HE’S down, but Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who made the now discredited link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, is not giving up.

On 24 May, the UK’s General Medical Council (GMC) ruled that Wakefield be struck off the UK medical register for “serious professional misconduct” in the course of his research at the Royal Free Hospital in London. The reasons listed by the GMC include dishonesty in a paper published in The Lancet in 1998 that first suggested the autism-MMR link, undeclared conflicts of interest, and ethical flaws in the way children were recruited …