The toxic cult of Andrew Wakefield The disgraced doctor has found a new audience

When vaccine scepticism is first injected into a parent’s psyche, a powerful chain reaction may follow. Beliefs about the likelihood of iatrogenic injury for one’s child can mentally overwhelm the host, before replicating in the surrounding community. The main symptoms in adults are increased fear of medical professionals, a strong desire to believe in unorthodox explanations, and a righteous feeling of sticking it to the man. In their children, a more immediately likely outcome is catching a virus. Very occasionally, there will be permanent disability or death.

In Britain, Andrew Wakefield’s infamous Nineties Lancet paper — proposing a since-discredited causal link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, bowel disease, and autism — was presumed responsible for a large drop in take-up during the years that followed. The article was later retracted, the methodology criticised, and Wakefield eventually struck off for serious professional misconduct; but by then he had already been working in Austin, Texas for around a decade, and a substantial reduction in childhood vaccination rates was happening there too. This year, Texas has had its highest incidence of measles this century, with two fatalities in unvaccinated and otherwise healthy children. Relative to 2024, the US has seen a staggering 460% increase in measles cases generally — from 285 to over 1,300 — with Texas the biggest contributor.

Correlation is not causation, you might reasonably protest; but this does not seem to be a popular sentiment with Wakefield and his acolytes. Originally a researcher in gastroenterology, he apparently sets great store by his gut feelings, and the approach seems to be catching. Earlier this month, Donald Trump said that the MMR jab should be separated into three different vaccines, and spaced out over years — a recommendation surely likely to mean that many listening parents won’t get round to the full course. “They’ve pumped so much stuff into those beautiful little babies, it is a disgrace,” the President added.

This week, as Wakefield visited his hometown of Bath for a rare public appearance in his native country, organisers played the Trump clip and it got a spontaneous round of applause. I paid £7 to watch the event online, part of a larger tour by the former doctor taking place this month. It was hosted by an organisation called the “World Council for Health”. Free WCH resources online include a guide to “Spike Protein Detox”, “10 things you need to know about wireless radiation” and a piece warning about “the hazards of wind turbine blade debris”.

WCH co-founder Dr Tess Lawrie was the interviewer for the evening, and let’s just say she was no Andrew Neil. She started by announcing that her famous guest had been “right all along” about the MMR, before telling the audience that, as a child, he had been “head boy at King Edward’s School, and captain of the rugby team” — from which she apparently inferred he was unlikely to be guilty of any future wrongdoing. And things only got more barmy from there.

Sitting across from Lawrie on stage, Wakefield came across as weary but dignified, a bit like an ageing royal butler. With the help of his interviewer’s adoring prompts, he explained that he had uncovered a massive medical scandal, been viciously suppressed by the medical establishment because of it, and now works tirelessly on behalf of the victims to growing public acclaim. Though sprinkling his discussion with technical-sounding words, concrete factual detail didn’t seem to be his strong point. At one point, he said that the average American received “100 shots by the time [they were] 18 years of age” — a number even higher than the improbable figure recently claimed by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and 70 more than the schedule recommended by the US health department. Meanwhile, on the matter of “integrity and honesty”, Wakefield proposed a novel test: if you haven’t been sued yet, then it must be true.

His lawyer popped up too, to tell viewers that the fraud case alleged against his client had been “fixed”; and that there was an 18-part, subscription-only video series available on his own Substack for any residual doubters. During the audience Q&A, a female paediatrician apologised to Wakefield for having ever disbelieved him, while a concerned mum said she had three autistic boys (“in old money, Asperger’s”), but only the eldest had been given the MMR. While she herself didn’t seem to think that this constituted a challenge to Wakefield’s pet theory — and of course, it didn’t, since he has never claimed that autism can only be caused by the MMR vaccine — he apparently took the point as an objection anyway, falling over himself to offer other man-made explanations for autism in unvaccinated children: sinister possibilities like “mercury preservative in vaccines”, “aluminium”, and “horizontal transmission”. The suspicion that neurodevelopmental disorders might happen without jabs having anything to do with it could not be allowed to stand.

