Med School Interviews: The MMR Autism Scandal | PostGradMedic

[Music] hello ladies and gentlemen Ola here and welcome back to the channel once again this is going to be another med school interview focused video specifically talking about the MMR vaccination scandal it's something that many of you may actually remember certainly a parent's probably will if you don't a very very clear abuse of position by a respected member of the medical profession and an event that caused a potentially enormous amount of damage the repercussions of which we are still experiencing today so in this video we're going to be talking about what exactly happened during the MMR scandal and what it tells us about how people should behave as doctors and what steps can be taken to ensure that things like this don't happen again so how did it all start well everything with the MMR scandal began in 1998 when a surgeon named dr. Andrew Wakefield published a paper in The Lancet which is one of the most highly respected medical journals in the world this paper was called an excuse mix I'm going to have to read it allele lymphoid nodular hyperplasia nonspecific colitis and pervasive developmental disorder in children essentially the paper claimed a link between the combined MMR vaccine that's measles mumps and rubella and the development of bowel diseases such as Crohn's disease and the development of autism in children that had had the combined vaccine and because of this link Wakefield was postulating that all the three shots be given individually with a gap of a year between them instead of all at once house in the combined MMR that was routine at the time so some things to note about this paper firstly no one else was able to confirm or replicate Wakefield's findings normally what happens when a paper is submitted to a journal or at least a peer-reviewed journal it undergoes peer review meaning that other people will look over the findings and sometimes try and replicate the experiments no one was able to duplicate what Wakefield had done secondly it later came out that one of Wakefield students at the time this research had been going out testified that Wakefield during this experimental process had kind of willfully ignored data that contradicted his main hypothesis which is one of the big no nose in research sample size was also very very small it consisted only of twelve patients the point that Wakefield was trying to push remember was that these children had developed autism and these bowel conditions after receiving the MMR shot again when the experiment was looked into in the data examined it turned out that at least five of these children also already had known developmental disorders present before coming anywhere near the MMR shot and rather crucially the team also failed to demonstrate a link between the MMR vaccine and the development of autism as well as this autistic enterocolitis condition that Wakefield was pushing they couldn't demonstrate any sort of causal link it would have been at best a correlation not a causation and then the problems really start to come because although we've got this very small sample group with questionable findings the media then gets hold of it and newspapers up and down the country start publishing scare mongering articles about this link between MMR and autism that they claimed to have found and this huge media panic led to very large numbers of parents becoming very skeptical of getting their kids vaccinated at all this highlights a huge problem with how newspapers report things like this where both the author of the articles involved and the layperson reading the articles will not have the level of understanding that you would need to interpret results like this properly they're being fed a lie but you know very reasonably parents would be skeptical of Kane their kids vaccinated given these findings being published everywhere but of course because it's all about selling newspapers very few of the articles indicated that the vast vast vast scientific consensus is that MMR combined shot is perfectly safe so after all this had happened a huge investigation takes place and the ultimate finding surprise surprise is that way filled and his team had not met the rigorous standards expected during this kind of medical research in particular one of the big worrying factors is that the children in question remember those 12 patients that he examined these children had been subjected to some quite invasive tests including colonoscopies and lumbar punctures that were completely unnecessary for the clinical need of the children all of this research was done without proper approval and oversight by an ethics committee which you always need for any kind of medical research and then on top of that they were found to have falsified data for the publication as well furthermore it also emerged that Andrew Wakefield had been paid to engage in this research and had financial interest coming from solicitors that were representing groups of families that were convinced essentially that their children receiving the MMR shot had led to their development of autism and if that weren't enough it also transpired that Wakefield himself was in the process of applying for a patent on a single-shot vaccine jab which obviously if you've got a combined MMR jab that's very cheap that's not going to be as financially successful so he also had personal interest in there as well but as happens in all cases like this there was a full GMC General Medical Council investigation into Wakefield and his colleagues and Wakefield denied all of the charges and they were focusing on Wakefield and his colleagues fitness to practice remember that the GMC maintains a register of all doctors that are allowed to clinically practice in the United Kingdom so in a fitness to practice hearing they're weighing up all the evidence and deciding whether or not he should still be allowed to practice medicine so when the investigation was complete Andrew Wakefield was found to have failed to act properly in his duties as a consultant and dishonestly and unprofessionally with regards to his research he was considered to have brought the medical profession into deep disrepute which i think is pretty fair and because of this it was decided that no sanction short of erasing his name from the medical register would have been suitable so on the 2nd of February 2010 The Lancet formally withdrew Wakefield's original paper which removes it from the established medical literature and on May the 24th 2010 dr. Wakefield was permanently erased from the medical register of the United Kingdom which effectively ends his career as a doctor in England now what impact did this have more widely well according to the Associated Press which is an American non-for-profit news monitoring group immunization rates in Britain dropped from 92% to 73% and were as low as 50% in some parts of London and the effect wasn't nearly as a dramatic in the United States but because The Lancet is such a widely popular and respected medical journal up to 125 thousand children in the United States didn't receive their MMR vaccines specifically because of this paper so why am I talking about it today why is this important for you guys who are thinking about applying to medical school to know because it shows what happens when doctors abuse their position of power doctors rightly or wrongly are held in very very high regard by the general public and are considered to speak authoritative lis in matters of science and medicine because of the fraudulent actions of just one doctor published in just one paper in just one journal it's very possible that hundreds of thousands of children across the world didn't receive the perfectly safe vaccine that they should have had and that many of them may have died as a result of this it needlessly places them at risk of potentially deadly disease and I think this case is a really good illustration of why we have research ethics committees why we have full peer review when papers are submitted to journals and why the GMC is so focused on doctors not bringing the medical profession into disrepute and acting appropriately based on their position but I hope that's been helpful guys thank you very much for watching please be sure to hit that like button follow me leave a comment subscribe to the channel don't forget to go and check out post-grad Medicom for more interview prep videos just like this and you can leave me some feedback in the comments or through the contact form on my website letting me know what video you'd like to see take care and I'll see you next time

Channel: Dr Ollie Burton

Views: 8,094

Keywords: ollie, burton, ollie burton, warwick medical school, leamington spa, postgradmedic, medicine, medical school, med school, vlog, blog, ollieplays, ollieguitar, graduate entry medicine, university, education, diary, graduate medicine, grad medicine, grad entry medicine, study, revision, neuroscience, anatomy, physiology

Id: ARMSN237jEw

Length: 8min 56sec (536 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019