"Most notably, there was Andrew Wakefield, the British gastroenterologist who authored the now-infamous 1998 study that suggested there might be a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Jenny McCarthy was breathed into being because of Andrew Wakefield.
The wider world hasn’t been kind to Wakefield, who lost his medical license in 2010 and is widely described as a one-man public health disaster. Here, though, he was treated as a battle-scarred hero. The room hung on his every word.
“One in two children will have autism by 2032,” he told us, to horrified gasps. “We are facing dark times. The government and the pharmaceutical industry own your bodies and the bodies of your children.”
“There are no [vaccine] exemptions anymore,” Sean David Morton piped in. “Not even if you’re Jewish. But I think Obama made an exception for Muslims.” He switched into what may have been an impression of someone with an Arabic accent: “Ay yi yi!”...
Earthly concerns commenced early on a Monday morning with Andrew Wakefield, down in the green-carpeted Botticelli dining room. He was in a dour mood.
“The story of my life is that I had a promising career and I flushed it down the toilet,” he said. He wasn’t overstating things: Wakefield was a gastroenterologist in London in 1998, when he and a dozen co-authors published a piece in the Lancet,claiming that eight of 12 children they’d studied had developed behavioral symptoms associated with regressive autism after receiving the MMR vaccine. The study didn’t definitively state there was a link between the MMR and autism, although now Wakefield says he believes that to be the case.
The Lancet retracted it in 2010, and 10 of Wakefield’s 12 co-authors wrote a subsequent retraction that doubled as an apology for creating conditions in which an untold number of parents became afraid to vaccinate their children. Wakefield lost his license and was accused of having been working on patenting an alternate measles vaccine of his own and of being paid by a personal injury lawyer. (Wakefield called those reports inaccurate and done with bad intent. In 2007, he sued Brian Deer, the journalist who wrote the investigative pieces about him, for libel, but eventually dropped the case. He later sued the British Medical Journal, where Deer’s stories were published, as well as Deer personally for defamation in Texas; that suit was thrown out in 2014. A judge ruled state courts there didn’t have jurisdiction over a British publication.)
Wakefield’s belief in his own theories has never wavered... Compared to many of the presenters, Wakefield was quite coherent, with a thesis that hung together in a logical way, at least on the surface. It was easy to see why he’s a star in the anti-vaccine world.
The question was why he was delivering a passionate defense of his life’s work not to the medical establishment, but to an audience mainly composed of retirees, in a dining room, on a boat, in the middle of the sea...
The political scientists Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, who authored the study, argue that conspiracy theories are, at their core, an attempt to deal with emotional distress, the kind caused by a shocking or inexplicable event: a vicious new drug coming out of nowhere, planes demolishing the World Trade Center, the president shot dead on a sunny day, riding through the streets of Dallas. Conspiracy theories provide a soothing order and, with it, reassurance.
But there’s also a reason why Americans are particularly prone to believing in conspiracy theories: In our case, quite a lot of outlandish things turn out to be true. The CIA really did conduct serious research into whether it could use mind control on its enemies, a program known as MKULTRA; it really did try to assassinate Fidel Castro through an increasingly absurd series of weaponized devices (exploding cigar, booby-trapped seashell, ballpoint pen laced with poison). The U.S. Army really did try to use elements of the “human potential” movement to try and develop “psychic spies,” known as the Stargate Project. The FBI really did run the COINTELPRO program, a series of covert operations designed to undermine and destroy political organizations from within"
http://jezebel.com/sail-far-away-at-sea-with-americas-largest-floating-1760900554?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email
FB: mostly fascinating because Andrew Wakefield, the guy who wrote the paper that started the vaccines=autism thing, is on the cruise and talks about his life.
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