JOHN EVANS
OP-ED EDITOR

The U.K General Medical Council (GMC) has excoriated one of the fathers of the modern anti-vaccination movement, and I couldn’t be happier.
Dr. Andrew Wakefield is the principal author of a 1998 paper suggesting a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism in children. His peers considered the paper questionable almost as soon as it was published.
The British regulatory agency ruled on Jan. 28 that Wakefield had been irresponsible, unethical, and dishonest in the research and writing of the paper, which has become the sacred text of the anti-vaccination movement.
It was discovered that not only was he getting financial backing from a group of lawyers already pursuing an anti-MMR lawsuit, but he had also already patented his own measles vaccine – one which might be called into use if the MMR vaccine fell out of favour.
The effect of the paper was immediate. The spectre of autism drove parents to decline to vaccinate their children and infection rates skyrocketed. In 1995, before the Lancet published the paper (the venerable journal has since retracted it) – there were only 47 cases of measles in all of England and Wales together. In 2008, there were 1001.
Wakefield will likely never practice medicine in the U.K. again, which is a triumph of justice, but it doesn’t end this sordid story.
Wakefield’s vaccine-hating followers seem unshaken by the verdict and the damage their misplaced advocacy has caused, accusing the GMC hearing of being a kangaroo court and continuing to support Wakefield’s new U.S.-based practice.
The World Health Organization reports that immunization efforts have brought the world death toll from measles down from a staggering 757,000 in 2000 to 197,000 in 2007.  Hundreds of thousands of people were saved from death, and countless more were saved from the severe diarrhoea, pneumonia, blindness and brain damage that measles can bring.
It is true that vaccines are not totally risk-free, but nothing in life is. Pushing the dishonest idea that the tiny, known risks of a bad vaccine reaction are worse than the staggering cost in lives and human suffering that ceasing to vaccinate against preventable disease would bring is among the vilest deceptions I can imagine. We should all follow the GMC’s lead – aggressively working to support effective, proven treatments like vaccination against profiteering, anti-science scaremongers like those in the anti-vaccination movement.