So, this past week, we read the infamously retracted paper written by A. J. Wakefield. I am going to only attribute the article to Wakefield, even though the paper was originally published with multiple authors, because all of the other authors retracted their names after they discovered Wakefield had a conflict of interest when writing this paper.
This is the article that lead to the whole "Vaccines cause Autism". There is a lot of interesting things wrong with this paper and interesting reviews of this paper. One of the main problems is that Wakefield was payed (I believe in the forms of grants) by a law firm that was planning on suing the vaccination companies. Other problems with the paper include that a bunch of the results were falsely reported, the children were never actually psychologically tested for the study to see if they had developmental disorders, and that the mothers reported the possible link between vaccination and developmental disorders.
The thing that I found most intriguing about this paper was that in the third to last paragraph the paper states, "Published evidence is inadequate to show whether there is a change in incidence or a link to the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine." The last paragraph then goes on to state, "In most cases, onset of symptoms was after measles, mumps, and rubella immunization. Further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome and its possible relation to the vaccine." As part of the falsifying of data, if you look in the paper, some of the children started showing symptoms before they were vaccinated, and for the rest, I am going to assume that the symptoms just didn't exhibit themselves until after vaccination. This is probably due to children being incredibly young when they are immunized and don't develop the ability to talk and walk and read until they are older than that.
One of the most interesting results of this paper, was the decrease in parents having their children vaccinated. There has also been a huge increase in the amount of children catching these diseases. I think that someone should do a study comparing the number of incidents of the diseases and the percentage of children vaccinated, before this paper was published and after this paper was published. This resulting study would have a very strong correlation between children getting these diseases and children not getting vaccinated. (This study would have to take into account that if someone is unvaccinated, then there is a greater chance of the people they associate with getting the disease, even if the associates were vaccinated.)
I think one of the worst outcomes of this paper is the lack of funding that autism has now received. The general public is still under the assumption that vaccinations cause autism, so clearly they don't need to fund autism research if they already know the cause, right? Wrong.
I also thought it was interesting the amount of the paper that focused on the digestive problems of the children. I was previously unaware that children with autism tended to have digestive problems. I thought it was interesting that the children actually had colonoscopies. This was later (according to wikipedia) was considered, during the investigation of Wakefield's study, to be "unnecessary invasive medical procedures."
All in all, a very interesting study to read and research the results of.
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