World media
coverage of BMJ "Secrets of the MMR
scare" series in January 2011
This page
is material from the award-winning investigation by Brian Deer for The Sunday Times of London, the
UK’s Channel 4 TV network and BMJ, the British
Medical Journal, which exposed vaccine
research fraudster Andrew Wakefield |
Investigation
summary
In
January 2011, Deer's investigation
reached its climax when the BMJ ran a
three-part series, supported by
editorials, titled "Secrets of the
MMR scare", which brought together
many of Deer's findings. Hundreds of
media organisations reported the first
story.
The New York Times:
Autism Fraud
The report that first
triggered scares that a vaccine to
prevent measles, mumps and rubella might
cause autism in children has received
another devastating blow to its
credibility. The British Medical Journal
has declared that the research was not
simply bad science, as has been known for
years, but a deliberate fraud.
The study, led by Dr. Andrew
Wakefield, was published in The Lancet in
1998. It was based on just 12 children
with supposedly autismlike disorders and
purported to find a link between the
vaccine, the gastrointestinal problems
found in many autistic children, and
autism.
While parents around the
world were understandably alarmed, many
scientists rejected the claims,
including, eventually, 10 of Dr.
Wakefield’s co-authors. A high-level
British medical group, after an
exhaustive fitness-to-practice hearing,
found Dr. Wakefield guilty of dishonesty
and misconduct. The Lancet retracted the
article in part, it said, because the
authors had made false claims about how
the study was conducted.
Now the British Medical
Journal has taken the extraordinary step
of publishing a lengthy report by Brian
Deer, the British investigative
journalist who first brought the
paper’s flaws to light — and
has put its own reputation on the line by
endorsing his findings.
After seven years of
studying medical records and interviewing
parents and doctors, Mr. Deer concluded
that the medical histories of all 12
children had been misrepresented to make
the vaccine look culpable. Time lines,
for example, were fudged to make it seem
as though autismlike symptoms developed
shortly after vaccination, while in some
cases problems developed before
vaccination and in others months after
vaccination.
Dr. Wakefield has accused
Mr. Deer of being a hit man. But the
medical journal compared the claims with
evidence compiled in the voluminous
transcript of official hearings and
declared that flaws in the paper were not
honest mistakes but rather an
“elaborate fraud.”
Some parents still consider
Dr. Wakefield a hero, and others have
moved on to other theories, equally
unsupported by scientific evidence, as to
how vaccines might cause autism.
They need to recognize that
failure to vaccinate their children
leaves them truly vulnerable to diseases
that can cause enormous harm.
Online: January 12 2011.
Print: January 13 2011 (Page A22)
The Wall Street Journal:
The Autism Vaccine Hoax
A tragic scare campaign
is exposed as 'fraud'.
Twelve years late, the media
and medical community may finally be
digging a grave for one of the more
damaging medical scares in history. We're
speaking of the vaccines-cause-autism
panic, the burial of which cannot come
too soon.
The British Medical Journal
this week published an article and
editorial explaining that the 1998 study
that provoked the vaccine scare was an
"elaborate fraud." That study,
published in the (once) respected journal
"The Lancet," was by British
doctor Andrew Wakefield and other
researchers, who claimed that the widely
used measles, mumps and rubella vaccine
was linked to autism. Around the same
time, U.S. parents and opportunistic
lawyers latched on to a related theory
that vaccination shots containing a
mercury compound called thimerosal caused
autism.
Despite broad evidence even
in the 1990s that these claims were
unfounded, the medical community was slow
to push back. Nervous public-health
groups inspired a panic by rushing to get
thimerosal out of vaccines. The Lancet
stuck by its article, the media
sensationalized the story, and Congress
joined the cause celebre. Maine Senators
Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins went so
far as to kill a vaccine liability
provision so that parents could bring
thimerosal suits. Indiana Republican Dan
Burton was especially irresponsible in
raising public fears.
By 2004, Britain's
immunization rates had dropped to a low
of 80%; the rates have recovered only
slightly. The Centers for Disease Control
says that in the U.S. 40% of parents have
delayed or declined at least one of their
children's shots. This has led to the
needless re-emergence of once-conquered
diseases.
Measles is now endemic in
England and Wales. California recently
suffered a whooping cough outbreak that
sickened 7,800 people and killed 10
babies. As Paul Offit, the chief of
infectious diseases at the Children's
Hospital of Philadelphia and one of the
few who stood up against the autism
scare, writes in his new book
"Deadly Choices," the victims
of this "war on science" are
children.
Researchers have all the
while continued to churn out studies
disproving the vaccine-autism link.
Vaccine courts have struck down
thimerosal claims. Yet it is only
recently that professional journals and
media have rediscovered a responsibility
gene.
It took the Lancet until
last year to offer a full retraction of
the 1998 study, and that came only after
Britain's medical regulator had ruled
that Mr. Wakefield had acted
"dishonestly and
irresponsibly." The British Medical
Journal's article is the first in-depth
look at Mr. Wakefield's abuses. By
journalist Brian Deer—who has
investigated Mr. Wakefield for
years—the article reports that the
doctor grossly misrepresented the cases
of 12 children to support his theory, and
that he worked with plaintiffs attorneys
to exploit the panic for financial gain.
This is a start, but the
health community and media have a long
way to go to restore public trust in
immunizations. They also bear some
responsibility for the dollars that have
been diverted from research into finding
the real causes of the terrible
affliction that is autism. Let's hope
they now broadcast the vaccine truth as
much as they encouraged the vaccine
panic.
8 January 2011
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