After Andrew Wakefield finally had his laughable “research” paper withdrawn, what happened to the people who peer reviewed and approved it originally?

16 comments

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2. Obviously not, just look at all the bullshit around COVID. I don’t believe his papers were peer reviewed

3. I don’t believe the peer-reviewers were made aware of the conflict of interest:

   *”If we had known the conflict of interest Dr Wakefield had in this work I think that would have strongly affected the peer reviewers about the credibility of this work and, in my judgement, it would have been rejected,” he said.*

   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3510721.stm

4. I may be mistaken, but The study was published so it could be peer reviewed. It was the peer review that noticed the issues.

   Wakefield went straight to the media and really pushed his lies. And the media and public were not used to that type of action ,in those times.
   I hate him.

5. I’d recommend this to anyone who wants to know more about Wakefield.

   I don’t know if the paper was peer reviewed or not but it does mention that there were papers debunking/strongly questioning Wakefield’s findings in the same issue of the journal his was published in which I think shows what scientists thought of it at the time.

   https://youtu.be/8BIcAZxFfrc

6. There are journals in which you can publish without peer review. That contributed to some serious covid misinformation, as well; It was published, so it’s right! Yeah, but was it in a respectable journal one or one of those pay-to-play setups?

7. Many biased and nonsensical papers still get published (although you can argue most are in journals that no one ever pays attention to anyway). That will likely never change. One thing that has changed in the last 20 years is the ability to share and analyse data. The advancement of the internet means that the original data can more easily be requested and these papers can be more easily debunked. As someone pointed out, there were other papers debunking Wakefields work at the time and it was difficult to tell who was correct. [Recently, methods were used to find the truth about ivermectin.](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01535-y) So we would at least be quicker and more definite about spotting these falsified data.

8. Andrew Wakefield should be in prison.

9. He got to date and have a steady relationship with Ella Macpherson. Ella fuc*ing Macpherson.

   I would make up pretty much any data push forward ant vaccine nonsense to date her.

   I think she was on my wall at some point as a teenager.

10. I realise you know who Wakefield is, but your post could equally well be about some niche writer in some specialist subject of no interest to the general public.

    Maybe include some context?

11. The issue is people misinterpreted his paper. He never said vaccines cause all types of autism – he said in **some** cases, children developed something **resembling** autism after the injection.

12. what was autism called years ago, i never heard of it when i was a kid, what does it really mean?

13. As someone who reviews papers (I was going to say for a living but they don’t pay me): you can only review what’s been put in front of you in good faith. If there’s a conflict of interest not declared or flat out lies you can’t do anything about that. You can only say if the results can be drawn from the methods used, if the methods look sound and then if the conclusions drawn are supported by the results. There’s a bit more to it than that but peer review isn’t infallible*. The second peer review comes post publishing and that worked great in this case.

    Reviewing is a thankless job as it is without adding witch hunts to it!

    *thanks Mandolinist!

14. Was Wakefield the “vaccines cause autism” guy? Or is there somone else at that level of stupid

15. The Wakefield article has led to more stringent analysis of medical research. As a single paper with a tiny sample size it would get such a low [GRADE](https://www.nice.org.uk/process/pmg6/chapter/reviewing-the-evidence) score that it would never make a contribution to medical practice.

16. So, there were 12 other authors of that paper.

    John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch were both charged by the GMC with misconduct. Walker-Smith, the senior author, was found guilty.

    10 of the authors publicly criticised the conclusions drawn from the paper. Wakefield, unsurprisingly, was not one of them.

    No doubt, all of those authors will have had to work extra hard rebuilding trust in their academic authoring. I am sure they now check the source data of their studies more carefully, for those still in academia.

    As an aside, huge changes were made to many ethics committees following this sorry saga, to provide greater oversight and scrutiny of what actually happens following a study’s approval, rather than giving the approval and leaving it there.

    As for the reviewers, they can only do so much to detect such fabrication. For starters they would assume that a paper with 12 additional co-authors would have a certain level of internal scrutiny. To have 13 academics conspire to publish knowingly false data would, even today, be unprecedented. Most researchers pride themselves on their academic integrity. The reviewers would also expect the ethics committee at such a prestigious and respected university to ensure proper oversight.

    If the data looks valid, the statistics add up, the paper highlights the limitations of the study (e.g. small sample size, no controls), everything which is asserted is backed up by references, etc etc; then there’s only so much reviewers can do. They can’t guess Wakefield was getting funding from some lawyers if he didn’t declare it. They won’t have the raw medical records of the study participants, etc. The Lancet in particular requires the main author to declare that at least one other named author has verified the data in the paper from source.

    No doubt things were slightly different at The Lancet 20 years ago. For what it’s worth, The Lancet say thay had his conflict of interest (funding) been declared, then they would have rejected it. It is pretty difficult to find out a conflict of interest if, when that person is asked if they have any competing interests, they say no.