A 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield purported to link the administration of the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella) with autism in children. A Times of London study has found that the doctor manipulated the data to produce those results.
The research was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet. According to the paper, the parents or physicians of eight of these children had linked the start of behavioral symptoms to MMR vaccination, sometimes within days of an inoculation.
The Times of London article stated that:
In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.
Strangely, although the research involved only 12 children, a number statistically too small anyway. According to the report, after the publication of the report, despite its statistically invalid nature, rates of inoculation in the U.K. fell from 92% to below 80%.
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