by Brian Deer
February 28, 1998: The Lancet publishes Wakefield’s paper claiming discovery of the bowel-brain “syndrome,” putatively caused by MMR, that he said he would find before he performed the research.
March 3, 1998: Wakefield meets to discuss a private company of his own to develop putative products, including a measles vaccine, which only have any prospects of success if public confidence in MMR is damaged.
October 1998: The first court claims are filed in the UK class action lawsuit against MMR vaccine manufacturers. Wakefield is the principal expert, creating the underlying hypothesis and pivotal evidence for the case as if he is an independent scientist.
July 1999: The US Public Health Service and the American Academy of Pediatrics urge the withdrawal of a mercury-based preservative, thimerosal, from vaccines. Lawsuits and anti-vaccine campaigning follow.
December 1999: Wakefield’s university and medical school ask him to replicate his research claims with a gold-standard scientific study. After months of delay, he refuses.
April 2000: Irish pathologist John O’Leary appears on Capitol Hill to give “independent testimony” to a congressional committee that Wakefield, seated beside him, is “correct.” Neither man reveals they are business partners, and that O’Leary, too, works for the lawyer Barr.
November 2000: Appearing on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Wakefield claims, wrongly, that autism “took off dramatically” in the United States and later in Britain when MMR was introduced.
January 2001: British newspapers launch campaigns backing Wakefield after he publishes a purported review of vaccine safety studies, and repeats his calls for single vaccines.
January 2002: As Wakefield’s campaign moves to the United States, media outlets announce his appointment as head of a “multi-million dollar” research program, which turns out to be a Florida family doctor’s office.
October 2003: Barr’s class action lawsuit against MMR makers collapses in London for lack of evidence. The total cost of the action, which drove the crisis, converted to rough 2019 figures, was one hundred million US dollars.
February 2004: The Sunday Times of London runs Deer’s page 1 story disclosing Wakefield’s contract with Barr and the litigant status of children in the Lancet study.
January 2005: Wakefield, funded by a UK medical insurer, announces and then stalls a libel lawsuit over Deer’s revelations. But, after a London judge finds the suit driven by “public relations purposes” and orders Wakefield to trial, he drops the action and pays costs.
April 2006: As measles outbreaks follow Wakefield’s campaign, Deer reports the first death in Britain from the disease in fourteen years.
September 2006: Complaints begin to surface about a Wakefield business in Austin, Texas. Parents say they feel pressure to have children without bowel symptoms undergo colonoscopies.
February 2009: The Sunday Times of London runs another of Deer’s page 1 stories revealing wholesale discrepancies between the Lancet paper and medical records.
May 2010: The UK doctors’ regulator, the General Medical Council, orders Wakefield to be banned from medical practice. Charges found proven include dishonesty, fraud, and a “callous disregard” for children’s suffering.
January 2011: A US media firestorm erupts after CNN’s Anderson Cooper reports an editorial in the British Medical Journal denouncing Wakefield’s research as “an elaborate fraud.”
March 2011: Wakefield appears in Minneapolis, addressing Somali Americans. Outbreaks of measles follow.
January 2012: Wakefield, funded by investment millionaire Bernard Selz, sues Deer and the British Medical Journal in Texas. The defendants reject the suit as frivolous, and counter-sue for their costs. But the case is thrown out for lack of jurisdiction.
May 2013: Wakefield appears in a video from the bedside of a developmentally challenged Chicago fourteen-year-old, Alex Spourdalakis, ferried to New York for a colonoscopy. Days later, the boy is killed by his mother.
June 2014: Anti-vaccine campaigner Brian Hooker, acting with Wakefield, tries and fails to entrap a CDC scientist, William Thompson, into alleging fraud in US government vaccine research.
April 13, 2016: Actor Robert De Niro appears on NBC’s Today urging viewers to see Vaxxed, a ninety-one-minute video by Wakefield claiming that Thompson had alleged fraud at the CDC.
November 3, 2017: Wakefield meets and begins a relationship with wealthy Australian supermodel Elle Macpherson.
November 2018: The World Health Organization warns of a global resurgence of measles. Two months later, “vaccine hesitancy” is named as one of the top ten threats to human health.
May 2019: At the center of major measles outbreaks in New York, Wakefield appears via Skype dismissing risks from the disease. He says, “I have never been involved in scientific fraud.”
December 2019: Ending a year marked by measles outbreaks around the world, the tiny Pacific islands of Samoa report more than eighty measles-related deaths in less than two months, after many years of none. Almost all are among children under five. Authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo notify nearly five thousand measles-related deaths for the year.
NOTE TO READERS
In an essay on the craft of journalism, the celebrated writer Tom Wolfe decried the output of what he called “the literary gentleman with a seat in the grandstand.” Plenty of such books have been written about vaccines, autism, and the integrity of science. The Doctor Who Fooled the World isn’t among them.
