It took years, and an enterprising reporter to check on the facts, but now it’s official: The “MMR vaccine causes Autism”paper was not only flawed, but was made up. It was part of a money making scam concocted by a lawyer who hoped to make money off of a class action lawsuit, with the help of a doctor who was paid by that lawyer to “find” something to sue, and who also had monetary interests in pushing a different vaccine.
The original study, which was based on only 12 patients, was itself flawed. Often studies show a “cluster” of disease in an area, by coincidence, or rarely from a local illness. If the vaccine was the cause, other physicians would have noted a similar cluster of problems, yet no one did.
But in this case, the doctor recruited many of the patients from all over the place, so the extent of the “problem” would be exaggerated, since 12 cases who walk off the street and get seen in a hospital may signal an epidemic, but searching and finding only 12 cases out of millions of children in the UK who got the vaccine over several years may or may not prove anything but a simple coincidence.
But the tabloids and other groups soon took hold of the flawed scientific finding, and exploded the “problem” out of proportion: yet doctors were less convinced, for the dirty little secret is that when you compared population statistics, no one else seems to have found more autism in children who got MMR than who didn’t..
From an editorial in The British Medical Journal:
…the paper was a small case series with no controls, linked three common conditions, and relied on parental recall and beliefs.4 Over the following decade, epidemiological studies consistently found no evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.5 6 7 8 By the time the paper was finally retracted 12 years later,9 after forensic dissection at the General Medical Council’s (GMC) longest ever fitness to practise hearing,10 few people could deny that it was fatally flawed both scientifically and ethically.
So we have a flawed study that exploded into an urban legend. And no matter how many doctors and scientists protest, the parents who argue against it have passion and their beloved handicapped child to argue we are wrong.
Science has problems when it confronts blind belief in quacks and faith healing scams, but in this case, the parent’s story makes for better headlines (and more profits for the tabloid press) so alas science was not getting it’s truth out there to the public.
But in this case, the consequences of the hysteria were concrete. As a result of this “urban legend”, many parents suffered from guilt because they blame themselves for letting the child be given the vaccine, and many children have developed mumps or measles (both of which can cause encephalitis and brain damage) and there have even been a few measles deaths because their parents are too afraid to let the children get the shot.
Yet the most recent story goes beyond misunderstanding science, because it suggests that outright fraud was committed for financial gain. Again, from the BMJ:
In a series of articles starting this week, and seven years after first looking into the MMR scare, journalist Brian Deer now shows the extent of Wakefield’s fraud and how it was perpetrated (doi:10.1136/bmj.c5347). Drawing on interviews, documents, and data made public at the GMC hearings, Deer shows how Wakefield altered numerous facts about the patients’ medical histories in order to support his claim to have identified a new syndrome; how his institution, the Royal Free Hospital and Medical School in London, supported him as he sought to exploit the ensuing MMR scare for financial gain; and how key players failed to investigate thoroughly in the public interest when Deer first raised his concerns.11
It was a deliberate scam or fraud, to make money.
Journalist Brian Deer has a summary of his findings in the BMJ or you can read them at his website, which summarizes the plot:
…the investigation discovered that, while Wakefield held himself out to be a dispassionate scientist,(yet) two years before the Lancet paper was published – and before any of the 12 children were even referred to the hospital – he had been hired to attack MMR by a lawyer, Richard Barr: a jobbing solicitor in the small eastern English town of King’s Lynn, who hoped to raise a speculative class action lawsuit against drug companies which manufactured the shot.
The physician involved rewrote the case histories of the children to make the evidence stronger, even claiming that their bowel biopsies were positive when they were actually normal. Several of the children had symptoms of developmental delay or problems before getting the vaccine, and others got the vaccine months before the problems started, but were reported to have problem within days of the vaccine:
In an exercise never before accomplished by a journalist, Deer was able to go behind the face of the 1998 paper, identify the subjects, and access original patient data. Penetrating veils of medical confidentiality, he discovered that the hospital’s clinicians and pathology service had found nothing to implicate MMR, but that Wakefield had repeatedly changed and misreported diagnoses, histories and descriptions of the children, which made it appear that the syndrome had been discovered.
The bad problem about all of this is that few ordinary folks realize that autism is a “syndrome”, not a single disease.
It has many causes: PKU or metabolic syndromes, Fragile X syndrome, encephalopathy from eating lead paint, a child whose mom had Rubella while pregnant, encephalopathy from a virus or from the old DPT vaccine (we now use a newer version that doesn’t have the problem). Many children have a high fever before the symptoms develop, so we suspect a viral encephalitis, or maybe an ear infection that caused a high fever also caused meningitis that was not recognized but was treated by the antibiotic given to cure the ear infection. Neonatal sepsis or jaundice can cause autism too, especially in a premature child.
