I didn't think!!! I experimented!!!
Yeah right.........Its not like he had any credibility to lose is it.
Andrew Jeremy Wakefield (born c. 1957) is a British former gastroenterologist and medical researcher, known for his fraudulent 1998 research paper in support of the now-discredited claim that there was a link between the administration of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, and the appearance of autism and bowel disease.
On 28 January 2010, a five-member statutory tribunal of the GMC found three dozen charges proved, including four counts of dishonesty and 12 counts involving the abuse of developmentally challenged children.
In January 2011, an editorial accompanying an article by Brian Deer in BMJ identified Wakefield's work as an "elaborate fraud". In a follow-up article,Deer said that Wakefield had planned to launch a venture on the back of an MMR vaccination scare that would profit from new medical tests and "litigation driven testing". In November 2011, yet another report in BMJ revealed original raw data indicating that, contrary to Wakefield's claims in The Lancet, children in his research did not have inflammatory bowel disease.
Wakefield's study and his claim that the MMR vaccine might cause autism led to a decline in vaccination rates in the United States, United Kingdom and Ireland and a corresponding rise in measles and mumps, resulting in serious illness and deaths, and his continued warnings against the vaccine have contributed to a climate of distrust of all vaccines and the re-emergence of other previously controlled diseases. Wakefield has continued to defend his research and conclusions, saying there was no fraud, hoax or profit motive. In February 2015, he publicly repeated his denials and refused to back down from his assertions, even though—as stated by a British Administrative Court Justice in a related decision—"There is now no respectable body of opinion which supports (Dr Wakefield's) hypothesis, that MMR vaccine and autism/enterocolitis are causally linkedBut Deer's investigation - nominated in February 2011 for two British Press Awards - discovered that, while Wakefield held himself out to be a dispassionate scientist, two years before the Lancet paper was published - and before any of the 12 children were even referred to the hospital - he had been hired to attack MMR by a lawyer, Richard Barr: a jobbing solicitor in the small eastern English town of King's Lynn, who hoped to raise a speculative class action lawsuit against drug companies which manufactured the triple shot.
Unlike expert witnesses, who give professional advice and opinions, Wakefield had negotiated an unprecedented contract with Barr, then aged 48, to conduct clinical and scientific research. The goal was to find evidence of what the two men claimed to be a "new syndrome", intended to be the centrepiece of (later failed) litigation on behalf of an eventual 1,600 British families, recruited through media stories. This publicly undisclosed role for Wakefield created the grossest conflict of interest, and the exposure of it by Deer, in February 2004, led to public uproar in Britain, the retraction of the Lancet report's conclusions section, and, from July 2007 to May 2010, the longest-ever professional misconduct hearing by the UK's General Medical Council (GMC).
Barr [audio] paid the doctor with money from the UK legal aid fund: run by the government to give poorer people access to justice. Wakefield charged at the extraordinary rate of £150 an hour - billed through a company of his wife's - eventually totalling, for generic work alone, what the UK Legal Services Commission, pressed by Deer under the freedom of information act, said was £435,643 (then about $750,000 US), plus expenses. These hourly fees - revealed in The Sunday Times in December 2006 - gave the doctor a direct personal, but undeclared, financial interest in his research claims: totalling more than eight times his reported annual salary and creating an incentive not only for him to launch the alarm, but to keep it going for as long as possible.
In addition to the personal payments, Wakefield was awarded an initial £55,000, which he had applied for in June 1996, but which, like the hourly fees, he never declared to the Lancet as he should have done, for the express purpose of conducting the research later submitted to the journal. This start-up funding was part of a staggering £26.2m of taxpayers' money (more than $56m US at 2014 prices) eventually shared among a small group of doctors and lawyers, working under Barr's and Wakefield's direction, trying to prove that MMR caused the previously unheard-of "syndrome". Yet more surprising, Wakefield had asserted the existence of such a syndrome - which allegedly included what he would dub "autistic enterocolitis" - before he performed the research which purportedly discovered it.
The Sunday Times investigation unearthed another shocking conflict of interest. In June 1997 - nearly nine months before the press conference at which Wakefield called for single vaccines - he had filed a patent on products, including his own supposedly "safer" single measles vaccine, which only stood any prospect of success if confidence in MMR was damaged. Although Wakefield denied any such plans, his proposed shot, and a network of companies intended to raise venture capital for purported inventions - including "a replacement for attenuated viral vaccines", commercial testing kits and what he claimed to be a possible "complete cure" for autism - were set out in confidential documents.As with the researcher, so too with his subjects. They also were not what they appeared to be. In the Lancet, the 12 children (11 boys and one girl) had been held out as merely a routine series of kids with developmental disorders and digestive symptoms, needing care from the London hospital. That so many of their parents blamed problems on one common vaccine, understandably, caused public concern. But Deer discovered that nearly all the children (aged between 2½ and 9½) had been pre-selected through MMR campaign groups, and that, at the time of their admission, most of their parents were clients and contacts of the lawyer, Barr. None of the 12 lived in London. Two were brothers. Two attended the same doctor's office, 280 miles from the Royal Free. Three were patients at another clinic. One was flown in from the United States.But on 28 January 2010 - after 197 days of evidence, submissions and deliberations - a panel of three doctors and two lay members hearing the GMC case handed down verdicts which wholly vindicated Deer. Branding Wakefield "dishonest", "unethical" and "callous", they found him guilty (against a criminal standard of proof) of some three dozen charges, including four of counts of dishonesty and 12 involving the abuse of developmentally-challenged children. His research was found to be dishonest and performed without ethical approval. Five days later, the Lancet fully retracted the paper from the scientific literature as "utterly false", prompting international media interest and further retractions.
