Trump gives anti-vaccine zealots a shot in the arm

The disgraced British doctor Andrew Wakefield has recruited a powerful ally

The Sunday Times, January 29, 2017
Brian Deer and Josh Glancy

On Donald Trump’s first night as president, a video was posted online that sent a shudder through the medical and scientific world. It showed a man of 60 in black tie at Washington’s most sought-after inauguration ball, railing against America’s health protection agency.

The shaky footage provoked a furious response in the medical community, with doctors and scientists tweeting: “I need anti-nausea meds” or more simply “bloody hell”.

The man in question was Andrew Wakefield, a disgraced British former doctor, who was struck off in the UK in 2010 for bogus research linking the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine to autism. After an award-winning investigation by The Sunday Times, the General Medical Council hit him with charges, including one that he acknowledged through his lawyers to be of “fraud”. And yet there he was, popping up in Washington for the inauguration.

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After fleeing Britain with his wife and four children, Wakefield was mauled by the American media. Time magazine listed him among history’s “great science frauds”. But once again he has convinced anxious parents and conspiracy theorists to believe his warnings against vaccinating children.

And now Wakefield may have a powerful new supporter — the president. A fortnight ago Trump invited Robert F Kennedy Jr, nephew of the former president and a prominent vaccine sceptic, to Trump Tower. Kennedy said afterwards that he had been asked to head a new commission on vaccines, although a Trump spokeswoman later said no final decision had been made.

Trump has long been interested in the anti-vaccine movement. In December 2007 he said: “My theory [about autism], and I study it because I have young children, my theory is the shots. We’ve been giving these massive injections at one time, and I really think it does something to the children.”

In 2012 Trump met Gary Kompothecras, an anti-vaccine campaigner and wealthy Republican donor from Florida. Trump tweeted: “Massive combined inoculations to small children is the cause for big increase in autism”. In August last year Trump was introduced to Wakefield on the campaign trail and they had their picture taken together.

Wakefield and other campaigners against vaccination have made headway in America. Exemptions from vaccinations in Texas, where Wakefield lives, rose from 2,314 in 2003 to 38,197 in 2013. After a measles outbreak in California in 2015, public health officials laid part of the blame at Wakefield’s door.

Erin, a 36-year-old teacher from New York, no longer vaccinates her two sons. She originally put the elder boy on a slow vaccination schedule, but after researching the issue further, she balked at giving him an MMR shot, fearing it might give him autism.
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“I couldn’t live with myself knowing that he was so young and thriving and I could give him this one shot and he wouldn’t be the same,” she said. Erin believes that the campaign against Wakefield is conducted by people with a “vested interest” in the vaccine industry.

“He had to be discredited because otherwise the pharma companies would have had parents not wanting their products.”

Under Trump the stage has been set for Wakefield’s ideas to gain more traction. That troubles Maranda Dynda, 23, from Pittsburgh, who had a daughter when she was 19 and quickly found herself deep in the anti-vaccine movement. “I fell down an anti-vax wormhole online,” she said. “I believed it because I was afraid for my child. You’re so vulnerable to all the scary scenarios out there.”

Dynda did not vaccinate her daughter until she was almost two, when she began to rethink her position. “I started to notice the people I associated with in the anti-vaccine community believed in things I found ridiculous, such as Aids denial and that the Earth is flat,” she said. “Instead of going to conspiracy websites and YouTube, I spoke to doctors and read the actual science.”

When Dynda published a blog explaining her volte-face, “It was like leaving a cult,” she said. “I got death threats, people telling me I was a terrible mom. I lost most of my friends.”

Dynda does not feel anger towards parents who she believes are trying to do the right thing by their children. But anti-vaxxers such as Wakefield are a different matter. “I do get frustrated with them,” she said. “It’s just irresponsible.”

Trump promised that as president he “would not allow one-time massive shots” and tweeted that doctors “lied” about vaccinations. “So many people who have children with autism have thanked me,” he said on Twitter.

Wakefield spotted his chance. No longer a doctor, he calls himself a “film maker”, and supplied Trump with a 91-minute documentary called Vaxxed. The film claims that a poorly designed study of MMR by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was proof of a government conspiracy.

CDC scientists, he said, were guilty of crimes worse than “Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler”, responsible for “a million damaged children”.

Wakefield has convinced his supporters he is a victim, silenced for telling the truth. “They make it about me,” he told audiences at his screenings. “It’s a one-trick pony to say, ‘Parents, this man’s a liar, and doctors and scientists, if you get involved in this vaccine safety issue, or investigating autism and vaccines, this will happen to you.’”

It is not just Trump who appears susceptible to the anti-vaccine movement. Last week, the congressman Tom Price, the nominee to become health and human services secretary, said in his Senate confirmation hearing that the “science” was that vaccines did not cause autism. But asked whether parents should follow the approved schedule of shots, Price fudged his response.

Ever since his night at the ball, Wakefield has been firing off messages to supporters. The plan is to bombard Trump’s advisers with anecdotes from parents who say their children were born normal but were never the same after vaccination.

“These are going to someone who can make a huge difference,” the former doctor said last week.

“There are now 6½ thousand or so and we need at least 10,000 stories of vaccine injury, or more.”

It is a similar technique to the one used in the 1990s that ended his career. Hired by a firm of lawyers, he covertly, through anti-vaccine groups, recruited parents who blamed MMR for their children’s misfortune. When their stories were analysed, with access to medical records, they melted away like snowballs in sunshine.

Price is a former orthopaedic surgeon and will not be short of briefings on the facts. His department will tell him of its experience in litigation, where more than 5,000 claims have been filed in federal court since Wakefield first surfaced in Britain. And in not one instance — as the court itself has stated — was a vaccine found to cause autism. But that will not stop Wakefield.

“It was wonderful, it was great, tremendous support for the administration for what he’s doing,” he said after the inauguration ball. “Met with some very good people.”

As with so much else, the issue of vaccinations has been thrown into uncertainty by Trump’s victory.

America must wait and wonder whether the new president will make infectious diseases great again.