furrbear | Feb. 3rd, 2010

The medical journal Lancet has retracted study linking vaccine to autism.

(CNN) -- The medical journal The Lancet on Tuesday retracted a controversial 1998 paper that linked the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism.

The study subsequently had been discredited, and last week, the lead author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, was found to have acted unethically in conducting the research.
...
The Wakefield study has been a key piece of evidence cited by many parents who do not vaccinate their children because of autism fears.

"The story became credible because it was published in The Lancet," Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, said Tuesday. "It was in The Lancet, and we really rely on these medical journals."

Singer, the mother of a child with autism, added, "That study did a lot of harm. People became afraid of vaccinations. This is the Wakefield legacy: this unscientifically grounded fear of vaccinations that result in children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases."

Retractions are rare in medical journals and usually occur as a result of fraud or plagiarism, said Marcia Angell, a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

"It is a major event when there is a retraction like this," she said. "It sounds like there was a misleading design of the study ... patients not randomly chosen. There were ethical violations."

Conspiracy theorists everywhere claim it's a conspiracy!