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Profile: Andrew Wakefield, the man at the centre of the MMR scare

The Times
The Times

Andrew Wakefield, the doctor cast out of British medicine after triggering a global scare over the MMR vaccine, was born into the profession.

His parents were a GP and a neurologist; he graduated in medicine from St Mary’s Hospital in London and moved into gastrointestinal surgery. By the age of 29 he was a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Dr Wakefield, now 53, spent time in Canada studying intestine transplants, before returning to the UK in the late 1980s to work at the Royal Free Hospital and focus on the research that would make him notorious.

In 1998, he and a group of colleagues published a study in The Lancet suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine, bowel disease and autism.

The study,