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Andrew Jeremy Wakefield (born 3 September 1956) is an English , anti-vaccine activist, and former senior surgeon. He was struck off the medical register for "serious professional misconduct" due to his involvement in the fraudulent 1998 Lancet MMR autism study that falsely claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
The publicity surrounding the study caused a sharp decline in vaccination uptake, leading to a number of outbreaks of measles around the world and many deaths as a result. He was a surgeon on the liver transplant programme at the Royal Free Hospital in London, and became a senior lecturer and honorary consultant in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free and University College School of Medicine. He resigned from his positions there in 2001 "by mutual agreement", then moved to the United States. In 2004, Wakefield co-founded and began working at the Thoughtful House research centre (later renamed the Johnson Center for Child Health and Development) in Austin, Texas. He served as executive director of the centre until February 2010, when he resigned in the wake of findings against him by the British General Medical Council which had struck him off their register. He has subsequently become known for his anti-vaccination activism.
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 Reproducibility his findings, and a 2004 investigation by Sunday Times reporter Brian Deer identified undisclosed financial conflicts of interest on Wakefield's part. Wakefield reportedly stood to earn up to $43 million per year selling test kits. Most of Wakefield's co-authors then withdrew their support for the study's interpretations, and the General Medical Council (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, 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 "there 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 .
After leaving King Edward's School, Wakefield studied medicine at St Mary's Hospital Medical School (now Imperial College School of Medicine), fully qualifying in 1981.
Wakefield became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1985.
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.
The Times reported in May 2010 that he was a medical advisor for Visceral, a UK charity that "researches bowel disease and developmental disorders".
Wakefield has set up the non-profit Strategic Autism Initiative to commission studies into the condition, and in 2013 was listed as a director of a company called Medical Interventions for Autism and another called the Autism Media Channel.
Although initially supported by Donald Trump, who appeared with him in inauguration photos, the emergence of a measles epidemic led Trump to reconsider his stance. Subsequently, social media platforms provided Wakefield with a fresh avenue to promote his anti-vaccination campaign, resulting in global repercussions, despite the fact that he has never directly treated a patient.
Wakefield directed the anti-vaccination film "" in 2016 which was removed from the Tribeca Festival by one of its co-founders, Robert De Niro, whose son is on the autism spectrum.
According to a 2020 article in The Telegraph, Wakefield had become prominent in the anti-vaccine movement and during the COVID-19 pandemic, promoted his discredited claims about vaccine safety. He appeared at summits warning that vaccines "will kill us" and called for widespread protests against their use.
In a 2025 interview with Democracy Now, investigative journalist Brian Deer identified Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Andrew Wakefield, and Del Bigtree as the core leaders of the anti-vaccine movement. During the interview, Deer offered his perspective on the Senate confirmation hearings for Kennedy Jr., specifically addressing the questioning by senators Bernie Sanders and Bill Cassidy regarding Kennedy's alignment with Wakefield's discredited theory linking vaccines to autism.
Later, in 1995, while conducting research into Crohn's disease, he was approached by Rosemary Kessick, the parent of a child with autism, who was seeking help with her son's bowel problems and autism; Kessick ran a group called Allergy Induced Autism. In 1996, Wakefield turned his attention to researching possible connections between the MMR vaccine and autism.
At the time of his MMR research study, Wakefield was senior lecturer and honorary consultant in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine (from 2008, UCL Medical School). He resigned in 2001, by "mutual agreement and was made a fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists", and moved to the US in 2001 (or 2004, by another account). He was reportedly asked to leave the Royal Free Hospital after refusing a request to validate his 1998 Lancet paper with a controlled study.
Wakefield is barred from practising as a physician in the UK, and is not licensed in the US. He lives in the US where he has a following, including the anti-vaccinationist Jenny McCarthy, who wrote the foreword for Wakefield's autobiography, Callous Disregard. She has a son with autism-like symptoms that she believes were caused by the MMR vaccine. According to Deer, , Wakefield lives near Austin with his family.
