The Wakefield Legacy

18 Jul

A report in the online Times about the appalling practices of Andrew Wakefield, revealed what will be his true legacy. Sickness, hospitalisation and (God forbid) death.

We know now after the Cedillo hearings that not only was Andrew Wakefield using a contaminated lab that couldn’t possibly have located measles virus but that at the time he was writing his Lancet paper he knew that what he was saying was false. He knew his positive results were actually not positive at all. And still he went ahead.

There is yet another measles outbreak in London at the moment:

City and Hackney Teaching Primary Care Trust says that there have been 32 cases in Hackney since May and 13 in the past week. Most of the cases were among the Orthodox Jewish community.

Let us all hope that none of these people come to any serious harm. And whilst we hope we should be horrified by the unmissable implications of measles data from England and Wales:

Of 133 cases in England and Wales last month, only six were in people who had been vaccinated.

That is about the clearest signal I can imagine that what not vaccinating leads to is illness. Over 95% of the measles cases in England and Wales last month are happening to non-vaccinated people. This is very, very worrying.

This is the real legacy of Andrew Wakefield’s antivax stance. Looking at a possibility never hurt anyone. Researching a hypothesis never hurt anyone. Refusing to see the inevitable when study after study fails to establish a link is hurting people.

The bottom line is this – MMR doesn’t cause autism. There is no evidence to suggest it does. Those who perpetuate the belief that there is or who continue to cry shamefully for ‘just one more study’ share responsibility for these outbreaks and the people who get hurt in them. For the sake of your conscience’s alone, I hope no real harm comes to any of these people.

4 Responses to “The Wakefield Legacy”

  1. isles July 18, 2007 at 17:04 #

    Wakefield is just about the textbook definition of a sociopath, is he not?

    Medicine.net says a sociopathic personality is characterized by “a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others and inability or unwillingness to conform to what are considered the rights of society.” A sociopath exhibits “an inability to tolerate boredom, feeling victimized, and a diminished capacity for intimacy.”

    Boredom – nothing like throwing a wrench into public health to liven up one’s day!
    Victimized – Hoo, yeah.
    Intimacy – dunno, but has lived on a different continent from his wife for quite a while now…

  2. Susan Fillmore now Cook July 18, 2007 at 20:33 #

    I would like to get in touch with Isabella Thomas I have lost her phone number since she has moved to Somerset.and I have moved to Canada.
    my E Mail account is doubletwenty@shaw.com

    Thank you
    for and behalf of Zack Fillmore (son)

  3. Shinga July 19, 2007 at 12:42 #

    You will have seen, of course, that some people’s response to that story has been to harp on about “Ahah – 6 people who caught it were vaccinated. I thought that vaccination was supposed to protect us – get out of that”. I failed ot have a comment posted in other papers that had this, but my husband managed to get this comment into The Times and I shall expand on it later today.

    MMR is good at producing appropriate measles titres after 1 dose with a later boost. According to the NeLM it persists for at least 10 years after the 2nd dose.

    There will always be some people for whom it fails. Prof. Diane Griffin is the authority on measles: she is an editor for Field’s Virology and wrote the measles chapter for the last 3 editions. She says that around 5-15% of the population don’t respond (it varies across countries) if there is only one dose given. They are the people who also benefit from herd immunity – if others are vaccinated then they are less likely to be exposed and infected.

    Not enough space to explain the figures but if 133 were ill out of (say) 300 who were exposed, then 127/150 unvaccinated children developed it (measles is highly transmissible) but only (say) 6/150 vaccinated children. Age and no. of doses matters.

    The Times has a limit of 1000 characters…

    I’m now 0/10 for the Daily Mail‘s recent coverage of vaccine issues – I had 3 goes at trying to get a sensible comment it to balance that Halvorsen nonsense.

  4. Anwen August 26, 2007 at 18:59 #

    When my daughter was MMR age, her dad was quite worried about the whole autism/MMR thing and I ended up being referred to a paediatrician to discuss it. As well as pointing out plenty of evidence that the ‘link’ was a load of bullsh*t, and that if DD got measles the complications could be very bad, she made the point (very clearly) about the risks to the whole community from reduced uptake of MMR – my daughter was and is pretty robust (she had had pneumonia a few months before this point and in spite of being badly anaemic and very very ill, she was fully recovered in about a week, and at her illest point was still able to fight off myself and two burly nurses trying to re-insert a drip point) but plenty of kids in our area (City and Hackney, actually…) are not, and it would be unfair to put them at risk to protect my child against a ‘potential’ risk of something which isn’t even life threatening etc.

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