It looks like parents might not have quite the reason to fear vaccinating their children as was previously thought. One of the researchers who was responsible for conducting the study that claimed to link autism to children’s regular vaccinations, has recently been discovered to have covered up major flaws in his research that led him to link the two.
Andrew Wakefield did not make it clear that many of the children he used in his studies had developmental problems before they were given any kind of vaccination.
A new report that was recently published in the British Medical Journal elaborates on the study, saying that almost all of the cases that Wakefield used in his 1998 paper were misrepresentations of what was actually true according to medical records and family memories about the children.
When Wakefield’s study was published, people in the United States and Britain were extremely worried about vaccinating their kids against Measles, Mumps, and Rubella, and many parents began refusing the vaccine for their children.
Although there were numerous other studies that looked at the link between the vaccine and autism, Wakefield’s was the only one that claimed to find any sort of connection.