The British Medical Journal: Wakefield's MMR Study "An Elaborate Fraud"

PDFs of the editorial and the article and other resources at the bottom of the post.

BMJ declares MMR study “an elaborate fraud” - Autism claims likened to “Piltdown Man” hoax

Today [January 6, 2011], the BMJ declares the 1998 Lancet paper that implied a link between the MMR vaccine and autism “an elaborate fraud.”

Dr Fiona Godlee, BMJ Editor in Chief says “the MMR scare was based not on bad science but on a deliberate fraud” and that such “clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare.”

She is struck by a comparison between researcher Andrew Wakefield’s fraud and Piltdown man, that great paleontological hoax that led people to believe for 40 years that the missing link between man and ape had been found.

She also questions the veracity of Wakefield’s other publications and calls for an investigation “to decide whether any others should be retracted.”

A series of three articles starting this week reveal the true extent of the scam behind the scare. The series is based on interviews, documents and data, collected during seven years of inquiries by award-winning investigative journalist Brian Deer.

Thanks to the recent publication of the General Medical Council’s six million word transcript, the BMJ was able to peer-review and check Deer’s findings and confirm extensive falsification in the Lancet paper.

In an editorial, Dr Godlee, together with deputy BMJ editor Jane Smith, and leading paediatrician and associate BMJ editor Harvey Marcovitch, conclude that there is “no doubt” that it was Wakefield who perpetrated this fraud. They say: “A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was gross.”

Yet he has repeatedly denied doing anything wrong at all, they add. “Instead, although now disgraced and stripped of his clinical and academic credentials, he continues to push his views. Meanwhile the damage to public health continues.”

“Science is based on trust,” concludes Dr Godlee. “Such a breach of trust is deeply shocking. And even though almost certainly rare on this scale, it raises important questions about how this could happen, what could have been done to uncover it earlier, what further inquiry is now needed, and what can be done to prevent something like this happening again.”

Editorial: Wakefield’s article linking MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulent  Download MMR1edit

Table contrasting the Lancet paper with NHS records of patient diagnoses and histories: Download MMR1table

Article: Secrets of the MMR scare: how the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed Download MMR1

Online analysis: Piltdown medicine: The missing link between MMR and autism Download MMR1blog

Comments

[EoR]

Of course, in the antivaxxers' eyes this will just make him even more a martyr to Big Pharma and prove that he was right all along. Though Wakefield deserves to be eternally associated with "Piltdown medicine".

[Oakwoodbank Ac]

It can reasonably be assumed that some vaccines do cause damage to children or we would not have the Vaccine Damage Payments Act 1979. [1] The list of diseases to which this act applies includes measles and rubella as well as diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough.

There does not appear to have been a consolidated paper that attempts to show how vaccines might cause brain damage by a review of the scientific literature except for the one that I have published on various web sites including scribd. [2] It has been published for open access and I have not received any remuneration from any source. This paper looks at the causative factors mainly from the effects of the whooping cough vaccine (pertussis).

However, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Immunization Program, promulgates that the risks from MMR vaccine can be permanent brain damage. [3]

Epidemiologists will probably say, and quite rightly, that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the occasional damage that is caused by some of them. The number of payments for vaccine damage in the UK is in excess of 1,000 and compared with the number of children who have benefitted, that number is miniscule bit not unimportant.

Over a thousand children will be living diminished lives as a result and their parents will be anguished that they were, in part, responsible for their child’s disability.

For this lifetime of inequality and the loss of; normal education, a job and a life that contains the expectancies that most of us have envisaged and possibly achieved, the maximum award is, if you're severely disabled as a result of a vaccination, one-off tax-free payment of £120,000.

It is this shameful situation that ought to cause concern rather than a continuing denouncement of Wakefield. He may have got his understanding of the relationship between MMR and Autism wrong but that does not prove that there isn’t one.

1 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1979/17/section/1
2 Challoner A. Brain Damage Caused by Vaccination. http://www.scribd.com/doc/19408267/Brain-Damage-Caused-by-Vaccination 2009.
3 http://www.cdc.gov/nip/publications/VIS/vis-mmr.pdf

[John]

Fact: Vaccines can damage children. Pertussis vaccination in the 1970s is accepted to have caused brain damage in many children. Vaccine damage is accepted by the authorities, and under-reported. For example, the high pitched scream reported by many parents after vaccination is a symptom of encephalitis, swelling of the brain, yet this significant event is dismissed by medics as a "minor" side effect.

