Andrew Wakefield falsely linked the MMR vaccine with autism 22 years ago and the repercussions are still being felt today.
Journalist Brian Deer has been investigating the scandal since 2003. His new book is called The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines.
Photo: Sherry Yates/123RF
Listen to the full interview with Brian Deer
Banned from medicine, thanks to Deer's discoveries, Wakefield fled to the United States to and is now busy on the US anti-vaccine circuit.
Wakefield was an unknown researcher in the 1990s looking at a possible link between measles and Crohn’s disease, Deer told Jesse Mulligan.
That idea didn’t go very far as measles was declining because of vaccination and yet Crohn’s disease was increasing.
“So, he shifted over to measles vaccines and started to argue that measles vaccine caused Crohn’s disease.”
Wakefield was then approached by a firm of lawyers.
“They invited him to move from bowel disease, which was his interest, to brain damage which was their interest.”
They wanted to start a law suit against the manufacturers of the MMR (measles, mumps rubella) vaccine claiming it caused autism.
“They invited him to become essentially their employee and he set about researching for this law firm to make a case that the MMR vaccine caused autism,” Deer says.
This culminated in a research paper that was published in British medical journal The Lancet in 1998.
The paper concerned a group of 12 children brought to a bowel clinic in the UK.
“He made claims about children whose parents brought them to a bowel clinic in a hospital and said that these parents had conveyed to him the information that their children had been perfectly normal, had received the MMR vaccine, and 14 days later they were showing the first signs of autism,” Deer says.
Deer was stated looking into the research in 2003 and interviewed a mother of one of the children in the study.
“I asked her in great detail what happened to her child and the story she told me simply couldn’t be reconciled with anything contained in the Wakefield Lancet paper.
“And that discrepancy set me off looking for an explanation about what was going on.”
He then uncovered Wakefield’s “cosy” relationship with the group of lawyers.
“It was very cosy indeed, he’d been retained two years before the paper was published in The Lancet, he’d been hired by this firm of lawyers, he’d agreed to work for them for a very substantial sum of money
“He was being paid hourly rates to make a case against the MMR vaccine to get a law suit going.”
This relationship had never been reported before, he says.
“He’d never told The Lancet about it, they knew nothing about it, his co-authors didn’t know he had this deal.”
Further probing into Wakefield’s research was like peeling the layers of an onion, Deer says.
“He’d also taken out a patent eight months before the launch of that paper on his own single measles vaccine.
“He was arguing publicly that parents should turn down the 3-in-1 measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and ask for single vaccines.”
Later Deer discovered Wakefield had altered the histories, symptoms and diagnoses of the children contained in his paper to create the appearance of a new syndrome allowing the law firm that paid him to take forward litigation.
That class action was launched in October 1998 and ran until 2003, when it collapsed at a final cost on both sides of $US100 million, he says.
But the damage was done and the scare over MMR continues to this day.
His research is now entirely discredited, The Lancet has withdrawn the paper and Wakefield may no longer practise medicine in the UK, but Deer remains concerned about the integrity of published research generally.
“This could be happening here and now and anywhere because of the way that anonymised scientific research is brought forward.
“The journals and the experts talk about peer review, which is an extremely flawed system.
“People think a peer review is a test of truth, but it is not ,it is just a test of superficial plausibility.”
Wakefield has never apologised for or retracted his discredited research.
“He just couldn’t do it, it simply wasn’t in his nature, he’s simply unable to recognise that if you’re doing what he did that was firstly a profound conflict of interest and that conflict of interest lead him to cross the line into what the BMJ editors commenting on my piece described as fraud.”
Now Wakefield is a full time anti-vaccine campaigner.
“He’s very much one of the engines now of this anti-vaccine movement and it all begins in deceit.”