Healthy Discoveries: UK autism-vaccine study was "elaborate fraud"

Healthy discoveries

The British Medical Journal said that Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the-now disgraced British doctor who published studies linking vaccines with autism, committed an "elaborate fraud" by counterfeiting data.

The journal's editors said it was not possible that Wakefield made a mistake but must have counterfeited the data for his study, which persuaded thousands of parents that vaccines are harmful and which is blamed for ongoing outbreaks of measles and mumps.


The journal, commonly nicknamed the BMJ, supported its position with a series of articles by a journalist who used medical records and interviews to indicate that Wakefield counterfeited data.


For example, the reports found that Wakefield, who included data from only 12 children in his report, studied at least 13 and that several indicated symptoms of autism before having been vaccinated.


Fears that vaccines might cause autism haven't only caused parents to skip vaccinating their children, but have forced expensive reformulations of many vaccines.


"Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no suspicion that it was Wakefield," BMJ editor Dr. Fiona Godlee and colleagues wrote in a commentary, available online at http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7452


In 1998, The Lancet medical journal, a rival to the BMJ, published a study by Wakefield and colleagues linking the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism.


The other researchers later withdrew their names from the study and The Lancet officially retracted the paper in February.


"Smear campaign"


Wakefield said that he was the victim of a smear campaign by drug manufacturers.


In an interview late on Wednesday with CNN, Andrew Wakefield exiled inventing data and blasted a reporter who apparently revealed the counterfeits as a 'hit man' doing the bidding of a powerful pharmaceutical industry.


When  asked who he meant by 'they,' he said Deer 'was supported in his investigation by the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries, which is funded directly and solely by the pharmaceutical industry.'


The study unleashed a widespread parental boycott of the vaccine in Britain, and unease reverberated also in the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

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