Sorry Jenny McCarthy. First the split with Jim Carrey. Now this.

Turns out the whole basis for your vaccination-causes-autism side career is fraudulent (as many had suspected). It was all made up. Here in the celebrity-as-health-expert/conspiracy-theorist capital of the world, this has to be a sad day.

The British medical journal BMJ this week concluded that the landmark autism study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield in 1998 was an “elaborate fraud.”

CNN:

“It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors,” Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told the network. “But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.”

Wakefield, apparently disgraced, was stripped of his U.K. medical license in spring.

His paper sparked a new movement against child vaccination in the U.S., causing some parents to skip the time-tested precaution and making way for a measles comeback.

So what does cause autism? Experts still don't know, but we recently reported on a study that found a correlation between children who live near freeways and the disorder.

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