CDC Whistleblower Makes Claims about Vaccine Study

Last month, U.S. Congresswoman Bill Posey (R-FL) shared a quote on the House floor stating that the authors of a 2004 Pediatrics paper chose not to report any race effects on the link between MMR vaccines and autism. The quote, which reportedly comes from Dr. William W. Thompson, goes on to say that “The remaining four co-authors all met and brought a big garbage can into the meeting room and reviewed and went through all the hard copy documents that we had thought we should discard and put them in a huge garbage can. However, because I assumed it was illegal and would violate both FOIA and DOJ requests, I kept hard copies of all documents in my office and I retained all associated computer files.”

Thompson claims that the findings show an increased risk of autism about African-American boys who received the MMR vaccine, but that this information was not disclosed by the authors. According to Forbes, however, a recent analyses shows that this is not the case. “The criticism that the study discarded data from African American subjects just doesn’t hold water. No data was discarded. For the subjects who were linked to birth certificates, the researchers performed additional analyses. In this light, I see a careful observational study that assessed the role of potential confounders.” said statistician Jim Frost.

The quote, which would have occurred in 2002, seems to suggests that scientists would be able to get rid of data by throwing away hard copies into a garbage can. However, this contradicts the way research operates within the CDC, which has multiple digital backups of data. According to the US Department of Health and Human Serivces’ Office of Research Integrity, “Generally speaking, enough data should be retained so that the findings of a project can be reconstructed with ease. While this does not mean that a project needs to retain all the raw data that were collected, relevant statistics and analyses from this data should be saved, along with any notes or observations.”

Thompson has been labeled the “CDC Whistleblower” after he raised concerns about the 2004 paper to bioengineer Brian Hooker and Andrew Wakefield, a delicensed doctor. Hooker reanalyzed the data published a paper that purportedly showed a higher risk of autism among African-American boys who received an MMR vaccine. The paper has since been retracted.

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