As Britain clamoured for jabs against swine flu last week, another kind of vaccine scare raged across north America, one that on this side of the Atlantic we’ve grown tired of. One of the world’s leading medical journals had given its verdict on the MMR jab, judging the research that had terrified a generation of young parents to have been what they called “an elaborate fraud”.
A minor firestorm gripped the US television networks. “Just hours ago,” announced CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “the British Medical Journal [BMJ] did something extremely rare for a scientific journal. It accused a researcher — Andrew Wakefield — of outright fraud.”
It was the latest chapter of a Sunday Times investigation that, in a series of stories, exposed the doctor behind