Update on anti-vaccine lobby icon

Andrew Wakefield is in the news again. He received a dishonorable mention in this previous blog post,...and the evil that lurks in the anti-vaccine lobby

Now there's this:

Anti-vaccine Crusader Andrew Wakefield Loses Medical License

Posted by Sierra on May 24th, 2010 at 12:05 pm

Finally. British doctor Andrew Wakefield, whose questionable research into a link between autism and vaccination began a tidal wave of anti-vaccine sentiment in the U.S and Britain, has lost his medical license.

Wakefield’s research on autistic children and the MMR vaccine was the first published work to draw a connection between the vaccine and the disorder. Later researchers have been unable to replicate his results. Earlier this year, the Lancet retracted his papers. Shortly thereafter, he was censured by Britain’s leading medical body.

Today, he’s lost is license to practice medicine in Britain.

Wakefield described the ruling against him as “a little bump in the road”. That’s probably because it’s been a long time since he made his living practicing medicine in Britain.

He lives in Texas now, where he’s a prominent activist in the anti-vaccine movement. The medical establishment may have kicked him to curb, but he’ll always have Jenny McCarthy.

Wakefield’s controversial research claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and suggested that giving the vaccines to children separately instead of as a mixed dose. He’s losing his license because his research violated ethics rules about the treatment of children as research subjects. He’s also been cited for hiding his financial conflicts of interest; Wakefield was being paid huge sums by lawyers hoping to file a class action lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers.

For a quick pictorial history of the Wakefield case, check out this 15-page cartoon story.

To parents who believe his theories, Wakefield is a saint. To those who believe in science, he’s an obstacle to research of real value for children with autistic spectrum disorders. Personally, I’m celebrating this move by the British General Medical Council. Hopefully being stripped of credentials will make Wakefield seem less authoritative to those who’ve been listening to him, and we can move the resources on autism research back to real avenues of inquiry.

Make sure you follow the link for the quick pictorial history of the Wakefield case.

Maybe that will put the nail in the coffin for that particular hypothesis.

The more worrying one still has merit, from a Natural Law point of view.

You can't violate Natural Law without there being temporal consequences. Vaccines themselves do not violate Natural Law, so there is nothing intrinsic to vaccinations that should cause temporal consequences.

However,

As the abstract of the study indicates, autism rates in the US and the UK began to increase around the same time that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine switched from using animal cells to using human cells that had been derived from aborted fetuses.