Wakefield — He’s Back!

Looking like an Elon Musk groupie in his promo picture, Andrew Wakefield — the physician who started the fraudulent claims that MMR vaccines are linked to autism in children in order to scam up to $43 million from the public — is back. He’s living in Austin, TX, has a media company, and has been embraced by MAHA enablers associated with Peter McCullough and the fetid “gaslight science” of the McCullough Foundation, as in this recent “report” posted on Zenodo which has garnered more than 100K views:

Just yesterday, the CDC site changed its wording to state that “the claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”

Bullshit. Unmitigated and harmful bullshit.

But here’s the real problem behind the persistence and prominence of these bogus claims which have been with us for nearly 30 years now — search engines.

When Wakefield first perpetrated his hoax, Google was just launching. Wakefield and his institution used traditional approaches to promote the inflammatory study, which in and of itself should have been cause for concern. Why scare the public with a study of about a dozen cherry-picked subjects with no science leading up to the claims?

But while their fax machines, phone banks, and press outreach generated what prior to Google would have been at most a week’s worth of tumult and tension, thanks to the persistence of Google search results, the effect was much longer-lasting.

• Just as we forget that social media is also a coordination technology, we forget that search engines are a preservation/perpetuation technology.

So, rather than the fraudulent paper being marginalized by the scientific community — a community that worked diligently to refute the fraudulent findings from the jump because they are wrong, wrong, wrong — Google kept Wakefield’s fraud front-and-center long enough for Jenny McCarthy to find it when her own son was diagnosed with autism.

Then things exploded, because search engine centrality techniques and celebrity have always generated powerful dark magic online.

So, here we are, at the end of 2025, knowing full well vaccines are safe but with MAHA fraudsters bringing back the OG, using our reckless open science platforms to post lies, and amplifying these with the Nazi-tolerant newsletter company Substack to pollute search engines once again with essentially the same lies Wakefield started in 1998.

But now, they have something more powerful than celebrity on their side — they have the CDC’s halo of authority, damaged as it is.

This is the sickest, saddest story of how the Internet disrupted science. And it makes me want to weep for the pediatricians I used to work with who struggled against the massive cyberlibertarian forces that have brought us to this point.

• How misaligned with science have these technologists been? Remember when the head of HighWire Press bragged that the preprint platform he built garnered more attention for a fraudulent preprint than his journals platform could for solid science? Probably not. But I do.

My heart aches for the children who are already suffering unnecessarily from measles and whooping cough throughout North America — all because Wakefield’s lies continued to generate clicks.

Thanks, Internet. You really suck sometimes.