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![Andrew Wakefield: the fraud investigationBrian Deer’s Sunday Times investigation[Long-read summary: 4,000 words]With revelations scattered across seventeen years, between 2003 and 2020 Brian Deer pursued a landmark public interest investigation for The Sunday Times of London, with spin-offs for a UK TV network and the British Medical Journal, into allegations linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) with brain and bowel damage in children. At the time Deer began, with an empty reporters’ notebook, Britain had been gripped by years of controversy over the three-in-one MMR — spawning epidemics of fear, guilt, and infectious disease, exported to the United States and many other countries, fuelling every kind of confusion about vaccines.British news headlines of those days powered the scare:NEW TESTS ‘CONFIRM THE LINK’ BETWEEN MMR AND AUTISMCRYING SHAME OF THE VACCINATION VICTIMSTHE QUESTION EVERY PARENT IS ASKINGAlmost incredibly, the prime source for such concerns — which in the 2020s would go on to seed global “anti-vax” networks opposing covid-19 shots — was a mere five-page research paper, blaming MMR for autism, published in February 1998. Follow Brian on Twitter:Follow @deerbrianWritten by a then-forty-one-year-old academic researcher, Andrew Wakefield, co-authored by a dozen associates (who played little or no part in it), and published in the prestigious Lancet medical journal, this paper reported on the anonymised cases of just twelve children with apparent developmental issues, most of whose parents were said to finger MMR.February 2004: The first of Deer’s many reports unravelling the Andrew Wakefield scandalBacked by an extraordinary video news release and a tense press conference, both organised by Wakefield’s employers at the Royal Free Hospital Medical School, in Hampstead, north London, the four-thousand-word paper provoked heavy media interest and was followed by a relentless campaign. This included further publications by Wakefield attacking MMR and led to a collapse in public confidence in the shot, which, since the late 1980s in the UK (and the early 1970s in the US) has been given routinely to children, at or soon after the age of one, almost eradicating measles and rubella from developed countries.Get Deer’s book: The Doctor Who Fooled the WorldThe loudest alarm rung in the 1998 Lancet paper were findings claiming that the parents of two thirds of the twelve enrolled children blamed MMR for what Wakefield called a new “syndrome.” This combined a novel bowel disease he claimed to have discovered and what he called “regressive autism,” a severe disability, in which he said language and basic skills were lost. Most disturbingly, the paper described the patients’ first “behavioural” symptoms as appearing suddenly after MMR: an average of just 6.3 days following vaccination, with a maximum (in two cases) of 14 days.Although Wakefield’s report involved only a dozen White kids, aged between three and nine, and (despite protestations to the contrary) its results would never be replicated, medical breakthroughs often begin with small-scale observations, and, if true, the 1998 Lancet findings might have been the first snapshot of a hidden epidemic of devastating injuries to children. “It’s a moral issue for me,” Wakefield announced at the press conference to launch his attack, where he called for a boycott of the combined MMR in favour of breaking it up into single measles, mumps, and rubella shots, to be administered at yearly intervals. “I can’t support the continued use of these three vaccines, given in combination, until this issue has been resolved.”As the doctor campaigned, UK vaccination rates slumped below the level needed to keep measles at bay. Even the British prime minister, Tony Blair, became embroiled in the affair when Wakefield supporters suggested — the Blairs say wrongly — that one of the family’s sons didn’t receive MMR. Meanwhile in America, a ferocious anti-vaccine movement took off after Wakefield toured autism conferences and in November 2000 appeared on the CBS network’s 60 Minutes programme linking MMR with what he called an “epidemic of autism”. This was followed by campaigners’ allegations that all vaccines were suspect: either due to their ingredients or because of the growing number recommended to be given.“In 1983 the shot schedule was ten. That’s when autism was one in 10,000. Now there’s 36, and autism is one in 150,” argued American actress Jenny McCarthy, who blamed MMR for her own son’s autism and gained the highest profile in the US for such beliefs. “All arrows point to one direction.”Andrew Wakefield unmaskedSensing a good story, journalists scrambled to back Wakefield, or to spotlight parents’ fears of MMR. But in September 2003 Brian Deer was assigned to investigate the controversy and unearthed a scandal of astounding proportions. Far from the scare being based on honest research, he uncovered a monstrous deception.The truth was that Wakefield had been secretly payrolled to create evidence and, while planning business schemes to personally profit from the controversy, he’d changed, misreported, and manipulated the children’s histories to rig his results in the Lancet.Full story: North American edition of Brian Deer’s book, from Johns Hopkins UniversityBefore Deer’s intervention, Wakefield had appeared to all the world as a respectable medical school researcher. Tall and square-headed, with hooded eyes and a booming voice, he was the son of doctors (a neurologist and a family practitioner), had grown up in Bath, a prosperous west-of-England spa town, and joined the Royal Free in November 1988 after postgraduate training in Toronto, Canada. His demeanour was languid — he was privately educated — and, born in September 1956, he appeared as if a lingering example of the presumed honour of the upper middle class.But Deer’s investigation — nominated in February 2011 for two British Press Awards — discovered that, while Wakefield held himself out to be a dispassionate scientist, two years before the Lancet paper was published — and before any of the twelve children were even seen at the hospital — he’d been hired to attack MMR by a lawyer, Richard Barr: a mediocre jobbing solicitor in the small eastern English town of King’s Lynn, who hoped to raise a speculative (and lucrative) class action lawsuit against drug companies that manufactured the shots.Unlike expert witnesses, who give professional advice and opinions, Wakefield secretly negotiated an unprecedented contract with Barr, then aged forty-eight, to conduct both clinical and scientific research. Their goal was to find evidence of Wakefield’s claimed new “syndrome”, intended to be the centrepiece of (later failed) litigation on behalf of about 1,600 British families mainly recruited through stories planted in media. This publicly undisclosed role for Wakefield created the grossest conflict of interest, and the exposure of it by Deer, in February 2004, led to public uproar in the United Kingdom that would resonate around the world. As the Independent newspaper commented in an editorial on the day of Deer’s first report:“It may turn out that the greatest recent crisis in public health need never have happened.”Within weeks of the first disclosure, almost all of the Lancet paper’s authors (excluding Wakefield) retracted its “Interpretation”, or conclusions, section. And, from July 2007 to May 2010, the UK doctors’ regulator, the General Medical Council (GMC), held its longest-ever misconduct hearing, reinvestigating the journalist’s early findings. