Lancet did a full retraction of that study. Back in 1998, Wakefield didn't cop to his conflicts of interest. It was a small study that, at the time, merited follow up.
Still. There is a large enough population that doesn't believe that public health is important, (hello, my new FL gov, who believes all hospitals should be privatized) and sources like the Lancet that essentially state why public health's important are discredited when stuff like this happens.
Given the double standard, (conservative sources can mess up, and apologize and it's forgotten, but more "liberal" sources mess up and it's stuck to them forever) it means that mags like the Lancet have to be above this kind of thing, if that makes sense.
The Lancet is a research journal, not a magazine. Sometimes terrible articles fall through the cracks and get published. But science corrects itself, so when later research failed to replicate the results and the fraud started to come to light, most of the authors of the paper withdrew their names, and eventually the paper was retracted. What else is the Lancet supposed to do? Yeah, an editor screwed up, but that's all in hindsight. The journal can't be held responsible for how Wakefield and his team publicized their results.
The sad thing is that there's probably little that can be done to convince anti-vaccine parents that they're wrong. Sure, some were convinced by the Wakefield et al study, but the decision to not vaccinate children is a big one, and there's a lot of emotional incentive to not be wrong, so I think few of these parents would be willing to acknowledge that they're wrong, because that would mean they put their children in unnecessary danger.
Haha, I don't think anything seems rambly after the formatting I had to do to get these articles out of a pdf, haha.
I can see where you're coming from. I think in order to avoid parents being in denial because they put their parents in danger, someone is going to have to put it on Wakefield & colleagues' shoulders and make them publically accountable. I don't blame parents for following a study that said their kids are in danger, that's any parents natural reaction, though not believing the additional studies that disproved the originals is a different matter. But I think if they could sue Wakefield or something, you might be able to get people out of denial, who knows.
No, that makes sense. I can understand the urge of parents to blame vaccination for this; I think in some ways, it's a lot easier to believe that there's a conspiracy against you than to realize that your child has a pretty terrible illness that's got few treatment options and nobody knows why they have it. The problem arises when you use that belief as a justification to take away from actual scientific research that could help your child and other children. And the more people insist on studying a link that's been disproven over and over again, the fewer funds are available for trials and investigations that might be useful.
The problem is, they're opting to avoid taking an action that is rumored to possibly put their kid at risk, while NOT vaccinating really does put their kid at risk, with scientific proof and everything. The only reason the antivac movement has gone as far as it has is because the unvaccinated kids have benefited from herd immunity - most people around them are vaccinated, so there aren't any epidemics or even serious outbreaks in the US or UK, so the kids haven't been exposed. Until recently, that is, now that there are concentrations of unvaccinated kids, and sometimes immigrants from poorer countries who never got vaccinated
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Given the double standard, (conservative sources can mess up, and apologize and it's forgotten, but more "liberal" sources mess up and it's stuck to them forever) it means that mags like the Lancet have to be above this kind of thing, if that makes sense.
/rambly post is rambly
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Sorry if that sounds a bit rambly.
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I can see where you're coming from. I think in order to avoid parents being in denial because they put their parents in danger, someone is going to have to put it on Wakefield & colleagues' shoulders and make them publically accountable. I don't blame parents for following a study that said their kids are in danger, that's any parents natural reaction, though not believing the additional studies that disproved the originals is a different matter. But I think if they could sue Wakefield or something, you might be able to get people out of denial, who knows.
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...wow, I got rambly too. Apologies.
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