The tele-seminar’s aims are to discover “what really happened” and “what he has discovered since”.
What Really Happened
If you want a straightforward, unbiased view: http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html
Dr Wakefield patented a measles jab. The only way he could make money from it was to cause people to stop using the combined MMR jab.
Dr Wakefield then found himself hired by a lawyer to “prove” a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, for which he was paid nearly half a million pounds of UK taxpayers’ money.
In order to “prove” this link, Dr Wakefield “tested” children. He put them through painful and unjustifiable procedures – everything from paying kids £5 at his son’s birthday party to let him take blood from them, to giving them lumbar punctures (a spinal tap; the insertion of a hollow needle into the spine).
And even after all of that immoral activity, he obtained a set of results which are at best meaningless, and at worst, downright misleading.
 
The knock-on effect of his activities was to trade on the desperate hopes of parents of autistic children (many of whom still genuinely believe he was on to something) to earn as much money as he possibly could. And since then, measles – practically eradicated by the MMR jab – has come back as a threat to children’s health. Rates of reported measles infections soared after the MMR scare. I have immense sympathy for parents of autistic kids – but this is just plain wrong.
There was no “media witch-hunt” as WDDTY reports. In fact, the media jumped right onto the MMR scare bandwagon and were, arguably, the reason it took so long for Mr Wakefield to be barred from practising medicine in the UK.
What has he discovered since
He’s discovered that there are enough people who are willing to pay him to peddle his dangerous, criminal rubbish in the USA to make it worth his while moving over there and doing the lectures circuit.
It is an utter disgrace that WDDTY supports this man and is promoting him in this way.
Even if you think the scientific study was sound; even if you believe there’s something in what he came up with; even if you disregard the total lack of any kind of verifiable evidence that there is some link between MMR and autism; even if you are willing to dismiss the views of the entire medical establishment, please just think about what this man was willing to put children through just to make some fast cash.
Don’t support WDDTY in this disgusting act. Tell them that you think they are wrong.
If we really, as a society, think it is right to be using our children as guinea-pigs to make money, and then put the lives of millions of other children at risk and undo all the work that the single MMR vaccine has done to combat child illness and fatalities, then our children really have no hope.
 

Simon, your comment is a red herring. Nowhere in the GMC hearing was mentioned Dr. Wakefield’s application for patent of what is primarily a treatment regimen. I could just as easily point out the literal billions of dollars of profit being realized by the pharmaceutical industry, at the public’s expense, as motivation for egregiously unethical behavior.

It doesn’t help anyone’s understanding if you replicate misinformation.Shawn Siegel wrote: “To the contrary, wakefieldswrong – Dr. Wakefield’s findings have been replicated; indeed, in one of those studies, the subjects of which were autistic kids with bowel disease, not only was measles virus found in the gut of 85% of those tested, but initial testing showed said virus – in every case – to be specifically the vaccine strain; further tests confirmed that finding.”Well, no.You are referring to preliminary work presented in a 2006 IMFAR abstract; these results, like earlier work presented at the 2004 IMFAR from the same senior author (plus Wakefield) claiming that measles virus was found in cerebral spinal fluid, remains unpublished. The simplest explanation for why these two preliminary reports of potentially important results have died a quiet death is that, upon further review, they turned out to be wrong; in particular, the PCR primers used to detect measles virus RNA have been shown to react with human DNA, and careful examination of the preliminary results is necessary to exclude false positives; in addition, the work did not include samples from any children without ASD, suggesting that it is likely that the authors must have subsequently discovered that they obtained similar results from samples from any human (with or without ASD) and so simply moved on. You should compare this preliminary report to the careful work that has actually been peer reviewed and published and which demonstrates why the unpublished work presented in those abstracts remains unpublished four or six years later [J Med Virol. 2006 May;78(5):623-30; Pediatrics. 2006 Oct;118(4):1664-75].Moreover, there has been only ONE bona fide attempt to replicate Wakefield’s work that suggested a temporal association with administration of MMR and the development of GI problems and ASD. The authors concluded: “The work reported here eliminates the remaining support for the hypothesis that ASD with GI complaints is related to MMR exposure. We found no relationship between the timing of MMR and the onset of either GI complaints or autism.” [PLoS One. 2008 Sep 4;3(9):e3140]When you suggest that Wakefield’s work has been “replicated”, I assume you refer to some published case reports of GI complaints in adults with ASD, to an unpublished conference report, and to a publication in a journal that has published a total of THREE research articles and which was founded and run by Wakefield’s friends and business partners, including, I think, two others who were also recently forced out from Thoughtful House. None of this work attempts in any way to “replicate” Wakefield’s findings of an association of MMR with the onset of ASD, and so those who claim that Wakefield’s work claiming an association of MMR and ASD really mean that it turns out, unsurprisingly, that people with ASD can also have bowel pathology. There’s a good discussion of this “independent” confirmation of Wakefield’s thoroughly-repudiated work here:http://justthevax.blogspot.com/2010/02/independent-wakefield-way-really.html

