The other day, LBC broadcast a breathtaking programme where presenter Jeni Barnett used her expertise as a parent to pooh-pooh the entire medical and scientific community. MMR is dangerous. There’s no evidence for it, but it’s a scientific fact. You know the kind of thing.

That first link is to the audio; there’s a transcript here.

I particularly like the bit where Barnett demands that a doctor explains how somebody who’s been immunised against flu can still catch a cold. As he explains:

That vaccine protects you from influenza, it doesn’t protect you from colds.

It seems she’s unrepentant:

I thank those of you who have sent me information about sites that may be of use to me.

I thank the Bad Scientist for being just that. Sarcasm doesn’t shift peoples opinions. Making another person feel small because they don’t have a Bad Science degree and then nit-picking over semantics is not the answer either.

Since when has providing a great deal of evidence that somebody’s been talking out of their arse been “nit-picking over semantics”?

In other news, it seems that the discredited Wakefield study that kicked off the stupid and dangerous anti-MMR scare was even more flawed than previously suspected. The Sunday Times reports:

THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.

Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.