by Brian Deer
And then, when I figured, at last, that was that, he bubbled up again, after months out of sight, like an alligator from Macpherson’s swimming pool. This was a Monday evening in May 2019, when he graced the digital stream with an appearance, via Skype, during an outbreak of his favorite disease.
The location was a ballroom: the Atrium Grand Ballroom, in the hamlet of Monsey, in Rockland County, thirty miles north of Manhattan. Better known for weddings with single-sex dancing, readings from the Torah, and stamped-on wine glasses, this shopping mall venue was the hub of a community of ultra-Orthodox Jews. It was among these that the virus once slated for eradication had erupted that spring and provoked the extreme measure of a public ban on unvaccinated kids.
By now Wakefield realized that Donald Trump had betrayed him. Before the Rockland outbreak, and its New York City cousin, the president had said nothing publicly about immunization at any time since entering the White House. Then, at the height of the reporting of that year’s alarm, Trump commented on what families should do. “They have to get the shots,” he called out to journalists, on the way to his chopper. “The vaccinations are so important. This is really going around now. They have to get their shots.”
Wakefield knew better, and his mission that Monday was much the same as it was, years before, with the Somalis: he was targeting a troubled community. In his sights were neighborhoods where immunization rates were low, and he wanted to keep them that way. Vaccines, he now preached, were “neither safe, nor effective,” and the historic decline in deaths and sickness from measles, was “nothing to do with vaccination.”
His appearance looked strange: like the face of a sweating ghost, materializing from out of the ether. On a screen, erected in the fifteen-hundred-seater ballroom, his shiny forehead and cheeks glowed lobster-red raw, like he’d been making full use of the nearly two acres around Macpherson’s waterfront mansion. But two zones of his complexion remained spectral pale: one striping horizontally, narrow at the nose, wider around the eyes; the other like a bib, around his mouth.
“I want to reassure you that I have never been involved in scientific fraud,” he announced to the ranks of Haradi Jews, who’d been summoned to the Atrium by robocall phone messages. “What happened to me is what happens to doctors who threaten the bottom line of the pharmaceutical companies, and who threaten government policy, in the interests of their patients.”
The ever patientless doctor must have forgotten the Australians, Warren and Marshall of H. pylori fame. They shared the Nobel Prize after slaughtering drug markets, dining out on dissing Big Pharma. And it must have slipped his mind that he’d only criticized MMR after British researchers found fault with two brands. John Wilson was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. The CDC whistleblower still worked for the government (with a pay raise). None had been charged with fraud, or dishonesty. Only him. And he knew why.
“I want to let you know that you have been misled,” he told his audience, following an address by the “Emmy-winning” Vaxxed producer, Del Bigtree, funded by a Manhattan financier. “I’m going to talk specifically about measles.”
Only forty-five seconds made it onto Twitter. But I found his latest angles on YouTube. During the months that I’d thought he was sunning in Miami, he’d not merely been counting the ways he loved Macpherson. He’d also repackaged himself as a tutor, making a series of video lectures.
I counted twenty-one, bought a tub of strawberry ice cream, and spent an afternoon making notes. Measles was now good, apparently. Vaccines made it worse. “Herd immunity” was a dangerous delusion.
His YouTube audiences were impressed by the performances, spoken to camera, hands clasped near his chest. “What a great series,” “You are a blessing to humanity,” “Great to hear from you again.”
To me, his epistles didn’t make a lot of sense. On one hand, he said the worldwide fall in deaths and illness wasn’t as a result of immunization but because the disease was evolving to be milder. But then he also claimed that measles was doing more harm, as a result of immunization.
Please, I thought. Who’s got a wet towel? I honestly couldn’t take much more. So the illness was getting milder, and shots made it more dangerous? Was this the lesson of the outbreaks then exploding around the globe? Ninety-five percent of confirmed cases among the Somalis were unvaccinated. Figures reported from Rockland County were likewise.
Even I knew that, for an RNA genome, measles was a comparatively stable virus. “I am not aware of any changes that would affect the pathogenicity,” says, for instance, a virologist and professor of molecular biology, who, unlike Wakefield, had published countless research papers on paramyxoviruses. If there was any progression toward a milder infection, he tells me, the most likely reason was the advance of vaccination.
But, he was an expert. So what would he know? The question for me wasn’t who to believe, but what should have been asked, two decades before, over Wakefield’s performance in an Atrium. Like, who was this guy to call the shots on children’s safety? Who was he? What did he want?
He didn’t like doctoring, that’s for sure. Nor was he a scientist: as researcher after researcher lined up to point out after I nailed him. “It was junk,” says one of his former team members, who’d worked alongside Nick Chadwick in the tenth-floor lab. “I think he just read about measles in a textbook. That’s not how science is done.”
Others pointed out that they’d tried to help him, only to find their efforts rebuffed. An internationally renowned authority on measles virus, a pathologist with deep experience assessing children’s biopsies, and a world-class clinician in inflammatory bowel diseases, all said they explored collaborations with Wakefield that fell apart after advice he didn’t like.
