Anti-vax quack Andrew Wakefield meets with Trump

[mainer]

Truly scary. Could Trump's administration make it illegal for school districts to require vaccination? Is our nation about to lose its herd immunity?

“For the first time in a long time, I feel very positive about this, because Donald Trump is not beholden to the pharmaceutical industry,” movement leader Andrew Wakefield told STAT in a phone interview.

“He didn’t rely upon [drug makers] to get him elected. And he’s a man who seems to speak his mind and act accordingly. So we shall see,” said Wakefield. A former doctor whose medical license was revoked, Wakefield launched the movement to question the safety of vaccines nearly two decades ago with a fraudulent study (which has since been retracted) suggesting that a widely administered vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella can cause autism.

Wakefield and a small group of like-minded activists spent nearly an hour with Trump in the closing months of the presidential campaign. “I found him to be extremely interested, genuinely interested, and open-minded on this issue, so that was enormously refreshing,” Wakefield said.

https://www.statnews.com/2016/11/30/donald-trump-vaccines-policy/

[Turbineguy]

1. All you need is enough people

to serve the rich. The rest are just a cost.

[HAB911]

2. No doubt about it......until

the herd begins to thin out from rampant disease

In some ways, there is justice in the anti-vax herd's demise

[NRQ891]

3. anti vax? is DEC still even around? nt

[CentralMass]

7. :-) Some of its alumni are.

[NRQ891]

8. makes sense, given your location nt

[brooklynite]

4. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist friend mentioned this yesterday...rumor he may be up for CDC

...story goes this is due to Baron's apparent autism.

[Fast Walker 52]

11. that would be interesting to see

[yellowcanine]

5. Wakefield is the one who should be locked up.

His fraudulent study did a lot of harm to the medical community and to patients. Hard to say how many lives have been lost as a result of his fraud.

[Fast Walker 52]

10. it's complicated, but that study was not fraudulent

and Wakefield has largely been smeared by the media and the pro-vaccine crowd who plays fast and loose with facts.

I know I'll get a lot of flak for "defending him", and people will say I'm anti-vaccine. But I'm not. It's just the story is more complicated than that.

[brooklynite]

12. Feel free to enlighten us.

Are you suggesting he lost his medical license because of "the media and the pro-vaccine crowd"?

[alarimer]

13. Bullshit. It's isn't "more complicated".

Wakefield is an utter fraud.

He committed scientific fraud. He lost his license to practice medicine.

[yellowcanine]

14. A British medical panel concluded otherwise and Lancet retracted the article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/health/research/03lancet.html

A British medical panel concluded last week that Dr. Wakefield had been dishonest, violated basic research ethics rules and showed a “callous disregard” for the suffering of children involved in his research. Dr. Richard Horton, editor in chief of The Lancet, said that until that decision, he had no proof that Dr. Wakefield’s 1998 paper was deceptive.

“That was a damning indictment of Andrew Wakefield and his research,” Dr. Horton said.

With that decision, Dr. Horton said he could retract the 1998 paper. Dr. Wakefield could not be reached for comment.

One can argue about what constitutes actual "fraud" but a reasonable person can conclude that this is it based on the finding of the medical panel. And the fact that you would talk about the "pro-vaccine crowd playing fast and loose with the facts" raises the question of just who is playing fast and loose with the facts here. "Pro-vaccine crowd" meaning the people who insist on following the science rather than the claims of a discredited researcher who has had his medical credentials revoked?

[Fast Walker 52]

16. I've read the paper. Have you?

The point of the paper was not about vaccines causing autism. It only hinted at a possible link.

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(97)11096-0/fulltext

I can email you the PDF if you can't get access.

The initial problem with the paper was a largely concocted issue about a conflict of interest, not fraud. This is a problem that used to be a huge problem in medical studies, overall, and not unique to this study.

Read this:
http://www.melaniephillips.com/the-smearing-of-andrew-wakefield

My main point is Wakefield became the villain for the whole vaccine industry and anti-anti-vax people who insist that vaccines could never ever cause problems. They use demagoguery to say that questioning vaccines in any way leads to children being harmed or killed.

The medical community rightfully wants kids to get vaccinated to prevent disease. The main problem is that if they (doctors, pharmaceutical industry) admit that even some small percentage kids have severe adverse reactions to vaccines, it will scare parents from getting their kids vaccinated. So they dishonestly promote the position that no kids ever have severe adverse reactions to vaccination. And they smear people like Wakefield who try to say there might be a problem with vaccines in some kids.

The issue is not vaccines "causing" autism, because that is too simplistic and can't explain the alarming rise in autism over the past couple of decades. But it's much harder to rule out that in some small number of kids, that getting vaccinated was a trigger for symptoms.

I have direct experience with this, as my son was just starting to talk at 18 months, and then got the MMR vaccine, and within a day or two there was a noticeable regression in his communication ability. Thankfully he never developed autism, but he didn't start really talking again for another 18 months. Significantly, a lot of parents have had a similar experience, with autism-like symptoms coming on after the vaccine. My daughter was born later and had the full set of vaccines, and never had any issues.

So I want to emphasize that I am not anti-vaccine. But I find it interesting how if you point out simple things like I did here, you get jumped on.

This is a huge, complicated issue that has been debated endlessly, and there is much more to discuss but I do have limited time.

[Archae]

19. Melanie Phillips?

You got to be kidding, she's a right-winger, anti-vaxx Wakefield groupie, and Climate Science denier as well.

