Andrew Wakefield's Vaccine-Autism Study

Andrew Wakefield's 1998 Lancet paper ignited a global health crisis by falsely linking the MMR vaccine to autism. An investigation by _The BMJ_ uncovered that Wakefield manipulated patient data, including falsifying medical histories for all 12 children in the study. This single fraudulent publication triggered a sharp decline in vaccination rates, leading to measles outbreaks that caused at least 10 deaths in the U.S. and Europe between 2000 and 2015. Wakefield's deception, surpassing #2's scale of technical fraud, continues to undermine public health, with a 2023 CDC study estimating that vaccine hesitancy costs over 100,000 lives annually worldwide from preventable diseases.