Its the "Its all a conspiracy" defence

Doctor at centre of MMR controversy 'failed in his duties as a responsible consultant', rules GMC | Mail Online

Speaking to the Mail on Sunday at the weekend, Dr Wakefield said he feared the GMC's decision today would be politically-motivated.

'If there's any justice, we should be cleared,' he said. 'However, there's the political backlash to consider. I fear the GMC will want to make an example of us.

'The issue was not about me, but about how to crush dissent. I scare the establishment because I care and I am diligent.

'I think they're terrified because they've not done adequate safety studies. I've been treated in the standard way in which people who raise these kinds of questions are treated.

'It's extremely challenging, but if I fail to stand up to the bullies, the price to be paid is enormous.'

Verdicts on the facts of the case were delivered today at the disciplinary hearing in central London which has so far cost at least £1 million. 

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

whoa. I had to look up this one (the Sky report is a Murdoch Alert mash up). Recommending component separation of the combined vaccination didn't immediately strike me as malpractice, dubious but not criminal, since after all vaccination is still ordered. Publication of research  based on a 12 person sample is so ludicrous, it's difficult for me to imagine hysterical reaction to such obscure findings without assistance from the press and Wakefield Media LLC on the way up, as on the way down (Deer's mission is missing a foil.).

So to the particulars of the inquiry into Wakefield's medical practices...

[wiki] centred on claims, brought forth by journalist Brian Deer, that autistic and neurotypical children may have been subjected to unnecessary lumbar punctures [!!] and colon biopsies [!!],[5] including one colonoscopy that caused the child life-threatening perforations of the bowel [!!].[6]

WTF. Authorities will revoke Wakefield's license? And what's the likelihood of former "patients" civil suits?

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Fortunately, I get all my vaccine news from Oprah and Jenny McCarthy, so I'll not be troubled by this.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

Ben Goodacre has written extensively on this at http://www.badscience.net/category/mmr/ and in his book of the same name.

He calls the chapter based on this "The Media's MMR Hoax" and, despite his damning dissection of the study, expresses disquiet that Alexander Wakefield looks like being hung out to dry by the media for a scandal largely created by the media.

It's one of Goodacre's general themes that science stories are written by non-specialists, even when a newspaper has specialists, because studies are far more newsworthy when they're misinterpreted.  A headline "fact" is taken out of context, and the reader is given no chance to assess how good the study actually was or whether its findings are significant.

This is quite personal to me, because my son was born in 1998, and I had to make the vaccination decision more-or-less at the height of the controversy. Single dose vaccines were withdrawn in this country, to prevent parents demanding those instead.  I considered going to Europe (as some families did) for the single vaccines, but it didn't really take much reflection to work out that six trips to France constituted a greater risk than the MMR (as well as being a wholly unnecessary additional risk for his older sister).

Tomorrows newspapers will be interesting, for example how the Papers who have whipped up a frenzy about the supposed link between the MMR vaccine and Autism report this.

Either as a conspiracy or without any mention that they ever reported on it before. There will be criticism of the "the media" with the undertones that they mean those guys over there.