Doctor of horseshit
The Australian reports that the University of Wollongong has accepted a PhD thesis from someone in “the social sciences” (it fails to specify, which is frustrating) which claims that there’s a massive conspiracy between the WHO and Big Pharma to promote vaccinations.
The candidate in question is a prominent anti-vaxxer.
Judy Wilyman, the convener of Vaccination Decisions and Vaccination Choice, submitted the thesis late last year, concluding Australia’s vaccination policy was not a result of independent assessment but the work of pharmaceutical industry pressure on the WHO.
The WHO convened a “secret emergency committee” funded by drug firms to “orchestrate” hysteria relating to a global swine flu pandemic in 2009, Ms Wilyman said in her thesis.
“The swine flu pandemic of 2009 was declared by a secret WHO committee that had ties to pharmaceutical companies that stood to make excessive profits from the pandemic,” she wrote.
Several medical researchers and public health advocates have slammed the PhD thesis — to be awarded through the university’s School of Humanities — with some calling for it to be sent to the university’s academic board for review.
If she’s in a literature department, maybe there are no criteria by which the thesis would be considered All Wrong and Incompetent and thus rejected, but in any other department…there would be, wouldn’t there? Or should be?
Ms Wilyman has been the subject of controversy for several years, most notably falsely linking vaccination with autism and questioning whether a family was paid to use their young daughter’s death to promote vaccines.
In October, she circulated an interview on her Vaccination Choice Facebook page in which anti-vaccination campaigner Sherri Tenpenny suggested Nazi scientists had “infiltrated” new medication research and were working to make “everybody on the planet sicker”.
Senior immunology academic John Dwyer, spokesman for the Friends of Science in Medicine, said he would write to the university and express his concerns. “The candidate (Ms Wilyman) has endorsed a conspiracy theory where all sorts of organisations with claimed vested interests are putting pressure on WHO to hoodwink the world into believing that vaccines provide more benefits than they cause harm,” Professor Dwyer said.
Can people just say any old bullshit and get a PhD?
The thesis was supervised by Brian Martin, a professor of social sciences at the university with a long history of supporting controversial PhD candidates.
Another of Professor Martin’s students was Michael Primero, associated with Medical Veritas, a self-described journal of “truth in health science” that alleged the Rockefeller Foundation had declared a war on consciousness through the imposition of musical tuning standards.
Professor Martin dismissed concerns about the paper, saying they were “not genuine concerns about quality and probity but instead part of a campaign to denigrate viewpoints they oppose”.
Oh jeezus – it’s not a matter of viewpoints, it’s a matter of making shit up.
Ms Wilyman’s thesis cited a 27-year-old paper that claimed there was no clear link that human papillomavirus infection is causally related to cervical cancer, despite more recent work suggesting 70 per cent of cervical cancer is related to HPV.
“The promotional campaigns for HPV vaccine misrepresented the risk of HPV infections and cervical cancer to women in different countries,” Ms Wilyman wrote.
“This was done in order to create a market for the vaccine.”
Plus, they’re extra-terrestrials.
She can join the Rev. Ian Paisley and Ken Ham on the list of people with useless doctorates.
Plus, they’re extra-terrestrials.
Hah! That’s exactly what I was thinking. If this sort of “viewpoints they oppose” is now acceptable doctoral level research, then why not someone with a thesis to expose the grand government scandal to cover up reptilians visiting from planet X? I mean, it’s a viewpoint.
Bernard@#1:
The trouble is that Ham’s (and Paiseleys, too, perhaps?) “doctorate” is from an unaccredited private diploma mill with no research credentials. U of Wollongong is an accredited public research university. They risk serious damage to their reputation by accepting claptrap in place of serious scholarship.
Well, the only real error is that word “conspiracy.” The WHO and Big Pharma aren’t doing this in secret. They all share the same set of ideas and courses of action based on those ideas. Coming from the Land of the Giant Beanstalk, it’s going to look like they’re in this together … because they are.
Social sciences these days seem to harbor quite a few denizens who are so openminded that their brains fell out. When did that happen?
