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.

Don’t you just love it when a piece of news comes up just in the nick of time that allows you to knock someone’s argument right out of the park? It’s gin, yahtzee and checkmate, Ms Jeni Barnett and the anti-MMR contingent over at JABS. The debate (I am using this term very loosely here – this really is not much of a debate) is O-V-E-R. The findings in the 1998 Lancet paper regarding the MMR vaccine causing autism by Dr Andrew Wakefield were rigged. To be perfectly honest, I am not surprised. His claims have not been reproducible since 1998. This Sunday Times story gives the details as to how the study was rigged.

Now for the past few days the bad science blogs were filled with outrage from the drivel that came from Jeni Barnett’s LBC radio show, as well as the treatment of Dr Ben Goldacre by the lawyers of LBC. However this outrage is, as claimed by the anti-MMR contingent at JABS, fuelled by the money from the “Big Pharma”. Money from the Big Pharma? The last I checked my bank account, which was this morning, I was still a poor PhD student.

So what should happen to Dr Andrew Wakefield? In 2005, Korean stem cell biologist Dr Hwang Woo-Suk claimed to have created the first stem cell line from a cloned human embryo, a big breakthrough if true. Subsequently, the data were found to be inflated and faked and Dr Hwang Woo-Suk was charged with fraud. No lasting damage was done with this fraud, except national pride and the integrity of science. The journal Science retracted his paper and he was fired from his institution, and subjected to criminal investigations. Should the same apply to Dr Wakefield? If anything, his research, a fabrication as it would seem now, which arguably caused the MMR panic, led to uptake of the vaccine drop from >95% to <80%, and led to measles becoming endemic in the UK again. We have lost herd immunity for measles. Last year there were 1,348 cases, compared with less than 58 in 1998. More importantly, there has been fatalities.

Should he at least stand trial for causing this mess? Dr Hwang Woo-Suk has since apologised to the nation. Dr Andrew Wakefield still stands by his research and the links between MMR and autism. We need an end game to this whole mess to stand a chance of putting this debate to rest once and for all, such that we could get on the road to acquiring herd immunity for measles again.