BMJ (once the British Medical Journal) today published an article, along with a no-holds-barred editorial which states unequivocally that Andrew Wakefield's claims of a link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) and autism were nothing more or less than "an elaborate fraud."
By now, most of us are I'm sure familiar with Wakefield's claims, published by The Lancet in 1998. And while The Lancet
retracted the article early last year and expressed regret about having published it, the damage has of course been done, with a variety of interested groups - parents with children on the spectrum, opponents of vaccine manufacturers, garden-variety conspiracy theorists, etc. - having latched on to Wakefield's claims. The result, of course, is rising numbers of measles diagnoses among children, both here in the United States, as well as in the UK.
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