My Obsessions

Britain is experiencing serious outbreaks of measles that look to be a delayed consequence of a failure to vaccinate infants and young children more than a decade ago. A prime cause of that failure was ill-founded fears among parents that a widely used vaccine to combat measles, mumps and rubella might cause autism. Because they shunned the vaccine, their children, now in their teens, are suffering the consequences.

Those fears had been fanned by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a British researcher, who claimed to have found a link between the vaccine, gastrointestinal problems found in many autistic children and autism itself. His work was subsequently discredited, and the BMJ, a British medical journal, concluded that flaws in his scientific study were not honest mistakes but an “elaborate fraud.”

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has denied Hobby Lobby’s request to block part of the federal health care law that requires employee health-care plans to provide insurance coverage for the morning-after pill and similar emergency contraception pills.

The declines occurred in cities that have had obesity reduction policies in place for a number of years.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday revived a challenge to President Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms, allowing a Christian college to pursue litigation raising First Amendment objections to a law that the court mostly upheld in June.

Are researchers shilling for pharmaceutical companies in The New England Journal of Medicine? That’s the question raised by a Washington Post investigation that found that a disproportionate number of research articles in the leading journal were funded by drug companies and in many cases authored by a researcher who had accepted money from the company. And the journal is hardly the only offender. While the tangle of money and science may not lead directly to unscientific behavior, one can hypothesize that it increases the likelihood for some health-care hanky-panky.