Lee's Blog

At long last, the General Medical Council has rendered a verdict in its interminable case against Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield produced “research” (repudiated by most of those who would have been co-authors) purporting to show that the MMR shot (or jab as the British say) causes autism.

Wakefield neglected to mention that he had been paid to produce this “research” by trial attorneys seeking the lucrative anti-vax business, or that the test results he reported weren’t the actual test results, or that he had a patent on a separate measles vaccine that would allow him to profit if people were scared away from the MMR.

Quoth the BBC:

The General Medical Council ruled he had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in doing his research.

The verdict, read out by panel chairman Dr Surendra Kumar, criticised Dr Wakefield for the invasive tests, such as spinal taps, that were carried out on children and which were found to be against their best clinical interests.

The panel said Dr Wakefield, who was working at London’s Royal Free Hospital as a gastroenterologist at the time, did not have the ethical approval or relevant qualifications for such tests.

The GMC also took exception with the way he gathered blood samples. Dr Wakefield paid children £5 for the samples at his son’s birthday party.

Dr Kumar said he had acted with “callous disregard for the distress and pain the children might suffer”.

He also said Dr Wakefield should have disclosed the fact that he had been paid to advise solicitors acting for parents who believed their children had been harmed by the MMR.

But then they go on with this:

The GMC now has to consider whether Dr Wakefield’s behaviour, and that of his colleagues, amounts to serious professional misconduct and then if any sanctions should be imposed, such as striking them off the medical register.

How could that not be serious professional misconduct? Forget the other dishonesty, forget the children who have died because he frightened their parents out of protecting them with vaccines. He was conducting unauthorized and unethical “research” that involved hazardous and unnecessary medical procedures on children! What else is there to “consider”?

The anti-vaxxers like to demand whether those who support vaccination will themselves get the H1N1 flu shot. Speaking only for myself …

I have only had the flu once. I vividly recall coming down with the flu on April 15, 1991. I remember the exact date since the following Monday I was in the emergency room getting chest X-Rays for the resulting pneumonia. It took two months and three rounds of antibiotics (the first two rounds involving two antibiotics simultaneously) to clear it up.

Of course I’m getting the H1N1 flu shot. Also the seasonal flu shot. Also the whooping cough immunization if I can find someone to give it to me.

Speaking of Dr. Gordon, he hangs out on ScienceBlogs for his medical information:

As for the comments about my ignorance: Yes, I have gaps in my knowledge base and will keep coming back here to fill some them.

I mentioned that I found this troubling, and he replied:

don’t underestimate the brain power on this site.

Yeah, okay, but personally, if I go to a doctor, I would hope that he has a medical education and has kept up with the medical literature, and I would prefer that he fill in the gaps in his knowledge via continuing medical education, rather than whatever random bits various brainy people (probably not medically trained) throw out in blog comments. But maybe that’s just me.

My favorite blogger is Orac at Respectful Insolence. A commenter who shows up there sometimes is Dr. Jay Gordon, “Pediatrician to the Stars”. Dr. Gordon apparently claims that he is not anti-vaccine though I find that hard to believe based on this:

I gave a half dozen vaccines today. I gave some reluctantly but respected parents’ wishes to vaccinate.

If he’s not anti-vaccine, why would he be reluctant to vaccinate? Note that he doesn’t say, there were contra-indications in these specific cases, but the parents insisted so I went ahead (though that in itself would be a worrisome statement). Rather, he didn’t want to do it but the parents insisted. That sounds like an anti-vaxxer to me.

So yesterday, Dr. Gordon showed up in Orac’s comments again. This time, someone asked what justification he had for putting off tetanus vaccination, and he answered, incredibly:

Tetanus is not “everywhere.” It’s in Africa and other parts of the globe while we in the USA have a few dozen cases/year. I would like to see more effective tetanus vaccination there.

Various people pointed out that tetanus is everywhere (well, everywhere on Earth — they did acknowledge that there’s an entire universe out there that is not so far as we know contaminated with the tetanus organism), that it is not communicable so herd immunity does not apply, and that the only reasons the U.S. has only a few dozen deaths per year are (a) most Americans are vaccinated and (b) our medical system is really good at saving people.

Dr. Gordon replied:

I know that C. tetani bacteria are not just in Africa and that the disease is not communicable . . . but, there are very few cases in America and hundreds of thousands of fatal cases in Africa. It doesn’t take much thought to realize we should focus on getting the vaccines and the education to countries whose population is actually threatened by the disease.

