An Awful Vaccine Injury Link
The line from Wakefield to Krumholz is brighter than I first imagined
One of the most infamous incidents in the scientific literature may have just echoed, sweeping the head of medRxiv up in a scam. I’ve written about it before, but the potential implications have been reverberating in my head ever since — and they seem both bad and serious.
The main issue involves undisclosed financial interests among his co-authors upon posting a preprint on medRxiv — interests in a “vaccine injury” hypothesis, the same one that Andrew Wakefield was attempting to profit from in 1998.
That year, Wakefield published a paper in the Lancet describing a consecutive series of 12 children (3-10 years old, 11 of whom were boys). He reported that two-thirds of the parents had noticed behavioral symptoms beginning in association with the children’s measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccines. All the children had intestinal abnormalities.
The paper was published in a section of the Lancet under the rubric, “Early Report,” a section commonly known for more tentative, speculative, and brief findings.