GIGO: Sometimes Costing Lives

[Annie]

This is the second Lancet article to be found faked and used for political/social agenda. This one cost lives, the other incurred more insurgencies. Truly reprehensible. Save us from 'peer review' if this is what is now coming out. There is no way not a conspiracy, if 'reviewed':

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/lif...cle5683671.ece

February 8, 2009
MMR doctor Andrew Wakefield fixed data on autism
Brian Deer
THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.

Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.

The research was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet medical journal. It claimed that the families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on within days of the jab. The team also claimed to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease underlying the children’s conditions....

...espite involving just a dozen children, the 1998 paper’s impact was extraordinary. After its publication, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%. Populations acquire “herd immunity” from measles when more than 95% of people have been vaccinated.

Last week official figures showed that 1,348 confirmed cases of measles in England and Wales were reported last year, compared with 56 in 1998. Two children have died of the disease.

With two professors, John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch, Wakefield is defending himself against allegations of serious professional misconduct brought by the GMC. The charges relate to ethical aspects of the project, not its findings. All three men deny any misconduct.

Through his lawyers, Wakefield this weekend denied the issues raised by our investigation, but declined to comment further.

 

[garyd]

Why am I not surprised? Maybe because increasingly science and scientist are not being driven by a search for the truth but rather by a narrow interest in shoving a left wing political agaenda down the throats of the rest of us in which not a few of them see themselves as some weird variant of Plato's philosophical elite that should be running things.