The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines

In February 1998, a then-unknown British doctor, Andrew Wakefield, published a scientific paper in a top medical journal, The Lancet, that struck at the peace of young families everywhere. Researching twelve developmentally challenged children, he claimed to have found evidence that the lifesaving three-in-one vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella, MMR, caused a frightening "new syndrome" of autism and bowel disease. Parents were terrified, vaccination rates plummeted, and Wakefield emerged as a charismatic crusader, exporting epidemics of fear, guilt, and infectious disease to the United States and then the world. Turning his attention to all vaccines, he now leads a campaign against immunization with tens of thousands of supporters.

In The Doctor Who Fooled the World, Brian Deer, the man whose fearless reporting over more than a decade nailed the truth about Wakefield, cuts to the heart of the most damaging medical conspiracy of our time. In this page-turning true story, Deer reveals how Wakefield engineered the greatest public health crisis since the early years of AIDS. Laying bare rigged research, secret business schemes, and financial and commercial conflicts of interest, Deer unravels a shocking web of deceit. At the same time, he fights off lawsuits and smear campaigns to plot the chain of causality behind the now-discredited doctor's rise to influence. The only journalist to crack Wakefield's secrets, Deer explains how he gained legal access to patients' records, uncovering the truth about their histories and diagnoses, ultimately securing the paper's retraction. "Many people have had papers in The Lancet," Deer writes. "I have had one out."

Presenting readers with harrowing portraits of children with autism, as well as the stories of parents desperately questing for answers, this is, above all, a human story of ambition gone wrong. A riveting exercise in old-school journalism, The Doctor Who Fooled the World is also a tale of one man's pursuit of greatness, thwarted when the facts don't fit.

Brian Deer is a veteran British investigative journalist, best known for his inquiries into the drug industry, medicine, and social issues for the Sunday Times of London. Among his awards, Deer was twice named the UK’s specialist reporter of the year, and in 2016 he was made Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) by York St. John University.