“I did some fecal calprotectin levels for him,” a professor of gastroenterology emails me. “He then drafted his hypothesis with my name on it, where the central mechanism of damage was vaccine induced increased intestinal permeability, leading to absorption of neurotoxins affecting the brain. It was all gobbledygook, and I put it right but, because it interrupted his belief, he took no notice and published the paper and took my name off it. He is now rich, famous and lives with a sex goddess.”
A senior virologist told me he was commissioned to peer review the J Med Virol paper, which launched the whole measles thing. “It’s burned on my memory,” he says, twenty-three years later, explaining that he asked his lab’s electron microscopy specialist whether what Wakefield had photographed was measles. “So my man said, ‘No it’s not, it’s microfilaments,’ which is a normal component of cells. [Wakefield’s] got: ‘This is a T-cell eating something else.’ And my man says, ‘No it isn’t. He’s got the picture upside down, and it’s the other way around.’ ”
Countless sources told me how important it seemed to Wakefield that he shouldn’t be questioned or contradicted. And no fewer than three (possibly four) recounted a spectacular incident when he was orally examined in a “viva” session over a master’s degree dissertation. Notwithstanding his customary grand demeanor, they said he was so rattled by the quizzing he got that he “walked out,” or “stormed out” (the verb varies between accounts), and so failed to obtain the qualification.
“He reckoned the examiners were ignorant, and didn’t understand what he was doing,” one professor tells me over lunch. “Now, I have never, ever, heard in forty, fifty, years of clinical science, of anyone who’s walked out of a viva.”
That reported incident showed character revealed under stress: where character is usually revealed. And it wasn’t only Wakefield where its marks were left, but in a trail of dented reputations and damaged careers among those who fell for that charisma.
Roy Pounder, his mentor, and Arie Zuckerman, the dean, (who both refused to speak to me) had lost their chance of being honored with knighthoods (and thus donning the glorious prenominal “Professor Sir”) in the aftermath of the Royal Free scandal. The first stood
for the presidency of the Royal College of Physicians—and lost the election after my first findings. The second presided over the launch of a health crisis that his peers could never forgive.
“This has been dragging on now for eighteen years,” Zuckerman had practically wept, after rising from the witness chair at the end of his evidence to the General Medical Council panel.
Among the rest, of course, was The Lancet’s editor, who would forever be taunted over his decision to publish. And the Australian professor, John Walker-Smith, who, despite escaping conviction due to procedural error, would regret ever entering the concrete castle with its views across Hampstead Heath. Barts, Barts. He should have stayed at Barts. “The mother hospital of the Empire.” What a dope.
But these men’s humiliation was nothing to the collateral of Wakefield’s gift to families. That, in my opinion, should be carved in yellow limestone and erected by the entrance to that villa on Beacon Hill, ninety minutes by train west of London.
Here lived Andrew Wakefield
A doctor without patients
He brought us fear, guilt, and disease
For medicine and the media, it was fear and disease that were the be-all and end-all of the saga. Parents got scared, kids went unvaccinated, illness bounced back among those left unprotected, occasionally with brain damage and deaths.
For me, however, it was the overlooked suffering: the gnawing horror of guilt. Sure, I wrote about failing confidence and outbreaks of disease. I even reported the first British death (a thirteen-year-old boy) from measles in fourteen years. But thanks to a conversation with Newsnight’s woman in scarlet, I’d seen the crisis a little differently from the start.
I phoned her first—the day before Ms. Two—and invited her to walk me through her story. “It was dreadful,” she told me, of what happened with her son, which I noted on page 19 of my notebook 1, in September 2003. “I had taken him while he was vaccinated, and so there was a major guilt side that I should have done all this research before the vaccine was given.”
Richard Barr and Kirsten Limb had long spread this anxiety, as if they thought their clients needed reminding. “We know that many parents find it difficult to come to terms with the fact that their child might have been damaged by a vaccine,” they’d announced in a “fact sheet” before the twelve-child paper was published. “If the damage is caused by some natural illness then it is something over which they have no control; but if it was caused by a vaccine then inevitably many parents will feel guilty for agreeing to have their child vaccinated.”
Shrewd advice. Parents blaming themselves was an agony that I found everywhere.
“No matter who I interview,” said Wakefield’s business partner Polly Tommey, for instance, summarizing what she’d heard on the black bus tour. “They can’t sleep at night. They are racked with guilt.” And, “along with the guilt,” she added, they were “rocking in grief,” grabbing “anything they can to numb the pain.”
She’d found her analgesic. Her painkiller was Wakefield, whom she wanted to share with the world. What would it take, she asked, during a video in which he featured, for the “powers that be” to own up and admit that vaccines had “injured and killed so many people”?
Tommey had a point. If maybe not the one she thought. And I pasted both her comments into a pair of matched slides, which I could click back and forth in PowerPoint. Both featured a block of identical Vaxxed artwork, including her face and an alliterative slogan:
Listen to the Parents, Not the Pediatricians
In other words, listen to her.
On one of my slides, I typed her quote on guilt; on the other, her “powers that be.” Back and forth, I’d click. Back and forth. Back and forth. Her face looking out, unmoving.
