MY VACCINE WAR
FOR three years I’d been investigating Andrew Wakefield, determined to show that the British medical researcher who’d made millions of parents nervous about giving their children vaccines, because of his claims that they caused autism, was in fact a fraud.
Then one day in 2006, Wendy Stephen stepped into my life. She introduced herself in a 600-word email as the mother of a vaccine-injured child.
Wendy told me that in 1991, her baby daughter had received the three-in-one MMR jab against measles, mumps and rubella and lost all hearing in one ear. This was a rare and recognised side-effect of two brands of MMR that were discontinued in Britain the year after Wendy’s daughter got her shot.
As a result of that injury, Wendy’s family had joined a giant lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers. This followed research published by Wakefield in The Lancet medical journal in 1998, erroneously claiming the MMR jab caused autism and chronic bowel disease.
Lawyers had recruited about 1 600 child claimants for the epic litigation. This high-profile action was the catalyst that sparked an MMR scare that terrified a generation of young parents – and led to a huge drop in immunisation levels, exposing countless children to the dangers of measles (which can be fatal), mumps and rubella.
The legal case eventually collapsed amid a total lack of evidence for Wakefield’s claims.
Just a few weeks after she emailed me, Wendy and I saw each other at
