By Allison Connolly - Jan 13, 2011

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-13/study-tying-vaccine-to-aut...

The author of a study linking vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella to an increased risk of autism said the research was “not a hoax,” contrary to reports in the British Medical Journal calling the findings a fraud.

Andrew Wakefield, who led the study published in the Lancet in 1998 and retracted last year, said he stands by the paper’s methodology and results, which have been duplicated in five other countries, according to a statement released today.

“My research and the serious medical problems found in those children were not a hoax and there was no fraud whatsoever,” Wakefield said. “Nor did I seek to profit from our findings.”

Investigators in the U.S., Italy, Venezuela, Canada and Poland confirmed the original results, with 11 published reports in peer-reviewed medical journals supporting the findings, he said in the statement.

Each of the dozen cases included in the study led by Wakefield at the Royal Free Hospital in London and published in 1998 in the Lancet was misrepresented or altered, journalist Brian Deer wrote in the BMJ article published Jan. 6. There’s “no doubt” there was a fraud that originated with Wakefield, BMJ editors concluded after reviewing Deer’s work.

The journal published another article by Deer on Jan. 11 saying that Wakefield “intended to make huge sums of money” from the research by selling diagnostic testing kits and other products.

Co-Authors Backed Away

Ten of Wakefield’s 12 co-authors on the Lancet paper backed away in 2004 and the journal retracted the study last year, saying some of the claims “have been proven to be false.”

The Lancet retraction left “the door open for those who want to continue to believe that the science, flawed though it always was, still stands,” BMJ editors wrote in an editorial accompanying Deer’s report. “We hope that declaring the paper a fraud will close that door for good.”

Immunization rates fell in the U.K. to about 80 percent by 2004, from 92 percent nine years earlier, as parents concerned that the treatment was risky refused vaccine, according to the Health Protection Agency. In 2008, measles was declared endemic in England and Wales for the first time in 14 years, the BMJ said.

The Sunday Times of London and Channel 4 television network funded the investigation, and the BMJ commissioned and paid for the reports published in the journal.

“My goal has always been and will remain the health and safety of children,” Wakefield said in today’s statement. “Since the Lancet paper, I have lost my job, my career and my country. To claim that my motivation was profit is patently untrue.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Allison Connolly in Frankfurt at aconnolly4@bloomberg.net and Naomi Kresge in Berlin at nkresge@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Phil Serafino at pserafino@bloomberg.net.