Andrew Wakefield

Lore & Background

Andrew Jeremy Wakefield was born on 3 September 1956 at the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital in Taplow, Buckinghamshire, England, to Graham Wakefield, a neurologist, and Bridget d'Estouteville Matthews, a general practitioner. He attended King Edward's School, Bath, as a day pupil and later studied medicine at St Mary's Hospital Medical School, qualifying in 1981. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1985. From 1986 to 1989, he was at the University of Toronto studying small intestine transplantation, then returned to the UK to join the Royal Free Hospital in London in the 1990s, working on the liver transplant programme and later on inflammatory bowel disease.

Reader's Guide

Wakefield's significance lies in his fraudulent 1998 Lancet paper, which falsely linked the MMR vaccine to autism. The study was later retracted after an investigation by The Sunday Times reporter Brian Deer revealed undisclosed financial conflicts of interest, including that Wakefield reportedly stood to earn up to US$43 million per year selling test kits. The General Medical Council found him dishonest, and he was struck off the UK medical register in 2010. His work caused a sharp decline in vaccination uptake, leading to measles outbreaks and deaths worldwide. He subsequently became a prominent anti-vaccine activist, directing the 2016 film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe and promoting discredited claims during the COVID-19 pandemic. His legacy is that of a discredited figure whose actions undermined public health.

Did You Know?

• Wakefield was a senior surgeon and honorary consultant in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free Hospital before resigning in 2001.
• He co-founded the Thoughtful House research centre in Austin, Texas, in 2004 and served as its executive director until February 2010.
• The 1998 Lancet paper was fully retracted in 2010 after the GMC found elements had been falsified and the journal had been deceived.
• In 2016, Wakefield directed the anti-vaccination film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, which was removed from the Tribeca Film Festival by Robert De Niro.