Links to outside attacks, defenses and the original materials will be put here as I get around to it. As of today, October 12, 2014, there have been two Andrew Wakefield narrated Vimeo videos posted to the internet world that reveal (or purport to reveal) two apparently very serious instances of the DeStefano paper authors colluding to alter their statistical analysis in such a way as to minimize or hide the presence of statistically significant differences in the incidence of autism found in subsets of their study cohort receiving the MMR vaccine and matched subsets not receiving the vaccine.
CDC Whistleblower Revealed (Aug 17, 2014)
“Isolated” Autism – Your child? (Oct 5, 2014)
Some of the follow up materials I have collected:
A Break in the Wall - William W. Thompson (Aug 25, 2014)
CDC Scientist Claims Research Team Covered Up Vaccine-Autism Link (Aug 27, 2014, likely date)
A search for "CDC whistleblower revealed" (in quotes) on the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times on Oct 12, 2014 did not return any hits. A search for “CDC Thompson MMR” (not in quotes) gave no returns for WaPo or LAT; however, the NYT did come up with a few from years past, not including this news event of 2014. It’s interesting that their most “relevant” report (“Immunizations – In-Depth Report”) shows up because it includes a reference to a 2007 paper by Thompson himself (
) – one of only 24 references for their long report. No doubt included because Thompson, who works for the CDC, is one of the real authorities on the subject of vaccine safety. In fact that paper appears in 5 of the six hits for that search – see for yourself here.
A search for "CDC whistleblower revealed" on Google News also yields no returns, and in fact, although Google is my basic first news site every morning, I have yet to come across a news article on the subject itself there. (As of 10-12-14.) I only found out about the news, which to me seems quite important, via a health newsletter I am subscribed to.
On the other hand, a search for “CDC Thompson MMR” (without quotes) does return 28 news articles on 10-12-14. Their algorithm gives the top two spots to critical mentions of the Thompson whistleblower news (dated Sep 14 and Oct 9) and the third to an alternative news site’s positive take on the second Wakefield video.
Before I lay out more links to the few news stories I have found as well as to some discussions of the actual issues and factual claims that are made, we should look at CNN, where a reader posted his/her own news item on their iReports section. There was a bit of a flare up of discussion and reporting at CNN sparked off by this reader. Nevertheless, a search for "CDC whistleblower revealed” (with quotes) still brings in nothing. On the other hand, a search for “CDC Thompson MMR” (without quotes) returns one news story: “Journal questions validity of autism and vaccine study” (updated Wed August 27, 2014). To discover the small flare up, we must go to iReports, where we discover 19 reports on 10-12-14 – here. The general tenor of the 19 reports is skeptical and angry about the CDC. The one CNN article
