Andrew Wakefield

Andrew Jeremy Wakefield (born September 3, 1956) is a British anti-vaccine activist, former physician, and discredited academic who was struck off the medical register for his involvement in The Lancet MMR autism fraud, a 1998 study that fraudulently claimed a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.

He has subsequently become known for anti-vaccination activism.

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.

As a student 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 (now Imperial College School of Medicine), fully qualifying in 1981.

Wakefield became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1985.

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.

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.

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.

Publicity around the 1998 study caused a sharp decline in vaccination uptake, leading to a number of outbreaks of measles around the world.

He was a surgeon on the liver transplant programme at the Royal Free Hospital in London and became senior lecturer and honorary consultant in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free and University College School of Medicine.

Wakefield published his 1998 paper on autism in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, claiming to have identified a novel form of enterocolitis linked to autism.

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, and was barred from practising medicine in the UK.

In a related legal decision, a British court held that "[t]here is now no respectable body of opinion which supports [Wakefield's] hypothesis, that MMR vaccine and autism/enterocolitis are causally linked".

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.

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 subsequently helped establish and served as the executive director of Thoughtful House Center for Children, which studies autism in Austin, Texas, where, according to The Times, he "continued to promote the theory of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, despite admitting it was 'not proved'."

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.

He resigned from his positions there in 2001, "by mutual agreement", then moved to the United States.

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 (or 2004, by another account).

In 2004, Wakefield co-founded and began working at the Thoughtful House research center (now renamed Johnson Center for Child Health and Development) in Austin, Texas, serving as executive director there until February 2010, when he resigned in the wake of findings against him by the British General Medical Council.

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 (GMC) conducted an inquiry into allegations of misconduct against Wakefield and two former colleagues, focusing on Deer's findings.

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 (from 2008, UCL Medical School).

In 2010, the GMC found that Wakefield had been dishonest in his research, had acted against his patients' best interests and mistreated developmentally delayed children, and had "failed in his duties as a responsible consultant".

He resigned from Thoughtful House in February 2010, after the British General Medical Council 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 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,, Wakefield lives near Austin with his family.

Wakefield has set up the non-profit Strategic Autism Initiative to commission studies into the condition, and is currently listed as a director of a company called Medical Interventions for Autism and another called the Autism Media Channel.

In 2016, Wakefield directed the anti-vaccination film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe.