The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines - Hardcover

Deer, Brian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1421438003 ISBN 13: 9781421438009

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020

Synopsis

Brian Deer exposes a conspiracy of fraud and betrayal behind attacks on a mainstay of medicine.
 
"This is a remarkable book" - The Times
 
"Riveting" - Nature
 
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 immunization. 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.
 
2021 winner: Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY), and 2021 Eric Hoffer Book Award

About this title

About the Author

Brian Deer is a multi-award-winning investigative reporter, best known for inquiries into the drug industry, medicine, and social issues for the Sunday Times of London. He joined the paper in the 1980s and quickly won praise for campaigns that led to the lifting of legal immunities from hospitals and to the Disabled Persons Act, which conceded new rights to people with disabilities. He was the UK media's first social affairs correspondent, covering issues such as poverty, homelessness, prisons, and health policy.

Among Deer's professional recognitions, he has been nominated three times for British Press Awards, the paramount prize for newspaper journalists, winning the title of specialist reporter of the year twice, and shortlisted for the title of reporter of the year. Judges said of his first prize, for investigations published longform in The Sunday Times Magazine, that he was probably "the only journalist in Britain that polices the drugs companies." For his second, awarded for investigations included in this book, they said his reporting was "a tremendous righting of a wrong." Among his television work, his hourlong investigation, The Drug Trial That Went Wrong, was shortlisted for a Royal Television Society award.

In 2016, Deer was made Doctor of Letters by York St. John University. He was the 2009 Susan B. Meister lecturer in child health policy at the University of Michigan and the 2012 Distinguished Lecturer in Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. He has lived in New York, San Francisco, and Atlanta, and presently lives in London.

Website: briandeer.com Twitter: @deerbrian

Edition details

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1421438003
• ISBN 13: 9781421438009
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 408