The Doctor Who Fooled the World
Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines
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- $37.99
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- $37.99
Publisher Description
From San Francisco to Shanghai, from Vancouver to Venice, controversy over vaccines is erupting around the globe. Fear is spreading. Banished diseases have returned. And a militant "anti-vax" movement has surfaced to campaign against children's shots.
But why?
In The Doctor Who Fooled the World, award-winning investigative reporter Brian Deer exposes the truth behind the crisis. Writing with the page-turning tension of a detective story, he unmasks the players and unearths the facts. Where it began. Who was responsible. How they pulled it off. Who paid.
At the heart of this dark narrative is the rise of the so-called "father of the anti-vaccine movement": a British-born doctor, Andrew Wakefield. Banned from medicine, thanks to Deer's discoveries, he fled to the United States to pursue his ambitions, and now claims to be winning a "war."
In an epic investigation spread across fifteen years, Deer battles medical secrecy and insider cover-ups, smear campaigns and gagging lawsuits, to uncover rigged research and moneymaking schemes, the heartbreaking plight of families struggling with disability, and the scientific scandal of our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This riveting history of Andrew Wakefield's career as an advocate for the discredited link between the measles vaccine and autism serves as a stirring demonstration of the process and power of investigative journalism. Deer, a Sunday Times of London reporter, presents Wakefield as a charismatic but mediocre doctor and research head, "untroubled by conscience," as he conducted extensive, invasive testing of 12 children to create "bespoke evidence" for a lawyer ally's planned civil action against the vaccine's developers, and then misrepresented the data in his now-infamous 1998 paper in the British medical journal Lancet. Deer recounts uncovering Wakefield's deceptions thanks to testimony from disillusioned parents of study participants and guidance from more meticulous scientists. In large part due to Deer's articles, Wakefield lost a university position, saw his article retracted, and was accused by the British Medical Journal of fraud. However, Deer's final tone is less than triumphal, as Wakefield, despite his professional disgrace, found new celebrity with the nascent American antivaccine movement, presenting himself as an intellectual martyr on behalf of unpopular ideas. Readers who love a good debunking will find Deer's narrative logical, exciting, and enraging.
