Havin' Trouble with CDC Whistleblower, William Thompson
I'm having a lot of trouble trying to write an article about MMR/Autism whistleblower, William Thompson.
On the one hand I don't want to waste this opportunity to show the scientific community that our concerns our real, and yet at the same time I don't want to let this guy off for concealing important evidence for more than a decade.
At the outset I have to say I'm really not a punishing kind of guy. In law school I worked for the US Attorney's office in San Francisco, assembling wiretap evidence in a large Oakland drug case. That meant I spent a lot of time listening to tapes of these guys talking.
And I found them not to be the threatening kind of all-powerful criminals you see in police thrillers, but discovered they were really leading pathetic, miserable lives. I also couldn't escape the realization that somebody like me, the top 10% of society, would be prosecuting the bottom 10% of society to make sure that the 80% in the middle remained relatively safe.
It's probably no surprise I ended up in teaching, trying to help students be interested in and excited by science, and also to be individuals who valued honesty. I wanted to help people be good, not punish them when they go bad. I've often thought that the best of science and the best of law share a common aim, as when a person stands to present testimony in a courtroom they swear an oath to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." The same expectation applies to scientists who work at government institutions when they publish scientific research in major journals.
It's with this in mind I have to detail some of my troubles with Dr. William Thompson.
From an e-mail Dr. Thompson allegedly wrote on October 18, 2002 to Melinda Wharton. "I am writing you once more regarding the recent Department of Justice (DOJ) request for a broad range of documents associated with MMR, thimerosal, and autism. I first spoke with you on September 3rd of 2002 regarding the sensitive results we have been struggling with in the MADDSP MMR/Autism study." I may not be a CDC scientist, but I've been both a lawyer and a science teacher and it seems to me that the phrase "sensitive results" is one probably never uttered by Galileo, Darwin, or Einstein.
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