Anti-vaccine Activists Throw Twitter Tantrum

Unlike Kitty, the anti-
vaxxers don't learn.

Last night, in a stunning display of groupthink, a whole bunch (gaggle? swarm? what's the collective noun for a group of loons?) of anti-vaccine activists took to Twitter in a cynical ploy to draw attention to their latest torturing of science and statistics. I'm talking about the recently published paper by Brian Hooker that appears to have used an improper study design and the wrong statistical measures to reach a preconceived conclusion that MMR vaccine is associated with autism, except that it showed there was zero association with any children except for African American boys who were vaccinated off-schedule. They used the hashtag #CDCwhistleblower to do what really amounted to the social media equivalent of a temper tantrum, whining about how the mainstream media is not reporting on the study. It was really a sad display, as they simply all copied and pasted from the same list of talking points, not even adding their own interpretation. And when presented with links to analyses of Hooker's study, they didn't even bother reading. Instead, what we got were the shameless exploitation of victims of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, implications that one of the DeStefano authors was a race-traitor and whining that no one was taking them seriously, all while posting links to a video in which the CDC is compared to Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Pol Pot. Oh, and accusing the mainstream media that they want to cover the story of being part of the cover-up. And they wonder why people think they're missing a few screws?

Just a short post to let y'all know about the shameful, sad display. Without any actual science on their side, they're left with smearing those they don't like and trying to game the system. I'll leave it at that, as it doesn't warrant a full-length post.

Andrew Wakefield Tortures History

I've written before about how the anti-vaccine movement regularly gets the science wrong (see, for example, here and here). Most often, it involves how they interpret (or, rather, misinterpret) studies that they think support their view that vaccines are the root of all evil, causing all manner of disorders. They regularly misrepresent and torture the scientific literature to fit their agenda. But occasionally, it involves actually attempting to do science themselves, the latest of which being a study [Edited to Add: this study has been fully retracted by the journal.] recently published by Vaccine Injury Compensation Program petitioner, Brian Hooker, PhD and funded by the anti-vaccine group Focus Autism. This study has been examined by an epidemiologist, another epidemiologist, and a cancer researcher. The players have also been examined by a dyslexia consultant and autism advocate (see also here). This study, in addition to being of questionable validity, has spawned quite the brouhaha among anti-vaccine activists. In short, Hooker took a dataset that was analyzed by a group of CDC investigators. Their finding was that age at first vaccination with MMR did not appear to [edited to clarify and correct] affect the risk of be associated with autism [ETA: cases (those with autism) were no more or less likely to have been vaccinated with MMR than controls before 18, 24 and 36 months; the study design could not establish causation, only correlation]. The results of their study were published as a case-control study. Hooker used the same dataset to create a cohort study and found that there was no increased risk of autism in any of the groups (i.e., MMR does not cause autism) except one: African American males, for which he puportedly found a 3.36-fold increased risk of autism when they were vaccinated between 24 and 31 months. Read the two posts by those epidemiologists for why his analysis is suspect.

I'm not going to go into the science behind the studies, because it relies very heavily on statistics, and I'm not a statistician or epidemiologist. As an aside, neither is Dr. Hooker. Instead, I want to focus on some statements made by one Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor who committed scientific fraud, resulting in the full retraction of his 1998 case series study on MMR and the stripping of his medical license. Wakefield boldly added himself to the list of not only torturing science, but now adds to his accomplishments torturing history and ethics (granted, we already knew he was ethically challenged). You see, in his videos (here and here) about the alleged "whistleblower", William Thompson,Wakefield compared the purported "cover-up" to the Tuskegee syphilis debacle. It's a false comparison used simply to inflame people and claim the race card.