Unfortunately, the anecdotes from the parents of children with ASD don’t really provide much meaningful information. Although I have no doubts that many parents are convinced that their children regressed soon after vaccination, it happens that the ONLY published prospective study of the development of ASD clearly demonstrates that parents are poorly equipped to judge a child’s regression and that parents consistently date the onset of regression long after it can be detected by trained researchers; in such cases, it is human nature to ascribe a change to some notable event that happens to occur when the parent finally notices a change. You may be interested in this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20410715 Note that the researchers detected that the children who went on to develop ASD were already fundamentally different from typically-developing children by twelve months of age; note also that the researchers detected regression in the majority (86%) of the children, although the parents noted regression much less commonly (17%) and only at later dates. (Note, too, that since the children studied were younger siblings of children with autism, the parents were undoubtedly more aware of the signs of ASD than most, since they’d already witnessed the development of the condition.) Thus parental reports of the timing of the onset of regression are of interest but of limited value in determining any factors that might be involved in initiating the regression, since any such factors seem to be in play long before parents become aware of any developmental problems, probably early in gestation. http://imfar.confex.com/imfar/2010/webprogram/Paper7432.html Other similar studies are ongoing but have yet to be reported. Regarding the bowel problems: Although there is evidence that children with ASD have bowel issues only about as frequently as do other children with developmental impairments, it’s not unreasonable to consider that any condition that affects neurodevelopment in the brain might also affect development in the nerves in the gut; however, this offers no evidence to support Wakefield’s Lancet study—but it does explain why Wakefield recently published on the possible connection between GI issues in ASD and a mutation in the MET gene that affects both interneuron development and peripheral organ development and repair. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2796865/?tool=pubmed Frankly, I suspect that Wakefield understands but (for financial reasons) cannot admit that the MMR vaccine has nothing to do with autism, just as he earlier acknowledged that he was unable to confirm his earlier experiments that had incorrectly implicated measles virus in the etiology of inflammatory bowel disease.

Mr. Siegel, I provided links in my previous post that illustrate the points that I was trying to make. The first research grant that I received two decades ago was for work that involved the polymerase chain reaction that the Walker group also employed in the preliminary, still-unpublished work that was reported some years ago at IMFAR, and I began DNA sequencing studies as a Ph.D. student back when DNA sequencing was difficult, before I turned to medicine. Based on my experience in biomedical research, I’m convinced that Wakefield was wrong, and I believe that Walker’s work (reported at IMFAR) is almost certainly hobbled by the same problems that have plagued other PCR-related work, including the infamous Uhlmann (and Wakefield) paper that has been deconstructed by one of the world’s leading experts in the technical aspects of the reaction:

http://www.badscience.net/wp-content/uploads/erp_mmr.pdf

I have no problem with you believing what you want to believe. You may prefer to believe that objective evidence is trumped by anectdotes that directly are directly contradicted by the evidence. Nonetheless, I should point out to you (for the last time) that what you believe is not supported by the scientific evidence. 

Mr. Siegel, when anecdotes are directly contradicted by the data collected in meticulous experiments conducted by trained scientists, as in the prospective study of the development of ASD that I cited, it’s time to devalue anecdotes. The earth looks pretty flat to me and to my neighbors, although Eratosthenes showed over 2,000 years ago that the earth is, in fact, nearly round, and his experimental evidence has been supported by a great deal of additional work that contradicts the anecedotal evidence. It doesn’t really matter how many people claim that the earth looks flat—it’s not.