This is a work of reportage, fact, analysis, and some opinion based on what I believe to be the most extensive investigation by a reporter into an aspect of medicine ever undertaken. From my first, routine, assignment, in September 2003, to my writing of this note in October 2019, my life was dominated (albeit with breaks) by the who, what, when, where, and why through which epidemics of fear, guilt, and infectious disease were manufactured and exported to the world.
Before laying out that story for the first time in this book, my inquiries into the research and claims of Andrew Wakefield and his associates generated more than two dozen reports for the Sunday Times of London, Britain’s market-leading quality weekend newspaper. Prompted by those, I was invited by BMJ, the British Medical Journal—one of the “big five” general medical journals internationally—to deepen the evidence with peer review and fresh editorial checking for a specialist readership. This effort produced seven reports running to tens of thousands of words in text and footnotes.
I also benefited from a commission to make a one-hour, prime-time Dispatches investigation for the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 TV network—as well as from the broadcaster’s determined efforts to meet Wakefield at trial in the English courts—to avoid which he paid our costs and walked away.
Underpinning my reporting lies a trove of more than twelve thousand indexed documents that I gathered over the years. Some five hundred video and audio recordings are also archived. And I ordered more than 200 items from storage at the British Library. At my suggestion, for editorial validation, more than two thousand of these materials (including letters, emails, interview transcripts and recordings, legal papers, business reports, patents, etc.) were submitted for cross-checking against the pre-publication manuscript of this book, allowing my evidence to be examined by the publishers, at arm’s length from me.
Were it not for the exhaustive indexing of documents (obtained by painful extractions under freedom of information legislation, and gathered from diverse sources, including the parents of children involved in Wakefield’s research, court papers, and what I’m told is a six-million-word transcript [I’ve never counted] from the longest-ever medical misconduct hearing), I could have finished this text, at twice the length, in half the time. But at its heart are real people and specific facts potentially impacting on the safety of children.
I’ve filed more than two hundred pages of statements in district court, verified under penalty of
perjury, and have been deposed under oath for six-and-a-half hours by Wakefield’s lawyers. This story is, and would have to be, true.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
On my personal website, briandeer.com, I’ve hosted, for some years, a video featuring an environmental microbiologist named Dr. David Lewis, who claimed to exonerate Andrew Wakefield. In the video, he explains the logic by which he purported to expose my journalism as a sham: on grounds that it was too good to be true. “Brian Deer, a reporter with no training in medicine or science, supposedly wrote these articles,” he told an anti-vaccine conference in Chicago. “It doesn’t make sense. These are well-written articles by someone who has considerable expertise in medical practice.”
I wrote those articles. And I wrote this book. Nevertheless, journalism is always a team effort, and many people have contributed to the enormous undertaking that lies behind it. Unlike those who so often seek to mislead the public, my work has been subject to phenomenal scrutiny, perhaps exceeding any comparable project in the annals of journalism or medicine.
First, the team at the Sunday Times, led by its editor, John Witherow, and after he departed for the top job at the paper’s sister, the Times, his successor, Martin Ivens. Then hands-on, the executive editor, Bob Tyrer, whose continuing support over more than a decade ensured that this investigation was never lost amid fierce competition for space. It was also he who rescued me from The Lancet’s spoiler, when the journal did its best to frustrate my findings and substitute what would be proven to be untrue. Paul Nuki, the paper’s “Focus” editor, was there at the beginning and reappeared at the end to read my manuscript, for which I’m indebted. Richard Caseby, then managing editor, most notably tackled attempts by Wakefield’s inner circle to spread false information. And among others, Alan Hunter, Jack Grimston, Charles Hymas, Mark Skipworth, Sian Griffiths, Angela Connell, Peter Conradi, Richard Woods, Rosemary Collins, Robin Morgan, and Graham Paterson all played important roles over the years. Sorry to anyone I’ve missed.
Channel 4 Television, one of the UK’s five terrestrial networks, took up the story at a critical time, commissioning, supervising, and defending my one-hour prime-time Dispatches film, “MMR—What They Didn’t Tell You.” There, Dorothy Byrne, head of news and current affairs, green-lighted the project, while her deputy, Kevin Sutcliffe, supervised it for much of the time on a daily basis. At the independent company Twenty Twenty Productions, the executive producer, Claudia Milne, set the tone and style with producer and director Tim Carter. Hugo Godwin, associate producer, contributed phenomenal research, while Peter Casely-Hayford kept an eye on the management side. A key segment, when I confronted Wakefield at the Indianapolis Convention Center, was filmed by Iki Ahmed, whose skill at keeping up with a moving target revealed to viewers the nature of the man we sought.
At The BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, the editor-in-chief, Dr. Fiona Godlee, was inspired to invite me to lay out my findings for a professional audience, generating what I believe to be the most-read report in her journal’s history. She personally supervised the project, “Secrets of the MMR Scare,” which took our journalism most vitally into the United States. She was supported by her deputy, Jane Smith, tasked with fact-checking key elements of the evidence, while editors Trevor Jackson, Tony Delamothe, Deborah Cohen, Rebecca Coombes, Jackie Annis, and Trish Groves all contributed to discussing, querying, checking, and getting the copy into the pages and online.
