Vaccine-Autism Link Not Only Wrong, But an ‘Elaborate Fraud’

Vaccinating children is important, but has come under increasing scrutiny over the last decade.  So much so, that many parents have stopped vaccinating their children.  The result of this trend has been devastating as new cases of previously eradicated diseases in the US such as measles have been popping up.   Most pharma companies stopped working on measles decades ago, leaving the US unable to launch a counteroffensive if the disease popped its ugly head in greater numbers. 

Many parents have come to believe that autism was caused by vaccines.  This could not be farther from the truth, as local vaccine expert Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has been saying for over a decade.  Some people were so convinced of the autism-vaccine link that they sent death threats to Dr. Offit’s house.  In the end, Dr. Offit was right.  

The seminal study linking autism to children’s vaccines was found to be fraudulent (here’s a thorough accounting by BMJ).  I like this summary from NY Magazine:

“One of the most famous flawed studies ever conducted, Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s now-retracted 1998 paper that linked vaccines to autism has been found to be not a scientific error, but a deliberate lie. BMJ, a British medical journal, has just published its investigation of the matter and concluded that Dr. Wakefield purposely falsified his data. They report that he was contracted by lawyers determined to sue the vaccine manufacturers, regardless of scientific truth.

British authorities revoked Wakefield’s medical license back in May 2010, but the effects of his study persist on both sides of the Atlantic: Vaccination rates have hit record lows here in America, and measles rates have skyrocketed accordingly. It remains to be seen whether these new revelations about the Wakefield study will have any effect, or if they’ll be drowned out by the Jenny McCarthys of the world and their continuing campaign against childhood vaccination.”