On Thursday, February 12th – Darwin Day, no less – I had just finished checking in on a patient in the ICU and decided to check the news.  I was greeted on the front page by this story.  I had to read the headline twice to make sure I read it right.

The vaccine court, a special court convened to determine whether petitioners were entitled to compensation from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, had ruled on three test cases wherein parents asserted that their children had acquired autism through a combination of MMR vaccine and thimerosal from other vaccines.   The ruling was that the evidence presented did not prove a link between autism and childhood vaccines.  In fact, the evidence presented was “overwhelmingly contrary to the petitioners’ contentions.”

Many in the medical and scientific community waited for these rulings with bated breath, all the more concerned because the vaccine court had a lower standard of evidence than a regular civil trial.  Because of this lower standard, even though the scientific evidence clearly showed no link between autism and vaccines, there still remained a small chance that the petitioners could have received an award.  If that happened, it would have been ugly.  I don’t even like to think about what it would have meant for child health in this country.  But fortunately, science and reason prevailed, and I breathed a heavy sigh of relief that morning followed by a triumphant fist-in-the-air.  Just as fortunately, none of the ICU nurses saw me.

On a more sordid note, the Andrew Wakefield saga also deepened this month.  If you recall, Wakefield was the doctor who published a paper in Lancet in February of 1998 purporting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.  Despite involving only 12 children, the paper’s effects tipped off a MMR vaccination scare that was felt throughout the world, with sharp dropoffs in MMR vaccination rates over the subsequent years.  The sketchy stuff comes when, over the course of the next several years, 10 out of 12 coauthors on the Wakefield paper jointly publish a retraction of the original paper’s conclusions, independent researchers are unable to replicate any of Wakefield’s data, and we learn that Wakefield was massively conflicted in his research – having filed patents for an alternate vaccine to replace MMR and having received over four hundred thousand pounds in fees from lawyers seeking to sue MMR vaccine manufacturers.

Right – scary.  But wait, it gets better.  This month, the London Sunday Times revealed that Wakefield may very well have cooked up the data for his landmark 1998 paper (more details here).  The audacity boggles the mind.  It angers me greatly to think that this one doctor, acting so irresponsibly, selfishly, and unethically, has caused so much damage to child health.  I am, however, at least grateful that science (and a tenacious journalist named Brian Deer) has finally caught up with this guy a little.  Hopefully with the efforts of further inquiries, peer review, and reeducation, science will be able to correct this injustice.  (If you want to read more, Orac talks a lot more about this issue here.  Wikipedia even has a decent bio on Wakefield detailing all the latest controversies.)

So all in all, with just three days left in the month, we’ve had one solid victory for science and a big step towards correcting a past wrong.  Perhaps not as fast as I would like, but still not too shabby.  Charles Darwin would, I think, have approved.