A recent blog entry in Psychology Today, acknowledged that Andrew Wakefield, along with two of his collaborators, were “found by Britain's General Medical Council (GMC) to have engaged in misconduct in relation to sparking a controversy over the autism-MMR myth.” He could potentially lose his license to practice medicine.
Yesterday the Journal Lancet retracted the 1998 study linking a routine childhood vaccine to autism and bowel disease after a U.K. investigation found flaws in the research.
One of the charges against Wakefield was that “he provided a research proposal to a lawyer seeking to sue vaccine manufacturers for causing autism.” In this case, it was not a pharmaceutical company who paid a doctor to promote a drug off-label or to ‘ghostwrite’ a manuscript, rather, it was the litigators trying to deepen their pockets—a goal that most plaintiff’s attorneys pride themselves in. In Comparison, drug and medical device companies exist for the sole purpose of improving patient treatment and health, with the goal of advancing science and technological innovation.
A case like this should raise more questions about the doctor’s attorney’s use to testify as experts, and whether their attorneys are “ghostwriting” their reports and testimony in a favorable light to their case. One group of experts cannot be victimized—those that work with industry—while another group—those that work with litigators—go unchecked.
Wakefield’s research “suggested that measles was a cause of autism because he and his colleagues purportedly detected components of the measles virus in the gastrointestinal tracts and blood of children with autism that were not present in typically developing children.” In contrast to his research, “D'Souza and colleagues (2006) “found that although his technique produced many positive reactions in both children with ASDs and typical children, these reactions were further analyzed and found to be false positives for all subjects.”
According to the blog post, Wakefield was “found by Brian Deer to have been paid a great deal by this group seeking to pursue litigation against vaccine manufacturers in the United Kingdom.” This “conflict of interest” resulted “ten of Wakefield's co-authors requesting that their names be withdrawn from the original publication in the journal Lancet used as support for this hypothesis.”
The damage done by Wakefield is significant because it has destroyed the “public's confidence in vaccination,” and it has given people another reason to distrust the work of doctors on valuable clinical research. The fact that such fear can come from the financial incentives offered by attorneys is disturbing. While it is certainly true that everyone deserves their day in court, falsifying information to get on the stand will never bring about justice.