update on bad science situation

I hope you have been following the story of LBC and Global Radio's legal threats to Dr Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog after he featured 44 minutes from one of Jeni Barnett's shows in which she talked about MMR while clearly being utterly uninformed. As he has pointed out several times the reason for featuring the whole section on MMR was so he could not be accused of cherry-picking quotes or misrepresenting Ms Barnett's position.  He also made clear that it was not intended to be a specific attack on Jeni Barnett or on LBC, nor was his concern specifically MMR, although the figures for measles cases since take up of the vaccine dropped off are shocking. Dr Goldacre was using the broadcast as an exemplar of the kind of irresponsible and uninformed coverage health topics get in the media. Regular readers of Bad Science will be well aware that this is a recurrent concern.

Since the legal chill following the heavy-handed intervention of LBC's lawyers to force Dr Goldacre to remove the audio the story seems to have grown bigger every day, culminating with Stephen Fry weighing in via Twitter. Despite claiming that she wanted a debate Jeni Barnett seems to not only have removed comments from her blog posts, but to have removed the two posts related to this controversy altogether. Luckily Quackometer managed to find them down the back of the sofa and has them available for your perusal here.

Bad Science now has a lengthy update on the still developing story which I urge you to read. As well as many useful links there are suggestions for action such as complaining to LBC and Global Radio, or to Ofcom. There is also an Early Day Motion that you should ask your MP to support:

“That this house expresses its support for the use of the combined MMR vaccine, notes with concern the re-emergence of measles and the loss of life and long term health problems which will afflict children as a result of the decline in the vaccination rate which followed Dr Andrew Wakefield’s now discredited research paper suggesting a link between MMR and autism; expresses its disappointment that ill-informed comments by presenters such as Jeni Barnett on her LBC radio show will continue to cause unfounded anxieties for many parents and are likely to result in some parents choosing not to vaccinate their children, recognises the right of Jeni Barnett as a parent to make her own judgement about vaccinations for her own children but implores her and others in the media to act more responsibly when making comments in the public domain and expresses its hope that in the future, reporting of the issue of MMR will be less sensationalist and more evidence based”

Embarrassingly because of my post last week apparently both Holford Watch and consequently Bad Science adapting their links of blog coverage have featured santiago in company he does not really deserve to be keeping. I am not a scientist, I am not a Doctor, and my lack of both mathematical and scientific knowledge is genuinely embarrassing to me. I am therefore very dependent on sites like Holford Watch, Bad Science, Gimpy's Blog, Quackometer and others to cut through the bullshit that gets thrown out daily by the media. I have tried in this post and the previous one on this issue to be very careful and not to make statements where I do not understand what I am saying. Personally I have no concern about deferring to people who know what they are doing. I would not get some bloke down the pub to do my gas fitting work if he was not qualified (currently CORGI, soon to be Capita under Gas Safe Register so you know), likewise I will go to a qualified Doctor for medical advice rather than some crank who thinks magic water will cure me.

And here is a confession, like probably a lot of my readers who have no real scientific or medical knowledge I have in the past thought there might be 'something in' all manner of alternative nonsense. On the topic of MMR I read the Private Eye coverage of the concerns raised by Andrew Wakefield which have subsequently been shown to be unfounded. Being a careless sort then I believed what was written - I may still have the special publication they produced. I do not recall any retraction or correction by them which is a great shame as I generally set more weight by Private Eye stories than by most of the rest of the print media. And this is one of the useful things that I have learned from reading Bad Science over the last few years - if it is something I know nothing about then better to remain sceptical about mainstream coverage until I've done some research and looked at what actual experts have to say. I hope this explains my caution and the relative forest of hyperlinks. The digression into gas safety is simply because I thought it was a passable analogy, and I know something of the law in this area from my work.

Note: Apologies for the slightly crappy look of this post. For some reason Safari and Blogger don't work well together and every time I cut and paste text from somewhere else it fucks up the formatting something chronic. I simply don't have the time to mess about with the html getting it right.

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