These possible triggers were reported as MMR in eight cases, and measles infection in one. The paper was instantly controversial, leading to widespread publicity in the UK and the convening of a special panel of the UK's Medical Research Council the following month. One 2005 study in Japan found that there was no causal relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism in groups of children given the triple MMR vaccine and children who received individual measles, mumps and rubella vaccinations. In Japan, the MMR vaccine had been replaced with individual vaccinations in 1993.
Although the paper said that no causal connection had been proven, before it was published, Wakefield made statements at a press conference and in a video news release issued by the hospital, calling for suspension of the triple MMR vaccine until more research could be done. This was later criticized as 'science by press conference'. According to BBC News, it was this press conference, rather than the paper in The Lancet, that fuelled the MMR vaccination scare. The BBC report said he told journalists: "it was a 'moral issue' and he could no longer support the continued use of the three-in-one jab for measles, mumps and rubella. 'Urgent further research is needed to determine whether MMR may give rise to this complication in a small number of people,' Wakefield said at the time." He said, "If you give three viruses together, three live viruses, then you potentially increase the risk of an adverse event occurring, particularly when one of those viruses influences the immune system in the way that measles does." He suggested parents should opt for single vaccinations against measles, mumps and rubella, separated by gaps of one year. 60 Minutes interviewed him in November 2000, and he repeated these claims to the U.S. audience, providing a new focus for the nascent anti-vaccination movement in the U.S., which had been primarily concerned about thiomersal in vaccines.
In November 2001, Wakefield resigned from the Royal Free Hospital, saying, "I have been asked to go because my research results are unpopular." The medical school said that he had left "by mutual agreement". In February 2002, Wakefield stated: "What precipitated this crisis was the removal of the single vaccine, the removal of choice, and that is what has caused the furore—because the doctors, the gurus, are treating the public as though they are some kind of moronic mass who cannot make an informed decision for themselves."
In 2004, Wakefield began working at the Thoughtful House research centre in Austin, Texas. Wakefield served as executive director of Thoughtful House until February 2010, when he resigned in the wake of findings against him by the British General Medical Council.
In February 2004, the controversy resurfaced when Wakefield was accused of a conflict of interest. In The Sunday Times, Brian Deer reported that some of the parents of the 12 children in the study in The Lancet were recruited via a UK lawyer preparing a lawsuit against MMR manufacturers, and that the Royal Free Hospital had received ÂŁ55,000 from the UK's Legal Aid Board (now the Legal Services Commission) to pay for the research. Previously, in October 2003, the board had cut off public funding for the litigation against MMR manufacturers. Following an investigation of the allegations in The Sunday Times by the UK General Medical Council, Wakefield was charged with serious professional misconduct, including dishonesty. In December 2006, Deer, writing in The Sunday Times, further reported that in addition to the money they donated to the Royal Free Hospital, the lawyers responsible for the MMR lawsuit had paid Wakefield personally more than ÂŁ400,000, which he had not previously disclosed.
Twenty-four hours before the 2004 Sunday Times report by Deer, The Lancets editor Richard Horton responded to the investigation in a public statement, describing Wakefield's research as "fatally flawed" and said he believed the paper would have been rejected as biased if the peer reviewers had been aware of Wakefield's conflict of interest. Ten of Wakefield's twelve co-authors of the paper in The Lancet later published a retraction of an interpretation. The section of the paper retracted read as follows:
The retraction stated:
In addition to Wakefield's unpublished initial patent submission, Deer released a copy of the published patent application. On page 1, the first paragraph of this stated:
Before describing the research in Wakefield's 1998 paper in The Lancet, at the same page this patent explicitly states that the use of the MMR vaccine causes autism:
According to Deer, a letter from Wakefield's lawyers to him dated 31 January 2005 said: "Dr Wakefield did not plan a rival vaccine."
In the Dispatches programme, Deer also revealed that Nicholas Chadwick, a researcher working under Wakefield's supervision in the Royal Free medical school, had failed to find measles virus in the children reported on in The Lancet.
