Emotional interviews
Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon:
There are not two sides to every story. Not every issue requires us to legitimize an opposing view. Like, for instance, when the other perspective is totally crackpot. For example, if you’re a disgraced fraud, maybe you’re really not the best source for information about vaccines.
Totally crackpot and harmful as well. The crackpot in question is Andrew Wakefield.
This week the Tribeca Film Festival announced it’s debuting a provocative new documentary with the flamboyant name “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Controversy.” The film’s description promises, “Digging into the long-debated link between autism and vaccines, ‘Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe’ features revealing and emotional interviews with pharmaceutical insiders, doctors, politicians, parents, and one whistleblower to understand what’s behind the skyrocketing increase of autism diagnoses today.” It is directed by Andrew Wakefield. Yeah. That Andrew Wakefield.
The one who’s done more than anyone else to bring back measles.
In 2000, measles had been considered virtually eliminated in the U.S. — and in 2014 there were 644 measles cases spanning 27 states — more than than the previous four years put together. In Orange County the same year, 41 percent of kindergarteners were not vaccinated. Oh and here’s the thing: In 2011, Wakefield’s stunner of a report was fully retracted as “an elaborate fraud.” The British medical journal BMJ’s editor said at the time that “It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors. But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.” Wakefield is now barred from practicing medicine in the UK.
Now that’s a guy who actually merits no-platforming.
So, who will direct the documentary on Dr Paolo Macchiarini, who allegedly falsified results in order to perform experimental surgery using plastic trachea implants on eight patients, at least six of whom are no longer alive and none of whom avoided excruciating pain and suffering? Despite some frantic whistle-blowing, he was only formally fired this week from Karolinska Institutet (who nominate for the Nobel in physiology and medicine). He had been suspended for a couple of months prior to that.
Perhaps himself? Or some of his monumentally disgraced superiors? Maybe the ethics committee? Star and narrator/tragedy chorus. Nice lucrative gigs too.
Seems to be unlimited potential for fraud and abuse in a profession ultimately based on trust. Any profession.
Fucking Andrew Wake. Fucking fucking Andrew Wake. Conman who performed unapproved, unethical research, including taking blood from children without parental permission, who failed to declare financial interest, who falsified data and is an utter disgrace to the medical profession which is why he was struck off.
And this this is the bastard who has become lionised as a victim by the anti-vaxxers.
I have no words.
It’s enraging, isn’t it.
Ugh. It’s stuff like this that really makes me sad as a scientist and a skeptic. Wakefield’s fraudulent work couldn’t survive peer review for long, and he’s basically been forced out of science. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean his bullshit will become any less potent to those who have a reactionary fear to “big pharma” and medical science in general. No, this “documentary” will disseminate his dangerous ideas more efficiently and effectively than his “science” ever could. Why bother with data when you can ask people how they feel about it?
I don’t know which doctors will appear in the film, but I’d be willing to bet a lot of money that some shady tactics were used to get legitimate, pro-science doctors in it, edited to fit the film’s narrative, a la Ben Stein’s “Expelled”. I’m going to go cuddle with my properly vaccinated puppy.
Unfortunately, it probably means it will become more potent. Whenever someone is proven to be a fraud or a charlatan, that seems to increase their credibility with their followers. Why? Because if the medical establishment (which he proved is bad) is out to get him, they are scared of him. They are targeting him. They are treating him unfairly. And his star will rise further, because he is a brave, brave soul trying to get the truth out against all the well-funded, evil establishment figures who want to…I don’t know, take over the world through vaccines? Something.
Frankly, the logic in this one doesn’t work. Doctor’s stand to gain by giving more shots with lower doses – more visits, more charges. Still, they insist that giving these shots is not harmful, does not cause autism, and is doing a lot of good. Strange, isn’t it? Almost like…the doctors are maybe trying to do the best thing, rather than the most lucrative thing?
Apparently DeNiro decided to no-platform it…
Fuckyeah. And yet he was super-platformed. For years.
It wasn’t that nobody else was allowed to talk, it was that media pretended (even though they knew better) that Wakefield’s fraudulent, harmful bullshit was 50% of an argument they themselves made up. They encouraged Wakefield by inviting him on pretty much every single TV show, his nonsense largely untackled by reasonable people. Then they denounced him when it eventually became clear even to them that he was talking shit, as though they hadn’t paid him for years to talk that exact shit. Then they recycled the same shit a few years later when they presumably figured everyone had forgotten about it.
Let me be clear: Wakefield was wrong and totally at fault. He harmed people in his charge and did his best to promote his own lies as acceptable policy. But he was encouraged to do this by the media. Nobody would have heard of him or his bullshit if the media hadn’t pretended that he was a legitimate authority on vaccination.
Back when [some of us] identified as skeptics, I think we were mostly angry at super-platforming. People with stupid and/or wrong ideas had platforms they didn’t deserve and that’s what pissed us off.
I think we were right. I think we’ve lost sight of that.