to think that there is a witch hunt against Andrew Wakefield?

[MagalyZz]

I just can't believe that they're still gunning for this guy!?

Whatever you make of his research, it WAS his research and he found what he found and he should be allowed to "suggest a link"

I have a child on the spectrum who had the MMR and I do not think the MMR had anything to do with it, but I do believe Dr Wakefield that a tiny percentage of people do react very badly to this vaccine.

Leave the guy alone ffs!!

Yes it does but very rarely is it life threatening...I know how serious autism can be and how profoundly it can affect children- but autistic child or dead child- no contest to me really.
BUT thats by the by because there is no link.

FPT, that did help. I cannot believe he gave children lumbar punctures for research purposes rather than for their own medical needs, and without approval of an ethics committee. That alone should justify him being struck off.

Does anyone on this thread really think it is okay for doctors to give children lumbar punctures for research purposes?

Wasn't he also paid to advise on legal action by parents who believed their kids had been harmed by the MMR so he also had an undisclosed conflict of interest.

yanbu.

As for the poster whose child caught measles at ten MO, well perhaps the reason for that was because she wasn't old enough yet to have the mmr, chances are she would have caught it anyway.

Wakefield never said children shouldn't be vaccinated, his issue was with the tripple vaccine. If the govt wanted people to take up vaccination they could easily have permitted single vaccines, the take-up would have been higher then, but no.

Redredwine you really have no idea, do you?

tbh I was shocked that he only was struck of now...

Redwine - that isn't the 'contest' though is it? There have been very few actual deaths from those diseases; mumps and rubella in particular are generally mild.

YABU
Very.
Speaking as the mother of a profoundly autistic son.

Well it's done now. They can't gun for him anymore. And in their eyes he can't do any more 'damage'. He broke the rules so he had to expect this, whatever you might think about him and his reseach personally.

Dr Wakefield displayed grave errors in behaviour,ethics and judgement.i agree with gmc decision

here have been very few actual deaths from those diseases; mumps and rubella in particular are generally mild.

if you look at the stats of the measles epidemic in germany a few years back, they are quite shocking. I don*t remember the exact numbers but there was permanent damage to the child in about 1 in 1000 confirmed cases there was permanent damage to the child.

On the other thread someone said there was a clinical need for that. I don't know if that is true or not, I can only offer my experience.

As for ethics I do believe he was a maverick but then weren't many great discoveries based on leaps of faith in the past? I always thought that scientists were supposed to "think outside the box" (ghastly corporate term now) and then prove their ideas empirically.

Not saying that Wakefield did or didn't do this and I do not presume to know enough about this subject to have a definite opinion on it. I'm busy caring for my autistic son who became gravely ill following his MMR and who developed extreme gastro-intestinal problems which the NHS professionals freely acknowledge but have never offered to treat or investigate.

I was on a course last week for parents of children with ASD and we were discussing eating habits, diet and stomach problems with regard to the near-impossibility of potty training children with ASD.

When I asked the group as a whole if G.Ps or paediatricians had ever referred their children to a specialist in that area the course leaders nearly fell off their chairs. Nobody had been given that option.

That tells me something. Maybe that Wakefield is considered so controversial that our children's health is even now being put at risk. What if my child's "typical austic gut, nothing to do with the MMR and not worth looking into" is masking a serious condition? I'll never know.

The GMC struck off a doctor who seriously broke ethical guidelines on conducting clinical studies and forced children to undergo invasive and painful procedures that they did not need in order to help line his pocket.

And people are surprised? Defensive of him?

Some people are idiots.

Don't forget that he wasn't struck off because of the correctness or not of his research but rather for his unethical research methodology that subjected children to unecessary medical procedures.

Noblegiraffe
X post
I think the thousands of pounds of fees he didn't disclose and the single jab vaccine he was apparently trying to patent just add to the picture of behaviour below the standard expected of a consultant.

but doesn't permanent damage to a child compare with permanent damage through autism?

People here are saying that autism isn't as bad as mmr because children don't die from it. Let's see - how many children have died of measles in the past ten years here in the UK, um that would be none. Mumps? Ditto. In fact mumps is a disease that can cause infertility in adults so why there is this hysterical need to vaccinate against it in toddlerhood I have no idea.

The risk from rubela is to the unborn child, and again that is risk of disability not death.

In fact I'd be interested to know whether anyone on mn who is so passionate that wakefield got what he deserved has actually been affected by the decision not to vaccinate their own child. Because there are certainly mumsnetters who have been affected by the decision to vaccinate.

The cost of the GMC proceedings against Wakefield runs into many times what the NHS spends on researching autism. Ridiculous waste of money if you ask me - especially as he doesn't even practise in the UK anyway. And then you compare it to other cases where they allow doctors who download child porn to stay on the register...

One reason why parents defend Wakefield is that at least he was interested in finding out what was going on the guts of children with autism. Other doctors and routine care just brushed them off.

I am actually quite disgusted now that people are going on about their kids rather than the kids who endured this agony at his hands.

I will ask again, do you think it is acceptable that someone else's children were subjected to lumbar punctures purely for research purposes?

I don't care if he found the cure to cancer and diabetes. It is wrong to experiment on children in this way.

I don't dispute that it can cause permanent damage Sonilaa but Redwine's post was 'autistic child v dead child'. And equally autism causes permenant damage to the child.

Measles can be serious, yes I agree, so vax against measles by offering singles. The mumps part of MMR doesn't actually work that well anyway.

How was he 'lining his pockets' exactly? Only link I can see is that he earned money acting as an expert witness. In common with many other doctors.

My mother had a lumbar puncture for her own health needs. She knew that and the doctors still had to hold her down. It is agony. So yes, part of that research team must have held children down.

Ermm yes I DO have an idea actually Wannabe....a major complication of measles is encephalitis- which can cause death. Blah blah yes its rare but it does happen and ive seen it with my own eyes. So maybe YOU have no idea?