Andrew Wakefield spews nonsense about how the COVID-19 vaccine will “permanently alter your DNA” A David Gorski Article

 As 2021 dawned, my first post of the year was about how many of my fellow physicians behaved very badly last year with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. While many physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals bravely risked their lives to care for COVID-19 patients (and some even died of COVID-19), a small but disturbing and impossible-to-ignore number of doctors denied or minimized the pandemic, sold unproven or even quack “cures,” and helped spread conspiracy theories designed to spark resistance to public health interventions, like masking, social distancing, and closures of businesses that involve large numbers of people gathering. Some have even engaged in germ theory denial by claiming that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that has been shown to cause COVID-19, either doesn’t exist (it’s an exosome!) or doesn’t cause COVID-19. As these examples led me to think about how such people could get through medical school (just as Andrew Wakefield always did), I learned earlier this week that it wasn’t just doctors, but pharmacists as well, who fall prey to conspiracy theories:

A pharmacist who was arrested on charges that he intentionally sabotaged more than 500 doses of the Covid-19 vaccine at a Wisconsin hospital was “an admitted conspiracy theorist” who believed the vaccine could harm people and “change their DNA,” according to the police in Grafton, Wis., where the man was employed.

The police said Steven Brandenburg, 46, who worked the night shift at the Aurora Medical Center in Grafton, Wis., had twice removed a box of vials of the Moderna vaccine from the refrigerator for periods of 12 hours, rendering them “useless.”

“Brandenburg admitted to doing this intentionally, knowing that it would diminish the effects of the vaccine,” the police said.

In addition, Brandenberg was clearly a troubled man who believed in other conspiracy theories as well, was going through a divorce, and reportedly had brought a gun to work on two different occasions.

Regular readers will remember that the idea that mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines, like the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, will “damage” or somehow “irreversibly alter” your DNA was featured here quite a while ago. I was…not kind…to those promoting this idiotic idea because, to put it uncharacteristically briefly for me, to have such an idea bespeaks an utter ignorance and/or misunderstanding of some very basic molecular biology of the sort that is taught in introductory level biology classes in college. Unfortunately, it’s not just pharmacists. For example, my post deconstructing that claim primarily examines the claim as promoted by a physician, Dr. Carrie Madej.

And then there’s Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield, as you know, is the British physician who launched the modern antivaccine movement nearly 23 years ago with his Lancet paper implying that the MMR vaccine was associated with an increased risk of autism. When last we left him, pre-pandemic, he had been reduced to writing for the official journal of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) that John Birch Society for physicians disguised as a medical professional society that regularly lets ideology trump science. traffics in the most vile antivaccine misinformation (e.g., from the claim that shaken baby syndrome is a “misdiagnosis” for vaccine injury that I discussed the first time I found the group to anti-immigrant fear-mongering, climate science denial, HIV/AIDS denialism, blaming breast cancer on abortion using execrable “science,” and more. The AAPS views doctors as some sort of mythical brave mavericks outside the “herd” (of sheeple, apparently) whose godlike total autonomy must never be infringed by the government, having gone on record about Medicare as stating that “the effect of the law is evil and participation in carrying out its provisions is, in our opinion, immoral.” Basically AAPS rejects any government involvement in medicine, be it Medicare and Medicaid or even state medical boards, as an unacceptable impingement on the absolute autonomy of physicians. It rejects even the concept of a scientific consensus about anything, while rejecting evidence-based guidelines as—you guessed it!—an unacceptable affront to the godlike autonomy of physicians. It last hit the news in a big way four years ago, when it was reported that Donald Trump’s pick to be his first Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, was a member of AAPS. More recently, right before the pandemic overwhelmed all other news, it even sued to protect its “right” to promote antivaccine misinformation.

https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/01/07/wakefields-back/

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