Journal Claims Profit Motive Helped Fuel Autism-Vaccine Scare

NPR.org - January 12, 2011 by Scott Hensley

"In the second installment in a series for the BMJ, investigative journalist Brian Deer lays out evidence that a search for profits helped drive medical work that asserted a vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to autism.

In the first piece for the British Medical Journal, Deer asserted the data behind a 1998 study in the Lancet, withdrawn last year, were worse than wrong — they had been manipulated.


Now Deer writes in more detail about Dr. Andrew Wakefield's big plans to make money from the work. There was support for the research from a lawyer with ambitions to launch product liability suits against vaccine makers. But other business ideas ranged from a company that could commercialize new clinical tests to development of a modified measles vaccine."

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