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DISCREDITED surgeon Andrew Wakefield, who authored the controversial paper that linked the MMR vaccine with autism in 1998, received another blow to the tatters of his reputation this week as the BMJ published a series of papers claiming that the work was not only misleading, but also “fraudulent”.
Wakefield’s claims infamously led to a slump in the number of children being given the MMR vaccine. Now new research by journalist Brian Deer of the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper brands Wakefield’s work “a fix”, claiming that he modified key facts about patients in his study in order to support a desired outcome.
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Deer goes as far as to compare it to the Piltdown man, a hoax in 1912 in which Charles Dawson combined the jaw of an orang-utan with the skull of a modern man, claiming it to be the fossilised remains of an early human.
Wakefield’s original paper was published in The Lancet, but was retracted in February 2010 partly because it had been discovered that Wakefield had undisclosed conflicts of interest and that the children in his study had been pre-selected.
The British General Medical Council (GMC) later ruled that Wakefield be banned from practising medicine.
In the BMJ papers, Deer claims that Wakefield doctored details of patients. Deer compared the patients’ medical records, which were presented at a GMC hearing, with the paper’s findings and found many discrepancies. For example, although Wakefield claimed the 12 children in his study were developing normally before they were given the MMR vaccine, Deer claims five had actually been recorded as having developmental problems. “Not one of the 12 children’s cases in [Wakefield’s] paper can be reconciled with National Health Service records,” he says.
In the second of three papers, Deer accuses Wakefield of seeking to exploit a potential MMR scare for financial gain, detailing plans for an alleged “secret business” that could make £28 million a year selling diagnostic testing kits and possibly “replacement” vaccines.
Wakefield is standing by his work, suggesting the claims of fraud are an attempt to sabotage legitimate research into the safety of vaccines. Either way, those groups who still shun vaccines despite the revocation of the paper are unlikely to have their minds changed by these latest findings (also see “The irrationality vaccine”). In terms of vaccine uptake, the bulk of the damage seems to have been done.
What this investigation does do is raise questions over how the paper got past The Lancet‘s editorial board in the first place, and leads us to ask how to ensure these mistakes are not repeated. When approached by 91av to discuss the issues raised this week, The Lancet declined to comment.
