British doctor
who kicked-off vaccines-autism scare
may have lied, newspaper says
February 9 2009
Dr. Andrew Wakefield,
the British physician who
jump-started the scare about a link
between the measles-mumps-rubella
(MMR) vaccine and autism, manipulated
and changed data to make his case in
the 1998 Lancet paper, according to
an investigation by the Sunday Times
of London.
The purported link has
subsequently been refuted by a large
number of epidemiological studies.
That Lancet paper said that the
families of eight of 12 autistic
children attending a routine clinic
at Wakefield's hospital claimed that
symptoms of autism developed within
days after they were given the shot
-- or the "jab," as the
British call it. Wakefield and his
colleagues also claimed to have found
the measles virus in the children 's
intestines and that the virus caused
an inflammatory bowel disease linked
to autism.
But by studying
confidential and public records,
investigative reporter Brian Deer,
who has been following the MMR
controversy since the beginning,
found a different story. Hospital and
other records indicated that
virtually all of the children had
begun developing symptoms of autism
well before the shot, Deer's report
said. Hospital pathologists examining
the children for signs of
inflammatory bowel disease were
unable to find it in most of the
cases, Deer discovered, but Wakefield
or someone on the team changed the
data to make it appear as if the
condition was found, Deer reported in
the Times. At least one parent of a
child in whose intestines the virus
was said to have been found took
samples to three other labs, which
were unable to find the virus, Deer's
report said.
Moreover, Deer reported,
Wakefield was retained as an expert
witness two years earlier by a lawyer
planning to sue vaccine manufacturers
on behalf of parents who thought MMR
caused their children's problems. The
parents cited in the Lancet article
came to Wakefield's clinic in
response to an advertising campaign
led by the lawyer' s group, called
Jabs, and not for routine screening,
Deer's report said.
In 2004, 10 of the 13
original authors on the Lancet paper
requested that the paper be withdrawn
, concluding that "no causal
link was established between MMR
vaccine and autism because the data
was insufficient." Wakefield has
continued to stand by the paper 's
conclusions.
Wakefield and two other
co-authors, Dr. John Walker-Smith and
Dr. Simon Murch, are now defending
themselves against allegations of
professional misconduct brought by
England's General Medical Council,
which oversees physicians. Those
charges are not related to the data
in the newspaper, but to the
researchers' ethics in using the
children .
The Times said it was
forwarding all the new data to the
GMC for review. Through his lawyers,
Wakefield denied the paper's
allegations.
In the fallout from
Wakefield's original paper,
vaccination rates in the country have
fallen from 92% to below 80%. As a
consequence, 1,348 cases of measles
were reported in England and Wales in
2008, compared with only 56 in 1998.
Two children died of the disease.
