Andrew Wakefield, whose warnings about a possible link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism sparked a public health scare, was accused this week by the General Medical Council of paying children £5 (€7.40; $10) each to give blood samples at his son's birthday party.
The accusation was made in the GMC's case involving three doctors who collaborated on a 1998 Lancet paper on developmental disorders in children. Dr Wakefield, John Walker-Smith, and Simon Murch are accused of ignoring limitations placed on them by the research ethics committee of the Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust and subjecting children to procedures that were not clinically indicated, including lumbar punctures, barium meals, general anaesthesia, and colonoscopy.
Dr Wakefield is also accused of misleading the Lancet in failing to disclose his involvement in an application for a patent for a new type of MMR vaccine and his receiving funding from the Legal Aid Board to investigate patients involved in litigation over alleged reactions to the vaccine.
The disclosure that legal aid funding had paid for some of the clinical investigations in the Lancet paper led the journal to formally retract the study in 2004, citing a “fatal conflict of interest.”
The GMC accuses Dr Wakefield of misleading the Legal Aid Board about how he used £55 000 of their research funding. His costing proposal asked for £13 750 for hospital beds and investigations that were actually covered by the NHS, the charges say.
The GMC charges that Dr Wakefield and Dr Walker-Smith gave an experimental drug called “oral measles virus-specific dialyzable lymphocyte extract transfer factor” to one patient named as Child 10. They began administering the drug a year before receiving ethics committee approval to do so and before obtaining information on its safety in children, the charges allege.
Dr Wakefield submitted a proposal to the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine “to set up a company called Immunospecifics Biotechnologies Ltd to specialise in the production, formulation and sale of Transfer Factor.” The proposal stated that Child 10's father, known as Mr 10, would be managing director of the company, while Dr Wakefield would be research director.
The birthday party incident was described by Dr Wakefield himself in a speech given to the Mind Institute in California, a recording of which was broadcast by the television station ITN on 16 July.
In the video Dr Wakefield says, to audience laughter, “And you line them up—with informed parental consent, of course. They all get paid £5, which doesn't translate into many dollars I'm afraid. But … they put their arms out and they have the blood taken. All entirely voluntary.”
Dr Wakefield is accused of taking blood in an inappropriate social setting without ethical approval, of offering financial inducements, of showing a callous disregard for the distress and pain of the children, of abusing his trust as a practitioner, and of bringing the medical profession into disrepute.
The case is expected to last until October.