Two decades ago, on February 28, 1998 in particular, a reputable medical inspection hosted a small survey which was to have one of the most devastating impacts on modern medical journals.
Doctor and researcher Andrew Wakefield analyzed the cases of 12 children and suggested that there was a correlation between the vaccine and measles, rubella and mumps and autism. The MMR vaccine that is given to millions of children around the world every year.
Despite the fact that his bronze work has long since been scientifically debunked and The Lancet magazine removed it from its pages, the damage had been done. And it was to have disastrous consequences for both the public health of the world population and its very institution medicine.
Wakefield would eventually lose his license, and autism researchers would prove time and time again that childhood developmental disorder is not caused by vaccines, only that the seed of misunderstood doubt has been sown.
As you can see, Wakefield's meager data and monstrously erroneous conclusions may not have had any effect on the medical community, but in some parts of the world they have resonated. We call them vaccinators today and it is a dangerous public health movement that refuses to vaccinate its children because of Wakefield's copperplate research.
Of course, when epidemics break out, vaccinators are running to be vaccinated en masse, as obviously skepticism is one thing and health is another.
The doctor's scandalous study unfortunately also had this side loss, the outbreak of measles pandemics in Europe, Australia and the US focusing on those communities that refuse to be vaccinated for fear of autism.
The anti-vaccination scandal has reached such proportions that many countries are rushing to make childhood vaccination mandatory (such as the United States, Italy, Germany, Romania, etc.) and in all countries where it is already institutionalized, the authorities punish now with heavier fines for parents who send their children to school unvaccinated (such as Italy with 500 euros, Germany with up to 2.500 euros and Australia with 4.000 euros).
Europe alone was unlucky to see 21.000 cases of measles in 2017 and in Italy, Ukraine and Romania the rash became an avalanche.
This year, the World Health Organization included the refusal to vaccinate on major threats to world health, we are talking about such an extent of the gloomy phenomenon. And not only that, but for the right setback of society. The World Health Organization happily claimed that by 2015 measles would have been eradicated from the face of the earth, but did not take into account the anti-vaccination movement that overturned scientific correlations.
Now he tells us that the increase in cases of measles has reached alarming proportions on a universal scale and undermines the progress of decades we have made as human beings. At the same time, university studies deconstruct Wakefield's methodologically dubious work linking childhood vaccines and autism continue to be produced, although the anti-vaccine frenzy does not stop.
But why;
The scientific community is not talking today about Wakefield's own work, which belongs to the timepiece of history, but about how he managed to get something like this published in one of the most authoritative and serious medical reviews in the world. But also because he received all this attention.
British gastroenterologist Andrew Jeremy Wakefield based the link between the world-renowned and tested MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine and autism in a study of just 12 children. Case study was essentially his work, the weakest kind of medical study that does not produce any safe results.
Not that case studies have no research value, after all, they are not just the kind of studies that allow you to make such bold claims. Worse in the Wakefield case, the doctor had manipulated his research, "teasing" the data to get the results he wanted: "No case was free from misinformation or manipulation," he concludes. one of the exploratory works on the method followed by the doctor.
At the same time, Wakefield had something else on his mind, which he failed to hide, what we commonly call a "conflict of interest." While incriminating the triple MMR vaccine, he obtained commercial patents for his own vaccines. If we have to say, they were of a similar composition, they were just made separately!
Wakefield thus rejected the triple MMR and told parents that their children should be given unique doses of each. From his own vaccines. He concluded: "For the vast majority of children, the MMR vaccine is OK, but I think there is enough stress to give the three vaccines separately."
What is the result of his statements and the journalistic frenzy that followed? How the child vaccination rate fell by 80% in Britain and less than 50% of the children of the country took both -necessary- doses. Measles cases are now raging in England, which has struggled to see its first measles death in 14 years. Mumps reached an epidemic in the country in 2005.
Do you want it even worse? The General Medical Council, the regulatory medical authority of England, found that Wakefield had paid the parents of the children who came to his 10-year-old son's birthday party to get blood for his research! Demonstrating "complete contempt for the discomfort and pain he caused the children", as the regulator wrote in its announcement and later took his leave.
