People turn a blind eye to the scientific fraud inherent in "man-made climate change for profit" research just like they did with the anti-vaccine crowd.
CNN) -- Recently, the United States has seen a resurgence of Bordetella pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease more commonly known as "whooping cough." The disease mostly afflicts children, though adults can catch it, too. Whooping cough is easily prevented with vaccination.
According to the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention, vaccination, introduced in the 1940s, brought the number of cases per year down from 107,473 in 1922 to just 1,248 in 1981. Since 1982, however, the number of cases has steadily increased.
In recent years, there has been a general decline in vaccination to prevent many childhood diseases in the United States. In 2012, the number of whooping cough cases in the United States hit a long-time high of 48,277.
The decline in vaccination is in part due to the rise of the anti-vaccine movement, which has found spokespeople in celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and politicians like Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. It is a movement that relies on scientific fraud and pseudoscience.
In the not too distant past, one of the scientific community's primary concerns was preventing scientific fraud. Episodes like the 1998 fabrication of data indicating a connection between childhood vaccines and autism risk have clear public health and policy repercussions. Claiming a link between vaccines and autism opens the door for false claims about the dangers of other vaccines, allowing, for example, politicians like Bachmann to inflame the public's doubts about the benefits of vaccination against the human papillomavirus, or HPV.
Link: http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/06/opinion/wong-scientific-fraud/