Intended for healthcare professionals


Wakefield’s article linking MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulent


Re:If Wakefield's Lancet study was a fraud, why were its findings duplicated in 5 other countries?

Lucija Tomljenovic asks why Andrew Wakefield's findings were
duplicated in 5 other countries. The answer is easy:

They were not.

The findings in the since retracted Lancet paper were reported as

"We have identified a chronic enterocolitis in children that may be
related to neuropsychiatric dysfunction. In most cases, onset of symptoms
was after measles, mumps, and rubella immunisation."

There has not been an independent verification of this triad of
results, also not in the list Dr. Tomljenovic provides (1), which
comprises case reports, conference proceedings and papers of colleagues of
Wakefield's in journals he edited, as Debajyoti Datta rightly points out

The case of bowel inflammation in one autistic adult and two
editorials from a time when the extent of data manipulation in the Lancet
paper were still unclear (2000 and 2005) (3) don't "duplicate" Wakefield's
findings and the reference to the Cochrane's 2005 review of the MMR
vaccine (4) is a typical anti-vaccine canard. The topic at hand is whether
MMR causes autism with gut problems - the same Cochrane Review answers
precisely this question:

Crohn's disease was found."

I was wondering why a post-doctoral fellow, with free access to the
biomedical literature, an associate editor of a biomedial journal herself
(5), with no declared conflict of interest, would indiscrimately copy and
paste from anti-vaccine pages defending Andrew Wakefield, but quickly
found that Dr. Tomljenovic has recently spoken on the same anti-vaccine
conference as Andrew Wakefield (6), which might explain her bias. The
willingness of someone with scientific training to associate with the anti
-vaccine circus is still baffling.







Competing interests: I have previously blogged about this issue.

24 January 2011
Catherina G. Becker