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Skeptimedia

Wakefield's Delusions

9 Feb 2011. Andrew Wakefield's delusions have expanded to the point where he will go down as one of the most notorious cranks in medical history. In a rambling interview with the illustrious Mike Adams of NaturalNews, Wakefield says all the great thinkers of medical history are ignored in their lifetime. Many are eventually recognized for their brilliance, but some (and I suspect Wakefield is one of these) are never recognized.

Wakefield, as you may remember, first made a name for himself at a press conference prior to the publication of what should have been a widely ignored article on an observational study of twelve children involving a possible connection between bowel disorders and developmental disorders. The paper had nothing to do with vaccine safety. At the press conference on 26 February 1998 to promote the paper (published 28 February 1998), Wakefield shocked his colleagues by using the occasion to suggest that the MMR vaccine, in use in the United States since the early 1970s and in Great Britain for a decade, could be responsible for the rising rates of autism. He speculated about "some children" having especially sensitive immune systems that made them unable to handle the three vaccines at once. He made further speculations about autism and asserted that he could no longer "support the continued use of the three vaccines given together." We now know that he was hoping to cash in on a patent for a single shot measles vaccine. He was then, and continues now, to just make stuff up.

Now he claims that vaccination itself poses a long-term threat to the survival of the human species. Things will not get better because those who promote vaccines for public health are doing a tango with the Evil One:

...science in the private interest, I'm afraid, is damaging for the people....

[Science] has sold out to the pharmaceutical industry, and to the pharma-government complex. Medical schools are dependent upon their funding in large part from the pharmaceutical industry, or pharmaceutical industry influences, and this is dancing with the Devil in respect to the way in which science should be conducted, and the influences placed upon it....

So we are creating a marketplace; we are creating a wonderful revenue model; and we are creating a potential time bomb for the population....

You cannot sterilize the world, nor should you. This whole notion of the Germ Theory needs to be radically modified in light of what we now know, so that we have scientists who acknowledge that this fundamental and very essential ecological interaction between man and microbe, or plant and microbe, is vital... but you have a commercial imperative which pays no heed to that at all.

Wakefield also claims that the world has been sold a bill of goods by the Science/Big Pharma cabal regarding thimerosal (ethyl mercury) in vaccines. We're told by the cabal that the scientific evidence shows that there's no link between mercury thimerosal preservative and vaccinations. "In fact," says Wakefield, "when the data are analyzed, when the studies are looked at comprehensively, 74 percent of those studies' published data support a link between mercury and autism." (He refers us to the work of DeSoto.) Wakefield's work had nothing to do with thimerosal, but he is now on that bandwagon, which endears him to such groups as those folks who run Age of Autism. Vaccines, Wakefield now proclaims, are delivering toxins to our children, not just mercury but aluminum and other poisons. We are changing the fundamental relationship between infectious agents and our immune systems, he says, and opening the eyes of the masses to the potential for worldwide disaster is worth being a martyr for.

As long as I don't suffer from the vainglorious belief that this is all going to be resolved in my lifetime -- I hope it is for the sake of these children -- but I'm so far beyond that notion that I need some kind of redemption from the American Academy of Pediatrics, or The Lancet, I don't. These are instruments of a state that I don't really want to be associated with.

The American Academy of Pediatrics is an instrument of the state? Why argue over the data when you can promote yourself as an opponent of state agents who are out to destroy the state by killing all its children so they won't grow up and need to be governed? What will he argue for next? That we should not treat our water to make it safe to drink because that would be changing the fundamental relationship between infectious agents and our biological systems? Does Wakefield really believe that the days of cholera were the good old days?

If Andrew Wakefield doesn't win a Pigasus Award this year, there is no justice left in the world.