© Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated PressA new report says Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues altered facts about patients in their study linking autism to the MMR vaccine.
The first study to link a childhood vaccine to autism was based on doctored information about the children involved, according to a new report.
The 1998 paper by Dr. Andrew Wakefield and colleagues was renounced by 10 of its 13 authors and later retracted by the medical journal
Lancet , where it was published. Still, the suggestion that the MMR vaccination shot was connected to autism spooked parents worldwide and immunization rates for measles, mumps and rubella have never fully recovered.
A new examination has found, by comparing the reported diagnoses in the paper to hospital records, that Wakefield and colleagues altered facts about patients in their study.
The analysis, by British journalist Brian Deer, found that despite the claim in Wakefield's paper that the 12 children studied were normal until they had the MMR shot, five had previously documented developmental problems.
Deer also found that all the cases were variously misrepresented when he compared data from medical records and the children's parents.
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