private eye mmr admission of failure
I haven't yet seen responses from scientific and medical bloggers with greater knowledge of this area, but after an equivocal and not especially prominent piece in their last issue, which actually annoyed more people than it pleased, Private Eye has a much better, more detailed and more prominent article in the new issue on their coverage of Andrew Wakefield's claims about MMR. Although there are still grounds for quibbling - they stick to the line that asking questions on behalf of parents was the right thing to do, as if there was no wider context of falling vaccination rates, and say they should have conceded the argument after the second Cochrane review of 2005 not the first of 2002 (or even earlier) - the piece does begin,
Private Eye got it wrong in its coverage of MMR. It gave undue prominence to unproven theories based on a small umber of uncontrolled observations, and paid far less attention to the weight of evidence from large comparative studies that failed to find any association between MMR and autism.
Private Eye No.1256 19 February - 4 March 2010 p.17
Unfortunately, presumably from a misguided sense of 'balance', they give just as much space to four letters supportive of either Andrew Wakefield, or of Dr Wakefield and his claims, including one from a parent of a child investigated by Dr Wakefield, and another from Jackie Fletcher, the national coordinator of JABS, a notorious anti-vaccine organisation (pp.16-17). Allowing interested parties an equal amount of space to peddle conspiracy theories and repeat claims that have never been proven, and which you are claiming to distance yourself from is not 'balance'. At best it shows a muddled understanding of the issues by the editorial staff.
So once again, although the article in this issue is by far the clearest statement of culpability by Private Eye to date, they have managed to send mixed messages, and give prominence to the opinions of an anti-vaccine pressure group. I and many others have lost a significant amount of trust in Private Eye over this, and unfortunately the current issue doesn't do much to restore that trust. At present I'm not sure if the artice will be available online, it wasn't when I checked just before posting.
Private Eye got it wrong in its coverage of MMR. It gave undue prominence to unproven theories based on a small umber of uncontrolled observations, and paid far less attention to the weight of evidence from large comparative studies that failed to find any association between MMR and autism.
Private Eye No.1256 19 February - 4 March 2010 p.17
Unfortunately, presumably from a misguided sense of 'balance', they give just as much space to four letters supportive of either Andrew Wakefield, or of Dr Wakefield and his claims, including one from a parent of a child investigated by Dr Wakefield, and another from Jackie Fletcher, the national coordinator of JABS, a notorious anti-vaccine organisation (pp.16-17). Allowing interested parties an equal amount of space to peddle conspiracy theories and repeat claims that have never been proven, and which you are claiming to distance yourself from is not 'balance'. At best it shows a muddled understanding of the issues by the editorial staff.
So once again, although the article in this issue is by far the clearest statement of culpability by Private Eye to date, they have managed to send mixed messages, and give prominence to the opinions of an anti-vaccine pressure group. I and many others have lost a significant amount of trust in Private Eye over this, and unfortunately the current issue doesn't do much to restore that trust. At present I'm not sure if the artice will be available online, it wasn't when I checked just before posting.
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