Vaccines, Thimerosal and Autism

The thimerosal preservative in MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine causes autism and other developmental disorders in children. That has been the line for the last 7 or 8 years and the guy who pushed the hypothesis the hardest, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, has some splainin to do.

It turns out that Dr. Wakefield was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds by lawyers who were trying to prove the vaccine was unsafe. You can read about it in the The Sunday Times.

ANDREW WAKEFIELD, the former surgeon whose campaign linking the MMR vaccine with autism caused a collapse in immunisation rates, was paid more than £400,000 by lawyers trying to prove that the vaccine was unsafe.

I can't find the words to describe how I feel about this guy.

Wakefield’s work for the lawyers began two years before he published his now notorious report in The Lancet medical journal in February 1998, proposing a link between the vaccine and autism.

So are his findings correct or not? The Lancet has retracted the article.

Later The Lancet retracted Wakefield’s claim and apologised after a Sunday Times investigation showed that his research had been backed with £55,000 from lawyers, and that the children in the study used as evidence against the vaccine were also claimants in the lawsuit.

I really love this one....

Also among those named as being paid from the legal aid fund was a referee for one of Wakefield’s papers, who was allowed £40,000. A private GP who runs a single vaccines clinic received £6,000, the LSC says.

At least one reviewer of the Lancet paper was also paid off.

You can find a list of Dr. Wakefields autism papers here for what they are now worth.

You can find the Institute of Medicine's report on Vaccines and Autism here.