No need to introduce this one to junkscience.com readers.
ACSH and Mike Shaw pointhttp://acsh.org/2014/03/wakefield-scandal-spelled-shout-michael-shaw/ to the work by a Brit journalist on the Wakefield problem.
Way back when, when my hair wasn’t grey, mercury created all kinds of fuss.
I do believe mercury phobia helped this little vaccine panic narrative along because the preservative thimerosol had a small amount of mercury, which is critical to keeping contamination out.
Mercury in ambient amount doesn’t cause brain damage but present in such small amoutns it is not toxic adn certainly doesn’t cause any diseases or damage.
Autism is a new segment of mental retardation. The segment of MR that went away in the recent past is now called autism.
It is not increasing, the diagnosis is just being used to distinguish a form of mental disability.
Wakefield’s scare research was done on an incredibly small number of subjects in a most fallacious way.
If there is a vaccine toxicity, he didn’t design a study that could show it. He just jumped right to the conclusion he wanted.
http://acsh.org/2014/03/wakefield-scandal-spelled-shout-michael-shaw/
He was paid well by a lawyer for the express purpose of finding some form of harm related to the MMR vaccine because it would generate a massively profitable class action lawsuit. In addition he had patented a measles vaccine that would never sell so long as MMR was trusted. His original stance was not that vaccines were bad but that the combined vaccine was unsafe compared to single pathogen vaccines such as the one he hoped to sell.
The real question is why the Lancet published such an obviously flawed study. Or even better, why they still enjoy any respect at all.