Top all-time · #9095
Brian Deer
Personal blog · briandeer.comhealthpolitics
Brian Deer's personal blog at briandeer.com covers health and politics. Since 2010, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-04-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link these pages on Andrew Wakefield's Lancet MMR-autism paper and on Thatcher's 'no such thing as society' quote. The comments cite them as sources without praise or criticism.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /social/thatcher-society.htm2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-11-23
- /mmr/lancet-paper.htm2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-06-09
What Hacker News says?
Yeah. Andrew Wakefield was stripped of his medical license in 2010 for publishing fraudulent research and it was later discovered that he was paid to discredit the MMR vaccine.[0] And yet, ~10% of Americas still believe the study. [1] [0] https://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-summary.htm [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/276929/fewer-continue-vaccines-...
Comment linking /mmr/lancet-summary.htm
on “The 'attention economy' corrupts science”Submitted The Doctor Who Fooled the World, by Brian Deer as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe alternative view is that 'power abhors a vacuum'. If we, the society, don't fill it with a government and try to control it (admittedly not an easy, and always imperfect, endeavour), it will be fill by something that have not our interest as a priority. Of course, this doesn't make sense for people who think, literally, that "there is no such thing as society" [1]. [1] http://briandeer.com/social/thatcher-societ…
Comment linking /social/thatcher-society.htm
on “The Real Adam Smith”Your comment is untrue. As the author of the submitted article notes about a related proposed explanation for autism incidence, "First, in the broadest sense, the epidemiology doesn’t jibe." And that has always been the problem with the lawyer-profit-motivated hypothesis about vaccines and autism: it never matched the epidemiological evidence. http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/autism/index.html http://www.na…
Comment linking /mmr/lancet-summary.htm
on “An Immune Disorder at the Root of Autism”Your argument that "vaccines cause autism" has huge problems, not the least of which are thimerosal-free vaccines over the last decade. In addition, the authors of the first study you cited appear to be involved in vaccine litigation and in a business that purports to treat autism by "chelation therapy" and would thus seem to have a vested interest in research findings that show heavy metals cause pathology. Your se…
Comment linking /mmr/carol-stott.htm
on “Retracted autism/vaccine study an 'elaborate fraud,' British journal finds”It sounds like your review process went very well. Those hardened anti-novelists have probably rejected piles of genuinely crank material. They're needed to keep the literature free of true rubbish. Of course they're not perfect so sometimes rubbish gets through and sometimes good work gets blocked, but if the researcher really believes in their work, they'll go to extra lengths to break through, as you did. Maybe t…
Comment linking /mmr/lancet-paper.htm
on “Bias Against Novelty in Science”And if someone doesn't trust you, look in the mirror. What do you do to gain trust if someone is continually spreading rumors about you behind your back? http://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-summary.htm
Comment linking /mmr/lancet-summary.htm
on “Science-Based Medicine Answering Our Critics”"there's no such thing as society." I'd forgotten that Thatcher quote. However, when you see it in context it really doesn't look that bad: http://briandeer.com/social/thatcher-society.htm
Comment linking /social/thatcher-society.htm
on “Macro Perspective: Is This America's Great Decline? ”For those not clicking on the link (like me), it's Andrew Wakefield - who published a blatantly false paper in The Lancet in 1998 [1], linking MMR vaccines to autism [2] - triggering the anti-vaccination movement, leading to a resurgence of hitherto eradicated diseases [3]. [1] - http://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-paper.htm [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
Comment linking /mmr/lancet-paper.htm
on “What are some of the worst academic papers ever published?”It does not take a significant amount of research to determine the above characterization of Wakefield's actions are, at best naively optimistic about either his competency, his ethics, or both. The publicly available and extensively detailed [1] findings of the review board that rescinded his license show with little room for interpretation an impressive list of conflicts of interest, improper treatment of patients…
Comment linking /solved/gmc-charge-sheet.pdf
on “Ask HN: What really happened with Andrew Wakefield?”
