Andrew Wakefield (R) | Shaun Curry/AFP via Getty Images Trump offers vindication to vaccine skeptic doctor The US president is embracing Andrew Wakefield’s debunked claim linking a top vaccine to autism.

The public health sector’s most reviled figure has resurfaced as a firebrand with a following, thanks to Donald Trump and the populist backlash the new U.S. president champions.

Seven years ago, Andrew Wakefield fell into disgrace after his 1998 study linking a key childhood vaccine to autism was roundly repudiated. But vaccine skepticism is once again on the rise, fueled by a mistrust of big pharmaceutical companies and public health authorities on both the left and the right worldwide. And now officials on both sides of the Atlantic — including Trump — are embracing Wakefield’s defiance of science as part of their broader appeal to anti-establishment rage.

For Wakefield, a British gastroenterologist whose career was destroyed after the Lancet retracted his study linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism, the timing couldn’t be better. He recently has re-emerged as the producer of a documentary that purports to confirm his theory. His message proved too controversial to be screened in Parliament, but 150 people sat on uncomfortable wood chairs in dank, cold Espace Lumen in Brussels earlier this month to watch the film and hear Wakefield speak. Green MEP Michèle Rivasi defied her party to host the event, on the grounds that stifling debate about vaccine safety will only further sow distrust.

Trump appears to have more directly embraced Wakefield’s message. When the two met last year, according to Wakefield, Trump told him, “I’m gonna do something about this because I know it happened, I’ve seen it in people who worked with me and their children.”

In 2012, Trump echoed Wakefield's discredited claims that combining the three viruses in a vaccine increases children's chance of getting autism.

“And I believe him,” Wakefield added, during an interview last week in Brussels. “If he does say he’s going to do something, he does it.”

Trump’s mixed messages

In 2012, Trump echoed Wakefield's discredited claims that combining the three viruses in a vaccine increases children's chance of getting autism. And while he stressed during a 2015 debate for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination that he was generally in favor of vaccines, Trump again blamed the triple shot for causing autism in employees’ children.

“You take this little, beautiful baby and you pump — it’s meant for a horse, not for a child,” Trump said, adding that autism has become an “epidemic” in recent decades.

The question had come up in the debate because earlier that year, a widespread measles outbreak linked to Disneyland in California spread among unvaccinated people in multiple states. The Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Tom Frieden sought to reassure people that the measles vaccine is safe, in a sign that Wakefield's claim was being blamed for the outbreak.

In Brussels, Wakefield played down the risk, saying that the children who had gotten measles at the amusement park "went home, they’re fine. Kids with autism aren’t fine. They’re wrecked for life," he said.

During that September 2015 presidential debate, no one knew that Trump’s convention-defying candidacy would become an unstoppable political force. And since he won the election in November, Trump has offered new legitimacy to Wakefield and his allies — much to the consternation of the medical mainstream who see Trump’s concern about vaccines part of a broader denial of science along with his rejection of man-made climate change.

Wakefield said he was delighted to hear that Trump tapped Robert Kennedy Jr., a prominent American vaccine skeptic, to lead a vaccine safety commission after their meeting at Trump Tower in January.

Then again, Trump’s team has since said that the commission isn’t a done deal. And Trump’s freshly-confirmed health secretary, Tom Price, said that science has proven there is no link between vaccines and autism and he committed to conveying factual information to "Congress, the president and the American people.”

Wakefield ‘won’t be steamrolled’

Wakefield's documentary, Vaxxed, warns that 80 percent of the boys in the U.S. could be at risk of getting autism by 2032 if children continue to be given the combined shot before they turn three, and he accuses the U.S. CDC of colluding with drugmakers to cover up the dangers.

Some vaccines have been shown to cause debilitating side effects in a fraction of people — at least 100 teenagers in the U.K. are seeking damages for getting narcolepsy from the swine flu shot, for example. Some 1700 such cases are known to exist across Europe. Overall, however, vaccines have been proven safe and are credited with eradicating diseases such as smallpox and protecting people from a host of infections that used to kill and cripple. Today, vaccines save 2 to 3 million lives each year, according to estimates from the World Health Organization.

Studies conducted since Wakefield’s retracted piece have not found any link to autism. One of the latest studies, published in 2015, looked at 95,000 children. Wakefield's study looked at 12.

That has not stopped the disgraced doctor from keeping up the fight.

Wakefield predicted the rebellion that drove Trump into office would help his cause.

“It’s our obligation as doctors to stand out to GlaxoSmithKline and to Merck and not to be steamrolled by public health officials that think they know better," he told 150 parents, pediatricians and other people unsure of vaccine safety in Brussels last week.

In the interview, Wakefield predicted the rebellion that drove Trump into office would help his cause.

“Keep censoring it," he said in reference to his documentary being pulled from screening in the European Parliament or at the Tribeca Film Festival in the U.S. last year. "Because when you start telling people what they can do and think, then they get really pissed off," he said. “What happens in America tends to carry over."

Sarah Wheaton contributed to this report.