by Robert W. McDonald

Created on: February 18, 2010   Last Updated: February 20, 2010

The longstanding allegation that childhood immunizations are in some way related to autism was dealt its death blow on February 2, 2010 when the British medical journal “Lancet” announced that it was formally retracting the 1998 report that first suggested a possible relationship between the two.

In the professional medical literature, retracting a previously published report or study is considered the “death penalty” of medical research. Formal retractions are unusual and are published only after the original research is demonstrated to have been based on critical flaws in its methodology or when a further review of the original data has demonstrated overwhelming evidence that the original study data was manipulated to demonstrate a relationship that, in actuality, did not exist.

The “Lancet’s” retraction came less than a week after a decision by Great Britain’s General Medical Council that the original study’s lead investigator, Andrew Wakefield, had deliberately manipulated his research data in order to demonstrate a relationship between routine childhood immunizations and autism that, in fact, did not exist.

The General Medical Council’s report also stated that it had found that Wakefield had also ordered unnecessary diagnostic tests, failed to act “in the best interests” of the children under his care, and had breached the ethical standards of medical research when he failed to disclose that he was simultaneously acting as a paid, “expert” consultant to several British law firms that were pursuing lawsuits against vaccine manufacturing companies.

Under Great Britain’s administrative law practices, the General Medical Council is responsible for licensing physicians and setting standards of medical practice. The Council also disclosed that it was conducting a “fitness to practice” medicine investigation of Wakefield, which could result in either the suspension or revocation of his medical license.

Wakefield’s original report described a series of 12 patients under the age of 10 who had allegedly developed both bowel disease and developmental disorders following measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination. However, a second study published in “Lancet” in 2004 was unable to reproduce Wakefield’s findings in a larger group of autistic children, prompting 10 of the 12 researchers whose names had appeared as co-investigators on Wakefield’s  to publish a letter  in “Lancet” asking that their names be removed from his report.

In the United States, Wakefield’s report prompted a comprehensive review of MMR vaccines by both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. The results of that review, also published in 2004, found that there was no evidence to support Wakefield’s contention.

Although Wakefield’s 1998 report prompted dozens of lawsuits against the pharmaceutical industry, all such actions have either dismissed for lack of merit or by a decision of a civil law jury that there was insufficient scientific and medical evidence to demonstrate a distinct relationship between autism and MMR vaccinations.

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