The Wakefield MMR verdict

January 28th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, MMR | 135 Comments »

Here’s a very brief piece I bashed out for the Guardian newsdesk today on the Wakefield finding, the further reading below will be more helpful if you’re interested in the story.

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Thursday 28 January 2009

In medicine, “untoward incident inquiries” tend to look for systems failures, rather than one individual to blame. Read the rest of this entry »

LBC, MMR, Jeni Barnett, an Early Day Motion, the Times, and, er, a bit of Stephen Fry…

February 10th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, dangers, jeni barnett, LBC, legal chill, MMR, regulating media, scare stories, stifling criticism | 155 Comments »

I thought since a few days have passed that I should let you know what’s happening with the slightly ridiculous LBC situation. If you skip to the bottom you will find a discussion on some mischievous activism which I think has great potential.

Since LBC unwisely threw their legal weight around to prevent you from being able to freely experience and ponder that astonishing 44 minute tirade against MMR, the inevitable has happened. The audio has been posted on a huge number of websites around the world, over 120 blogs so far are linking to the story, and more importantly, hundreds of thousands of people are talking and reading about the ignorance that Jeni Barnett exemplified in that worrying broadcast. It has been covered in the Times, and an Early Day Motion is being set down in parliament.

Read the rest of this entry »

Er, “help”. Legal Chill from LBC 97.3 and “Global Radio” over Jeni Barnett’s MMR scaremongering

February 5th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in Global Radio, jeni barnett, legal chill, MMR, stifling criticism | 228 Comments »

[Update: recent developments are now available here, including an EDM in parliament and discussion in mainstream media]

[Update: links to transcripts and audio hosted elsewhere at bottom of post]

One more thing, since Stephen Fry excellently tweeted this post to his 8 billion followers (weirdly he wakes me up every morning) I’ve had to activate supercache to prevent the site from dying. This means your comments will be stored for later but can only appear intermittently, sorry about that, nice to have you, and do look around for the site for more educational moronbaiting entertainment.

LBC have instructed their lawyers to contact me.

Two days ago I posted about a 7th Jan 2009 broadcast in which their presenter Jeni Barnett exemplified some of the most irresponsible, ill-informed, and ignorant anti-vaccination campaigning that I have ever heard on the public airwaves. This is important because it can cost lives, and you can read about the media’s MMR hoax here.

To illustrate my grave concerns, I posted the relevant segment about MMR from her show, 44 minutes, which a reader kindly excerpted for me from the rest of the three hour programme. It is my view that Jeni Barnett torpedoes her reputation in that audio excerpt so effectively that little explanation is needed.

LBC’s lawyers say that the clip I posted is a clear infringement of their copyright, that I must take it down immediately, that I must inform them when I have done so, and that they “reserve their rights”.

To me this raises several problems:

Read the rest of this entry »

The media’s MMR hoax

August 30th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, badscience, MMR | 57 Comments »

image

This is an extract from my new book “Bad Science“, in the Guardian today. It’s out on Monday: my recommendation is that you buy it, and give it to someone who disagrees with you.

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Saturday August 30 2008

Dr Andrew Wakefield is in front of the General Medical Council on charges of serious professional misconduct, his paper on 12 children with autism and bowel problems is described as “debunked” – although it never supported the conclusions ascribed to it – and journalists have convinced themselves that his £435,643 fee from legal aid proves that his research was flawed.

I will now defend the heretic Dr Andrew Wakefield.

Read the rest of this entry »

Observer MMR story disappears from archives – updated

July 24th, 2007 by Ben Goldacre in MMR | 44 Comments »

Lots of people have emailed in to say that the Observer’s spectacularly misleading MMR story has been removed from the archive and is no longer available online.

observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2121521,00.html

For obvious reasons of propriety I have studiously avoided having an inside track on anything to do with this piece from the beginning, so I have no idea what is going on here.

From the comments:

A clue about the removal of the Observer piece?

“A paragraph regarding concern about MMR overseas, extracted from a piece in the Observer now deleted from the website due to concerns about its accuracy, has been removed from this article until the information can be verified”

MMR and The Observer – a nation waits

July 21st, 2007 by Ben Goldacre in MMR | 7 Comments »

I’ve been told by Dr Fiona Scott that the main news editor of the Observer phoned her today, and she has been promised that there will be a large article in tomorrow’s Observer [EDIT it’s up now, here] reproducing in full and unedited the comments that she ended up posting, in desperation, in the commentisefree thread beneath their previous and rather incomprehensible non-retraction. In those, she explained that they had repeatedly misrepresented her views, and had consistently failed even to ask her what they were, despite her protesting. Read the rest of this entry »

MMR: the scare stories are back

July 18th, 2007 by Ben Goldacre in bad science | 23 Comments »

Here’s my piece from the British Medical Journal, or at least the last version I saw of it.

Medicine and the media
Ben Goldacre
doctor and writer, London,
Guardian and BMJ columnist
ben@badscience.net
DOI 10.1136/bmj.39280.447419.59
www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/bmj.39280.447419.59

A UK newspaper has once again linked autism with MMR and sparked a spate of media scaremongering. But the original story was wrong on every count, writes Ben Goldacre

It was Read the rest of this entry »

The MMR story that wasn’t

July 18th, 2007 by Ben Goldacre in MMR | 36 Comments »

Bad science
Ben Goldacre
Wednesday July 18, 2007
The Guardian

Whatever you think about Andrew Wakefield, the real villains of the MMR scandal are the media. Just one week before his GMC hearing, yet another factless “MMR causes autism” news story appeared: and even though it ran on the front page of our very own Observer, I am dismantling it on this page. We’re all grown-ups around here. Read the rest of this entry »

MMR Is Back

June 2nd, 2006 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, mail, MMR, scare stories, telegraph, times | 67 Comments »

Ben Goldacre
3rd June 2006
The Guardian

[Mmmm uh-oh I’ve just found out the Guardian newsdesk have cut this by 200 words while I was having an afternoon snooze. I can’t bear to look. Anyway, here’s what I wrote…]

MMR is back. “US scientists back autism link to MMR” squealed the Telegraph. “Scientists fear MMR link to autism” roared the Mail. “US study supports claims of MMR link to autism” croaked The Times, a day later.

Strap me to the rocket and print my home address in the paper, I’m going after them again. So what was this frightening new data? Well it’s hard to tell, since it hasn’t been properly published anywhere yet, so you can’t actually read it and Read the rest of this entry »

MMR letter in Telegraph

February 15th, 2006 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, MMR, telegraph | 4 Comments »

After an article on MMR appeared in the Telegraph I wrote a letter, and they printed it: recognition at last. I’m putting it here because to be honest, this blog is kind of my scrapbook…

Their article was ‘Why I am terrified of trusting MMR’ By Beezy Marsh 12/02/2006

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/02/12/nmmr112.xml

Sensitive figures

Your report on the MMR vaccination controversy (News, February 12) says “population-based studies are not sensitive enough to pick up problems that may affect a tiny minority of children”. The figures do not support this assertion: autism has increased from one child in 2,500 to one in 250, an increase the anti-MMR lobby ascribes to the vaccine. A tenfold increase is not a “tiny minority”,and figures this large present no problem for the sensitivity of population studies.

The purpose of vaccination is to reduce the prevalence of viruses throughout the population – and ultimately eradicate them – not to protect an individual child. For example, there has been an increase in mumps, from only 200 cases a year to 40,000 since the anti-MMR campaign began, but the increase has been mostly among teenagers, not un-vaccinated babies.

(Dr) Ben Goldacre, London NW5