Wow. I can’t believe a researcher did this (actually, apparently a group of researchers was involved in this “research”). Information about participants was misrepresented and altered, I guess so that the researchers would be certain to get the results they wanted to get.

Meanwhile - thousands, if not millions, of parents are now avoiding vaccinating their kids, putting their kids’ health in danger (as well as the health of those around them) from the fears stirred up by this fake report.

(AP)  LONDON — The first study to link a childhood vaccine to autism was based on doctored information about the children involved, according to a new report on the widely discredited research.

The conclusions of the 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues was renounced by 10 of its 13 authors and later retracted by the medical journal Lancet, where it was published. Still, the suggestion the MMR shot was connected to autism spooked parents worldwide and immunization rates for measles, mumps and rubella have never fully recovered.

A new examination found, by comparing the reported diagnoses in the paper to hospital records, that Wakefield and colleagues altered facts about patients in their study.

The analysis, by British journalist Brian Deer, found that despite the claim in Wakefield’s paper that the 12 children studied were normal until they had the MMR shot, five had previously documented developmental problems. Deer also found that all the cases were somehow misrepresented when he compared data from medical records and the children’s parents.