In January 2005, Wakefield initiated libel proceedings against Channel 4, the independent production company Twenty Twenty and Brian Deer, The Sunday Times, and against Deer personally along with his website briandeer.com in the case Wakefield v Channel Four Television and Others 2006 EWHC 3289 (QB); 2007 94 BMLR 1. Within weeks of issuing his claims, however, Wakefield sought to have the action frozen until after the conclusion of General Medical Council proceedings against him. Channel 4 and Deer sought a High Court order compelling Wakefield to continue with his action, or discontinue it. After a hearing on 27 and 28 October 2005, Justice David Eady ruled against a stay of proceedings:
The judgment identified Channel 4's "very lengthy extracts" summarizing Deer's allegations against Wakefield:
Eady's ruling states that, "The views or conclusions of the GMC disciplinary body would not, so far as I can tell, be relevant or admissible", that Channel 4's allegations "go to undermine fundamentally the Claimant's professional integrity and honesty", and that, "It cannot seriously be suggested that priority should be given to GMC proceedings for the resolution of issues."
In December 2006, Deer released records obtained from the Legal Services Commission, showing that Richard Barr, a lawyer planning a class-action lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers, had paid ÂŁ435,643 in undisclosed fees to Wakefield for the purpose of building a case against the MMR vaccine. Those payments, The Sunday Times reported, had begun two years before publication of Wakefield's paper in The Lancet. Within days of Deer's report, Wakefield dropped all his libel actions and was ordered to pay all defendants' legal costs.
In June 2005, the BBC programme Horizon reported on an unnamed and unpublished study of blood samples from a group of 100 autistic children and 200 children without autism. They reported finding 99% of the samples contained no trace of the measles virus, and the samples that did contain the virus were just as likely to be from non-autistic children, i.e., only three samples contained the measles virus, one from an autistic child and two from a typically developing child. The study's authors found no evidence of any link between MMR and autism.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the United States National Academy of Sciences,
Wakefield denied the charges; on 28 January 2010, the GMC ruled against Wakefield on all issues, stating that he had "failed in his duties as a responsible consultant", acted against the interests of patients, and "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in his controversial research. On 24 May 2010, he was struck off the United Kingdom medical register. It was the harshest sanction that the GMC could impose, and effectively ended his career as a physician. In announcing the ruling, the GMC said that Wakefield had "brought the medical profession into disrepute", and no sanction short of erasing his name from the register was appropriate for the "serious and wide-ranging findings" of misconduct. On the same day, Wakefield's autobiography, Callous Disregard was published, using the same words as one of the charges against him ("he showed callous disregard for any distress or pain the children might suffer"). Wakefield argued that he had been unfairly treated by the medical and scientific establishment.
In April 2010, Deer expanded on laboratory aspects of his findings in a report in the BMJ, recounting how normal clinical histopathology results (obtained from the Royal Free hospital) had been subjected to wholesale changes, from normal to abnormal, in the medical school and published in The Lancet. On 2 January 2011, Deer provided two tables comparing the data on the twelve children, showing the original hospital data and the data with the wholesale changes as used in the 1998 The Lancet article.
On 5 January 2011, BMJ published an article by Brian Deer entitled "How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed". Deer said that, based on examination of the medical records of the 12 children in the original study, his research had found:
In an accompanying editorial, BMJ editors said:
The British Medical Journal editorial concluded that Wakefield's paper was an "elaborate fraud".
In a BMJ follow-up article on 11 January 2011, Deer stated that Wakefield had planned to capitalize on the MMR vaccination scare provoked by his paper. He said that based upon documents he had obtained under Freedom of information legislation, Wakefield—in partnership with the father of one of the boys in the study—had planned to launch a venture on the back of an MMR vaccination scare that would profit from new medical tests and "litigation driven testing". The Washington Post reported that Deer said that Wakefield predicted he "could make more than $43 million a year from diagnostic kits" for the new condition, autistic enterocolitis. According to Deer's report in BMJ, the ventures, Immunospecifics Biotechnologies Ltd and Carmel Healthcare Ltd—named after Wakefield's wife—failed after Wakefield's superiors at University College London's medical school gave him a two-page letter that said:
WebMD reported on Deer's BMJ report, saying that the $43 million predicted yearly profits would come from marketing kits for "diagnosing patients with autism" and that "the initial market for the diagnostic will be litigation-driven testing of patients with AE autistic from both the UK and the US". According to WebMD, the BMJ article also claimed that Carmel Healthcare Ltd. would succeed in marketing products and developing a replacement vaccine if "public confidence in the MMR vaccine were damaged".
