Unleashing a Modern Plague to Profit by £435 643

Here is a snippet from an article in the British Journal of Medicine documenting the fact that the uproar over "vaccines" started from a greedy doctor who fraudulently altered data to make a case against vaccines in order to collect a consulting fee from a law firm that was suing the vaccine manufacturers:

Unknown to Mr 11, Wakefield was working on a lawsuit, for which he sought a bowel-brain “syndrome” as its centrepiece. Claiming an undisclosed £150 (€180, $230) an hour through a Norfolk solicitor named Richard Barr, he had been confidentially put on the payroll two years before the paper was published, eventually grossing him £435 643, plus expenses.

Curiously, however, Wakefield had already identified such a syndrome before the project which would reputedly discover it. “Children with enteritis/disintegrative disorder [an expression he used for bowel inflammation and regressive autism] form part of a new syndrome,” he and Barr explained in a confidential grant application to the UK government’s Legal Aid Board before any of the children were investigated. “Nonetheless the evidence is undeniably in favour of a specific vaccine induced pathology.”

In short, greed motivated the "researcher" to invent data so that he could satisfy the lawyers and collect his fees. As a result of this fraud, vaccination rates have fallen around the world and children are now getting sick, permanently injured, and dying, all for one man's greed and the credulous public eager to be anti-science and believe any crackpot idea that comes along.

The BMJ article is filled with details and is somewhat difficult to follow for a general audience. Here is a bit from a CNN report that distills the "news worthy" essence:

A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an "elaborate fraud" that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday.

An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study -- and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible.
"It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data."

Britain stripped Wakefield of his medical license in May. "Meanwhile, the damage to public health continues, fueled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals and the medical profession," BMJ states in an editorial accompanying the work.

CNN invites you to watch the Anderson Cooper report that provides the full story.

It is people like Jenny McCarthy, an actress who has no scientific training, who uses her looks and her public persona to sell the profoundly wrong message that "vaccines cause autism". It just isn't true. But once lies are spread, it is hard to defeat them. McCarthy should be deeply sorry for the deaths and injuries her charlatantism has caused. Sadly, people like Jenny McCarthy are never called to account for the tragedies she has caused. And she is probably so caught up in her self-delusion that she is unwilling to recognize the truth and accept the great harm she has caused.

Update 2010jan10: Here's a bit from Wikipedia where experts validate the fact that uninformed "activists" like Jenny McCarthy have caused the deaths of children:

Following the January 2011 BMJ revelations of fraud by Wakefield, Paul Offit, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a "long-time critic of the dangers of the anti-vaccine movement", said, "that paper killed children", and Michael Smith of the University of Louisville, an "infectious diseases expert who has studied the autism controversy's effect on immunization rates", who said "clearly, the results of this (Wakefield) study have had repercussions."

I believe that Jenny McCarthy, once she realizes the harm she's done, will be horrified and apologetic. But she, like all people who fail to do their homework before getting on a soapbox, needs to realize that words have consequences. We've just seen an example of this with the Gabrielle Giffords assassination. Spouting off a theory without evidence, knowledge, and appropriate theoretical framework is like an unhinged person with a gun: this is trouble just waiting to happen.