Update: Thanks to Peter West (@WestPeter) for my favorite new phrase: Evidence-(de)based.
Better to own up to your mistakes than pretend they didn't happen, hoping they'll go away. So kudos to The Lancet for retracting a paper they published in 1998. Dr. Andrew Wakefield had claimed his research findings substantiated his belief that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism in children.
As reported in the LA Times, Britain's medical regulator, the General Medical Council, concluded recently that "The British doctor whose suggestion of a link between the MMR shot and autism helped cause vaccination rates to plunge conducted his now-discredited research in a dishonest and irresponsible manner.... His study, however, was based on just 12 children. Lancet later declared that it should not have published the report, and further studies have not been able to replicate Wakefield's results."
A separate LATimes story quoted Dr. Jeffrey Boscamp of the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey as saying that the original report "was outrageous," and that "Most of the authors asked for their names to be removed from the study. It's unfortunate that it undermined confidence in vaccines when in fact it wasn't true at all." In its comment today, The Lancet said that the "claims in the original paper that children were 'consecutively referred' and that investigations were 'approved' by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false."
Comments