In October 2012, research published in PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, identified Wakefield's 1998 paper as the most cited retracted scientific paper, with 758 citations, and gave the "reason for retraction" as "fraud".
The following day, the editor of a specialist journal, NeuroToxicology, withdrew another Wakefield paper that was in press. The article, which concerned research on monkeys, had already been published online and sought to implicate vaccines in autism.
In May 2010, The American Journal of Gastroenterology retracted a paper of Wakefield's that used data from the 12 patients of the article in The Lancet.
On 5 January 2011, British Medical Journal editors recommended that Wakefield's other publications be scrutinized and retracted if need be.
In an Internet radio interview, Wakefield said the BMJ series "was utter nonsense" and denied "that he used the cases of the 12 children in his study to promote his business venture". Deer has filed financial disclosure forms and rejects Wakefield's claim that he is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. According to CNN, Wakefield said the patent he held was for "an 'over-the-counter nutritional supplement' that boosts the immune system". WebMD reported that Wakefield said he was the victim of "a ruthless, pragmatic attempt to crush any attempt to investigate valid vaccine safety concerns".
Wakefield says that Deer is a "hit man who was brought in to take him down" and that other scientists have simply taken Deer at his word. While on Anderson Cooper 360°, he said that he had not read the BMJ articles yet, but he denied their validity and denied that Deer had interviewed the families of the children in the study. He also urged viewers to read his book, Callous Disregard, which he said would explain why he was being targeted, to which Anderson Cooper replied: "But sir, if you're lying, then your book is also a lie. If your study is a lie, your book is a lie."
Wakefield later implied that there is a Cabal by public health officials and pharmaceutical companies to discredit him, including suggesting they pay bloggers to post rumours about him on websites or that they artificially inflated reports of deaths from measles.
Deer mentioned that all of Wakefield's previous libel actions had been dismissed or withdrawn.
In January 2012, Wakefield filed a defamation lawsuit in Texas state court against Deer, Fiona Godlee, and the BMJ for false accusations of fraud, seeking a jury trial in Travis County. The filing identified Wakefield as a resident of Austin, and cited the "Texas Long-Arm Statute" as justification for initiating the proceeding in Texas. The BMJ responded that it stood by its reports and would "defend the claim vigorously". In August 2012 District Court Judge Amy Meachum dismissed Wakefield's suit for lack of jurisdiction. Her ruling was upheld on appeal in September 2014 and Wakefield was ordered to pay all parties' costs.
On 5 April 2011, Deer was named the UK's specialist journalist of the year in the British Press Awards, organised by the Society of Editors. The judges said that Deer's investigation of Wakefield was a "tremendous righting of a wrong".
Wakefield's study and his claim that the MMR vaccine might cause autism led to a decline in vaccination rates in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, and a corresponding rise in measles and mumps infections, resulting in serious illness and deaths. His continued claims that the vaccine is harmful have contributed to a climate of distrust of all vaccines and the reemergence of other previously controlled diseases.
The Associated Press said:
WWAY, an ABC affiliate in Wilmington, North Carolina, said:
Paul HĂ©bert, editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) said:
A profile in a New York Times Magazine article commented:
In January 2011, CNN reported:
On 1 April 2011, the James Randi Educational Foundation awarded Wakefield the Pigasus Award for "refusal to face reality".
A 2011 journal article described the vaccine-autism connection as "the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years".
In 2011, Wakefield was at the top of the list of the worst doctors of 2011 in Medscape's list of "Physicians of the Year: Best and Worst". In January 2012, Time magazine named Wakefield in a list of "Great Science Frauds". In 2012 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement in Quackery award by the Good Thinking Society.
