To many of those gathered at this elegant stately home in Wiltshire, just one word describes the man they have come to see.
‘He’s a hero,’ says Dr Richard House, a 70-year-old university lecturer, whose bright blue T-shirt bearing the phrase ‘World Homicide Organisation’ gives a clue as to his beliefs about the medical establishment. ‘He stood up for the truth – and was destroyed for it.’
This sentiment is echoed among many of the 120-strong crowd, who have each paid £35 – and in many cases travelled from far and wide – to hear a man who has been given a few other labels over the years.
‘Liar’, ‘crank’, ‘charlatan’ and ‘corrupt’ are certainly among them – as well as ‘father of the modern conspiracy theory’.
His name, emblazoned on posters across this venue, is ‘Dr Andy Wakefield’ – although despite his continued use of that professional honorific, he was struck off Britain’s medical register 15 years ago.
And he has come here on a chilly October evening to Hartham Park – normally the setting for weddings and corporate retreats – to deliver an ‘urgent address for the UK’.
The event – Wakefield’s second public appearance in Britain in recent weeks – is widely seen as an attempt at domestic reinvention by a man whose name has become a byword for misinformation, quackery and fraud.
So widespread is his infamy that his story barely needs repeating. But in brief: in 1998, Wakefield, then an obscure gastroenterologist at London’s Royal Free Hospital, co-authored an article in The Lancet suggesting a possible link between the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine and the onset of autism, as well as proposing that it caused a previously unidentified form of paediatric bowel disease.
‘Dr Andy Wakefield’ – although despite his continued use of that professional honorific, he was struck off Britain’s medical register 15 years ago
Alarm bells should already have been ringing when Wakefield held a Press conference to announce his article – at which he recommended that parents reject the combined MMR jab in favour of single vaccines.
The effect was swift, profound and long-lasting. Across the UK, vaccination rates plummeted, and in the years that followed, MMR uptake dropped from 92 to 73 per cent nationally – and as low as 50 per cent in some London boroughs.
Measles, once all but eliminated, began to reappear. This year alone in Britain, there have been 772 confirmed cases, while in July a child in Liverpool died from the disease. Globally, the impact was similar, as vaccine fears, fuelled in large by Wakefield’s claims, spread across borders.
In time, thanks to dogged work by investigative journalists, it emerged that Wakefield had selectively edited medical histories to fit his spurious hypothesis, while invasive procedures such as colonoscopies and lumbar punctures had been conducted on children without approval.
Scientists and clinicians soon debunked his research, finding that his ‘study’ had been based on a tiny sample size of just 12 children, suffered from a lack of controls and featured conclusions based on anecdotal reporting rather than replicable data.
Almost as bad, perhaps, were his financial conflicts of interest. Wakefield had failed to disclose that he had received £435,000 from a lawyer preparing a class-action lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers, and that he had also filed a patent for his own measles vaccine, which would have been a direct competitor to the MMR jab.
Finally, in 2010, the UK’s General Medical Council found Wakefield guilty of serious professional misconduct, including dishonesty and unethical treatment of children. He was struck off; The Lancet formally retracted his paper, branding it ‘utterly false’; and the British Medical Journal described it as ‘fraudulent’.
Only last month, Wakefield’s crusade was given a further boost when Donald Trump (pictured together in 2016) launched into a blistering and unexpected broadside from the Oval Office
That should have been that –and this cheat and egotist should have slunk into obscurity.
Instead, the self-promoting Wakefield reinvented himself in America and found extraordinary fame and fortune there, being welcomed as a whistleblower and martyr. The liberal city of Austin, Texas – which boasts a thriving ‘alternative medicine’ scene and plenty of money – has proved a particularly fertile ground for him.
Wakefield became the executive director there of the Thoughtful House, a ‘treatment centre’ for autistic children, paying himself a handsome salary of about £250,000.
It may be no coincidence that Texas has recently been suffering the worst outbreak of measles in America this century, with more than 760 cases and two fatalities among children, neither of whom had underlying health conditions – and neither of whom had been vaccinated.
At first the privately-educated Wakefield was joined in Texas by his wife Carmel – who had stood by his side throughout his fall from grace – and their four children, with the family settling into a multi-million-pound five-bedroom ‘ranch house’.
In 2017, Wakefield left Carmel to ‘find himself’ – and was photographed in an embrace with Australian supermodel Elle Macpherson soon afterwards.
The subsequent divorce from Carmel was swift – and Wakefield gave every appearance of relishing having a woman Time magazine had nicknamed The Body as a girlfriend.
Just last year, Macpherson drew sharp criticism after she suggested she had rejected chemotherapy and surgery after her 2017 breast cancer diagnosis, instead pursuing an ‘intuitive, heart-led, holistic’ programme to treat the disease.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump’s eccentric health secretary and a confirmed anti-vaxxer, has called Wakefield ‘among the most unjustly vilified figures of modern history’
David Marshall, a retired GP, believes Wakefield has been falsely maligned by the medical establishment and his wife, Marian, agrees
In short, America’s surging anti-vax movement – which has enjoyed a huge boost, of course, since the Covid pandemic – has represented an extremely lucrative audience for Wakefield, 69.
Austin in particular is stuffed with richly funded, anti-vaxxer, pro-Wakefield groups – and the man himself has hailed ‘a revolution in America’.
In 2016 his slick, emotionally manipulative documentary, Vaxxed: From Cover-Up To Catastrophe – billed as ‘the film they don’t want you to see’ – made more than £1million at the box office worldwide.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump’s eccentric health secretary and a confirmed anti-vaxxer, has called him ‘among the most unjustly vilified figures of modern history’.
