A little over twenty years ago, in 1998, a man and his colleagues set out on a research venture that would receive attention and publicity from both health experts and the general public. Andrew Wakefield, head of this research study, conducted an experiment centered around the relationship between the MMRV vaccine and a child’s development of autism. More specifically, as laid out in an article found at the National Center of Biotechnology Information, this study suggested that this particular vaccine could serve as a predisposition for a child to develop “pervasive developmental disorder”.
This study has since been retracted for many reasons, one of which is due to the extremely small sample size selected by Wakefield. In this study, Wakefield only had 12 child participants. This low number of participants limits the ability of this study to be generalized to any group outside of the one chosen by Wakefield and his 12 colleagues. A larger criticism on the nature of this study was its intent, as it became known that Wakefield and his selected colleagues were specifically paid by a lawyer to find an association between vaccines and autism. This type of bribery, as explained in the British Journal of Medicine, comprises the information produced by the study as it was manipulated with the intent of personal gain for Wakefield and those he self-selected to be in his study. With intent to profit off of a lawyer who had been involved with lawsuits between parents and vaccination companies, Wakefield self-selected a cohort that would support this biased and motivated scientific approach to the research.
Researchers responded to Wakefield’s study by doing what they do best, more research. Seventeen years after the publishing of Wakefield’s original controversial study, produced the largest research study to date looking further into this relationship. With a much larger sample size, this time 95,000 children across the US, the researchers confidently concluded that there was no association between the MMVR vaccine and autism. This response by scientists and those passionate about the integrity of honest research displays the attempt to reconcile any unwarranted controversy and quell unwarranted anti-vaccination sentiments that may have resulted from Wakefield’s study.
