Liberal Burblings

It’s worth reading every word of the article entitled MMR scare doctor conducted invasive, unnecessary tests on children says GMC in today’s Guardian (it has a different title online).

The whole MMR scare is utterly mind-blowing, particularly now that the full story is coming out. But as Ben Goldacre points out, not for the first time, it’s no good entirely blaming Dr Wakefield and his colleagues: The media are equally guilty:

Wakefield was at the centre of a media storm about the MMR vaccine and is now being blamed by journalists as if he were the only one at fault. In reality, the media are equally guilty.

Even if it had been immaculately well conducted – and it certainly wasn’t – Wakefield’s “case series report” of 12 children’s clinical anecdotes would never have justified the conclusion that MMR causes autism, despite what journalists claimed: it simply didn’t have big enough numbers to do so.

But the media repeatedly reported the concerns of this one man, generally without giving methodological details of the research, either because they found it too complicated, inexplicably, or because to do so would have undermined their story.

As the years passed by, media coverage deteriorated further. Claims by researchers who never published scientific papers to back up their claims were reported in the newspapers as important new scientific breakthroughs while, at the same time, evidence showing no link between MMR and autism, fully published in peer reviewed academic journals, was simply ignored. This was cynical and unforgivable.

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3. Media foam over one University Challenge contestant
4. MMR scare: It's the media's fault
5. Huhne hits media pay dirt