A week or so ago I posted about Andrew “MMR is bad okay” Wakefield being struck off the medical register and mentioned in passing that he himself had patented a single measles vaccine, to se in place of the MMR vaccine that was supposed to be causing autism in children. He therefore wasn’t just doing bad research with questionable results to reach false conclusions, he seemed to be doing it out of a financial motive. Nobody needs a single measles vaccine if the MMR vaccine is available and safe, after all. What I didn’t realise was just how quacky Wakefield’s patents were:
Wakefield’s patent application’s description of the production of his transfer factor product makes startling reading.
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So, we have measles virus and mice. Then we have the mice lymphocytes and a human cell line. Then more measles virus, for some reason. Then goats, and the final product coming from the colostrum of the nanny-goat. The route of administration described in the patent application is oral, but intramuscular injection is also referred to. There is description of reactions of human patients to this preparation, but absolutely no hint of any of the normal drug testing procedures that would have to be undertaken for any product to be licensed as a safe and effective therapeutic agent. Really, read the original text. It’s a classic example of junk science.
Just how happy should concerned parents be to have something like this injected into their children? Mice? Human bone marrow? Goat’s milk? Measles virus involved in the production process? Absolutely no background literature supporting the process, and no evidence of any safety or efficacy testing?
From the start then, even before he did his notorious “research”, Wakefield seemed to have been deeply involved in pseudoscience and quackery. How than was it possible for the press to take him serious for so long that the safety of the MMR vaccine was actually in doubt, if not amongst medical practitioners, at least amongst the “informed” lay audience, for years? It’s one thing to understand and know that science reporting in general is woefully inadequate almost everywhere. Quite another to know it’s so bad as this, that an obvious quack as Wakefield has turned out to be was believed and barely investigated.