Unfair hounding of MMR researcher

FOLLOWING the latest claim from The Lancet over the safety of MMR, quickly endorsed by Dr John Reid, people should be aware of the campaign to vilify Dr Andrew Wakefield. The latest ‘wheeze’ tries to discredit his research by alleging a financial interest was not declared when his report was published. His co-author, Dr Harvey, interviewed on TV, said the claim was trivial.

At most, the authors may have omitted to mention the Legal Aid Board in the acknowledgements which typically accompany scientific papers. This begs the question as to whether The Lancet exercised its own editorial role properly by asking the authors if all acknowledgements had been included.

Also, if The Lancet wishes to imply the content of the work was somehow influenced by the receipt of Legal Aid monies, then they are tearing down the chimera of ‘peer review’. Dr Wakefield was working in a public sector hospital, receiving money from a public sector body. How many other authors of scientific papers receive money from private sector sources?

The Lancet is also on shaky ground because there are major problems with the reporting of adverse reactions to medications, including vaccines.

I continue to be puzzled by the opprobrium heaped on Dr Wakefield, who has simply undertaken standard scientific enquiries. After finding live measles vaccine in the gut of children he has considered the options for where that virus may have come from, and set up the hypothesis that it came from something which had previously been administered, namely the MMR vaccine. This hypothesis is then subject to further investigation to prove or disprove the theory.

In a more considered environment, his finding would have prompted research into whether the single measles vaccine could provoke the same reaction in the gut, and indeed, what the incidence of measles is in the gut of the general population.

D Hodgson, Cumbria

THE furore over Dr Wakefield appears to have reached Huttonesque proportions. The implication? He made it up to make money. So why didn’t The Lancet discover this "fatal flaw" when peer-reviewing his paper? How does it "flaw" the discovery of the measles virus?

The Health Secretary, John Reid, demands an "urgent" inquiry, but only after the press ask him. Wasn’t it "urgent" until then? He raises two questions, though: Why no urgency to discover why the measles virus gets in the gut and why no urgency to determine the reasons for steep increases in the numbers of autistic children? Better diagnosis? If so, is there a decrease in those with general non-attributable retardation?

The government’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, rushes to judgment before the study of Wakefield is undertaken and peer-reviewed. The General Medical Council will investigate the "conflict of interest". But to what extent, since some members will have shares in, or funding from, MMR manufacturers and GPs receive bonuses for MMR targets?

How do these people sleep at night? Is it because they don’t have a child keeping them up till 5am obsessed with watching the History Channel?

J M MacInnes, Muir of Ord