Julie, good luck! Let us know what feedback you get.

As a follow up, this story was online today:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/02/12/autism.vaccines/index.html

A special vaccine court ruled that, in the case of three children, there was not enough evidence to support the claim that the MMR vaccine had caused autism. But there will be more court decisions to come. From the article:

“Since 2001, thousands of parents of autistic children have filed petitions seeking compensation from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program at Health and Human Services.

By mid-2008, more than 5,300 cases had been filed in the program — and 5,000 of those were still awaiting adjudication, according to the agency. “

Here are some factoids:

Statistic

1,348 The number of cases of measels (one of the M’s in MMR) in the UK last year, according to the Health Protection Agency.

56 The number of cases of measels in 1998, the year Wakefield’s initial study was published.

That is frankly alarming.

They’ve got a lot of stories covering various aspects of the case.

Tara Smith writes on her blog Aetiology:

“This is truly incredible. Even being familiar with Wakefield’s statements over the past decade about his research, and his complete denial about studies that have contradicted his own findings, it’s still pretty shocking that he completely made up data, and then pushed it for ten years as children around the world became ill and even died in light of his research. It’s even more disgusting in light of the fact that I doubt this new information will change many minds when it comes to vaccination–the meme has already spread too far to let a little thing like atrocious scientific misconduct rein it in now.”

http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2009/02/vaccines_and_autism–can_we_st.php

And Mike Dunford writes on the blog “The Questionable Authority”:

“Sadly, as Phil Plait already pointed out, it’s not likely that these latest revelations about Wakefield’s research practices will have any effect on most of the MMR causes autism proponents. Simply put, their belief in the perils of vaccination has reached almost religious levels. The existence of a large number of (better) studies that fail to demonstrate a link have not dissuaded them, and it’s unlikely that a revelation that the one article that supports their beliefs is fraudulent will change their minds.”

http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2009/02/scientific_misconduct_and_the.php

Thanks for this post. I’ve passed this post around on twitter and facebook.