---
title: "Lancet MMR vaccine-autism report"
chunk: 5/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_vaccine-autism_report"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:18:00.602839+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Full retraction and fraud revelations ===
In an April 2010 report in The BMJ, Deer expanded on the laboratory aspects of his findings recounting how normal clinical histopathology results generated by the Royal Free Hospital were later changed in the medical school to abnormal results, published in the Lancet. Deer wrote an article in The BMJ casting doubt on the "autistic enterocolitis" that Wakefield claimed to have discovered. In the same edition, Deirdre Kelly, President of the European Society of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition and the Editor of the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition expressed some concern about The BMJ publishing this article while the GMC proceedings were underway.
On 5 January 2011, The BMJ published the first of a series of articles by Brian Deer, detailing how Wakefield and his colleagues had faked some of the data behind the 1998 Lancet article. By looking at the records and interviewing the parents, Deer found that for all 12 children in the Wakefield study, diagnoses had been tweaked or dates changed to fit the article's conclusion. Continuing BMJ series on 11 January 2011, Deer said that based upon documents he obtained under freedom of information legislation, Wakefield—in partnership with the father of one of the boys in the study—had planned to launch a venture on the back of an MMR vaccination scare that would profit from new medical tests and "litigation driven testing". The Washington Post reported that Deer said that Wakefield predicted he "could make more than $43 million a year from diagnostic kits" for the new condition, autistic enterocolitis. WebMD reported on Deer's BMJ report, saying that the $43 million predicted yearly profits would come from marketing kits for "diagnosing patients with autism" and that "the initial market for the diagnostic will be litigation-driven testing of patients with [autistic enterocolitis] from both the UK and the USA". According to WebMD, the BMJ article also claimed that the venture would succeed in marketing products and developing a replacement vaccine if "public confidence in the MMR vaccine was damaged".
In an editorial accompanying Deer's 2011 series, The BMJ said, "it has taken the diligent scepticism of one man, standing outside medicine and science, to show that the paper was in fact an elaborate fraud", and asked:

Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children's cases accurately? No. A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was gross. Moreover, although the scale of the GMC's 217 day hearing precluded additional charges focused directly on the fraud, the panel found him guilty of dishonesty concerning the study's admissions criteria, its funding by the Legal Aid Board, and his statements about it afterwards.

Summarizing findings as of January 2011 in The BMJ, Deer set out the following analysis of the cases reported in the study:

The Lancet paper was a case series of 12 child patients; it reported a proposed "new syndrome" of enterocolitis and regressive autism and associated this with MMR as an "apparent precipitating event". But in fact:
Three of nine children reported with regressive autism did not have autism diagnosed at all. Only one child clearly had regressive autism.
Despite the paper claiming that all 12 children were "previously normal", five had documented pre-existing developmental concerns.
Some children were reported to have experienced first behavioural symptoms within days of MMR, but the records documented these as starting some months after vaccination.
In nine cases, unremarkable colonic histopathology results—noting no or minimal fluctuations in inflammatory cell populations—were changed after a medical school "research review" to "non-specific colitis".
The parents of eight children were reported as blaming MMR, but 11 families made this allegation at the hospital. The exclusion of three allegations—all giving times to onset of problems in months—helped to create the appearance of a 14 day temporal link.
Patients were recruited through anti-MMR campaigners, and the study was commissioned and funded for planned litigation.
In subsequent disclosures from the investigation, Deer obtained copies of unpublished gastrointestinal pathology reports on the children in the Lancet study that Wakefield had claimed showed "non-specific colitis" and "autistic enterocolitis". But expert analyses of these reports found bowel biopsies from the children to be overwhelmingly normal and with no evidence of any enterocolitis at all.
In September 2020, Johns Hopkins University Press published Deer's account of the fraud in his book The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines. The book includes reporting of parents whose children were among the twelve recruited by Wakefield in the Lancet study. One described the paper as "fraudulent" while another complained of "outright fabrication".