Ben Goldacre gives this TED talk on bad science and how it’s peddled upon the medical community and the masses.
The following comes from the Ted Talk web site about the medically trained speaker, Ben Goldacre:
“It was the MMR story that finally made me crack,” begins the Bad Science manifesto, referring to the sensationalized — and now-refuted — link between vaccines and autism. With that sentence Ben Goldacre fired the starting shot of a crusade waged from the pages of The Guardian from 2003 to 2011, on an addicitve Twitter feed, and in bestselling books, including Bad Science and his latest, Bad Pharma, which puts the $600 billion global pharmaceutical industry under the microscope. What he reveals is a fascinating, terrifying mess.
Goldacre was trained in medicine at Oxford and London, and works as an academic in epidemiology. Helped along by this inexhaustible supply of material, he also travels the speaking circuit, promoting skepticism and nerdish curiosity with fire, wit, fast delivery and a lovable kind of exasperation. (He might even convince you that real science, sober reporting and reason are going to win in the end.)
As he writes, “If you’re a journalist who misrepresents science for the sake of a headline, a politician more interested in spin than evidence, or an advertiser who loves pictures of molecules in little white coats, then beware: your days are numbered.”
I believe that the final word on causal link between autism and vaccines is still out, especially considering how many vaccines that children are subjected to from birth, and in part due to my experience with children given rounds of shots and the effects of such that I witnessed. I appreciate Goldacre’s talk for revealing sneaky practices of the pharmaceutical industry to push various chemicals on the public, especially on children.
For more on vaccines from this blog, click here for JAMA study.
News and Views 