Vaccines: It's not what the papers say, it's what they don't

[Dominus Atheos]

Guardian

Writing this column really scares me because I wonder whether everything else in the media is as shamelessly, venally, manipulatively, one-sidedly, selectively reported on as the things I know about. But this week the reality editing was truly without comparison.

On Tuesday the Telegraph, the Independent, the Mirror, the Express, the Mail, and the Metro all reported that a coroner was hearing the case of a toddler who died after receiving the MMR vaccine, which the parents blamed for their loss. Toddler 'died after MMR jab' (Metro), 'Healthy' baby died after MMR jab (Independent), you know the headlines by now.

On Thursday the coroner announced his verdict: the vaccine played no part in this child's death. So far, of the papers above, only the Telegraph has had the decency to cover the outcome. The Independent, the Mirror, the Express, the Mail, and the Metro have all decided that their readers are better off not knowing. Tick, tock.

Does it stop there? No. Amateur physicians have long enjoyed speculating that MMR and other vaccinations are somehow "harmful to the immune system" and responsible for the rise in conditions such as asthma and hay fever. Doubtless they must have been waiting some time for evidence to appear.

This month a significant paper was published by Hviid and Melbye in the December 1 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. They examined 871,234 children in a Danish birth cohort, comparing asthma in those who had MMR against those who didn't. MMR-vaccinated children were massively and significantly less often hospitalised with an asthma diagnosis, and used fewer courses of anti-asthma medication than unvaccinated children. This "protective" effect of the MMR vaccine was more pronounced for hospitalisations with severe asthma diagnoses.

Those results aren't just incompatible with an increased risk of asthma following MMR vaccination, they actually support the hypothesis that MMR vaccination is associated with a reduced risk of asthma in young children. Tick, tock.

And most astonishing of all is the tale of "the Uhlmann paper", or the "O'Leary paper". This came out in 2002 and claimed to have found evidence of vaccine measles virus in tissue samples from children with autism and bowel problems, to massive media acclaim.

As I've said previously, two similar papers, by Afzal et al and D'Souza et al, in 2006 found negative results on almost the same question, and were unanimously ignored by the media (even though D'Souza actively went out of his way to show how O'Leary et al got false positives).

Stephen Bustin is professor of molecular science at Barts and the London. He examined the O'Leary lab for the court case against MMR, as an expert witness for the drug company defendants. The case collapsed, and he was unable to discuss his findings. Then he was called to give evidence in the American "autism omnibus" case against the vaccine. The anti-vaccine movement did their best to prevent this. They knew what he had found: it appears to be incontrovertible evidence that the lab was detecting false positives.

Now Bustin has finally been able to write about what he found in O'Leary's lab. He published this month. Nobody who covered the original O'Leary paper has written about it. Not a soul will.

Measles cases are rising. Middle class parents are not to blame, even if they do lack rhetorical panache when you try to have a discussion with them about it.

They have been systematically and vigorously misled by the media, the people with access to all the information, who still choose, collectively, between themselves, so robustly that it might almost be a conspiracy, to give you only half the facts.

Today, I have merely given you some small part of the other half, and next week I will move on: but know that nobody else has.

[Guardsman Bass]

This is hardly new; we've been dealing with the "vaccines = autism" idiots for a long while. I guess they expanded into a new subculture of "vaccines = asthma." These people are the reasons why vaccines should be mandatory unless you can show that you have a verifiable health risk associated with taking the vaccine (like Broomstick mentioned she had with the Smallpox vaccine).

[Phantasee]

I think the point of the article was that it's also the media's fault for not reporting when vaccines are shown to not have a link to a problem like autism or asthma, or actually benefit children (like the asthma being less common or severe in vaccinated children).

[KrauserKrauser]

The media reporting non-sensationalist stories? How boring!

Didn't you know that journalism is about reporting to the lowest common denominator, not reporting the facts?

Who needs fact checking, investigation and actual reporting work when you can just fear monger for profit?

[Executor32]

It's sad to see that it's no longer just the tabloids that pull this shit. I thought it was bad enough when I saw a headline on one of them about "Obama's Fury Over New Tell-All Book", which after leafing through I saw was about some book written by that delusional douchenozzle Larry Sinclair, with no Obama reaction whatsoever.

[Zixinus]

The media never was and never will be interested in telling the truth. They are a business, whether its government or private, and they only care to make a profit and hammer their own viewpoints.

In case of conservative USA, I'm sure that somewhere on the news company's foodchain, someone really likes the idea of sabotaging people's faith in science.

[Vendetta]

If you want some real horror stories about science journalism, you need to read the book that goes with that column (Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre).

There are gems like the "special laboratory" all the papers sent their own undercover swab samples to for the big MRSA scare actually being a bloke in a garden shed using kitchen utensils and a non-accredited mail order PhD.

[Darth Wong]

That's why we need a news service which is treated as just that: a public service. As long as it's a for-profit business, we'll get nothing but people trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

[PeZook]

That's why we need a news service which is treated as just that: a public service. As long as it's a for-profit business, we'll get nothing but people trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

But don't you know? Public television has lower quality programming and boring shows nobody likes to watch, so it's automatically pointless!

Believe it or not, public TV in Poland is criticized very harshly because it doesn't have enough trash in it. It is required by law to emit plenty of educational programs, and lots of idiot free marketers snort derisively at this requirement, as if it was somehow evil for TV to have "physics for children" or "animal preservation efforts in africa" styled programs.

The sad thing, though, is that they're kinda right. Most people like to watch trash.

[bobalot]

I remember all these conservative arseholes and free marketeers whining about how "left biased" the ABC was (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Public TV). When they did an actual survey of peoples opinions, they found the 75%+ of people thought the ABC wasn't biased. And while viewer numbers wasn't the highest, it was very significant. It made them shut up for about a week before they starting whining again. I guess they know better than millions of Australians.

It's comparing apples and oranges in a way as well. The ABC has 4-5+ hours of kids shows and educational programs per weekday. It's a bit unfair to say all because it only caters to the demographic of young children, it doesn't perform a valuable role for society in educating our youngsters.