The scandal over the supposed link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism is one of the worst health scares in living memory. Hundreds of thousands of parents rejected one of the most fundamental safeguards for children on the basis of a false alarm. Today, it’s what we would call “fake news”.
Measles, a highly unpleasant disease which can lead to life-threatening infections of the lungs and brain, had been virtually eliminated in Britain following the introduction of MMR in 1988. Just decades before that, up to half a million children were infected every year, and about 100 died. Even in 1988, there were 80,000 cases, with 16 deaths.
Within just 10 years of MMR’s introduction, however, rates of infection were plummeting towards zero. But then a highly successful public health campaign was derailed. After the vaccine scare, the disease made a comeback, with more than 2,000 cases confirmed in 2012. Small children who had not been given either the initial MMR jab (usually at about one year old) or the usual supplementary jab — or both — found themselves at risk. By 2006, in London, almost half of five-year-olds had not received both jabs.
But it wasn’t just them. As Professor David Salisbury, head of immunisation at the Department of Health, warned, measles unchecked “spreads like wildfire”. Herd immunity, which prevents outbreaks of disease because so few people are vulnerable, began to break down. In 2013, Wales saw a measles epidemic and Gareth Colfer-Williams, 25, from Swansea, died. He had not had the MMR jab.
Cases of mumps, which can lead to viral meningitis, and rubella, also rose. As a result, Public Health England announced a vaccination campaign targeting one million children who had missed one or both jabs. Today, happily, vaccine take up is back to high levels.
Peddling a poisonous message once more
Unfortunately the man who triggered this entirely unnecessary health crisis is also back. Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced specialist who left the country after being struck off the medical register in 2010 by the General Medical Council (GMC), has returned to peddle his poisonous message once more. He continues to deny the scientific evidence and, by doing so, puts lives at risk.
Fake news is damaging but fake science is potentially lethal. Vaccination is probably the single greatest success story of the last century in medicine. We cannot allow it to be sacrificed to ignorance, prejudice and vested interests. Has Andrew Wakefield been emboldened by these developments? This is his first public visit to Britain since being struck off. The former gastroenterologist, described by the GMC as “dishonest,” “irresponsible” and having shown a “callous disregard for the suffering of children”, has lived in Texas for the past decade where he has continued to campaign against the MMR vaccine.
He is here to promote the film Vaxxed, which claims the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention manipulated and destroyed data in a study of the MMR vaccine and autism. It is a fanciful lie. Yet Wakefield was invited to speak at an event hosted at a private university in London.
The Centre for Homeopathic Education (CHE), running the event, even presented Wakefield with an award (though the university has since declared that it knew nothing about the nature of the event, has cut all ties with the CHE and “does not endorse the views of the film that hired our venue last night”).
Vaxxed was directed by Wakefield himself and produced by the Autism Media Channel, of which Wakefield is a director.
The reviews in the US, where it was released last April, have derided it as “pseudoscience” and “anti-vaccine propaganda”. Plans to screen it at the Curzon cinema, Soho, and at the European Parliament have been abandoned following protests. It is 19 years since Wakefield published his infamous 1998 research paper in The Lancet, which started the MMR and autism scare. Over the ensuing two decades, scores of subsequent studies have failed to confirm its findings, 10 of his co-authors publicly dissociated themselves from it and The Lancet itself withdrew the paper following the GMC verdict.
Wakefield’s fraudulent research destabilised carefully nurtured vaccination programmes which are acknowledged to have saved millions of lives worldwide — from smallpox, polio, diphtheria, typhoid, tetanus, meningitis — and measles.
We must join the battle against the vaccine-deniers and evidence must be our weapon. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, the only thing necessary for fraudsters to triumph is for honest doctors and scientists to do nothing.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2017
Lord Ara Darzi is a surgeon and director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London. He was a Labour health minister from 2007-09
