was struck off the UK medical register, with a statement identifying deliberate falsification in the research published in The Lancet, and is barred from practicing medicine in the UK. The CDC, the IOM of the National Academy of Sciences, Australia's Department of Health, and the UK National Health Service have all concluded that there is no evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. A Cochrane review concluded that there is no credible link between the MMR vaccine and autism, that MMR has prevented diseases that still carry a heavy burden of death and complications, that the lack of confidence in MMR has damaged public health, and that the design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies are largely inadequate. Additional reviews agree, with studies finding that vaccines are not linked to autism even in high risk populations with autistic siblings. In 2009, The Sunday Times reported that Wakefield had manipulated patient data and misreported results in his 1998 paper, creating the appearance of a link with autism. A 2011 article in the British Medical Journal described how the data in the study had been falsified by Wakefield so that it would arrive at a predetermined conclusion. An accompanying editorial in the same journal described Wakefield's work as an "elaborate fraud" that led to lower vaccination rates, putting hundreds of thousands of children at risk and diverting energy and money away from research into the true cause of autism. A special court convened in the United States to review claims under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program ruled on February 12, 2009, that the evidence "failed to demonstrate that thimerosal-containing vaccines can contribute to causing immune dysfunction, or that the MMR vaccine can contribute to causing either autism or gastrointestinal dysfunction", and that parents of autistic children were therefore not entitled to compensation in their contention that certain vaccines caused autism in their children. Vaccine overload Vaccine overload, a non-medical term, is the notion that giving many vaccines at once may overwhelm or weaken a child's immature immune system and lead to adverse effects. Despite scientific evidence that strongly contradicts this idea, there are still parents of autistic children that believe that vaccine overload causes autism. The resulting controversy has caused many parents to delay or avoid immunizing their children. Such parental misperceptions are major obstacles towards immunization of children. The concept of vaccine overload is