General Medical Council hands down first decision on Andrew Wakefield

Kev put it well—”Andrew Wakefield – what were you expecting to happen?“. I doubt many people expected a different outcome than, “dishonest” and “Irresponsible”.

Kathleen Seidel at Neurodiversity.com has blogged this as well U.K. General Medical Council Rules Wakefield & Co. “Dishonest,” “Irresponsible”.

You can read the decision for yourself at Neurodiversity.com.

Dr. Wakefield has responded, and the BBC is hosting a video of that. Dr. Wakefield has invited people to look for themselves and come to their own conclusions. I have. I agree with the GMC. The BBC is also hosting video of Dr. Wakefield joking about the birthday party blood draws.

I’ll touch on some parts of the decision as time permits. There is enough of a blog storm going on with people defending Dr. Wakefield, often with, quite frankly, bogus arguments. I see none of them addressing the real charges or, for that matter, the real purpose of the hearings.

For example, here is an important quote from the decision:

The Panel wish to make it clear that this case is not concerned with whether there is or might be any link between the MMR vaccination and autism.

Whenever you read people talking about this being about the research itself (as opposed to the ethics of the research methods), you are reading someone who is misinformed or worse.