A specific point to Urbantravels before I get started: what you say might make some sense in the US, but if you knew anything at all about the reality of libel law in the UK, you would know that it is not a realistic option for anyone but the super-rich, so please don't go concluding anything about the truth of the matter if Dr Wakefield is unable to fight back effectively.
Yes- I am no 'supporter' of Andrew Wakefield as such. But I've been struck at the level of often quite rabid ad hominem against him over the years. Since becoming a veteran of the effects of bad science and rhetoric masquerading as science which you do sort of become when you enter the murky world of ME/CFS, I've learned to spot rhetorical devices or just plain fallacies much more efficiently (I believe at least), and over the years, seeing the viciousness on various forums (Bad Science, the Crippen blog, as just two of many) towards Wakefield, for example, it had occurred to me that there is very little substance to these attacks once you wade through them. On top of that, the ad hominem of parents of autistic children, parents who believe their children were damaged by MMr, those raising concerns about vaccination, has been frequent. So the alarm bells started ringing for me. When factual evidence is scarce, but authoritative assertions about people being bad in various ways appear instead, people's alarm bells should be ringing.
The censorship of the original paper by 'retraction' is also appalling. That smacks of re-writing history and abuse of power. I would advise everyone who can to read it, because it sets in context some of the claims being made.
Brilliant summary Angela, I see it exactly the same way. If only I could be so succinct as you...
Pretty much everything I want to say has already been said very well by others, especially by Angela and Wayne, but I'll add my personal perspective because the points Angela makes do illustrate how this whole issue has disturbing parallels with our own situation.
So my perspective is this. When I came on to this forum just over a year ago, I reckon if you'd asked me my opinion on MMR/autism I'd have said it was pretty much disproved as far as I could see, and that Wakefield and others had perhaps behaved a little recklessly. I've never really paid the subject much attention since I don't have kids myself (and probably never will, to my great regret), so I can't exactly remember what I thought about it. But the case seemed relatively straightforward to me: probably just a mistake.
Then in the context of an ME/CFS discussion I was pointed at one link: an interview by a journalist with Dr Wakefield himself (I think I'll keep calling them Dr no matter what is done to such people btw).
I was shocked to the core by what I read. What disturbed me so much was that despite the blanket media coverage, and despite all the other lengthy articles I read elsewhere (including Deer's pieces), there was clearly a whole other side to this whole story that I'd never heard. And riddled through that other side to the story were some really powerful points which - even regardless of whether the facts presented there were really true - gave me enormous pause for thought.
I quickly realised that I had only ever heard one side of the story, and that the other side cast the allegations in a whole new light.
Angela has much more backplot in the ME world than I do, so I can confirm that what she says about her having developed a radar for the tactics of The Lobby is absolutely true: you need to keep a sharp eye out for the signature behaviours of these people, because they are pros at what they do.
In short: they are masters of spin, manipulation of information, presentation of arguments in a misleading way that gets past your critical faculties and seeps into your brain somehow, through relentless pressure. Ad hominem arguments - attacks on all the individuals around the issue, subtle and not-so-subtle malignments of their character, aggressive expressions of contempt and anger, sneering insinuations about people's intelligence - those things seem to surround everything. Compelling and well-referenced evidence is convincingly presented, in such a powerful way that it's only when you come to sit down with the help of the counter-argument, and ask yourself what that evidence actually amounts to, that you realise it's all circumstantial, tangential, and irrelevant to the important points. A character assassination, basically, and a clever distraction from the real issues.
The thing is: however well-written and well-referenced and well-researched, Deer's work presents only one side of a very complex story - and the other side is simply not presented to the public at all. Deer never even asked Wakefield for his side of the story, and never presented it: he didn't seem to need it; his work was one-sided from day one.
This whole approach is all brilliantly articulated on the current Bad Science thread on this subject, by a number of posters. The argument runs like this...
(Sigh) And I suppose this particular part of the media is now going to ask for 'the other side of the story'. Journalists always feel like they have to present both sides. But that isn't appropriate here. In this case, we have the Scientific Truth on one side, and a load of old rubbish on the other side. If you present both sides of the story, when one side is truth and the other side is lies, you'll only confuse people. This obsession with letting everybody present their side of the story gets abused, because it means that the people who are wrong have to get equal airtime with the people who are right.
If you check out BS for the relevant quotes I'm referring to, you couldn't ask for a more explicit exposition of how dangerous the (amateur) philosophy of these people is. It's a fair assumption that they have a rather better understanding of (their area of) science than they do of politics or philosophy, and another fair assumption that they live and operate within a pretty sheltered world, to be coming out with stuff like this.
It's really no exaggeration to describe the sort of philosophy I've described above as a form of totalitarianism, censorship, oppression. Extremist, materialistic, atheistic establishment scientists who believe that any other way of looking at the world than their own needs to be censored and oppressed, should set VERY loud alarm bells ringing to anybody who's familiar with the history of totalitarian movements, and the history of the involvement of such scientists in helping to bring those horrors into the world.
Their argument boils down to this. This other guy should not have the right to reply to these allegations, because the allegations are true, they are right, and he is wrong. Therefore nobody should be allowed to hear his dangerous words, because most people aren't as clever as me, and they might believe what he says, to their own detriment.