Uh, right. Most people in the U.S. are vaccinated against tetanus, so we should let the rest, and all young children, go without vaccination while we “focus on getting the vaccines and the education to countries whose population is actually threatened by the disease.” And, then, as Americans start to die in large numbers from tetanus because they aren’t vaccinated, why, then we’ll vaccinate them because then the population will be actually threatened. And once most people are vaccinated, the death rate will go way down in the U.S., and we can stop vaccinating again until it goes up. Perfect!

On what possible basis could someone who makes Dr. Gordon’s argument claim not to be anti-vaccine? I thought he was building up his practice by catering to anti-vaxxers, cynically figuring that he can look like the good guy by not vaccinating, while relying on herd immunity to protect his patients. But if he won’t even vaccinate for tetanus, where herd immunity doesn’t apply, well … perhaps I’ll just finish this sentence by saying that I believe him to be an anti-vaxxer whatever he says.

Orac has been writing a lot about the declining uptake of vaccination and the resulting failure of herd immunity*. Here he describes the result of failure of herd immunity, in the form of a child who barely survived Haemophilus influenza type B. She got it even though she was vaccinated because, it turned out, she had an immune deficiency disorder and unknowingly relied on herd immunity to protect her.

Given that I have asthma, I’m starting to get very worried about the possibility of pertussis. I doubt I can get vaccinated while still wheezing and sniffling from this wretched cold (now on its twelfth day, but as soon as possible, I want to get what protection I can. My tetanus shots wore off a long time ago, too.

*I think they might have done better to pick a different term — population immunity, or if they want something short and a bit exotic, deme immunity. That lackwit Jeni Barnett (*spit*) made a big deal about asking people if they intended to be part of the herd ignorantly lowing in the field.

The broadcast by that lackwit Jeni Barnett (*spit*) has probably been done to death by better folks than I, but I have yet more comments about it. I particularly have a comment about this part, with the homeopath Tracy:

Barnett: Tracy, let me ask you this. When measles–if there’s a case of measles at the kids’ school, or if there’s a case of mumps or chickenpox-what do you do?

Tracy: I say, “Great! Come on kids — let’s go get it”. Because children get childhood diseases for a reason. It’s to boost their immune system so that later on in life when they come into contact with those diseases, it doesn’t affect them so severely. And that is why they are called childhood diseases

So the homeopath is saying that children should be deliberately infected with the disease so their immune system will be able to resist it later.

If you’re going to deliberately infect a child with a disease, it seems to me that it might be a good idea to seek out a weak strain of the disease to infect them with. I mean, we know that some strains can be very virulent and others not so bad. If we want to expose the children for their later protection, I think we’d want to expose them to the least dangerous strain we could find. Of course we’d still worry that a child’s immune system wouldn’t be strong enough to fight off the weak strain of the virus, but — if the child couldn’t fight off the weak strain, he sure couldn’t fight off the stronger strains he might encounter in school.

In fact, while we’re at it, suppose we tried, not only to find a weak strain, but also to expose the child in such a way that disease will have a difficult time gaining a foothold, while the child’s immune system has the maximum chance of building a defense. Do you think that might be good? After all, even the homeopath acknowledges that the child might get very ill:

The only reason children get really, really ill and perhaps, you know, suffer serious side-effects are if: a) their immune system is not strong enough to fight off the virus, or b) they are being suppressed by drugs or in some other way.

And how would a loving parent know if the child’s immune system wasn’t strong enough to handle that case of measles at the school, except by exposing the child and seeing what happens? That doesn’t sound terribly safe.

Maybe we ought to have a way of exposing the child to a strain that we know to be weak, and in a fashion that we know will make it hard for the virus to get a foothold. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? That’s what all those allopaths ought to be working on!

When I was a child, I read everything I could get my hands on. I preferred science, science fiction, and fantasy, but if I couldn’t get them, I’d read whatever came to hand. So among other things, I read murder mysteries.

I didn’t enjoy murder mysteries and, since I was just a child, most of them simply puzzled me, as I had no idea why people would behave the way they did. But I tend to remember stories that puzzle me, and there is one murder mystery that has apparently stuck in the back of my mind all these years, to be brought to the forefront by the flap over Jeni Barnett (*spit*).

