The doctor whose study triggered a collapse in public confidence in the combined measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine told a disciplinary panel last week that he made up details of his son’s birthday party—at which he took blood samples from several children—when giving a speech in California.
Andrew Wakefield was one of the authors of the 1998 Lancet paper on inflammatory bowel disease and autism. He is now facing a General Medical Council fitness to practise panel, accused of serious professional misconduct, alongside two other authors of the study, Simon Murch and John Walker-Smith.
Dr Wakefield’s comments at a press conference announcing the paper, where he linked the MMR vaccine to a risk of autism, led to a public health scare that saw uptake of the vaccine dip below 80%. The Lancet later repudiated the paper, after it emerged that Dr Wakefield had extensive financial ties to lawyers and families who were pursuing the manufacturers of the vaccine in the courts and that most of his research participants were litigants.
The GMC’s charges against Dr Wakefield include allegations that, in 1998 while a consultant at the Royal Free Hospital, London, he unethically paid children at his son’s 10th birthday party £5 (€6; $10) each to give blood samples he wanted for his research.
Last week the GMC panel saw video footage of a speech Dr Wakefield gave in 1999 at a meeting of parents of autistic children called by the Mind Institute of the University of California, Davis, where he jokingly described children fainting and vomiting after giving blood.
“Two children fainted, one threw up over his mother,” he told his laughing audience in the clip. “People said to me, you can’t do that—children won’t come back to your birthday parties. I said we live in a market economy; next year they’ll want £10.”
But Dr Wakefield told the GMC panel that he had made up these details to amuse his listeners. “It was the end of a long and rather exacting talk for the parents, and it was an attempt to introduce a little bit of levity,” he said. “It was a quip, just a story. The way these stories are told, if the audience responds you tend to respond back. So the story was told. But it had no bearing on the truth at all.”
“Clearly, if it has caused any distress then I am extremely sorry for that,” said Dr Wakefield. “That wasn’t my intention.” He added that he had been “naive” to think he could take the samples without the permission of an ethics committee.
Dr Wakefield’s defence challenged testimony given earlier by Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, who said that he had not known before the article’s publication of Dr Wakefield’s work on behalf of MMR litigants.
Dr Wakefield alleged that newly uncovered documents reveal an extensive correspondence between the Lancet and Dawbarns, the firm of solicitors representing MMR claimants. These letters, several months before publication of the 1998 article, described Dr Wakefield’s work on behalf of the MMR litigants, he said. While he was “not impugning Dr Horton’s honesty,” said Dr Wakefield, the documents proved “in my opinion beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was aware of all these factors.”
Dr Horton, reached by email while travelling abroad, denied any foreknowledge of the conflict of interest, saying that the correspondence did not make clear Dr Wakefield’s role in litigation.
The case continues.