Oh, dear, I want this man to suffer so.

Prepare for the deluge. The vaccines-cause-autism crowd will not be swayed by so-called proof.

Or... lets say you do think maybe vaccines are risky. For you, it becomes doubly important to convince everyone else to vaccinate, because the only thing that will keep your unvaccinated kid safe is if other people vaccinate enough to create herd immunity. Your child will be at even worse risk if you spread your doubts to other parents.

Vaccine deniers owe to their kids to shut the fuck up.

The quack has been exposed, but the damage caused by his followers like Jenny McCarthy has been staggering.

http://www.jennymccarthybodycount.com/Je…

That is appalling. A friend of my son's, a teenager, cut himself on something rusty in a field, and there was this big hoopla about getting him to hospital for a tetanus shot right away...he had never been vaccinated for anything.

The worst part of this is that the study appeared legitimate. Fraud like this, coming from an otherwise trustworthy and reputable source, causes a chain reaction of disbelief in all science.

I hope "Dr." Wakefield contracts smallpox.

I must admit I had my doubts about vaccines based on this study. Glad to hear it's finally, officially been declared a fraud. Not glad that millions of children (and the general public) were needlessly endangered, but glad the uncertainty's over.

Lock him up, throw away the fucking key. The deaths of many innnocent children are on this man's head. I might just barely forgive McCarthy if she were to issue an immediate retraction and dedicate a significant fraction of her remaining life to undoing what she has done.. Otherwise, may she, as well, burn in hell.

I love freedom of speech as much as the next guy, but it sure would be nice if there were some kind of criminal penalty for what Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy have done.

@9, I think a very good argument can be made that this was the equivalent of "fire in a crowded theater." Moreover, though, anyone who has contracted measles - especially if they themselves were vaccinated for measles, but their contacts weren't - has a civil suit, I'd think.

@11 - Yeah. You could maybe also make a case for slander or libel (whatever, I'm not a lawyer), and let the vaccine makers sue the shit out of them.

Ideally, though, I'd love to see Wakefield and McCarthy suffer a punishment proportionate to the hundreds of people who have died from preventable diseases since they started spouting their bullshit.

He should be charged with murder.

We have known for a while that the results were incorrect. The new revelation is proof of fraud. We even had evidence of fraud previously.

What bothers me most is that as this new revelation of proof of fraud comes out people are still only now coming around to understanding that the MMR vaccine DOES NOT cause autism. No matter how many people you tell that there is zero science that shows the vaccine causes autism someone heard it from someone who had an autistic kid and so on. Millions of mom's have been tricked into this entire movement which was essentially time and money wasted that could have actually gone to help autistic children.

completely infuriating.

It's unlikely to convince the Vashon Island Taliban.

@10 - that had nothing to do with the quality of Canadian health care, and everything to do with dipstick parents. Childhood vaccines are all covered by our provincial health care plans, parents pay nothing out of pocket and they are available everywhere.

Meh... it's kinda old news. The "antivax" crown has moved on to other random reasons why vaccines are bad. According to my sister-in-law, the polio vaccine doesn't actually prevent polio, but "Guillain-Barre syndrome" is actually just polio that they've renamed because the vaccine is a failure.

Here's a recent one she posted: http://preventdisease.com/news/09/102809… All fancied up in "scientific"jargon and really just reflecting an utter misunderstanding of how vaccines work.

There was an episode of Talk of the Nation focusing on the facts surrounding this issue some time ago. One mother who chose to not vaccinate her children called in decrying the one sidedness of the show (no experts would represent the anti-vaccine side).

When asked if she would change her mind after given evidence that the whole thing was a fraud her reply was something to the effect of, "no...no amount of evidence could change my mind. I'm KNOW it's true."

Not everyone thinks like this but there are a number of people who value faith over facts.

@ 19, no shit. LOTS of people value faith over facts. That's why there are so many people convinced that climate change isn't caused by people, or that cutting taxes will kickstart the economy and lead to budget surpluses, or that complete and total deregulation will result in a utopia where the best and brightest will prevail.

I recall seeing news of some study that shows that certain people are likely to become even more fervent in their false beliefs when confronted with facts. That mom is a case in point.

Its yet another example of how bat-shit crazy humanity is in general. When the whole autistic "facilitated communication" fad of the 1980s/90s was completely debunked over and over, the large sub-culture that it had spawned just kept on rollin'. But - as always! follow the damn money, because a whole bunch of people were making a whole bunch of money off of it, and probably still are.

It's bitterly ironic to know that those of us who have older autistic children never got hooked into any belief system like this because back then when our kids were diagnosed, WE were blamed.

It's a lot of grasping at straws in the autism community, because no matter how much parents love their children, it usually sucks to have to parent them forever. It's not a simple thing to pin down the cause(s), but most people cannot grasp that correlation is not equal to causation.

Non-MMR things that correlate with the sharp uptick in autism diagnosis: availability and prevalence of cable television and a doubling of US cheese consumption. But people like TV and cheese, not so much pokes with pointy things.