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});The Barr-Wakefield dealFor all Wakefield’s talk of his “moral issue,” for eight years he was Richard Barr’s hired gun. Under an undisclosed agreement between the pair, Wakefield was to be paid (audio) from the UK legal aid fund, run by the government to give less well-off people access to justice. Wakefield charged at a rate of £150 an hour (more than £254 an hour at October 2022 values) — billed through a company of his wife’s. Eventually payments to him (for generic work alone) totalled what the UK Legal Services Commission, pressed by Deer under a new freedom of information act, said was £435,643 (£738,000, or nearly US $900,000, at 2022 values), plus expenses. These hidden fees — revealed by Deer in The Sunday Times in December 2006 — gave the doctor a direct personal, but undeclared, financial interest in his research claims: totalling more than eight times his reported annual salary and creating an incentive not only for him to launch the public alarm but to keep it going for as long as he could.In addition to the personal payments, he was covertly awarded an initial £55,000, which he’d applied for with Richard Barr in June 1996 (twenty months before the Lancet publication; six weeks before the first of the twelve children was admitted to the Royal Free), but which, like the hourly fees, he never declared to the Lancet as he should have done, to carry out the research submitted to the journal. This start-up funding was part of a staggering £26.2m of British taxpayers’ money (more than £44.3m, US $53.6m, at 2022 values) eventually shared among a small group of doctors and lawyers, working under Barr’s and Wakefield’s direction, trying to prove MMR caused his “syndrome”. Yet more surprising, Wakefield had asserted the existence of such a syndrome — allegedly including what he would later dub “autistic enterocolitis” — before he performed the research which supposedly discovered it.This Barr-Wakefield deal was the foundation of the vaccine crisis — morphing into campaigns against shots for everything from human papillomavirus to SARS-CoV-2 — both in Britain and throughout the world. As Barr instructed Wakefield in a confidential letter (obtained by Deer) six months before the Lancet published:“I have mentioned to you before that the prime objective is to produce unassailable evidence in court so as to convince a court that these vaccines are dangerous.”Full story: International edition of Brian Deer’s book, from Scribe, London & MelbourneAnd, if this wasn’t enough to cast doubt on the research’s objectivity, Deer unearthed another shocking conflict of interest. In June 1997 — nearly nine months before the press conference at which Wakefield called for single vaccines — he’d covertly filed for a patent on products, including his own supposedly “safer” single measles vaccine, which only stood any prospect of success if confidence in MMR was damaged.Although Wakefield later dishonestly denied the existence of such patent claims, his proposed shot, and a network of companies intended to raise money from naïve investors (for purported Wakefield inventions including “a replacement for attenuated viral vaccines”, commercial testing kits, and what he claimed to be a possible “complete cure” for autism) were set out in confidential documents.One Wakefield business was awarded £800,000 (about £1.35m, US $1.6m, at 2022 values) from the UK legal aid fund on the strength of (later discredited) data which he’d co-authored with an Irish pathologist named John O’Leary. And, even as the Lancet paper was being prepared, behind the scenes Wakefield was negotiating plans to exploit the public alarm with secret schemes to line his pockets. “Disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield plotted to make £28 million a year [£49.6m, US $59.6m, at 2022 values] from the MMR jab panic he triggered,” was how the British newspaper The Sun, for example, reported in January 2011 on this disclosure from Deer.Behind the veilAs with the researcher, so too with his subjects. They also weren’t as they appeared. The twelve children (eleven boys and one girl) reported in the Lancet were held out as if merely a routine series of developmentally challenged patients with bowel symptoms needing investigation by gastroenterologists. That so many of the kids’ parents were said to blame autism on a common vaccine, understandably, caused widespread concern. But Deer discovered that nearly all the children had been pre-selected through MMR campaign groups, and that, at the time of their admission to the hospital, most of their parents were clients or contacts of Richard Barr’s law firm. None of the twelve lived in London. Two were brothers. Two attended the same doctors’ office, 280 miles from the Royal Free. Three were patients at another clinic. One was flown in from the United States.Get Deer’s book: The Doctor Who Fooled the WorldDeer’s investigation revealed, moreover, that the paper’s pivotal purported finding — a sudden onset of autism within days of vaccination — was a sham: laundering into medical literature, as apparent facts, the unverified — and sometimes altered — assertions of a group of unnamed parents who (unknown to the journal and its readers) were bound to blame MMR when they came to the hospital because that was why they were invited. Parents blaming the shot wasn’t a “finding” at all. It was a secret qualification to take part. Wakefield — a former trainee gut surgeon, contractually forbidden to provide clinical care — denied this for years. But confidential medical records revealed the true number of children whose parents claimed were injured by MMR wasn’t eight, as the paper said: it was eleven of the twelve — later all twelve — and in most cases records noted legal involvement before the kids were even referred to the hospital. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});Regarding the only little girl in the project, for instance (who didn’t have any known inflammatory bowel disease), her local family physician noted in records:“Mum taking her to Dr Wakefield, Royal Free hospital, for CT scans, gut biopsies, ? Crohn’s. Will need referral letter. Dr Wakefield to phone me. Funded through legal aid.”In the light of such discoveries, the grounds were overwhelming to dig deeper into Wakefield’s activities. In an exercise never before accomplished by a journalist, Deer was able to gain parents’ co-operation and to exploit the GMC hearing — which reinvestigated his first findings on the scandal — to go behind the face of the 1998 paper, identify the subjects, and access patient data. Penetrating veils of medical and legal confidentiality, Deer discovered the hospital’s clinicians and pathology service had found nothing to implicate MMR, but Wakefield (who alone wrote the Lancet paper) distorted diagnoses and clinical histories to make it appear that he’d found his promised syndrome when he hadn’t.As first revealed by Deer in The Sunday Times in February 2009, the effect was to give the impression of a link between MMR, bowel disease, and the sudden onset of autism when otherwise none was evident. Routine, but unreported, blood tests for bowel inflammation were normal. And what the hospital’s clinicians and pathology service actually found in the kids’ guts was constipation, with predominantly normal biopsies and benign or normal features. When taken together with developmental histories, moreover, not one case was free of critical mismatches between the twelve-child paper and the kids’ contemporaneous records. Some children were a cause for concern before vaccination. Some were deemed normal months afterward. Some weren’t even diagnosed with autism.Among the children Wakefield falsely reported as suffering from the “syndrome” was the penultimate case in the series, a five-year-old boy from northern California, whose father was outraged by the deception. He wrote to Deer:“If my son really is Patient 11, then the Lancet article is simply an outright fabrication.” Protections sidelinedIn addition to discovering the study was rigged, Deer uncovered a raft of further issues, including deception over ethical supervision. Research