Wakefield accused of fraud over MMR scare

FOLLOWING A lengthy investigation, the British Medical Journalsays the 1998 scare involving the MMR vaccine, which led to a marked drop in childhood immunisation rates, was based not on bad science but on a deliberate fraud perpetrated by the original investigator, Dr Andrew Wakefield.

In an editorial published this morning, the journal’s editor-in-chief, Dr Fiona Godlee, says its investigations reveal gross misreporting by Wakefield, who was struck off by the General Medical Council last year. “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,” she says.

Drawing on interviews, documents, and data made public at the council’s hearings, investigative journalist Brian Deer shows how Wakefield altered numerous facts about the patients’ medical histories to support his claim to have identified a new syndrome linking MMR vaccine with the development of autism and how he sought to exploit the ensuing scare for financial gain.

Unknown to the parents of the children he investigated, Wakefield was working on a lawsuit for which he claimed £150 (€180) an hour from a legal aid fund.

When Deer cross-checked patient details as outlined in the original Lancet research paper and the patients’ actual hospital notes, he found numerous discrepancies.

The controversial study, since formally retracted by the Lancet, looked at 12 children with developmental and bowel problems. Eight allegedly had autism, which their parents reported began soon after their vaccination with MMR. The authors proposed that MMR caused a leaky bowel, which allowed a toxin to enter the body, travel to the brain and cause autism.

The original controversy significantly affected childhood immunisation rates. Prior to Wakefield’s intervention, MMR uptake rates were above 90 per cent. However, five years later, rates had fallen to 70 per cent and below in some areas. In tandem with this fall, measles rates went up; an outbreak in the Republic in 2000 resulted in more than 1,600 cases of the disease and three deaths.

“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.”