by Brian Deer
He must have used that argument many hundreds of times, as he trekked round autism conferences. But that Friday afternoon there was fire in his speech that drew air from something unsaid. Still unknown to most present, his script would soon change, as anecdotes would be joined by the whistleblower story, in a bid to revisit old triumphs.
By now, William Thompson had issued a second statement, challenging Wakefield’s account. It was true that the psychologist believed his CDC colleagues had “intentionally withheld controversial findings,” but he didn’t agree about the upshot. “The fact that we found a strong statistically significant finding among black males does not mean that there was a true association between the MMR vaccine and autism-like features,” he said, striking at the heart of Wakefield’s latest argument. “This result would have probably have led to designing additional better studies.”
He’d got that right. DeStefano et al. had designed a defective study. In comparing cohorts of kids with and without autism to see which was vaccinated earliest, they failed to account for the way the onset of symptoms might impact on the first group’s behavior. Simply put, some children (especially those, like African Americans, with lower vaccination rates) might have received their first shots after their parents joined the desperate quest, loading misleading associations into the stats.
As the 2004 Pediatrics paper explained in its “Methods” section, instead of trying to match symptoms against the dates shots were given, the project had compared age bands for the children—as if this wasn’t a fatal mistake.
Other studies have tried to address the possible relationship to MMR vaccination by examining the temporal relationship between vaccination and onset of initial parental concern, date of first diagnosis of autism, or onset of regression (if present). We had incomplete information on these events, so we compared the distribution of ages at first MMR vaccination between case and control children.
Asking the wrong question, they got wrong answers, generating what Thompson described in a phone call with the father, Brian Hooker, as “something they couldn’t understand.” The misconceived study (which one senior pediatrician tells me he thought was a “job creation scheme for epidemiologists”) had been hugely expensive, and might have provoked public disquiet if abandoned. But two decades on—thanks to the psychologist’s office politics and Wakefield’s dishonesty—it had resurfaced to ignite the most damaging immunization controversy since NBC’s “Vaccine Roulette.”
You say “fraud,” I say “fraud.” Wakefield mirrored his critics. And standing among the mothers, at the foot of the steps at Santa Monica, was just the man to polish his glass. His name was Del Bigtree, aged forty-five: dressed in a purple T-shirt, with a mane of wavy gray hair, holding a 35mm camera at nose height.
He was gathering material to repackage the crusade and finish what Wakefield started with his video.
At the time of the Facebook “Get this out!!!!!,” Bigtree had worked as a TV producer for a daytime magazine show, The Doctors. His credits included “Late Night Snacking Mistakes” and “Chest Wrinkle Cream Put to the Test.” Brash, fast-talking, and prone to flights of fantasy, he presented himself as an “Emmy Award–winning producer,” in which guise he’d gone to work for Wakefield. In fact, the network ranked him at position twenty-eight in a thirty-six-strong team that won the prize for CBS. And his mother chips in that he acquired people skills from “a lot of years he did waiting on tables.”
Bigtree’s instinct was to make the most of what he’d got. And in the whistleblower story he’d got plenty. In the months that followed the Santa Monica event, he took the ex-doctor’s nine-and-a-half-minute video, scrubbed it of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hitler, made Wakefield the star, inserted human interest, gave it a name, Vaxxed, stretched it to a running time of ninety-one minutes, and launched it as the centerpiece of an assault on vaccination of a like never seen before.
As ever, it drew on parents’ grim anecdotes. “She lost all acquired speech,” “Within days he stopped talking,” “She had seizures every day for the rest of her life until she died in my arms.”
But such pain was now threaded into a whistleblower narrative—in which its creators interviewed each other. Omitting Thompson’s statements that contradicted their claims (information any ethical filmmaker would be obliged to include), front and center was its “director”—Wakefield—playing himself as a vindicated victim of injustice.