on patients is governed by national and international standards — particularly the Helsinki Declaration [1996 revision] — and no reputable hospital review board would have endorsed the kind of fishing expedition into the guts of young children that Wakefield embarked on for Barr. Without that endorsement, moreover, no reputable medical journal would have published any resulting paper. Against that background, to satisfy the Lancet‘s patient-protection requirements, but without revealing to hospital authorities what was really going on, Wakefield dishonestly reported that a gruelling five-day battery of invasive and distressing procedures he caused to be performed on the kids — including anaesthesia, ileocolonoscopies, lumbar punctures, MRI brain scans, EEGs, radioactive drinks and x-rays — pre-agreed for the lawsuit, was approved by the Royal Free’s ethics committee. As the paper stated under the heading “Ethical approval and consent”:Investigations were approved by the Ethical Practices Committee of the Royal Free Hospital NHS Trust, and parents gave informed consent.But Deer proved that, despite the research being executed on the uniquely vulnerable, developmentally challenged children of sometimes distraught parents hoping for money to help with their care, the ethics committee wasn’t told the truth about the project and never gave any such approval. Responding to Deer in February 2004, Wakefield and his key accomplices — Royal Free paediatricians and Lancet co-authors John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch — denied this explosive discovery and issued a formal statement for media. But, after being confronted with the evidence at the GMC hearing, they changed their story and — despite clear rules — now argued they needed no approval.And yet in the Lancet they’d expressly claimed to have it: requiring a London High Court judge to intervene. As Justice Mitting later ruled of the ethics statement (written by Wakefield):“This statement was untrue and should not have been included in the paper.” Andrew Wakefield’s scienceDeer also probed Wakefield’s basic science. The story was much the same. The doctor obtained the legal money and planned his business ventures against a hypothesis of his own that the culprit for both the (fake) inflammatory bowel disease and (unsubstantiated) regressive autism was persistent infection with measles virus, found live as a normal part of MMR. But Deer demonstrated on UK TV that sophisticated, unreported, molecular tests carried out in Wakefield’s own lab had found no trace of measles in the children’s guts, blood, or cerebrospinal fluid. Those tests, moreover, were among a string of findings from labs around the world which also found no evidence of the virus. In a further report by Deer, The Sunday Times also disclosed critical flaws in one apparently positive study, led in Dublin by pathologist John O’Leary, using samples supplied by Wakefield. This misled thousands of families in the UK and US, ensnared for years in hopeless litigation almost entirely based on Wakefield and O’Leary’s claims.Deer (who in April 2006 reported the first British measles death in 14 years) took no view on whether vaccines may or may not cause autism. But he never found any scientific material repeating the Lancet project or its findings. Although, self-evidently, all kinds of children, including those with autism, suffer from digestive issues, he learnt of a mass of authoritative research comprehensively contradicting Wakefield. “Specifically, numerous studies have refuted Andrew Wakefield’s theory that MMR vaccine is linked to bowel disorders and autism,” was how the American Academy of Pediatrics summarised the consensus in an August 2009 statement to NBC News for a Dateline programme on the clash between Wakefield and Deer. “Every aspect of Dr Wakefield’s theory has been disproven.”The English courts also spoke on this aspect, for example in the ruling of Justice Mitting, handed down in March 2012:“There is now no respectable body of opinion which supports his hypothesis, that MMR vaccine and autism/enterocolitis are causally linked.”And England’s Court of Appeal declared in May 2020:“Dr Wakefield’s paper has since been wholly discredited.”Follow Brian on Twitter:Follow @deerbrianThe impact of Deer’s investigation has been felt around the world, with media coverage from New Zealand to Canada. In the UK, the Sunday Times revelations prompted huge follow-up by other news outlets, and, after years during which MMR vaccination rates fell in response to the campaign led by Wakefield and Barr, a reversal in the trend over the years of Deer’s reporting until public confidence fully returned.Meanwhile, in the US – where the Barr-Wakefield deal was joined by unsubstantiated complaints marshalled by American attorneys that a mercury-based vaccine preservative, thimerosal, was also at fault in autism — findings by Deer were presented by the Department of Justice in federal court, followed in February 2009 by scathing rulings. After hearing a test case of petitions from some 5,000 US families, one presiding special master (or judge) said: “It is a noteworthy point that not only has that ‘autistic enterocolitis’ theory not been accepted into gastroenterology textbooks, but that theory, and Dr Wakefield’s role in its development, have been strongly criticized as constituting defective or fraudulent science.”Wakefield denies everythingIn response to Deer, Wakefield supporters falsely denied that he took money for research or claimed his own vaccine, and, amid a barrage of sometimes paid-for smears, stalking by a Wakefield lawyer named Clifford Miller, and crank abuse of the journalist, lauded the doctor as a “hero”.The father-of-four Wakefield’s deceits, however, hadn’t only triggered the resurgence of sometimes fatal or brain-disabling diseases, plunged countless parents into the hell of believing it was their own fault for agreeing to vaccination that a son or daughter developed autism, and misled an ethics committee over child rights and safety, but it was discovered he’d gone as far as to betray a vaccine safety whistleblower whose identity he discovered and had bought blood from children as young as four years old, attending a birthday party, then joked about them crying, fainting and vomiting.Get Deer’s book: The Doctor Who Fooled the WorldMeanwhile, Wakefield falsely denied any conflicts of interest and even claimed he never said MMR caused autism. But documents — including his patents — evidenced his assertions, and he published a string of further falsified reports, while working with Richard Barr, to undermine confidence in the shot. Even when he knew his key allegations were proven baseless, he was found promoting them from a controversial business in Austin, Texas, called Thoughtful House, where — after being fired from the Royal Free in October 2001, following his refusal to repeat the Lancet study with a larger number of children — he held a lucrative post spun from his campaign.January 2011: The first of Deer’s “Secrets of the MMR scare” reportsThroughout Deer’s investigation, Wakefield refused to co-operate, filed baseless complaints, and issued statements denying every aspect. He also initiated, sought to stall, then abandoned with some £1.3m ($2m) costs (about £2.14m, US $2.6m, at 2022 values), a two-year “gagging” libel lawsuit in London, financed by the Medical Protection Society which defends doctors against their patients. In reply, Deer pressed the court for a speedy trial to clear his name, publicly accusing Wakefield of being “unremittingly evasive and dishonest”. The doctor’s conduct in this litigation was also damned by the judge hearing the case, who said Wakefield appeared to have filed suit for “public relations purposes,” “wished to extract whatever advantage he could from the existence of the proceedings while not wishing to progress them”, and