New News in the Vaccines Debate as Journal Alleges Fraud..
LIES, FRAUD & STATISTICS – NEW NEWS IN THE VACCINE DEBATE
Vaccines work, but debate continues over vaccine morality,safety, ethics, and performance.
Medical and scientific evidence clearly demonstrates that the benefits of preventing suffering or death from diseases far outweigh the rare side effects of vaccination.
The anti-vaccination movement argues vaccines don’t work, that getting disease is good and the occasional death is normal, that hygiene reduces the need for vaccination, or that it violates an individual’s right to choose. These arguments reduce vaccination rates and result in increased outbreaks of preventable and sometimes fatal diseases.
Some scientific researchers have now identified a pattern in the antivaccination movement activities.
- An investigator suggests that a particular medical condition is an adverse effect of vaccination based on a particular scientific study, leading to public panic and widespread critisicm of vaccination. The initial study is then not reproduced by other groups of scientists, but it takes several years for the public to regain confidence in vaccination.
In one celebrated case in 1998, The Lancet (the UK’s top medical journal) published an article of a study by Dr Andrew Wakefield which linked autism to measles/mumps vaccine in children.
Panic followed as parents refused to have their children vaccinated – not just for measles/mumps, but for ANY diseases.
The panic rapidly followed into the pet industry, where those same parents refused to have their pets vaccinated for Calicivirus, Parvovirus, Distemper and Hepatitis. Now, 10 years later, we see significant outbreaks of Parvovirus, and Distemper is re-emerging after not having been seen in a generation.
There is also an animal welfare issue and an ethical one – do we have the right to deliberately risk our pets getting these potentially fatal diseases, if a quality and well proven prevention method (vaccination) is available?
Recently The Lancet took the unprecedent step or formally retracting the paper – a significant embarassment for this major Journal. Dr Wakefield lost his licence to practice medicine. The British Medical Journal charged Dr Wakefield with fraud, altering study data to “prove” his case.
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Thanks also to Wikipaedia for the definitions used in this article.