The Medical Hoax That Still Haunts Us Today

It wasn’t just the inability to replicate Wakefield’s study that got his paper retracted

Many people believe that vaccines can cause autism, despite years and years of research showing otherwise. This all started after the release of a 1998 paper by Wakefield and twelve of his co-authors that claimed there was a link between autism and the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Although, later retracted this paper left behind extremely damaging results on the community. Results that even years later, healthcare professionals continue to fight through. Wakefield had changed the world, in the worst way possible.

The study.

It all started in 1998 when Wakefield et al. published a study in the Lancet, that claimed to have found a connection between autism and the MMR vaccine. After performing a study on twelve children, Wakefield claimed that a regressive autism phenotype called autism-enterocolitis syndrome was triggered by the MMR vaccine. In simpler terms, he theorized that the MMR vaccine could cause gastrointestinal problems which could then lead to autism. Although the 1998 paper is the most popular one, Wakefield also issued a paper in 2000, claiming that the MMR vaccine was implemented without sufficient safety testing. The thing is these papers initially had no effect on the world, in fact, they pretty much remained out of sight. It was only when a medical charity held a televised press conference where Wakefield was given the opportunity to outline the results of his study, that the papers took a drastic turn. Vaccination rates in England had decreased from 91% in 1998 to below 80% in 2003, and cases of measles rose from 56 in 1998 to 1370 in 2008. By 2009, 1 of 5 parents in the US believed that vaccines cause autism. We had entered a public health crisis.

The doubt begins.

All around the world, researchers rushed to conduct their own studies to verify the link between the MMR vaccine and autism but came up with nothing. A cohort study in Denmark tested over 500,000 children and found no increased risk for autism after MMR vaccination. Two reviewers performed a meta-analysis consisting of five cohort studies involving over 1,000,000 children, and five case-control studies involving just under 10,000 kids. Ultimately they found no evidence for increased risk of developing autism after getting the MMR vaccine in both the cohort data and the case-control data.

In addition to that, many researchers questioned the technicality of the study. To start, this study had been conducted on twelve children — a very small subject size. Research had been conducted on nine of the children without the hospital’s ethics committee approval, while three of them had unnecessary invasive procedures. Wakefield deliberately lied in the Lancet paper claiming that participating children were referred independently to the study when in reality, many of the children were chosen specifically by Wakefield. Not only did he use a biased population for his study, when given the chance to come clean about it, he lied, not once but twice. Brian Deer, a British investigative reporter, who probably played the most important role in the demolishment of Wakefield’s theory, found that he had manipulated the children’s medical records to favour his study. For example, medical tests that were performed on the children in this study came back negative for gastrointestinal problems, however, Wakefield had labelled it in his paper as “non-specific.” Although unrelated to the study, Wakefield had also paid five pounds to each child to obtain blood samples at his own son’s birthday party and later joked about it in a public presentation.

After the conduction of over twenty studies and an in-depth analysis of the study by Wakefield et al., the scientific community united together against this theory, believing that vaccines did not cause or contribute to the development of autism.

The alleged end to Wakefield’s greatness.

In 2010, the Lancet decided to retract the Wakefield et al. paper. This decision was made after ten of the twelve co-authors of the paper stepped forward to admit that there was in fact insufficient data to determine a link between MMR vaccine and autism. However, that alone did not cause the publication to withdraw the paper. It was brought to the attention of the Lancet that he had failed to disclose financial interests related to the study. Dr. Wakefield had received approximately $670,000 from lawyers who were representing parents in lawsuits against vaccine-producing companies, specifically MMR. In the statement issued by the editors of the Lancet regarding the financial intentions of Wakefield, three allegations were verifiable.

The children who reported in the Lancet study were also part of a Legal Aid Board funded pilot project, led by Dr.Wakefield — a pilot project with the aim of investigating the grounds for pursuing a multi-party legal action on behalf of parents of allegedly vaccine-damaged children, the existence of which was not disclosed to the editors of The Lancet.

That the results eventually reported in the 1998 Lancet paper were passed to lawyers and used to justify the multiparty legal action prior to publication, a fact that was not disclosed to the editors of The Lancet.

That Dr Wakefield received £55000 from the Legal Aid Board to conduct this pilot project and that, since there was a substantial overlap of children in both the Legal Aid Board funded pilot project and the Lancet paper, this was a financial conflict of interest that should have been declared to the editors and was not.

It was also later revealed that Wakefield had been working on creating his own supposedly “safe” MMR vaccine which was to be marketed by the father of one of the children in his study.

Even though questions began to rise around the findings of this study, it took twelve years for him to lose his licence. When the time came, Wakefield was given about 30 days to appeal the allegations against him. His one last chance to save his medical license, his career. Surprisingly (or not), he provided no explanations to back up his claims from the study, and as a result, the doctor was found guilty by the British General Medical Council (GMC) of three-dozen charges and was banned from practicing medicine.

Where is Wakefield now?

As much as we’d like to believe that this was the downfall of Wakefield, it wasn’t. After the disgraced doctor lost everything in the UK, he found refuge in the US where he was gladly accepted by the anti-vaxxers of America. He continues to promote dangerous views related to vaccine safety and remains resistant in his views. Just a few years ago, in 2017, he was linked to one of the largest measles outbreak in Minnesota after he had educated communities there about the “risks” associated with MMR vaccines. Back in 2018, he sat down with reporters from The Independent to talk about how the scientific community allegedly wronged him.

“I was discredited in the eyes of those who wanted to see me discredited. In other words, those who had an interest in maintaining the status quo”

He continues to remain defiant and promote his beliefs all over the States, yielding terrifying consequences.

What happens now?

Although scientifically this story may be over, in reality, it is not. Wakefield’s work led to the development of the anti-vaxxer movement and is part of the reason why people are hesitant to get the COVID-19 vaccine today. One individual triggered a worldwide panic, that 23-years later, still exists today. According to the Conversation, almost three in five people in the world still believe that vaccines can cause autism in healthy kids. Just within the first three months of 2019, World Health Organization (WHO) reported more than 110,000 measles cases globally, marking a 300% rise from the same period in the previous year. The outcome of this one event has led us into an ongoing battle for vaccine safety.

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