Andrew Wakefield, a British gastroenterologist, published a fraudulent study in the Lancet. His medical research was seized by the UK Medical Register because they found dishonesty in his research paper. His findings published in the research paper were that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine caused a new syndrome of enterocolitis and regressive autism. The research was granted by the UK Government Legal Aid to Wakefield for enterocolitis with relevance in gastroenterology for inflammation of the digestive tract, small intestine and colon. Aggressive autism, which is autism developed during childhood, was discovered in the sample of children. The media was born when most people stopped getting vaccinated for fear of developing this disease. Authorities dug deeper into Wakefield's case to find out how he and his team interpreted this data. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Researchers began to question and manipulate his methods to find that autism was developed by vaccinations. The researchers encountered many complications with sample size, study selection, and controlled environment. The profit from the study gave Wakefield the motivation to publish his fraudulent data, influencing the decline in vaccinations administered. Wakefield's case was full of ethical violations of methods of vaccinating children and scientific misrepresentations when publishing the cause of autism. This experiment exposed gaps and assumptions found in the methods and sample size used by Wakefield to prove that vaccines led to autism. To begin, with prior knowledge of the selected sample of children, Wakefield was looking for children to test for behavioral problems, including language impairment. Twelve children, eleven boys and one girl, aged between three and ten years, were referred to a pediatric gastroenterology unit with a history of normal development followed by loss of acquired skills, including speech, diarrhea and abdominal pain ( Wakefield). Sequentially, the signs of autism characteristics are that children do not respond to conversation, so there is a high "chance" that children may have been diagnosed with autism before the pathways. These issues are crucial to scientific research and need to be carefully examined before publication. Another misconduct was the sample size; having a small sample size can increase error, and it is difficult to support a large population. With the sample size, Wakefield published that the children were previously normal and that the vaccine would show effects later. He manipulated the methods by ignoring the already existing signs of autism. The motivation behind this scandal was payroll. He spent two years researching this topic and received a salary throughout the entire process. Wakefield was working on a lawsuit, for which he sought gut-brain “syndrome” as the centerpiece, claiming an undisclosed fee of $230 an hour for a take of $435,643, plus expenses (Deer). This high compensation has made him an authority in finding the root cause of autism. He extended the truth of his findings to show that vaccines are linked to autism. Scientific findings are accurate laws and principles that have been proven through research and methods. Wakefield misrepresented information in his case to give him a salary that will be forever.
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