"What is indisputable is that vaccines protect children from dangerous diseases," said The New York Times, in one of a string of editorials in leading newspapers. "We hope that The Lancet’s belated retraction will finally lay this damaging myth about autism and vaccines to rest."
Three weeks later, on 17 February 2010, Wakefield was ousted by the directors of his Texas business, and on 24 May - day 217 of the GMC hearing - he was ordered to be erased from the UK doctors' register, ending his career in medicine. On 21 December 2010, that erasure was confirmed after he abandoned a court appeal against the verdicts.http://briandeer.com/solved/bmj-deer-mmr-tables.pdfMedical journal calls the fraud
Finally, in January 2011, BMJ, the British Medical Journal, concluded the investigation with a three-week package of disclosures and editorials, including three major reports by Deer: How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed, How the vaccine crisis was meant to make money and The Lancet's two days to bury bad news. The package (which involved peer-review and separate editorial checking of key evidence and documents) also included an introduction by Deer, Piltdown medicine, explaining the fraud and comparing it with Britain's most notorious scientific forgery. In editorials, the BMJ called Wakefield's research "an elaborate fraud" and accused the Royal Free medical school and the Lancet of "institutional and editorial misconduct".
http://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-summary.htm
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Kinky is using a feather. Perverted is using the whole chicken
I didn't think!!! I experimented!!!
Go soothingly on the grease mud, as there lurks the skid demon
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Kinky is using a feather. Perverted is using the whole chicken
So I've mostly finished reading her work - interesting Woman.
The general points that I felt she raised are:
1: Everything should be subject to the Scientific Method (alternative Medicine and negative Clinical Trials) and there should be greater transparency behind this
I agree - it's interesting to note that she endorses the Scientific Method and peer review, even if in the same breath she says most of what is peer reviewed atm is biased. Which I note is in contrast with some of the views you have espoused.
2: The Pharmaceutical companies have got too much financial access to the end users and even with declared conflicts of interest, these remain.
I agree in part - In much the same way that I feel that Lobbying is really just a legal form of Corruption, however I am also a realist and accept that there is and will always be a level of Corruption, the discussion point then becomes whether it is too high.
3: R&D shouldn't be done by private institutions, it should be done by neutral parties
I disagree - Private industry (when properly regulated) is more efficient at developing innovation - this is true not just for Pharmaceuticals, but almost all industries.
4: Drugs are prescribed first for an increasing number of conditions.
This is an interesting point on 2 counts - She mentions ED and Social Anxiety - two conditions that traditionally would have been dismissed as 'can't get it up' and Extreme shyness - the way she mentions them I think is a disservice to those afflicted by them. I'll concede that she is probably talking about borderline cases or mild cases - but I feel it is a safe assumption that if someone feels that they are afflicted enough to warrant a Dr's visit, then they feel that there is an impact on their quality of life.
The second interesting point is IMO not though any manipulation of the Drug companies per se, but more a reflection of our societal move to instant gratification - consider Social Anxiety - someone says that you can attend classes, work hard and perhaps after 6 months - a year, you may be able to overcome it, another person says you can take a pill and be fine tomorrow - which would you choose? Things such as the Internet have made Instant Gratification the norm - 20 years ago a Mail order delivery might take months to arrive, Today an Internet Order can be shipped overnight, some sites even being able to do same-day delivery if ordered before a certain time period.
Are the Drug companies leveraging this fact, undoubtedly - but they are simply responding to the Market's desires - I don't think the full blame can be levelled at the Pharmaceutical company here.
Physics; Thou art a cruel, heartless Bitch-of-a-Mistress
I didn't think!!! I experimented!!!
I didn't think!!! I experimented!!!
Straw Man. I don't know and have not heard of anyone who will forcibly vaccinate children. The consequence of you not wishing to vaccinate your children however should be that they are therefore restricted in their activities so they cannot act as potential reservoirs and / or vectors of infection in e.g. a public facility such as a school.
Same as, you can drink. But then you cannot legally get behind the handlebars or the wheel and drive. QED.
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