"First, do no harm."

[unixronin]

Or, not.

The General Medical Council ruled that Dr Andrew Wakefield, who claimed a link between the MMR jab and autism, also “failed in his duties as a responsible consultant”.

[...]

His 1998 research, based on 12 children, was published in the Lancet and is said to have done more damage than anything published in a scientific journal in living memory.

[...]

The charges against the trio run to 93 pages and include the allegation that Dr Wakefield failed to disclose to the Lancet that he had accepted £55,000 from the Legal Aid Board.  The money was allegedly for research to support legal action by parents who believed their children were harmed by MMR.

Step 1:  Create a false medical panic.

Step 2:  Rent yourself out to people looking for someone to blame for their kid's autism.

Step 3:  Profit!

(Pointer via brownkitty)

Comments

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

nor is the panic necessarily false

That is, fortunately, not the standard we use for credible scientific research. It is not necessarily false that the entire cosmos sprang into existence five minutes ago, with everything in such perfect order as to create an illusion of history. However, the total lack of evidence to support such a view means that this view, while not necessarily false, is hardly within the heartland of scientific thinking. A physicist who promulgated this view as anything more than a thought experiment would rightly be decried for operating outside of the heartland of physics.

The same applies to Dr. Wakefield.