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Journalistic COI

February 14th, 2009 Bryn Williams-Jones

A recent flurry of news stories about Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who in a 1998 Lancet paper proposed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, has raised numerous research ethics issues about data forgery, impact on public health, etc. See for example, the Bioethics Blog entry The Data Fake That Set the World Afire and this story by the UK Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer MMR doctor Andrew Wakefield fixed data on autism.

But as noted by my friend Chris MacDonald, author of the much acclaimed Business Ethics blog (#81 on EthicSphere’s 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics 2008), there’s more to this story then medical malfeasance and science fraud.

The following article from the Spectator, The witch-hunt against Andrew Wakefield, raises questions about the integrity and conduct of the Times journalist, Brian Deer, who has been actively following (and even leading) the case against Dr Wakefield.

“Last weekend, the paper published a two-page ‘investigation’ and a front-page spin-off story alleging that ‘Deer claimed that his ‘investigation’ was confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council’

What the Sunday Times did not report was that the GMC investigation into Wakefield was triggered by a complaint from… Brian Deer, who furnished the allegations against him four years ago. He has thus been reporting upon the hearing into his own complaint. Since when has a reputable paper published a story by a reporter who is actually part of that story himself – without saying so – and who uses information arising from the disciplinary hearing which he himself has instigated and which is investigating allegations he himself made in the first place?”

To quote Chris MacDonald,

“The troubling part is that the criticism of Wakefield might (might) actually be valid. But the Sunday Times journalist is clearly in a COI.”

There’s sometimes a fine line between reporting the news, and actually being involved in making the news that one then reports…

P.S.: See this great blog entry by Nancy Walton, over at the Research Ethics Blog, on what’s actually missing from the debate about autism and MMR. The Wakefield story and the need for clarity

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