Did Reed Elsevier interfere in the editorial decisions of Neurotoxicology?
In wake of last month’s GMC findings, a rapid-fire series of events followed. The editor-in-chief of The Lancet, Richard Horton, issued a retraction of Wakefield’s case series report published by the journal in 1998. Although regrettable the retraction was not especially surprising, since Horton’s well-documented betrayal of Wakefield has placed him at the center of what we have called the Wakefield Inquisition (see HERE). Although Horton has consistently defended his scientific judgments in public, including the decision to publish the 1998 case series, Horton claimed to be surprised to learn that Wakefield was assisting autism parents in the U.K.’s equivalent of vaccine court. He then used the occasion to set the Inquisition in motion, admitting in his 2004 book, MMR: Science and Fiction, to meeting with an unnamed medical regulator and counseling him on how to build their case against Wakefield (see HERE). Unlike Cranmer, Horton has made himself one of the primary agents in the supp
