The Most Damaging Medical Hoax Ever | Doorstep Pharmacy

Vaccination and immunisation programmes are one of the most important and effective tools for preventing many serious diseases and illnesses and have made infections that were at one point death sentences into ones easily managed by regular treatment at worst.

At best, as was the case with smallpox, diseases can be wiped out entirely, only existing in small samples in laboratories in extremely controlled conditions.

It allows people to treat conditions that once required hospitalisation with a pharmacy at home, and thanks to the greed of a small group of men and a particularly transparent hoax published unwittingly by one of the world’s most trusted medical journals and spread by media publications, was almost undermined entirely.

The MMR Hoax

There are two places to start with the fraudulent link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, non-specific colitis (a bowel infection with no known cause), and childhood pervasive developmental disorder (often characterised as autism in reporting).

The story revolves around a single early report published in The Lancet, one of the most trusted English-language medical journals in the world, which suggested a potential causal link between the MMR combined vaccine given to young children and the development of autism.

Whilst much of this information did not come to light until 2004 thanks to the work of journalist Brian Deer, it is essential to know the context for which the paper was created first, as it highlights the motive that inspired its creation.

The paper was written two years after lawyer Richard Barr, planning a vaccine damage lawsuit against several MMR vaccine manufacturers, had approached Andrew Wakefield, then an honorary consultant in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine.

As well as this, Mr Wakefield had a patent filed for a set of single vaccinations, a solution he had advocated for in interviews surrounding the publication of the paper

These conflicts of interest were such that Richard Horton, editor-in-chief at The Lancet conceded that the paper should never have been published.

There were also ethical issues concerning the tests themselves and the adulteration and outright fabrication of results.

The paper itself, already reporting on a study of just twelve children, found that whilst nine of the children who were reported to have regressive autism, three of them did not have any autism diagnosis at all, and only one had regressive autism as claimed.

Five had pre-existing concerns surrounding their development despite being described as “previously normal”, whilst others who experienced behavioural symptoms only did so months after the MMR vaccination.

It must also be noted that the paper was undertaken specifically for a planned class action lawsuit, and as a result patients (including one from the United States), were recruited with the help of campaigners against the MMR vaccine in the first place.

Most of this was revealed by Brian Deer in a series of documentaries and articles in 2004. However, before this had been revealed, vaccination rates dropped significantly, leading to increased rates of both measles and mumps in the UK.

Larger studies have never been able to replicate the results of the study and there is no connection between the MMR vaccine and autism.

Andrew Wakefield was struck off after the longest General Medical Council inquiry up to that point, and vaccination rates recovered after the revelation of the fraud and the full retraction of the initial paper.