I do not remember the characters’ names, so let’s just say the murder victim was named Mary. The police were quite puzzled by her murder since there seemed to be no motive — she had no enemies. The break in the case came when a witness recalled seeing her talk to a stage actress, let’s call her Anne, backstage not long before the murder. The witness remembered this especially because Anne had had a very odd look on her face after the conversation. But Anne and Mary did not know each other, though Mary was a great fan of Anne.

Questioning of the witness revealed that Mary had been burbling on to Anne about what a great fan she was and how she had come to see her backstage the previous year, even though Mary had been developing rubella at the time. Further investigation revealed that Anne had been pregnant the previous year, had caught rubella, and as a result had lost the baby — it was still-born or miscarried, or perhaps born terribly damaged. The logical conclusions, which proved to be true, were that the odd look on Anne’s face was the result of her putting two and two together and realizing that Mary had killed the baby through her irresponsible behavior, and that Anne had murdered her in retaliation.

I will note that the police thought Anne was precisely correct — Mary had killed the baby — but they didn’t think Anne should exact her own vengeance. The police in the story knew what everybody used to know: rubella kills and maims babies if the mother catches it early in pregnancy.

I did not, of course, note the copyright of the book and wouldn’t remember it if I had, but I would lay odds that it was written in the mid 1960s, during or right after the rubella epidemic that killed an estimated 30,000 babies, and injured 20,000 more, in the United States, and that Anne’s motives were completely comprehensible to Americans at the time. They knew very well that rubella is not “harmless.”

You might wonder why this story came to my mind. Just this quote from Jeni Barnett (*spit*):

I was sitting next to Nick Owen on the settee at TV AM when his children were incubating rubella which is measles, and I was pregnant!

Given her age (she was born in 1949), I suppose that she had already had rubella and so was immune; thus her action in exposing herself to the disease while pregnant was not desperately irresponsible. Still, given her claims that these diseases are entirely harmless (unless you’re the one in fifteen who dies of them, in which case who cares about you?), it seemed like she was encouraging young women, women who hadn’t had rubella or been immunized, not to make any effort to avoid exposure to rubella during pregnancy. That strikes me as appallingly irresponsible.

If you casually google

“jeni barnett” mite

the very first result is HolfordWatch quoting … me.

Someone was looking very, very hard to come across my little blog.

In thinking about this, I thought of a couple of stories that the radio station, LBC Radio, should have thought about before launching their legal thuggery.

First, there is the story of Ray Bradbury and EC Comics. EC Comics adapted a couple of his stories into a comic. They were quite blatantly violating his copyright, but instead of hiring a pricey legal firm to threaten immediate legal action and ominously “reserve their rights against him,” he wrote them a very nice letter, complimented them on their work, and added that it seemed that they had inadvertently omitted to send him his royalty check. He knew, and they knew he knew, that they had not intended to pay a royalty, but it cost him nothing to be polite and give them a way to back down gracefully. They sent the check forthwith, but moreover they continued to adapt his stories, giving him some additional royalties and also exposure to an audience that might not otherwise have heard of him. It was a good relationship for both, which could never have come about if he’d charged in with all legal guns blazing.

Second, there is a story which I remember from history class but couldn’t find in a quick search online. Shortly before the American Revolution, the British Parliament declared, in several Acts, its right to impose on the colonies such laws and taxes as it should see fit, as it was the sovereign. I believe it was Benjamin Franklin, but I may misremember, who agreed that Parliament had the right and power to impose such laws, but sometimes it is wiser not to use your right and power. Parliament didn’t listen, and we know the result.

So, even though LBC Radio had the right and power to use their legal thuggery to force Ben Goldacre to remove the audio clip (which as I understand it really did violate their copyright), it would have been wiser not to. Had I been in their shoes, I would have sent him a polite letter or email, from a higher-up in the company, not a hired legal thug, to this effect:

We have seen your website and your comments on the recent broadcast by Jeni Barnett. We appreciate your concerns and will revisit our policies on such controversial issues. We understand your reasons for posting the entire 44 minute audio clip, since you wanted your readers to have the full flavour of her idiocy [okay, so maybe they wouldn't go that far], but our solicitors [or whatever the correct British term is in this case] tell us that you have posted more than is covered by fair use, so we must ask you to remove the clip. We welcome a debate on the issues raised, but in fairness to our investors, we must also protect our rights to our intellectual property.

