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Today I will be discussing Andrew Wakefield’s claims on how “vaccines cause autism”. The paper that he published in Lancet has since been retracted, but it is important to look at his claims and analyze where mistakes were made. His study consisted of 12 children with ages ranging from 3-10 years old. Eleven of the twelve children were boys. He focused on children with chronic enterocolitis and regressive development. This paper shocked the general population, and there was a lot of speculation in the scientific community about his findings. Afterwards, there were many sources stating that his experiment and his conclusions were not supported.
An article published in the PMC journal stated that his small sample size and uncontrollable design led to fraudulent conclusions. It also stated that there were some conflicts of interest due to lawyers funding Wakefield’s research and those same lawyers being involved in lawsuits with the parents against vaccine companies. Experiments that have been conducted after the release of Wakefield’s paper have reflected opposite results. A paper that was published in PubMed revealed that there was actually evidence against the correlation with autism and the MMR vaccine or any measles vaccine. The sample size for this experiment was 8x larger than the sample size of Wakefields. This study also had a control group and did not go against any ethical guidelines. Although it was established in the scientific community that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism, there was a large effect on the general population’s views on vaccines.
An article published in PBS stated that in 2000, the measles had been completely eliminated from the US. In 2011 however, there were more than 200 cases that appeared. These outbreaks originated overseas in Europe. These outbreaks are thought to be caused by parents who did not vaccinate their children. This was due to the fear of their children developing autism. This has caused a risk of disease in the general population and related health complications. Because of this, the “wakefield fraud” has become one of the most serious frauds in medical history.
