subject of criticism for his promotion of medically dubious techniques and products including hair analysis, his support of the now struck off doctor Andrew Wakefield, and advocating the use of "non-drug alternatives for mental health" for which he has been given an award by the Church of Scientology-backed Citizens Commission on Human Rights. In 2006 Patrick Holford was discovered to be using his PR advisor to delete content on his Wikipedia page which was critical. HIV Holford's claim in The New Optimum Nutrition Bible that "AZT, the first prescribable anti-HIV drug, is potentially harmful, and proving less effective than vitamin C" has been criticised by Ben Goldacre. Goldacre writes that Holford based this conclusion on a non-clinical study where "you tip lots of vitamin C onto HIV-infected cells and measure a few things related to HIV replication". Goldacre notes that the paper does not compare vitamin C to AZT for efficacy. He argues that "Holford was guilty of at least incompetence in claiming that this study demonstrated vitamin C to be a better treatment than AZT." Prof David Colquhoun argues that Holford's "advocacy of vitamin C as better than conventional drugs to treat Aids is truly scary". Holford replied to The Guardian newspaper that: "As [Goldacre] well knows, the author of the research – Dr Raxit Jariwalla – wrote to the Guardian (January 20, 2005) the last time Goldacre made this claim, to confirm that my statement is correct on the basis of two [non-clinical] studies on HIV-infected cells. The real crime here is that no full-scale human trials have been funded on vitamin C to follow up Jariwalla's important finding because it is non-patentable and hence not profitable. Goldacre seems unconcerned about the way commercial interests distort scientific research." Goldacre replied that Raxit Jariwalla was a senior researcher at the Rath Research Institute in California – connected to vitamin salesman Matthias Rath. Matthias Rath has been linked to the previous policy of the South African government to deny anti-viral drugs to HIV positive patients. Autism Holford believes that there is a potential link in some susceptible children between the MMR vaccine and the development of autism-like symptoms. This is against the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community and many high-quality empirical studies that demonstrate there is no such link. The Wakefield et al. paper upon which this hypothesis was based has been discredited by the scientific community, was retracted