Andrew Wakefield is among the most controversial figures in autism circles. His research on the question of whether theMumps-Measles-Rubella (MMR) vaccine could be the cause of an autism epidemichas created a huge rift in the autism community.
This article explains Wakefield’s positions on vaccines and autism, and how they were developed. It discusses how anti-vaccine advocates claim a link to autism that Wakefield’s refuted research never demonstrated.
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Dr. Wakefield is an academicgastroenterologist(digestive system specialist) and surgeon with a special interest in inflammatory diseases.Born in Britain in 1957, he was educated in Canada and became a physician at the Royal Free Hospital in London.
Early in his career, Wakefield made an important contribution to medical research when he identified the cause ofCrohn’s disease, a major gastrointestinal illness, as decreased blood flow to the intestines.
Soon after this discovery, Wakefield began digging into the question of whether it was measles virus from the MMR vaccine that caused the blockage of blood flow leading to Crohn’s. While the answer to this question was “no,” the possibility of measles virus as a culprit for GI issues continued to interest him.
In 1998, Wakefield and a group of colleagues published a research study which linked inflammatory bowel symptoms in 12 autistic children to the MMR vaccine. That study, published in the respected British medical journal The Lancet, launched a massive anti-vaccine movement in the United Kingdom, the United States, and around the world.
While Wakefield’s original MMR/autism research has been repudiated and never fully replicated, it remains the underpinning of a movement which continues to point to vaccines as the theoretical cause of a huge increase inautism spectrum disorder(ASD) diagnoses.
It’s important to note, however, that for all the anti-vaccine rhetoric in the autism community, Wakefield himself did not make an absolute claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism. An archived copy of Wakefield’s former Texas-based website, “Thoughtful House,” stresses there is no established link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Research, however, continues.
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4 Sources
Verywell Health uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
BBC News.Profile: Dr Andrew Wakefield.
Deer B.How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed.BMJ. 2011;342:5347. doi:10.1136/bmj.c5347
Thoughtful House Website.
Paul Offit, MD.Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure.Columbia University Press.2008.
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