Doctor who did autism research in Austin sues medical journal, writers
A British doctor who was stripped of his medical license in the U.K. in 2010 and who was accused in a journal last year of publishing bogus research filed a defamation suit this week in state District Court in Travis County.
Andrew Wakefield, who lives in Austin and founded an autism center that was on Bee Cave Road, is suing the British Medical Journal; its editor, Dr. Fiona Godlee; and investigative journalist Brian Deer — all based in the United Kingdom. His suit concerns a Jan. 5, 2011, journal article by Deer and an accompanying editorial by Godlee that called Wakefield’s research on autism and a novel bowel disease fraudulent.
“The Defamatory Statements were and are false and written and published with actual malice and intended to cause damage to Dr. Wakefield’s reputation and to permanently impair his reputation and livelihood,” says the suit, filed Tuesday. It seeks unspecified damages.
The journal issued a statement saying that it stood by the writings and would “defend the claim vigorously.” Wakefield, who is seeking a jury trial, has a “history of pursuing unfounded litigation, (so) any action brought against the BMJ and Mr Deer in London would have been immediately vulnerable to being struck out as an abuse of process,” an email from the journal says. Wakefield referred questions to his lawyer, William Parrish, who did not return calls Friday.
In a paper that appeared in the Lancet in 1998 and ultimately was retracted by the editors 12 years later, Wakefield suggested a link between a new kind of autism-bowel disease and the childhood measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. The Lancet paper, and Wakefield’s subsequent comments about it, set off a worldwide scare over the vaccine, known as MMR.
