![]() Second, the year before the study’s publication, he had applied for a patent for his own single measles vaccine and would thus have profited had his research frightened people away from the combined MMR. Indeed, an anti-vaccine pressure group linked to this lawyer was how Wakefield recruited the patients for his study. ![]() First, he was being retained, on a substantial fee, by a lawyer who had plans to sue the makers of the vaccines on behalf of the parents of children with autism. The Wakefield paper, far from being an honest mistake or an understandable dead end in a tentative line of research, was fraudulent right from the beginning.Īs for the motivation, Deer showed, Wakefield had two major financial interests in the research turning out the way it did. He simply invented the “fact” that all the children showed their first autism-related symptoms soon after receiving the MMR whereas in reality, some had records of symptoms beforehand, others only had symptoms many months afterward, and some never even received a diagnosis of autism at all. In a series of stunning articles in The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal), Deer described how Wakefield misrepresented or altered the medical details of every single one of the twelve children included in his paper. What many aren’t aware of, though, is that the Wakefield paper, far from being an honest mistake or an understandable dead end in a tentative line of research, was fraudulent right from the beginning.Īfter the study’s publication and the attendant controversy, the investigative journalist Brian Deer began to dig into Wakefield’s data and, crucially, his motivations. It’s also been shown that combination vaccines are just as safe as individual ones. Since 1998, there have been several large-scale, rigorous studies showing no relation between the MMR vaccine (or any other vaccine) and autism spectrum disorder. In interviews and a press conference after the paper’s publication, Wakefield repeatedly stated that the MMR should be split up into three individual vaccines, because the combination was “too much for the immune system of some children to handle.”īy now, most people know that Wakefield’s findings have been discredited. The theory was that measles virus left in the system from the MMR vaccine was a cause of both gut- and brain-related symptoms (Wakefield called the condition, which he was describing for the first time, “autistic enterocolitis”). On the basis of a sample of twelve children, Wakefield and his coauthors claimed that the combined measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine was linked to autism. I’m referring, of course, to the infamous 1998 study on vaccines published in The Lancet by the British doctor Andrew Wakefield. It caused so much fear and confusion that even though it occurred more than two decades ago, we still live with its noxious effects today. He explains how the scientific publishing system also let the us down-it took 12 years to retract the fraudulent study, which since its publication has sowed doubts around the safety of vaccines and, as a result, weakened public health.Īmong the very worst scientific fraud cases was one that not only misled scientists and doctors, but also had an enormous impact on the public perception of a vitally important medical treatment. But Ritchie shows that the ensuing harm to public health wasn’t the fault of a rogue physician alone. Ritchie recounts the scientific duplicitousness underlying the infamous 1998 study that purported to find a link between autism and vaccination. Fraud is the subject of the excerpt below. What has caused the breakdown of our scientific ideals and systems? Ritchie identifies the four main culprits-fraud, bias, negligence, and hype. It’s not that something is amiss with science per se, Ritchie writes, but the very human systems in which science takes place. And, as you’ll see below, it’s failing us not in insignificant ways. Psychologist Stuart Ritchie’s new book, Science Fictions, provides an uncomfortable tour of the current state of the scientific system that has provided us with so much-cures for disease, discoveries about ourselves, knowledge of this and other worlds-but is beginning to let us down.
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