Andrew Wakefield

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Lore & Background

Andrew Jeremy 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, Buckinghamshire, 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 attended sixth form at Kingswood School Bath before going on to study medicine at St Mary's Hospital Medical School (now Imperial College School of Medicine), fully qualifying in 1981. He 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. 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 (GMC) 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.

Reader's Guide

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 The Sunday Times reporter Brian Deer identified undisclosed financial conflicts of interest on Wakefield's part. Wakefield reportedly stood to earn up to US$43 million per year selling test kits. Most of Wakefield's co-authors then withdrew their support for the study's interpretations, and the GMC 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, had 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 "[t]here is now no respectable body of opinion which supports [Wakefield's] hypothesis, that MMR vaccine and autism/enterocolitis are causally linked." In 2016 Wakefield directed the anti-vaccination film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe. According to a 2020 article in The Telegraph, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he promoted his discredited claims about vaccine safety, appeared at summits warning that vaccines "will kill us" and called for widespread protests against their use.

Did You Know?

• Wakefield reportedly stood to earn up to US$43 million per year selling test kits related to his discredited MMR-autism claims.
• The 1998 Lancet paper was based on a study of just twelve children with autism.
• Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register in 2010 for deliberate falsification of research published in The Lancet.
• He directed the anti-vaccination film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe in 2016.
• During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wakefield appeared at summits warning that vaccines 'will kill us' and called for widespread protests.