So what survives of “autistic enterocolitis” after Wakefield’s disgrace and the paper’s retraction? The answer requires an understanding of Wakefield’s mission, which was to discover precisely such a disease. Two years before the paper was published he was hired by a solicitor to help launch a speculative lawsuit against drug companies that manufactured MMR vaccine. And the instrument of their attack was to find what he called at the time “a new syndrome”6 of bowel and brain disease caused by vaccines.
“In contrast to the IBD cases, which have a prima face [sic] gastrointestinal pathology, children with enteritis/disintegrative disorder form part of a new syndrome,” said Wakefield and the lawyer in a confidential submission for legal aid funding for the project in June 1996, before any of the 12 children in the paper had been investigated. “Nonetheless, the evidence is undeniably in favour of a specific vaccine induced pathology.”9
But when the children were brought in to the Royal Free for ileocolonoscopy, between July 1996 and February 1997, a snag in Wakefield’s project emerged. The hospital’s pathology service repeatedly judged colonic biopsy samples to be unexceptional, and thought bowel disease was a possibility in only one child.
. Looks how it ends - the author is deluded enough to think that the people who died in the "1918-19 flu epidemic" (which actually lasted until December 1920) were killed by aspirin!
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