The paper was completely bizarre. The idea that these were genuinely random consecutive referrals didn't hold up for a minute - if 8 out of 12 children with this presentation really had been vaccinated within 2 weeks of onset of symptoms, the entire world would have noticed. In the end, after Wakefield had "persuaded" the parents, every single one of these "random" referrals was involved in the vaccine lawsuit.
Of course, Wakefield changed the timings - originally the 14-day onset was a mean, with a much wider range. But when he came to the final paper the 14-day figure was the
maximum, with the mean at something like 6 days. He didn't check what the parents were saying (which wasn't even consistent) with the children's medical records - these showed much more variable times of onset, with a fair number actually having shown signs before MMR.
And then again the children didn't really have bowel disease. The parents responded to a circular from the lawyer (Barr) asking about bowel symptoms in these allegedly vaccine-damaged developmentally abnormal children, but in most cases all that was wrong was constipation because the brats' toileting habits were erratic. The routine path reports on the biopsies came back normal, but then Wakefield, who seems to have been an inexperienced histopathologist at best, changed the reports to "non-specific colitis". Walker-Smith later tried to say it was a matter of opinion, the changes weren't dramatic - yeah, right, changes so subtle that the regular, experienced histopathologists didn't see them, but they were still bad enough to have caused the children to become brain damaged.
And then of course his measles virus detection results were false positives because of poor specificity of an immunoassay antibody. PCR (which if anything can fall down on the specificity front) found nothing, and he knew that, but didn't bother mentioning it. (I think in one document he actually claimed the PCR results were positive.)
And all he looked at was measles. He didn't even type the strain of what he allegedly found to show it was vaccine virus (hard to do when it's a false positive in the first place). He didn't look at the mumps or rubella components. So where on earth did the idea that the polyvalent vaccine was to blame, while the monovalent measles vaccine would be safe?
Right out of his imagination, that's where. When he was challenged on that, he said it was purely his own invention, and it was the job of the public health people to check it out. Even if all his results and conclusions had been on the level, there was never any reason to believe monovalent vaccines would behave any differently from the polyvalent vaccine.
Of course, he promoted the "MMR causes autism" link widely and explicitly and vociferously for about ten years. Saying that the paper didn't demonstrate a link (true) and that he's not promoting a link now (debatable) is so disingenuous I don't know who's going to believe it, even among his ardent followers.
Rolfe.