And that was her choice, like for so many of his followers: beat yourself up, or accuse someone else. It was the trap, I believe, that made him. Within that awful space between guilt and accusation, he’d risen to be all that he was. If you’d listened to me, your child wouldn’t have autism. It’s them. It’s them. It’s they.
Professionals with long memories had seen it before. It was the face of the “refrigerator mother.” It was blame the parent: lay the charge on their choice, and make a living out of selling them redemption.
“Trust your instincts,” he’d say when science had failed him. But what I thought he really meant was trust mine.
And they loved him for it. He was a “wonderful” physician: so caring, professional, and wronged. But victims also said that of the serial killer Harold Shipman. His admirers were one and the same as his prey. “He was so popular,” noted a patient who didn’t die at Shipman’s hands. “Everyone thought he was a marvelous doctor.”
Wakefield’s mothers felt guilt so that he didn’t have to. They bore remorse and shame on his behalf. And why that’s important isn’t just because they suffered—shouldering a pain they surely didn’t deserve—but because it let him mobilize their misery.
The weaselly insinuations behind Barr’s failed lawsuit—that doctors and scientists weren’t playing it straight—had eaten at parents’ hearts since the 1990s. And like a pyramid sale in bitterness and hatred, Wakefield had conscripted a global militia, armed with modern weapons—Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube—undreamt of in the golden age.
Planners and professionals couldn’t see how it was done—like they couldn’t with that twelve-child paper. Indignant at the impertinence of a doctor doubting vaccines, they missed even asking the right questions. And now faced with a phenomenon they still didn’t understand, they ran opinion surveys on “vaccine hesitancy,” backed legal bans, and beat the drums of disease. But they talked past his army of the tormented and heartbroken, who wouldn’t quit anytime soon.
The man, meanwhile, untroubled by conscience, addressed hundreds of Jews in the Atrium Grand Ballroom, sure to take from them more than he gave. He craved the attention. Yes. He loved his voice. Yes. One of the professors who taught him at medical school described him as “one of the most attention-seeking individuals” he’d ever met.
Wakefield even had the chutzpah to cast himself as the victim, the most classically malignant projection. “I lost my career,” he’d bleat, as if it wasn’t his fault. “I lost my job, I lost my income, I lost my country, and I lost my reputation.”
Poor, poor Andy. Too bad.
But I thought there was more. He was owning that outbreak. In his dark confusion of subject and object, he wanted us to know that he controlled events. He reveled in the dance to his tune. And, like one of those fantasists you used to hear of, back in the day, who snuck into hospitals, stole a white coat, and stepped out onto the wards to diagnose and treat, I believe that, inside, he was laughing.
His own mother revealed something that I’d mulled over for years. We were talking one evening, my tape recorder running. I think Bridget may have sipped a dry sherry. And she made reference to Edward Matthews, he of Sex, Love and Society, when explaining her second son’s character. “He’s very like my father,” she said. “If he believed in something, he would have gone to the ends of the earth to go on believing.”
To go on believing. Not to search for solutions. He’d always been making a case. And the case he made—which was rarely not for profit—was that his big ideas must prevail. No matter his betters, no matter the truth, no matter the outbreaks of fear, guilt, and disease, nothing would obstruct his path.
The way I saw it, it was never about the science, the children, or the mothers. It had always been about himself.
TIMELINE
November 1988: One month after the three-in-one measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, MMR, is launched in Britain, Andrew Wakefield returns to London to work at the Royal Free medical school, Hampstead, after a training job in Toronto, Canada.
September 15, 1992: The media reports the British government’s discontinuation of two MMR brands due to the mu
mps viral component causing sporadic cases of meningitis.
September 23, 1992: Wakefield asks the government for money to research MMR measles component and Crohn’s disease, warning of possible media involvement.
April 1993: A science journal publishes a paper in which Wakefield claims to photograph measles virus in bowel tissues from Crohn’s patients.
January 1994: A British mother, Jackie Fletcher, launches a campaign group claiming that MMR damaged her infant son’s brain. She plans to sue the manufacturers and seeks similar cases to her own.
September 1994: A small-town lawyer, Richard Barr, is awarded a contract by the British government’s Legal Aid Board to represent litigants in a potential class action lawsuit over MMR.
February 19, 1996: Wakefield accepts a deal to work for Barr at lavish hourly rates to construct a case against MMR. This deal remains secret until exposed in Deer’s investigation.
February 19, 1996: On the same day, two hundred miles from London, a doctor refers the first child to Wakefield’s research project after the six-year-old’s mother is advised by Fletcher.
June 1996: Before any children are admitted for his research, Wakefield applies to the legal board for a grant to test for vaccine damage, predicting that he will find a new “syndrome” of bowel and brain disorders caused by MMR.
June 1997: Wakefield registers for a patent on his own single measles vaccine, plus treatments for both autism and inflammatory bowel disease.
September 1997: After flying to the United States, Wakefield speaks at an anti-vaccine meeting near Washington, DC.
February 26, 1998: At a press conference to announce a paper in The Lancet, Wakefield attacks MMR, urging parents to avoid it in favor of single measles vaccinations. His legal deal stays secret.