This week we begin a special series of articles by the journalist Brian Deer. It focuses on what may seem a familiar story—the scare linking the MMR vaccine with autism, launched at a press conference in 1998 after the Lancet published a paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues describing 12 children with brain and bowel disease.

Deer’s investigation into Wakefield’s work has taken seven years. It led to the UK General Medical Council’s longest ever fitness to practise hearing, after which Wakefield and his senior co-author, John Walker-Smith, were struck off and the paper was retracted. That surely should be the end of the story.

It turns out not to …