The prestigious medical journal The Lancet published its first issue 1823 — and it's been putting out new peer-reviewed scientific papers every week ever since.
It would be an understatement to say that getting your paper into The Lancet isn't easy at all:
- First, you've got to be a successful scientist who spent years working on, and specializing in, a certain topic.
- The next step is achieving a major scientific breakthrough, or at least making a big and important discovery in your field of medical science.
- The third step is when a group of people — usually older, more successful and, generally speaking, more experienced than you — double or triple check everything you've done. They pour over your topic, your methods, and the conclusions you reached during your scientific experiment, trying to prove you wrong at every turn.
The publication
In his paper, Dr Wakefield and his team investigated cases of 12 children who had been showing symptoms of bowel disease. What the team found out is that all 12 of the subjects in this study were exposed to the MMR vaccine. Nine out of 12 of these subjects were also diagnosed with autism and one subject was diagnosed with psychosis, while the other two had encephalitis. The conclusion was, quote:
"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."
The environmental trigger was, supposedly, the MMR vaccine.
The problems
In the years following the publication of this shocking finding, Dr Wakefield continued publishing works in smaller papers, in a personal mission to convince people that vaccines aren't safe. Although the subsequent papers were published in lesser-known journals and had little to no evidence backing their claims up, the story about the (lack of) safety of immunization was widely covered by popular media all over the world.
- Dr Wakefield's sample size was way too small to draw any conclusions, let alone to have any statistical significance.
- Dr Wakefield also didn't include a control group (for example, a group of children who didn't receive the MMR vaccine) so he and his team didn't really have any data they could compare their findings to.
- And last, but not least, Dr Wakefield ignored one of the main scientific principles, one scientists repeat ad nauseam — that correlation doesn't equal causation. In other words, you can't conclude that two things are related just because they happen at the same time, or one follows the other.
In this particular example, the children did develop some form of autism after receiving the MMR vaccine. Autism is often diagnosed at or around the age of four, however, and it is really hard to notice any type of neurological disorder before the age of two, when children aren't normally very communicative.
The first dose of the MMR vaccine is administered when a child is 15 months old, and the second dose follows at the age of four. If a child falls on the autism spectrum, this diagnosis is very likely to be made at this same age, regardless of whether the child has received the vaccine.
Also, contrary to what Dr Wakefield reported, the sampling wasn't consecutive. The team cherry-picked cases that supported their hypothesis.
The aftermath
As of 2010, Andrew Wakefield is no longer a doctor. The UK's General Medical Council revoked his medical license, as he was found guilty of about 30 charges.
Since the fraudulent paper was published, many studies have been conducted to prove that the MMR vaccine is indeed safe. The newest such study, coming from Denmark, included 657451 children born between 1999 and 2010. No connection between the MMR vaccine and the onset of autism spectrum disorder has been found.
In conclusion
Twenty years ago, a paper was published by a fraud whose only goal was to gain financial success and fame. Dr Andrew Wakefield's claims have been disproved many times over the years, but there are still a lot of people who believe that vaccines are dangerous and can cause autism, resulting in deaths around the world.
Anybody who still uses Dr Wakefield's "research" as an argument against vaccination — because the fact that this study appeared in a scientific journal seems to lend it credibility — should also be familiar with the aftermath, and know that a scientific consensus founded on ample research exists. The benefits of MMR vaccination outweigh the risks in almost all cases.
If you choose not to vaccinate as a parent, you are putting your own children in danger, but also the people around them. Herd immunity is the most important mechanism of fighting infectious diseases. In some people, a vaccine just won't help build any immunity against the disease, as vaccines don't have a 100 percent success rate. Other people are too young to be vaccinated, while some have lost immunity against some diseases over the time. Exposing those people to the disease could be a death sentence to them.