The Times: MMR doctor Andrew Wakefield ‘abused his position of trust’
The doctor who first claimed that the MMR vaccine could cause autism has been found guilty of a series of misconduct charges, that include putting children through painful and unnecessary tests, a disciplinary hearing has ruled today.
Dr Andrew Wakefield showed “a callous disregard” for the suffering of children and “abused his position of trust” as a doctor in carrying out a study which sparked the biggest vaccine scare in a generation and has been blamed for the resurgence of measles in Britain, the General Medical Council (GMC) found.
He was also found to have brought the medical profession “into disrepute” after he took blood samples from youngsters at his son’s birthday party in return for payments of £5 and failed to disclose vital conflicts of interest around his work – which has since been discredited.
Along with two former colleagues who were also involved in the study on 12 children, originally published in the Lancet medical journal in 1998, Dr Wakefield now faces being suspended or struck off the medical register if this verdict is confirmed by GMC later this year.
The findings from the 1998 Wakefield et al study on 12 children have failed to be replicated in subsequent studies involving millions of children. He failed to disclose conflicts of interest to the editors of The Lancet before his original paper was published in 1998 (he had received £55,000 before the study even began from lawyers representing parents wanting proof that the MMR had caused autism in their children, and had patented an alternative ’single shot’ measles vaccine for his own personal gain). In the decade since the publication he received 8x his medical salary from fees as an “expert” provided through the UK legal aid system meant to assist people in poverty. The flagrant procedural flaws in the study (the children were not a random sample of cases from one hospital, the families had been specially recruited from already-existing anti-MMR activist groups, and their medical histories were manipulated and misrepresented) right from the off make its approval for publication by The Lancet’s peer review system look none too clever either, although of course peer review is never proof against blatant fraud (that’s what subsequent replication-attempt studies tend to reveal).
The original Wakefield study is as debunked and discredited as it is possible for a piece of unethical cherry-picking “research” to be. Yet the article goes on to describe how supporters of Dr Wakefield attended the GMC hearings to heckle the chairman read out the panel’s verdicts and cheer as Wakefield addressed reporters afterwards. Continue reading ‘And still they defend him’






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