In a tweet sent to over 3,000 followers, California State Senator and vaccine exemption elimination bill co-sponsor Dr. Richard Pan called senior Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scientist-turned-whistleblower Dr. William Thompson “another Wakefield fraud.” Pan’s calling Thompson a “Wakefield fraud” was a reference to de-licensed British doctor Andrew Wakefield, who publicized Thompson’s identity and voice recordings without his approval in a series of videos released online. Yet the article linked to in Pan’s tweet concerned a paper authored by neither Thompson nor Wakefield, was never found to be fraudulent and which in no way detracted from what Thompson himself said in a public statement released last August:
“I regret that my co-authors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African-American males who received the [measles, mumps, rubella] MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.”