Alas, often we doctors can’t find the cause, so the parents blame each other, and divorce. They blamed the Obstetrician, resulting in skyrocketing malpractice insurance for physicians. They blamed the medicine for the ear infection. In the “good old days” the “cause” of high IQ autism was even blamed on “frigid mothering”.
So when the tabloids and conspiracy sites started to blame the vaccine, I got worried, but not surprised. Passing the blame onto someone else is one way to cope with this tragedy.
But the fraud in this case cannot be overlooked. Too many have suffered from the crime.
And the scientific community itself has to examine itself in how it does “peer review” before publishing papers.At least one paper compared it to the “piltdown man” scandal, where the “missing link” was found years later to be a hoax.
Maybe with this urban legend put to rest, there will be more energy and funding to find the various causes for Autism syndromes, and even find ways to treat these children.
As for MMR vaccine: Here is a story I bet you don’t know:
Joint News Release American Red Cross/CDC/UN Foundation/UNICEF/WHO
3 December 2009 | ATLANTA | Geneva | NEW YORK | WASHINGTON – The Measles Initiative announced today that measles deaths worldwide fell by 78% between 2000 and 2008, from an estimated 733 000 in 2000 to 164 000 in 2008.
Yes, measles kills. When I worked in Africa, I saw several children die from measles, and our hospital were involved in a major push to get our area of the country immunized. But such lives saved rarely make the headlines in the tabloids..
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Nancy Reyes is a retired physician living in the rural Philippines
6 users commented in " The MMR/Autism Scam (Follow the Money) "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackYou guys should stop complaining because, one the health care we have now isnt as good as it was supposed to be. also the law has just been signed so give it some time. so if u want to say u have the right to choose tell that to ur congress men or state official. If you do not have insurance and need one You can find full medical coverage at the lowest price search online for “Wise Health Insurance” If you have health insurance and do not care about cost just be happy about it and trust me you are not going to loose anything!
How funny! Just yesterday I said that people needed to follow the money, only my version states that people should follow the money looking at the big $$ pharm companies who stand to gain much by potentially distroting the facts. One such fact is that the media is now apparently airing these new study findings with the blessings of said big $$ pharm companies based on their argument that the Dr.’s evidence is flawed. The Dr. got a lot of the information that he used to base his own argument on from the Parents of Children who have already been diagnosed and suffer from Autism/Asperger’s after receiving vaccinations.
Basically what that says to me is that these new studies are IGNORING the data coming from the Parent’s of Children who have already been diagnosed and the documented information about those already known cases.
Definately, follow the money trail!
PAS, the point is that a few of these kids had Autism BEFORE the vaccine, and others didn’t get it for months afterward, suggesting another cause for their problem.
And Autism has many causes and existed long before the vaccine (except that 40 years ago most of these kids were institutionalized and called “retarded”, not autistic).
The parents are looking for a cause of their children’s disease, and when celebrities with no medical expertise go on TV and tell them it’s “big pharm”, and the result is a witch hunt that is about as scientific as blaming the old lady down the street for giving the kid an evil eye (which was the cause of autism in the past).
By blaming the vaccine, they are wasting money and effort that would best be used to find causes and treatment for the problems (the many causes) of autism syndromes.
As for big pharm: The vaccine has saved at least half a million kids lives in the last ten years.
tioedong,
Hypothesis are common nowdays it seems. Are we now in the war of hypothesis’s?
Rather than to lynch the good Dr. for calling attention to the facts that have been presented to him by the Parent’s of Children who are known to suffer from Autism/Asperger’s Syndrome, how about focusing in more on why it is that these Children began suffering the symptoms of these afflictions after receiving immunizations?
I have one son who developed Asperger’s Syndrome after receiving immunizations. My four other Children have had the same shots with no visable affects. Why? Was my Son more genetically prone to develop A/S symptoms after receiving those shots and if so why????
The researchers/scientists need to quit ignoring the facts (most important fact: Many Children are developing symptoms after receiving vaccinations.) and find a way to screen Children who are likely to develop Austism/Asperger’s. Making the conscious effort to save young lives from experiencing these life long debilitating conditions should be the number one goal here.
The point is that he made up the facts to “prove” a hypothesis. That is fraud.
Long before MMR vaccine existed, we saw cases of children who were okay or slightly slow until age 1 or 2, then they regressed.
We aren’t “ignoring” these things: we just have to be honest about the lack of proof.
Please show me these facts that are suspected of being “made up”.
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