Reprint
I exposed Andrew Wakefield, the original measles anti vaxxer – but he became a hero
by Brian Deer
25 January 2024
The discredited British doctor who sparked a scare over the MMR jab in the 90s is now a celebrity in Trump’s America – and his hand can be seen in our current measles crisis
If you’re under 35 and don’t have kids, the phrase “MMR scare” might not mean much. For the rest of us, it’s a portal back to the 90s and the national obsession that then stalked Britain over the three-in-one vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella: did it, or didn’t it, cause autism?
At a population level, it plainly doesn’t. But, with outbreaks of measles now at record levels across Europe, and Birmingham Children’s Hospital, among others, said to be inundated with sick kids, that scare – and its mastermind, one Andrew Wakefield – are back on the agenda.
I know more about Andrew Wakefield than most. For more than 20 years, with time off for good behaviour, I’ve tracked his role in the so-called “anti-vaccine movement”: reborn in Britain in the 1990s, exported to America during the following decade, and then disseminated across the world.
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I don’t think he’s yet pronounced on the present resurgence of disease. But while Wakefield, 67, started with the MMR jab back in the 90s, he’s now full-on “anti-vax”: against them all. “If I had a baby, I would not vaccinate them,” is the way I’ve heard him put it to admirers. “That’s the only honest answer I can give you.”
He comes over as honest. He’s often called “charismatic”. And that’s how the UK first received him, decades back, when in February 1998 – ten months after Tony Blair moved into Downing Street – the then gut surgeon appeared to bare his soul at a breathless press conference called by London’s Royal Free hospital and medical school.
The occasion was the release of a five-page report by him in a top medical journal, The Lancet. Other authors, with little or no part in it, were named. But this was Wakefield’s moment to take the stage as a crusader for children’s health.
Scattered around the hospital’s atrium, where the press event occurred, preprints of the report told a terrifying tale of “apparent” horrific injuries from MMR. Twelve anonymised children, aged from three to nine, were tabulated as evidence of a link with a “regressive” brain disorder, three-quarters being listed as “autism”.
“It’s a moral issue for me,” he declared as TV lights scorched and reporters scribbled. “And I can’t support the continued use of these three vaccines, given in combination, until this issue has been resolved.”
The medical establishment was outraged by the impertinence of any doctor doubting vaccines. “And 12 patients? This surgeon is nuts.” But, if what the report said was true, this critique was misplaced: this could be the first signal of a hidden epidemic of catastrophic harm to kids. Parents of eight of the 12 cases in his series were reported to have declared their child was developing normally, received the triple shot, and showed the first “behavioural” symptoms within “days”.
The Royal Free distributed a video news release to maximise the coverage. And with a full professor, one Roy Pounder, endorsing Wakefield’s findings, all that night’s news broadcasts summarised his claims, and a national neurosis erupted.
“New tests ‘confirm the link’ between MMR and autism” (Sunday Express). “Mr Blair gets the needle” (Daily Mail). “A jab in the dark” (The Guardian). Private Eye even printed a 32-page special, feting Wakefield as a crusading hero.
Over the next six years, vaccination rates slumped, until in 2004 they reached their lowest point since the triple shot was first introduced in October 1988.
I tried to keep out of it. I’d covered vaccines twice before. But with a long history at The Sunday Times of being truthful, if annoying, I was assigned to take a fresh look at what was causing outbreaks of measles like today’s. And I could hardly believe what I found.
First, Wakefield’s “moral issue” concealed a sickening conflict of interest. He was covertly a hired gun for a solicitor, one Richard Barr, who hoped to raise a speculative class action lawsuit after a couple of early brands of MMR were withdrawn.
“The prime objective,” Barr instructed Wakefield in a confidential letter, six months before The Lancet report, “is to produce unassailable evidence in court so as to convince a court that these vaccines are dangerous”.
That conflict was just the start of several dozen exclusives, in which I revealed the scare to be rooted in a scam.
Nearly all the kids’ parents were already lawyers’ clients, and fingering MMR wasn’t a Wakefield “finding”. It was a ticket to enrollment in his project. The research was sponsored by the government’s legal aid scheme, that would eventually pile in with £26.2m of taxpayers’ money (at about 2003 prices), including more than than £400,000 for Wakefield.
At the press conference, he called for the government to return to single shots for measles, mumps and rubella. But eight months earlier, he’d filed a patent application for his own measles vaccine – with his own businesses to profit from the furore.
As my investigation rolled forward, media “scare” stories faded. I won an award and Wakefield was arraigned by a General Medical Council hearing.
He denied wrongdoing, as he’s done to this day. He’s unsuccessfully sued me twice – in Britain and the United States – for what a High Court judge called “public relations purposes.” But the GMC’s panel nailed him with a shopping list of charges.
After sitting for 217 days, in sessions stretching between July 2007 and May 2010, the GMC backed me, endorsing my reporting, by striking off Wakefield with dozens of examples of serious misconduct, including four counts of dishonesty regarding his Lancet project – with one charge his own lawyer called “fraud”.
By then Wakefield had long since fled the Royal Free after refusing to replicate his research. But he never gave up on his war against vaccines, launching broadsides against everything from Hepatis B to HPV shots from a new bolthole in Austin, Texas.
Despite being ostracised in Britain, he has become an influential celebrity in Trump’s America – having been a guest at his inaugural ball – and even dated the supermodel Elle MacPherson.
Of course, he’s not alone in fuelling this winter’s measles crisis. Many kids missed their shots during the Covid pandemic; health services are failing; and in a global empire in which he’s come to be lauded as “father of the anti-vaccine movement”, his crown has been snatched by an American, Robert Kennnedy, who’s running as an independent for president.
But his invisible hand is at work today through the network he created over decades, spreading smears through countless conferences and videos. As Covid reared its head in December 2019, he pounced on the pandemic as a new chance to shine, dismissing the killer disease as mere “Wu Flu” and denying the vaccines were vaccines.
With MMR, meanwhile, his supporters remain in place, helping fuel the present crisis.
He’s still not happy with me. He says I’m a “psychopath” and that it’s me, not him, who’s the fraudster. His people are still out there, doing their worst, running thousands of websites and social media groups.
And they don’t like me either. “You are one of the most evil, lying awful men that has ever lived,” one of hundreds of likeminded correspondents emails me. “So many children are sick or have died because of you.”
Maybe she was confused, and meant to send it to him. I don’t think criticism bothers him.
Indeed, with a lifestyle unthinkable to a gut surgeon in Britain, adored by women, his favourite disease running riot through children, you might conclude he’s a winner after all.
And doesn’t he perfectly represent the paradox of our times: that a lie travels faster than the truth. His pariah status, that I helped construct, has fuelled his rise – and makes me seriously wonder how things might have played out if I hadn’t investigated his Lancet paper in the first place.
In today’s new age of peer-to-peer media, bubbled tribalism, and suspicion of expertise, it may be that truth-tellers, as I’ve tried to be, turn out to be their own worst enemies. With evidence of guilt invoked as proof of innocence, cheats and liars might be better left alone.
Brian Deer is the author of ‘The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield’s War on Vaccines‘ (£16.99, Scribe). He tweets @deerbrian
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