, seen here in 2025
Conflict of interest Public understanding of the claims sharply changed in February 2004 with revelations by
The Sunday Times of an undisclosed
conflict of interest on Wakefield's part in that, two years before the paper's publication, he had been approached by Richard Barr, a lawyer of
Justice, Awareness and Basic Support, who was looking for an expert witness to start a planned
class action regarding alleged "vaccine damage". Barr hired Wakefield at £150 per hour, plus expenses, and only then did they recruit the twelve children, actively seeking the parents of cases that might imply a connection between MMR and autism. Barr and Wakefield convinced the UK
Legal Aid Board, a UK government organization to give financial support to people who could not afford access to justice, to assign £55,000 to fund the initial stage of the research. 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. Based on Deer's evidence,
the Lancet editor-in-chief
Richard Horton said Wakefield's paper should have never been published because its findings were "entirely flawed". Although Wakefield maintained that the legal aid funding was for a separate, unpublished study (a position later rejected by a panel of the UK
General Medical Council), the editors of
The Lancet judged that the funding source should have been disclosed to them. Horton wrote, "It seems obvious now that had we appreciated the full context in which the work reported in the 1998
Lancet paper by Wakefield and colleagues was done, publication would not have taken place in the way that it did." Several of Wakefield's co-researchers also strongly criticized the lack of disclosure. The paper itself said, "Ethical approval and consent. Investigations were approved by the Ethical Practices Committee of the Royal Free Hospital NHS Trust, and parents gave informed consent." The dispute over this would remain unresolved, however, until settled in the English High Court in March 2012, where a senior judge vindicated Deer. Quoting the text, Justice Mitting ruled, "This statement was untrue and should not have been included in the paper."
Retraction of an interpretation The Lancet and many other medical journals require papers to include the authors' conclusions about their research, known as the "interpretation". The summary of the 1998
Lancet paper ended as follows: while insisting that the possibility of a distinctive gastrointestinal condition in children with autism merited further investigation. However, a separate study of children with gastrointestinal disturbances found no difference between those with
autism spectrum disorders and those without, with respect to the presence of measles virus
RNA in the bowel; it also found that gastrointestinal symptoms and the onset of autism were unrelated in time to the administration of MMR vaccine. 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 vaccine, Wakefield was found guilty by the
General Medical Council of serious professional misconduct in May 2010 and was struck off the
Medical Register, meaning he could no longer practise as a doctor in the UK. 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. Deer continued his reporting in a
Channel 4 Dispatches television documentary, ''MMR: What They Didn't Tell You'', broadcast on 18 November 2004. This documentary reported that Wakefield had applied for patents on a single measles vaccine that claimed to be a potential rival of MMR, and that he knew of test results from his own laboratory at the
Royal Free Hospital that contradicted his own claims. Wakefield's patent application was also noted in
Paul Offit's 2008 book, ''
Autism's False Prophets''. In January 2005, Wakefield sued Channel 4, 20/20 Productions, and the investigative reporter Brian Deer, who presented the Dispatches programme. However, after two years of litigation, and the revelation of more than £400,000 in undisclosed payments by lawyers to Wakefield, he discontinued his action and paid all the defendants' costs. 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. This funding came from the UK legal aid fund, a fund intended to provide legal services to the poor.
Manipulation of data 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. Wakefield falsely denied these allegations, and even filed a complaint with the
Press Complaints Commission (PCC) over this article on 13 March 2009. The complaint was expanded by a 20 March 2009 addendum by Wakefield's publicist. In July 2009, the PCC stated that it was staying any investigation regarding the
Sunday Times article, pending the conclusion of the GMC investigation. Wakefield did not pursue his complaint, which Deer then published along with a statement saying he and
The Sunday Times rejected the complaint as "false and disingenuous in all material respects", and that the action had been suspended by the PCC in February 2010.
UK General Medical Council inquiry Responding to the first
Sunday Times reports, the
General Medical Council (GMC), which is responsible for licensing doctors and supervising medical ethics in the UK, launched an investigation into the affair. The GMC brought the case itself, not citing any specific complaints, claiming that an investigation was in the public interest. The then-secretary of state for health,
John Reid, called for a GMC investigation, which Wakefield himself welcomed. During a debate in the House of Commons, on 15 March 2004, Dr. Evan Harris, 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. In June 2006 the GMC confirmed that they would hold a disciplinary hearing of Wakefield. The GMC's Fitness to Practise Panel first met on 16 July 2007 to consider the cases of Wakefield, Professor John Angus Walker-Smith, and Professor Simon Harry Murch. All faced charges of serious professional misconduct. 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. The GMC stressed that it would not be assessing the validity of competing scientific theories on MMR and autism. The GMC alleged that the trio acted unethically and dishonestly in preparing the research into the MMR vaccine. They denied the allegations. The case proceeded in front of a GMC Fitness to Practise panel of three medical and two lay members. 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. Wakefield was found to have acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" and to have acted with "callous disregard" for the children involved in his study, conducting unnecessary and invasive tests. The panel found that the trial was improperly conducted without the approval of an
independent ethics committee, and that Wakefield had multiple undeclared
conflicts of interest. On 24 May 2010, the GMC panel ordered that he be struck off the medical register. Simon Murch was found not guilty. In response to the GMC investigation and findings, the editors of
the Lancet announced on 2 February 2010 that they "fully retract this paper from the published record".
The Lancets editor-in-chief
Richard Horton described it as "utterly false" and said that the journal had been deceived.
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. Lord Bach, Ministry of Justice dismissed this possibility.
Full retraction and fraud revelations In an April 2010 report in
The BMJ, Deer expanded on the laboratory aspects of his findings recounting how normal clinical
histopathology results generated by the
Royal Free Hospital were later changed in the medical school to abnormal results, published in
the Lancet. Deer wrote an article in
The BMJ casting doubt on the "autistic enterocolitis" that Wakefield claimed to have discovered. On 5 January 2011,
The BMJ published the first of a series of articles by Brian Deer, detailing how Wakefield and his colleagues had faked some of the data behind the 1998 Lancet article. 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. Continuing
BMJ series on 11 January 2011, Deer said that based upon documents he obtained under
freedom of information legislation, Wakefield—in partnership with the father of one of the boys in the study—had planned to launch a venture on the back of an MMR vaccination scare that would profit from new medical tests and "litigation driven testing".
The Washington Post reported that Deer said that Wakefield predicted he "could make more than $43 million a year from diagnostic kits" for the new condition, autistic enterocolitis. According to
WebMD, the
BMJ article also claimed that the venture would succeed in marketing products and developing a replacement vaccine if "public confidence in the MMR vaccine was damaged". 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. The book includes reporting of parents whose children were among the twelve recruited by Wakefield in
the Lancet study. One described the paper as "fraudulent" while another complained of "outright fabrication". ==Aftermath==