I have talked about this before, but I’m going to point it out again. Not only did he falsify data, but he conducted unethical medical research on children.
Andrew Wakefield was found guilty of professional misconduct by the UK General Medical Council. I’ve worked in research for a pediatric hospital, and two of the GMC findings constitute major violations of professional ethics for research on children here in the US (I’m pretty sure the UK is similar since these findings formed the basis for revoking his medical license and retracting his Lancet paper.
He performed invasive medical procedures with potential serious side-effects on autistic children contrary to the children’s clinical interests. I.E. the colonoscopies, biopsies and lumbar punctures he performed on these children were of no benefit to them and were done strictly for research purposes. All procedures done for research purposes only should be approved by an ethics board known as an institutional review board, which ensures that parents are given enough information about the research and negative side effects of the procedure (adverse events) so that they can give informed consent. Wakefield did not do this. He sidestepped the ethical review process. We have no idea if any children were harmed by this, because there was no tracking of adverse events, because there was no review board involved.
He performed invasive medical procedures on “normal” non-autistic children with no clinical benefit to them, no ethical oversight and no informed consent. In fact, these were children he was not even seeing as their doctor, he simply asked parents at his child’s birthday party if they would allow a blood draw on their children for £5. Now, a blood draw is WAY less invasive, painful and has less potential to cause injury. But it’s still an invasive medical procedure done for zero reason and without informed consent of their parents.
Basically, Andrew Wakefield is an unethical asshole, on par with the people who ran the Tuskegee study.