Rolling Stone Retracts Autism Article, but Lots of Junk Journalism Remains

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Rolling Stone Retracts Autism Article, but Lots of Junk Journalism Remains

By Jim | January 21, 2011

Rolling Stone's retraction* of F. Kennedy Jr.'s 2005 article " Deadly

Immunity, " which claimed that vaccines cause autism, is welcome — but it also

points the spotlight at a lot of other journalists who have published utter

garbage about vaccines over the years. Some of their most prominent work —

giving sympathetic airings to the notion that vaccines may be dangerous —

remains out there on the Web, uncorrected, as if it were still true.

Kennedy's Rolling Stone article originally said that " … the link between

thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real. " But

since The Lancet retracted the original piece of research that made that link,

and since the British Medical Journal then revealed that the study wasn't merely

a mistake but an outright fraud, the entire notion that vaccination and autism

are somehow linked has been thoroughly debunked.

Those aren't the only retractions. A federal court of appeals recently found

that a Dublin laboratory that purportedly found measles virus in the guts of

autistic children who had been given a measles-mumps-rubella vaccine must have

faked its results.

Salon editor Joan Walsh, who also published Kennedy's story, said:

… continued revelations of the flaws and even fraud tainting the science behind

the connection make taking down the story the right thing to do.

Walsh's action is unusual however. Here's a brief list of some of the more

prominent pieces of junk journalism you can find on the web that reporters and

editors have made no effort to amend or correct:

CBS News' Sharyl Attkisson* has been more sympathetic than most over the years

to individuals who claim that vaccines have something to do with autism. In 2004

she produced a report that said:

Nobody makes the claim that all ADD and autism cases are caused by the mercury

in vaccines. But many researchers believe it plays a large role in our epidemic

of the 1990s.

In 2008, Attkisson wrote a blog item about a Public Library of Science study

that showed no vaccine-autism link. But instead of describing the study,

Attkisson quoted in full and verbatim an " opposing analysis " by the

" researchers " at Thoughtful House. Thoughtful House is the former employer of

Wakefield, the disgraced researcher whose bogus Lancet article first

linked vaccines to autism. (That's him to the right.)

The U.K's Daily Mail for years kept up a drumbeat of stories about vaccines and

autism. Here's a typical one, " Scientists fear MMR link to autism, " quoting

Wakefield:

This new study confirms what we found in British children and again with

Professor O'Leary. The only exposure these children have had to measles is

through the MMR vaccine.

`They were developing normally until they regressed. They now suffer autism and

bowel disease.

The author of the study Wakefield was referring to later said his study claimed

no such link.

Fox & Friends' Alisyn Camerota last year aired a piece titled " Autism

correlation coverup? " that suggested the government was forcing parents of

autistic children to jump through impossible hoops to prove that vaccines are

damaging. Autism News Beat has a good explanation of why Camerota's piece is

baloney, but even better than that Fox News itself reported this year that

" Study Linking Vaccine to Autism Was `Elaborate Fraud.` "

The Huffington Post continues to publish the blog of McCarthy, the former

Playboy model who still believes vaccines cause autism, as if nothing has

happened, and as if she doesn't have a history of getting things wrong. On Jan.

10, days after the study by Wakefield was revealed as a conspiracy cooked up by

anti-vaccine activists hoping to win a lawsuit, McCarthy wrote:

Dr. Wakefield did something I wish all doctors would do: he listened to parents

and reported what they said.

… Since when is repeating the words of parents and recommending further

investigation a crime?

In fact, research fraud — which is what Wakefield allegedly did — is a crime in

the U.S.

The good news is that Google's search algorithm is doing its job: The wave of

media coverage about the debunking of the Wakefield study has buried thousands

of poorly reported stories from the mid-2000s in which activists with theories

got sympathetic treatment while the boring, high-quality evidence was ignored.

But still, it would be nice if the media could admit they're wrong every now and

again.

*As Retraction Watch makes clear, Rolling Stone deleted the story from its site

without explanation. Only Salon explained its errors.