If it is actually the case that Andrew Wakefield faked, fudged, or whatever you want to call “making up” one’s data, in his original studies regarding the effects of vaccines on children who later came to have autism, as reported in the UK’s Times Online, then his research misconduct didn’t just set back scientific research 10 years–it set back an entire generation of children, their families, and a society grappling with autism, and that will do so for decades to come.
As Bad Astronomy’s post predicts, Wakefield’s outing–if it happens–may result in some losses from the antivaccination community, but it is unlikely that parents of children with autism are going to cease to cling to that explanation in the absence of an alternative one.
The bottom line is that it appears that Wakefield faked his data, and even though most of the other researchers had already backed away from the idea that MMR vaccination caused autism and in fact retracted the conclusion section of their paper in the Lancet in 2004, Wakefield has not. Even if he did, the damage has been done. A decade’s worth of children with antivaccination parents have avoided shots that may have been perfectly safe for them while measles cases have been on the rise. Plus, with all the focus on vaccines as the problem, other causes for autism have likely gone overlooked.
The damage done by the Wakefield fake is inestimable to the research community, to families, and most importantly to the children suffering from autism. Yet, parents, clinicians and caregivers will still likely cling to a theory that will be shown to have had NO scientific merit from the beginning–because without some explanation and something to blame, it is very hard to move on.
Summer Johnson, PhD