Britain bars from practice the doc who connected autism & vaccines - his research was conducted “unethically”
LONDON – A doctor who persuaded millions of parents worldwide that a common vaccine could cause autism was barred from practicing medicine in his native Britain on Monday after the country’s top medical group found he conducted his research unethically.
Dr. Andrew Wakefield was the first researcher to publish a peer-reviewed study suggesting a connection between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella. That prompted legions of parents to abandon the vaccine in moves that epidemiologists feared could lead to outbreaks of the potentially deadly diseases.
Vaccination rates in Britain and other rich countries have not fully recovered since Wakefield and his colleagues’ research was published in 1998 and there are measles outbreaks across Europe every year. There are also sporadic outbreaks of the disease in the U.S.
His study in the medical journal Lancet was widely discredited, however, after Britain’s medical regulator found it did not meet ethical standards; other studies found no link; and a British journalist revealed Wakefield had been paid by lawyers of parents who suspected their children were harmed by the vaccine.