Kurt Eichenwald - The Big Lie: How One Doctor’s Medical Fraud Launched Today’s Deadly Anti-Vax Movement

This story is based on interviews I conducted with scores of people involved in the events it recounts, as well as on thousands of pages of documents, including court records, sworn statements, hearing transcripts, official witness interviews, and transcripts from 148 days of testimony over two and a half years before Britains General Medical Council. Other materials include personal letters, emails, memos, financial records and contracts, telephone logs, business plans, meeting minutes, video and audio recordings, medical reports and presentations, travel documents, scientific analyses and research papers, and an array of books, articles, and news broadcasts.

Every history builds on the work of others, and this is no exception. This story could never have been told without the tenacity of Brian Deer, the British reporter who exposed Andrew Wakefields chicanery. Without Deers reporting dating back to 2004, there is a strong chance that Wakefields deceits would have remained undiscovered, and his fraud would be wreaking far more global damage than it already has. Because of his dedication to truth, Deer has endured almost two decades of personal and professional attacks by members of the anti-vax movement. Anyone recounting this tale owes him a debt of gratitude.

Most of my interviews were conducted on condition of anonymity. However, I have chosen not to identify most sources who went on the record. This is because I have found that, in an investigative story, indicating those who agreed to speak on the record makes it easier to deduce the identities of those who did not.

Dialogue and the events described were reconstructed with the help of participants or witnesses to the conversations, documents that describe them, recordings of the words, or articles from reporters who heard the statements that are quoted. Because of the various means used to reconstruct dialogue, readers should not assume that a given speaker was my source for their statements. In a few instances, secondary sources had been informed of conversations with a participant; if the secondary source agreed on what was said, or the comments were corroborated by documents, the dialogue was used. Material reconstructed by this method never amounted to more than one sentence in a given scene and was never incriminating.

To weave together the narrative of the rise and collapse of Andrew Wakefield, I assembled a pyramid of credibility for the hundreds of sources I used. At the top were video, audio, and transcripts of the events described. Next were contemporaneous records: letters, emails, business plans. Following that were sworn statements, testimony, and interviews provided in official proceedings. Given the length of time that has passed, I compared some sources memories of dialogue with statements they made decades earlier. In those instances, I often quoted back to a source comments they had made to other reporters; if the source stood behind those words from many years before, I used them.

Of course, I am not claiming that the dialogue in these pages is a perfect transcript of incidents that occurred thirty years agothat would be a feat of journalism beyond any reporters powers. It does, however, represent the best recollections of those events and conversations, supported by voluminous documentary records. Over the years, I have found that this approach more accurately reflects reality than mere paraphrase can. Indeed, I have often had sources summarize conversations for me, then asked them to go back and attempt to reconstruct the dialogue. When pushed to dig into memoriesor when aided by documents placed before themthey frequently concluded that their summary recollections were incomplete or even incorrect compared with the dialogue they reconstructed.

In some cases, I was unable to determine the precise date when an event occurred. In those instances, I present the scene at the point in the narrative that is most consistent with the information contained in the relevant documents and interviews. Lacking certainty about the exact date, I have omitted it.

Finally, a note about science. I am not an expert on vaccines, developmental disorders, or any other medical or scientific field. However, from the time I first engaged in science reporting in 1999, the brilliant researchers Ive interviewed have taught me what goes into strong medical studies and described the dangerous shortcuts taken by the careless or unconcerned. Researchers cannot take their interpretations a single step beyond what the data shows without sacrificing their credibility.

And that, perhaps, is the most shocking thing about Wakefields work: His published research did not prove what he implied (and later said) it did. His study never showed a causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Reporters did a disservice to the world by allowing Wakefield to spin nonsense at media appearances without carefully reading his study and disclosing that it offered no data-driven scientific support for his claims. Indeed, his small, inconclusive study would likely have passed unnoticed if the media had reported what the research actually found, and hadnt allowed the lead scientist to publicly lie with impunity.

The Big Lie