The Great DBH Rant

The flurry of activity in the bad science blogosphere in the past few days, coupled with the overwhelming support for Dr Ben Goldacre, from bloggers, mainstream newspapers, as well as celebrity in the form of Stephen Fry, against the legal garbage LBC has thrown at him was nothing short of amazing. It goes to show that even with mighty legal muscle, you can’t cover up bollocks from ignorant fools. The pressure built up in the blogosphere these few days has led Jeni Barnett to buckle under the pressure and subsequently delete all offending posts (along with their comments) from her blog.

Big mistake and I am sure the eggs will be dripping for a long time to come.

So what now? What is the next step from here? This whole fiasco has kicked up a little bit of a storm that it may well be wrong to not milk it for all it’s worth. I have come across chatter in some forums that we should continue to hound Jeni Barnett and her whole series of cock-ups (ignorant and ill-informed views, defiant blogposts, censorship of comments, and ultimately, making them magically disappear and pretend nothing’s happened).

Hounding Jeni Barnett will, at best, only make her life a little bit more uncomfortable. Justified it may seem but in the grand scheme of matters, it won’t do much other than a small win for sensible reasoning and common sense. It will quickly be forgotten. I think the developments in the past few days should be milked to reinforce the idea that the MMR vaccine is safe to the general public, as well as launching a general condemnation to the anti-vaccination camp. The ultimate goal should still be acquiring herd immunity for measles, thus kicking measles out of the country, such that we can pick up from where we left off – the 90s. The momentum is certainly there, on the back of the Barnett fiasco, David Aaronovitch’s intervention in the Times, Stephen Fry’s support, as well as the Brian Deer revelation regarding fabrications in Andrew Wakefield’s Lancet paper, which provided the first (and only) indications of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

In fact, I think Andrew Wakefield is a very lucky man. Brian Deer’s article was published on Sunday (08 February 2009), right in the middle of the Jeni Barnett and LBC storm. In fact I think they have taken most of the flak for Andrew Wakefield.

It would be great if Brian Deer would produce some sort of response regarding Wakefield’s rebuttals to his accusations. This would put the “head” of the anti-vaccination camp back into the spotlight, which I think is important. He has been riding on the waves of the 1998 Lancet paper for a little bit too long now, in my opinion. Usually in the space of 11 years, I would expect a piece of dubious research to have come up with new, as well as more convincing evidence. Otherwise, it is time for it to be put to rest – for good.

Now would also be a good time for the NHS to put out a better campaign for the MMR vaccine. The current one has no bite to it, as Dr Aust has talked about.

This really is a good opportunity to quash anti-vaccination talk. It burns my brain to even think about how such talk could exist.