Andrew Wakefeid’s popularity in America

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There cannot be many doctors as thoroughly discredited and ostracised as Andrew Wakefield has been in the UK who are subsequently seen smiling at the inauguration ball of a US president and later discovered to be dating the Australian model Elle Macpherson.

But there he is. Wakefield was all but drummed out of Britain. The gastroenterologist lost his job, had his scientific paper linking the MMR vaccine and autism retracted by medical journal the Lancet and, in 2010, was struck off the medical register. He disappeared to the US and it was assumed he had gone to ground, having lost all credibility. He was a spent force, even though his name was often in the air as the anti-MMR views he seeded around the world led to many parents shunning the vaccine and outbreaks of measles wherever anyone had heard Wakefield’s creed.

It was known he was in Texas with those who shared his views on vaccines and conspiracy. But he was not a public figure. Until Donald Trump was elected US president of the United States.

Under an anti-establishment presidency, the anti-vaccine crusader, whose views appear to have become all the more entrenched by his drubbing at the hands of eminent scientists around the world, is back in the limelight and his new visibility could give his arguments even more currency. At one of President Trump’s inaugural balls in January last year, he was quoted as contemplating the overthrow of the (pro-vaccine) US medical establishment in words that brought to mind Trump himself. “What we need now is a huge shakeup at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – a huge shakeup. We need that to change dramatically.”

This week, it became clear that Wakefield has been accepted by celebrity-smitten US society. Separated from Carmel, the wife who was staunchly at his side throughout the UK debacle, he is now dating Elle Macpherson, a supermodel with her own nutrition brand. He was photographed this week kissing her on an organic farm in Miami.

In fact, Wakefield never did run and hide. From the very beginning, he had supporters who hailed him as a hero victimised by the medical establishment in the UK which, they believed, was in hock to big pharma. The perpetual cry of the anti-vaxxers is that you can’t trust the drug industry – which is only interested in profits and not people – to tell you the truth.

There are plenty of vaccine sceptics in the US and, as everywhere, parents of autistic children looking for answers. Wakefield went to Texas, working with autism-related charities and businesses. In 2005, while still a registered medical practitioner, he became director of the Thoughtful House Center for Children, an autism treatment and education centre in Austin (now known as Johnson Center for Child Health and Development), but resigned after losing his licence.

He then founded the Strategic Autism Initiative the same year, and ran it with Polly Tommey, a British mother with an autistic son, who has been a major collaborator and ally. Wakefield also founded the Autism Media Channel in Austin, which makes videos asserting a link between autism and the MMR vaccine.

The scientific establishment has its work cut out. Wakefield and his supporters insist mainstream science is wrong and will not be persuaded otherwise. The conspiracy theories of the anti-vax movement are all over the internet. The apparent acceptance of Wakefield into the upper echelons of American society can only boost them further.