
Secret businesses aimed to exploit vaccine fears, British Medical Journal finds - J3L2404
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110111184129.htm
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kahirsch
The BMJ article is open access and written for a general audience:
<http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c5258.full>

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Roritharr
And the Award for the downright most evil person on the planet 2010 goes to:
Andrew Wakefield!

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jedsmith
Yet Jenny McCarthy continues to parrot his agenda, even in the last few days.

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burgerbrain
I'm afraid to say that I don't think that's even surprising, even people you
would presume to be more sensible than her (a certain few HN commenters for
example) continue to spew this nonsense. If you think about it, these are
people who have been _deep_ in conspiracy theory territory for quite some
time, and have invested a good deal of mental effort into eradicating any
doubt in their own minds. They have preformed enough mental gymnastics that in
their minds, any proof presented _against_ their delusion is actually proof
_in support of it_. Accusations of fraud only strengthen their resolve.

Anyone how has objectively been following this issue for the past few years
should have caught on quite some time ago, why should they only wisen up
_now_?

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colinsidoti
An interesting anti-vaccine argument is that of chiropractors. They often
believe chiropractic is a viable alternative that poses less risk than
vaccines do (which they will acknowledge is still quite small, but why risk
it?). I'm mentioning this because it's the side I heard about long before
Wakefield's finding was published, and people seem to think there was no anti-
vaccine argument before 1998.

Unfortunately this is impossible to prove, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Do the research and pick a side yourself.

~~~
Vivtek
The _original_ theory of chiropractic made spinal misalignment out to be the
cause of _all_ disease. Over time, chiropractic has become less virulent as it
adapted to the host organism, and in fact in many cases can be considered
symbiotic.

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Alex3917
"Wakefield met with medical school managers to discuss a joint business even
while the first child to be fully investigated in his research was still in
the hospital"

So the heads of several medical schools knew or had strong reason to suspect
the data was being cooked, and said nothing. But of course this didn't happen
because the scientific establishment is corrupt, it's Hollywood's fault.

Science as usual.

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tomjen3
The medical establishment has long been known to be corrupt or at least
suspect - Elsevier was paid to make an entire fake journal so some company
could publish their "article".

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cstross
Quick, a multiple choice exam!

Elsevier is best known as being:

a) A publishing company who are in the business of selling ink on paper, whose
success is evaluated by their shareholders on the basis of their profitability

b) A medical research organization who are in the business of pushing back the
frontier of human knowledge, whose success is evaluated by their peers on the
basis of their replicable research findings

Answer: [ a ]

(Meta: the point I'm trying to make is that the publishing houses who produce
the scholarly journals are not themselves engaged in scientific research. They
hold a vital position within the research community, but their actual goal is
commercial success. Consequently their goals sometimes become disastrously
misaligned with those of their host sector.)

~~~
mturmon
And, to take this a step farther, note that one of the most powerful forces
contesting the bad influence of for-profit journals has been the research
establishment itself.

For instance, most of the board of Kluwer's journal Machine Learning resigned
to make an open journal (JMLR,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Res...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Research)).
And NIH now requires free distribution of articles produced under NIH grants,
after an embargo period (<http://publicaccess.nih.gov/>)

