Vaccines are back in the news big time in this dreadful year of 2020. The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated how vital vaccines are. Without a vaccine for COVID-19, we have all been in peril this year.
The world needs a vaccine badly—a safe and effective one—so that we can all get back to normal living. The race is on. But before that, vaccines have been in the news for another reason—the rising anti-vaccine movement. The modern anti-vaxxers got their boost with what turned out to be a false claim: the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine could cause autism. Science-minded people soon knew that claim was wrong and based on retracted, fraudulent research, but certain vociferous segments of the public held on to their suspicions of a link. They have been energized by recent notorious films and social media campaigns propagandizing against vaccines.
For all those reasons, it seems a good time to revisit the origin case. Peter M. Steinmetz, MD, does so in our cover article, “The Scientific Frauds Underlying the False MMR Vaccine-Autism Link.” Steinmetz describes the six fabrications and falsifications in Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s original (and later retracted) 1998 Lancet paper and his subsequent written response to criticisms. Steinmetz is a research neurologist and chief scientist at the Neurtex Brain Research Institute. “The scientific frauds in Wakefield’s 1998 paper are clear from the readily available records,” he concludes, “and it is clear why this paper was eventually retracted when the full record became available.”