A controversial study which unleashed a widespread parental boycott of the MMR vaccination in Britain has been deemed a fraud.
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PARIS: A 1998 study that unleashed a major health scare by linking childhood autism to a triple vaccine was “an elaborate fraud,” the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has charged.
Blamed for a disastrous boycott of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine in Britain, the study was retracted by The Lancet last year and its senior author disgraced, after the country's longest-running hearing, for conflict of interest and unethical treatment of patients.
But the BMJ, taking the affair further, branded the paper a crafted attempt to deceive, among the gravest of charges in medical research.
No 'new syndrome' found
"The paper was in fact an elaborate fraud," the BMJ said in an editorial, adding: "There are hard lessons for many in this highly damaging saga."
It pointed the finger at lead author Andrew Wakefield, then a consultant in experimental gastro-enterology at London's Royal Free Hospital.
Wakefield and his team suggested they had found a "new syndrome" of autism and bowel disease among 12 children. They linked it to the MMR vaccine, which they said had been administered to eight of the youngsters shortly before the symptoms emerged.
Study results never replicated
Other scientists swiftly cautioned the study was only among a tiny group, without a comparative ‘control’ sample, and the dating of when symptoms surfaced was based on parental recall, which is notoriously unreliable. Its results have never been replicated.
But the controversy unleashed a widespread parental boycott of the jab in Britain, and unease reverberated also in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Hundreds of thousands of children in Britain are now unshielded against these three diseases, said the BMJ. In 2008, measles was declared endemic, or present in the wider population much like chicken pox, in England and Wales.
Dates faked and diagnoses misrepresented
Wakefield was barred from medical practice last year on grounds of conflict of financial interest and unethical treatment of some children involved in the research.
The BMJ, delving into the accuracy of the study as opposed to its ethics, said Sunday Times investigative journalist Brian Deer had "unearthed clear evidence of falsification."
Not one of the 12 cases, as reported in the study, tallied fully with the children's official medical records, it charged. Some diagnoses had been misrepresented and dates faked in order to draw a convenient link with the MMR jab, it said.
Vaccination and Regression
Your coverage of Brian Deer - who is no friend of parents of children with autism, and who last time I met him looked straight through me and refused to shake my outstretched hand - misses the essential point. Children such as my son Oliver were developing perfectly normally up to the exact point that they were immunised. He (and others like him) then stalled, and then regressed, having suffered an acute reaction in the hours following vaccination. Neither Brian deer nor the medical authorities have any explanation for this, nor any interest, apparently, in seeking one. The autism epidemic is continuing, and the financial cost is mounting. Your readers (and taxpayers) have all been warned. Don't say we didn't try to tell you.
David Thrower
Warrington UK