The doctor who triggered an international health scare over the safety of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine will take the stand at the General Medical Council in the UK an attempt to save his professional reputation, The Independent reports. Ten years after Andrew Wakefield’s paper linking the MMR vaccine with bowel disease and autism appeared in The Lancet, he will defend the research, which is said to have done more damage than anything published in a scientific journal in living memory, the paper writes.

Scores of parents who are convinced that the vaccine caused autism in their children will demonstrate in his support outside GMC’s headquarters in London, where the case is being heard, as they did when the hearing opened last July. They claim he is the victim of a witch-hunt by the Government and the pharmaceutical industry, who have conspired to cover up the harm the MMR jab has caused.

Along with two of his former colleagues, Simon Murch and John Walker-Smith, the 51-year-old Wakefield is accused of abusing his position as a doctor and of failing to obtain the necessary ethical approval for his research on children, or of going beyond it or of not being qualified to carry out the procedures he undertook. If found guilty of serious professional misconduct, all three doctors face being struck off the medical register. They deny the accusations.

The risk is that the GMC case against Wakefield will reinforce the view that there is a conspiracy by the government, pharma and the medical establishment to promote the MMR vaccine and discredit a doctor whose only sin was to raise questions about its safety. If found guilty, he will become a martyr to the cause – a lone voice struggling to defend the interests of desperate parents and their damaged children. If he is exonerated, it will add fuel to the anti-MMR campaign, The Independent writes.

The charges, though narrowly focused on the ethics of the research rather than the disputed link between MMR and autism, have revived the decade-old row which has pitched parents against the medical establishment and led to a collapse in immunisation levels nationwide. Vaccination rates with MMR stood at 91 per cent in 1997-98, before The Lancet published Wakefield’s findings. In the ensuing scare, vaccination rates slipped to 80 per cent in 2003-4 and lower still, to 60 per cent, in parts of London, the paper writes, adding that, although the rates have since recovered to 85 per cent, hundreds of thousands of children remain unprotected from the diseases and cases of measles have soared.

Almost 1,000 people were infected with the illness last year – the highest figure since records began in 1995. The illness causes fever which can lead to serious complications. Cases of mumps have also risen sharply.

The five-member GMC panel, who are each being paid about $650 a day, have spent three months listening to the prosecution case. Today, they begin hearing the case for the defence. A further three months of hearings are scheduled, involving scores of lawyers, medical experts and witnesses in what is likely to be one of the most expensive misconduct cases ever heard by the GMC, which is responsible for regulating doctors and ensuring good medical practice. There is speculation that a judgment could be delayed until 2009.

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