Journal: Autism/vaccine study a fraud

LONDON, Jan. 5 (UPI) -- An investigative journalist says the former physician whose study purported to find a link between autism and toddler vaccines created an "elaborate fraud."

Journalist Brian Deer writes in the British Medical Journal that two years before Andrew Wakefield and 12 others published their original paper in The Lancet in 1998 linking developmentally challenged children to the vaccine, Wakefield was working on a lawsuit that argued a bowel-brain "syndrome" after some children had been vaccinated with the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

Wakefield received more than $670,000 plus expenses from the lawyers, Deer says.

"Children with enteritis/disintegrative disorder -- an expression he used for bowel inflammation and autism -- form part of a new syndrome, nonetheless the evidence is undeniably in favor of a specific vaccine induced pathology," Wakefield and colleagues said in a confidential grant application to the British government's Legal Aid Board before any of the children were investigated, Deer says.

Of the 12 cases Wakefield examined in the paper, five showed developmental problems before receiving the MMR vaccine and three never had autism, Deer says.

Deer interviewed the parents of several children who were believed to be part of the study and found numerous inconsistencies between the children's experiences and the case information published in the study. However, Wakefield denies wrongdoing and has said he never claimed the children had regressive autism -- in which a child appears to develop typically but then starts to lose speech and social skills. Only one child was diagnosed with regressive autism, Deer says.

The 1998 study was retracted in February 2010.