Report Linking Vaccine to Autism 'Fraudulent,' Says British Medical Journal

British Medical Journal says widespread belief based on falsified data.

ByABC News
January 5, 2011, 2:52 PM

Jan. 5, 2011— -- Evidence published a decade ago, giving birth to the belief of a connection between vaccines and autism, has been deemed outright "fraudulent," according to an editorial published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal.

Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a former British surgeon, published research in 1998 that seemed to establish a link between vaccines and autism. But authors of the editorial confirmed previous suggestions that Wakefield skewed patients' medical records to support his hypothesis that the widely-used measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) combination vaccine was causing autism and irritable bowel disease.

The autism-vaccine link was one of the major medical controversies of the last decade.

"Clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare," the authors wrote in the editorial.

According to the editorial, Wakefield stood to gain financially from his purported findings because of his involvement in a lawsuit against manufacturers of the MMR vaccine. British news reports said Wakefield was hired as a consultant by lawyers trying to sue the vaccine's manufacturers. His compensation, they said, was about $750,000.

Wakefield's representatives would not offer an on-the-record comment today.

The editorial may not be enough to dissuade many people who believe Wakefield's claims, no matter how compelling the scientific evidence, according to Dr. Paul Offit, chief of the Section of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia.

"It's unfair for the BMJ to call him a fraud, because as a fraud you have to have mal intent," said Offit. "But if you give Wakefield a lie detector test and ask him if he thinks MMR causes autism, he'd say yes. And he would probably pass, because he holds to it as one holds to a religious belief."

Wakefield's claim, first published in The Lancet, has since been roundly discredited. But though the paper was retracted from the journal in February 2010, it is still cited by some doctors and many parents of children with autism.

Colleen McGrath, 42, of San Diego, Cali, heard Wakefield speak at a local autism conference in July 2010 and said she knew she was doing the right thing by selectively choosing which vaccines would be best for her two children.