Andrew Wakefield, the vaccine scaremonger who’s snared supermodel Elle Macpherson

The disgraced doctor who sparked the MMR scandal has built himself an admiring coterie of guilt-ridden mothers and wealthy women

The Sunday Times
Brian Deer, Sunday July 22 2018

When I give lectures on the research cheat Andrew Wakefield I sometimes start with a PowerPoint presentation of pictures showing him accompanied by women. In the first slide his arm drapes around an adoring country singer. The next shows him at the centre of four grinning ladies. After that there are nine women beaming at a book launch. Eventually I project a stock image of a sea of mothers, the source of his wealth and power.

Years ago I was assigned by The Sunday Times to look into Wakefield, “the MMR doctor”, as we called him then. At the time he rode high, terrifying a generation of young parents. He claimed that the three-in-one measles, mumps and rubella vaccine was causing an epidemic of autism in children. But I found he was hiding secret payments from lawyers and that he had rigged his explosive results.

“Revealed: MMR research scandal” was this newspaper’s splash in February 2004. “MMR doctor fixed data on autism” made a front page five years later. And there was “MMR scare doctor planned rival vaccine”, “Doctoring the evidence”, “Schoolboy, 13, dies as measles makes a comeback” — and too many more to list here.

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I still keep an eye on Wakefield. And now I’ve got a new PowerPoint slide. Unfazed by the loss of the licence that entitled him to practise as a doctor and after a series of dishonesty charges, this wretch appears to have won the heart of Elle Macpherson, the Australian supermodel.

Snatched pictures last week caught them, lips locked, while they were shopping at a Miami food stall. She was dressed in blue cotton. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt. He has come a long way since his glory days in London, when he would send autistic children with constipation to be intubated as far as their small intestines to justify his theories.

Macpherson, 54, isn’t the first to be charmed since “Andy”, 61, moved to America. That was a Chicago lawyer named Elizabeth “Liz” Birt, then 49, who was tragically killed in a car crash. She raised the money for him to start a new life and, more importantly, sponsored his US visa. “She went to her grave thinking he was the way, the truth and the light,” said a friend of the family, in an email. He has since become an American citizen.

According to records, Birt helped raise $735,000 (£560,000 at today’s rates) in a business he launched in Austin, Texas. That would also be backed by two more women for Wakefield’s “start-up costs”.

Then came Troylyn Ball, a wealthy horsewoman, and Jane Johnson, of the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical family, who helped him start a new life in Austin. Ball and Johnson set him up in a $280,000-a-year job created just for him. And then came his current business partner, Polly Tommey, 51, a magazine publisher and one-time body double for the actress Charlotte Rampling. “He’s just a lovely guy who only wants to protect children,” she said last week. “He deserves happiness as much as anyone.”

Since he moved to America, much of his time has been spent on the road, attending conferences and making speeches while Carmel O’Donovan, his wife, stayed home with their four children.

Long before Macpherson, women were charmed by his spell, which primitive societies might have called magic.

His mother, Bridget Wakefield, a retired family doctor, told me, years ago, that she kept a book created by “American mothers”, containing two or three hundred eulogies. “Each mother wrote in it, put pictures in it, or wrote a little thing about their children,” she said.

At St Mary’s medical school, London, in the 1980s, he was captain of rugby, a natural team builder, popular. People called him “charismatic”.

He’s naturally funny, can hold an audience and thrives on being the centre of attention. Even after he was sacked from the former Royal Free Hospital medical school in London in 2001 he often attracted the c-word. “He is tall, handsome, fluent, charismatic,” wrote a professor, who compared him to Diana, Princess of Wales, “and above all a man of conviction.”

His interpersonal skills have made him the star at a network of fringe autism conferences across America. Suspicion that vaccines may have injured their children has created a market of bewildered parents enticed to such events, where, it seems to many, they are preyed upon by quacks and unscrupulous opportunists. They sell vitamin pills, homeopathic remedies, diagnostic tests, books and videos, all aimed at the autism dollar.

I would guess that the market might consist of 100,000 women. And you really won’t find many men. “Vaccines cause autism” is the new “refrigerator mother” — a long-debunked theory that maternal coldness lay behind many developmental disorders.

Guilt is the magic ingredient that brought Wakefield success in America. His message to parents that MMR causes autism may have encouraged many worried families to skip shots for their children, leading to outbreaks of disease. But that is to forget an even more badly damaged group, the mothers of children with autism.
“It has made me so bitter and twisted,” they tell each other. “Eight years ago I made a tragic mistake as a parent.”

And: “We’d convinced ourselves it was nothing we had done. Now we knew it was our fault.”

They blame themselves for vaccinating a son or daughter. It is a powerful message and has built Wakefield a following that, for years, has paid his bills. Having stirred their guilt, he then offers a remedy.

Sometimes mothers, heartbroken over their children, sob in his presence. “Dr Wakefield is a hero,” is a common refrain. “I don’t know where we would be without him.”

Wakefield may seem a surprising choice to become the companion for a woman nicknamed “the Body”. As a record five-time cover star for Sports Illustrated’s celebrated swimwear issue, Macpherson is not short of attention. Married twice, most recently to Jeffrey Soffer, a billionaire, and with an earlier relationship with the French-born financier Arpad Busson, she has rarely been alone for long.

She has two sons by Busson. But there is no talk of either having autism. Her children look terrific — two handsome young men. So what is her attraction to Wakefield?
The disgraced former doctor is a Roger Moore figure — charming, smooth and never angry — unless you cross him. As I have. He has sued me four times in Britain and America. He lost each case and paid costs.

To his followers he has a convincing story that he is the victim of a conspiracy cooked up by the pharmaceutical industry and unscrupulous journalists. The story he might have told Macpherson, as he has many others, has been honed for 15 years.

The way he tells it is that he is so dangerous to the Establishment that he is persecuted by drug companies and governments. He says they fear the threat he poses to their profit and policies.

I am a corrupt “psychopath” too. Dark forces brought him down in a conspiracy of lies to cover up horrific injuries the drug companies have inflicted upon children.
“It was a strategy,” he declares. “A public relations strategy to say, ‘We discredit this man. We isolate him from his colleagues. We destroy his career and then we say to other physicians who might dare to get involved: this is what will happen to you.’”

In fact it was an example of old- fashioned public-interest investigative reporting: the kind of thing that newspapers do best. As the reporter involved, I have won one journalism prize for investigating drug companies and another for investigating Wakefield.

His story is in every way a fantastic conceit. It is morality judo — heaving the weight of the case against him into evidence of his innocence and integrity.
Macpherson is a wealthy woman and has recently grown richer with a reported divorce settlement from Soffer that apparently grossed her $79m in cash and property. Good luck to them both.

Brian Deer’s book on the vaccine controversy will be published next year