Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them

by Jennifer Wright

Today you may have heard from a vocal minority of people who do not believe in vaccination. Many of those people distrust vaccines because in 1998 a gastroenterologist named Andrew Wakefield published a paper in the Lancet claiming there was a link between children receiving the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) and children developing autism. Wakefield was a fraud. In 2010 he was stripped of his medical license. He was found to have conducted unethical experiments and accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from lawyers attempting to sue the makers of MMR vaccines.34 Wakefield was also attempting to create a new measles vaccine and would have profited handsomely if the MMR vaccine was discredited. He preyed upon people’s fears and their concern for their children in order to obtain personal advantage. After an investigation by the intrepid Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer, it was found that the medical histories of all twelve children in Wakefield’s study had been misrepresented.35 In 2010 the editor of the Lancet issued the following retraction: “it was utterly clear, without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the paper were utterly false.”