Giving a soapbox to pseudoscience

 The largest measles outbreak for a decade is posing a serious danger to many, so why is the media still providing a platform for a discredited scientist?

Wales’ current measles outbreak has resurrected a controversy that will not die; a zombie debate that science should have put to rest years ago. Unfortunately, while science trades in evidence, the same cannot always be said of media outlets – often under pressure to produce sensationalist headlines while feigning ignorance of their powerful influence.

The furore all kicked off in 1998 when a paper published by the Lancet suggested a link between the measles mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. The study was jumped on by scaremongering reporters who propelled bowel surgeon Andrew Wakefield to media stardom, hailed by anti-vaccination campaigners as a Galileo-like maverick. Wakefield was lead author of a study that examined 12 autistic children who had apparently developed the condition after their MMR vaccination. His claims that MMR was linked to autism have now been disproven in multiple studies that tried to replicate his methods. Furthermore, the ethics of the study were questioned when the children involved in the research were found to have been subjected to unnecessary and invasive procedures. And perhaps most importantly, it was uncovered in 2004 that the parents of the autistic children were recruited by a lawyer preparing a lawsuit against MMR manufacturers. Wakefield had been paid more than £400,000 to conduct research that could display a correlation between the vaccine and autism. The Lancet’s editor said he believed the paper would have been rejected for bias if peer reviewers have been aware of Wakefield’s financial conflicts of interest.

Now, as a measles epidemic is upon us, despite losing his job and license to practice medicine, Wakefield’s media presence has re-emerged. The Independent recently gave his statement pride of place on the front page of their Saturday paper with the accompanying headline: MMR scaredoctor: “This outbreak proves I was right all along”. The article included a press release of Wakefield’s thoughts on the worst measles outbreak in a decade, inexplicably shifting the blame to the government. At the time, the scare around the MMR vaccine was considerable. Wakefield’s work was covered so prominently in the media that even parents with a scientific background were left agonising over what would be the best decision for their child. UCL Physics Professor Jon Butterworth has written about the anguish he felt, trying to weigh up the evidence when it came to vaccinating his own son in 2003. He said: “In the end, even to a physicist and a chemist, the medical evidence was overwhelming. He got his MMR. But it was hard. The terrible media reporting, and the terrible way the scare was dealt with politically, put parents in a horrible situation.”

If a vastly educated scientist can have misconceptions about a life-saving vaccine, it must have been torturous for less-informed families (without access to scientific literature) that expected to get valid, truthful information from their newspaper of choice. A credible newspaper should know better than to give a high-profile platform to a scientist whose work has been debunked. And while the article does point out that Wakefield’s was discredited and his claims are at best dubious, it does give a prominent proportion of article space to his opinions and so requires a careful read. Wakefield may have been wrong, his research and opinions may have been biased, but it is lunacy that he is held solely responsible for the panic that has – and continues to – put people in avoidable danger through misinformation. Wakefield didn’t really create this controversy or the recent measles outbreak in Swansea, shameless reporting did.