Associated Press
MMR vaccination rates are slowly recovering in the wake of a discredited autism study.
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A rumor debunked
Have you ever heard of the British medical journal Lancet? Odds are good you haven’t. Have you ever heard someone tell you that the mumps, measles, rubella vaccine causes autism? The odds are probably better that you have.
Well, if it were not for Lancet, a well-regarded publication, you wouldn’t have heard that nonsense about MMR. In 1998, Lancet published a report linking autism and the vaccine, a report that, it turns out, was based on a sample of 12 British children.
Since the report, Lancet said it never should have published it and indeed last week formally retracted it. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Britain’s medical regulator found that Andrew Wakefield, the researcher, “acted unethically in the way he collected blood samples from children and in his failure to disclose payments from lawyers representing parents who believed the vaccinations … had hurt their kids.”
Because of the report, many parents refused vaccinations. And although MMR vaccination rates have begun to recover, more than 1,000 children came down with measles in 2008, compared with several dozen annually at the time of the report.
Talk about hurting kids.