Andrew Wakefield infamously published a paper in the journal Lancet, which was later retracted, that some say started the modern anti-vaccine movement.
At the press conference for the study, in 1998, he said:
“Again, this was very contentious and you would not get consensus from all members of the group on this, but that is my feeling, that the, the risk of this particular syndrome developing is related to the combined vaccine, the MMR, rather than the single vaccines.”
Andrew Wakefield
Since then, Wakefield:
- created a company to make a replacement for the MMR vaccine (1999)
- watched rates of MMR vaccination drop to new lows in the UK
- has 10 of 13 co-authors of his paper issue a partial retraction (2004)
- observed increasing numbers of measles outbreaks in the UK (2006)
- gets investigated by the General Medical Council (2007)
- has his paper fully retracted by the Lancet and he is erased from the medical register (2010)
Wakefield then moves to the United States to become an autism “expert” and later begins to make anti-vaccine movies.
More on Andrew Wakefield
- Andrew Wakefield Is Not A Fraud?
- Explaining the Correlation of Autism After Vaccines
- Vaccines and Autism Redux
- About Those Research Papers Supporting the Vaccine/Autism Link
- How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Hurts Autistic Families
- Competing Anti-Vaccine Autism Theories
- Exposed: Andrew Wakefield and the MMR-autism fraud
- Brian Deer: the Lancet scandal
- The fall of Andrew Wakefield
- Secrets of the MMR Scare Timeline
- Wakefield’s many statements that MMR causes autism
- Andrew Wakefield discredited – a collection of his attacks on vaccines
- Wakefield Has Never Been, and Never Will Be, Exonerated
- Wakefield Tortures History
- Reviewing Wakefield’s VAXXED : Antivaccine propaganda at its most pernicious