was using them as “a weapon in his attempts to close down discussion and debate over an important public issue”.Wakefield paper retractedFaced with overwhelming proof of his grotesque misconduct, Wakefield concocted a preposterous conspiracy theory to account for his exposure and denied rigging his results. As he argued in a March 2009 statement:“The notion that any researcher can cook such data in any fashion that can be slipped past the medical community for his personal benefit is patent nonsense. Scientific rigor requires repeatability for verification of any research and Mr Deer’s implications of fraud against me are claims that a trained physician and researcher of good standing had suddenly decided he was going to fake data for his own enrichment.”Yet, that’s precisely what Wakefield did. And on 28 January 2010 — after 217 days of evidence and submissions — a panel of three doctors and two lay members hearing the GMC case handed down verdicts wholly vindicating Deer. Branding Wakefield “dishonest”, “unethical” and “callous”, the panel found him guilty (against the criminal standard of certainty) of some three dozen charges, including four counts of dishonesty (including one Wakefield himself submitted through counsel to be a charge of “fraud”) and twelve involving the abuse of developmentally challenged children. The panel found his research to be dishonest and performed without ethical approval. And, five days after these rulings, the Lancet fully retracted the 1998 paper from the scientific literature as “utterly false”, prompting international media interest and further retractions.“What is indisputable is that vaccines protect children from dangerous diseases,” said The New York Times, in one of a string of editorials in leading newspapers. “We hope that The Lancet’s belated retraction will finally lay this damaging myth about autism and vaccines to rest.” (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});Three weeks later, on 17 February 2010, Wakefield was ousted by the directors of his Thoughtful House business in Texas, and on 24 May — day 217 of the GMC hearing — he was ordered to be erased from the register of UK doctors, ending his career in medicine.On 21 December 2010, that erasure was confirmed after his legal team withdrew their support for his case and he abandoned an appeal against the verdicts.Journal calls the fraudBut the Andrew Wakefield story continued to astonish, even after his career was over. In January 2011, the British Medical Journal (BMJ), helped develop the investigation for a medically qualified readership with a three-week package of disclosures and editorials centred on three major reports by Deer. The BMJ package (including peer review, editorial checking, and 60 hours of legal review) also included an introduction by the journalist, Piltdown medicine, comparing the features of Wakefield’s fraud with those of Britain’s most notorious scientific forgery. The journal’s editors called Wakefield’s twelve-child study “fraudulent” and accused the Royal Free medical school and the Lancet of “institutional and editorial misconduct”.Regarding Deer, the BMJ‘s editors noted a paradox. A mere reporter had beaten experts to the truth:“It has taken the diligent scepticism of one man, standing outside medicine and science, to show that the paper was in fact an elaborate fraud.”Among hundreds of reports worldwide on Deer’s revelations in the BMJ — which were covered by all north American networks and reached almost half of Americans surveyed days later in a Harris poll — The New York Times said in a second editorial on the affair: “Now the British Medical Journal has taken the extraordinary step of publishing a lengthy report by Brian Deer, the British investigative journalist who first brought the paper’s flaws to light — and has put its own reputation on the line by endorsing his findings.”Three months later, Deer’s personal journey reached a turning point when in April 2011 he was named specialist journalist of the year in the British newspaper industry’s annual Pulitzer-style Press Awards. Judges for the Society of Editors praised what they called his “outstanding perseverance, stamina and revelation on a story of major importance”. They said of his investigation: “It was a tremendous righting of a wrong”.MMR percentage uptake, 1994–2012, England & Wales. Source data generating each bar above combine the last three quarters of each calendar year with the first quarter of the next. [Click for key]Parents speak outAnd yet Wakefield still refused to apologise and, in a bid to raise money by tricking his supporters, the following year filed another vexatious lawsuit: this time in Austin, Texas. Like his London action, however, it stood no prospect of success and, despite an abandoned appeal to the state’s supreme court, was thrown out by senior judges. In fact, it appeared the Texas case was kept alive mainly to create content for a faux “documentary” by one Miranda Bailey who, in a contrived collaboration with her host, faked the appearance of “fly on the wall” coverage at Wakefield’s Austin home and falsely claimed Deer refused to reply. That might have concluded many years of inquiry: a rarely paralleled newspaper investigation. As Deer summarised a position of the utmost confidence:This story is so detailed and my reporting so persistent… that either it’s honest and correct — in substance and sting — or Wakefield must have fallen victim to the most sustained barrage of malicious defamation in the history of the English language. But the ex-doctor’s dishonesty provoked further developments as parents, former colleagues, and others came forward to tell the journalist what they knew. One mother, who for years betrayed Wakefield’s network from the inside, declared of her reasoning for collaborating with Deer:“I had a situation where there were two men. One was a doctor and the other was a journalist. One of them was saying ‘white’ and the other ‘black’. One of them was an honourable man. And one of them was a shyster.”Finally, in September 2020 (delayed by the pandemic) came Deer’s exhaustively and independently checked book on the scandal, The Doctor Who Fooled the World. This was published in North America by Johns Hopkins University, elsewhere in English by the quality publishers Scribe, and with rights so far sold for Polish, French, Russian, Korean, and Chinese languages. Among reviews, the top science journal Nature described the book as “riveting,” The Times called it “remarkable,” and The Wall Street Journal explained:“Exposing researchers who lie, cheat and fake their data often requires the work of courageous whistleblowers or tenacious investigative journalists. Enter Brian Deer.” Among many new revelations regarding what the book calls “a conspiracy of fraud and betrayal,” it identifies not only the sham science behind the attack on MMR, with critical information withheld from the public for decades, but also the horrifying suffering of children in Wakefield’s research, some held down kicking and screaming as they resisted the battery of unethical experiments forced upon them at the Royal Free in London. And then the upshot: exquisite final evidence in the words of one of the Lancet twelve’s parents. Coming forward to supply Deer with a trove of contemporaneous documents proving Wakefield’s misconduct, all over again, she wrote: “I know that paper is not right and fraudulent. I can see that from what was written about my son.”ORDER IN USAORDER IN UKAlso from all Amazon sites including Australia | India | Canada | BrazilREAD HOW DEER’S WAKEFIELDINVESTIGATION WAS CHECKEDInvite Brian Deer to speak at your eventHear the astonishing true story of the plot behind today’s controversy over vaccines, and its exposure by an investigative journalistContact BrianFollow Brian on Twitter:Follow @deerbrian](https://briandeer.com/wp-content/uploads/andrew-wakefield-splash.jpg)
