Andrew Wakefield
British former doctor
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2025 | Identified by investigative journalist Brian Deer as a core leader of the anti-vaccine movement during an interview on Democracy Now. |
2022 | Wakefield's fraudulent study was included on a list of '11 of the biggest lies in history'. |
2020 | Promoted discredited claims about vaccine safety during the COVID-19 pandemic, appearing at summits warning that vaccines 'will kill us'. |
2018 | The Skeptic awarded Wakefield the Rusty Razor award for pseudoscience and bad critical thinking. |
2016 | Wakefield's film 'Vaxxed' was withdrawn from the Tribeca Film Festival after festival founder Robert De Niro reversed his decision to include it. |
2016 | The film was also scheduled to be projected at the Mairie de Paris but was moved to a small private cinema, which Wakefield characterized as censorship. |
2016 | Directed the anti-vaccination documentary film 'Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe'. |
July 3 2015 | Wakefield participated in a protest in Santa Monica, California, against SB 277, a bill that removed personal belief exemptions to school vaccine requirements in California state law. |
April 24 2015 | Wakefield received two standing ovations from students at Life Chiropractic College West while speaking against Senate Bill 277, a bill proposing to eliminate non-medical vaccine exemptions. |
March 9 2015 | Wakefield was scheduled to testify before the Oregon Senate Health Care Committee against Senate Bill 442, which would eliminate nonmedical exemptions from Oregon's school immunization law. The meeting was ultimately canceled by the committee chairman. |
February 2015 | Wakefield denied responsibility for the Disneyland measles epidemic and reaffirmed his discredited belief about MMR and autism, by which time 166 measles cases had been reported. |
February 13 2015 | The Rimini court's decision was overturned by a Court of Appeals in Bologna. |
2013 | Listed as a director of Medical Interventions for Autism and the Autism Media Channel. |
October 2012 | Research published in PNAS identified Wakefield's 1998 paper as the most cited retracted scientific paper, with 758 citations, explicitly noting 'fraud' as the reason for retraction. |
June 2012 | A local court in Rimini, Italy ruled that MMR vaccination caused autism in a 15-month-old boy, heavily relying on Wakefield's discredited Lancet paper. |
January 2012 | Time magazine named Wakefield in a list of 'Great Science Frauds'. |
2011 | Wakefield was ranked at the top of Medscape's list of 'Worst Doctors of 2011'. |
April 1 2011 | The James Randi Educational Foundation awarded Wakefield the Pigasus Award for 'refusal to face reality'. |
January 2011 | CNN reported on the impact of Wakefield's fraudulent vaccine study, highlighting its consequences. |
January 11 2011 | Deer revealed Wakefield's plan to profit from the MMR vaccination scare, potentially making $43 million annually from diagnostic kits for a fabricated condition called 'autistic enterocolitis'. |
January 5 2011 | British Medical Journal editors recommended a comprehensive review and potential retraction of Wakefield's other publications. |
January 5 2011 | BMJ published Deer's article 'How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed', detailing fraudulent aspects of Wakefield's original research. |
January 2 2011 | Brian Deer provided comparative tables showing original hospital data and the modified data used in the 1998 Lancet article. |
May 2010 | The American Journal of Gastroenterology retracted a Wakefield paper that used data from the 12 patients in his original Lancet article. |
May 24 2010 | Wakefield is struck off the United Kingdom medical register, effectively ending his career as a physician. On the same day, his autobiography 'Callous Disregard' is published. |
April 2010 | Brian Deer expanded on his investigation, detailing how clinical histopathology results were altered from normal to abnormal in Wakefield's medical school research. |
February 2010 | Resigned from his position as executive director of the Thoughtful House research centre (renamed Johnson Center for Child Health and Development) following GMC findings. |
February 3 2010 | The editor of NeuroToxicology journal withdrew Wakefield's paper about vaccine research on monkeys, which had already been published online. |
February 2 2010 | The Lancet formally retracted Wakefield's 1998 paper, stating that claims about patient referral and ethics committee approval were proven false. |
January 28 2010 | GMC rules against Wakefield on all issues, finding that he failed in his duties as a responsible consultant and acted dishonestly and irresponsibly in his research. |
This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia article Andrew Wakefield, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.