If you’re a savvy Retraction Watch reader — or if you’ve paid any attention at all to the news in the last 18 hours — you will have heard by now that the BMJ has called Andrew Wakefield’s work on autism and the MMR vaccine a “hoax.”
The February 2010 retraction of the original Wakefield paper in the Lancet was, of course, a huge deal. If there were a Canon of Scientific Retractions, it would be in it. It happened before we launched Retraction Watch, however, so we haven’t commented much on it.
We plan on writing about major retractions in history, but the frequency of fascinating timely ones hasn’t abated enough yet to let us do that. (One exception: Our Best of Retractions series.) And in any case, there have been a lot of pixels spilled on this one already, so we’re not sure we have much to add. That’s the nice thing about the web: It leaves us free to curate as well as create.
One comment we want to offer is that the investigation by Brian Deer in the BMJ is yet more proof that scientific retractions are worth watching. While most retractions don’t involve fraud, many involve misconduct. And if you peel back enough layers of the onion on many of those, you’ll uncover critically important stories. Deer has been doing this for more than a decade when it comes to Wakefield’s work, as have others. Adam did it when he broke the story of Scott Reuben’s fraud.
But as we noted, there are already a lot of pixels spilled on the most recent chapter in the Wakefield story, and we’re not sure what else we can add right now. So here are a few suggestions for smart commentary:
- Seth Mnookin, author of Panic Virus, on whether the BMJ hyped their investigation, and how much of it was really new. Mnookin — a friend of Ivan’s from college — was on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 last night, as was Andrew Wakefield. (More disclosure: Ivan’s wife works as a writer/producer at AC360.)
- Gary Schwitzer on why the story shows that one journalist can make a difference.
- The Association of Health Care Journalists’ Covering Health blog rounds up tip sheets, AHCJ award contest entries, and more on autism.
- David Gorski calls Deer’s piece “the last swing of the sword that hacks off Wakefield’s last limb,” although he thinks he’ll keep fighting.
DavidDarryl Cunningham’s cartoon version of the saga, from May.- A look at what we can learn from the fiasco about communicating risk, from David Ropeik at Scientific American
We’ll add to that list as we come across other good stuff. (Thanks to Bora Zivkovic and EvidenceMatters for a few of these links.) And here’s what our sister blog, Embargo Watch, posted about whether a tweet — and later, CNN — broke the embargo on the BMJ articles.
Thanks for the link to my strip. You did get my name wrong though. Ooops!
Fixed — apols and thanks!
I’m keeping a list of positive responses to the BMJ (Yes Wakefield is a fraud, and here are the implications…) and negative responses (Wakefield’s research IS TOO valid and vaccines cause autism anyway) at A roundup of responses to the BJM & Wakefield’s research was motivated by fraud.
Some observations
1. The positive responses come from a broad range of sites — politically left and right; people who are skeptics/ people who have heretofore (to my knowledge) never commented on vaccines or autism before, and so on. The negative responses are from a predictable set of sites and people.
2. The news coverage in the US has (perhaps inadvertently) perpetrated the idea that all parents of children with autism believe in the vaccine causation myth. It is a complete falsehood. Many parents of children with autism and adults with autism robustly reject the myth.
3. Kev Leitch, whose daughter has intense autism, has a moving post on how Wakefield’s actions have damaged everyone affected by autism
You say ‘the BMJ has called Andrew Wakefield’s work on autism and the MMR vaccine a “hoax.”’ but I can’t find the word “hoax” used in the two BMJ articles linked.
Thanks for your comment. The press release likens the retracted paper to the Piltdown Man hoax. Here are the first few paragraphs:
He is back:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/magazine/mag-24Autism-t.html?_r=1&hp
Hi,
If you are still considering adding additional commentary, I would highly recommend the video “Vaccines: A Measured Response” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BIcAZxFfrc) as an in-depth examination of the paper’s ethical and methodological failings for a non-technical audience