In twenty-four appearances—from seven seconds in length to nearly three minutes—he was presented as merely an ex–bowel researcher, approached out of the blue by a random mother, and then selflessly dedicating his life. Years later, he’s approached by Brian Hooker, as if a stranger, with the news of Thompson proving him right.
“Wow, really?” Wakefield recalls, onscreen, as his reaction to the psychologist’s information about the Pediatrics study. “After everything that had happened. Everything we’d all been through. Everything that the families had suffered for the last fifteen years. And the CDC had known all along there was this MMR-autism risk.”
Also onscreen were Bigtree and Polly Tommey, the English autism entrepreneur. The former—Vaxxed’s producer—appeared sixteen times, sometimes speaking as if a medical expert. And the latter—co-owner of the film’s production company—supplied the boutique anecdote. In seven appearances, totaling eight minutes, she and her husband, Jonathan, said their son didn’t “wake up” to the child he’d been after a seizure on the day of his shot.
Here was home video meets Triumph of the Will. “We have a piece of the movie that was cut,” Wakefield would tell an overwhelmingly black audience, for instance, in the Compton district of Los Angeles. “And it’s a picture of Red Square, at the height of Soviet power. And there are thousands of people marching in precise step. There are missiles and tanks. And the power of the structure is massive, and could never be overturned. Yet it disappeared in the blink of an eye, led by one man.”
Bigtree’s advice was, wisely, adopted. But Wakefield was no passenger on the project. Much like he won drug companies to fund him at Hampstead, he turned his charms to raising enormous sums of cash, which would only be revealed, in June 2019, by reporters Lena Sun and Amy Brittain, in a Washington Post investigation. A New York hedge fund millionaire, Bernard Selz, seventy-nine, and his wife, Lisa Selz, sixty-eight, were reported to have given $3 million to Wakefield, Tommey, and Bigtree—including two hundred thousand for Wakefield to sue the British Medical Journal and me.
And then . . . and then . . . Vaxxed hit the big time. That dependable charisma paid off. He got himself introduced to an actor, Grace Hightower (it was said that he slipped onto a movie set where she worked), who wasn’t only the mother to a teenage son with autism, but was married at the time to the boy’s seventy-two-year-old father: the A-lister Robert De Niro.
Here was a name to add a footnote to history: De Niro threw his weight behind Vaxxed. First booking it for a festival that he produced in Manhattan, and then withdrawing it after a deluge of condemnation, he brought publicity the Selzes’ money couldn’t buy. He even appeared at breakfast on the NBC network, recommending that viewers “must see” it.
“There are many people who will come out and say ‘No, I saw my kid change, like overnight,’ ” the double Oscar-winner told Today host Willie Geist, three days after Vaxxed was released in New York City, on April 1, 2016.
“Is that the experience you had, Robert?” Geist responded. “Something changed overnight?”
“My wife says that. I don’t remember.”
Now Wakefield was made. One way or another. With the Selzes and De Niros, he was laughing. Hardly had Today taken its next commercial break than the ex-doctor had a deal with a Los Angeles distributor to take his crusade from city hall steps into movie houses, coast to coast.
No question, something remarkable was happening: a transformation in anti-vaccine campaigning. In the next six months, Vaxxed reportedly g
rossed more than $1.1 million, playing some weeks at nearly one hundred locations. And employing an app, Gathr—a theater-on-demand service (which booked multiplex screens if enough customers reserved tickets)—some audiences were six hundred strong.
It was an extraordinary feat, thanks to the De Niros and Selzes, igniting parents’ fear of children’s vaccines not seen since the 1980s. With celebrity and money they overrode science, achieving in the United States what was accomplished in London with that twelve-child paper in the Atrium.
To get Wakefield’s team from location to location, a long-wheelbase Coachmen motorhome was bought, sprayed black, and driven from city to city. It was emblazoned with the film’s title and slogans in red and white:
Where there’s risk, there must be choice
We are not government property
Trundling freeways and throwing open its doors at parking lots and gas stations, here was a road trip like a band on tour: a nationwide mobilization. And with advance publicity through social media, at key pit stops, the vehicle became a studio: spreading in real time through Facebook and Periscope visitors’ stories about “what happened” to children.
