Page 3 of 3 [ 33 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2, 3

Davvo7
Toucan
Toucan

User avatar

Joined: 2 Mar 2013
Age: 61
Gender: Male
Posts: 286
Location: UK

16 Apr 2015, 3:42 am

Regarding the Wakefield "study", please read this excerpt from the British Medical Journal to clarify the reality of that fraud and the disgusting reality of that man. I apologise for the length of this post but since this has been cited, and continues to be used to justify stupidity it needs to be clarified.

http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7452

Wakefield’s article linking MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulent

Authored by Andrew Wakefield and 12 others, the paper’s scientific limitations were clear when it appeared in 1998.2 3 As the ensuing vaccine scare took off, critics quickly pointed out that the paper was a small case series with no controls, linked three common conditions, and relied on parental recall and beliefs.4 Over the following decade, epidemiological studies consistently found no evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.5 6 7 8 By the time the paper was finally retracted 12 years later, 9 after forensic dissection at the General Medical Council’s (GMC) longest ever fitness to practise hearing,10 few people could deny that it was fatally flawed both scientifically and ethically. But it has taken the diligent scepticism of one man, standing outside medicine and science, to show that the paper was in fact an elaborate fraud.

In a series of articles starting this week, and seven years after first looking into the MMR scare, journalist Brian Deer now shows the extent of Wakefield’s fraud and how it was perpetrated (doi:10.1136/bmj.c5347). Drawing on interviews, documents, and data made public at the GMC hearings, Deer shows how Wakefield altered numerous facts about the patients’ medical histories in order to support his claim to have identified a new syndrome; how his institution, the Royal Free Hospital and Medical School in London, supported him as he sought to exploit the ensuing MMR scare for financial gain; and how key players failed to investigate thoroughly in the public interest when Deer first raised his concerns.11

Deer published his first investigation into Wakefield’s paper in 2004.12 This uncovered the possibility of research fraud, unethical treatment of children, and Wakefield’s conflict of interest through his involvement with a lawsuit against manufacturers of the MMR vaccine. Building on these findings, the GMC launched its own proceedings that focused on whether the research was ethical. But while the disciplinary panel was examining the children’s medical records in public, Deer compared them with what was published in the Lancet. His focus was now on whether the research was true.

The Office of Research Integrity in the United States defines fraud as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism.13 Deer unearthed clear evidence of falsification. He found that not one of the 12 cases reported in the 1998 Lancet paper was free of misrepresentation or undisclosed alteration, and that in no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal.

Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children’s cases accurately? No. A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was gross. Moreover, although the scale of the GMC’s 217 day hearing precluded additional charges focused directly on the fraud, the panel found him guilty of dishonesty concerning the study’s admissions criteria, its funding by the Legal Aid Board, and his statements about it afterwards.14

Furthermore, Wakefield has been given ample opportunity either to replicate the paper’s findings, or to say he was mistaken. He has declined to do either. He refused to join 10 of his coauthors in retracting the paper’s interpretation in 2004,15 and has repeatedly denied doing anything wrong at all. Instead, although now disgraced and stripped of his clinical and academic credentials, he continues to push his views.16

Further, from the website of the Journalist Brian Deer,

http://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-summary.htm

But Deer's investigation - nominated in February 2011 for two British Press Awards - discovered that, while Wakefield held himself out to be a dispassionate scientist, two years before the Lancet paper was published - and before any of the 12 children were even referred to the hospital - he had been hired to attack MMR by a lawyer, Richard Barr: a jobbing solicitor in the small eastern English town of King's Lynn, who hoped to raise a speculative class action lawsuit against drug companies which manufactured the triple shot.

Unlike expert witnesses, who give professional advice and opinions, Wakefield had negotiated an unprecedented contract with Barr, then aged 48, to conduct clinical and scientific research. The goal was to find evidence of what the two men claimed to be a "new syndrome", intended to be the centrepiece of (later failed) litigation on behalf of an eventual 1,600 British families, recruited through media stories. This publicly undisclosed role for Wakefield created the grossest conflict of interest, and the exposure of it by Deer, in February 2004, led to public uproar in Britain, the retraction of the Lancet report's conclusions section, and, from July 2007 to May 2010, the longest-ever professional misconduct hearing by the UK's General Medical Council (GMC).

Barr [audio] paid the doctor with money from the UK legal aid fund: run by the government to give poorer people access to justice. Wakefield charged at the extraordinary rate of £150 an hour - billed through a company of his wife's - eventually totalling, for generic work alone, what the UK Legal Services Commission, pressed by Deer under the freedom of information act, said was £435,643 (then about $750,000 US), plus expenses. These hourly fees - revealed in The Sunday Times in December 2006 - gave the doctor a direct personal, but undeclared, financial interest in his research claims: totalling more than eight times his reported annual salary and creating an incentive not only for him to launch the alarm, but to keep it going for as long as possible.

In addition to the personal payments, Wakefield was awarded an initial £55,000, which he had applied for in June 1996, but which, like the hourly fees, he never declared to the Lancet as he should have done, for the express purpose of conducting the research later submitted to the journal. This start-up funding was part of a staggering £26.2m of taxpayers' money (more than $56m US at 2014 prices) eventually shared among a small group of doctors and lawyers, working under Barr's and Wakefield's direction, trying to prove that MMR caused the previously unheard-of "syndrome". Yet more surprising, Wakefield had asserted the existence of such a syndrome - which allegedly included what he would dub "autistic enterocolitis" - before he performed the research which purportedly discovered it.

This Barr-Wakefield deal was the foundation of the vaccine crisis, both in Britain and throughout the world. "I have mentioned to you before that the prime objective is to produce unassailable evidence in court so as to convince a court that these vaccines are dangerous," the lawyer reminded the doctor in a confidential letter, six months before the Lancet report.

And, if this was not enough to cast doubt on the research's objectivity, The Sunday Times investigation unearthed another shocking conflict of interest. In June 1997 - nearly nine months before the press conference at which Wakefield called for single vaccines - he had filed a patent on products, including his own supposedly "safer" single measles vaccine, which only stood any prospect of success if confidence in MMR was damaged. Although Wakefield denied any such plans, his proposed shot, and a network of companies intended to raise venture capital for purported inventions - including "a replacement for attenuated viral vaccines", commercial testing kits and what he claimed to be a possible "complete cure" for autism - were set out in confidential documents.

One Wakefield business was awarded £800,000 from the legal aid fund on the strength of (later discredited) data which he had co-authored. And, even as the Lancet paper was being prepared, behind the scenes he was negotiating extraordinary plans to exploit the public alarm with secret schemes that would line his pockets. "Disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield plotted to make £28 million a year from the MMR jab panic he triggered," was how the British tabloid newspaper The Sun, for example, reported in January 2011 on this late disclosure from Deer.