Soccer Dad

Settled science

The Lancet retracts a paper that claims that vaccines cause autism.

A prominent British medical journal on Tuesday retracted a 1998 research paper that set off a sharp decline in vaccinations in Britain after the paper's lead author suggested that vaccines could cause autism.

The retraction by The Lancet is part of a reassessment that has lasted for years of the scientific methods and financial conflicts of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who contended that his research showed that the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine may be unsafe.

Included in Dr. Wakefield's malfeasances was a conflict of interest.

But an investigation by a British journalist found financial and scientific conflicts that Dr. Wakefield did not reveal in his paper. For instance, part of the costs of Dr. Wakefield's research were paid by lawyers for parents seeking to sue vaccine makers for damages. Dr. Wakefield was also found to have patented in 1997 a measles vaccine that would succeed if the combined vaccine were withdrawn or discredited.

Sound like anyone we know?

In this case, though, the way Gore makes that money is not quite the old fashioned way. (Although, in the sense of the world's oldest profession, it is.) Here is how it works.

Step 1. Lobby the world, the country, and the government that it must do something big and soon to save the planet. In Gore's case, we have his book, his movie, his franchised PowerPoint brief, his Nobel Peace Prize, his Oscar, etc.

Step 2. Specifically lobby your government to spend big money on projects to save the planet. Better yet, make sure that money goes to very specific contractors. In this case, we have "smart grids", which the government is now spending $3.4 billion on. And specifically, a little company called "Silver Spring Networks" got $560 million from the government for it.

Step 3. Invest in those very specific contractors. In Al Gore's case, he has a company for this investing kind of thing: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. His company, by coincidence I'm sure, had invested $75 million in Silver Spring.

Step 4. Collect big money from those investments. In Al Gore's case, he is also a "corporate adviser" to Silver Spring.

Al Gore defends all this as putting his money where his mouth is and investing in what he believes. That would almost make sense, were it not for the fact that money is made in this "industry" only because the government is sending dump-trucks full of money to these companies.

With the latest revelations about collecting data to "prove" global warming, when will responsible scientists, journalists and politicians start admitting that the rubes were right all along?

And when will the Lancet retract its Palestinian wife beating paper?

Let's also remember that bad science can kill.

Meanwhile, Britain's child vaccination rates had plummeted to below 70% in some areas, down from more than 90% in the mid-1990s. The country has since suffered waves of measles outbreaks. In 1998 England and Wales had 56 cases; by 2008 the number was 1,370. In 2006, the first British child died of measles in more than a decade.