Suzanne Humphries on wakefield: what the evidence says · JRE #2294
SUBJECT: WAKEFIELD
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
And he published this paper, which remained in the journal for 12 years. And all it said at the end was, further research needs to be done in order to see if there is any real connection between the MMR vaccine, autism, and toxic nodular enterocolitis.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The 12-year timeline is accurate: Andrew Wakefield's paper was published in The Lancet in 1998 and fully retracted in 2010. The rest of the characterization is misleading. The paper did more than call for further research: it reported that 12 children with gastrointestinal disease and developmental regression showed onset generally associated in time with possible environmental triggers, and although it added a caveat that the authors did not prove an association with MMR, it explicitly raised the vaccine as a suspected trigger (a link Wakefield amplified publicly). Critically, The Lancet did not retract the paper because it was merely inconclusive. It was retracted on the basis of Britain's General Medical Council findings that the children were carefully selected, that Wakefield's research was funded by lawyers suing vaccine makers, and that several elements were incorrect and falsified. Ten of the original authors had already retracted the vaccine interpretation in 2004, and the paper is now widely described as fraudulent. (The transcript phrase toxic nodular enterocolitis appears to be a mishearing of the paper's autistic enterocolitis framing.)