Dr. Andrew Wakefield “a man in a hurry”
August 18, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the figure at the center of the controversy over the MMR vaccine and autism, was a “man in a hurry,” according to Professor John Walker-Smith in a hearing before the General Medical Council (GMC). The hearing is about “alleged irregularities in research methods.” Dr. Wakefield was the primary author of the 1998 Lancet paper that
According to the August 14th Hampstead and Highgate Express, Dr. Wakefield, Prof. Walker-Smith and another colleague, Professor Simon Murch, are accused of
……blunders in research involving 12 boys between 1996 and 1998. They are alleged to have carried out invasive procedures at the Hampstead hospital, including colonoscopies and lumbar punctures on the autistic children without proper approval.
Asked whether Dr Wakefield had pushed him into it, Prof Walker-Smith said: “I think that’s true. If we had not had any urgency to get on with it, we would not be in the muddle we are in now because we would have done it in the usual way by getting a referral. Dr Wakefield was a man in a hurry and in full-time research.”
Sally Smith QC, for the GMC, told the hearing that Dr Wakefield, 51, wanted to get the approval for the study as quickly as possible so he could prove his theory. The resulting study, published in the Lancet medical journal in 1998, led to many parents rejecting the MMR vaccine.
She said: “There’s a pressure to get there before someone else does. Dr Wakefield had a strong conviction that his hypothesis was correct. He believed it and that’s what led to the pressure.”
Dr. Wakefield faces being struck off the medical register in the UK. Among the allegations is a charge that he took blood samples from children (who were paid £5) at his son’s birthday party — being too much “in a hurry” to do this in a more appropriate setting?
Aggh. He *knew* his hypothesis was correct, so medical and research ethics be blowed. Hope the Council throws the book at him.
In a bit of hopeful news, I was pleased to see that yesterday’s Parade magazine managed to do an entire sidebar on childhood vaccines and vaccine safety without mentioning autism even once!
One thing not mentioned in this article are the complications that reportedly developed after the colonoscopies. It is alleged that there were a dozen punctures in the boys intestines. Further complications arose from not treating those punctures in a timely fashion, so other internal failures resulted from the leakage.
The charges against him are more serious than just being in a hurry.
It is extremely disappointing that it took the medical establishment more than ten years to finally get around to looking at this fellow’s behavior.
Colonoscopy at the Royal Free Hospital was not clinically justified—thanks for noting that.
joy Mama! I noticed EXACTLY that same thing and had EXACTLY that same thought. I was really pleased with them.
Wakefield violated well-known ethical tenets for research involving humans. And he knows that, I’m sure. You’d pretty much have to have been living under a rock not to know.
The birthday party business is beyond belief, in and of itself.
I don’t know if the “man in a hurry” was meant literally or is a derivative of the political saying, “Beware of an old man in a hurry”, but it seems to apply.
If you review the history of Wakefield and the MMR, it’s possible to get the impression that the “hurry” was about having some kind of breakthrough medical discovery; I also think the media were kind of “in a hurry” to report on his findings, and to make a movie about him.
The saying comes from cutting corners to make a splash and score some kind of coup.
Hence the “Beware”. In Wakefield’s case of societal impact and the immediate and substantial injury to at least one of the original study subjects, the caveat seems to apply.
What a lot of damage one individual can cause.
I tend to think of it also in the phrase “young man in a hurry.”
I suppose the General Medical Council are not really the ones to do this job effectively (presuming there was research misconduct and research without consent). They really are a corrupt old body who generally protect scientific crooks, like one previous member of the Medicines Control Agency, medical directors of a certain large pharmaceutical company and a couple of medical school Deans …….
So Wakefield’s (presumably) deserved punishment is hardly going to work out well
Wakefield is a hero, and his research conclusions are correct. His “hurry” was to try to save tens of thousands of children from destruction at the hands of the CDC and a poorly thought out vaccination program. In your rush to crucify him, you have forsaken thousands of children, and each of you should be ashamed of yourselves. From who have you received your pieces of silver. The CDC? Big Pharma? or other government bureaucrats trying to cover up the inoculation nightmare they have created for tens of thousands of families?
I totally agree with JMH. Even if what Wakefield found was only a piece of the puzzle and even if his explanation was not quite right, at least he had the courage to step out of the scientific belief systems and do the research. Science can be like a religion. People believe what they are told is the truth (such as the belief that the earth is a flat pancake) until insurmountable evidence proves otherwise, but until that time they will defend their beliefs as if their life depends on it.
I wish the same amount of effort had been put into good solid unbiased scientific research to investigate the following:
➤ The effect of Thimerosol on babies before the Pharmaceutical companies decided to use it as a preservative (and is it really the only and best available preservative to give to young babies?)
➤ The effectiveness of vaccinating a baby at an age where the immune system is immature (till 9 months of age) and where the mother’s antibodies are supposed to protect the baby as their immune system is not capable of working out what antibody to make yet. So how can it work out what antibody to make in response to a vaccine or 3 vaccines in one??
➤ The effect of three vaccines at any one time instead of one on the child’s immune system.
Where are the antibody titers that prove that a 2 month old baby has made sufficient antibodies against 3 diseases to protect him/her against these diseases?
If you think these things have been researched as they should, please give me the science as I have been looking for these research articles for the last 20 years.
Perhaps it is like Thalidomide where only the horrific effects of the drug stopped its general us. Another obvious example is the hormone replacement pill (HRT), where all the critics were silenced until the required proper research was belatedly done. As a result the life threatening side effects of HRT were proven and the research project was subsequently abandoned.
Let us put our effort into getting to the cause of the rise in ASD, Asthma, allergies etc., rather than blocking from our investigation everything that doesn’t agree with our belief systems.
AK
Please post your source for information on if there were complications following the procedures in this study. This is the first I have seen this and if there is proof, rather than just rumor, I for one would like to see it.
The colonoscopies performed on the children at the Royal Free Hospital were not “clinically necessary”:
http://www.autismvox.com/colonoscopy-at-the-royal-free-hospital-was-not-clinically-justified-500000-payout/
One child’s bowel was perforated in more than 12 places during the surgery; he spent two weeks in intensive care afterwards at Great Ormond Street Hospital.