Why Wakefield became a cause célebre

So, Andrew Wakefield has been struck off by the GMC. Brian Deer has covered the story extensively and uncovered details about the trials that proved to be Wakefield's downfall - details about payments from the legal aid fund, a patent for a vaccine, and the questionable way in which the trials were carried out. His determined investigations show how good journalism can function as a counterbalance to poor judgment by a whole host of agencies from ethics committees to the Lancet which unintentionally promoted the spread of the MMR-autism belief.
But a great deal of blame has also been directed at the newspaper stories that covered the initial findings (based it has to be said on a press conference at the Royal Free Hospital chaired by its professor of medicine, and then on a paper in the Lancet, - both of which most journalists would regard as reasonable sources).
While it would be impossible to defend all the coverage, it is worth noting the historical context.
The UK had recently emerged from the BSE crisis. The medical establishment had been found to be over-sanguine about the threat, ministers had dissembled, and the chief medical officer chose not to correct unfortunate ambiguously reassuring statements. It took much longer than it should have for the real risks to be identified and for preventive action to be taken.
In this context, the pursuit of the MMR-autism hypothesis, in the face of establishment opposition, looks less contrary, and more like the pursuit of the public interest against an orthodoxy that had recently been found to be less than open. What is not defensible is the subsequent highly selective reporting of studies that gave some weight to the hypothesis while ignoring the numerous, better, bigger, more statistically significant studies that did not.
The 'swine flu' pandemic last year shows that an open attitude and a recognition of uncertainty is the right response to take. Most people are sympathetic to the 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' tightrope of a response to a potential health threat. What they find less forgivable is the realisation that information, albeit imperfect information, is being concealed, or finessed.
BSE was a bad enough scandal by itself. The bad taste it left in the mouths of journalists and others was a contributory factor in the wildfire spread of the belief, however unsupported by evidence, that MMR might contribute to autism.

Chocolate as part of a healthy diet. Yeah right

There is a kind of news story is‘too good to check’ where the desire for the story to be true over-rides the negative cynicism that is the default state of any decent news room. It’s what hoaxers and pranksters rely on when they persuade reporters and their editors to publish stories that are plainly complete bollocks.

Usually, but not always, these baseless narratives are ‘harmless’ enough and may prompt a weary smile among the media-savvy. The journalists and reader are, arguably, in a conspiracy: ‘we know this is probably crap, but there is a minute chance it might possibly be true, and it’s a laugh, isn’t it?’

Sometimes these stories are ‘what we would like to believe is true, but isn’t’, and one of the best examples is the ‘chocolate is good for you’ meme. Every now and then, some researchers somewhere will have carried out some research on mood and chocolate, or looked at some of the chemicals in cocoa, and found that they are (big fanfare) antioxidants. And we all know from the face cream ads that antioxidants are good for us.

The latest in this Mobius loop of articles are stories suggesting depressed people self-medicate with chocolate. My former colleagues at NHS Choices have done a decent job of picking the study apart here. There’s a story about chocolate and heart disease from the Telegraph; and one here from the Mail about
from the Mail about chocolate reducing stress.
But I’m not really talking about the details of the studies here, more the cumulative effect that might suggest to the nutritionally illiterate that chocolate has significant health benefits.
Now I like chocolate. A lot. Now that my beer consumption is more sporadic, it’s probably the reason that my waistline is what it is. But a food which is 18.5% saturated fat and 56.7% sugar by weight cannot be healthy, not in any universe where Newton’s law on the conservation of energy apply. No marginal antioxidants or mood-enhancing properties make up for the fact that eating chocolate regularly will contribute to, at the least, becoming overweight, and increasing risk of diabetes and heart disease.
I would like chocolate to be good for me, just like other people would like red wine to be good for them. But it isn’t, and the attractive stories are wishful thinking.
What is worrying is the well-known psychological effect of repetition: if you say something often enough 'it becomes true'. But it doesn't, and the repetition encourages out efforts to catch up with US levels of obesity.