Discovering that your child has an autism spectrum disorder is a frightful experience; it happened to one of my oldest friends. First you’re happily and optimistically watching your child develop like any other excited parent – and then you’re watching your child regress and the gap between him and normal kids his age inexorably widen. You wonder what’s going on inside his mind; you worry about his care should something happen to you; and as he gets older you worry about how people will react to him when he passes puberty and non-standard behaviour becomes more scary than cute. With the number of diagnoses growing – the US Centers for Disease Control puts the rate at about 1 in 150 children; the advocacy organisation Autism Speaks says 1 in 110 – small wonder that terrified parents grasp at anything that looks like it might be a cure or a preventive measure. The coincidence of timing – MMR is administered at roughly the same age at which children begin displaying the symptoms of autism disorder – means that vaccines seem an entirely plausible cause.

Wakefield’s paper, which studied a sample of only 12 children, provided a plausible and simple answer: vaccines. That was helpful for Wakefield, who had a second career as a plaintiff’s expert in autism litigation. You can see the temptation: vaccines, unlike genetics, have manufacturers who can be sued. as Forbes has a nice piece on this type of conflict of interest, and proposes that academic journals should include opposition-side expert witnesses in the peer review panel for any author who has acted as an expert witness in litigation.

In the more than ten years since its publication, Wakefield’s paper has spawned an entire movement of anti-vaccinists. Utterly predictably, once-vanishing “childhood” diseases are on the rise, bringing back all the dangerous complications doctors invented vaccines to eradicate in the first place. There are the inevitable celebrities, most notably Jenny McCarthy. And, since everyone loves a good conspiracy theory, the sad thing is that retracting the paper merely fuels the martyred conviction of anti-vaccine groups that Big Pharma has won again.

In this situation, no one has won. The Lancet‘s reputation is damaged. Wakefield is likely to lose his licence to practise medicine. Children have died of diseases like whooping cough that were so long gone doctors don’t even recognise the symptoms. Despite lowered vaccination rates the number of autism cases continues to rise. And parents of autistic children are still desperate and frightened.

Tony Blair’s government must take some of the blame. The UK has sometimes backed invasive and expensive legislation on the basis that “If it saves the life of just one child…” But in this particular case, despite public loss of confidence after BSE, Blair basically told parents with concerns to shove it, take the vaccine, and shut up. He was, we now know, scientifically right, but he was culturally wrong. A more painstaking approach might have meant less rejection of the government’s backing of the MMR vaccine.

When I started The Skeptic the big topics we were concerned about tended to be psychic fraud. That stuff is small fry. It may be annoying that people believe in astrology or believe in the physical effects created by the occasional washed-up stage magician, but you don’t die of that kind of gullibility. The big stuff is science fraud, especially because while the scientific process can undo the damage and rebuild the truth, the consequences for innocent bystanders often can’t be undone.

Wendy M. Grossman, http://www.pelicancrossing.net

So while there was an initial, and, to be fair, understandable panic, this was short lived as the relevant authorities quickly swung into action and began reassuring the nation. Those whose job it is to make decisions based on evidence have seemingly learned from the debacle that was the MMR vaccine. The joint director for public health for NHS Coventry and Coventry city council even went as far as to release preliminary findings of the post-mortem, in an attempt to prevent the media working itself into too much of an indignant lather.

The majority of media outlets did tone down their reporting. The Mirror encouraged parents not to panic. Why-ever would they do that? The Sunday Express, however, stood firm in the face of facts, claiming that JAB ‘AS DEADLY AS THE CANCER’. They based this subtle headline on an “exclusive interview” with Dr. Diane Harper, “who was involved in the clinical trials of the controversial drug Cervarix”. They went on to write that she has claimed “The cervical cancer vaccine may be riskier and more deadly than the cancer it is designed to prevent” and quote her as saying “All this jab will do is prevent girls getting some abnormalities associated with cervical cancer which can be treated. It will not decrease cervical cancer rates at all”.

Indeed Dr. Harper has been heavily involved in a number of trials of both GlaxoSmithKline’s Cervarix and Merck’s HPV vaccine Gardasil. And indeed Dr Harper has raised concerns about the manner in which these drugs have been promoted and the risks associated with them.

However the way Dr Harper was portrayed in the article was strange given that she herself has written that “HPV vaccination of pre-pubescent girls will be effective for many girls. Vaccinating girls and women older than 12 years of age may accelerate the reduction in cervical cancer rates” and, not 2 months ago “Post-marketing surveillance of Cervarix and Gardasil continues to show that they are safe for most women despite rarely occurring serious events”.

Thus it was with unsurprising inevitability that it turned out the good Doctor had been completely misrepresented by the Express. When I contacted Dr Harper shortly after the piece was published she said she had been “burned” by UK reporters. She has now filed a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission. The paper has pulled the story from their website, and published an apology over the weekend.

It seems the media simply hasn’t learnt. When all the mainstream outlets jumped on the MMR bandwagon, even though anyone with the barest understanding of the subject could see there was nothing too it, it directly lead to a decrease in parents getting their children immunised and thus an increase in the levels of measles. Crap reporting has a direct consequence on the world, and until mainstream media realise and accept their responsibilities they will continue, in a very real sense, to put people lives at risk. The Express has not responded to my request for clarification on how they came to the conclusion that the HPV jab was more dangerous than cervical cancer. What impact their apparent misrepresentation will have on cervical cancer rates remains to be seen.