A Forgotten Pioneer of Vaccines

"On 28 January 2010, a five-member statutory tribunal of the GMC found three dozen charges proved, including four counts of dishonesty and 12 counts involving the abuse of developmentally challenged children. The panel ruled that Wakefield had "failed in his duties as a responsible consultant", acted both against the interests of his patients, and "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in his published research. The Lancet immediately and fully retracted his 1998 publication on the basis of the GMC’s findings, noting that elements of the manuscript had been falsified. Wakefield was struck off the Medical Register in May 2010, with a statement identifying dishonest falsification in The Lancet research, and is barred from practicing medicine in the UK.

"In January 2011, an editorial accompanying an article by Brian Deer in BMJ identified Wakefield's work as an "elaborate fraud". In a follow-up article, Deer said that Wakefield 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". In November 2011, yet another report in BMJ revealed original raw data indicating that, contrary to Wakefield's claims in The Lancet, children in his research did not have inflammatory bowel disease."

That's a lot more than "retracted" and "discredited".

And then there's this bottom line for the hero: "Dr. Hilleman, who might reasonably have been expected to win a Nobel Prize, got hate mail and death threats instead." I suspect he cared little about that, and a lot about the resulting childhood morbidity and mortality.

Additional note: there's a very important vaccination principle known as herd immunity. If enough of the "herd" get vaccinated, then the ones for whom it doesn't take get protected because they never get exposed. You don't need the vaccination rate to drop by much for this to become a big factor.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22354895