A Brief History of the MMR and Autism

In 1998, Andrew Wakefield and 12 others published a paper that suggested that a vaccine called the MMR (measles mumps and rubella) had a link with a new condition they described as giving kids bowel problems and autism.

The results were predictable. The UK media fell over themselves to report on the MMR vaccine causing autism.

Wakefield's new hypothesis was that after the MMR was injected, it went to their gut and caused gastric problems - a condition he called "autistic enterocolitis" - after that it travelled to the brain where it caused or triggered autism.

He based this hypothesis on his 1998 study which looked at 12 autistic kids and in 8 of them alleged a connection.

What he did was send his gut samples off to a lab called Unigentics run by John O'Leary who used a technique called PCR to examine Wakefield's samples and said that it showed the children's symptoms were caused by the MMR because the PCR technique showed there was vaccine strain measles virus in the gut samples.

Nine years later in 2007, the Autism Omnibus hearings are taking place in the US. These are legal hearings wherein parents who thought their children were made autistic by vaccines grouped together to sue the US government and vaccine manufacturers.

Two people made very strong impressions on how weak the MMR hypothesis was. The first was Stephen Bustin. The second was Nick Chadwick who actually worked under Wakefield when he wrote his '98 paper.

Professor Stephen Bustin is the world's foremost PCR expert. Bustin uses PCR every day in his work, he has 14 papers in the peer reviewed literature on PCR and is the author of the "A to Z of Quantitative PCR" which is considered "the bible" of PCR.

Bustin examined Unigentics in great detail and found that the lab made a fairly basic error of science when looking at Wakefield's samples:

"Now, these are from samples that should have been discarded according to the SOP from Unigenetics because there was no GAPDH present, i.e., the RNA is degraded. Now, if this is degraded RNA yet I'm getting the same Cts for my F-gene target this can't be RNA because it would have been degraded.

"That's what the GAPDH showed me. Now, if it isn't RNA it has to be DNA. If it is DNA it can't be measles virus it has to be a contaminant."

In other words, the samples Wakefield provided to Unigentics were useless because Unigenetics own documented lab procedure says they were. But they used them anyway. The results were a bombshell. Using O'Leary's procedure the results cannot actually be RNA. If its not RNA then it must be DNA and if its DNA then it can't be measles virus because measles virus doesn't exist as DNA.

What the Unigentics lab detected in Wakefield's samples were contaminants. There's no way that Unigentics could possibly have been detecting measles virus.

This was backed up by Chadwick who checked Wakefield's work (at his request). He also did a PCR test.

Q. What results did you receive from the gut biopsy materials for measles RNA?
A. They were all negative.
Q. They were always negative?
A. Yes. There were a few cases of false positive results, which I used a method to see whether they were real positive results or false positive, and in every case they turned out to be false positive results. Essentially all the samples tested were negative.
Q. Did you inform Dr. Wakefield of the negative results?
A. Yes. Yes.

So not only are the samples Wakefield provided useless, the testing he asked Chadwick to perform showed they were useless. He knew this. And yet he went ahead anyway.

Its also worth noting that every subsequent piece of MMR science (save one unpublished poster presentation) went through Unigenetics lab and went through the same process as Wakefield's.

In order to find possible reasons for Wakefield sending material he knew was useless to a lab that screwed up we need to go back to 1997. One year before the Lancet paper implicating MMR was published.

In '97, a journalist called Brian Deer found out that Andrew Wakefield had filed a patent application.This application was for a rival vaccine that could potentially replace MMR. Deer alleges that if MMR could be framed as a bad guy then the NHS (and maybe the world's health services) would drop MMR and this new vaccine could step in. As the patent holder for this new vaccine, Wakefield could get very rich says Deer.

In the UK, confidence in vaccines collapsed. Between the years 97/98 to 2004/05 MMR uptake dropped by 10%. In 2006 and again 2008, a child died of measles.