An MMR vaccination campaign on Australian aborigianl children resulted in the deaths of 50% of the infants vaccinated. Google it to find out more. Funny how that tragic event was not more widely reported in the media.

Fact: many vaccines contain aluminium compounds as an adjuvant. Aluminium is a neurotoxin. The dose in vaccines administered to babies is equivalent to several hundred times the permitted daily adult exposure.

Fact:Many vaccines contained, and many still contain, mercury compounds. Mercury is a neurotoxin.

I would be most surprised if some sort of brain damage DID NOT result from injecting neurotoxins into infants. Whether autism is indicative of lesions in certain areas of the brain is yet to be determined. Almost certainly, ALL vaccines, not just MMR, are to blame. For many infants, MMR is probably the final insult on top of previous exposure.

The witch hunt against Andrew Wakefield must stop. Autism exists. If vaccines might be a cause, it needs to be investigated properly, and openly. Something is ruining chidlren's health, so many are chronically sick. Scientists must put their efforts into finding out the TRUTH, however unpalatable that turns out to be.

[Science Mom]

Oakwood Ac, you say, "It is this shameful situation that ought to cause concern rather than a continuing denouncement of Wakefield. He may have got his understanding of the relationship between MMR and Autism wrong but that does not prove that there isn’t one."

But this relationship is already known and to a great degree, the frequency. We know that vaccines do cause some injury and that the corresponding diseases causes far more injury, by orders of magnitude. We have accumulated information to try and reduce vaccine injuries by identifying those who may be prone and this is an ongoing endeavour.

John, you say, "An MMR vaccination campaign on Australian aborigianl children resulted in the deaths of 50% of the infants vaccinated. Google it to find out more. Funny how that tragic event was not more widely reported in the media."

Yet you don't provide any supporting information for this. The onus is upon you to do so you know.

Fact: many vaccines contain aluminium compounds as an adjuvant. Aluminium is a neurotoxin. The dose in vaccines administered to babies is equivalent to several hundred times the permitted daily adult exposure.

No, that is not a fact. The dose matters and it takes several grams acutely administered or slightly less, chronically administered to achieve neurotoxicity. The route of administration also matters. The amount in vaccines does not exceed adult exposure by several hundred times or at all.

Fact:Many vaccines contained, and many still contain, mercury compounds. Mercury is a neurotoxin.

Not a fact either. Only a couple of paediatric vaccines contain trace amounts of thimerosal (so small they can only be measured by virtue of exquisitely sensitive instrumentation), the rest contain none. Mercury is a neurotoxin, in again sufficiently higher doses.

There is no witch hunt against Wakefield, he brought that completely upon himself by lying and falsifying data. There has been so much money and time diverted from ASD aetiologies and vaccine research in relation to autism has been very transparent and globally replicated. There is no association on a population level. It's time that people focus their time and energy on other possibilities, of which there are many.

[Chris]

In short:

Wakefield lied and
children died.

Oh, and Oakwoodbank...

Your first link is over thirty years old, and is about a vaccine no longer used that is not the MMR.

Your second reference is about a vaccine that is no longer used, which is also not the MMR.

And the third one does not even exist (it redirects to an MMR vaccine information sheet, big whoop!).

[Corina Becker]

I'm getting a measure of schadenfreude about this, but as crooked as Wakefield is, let's also remember that he was approached in order to do this. I covered this Feb last year in The Triggering of Wakefield. I think it still kind of applies.

[Sam]

Wakefield lied for financial gain at the expense of children's lives. This is about as severe a moral crime as I can imagine.

The anti-vaxxers should be *furious* at Wakefield, not defending him.

[OneMom]

What amazes me is that despite Wakefield's "research" never being duplicated in any other study, the retraction of the Lancet article, and no Brian Deer's report, is that so many people continue to worship at Wakefield's altar. Too many people holding on to the mentality of "I've already made up my mind, don't confuse me with the facts".