Vaccines and Autism
It has
long been known that the proposed link between childhood vaccines and autism was at best, bad science.
Doctor Andrew Wakefield first proposed this in an article in Lancet. Lancet retracted the paper last February and in May of this year, Dr. Wakefield's medical license was yanked.
CNN
has a nice write up and includes information from a new paper:
Retracted autism study an 'elaborate fraud,' British journal finds
A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an "elaborate fraud" that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday.
An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study -- and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible.
"It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data."
Britain stripped Wakefield of his medical license in May 2010. Efforts to reach him for comment were unsuccessful Wednesday.
"Meanwhile, the damage to public health continues, fueled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals and the medical profession," BMJ states.
A bit more about the good Doctor:
Wakefield has been unable to reproduce his results in the face of criticism, and other researchers have been unable to match them. Most of his co-authors withdrew their names from the study in 2004 after learning he had had been paid by a law firm that intended to sue vaccine manufacturers -- a serious conflict of interest he failed to disclose. After years on controversy, the Lancet, the prestigious journal that originally published the research, retracted Wakefield's paper last February.
he had had been paid by a law firm that intended to sue vaccine manufacturers -- there is a special level of hell for people like that...
Posted by DaveH at January 5, 2011 5:14 PM