All I know for sure is that, like Anthony, my Grifflet-in-progress is getting vaccinated on schedule. It took meeting only one woman who had contracted gestational rubella to drive that point home.

@6, you can remove the "Dr." entirely. The UK stripped this baby-killer of his medical license last year.

I hope that the publicity prevents more credulous people from putting their infants lives at risk, but I doubt it will have much effect on the "true believers". They are emotionally invested in this in a manner that is religious, not scientific. They already believe that this is some "big Pharma" conspiracy anyway, to them more loud denunciations of Wakefield is "proof" that he is persecuted and therefore right. It's the exact same dynamic as creationists or climate change denialists, except in this case it's worse. A true believing mother MUST refuse to believe she was wrong because if she admits she is, that means she put her own children at risk of death for a lie.

Slog's own Dr Golob could shed light on the current state of research-

Dr Golob will tell you that it is very easy for a clever researcher to design a study to give results in the direction they seek.

And how, even if a researcher is trying to be nuetral it is easy to allow the biases we all poses about pretty much everything (social policy, scientific theory, etc etc) to unintentionally colour study design and interpretation.

And how, in the murky subjective field of social policy research it is especially difficult not to let your personal feelings affect your research.

He can also explain how the university/research community, especially where social science is concerned, is an overwhelmingly liberal one fervent in all the tenents of the secular humanist homoliberal theology.

And how devasting it can be to one's career to swim against the homoliberal orthodox tide when it comes to securing position, tenure and grants.

Dr Golob could also tell you how fervently homosexual (and faghag) researchers at universities all across the nation are seeking "proof" to validate their beliefs about homosexuality.
After all, what's a little academic fudging when it is for the good of The Cause?....

He could also explain how the media, another hotbed of liberalism, laps up the phony bullshit "research" shat out by Queer,Inc and regurgitates it to a credulous public.

We have already seen how Global Warming research fraud operated very similarly to this vaccine hoax.

Dr Golob could explain that gushing fawning "research" about lesbian moms and homosexual penguins and gay genes are part of the same fetid fecal gumbo of HomoLiberal BullShit.

Just ask him........
.

There was a really great, if infuriating, episode of Frontline about this last year. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/…

Totally agree that the anti-vaccine crowd has bought into a religion. You don't need a god to fuck things up with faith.

One generation of crippled children living short sad lives in iron lungs would be all it would take to put this nonsense to bed.

Reading some of the comments in the frontline website is pretty painful. People decrying them for not covering the other side of the issue despite there not really being another side to talk about.

Ahhh, but unless you know a child who was happy and talking the day before receiving the MMR, and has been mute and fully autistic since the day after, I guess this seems concrete. Smoke and Mirrors.

Autism doesn't have anything to do with how happy a child is or whether they happened to speak in a given day.

Not to mention that the studies done since this initial fraudulent one have found that your anecdotal case is not a common one.

Just because it happened to you doesn't mean it happened to everyone.

Anyway, how do you know the day when autism starts? Autism is a very ambiguous condition.

Autism is not an ambiguous condition; it's a condition that has a fairly wide spectrum of behavioral characteristics. On one end of the spectrum, it's very obvious; on the other end (including Asperger's Syndrome), some of the behavioral characteristics could be due to other factors.

What @4 and others said.

@31 heck, even the measures we use for intellectual capacity are ambiguous ... but all diseases tend to be a spectrum, think of a giant bell curve of normals on one end (non-disease) overlapped with a smaller tiny peak curve of affecteds on the other end.

It's like a snake that just swallowed a giant elephant and is almost finished digesting a tiny marmot.

@31-33 Whether autism is ambiguous or not depends on whether you're talking about diagnosis or the underlying biology. Diagnosis isn't very ambiguous (something like 4 out of 8 standard symptoms is a positive), but the biology is. I'd guess it's because what we call autism is actually a group of biologically distinct conditions with similar symptoms, but who knows. The best understood aspect of autism is probably that vaccines are highly unlikely to cause it, thanks to Mr Wakefield. What a great scientist.

As the mother of an autistc child I will take autism over measles, mumps, tetnus, diptheria etc.. anyday. But I understand that it is really difficult to accept that your child has a condition that will make their life difficult and parenting difficult and is financially and emotionally draining and there is no explaination why. It is much much easier to have something to blame like the MMR.

Also I would like to point out that autiam is not a death sentence! It's a struggle but many autistic kids can, with help, learn to lead happy, fufilling lives.

And I really wish someone would stick a mike in the face of some parent whose kid developed a preventable disease and ask them is they still think they made the right choce for their family and what they advise new parents to do with their babies.

There is all this debate about whether vaccinations are the cause of autism. Sure there may be evidence to show that autism appeared after a vaccination, but there is also evidence that suggests vaccinations aren't the MAIN culprit.
Link between vaccines and autism