Researcher who tied MMR vaccine to Autism faked data

Shameful. [Link]

First, no scientist not associated with Andrew Wakefield has ever been able to replicate his work. Second, as was exposed by U.K. reporter Brian Deer, not only was Wakefield paid big bucks by trial lawyers seeking to sue vaccine manufacturers for "vaccine injury" to do his studies on autistic children, a conflict of interest he never revealed and that had to be exposed through Deer's investigations, but months before he published his Lancet paper Wakefield had applied for a patent on a an allegedly safer single measles vaccine that could succeed best if the safety of the MMR were called into doubt. Even after all of this came to light, leading to Wakefield's correctly being dragged in front of the General Medical Council for charges of scientific misconduct. Even after this, he still enjoys a cult of personality that I can't figure out, and is often portrayed as being "persecuted" by the British medical establishment. Third, was revealed at the Autism Omnibus proceedings when PCR expert Stephen Bustin testified about the shoddy methods at the laboratory used to do the PCR on the colon biopsies. In brief, the laboratory used was set up such that cross contamination between the plasmids used to maintain the measles virus sequences and the area where the PCR was done. PCR is very sensitive; if there is contaminating plasmid sequence, it is very easy to amplify and detect it even when there is nothing in your samples. Indeed, I've experienced this very problem on occasion in my own lab. Unfortunately, in the case of Wakefield's research, no controls were done to make sure that contamination was detected in the negative controls. Finally, Wakefield's results were roundly refuted in an attempt to replicate his work that was published last year. As you can see, Wakefield's work and ethics are about as bad as it gets.

Or so I thought, until readers started sending me this article published in The Times, again by Wakefield's nemesis Brian Deer. Holy crap. If only a fraction of the allegations in this article are true, not only is Wakefield an unscrupulous and incompetent scientist but he's a scientific fraud as well: