PSY 240 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: General Medical Council, Royal Free Hospital, Andrew Wakefield
Document Summary
Andrew wakefield : wakefield and 11 co-authors release a publication in the lancet (1998) Conflict of interest: after failures of replication over several years, and identification of previously undisclosed conflicts of interest, the majority of the papers co-authors withdraw support for the findings. It was identified that wakefield had received ,000 in funding from a legal aid fund for the purpose of supporting a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers: the lawsuit later failed. Barred: the lancet fully retracts the original publication, wakefield is struck from the uk medical register, cannot practice again. Fallout: wakefield"s unpublished raw data identifies that the children in his study didn"t have inflammatory bowel disease. The impact: costs of discredited anti-vaccine pseudoscience are difficult to calculate, common estimates range between 2-3 million lives saved per year by vaccination. Whittemore peterson institute: affiliated with unr/center for molecular medicine. Identified, in 2009, virus xmrv as a potential causal agent for chronic fatigue.