Andrew Wakefield: the fraud investigationBrian Deer’s Sunday Times investigation[Long-read summary: 4,000 words]With revelations scattered across seventeen years, between 2003 and 2020 Brian Deer pursued a landmark public interest investigation for The Sunday Times of London, with spin-offs for a UK TV network and the British Medical Journal, into allegations linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) with brain and bowel damage in children. At the time Deer began, with an empty reporters’ notebook, Britain had been gripped by years of controversy over the three-in-one MMR — spawning epidemics of fear, guilt, and infectious disease, exported to the United States and many other countries, fuelling every kind of confusion about vaccines.British news headlines of those days powered the scare:NEW TESTS ‘CONFIRM THE LINK’ BETWEEN MMR AND AUTISMCRYING SHAME OF THE VACCINATION VICTIMSTHE QUESTION EVERY PARENT IS ASKINGAlmost incredibly, the prime source for such concerns — which in the 2020s would go on to seed global “anti-vax” networks opposing covid-19 shots — was a mere five-page research paper, blaming MMR for autism, published in February 1998. Follow Brian on Twitter:Follow @deerbrianWritten by a then-forty-one-year-old academic researcher, Andrew Wakefield, co-authored by a dozen associates (who played little or no part in it), and published in the prestigious Lancet medical journal, this paper reported on the anonymised cases of just twelve children with apparent developmental issues, most of whose parents were said to finger MMR.February 2004: The first of Deer’s many reports unravelling the Andrew Wakefield scandalBacked by an extraordinary video news release and a tense press conference, both organised by Wakefield’s employers at the Royal Free Hospital Medical School, in Hampstead, north London, the four-thousand-word paper provoked heavy media interest and was followed by a relentless campaign. This included further publications by Wakefield attacking MMR and led to a collapse in public confidence in the shot, which, since the late 1980s in the UK (and the early 1970s in the US) has been given routinely to children, at or soon after the age of one, almost eradicating measles and rubella from developed countries.Get Deer’s book: The Doctor Who Fooled the WorldThe loudest alarm rung in the 1998 Lancet paper were findings claiming that the parents of two thirds of the twelve enrolled children blamed MMR for what Wakefield called a new “syndrome.” This combined a novel bowel disease he claimed to have discovered and what he called “regressive autism,” a severe disability, in which he said language and basic skills were lost. Most disturbingly, the paper described the patients’ first “behavioural” symptoms as appearing suddenly after MMR: an average of just 6.3 days following vaccination, with a maximum (in two cases) of 14 days.Although Wakefield’s report involved only a dozen White kids, aged between three and nine, and (despite protestations to the contrary) its results would never be replicated, medical breakthroughs often begin with small-scale observations, and, if true, the 1998 Lancet findings might have been the first snapshot of a hidden epidemic of devastating injuries to children. “It’s a moral issue for me,” Wakefield announced at the press conference to launch his attack, where he called for a boycott of the combined MMR in favour of breaking it up into single measles, mumps, and rubella shots, to be administered at yearly intervals. “I can’t support the continued use of these three vaccines, given in combination, until this issue has been resolved.”As the doctor campaigned, UK vaccination rates slumped below the level needed to keep measles at bay. Even the British prime minister, Tony Blair, became embroiled in the affair when Wakefield supporters suggested — the Blairs say wrongly — that one of the family’s sons didn’t receive MMR. Meanwhile in America, a ferocious anti-vaccine movement took off after Wakefield toured autism conferences and in November 2000 appeared on the CBS network’s 60 Minutes programme linking MMR with what he called an “epidemic of autism”. This was followed by campaigners’ allegations that all vaccines were suspect: either due to their ingredients or because of the growing number recommended to be given.“In 1983 the shot schedule was ten. That’s when autism was one in 10,000. Now there’s 36, and autism is one in 150,” argued American actress Jenny McCarthy, who blamed MMR for her own son’s autism and gained the highest profile in the US for such beliefs. “All arrows point to one direction.”Andrew Wakefield unmaskedSensing a good story, journalists scrambled to back Wakefield, or to spotlight parents’ fears of MMR. But in September 2003 Brian Deer was assigned to investigate the controversy and unearthed a scandal of astounding proportions. Far from the scare being based on honest research, he uncovered a monstrous deception.The truth was that Wakefield had been secretly payrolled to create evidence and, while planning business schemes to personally profit from the controversy, he’d changed, misreported, and manipulated the children’s histories to rig his results in the Lancet.Full story: North American edition of Brian Deer’s book, from Johns Hopkins UniversityBefore Deer’s intervention, Wakefield had appeared to all the world as a respectable medical school researcher. Tall and square-headed, with hooded eyes and a booming voice, he was the son of doctors (a neurologist and a family practitioner), had grown up in Bath, a prosperous west-of-England spa town, and joined the Royal Free in November 1988 after postgraduate training in Toronto, Canada. His demeanour was languid — he was privately educated — and, born in September 1956, he appeared as if a lingering example of the presumed honour of the upper middle class.But Deer’s investigation — nominated in February 2011 for two British Press Awards — discovered that, while Wakefield held himself out to be a dispassionate scientist, two years before the Lancet paper was published — and before any of the twelve children were even seen at the hospital — he’d been hired to attack MMR by a lawyer, Richard Barr: a mediocre jobbing solicitor in the small eastern English town of King’s Lynn, who hoped to raise a speculative (and lucrative) class action lawsuit against drug companies that manufactured the shots.Unlike expert witnesses, who give professional advice and opinions, Wakefield secretly negotiated an unprecedented contract with Barr, then aged forty-eight, to conduct both clinical and scientific research. Their goal was to find evidence of Wakefield’s claimed new “syndrome”, intended to be the centrepiece of (later failed) litigation on behalf of about 1,600 British families mainly recruited through stories planted in media. This publicly undisclosed role for Wakefield created the grossest conflict of interest, and the exposure of it by Deer, in February 2004, led to public uproar in the United Kingdom that would resonate around the world. As the Independent newspaper commented in an editorial on the day of Deer’s first report:“It may turn out that the greatest recent crisis in public health need never have happened.”Within weeks of the first disclosure, almost all of the Lancet paper’s authors (excluding Wakefield) retracted its “Interpretation”, or conclusions, section. And, from July 2007 to May 2010, the UK doctors’ regulator, the General Medical Council (GMC), held its longest-ever misconduct hearing, reinvestigating the journalist’s early findings. