Liz Ditz lizditz.typepad.com On March 3, 2012, Mr. Justice Mitting of the UK’s High Court of Justice ruled that the UK’s General Medical Council (GMC) had acted improperly in Professor John Walker-Smith’s hearing on charges of serious professional conduct, and therefore he quashed both the finding  of serious professional misconduct and the sanction of erasure.  (You can find the entire ruling at http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2012/503.html.) It’s important to be very clear about what this ruling means. Mr. Justice Mitting did not find that Professor Walker-Smith’s actions were medically necessary or ethical. The ruling does not exonerate Walker-Smith. That was not what the hearing was about. Mitting was only ruling on the conduct, the decision-making, of the GMC’s Fitness to Practice panel. More broadly, Mitting found aspects of the GMC’s procedures to be flawed. And Mitting’s  ruling has nothing to do with the retraction of the 1998 paper. It’s still retracted. It does not validate Andrew Wakefield’s integrity, or affect the…