Andrew Wakefield
Andrew Jeremy Wakefield is an English fraudster, anti-vaccine activist, and former senior surgeon. He was struck off the medical register for "serious professional misconduct" due to his involvement in the fraudulent 1998 Lancet MMR autism study that falsely claimed a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and autism.
The publicity surrounding the study caused a sharp decline in vaccination uptake, leading to a number of outbreaks of measles around the world and many deaths as a result. He was a surgeon on the liver transplant programme at the Royal Free Hospital in London, and became a senior lecturer and honorary consultant in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free and University College School of Medicine. He resigned from his positions there in 2001 "by mutual agreement", then moved to the United States. In 2004, Wakefield co-founded and began working at the Thoughtful House research centre in Austin, Texas. He served as executive director of the centre until February 2010, when he resigned in the wake of findings against him by the British General Medical Council which had struck him off their register. He has subsequently become known for his anti-vaccination activism.
Wakefield published his 1998 paper on autism in the British medical journal The Lancet, claiming to have identified a novel form of enterocolitis linked to autism. However, other researchers were unable to reproduce his findings, and a 2004 investigation by Sunday Times reporter Brian Deer identified undisclosed financial conflicts of interest on Wakefield's part. Wakefield reportedly stood to earn up to $43 million per year selling test kits. Most of Wakefield's co-authors then withdrew their support for the study's interpretations, and the General Medical Council conducted an inquiry into allegations of misconduct against Wakefield and two former colleagues, focusing on Deer's findings.
In 2010, the GMC found that Wakefield had been dishonest in his research, had acted against patients' best interests, mistreated developmentally delayed children, and had "failed in his duties as a responsible consultant". The Lancet fully retracted Wakefield's 1998 publication on the basis of the GMC's findings, noting that elements of the manuscript had been falsified and that the journal had been "deceived" by Wakefield. Three months later, Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register, in part for his deliberate falsification of research published in The Lancet. In a related legal decision, a British court held that "here is now no respectable body of opinion which supports hypothesis, that MMR vaccine and autism/enterocolitis are causally linked".
In 2016, Wakefield directed the anti-vaccination film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe.
Early life and education
Wakefield was born on 3 September 1956, to Graham Wakefield, a neurologist, and Bridget d'Estouteville Matthews, a general practitioner, at the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital in Taplow, England. As a day pupil at the independent King Edward's School, Bath, he was captain of his local rugby team.After leaving King Edward's School, Wakefield studied medicine at St Mary's Hospital Medical School, fully qualifying in 1981.
Wakefield became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1985.
Career
At the University of Toronto from 1986 to 1989, he was a member of a team that studied tissue rejection problems with small intestine transplantation, using animal models. He continued his studies of small intestine transplantation under a Wellcome Trust travelling fellowship at University of Toronto in Canada.In the late 1980s, Wakefield returned to the UK to focus on research. He joined the Royal Free Hospital in London in the 1990s and remained there until his resignation in 2001. He was part of a team at the Royal working on inflammatory bowel disease from 1995 to 1998.
Following his resignation from Royal Free, Wakefield moved to the United States, where he co-founded the Thoughtful House research centre in Austin, Texas. He served as the executive director of Thoughtful House, which studies autism, and continued to promote the theory of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, despite admitting it was "not proved."
In February 2010, Wakefield resigned as the executive director of Thoughtful House after the British General Medical Council concluded that he had engaged in unethical and dishonest conduct during his research. The GMC found that he had been "dishonest and irresponsible" in conducting his earlier autism research in England.
The Times reported in May 2010 that he was a medical advisor for Visceral, a UK charity that "researches bowel disease and developmental disorders".
Wakefield has set up the non-profit Strategic Autism Initiative to commission studies into the condition, and in 2013 was listed as a director of a company called Medical Interventions for Autism and another called the Autism Media Channel.
Although initially supported by Donald Trump, who appeared with him in inauguration photos, the emergence of a measles epidemic led Trump to reconsider his stance. Subsequently, social media platforms provided Wakefield with a fresh avenue to promote his anti-vaccination campaign, resulting in global repercussions, despite the fact that he has never directly treated a patient.
Wakefield directed the anti-vaccination film "Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe" in 2016 which was removed from the Tribeca Film Festival by one of its co-founders, Robert De Niro, whose son is on the autism spectrum.
