The anti-vax doctor who’s immune to the truth

His fall wasn’t recent, or easily missed by Trump’s team tasked to check the night’s guest list. By now, his disrepute was both acute and chronic, absorbed into popular culture. He’d been drawn as the villain in a cartoon strip (“The Facts in the Case of Dr. Andrew Wakefield”), sweated over by students in high school exams (“Was Dr. Wakefield’s report based on reliable scientific evidence?”), and his name embraced in public conversation as shorthand for one not to be believed: The Andrew Wakefield of biology; The Andrew Wakefield of politics; The Andrew Wakefield of transportation and planning.

Yet here he was at the Liberty Ball, on Friday, January 20, 2017, at a little after seven in the evening. Behind him, on Level 2 of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, the first of the night’s revellers to pass through security rustled in their finery toward fluorescent-fronted bars. And Trump would later shuffle here with the first lady, Melania, to Frank Sinatra’s 1960s classic My Way. “So, uh, yeah, very, very exciting times,” Wakefield gushed.

“I wish you could all be here with us.”

Me too.

Four days later, I got the call. Could I file 800 words on this development? For 13 years, on and off, I’d tracked him for The Sunday Times newspaper in London. With national press awards, and even an honorary doctorate, I’d become the Abraham Van Helsing to our subject’s Count Dracula, who now appeared to be climbing from his grave.

He’d originally acquired profile on my side of the Atlantic, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Back in the day, he’d been nobody: a doctor without patients at a third-rate London hospital and medical school. He’d been a laboratory gastroenterologist, a former trainee gut surgeon, most relevantly defined by what he wasn’t. He wasn’t a virologist, immunologist, or epidemiologist. He wasn’t a neurologist, psychologist, or psychiatrist. He wasn’t a pediatrician or clinician.

As time passed, however, he became a global player – a man with his fingerprints on nations. But he didn’t offer healing, or scientific insight. He brought epidemics of fear, guilt, and disease. These he exported to the United States, and from there to everywhere that humans are born. As a stinging editorial from the New Indian Express put it:

“Can one person change the world? Ask Andrew Wakefield.”

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I’d first heard his name in February 1998, on the occasion of a report, or “paper,” he published in a top medical journal, The Lancet. In a five-page, 4000-word, double-columned text, he claimed to have discovered a terrifying new “syndrome” of brain and bowel damage in children. The “apparent precipitating event,” as he called it on page 2, was a vaccine given routinely to hundreds of millions. He later talked of an “epidemic” of injuries.

In time, he’d take aim at pretty much any vaccine, from hepatitis B to human papillomavirus. But, in the beginning, there was one in his crosshairs. This was a three-in-one shot against measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR), which he argued was the cause of a rising tide of “regressive” autism, in which infants lost language and skills. “Sufferers have to live in a silent world of their own, unable to communicate,” he warned.

Across Britain, no surprise, young families were petrified. From the hospital where he worked – and more particularly, from its medical school – he launched a crusade, triggering a public health crisis unrivalled since the early years of AIDS. Immunisation rates plummeted. Killer diseases returned. And countless parents of children with developmental issues, who’d followed doctors’ orders and vaccinated their kids, endured the horror of blaming themselves.

Wakefield had laboured to make it in America: addressing congressional committees, and schlepping round anti-vaccine-tinged conferences.

At the time, I ignored him. I’d looked into vaccines, and I thought that his paper stank. His findings were too cute, too eerily familiar. But I assumed they were impossible to check. Among my bigger stories had been medical investigations (especially chasing fraud and drug industry scams), and I reckoned that the proofs of what Wakefield had done would take more than a lifetime to unearth. They’d be buried in the vaults of patient confidentiality, as accessible as Trump’s tax returns.

But then, five years later, all that changed with a topical feature assignment. By then, the “MMR doctor” was so celebrated in Britain that anything new would get a “good show,” as journalists used to say in the golden age of ink on paper. So I interviewed the mother of a developmentally challenged boy whose details were anonymised in that Lancet report. And there began Wakefield’s end.

Nothing came easy. He refused to be interviewed, and ran away when I approached him with questions. The Lancet defended him. The medical establishment protected him. Other journalists waged war on me. But, as I pressed on, asking questions, gathering documents, and resisting lawsuits that he brought to try to gag me, his report was retracted as “utterly false,” and his doctoring days were done.

