Andrew Wakefield and His Trail of Disease

The Crap

It’s amazing what catastrophe one fraudulent article can bring to a society in a world where information spreads like bacteria. People are so quick to believe anything they see or hear, especially if it comes from a respected and esteemed scientist. And why should they not? Scientists who publish their papers have an ethical responsibility to ensure the information they share is sound, professional, and true. But, what we have come to find out is that the information Andrew Wakefield published about the MMR (Mumps, Measles, and Rubella) vaccine and its link to autism is neither sound, professional, nor true.

In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a British scientist, published a scientific research article fraudulently linking autism to the MMR vaccine when there was insufficient evidence to claim causation. An article by the Indian Journal of Psychiatry explains in depth all of the lies Wakefield deceived people into believing and just how unethically he conducted his research. To begin, Wakefield concluded his research on an extremely small sample size of only twelve children, which he selectively chose to best suit his claim. Also, it is now known that Wakefield’s research was funded by lawyers hired by parents suing vaccine producing companies. Um, hellooo bias. Wakefield deliberately published a fraudulent article for his own financial gain, completely disregarding the impact it would have on children and families globally. Since its publication twenty-two years ago, the article has been refuted by scientists and organizations all over the world (and even retracted by 10/12 of its own authors and the publishing journal), but yet parents are scared to vaccinate their kids. They would rather put them at risk for MMR than give them the life saving vaccine, all out of belief that they’re doing what’s best for their children.

The Impact

According to information from Time Magazine, it took twelve years for the fraudulent article to be officially retracted and nearly two decades for the United Kingdom’s immunization rates to recover after the initial publication. During those two decades, families in the UK experienced more than 12,000 cases of measles and at least three deaths. Measles had been declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, but in the aftermath of the Wakefield scandal, there has been a resurgence of it (with more than 2,216 reported cases). Wakefield continued to campaign against vaccination in his film, Vaxxed, which was released to independent theaters in Europe and America in 2016. After the film was released there was a four fold increase in measles cases and 35 deaths in Europe the following year.

The anti-vaxx movement has been trending all over the media lately and many people have been blindly believing what they see. The media does not do well with properly displaying the truth and informing society. So many are too quick to publish a “hot piece” that they don’t consider the implications of what they’re conveying. The truth may not be as flashy or shocking as the stories they want to tell, so they distort it into lies for society to soak up. But the fact of the matter is that vaccines do save lives and the trendiness of being anti-vax is destroying the health of our societies and putting others who rely on herd-immunity at risk. And that’s the tea sis.