The GMC recently announced that Dr. Andrew Wakefield was dishonest, his study was false and he had a callous disregard for children.
VAN UK would like to point out that the case paper involving 12 children was NOT a study but a case paper and Dr. Wakefield asked that a study be undertaken to establish if there was a link between MMR, autism and bowel disease. He also said that such a link at the time had not been ‘proven’, so the DOH’s reaction has been a massive over-reaction and in our opinion, somewhat guilty. A guilty party always goes on the defensive.
If the DOH were truly concerned about children dying from measles (and incidently, 96% of deaths are in the third world), then they would have continued to allow parents access to the single measles vaccine on the NHS. The fact that they withdrew it, leaving a lot of pro-vaccine parents unwilling to vaccinate, would seem to us rather counter productive. If you believe in vaccines as they do then any vaccine is better than none.
Ever since the publication of the 1998 case paper, the DOH have presented studies supposedly to ‘prove’ that MMR doesn’t cause autism, instead of doing what they were supposed to, determining what DOES cause it and investigating the bowel symptoms of the children, most of whom are in serious pain. One of the mother’s of a child in the paper told me she cannot even take her child to the GP because they say to treat him would be ‘too political’ and when he has had serious medical events happen to him, the A+E staff have told her they will ‘only treat the emergency, not the condition’.
These children have been dumped like hot potatoes and no one from the medical profession except Dr. Wakefield and his team have cared to help them. Since when did politics come before pain and suffering?
The children – some of them now young adults – were not allowed to state their views on their treatment at the GMC hearing and for those who were too disabled to do so, their parents were denied the opportunity to speak for them. Not one parent of the 12 children involved complained about Andrew Wakefield, in fact, some said he had been helping their children and relieving their pain.
It seems to us that it is the DOH who has a callous disregard for the wellbeing of children.
To retract a paper is not going to make the issue go away. There have now been studies done in the US and court hearings showing a link between autism and vaccines and there has been a very recent paper (listed on the autism, mercury and vaccines page of this site) that replicated Andrew Wakefield’s findings of bowel disease in autistic children.
If a doctor cannot even question something because it is against popular theory, that is not science and we feel that the Lancet has lost some of its credibility as a result.
