The most important ethical issue regarding Wakefield’s study is that it generated a popular antiscientific myth. As a result, thousands of parents believed in the alleged connection between the MMR vaccine and the autism onset in children. In attempts to protect youngsters, they would put them in a bigger danger by opting not to get them vaccinated. Moreover, scientists and concerned people spent years of time and huge sums of money to establish the truth. Otherwise, they could have aimed all the resources at actual autism studies.
Fortunately, the scientific community rejected the results of Wakefield’s study. Due to the theory of inconsistency and the absence of specific proofs, many scholars doubted the findings and conducted a range of follow-up research. Wakefield’s theory consisted of two parts, with the first one demonstrating a correlation between the MMR vaccine and gut inflammation in children (“Vaccines and the autism myth – part 1”). In the second part, he suggested that the gut inflammation resulted in the generation of some mystery protein that provoked autism (“Vaccines and the autism myth – part 1”). However, the subsequent studies did not detect any correlation between the MMR vaccine and autism or the MMR vaccine and gut inflammation in children. Moreover, no protein worked the way Wakefield had described in the research (“Vaccines and the autism myth – part 1”). Therefore, the study was fully rejected, and ten out of thirteen of its original authors retracted.
As turned out later, Wakefield did not mention his bias in the creation of the study. As the owner of a company selling an alternative MMR vaccine, he was financially interested in destroying the original MMR vaccine’s reputation (“Vaccines and the autism myth – part 2”). Moreover, people who wanted to sew the MMR vaccine producers had paid Wakefield to fabricate his research (“Vaccines and the autism myth – part 2”). However, even apart from the bias, Wakefield’s research lacked another crucial component, the experimental group.
The twelve children who reportedly experienced gut inflammation after the vaccination were in the control group. In the fair study, one would have changed variables and tested more subjects to establish the vaccine’s real impact. The most logical choice would be to study the reaction to the vaccine in children who showed neither autism nor gut inflammation symptoms before the vaccination. Children with overt autism symptoms manifested before the vaccination would be perfect candidates for the second experimental group. It would allow the scientists to see if the vaccine aggravated the symptoms.
Works Cited
“Vaccines and the autism myth – part 1 | Infectious diseases | Health & Medicine | Khan Academy.” YouTube, Web.
“Vaccines and the autism myth – part 2 | Infectious diseases | Health & Medicine | Khan Academy.” YouTube, Web.