"As someone who has spent two years doing nothing but looking into various vaccine scares, I found the way these latest revelations, which were based on reporting by Brian Deer, were packaged to be problematic." ~ Seth Mnookin
Edited to add link.
http://sethmnookin.com/2011/01/06/the-problems-with-the-bmjs-wakefield-fraud-story/...
Here is part of the
http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c5347.full">"science" that Mnookin, rightly takes issue with.
But child 11’s case must have proved a disappointment. Records show his behavioural symptoms started too soon. “His developmental milestones were normal until 13 months of age,” notes the discharge summary. “In the period 13-18 months he developed slow speech patterns and repetitive hand movements. Over this period his parents remarked on his slow gradual deterioration.”
That put the first symptom two months earlier than reported in the Lancet, and a month before the boy received the MMR vaccination. It's unclear to me what specifically Deer is saying? :shrug:
Additionally, Deer asserts that some of parents took issue with
his methods of gathering information.
Her concerns about MMR had been noted by her general practitioner when her son was 6 years old.24 But she told me the boy’s troubles began after his vaccination, which he received at 15 months.25 “He’d scream all night, and he started head banging, which he’d never done before,” she explained.
Q - “When did that begin, do you think?” I asked.
A - “That began after a couple of months, a few months afterward, but it was still, it was concerning me enough, I remember going back.”
Q - “Sorry. I don’t want to be, like, massively pernickety, but was it a few months, or a couple of months?”
A - “It was more like a few months because he’d had this, kind of, you know, slide down. He wasn’t right. He wasn’t right. Before he started.”
Q - “Not quicker than two months, but not longer than how many months? What are we talking about here?”
A - “From memory, about six months, I think.”
Q - The next day, she complained to my editors. She said my methods “seemed more akin to the gutter press.” But I was perplexed by her story, since there was no case in the Lancet that matched her careful account.Mnookin closes his article thusly. ~
"The lead in the main BMJ story quotes the father of the one of the initial 12 children in Wakefield’s 1998 study as saying that Wakefield misrepresented his son’s medical history. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the past twenty years of vaccine scares, it’s that memory is immensely fallible — especially when it comes to emotionally charged situations. (At one point I had a whole chapter in my book about false memories…but, like about 200 hundred other pages, it ended up getting cut.) From the day it was published, one of the major problems with Wakefield’s original work that researchers pointed to was that it relied on parents’ post-facto recollections to determine what had or had not actually happened. Those memories weren’t a suitable substitution for actual data then…and they’re not now, either."Mr. Mnookin and I are in rare agreement.
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