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24 Jan 2011 01:26

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Politics: Max Headroom: Andrew Wakefield denies autism study fraud

  • The autism/vaccine guy speaks out: In recent weeks, Andrew Wakefield’s name, already synonymous with a questionable autism study from over a decade ago, has been dragged through the mud further amid reports that the report is an elaborate fraud. He still stands behind his study, claims the reporting of Brian Deer was completely, utterly wrong, and emphasizes that he did not personally profit off the study as reported. Credit to Alisyn Camerota, who hits him pretty hard with questions the whole way through. It’s weird that this interview isn’t getting much attention at the moment. (Note: He said he was going to upload some proof to his blog, but we see absolutely nothing new there.)
  • Shouting at your laptop If you’re like us and do searches on newsworthy political topics on YouTube every once in a while, you might run into this guy. This guy, a conservative, likes yelling really quickly. it’s his whole schtick. Here, he’s yelling about Keith Olbermann. He’s like a combination of Billy Mays (God rest his soul) the Micro Machines guy, and Rush Limbaugh. Mostly Rush.
  • Backed into a birther corner On “Meet the Press,” our boy David Gregory was chattin’ up our good friend Eric Cantor, basically trying to get him to say something bad about birthers. Cantor, eventually realizing that he couldn’t weasel out of Gregory’s line of questioning, gave him a half-answer on the question. Honestly, Cantor was right the first time. Why are we talking about this still?

05 Jan 2011 20:06

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World: Report: Retracted autism/vaccine study “elaborate fraud”

  • It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors. But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.
  • British Medical Journal editor-in-chief Fiona Godlee • Explaining that the findings in an infamously retracted autism study in 1998 were not only false, but fraudulently made-up. BMJ claims that the Lancet study’s author, Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the histories of the twelve people used in the study. The result was a sharp drop in vaccinations, leading to a significant increase in measles cases in the ensuing years. Wakefield’s medical license was revoked las year as a result. He apparently received over $674,000 from a law firm that wanted to sue vaccine-makers, which was not made public until years after the study first came out. He does have some supporters who question the allegations, but if this is true, he’s an evil mother(#&@)!#. source