Would You Trust Your Child With This Anti-Vax Ex-Doctor?

Today I want to shine a bit of light on the conspiracy theorist behind the film “Vaxxed” and its recent sequel, “Vaxxed II.” I’m not going to provide any links to the movie, or to describe it, except to say that it’s a slickly-produced conspiracy theory masquerading as a documentary. Don’t watch it.

Anti-vax activists often use conspiracy theory tactics, which work like this: they simply make up a claim, out of thin air, that a secret cabal of doctors (or government scientists, or pharma companies) is out to harm patients by giving them vaccines, and is hiding the “truth” about the risks of vaccination. Never mind how irrational this is, and never mind that there’s not a shred of evidence behind it: if you try to argue with the anti-vaxxer, you’re part of the conspiracy.

So rather than try to disprove something that was never proven in the first place, let’s look instead at the source of the anti-vax propaganda film, “Vaxxed.” The source is one man: Andrew Wakefield. Who is this guy, and why is he so obsessed with vaccines?

Wakefield was once a doctor, before he had his license revoked a decade ago. In his former life, he was a gastroenterologist, with no special training in vaccines or infectious diseases. He first gained fame–a lot of fame–for a 1998 paper in a medical journal, The Lancet, in which he claimed to have discovered a link between the MMR vaccine (that’s the one that covers measles, mumps, and rubella) and autism.

Here are some things you need to know about Wakefield before watching his movie:

1. Wakefield’s 1998 paper, it eventually turned out, was “an elaborate fraud.” Wakefield defrauded the public, his patients, and even his own co-authors on the paper, most of whom were unaware of his elaborate conflicts of interests.
2. Before he published his 1998 study, Wakefield was hired by a lawyer, Richard Barr, who was trying to build a lawsuit against vaccine makers. Barr paid Wakefield £435,000 (equal to $750,000 US dollars at the time) to help him build his case. Wakefield’s co-authors were unaware of this contract.
3. The study claimed that 8 out of 12 children had been diagnosed with autism soon after getting the MMR vaccine. It described these children as “a consecutive series” of admissions to the hospital where Wakefield worked. That was a lie. It turned out, as investigative journalist Brian Deer revealed, that all 12 children and their parents were referred to Wakefield by Barr–the lawyer who was paying Wakefield to conduct the study, and who was trying to sue vaccine makers.
4. Wakefield also falsified data on all 12 of the children in his original study.
5. Wakefield conducted “invasive and distressing procedures” on the children without approval from his hospital’s ethics board.
6. After learning some of the back story, 10 of his 12 co-authors tried to retract the paper in 2004. Wakefield refused to join them, so they published a partial retraction, signed by the 10 co-authors. The Lancet itself later fully retracted the paper (over Wakefield’s objections), but it took until 2010 for them to act. By then, the anti-vax movement had spread widely.
7. Prior to publishing his paper, Wakefield filed a patent claim for a “safer” vaccine for measles, one that would have profited him greatly once he discredited the (perfectly safe) MMR vaccine.
8. After losing his license in the UK, Wakefield moved to Austin, Texas where he ran an organization called Thoughtful House, through which he paid himself a salary of $280,000. (Perhaps coincidentally, Austin is now a hotbed of anti-vaccination activism.)

For more than 20 years, Andrew Wakefield has made money off false claims that vaccines cause autism, first put forth in his discredited 1998 paper. He gives talks, writes books, conducts seminars, and now makes movies, of which make him money. Since the publication of his paper, dozens of studies involving literally millions of children have shown, time and again, that vaccines do not cause autism. Wakefield has denied every one of those studies, and continues to push his bogus claims.

(Why, you might ask, have scientists conducted studies looking for a link between autism and vaccines, if there was never any evidence for such a link? The answer is simple: anti-vaxxers have been so successful at scaring people about a nonexistent threat that scientists and public health experts felt it necessary to conduct those studies, in order to reassure people. Literally millions of dollars have been spent to prove something we already knew.)

Meanwhile, measles outbreaks have appeared with increasing frequency in the U.S., the UK, other European countries, and around the world, including the deadly outbreak in Samoa late last year, which caused 5,700 infections and 83 deaths in a population of just 200,000. Wakefield’s new movie was released in the middle of that outbreak.

So to anyone who watched the movie Vaxxed and is now having doubts about vaccines, I ask: would you trust your children with this man? I wouldn’t.

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