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Debunked Medical Studies Have Staying Power

Debunked Medical Studies Have Staying Power

February 11, 2015

Medical Research

Washington Jewish Week — Why do some people stubbornly believe that vaccinations and autism are linked, even though such a connection was scientifically debunked a dozen years ago?

Like antibiotic resistant bacteria, bad science sometimes refuses to die.

Ivan Oransky, who writes for Retraction Watch, a blog which reports on retracted medical and scientific studies, points to two reasons he believes explain why disputed studies are still cited as gospel by some. When people have a motivated reason to believe something, it is likely they will process any new information “based on what [they] already believe.”

Oransky believes this is the case with parents who still insist there is a connection between immunizations and autism. Parents want an answer as to why their children get a disease or a syndrome. Pointing to a specific event – like a vaccination – fills that need.

“Roughly 500 scientific studies are retracted each year,” says Oransky, vice president and global editorial director of MedPage Today and a professor of medical journalism in NYU’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.

BGU's Dr. Leslie Lobel

BGU’s Dr. Leslie Lobel

Because retractions of studies aren’t widely disseminated, “they are still cited as if they are legitimate when, in fact, they are not,” Oransky says, pointing specifically to a debunked study that claimed there was a link between vaccinations and autism.

If anything is to come out of the latest measles outbreak that has seen more than 100 people infected in 14 states, BGU virologist and infection disease expert Dr. Leslie Lobel hopes that it will be a wake-up call, and that opposition to vaccinations will disappear.

“There is not a scientific basis” to forgo immunizations, says Dr. Lobel, co-director of BGU’s Laboratory of Immunology in the Shraga Segal Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Genetics.

If people remembered how bad previous epidemics were, Dr. Lobel, who was born and raised in New York, believes they would be more inclined to have their children vaccinated. “People used to die from the measles and polio” or become crippled, he says. “People forget the ravages of human disease.”

“The society we live in is highly dependent” upon people being vaccinated to stop the spread of infectious disease, says Lobel, who studies Ugandans who have survived Ebola to see what helped them recover.

Read more on the Washington Jewish Week website >>