I think the best part is how the journal told him he was focusing too much on climate change over other factors in peer review, he spends most of it trying to defend only accounting for climate change, then after publication comes out and goes on a media tour about how he was forced, forced i say to only include climate change by the journal, seemingly forgetting that the journals peer review comments are published alongside the paper.
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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This has big "I voted the general election in three states and then complained about voting security on Fox News" energy.
This is in the same vein as that idiot that started the anti-vaxxer movement by writing a bogus study about vaccines causing autism. Tbf, his bullshit should've been uncovered while reviewing the study...
I think this is worse, arguably. Don't get me wrong, Wakefield wasn't good. But this is actually worse.
Wakefield wanted to call into question a thing which, at the time, was a relatively small thing: the MMR vaccine. There was no political platform of vaccines back then, it was the fallout from his con years after that created that platform. He wanted to do that so he could sell his own snake oil cure-all for autism. He frankly didn't care about vaccines, he simply knew people were hesitant about shots and overly concerned about normalcy.
So Wakefield really was just a greedy sonuvabitch ready to capitalize on the tremendous effort parents of autistic children are ready to commit for their kids. Bad, but just selfish greed. Not trying to accelerate an already existential crisis for political maga points.
This though, climate change, is already the political platform. This is very clearly an attack on the very institutions of academia themselves. This is trying to discredit the act of collecting data and replicating experiments as real science. And there's frankly a lot to say about that topic today (p<0.05 apocalypse) but this isn't saying any of that. It's simply saying "here's a reason not to trust climate science at all". That's the argument. That's way more dangerous than anti-vax arguments. Thank God this instance was as ineffective as it was.
Silver lining, it took almost ten years for Wakefield to get caught and detracted. This didn't take long to catch at all because the guy who did it was smug about his shitty goal, in typical right winger fashion: he went and published an opinion piece on his own paper, to the surprise of even his co-author.