From hero to zero

Abstract

Andrew Wakefield was once the media’s darling—but a new study unravels why they turned against him. Michael Fitzpatrick reports

The British media, once captivated by Andrew Wakefield, the former researcher at London’s Royal Free Hospital whose pronouncements a decade ago launched the scare linking autism and the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, have now turned against him. In February 2008 a study of measles antibodies in 250 children who had been given the vaccine (including 98 children with autism and control groups of children with special educational needs and typically developing children) provided further powerful evidence against any link with autism. The media response was extensive and overwhelmingly supportive of the case for the safety of the MMR vaccine. How times change.

In her authoritative survey of media coverage of the MMR controversy at its height in 2002, Tammy Boyce, a researcher in media studies at Cardiff University, details the media’s influential bias against the MMR vaccine.¹ As she puts it, “The media coverage told parents not only what to think, but also how to think about the MMR vaccine, that the vaccine might be unsafe and science and the government could not be trusted.” She shows how much of the press took Dr Wakefield at face value, as a maverick and martyr, and failed to give the public an accurate account of the weakness of his case when weighed against the scientific evidence. The result was that newspaper, radio, and television coverage exacerbated popular fears, leading to a significant fall in uptake of the vaccine and leaving a substantial number of children vulnerable to measles outbreaks.

But the media are fickle in their loyalties. In 2002 Lorraine Fraser was lauded as health reporter of the year for her series of militantly anti-MMR articles in the Daily Telegraph. By the close of 2003 the climate had begun to change, and the Guardian’s Ben Goldacre won the best feature prize at the British science writers awards for an article that criticised Dr Wakefield and his anti-MMR campaign. In summer 2007 the Observer published a routine anti-MMR feature. This included all the familiar elements: the leak of an unpublished (and rapidly discredited) paper purporting to substantiate the anti-MMR case; the endorsement of a hitherto unknown scientist (who was soon shown to be a close collaborator of Dr Wakefield and also on the expert witness payroll in the anti-MMR litigation); and a sycophantic interview with Dr Wakefield by a journalist who was not a specialist science or health writer. Whereas a few years earlier such a feature might have given this journalist a chance of an award, now it provoked a storm of complaint from the pro-MMR lobby, in a display of vigour that was conspicuously absent at the height of the controversy.

Dr Wakefield has learnt to his cost the capriciousness of the celebrity culture of which he was once a beneficiary. In June 2002 he was described as “a handsome, glossy-haired, charismatic hero to families of autistic children in this country and America,” in one of many fawning accounts (this one was in the Telegraph Magazine). He was played as the “caring, listening doctor” by Hugh Bonneville in the hagiographical television docudrama Hear the Silence in December 2003. Yet in November 2004 Dr Wakefield was being pursued by investigative journalist Brian Deer in another television programme, refusing to answer questions about allegations of financial conflicts of interest and ethical violations in his research (the subject of ongoing fitness to practise proceedings at the General Medical Council).

By the summer of 2007 Dr Wakefield found himself linked in the press to reports of a settlement made by his former employer, the Royal Free Hospital, in respect of complications claimed to have been sustained by a patient after a colonoscopy carried out by another doctor. He was also stigmatised for outbreaks of measles in 2006 and 2007, which were concentrated among Irish travellers and orthodox Jews, despite these being communities in which neither the mass media nor Dr Wakefield has much influence and in which a low uptake of MMR vaccine long predates his notorious Lancet paper. After briefly basking in the limelight Dr Wakefield has now been cast into the gutter. Once readily absolved by journalists of all responsibility for falling vaccine uptake, he now gets the blame for things over which he has no direct responsibility.

Much can be learnt from the MMR story, by doctors and scientists, journalists, politicians, and also, Tammy Boyce insists, by parents, who although sceptical of professional authority remain resistant to adopting the role of active consumer in matters of health—a role that the government increasingly thrusts upon them.

The press took Dr Wakefield at face value as a maverick and martyr and failed to give the public an accurate account of the weakness of his case