A writer from The New York Times, who was covering a 2011 event in Tomball, Texas where Wakefield spoke, was threatened by its organizer, Michelle Guppy: "Be nice to him, or we will hurt you." Guppy is the coordinator of the Houston Autism Disability Network.
In June 2012, a local court in Rimini, Italy, ruled that the MMR vaccination had caused autism in a 15-month-old boy. The court relied heavily on Wakefield's discredited Lancet paper and largely ignored the scientific evidence presented to it. The decision was appealed. On 13 February 2015, the decision was overturned by a Court of Appeals in Bologna.
In February 2015, Wakefield denied that he bore any responsibility for the measles epidemic that started at Disneyland. He also reaffirmed his discredited belief that "MMR contributes to the current autism epidemic". By that time at least 166 measles cases had been reported. Paul Offit did not agree, saying that the outbreak was "directly related to Dr. Wakefield's theory".
Filmmaker Miranda Bailey followed Wakefield and his wife Carmel and their children for five years filming a documentary about Wakefield as a person, The Pathological Optimist. According to Robert Ladendorf writing for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, Bailey attempted to remain neutral and add a "human touch", which Ladendorf says was successful. Wakefield is shown "as a soft-spoken but beleaguered family man trying to resurrect his reputation and raising money for his legal fund."
In 2018, The Skeptic awarded Wakefield the Rusty Razor award "for pseudoscience and bad critical thinking." The award is decided annually by readers' votes. Editor Deborah Hyde said, "Our contributors clearly felt that anti-vaccination damage is still a current issue, despite Mr. Wakefield first having come to public attention so long ago. These childhood diseases can do real damage, so we're proud to be an organisation that gets the good news out there. The evidence is overwhelming that vaccination is safe. Protect your children and your community by using it."
In 2022, Wakefield's fraudulent study was included on a list of "11 of the biggest lies in history".
On 24 April 2015, Wakefield received two standing ovations from the students at Life Chiropractic College West when he told them to oppose Senate Bill 277 (SB 277), a bill that proposes elimination of non-medical vaccine exemptions. Wakefield had previously been a featured speaker at a 2014 "California Jam" gathering of chiropractors, as well as a 2015 "California Jam" seminar, with continuing education credits, sponsored by Life Chiropractic College West. On 3 July 2015, Wakefield participated in a protest held in Santa Monica, California, against SB 277, a recently enacted bill which removed the personal belief exemption to school vaccine requirements in California state law.
Regarding his anti-vaccine advocacy, Wakefield has been described as a conspiracy theorist by ThinkProgress, The Washington Post, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Wired, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Steven Salzberg, and Paul Offit.
Early life and education
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, England. As a day pupil at the independent King Edward's School, Bath, he was captain of his local Rugby union team.
Career
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.
Claims of measles virus–Crohn's disease link
Back in the UK, he worked on the liver transplant programme at the Royal Free Hospital in London. In 1993, Wakefield attracted professional attention when he published reports in which he concluded that measles virus might cause Crohn's disease; and two years later he published a paper in The Lancet proposing a link between the measles vaccine and Crohn's disease. Subsequent research failed to confirm this hypothesis, with a group of experts in Britain reviewing a number of peer-reviewed studies in 1998 and concluding that the measles virus did not cause Crohn's disease, and neither did the MMR vaccine.
The Lancet fraud
On 28 February 1998, Wakefield was the lead author of a study of twelve autism spectrum that was published in The Lancet. The study proposed a new syndrome called autistic enterocolitis, and raised the possibility of a link between a novel form of bowel disease, autism, and the MMR vaccine. The authors said that the parents of eight of the twelve children linked what were described as "behavioural symptoms" with MMR, and reported that the onset of these symptoms began within two weeks of MMR vaccination.
