The free newspaper Metro is the first UK media outlet to report on the Hornig MMR study in today’s copy (page 7).
Metro is part of the same group as The Daily Mail. The irony.
It says:
The MMR jab does not cause autism, a major international stusy has concluded. The measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine – which previous reports suggested was a trigger for the condition – has “no link” to it, researchers said. They failed to find any trace of the measles virus in the bowels of the autistic children, debunking the theory of the bug – present in the vaccine – causes the gut to produce autism-inducing toxins. “If you want to implicate a factor in the causation of an illness, it must be present before the illness”, said US researcher Dr Ian Lipkin.
There’s a number of things one could take issue with in that report, but they have at least reported on the paper and noted the important message about the study.
See also The Daily Mail, which also reports the Hornig study without going for quotes from the usual suspects.
Oliver Kamm has also kindly linked to this blog in his piece “Science and its discontents” at The Times, which covers the scare over the the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) creating a black hole, the MMR vaccine scare, and creationism. I particularly like the quote from Prof Brian Cox (no relation), about the LHC scare, “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.”
Brian Cox is an enthusiatic and effective communicator. He was once a pop star, and was also the scientific advisor to the recent science fiction film Sunshine (his DVD commentary being one of the few interesting examples of the DVD commentary genre). Here you can listen to him speaking about the Large Hadron Collider at Ted Talks.
His style of communication should perhaps be used in other areas of science and public policy.
UPDATE: Now in The Telegraph.
UPDATE 2: NHS Choices have an analysis. The Daily Express, that expended 74 words on the matter on page 24. The Belfast Telegraph had 512 words on page 2 on Thursday, and Newcastle’s Evening Chronicle had 64 words on page 4 well before other UK news sources. The BBC remains silent. So far, no news service appears to have carried comments by anti-vaccine groups.