“It was utterly clear, without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the paper were utterly false,” said Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet. “I feel I was deceived.”
He was speaking in February 2010, the day the journal finally pulled a paper it had printed in February 1998. The paper, by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues at the Royal Free hospital, tied the MMR jab, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella, to bowel disease and autism. It rested on a case series of 12 children. It also set off a crisis in MMR vaccination across the UK.
What the regulator found
The retraction followed a ruling by the General Medical Council. Its disciplinary panel decided that children had undergone invasive procedures nobody needed for their care, lumbar punctures among them, purely for research and without valid ethical approval. Horton said Wakefield “was dishonest” and “deceived the journal.”
Doubts about the study first surfaced in 2004, and the journal turned to the Royal Free hospital for an inquiry. Humphrey Hodgson, a professor and the school’s vice-dean at the time, wrote back that the hospital was “entirely satisfied” the work had faced rigorous ethical scrutiny. Horton later explained the limit of the system: peer review cannot rule out misconduct unless reviewers examine every case record. “The entire system depends upon trust,” he said.
Michael Fitzpatrick, who has written books on the MMR scare, called the retraction “good news – only 10 years too late.”
Three months later, in May 2010, the council removed Wakefield from the medical register. A fitness to practise panel found him guilty of serious professional misconduct and said erasure was the only sanction appropriate to protect patients and keep public trust in the profession. One episode drew particular attention. At a birthday party, Wakefield took blood samples from children and paid each of them £5, which the panel called a “callous disregard” for the children’s possible distress.
He did not back down. In a television interview with Matt Lauer, he called the ruling “a little bump on the road” and maintained that vaccines cause autism.
The BMJ investigation
A year later, in 2011, the BMJ published a series by the reporter Brian Deer. Fiona Godlee and colleagues, in an editorial alongside it, wrote that the paper came from deliberate fraud rather than bad science. Deer set the patients’ NHS records against the paper’s account of their diagnoses and histories and concluded that the link with autism had been manufactured. He also reported that Wakefield planned secret businesses meant to make money on both sides of the Atlantic from his claims. The third part described the journal’s response when Deer raised concerns in 2004: 5,000 words of denials within 48 hours.
The cost
Nobody has reproduced the findings from those 12 patients. Several large studies, among them a case-controlled study that drew on researchers at the CDC, Columbia, Massachusetts General Hospital and Trinity College Dublin, disputed them. Falling MMR uptake in the UK lined up with a rise in measles cases and renewed deaths from the disease, HCPLive reported.
Sources
- Lancet retracts 'utterly false' MMR paper | Society | The Guardian Skip to main content The Lancet today finally retracted the paper that sparked a cr
- Controversial Autism Doctor Stripped of License | HCPLive –> –> Advertisement |Articles|May 25, 2010 Controversial Autism Doctor Stripped of License
- Fraud Behind the MMR Scare | Immunize.org Skip to content Immunize.org supports evidence-based vaccination recommendations and schedules. Read more at
