‘Dishonest and irresponsible’: 25 years of Andrew Wakefield’s MMR claims

Nevertheless, smallpox vaccines became widespread, and on May 8, 1980, the world was declared officially free of the disease. 

As one vaccine was changing the world however, another was at the centre of a scare. DTP, the combined jab against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough), had been linked to not only typical vaccine side-effects, including inflammation and fever, but also alleged neurological and physical issues.

‘When Wakefield’s paper came out, I knew more about vaccines than he did,’ says Deer. ‘I didn’t know much, but I knew enough because I’d been working on precisely the same issues [with DPT] and I recognised the paper as having some massively similar features to a similar paper that was published in 1974.

‘I thought “they’re doing the same thing but there’ll never be any way you can prove it” – because the thing about biomedical papers of all kinds is they’re anonymised, so there’s no way under normal circumstances you’d ever find out who [the children] were or what was really wrong with them, so I didn’t get involved.’

Yet.

The results of that investigation can be read in his 380-page book, The Doctor Who Fooled The World, an extraordinary and complex tale of how Wakefield waged a personal war on MMR and hoped to make money doing so.

But the simplified version is as follows.

It is worth noting that case studies are a legitimate form of academic research, and that 12 participants is not an unusually low cohort. As Deer notes, AIDS was first described in a study of just five adult men, and autism itself was initially described from a group of 11 children. 

However, as highlighted by Dr David Turner, associate professor and honorary consultant microbiologist at Nottingham University, a case study alone would never have been enough to ascertain a definitive link.

‘Really it was preliminary information, and it would need to be repeated and looked up again to hold any weight at all,’ he explains. ‘The paper was entirely fraudulent, but even if it hadn’t been, if the data hadn’t been made up, it was still a very preliminary report.

‘It’s not surprising there was major interest in it, but it was amplified out of all proportion.’

The media’s role in fanning the flames of this burgeoning scare varies depending on individual opinion. 

Deer says the original paper was mostly fairly reported, but there was also ‘some really bad journalism’.

‘There was a handful of journalists who basically hitched their wagon to Wakefield’s mule,’ he says. ‘He and the lawyer he was working with [Barr] spoon-fed them information and they printed it.’

Dr Vanessa Silba, consultant epidemiologist at the UK Health Security Agency, adds that ongoing coverage played a significant role in subsequent outbreaks. 

‘When the paper was published it slowly started to gather momentum and it got a huge amount of media coverage both in the UK and internationally,’ she says. ‘It did have a massive impact and that media coverage kept going on for years.  

‘In the UK we saw uptake for the MMR go down nationally to as low as 80% – so it didn’t completely plummet, but in order to be able to control measles we need to achieve 95% uptake with two doses, because measles is one of the most transmissible diseases known to man.’ 

In all the reporting however, one essential element not uncovered was the financial web Wakefield had also woven around his central tenet. Only during the course of his investigation would Deer discover the full extent of his business dealings.

Alongside setting up various companies to capitalise on the commercial aspects of the study, including one that would pay him £40,000 a year (plus £50,000 in travel expenses), Wakefield had filed a patent for a single measles vaccine. He was also developing products to treat bowel disease and autism.

But above all, it was the desire for a class action lawsuit by Barr that was the driving force behind the study. 

The children Wakefield subjected to unnecessary and invasive procedures had not simply turned up at the Royal Free presenting with eerily similar symptoms. By deliberately seeking likely candidates, Wakefield and Barr had set out to create the evidence needed to bring a major lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers. While doing so, Wakefield was paid £150 an hour for his work by Barr.

However, the lawsuit didn’t happen.

In 2003, the Legal Services Commission ceased support after barristers for the claimants said they ‘could not make the claim that MMR causes autism’.

The following year, ten of the paper’s other authors retracted its ‘interpretation’ section, in which the claim was made. By now, Wakefield had been asked to leave the Royal Free Hospital after failing to do what all scientists must – replicate his study. Only by conducting further tests could he confirm his claims that MMR caused autism.

Across the world, the fear he sowed by faking a scientific study to prove his own theory and potentially make millions still manifests itself across a whole spectrum of society, from fervent anti-vaxxers to new parents instilled with an unnecessary sense of trepidation.

And as the arrival of Covid vaccines turbo-charged the cultural divide, Deer says it need not have been this way.

‘The previous concerns [over DPT] had died down,’ he says. ‘But when Wakefield appeared it set off a whole new movement.