Ben Swann’s long-awaited report on the “CDC whistleblower” goes over like a lead balloon of antivaccine misinformation
Ben Swann's report on the "CDC whistleblower" reminded me a great deal of another great wreck in history. I had debated whether to use a picture of the Titanic instead, but decided that a big blow up was more appropriate. Sorry, Ben. Actually, no, I'm not.
Ben Swann, anchor of the evening news for the local
Atlanta CBS affiliate and the face of his
Truth In Media series of videos, thinks himself an investigative journalist and a truth teller, but much of what I see him reporting more closely resembles reporting as though done by a cross between
Ted Baxter,
Ron Burgundy, and
Alex Jones. For one thing, Mr. Swann sure does love him some conspiracies, and he sure is susceptible to antivaccine nonsense, no matter how nonsensical. I first saw him in action nearly three months ago, when he
credulously regurgitated the antivaccine talking points on display in the antivaccine protest in Atlanta in which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Barbara Loe Fisher, and whole gaggle of the usual antivaccine suspects converged on Atlanta and the
CDC with Scientology-allied Nation of Islam minister Tony Muhammed to protest…well, what the protest was about wasn’t exactly clear. Ostensibly, it was about the so-called “CDC whistleblower,” a CDC scientist named William Thompson who was involved with a number of CDC studies that failed to find a link between vaccines and autism back in the day. Yesterday, he published the culmination of his “investigation” (and I do use the term loosely) on his Truth In Media website as a story,
CDC, Vaccines and Autism. As was the case with Swann’s previous reports on this issue, it’s largely a load of misinformation, shoddy reporting, and lying by omission, only stretched out to 25 minutes. In fact, I was rather disappointed by it, after having looked forward to it for two weeks after Swann had announced it, so much so that I wondered whether it was even worth blogging. Then I realized that this sort of stuff needs to be countered, and as a fairly high profile medical blogger I had an obligation to address this specific video, even though there really is nothing new in it. But first, some background.
I’ve discussed Thompson (a.k.a. the “CDC whistleblower”) and his claims in considerable detail on multiple occasions since his existence was first
revealed by the antivaccine tag team of Brian Hooker and Andrew Wakefield in a truly despicable video in which Wakefield likened the vaccine program to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Why did he make this claim? Why has Thompson been trumpeted as the “CDC whistleblower” since Wakefield’s video was released in August 2014? I like to think it’s because antivaccinationists think that he’s revealed actual evidence of what I like to call the
central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement, namely that there is “smoking gun” evidence out there that vaccines cause autism but the CDC (or government or big pharma or all of them in cahoots) is covering it up. In this case, for whatever reason, William Thompson had a
number of telephone conversations with biochemical engineer turned incompetent antivaccine epidemiologist Brian Hooker over many months, in which he apparently ranted against his colleagues at the CDC and claimed that a finding had been suppressed in a
paper by DeStefano et al on which Thompson was also coauthor that was published in 2004. Apparently with Thompson’s advice, Hooker undertook a
reanalysis of the data in this paper that was so incompetently performed that epidemiologists everywhere mocked him mercilessly. Let’s just say that Hooker analyzed a case control study as a cohort study and ignored one major confounder, which left him with the almost certainly spurious finding that receiving the MMR vaccine before the age of 36 months was correlated with a 3.4-fold increased risk of autism in only one subgroup, African American males. Of course, as I put it at the time, other than that spurious result, Hooker
had just proven Andrew Wakefield wrong when it comes to all children other than African-American males.
In any case, it wasn’t long before Thompson lawyered up and claimed whistleblower status. Around the same time, he gave a number of documents to Representative Bill Posey (R-FL), who made a
pointless speech on the House floor a few days before summer recess about them when few were listening and otherwise did basically nothing with them. Meanwhile, as
more and more of Thompson’s statements were made public, it was hard not to get the impression that he
had turned antivaccine. In any case, Ben Swann swallowed the CDC whistleblower story that claimed those documents held a “smoking gun” in which Thompson’s colleagues had altered the research plan for DeStefano et al after the study was underway in order to “hide” the result in African-American boys and had destroyed a bunch of data in order to prevent that from becoming known. Two months ago, we learned that Swann had
obtained all the CDC whistleblower documents from Rep. Posey’s office and was planning on doing a report on it. Unfortunately for Swann, Matt Carey beat him to the punch, obtaining all the documents himself and
doing an excellent analysis that shows that
there was no coverup. For your edification, he even provided a link to download all the files yourself if you wish.
It’s right here. I myself also reviewed the CDC whistleblower documents and agreed with Matt that there’s a
whole lot of nothing going on there, noting from the documents’ contents that even William Thompson
doesn’t appear to believe that the result in African-American boys was real.
I’m very important. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany. That’s why you’ll have to watch the video on my own website to see my awesomeness. Well, that, and the fact that the CBS affiliate in Atlanta where I anchor the evening news wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot cattle prod.
So when I learned that Swann was going to post his CDC whistleblower report on January 26, I was actually looking forward to it. Maybe he’d come up with a new antivaccine spin on the story that I hadn’t heard before. Alas, it was not to be, as you will see if you
watch Swann’s video, which unfortunately doesn’t allow embedding. Before I get to the video, there’s one thing I noticed in the text:
See more about Swann's ridiculous article and video at:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2...s-over-like-a-lead-balloon-of-misinformation/
