How Andrew Wakefield turned Austin into the US antivax capital

Steve Levine with a copy of the article he wrote against Andrew Wakefield in 2011

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Wakefield thrived in America, speaking at conferences and heralded as a martyr by mothers of autistic children who believed the disorder was caused by a vaccination. He was the father of the modern conspiracy theory. Crowds cheered, fans sobbed, people called him their “Jesus Christ”. It is from these Texan-born groups that Robert F Kennedy Jr, President Trump’s health secretary, was introduced to the same doctrine. Kennedy said in 2019 that Wakefield was “among the most unjustly vilified figures of modern history”.

Today, Wakefield is back on the conference circuit, speaking at events in the UK this month and Austin in November for which he is titled “Dr Andy Wakefield”, despite the fact he is barred from practising.

He has restyled himself as a filmmaker, releasing anti-vaccine propaganda movies, has a multi-million dollar home and a polished reputation. This is the reinvention of Britain’s most infamous fraudulent doctor.

On Saturday night, Wakefield hailed “a revolution in America” over vaccine policy while making a rare public appearance in the UK. He was speaking at an all-day conference at a hotel in York, and told the audience — who had paid up to £150 to see him — of his excitement over Kennedy’s appointment as US health secretary.

Wakefield was also asked what he thought of Trump’s claims that there was a link between pregnant women taking paracetamol and an increased risk of autism. Wakefield said “it’s a very interesting and biologically plausible notion” and added that “[studies’] conclusions have been inconclusive”. Medical experts say paracetamol remains the safest painkiller available for pregnant women.

On Tuesday he will speak at another sold-out event in Corsham, Wiltshire.

Dr Andrew Wakefield with his wife Carmel, holding flowers, outside the General Medical Council in 2010

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Peter Hotez, a researcher of infectious diseases at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said: “Wakefield’s paper was version 1.0 of the antivax movement; before him there wasn’t a link between autism and vaccines. Texas has since become an epicentre of this political movement.”

A community of antivaxers gathered around Wakefield’s adopted home in Austin, with some residents saying they moved because of the disgraced doctor. This year, Texas had the largest outbreak of measles in the US since the disease was eliminated in the country in 2000, with more than 760 confirmed cases. There have been two fatalities among school-aged children, neither of whom had underlying health conditions and neither of whom had been vaccinated.

Wakefield’s 1998 study claimed that eight out of 12 children had been diagnosed with autism soon after getting the MMR vaccine, suggesting a link. However, Brian Deer, the Sunday Times journalist, revealed that all children and their parents were referred to Wakefield by a lawyer trying to build a case against vaccine makers, who had paid him £435,000 the year before. Wakefield also filed a patent claim for a “safer” measles vaccine during the research process. He declared neither interest.

A 2003 paper in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, now known as Jama Pediatrics, which reviewed a dozen epidemiological studies, concluded that there was no evidence of an association between autism and MMR. Dozens of studies in peer-reviewed journals since have come to the same conclusion.

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The following year, Somerset-born and privately educated Wakefield moved to Austin, where he became the executive director of the Thoughtful House, his treatment centre for autistic children. In a recent podcast, Wakefield said he moved because his career had “unravelled” at home. “There is the opportunity [in America] to set up a private clinic where you can do research and set up a clinic and help these children.”

His donors included Charlie Ball, the former Dell executive, and his wife Troylyn. The actor Jim Carrey and his then-girlfriend Jenny McCarthy were also vocal supporters. Wakefield was paid a salary of $280,000. Two years later, his wife, Carmel, and their four children, James, Samuel, Imogen and Corin followed him to Texas, living in a five-bedroom ranch house in the hills just outside Austin.

Michelle Guppy, 57, from Houston, whose autistic son is now 31, was introduced to Wakefield around that time. “I had stumbled upon his research and that’s where our journey started,” said Guppy, who believes Wakefield’s disproven theory about the MMR vaccine. Guppy said she paid around $4,000 for her son to be treated at the Thoughtful House, where a doctor put him on a diet. Levine said that the organisation also prescribed patients chelation, a high-risk treatment with no credible evidence to prove its efficacy, which involves removing heavy metals from the bloodstream.