Aftermath of initial controversy
Wakefield continued to conduct clinical research in the United States after leaving the Royal Free Hospital in December 2001. He joined a controversial American researcher, Jeff Bradstreet, at the International Child Development Resource Center, to conduct further studies on the possible relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Wakefield v Channel 4 Television and Others
In November 2004, Channel 4 broadcast a one-hour Dispatches investigation by reporter Brian Deer; the Toronto Star said Deer had "produced documentary evidence that Wakefield applied for a patent on a single-jab measles vaccine before his campaign against the MMR vaccine, raising questions about his motives".
Other concerns
Wakefield's data was also questioned; a former graduate student, who appeared in Deer's programme, later testified that Wakefield ignored laboratory data that conflicted with his hypothesis. An independent investigation of a collaborating laboratory questioned the accuracy of the data underpinning Wakefield's claims.
Immunization Safety Review Committee (2026). 9780309532754, Institute of Medicine. . ISBN 9780309532754 along with the CDC and the UK National Health Service, have found no link between vaccines and autism. Reviews in the medical literature have also found no link between the MMR vaccine and autism or with bowel disease, which Wakefield called "autistic enterocolitis".
General Medical Council hearings
Between July 2007 and May 2010, a 217-day "fitness to practise" hearing of the UK General Medical Council examined charges of Medical ethics against Wakefield and two colleagues involved in the paper in The Lancet. The charges included that he:
Fraud and conflict of interest allegations
In February 2009, The Sunday Times reported that a further investigation by the newspaper had revealed that Wakefield "changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism", citing evidence obtained by the newspaper from medical records and interviews with witnesses, and supported by evidence presented to the GMC.
Journal retractions
On 2 February 2010, The Lancet formally retracted Wakefield's 1998 paper. The retraction states: "The claims in the original paper that children were 'consecutively referred' and that investigations were 'approved' by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false."
Wakefield response
As of January 2011, Wakefield continued to maintain his innocence. In a press release, he stated,
Deer counter-response
Deer responded to Wakefield's charge by challenging Wakefield to sue him:
Epidemics, effects, and reception
Physicians, medical journals, and editors have made statements tying Wakefield's fraudulent actions to various epidemics and deaths. Michael J. Smith, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Louisville, an "infectious diseases expert who has studied the autism controversy's effect on immunization rates", said, "Clearly, the results of this Wakefield study have had repercussions."
Political activism
Wakefield was scheduled to testify before the Oregon Senate Health Care Committee on 9 March 2015, in opposition to Senate Bill 442, "a bill that would eliminate nonmedical exemptions from Oregon's school immunization law". The Oregon Chiropractic Association had invited him. The chairman of the committee then canceled the meeting "after it became clear that" Wakefield planned to testify. She denied that her decision had anything to do with Wakefield's plans.
Vaxxed film
In 2016, Wakefield directed the anti-vaccination propaganda film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe. The film purports to show "an appalling cover-up committed by the government agency charged with protecting the health of American citizens the ... an alarming deception that has contributed to the skyrocketing increase of autism and potentially the most catastrophic epidemic of our lifetime." The film was withdrawn from New York's 2016 Tribeca Film Festival after the festival's founder Robert De Niro (who has a child with autism) reversed his decision to include it. The film was also scheduled to be screened at the Mairie de Paris but was then moved to a small private cinema. Wakefield called this action censorship. Ian Lipkin, professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, writing in The Wall Street Journal, said: "If Vaxxed had been submitted as science fiction, it would merit attention for its story line, character development and dialogue. But as a documentary it misrepresents what science knows about autism, undermines public confidence in the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and attacks the integrity of legitimate scientists and public-health officials".
Selected works
Books
Journal articles
Films
Wakefield has directed the following films: 7th Chakra Films. Accessed 15 October, 2025.
See also
Notes
External links
Categories: 1956 Births, Living People, Academic Scandals, Alumni Of Imperial College London, Alumni Of St Mary's Hospital Medical School, British Anti-vaccination Activists, English Conspiracy Theorists, English Fraudsters, Medical Controversies In The United Kingdom, Medical Doctors Struck Off By The General Medical Council, Medical Scandals In The United Kingdom, Place Of Birth Missing, People Educated At King Edward's School, Bath, People Involved In Scientific Misconduct Incidents, Mmr Vaccine And Autism
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