https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02989-9
The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield’s War on Vaccines Brian Deer Scribe UK (2020)
Since Edward Jenner’s first scientific description of vaccination in 1798 — using cowpox pus to protect against smallpox — there has been push back. Throughout the nineteenth century, in the United States and the United Kingdom, there were cycles of increased smallpox vaccination, rising opposition, drops in immunization coverage, outbreaks, better appreciation of vaccination, more of it, and more protests. This stand-off eased around the start of the twentieth century when, with sanitation and medical care improving, public health placed less emphasis on compulsory vaccination. Probably the last time the world waited with bated breath for a vaccine — against polio in the 1950s — it was welcomed with open arms.
The modern wave of vaccine scepticism has its origins in the 1970s. That was when concerns (later determined to be unfounded) about the safety of a whole-cell vaccine against pertussis, or whooping cough, came to the fore in many high-income countries. In the 1980s and 1990s, a few organized groups opposed to vaccines emerged in many countries, including the United Kingdom.
It was in this context that, in 1998, Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues published a now-infamous and retracted paper in The Lancet, following which, in 2010, Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register for misconduct by the country’s General Medical Council. The fraudulent work on 12 children promoted a non-existent connection between autism and the MMR vaccine, used against measles, mumps and rubella. It propelled Wakefield to notoriety and turbocharged the anti-vaccine movement. He remains a headliner on the international vaccine-sceptic circuit as diseases once vanquished return because of falling rates of immunization. Many large epidemiological studies have found no difference in risk of developmental delays between children who receive the MMR vaccine and those who don’t1.
