Dr Andrew Wakefield caused a stir when he associated the risk of autism with what?
Andrew Wakefield Andrew Wakefield Andrew Jeremy Wakefield (born 1957) is a discredited former British doctor who became an anti-vaccine activist. He was a gastroenterologist until he was struck off the UK medical register for unethical behaviour, misconduct and fraud. In 1998 he authored a fraudulent research paper claiming that there was a link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism and bowel disease. After the publication of the paper, other researchers were unable to reproduce Wakefield's findings or confirm his hypothesis of an association between the MMR vaccine and autism, or autism and gastrointestinal disease. A 2004 investigation by
Controversies in autism misreported results in his 1998 paper, creating the appearance of a link with autism. A 2011 article in the British Medical Journal described how the data in the study had been falsified by Wakefield so it would arrive at a predetermined conclusion. An accompanying editorial in the same journal described Wakefield's work as an "elaborate fraud" which led to lower vaccination rates, putting hundreds of thousands of children at risk and diverting energy and money away from research into the true cause of autism. Following the belief that individual vaccines caused autism was the idea of vaccine overload, which claims