Have a read if you have time… http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4541/
The University seems to have been ducking questions about why they were permitting her to even produce the Thesis, let alone the degree be granted for quite some time. Reading the critique it’s hard to form any opinion other than that she is a poor researcher and an unpleasant person (based on her treatment of parents whose baby died of Pertussis).
‘Can people just say any old bullshit and get a PhD?’
Apparently. It’s been making me wonder seriously why I’m bothering to make the investment of time, effort and money.
Oddly enough, the foolishness about conspiracies, and the utter lack of science has become so mundane that the argument in this that really strikes me is…
She thinks *Nazi* scientists want to *increase* the number of people with *disabilities*.
So she knows fuck-all about history, too.
She’s firmly in “lizard People” territory.
When I grow up I wanna do a PHD thesis about sick imaginations in overdrive.
Sort of depends on the school, and on the committee (when I say school, I don’t mean the university, either. I mean most universities will have a department (school) or some professors, allowing poor research and poor work in general. I suspect at least some of that comes from the pressure that is on everyone to increase completion rates, but I don’t know if that pressure extends to the graduate schools, since our school does not have a graduate school. There are some administrators who do not accept the idea that not everyone should be getting a college degree, that some people would be better served in a different type of training, etc.
In addition, there are some professors who really don’t care that much. They don’t respect their institutions, and sometimes not even their students. They’re just putting in time.
I makes me frustrated, because this sort of thing makes people suspect those of us who got a legitimate Ph.D., doing appropriate sort of work and citing proper sources, and had to continuously review and rewrite it to make sure we had professional leel work. But then, I was in the hard sciences. I think the view tends to be a lot less post modern, all ideas equal, there.
@7 Samantha Vimes
She thinks *Nazi* scientists want to *increase* the number of people with *disabilities*.
So she knows fuck-all about history, too.
This made me laugh because that was exactly my thought too!
I was a nurse and I have a science degree (Environmental Science but at least I dealt with papers and their interpretations in both cases) and anti-vaxxers make me want to weep. It’s the second most effective public health measure ever instituted (the first was sewers and clean water). Wakefield was known by the medical establishment to be full of shit within six months of his original case study being published. Since then the issue has received massive attention from both Big Pharma and the medical establishment. Seriously, there are hundreds, maybe thousands by now, of quality class A research papers (proper studies, not case studies) that all show that Wakefield was full of shit.
For non-medical folks, a case study is the least rigorous form of publication. It is basically a description: “I had a patient and this happened.” Basically, it is anecdote by a trained professional. Scientifically it should be considered as interesting but not something on which to base treatment unless there is literally no other research available.
I don’t get how Wakefield’s transgressions get whitewashed by the antivaxxers. He was attempting to develop (a more lucrative) set of alternatives to the MMR and he had been paid to appear as an expert witness in anti-vaccination court cases before he published his crappy little self-selected case study – something he neglected to declare in the preamble to the case study. He also threw parties for children and took blood samples from them without prior permission from parents/guardians which is a massive ethical no-no.
The guy is a fraud and a charlatan which is why the BMA (finally) struck him off the register in the UK. And yet he’s a damned hero to the anti vaxxers – something I blame largely on the media. Without the press reporting on the issue and the need to “balance” every viewpoint, no matter how ludicrous or bizarre, the anti-vaxxers would have much less material available to “support” their cause.
THe anti-vaxx information bubble didn’t start with Wakefield. Back before Jenner, the quasi-religious, pseudo-religious, and flat-out religious, opposition to prevention or immunization was fully entrenched. George Bernard Shaw’s anti-vaxx writings could be issued today and find the same audience.
What may be most galling here, is the apparent link between conspiracist fantasies and the epistemic nihilism of the post-Foucault academy. If your professors refuse to consider the existence of objective truth, why NOT get a PhD for anything that dribbles out of your mouth?
Oh yes, it started before Wakefield. But Wakefield added a quasi-scientific legitimacy to the movement. Assuming you take his “paper” in isolation and ignore all the work done afterwards. Wakefiled is the one the media talk about, the “martyr” of the curent anti-vaxxer movement.