Lancet Retraction Ends Vaccine-Autism Debate
March 8th, 2010 | No Comments | Source: Wall Street JournalTwo weeks ago, the prestigious medical journal Lancet retracted a 1998 article that purported to show a link between childhood vaccines and autism. The article stimulated a decade-long debate about vaccine safety, and the Lancet’s retraction effectively ended reasonable scientific discourse on the subject: the vaccines are safe.
Ten of 13 authors of the paper had issued a partial retraction 6 years ago, but the first author, Andrew Wakefield, did not.
Wakefield’s study had focused on 12 children that had gastrointestinal problems. Eight had symptoms that their parents or a doctor thought were caused by the MMR vaccine, and 9 exhibited autistic behaviors.
That study triggered widespread concern that measles-mumps-rubella vaccine caused autism. Parents decided against immunizing their children as a result. Roughly 2.1% of US children weren’t immunized with the MMR vaccine in 2000, nearly triple the rate of 0.77% in 1995, according to a study in Pediatrics.
This occurred despite the publication of several subsequent studies which showed that vaccines were safe. The most notable among these were a 2004 review of the literature by the Institute of Medicine and a 2008 study by the CDC which looked specifically at children with GI problems.
“This retraction by the Lancet came far too late,” Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s very easy to scare people; it’s very hard to unscare them.”
The Lancet pulled the plug after a UK-based health care regulator concluded the Wakefield study was bogus. The General Medical Council’s report included allegations of ethical violations by some investigators, including “cherry-picking” children for the study, rather than taking kids as they presented randomly to the hospital, as had been implied in the paper.




The emails in question cover a critical period in 2002 when attorneys from Justice prepared a memo that cleared the way for CIA operatives to use waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other techniques against al-Qaeda suspects, according to the
Scott Reuben, who had been among the nation’s most respected investigators on the subject, had been charged with one count of healthcare fraud.
Such behavior would exceed the protective role assigned to Blackwater in a contract with the CIA, the sources said.
Cologne have shown there already is an Internet-based black market for the substances, which are believed to provide benefits similar to anabolic steroids with fewer side effects.
Oddly, no other first-tier journal followed suit.
Following Djulbegovic’s presentation, JAMA editor Catherine DeAngelis told an audience of fellow journal editors, “the cynic in me says that if you’re not submitting to JAMA because you have something to hide, so be it. God bless the rest of you for taking those [studies]!”
“We thought very hard about how to provide the clearest, most honest message,” said Jerome Kim, an Army scientist involved with the study. “We stand by the fact that this is a vaccine with a modest protective effect.”
Some AIDS activists and scientists believe the vaccine merits further study, but worry that the botched announcement might undermine support for the vaccine and HIV vaccine trials generally.
“Any vaccine distribution decisions that appear to direct vaccine to people outside the identified priority groups (can) undermine the credibility of the program,” Thomas Frieden warned state and local health departments in an email.
Five years ago, Parke-Davis forked over $430 million to settle a similar suit involving Neurontin.
White’s group identified 24 articles and correspondences with editors that had either been produced with support from grants that Parke-Davis or by Parke-Davis ghostwriters.
Throckmorton, a PhD, teaches psychology at Christian-oriented Grove City College in Pennsylvania. He once was the president of the American Mental Health Counselors Association.
The APA has 150,000 members. Its new guidelines call for counselors to assure clients that homosexuality is not an illness and that gay people can lead happy, productive lives. Counselors are also supposed to emphasize that therapy can’t change sexual orientation.
NCI oncologist Tito Fojo and NIH ethicist Christine Grady called-out Erbitux as a particularly egregious example. An 18-week regimen of Bristol-Meyers Squibb’s cancer-fighter costs $80,000 and prolongs life by 1.2 months on average, they say.
But low-level fudging is
At least 8 Senators on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hold health care stocks worth a minimum of $600,000 and possibly as much as $1.9 million.
Studies from Germany, Sweden and Scotland, published last Friday in Diabetologia, suggest a “possible link” between the
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Now, these same scientists worry his plan may have the 




