Med: Autism and MMR Vaccine Study an 'Elaborate Fraud'

I think there have been discussions here previously about vaccines, and while there might well be some people, especially children, who can have difficulty with multiple vaccines, the issue of vaccination causing autism is particularly fear-inducing.  But the 1998 'study' has been judged fraudulent:

Autism and MMR Vaccine Study an 'Elaborate Fraud,' Charges BMJ
Deborah Brauser

 ---Educational Item---January 6, 2011 — BMJ is publishing a series of 3 articles and editorials charging that the study published in The Lancet in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues linking the childhood measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine to a "new syndrome" of regressive autism and bowel disease was not just bad science but "an elaborate fraud."

According to the first article published in BMJ today by London-based investigative reporter Brian Deer, the study's investigators altered and falsified medical records and facts, misrepresented information to families, and treated the 12 children involved unethically.

In addition, Mr. Wakefield accepted consultancy fees from lawyers who were building a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers, and many of the study participants were referred by an antivaccine organization...

...Although The Lancet published a retraction of the study last year right after the UK General Medical Council (GMC) announced that the investigators acted "dishonestly" and irresponsibly," the BMJ editors note that the journal did not go far enough.

"The Lancet retraction was prompted by the results from the [General Medical Council] hearing and was very much based on the concerns about the ethics of the study," Dr. Godlee told Medscape Medical News. 

"What we found was that it was definite fraud and that is a very important thing for the world to know. This article shows that the science was falsified and should be discounted," continued Dr. Godlee...

...Mr. Deer did his first investigative stories on the Wakefield paper in 2004 for the Sunday Times in London and a UK television network. On the basis of his findings, the GMC's Fitness to Practice panel convened in 2007 and heard from 36 witnesses during a period of 2 and a half years.

At the end of January last year, as reported by Medscape Medical News , the panel used strong language in condemning the study's methods and noted that Mr. Wakefield and 2 other colleagues had broken guidelines.

The Lancet issued its retraction 5 days later, citing the panel's findings that the participants were not consecutive patients seeking treatment and that the study had falsely reported being approved by an ethics committee.
...the GMC later found that Mr. Wakefield and coauthor John Walker-Smith committed serious misconduct and struck them off the medical register... 

...Last spring, the BMJ went to Mr. Deer to ask if there was more to this story. In this newest article, he reports that "multiple discrepancies" were found, including the following:

•Only one of the studied 9 children actually had clear regressive autism and 3 did not have a diagnosis of any autism type;
•Five had preexisting development concerns — although all 12 were classified in the study as "previously normal"; and
•The exclusion of important allegations helped create "the appearance of a 14-day temporal link."
In addition, none of the 12 patients were "free of misreporting or alteration," he writes...

...The editors write that although a breach of trust this large is "almost certainly rare," it raises questions about what could have been done earlier, what further inquiry is needed, and what can be done to keep it from happening again..."We wanted to also look at what motivated Andrew Wakefield, looking at the commercial schemes he established to exploit the MMR scare, and then we examine what happened when the issues of concern were first raised back in 2004 and why it was not taken more seriously at that time..."

[There was a falsified study about breast cancer and bone marrow transplant as efficacious(?sp) therapy that was probably on a similar scale - me]

This article came from Medscape, so I cannot give you a link.

Lying about medical research - really gives me a visceral punch.  Dreadful. (Of course, there isn't any rivalry between the BMJ and the Lancet, is there?)
If someone has already posted on this, my apologies.

Debbi
who didn't look through the 1000+++ emails in her in-box to check (<sigh> nor did she try a mail-search)


      

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