Brian Deer - The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines

On the first night of the Donald Trump presidency, a video went up on the World Wide Web that sent a shudder through medicine and science. It featured a sixty-year-old man in a black tie and tuxedo, grinning into his phone under blue and white lights from a ballroom in Washington, DC.

Sorry about that, guys, he says, in a mellow British accent that would suit James Bond or a Harry Potter wizard. I dont know whether people are back on. Yeah?

Then he repeats himself. Sorry about that.

Below medium-brown hair, his face glistens with sweat. White light flashes on gray eyes. As he talks, he walks: first in brightness, then shadow, pursing full lips as if searching for a thought. Then raising a fist to cough. Just looking round to see if theres anyone important here, he says, unzipping a smirk at his proximity to power. If I can prevail upon them.

The picture is shaky and doesnt last long: two-and-a-half minutes of sideways-turned images, streamed live on Periscope, a self-broadcasting app, from that nights most exclusive event. A muffled beat thumps. Spotlights blaze. Secret Service agents take up positions.

To some of us watchingas I was, from Londonhe looked like the perfect party guest. People once said he was handsome, even hot, with a sportsmans physique, a charismatic charm, and a confidence that led others to trust him. That night, in a winged collar and pretied bow, he might have passed for a diplomat, a knighted stage actor, or a retired major league baseball star.

But to others around the world, his appearance provoked gasps. Youd think the Prince of Darkness had stepped onto the dance floor. For this was Andrew Wakefield, a disgraced former doctor whod been booted from his profession on charges of fraud, dishonesty, and a callous disregard for childrens suffering.

Too much to comprehend, sneered a Texas gastroenterologist, in a flurry of Twitter posts fired that night. I need anti-nausea meds, moaned a chemist in Los Angeles. A Dutch autism researcher: Scary times indeed. A Brazilian biologist: An administration for charlatans. And from a PhD student on the North Island of New Zealand: I hoped hed just crawled under a rock.

No chance of that. This man reveled in infamy. His nature and predicament required it. Not since the 1990s and the arrest of one Harold Shipmanwho serially murdered two hundred of his patientshad a British medical practitioner been so scorned. The New York Times described Wakefield as one of the most reviled doctors of his generation. Time magazine listed him among historys great science frauds. And the Daily News spat that hed been shamed before the world, under the headline:

Hippocrates would puke

His fall wasnt recent, or easily missed by Trumps team tasked to check the nights guest list. By now, his disrepute was both acute and chronic, absorbed into popular culture. Hed 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. Wakefields 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 nights revelers 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 Sinatras 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 eight hundred words on this development? For thirteen years, on and off, Id tracked him for the Sunday Times newspaper in London. With national press awards, and even an honorary doctorate, Id become the Abraham Van Helsing to our subjects Count Dracula, who now appeared to be climbing from his grave.

Hed originally acquired profile on my side of the Atlantic, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Back in the day, hed been nobody: a doctor without patients at a third-rate London hospital and medical school. Hed been a laboratory gastroenterologist, a former trainee gut surgeon, most relevantly defined by what he wasnt. He wasnt a virologist, immunologist, or epidemiologist. He wasnt a neurologist, psychologist, or psychiatrist. He wasnt a pediatrician or clinician.

As time passed, however, he became a global playera man with his fingerprints on nations. But he didnt 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.

Id 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, four-thousand-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.