Michelle Evans

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Guppy said it was having her beliefs “validated” by the treatment centre that “activated” her campaigning. “Me and other mothers started networking meetings through our church, where we brought in speakers like Dr Wakefield. We wanted to be with him, be around him, have a picture with him, to be like: this is the man who’s helping our family. He was that sort of celebrity. He has the bravery of a soldier, he’s running right to the bullets and he doesn’t care if he gets hit. He gives you the bravery to speak the truth.”

Contemporaneous footage shows Wakefield as a scruffy scientist-type, a bumbling British maverick. “I’m neither particularly clever or brave but I am terrified of mothers of autistic children,” he said to one crowd. In another, he compares himself to Nelson Mandela.

In 2010, the GMC revoked Wakefield’s licence, saying he acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” and engaged in “deliberate fraud”. The Lancet retracted his study the same year. Wakefield resigned from the Thoughtful House and it was renamed The Johnson Center for Child Health and Development, which has since publicly distanced itself from Wakefield’s vaccine-autism theory. “I have never been involved in scientific fraud,” Wakefield said at an event in 2019.

Polly Tommey, 59 believes her autistic son, Billy, now 29, was “injured” by the MMR vaccine. “Every time I speak to [Wakefield] and people around him, they say that it was just all a big witch hunt,” she said. “I don’t care what the science says, I care about what happened to my child. People say that we parents were brainwashed by Andy, but we went to Andy to say: this is what happened.”

Tommey first met Wakefield when she interviewed him for her magazine, The Autism File, in which she “shouted to the world” her fears about the MMR vaccine. In 2012, Tommey moved her family to Austin after failing to raise enough money to fund a large residential autism centre in the UK. She chose Texas “because that’s where Andy was”. The two families became close friends and business partners, continuing to spread vaccine misinformation.

She is one of the big names in the vaccine-conspiracy community and the family live in a wealthy Austin suburb of enormous mansions. In 2015, after a fundraising event at the local country club and with members of the church, The Autism Trust, Tommey’s non-profit, was given the house and 40-acres around it (which they call “The Land”) with the intention of making it into a residential centre for autistic adults.

Polly Tommey in her home, which was donated to The Autism Trust

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Berta Bradley, the seller, had an autistic son, Kent and Tommey agreed to take him into their care. According to public accounts, the non-profit took in $100,436 in 2014. “It’s what happens when you start praying,” Tommey said.

In 2020, the non-profit was given an anonymous cash donation so large they could buy the neighbouring home, a sprawling red brick McMansion. The organisation held $2.36 million in total assets in 2023, taking in $208,000 in revenue that same year, according to public accounts. They rent the second house on Airbnb, saying the money is funnelled back into the non-profit. “We don’t want to rely on donations,” said Tommey.

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Despite functioning for over a decade, they are yet to take in any more residents beyond Kent and their son, Billy. “It’s a work in progress,” said Tommey. People drop in to use the garden as a “day centre”, where autistic adults can pet the horses and feed the chickens. There are no hired carers.

In Texas, Tommey said, they “don’t question me, they believe me. They’re like, how can we now help you with Billy and building the centre? What can we do? If you said in England, I’m going to do a degree in yoga, people say, what school did you go to? What is your qualification? Here, people don’t care.” Wakefield, she continued, had a similar experience. “Andy came to Austin because it’s just miserable after being struck off.”

In 2014, Wakefield lost his defamation case against the BMJ, despite having raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees through the Dr Wakefield Justice Fund. Around this time, he started a non-profit with Tommey, called the Autism Media Channel, under which they produced the donor-funded, anti-vaccine propaganda film, Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, which was released in 2016 and made $1.6 million at the box office worldwide.

That year, Michelle Evans, 47, received a call “out of the blue” from Wakefield, asking her to be a research assistant on the film. Evans’ daughter, now 14, had been diagnosed with autism, which she believed was caused by the flu vaccination (overwhelming data demonstrates there is no link).

