Autism and MMR

Power of Prestige: The prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet has had to retract an article it published four years ago that posited a link between autism and the MMR vaccine, citing a conflict of interest:

One of the world's pre-eminent medical journals, the British magazine The Lancet, has said that it should never have published a 1998 study into controversial research linking a triple vaccine for infants to autism due to the researcher's 'fatal conflict of interest'.

The journal's editor said at the weekend that the British physician who conducted a controversial study linking the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism should have revealed that he was gathering information for a lawyer representing parents who believed that their children had been harmed by the vaccine.

At least one British politician is calling for an inquiry, as well he should. The Lancet is world-renowned medical journal. Anything it publishes gets automatic respect, just by virtue of being in its pages. As does anything published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the BMJ, and JAMA. To top it off, the popular press picks up on the press releases from these journals and spins what may be marginally significant findings into findings of great significance, as Howard Lovy points out in this piece. In this case, the editor of The Lancet is just as responsible for the impact the paper had on public health as the researcher who wrote the paper. As another editor said of him:

Secretly I admire him but I do wonder if he is slipping sideways into journalism rather than scientific editorship.

Many who read The Lancet regularly wonder the same thing.