Dishonest vaccine study set disease prevention back a decade

The doctor who launched the modern anti-vaccine movement acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly," Britain's General Medical Council has ruled. But fear not. Dr. Andrew Wakefield is still a hero to his many acolytes. And others, with curious credentials, fight on to terrify parents into not getting their children inoculated.

In 1998, Wakefield wrote and then vociferously hawked an article in the British medical journal Lancet linking autism to the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella). After the council's decision, Lancet last week retracted the article. Among the facts that have come out of the inquiry into Wakefield's research is that two years before his paper appeared, lawyers seeking to sue vaccine makers paid Wakefield the equivalent of $700,000.

After Wakefield's article appeared, vaccination levels plummeted in Britain and declined in the United States, and the diseases they prevented surged. Measles cases increased sevenfold in the United States.

"One person's research set us back a decade, and we're just now recovering from that," Mark Sawyer, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at Radey Children's Hospital in San Diego, told me in an interview.

But are we recovering? Anti-vaccination groups have popped up like toadstools after rain (there are more than 180 on the Web), while older ones such as the National Vaccine Information Center were reinvigorated. For the most part, these groups have had only a marginal effect on national vaccination rates, but they have encouraged localized boycotts of immunization. (In one Washington county, 27 percent of children had vaccination exemptions in 2006-07.) The result has been a resurgence of diseases gone so long that some doctors don't even recognize them. And children die because of it.

Before the MMR vaccine became available in 1971, measles, mumps and rubella annually afflicted 530,000, 162,000 and 48,000 U.S. children, respectively, killing a total of more than 600. By the middle of the last decade, there were fewer than 7,000 new cases annually and zero deaths. But the anti-vaccine groups generally claim the injections were irrelevant and that factors such as better nutrition caused the declines.

Meanwhile, their "science" comes down to little more than that autism symptoms are often first recognized at the same age that children are getting their first vaccinations. So they lumped the MMR in with a list of other childhood vaccines that formerly contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal, although the MMR never contained thimerosal.

And don't dismiss the power of a good old-fashioned conspiracy. "It's astounding to me that people can imagine that America's pediatricians and family physicians and public health officials are scheming to harm children," Sawyer says.