The Doctor Who Fooled the World Read online

  THE DOCTOR WHO FOOLED THE WORLD

  Brian Deer is a veteran British investigative journalist, best known for his inquiries into the drug industry, medicine, and social issues for The Sunday Times of London. Among his awards, Deer was twice named the UK’s specialist reporter of the year, and in 2016 he was made Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) by York St John University.

  Scribe Publications

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  2 John Street, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  This edition published by arrangement with Johns Hopkins University Press

  Published by Scribe in ANZ and the United Kingdom in 2020

  Copyright © Brian Deer 2020

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

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  For additional information about sources for quotations and facts cited in the book, please see the Note to Readers on page 379.

  9781925713688 (Australian edition)

  9781911617808 (UK edition)

  9781925938142 (ebook)

  Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

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  O what a tangled web we weave,

  When first we practise to deceive!

  WALTER SCOTT, MARMION

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: Resurrection

  BIG IDEAS

  1. The Guinness Moment

  2. It Must Be Measles

  3. Quests Collide

  4. The Pilot Study

  5. Child Four

  6. A Moral Issue

  SECRET SCHEMES

  7. Everybody Knows

  8. First Contact

  9. The Deal

  10. Trouble in the Labs

  11. Spartanburg Science

  12. Asked and Answered

  13. Turn of the Century

  14. On Capitol Hill

  15. Letting Go

  16. The Bridge

  17. Unblinded

  EXPOSED

  18. Assignment

  19. Cracking the Coombe

  20. The Spoiler

  21. Texas

  22. Nothing As It Seems

  23. Sesame Street

  24. Enterocolitis

  25. We Can Reveal

  26. Cry Smear

  27. An Elaborate Fraud

  AVENGED

  28. Rock Bottom

  29. Payback Time

  30. Vaxxed

  31. Wakefield’s World

  32. Cause and Affect

  Epilogue: A Wonderful Doctor

  Timeline

  Note to Readers

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  Resurrection

  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 don’t 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 there’s anyone important here,” he says, unzipping a smirk at his proximity to power. “If I can prevail upon them.”

  The picture is shaky and doesn’t last long: two-and-a-half minutes of sideways-turned images, streamed live on Periscope, a self-broadcasting app, from that night’s most exclusive event. A muffled beat thumps. Spotlights blaze. Secret Service agents take up positions.

  To some of us watching—as I was, from London—he looked like the perfect party guest. People once said he was “handsome,” even “hot,” with a sportsman’s 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. You’d think the Prince of Darkness had stepped onto the dance floor. For this was Andrew Wakefield, a disgraced former doctor who’d been booted from his profession on charges of fraud, dishonesty, and a “callous disregard” for children’s 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 he’d 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 Shipman—who serially murdered two hundred of his patients—had 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 history’s “great science frauds.” And the Daily News spat that he’d been “shamed before the world,” under the headline:

  Hippocrates would puke

  His fall wasn’t recent, or easily missed by Trump’s team tasked to check the night’s guest list. By now, his disrepute was both acute and chronic, absorbed into popular culture. He’d 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. Wakefield’s 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 night’s 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 Sinatra’s 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, I’d tracked him for the Sunday Times newspaper in London. With national press awards, and even an honorary doctorate, I’d become the Abraham Van Helsing to our subject’s Count Dracula, who now appeared to be climbing from his grave.

  He’d originally acquired profile on my side of the Atlantic, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Back in the day, he’d been nobody: a doctor without patients at a third-rate London hospital and medical schoo
l. He’d been a laboratory gastroenterologist, a former trainee gut surgeon, most relevantly defined by what he wasn’t. He wasn’t a virologist, immunologist, or epidemiologist. He wasn’t a neurologist, psychologist, or psychiatrist. He wasn’t a pediatrician or clinician.

  As time passed, however, he became a global player—a man with his fingerprints on nations. But he didn’t 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.

  I’d 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.

