A statement by the editors of The Lancet.

1 were brought to the attention of senior editorial staff of the journal. The allegations are: 1. That, contrary to a statement in the Lancet paper, ethics approval for the investigations conducted on the children reported in the study, some of them highly invasive (eg, lumbar puncture), had not been given. 2. That the study reported in The Lancet was completed under the cover of ethics approval for an entirely different study of 25 children with " A new paediatric syndrome: enteritis and disintegrative disorder following measles/rubella vaccination ". 3. That, contrary to the statement in the Lancet paper that children were " consecutively referred to the department of paediatric gastroenterology " at the Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine, children were invited to participate in the study by Dr Andrew Wakefield and Professor John Walker-Smith, thus biasing the selection of children in favour of families reporting an association between their child's illness and the MMR vaccine. 4. That the children who were reported in the Lancet study were also part of a Legal Aid Board funded pilot project, led by Dr Wakefield-a pilot project with the aim of investigating the grounds for pursuing a multi-party legal action on behalf of parents of allegedly vaccine-damaged children, the existence of which was not disclosed to the editors of The Lancet. 5. That the results eventually reported in the 1998 Lancet paper were passed to lawyers and used to justify the multi-party legal action prior to publication, a fact that was not disclosed to the editors of The Lancet. 6. That Dr Wakefield received £55 000 from the Legal Aid Board to conduct this pilot project and that, since there was a substantial overlap of children in both the Legal Aid Board funded pilot project and the Lancet paper, this was a financial conflict of interest that should have been declared to the editors and his co-authors and was not. 2 The editors of The Lancet have seen and reviewed the documentary evidence available in support of these allegations. In acting on this information we have followed the guidelines on dealing with alleged misconduct as set out by the UK Committee on Publication Ethics, on which representatives of The Lancet sit. 3 We have presented this evidence to the senior authors of the 1998 Lancet paper (institution at which the original work took place. With this notice are accompanying statements from …