A Good Week for Science (And a Bad Week for Antivaxxers)

Better late than never: 

For a decade, many parents have worried that vaccines might somehow be causing autism in children. Repeated assurances from respected experts that there is no link have failed to quiet those fears. Now The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal that published the paper that first gave wide credence to those fears, has retracted it, saying that the paper’s authors had made false claims about how the study was conducted.

The journal acted after a British medical panel had found the lead author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, guilty of dishonesty and flouting medical ethics.

 

 

More background on those findings here and here.

 

A great take from the Skepchick Rebecca Watson on why this all matters:

 

 

More analysis from Phil Plait: 

...Of course, that won’t even slow Wakefield or the antivaxxers. They don’t care for the real world, based on evidence and fact. They are, for all intents and purposes, religious zealots now, believing in Wakefield, Jenny McCarthy, and the rest with such fervor that there is literally no amount of evidence that can ever sway them. And they will continue to spin, fold, and mutilate the truth, while we watch as diseases rise back from the dead, infecting hundreds of thousands of people, and killing many of them.

Never forget what’s at stake here. Never.

 

 

Steve Novella: 

This should be the final nail in the coffin of this controversial and harmful study. Coming 12 years after the original paper, after just about every element of the research and its findings have been refuted, the Lancet retraction almost seems unecessary. But it is necessary and important. As the retraction indicates – it removes this dubious research from the published record.

 

(...)

 

I applaud the Lancet for finally retracting the Wakefield study and removing it from the published record. It should not, however, have taken this long.

David Gorski: 

When will the madness end? I fear that it will only end when vaccine-preventable diseases return to the point where every parent fears them again. No, it’s more than that. Vaccine-preventable diseases are already returning. That’s why I fear it will only end when they return to the point where the fear of disease is more intense than the fear of the vaccine-autism bogeyman. In the meantime, while Third World countries clamor for life-saving vaccines and Bill Gates pledges $10 billion to bring vaccines to the world, here in the developed world we have men like Andrew Wakefield feeding an irrational fear of vaccines that threatens to reverse all the progress of the last few decades.