The Barbarian
Crabby Old White Guy
- Apr 3, 2003
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The "autism" story turns out to have been a doctor, bribed by people who had a financial interest in spreading the story:
The doctor whose study triggered a collapse in public confidence in the combined measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine told a disciplinary panel last week that he made up details of his son’s birthday party—at which he took blood samples from several children—when giving a speech in California.
Andrew Wakefield was one of the authors of the 1998 Lancet paper on inflammatory bowel disease and autism. He is now facing a General Medical Council fitness to practise panel, accused of serious professional misconduct, alongside two other authors of the study, Simon Murch and John Walker-Smith.
Dr Wakefield’s comments at a press conference announcing the paper, where he linked the MMR vaccine to a risk of autism, led to a public health scare that saw uptake of the vaccine dip below 80%. The Lancet later repudiated the paper, after it emerged that Dr Wakefield had extensive financial ties to lawyers and families who were pursuing the manufacturers of the vaccine in the courts and that most of his research participants were litigants.
The GMC’s charges against Dr Wakefield include allegations that, in 1998 while a consultant at the Royal Free Hospital, London, he unethically paid children at his son’s 10th birthday party £5 (€6; $10) each to give blood samples he wanted for his research.
Last week the GMC panel saw video footage of a speech Dr Wakefield gave in 1999 at a meeting of parents of autistic children called by the Mind Institute of the University of California, Davis, where he jokingly described children fainting and vomiting after giving blood.
“Two children fainted, one threw up over his mother,” he told his laughing audience in the clip. “People said to me, you can’t do that—children won’t come back to your birthday parties. I said we live in a market economy; next year they’ll want £10.”
But Dr Wakefield told the GMC panel that he had made up these details to amuse his listeners. “It was the end of a long and rather exacting talk for the parents, and it was an attempt to introduce a little bit of levity,” he said. “It was a quip, just a story. The way these stories are told, if the audience responds you tend to respond back. So the story was told. But it had no bearing on the truth at all.”
Wakefield admits fabricating events when he took children’s blood samples
Darwin's discoveries showed that it had to be many millions of years old. Lord Kelvin's measures of heat from the Earth showed that it had to be at least tens of millions of years old, but not much more than that. Then Rutherford's discovery of radioactivity made it clear from where the extra heat was coming, and the data showed it to be billions of years od.
Those seem to be the oldest rocks on Earth, so a pretty good number.
This is why experiments and observations, confirming the many predictions of evolutionary theory, are so important. Would you like me to show you some more of them?
Now step into the realm of never-observed, unmeasurable, untestable, unverifiable doctrine of YE creationism given the error-laden record of past creationist claims, then it's no surprise that few people familiar with the evidence believe your new religious doctrines.
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