Profile for Sharon Fennell
Latest posts from Sharon Fennell (see all)
Sharon Fennell has posted 2 times (0 in the last month).
Oppression through the policing of clothing
France’s lower house of parliament recently approved a bill to ban the wearing of a burqa or niqab in public. People caught wearing garments “that hide the face” will be fined 150 euro and those who force women to cover up could be fined up to 30,000 euro and face a one-year jail term. Some [...] more »
The strange case of Ex-Dr Wakefield and the MMR vaccine…
Andrew Wakefield is the ex-doctor, whose scant regard for scientific accuracy or ethics has led to him being struck off the medical register. Yesterday the General Medical Council (GMC) found him guilty of serious professional misconduct, having found him guilty last January of having “showed a callous disregard” for the suffering of children, saying also [...] more »
Latest comments from Sharon Fennell (see all)
Sharon Fennell has commented 6 times (0 in the last month).
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Books
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Debating the Churches’ Role in the Peace in Northern Ireland
This morning’s Sunday Sequence featured a substantial debate (about 35 minutes into the recorded programme) on a new book,Religion, Civil Society and Peace in Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press 2011), written by sociologists John Brewer, Gareth Higgins and Francis Teeney. The debate was framed in an opening vignette by presenter William Crawley in uncompromising terms, [...] read our review » -
Stay out of Libya: counterinsurgency doesn’t work
A moment of some significance in journalism perhaps, as the New York Times reviews the current talked about book, The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan by Bing West. The author is no bleeding heart but a former assistant Defense Secretary from the Reagan era who stomped his way round the Afghan [...] read our review »
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Spare us a phoney row about racism, we’ve got enough on
A silly media row about racism just had to figure in the riots’ post mortem. Was the Tudor history expert David Starkey racist on Newsnight when he said: The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion. And black and white, boy and girl, operate in [...] read our review »
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Comment on NI blogger at the heart of much MSM ado about, well, nothing…
on 24 March 2011 at 9:42 am
Thanks for your suggestions. I’ll take advice on contacting PCC- might be a bit of overkill. But I was in touch with Guardian journalist Leo Hickman on Twitter; have the conversation on my blog:
http://thefamilyvoyage.blogspot.com/2011/03/guardian-journalist-explains.html
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Comment on NI blogger at the heart of much MSM ado about, well, nothing…
on 23 March 2011 at 2:34 pm
Thanks Mick.
The worry is this will become part of the climate debate mythology- “the zealots who called poor Johnny a paedophile.” It’s already started.
Does anyone have ideas on how I could best go about getting in touch with the journalists who wrote the articles? I’d like to see some retractions.
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Comment on The strange case of Ex-Dr Wakefield and the MMR vaccine…
on 26 May 2010 at 12:44 pm
Wee buns, the man has been found guilty after a long and involved trial and given the serious nature of his many failings, has been struck off. The benefits of vaccination are easily apparent and I won’t bother to discuss them with an antivaccinator. Vaccination can in no way compare to the crimes of Wakefield against the children he was supposed to be helping and the many others caught up in the aftermath of his self-promotional campaign against vaccines.
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Comment on The strange case of Ex-Dr Wakefield and the MMR vaccine…
on 26 May 2010 at 12:32 pm
Dr Fitzpatrick has written a decent article on the failings of the scientific publication bodies and has consistently spoken out against the MMR scaremongering. I neither know nor care about his former political affiliations and won’t be derailed by your unproven opinion on what he thinks about AIDS.
Whether the panel that spent years investigating Wakefield’s many failings as a doctor and scientist are linked to the drug industry (the pharma shill gambit) in any way is not a valid question. He failed in his duty of care- that’s what counts.
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Comment on The strange case of Ex-Dr Wakefield and the MMR vaccine…
on 26 May 2010 at 12:31 pm
Dr Fitzpatrick has written a decent article on the failings of the scientific publication bodies and has consistently spoken out against the MMR scaremongering. I neither know nor care about his former political affiliations and won’t be derailed by your unproven opinion on what he thinks about AIDS.
Whether the panel that spent years investigating Wakefield’s many failings as a doctor and scientist are linked to the drug industry (the pharma shill ambit) in any way is not a valid question. He failed in his duty of care- that’s what counts.
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Comment on The strange case of Ex-Dr Wakefield and the MMR vaccine…
on 25 May 2010 at 5:55 pm
There’s no doubt that the media played a huge role in all this. Ben Goldacre has a chapter in his excellent (apart from one line) “Bad Science” book on the role the MSM played in propagating this appalling scenario;
“[the MSM] drove this story cynically, irrationally and willfully onto the front pages for nine solid years…they overextrapolated from one study into absurdity, while studiously ignoring all reassuring data, and all subsequent refutations.”
In 1998 when the Lnacet paper was published and Wakefield said in a press conference that he recommended parents avoid the MMR, the MSM didn’t make much of his claims. My daughter was born that year and though a few of my middle class chums worried a bit about the vaccine, only one person paid for single vaccines. The real press frenzy started a few years later and this time it wasn’t science writers telling the story in back pages, but editorial writers and “voices of reason” like Melanie Philips. Chanel 5 (as it was the known) made an drama about the “great man” fighting for all the poor mums whose perfect children were (as they presented) pulled into autism following vaccination.
The effects snowballed and Wakefield thrived in the adulation, moving away to make a mint in a Texas clinic specialising in unnecessary medical procedures and unproven treatments on autistic children until even they had to sack him this winter. He worked the anti-vaccine conference circuit and had lavish profile pieces penned in major newspapers. He got away with claiming the mantle of Vaclav Havel in defending his actions, pretending that instead of knowing he’d cheated and lied about his supposed science, he was the Galileo figure fighting to make sure the truth was made known.
The other main culprit in all this is the medical establishment. Few doctors spoke out publicly against the vaccine nonsense, and it took a journalist, Brian Deer, to uncover the real truth about Wakefield. One of the few doctors who has always been willing to engage about this is Dr Michael Fitzpatrick who has a good post on “failures of scientific quality control” in Spiked.
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