For years, many have believed there is a link between an aggressive US vaccination schedule and autism. On one side you have the medical establishment claiming there has never been a study to prove a link while on the other side, throngs of people with stories of healthy children developing symptoms of autism within hours or days of vaccinations.
A recent report will, no doubt, add more substance to this discussion. The respected British medical journal The Lancet has retracted a 1998 study suggesting a link between autism and childhood vaccination with the MMR – measles-mumps-rubella vaccine.
From Medicinenet.com:
The retraction follows the finding of the U.K. General Medical Council (GMC) that says study leader Andrew Wakefield, MD, and two colleagues acted “dishonestly” and “irresponsibly” in conducting their research.
The Lancet specifically refers to claims made in the paper that the 12 children in the study were consecutive patients that appeared for treatment, when the GMC found that several had been selected especially for the study. The paper also claimed that the study was approved by the appropriate ethics committee, when the GMC found it had not been.
“We fully retract this paper from the published record,” The Lancet editors say in a news release.
As you would imagine the paper’s authors are standing by their original reports and claim no wrong-doing. Bottom line for me is, I just want this question answered accurately and rely on properly conducted peer-reviewed studies to help do this. It bums me out that these authors may have taken short cuts and misreported data for some personal gain or notoriety.
While this one retraction by no means definitively answers the question – can vaccinations cause autism? – it certainly doesn’t help. I’m sure the debate will continue, but I thought this was an interesting report worth noting, regardless of your position.
On a personal note, my wife and I have chosen to have our son receive most of the recommended shots, but on a delayed schedule. We are by no means researchers, but after some self-educating and consultation with our son’s pediatrician, we decided together that there are some shots he just doesn’t need, so we skipped them. Secondly, we believe that delaying the time table makes more sense and were very happy that our doctor agreed.
