Junk science kills

NY Post ^ | February 4, 2010 | ELIZABETH M. WHELAN

[Scanian]

The media gave big headlines to this week's stories on a prestigious British medical publication's retraction of an article that had claimed to show a causal link between standard childhood vaccinations (measles, mumps and rubella) and autism.

Yet the coverage of the Lancet affair didn't truly convey the outrageousness of the original publication or the gravity of its consequences -- consequences long festering, since the paper was published not last week but 12 years ago.

Many of us in the scientific community recognized the "study" as junk when it appeared in 1998. Even before we learned of then-unknown ethical failings by its lead author, we knew the study was based on a tiny population of only 12 children. More, it relied on a novel methodology that assumed some bizarre, previously unheard of, association between children's autism and their manifestation of intestinal problems.

[bioqubit]

Dear Ms. Whelan,

It is in the nature of biology to find “bizarre” connections. Counter-intuitive discoveries are the stuff of Nobel Prizes. Why you and others continue to fail to deal with the data is what astonishes me. The findings were replicated in a better designed study.

[G Larry]

The leathality of junk science isn’t news.

The DDT ban has killed millions in the 3rd world.
This was acknowledged in, of all places, the July, 2007 National Geographic.

The only place DDT was a problem was here in the U.S. to extreme overuse, and the resulting concentrations downstream.

[Mase]

You appear to be unaware of Ms. Whelan's background and the organization she heads. Whelan certainly understands the "nature of biology" and the importance of being counter-intutitive in the discovery process. But that's not what this article is about. This is about outright fraud that caused unnecessary fear and, subsequently, unnecessary death. That fear, as she says, will continue to cause more deaths as people decline to immunize their children from diseases that should no longer be killing them.

Whelan and the American Council on Science and Health are dedicated to dealing with data in a scientific manner and are really the only organization effectively countering the evil being perpetrated on society by the food Nazis and the toxic terrorists. Like myself, Whelan realizes that far too much research today is being conducted to generate money rather than to find the truth. The best way to ensure the grant money continues to flow is to create fear based on junk science and then let the media run with it. There is a lot of that going on out there today and we are all worse off because of it.

Conservatives, especially conservative scientists, should be cheering and supporting Whelan as she labors to expose these scum.

[count-your-change]

Now The Lancet is going to pretend how careful they are in their publishing but over and over again the Wakefield study was refuted and the Lancet sat on its collective hands.
From the article: “Even when 10 of the original 13 authors withdrew their names from the article, Horton still refused to withdraw the study.”
Horton is an editor for The Lancet.
Please! No self righteous bleating from The Lancet.