Interesting item from Forbes' health care blog by Dr. Steven Salzberg, Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and the Horvitz Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park.
It's about time.
It took nearly three years, but the U.K.'s General Medical Council finally issued a ruling about Andrew Wakefield's 1998 study that claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. They ruled that he had acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in his research, and further that he didn't have the qualifications to be carrying out some of the experiments on children that he subjected them to.
He also filed for a patent on a "safer" vaccine that he was hoping to sell after he discredited the MMR vaccine. The GMC found all these behaviors amounted to "serious professional misconduct."
What's so awful about Wakefield's behavior is that it has directly contributed to a decline in vaccination rates, first in the U.K. and then in the U.S. and elsewhere.
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