The martyrdom of St. Andy, part 2: David Kirby rides to the rescue (sort of) [Respectful Insolence]

If I am wrong I will be a bad person because I will have raised this spectre.

The martyrdom of brave maverick Saint Andy continues apace, it would appear.

As you recall, last week, after an interminable proceeding that stretched out over two and a half years, the General Medical Council in the U.K. finally ruled on the question of whether Andrew Wakefield, the man whose incompetently performed, trial lawyer-backed study published in the Lancet in 1998, acted unethically. The answer, not surprisingly, was a resounding yes, or, as Mark Slackmeyer would put it, “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” True, not all the counts against Wakefield were ruled as proven, but most damning of them were, including misuse of public funds, performing invasive procedures on children for research purposes without proper ethics panel approval, and, worst of all from my perspective, acting not in the best interests of the children under the care of his research team. That last one, quite frankly, is unforgivable–every bit as unforgivable as wrong site surgery or mistakenly giving overdoses of radiation. Its manifestation was the performance of medically unnecessary invasive procedures, such as colonoscopies and lumbar punctures, on autistic children.

I won’t lie. When I heard of the ruling last week, it brought a smile to my face, even though it was announced on the very day before my grant deadline, the very day I was in the midst of pulling an all nighter to get the grant done, the very day I was in a pretty lousy mood–tired and even more cranky and cantankerous than usual. Hearing that the man whose bad science launched a thousand quackeries had finally been declared unethical and dishonest and was on the verge of having his U.K. medical license yanked (or, to use that wonderfully British turn of phrase, struck off) brought joy to my heart, the joy that comes with seeing justice done. True, it was justice delayed–by several years, given that evidence of Wakefield’s dishonesty and conflicts of interest had been published by Brian Deer back in 2004–but it was justice nonetheless.

Yesterday, there was a bit more justice laid down upon poor, poor, pitiful Saint Andy. Yesterday, what minuscule bit of seeming scientific credibility Wakefield had left was taken away from him. Yesterday, The Lancet decided to retract Wakefield’s 1998 paper, the paper that started the whole MMR scare nearly 12 years ago. For, yesterday, published online on The Lancet’s website was this brief message from its editors:

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