Andrew Wakefield, the British gastroenterologist who sparked a worldwide scare over the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, has been found guilty of serious professional misconduct and struck off the medical register by the General Medical Council.
In its summation of the case against Dr Wakefield the GMC fitness to practise panel concluded that erasing Dr Wakefield’s name from the medical register was “the only sanction that is appropriate to protect patients and is in the wider public interest, including the maintenance of public trust and confidence in the profession and is proportionate to the serious and wide-ranging findings made against him.”
Dr Wakefield now has 28 days to appeal against the judgment before he is officially struck off.
In January Dr Wakefield was found guilty of dishonesty and irresponsibility by the GMC, the UK’s regulatory body. The fitness to practise panel held that Dr Wakefield abused his position, subjected children to intrusive procedures such as lumbar puncture and colonoscopy that were not clinically indicated, carried out research that flouted the conditions of ethics committee approval, and brought the medical profession into disrepute (
BMJ 29 January 2010, ;340:c593, doi:
10.1136/bmj.c593).
After the GMC’s verdict the
Lancet retracted the 12 year old paper that sparked the crisis in confidence in the safety of the vaccine (
BMJ 2 February 2010;340:c696, doi:
10.1136/bmj.c696).
The paper, published when Dr Wakefield was a consultant gastroenterologist at the Royal Free Hospital in London, caused the biggest public health scare in UK history. Although the paper did not claim it had found a definite link between the vaccine and autism, Dr Wakefield suggested at a press conference that single vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella might be preferable to the triple vaccine.
His comments led to a plummeting in the uptake of the MMR vaccine and an increase in measles cases.
www.theguardian.com
www.businessinsider.com
