The paper further claimed discovery of a new medical “syndrome” of both brain and bowel disease in the children. All but one, it reported in text and tables, had developmental issues plus “chronic enterocolitis” — inflammation of both the large and small intestine. “It’s a moral issue for me,” Wakefield told his audience, calling for MMR to be suspended in favour of single shots for measles, mumps, and rubella. “I can’t support the continued use of these three vaccines, given in combination, until this issue has been resolved.” The dean equivocated, but the professor backed Wakefield. And so was born an intractable controversy as the paper was leveraged to launch a crusade: first against this vaccine, then later another… and another… all the way to SARS-CoV-2.
“It’s not a vaccine at all,” Wakefield would rail against the latter at the height of the Covid pandemic. “It’s actually genetic engineering.” Back in 1998, his ground had been firmer, even based on a mere dozen patients. Many medical insights begin with short case series. Autism: 11 kids in the Baltimore area, for example. Aids: five men in Los Angeles. That Thursday, it seemed possible the Royal Free had got lucky: maybe catching the first snapshot of a hidden epidemic of catastrophic injuries to kids. Massive studies around the world, however, found nothing to confirm this, leaving a whale of a riddle rotting on the beach. If parents of two-thirds of 12 children with developmental issues blamed the triple shot for the sudden onset of autism, why weren’t vaccine victims everywhere? Wakefield doubled down, claiming they were. But, while the medical establishment sought refuge in authority, urging the public to trust experts, not a lone-voice maverick, an old-school Sunday Times investigation, run by me, would pepper revelations across more than the next decade, revealing what this doctor had done.
Our first report splashed in February 2004, almost exactly six years after the press conference. “Revealed: MMR research scandal,” was the front page, igniting a new media firestorm. We had discovered a monstrous conflict of interest that Wakefield kept hidden, then denied. For two years before his “moral issue” surfaced — and before any of the children set foot in the hospital — he had been payrolled by a small-town solicitor named Richard Barr to help lead an attack on MMR. Unlike expert witnesses, who give advice and opinions, the doctor was delegated to arrange the tests, building pressure for a speculative lawsuit.
“I have mentioned to you before,” Barr wrote to Wakefield, six months before the Royal Free event, “the prime objective is to produce unassailable evidence in court so as to convince a court that these vaccines are dangerous.” Barr filed the lawsuit at the Royal Courts of Justice eight months after the breathless press conference. Wakefield claimed fees of £150 an hour (about £254 an hour at late 2022 values), drawn from the government’s legal aid fund. So, as he recruited the children and wrote the paper, he had a financial incentive not only to trigger a client-grabbing furore, but to keep it going for as long as he could.
Those clients poured in — nearly 1,600 families — as journalists were duped to fuel the scare. And by late 2003, when Barr’s lawsuit collapsed, Wakefield had. been handed £435,643 (about £738,000, or nearly US $900,000, at last year’s values), plus expenses, in taxpayers’ money. But as he gazed into the glare of TV lights, his legal deal was only one of his secrets. As he’d made his call for a switch to single vaccines, he forgot to mention that eight months previously he’d filed a confidential claim at the London Patent Office for his own, supposedly safer, single vaccine.
His shot wouldn’t have worked. When I asked experts about it, they laughed. But four days after the Royal Free event, he put it to the medical school that they start a joint company to raise money for this, and other products he’d imagined, which only stood much chance of enticing investors if confidence in MMR was damaged. Yet this doctor wasn’t shy of shady stuff, even hopelessly suing me for what a High Court judge described as “public-relations purposes”. So I carried on digging for years, on-and-off, exposing secrets and lies by the bucket. “If my son really is Patient 11, then the Lancet article is simply an outright fabrication,” complained the father of a California boy brought to London for the tests, after I found the dad and showed him a copy. “I know that paper is not right and fraudulent,” the mother of another boy, from the north of England, emailed me. “I can see that from what was written about my son.”
Confidential medical records (lawfully checked) confirmed the parents’ right to be angry. Some of the kids said to have symptoms days after MMR, actually had them before or up to nine months later. Some were reported with “autism” without this diagnosis. Tests for bowel disease came back normal. None of Wakefield’s data revealed enterocolitis: the chief gastrointestinal symptom was constipation. Parents blaming the shot, moreover, wasn’t even a “finding” — it was a covert qualification to take part. Records showed that not eight, but 11 of the kids’ families named the vaccine at the hospital (the 12th’s later joined them to file a claim in the lawsuit) — a give-away number, sure to provoke questions, if Wakefield hadn’t airbrushed the figures. The poisonous truth was that all but the American family had links with vaccine activists caught up in Barr’s plans, pointing them to Wakefield’s project. And, surprise, legal aid authorities at the time insisted that, for cases to qualify for public funding, alleged symptoms must follow within days.
Wakefield was finished, but he couldn’t say sorry. And when The Sunday Times ran with “MMR doctor fixed data on autism”, he fought back, denying all error. “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,” he argued, in one of countless lengthy rejoinders. He wasn’t alone in not wishing us well. Much of the medical establishment was aggrieved. “I will now defend the heretic Dr Andrew Wakefield,” sneered, for instance, Bad Science author Dr Ben Goldacre. “The media are fingering the wrong man, and they know who should really take the blame: in MMR, journalists and editors have constructed their greatest hoax.”
But tunes changed abruptly in May 2010, after a hearing longer than the trial of OJ Simpson in which the General Medical Council vindicated what we’d published and scrubbed Wakefield from the doctors’ register. The Lancet, which for 12 years defended the paper, retracted it. And, after opposing the GMC proceedings, the British Medical Journal highlighted the irony. “It has taken the diligent scepticism of one man,” the BMJ said in an editorial, “standing outside medicine and science, to show that the paper was in fact an elaborate fraud”.