Only last month, Wakefield’s crusade was given a further boost when Trump launched into a blistering and unexpected broadside from the Oval Office, claiming that ‘beautiful’ babies were being ‘pumped’ full of vaccines like they were ‘horses’ and that ‘blends’ of jabs were harmful.
Trump went on to link the rise in autism rates among children to mothers taking paracetamol during pregnancy, stating that Tylenol (an American brand name for the painkiller) ‘is no good’ and that pregnant women should ‘fight like hell’ to avoid it.
To his supporters in his native Britain – and it appears there is no shortage of them – such dubious recognition is proof of Wakefield’s power of perseverance.
The Hartham Park event had been organised by the grandly named World Council For Health (WCH), which presents itself as a legitimate international body but in practice promotes pseudoscience and conspiracy theories.
Co-founded in 2021 by Dr Tess Lawrie, WCH has advocated against vaccines and lockdowns, suggesting that Covid-style mRNA jabs present an ‘imminent danger’ of cancer and suggesting that ‘electromagnetic radiation’ from 5G mobile phone masts ‘increases brain and thyroid cancer risks’.
Tonight, though, it is Wakefield they have come to see. David Marshall, a 78-year-old retired GP, tells me he believes Wakefield has been falsely maligned by the medical establishment.
‘It was a stitch-up,’ he says. ‘He never said that the MMR vaccine led to autism: he said he was seeing patients with particular symptoms. He simply made these observations – he spoke as he saw it and he was vilified for it.’
His wife Marian, 74, nodded in agreement. ‘We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to vaccine harm,’ she said.
Dr House – in the ‘World Homicide Organisation’ T-shirt – was even more emphatic. ‘Big Pharma was never going to let him be right. What he said all those years ago has turned out to be true – and they couldn’t allow that.’
He had travelled from Stroud with his friend Marcus Blackett, 63, a former teacher. ‘I’m totally against vaccination,’ Blackett said. ‘My instinct was always that Wakefield was right. I’d seen autism numbers rising and I wasn’t prepared to take the risk.’
He told me how, when his now 24-year-old son reached the age of 12, he agreed he should be vaccinated against measles, on the basis that contracting the disease can cause problems in puberty.
‘But when my wife returned from the doctor, she said that as they did not have the individual vaccines, he had been given the MMR vaccine. And almost immediately he started having seizures which gradually got worse – until at 16 he had a full ‘grand mal’ [the most severe kind].
‘Those seizures continue to this day and this all happened in the aftermath of the MMR vaccine.’
There were many stories like these among attendees – several of whom had had medical training. A woman in her early 60s – a retired GP from the North-West, who asked not to be named –explained that she no longer trusted conventional medicine.
‘As you get older, you realise that much of what we were taught in medical school is based on rigid dogma,’ she told me. She refused the Covid vaccine, but deems the phrase ‘anti-vaxxer’ derogatory. ‘It’s used to shut people down,’ she said. ‘I’m not anti-anything – I just want people to make informed choices. Right now, that’s almost impossible.’
It’s a sentiment that sounds reasonable – and I hoped to hear more when Wakefield was on stage. However, when I identified myself as a journalist from the Daily Mail, I was told I was ‘not welcome’ by a woman in a WCH T-shirt, who said it was her duty to ‘protect Dr Wakefield’.
Journalist Kathryn Knight at Hartham Park in Corsham,Wiltshire, where a 120-strong crowd, who have each paid £35 – and in many cases travelled from far and wide – to listen to Wakefield
Wakefield and his now ex-wife, Carmel, arriving with supporters at the General Medical Council in 2007, where he was accused of gross misconduct
When I politely remonstrated, she maintained that it was a private event – despite it being live-streamed online – and told me that ‘no mainstream media were invited,’ before berating me: ‘People like you are despicable!’ Well, despicable or not, I soon found a recording of the event online.
It opened with a booming recorded announcement, apparently by Wakefield: ‘Humanity stands at a crossroads. We must choose between freedom and fear, ignorance or truth, the Great Reset or the Great Freeset.’
Anyone familiar with conspiracy theories knows that the Great Reset is one of the most notorious – a discredited idea that a cabal
of powerful individuals are intent on establishing a totalitarian ‘world government’ with no individual freedom.
Wakefield – who has previously compared himself, somewhat immodestly, to Nelson Mandela – was introduced by WCH’s Tess Lawrie and walked on stage to rapturous applause.
He began by describing some of his original 12 case studies from his discredited 1998 Lancet article – including one boy who, he claimed, could say ‘helicopter’ before receiving the MMR vaccine, only to lose all speech three weeks after having the jab.
‘When this [scandal] broke,’ he continued, ‘I was up against the WHO, Unicef, Bill Gates, the drug companies, the UK government, the US government, the Academy of Paediatrics… and then there was me. The dice were loaded against me.’
It was a remarkable blend of self-mythologising, self-pity, false modesty and defiance.
Wakefield beamed as a video was played of President Trump warning about the supposed dangers of combined vaccines. ‘This is a moment we never thought we’d see,’ he said. ‘Trump and the news finally saying vaccines and autism in the same breath. The world has changed and I hope I can bring that energy here.’
We shall see. Outside this strange, anti-scientific bubble, the consequences of Wakefield’s legacy are all too real. Vaccine hesitancy is on the rise worldwide. Measles rates are surging.
And Wakefield, despite his ostensible disgrace, remains a central figure in a movement that public health experts say is costing lives. While he may have been a hero to those at Hartham Park on Tuesday, for one health expert he is the opposite.
‘I compare him to a supervillain,’ respected professor of health law and science policy Timothy Caulfield said last year.
‘You almost can’t overstate the harm he’s done. He’s part of a global wave of vaccine hesitancy that’s killing people – mostly children. And again, that sounds like hyperbole. But we know it’s true.’