Running through that whole argument is a form of elitism, arrogance, anti-democratic sentiment, and contempt for the general population, that is oh so familiar to me, and it just fills me with disgust. My own life and career was already restricted even before I got ME, because I just can't bear to be around people like that for very long - I haven't the patience, I'd probably end up maiming one of them. Such people really do believe that they are the guardians of true knowledge, that they are so intelligent they need to be put in charge, that the ordinary idiots need to be protected by them from the dangers that freedom and democracy might bring them. And they really do just
know they are right, and so is everyone else around them in positions of power.
I might add that, as specialists in an education system that encourages/enforces specialisation and elitism at an early age, they share a common education, a common set of assumptions, a common contempt for anything outside their in-group's philosophy, a relatively homogeneous community in their 'ivory towers' protected from the wider world, status, wealth and privilege associated with their positions, an almost total financial, personal and political investment in the status quo,
and communities like Bad Science where they can publicly
and privately discuss with each other how to further their own beliefs.
So given all that, calling them a kind of conspiracy isn't too far fetched, semantically - despite the associations that the word 'conspiracy' has acquired over the years. They meet and discuss amongst themselves, in a huge international community, they organise together, they have shared radical and extremist assumptions and objectives, almost nobody has ever heard of them, many of them are in positions of great power and influence, they have access to a vast archive of information that the general population isn't allowed to see (published science, and unpublished info from their mates, kept from the population on the argument that "they wouldn't understand it and they wouldn't be interested in it")...they tick all the boxes for me. The only part that makes it confusing is: they would never in a million years see themselves as a 'conspiracy' - so they can easily laugh with contempt at the idea that there is such a thing as a conspiracy, without ever realising that they are it!
And it's frighteningly easy for anybody to manipulate this army of pseudosceptics by pointing them in the direction of something outside the mainstream they would like them to attack.
So...this is basically what I've learned over the last year. I started out with a fairly conventional view, accepting the view that the media had fed me regarding MMR/autism/Wakefield. I came across the other side of the story and realised that I had not been given all the information fairly, and not been allowed to make up my own mind because some people think I'm not smart enough to be trusted to do so. I read the other side of the argument more carefully and analysed the attacks on Wakefield, and I couldn't find anything substantial in them that didn't have a powerful rebuttal, and I couldn't find anything that really addressed the scientific questions - though as Angela rightly explains, it proved incredibly difficult to pick out the substance of the question from the mass of circumstantial smearing and sneering that surrounded it.
(Hey, that's a thought - do these people have a secret bible called "Smear and Sneer"?)
Next I looked at the studies that debunked the MMR/autism claim, having noted after examination of the detail that (very much like the idea that the WPI are claiming XMRV causes ME/CFS), Wakefield himself never actually made the claim that he's so angrily vilified for making. I read those studies in light of the understanding that the hypotheses around XMRV had suggested to us. And I found that none of those studies had any bearing whatsoever on the actual scientific issues, that all of them were examining a question that was obviously not the point, that they over-reached their evidence when summarising their findings (another hallmark of the spinners), and that they were being misused by being taken as evidence that the original paper was false and should not be investigated. Crucially, the whole line of scientific inquiry, it seemed, must not be investigated any further - because it had supposedly been disproven. (And I'm very concerned, incidentally, that the final shot seems to have been fired by one Dr. Lipkin, in a study that even I can see was not at all conclusive in the way he seems to have interpreted it...oh yes, that does worry me a lot...)
And by the way, just as with the WPI, I see rumours and disinformation which I now know to be untrue and/or misleading being repeated by
all sides of the argument, even on this thread. Once these memes take hold, and when one side of the argument struggles to be heard, the disinformation just lives on and on.
So here's where I end up. I'm not a retrovirologist, as it happens. I'm not an expert in these particular areas of science. I have some knowledge and I study whatever I can get my hands on, but it's not my specialism. I therefore can't form a strong opinion as to whether Wakefield was right or wrong based on the science.
What I
can conclude with confidence, is that this entire argument, and whole areas of science related to it, are surrounded by dishonesty, dirty tricks, nastiness, and elitist anti-democratic philosophies. I've witnessed the hysteria whenever the word vaccine is innocently mentioned, and it's immediately obvious that there are some hypotheses in science that just don't get equal airplay, and are rounded on and suppressed by a dishonest mob whenever the mere thought arises. There are some things that are not allowed to be said; there are some questions that are not allowed to be asked - and the suppression of anyone who crosses those lines is ruthless. And so it's quite obvious to me that the spirit of objective, balanced and open-minded scientific inquiry is NOT alive and well, in this area at least, and therefore the body of established science is inevitably going to be skewed by these fears and prejudices.
And so while I started out by not believing in Dr Wakefield, it's the behaviour and arguments of his enemies that have convinced me that he
might have a point. In fact I'm rather beginning to suspect that the quickest route to the truth is to follow these so-called sceptics and find out what they're attacking today. Because the more it gets under their skin, the more hysterical and unreasonable their persecution of it is, the more likely it is that it's a truth that they just daren't face up to - and they have the power to make sure that the vast majority of the UK population don't get to even hear the other side of the argument.
