Dr Andrew Wakefield, if he is still a doctor by the time you read this, seems to be a baddun. A disciplinary panel heard that when children arrived at his house for a birthday party he grabbed a syringe and extracted blood from each one of them, giving the kids five pounds in exchange. Some fainted or vomited following this unexpected procedure, just before the cake was cut. So, already we have a vampire trope to be going on with. Also, he now works at a clinic in West Texas, the last worldly refuge of all manner of scoundrels. As he arrived at the General Medical Council hearing which was to deliberate his fitness to continue practising in Britain he was surrounded by his usual cabal of autism groupies, all those mums and dads with placards who cannot bring themselves to shed the idea that the terrible illness which afflicts their kids was caused by anything other than some government imposed pathogen, something dark, mysterious and catastrophic lurking within the MMR vaccine. They howled their usual protests, cleaving to the notion that Wakefield is a brave and persecuted man of honour. The medical profession, almost as one, and the government insist that he is a charlatan, a quack — and go about the business of persecuting him. It is pointed out, drily, that his animus towards the MMR was not inconsistent with a patent he’d taken out on a single measles vaccine — so, financial greed is the final nail to be hammered into Wakefield’s professional coffin.
He is this year’s Sir Roy Meadow. In the summer of punk, 1977, Sir Roy concocted a suitably nihilistic illness, Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy which, once he had invented it and given it a name, existed as an unquestioned scientific fact, like the boiling point of water or the mass of an electron, for the next quarter of a century.
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