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Medical Journal Says Autism Study Was a ‘Fraud’ .

EXCERPTS:

An influential but now-discredited study that provoked fears around the world that childhood vaccinations caused autism was based largely on falsified data, according to an article and editorial published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal.

The article, by journalist Brian Deer, found that important details of the cases of each of 12 children reported in the original study either misrepresented or altered the actual experiences of the children, the journal said. “In no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal,” the editorial said. It called the study “an elaborate fraud.”

The original article, by British doctor Andrew Wakefield and other researchers, was published in the highly regarded journal The Lancet in 1998. The study concluded that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine—a mainstay of public health disease prevention efforts around the world—was linked to autism and gastrointestinal disorders.

The findings provoked a still-raging debate over vaccine safety and they prompted thousands of parents to forgo shots for their children. Measles outbreaks were subsequently reported in several Western countries. Several epidemiological studies conducted since the Wakefield paper by public health authorities haven’t found any link between the vaccines and autism.

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Have you ever seen how many medical studies are the result of fraud? They number into the thousands, some companies didn’t even do the studies, they just faked them completely and these are for major pharmasueticals ...

Quite possibly much like a lot of the "investment advice" I encounter daily: the product of true believers, mining the data in support of their belief.

IMO there is a pretty good chance in such cases that such observers are not even aware that they are selectively interpreting what they see.

Given the human propensity to act in this manner, our only real protection when such opinion is likely to really matter is better vetting pre-publication - which is enormously time consuming and often difficult to perform.