Andrew Wakefield's discredited theory linking vaccination and autism stirred public fears.It is one of the most serious allegations that could be made about a doctor: manipulating patients' histories to make money.
Wakefield was the lead author of a 1998 paper in The Lancet (A. J. Wakefield et al. Lancet 351, 637–641; 1998) reporting on the case histories of 12 children who had received the MMR vaccine and developed symptoms of autism or inflammatory bowel disease.
The paper inflamed public fears about vaccines, but it was retracted in 2010 after the UK General Medical Council (GMC) concluded that Wakefield had a charge of serious professional misconduct to answer, in part because it found that his team did not have proper ethical approval for tests performed on the children. Later in the year, the GMC found him guilty of the misconduct charge and revoked his licence to practice as a doctor. By then, more than 12 large-scale epidemiological studies had failed to find evidence of the hypothesized link (J. S. Gerber and P. A. Offit Clin. Infect. Dis. 48,456–461; 2009) and the MMR vaccine is today regarded as safe.
But was the paper merely mistaken, or a deliberate fraud? Articles by medical journalist Brian Deer published in the BMJ in 2010 and 2011 accused Wakefield of reporting histories for the children that were not consistent with their records and their parents' recollections, at a time when Wakefield was also being paid by lawyers intending to sue MMR manufacturers. Deer's articles themselves did not allege fraud, but on their basis a BMJ editorial in January 2011 called the paper fraudulent.
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