Disgraced Doctor Faked Linking Autism to Vaccines
Reuters
Thursday, January 6, 2011
More evidence that the
scientific community can no longer be trusted, as these unscrupulous people
will pump out anything that meets the approval of their paying constituents’
The British Medical Journal on Wednesday
accused a disgraced British doctor of committing an "elaborate fraud"
by faking data in his studies linking vaccines with autism.
Andrew Wakefield's work convinced thousands
of parents that vaccines are dangerous. Such fears have not only caused parents
to skip vaccinations for their children, which critics say has led to ongoing
outbreaks of measles and mumps, but have forced costly reformulations of many
vaccines.
The journal's editors said it was not possible that
For instance, the reports found that Wakefield, who
included data from only 12 children in his report, studied at least 13 and that
several showed symptoms of autism before they were vaccinated.
"Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt
that it was Wakefield," journal editor Fiona Godlee,
deputy editor Jane Smith and associate editor Harvey Marcovitch
wrote in a commentary.
They said the work "was based not on bad science
but on a deliberate fraud."
In 1998, the Lancet medical journal, a rival to the
British Medical Journal, published a study by
The other researchers withdrew their names from the
study, and the Lancet formally retracted the paper in February.
A disciplinary panel of
No study has shown any clear link between vaccines