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An anti-vaccine column published on cleveland.com by a Cleveland Clinic doctor has drawn harsh criticism.

The medical director and chief operating officer of the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute, who writes a monthly column for cleveland.com, created a firestorm over the weekend with a column in which he championed some of the discredited arguments of those who oppose vaccines.

Word spread quickly, largely through social media, causing the medical establishment and health reporters across the county to question why a high-ranking doctor at such an august medical institution would write something so irresponsible.

And, because Dr. Daniel Neides' column is published on cleveland.com, we're hearing questions about our role. Here, I offer some answers. If you have other questions, please post them in the comments of this piece, and I'll try to answer them.

How did Neides come to write a monthly column for cleveland.com?

In January 2014, Bridget Peterlin, then manager of public relations for the Clinic's Wellness Institute, sent me a note asking whether I'd be interested in a column from Neides, the institute's new director. Neides wanted to write about wellness for the weekly Sun newspapers. Peterlin included a sample column, about the benefits of eating nuts.

We welcome high-quality content for cleveland.com and the Suns, and this column had the benefit of being free. We discussed a title, came up with "Words on Wellness" and set up Neides as a trusted user on the system that feeds content to our website. That gave him the ability to publish columns directly.

Dr. Daniel Neides

Neides did not publish his columns himself, however. The Clinic's corporate communications staff handled that, using the account we had set up for him. I do not know if the corporate communications staff edited or revised Neides' columns before publishing them.

Over the past three years, Neides has written more than 30 helpful columns on a variety of topics, including imflammation, mindfulness, stress reduction and diet.

Does anyone at cleveland.com edit or approve Dr. Neides' columns before they are published on the website?

The short answer is no, but here's how the system works: These days, Bob Smith in the Clinic's Corporate Communications office has the duty of publishing the Neides column on cleveland.com. Smith is a former reporter for The Plain Dealer.

When Smith publishes a Neides column on our website, he sends an email to Linda Kinsey, our editor of the Sun newspapers, to alert her. Kinsey would often take a look at the column but never found anything objectionable.

But Smith didn't send an alert after the column was published Friday. The column is published in the Lyndhurst-South Euclid page of cleveland.com and copied to other community pages. Without an alert from Smith, Kinsey did not know it was there.

If we had noticed the column soon after it was published, I'd like to think we would have had a conversation about it, both internally and with the Clinic. Possibly, before the thing caught widescale attention, we would have unpublished it and sought revisions. That's hindsight, though, so I can't say for sure.

Why did the column disappear for a few hours Sunday and then re-appear?

Over the weekend, as word of the column spread, the Clinic disavowed it, and Neides apologized for the uproar it caused. That did little to reduce the uproar.

Around 4:30 p.m. Sunday, I received an email from a reader expressing outrage about the removal of the Neides column from our site. I was surprised by the email, as nothing should be deleted from our site without my approval, and we very rarely remove articles and columns from our site and do so only with much deliberation. We own the rights to everything published on our site, with rare exceptions.

I checked, and the column was not just unpublished, it was entirely gone from our system.

I sent a note to the reader to thank him for the alert, and we set about restoring the column, and the many comments associated with it. We found it in an archive, and within an hour or so, we republished it.

Upon review and after consultation with the Clinic, we learned that Smith was the one who deleted it. As that violates our policy, we have removed the access of Neides and the Clinic staff to the system that feeds content to our site.

That means they no longer can publish the column directly. Any future columns will have to be emailed to us, and someone at cleveland.com will publish them.

Why is the column staying on the site even though the Clinic has disavowed it and Neides apologized for it?

This column has become the topic of a widespread conversation. At cleveland.com, we strive to be the center of conversation, so we are loath to remove something that has become central to a debate.

As I said, if we had learned that Neides was pushing discredited anti-vaccination arguments before the column had become part of a bigger conversation, we might have asked him or the Clinic for revisions. By the time we knew of it, the conversation was raging.

Does cleveland.com have other trusted users who publish on the website?

We have a lot of freelancers who are trusted users with direct access to our site, and they generally publish before an editor reads the pieces. An editor usually catches up with the pieces to review them.

And, for part of 2014, several University Hospitals doctors wrote an occasional column called, "Advice from Doctor Mom," that the hospital staff published on cleveland.com, using a logon we created for that purpose.