Archive by date | December 2005

Science and the media

Unlike Annette, I’m a relative newcomer to the US of A, and I’m still fairly attached to my old stomping ground in the UK. And there is a knock-down, drag-out battle developing in the newspaper pages there about a scientific issue that I for one had thought was long gone: the link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The debate of course goes back to the Lancet paper by Andrew Wakefield way back in 1998, which suggested a link between the triple measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism (though the authors were careful to say that they had not established a causal link). This was followed by a precipitous drop in MMR vaccination in the UK, but in 2004, ten of the original co-authors of paper issued a ‘retraction of interpretation’ of the original paper in the face of increasing doubts about the results and the ethical conduct of the study.  Read more