Debunking the doctor who started the MMR scare

Hi Sparkies, 

This week, I want to tell you about a huge health story that rocked the UK – and, eventually, the world – when I was growing up. It began with a “scientific” paper in the late 1990s. It ended (sort of) with a series of investigations and a doctor losing his licence. And it fuelled one of the most pervasive and harmful medical myths still around today: that vaccines cause autism. 

When Andrew Wakefield published a paper in The Lancet, one of the UK’s most respected medical journals, linking the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism, he prompted a public panic that saw UK vaccination rates drop by more 10%. 

~ Ten percent may not sound like much, but it is tens of thousands of children potentially at risk of really nasty infections. Then there’s the risk to herd immunity – that’s when people who can’t be immunised, maybe because of other medical conditions, are protected because the people around them are already vaccinated. ~ 

The paper claimed to look at 12 children who had various bowel issues or developmental disorders, and had received the MMR vaccine. But it was faked. Data had been changed; Wakefield had been paid by lawyers wanting to sue vaccine companies; and the children in the study had been deliberately recruited from an anti-vaccine group. 

The reporter Brian Deer uncovered the whole thing, first with the Sunday Times and later Channel 4. To begin with, he had no idea how big it would be. “I thought it would be a two-week story, a double page if I was lucky and found something interesting,” he told me. 

Instead, the story ran for years. There were three phases to the investigation, Brian explained, published over seven years. First, exposing Wakefield’s connection to lawyers. After this came out in 2004, vaccination rates immediately started to rise back up. “Particularly in this country, people just go, ‘Oh, lawyers. Oh, now we get it. Now we understand what it's all about,’” Brian remembered.  

The second phase “followed the money”, exposing how Wakefield had devised a plan to profit off the scare. “He’d begun steps to set up all kinds of companies to exploit the alarm that he created,” Brian said. In media appearances, Wakefield claimed the combined vaccine could be too much for young immune systems to handle – and that he had applied for a patent for a “safer” measles vaccine. 

Then, the final phase: unpicking the paper itself, figuring out who each anonymous child was – and how Wakefield had lied about them. Brian said: “It let me do what I believe no journalist has ever been able to do before, which is go round the back of a piece of biomedical research, find out all the data that lies behind it and bring it forward.” He interviewed the parents, and they pointed out where Wakefield had manipulated the data.  

I’ve always thought of this story as one about vaccines. But for Brian, it was about a broader issue: integrity in medical research. “Way back in the early part of my career, in 1986, I did an investigation into the pharmaceutical industry and I realised people could just make up stuff and publish it in biomedical journals,” he told me. Unlike one of his own stories for a newspaper, there was no one following up on the work or checking the sources.

“I was focused on The Lancet, how it could be that they could have published this thing. That was my predominant interest then and it is today.” Even now, fraud remains an issue in medical research – Elisabeth Bik, for example, keeps catching doctored images in scientific papers. But the fraud Brian uncovered was practically invisible. 

“What Wakefield did I don’t think was particularly extraordinary,” he told me. “This kind of stuff is going on all the time, because all the data is anonymised, because no one gets the time to check the facts and there’s no third-party involvement … If Wakefield had been researching and published what he did, which was an outright fraud, in an area like diabetes or heart disease or Alzheimer’s, you simply would not have got the opportunity as a journalist to spend so much time looking at it.”

Luckily Brian did get that chance. And after years of work, he was vindicated when The Lancet retracted the paper entirely. Wakefield was investigated by the General Medical Council, the body that regulates doctors in the UK. At the end of an inquiry that lasted more than 200 days, Wakefield was struck off. He can’t use the title doctor.

Vaccination rates picked up after the first story was published; by 2011 they were back to more than 90%. “It was never a campaign,” Brian told me. “It’s not for me to tell people whether to vaccinate their children.”

Since he exposed the fraud, critics have tried to paint Brian as a shill for Big Pharma, or a goon hired to discredit Wakefield. That’s been Wakefield’s response as well: he denied fraud and claimed a grand conspiracy against his work. “I didn’t initially go after Wakefield,” Brian told me. “Well, I did when he sued me. You better believe I went after him when he sued me!” But time and time again as we spoke, Brian returned to the real subject of his investigation: the paper, and the harm it had caused. 

“It’s the honour of my life,” he told me, “that I was able to expose and bring an end to that paper.”

I spoke to Brian last week, just after Robert F Kennedy Jr appeared in front of the US Senate for a confirmation hearing. Kennedy’s one of the most famous proponents of vaccine misinformation in the US today; naturally, Trump wants him to run the Department of Health. During the hearing, the Democrat Senator Maggie Hassan challenged Kennedy’s lies, which she said were “relitigating settled science” and inflicting unnecessary guilt on parents who vaccinate:

Brian was watching as she spoke. “I was very moved by it, very moved, very validated. You know, I’ve done other things, I’ve had other investigations, but nothing that’s had that impact.”

Brian Deer’s book about his investigation is called The Doctor Who Fooled The World – I’d recommend it for the full nitty gritty on how he pulled the paper apart.

It’d be nice if debunking Wakefield’s paper had put an end to the “vaccines cause autism” myth. But as the saying goes, a lie can make it round the world before the truth puts its boots on. Exposing the paper as fraudulent took years, and even now, Wakefield’s lie still shows up in US Senate hearings. But we do have the truth, and we can use it. Parents don’t have to feel guilty for protecting their children from deadly diseases.   

Thank you for reading this week. It means a lot to know that so many of you care about the positive changes that journalism can have in the world. As always, let me know if you have seen any great examples of investigations or stories that have sparked change – maybe you’ll see them featured here in a future edition.

Until next time!