For about a decade, Wakefield has been making highly partisan films about MMR and related matters, which partly explains his renewed popularity now. As he told Lawrie this week, “in the clinic I can see and help one child at a time, maybe, but if I make a film, I can influence millions of people at a time”. In 2016, he directed Vaxxed, alleging a cover-up by US health bosses about links between the MMR and autism. A follow up, Vaxxed II: The People’s Truth, was released in 2019, in which Wakefield also featured as an interviewee. There were lots of agonising testimonies from parents whose children had neurodevelopmental disorders, and who assumed their own past decisions to vaccinate had caused the problem. RFK Jr was executive producer; he appeared as an interviewee in the film as well.

Back in 2019, both Wakefield’s and Kennedy’s respective crusades against the medical establishment looked like fringe concerns to most. They probably would have remained so, had the world not been plunged into the Covid crisis a year later, and had governments not emotionally blackmailed their citizens into taking an experimental vaccine many did not want, either for themselves or their children. Serious potential side-effects such as blood clotting and myocarditis were played down by authorities. Those who reasonably worried about such things were patronised and sneered at. All at once, the vested interests and subjectivity built into a supposedly neutral scientific system became evident to a much larger public.

At the same time, many of us were surrounded in our private lives by vaccine zealots — those who simply insisted there was no real moral choice to be made here, and that anyone refusing to get vaxxed was shamefully putting personal interests over those of the group. Small wonder, then, that many distrustful, anxious, coerced people moved mentally closer to the likes of Wakefield, who suddenly looked like a heroic, truth-telling holdout.

Ultimately, I don’t know whether certain vaccines cause autism or not; though having watched him in action, I am fairly certain that Wakefield doesn’t know either. What I do know is that vaccines can prevent diseases with sometimes horrible consequences; that they also occasionally have devastating side effects; and that deciding whether or not to take the plunge involves weighing up known risks. How to rank risk is not something objective. You may reasonably treat a rare but awful side effect as more salient in decision-making than I do. Either way, if someone doesn’t want a vaccine, either for themselves or their children, there should be no moral complaint. It’s about as clear-cut a case of a liberal right to bodily non-intervention as you can get.

And yet I do understand why some people get so weird about it all, and especially when it comes to their children. As a mother, putting a needle loaded with germs into perfectly unbroken, healthy young skin feels madly wrong anyway; and even more so when you consider what might cascade afterwards in the beloved body, as a result of your decision. The invention of vaccines plunged humans into a world of partial control and responsibility, where previously it was possible to console yourself that serious illness was mostly up to luck, or fate, or God. But now there is an important intervention you can personally make, or fail to make: get the vax, or don’t get it. Either way, if you choose wrong, what happens next will be partly your doing.

So psychologically demanding is this knowledge, that it can be easier to pretend to yourself there is no real choice to be made at all. On the one hand, then, we get those pretending to themselves that risks of side effects are completely overblown, and perhaps even stupidly conspiratorial. On the other, we get the never-vaxxers, burying their doubts in images of harmful causal connections set like cement. Neither wants to face the uncertainty built into every personal decision.

But the trouble with both coping strategies is that you can’t opt out of the consequences of your choices: they may come for you anyway, whether in the form of complications from disease, a side effect of a vaccine, or from trying something else entirely. Earlier this year, faced with a growing number of cases, RFK Jr recommended vitamin A in the form of cod liver oil as a measles treatment. In April, a West Texas hospital reported that measles-ridden children were being treated there for simultaneous vitamin A toxicity, thanks to overdosing by worried parents.

At the end of the day, we can’t eliminate luck, or fate, or God: some people will suffer, and we can only pray it won’t be those we love. We can wish it was otherwise, but there’s no escaping the burden of risk. All we can do is try to get the facts straight. And listening to Andrew Wakefield is almost certainly not going to help.

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