Andrew Wakefield

Allegations of ethical misconduct against Wakefield and two former colleagues involved in the Lancet study prompted the British General Medical Council (GMC) to begin in 2007 what became its longest ever ‘fitness to practise’ investigation. In January 2010 a GMC tribunal ruled that Wakefield and Professor John Walker-Smith") were guilty of serious professional misconduct. As a result, The Lancet retracted the original paper, 12 years after it was first published. Both doctors were struck off the medical register in May 2010,[[1]]( and have since filed High Court appeals. [[4]]( 4.2 Conflicts of interest: Andrew Wakefield 4.2.1 Legal aid work for parents suing vaccine manufacturers The paper said: "We identified associated gastrointestinal disease and developmental regression in a group of previously normal children, which was generally associated in time with possible environmental triggers."[[12]]( While the paper noted some parents' views that those environmental triggers included the MMR vaccine, the paper itself did not claim a causal link.[[13]]( At a press conference, Wakefield said he believed that instead of the triple MMR, children should be given doses in single jabs, preferably a year apart. The ensuing public furore 'directly'[[3]]( resulted in a dramatic fall in public uptake of the MMR vaccine[[16]]( down as low as 80 per cent in 2003-04. The BMJ points out that subsequent epidemiological studies “have consistently found no evidence of a link between autism and the vaccine”.[[3]]( In October 2001 Wakefield was asked to leave the Royal Free after failing to mount a large-scale controlled study to confirm or refute his claims about MMR.[[17]]( In 2004 Lancet editor Richard Horton publicly rejected the paper after it emerged that Wakefield had failed to declare he had received £55,000 in legal aid funds to advise solicitors representing parents considering suing over MMR.[[18]]( Soon after, ten of Wakefield’s co-authors and ex-colleagues also published a statement formally retracting the paper’s interpretation of the possible link between the MMR vaccine and autism, in view of the fact that ‘consequent events have had major implications for public health.’[[19]]( Wakefield and two co-authors responded on both issues, stating Wakefield had never concealed the legal aid funding, and had never made the claim of a causal link nor interpreted a possible MMR/autism link, so it was “difficult to know quite what has been retracted”. [[20]]( The BMJ editorial in January 2011 by editors Fiona Godlee, Jane Smith and Harvey Marcovitch stated they had “no doubt” that Wakefield “had perpetrated… fraud” in his flawed 1998 paper. Investigations by journalist Brian Deer, they said, had uncovered “clear evidence of falsification” of patients’ medical histories by Wakefield “in order to support his claim to have identified a new syndrome”. They stated that: a great deal of thought and effect must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction: misreporting was gross.”[[3]]( The BMJ editors said hard lessons had emerged from this “highly damaging saga”, particularly for the co-authors who the GMC had found were seemingly unaware of which child was which in the study’s anonymised text and tables; it was Wakefield alone who wrote the final version of the paper. [[3]]( In a subsequent editorial, editor-in-chief Fiona Godlee declared that a review of documents on the Lancet’s supposed ‘full investigation’, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, made it “hard to escape the conclusion that this represents institutional and editorial misconduct”.[[22]]( The disciplinary panel also found Wakefield guilty of dishonesty concerning the study’s admissions criteria, its funding by the Legal Aid Board and his statements about it afterwards. [[3]]( Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear t