On 28th February 1998, a fraudulent research paper by physician Andrew Wakefield and twelve coauthors, titled "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children", was published in the British medical journal The Lancet.
It was exposed in a lengthy Sunday Times investigation[2][3][4][5] by reporter Brian Deer,[6][7][8] resulting in the paper's retraction in February 2010[9] and Wakefield being discredited and struck off the UK medical register three months later.
In February 1998, a group led by Andrew Wakefield published a paper[1] in the British medical journal the Lancet, supported by a press conference at the Royal Free Hospital in London, where the research was carried out.
[11][12] This paper reported on twelve children with developmental disorders referred to the hospital and described a constellation of bowel symptoms, as well as endoscopy and biopsy findings, that were said to be evidence of a new "syndrome" that Wakefield would later call "autistic enterocolitis".
The Guardian and the Independent reported it on their front pages, while the Daily Mail only gave the story a minor mention in the middle of the paper, and the Sun did not cover it.
[19] In March 1998, a panel of 37 scientific experts set up by the Medical Research Council, headed by Professor Sir John Pattison found "no evidence to indicate any link" between the MMR vaccine and colitis or autism in children.
[19][20] Public concern over Wakefield's claims of a possible link between MMR and autism gained momentum in 2001 and 2002, after he published further papers suggesting that the immunisation programme was not safe.
Barr hired Wakefield at £150 per hour, plus expenses, and only then did they recruit the twelve children,[39] actively seeking the parents of cases that might imply a connection between MMR and autism.
According to journalist Brian Deer, the project was intended to create evidence for the court case, but this only became publicly known six years after the Lancet report, with the newspaper's first disclosures.
[40][page needed] Based on Deer's evidence, the Lancet's editor-in-chief Richard Horton said Wakefield's paper should have never been published because its findings were "entirely flawed".
In March 2004, immediately following the news of the conflict of interest allegations, ten of Wakefield's 12 coauthors retracted this interpretation,[46] while insisting that the possibility of a distinctive gastrointestinal condition in children with autism merited further investigation.
[48] Later in 2004, the newspaper's investigation also found that Wakefield had a further conflict of interest in the form of a patent for a single measles vaccines,[2][4] had manipulated evidence,[3] and had broken other ethical codes.
[50] In 2011, Deer provided further information on Wakefield's improper research practices to the British Medical Journal, which in a signed editorial described the original paper as fraudulent.
In 2006, Deer reported in The Sunday Times that Wakefield had been paid £435,643, plus expenses, by British trial lawyers attempting to prove that the vaccine was dangerous, with the undisclosed payments beginning two years before the Lancet paper's publication.
Melanie Phillips, an influential columnist with the Daily Mail, called the reporting of Wakefield's contract with the solicitor Richard Barr "a smear whose timing should raise a few eyebrows."
According to Deer writing in the BMJ, the General Medical Council hearing was also criticized by Richard Horton, the Lancet editor: "My own view is that the GMC is no place to continue this debate.
"[52] The Sunday Times continued the investigation, and on 8 February 2009, Brian Deer reported that Wakefield had "fixed" results and "manipulated" patient data in the Lancet, creating the appearance of a link with autism.
[59] During a debate in the House of Commons, on 15 March 2004, Dr. Evan Harris,[60] a Liberal Democrat MP, called for a judicial inquiry into the ethical aspects of the case, even suggesting it might be conducted by the CPS.
The GMC examined, among other ethical points, whether Wakefield and his colleagues obtained the required approvals for the tests they performed on the children; the data-manipulation charges reported in the Sunday Times, which surfaced after the case was prepared, were not at question in the hearings.
[66] On 28 January 2010, the GMC panel delivered its decision on the facts of the case, finding four counts of dishonesty and 12 involving the abuse of developmentally disabled children.
[49] The Hansard text for 16 March 2010 reported[74] Lord McColl asking the Government whether it had plans to recover legal aid money paid to the experts in connection with the measles, mumps and rubella/measles and rubella vaccine litigation.
By looking at the records and interviewing the parents, Deer found that for all 12 children in the Wakefield study, diagnoses had been tweaked or dates changed to fit the article's conclusion.
Moreover, although the scale of the GMC's 217 day hearing precluded additional charges focused directly on the fraud, the panel found him guilty of dishonesty concerning the study's admissions criteria, its funding by the Legal Aid Board, and his statements about it afterwards.
But in fact: In subsequent disclosures from the investigation, Deer obtained copies of unpublished gastrointestinal pathology reports on the children in the Lancet study that Wakefield had claimed showed "non-specific colitis" and "autistic enterocolitis".
[80] In September 2020, Johns Hopkins University Press published Deer's account of the fraud in his book The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines.
Promotion of the claimed link, which continues in anti-vaccination propaganda despite being refuted,[83][84] led to an increase in the incidence of measles and mumps, resulting in deaths and serious permanent injuries.