Kicking against the pricks

Published in Tribune, 13 February 2009

LIKE a nasty case of genital herpes, the controversy over the MMR vaccine just keeps coming back. Every time it seems to have been brought under control, bang, another outbreak of denial comes along to ruin everything. With every outbreak of scepticism comes the risk of an outbreak of disease. Let’s not forget, measles can kill or cause brain damage, mumps causes male sterility and rubella leads to birth defects.

I genuinely thought that the allegations about MMR causing autism were on the wane. It’s not just that there was never any evidence for it, nor even that every single one of the many studies scientists have carried out since Andrew Wakefield’s controversial 1997 paper have disproved the supposed link. These all carry weight within the scientific community, although they don’t get all that much airtime in the media.

But Wakefield himself has been totally, utterly and publicly discredited, with a cloud of allegations about unethical conduct, conflicts of interest, impropriety, incompetence and faked results hanging around him. Only this week, the Sunday Times’ Brian Deer, whose admirable work has uncovered much of the shenanigans around Wakefield’s work, revealed that the original study which launched the whole scare a decade ago was based on manipulated and fabricated data.

Any scientific credibility Wakefield’s claims about MMR might ever had has now been completely refuted, and any personal credibility he had is long gone. The media finally seemed to be losing interest. Most people, faced with that sort of refutation, might accept that they were wrong and abandon their views. No doubt some have, as the vaccination rates are edging up again.

But the anti-MMR movement, instead of giving up and moving on, has decided en masse to reject knowledge and evidence, and instead to embrace ignorance and anecdote. And they show no sign of going away.

The Guardian’s “Bad Science” columnist Ben Goldacre – who, like Richard Dawkins can usually be relied upon to be both right and infuriatingly confrontational at the same time – has made a point of attacking the MMR-sceptics in print and on his website. Although he’s a good and clever writer, I don’t always agree with his style. When dealing with lay people sceptical about scientific fact, it’s a lot more helpful to engage with them than to insult them. Far better to convince than to ridicule, even if ridicule is fun.

However, I can make an exception in this case. The ignorance here is wilful and the damage real, and it needs to be rooted out once and for all.

Goldacre’s latest spat is with Jeni Barnett, a presenter on LBC 97.3 FM, a London radio station with more than 800,000 weekly listeners who tune in for an average of 11 hours a week. On her January 7 talkshow, she dedicated the better part of an hour of public airtime to possibly the most brazenly idiotic, most proudly ignorant and most crassly offensive “discussion” of MMR I have ever come across. There is far too much in the show to summarise – Goldacre described the programme as “bad science bingo” because it was so thorough in its recital of all the pseudoscientific tripe that the anti-vaccination camp comes up with.

So far, so disgraceful (even if it makes for morbidly amusing listening). But LBC has threatened legal action against Goldacre for having reproduced an audio clip of part of Barnett’s show on his website. The station claims breach of copyright – even though the law explicitly allows reproduction for the purposes of criticism and news reporting.

The prospect of a massive media company with hundreds of thousands of loyal listeners threatening a lone voice of opposition is bad enough. When LBC is doing so to protect its irresponsible presenter, it’s more serious still.

Fortunately, the rise of blogging makes such ham-fisted efforts at censorship rather less effective than they once were. A network of supportive bloggers has published transcripts of the show. The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.org has posted the full audio file of the programme for anyone to download. And there is a growing campaign on the internet to encourage readers to complain to Ofcom about LBC’s misuse of their broadcasting license.

I hope their complaints are upheld. This programme – and countless others like it – recklessly endangers public health and spreads ignorance about health and science. This is not what commercial broadcasters are granted permission to use the airwaves for. The drop in MMR vaccination rates over the past decade has led to a staggering 2300 per cent rise in measles infections between 1998 and 2008. A disease that was once so rare that doctors hardly ever saw it has become endemic again. Children have died because of the MMR hoax, and the media – LBC in particular – needs to face up to what it has done.

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ON THE subject of wilful ignorance and pseudoscience, Northern Ireland’s environment minister, the DUP’s Sammy Wilson, has banned British Government climate change advertising from Northern Ireland. Against all the evidence, Wilson – an economist by training – claims the planet is cooling. If it’s not cooling, he says that warming is caused by the sun – or God. If he’s not too busy, perhaps God could drop him a line and tell him what an idiot he is.