“Many people have had papers in The Lancet,” I’d quip (with shameless immodesty, yet impeccable timing). “But I have had one out.”

It was what reporters like me would call a “result”. So I planned to move on to other projects. What I’d long looked forward to was to take a pop at statins – the uberblockbuster, anticholesterol class of drugs – including what was in those days the top prescribed medicine. Not because I knew anything that nobody had spotted, but because with Big Pharma there’s always something going on, and like with Mount Everest, it was there.

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But unlike the killer Shipman, who died in his cell, Wakefield wouldn’t leave the stage. He’d laboured since the beginning to make it in America: appearing on 60 Minutes, addressing congressional committees, and schlepping round a network of anti-vaccine-tinged conferences. And now he’d been noticed by “the Donald”.

“When I was growing up, autism wasn’t really a factor, and now all of a sudden, it’s an epidemic,” the future 45th president of the United States had declared, while still a mere billionaire property developer with a slot on reality TV. “Everybody has a theory,” he told a local newspaper, before unleashing a one-man Twitter storm on the subject. “My theory – and I study it because I have young children – my theory is the shots.”

It wasn’t his theory. He’d gotten it from Wakefield, whether or not he knew of its provenance. And just three months before the election that stunned the world, a Republican chiropractor and high-dollar donor who ran a combined medical and legal service for people in car crashes brought them fender-to-fender. They huddled for nearly an hour in Kissimmee, central Florida, then posed for photographs beside a furled state flag: Trump mouth open, as if unable not to talk; Wakefield grinning, hands clasped near his groin, in a black suit jacket, blue denim jeans and tan boots, scuffed at the toes.

There’s something wrong. A son or daughter won’t speak, doesn’t want to be held, or obsessively watches their fingers.

They had so much in common. And I’m sure Wakefield sensed this. In many ways, they were two of a kind. At the time, both were frantically criss-crossing the country (one in a bespoke Boeing 757, the other with a black recreational vehicle) pursuing uncannily similar objectives. The candidate’s priority was the white working class. Hurt. Angry. Neglected. The ex-doctor, meanwhile, sought a subset of parents – parents of children with autism and similar issues – who were hurt, angry and neglected.

People sometimes spoke as if being on “the spectrum” was fashionable: a quirk of hard wiring. And it can be. But for mothers and fathers of kids with no-quibble autism, its first symptoms often heralded a desperate quest through a labyrinth of hope and fear.

If you haven’t this experience, just pause to imagine it. The most precious thing in life, born so perfect, now with first words and steps. And then, sometimes subtly or sometimes so suddenly, there’s a difference. There’s something wrong. A son or daughter won’t speak, doesn’t want to be held, or obsessively watches their fingers. Maybe they have seizures, which seem to come out of nowhere. Possibly, they have a profound disability.

Then along comes a hero, with what sounds like solutions to riddles that others can’t solve. As one Wakefield associate told The New York Times: “To our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one.”

Others compared him to the Italian astronomer Galileo, who battled the Roman Catholic Church. “One of the last honest doctors in the western world… a genius… a beacon of scientific integrity… a brilliant clinical scientist of high moral character… incredible courage, integrity and humility.”

On such versions of the affair, this man was a visionary, crushed in a cynical conspiracy. The way he told it, he’d done nothing wrong. Every complaint levelled against him was a lie. Rather, he’d fallen foul of a hideous plot – by governments, drug companies, and especially by me – covering up horrific injuries to kids.

“It was a strategy,” he declared of the revelations that ruined him. “A deliberate strategy. A public relations strategy to say, ‘We discredit this man, we isolate him from his colleagues, we destroy his career, and we say to other physicians who might dare to get involved in this: this is what will happen to you.’”

But while Trump spoke of hope – with a campaign slogan to “make America great again” – as Wakefield had trekked around the United States that year, he’d only brought shades of suffering. Just weeks before the ball, a YouGov opinion poll found that nearly one third of Americans now feared that vaccines “definitely” or “probably” caused autism. Immunisation rates were falling as parents hurried to paediatricians to seek exemptions from the shots for their children. And not three months after that inauguration night, a resurgence of measles would explode around the planet, as what I thought I’d snuffed out reignited.

Reports began in Minnesota, where Wakefield had campaigned. Then more poured in from Europe, South America, Asia, and Australasia, as a disease once slated for universal eradication returned to sicken and kill.

