Closer To The Ideal

Andrew Wakefield is the guy who started the hoax that autism was caused by vaccines. His panic he started lead to many parents making poor choices for the health of their children. The full extent of the harm that he has done will never be know. Happily, his career is now coming to an end, and he is facing the dishonor that he deserves.

Twelve years after his now discredited claim in The Lancet that injections of the MMR vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella might cause autism and bowel disorders in children, Andrew Wakefield is closer than ever to being banned from practising as a doctor.

Publication of his claims panicked parents into abandoning the shots, which had peaked in uptake at 92 per cent of UK children in 1995, falling to a trough of just 81 per cent in 2004.

A panel appointed by the UK General Medical Council – which regulates and monitors British doctors – concluded today that there’s now no factual impediment to Wakefield and two of the co-authors on his paper facing charges of professional misconduct.

…The GMC panel also affirmed irregularities in the way Wakefield recruited and managed the 12 children involved in the study.

At least four of the 12 lacked the history of gastrointestinal symptoms and so did not constitute the “routine referrals to the gastroenterology department” that had been stated in the paper. “The panel concluded that your description of the referral process as ‘routine’, when it was not, was irresponsible and misleading and contrary to your duty as a senior author,” it says. “The panel is satisfied that your conduct in this regard was dishonest and irresponsible.”

On another occasion, at his own son’s birthday party in 1999, he took blood from children who were there as guests and paid them each £5 for agreeing to this. He was accused by the panel of showing “callous disregard for the distress and pain that you knew, or ought to have known, the children would suffer.”

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 1:54 pm and is filed under biology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.