Blog 1 – Wakefield’s MMR Vaccine Disclaimer

In 1995, Andrew Wakefield conducted a study that was determined to find causation between the Measles, Mumps, Rubella Vaccine and autism. According to Very Well Health, Wakefield was approached by a group of parents that claimed the vaccine had caused autism in their children and wondered if he could look into this. A few years later, Wakefield accepted the offer and studied twelve children who were “consecutively referred to the department of pediatric gastroenterology.” When people began to hear his warnings about the vaccine causing autism, some immediately stopped vaccinating their children. Without looking into Wakefield’s study and seeing what he had found to back up his claims, a group of anti-vaccinators grew and accepted the study at face value.

After publishing his work, many of his co-authors backed out of the study and did not support the information that was being published because they saw the many errors of the study. This seems to be a pretty bad sign when you are trying to publish a scientific study. There were several cases of misconduct throughout the study including ethical violations and the collection of error-filled data. Very Well Health also took note of the fact that Wakefield’s research has never been replicated. This is all very interesting to me because, although it was never able to be replicated and was even retracted from the scientific world, so many people base their ideas of anti-vaccination off of Wakefield. This movement continues today and has been going on ever since he came out with the study in 1995.

Prior to working on this research, Wakefield had discovered the cause of Chron’s disease, and was then exploring the option that the MMR vaccine may have been one of the leading factors for this disease. I suppose he had always been a little biased against the vaccine. I believe these attempts to find a connection between the vaccine and autism may have been forced by Wakefield through his desire to gain credit for another discovery soon after his first Chron’s disease discovery.

Now that a portion of the population has started listening to Wakefield and not receiving their vaccinations, we are beginning to see more outbreaks of these very diseases in the U.S. and across the world. Newsweek tells us there was an outbreak of Measles in 2014 that began at Disneyland in California and then spread to many other states in the US. It is interesting that Wakefield takes no responsibility for this and instead passes it off to those involved in the vaccine policymaking. The more people that do not receive the MMR vaccine, the more people we see becoming infected with the very viruses they could have been protected from.