Despite the criticism, Wakefield repeated his study, but failed to get the same results again. As the publisher of the great medical inspection characteristically comments here "British Medical Journal"Wakefield's article linking the MMR vaccine to autism was a scam": "Wakefield had ample opportunity to either get the same results again or say he was wrong. He refused to do both. "
In 2004, the 10 doctors who had co-authored the original study by lead researcher Wakefield recalled and withdrew from the writing team. But not Wakefield, who has made a new career as an anti-vaccination activist and an outstanding speaker on the global conspiracy behind child vaccination!
Without the medical license in his hands, he was now living richly from the books he took out with the sack…
In the 20 years that separate us from Wakefield's "teased" study, dozens of studies have shown that no association has been found between MMR and autism. Only on March 5, 2019 was a new one released, published in the review "Annals of Internal MedicineDanish scientists analyzed data from 600.000 children born in the country between 1999 and 2010 and concluded: "The results strongly suggest that MMR vaccination does not increase the risk of autism, does not cause autism in vulnerable children and is not associated with autism after vaccination ".
Before that, too significant in terms and sizes of study 100.000 children came to exactly the same conclusions: "These data indicate that there are no harmful links between the MMR vaccine and autism even in children who are already at higher risk of autism."
Really, we could cite one homobrontia still from large-scale studies into a literally thousands of children and a number of countries that have proven convincingly and scientifically that Wakefield's findings were the only ones he found. And he could not repeat either…
But how did this controversial research manage to gain such a strong foothold in society, talking today, two decades later, about a real phenomenon with even more real consequences? If we have to say it, it was the press that scandalized the public by viralizing the otherwise unscientific work.
"Wakefield has been at the center of a real media storm over the MMR vaccine and is now being accused by journalists as if he were the only one to blame. In fact, the media is just as guilty, "Guardian journalist Ben Goldacre aptly remarked in January 2010.
Despite the fact that the press learned early on the epistemological shortcomings and the methodological methods of the study, the issue was selling and selling a lot. In some striking cases, the newspapers even hid the number of children on whom the study was based, as this "12" was abandoned even at a non-scientific level.
And so the conspiracy cloak covered the fake research of this one and only man, as it now resonated with those who liked a good conspiracy theory. Only here counters a medical progress of decades that has saved humanity from most afflictions.
The discovery of the smallpox vaccine, for example, put an end to the infectious rash that, according to the World Health Organization, killed more than 300 million people in the 20th century. Today, smallpox is a thing of the past in our world, as the only human disease that has been completely eradicated from Earth (the last case occurred in Somalia in 1977).
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us that measles had disappeared from the US in 2000, which means that it was no longer an endemic disease. The epidemics that are happening now, the medical institution tells us, are from travelers returning from the US vaccine communities, such as the 2014 epidemic that started in the Amish community in Ohio.
Since 2000, more than 5,5 billion doses of measles vaccine have been given to children, saving some 20,4 million lives. "For the first time in 2016," concludes the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaking on a global scale, "estimated annual measles deaths were less than 100.000."
As for the disgraced and expelled from every medical association and scientific body Wakefield, he magically emerged in America Tramp! More than 10 years after his ouster from the medical community, the dark doctor has reappeared in the United States, where he continues to tour and sow his deadly rhetoric, having found an unexpected ally in the face of the American president.
Now would be a good time to retract your libelous attacks on @DrWakefield, lest you want to lose your PubMed index. pic.twitter.com/GBJtCaBzSD
- Jake L. Crosby (@JakeLCrosby) December 15, 2016
In 2017, Wakefield, 71, was responsible for the outbreak of a measles epidemic in an American-Somali community in Minnesota, the largest the United States has seen in several years. His work is directly linked to the meager rates of childhood vaccination in Texas, where he lives.
Since Trump's election, his campaign has found a new momentum. And how could it be otherwise than a president who said in 2015, in a Republican debate, that an employee's child developed autism after a vaccine!
The following summer, Wakefield was one of four anti-vaccination preachers Trump met, who even invited him to one of his celebrations when he took over the presidency.
So many decades of saving progress are now openly threatened by a movement of people who do not want to see reality as it…