Vaccines are back in the news big time in this dreadful year of 2020. The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated how vital vaccines are. Without a vaccine for COVID-19, we have all been in peril this year. The world needs a vaccine badly—a safe and effective one—so that we can all get back to normal living. The race is on.
But before that, vaccines have been in the news for another reason—the rising anti-vaccine movement. The modern anti-vaxxers got their boost with what turned out to be a false claim: the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine could cause autism. Science-minded people soon knew that claim was wrong and based on retracted, fraudulent research, but certain vociferous segments of the public held on to their suspicions of a link. They have been energized by recent notorious films and social media campaigns propagandizing against vaccines.
For all those reasons, it seems a good time to revisit the origin case. Peter M. Steinmetz, MD, does so in our cover article, “The Scientific Frauds Underlying the False MMR Vaccine-Autism Link.” Steinmetz describes the six fabrications and falsifications in Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s original (and later retracted) 1998 Lancet paper and his subsequent written response to criticisms. Steinmetz is a research neurologist and chief scientist at the Neurtex Brain Research Institute. “The scientific frauds in Wakefield’s 1998 paper are clear from the readily available records,” he concludes, “and it is clear why this paper was eventually retracted when the full record became available.”
* * *
Hans J. Eysenck was one of psychology’s towering figures, but skeptics have long viewed him with suspicion because of his credulous stance on paranormal claims and his coauthoring four books promoting parapsychology with discredited author Carl Sargent. Now we know things were far worse than even that. In this issue, U.K. psychologist David Marks outlines what he calls “an orchestrated saga of intellectual dishonesty” by the late British psychologist Eysenck and two collaborators. In “Hans J. Eysenck: The Downfall of a Charlatan,” Marks reveals a bone-shivering “story that must be told”: A pattern of data manipulation by Eysenck and two of his collaborators can be traced back over decades, even as early as 1946. Eysenck had been accused of cheating way back in the 1960s, but no action was taken. Sargent was accused of fraud in 1979, but Eysenck continued collaborating with him over the next five years in books that “grossly distorted the scientific evidence of the paranormal.” Now the dirty secrets are out. Journals have retracted fourteen of Eysenck’s papers and published seventy-one expressions of concern.
We were first alerted to the latest scandal about Eysenck by our skeptic colleagues in the Netherlands. We soon turned to Marks himself, who has published the revelatory article by Anthony Pelosi plus a scathing editorial of his own in The Journal of Health Psychology, which Marks edits. King’s College London deemed twenty-five publications by Eysenck and another collaborator (not Sargent) “unsafe,” yet Marks says the true number of unsafe Eysenck publications is most likely over 100. Marks is a longtime colleague of CSI and the Skeptical Inquirer and author of a classic work, The Psychology of the Psychic, and the just-published Psychology and the Paranormal. He has been courageous and forthright in his exposure and condemnation of Eysenck. He hopes that “future Hans Eysencks can be stopped in their tracks.”
—Kendrick Frazier