I had skimmed some mass-media stories about Wakefield back when he was making himself infamous. The one very big point that those stories didn’t seem to want to spell out, the critical conclusion that I didn’t understand until hbomberguy highlighted it, was that Wakefield’s scandal wasn’t the result of incompetence, bad luck, differences of opinion, or the kind of ordinary dead ends that happen in real science inquiry. Wakefield undertook a deliberate campaign of misinformation, one that he’d planned and stood to profit from.
Most of what I think I know about Wakefield, I learned from hbomberguy (YouTube).
I had skimmed some mass-media stories about Wakefield back when he was making himself infamous. The one very big point that those stories didn’t seem to want to spell out, the critical conclusion that I didn’t understand until hbomberguy highlighted it, was that Wakefield’s scandal wasn’t the result of incompetence, bad luck, differences of opinion, or the kind of ordinary dead ends that happen in real science inquiry. Wakefield undertook a deliberate campaign of misinformation, one that he’d planned and stood to profit from.