The General Medical Council has embarked on an investigation of the affair that has led to thousands of children not being vaccinated against a killer disease.

Yesterday Professor John O’Leary of Trinity College Dublin who, like Wakefield, carried out scientific tests for solicitors suing MMR manufacturers, said that this work “did not support the MMR/autism hypothesis”.

On Thursday the medical journal The Lancet published a statement by 10 of Wakefield’s 12 original co-authors “retracting the interpretation” of their 1998 study, which led to the suggestion of a link between MMR and autism.

Richard Horton, the magazine’s editor, even went so far as to send Wakefield an e-mail offering an opportunity for an “honourable retreat” from his position.

Wakefield caused widespread concern about the MMR vaccine six years ago when The Lancet paper was published. It claimed that the parents of eight out of the 12 children used in the study associated the jab with the onset of brain damage.

He announced at a press conference to launch the research study that parents should opt for single jabs rather than the MMR triple vaccine.

As a result, tens of thousands of children have been left unprotected against measles — a disease that as recently as the 1960s routinely killed and left many more British children catastrophically handicapped.

Last year there were 442 confirmed cases of measles in Britain, four times more than in 1998 — the year Wakefield’s Lancet paper was published.

In some areas only 53% of children are now vaccinated.

It was a four-month Sunday Times investigation that exposed the “fatal flaw” in the original research study and revealed a serious conflict of interest:

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