What was Dr Andrew Wakefield’s “crime”?
In 1998, Dr Andrew Wakefield, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and a senior researcher in the University Departments of Medicine and Histopathology at the Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine, published a paper in the Lancet with his colleagues entitled: Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children.
Dr Wakefield’s special interest was inflammatory bowel disease and this paper reported a case series of 12 children with developmental disorders whose mothers also described a constellation of bowel symptoms appearing shortly after their child’s vaccination.
Wakefield’s co-authors included specialist physicians in psychiatry, histopathology, radiology and gastroenterology. After carefully documenting their research findings in the paper, the investigators cautiously concluded (emphasis added):
We have identified a chronic enterocolitis in children that may be related to neuropsychiatric dysfunction. In most cases, onset of symptoms was after measles, mumps, and rubella immunisation. Further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome and it’s possible relation to this vaccine.
As a medical researcher reading the paper for the first time, without all the accompanying hubris of 1998, I can assure you that the conclusions of this expert group were entirely appropriate: more research was indeed needed. Words like “may” and “possible” suggested a high level of uncertainty among the researchers about a causal link. At a subsequent press conference, Wakefield suggested that it may be prudent to use single vaccines instead of the MMR triple vaccine until this could be ruled out, which sounds like common sense to me as both a doctor and a mother. …