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});The Barr-Wakefield dealFor all Wakefield’s talk of his “moral issue,” for eight years he was Richard Barr’s hired gun. Under an undisclosed agreement between the pair, Wakefield was to be paid (audio) from the UK legal aid fund, run by the government to give less well-off people access to justice. Wakefield charged at a rate of £150 an hour (more than £254 an hour at October 2022 values) — billed through a company of his wife’s. Eventually payments to him (for generic work alone) totalled what the UK Legal Services Commission, pressed by Deer under a new freedom of information act, said was £435,643 (£738,000, or nearly US $900,000, at 2022 values), plus expenses. These hidden fees — revealed by Deer in The Sunday Times in December 2006 — gave the doctor a direct personal, but undeclared, financial interest in his research claims: totalling more than eight times his reported annual salary and creating an incentive not only for him to launch the public alarm but to keep it going for as long as he could.In addition to the personal payments, he was covertly awarded an initial £55,000, which he’d applied for with Richard Barr in June 1996 (twenty months before the Lancet publication; six weeks before the first of the twelve children was admitted to the Royal Free), but which, like the hourly fees, he never declared to the Lancet as he should have done, to carry out the research submitted to the journal. This start-up funding was part of a staggering £26.2m of British taxpayers’ money (more than £44.3m, US $53.6m, at 2022 values) eventually shared among a small group of doctors and lawyers, working under Barr’s and Wakefield’s direction, trying to prove MMR caused his “syndrome”. Yet more surprising, Wakefield had asserted the existence of such a syndrome — allegedly including what he would later dub “autistic enterocolitis” — before he performed the research which supposedly discovered it.This Barr-Wakefield deal was the foundation of the vaccine crisis — morphing into campaigns against shots for everything from human papillomavirus to SARS-CoV-2 — both in Britain and throughout the world. As Barr instructed Wakefield in a confidential letter (obtained by Deer) six months before the Lancet published:“I have mentioned to you before that the prime objective is to produce unassailable evidence in court so as to convince a court that these vaccines are dangerous.”Full story: International edition of Brian Deer’s book, from Scribe, London & MelbourneAnd, if this wasn’t enough to cast doubt on the research’s objectivity, Deer unearthed another shocking conflict of interest. In June 1997 — nearly nine months before the press conference at which Wakefield called for single vaccines — he’d covertly filed for a patent on products, including his own supposedly “safer” single measles vaccine, which only stood any prospect of success if confidence in MMR was damaged.Although Wakefield later dishonestly denied the existence of such patent claims, his proposed shot, and a network of companies intended to raise money from naïve investors (for purported Wakefield inventions including “a replacement for attenuated viral vaccines”, commercial testing kits, and what he claimed to be a possible “complete cure” for autism) were set out in confidential documents.One Wakefield business was awarded £800,000 (about £1.35m, US $1.6m, at 2022 values) from the UK legal aid fund on the strength of (later discredited) data which he’d co-authored with an Irish pathologist named John O’Leary. And, even as the Lancet paper was being prepared, behind the scenes Wakefield was negotiating plans to exploit the public alarm with secret schemes to line his pockets. “Disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield plotted to make £28 million a year [£49.6m, US $59.6m, at 2022 values] from the MMR jab panic he triggered,” was how the British newspaper The Sun, for example, reported in January 2011 on this disclosure from Deer.Behind the veilAs with the researcher, so too with his subjects. They also weren’t as they appeared. The twelve children (eleven boys and one girl) reported in the Lancet were held out as if merely a routine series of developmentally challenged patients with bowel symptoms needing investigation by gastroenterologists. That so many of the kids’ parents were said to blame autism on a common vaccine, understandably, caused widespread concern. But Deer discovered that nearly all the children had been pre-selected through MMR campaign groups, and that, at the time of their admission to the hospital, most of their parents were clients or contacts of Richard Barr’s law firm. None of the twelve lived in London. Two were brothers. Two attended the same doctors’ office, 280 miles from the Royal Free. Three were patients at another clinic. One was flown in from the United States.Get Deer’s book: The Doctor Who Fooled the WorldDeer’s investigation revealed, moreover, that the paper’s pivotal purported finding — a sudden onset of autism within days of vaccination — was a sham: laundering into medical literature, as apparent facts, the unverified — and sometimes altered — assertions of a group of unnamed parents who (unknown to the journal and its readers) were bound to blame MMR when they came to the hospital because that was why they were invited. Parents blaming the shot wasn’t a “finding” at all. It was a secret qualification to take part. Wakefield — a former trainee gut surgeon, contractually forbidden to provide clinical care — denied this for years. But confidential medical records revealed the true number of children whose parents claimed were injured by MMR wasn’t eight, as the paper said: it was eleven of the twelve — later all twelve — and in most cases records noted legal involvement before the kids were even referred to the hospital. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});Regarding the only little girl in the project, for instance (who didn’t have any known inflammatory bowel disease), her local family physician noted in records:“Mum taking her to Dr Wakefield, Royal Free hospital, for CT scans, gut biopsies, ? Crohn’s. Will need referral letter. Dr Wakefield to phone me. Funded through legal aid.”In the light of such discoveries, the grounds were overwhelming to dig deeper into Wakefield’s activities. In an exercise never before accomplished by a journalist, Deer was able to gain parents’ co-operation and to exploit the GMC hearing — which reinvestigated his first findings on the scandal — to go behind the face of the 1998 paper, identify the subjects, and access patient data. Penetrating veils of medical and legal confidentiality, Deer discovered the hospital’s clinicians and pathology service had found nothing to implicate MMR, but Wakefield (who alone wrote the Lancet paper) distorted diagnoses and clinical histories to make it appear that he’d found his promised syndrome when he hadn’t.As first revealed by Deer in The Sunday Times in February 2009, the effect was to give the impression of a link between MMR, bowel disease, and the sudden onset of autism when otherwise none was evident. Routine, but unreported, blood tests for bowel inflammation were normal. And what the hospital’s clinicians and pathology service actually found in the kids’ guts was constipation, with predominantly normal biopsies and benign or normal features. When taken together with developmental histories, moreover, not one case was free of critical mismatches between the twelve-child paper and the kids’ contemporaneous records. Some children were a cause for concern before vaccination. Some were deemed normal months afterward. Some weren’t even diagnosed with autism.Among the children Wakefield falsely reported as suffering from the “syndrome” was the penultimate case in the series, a five-year-old boy from northern California, whose father was outraged by the deception. He wrote to Deer:“If my son really is Patient 11, then the Lancet article is simply an outright fabrication.” Protections sidelinedIn addition to discovering the study was rigged, Deer uncovered a raft of further issues, including deception over ethical supervision. Research on patients is governed by national and