  In time, he’d take aim at pretty much any vaccine, from hepatitis B to human papillomavirus. But, in the beginning, there was one in his crosshairs. This was a three-in-one shot against measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR), which he argued was the cause of a rising tide of “regressive” autism, in which infants lost language and skills. “Sufferers have to live in a silent world of their own unable to communicate,” he warned.

  Across Britain, no surprise, young families were petrified. From the hospital where he worked—and more particularly, from its medical school—he launched a crusade, triggering a public health crisis unrivaled since the early years of AIDS. Immunization rates plummeted. Killer diseases returned. And countless parents of children with developmental issues, who’d followed doctors’ orders and vaccinated their kids, endured the horror of blaming themselves.

  It has made me so bitter and twisted. I feel so guilty.

  Eight years ago I made a tragic mistake as a parent.

  We’d convinced ourselves it was nothing we had done. Now we knew it was our fault.

  At the time, I ignored him. I’d looked into vaccines, and I thought that his paper stank. His findings were too cute, too eerily familiar. But I assumed they were impossible to check. Among my bigger stories had been medical investigations (especially chasing fraud and drug industry scams), and I reckoned that the proofs of what Wakefield had done would take more than a lifetime to unearth. They’d be buried in the vaults of patient confidentiality, as accessible as Trump’s tax returns.

  But then, five years later, all that changed with a topical feature assignment. By then, the “MMR doctor” was so celebrated in Britain that anything new would get a “good show,” as journalists used to say in the golden age of ink on paper. So I interviewed the mother of a developmentally challenged boy whose details were anonymized in that Lancet report. And there began Wakefield’s end.

  Nothing came easy. He refused to be interviewed, and ran away when I approached him with questions. The Lancet defended him. The medical establishment protected him. Other journalists waged war on me. But, as I pressed on, asking questions, gathering documents, and resisting lawsuits that he brought to try to gag me, his report was retracted as “utterly false,” and his doctoring days were done.

  “Many people have had papers in The Lancet,” I’d quip (with shameless immodesty, yet impeccable timing). “But I have had one out.”

  It was what reporters like me would call a “result.” So I planned to move on to other projects. What I’d long looked forward to was to take a pop at statins—the uberblockbuster, anticholesterol class of drugs—including what was in those days the top prescribed medicine. Not because I knew anything that nobody had spotted, but because with Big Pharma there’s always something going on, and like with Mount Everest, it was there.

  But unlike the killer Shipman, who died in his cell, Wakefield wouldn’t leave the stage. He’d labored since the beginning to make it in America: appearing on 60 Minutes, addressing congressional committees, and schlepping round a network of anti-vaccine-tinged conferences.

  And now he’d been noticed by “the Donald.”

  “When I was growing up, autism wasn’t really a factor, and now all of a sudden, it’s an epidemic,” the future forty-fifth president of the United States had declared, while still a mere billionaire property developer with a slot on reality TV. “Everybody has a theory,” he told a local newspaper, before unleashing a one-man Twitter storm on the subject. “My theory—and I study it because I have young children—my theory is the shots.”

  It wasn’t his theory. He’d gotten it from Wakefield, whether or not he knew of its provenance. And just three months before the election that stunned the world, a Republican chiropractor and high-dollar donor who ran a combined medical and legal service for people in car crashes brought them fender-to-fender. They huddled for nearly an hour in Kissimmee, central Florida, then posed for photographs beside a furled state flag: Trump mouth open, as if unable not to talk; Wakefield grinning, hands clasped near his groin, in a black suit jacket, blue denim jeans, and tan boots, scuffed at the toes.

  They had so much in common. And I’m sure Wakefield sensed this. In many ways, they were two of a kind. At the time, both were frantically crisscrossing the country (one in a bespoke Boeing 757, the other with a black recreational vehicle) pursuing uncannily similar objectives. The candidate’s priority was the white working class. Hurt. Angry. Neglected. The ex-doctor, meanwhile, sought a subset of parents—parents of children with autism and similar issues—who were hurt, angry, and neglected.