And by the time the new president would seek re-election, the United States had experienced its worst outbreaks in three decades, while international agencies described “vaccine hesitancy” as one of the top 10 threats to human health.

It wasn’t just one man. Other gurus were available – most notably an actor, Jenny McCarthy, and a lawyer, Robert Kennedy – with their own critiques of vaccines.

Controversy stretched back at least a thousand years to when the Chinese learned to protect against smallpox. But it was Wakefield who stepped up to seize the modern crown as the “father of the anti-vaccine movement.”

And, like with L. Ron Hubbard who invented Scientology, or Joseph Smith who received the Mormon golden plates, to evaluate the merits of the creed he preached, you didn’t need sermons on -isms and -ologies. You needed to know the man.

He knew what he was doing. He felt it was his right. Rules were for suckers. He was special. But his road to Trump’s ball had been his own desperate quest: through a sinister side of science that threatens us all. If he could do what he did who else is doing what in the hospitals and laboratories that we may one day look to for our lives? And who else is out there, fooling the world, behind charisma and talk of conspiracy?

Laughing into his phone at the Liberty Ball, Wakefield signed off with glee. “I’m just going to bring some pictures of Donald,” he promised.

The ex-doctor without patients was back.

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The last I heard of Wakefield, he was shacked up in Miami, Florida, with a supermodel, divorced wife of a billionaire. Which only goes to show that, once you’ve fooled all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, your next big idea had better be good.

The lady was Elle Macpherson (a.k.a. “the Body”), a 55-year-old mother of two from Sydney, Australia, and patron of numerous good causes. She reportedly bagged $US53 million in cash and a $US26 million home after a four-year marriage to her last husband.

Wakefield, 62, was first sighted in her company in November 2017. The occasion was an anti-vaccine event in Orlando, Florida, where they met in what appeared to be a calculated introduction, having been seated together for dinner. Just two months later, they were spotted for a second time, at a similar kind of gathering in Red Bank, New Jersey. Then, once more, in May 2019, at another in Chicago, Illinois.

On a Monday evening in May 2019, Wakefield graced the digital stream with an appearance, via Skype, during an outbreak of his favourite disease.

The location was a ballroom: the Atrium Grand Ballroom, in the hamlet of Monsey, in Rockland County, 48 kilometres 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 measles virus, once slated for eradication, had erupted that spring and provoked the extreme measure of a public ban on unvaccinated kids.

By now Wakefield realised that Donald Trump had betrayed him. Before the Rockland outbreak, and its New York City cousin, the president had said nothing publicly about immunisation 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.”

In his sights were neighbourhoods where immunisation rates were low, and he wanted to keep them that way.

Wakefield knew better, and his mission that Monday was much the same as it was, years before, with a group of Somalis (in 2010-2011 he and his supporters had launched an anti-vaccination group in Minnesota targeting the Somali community; in April 2017, the community was blighted by a measles outbreak after the vaccination rate had fallen to 42 per cent in the aftermath of Wakefield’s intervention) he was targeting a troubled community.

In his sights were neighbourhoods where immunisation 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, materialising from out of the ether. On a screen, erected in the 1500-seater ballroom, his shiny forehead and cheeks glowed lobster-red raw, like he’d been making full use of the nearly 8000 square metres 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, Robin Warren, a pathologist, and Barry Marshall, a clinician, who published claims about a spiral-shaped bacterium (eventually named Helicobacter pylori), which they argued wasn’t merely the main cause of peptic ulcers but could be cured with cheap antibiotics.

They were right and would later share the Nobel Prize after slaughtering drug markets, dining out on dissing Big Pharma. And it must have slipped his mind that he’d only criticised MMR after British researchers found fault with two brands.

“I want to let you know that you have been misled,” he told his audience, following an address by the “Emmy-winning” producer of anti-vax documentary Vaxxed, Del Bigtree, funded by a Manhattan financier. “I’m going to talk specifically about measles.”

Only 45 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.

Wakefield said the worldwide fall in deaths and illness wasn’t a result of immunisation.

I counted 21, 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 immunisation but because the disease was evolving to be milder. But then he also claimed that measles was doing more harm, as a result of immunisation.

The man, 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.”

But I thought there was more. He was owning that measles outbreak. In his dark confusion of subject and object, he wanted us to know that he controlled events.

He revelled 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.

This is an edited extract from The Doctor Who Fooled the World by Brian Deer (Scribe).

*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from The Australian Financial Review can be found here ***