The modern anti-vaccination movement began when a paper written by Dr Andrew Wakefield was published in the Lancet medical journal in 1998. The now infamous paper suggested a link between the Measles Mumps and Rubella vaccine and the development of Autism in children.
However over the following years researchers were unable to reproduce Wakefield’s results to confirm this hypothesis. However despite this Wakefield paper caused panic amongst parents leading many of them to abandon vaccination all together, and so the modern Anti-vaccination movement was born.
Wakefield’s paper was later retracted from the journal after extensive research by the scientific community concluded that it was ‘bogus‘; for lack of a better word.
A prominent British medical journal on Tuesday retracted a 1998 research paper that set off a sharp decline in vaccinations in Britainafter the paper’s lead author suggested that vaccines could causeautism.The retraction by The Lancet is part of a reassessment that has lasted for years of the scientific methods and financial conflicts of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who contended that his research showed that the combinedmeasles, mumps and rubella vaccine may be unsafe.
Unfortunately by this time allot of the damage has already been done and we now have Die Hard Anti-vaccine fanatics the Australian Vaccination Network who continue to cite Wakefield’s discredited paper to scare parents into not vaccinating their children.
Dr Wakefield was struck of the UK medical register for his misconduct.
A U.K. medical regulator revoked the license of the doctor who first suggested a link between vaccines and autism and spurred a long-running, heated debate over the safety of vaccines.Ending a nearly three-year hearing, Britain’s General Medical Council found Andrew Wakefield guilty of “serious professional misconduct” in the way he carried out his research in the late 1990s. The council struck his name from the U.K.’s medical register.…..A 2004 statistical review of existing epidemiological studies by the Institute of Medicine, a respected nonprofit organization in the U.S., concluded that there was no causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Some autism activist groups, however, continue to advocate against vaccinations for children, despite the lack of scientific evidence for such a link. –The Wall Street Journal
and the trouble for No-longer-a-doctor Andrew Wakefield continues thanks to journalist Brian Deer who has further exposed Wakefield as a fraud.
THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.…..However, our investigation, confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal. –Brian Deer
However the Die Hard Anti-vaccine fanatics are still backing Wakefield even after his research has been shown to be a fraud. Meryl Dorey certainly still supports him and she’s as fanatical anti-vaccine as you can get.
So I support calls for justice when Wakefield is concerned. That of course means a long prison sentence for this fraud who gave birth to the modern anti-vaccination movement.