Andrew Wakefield, the man at the center of the vaccine/autism debate, spoke about his side of the issue at the Rapaporte Treasure Hall on Wednesday, April 13 at an event sponsored by the Age of Autism, the daily web newsletter that deals with autism-related issues. Wakefield was stripped of his medical license after allegations that he committed fraud in a report he wrote that was published in and later retracted from The Lancet, a medical journal in England.

The charges stemmed from an investigation conducted by journalist Brian Deer, who claimed that Wakefield "manually altered test results from his study."

Wakefield explained that the reason Deer thinks this alteration of results exists is because he and Deer used different records in their respective investigations.

According to Wakefield, Professor [John] Walker-Smith and his team at the Royal Free Hospital conducted weekly reviews of the hospital's bowel biopsies with a routine pathologist. Although that pathologist did not see anything worth noting, Dr. Amar Dhillon, the senior intestinal pathologist who was referred to the cases by Walker-Smith, found "severe" inflammation.

Wakefield insisted that he did not commit fraud and said that the ordeal "demonstrates that the process of diligence at a tertiary center is highly vulnerable to this kind of allegation because what [Deer] did was to take the reports of the routine pathologist and say they are different from what is reported in the Lancet and that is fraud."

He also spoke about his concerns for the safety of the vaccine schedule, saying that some vaccinations should not be given at the same time because certain viruses interfere with each other.

Toward the end of his lecture, Wakefield stressed the importance of engaging in a serious dialogue about how to solve this problem. "Dialogue on a high level would help," he said.

In an interview with the Justice, Jake Crosby '11, an intern with the Age of Autism who was in charge of the event, said that he wanted to bring Wakefield to Brandeis because he felt that Wakefield rarely has a chance to tell his side of the story. "[The link between vaccine and autism] is a very pressing issue and one that people need to talk about openly," he said.