The MMR debate

I just found this rather interesting article by George Monbiot about conflicts of interest in the debate over the safety of the MMR vaccine. Andrew Wakefield, who published a paper alleging links between the MMR vaccine and a number of diseases including autism, was revealed to have possible conflicts of interest. However, as Monbiot reveals, this is an extremely common problem in sections of the scientific community, with scientists putting their names to papers ghost-written by companies, sometimes never having seen the data on which the papers’ conclusions are based. Here’s the story.