Now get something *CREDIBLE* to back up your "Boo hoo hoo, Wakefield is being picked on,) bullshit.

Melanie Phillips supported Dr Andrew Wakefield, whose fraudulent work triggered the MMR vaccine controversy and led to his being struck off the medical register. Through numerous articles in the Daily Mail and The Spectator, Phillips championed Wakefield's claims while casting doubt on their rebuttal by scientists, doctors and politicians.[34][35] Her attacks on MMR attracted criticism from scientists and science writers,[34][36][37] yet Phillips continued to support Wakefield even after his research methods and motives began to attract serious scrutiny and criticism: "While Mr Wakefield is being subjected to a witch-hunt, and while the parents of the affected children are scandalously denied legal aid to pursue the court case which may well have finally brought to light the truth about MMR, those powerful people in the medical establishment are continuing to misrepresent the evidence."[38]

In May 2010, Andrew Wakefield was struck off the Medical Register for "serious professional misconduct", and is currently barred from practising medicine in the UK.[39] Phillips's support of Wakefield's "findings" and her campaign against the MMR vaccine has been both widely noted,[40][41] and credited for significantly undermining public trust in vaccines.[40]

Global warming[edit]

She does not agree with the scientific consensus regarding man-made climate change, and denounced what she claimed was "the data manipulation/shady practices scandal at the high temple of anthropogenic global warming theory". On 26 November 2009, Phillips claimed that there was no evidence of global warming, that temperatures are going down rather than up, and that sea ice is increasing rather than decreasing.[42]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanie_Phillips#Drugs

[LeftishBrit]

21. Melanie Phillips is sometimes described as the British Ann Coulter

Not as snarky perhaps, but just as fanatical.

[NickB79]

23. LEAVE ANDREW ALONE!!!!!

[LanternWaste]

15. If you're slammed, it will be for failing to provide any objective evidence.

If you're slammed, it will be for failing to provide any objective evidence (actually, failing to provide any evidence at all) to your support your allegation. But I do empathize with the desire to play at martyrdom...

[SidDithers]

24. Oh FFS...

If you're defending Wakefield, you're anti-vax.

And anti-vaxxers at DU should be treated the same as chemtrailers.

Sid

[mainer]

25. Lest we forget: measles morbidity/mortality pre-vax era

And this is just measles. Let's not forget polio, whooping cough, and all the other childhood diseases that used to kill kids.

In the decade before 1963 when a vaccine became available, nearly all children got measles by the time they were 15 years of age. It is estimated 3 to 4 million people in the United States were infected each year. Also each year an estimated 400 to 500 people died, 48,000 were hospitalized, and 4,000 suffered encephalitis (swelling of the brain) from measles.

btw, encephalitis often leaves permanent disabilities.


http://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html

[greatauntoftriplets]

6. That's damned scary.

[progressoid]

9. What the fuck?

[Initech]

17. Damn it, it just gets worse and worse!

[leftyladyfrommo]

18. Does he want to be Surgeon General?

Sounds like a perfect Swamp King choice. Just pick the worst possible person out there.

[0rganism]

22. i thought he was holding out for Ben Carson to be Surgeon General

but hell, Carson's actually a surgeon so that won't work out

[Thor_MN]

27. No, Carson for HUD, because Urban...

OK Gov Fallin for Interior, because, well, OK doesn't have coastlines.
Chao for Transportation, because drug traffiking is the family business.

[LeftishBrit]

20. Ugh. Two monsters of pure evil.

[still_one]

26. Par for the course. His HHS, Tom Price is part of the fringe medical group AAPS

Association of American Physicians and Surgeons

"D]espite the lab coats and the official-sounding name, the docs of the AAPS are hardly part of mainstream medical society. Think Glenn Beck with an MD. The group (which did not return calls for comment for this story) has been around since 1943. Some of its former leaders were John Birchers, and its political philosophy comes straight out of Ayn Rand. Its general counsel is Andrew Schlafly, son of the legendary conservative activist Phyllis. The AAPS statement of principles declares that it is “evil” and “immoral” for physicians to participate in Medicare and Medicaid, and its journal is a repository for quackery. Its website features claims that tobacco taxes harm public health and electronic medical records are a form of “data control” like that employed by the East German secret police. An article on the AAPS website speculated that Barack Obama may have won the presidency by hypnotizing voters, especially cohorts known to be susceptible to “neurolinguistic programming”—that is, according to the writer, young people, educated people, and possibly Jews."

"Perhaps [Price] was so attracted to the AAPS vision of doctors as special and “outside of the herd” to the point that he ignored its simultaneous promotion of dangerous medical quackery, such as antivaccine pseudoscience blaming vaccines for autism, including a view that is extreme even among antivaccine activists, namely that the “shaken baby syndrome” is a “misdiagnosis” for vaccine injury; its HIV/AIDS denialism; its blaming immigrants for crime and disease; its promotion of the pseudoscience claiming that abortion causes breast cancer using some of the most execrable “science” ever; its rejection of evidence-based guidelines as an unacceptable affront on the godlike autonomy of physicians; or the way the AAPS rejects even the concept of a scientific consensus about anything. Let’s just put it this way. The AAPS has featured publications by antivaccine mercury militia “scientists” Mark and David Geier. Even so, the very fact that Price was attracted enough to this organization and liked it enough to actually join it should raise a number of red flags. It certainly did with me, because I know the AAPS all too well."

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/12/tom-price-belongs-to-a-really-scary-medical-organization.html

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/medical-community-bitterly-brawls-over-tom-price-trumps-health-pick/