Stephen Salzburg, who runs genomic research at the University of Maryland scores a direct hit on the Sun and the quacks whose crap it published in Fighting Pseudoscience
I also wrote a letter to Michael Cross-Barnet who is in charge of op-Eds at the Sun. Here it is in the likely case they don't print my piece:
The Baltimore Sun published two articles that ignore the scientific evidence about the importance and safety of evidence-based vaccination and then make discredited claims about how to make vaccines and immunization safer. It should be ashamed of itself for doing so.
Medical science is not a he-said, she-said process. It is an incremental process of proving and disproving hypothesis based on biological evidence established through experimentation. When facts don’t fit a theory or an assertion, it’s the latter that is wrong.
By giving two pseudo-scientists, Margaret Dunkel and Mark Geier, access to it’s press, the Sun has legitimized misleading and dangerous claims about vaccine safety and about the role vaccines play in causing all sorts of childhood disorders, particularly autism. It perpetuates assertions that contribute to the rise of vaccine preventable diseases such as measles, whooping cough and cervical cancer. And it has legitimized the idea that wild claims about a product causing autism are “science” even if such claims have never been proven scientifically or have been disproven. To the Sun, just raising the possibility of danger is enough to merit publication.
I will not restate the scientific evidence about the significant benefits and incredibly small risks associated with vaccines. One can read Stephen Salzberg’s editorial in Forbes for a concise discussion.
The problem is not with the Geiers and Dunkels of the world who peddle their conspiracy theories and lethal prescriptions for assuring vaccine safety. The problem is with newspapers, new shows and politicians who promote fearmongering.
Would the Sun allow those ‘scholars’ who deny the Holocaust or claim astronauts never landed on the moon access to its editorial page? Both types of conspiracy driven twaddle exist in spite of the facts, not because of them. Yet the Sun, in giving Geier and Dunkel a platform, has given the scientific equivalent of Holocaust denialism legitimacy and renewed strength.
In so doing, it has shamed itself and empowered quacks to endanger the lives of children.
