How the anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield was adopted by Trump's America | Society

T There can not be many doctors as completely discredited and ostracized as Andrew Wakefield who was seen in the UK and who later discovered that he was dating the Australian model She Macpherson.

But he is here. Wakefield was almost excluded from Britain. The gastroenterologist lost his job, his scientific journal linking the MMR vaccine and autism retracted by the medical journal The Lancet and, in 2010, was removed from the medical register. He disappeared in the United States and it was assumed that he had gone to the ground, having lost all credibility. He was an exhausted force, even though his name was often in the air as the anti-MMR opinions that he sowed around the world have led many parents to avoid the vaccine and measles outbreaks wherever Someone had heard Wakefield's credo

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

Under an anti-establishment presidency, the anti-vaccine crusader, whose opinions seem to be all the more rooted by his beating at the hands Leading scientists from around the world, is back in the limelight and its new visibility could give more weight to its arguments. At one of President Trump's inaugural balls in January of last year, he was quoted as envisioning the overthrow of the American medical establishment (pro-vaccine) in terms that evoked him. – even Trump. "What we need now, it's a huge upheaval at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – a huge upheaval.We need that to change drastically."

That same month, Robert F Kennedy Jnr, skeptic about vaccines, announced that he would head a new federal panel on vaccine safety convened by Trump. This has not happened, but the possibility has shivered in the medical world.

This week, it became clear that Wakefield was accepted by the American celebrity society. Separated from Carmel, the woman who stood firmly with him throughout the British debacle, he now goes out with Elle Macpherson, a model with her own brand of nutrition. He was photographed this week kissing him on an organic farm in Miami.

In fact, Wakefield never ran and did not hide. From the start, he had supporters who considered him a victim hero of the medical establishment in the United Kingdom who, they believed, complained of big pharma. The perpetual cry of anti-vaxxers is that you can not trust the drug industry – which is only interested in profits and not people – to tell you the truth.

If Wakefield had the normal uncertainties of a research scientist, wondering what their research will prove, which had to be sprayed by the avalanche of criticism on Lancet's study. He and those around him now believe that there is a massive conspiracy to force vaccines on our children, run and funded by thriving pharmaceutical companies and those who take their shilling.

It has been 20 years since the crucial newspaper was published by the Lancet, one of the most respected medical journals in the world, in February 1998. Even at the press conference to launch the newspaper, the dean from the Royal Free Hospital in London, where Wakefield worked, was trying to calm speculation. The newspaper had only eight children – a series of cases, not a trial. But he claimed to find a link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, intestinal problems and autism in children. Little was known about the causes of autism. The paper was dynamite. Parents recalled that their autistic children would normally develop until they had MMR – in fact, it was around this age that symptoms often manifested, regardless of the age of onset. vaccination.

Wakefield could have taken criticism of the medical establishment on the chin, accepting that he might have been wrong and pursuing a promising career. But he refused to back down. In March, the Medical Research Council, which had been quickly instructed by the government to determine if there could be a problem with the MMR, said there was no evidence. Wakefield struggled, offering scientific articles by himself and his collaborators to try to prove the thesis. Their arguments were rejected. In 2001, he left his job at Royal Free. In 2004, allegations were published in the Sunday Times that Wakefield had been funded by the Council for Legal Aid while he was looking for evidence for parents of autistic children suing vaccine manufacturers to obtain compensation. In 2010, he was struck off the medical register and banned from practicing – the ultimate shame for a doctor.

At that time, he was in New York, insulting the British establishment and insisting that he was right. The decision of the General Medical Council was predictable, he said by phone. "It seemed to me that they had made this decision a long time ago, long before the evidence was heard.This is how the system deals with dissent.You isolate, discredit and give the" dissent ". example to other doctors and scientists not to get involved in this sort of thing.It is by examining the safety issues of vaccines, "he said.

There are many skeptics about vaccines in the United States and, like everywhere else, parents of autistic children are looking for answers. Wakefield went to Texas, working with charities related to autism and business. In 2005, while he was still a graduate doctor, he became director of the Children's Home Center, an education and autism treatment center in Austin (now known as Johnson Center for Health and Child Development). 19659003] He then founded the Strategic Autism Initiative the same year, and led it with Polly Tommey, a British mother with an autistic son, who was a collaborator and major ally. Wakefield also founded the Autism Media Channel in Austin, which makes videos asserting a link between autism and the MMR vaccine.

His most famous film is Vaxxed, directed by Wakefield, which premiered at the 2016 Tribeca Festival by Robert De Niro, the father of an autistic child. He alleges a concealment of the presumed link between MMR and autism by CDC – the Wakefield Institute said that it needed a reshuffle at Trump's inaugural ball. After the tumult that broke out and the discussions with the scientists, De Niro finally removed the film.

Many worried parents in the United States and Europe continue to avoid the MMR vaccine, fearing that this could precipitate autism in their child despite all the reassurances of the World Health Organization and the World Health Organization. public health authorities around the world. A measles outbreak in Minnesota in the spring of last year was caused by doubts about the MMR vaccine in the local Somali-American community, which had seen the incidence of autism rise. Wakefield had been a visitor to the community six or seven years earlier, telling them about the risk of autism.

Worldwide last year, measles cases climbed in Europe, according to the WHO. There has been a fourfold increase in 2017 with major epidemics in one in four countries. Festivalgoers were asked to get the jab, after infection rates in England tripled in a year. "More than 20,000 cases of measles and 35 lives lost in 2017 alone are a tragedy that we simply can not accept," said Dr. Zsuzsanna Jakab, WHO Regional Director for Europe in the United States. l & # 39; era. Romania, Italy and Ukraine were the most affected

. The loss of confidence in the MMR vaccine, which is very effective, has been questioned. There are ambitions to eradicate measles from the planet, but this will not be possible as long as confidence in immunization programs is compromised. Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi's Vaccine Alliance, says that vaccination in developed countries has never fully recovered since Wakefield's first statements and that "anti-vaccination campaigns that he continues to lead "endanger the health of children.

Internet and social media have spread doubts about vaccines and conspiracy theories around the world. Wakefield said it himself. Social media provided an alternative to "traditional media failures," he said – another phrase that could have come from a tweet from the US president himself. "In this country, he has become so polarized now … Nobody really knows what to believe," Wakefield said. "So people are turning more and more to social media."

The scientific establishment has its work cut out. Wakefield and his supporters insist that traditional science is bad and will not be persuaded otherwise. The conspiracy theories of the anti-vax movement are everywhere on the Internet. The apparent acceptance of Wakefield in the higher echelons of American society can only stimulate them further.