In January 2010 the UK's General Medical Council (GMC) decided that Wakefield had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly,” a ruling that led to him being struck off the medical register four months later.
In the first part of his investigation, Deer showed how Wakefield was able to manufacture the appearance of a medical syndrome that would hoodwink parents and large parts of the medical establishment with a fraud that “unleashed fear, parental guilt, costly government intervention, and outbreaks of infectious disease."
In the second part, he shows how the discredited doctor planned secret businesses intended to make huge sums of money, in the U.K. and the U.S., from his allegations.
The BMJ report says that Wakefield met medical school managers to discuss a joint business even while the first child to be fully investigated in his research was still in the hospital; and how just days after publication of his Lancet article, he brought business associates to his place of work at the Royal Free Medical School in London to continue negotiations.
Drawing on investigations and information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Deer says
Wakefield and his associates used financial forecasts that predicted they could make up to £28 million (about $43.7 million) a year from the diagnostic kits alone.
Deals Could Have Netted Millions
The kits in question were for diagnosing patients with autism.
Deer obtained one 35-page document marked "private and confidential" which confidently predicted: “It is estimated that by year 3, income from this testing could be about £3,300,000 rising to about £28,000,000 as diagnostic testing in support of therapeutic regimes come on stream.”
Would-be investors were told that “the initial market for the diagnostic will be litigation-driven testing of patients with AE [autistic enterocolitis, an unproven condition concocted by Wakefield] from both the UK and the USA”.
Deer’s investigation also reveals that Wakefield was offered support to try to replicate his results, gained from just 12 children, with a larger validated study of up to 150 patients,
but that he refused to carry out the work, claiming that his academic freedom would be jeopardized.
A further claim in the BMJ article is the existence of a business, named after Wakefield’s wife, which was intended to develop his own "replacement" vaccines, diagnostic testing kits, and other products which only stood any real chance of success if public confidence in the MMR vaccine was damaged..
http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/ne...journal-claims
Originally Posted by Katman
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