Thank you for your interest in our programmes, and we hope for a fruitful exchange of ideas on this matter.

See how easy that is? If he doesn’t immediately take down the clip (but he would have, I have no doubt), then they can send in the thugs. But more likely, he will comply by taking down the clip, then post the letter or email, making the radio station look good and fair-minded. There might even be a real debate, in which people from the radio station could even participate, giving them favorable publicity instead of what they’ve got. And in the future, when he hears of one of their broadcasters being a moron, he might comment on it as a sad falling-away from their standards as opposed to just the sort of idiocy we expect as a matter of course from such slime as these.

It is sad that everyone’s first recourse these days is to threats and hostility, instead of the civil actions exemplified by Ray Bradbury. There is always the mailed fist inside the velvet glove, we know that, but it isn’t necessary to start smashing in the doors with the mailed fist as your first move. You could try a polite knock, first.

There is a storm in the science blogosphere about a dim but shrill anti-vax radio creature named Jeni Barnett (*spit*). She broadcast a thing on the radio (lacking a better term) containing a full set of standard anti-vax nonsense but with some idiocy all of her very own to boot. Links to the transcript (made by a small group of dedicated science bloggers) are at the link above.

Ben Goldacre, of Bad Science, wanted people to know exactly what she said, but was concerned that if he merely quoted her, he would be thought to be taking her words out of context and making her look bad. So he posted the entire audio. Her lawyers, understandably wanting to prevent anyone from processing the thing as a whole, and listening to each idiocy with care, threatened him. He took the audio down, of course, but the blogosphere has picked it up and spread it far and wide. Like the legal thuggery of Clifford Shoemaker (*spit*), this legal thuggery has had the effect of making people all over the world aware of what would otherwise have passed pretty much unnoticed. Certainly I would never had heard of it if not for the legal thuggery which was reported by Orac.

People with a lot more intestinal fortitude than me have posted extensively about this radio creature’s stupidity. But I will mention my favorite parts of the transcript:

Now back in the day (and that’s an expression I’ve learned from my [unclear] son), back in the day, children got measles, children got mumps. I’m not suggesting – I am not suggesting – that we got backwards where some children, where we have one in fifteen children die of it. And that one person in fifteen is the one we have to be looking at and wondering why and dealing with it.

…

Is there something wrong with having mumps, is there something – you know is it – most people aren’t that one in fifteen.

Well, duh (speaking at a radio creature level).

I mean, anybody who is in a position to listen to her isn’t that one in fifteen. Not only that, but we aren’t even descended from that one in fifteen. All of our ancestors managed to live past their childhoods, at least into very young adulthood, or they would not have had children and thus would not be our ancestors. Why should we care if one child in fifteen dies? They aren’t us after all. And I’m sure it’s a great consolation to their parents to be told that we don’t care if their children die, so why should they?

An actual practicing nurse, the sort who deals with dying children, called in. You can read the transcript of the conversation here. The radio creature calls Yasmin vicious, but I don’t see anyone being vicious in this segment but the creature herself. Yasmin says the broadcast is extremely irresponsible, which is true; that it is not based on any facts, which is true; that people like this radio creature are responsible for the on-going measles epidemic in England, which is true; and that there are children who can’t get immunized or whose immune systems are weak because of something like chemotherapy, who are at risk of dying of measles caught from unimmunized children around them, which is true. Her most cogent comment are these:

So you really need to think about what you’re doing here and why you’re doing it.

…

You should think about what you’re doing in this programme. You’re doing a lot of damage. A lot of damage.

Of course the response to the second comment was, “Well, maybe. I don’t think so.” Yeah, well, that’s because she’s an ignorant moron spouting assertions that she doesn’t understand and that she learned from other people just as ignorant.

I will add that this radio creature claims to be merely arrogantly ignorant instead of actively vile::

I am not a scientist, I would not claim to be a scientist. When tested on the contents of the MMR vaccine I told the truth. I did not have the facts to hand. Was I ill informed? Yes.As a responsible broadcaster I should have been better prepared as a parent, however, I can fight my corner. I don’t know everything that goes into cigarettes but I do know they are harmful.

As a professional should I have been better prepared – YES – but the discussion took off in a direction I hadn’t expected when I received a vicious phone call from a Nurse I was utterly thrown. I won’t get thrown again.