Andrew Wakefield

Andrew Jeremy Wakefield (born 3 September 1956) is an English former surgeon who was removed from the medical register in 2010 for serious professional misconduct. He is now known as a fraudster and anti-vaccine activist. His notoriety stems from a fraudulent 1998 study published in The Lancet that falsely linked the MMR vaccine to autism. The resulting media frenzy caused vaccination rates to plummet, leading to measles outbreaks worldwide and numerous deaths.

Early life and education

Wakefield was born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire, to a neurologist father and a general practitioner mother. He attended King Edward’s School in Bath, captained his local rugby team, and later studied at Kingswood School before qualifying as a doctor from St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in 1981. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1985.

Career

Early in his career, he worked at the University of Toronto on small intestine transplantation, studying tissue rejection in animal models. He returned to the UK in the late 1980s and joined the Royal Free Hospital in London in the 1990s, where he worked on inflammatory bowel disease.

He resigned from the Royal Free in 2001 “by mutual agreement” and moved to the United States. There, he co-founded the Thoughtful House research centre in Austin, Texas, serving as its executive director until February 2010. He also became a medical advisor for the UK charity Visceral.

In 2004, investigative journalist Brian Deer uncovered that Wakefield had undisclosed financial conflicts of interest, including potential earnings of up to US$43 million per year from selling test kits. Most of Wakefield’s co-authors withdrew their support for the study’s conclusions.

General Medical Council hearings

The British General Medical Council (GMC) investigated and in 2010 found Wakefield had been dishonest, acted against patients’ best interests, mistreated developmentally delayed children, and failed in his duties as a responsible consultant. The Lancet fully retracted the paper, stating it had been deceived and that elements were falsified. Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register, and a British court later ruled that no respectable body of opinion supports his hypothesis of a causal link between MMR and autism.

After leaving Thoughtful House, Wakefield continued promoting his discredited theory. In 2016, he directed the anti-vaccination film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, which was removed from the Tribeca Film Festival by co-founder Robert De Niro. He set up the non-profit Strategic Autism Initiative and was listed as a director of companies called Medical Interventions for Autism and the Autism Media Channel.

Though initially supported by Donald Trump, a measles epidemic reportedly shifted Trump’s view. Social media later gave Wakefield a platform to spread his anti-vaccination message globally, despite never having directly treated a patient. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he promoted his discredited claims.