Are we finally ready to close the door on the much-disputed link between the MMR vaccine and autism?
On January 30, Britain’s General Medical Council ruled that Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist, had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in conducting his research that established a link between autism and the MMR vaccine. And yesterday, the British medical journal Lancet finally retracted the resulting 1998 study authored by Wakefield that helped drive MMR vaccination rates in the U.K. down to the point where in 2008, measles was officially declared “endemic” in the country.
The Lancet’s editor, Richard Horton, told The Guardian “It was utterly clear, without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the paper were utterly false,” he said. “I feel I was deceived.”
The GMC investigation, entailing 197 days of evidence, submission and deliberation between July 2007 and January 2010, exposed an unscrupulous researcher who falsified data, used sloppy laboratory techniques and subjected children to painful and potentially harmful medical tests like lumbar punctures and multiple colonoscopies to try and prove his notion that MMR vaccinations cause bowel disease and autism. Wakefield even went so far as to offer children attending his son’s birthday party £5 to donate blood samples.
The investigation of Wakefield and his shoddy and unethical research methods began in 2004 when British journalist Brian Deer began talking with parents of the 12 children involved in Wakefield’s study and reviewing medical records. Since then, Deer has dedicated countless hours and words to setting the record straight about Wakefield’s work—including the finding that his research was funded by lawyers representing parents who planned to sue vaccine makers for damages.
