Article: http://news.sympatico.ca/oped/coffee-talk/infamous_vaccine_autism_study_discredited/398dd551


Nikolita Note: Someone should send this to Jenny McCarthy... mad


The first study linking vaccines to autism is now considered a fraud. Dr. Andrew Wakefield's 1998 report in the journal Lancet showed a link between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella and has now been completely discredited.

According to journalist Brian Deer the information in the study was based on doctored information about the children involved in the study. The conclusions from the report were retracted by 10 of its 13 authors and later retracted by the medical journal Lancet.

Despite this, Wakefield's study left a lasting legacy. The suggestion that a vaccine could in some way be connected to autism scared enough parents worldwide that immunization rates have dropped dramatically. Over the last decade there has been a growing mistrust of the medical community and of vaccines at large.

This is in part due to the fact that not everyone believes that the Wakefield study is a fraud. Some suggest that the court responsible for ruling against the study, England's General Medical Council, was a ‘kangaroo court' in which public health officials were in the pocket of vaccine makers and Big Pharma. Those same officials played judge and jury in this case.

Others have more personal reasons to mistrust the discrediting of the study. Rick Rollens, an American parent of an autistic child and one of the founders of the MIND Institute says, "This is just another sad installment of the continued public lynching of Dr. Wakefield by the vaccine establishment and their lackeys in the public health community. The relentless personal and professional assaults on Dr. Wakefield will do nothing now or in the future to alter what we as parents of vaccine-induced autistic children already know: that is, vaccines can and do cause autism. No amount of orchestrated attacks by those who have a vested interest in defending the status quo on the historic and courageous work of Dr. Wakefield will change the truth."

Still, you have to wonder if parents of un-vaccinated children the world over are questioning their decisions after learning that Wakefield deliberately doctored his infamous study. To vaccinate or not vaccinate, that is the question. One of the most controversial questions a parent will face, made even more complicated by this new discovery.