Lab papers say research on autistic kids was started before any ethical approval

This page is research from an investigation by Brian Deer for the UK's Channel 4 Television and The Sunday Times of London into a campaign linking the MMR children's vaccine with autism. | Go to part I: The Lancet scandal | Go to part II: The Wakefield factor

In the first phase of Brian Deer's inquiries, it was revealed that the research investigations as published in the Lancet weren't approved by the Royal Free's ethics committee, despite saying in the text that they were. In the second part, Brian Deer has shown that most of the Lancet children included in the Lancet paper were admitted to the hospital before the ethics committee approved anything, despite an undertaking to the committee that children enrolled before approval would be excluded from the trial

Below are lab reports from October 1996 - more than six weeks before the hospital's ethics committee met and approved a study (albeit not what was published) by Wakefield and his colleagues. They show that gut samples from children had already been tested with antibodies for measles virus, in what the documents describe as the "autistic children study" and "autistic child study". In February 2005, Wakefield said through lawyers that he "at all times had proper ethical approval for his research to the extent the same was required"