The current custom to conflate all news gathering organizations into a colossal lump known as “The Media” is not surprising any more, but it is frustrating, because people use the phrase in a reflexive way to lay blame without having to say anything else. The same way people disdainfully refer to “The Government,” (even as they confuse city, county, state and federal jurisdictions in their complaining.)
These phrases are often employed, and expected, in what is supposedly “political debate” these days. Fine. It’s difficult for some people to get away from labels. But when “The Media” blame game is found in what purports to be a scientific text, it’s out of line, irresponsible and definitely not fact-based, which is what one would hope to expect from a book titled, “Anatomy 101 From Muscles and Bones to Organs and Systems, Your Guide to How the Human Body Works. A Crash Course in Anatomy and Physiology” by Kevin Langford, Ph.D.
Since it is a reference-type book, a “crash course,” it doesn’t go into great detail on any one subject. Which is why it is so mind-boggling to read the last paragraph of only three paragraphs found under the heading “Autism”:
“Many media articles have suggested a relationship between childhood vaccinations and autism. To date, the link between the two has been widely discredited within the medical and scientific community.”
It’s difficult to fathom. Professor Langford has to know, as a scientist, must be aware, as an educator, that is was the now-disgraced (former) doctor, Andrew Wakefield, in a 1998 paper (now retracted) published in the respected medical journal “The Lancet,” who started all the vaccination/autism nonsense. And anyone interested in the truth also knows that it was a member of the media — investigative reporter Brian Deer, of The Sunday Times of London, who exposed Wakefield’s research as fraudulent. (And Deer’s work was widely reported by other media, then and since.)
Deer reported that Wakefield had failed to get proper ethical approval for the study and failed to disclose drastic conflicts of interest, including a patent application for a vaccine that would have competed with the standard MMR shot and payments from lawyers who wanted evidence to use in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, Jennifer Raff (a scientist and not a member of the media) summarizes on her website.
Wakefield, who was stripped of his license to practice medicine in England, in turn (unsuccessfully) sued Deer for libel, once in England, and then later again in Texas, where Wakefield now lives, after Deer continued his investigations, Raff reported. In 2011, The British Medical Journal, editorialized on Deer’s reporting: “Deer shows how Wakefield altered numerous facts about the patients’ medical histories in order to support his claim.” It also called Wakefield’s work “an elaborate fraud.”
So to summarize for those who might read Professor Langford’s anatomy book (published this year): An irresponsible doctor created (or “suggested”) the vaccination/autism link, creating the scare. The media reported on the original “The Lancet” article because it was news. Which turned out to be fake. Which we know because a member of the media exposed the fraud.
“Anatomy 101” offers nothing to support the claim that ‘many media articles” were responsible for the most detrimental medical fraud in decades. Because it’s not true. Books purporting to be scientific really need to stick to the topic at hand.
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