16. The Fraudulent Roots of a Study
The publication of Dr. Wakefield’s study generated significant interest and controversy, so other large-scale studies were conducted to follow through and shed more light on his claims. However, researchers were unable to find any evidence to support his findings or replicate his work. So attention then shifted to the examination of Dr. Wakefield’s methodology: just how did the British physician arrive at his conclusions that linked the MMR vaccine to autism? It turned out that he had simply fabricated the evidence.
Dr. Wakefield did not make “mistakes” in his research. He simply made up much of the research and invented it out of thin air. To ice the cake – and transform the British physician from a dumb and incompetent researcher or crank into a cartoonish villain – it was discovered that Wakefield had been paid 55,000 British Pounds to claim that MMR vaccines caused autism. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. It was later discovered that Wakefield stood to make tens of millions of US dollars per year from his fraudulent study.
