MMR : the facade cracks

February 07, 2006
Daily Mail, 7 February 2006

Ever since the MMR controversy burst upon a bemused world back in 1998, the battle lines have been very clearly drawn.

In one camp is Andrew Wakefield, the gastro-enterologist who started the whole furore when he claimed to have discovered a new syndrome in children combining autistic symptoms with a new type of bowel disease.

The affected children’s parents believed that this was the result of their triple measles, mumps and rubella jabs. Mr Wakefield took their fears seriously and suggested that, for the sake of prudence, children should be vaccinated with single jabs rather than MMR.

In the uproar that has ensued ever since virtually the entire medical establishment, headed by the Department of Health, has lined up in the opposite camp to denounce Mr Wakefield’s claims in the most vitriolic terms as ‘junk science’ with no substance to them whatsoever. MMR, said all these experts with one voice, had been proved to be safe.

As a result, Mr Wakefield’s reputation has been systematically trashed and his research is said to be discredited. Yet many parents remain concerned. Only about 70 per cent of children are being vaccinated with MMR, raising fears of epidemics of measles, mumps and rubella. Indeed, as figures published yesterday revealed, in some areas a few as one in ten children has the triple jab.

Yet as the controversy deepened, there was never a chink in the united front the health department presented to the world. It painted the anti-MMR camp as a bunch of hysterical and grasping parents desperate to blame someone for the inexplicable tragedy that had befallen their children, and exploited by a cranky and irresponsible doctor who was putting the health of the nation’s children at risk by terrifying parents into avoiding giving them the MMR jab.

At the very core of the department’s case was its assertion that all the evidence was on its side. There had been no serious corroboration of Mr Wakefield’s claims and all reputable studies had shown MMR to be safe. There was simply no scientific case to answer.

Now, however, that united front has been shattered. A former senior Government medical officer has broken ranks to say that, on the contrary, the evidence suggests that for a small proportion of children MMR is not safe and that the Government is guilty of ‘utterly inexplicable complacency’.

The person who is saying this cannot easily be dismissed. Dr Peter Fletcher, a former Chief Scientific Officer at the Department of Health in the late 1970s, is a former medical assessor to the Committee on the Safety of Medicines and had responsibility for deciding whether new vaccines were safe. For years, therefore, he was at the very heart of the vaccine policy-making and regulatory establishment. If anyone knows how to assess all the available evidence on such matters, he surely does.

Full article posted at: http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles/archives/001580.html


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