I have just read an article that makes me absolutely furious.
In summary, it seems the doctor whose study ignited the scare that the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine might have a correlation with autism falsified his data. Someone went back and looked at the patient records his findings were supposedly based on, and they didn’t match up at all.
For years I’ve sidestepped this controversy, telling people who tried to drag me and my advocacy abilities into the dispute about whether or not to vaccinate, and whether the vaccines might be causing autism, that I would leave that to others; my concern was to figure out what would help our children now, and how to make sure that they got it regardless of their parents’ income or educational level. It didn’t make sense to me, and I didn’t want to be dragged into the arguments. But a lot of parents have swallowed this hook, line and sinker. It feeds into fears of a technology most do not fully understand, and of not doing what is best for our children. And once internalized, that fear doesn’t go away easily. It’s like a virus itself, one for which there is no inoculation. This doctor has played on those fears. The article that started all of this came out 10 years ago, but it will take far longer to undo the damage it’s done. I won’t be surprised if it takes a full generation, and I’m sure it will never disappear entirely. Meanwhile children have been and will continue be put at needless risk of entirely preventable diseases by parents worried that the consequences of prevention will be worse than the diseases themselves.
Articles expire, so the text follows:
The doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found. (emphasis mine)
Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.
The research was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet medical journal. It claimed that the families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on within days of the jab. The team also claimed to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease underlying the children’s conditions.
However, our investigation, confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal. Despite involving just a dozen children, the 1998 paper’s impact was extraordinary. After its publication, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%. Populations acquire “herd immunity” from measles when more than 95% of people have been vaccinated.
Last week official figures showed that 1,348 confirmed cases of measles in England and Wales were reported last year, compared with 56 in 1998. Two children have died of the disease.
With two professors, John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch, Wakefield is defending himself against allegations of serious professional misconduct brought by the GMC. The charges relate to ethical aspects of the project, not its findings. All three men deny any misconduct.
Through his lawyers, Wakefield this weekend denied the issues raised by our investigation, but declined to comment further.
(by Brian Deer, Times Online UK edition, Feb 8, 2009)
As if we hadn’t had enough to worry about.
My child is autistic. Dr. Wakefield did the wrong thing. BUT – I can show you ten sets of parents who had healthy normal children the day before the MMR vaccine, and 48 hours later their children were virtually incapable of anything. We DO have a lot to worry about – talk with the specialist doctors who are dealing with the rising cases, talk with the government departments who are fighting to handle a flood of newly autistic children…We had eight vaccines when I was a child; today there are twenty-seven. The rise in autism matches the increase EXACTLY. Enough denial – get REAL, despite lying doctors.
Since I’ve not seen you here before, I assume you don’t know much about me. I also have an autistic child, aged 11. That was my point – that we have more than enough to do without respected researchers lying. It may be the overabundance of vaccines has an effect, but the vaccine in question, the MMR, has been around for 45 years. But because this guy lied, researchers spent their time trying to either prove or disprove his findings instead of pursuing other, more fruitful lines of research.