How my friends fell for the MMR panic

"There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them," said George Orwell. MMR proved his point.

It was clear early on that Andrew Wakefield's link between the vaccine and autism could not hold. The Japanese city of Yokohama replaced MMR vaccinations with single jabs for measles, mumps and rubella. If Wakefield and the conspiracy theorists were right, autism rates should have collapsed. In fact, they went up.

No amount of evidence could change parents' minds, however. I had mothers with senior jobs in the arts, business and finance swearing to me that their children would never be vaccinated. Journalists I once respected joined the frenzy. The parents and reporters had one thing in common: none had a science degree.

Deplore them though I did, I understood why mass hysteria took hold. The MMR panic was the perfect story for an environmentally conscious generation with a knee-jerk suspicion of authority. The lone dissident - Wakefield - was blowing the whistle on an unnatural medicine dreamed up by Frankenstein scientists. He was up against sinister forces - "big government", "big pharma" and "the medical establishment" - that we knew in our casually cynical way were wicked by definition. The more the authorities tried to discredit him, the louder his supporters shouted "cover-up".

Put like this, the MMR panic that gripped my generation of graduates sounds understandable. But there was a dark side to it, darkening by the week. Wakefield did not tell the medical journal that published his theory of a potential conflict of interest. Now it is reported that he manipulated patients' data in the study they helped fund.

Wakefield denies the charge and I hope for his sake he's right. It is one thing to make a mistake, quite another to deliberately mislead. My gullible middle-class friends are not lightly crossed. They will be viciously unforgiving if they find out that they have been conned.