“When suddenly law and order breaks down, and I can get away with some shit that I can’t now,” says a man named Curt Linderman, who climbs into the bus with talk of the “fascistic Deep State” and produces a loaded pistol, “I’m gonna come looking for you. It’s as simple as that. I want retribution, and I want revenge for my son.”
Until I learned of their funding from the New York investor, I thought the trio’s demeanor remained eerily upbeat for the dark stories being collected on the tour. Tommey, in particular, laughed, giggled, and chirped, plainly having a wonderful time. “You guys are amazing,” she tells the gunman and his wife. “I think we’ve never been so high on YouTube.”
More money poured in, and a new message poured out: now Wakefield ruled that all shots were suspect. As the “documentary” credits rolled at the end of each screening, he, Bigtree, and Tommey often pulled out chairs, to sit and field questions. And there they led audiences beyond the Vaxxed script into a frenzy of escalating allegation.
For a while, the ex-doctor remained relatively cool. Returning to Santa Monica, two weeks after the film’s release, he lectured audiences in near-professional tones. The hepatitis B vaccine was “noted to be associated with multiple sclerosis,” he claimed. Thimerosal was “a major player in neurodevelopmental disorders.” Aluminum as an additive “had the potential for great harm,” and injecting it into children was “insanity.”
But, as the tour went forward, he grew ever bolder, until half the population were victims. “We are dumbing down the nation,” he declared, four months later, in Austin, Texas, flailing his arms in a black Vaxxed T-shirt. “And people are saying it’s the schools. It’s not the school system, but it’s a biological phenomenon. You don’t see it in girls. Girls aren’t failing. Boys are failing. Why are boys failing? Why? Because boys are susceptible to these toxic insults early in life.”
Those insults, he argued, weren’t just injuries. They were injuries intentionally inflicted. “They decided to lie and to cheat and to deprive you of informed consent for your children,” he railed at his audience, “and to damage the brains of millions.”
Tommey followed his lead, like she followed him to America. “No more killing of our babies,” she’d say. “They give our kids the injection, and we go back and tell them what’s happened to our child. And they can see it. It’s not just your child, or my child. It’s millions of children. So they know exactly what they’re doing.”
Here was the journey that led to Donald Trump, then crisscrossing America like themselves. In that year of rebellion—2016—when the United States was stunned by Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton, and Britain narrowly voted to leave the European Union, here were campaigners who grasped the paradox of the age: that the more incredible and outlandish their claims, the more these might spread and be believed.
Screenings were packed—sometimes in big theaters. And, at the end, they delivered more spectacle. As closing credits rolled, and house lights rose, Bigtree stepped forward and offered an invitation: part daytime host, part revivalist minister, and part purveyor of some miraculous remedy.
“Will every parent, or family member, with a vaccine-injured family member, please stand up at this time.”
Or, “Would everyone who has a vaccine-injured family member just please stand up, right now.”
His words varied slightly from screening to screening—from Nashville to Boise, San Francisco to Pittsburgh—but the request and the response didn’t change. Dozens among the audience—overwhelmingly women—rose from their seats, alone, or in clusters, to declare a vaccine victim. There was one over here, two over there, and a family at the back, in the gloom. Soon it would seem that maybe a quarter of those present were silently affirming their instincts.
“Look how many people just stood up,” Bigtree continued, here in small-town Utah. “The official statement by our medical community is that one in a million children is injured by a vaccine. Do you realize what the population of Provo would have to be if that is true?”
To any parent unsure about the cause of a child’s issues, here was surely a moment of decision. If so many present gave such visible testimony—primed by ninety-one minutes of Andrew Wakefield—wasn’t this a time to stand? Why not?
