Wakefield Case Study

1. What were the perceived conflicts of interest in Wakefield’s research activities? There were several conflicts of interest during the research, one of the conflicts was the amount of participants that were studied during the research and for a study like this the number of participants should have been larger than that. Another conflict of interest was the way that it was presented to the media which in turn they started to spread the news and people started to panic and stop given the vaccination to their kids. The next thing that was done incorrectly it was that there was money given to Dr. Wakefield by lancet. The book puts it like this “This information prompted a partial retraction of the 1998 paper by the Lancet on grounds of “a
On the other hand, there could also be a good argument on why the research should have been approved, because Wakefield though that the vaccine for MMR was too strong for children at that age, because their immune system was not develop enough to be able to take the amount of medicine that was given to them trough the vaccination, “ “in addition, Wakefield’s support for three separate vaccination, rather than the triple MMR (which he believed could be overloading children’s immune systems), included an experimental product under development by a company in which he had a financial interest” (Ghillyer, pg. 215, 2014). As you can see there could be two different sides of thinking in this case, the one that I think that I would most likely be incline to support would be the one that Wakefield journal should be discredited because I think he was thinking about the amount of money that would make if the new vaccination would had been
216, 2014) “While conducting his Follow-up study, Wakefield was found to have acted unprofessionally after taking blood samples from children of fellow medical professionals at his son’s birthday party in return for payments of 5 pounds.” (Ghillyer, pg. 216, 2014) Wakefield lost his license because he could not fallow the rules, I think he was to worry about the money he could make if his new vaccination would go through. The GMC lost lots of money because of the way that media publish the findings of the research, they focused their report on the amount of money that Dr. Wakefield was stand to make out of the new vaccination. This brought bad publicity to GMC and they did not like that, so they launched an extensive investigation of their own and came up with the conclusion that Dr Wakefield was having a problem with conflict of interest.
4. The GMC found that Wakefield brought his profession into disrepute with his conduct. What could he have done differently to share his concerns about