Wakefield's Autism Study

After reading the article and watching the videos regarding Wakefield’s autism study, I think that the Lancet was justified in retracting Wakefield’s research paper. Firstly, Wakefield consistently changed the participants’ medical histories to support his hypothesis that MMR vaccines will induce the likelihood of autism and bowel disease. His action was very unprofessional and despicable because scientific discovery should be based on actual evidence; however, in this case, the evidence that Wakefield used were mainly fabricated data. After obtaining the initial clinical reports and observations of the study, the committee found out that none of the information mentioned in the study in regards to the MMR vaccines correlate with the actual
Thus making his research invalid because the sample is irrelevant to the experiment. Since scientific journals have profound impact on the society, Wakefield’s inability to use randomized and unbiased samples made his research unreliable and thus should be retracted. Last but not least, Wakefield has conflicting interests when he conducted this study. As mentioned in the article and the videos, Wakefield was paid by a lawyer who was in the process of filing a lawsuit against a pharmaceutical company that manufactures the MMR vaccines. The lawyer paid Wakefield $750,000 dollars to write a journal that reveals MMR vaccines do directly result in autism and later received a payment of 55,000 pounds to submit the research to the Lancet. Wakefield, however, never disclose to the journal publisher about any money he received during the study. This is the another main reason why his study should be retracted because Wakefield has conflicting interests in this study. He is the primary author and at the same time he receives money illegally to fabricate data. Overall, just this reason alone can justify why the Lancet should disqualify this