  People sometimes spoke as if being on “the spectrum” was fashionable: a quirk of hard wiring. And it can be. But for mothers and fathers of kids with no-quibble autism, its first symptoms often heralded a desperate quest through a labyrinth of hope and fear.

  If you haven’t this experience, just pause to imagine it. The most precious thing in life, born so perfect, now with first words and steps. And then, sometimes subtly or sometimes so suddenly, there’s a difference. There’s something wrong. A son or daughter won’t speak, doesn’t want to be held, or obsessively watches their fingers. Maybe they have seizures, which seem to come out of nowhere. Possibly, they have a profound disability.

  Then along comes a hero, with what sounds like solutions to riddles that others can’t solve. As one Wakefield associate told the New York Times, “To our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one.”

  Others compared him to the Italian astronomer Galileo, who battled the Roman Catholic Church. “One of the last honest doctors in the western world . . . a genius . . . a beacon of scientific integrity . . . a brilliant clinical scientist of high moral character . . . incredible courage, integrity and humility.”

  On such versions of the affair, this man was a visionary, crushed in a cynical conspiracy. The way he told it, he’d done nothing wrong. Every complaint leveled against him was a lie. Rather, he’d fallen foul of a hideous plot—by governments, drug companies, and especially by me—covering up horrific injuries to kids.

  “It was a strategy,” he declared of the revelations that ruined him. “A deliberate strategy. A public relations strategy to say, ‘we discredit this man, we isolate him from his colleagues, we destroy his career, and we say to other physicians who might dare to get involved in this: this is what will happen to you.’ ”

  But while Trump spoke of hope—with a campaign slogan to “make America great again”—as Wakefield had trekked around the United States that year, he’d only brought shades of suffering. Just weeks before the ball, a YouGov opinion poll found that nearly one third of Americans now feared that vaccines “definitely” or “probably” caused autism. Immunization rates were falling as parents hurried to pediatricians to seek exemptions from the shots for their children. And not three mon
ths after that inauguration night, a resurgence of measles would explode around the planet, as what I thought I’d snuffed out reignited.

  Reports began in Minnesota, where Wakefield had campaigned. Then more poured in from Europe, South America, Asia, and Australasia, as a disease once slated for universal eradication returned to sicken and kill. And by the time the new president would seek reelection, the United States had experienced its worst outbreaks in three decades, while international agencies described “vaccine hesitancy” as one of the top ten threats to human health.

  It wasn’t just one man. Other gurus were available—most notably an actor, Jenny McCarthy, and a lawyer, Robert Kennedy—with their own critiques of vaccines. Controversy stretched back at least a thousand years to when the Chinese learned to protect against smallpox. But it was Wakefield who stepped up to seize the modern crown as the “father of the anti-vaccine movement.” And, like with L. Ron Hubbard who invented Scientology, or Joseph Smith who received the Mormon golden plates, to evaluate the merits of the creed he preached, you didn’t need sermons on -isms and -ologies. You needed to know the man.

  To me, his story is like The Wizard of Oz: a story in more ways than one. Here’s the protagonist on a twisting road, with real people and specific facts that should amaze, or anger, any right-thinking reader. And here, too, is another story, a “We can reveal,” laying bare how the tricks were done. The curtain is lifted, and the machinery displayed. The wizard himself is exposed.

  He knew what he was doing. He felt it was his right. Rules were for suckers. He was special. But his road to Trump’s ball had been his own desperate quest: through a sinister side of science that threatens us all. If he could do what he did—and I’ll show you what he did—who else is doing what in the hospitals and laboratories that we may one day look to for our lives? And who else is out there, fooling the world, behind charisma and talk of conspiracy?

  Laughing into his phone at the Liberty Ball, Wakefield signed off with glee. “I’m just going to bring some pictures of Donald,” he promised.