international standards — particularly the Helsinki Declaration [1996 revision] — and no reputable hospital review board would have endorsed the kind of fishing expedition into the guts of young children that Wakefield embarked on for Barr. Without that endorsement, moreover, no reputable medical journal would have published any resulting paper. Against that background, to satisfy the Lancet‘s patient-protection requirements, but without revealing to hospital authorities what was really going on, Wakefield dishonestly reported that a gruelling five-day battery of invasive and distressing procedures he caused to be performed on the kids — including anaesthesia, ileocolonoscopies, lumbar punctures, MRI brain scans, EEGs, radioactive drinks and x-rays — pre-agreed for the lawsuit, was approved by the Royal Free’s ethics committee. As the paper stated under the heading “Ethical approval and consent”:Investigations were approved by the Ethical Practices Committee of the Royal Free Hospital NHS Trust, and parents gave informed consent.But Deer proved that, despite the research being executed on the uniquely vulnerable, developmentally challenged children of sometimes distraught parents hoping for money to help with their care, the ethics committee wasn’t told the truth about the project and never gave any such approval. Responding to Deer in February 2004, Wakefield and his key accomplices — Royal Free paediatricians and Lancet co-authors John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch — denied this explosive discovery and issued a formal statement for media. But, after being confronted with the evidence at the GMC hearing, they changed their story and — despite clear rules — now argued they needed no approval.And yet in the Lancet they’d expressly claimed to have it: requiring a London High Court judge to intervene. As Justice Mitting later ruled of the ethics statement (written by Wakefield):“This statement was untrue and should not have been included in the paper.” Andrew Wakefield’s scienceDeer also probed Wakefield’s basic science. The story was much the same. The doctor obtained the legal money and planned his business ventures against a hypothesis of his own that the culprit for both the (fake) inflammatory bowel disease and (unsubstantiated) regressive autism was persistent infection with measles virus, found live as a normal part of MMR. But Deer demonstrated on UK TV that sophisticated, unreported, molecular tests carried out in Wakefield’s own lab had found no trace of measles in the children’s guts, blood, or cerebrospinal fluid. Those tests, moreover, were among a string of findings from labs around the world which also found no evidence of the virus. In a further report by Deer, The Sunday Times also disclosed critical flaws in one apparently positive study, led in Dublin by pathologist John O’Leary, using samples supplied by Wakefield. This misled thousands of families in the UK and US, ensnared for years in hopeless litigation almost entirely based on Wakefield and O’Leary’s claims.Deer (who in April 2006 reported the first British measles death in 14 years) took no view on whether vaccines may or may not cause autism. But he never found any scientific material repeating the Lancet project or its findings. Although, self-evidently, all kinds of children, including those with autism, suffer from digestive issues, he learnt of a mass of authoritative research comprehensively contradicting Wakefield. “Specifically, numerous studies have refuted Andrew Wakefield’s theory that MMR vaccine is linked to bowel disorders and autism,” was how the American Academy of Pediatrics summarised the consensus in an August 2009 statement to NBC News for a Dateline programme on the clash between Wakefield and Deer. “Every aspect of Dr Wakefield’s theory has been disproven.”The English courts also spoke on this aspect, for example in the ruling of Justice Mitting, handed down in March 2012:“There is now no respectable body of opinion which supports his hypothesis, that MMR vaccine and autism/enterocolitis are causally linked.”And England’s Court of Appeal declared in May 2020:“Dr Wakefield’s paper has since been wholly discredited.”Follow Brian on Twitter:Follow @deerbrianThe impact of Deer’s investigation has been felt around the world, with media coverage from New Zealand to Canada. In the UK, the Sunday Times revelations prompted huge follow-up by other news outlets, and, after years during which MMR vaccination rates fell in response to the campaign led by Wakefield and Barr, a reversal in the trend over the years of Deer’s reporting until public confidence fully returned.Meanwhile, in the US – where the Barr-Wakefield deal was joined by unsubstantiated complaints marshalled by American attorneys that a mercury-based vaccine preservative, thimerosal, was also at fault in autism — findings by Deer were presented by the Department of Justice in federal court, followed in February 2009 by scathing rulings. After hearing a test case of petitions from some 5,000 US families, one presiding special master (or judge) said: “It is a noteworthy point that not only has that ‘autistic enterocolitis’ theory not been accepted into gastroenterology textbooks, but that theory, and Dr Wakefield’s role in its development, have been strongly criticized as constituting defective or fraudulent science.”Wakefield denies everythingIn response to Deer, Wakefield supporters falsely denied that he took money for research or claimed his own vaccine, and, amid a barrage of sometimes paid-for smears, stalking by a Wakefield lawyer named Clifford Miller, and crank abuse of the journalist, lauded the doctor as a “hero”.The father-of-four Wakefield’s deceits, however, hadn’t only triggered the resurgence of sometimes fatal or brain-disabling diseases, plunged countless parents into the hell of believing it was their own fault for agreeing to vaccination that a son or daughter developed autism, and misled an ethics committee over child rights and safety, but it was discovered he’d gone as far as to betray a vaccine safety whistleblower whose identity he discovered and had bought blood from children as young as four years old, attending a birthday party, then joked about them crying, fainting and vomiting.Get Deer’s book: The Doctor Who Fooled the WorldMeanwhile, Wakefield falsely denied any conflicts of interest and even claimed he never said MMR caused autism. But documents — including his patents — evidenced his assertions, and he published a string of further falsified reports, while working with Richard Barr, to undermine confidence in the shot. Even when he knew his key allegations were proven baseless, he was found promoting them from a controversial business in Austin, Texas, called Thoughtful House, where — after being fired from the Royal Free in October 2001, following his refusal to repeat the Lancet study with a larger number of children — he held a lucrative post spun from his campaign.January 2011: The first of Deer’s “Secrets of the MMR scare” reportsThroughout Deer’s investigation, Wakefield refused to co-operate, filed baseless complaints, and issued statements denying every aspect. He also initiated, sought to stall, then abandoned with some £1.3m ($2m) costs (about £2.14m, US $2.6m, at 2022 values), a two-year “gagging” libel lawsuit in London, financed by the Medical Protection Society which defends doctors against their patients. In reply, Deer pressed the court for a speedy trial to clear his name, publicly accusing Wakefield of being “unremittingly evasive and dishonest”. The doctor’s conduct in this litigation was also damned by the judge hearing the case, who said Wakefield appeared to have filed suit for “public relations purposes,” “wished to extract whatever advantage he could from the existence of the proceedings while not wishing to progress them”, and was using them as “a weapon in his attempts to