Sally Beck On HuffPo: Lancet, Richard Horton and Waffling
Please pop over to HuffPo to comment on this post by Sally Beck: Richard Horton Waffles on Lancet's Wakefield Retraction
Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet was quick to dismiss Wakefield who he once told he had the 'utmost respect for.'
In one newspaper he said of the Wakefield study: "It was utterly clear, without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the paper were utterly false. I feel I was deceived."
This is in stark contrast to comments Horton made earlier in an interview with me for The Observer newspaper, and in a written email to an epidemiologist seeking clarification on whether the science in the Wakefield study held up. Horton was quick to confirm that the science in the paper, which looked at whether 12 autistic children also suffered bowel disease, was good.
He reiterated his statement in his evidence to the GMC, "There was no question in my mind that subject to external peer review and editor debate, we should publish this work," he said. "The description of what seemed to be a new syndrome and its relations to possible environmental triggers was original and would certainly have interested our readers."
Read the full post HERE.
And I like the definition of a soul. What would the world be without a little moral fiber.
Posted by: Benedetta | February 13, 2010 at 12:25 PM
This makes the second time I have heard this story. Here were the person is a husband to a ped, and another place were it was another mother observing this in a ped office in the U.K.
It is not just a seizure, but in my son's case as many here on this web site can probably testify too but it is a spiked temperature and then abnormal neurological behavior.
And febrile seizures when you have full blown clonic - rhymatic jerking is not normal or inherited.
So ---- the world is a big place could have happened twice and so what????
Posted by: Benedetta | February 13, 2010 at 12:23 PM
My HuffPo comment-
I found his bizarre analogies familiar......
http://struckbyenlightning.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc/
" children will be diagnosed with autism shortly after they are immunized. Just because it happens before, doesn’t mean it was the cause.
There’s a story that Paul Offit, author of Autism’s False Prophets, likes to tell that illustrates this beautifully:
"My wife is a privately practicing pediatrician in the suburbs. And she was in the office one day and there was a four-month-old sitting on her mother’s lap. And my wife was drawing a vaccine into a syringe that she was about to give this child. Well, while she was drawing the vaccine into a syringe the child had a seizure, and actually went on to have a permanent seizure disorder—epilepsy. And there had been a family history of epilepsy, so she was certainly at risk for that. If my wife had given that vaccine five minutes earlier, I think there’s no amount of statistical data in the world that would have convinced that mother that anything other than the vaccine caused the seizure, because I think those sort of emotional events are very hard to argue against."
Offit 101- Analogies to use against the vaccines causing autism groups --
On that same page in comments...
" Hi Lindsay,
I was reading one of your blogs back in Sept. where you wrote that you don’t believe in the soul. ."
that sums it up..
Posted by: Teresa Conrick | February 13, 2010 at 10:39 AM