Lake Saint Louis Physician Comments on "Elaborate Fraud"

Editors at the British Medical Journal (BMJ) said this week that Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 paper asserting the mumps, measles and rubella vaccine was linked to autism was "an elaborate fraud." At least one local doctor said the news isn’t news at all.

SSM St. Joseph Hospital West Pediatrician Dr. Douglas Barton also said he doesn’t believe the news will really change anything.

“Generally speaking, people who are concerned about that don’t want to hear my opinion,” Barton said. “They’ve already made up their minds.”

Thirteen years ago, Andrew Wakefield, a former intestinal specialist at Royal Free Hospital in London, claimed that the vaccine caused intestinal disorders that correlated with symptoms of autism.

According to TIME Magazine, journalist Brian Deer of the Sunday Times in London compared “Wakefield’s descriptions of the vaccinated children in the paper to the government’s National Health Service medical records of the youngsters requisitioned by England’s medical watch-dogs, the General Medical Council. What Deer and a panel of regulators found was fraud.”

Deer has revealed over the last eight years that Wakefield, among other allegations, was paid by an attorney eager to collect damages from vaccine manufacturers and used children in his study who already had displayed developmental delays before being vaccinated, Deer said in his article.

But Barton, a pediatrician who treats several autistic children in his Lake Saint Louis practice, said studies done in both Europe and the United States since Wakefield’s paper was published in the medical journal Lancet in 1998 have shown conclusively that the rise in autism rates has not correlated with the rise in vaccination rates. Other studies have shown the rate of autism remains constant in vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, he said.

“Wakefield didn’t just do the study poorly, but it appears he made up data.  He intentionally altered the study to produce his outcome,” Barton said. 

Conclusions drawn from Wakefield and his colleagues has been renounced by ten of its thirteen authors and was later retracted by the Lancet.

The Times article stated the devastating effect of Wakefield’s actions: " . . . the injury of hundreds of children, and even the deaths of some after they became infected with mumps, measles or rubella due to the fact that they were not vaccinated against MMR, and fueling of a worldwide suspicion of vaccines among parents.” The article, written by Alice Park, and published on Jan. 6, quotes Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a long-time critic of the dangers of the anti-vaccine movement as saying, “That paper killed children.” Offit wrote “Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All.” 

Barton blames sensationalistic journalism and “certain superstars who have made a living hyping fear” into an uneducated public. “We all have a fear of the unknown,” said Barton. “Science is one of those things that we don’t know a ton about.  It’s easier for people who create fear to use that.”

Actress Jenny McCarthy started an anti-vaccination grassroots movement some years ago, claiming that her son developed autism from vaccinations.

For a generation of parents who have never seen the devastating effects of diseases like polio or pertussis (whooping cough), it’s easy to forget how critical vaccines have been to people all over the world in the last half century, Barton said.

“Most parents today have grown up in an era where they haven’t seen a vaccine-preventable disease,” he said. “They don’t have the experience behind them to see what these diseases do to kids.”

Barton said the FDA has been vigilant regarding vaccines and their potential side effects. He gave the example of the whole cell pertussis vaccine that caused high fevers in those vaccinated. “It was pulled very quickly,” he said. In addition, a vaccine for rotovirus was replaced after just nine months of use due to its negative intestinal side effects, he said.

Another example, according to Barton, is the vaccine that is made available to military personnel to prevent anthrax. It is only given to those with the most serious risk of catching the disease and not to the general public, due to its side effects.

But perhaps the most conclusive proof for Barton and others that vaccines do more good than harm is that “if vaccines were causing problems, the lawyers would be getting rich and that hasn’t happened.”