Over the past decade, many parents have had strong feelings about a divisive issue: To vaccinate or not to vaccinate? Some parents have chosen not to vaccinate their children out of the belief that vaccines could trigger autism.
Those fears can be traced back to a paper published a dozen years ago in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal. The Lancet has now officially retracted that paper, saying the study had problems so serious that it never should have been published in the first place.
The 1998 study described an association between autism symptoms, inflammatory bowel disease, and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
The paper stopped short of drawing any cause-and-effect relationships, but the study’s lead author, gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, implied at a press conference that the MMR vaccine could cause autism and said that it might be safer for children to get vaccines for these three diseases separately, rather than all combined into one shot.
This, in turn, lit a fire that made a lot of parents question getting the vaccines at all. In the years that followed, MMR vaccination rates fell sharply in the U.K., and measles — a highly contagious illness that remains the leading cause of vaccine-preventable deaths worldwide — made a resurgence.
Recorded cases of measles in England and Wales jumped from 56 in 1998 to 1,348 in 2008. The trend has been less dramatic in the U.S., but dozens of cases in the past decade have been linked to lack of vaccination.
So what does the retraction of the study mean for parents? “They can take this as one more piece of evidence that [the MMR vaccine] isn’t something they should be worrying about,” says Dr. John Dunn, a pediatrician with Group Health Cooperative in Bothell, WA, and a vaccine safety investigator at the Group Health Research Institute.
Dr. Deirdre Bernard-Pearl, an integrative pediatrician in Albany, CA, agrees: “Giving this vaccine to healthy children makes sense most of the time, and I think parents can really relax more about it.”
Although Wakefield’s paper spurred loads of research on MMR and autism, no well-designed study has ever found a connection between the two, Dunn says. In 2004, 10 of Wakefield’s 12 coauthors even disavowed any causal link.
But after an investigative journalist from the London Sunday Times uncovered evidence that Wakefield had misrepresented or concealed important details of his study, questions arose that eventually led to The Lancet's retraction of the study, a highly unusual step.
Wakefield hadn’t disclosed that his research was supported by lawyers preparing a suit against an MMR vaccine manufacturer, and that some of the children in the study had actually been referred to him by those lawyers. To top it off, he’d filed a patent application for a single measles vaccine, so he stood to gain financially from replacing the triple vaccine.
Those revelations triggered an investigation by the U.K. General Medical Council, which found that Wakefield and two of his coauthors had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly.” Wakefield, who has resigned as director of an autism center in Austin, TX, in response to the uproar, called the decision “unfounded and unjust.”
Of course, for parents who are skeptical of vaccines, the worries go beyond autism. Marybeth Kavanagh, a Colorado mother whose two elementary-school children have never received a single vaccine, says that vaccination “was an all-or-nothing choice for me.” She remains concerned about preservatives, fillers and other ingredients in vaccines.
There’s anger and skepticism among parents on the other side of the issue, as well. The Lancet’s retraction “feels like too little, too late,” says Megan Bryant of Winston-Salem, N.C., who has a 2-year-old daughter. “Now there’s such a terrible rift between pro-vax and anti-vax parents — sometimes I feel like I can’t even discuss the issue with other parents — that science is proving powerless to mend it.”