And now, the antivax failure is complete: The Lancet withdraws Wakefield’s paper (Phil Plait’s take)
Oh, this is wonderful to hear: The Lancet — a leading UK professional medical research journal — is retracting the paper published by Andrew Wakefield back in 1998 that linked vaccines with autism.
The paper has been found to be multiply and fatally flawed, with Wakefield and his work being thoroughly discredit. As the Lancet editorial itself states:
Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al. are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation. In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were “consecutively referred” and that investigations were “approved” by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.
That’s great news, especially after Wakefield had his head handed to him last week by the GMC over his unethical and