Once upon a time not so long ago a doctor led a campaign against a vaccine.

The campaign grew and grew and then he was rumbled.

I was sitting there one day my lawyer's offices reading summary documents from Wakefield's research and I spotted within those evidence that he'd

falsified the diagnoses.

It's 16 years since Dr Andrew Wakefield was first exposed by a Sunday Times journalist.

But just as the world waits for news of a successful anti-Covid vaccine, he appears to be back. You're listening to stories about Times from The Times and the Sunday Times.

I'm David Erronovich.

Today, the Doctor, the Journalist and the Jabs.

I've spent most of my career reporting for the Sunday Times of London as we call it here in London.

That's Brian Deer, investigative reporter.

I've spent God knows how many years on and off looking at the whole issue of vaccine scares.

But perhaps his most celebrated work was when he examined very closely a claim that one vital vaccine had terrible consequences for some children.

Particularly the scare that took off in the 1990s and the 2000s from a hospital in London where Dr Andrew Wakefield made what a now notorious

claims alleging a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

This month has seen the publication of Brian's book on what he discovered. It's called The Doctor Who Fooled the World.

Andrew Wakefield's war on vaccines.

For Brian, this story begins on what he describes as a nice late summer day in 2003.

I was walking from Buckingham Palace up to Trafalgar Square where I was going for

lunch and on the left hand side at the Institute for Contemporary Arts I saw this drama documentary called Hear the Silence.

To be broadcast that autumn, Hear the Silence was described as a dramatized account of the

work that British gastrointestinal andorologist Andrew Wakefield had done five years earlier in 1998. Wakefield's work, now debunked, was published in the prestigious journal The Lancet and seemed to point to a possible link

between the MMR vaccine and children developing autism.

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