I’m naturally indebted to the supervising publisher of this book, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. At Aevitas Creative Management in New York City, my primary agent was Becky Sweren, supported especially by Esmond Harmsworth in Boston and Chelsey Heller, director of foreign rights.
On matters potentially impacting on public health and the safety of children, as well as the reputation of individuals, none of my journalism would have been possible without legal advice, checking, and support at every stage. At the Sunday Times, the editorial team and I were advised by solicitors Pat Burge and Alastair Brett as well as several ad hoc opinions from counsel.
At Channel 4, Prash Naik, then deputy head of legal and compliance, worked on the story alongside the production team, ensuring accuracy and fairness commensurate with the network’s statutory duties. Jan Tomalin, head of legal and compliance, drove forward a “defend like a claimant” strategy, in which we obtained court orders against Wakefield to compel him to produce medical records. Wise people don’t seek litigation, but we relished the possibility of seeing him at trial in London, but he threw in the towel, and paid our costs. At our solicitors, Wiggin LLP, we were advised and supported by Amali De Silva, Caroline Kean, Farida Mansoor, and Ross Sylvester. External counsel, retained from the London chambers of 5RB, were Adrienne Page QC, Matthew Nicklin (later Mr. Justice Nicklin QC), and Jacob Dean.
At The BMJ, Kim Lenart provided in-house legal support, and advice on copy came from Godwin Busuttil (5RB). From external solicitors Farrer & Co of London were Julian Pike and Harriet Brown. In the United States, our external advisers were Vinson & Elkins, where my point man was Marc A. Fuller (Dallas, Texas), with Thomas S. Leatherbury (Dallas), Sean W. Kelly (Dallas), Lisa Bowlin Hobbs (Austin, Texas), and David P. Blanke (Austin).
Peer review was contributed at numerous points along the way, including two rounds to meet the requirements of Johns Hopkins University Press. Additionally, I’m grateful especially to Dr. Harvey Marcovitch (pediatrics) and Professor Karel Geboes (gastrointestinal pathology) for providing that function for the BMJ series. Reading a late version of this book’s full manuscript, Professor Ingvar Bjarnasson (gastroenterology) picked me up on some important points of detail that a qualified reader might have spotted.
I benefited, too, from a personal seminar by consultant histopathologist Dr. Salvador Diaz-Cano at the Department of Pathology, King’s College Hospital, London, and from endoscopies performed on me, for purely clinical reasons of course, by Miss Lindsay Barker (lower) and Dr. Jeremy Nayagam (upper). Professor Ian Bruce (molecular biology) read my chapters featuring the polymerase chain reaction.
Many others lent kind support, advice, documents, and help. Most critically were the many parents of children with developmental and other issues who were involved with Wakefield, or various vaccine campaigners, and approached me with information. To protect them from abuse, I don’t name them here. And along with everyone who reads this book (and a good many who don’t), I gained immensely from the contribution of my special source inside Wakefield’s circle, who, turning double agent, supplied me with evidence, documents, and briefings over the better part of a decade. There is so much more that I could say about that, and I probably will elsewhere.
I’m deeply grateful to Sir Harold Evans, one of the most respected newspapermen of modern times, who not only recommended me to an agent, but whose seminal series of books on newspaper editing and design made it possible for me in the 1980s to bluff my way through my first months at the Sunday Times. On that theme, I owe the break of my life to Tony Bambridge (1937–1997) when, as editor of the Sunday Times Business News, he gave me a chance and, as a result, put up with more aggravation than he ever deserved. So, too, with Tony Rennell, whose advice to me as a young headline writer has remained with me as a beacon: “No, try again.” Such wisdom.
For practical help, I thank so many people, including Paulo Henrique Nico Monteiro and Vivian Lederman, São Paulo, Brazil; Gabriel León, Andrés Bello National University, Santiago, Chile; the staff of the British Library, science section; the Imperial War Museum, London; and Ronald J. O’Brien, at Thermo Fisher Scientific, Waltham, Massachusetts, for arranging a briefing on the ABI Prism 7700 PCR machine.
My friends Nick Downing and Ryan G. Wilson contributed vital advice and support, as well as the forbearance of listening to me going on about all this for years at a stretch. When writing, I was supported by the hour by Rádio NovaBrasil FM 89.7 São Paulo, with Hunny, the Clockwork Dog, mostly a
chow chow, sleeping beside my chair. During her periods on duty, I can reveal I was never attacked from behind.
The investigation that became The Doctor Who Fooled the World was funded entirely by the Sunday Times, London; the Channel 4 TV network; The BMJ; publishers’ advances for this book; and a check from Wakefield’s lawyers, on his behalf, to cover legal expenses for my website.