“Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep.” Henry VI, William Shakespeare.
In the Bard’s time, unlike today, this phrase referred to someone concealing a dangerous nature, and unfortunately this is entirely applicable to Andrew Wakefield who, early in his promising career as a charismatic young doctor, published a number of research papers. These, as later investigations showed, were of dubious quality.
One paper was published in 1998 in the highly prestigious British medical journal The Lancet. It later came to light that Wakefield, a charlatan of breathtaking dishonesty, had completely fooled his coworkers into thinking that his results were genuine.
The paper described the “results” of research undertaken on only 12 children. Wakefield alleged that the MMR vaccine (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) caused autism and that the measles vaccine in particular was the culprit.
To state that this paper changed the word is not an exaggeration. Vaccine resistance at that stage was confined to a few fringe groups and quack practitioners (where such opinions belong), but global opposition now spread like wildfire.
The paper almost immediately attracted well-deserved criticism and the relentless accumulation of evidence to the contrary eventually led to an investigation by the British Medical Council. Its report was utterly damning: Wakefield had lied from beginning to end. His name was removed from the British register of medical practitioners. This did not bother him much – if at all – and he departed to the USA where he resumed his activities, earning a hefty income in the process.
Deer took an interest in the affair from the beginning and his book describes Wakefield’s crimes in almost exhaustive detail.
Financial considerations undoubtedly played a major role in Wakefield’s behaviour: early in his career he, together with a lawyer, was already hatching a scheme which would have enabled him to patent and market his own measles vaccine. Fortunately, these plans did not come to anything.
A further motivation may have been the desire to achieve fame as a medical savior – if his allegations about the MMR vaccine were accepted, it would have caused a major earthquake in medical science, and he would most likely have received at least an MBE.
Nowadays Wakefield is famous in antivax circles, where he earns large sums of money by spreading false rumors about the imagined dangers of all vaccines, claiming that they are responsible for more than just autism. This has led to loss of life, as happened in the recent past during measles epidemics in Romania, France and Samoa.
“I do not feel at all responsible” he replied to questions about these deaths.
An aspect of Deer’s book which both my wife and I found slightly irritating was his tendency to hyperbole. Maybe it’s just the result of years as a journalist for British newspapers.
This book is aimed at readers with a specific interest in and at least some basic knowledge of vaccines and the doings of the antivax brigade. Those with no more than a passing interest in the subject will probably put the book aside after a few dozen pages, but anyone with an interest in these subjects will be richly rewarded.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
