Wakefield autism study a fraud, BMJ determines

CNN reports, an investigation published by British medical journal BMJ concluded that a retracted study by Andrew Wakefield, linking autism to child vaccines, was an “elaborate fraud.”

“It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors. But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.”
— Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of BMJ

The study, published in 1998, relied upon medical histories of 12 patients. BMJ’s investigation determined that Wakefield misrepresented or altered all of the patients’ medical histories.