“I was in the car pickup line at my daughter’s school,” she said. “I’d imagine he knew me because I was in the community with the other mothers.” She was paid a “nominal” amount for her work. “He’s very charismatic,” she said.

In 2015, Evans established campaign group Texans for Vaccine Choice, which blocked a bill to ban non-medical vaccine exemptions. “‘Mad moms in minivans,’ is what they called us,” she said. In 2003, there were just 2,300 non-medical exemptions in Texas. By 2016, there were 44,000. Evans sees Wakefield’s discredited paper as “setting off a butterfly effect”. “He just had to watch it happen.”

Rekha Lakshmanan, the chief strategy officer at The Immunisation Partnership, a non-profit based in Houston dedicated to eradicating vaccine-preventable diseases, remembers 2015 as the “tipping point” for the antivax movement. “That was when it entered mainstream politics,” she said. “It mobilised a large group of people and normalised what used to be on the fringe.” It also coincided with the popularisation of the Republican Tea Party movement. “I see it as micro constituency stacking: anti-abortion, anti-government, anti-establishment, anti-vaccine, anti-science. It fit together.”

Another producer on the Vaxxed movie was Malibu-based Del Bigtree, a daytime TV producer who met Wakefield and Tommey at a fundraising event. Bigtree soon moved to Austin and launched his antivax non-profit, Informed Consent Action Network, which spreads health misinformation. In 2023, it received $23 million in donations and Bigtree took a salary of $234,000. He now has an antivax podcast, The Highwire; he speaks at events “with the fervour of a preacher”, one mother said. Last year, he served as Kennedy’s communications director for his failed presidential campaign.

Aspiring filmmaker Claire Dooley, 26, met the Vaxxed bus in Mississippi, after her mother got involved in the online movement. In 2018, the Tommeys asked Dooley to be part of the crew on Vaxxed II: The People’s Truth.

Dooley met Wakefield in 2017

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Dooley moved in with the Tommeys in 2019, caring for Billy and Kent in exchange for rent. The following year, she was asked to move to Miami by Wakefield to edit another movie.

Tommey now works for the non-profit that Kennedy led before his political appointment, the Children’s Health Defence, which had a revenue of $16.1 million in 2023, with a paycheck for Kennedy of $326,056.

Sarah Kenoyer, a 43-year-old mother of five, was introduced to Tommey at her church in 2020 and was told to watch her movie, Vaxxed, by the pastor. “It awakened me,” she said. “Polly was very influential.” Soon after, Wakefield asked her to work on his film, Protocol 7, which he co-wrote with Terry Rossio, the screenwriter behind Aladdin, Pirates of the Caribbean and Shrek.

Sarah and Justin Kenoyer with their four-month-old baby

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According to Kenoyer, Wakefield is engaged to Kerry Anne Roschman, 62, a film producer from Florida whose first marriage was to a fast-food scion. Property records show that Roschman and Wakefield bought a property in Wimberley, a picturesque city outside Austin, last year, listed on Zillow for $2.4 million.

Terri Burke, the executive director of The Immunisation Partnership, said that Wakefield was no longer “particularly public”, focusing instead on filmmaking. “He is still held up as a martyr figure,” she said. “But it was this year that we have really seen the tide turning as a result.”

As many as 45 vaccine-related bills were introduced in the first month of this year’s legislative session, 37 of which were anti-vaccine, according to The Immunisation Partnership. In 2019, less than 1 per cent of Austin school district’s kindergarten pupils failed to comply with the state’s vaccine reporting requirements. Last year, it was 23 per cent.

Levine, former communications director at the Texas Medical Association, has never seen anti-vaccine sentiment this frightening in his 25-year tenure at the organisation, much of which he traces back to the British doctor. “Wakefield has his ‘cause célèbre’ in the US now, he is the ‘scientist’, the ‘saviour’ who was pushed down by the medical establishment. He has done such an enormous amount of damage to the world.”