Our Voting Public: Uninsured revolt against the Anti-Christ behind the climate hoax edition

An April survey from Kaiser Family Foundation found that four in ten Americans (42%) are unaware that "Obamacare" is actually the law of the land. 12% thought the health reform measure had been repealed by Congress, 7% thought it had been overturned by the Supreme Court (which actually upheld the law in June of 2012), and 23% didn't know enough to say whether the law was in force or not. Overall, 49% of Americans didn't know enough to say whether the law will impact their own families--but, depressingly, the percentage of people lacking that knowledge was highest in the two groups the law is likely to benefit most: the uninsured (of whom 58% said they didn't know how the law would affect them) and the poor (56%).

Another poll--from PublicMind at Farleigh Dickinson University--shows that 29% of all Americans (18% of Democrats, 27% of Independents, and a whopping 44% of Republicans) believe that an armed revolution might be necessary in the next few years, in order to protect our liberties. An armed revolution. In the next few years. Another 5% of Americans aren't sure about that. Well, that's good, I guess; one doesn't want to decide these things too precipitously.

And in other polling news from what appears to be this planet, Public Policy Polling (a well-respected polling firm known for asking the occasional oddball or controversial question) has found (among many other amusing and/or scary things) that 58% of Republicans think global warming is a hoax, while 77% of Democrats disagree; and that 20% of Americans think vaccines cause autism, while 34% aren't sure.

And 20% of Republicans believe that President Obama is the Anti-Christ. Well, I guess we know why they think armed revolution might be necessary. Hope your health insurance covers gunshot wounds.  

Wakefield Sues BMJ Editor for Defamation

Wow. Author of the a now-discredited Lancet article which started a vaccine scare by falsely linking MMR vaccination to autism onset, Andrew Wakefield is suing BMJ's editor, Fiona Godlee, and British investigative journalist Brian Deer, for defamation of his character. The complaint, filed in Travis County, Texas, is here. It focuses fairly narrowly on statements by Godlee and Deer to the effect that Wakefield manipulated or falsified data in the study.

The UK's General Medical Council, after the longest hearing in its history, found Wakefield guilty of serious professional misconduct in connection with the conduct of the research underlying the article, and erased him from its rolls. But they didn't specifically find that he altered data in the study; their main complaint about the article itself was that it mischaracterized the children under study--especially the means by which, and purpose for which, they were recruited. The GMC's findings spoke mainly to other forms of research and clinical misconduct. To review, the GMC found that Wakefield violated the limits of his appointment as an Honorary Consultant in a "breach of trust of patients and employers alike," and mismanaged funds, and failed to disclose "matters which could legitimately give rise to a perception of a conflict of interest," and conducted research on vulnerable children without required ethics review, and concealed that fact, and repeatedly breached "fundamental principles of research medicine," and acted contrary to the clinical interests of 9 of the 12 children mentioned in the article, and violated his duties as a senior author, and failed to correct his mistakes when given the chance, and made "dishonest and irresponsible" statements to the GMC board itself.

Of course, the fact that Wakefield was unprofessional in a bunch of different ways doesn't mean that he was unprofessional in all of the ways that Godlee or Deer have, at one time or another, alleged. It's just possible that one or the other of them has said something factually wrong by accusing Wakefield of some specific kind of scumbaggery that he didn't actually engage in. If so, may the damages found be very, very small.

Because the damage caused by Wakefield hasn't been small. The publicity around his unethical research likely caused children to die of completely preventable childhood diseases, and is certainly still causing misguided parents to fail to vaccinate their children. It is depressing to note that here, the Autism Action Network is already trumpeting Wakefield's suit against Deer and a woman whom they call "Fiona Godley." Their view is that Wakefield and his co-author John Walker-Smith "had their medical licenses suspended for their refusal to recant their hypothesis." They don't mention the actual GMC findings against Wakefield, nor those against Walker-Smith (which you can read here), nor the fact that in 2004, six years before the GMC acted, Walker-Smith and nine of Wakefield's other co-authors specifically retracted the portion of the paper that posited a link of MMR with autism.

Vaccine Trouble

An October study in Pediatrics shows that 13% of parents follow a non-standard vaccination schedule for their children, by refusing particular vaccines, delaying certain vaccines, or (in about 2% of all cases) refusing all vaccines. More disturbing is the fact that many parents who are currently using the recommended schedule are at risk of departing from it in the future: 22% of them disagreed that the expert-recommended schedule they were following was the best one to use, and 28% of them thought delaying vaccination would be safer for their children. This is the legacy, I think, of Andrew Wakefield's fraud and the misguided activism of RFK Jr., Jenny McCarthy, and others. Meanwhile, a paper presented at last week's meeting of the Infectious Disease Society of America showed that younger doctors have less faith in vaccines than older doctors. In a WebMD interview, one of the authors stated that while there was generally strong support among all doctors for vaccination, every increase of five years in year of graduation was associated with a 20% reduced likelihood that the doctor believed that vaccines were very safe, and with a 20% increased likelihood of agreement with the statement that "children get more immunizations than are good for them." Why would younger doctors have less faith in vaccines? This, too, may be partly a legacy of the recent controversies surrounding HPV vaccination, the alleged vaccine/autism link, and so on. But there may also be something else at work: younger doctors have no experience of the devastating effects of childhood diseases. Indeed, many young physicians are more apt to have seen an adverse reaction to a vaccine than a case of polio or whooping cough or rubella. Vaccines, in other words, may partly be victims of their own success.