“I had a woman grabbed me last night,” Bigtree told one local TV station. “I was walking out of the Q&A and she just grabbed me, and was sobbing.”
Nobody could doubt the showmanship. But, at best, those mothers were guessing. Right or wrong, they assembled two-and-two together, just like those before them in England. And here was the product of the same optical illusion as I exposed behind the twelve-child paper. Even before the black bus had set off across country, nearly six thousand families had filed with the vaccine court to sue for compensation over a child’s autistic issues: easily enough to salt these screenings, with parents, grandparents, siblings, and friends.
Who would ever guess at how it was done? He said they said; they said he said. Together, they agreed: it was true. Behold, a cauldron of self-verification. And so it went on.
Woo-oo-oo.
Anecdotes were scooped, standings were recorded for a sequel, Vaxxed II, and Q&As delivered to bounce online, narrowcasting the spectacle around the world. And as the mothers—some weeping—filed out into the dark, vox pops were captured and contact names taken to package and export their pain.
THIRTY-ONE
Wakefield’s World
As the Vaxxed bus trucked across the United States, back in Washington, DC, a different note was sounded over the merits of vaccinating children. On the last Tuesday of September 2016, speeches rang out from beneath forests of furled flags. A certificate was signed and cradled in display. Group photographs were posed for participants to take home. Even a cake was cut.
Adiós Sarampión y Rubéola
Bye-bye Measles and Rubella
Those present had flown in to represent two continents at a meeting of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). That day, its tail was up. With the last cases mopped from an outbreak in Brazil, measles was officially declared “eliminated” from their region, meaning that transmission of the virus had been halted for more than a year from the Canadian Arctic to the Chilean Cape Horn.
“To the ministers of health assembled here today,” proclaimed Merceline Dahl-Regis, chief medical officer of the Bahamas government, from the ceremonial room platform of PAHO’s curving, modernist headquarters building next to the US Department of State, “your colleagues, your children, your grandchildren, and generations to come will be able to see you in that photograph, on this day, when we have declared the Americas free of endemic measles.”
This moment had been targeted for twenty-two years: since PAHO—one of six regions of the World Health
Organization—vowed to send measles the way of smallpox: into extinction. That triumph might be the next step—from elimination in the Americas to eradication from Earth—when the virus would be entombed in high security labs and, after more certificates, speeches, and photographs, vaccination against it might end.
Everybody hoped that one day this might happen. PAHO had blazed the trail. The biology was hopeful for the RNA microbe. Its closest relative had already been caged. In June 2011—five years before that Tuesday—flags had been out at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization at the funeral of rinderpest: only the second infectious disease to be eradicated. A member of the same Morbillivirus genus of paramyxovirus bugs, it raised the dream that measles (along with the enterovirus polio) might eventually be immunized into oblivion.
“Measles can be stopped,” the WHO’s director-general, Margaret Chan, told applauding PAHO dignitaries from thirty-five countries and four associate members, following Dahl-Regis’s speech from the platform. “It is my hope that other regions of the world are encouraged by the success of the Americas.”
They had reason to clap. The stats told the story. PAHO ran one arm of a worldwide campaign that, in fifteen years, had seen measles deaths fall from half a million children, annually, to a little over ninety thousand. The projects they’d rolled out across North and South America had proved a showcase of what vaccines could achieve.
But even as Chan spoke—of “strong national immunization programs,” “dedicated financing,” and “political commitment”—beyond the sumptuous wood-lined ceremonial chamber, with its semicircle of seating, and four official languages, measles was making a comeback.
The first sign was bureaucratic. Just three weeks after the adiós to sarampión, a report was discussed at the WHO in Geneva, warning that progress to eradication was “slowing.” Then six months later, in April 2017, came a full-on outbreak, with nearly eighty cases, in the heartland of PAHO’s biggest member. In Minneapolis, Minnesota—where Wakefield had shared his wisdom in the winter of 2010–11—the Somali community was blighted for a second time with a disease that seemed to follow him like a smell.