I note that Fiona Godlee [1] gives a less full disclosure here than in her accompanying editorial which concludes with the statement: "the BMJ Group receives funding from the two manufacturers of MMR vaccine, Merck and GSK" [2].

Further I would point out that readers of BMJ may be at a disadvantage in assessing the information in front of them if they have not seen a report on Nature.com [3], also reproduced in Scientific American [4]. In it Prof Bjarnason is reported as saying:

"he doesn't believe they [the new materials] are sufficient to support claims in the Lancet paper of a new disease process. He also questions whether "non-specific" on the grading sheets refers to colitis, saying it could refer to any kind of gut changes. But he says that the forms don't clearly support charges that Wakefield deliberately misinterpreted the records. "The data are subjective. It's different to say it's deliberate falsification," he says."

Mr Deer states:

"he never accused Wakefield of fraud over the interpretation of pathology records"

and Dr Godlee herself is reported as saying:

"that the journal's conclusion of fraud was not based on the pathology...".

As to Dr Godlee her statement here[1]:

"The second point is that, even if we had concluded that we were obliged to obtain consent, we reasonably anticipated that we would have been unable to obtain it."

is surely of the sort that you proverbially frame and put above your mantelpiece.

[1] Fiona Godlee, 'Response to Adam Jacobs" http://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/11/15/re-pathology-reports-solve-...

[2] Fiona Godlee, 'Institutional Research Misconduct', BMJ 9 November 2011 http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7284

[3] Eugenie Samuel Reich, 'Fresh dispute about MMR 'fraud'', http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111109/full/479157a.html?s=news_rss

[4] Eugenie Samuel Reich, 'Discredited Vaccine-Autism Researcher Defended by Whistleblower Group', http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=discredited-vaccine-aut...

Competing interests: Autistic son