Dr Andrew Wakefield, who suggested the MMR vaccine was causing autism, was found to have acted unethically today.  Supporters outside the General Medical Council’s headquarters in London, where the hearings took place, chanted, “Wakefield’s right!”. The supporters were apparently mainly parents of the allegedly affected children.

The thing is, his research and conclusions have already been discredited, and the journal that published his work, the Lancet, has said it shouldn’t have. So what you have is a group of understandably upset parents who have, by continuing to support a man who has been shown to have been wrong in both his conduct and conclusions, unfortunately rendered themselves an ignorant mob. I understand why they need to believe, but I aso lament it.

In other news, a teenage girl was retrieved from the rubble of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, 15 days after the earthquake. She had survived by “drinking water from a  bath”. Rescuer JP Malaganne apparently considered this a “miracle”. The god of hydration works in mundane ways.

According to the rescuers on the scene they had arrived just in the nick of time. “I don’t think she could have survived even a few more hours,” said Rescuer Claude Fuilla, in no way aggrandising her role.

“She just said ‘Thank you’, she’s very weak, which suggests that she’s been there for 15 days,” said Samuel Bernes, head of the rescue team that discovered her. We can surmise from this that without some form of proof Mr Bernes would have entertained the idea that the young lady became stuck after crawling into the rubble for a bit of a lie down.

I also heard on the radio that someone on the medical ship where the girl was being attended to said that her survival was medically unexplainable. I simply don’t believe that’s true.