No doubt, many of you who will watch this evening’s program, on the faulty link between vaccinations and autism, will be angry. Disgraced British researcher Andrew Wakefield published an explosive study in The Lancet leading many to believe certain vaccines could cause autism. You’ll think this program is biased and that we did not do our due diligence by getting Wakefield’s side of the story. But you would be wrong. There are no two sides to this story.
“Part of the problem in the whole coverage of this study, was that journalists were hampered by the edict that there are two sides to every story,” according to Dr. Ronald Gold. “But that’s not the always the case with science. In this situation, there was only one side: the factual evidence.”
Dr. Gold was Head of the Division of Infectious Disease at the Hospital for Sick Children and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Toronto until he retired 15 years ago. He now sits on the provincial government’s Subcommittee on Immunization. Full disclosure: he has given independent advice to almost every vaccine manufacturer on vaccine research.
Dr. Gold made these remarks last month at a discussion organized by the Science Media Centre of Canada and the Canadian Journalism Foundation. Investigative journalist Brian Deer was the highlight of the evening – he is the reporter who broke the news that Wakefield failed to disclose a financial conflict of interest in his study, in a series of articles in The Sunday Times of London. Not that the medical community ever bought what Wakefield had to say. They were disputing the study from when it was first published in 1998, because they could not replicate his results.
And that’s an important component to this case. That a prestigious medical journal such as The Lancet would publish Wakefield’s study brings some serious questions to the debate on the effectiveness of peer review. These are some of the issues we will address on this evening’s program.
We’ll also explore the role the media played in perpetuating the false link between vaccines and autism.
After a past interview on The Current with our guest tonight, journalist and author Seth Mnookin, CBC Radio bowed to subsequent listener outrage, by getting the other side. In an interview with Andrew Wakefield from Austin, Texas, where he now resides, the former doctor said off the top of the interview: "Let me just reassure you and your listeners that there was absolutely no fraud. There is no basis to the allegations that have been made against me. And so I am equally perplexed as to how someone like Seth Mnookin, with no scientific training whatsoever, can come to the conclusions he’s come to.”
There is a basis to the allegations: The Lancet retracted the original study last year after the British General Medical Council found Wakefield’s work was dishonest and took away his license to practice medicine. In January of this year, the British Medical Journal denounced Wakefield’s work as being not only false, but fraudulent as well.
“I was flabbergasted,” said another of tonight’s guests, research ethicist Dr. Miriam Shuchman, in a conversation we had following last month’s panel discussion. “He came off sounding completely sound and authoritative. I would never have known there was any problem with what he was saying.”
And so, I never contacted Andrew Wakefield to have him on tonight’s show. He and his study have been discredited. The study used a highly questionable methodology and the results were falsified. End of story.
Aside from the children who have been left vulnerable to many childhood diseases they weren’t vaccinated for, the true victims in this are the families and the children with autism. This false linkage of the MMR vaccine to autism misled them and led to a lost decade in research — research which could be answering the questions of why their children are autistic. And, potentially, a treatment.
Many of you will accuse me of being a part of a conspiracy, along with the pharmaceutical industry. I assure you, I am not. You can watch past Agenda episodes where I've questioned the practices of this industry. But what I don’t question is the value of the vaccines themselves and the validity of rigorous scientific study.
I hope tonight’s discussion will answer questions for you, such as to how science could go so wrong. The only remaining question is how to undo the damage Wakefield has done.