close down discussion and debate over an important public issue”.Wakefield paper retractedFaced with overwhelming proof of his grotesque misconduct, Wakefield concocted a preposterous conspiracy theory to account for his exposure and denied rigging his results. As he argued in a March 2009 statement:“The notion that any researcher can cook such data in any fashion that can be slipped past the medical community for his personal benefit is patent nonsense. Scientific rigor requires repeatability for verification of any research and Mr Deer’s implications of fraud against me are claims that a trained physician and researcher of good standing had suddenly decided he was going to fake data for his own enrichment.”Yet, that’s precisely what Wakefield did. And on 28 January 2010 — after 217 days of evidence and submissions — a panel of three doctors and two lay members hearing the GMC case handed down verdicts wholly vindicating Deer. Branding Wakefield “dishonest”, “unethical” and “callous”, the panel found him guilty (against the criminal standard of certainty) of some three dozen charges, including four counts of dishonesty (including one Wakefield himself submitted through counsel to be a charge of “fraud”) and twelve involving the abuse of developmentally challenged children. The panel found his research to be dishonest and performed without ethical approval. And, five days after these rulings, the Lancet fully retracted the 1998 paper from the scientific literature as “utterly false”, prompting international media interest and further retractions.“What is indisputable is that vaccines protect children from dangerous diseases,” said The New York Times, in one of a string of editorials in leading newspapers. “We hope that The Lancet’s belated retraction will finally lay this damaging myth about autism and vaccines to rest.” (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});Three weeks later, on 17 February 2010, Wakefield was ousted by the directors of his Thoughtful House business in Texas, and on 24 May — day 217 of the GMC hearing — he was ordered to be erased from the register of UK doctors, ending his career in medicine.On 21 December 2010, that erasure was confirmed after his legal team withdrew their support for his case and he abandoned an appeal against the verdicts.Journal calls the fraudBut the Andrew Wakefield story continued to astonish, even after his career was over. In January 2011, the British Medical Journal (BMJ), helped develop the investigation for a medically qualified readership with a three-week package of disclosures and editorials centred on three major reports by Deer. The BMJ package (including peer review, editorial checking, and 60 hours of legal review) also included an introduction by the journalist, Piltdown medicine, comparing the features of Wakefield’s fraud with those of Britain’s most notorious scientific forgery. The journal’s editors called Wakefield’s twelve-child study “fraudulent” and accused the Royal Free medical school and the Lancet of “institutional and editorial misconduct”.Regarding Deer, the BMJ‘s editors noted a paradox. A mere reporter had beaten experts to the truth:“It has taken the diligent scepticism of one man, standing outside medicine and science, to show that the paper was in fact an elaborate fraud.”Among hundreds of reports worldwide on Deer’s revelations in the BMJ — which were covered by all north American networks and reached almost half of Americans surveyed days later in a Harris poll — The New York Times said in a second editorial on the affair: “Now the British Medical Journal has taken the extraordinary step of publishing a lengthy report by Brian Deer, the British investigative journalist who first brought the paper’s flaws to light — and has put its own reputation on the line by endorsing his findings.”Three months later, Deer’s personal journey reached a turning point when in April 2011 he was named specialist journalist of the year in the British newspaper industry’s annual Pulitzer-style Press Awards. Judges for the Society of Editors praised what they called his “outstanding perseverance, stamina and revelation on a story of major importance”. They said of his investigation: “It was a tremendous righting of a wrong”.MMR percentage uptake, 1994–2012, England & Wales. Source data generating each bar above combine the last three quarters of each calendar year with the first quarter of the next. [Click for key]Parents speak outAnd yet Wakefield still refused to apologise and, in a bid to raise money by tricking his supporters, the following year filed another vexatious lawsuit: this time in Austin, Texas. Like his London action, however, it stood no prospect of success and, despite an abandoned appeal to the state’s supreme court, was thrown out by senior judges. In fact, it appeared the Texas case was kept alive mainly to create content for a faux “documentary” by one Miranda Bailey who, in a contrived collaboration with her host, faked the appearance of “fly on the wall” coverage at Wakefield’s Austin home and falsely claimed Deer refused to reply. That might have concluded many years of inquiry: a rarely paralleled newspaper investigation. As Deer summarised a position of the utmost confidence:This story is so detailed and my reporting so persistent… that either it’s honest and correct — in substance and sting — or Wakefield must have fallen victim to the most sustained barrage of malicious defamation in the history of the English language. But the ex-doctor’s dishonesty provoked further developments as parents, former colleagues, and others came forward to tell the journalist what they knew. One mother, who for years betrayed Wakefield’s network from the inside, declared of her reasoning for collaborating with Deer:“I had a situation where there were two men. One was a doctor and the other was a journalist. One of them was saying ‘white’ and the other ‘black’. One of them was an honourable man. And one of them was a shyster.”Finally, in September 2020 (delayed by the pandemic) came Deer’s exhaustively and independently checked book on the scandal, The Doctor Who Fooled the World. This was published in North America by Johns Hopkins University, elsewhere in English by the quality publishers Scribe, and with rights so far sold for Polish, French, Russian, Korean, and Chinese languages. Among reviews, the top science journal Nature described the book as “riveting,” The Times called it “remarkable,” and The Wall Street Journal explained:“Exposing researchers who lie, cheat and fake their data often requires the work of courageous whistleblowers or tenacious investigative journalists. Enter Brian Deer.” Among many new revelations regarding what the book calls “a conspiracy of fraud and betrayal,” it identifies not only the sham science behind the attack on MMR, with critical information withheld from the public for decades, but also the horrifying suffering of children in Wakefield’s research, some held down kicking and screaming as they resisted the battery of unethical experiments forced upon them at the Royal Free in London. And then the upshot: exquisite final evidence in the words of one of the Lancet twelve’s parents. Coming forward to supply Deer with a trove of contemporaneous documents proving Wakefield’s misconduct, all over again, she wrote: “I know that paper is not right and fraudulent. I can see that from what was written about my son.”ORDER IN USAORDER IN UKAlso from all Amazon sites including Australia | India | Canada | BrazilREAD HOW DEER’S WAKEFIELDINVESTIGATION WAS CHECKEDInvite Brian Deer to speak at your eventHear the astonishing true story of the plot behind today’s controversy over vaccines, and its exposure by an investigative journalistContact BrianFollow Brian on Twitter:Follow @deerbrian
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Tim Wakefield
Tim Wakefield
Tim Wakefield
Tim Wakefield
