Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 medical paper, which started the controversy over a potential link between Autism and childhood vaccines, has been widely derided and discredited. Ten out of the thirteen authors of the paper have renounced it and the journal that published it retracted it. But that hasn’t stopped the possibility of a connection between the MMR vaccine and Autism from spooking parents world wide and causing a downswing in vaccination against several deadly diseases. Immunization rates have never fully recovered.
Hopefully the latest investigation of the study will finally put the last nail in it’s coffin. A new examination of the paper, which compared the reported diagnosis’s in the paper with hospital records, has shown that Wakefield and his colleagues actually altered facts about patients in their study to prove their point. British journalist Brian Deer found that at least five of the children that Wakefield reported to have been normal before their MMR shots had previously documented developmental problems. In fact, Deer’s investigation found that all of the cases in the study were somehow misrepresented when he compared data from the study with medical records and reports from the children’s parents.
Wakefield has lost his right to practice medicine in Britain because of the study, but he is still popular in America and has a new book ready to be published that maintains his claim of a link between vaccinations and Autism.
Deer’s article was paid for by the Sunday Times of London and Britain’s Channel 4 television network. It was published online Thursday in the medical journal, BMJ. In an accompanying editorial, BMJ editor Fiona Godlee and colleagues called Wakefield’s study “an elaborate fraud.” The journal suggests that Wakefield’s work in other journals should be examined to see if it should be retracted.
Many studies published since the controversial 1998 paper have shown no link between Autism and vaccination. But the fear that Wakefield’s study caused has left it’s mark. Measles has become more and more common since the paper was published, to the point that it was deemed endemic in England and Wales in 2008.