According to a 2020 article in The Telegraph, Wakefield had become prominent in the anti-vaccine movement and during the COVID-19 pandemic, promoted his discredited claims about vaccine safety. He appeared at summits warning that vaccines "will kill us" and called for widespread protests against their use.
In a 2025 interview with Democracy Now, investigative journalist Brian Deer identified Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Andrew Wakefield, and Del Bigtree as the core leaders of the anti-vaccine movement. During the interview, Deer offered his perspective on the Senate confirmation hearings for Kennedy Jr., specifically addressing the questioning by senators Bernie Sanders and Bill Cassidy regarding Kennedy's alignment with Wakefield's discredited theory linking vaccines to autism.
Claims of measles virus–Crohn's disease link
Back in the UK, he worked on the liver transplant programme at the Royal Free Hospital in London. In 1993, Wakefield attracted professional attention when he published reports in which he concluded that measles virus might cause Crohn's disease; and two years later he published a paper in The Lancet proposing a link between the measles vaccine and Crohn's disease. Subsequent research failed to confirm this hypothesis, with a group of experts in Britain reviewing a number of peer-reviewed studies in 1998 and concluding that the measles virus did not cause Crohn's disease, and neither did the MMR vaccine.Later, in 1995, while conducting research into Crohn's disease, he was approached by Rosemary Kessick, the parent of a child with autism, who was seeking help with her son's bowel problems and autism; Kessick ran a group called Allergy Induced Autism. In 1996, Wakefield turned his attention to researching possible connections between the MMR vaccine and autism.
At the time of his MMR research study, Wakefield was senior lecturer and honorary consultant in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine. He resigned in 2001, by "mutual agreement and was made a fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists", and moved to the US in 2001. He was reportedly asked to leave the Royal Free Hospital after refusing a request to validate his 1998 Lancet paper with a controlled study.
Wakefield is barred from practising as a physician in the UK, and is not licensed in the US. He lives in the US where he has a following, including the anti-vaccinationist Jenny McCarthy, who wrote the foreword for Wakefield's autobiography, Callous Disregard. She has a son with autism-like symptoms that she believes were caused by the MMR vaccine. According to Deer, as of 2011, Wakefield lives near Austin with his family.
''The Lancet'' fraud
On 28 February 1998, Wakefield was the lead author of a study of twelve children with autism that was published in The Lancet. The study proposed a new syndrome called autistic enterocolitis, and raised the possibility of a link between a novel form of bowel disease, autism, and the MMR vaccine. The authors said that the parents of eight of the twelve children linked what were described as "behavioural symptoms" with MMR, and reported that the onset of these symptoms began within two weeks of MMR vaccination.These possible triggers were reported as MMR in eight cases, and measles infection in one. The paper was instantly controversial, leading to widespread publicity in the UK and the convening of a special panel of the UK's Medical Research Council the following month. One 2005 study in Japan found that there was no causal relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism in groups of children given the triple MMR vaccine and children who received individual measles, mumps and rubella vaccinations. In Japan, the MMR vaccine had been replaced with individual vaccinations in 1993.
Although the paper said that no causal connection had been proven, before it was published, Wakefield made statements at a press conference and in a video news release issued by the hospital, calling for suspension of the triple MMR vaccine until more research could be done. This was later criticized as 'science by press conference'. According to BBC News, it was this press conference, rather than the paper in The Lancet, that fuelled the MMR vaccination scare. The BBC report said he told journalists: "it was a 'moral issue' and he could no longer support the continued use of the three-in-one jab for measles, mumps and rubella. 'Urgent further research is needed to determine whether MMR may give rise to this complication in a small number of people,' Wakefield said at the time." He said, "If you give three viruses together, three live viruses, then you potentially increase the risk of an adverse event occurring, particularly when one of those viruses influences the immune system in the way that measles does." He suggested parents should opt for single vaccinations against measles, mumps and rubella, separated by gaps of one year. 60 Minutes interviewed him in November 2000, and he repeated these claims to the U.S. audience, providing a new focus for the nascent anti-vaccination movement in the U.S., which had been primarily concerned about thiomersal in vaccines.
In November 2001, Wakefield resigned from the Royal Free Hospital, saying, "I have been asked to go because my research results are unpopular." The medical school said that he had left "by mutual agreement". In February 2002, Wakefield stated: "What precipitated this crisis was the removal of the single vaccine, the removal of choice, and that is what has caused the furore—because the doctors, the gurus, are treating the public as though they are some kind of moronic mass who cannot make an informed decision for themselves."