The highly prestigious British medical journal The Lancet has just retracted a paper that it had published in 1998 wherein a supposed link between the MMR vaccine and autism had been found. I should mention that the paper was retracted for ethical violations and not because of anything relating to the veracity of the conclusions reached. I suspect though that in light of the ethical violations, it would be plausible to question the study's findings.

Notwithstanding the repeated warnings by the scientific establishment that this link was utter nonsense (see Paul A. Offit's excellent book on the topic), Jenny McCarthy took on this issue as her cause célèbre. She was astonished that the NIH was not taking her own "research" seriously when she had apparently definitely "demonstrated" that the postulated link was veridical (using her own son as the case study). Some readers might remember my post on the narcissism and grandiosity of celebrities and my subsequent article based on my post in the November-December 2009 issue of Psychology Today magazine. Some of the readers who read my post were quick to point out it was arrogant to assume that NIH scientists who are specialists in the field of autism, might know more about the topic than Jenny McCarthy. Nice! It won't be long now before scientists prove that Madonna's Kabbalah fluid is not effective in neutralizing radiation (as she has claimed so vehemently)!