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Lancet Retraction Good News for Vaccine Advocates – but will it have an effect?

By: NWHF Staff | Posted on: February 5th, 2010 | Share:
Categories: Policies & Laws • Public Health

The Lancet, a British medical journal has retracted a 1998 research paper that set off a sharp decline in vaccinations in the United Kingdom when the author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, suggested that the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine can be unsafe vaccines could cause autism.

Britain’s General Medical Council has ruled that Dr. Wakefield acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly,” stating that two years before his paper appeared, lawyers seeking to sue vaccine makers paid Wakefield the equivalent of $700,000.

Despite that, as Michael Fumento writes in the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Wakefield “is still a hero to his many acolytes. And others, with curious credentials, fight on to terrify parents into not getting their children inoculated.”

Fumento expresses concern that anti-vaccination groups “have had only a marginal effect on national vaccination rates, but they have encouraged localized boycotts of immunization,” citing a Washington county with a 27% vaccine exemption rate.

Here in Oregon, Ashland has one of the highest exemption rates in the nation, at over 28%, which caused the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct community meetings to learn more about this community and its outlying statistic.

Among the views that emerged from those discussions was a feeling that people were being “sold” these vaccines by drug companies. “I never questioned the efficacy of vaccines until a doctor tried to get me to give my daughter a hepatitis B vaccine.  Hepatitis B is a sexually transmitted disease. I knew I didn’t have hepatitis B. I knew my husband didn’t have it. There was no way she would come in contact with anyone with hepatitis B.”

Another view was expressed by a nutritional consultant who said her concern was “out of respect for the immune system developing on its own and not inundating it with chemicals.”

Meanwhile, Fumento cites statistics showing that pertussis once afflicted more than 250,000 American children yearly, which dropped to 1,000 new cases annually by 1976 thanks to vaccines. By 2008, however, he pointed out that cases had soared to more than 10,000 annually.

Is there a way to make progress on this issue – and what would “progress” look like?