The British Medical Journal declared in January 2011 that a 1998 paper claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and childhood autism was an "elaborate fraud." Lead author Andrew Wakefield denied the accusations and attributed the campaign against him to pharmaceutical industry interests.
The original paper, published in The Lancet with 12 child subjects, proposed a new syndrome combining autism and bowel disease and tied it to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. The Lancet retracted the paper the previous year, and Wakefield lost his medical standing over financial conflicts of interest and unethical treatment of research subjects.
The BMJ found that none of the 12 cases matched the children's actual medical records. Diagnoses had been altered and dates manipulated to create a convenient connection to the vaccine. Of the nine children described as having regressive autism, only one clearly carried that diagnosis, and three had no autism diagnosis at all.
Subjects had been recruited through groups already opposed to the vaccine, and Wakefield had secretly received substantial payments through a law firm preparing litigation against the manufacturers. Ten of his co-authors had since withdrawn their interpretations of the study's findings.
The BMJ warned that measles was declared endemic in England and Wales in 2008, a consequence of the vaccination decline that followed the original paper's wide coverage.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this wire report, first published in January 2011, in its own words.