Andrew Wakefield
Andrew Jeremy Wakefield (born 1957) is a discredited former British doctor who became an anti-vaccine activist. He was a gastroenterologist until he was struck off the UK medical register for unethical behaviour, misconduct, and dishonesty for authoring a fraudulent research paper that claimed a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism and bowel disease.After the publication of the paper, other researchers were unable to reproduce Wakefield's findings or confirm his hypothesis of an association between the MMR vaccine and autism, or autism and gastrointestinal disease. A 2004 investigation by Sunday Times reporter Brian Deer identified undisclosed financial conflicts of interest on Wakefield's part, and most of his co-authors then withdrew their support for the study's interpretations. The British General Medical Council (GMC) conducted an inquiry into allegations of misconduct against Wakefield and two former colleagues. The investigation centred on Deer's findings, including that children with autism were subjected to unnecessary invasive medical procedures such as colonoscopies and lumbar punctures, and that Wakefield acted without the required ethical approval from an institutional review board.
On 28 January 2010, a five-member statutory tribunal of the GMC found three dozen charges proved, including four counts of dishonesty and twelve counts involving the abuse of developmentally delayed children. The panel ruled that Wakefield had "failed in his duties as a responsible consultant", acted against the interests of his patients, and acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in his published research. The Lancet fully retracted the 1998 publication on the basis of the GMC's findings, noting that elements of the manuscript had been falsified. The Lancet's editor-in-chief Richard Horton said the paper was "utterly false" and that the journal had been "deceived". Three months following The Lancet's retraction, Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register, with a statement identifying deliberate falsification in the research published in The Lancet, and was thereby barred from practising medicine in the UK. A British Administrative Court Justice noted in a related decision—"There is now no respectable body of opinion which supports (Dr. Wakefield's) hypothesis, that MMR vaccine and autism/enterocolitis are causally linked".In January 2011, an editorial accompanying an article by Brian Deer in BMJ described Wakefield's work as an "elaborate fraud". In a follow-up article, Deer said that Wakefield had planned to launch a venture on the back of an MMR vaccination scare that would profit from new medical tests and "litigation driven testing". In November 2011, another report in BMJ revealed original raw data indicating that, contrary to Wakefield's claims in The Lancet, children in his research did not have inflammatory bowel disease.Wakefield's study and his claim that the MMR vaccine might cause autism led to a decline in vaccination rates in the United States, United Kingdom and Ireland and a corresponding rise in measles and mumps, resulting in serious illness and deaths, and his continued claims that the vaccine is harmful have contributed to a climate of distrust of all vaccines and the reemergence of other previously controlled diseases.Wakefield has continued to defend his research and conclusions, saying there was no fraud, hoax or profit motive. In February 2015, he publicly repeated his denials and refused to back down from his assertions. ...more on Wikipedia
