With a detailed investigation of the MMR vaccine scare published today in the BMJ, Editor Fiona Godlee has said Dr Andrew Wakefield orchestrated a large-scale hoax. The investigation, conducted by journalist Brian Deer, exposes the financial gains Dr Wakefield stood to make through linking the MMR vaccine with autism. Deer highlights in his ‘Secrets of the MMR scare’ article that Wakefield made well over £400,000 through a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers – and planned to profit from his own measles vaccine.
As Godlee writes, “it is hard to find a parallel [to the Wakefield ‘fraud’] in the history of medical science”. But despite huge issues in the reliability of the study Wakefield published in The Lancet, the claims were taken as gospel by the majority of the public, with attitudes a clear reflection of the widespread media coverage around the study. It is a reminder that such misinformation can so easily snowball until it becomes held as truth. No doubt there are detailed psychological explanations behind why certain claims are so blindly accepted by the public and others thrown out. However, we can reasonably speculate that the emotive subject of vaccines and existing anti-vaccine feeling was a prime motivator for public support for Wakefield’s claims.
There was and in many cases still is a perception that pharmaceutical companies could be at the heart of unnecessary vaccinations. This familiar narrative of greedy, profit-motivated multinationals makes the heroic ‘champion of truth’ character Wakefield embodied at the time of the study publication pretty convincing to many.
The media feeds off these already existing cultural norms and perceptions – and cannot necessarily be blamed for doing so. Sadly, it is not unlikely that a similar scandal such as the Wakefield MMR scare could arise again, especially if anti-pharma perceptions remain unchallenged, corrected or in valid cases taken extremely seriously.