“Elaborate fraud” is what Andrew Wakefield’s findings were declared Wednesday by the British Medical Journal. The link that he had claimed between the thimerosal in MMR vaccination and autism had already been found to be baseless, and the medical journal The Lancet that published his 1998 paper formally retracted it almost a year ago. The significance of this week’s declaration is that Wakefield is judged not simply to have made honest mistakes but to have deliberately faked his “evidence”: fraud. Britain’s General Medical Council has declared his research to be “irresponsible and dishonest”.
Few recent stories of scientific research could so powerfully illustrate many knowledge issues within science regarding the role of peer review in science, scientific progress through weeding out error, the crucial nature of honesty and correct procedures in research when others will build their own work upon published claims – and, above all, the implications for decision-making of what is accepted as truth. Because of Wakefield, along with the anecdotal “evidence” proclaimed by a couple of mothers through the media (most infamously model Jenny McCarthy, showcased on Oprah Winfrey), thousands of parents fearing vaccination might cause autism have opted not to protect their children from the avoidable and often serious childhood diseases of measles, mumps, and rubella.
