughts looking at his quote was that the DeStafano paper enough was sufficient as it showed differential numbers; though I don’t know/think they calculated risk factors. I might have seen something from Yazbak on this once, but I can’t remember. I believe that most “real” scientists tend to hold Yazbak in relatively poor regard as much as Wakefield. His web hits aren’t re-assuring as to quality; at the very least, a quality web presence.

Second question—if the DeStefano data aren’t considered good, how can Dr. Wakefield make any conclusions based on them?

I’m not sure if Wakefield (or I) said that the data aren’t good. (?) But that’s always the problem with this type of discussion; the poor nature of diagnostic data can be shaped into whatever pretzel a conclusion demands.

In any case, the concern I tried to convey was that the assumption made by DeStafano, that enrollment in early intervention programs with requisite immunization was ‘likely’ the reason that children who were immunized later had less autism than those that were immunized earlier, wasn’t really supported by either any data, my experiences, or the timing necessary for children under three to have been flagged, tagged, and entered into early intervention programs; especially eight or ten years ago.

From the outside, this would seemingly have been relatively simple data to gather; the basis of the study were vaccination records and school records, if any ‘early intervention programs’ were based on public schooling, there should have been records available as towards when a child started in the system. Of course, this makes the assumption that the two school components(before the age of three early intervention programs and kindergarden) communicated. Or maybe there are privately run ‘early intervention programs’ that mandate vaccination that are available in that area. Going deeper is a big task with very small payoff.

What we do know is that we have no data on which to base this assumption; and that is the kind of thing that sets off my skeptic alarm.

Honestly, if a time differential were present with the MMR, I’d much more expect it to be focussed in the narrower ranges, say 12 – 14 months, as opposed to 12 – 36 months and > 36 months. That’s the other potential problem with this analysis, it groups 12-17 months together, and 18 onward. Of course, funding, logistics and other factors might make such a thing complicated. You can’t study everything.

HTH.

– pD

Second question—if the DeStefano data aren’t considered good, how can Dr. Wakefield make any conclusions based on them?

good point.

But, aside from the NAA “interviewing” him for their press release and Matt Lauer, who has interviewed him lately? It isn’t as though Dr. Wakefield seems to think the Dateline episode was favorable to him.

David N. Brown,

One of the prices we pay in the United States for freedom of speech is that sometimes you have to listen to people who you don’t like.

There are some very interesting things in the Dateline episode that are worth blogging. There are statements by Dr. Wakefield which, to this observer, don’t match what was said in the past or what is in the public record.