"With the retraction, the hypothesis that he put forward has been debunked"

I’m writing about vaccines again. Yes, vaccines—for the issue is both newsworthy and important to the party.

Yesterday, the British medical journal The Lancet announced its formal, full retraction of its infamous 1998 article, "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive-developmental disorder in children," by Andrew J. Wakefield, S.H. Murch, A. Anthony, et alia. The paper purported to find a link between the measles- mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism in young children; almost immediately, that tenuous finding was criticized in the pages of the same journal. As one correspondent from the County Durham Public Health Department in the UK wrote,

        This anecdotal reporting of a biased sample is poor science and has no place in a peer-reviewed journal... The anger of public health workers at this paper is not due to the challenge of public health dogma, as Wakefield suggests. It is because children are being put at risk from potentially lethal infectious diseases not by new reliable evidence but by media coverage of another badly designed study by this group.

It seems, after all, that Wakefield and his crew cherry-picked a sample of just twelve kids, and then drew blood from them at his son’s birthday party. That’s not exactly high science.

The Wall Street Journal’s story on this today is particularly revealing. In part, it notes that

        "the retraction of this paper doesn't mean that MMR doesn't cause autism and it's all a farce," said Wendy Fournier, president of the National Autism Association. It is "possible" that the MMR vaccine causes autism, she said, but "the science is not there in terms of the mechanism." The concern is that measles virus has been found in children's intestines after vaccination, said Ms. Fournier.

Fair enough, but as the WSJ quotes Greg Poland, professor of medicine and infectious diseases, and director of the vaccine research group at the Mayo Clinic,

        "With the retraction, the hypothesis that he put forward has been debunked"

That is, we also haven’t proven whether donuts and coffee might or might not cause autism either, but that doesn’t mean that one should avoid breakfast at Krispy Kreme. (Well, at least not for that reason.) In short, what Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues produced was over a decade of hysteria about a mythical danger, and that has endangered lives.

So, what does this have to do with the GOP in Travis County, Texas? As I’ve written before, there’s a dangerously anti-intellectual streak in the GOP today, and particularly in some factions that hang about the GOP here in Travis County. Whether it’s axe-grinding about the gold standard or something they call “world-class science standards,” the crankiness is particularly noisy. That’s bad for the unwanted attraction brought upon us by our vague and distant association with the weirder fringes of the movement, such as it is.

What’s particularly bad for us on this count is that Wakefield actually lives and works here in Austin. Proximity may account for the intensity of feeling locally about such a thoroughly debunked idea. His minions and strap-hangers may be whispering this stuff in the aisles at Whole Foods, but that doesn’t mean that we should continue to accord this viewpoint any prominence in our platforms or policies. The Lancet has moved on from this brief-but-inglorious episode in its history. The Travis County GOP needs to do so as well.