3: Vaccines Cause Autism

We don't know for sure what causes autism. But we know for sure that vaccines don't. It's not an open case. But let's crack it anyway and go over the arguments.

The case that vaccines cause autism was advanced by a British doctor called Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield wasn't an antivaxxxer. He was just a crook. When his research was analyzed by his colleagues during the effectively endless process of peer review that all scientific work faces, being constantly probed for credibility and reliability by other scientists, here's what they found:

His sample size was tiny: just twelve children. And of those, he suggested that eight had symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease and developmental problems that could have been autism. (Actually, all 12 of them did, but Wakefield thought eight looked more credible so he lied.) In his original paper Wakefield didn't explicitly claim that MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine) caused autism. He saved that for a patent application filed just after he published his paper, and before he had begun his campaign against MMR. In that patent, Wakefield said "it has now been shown that use of the MMR vaccine...results in... autism, in some infants." 

By 2004, after six years during which no other scientists were able to show a link between bowel inflammation and autism, or between autism and MMR, Wakefield was under serious scrutiny and by 2010 the editor of the Lancet, the journal that had published Wakefield's paper, was saying it had been "deceived" and that Wakefield's work was "utterly false." A Fitness to Practice Tribunal found Wakefield guilty of abuse, misconduct and dishonesty and struck him off the register, forbidding him to practice medicine in the UK

There's now little doubt that Wakefield falsified his results, acted unethically and committed fraud: he had several businesses in the pipeline intended to profit from his MMR/autism "research" at the time he was found out and had been paid almost half a million pounds ($750k) by a group of solicitors acting on behalf of parents who thought their children had been damaged by vaccinations to conduct his research. He didn't think the gravy train would stop there, though. Once public confidence in the MMR vaccine was damaged, Wakefield told the father on one of the boys in his study, it would be possible to make a fortune selling diagnostic kits to concerned parents. Wakefield expected to net about £43m a year (c. $64m) this way and he and the boy's father were in the process of setting the company up when the GMC caught wind and the bottom fell out.

Wakefield initially launched a libel suit against investigative reporter Brian Deer, who brought to light the discrepancies in his work that made the GMC pick up the case. He claimed that "Mr Deer’s implications of fraud against me are claims that a trained physician and researcher of good standing had suddenly decided he was going to fake data for his own enrichment," but after being found guilty and struck off by the GMC and having his companies to sell diagnostic kits and work on replacement vaccines closed down under him, he dropped his many libel suits and fled to the USA when the facts emerged, where he continues to publish anti-vaccination literature based on "research" the British Medical Journal said was "falsified."

In the United States, Wakefield's equivalent was Dr James Bradstreet. Bradstreet, like Wakefield, sought to profit from dodgy research: he published evidence that didn't support his conclusions, then used the conclusions to market his own system of "curing" children of the ostensible negative effects of vaccines, using dangerous, untested chelation therapies, hyperbaric (high-pressure) oxygen chambers, and experimental hormone treatment (yes, really). He also performed exorcisms. Again, yes, really. The sleep of reason brings forth the same superstitious spasms: generations after the polio epidemics that convulsed the USA and had desperate doctors (and even more desperate parents) trying almond baths and electric currents, we're back with the leeches, the fleams, the mumbled incantations, and, yes, incredibly, the casting out of the Evil One.

Like Wakefield, Bradstreet had a hard time in the courts, and like Wakefield he had plans to profit from his work that went beyond his immediate practice. When word of his "treatments" reached the FBI, they raided his lab and discovered evidence of grey-area and outright illegal drug dealing. Bradstreet was involved in a web of groups selling untested, possibly contaminated "medicines" manufactured in underground laboratories and black-market factories. Shortly thereafter Bradstreet was discovered in a local creek bed, dead from a gunshot wound to the chest that the local coroner's office ruled self-inflicted.

READ Autism - Should You Try a Casein and Gluten Free Diet for Your Child?

So there you have it: the nearest we've ever come to a convincing piece of evidence that there's any link between vaccines, autism and childhood developmental diseases. It comes from a fraud who treated children unethically, lied for money and had plans to lie more to make more, and now resides at the very beating heart of the anti-vaxxx movement where he continues to publish material like his 2010 book Callous Disregard — ironically, the words the GMC used to describe Wakefield's idea of professional ethics.

And it comes from a fraud and quack and black marketeer who was lucky not to kill any his "patients" outright: one of the drugs he used, a cancer treatment called GcMAF, killed five children in Switzerland the very day Bradstreet's offices were raided.

(It's possible Wakefield will take offense at the description I've given of him, or even think I am one of the bloggers who are paid by the pharmaceutical industry to spread false rumors, based on nothing more than court records and the records and pronouncements of the General Medical Council, about his misdeeds. Indeed Wakefield has sued many times for libel on this very issue and on every occasion, his suits have been withdrawn or abandoned, with one exception when a judge in Texas threw his case out. Don't hold your breath.)

We still don't know what causes autism; we do know it's not MMR.