Brian Deer is a British investigative reporter, best known for inquiries into the drug industry, medicine and social issues for The Sunday Times. Deer's investigative nonfiction book, The Doctor Who Fooled the World, was published in September 2020 by Johns Hopkins University Press. Career After graduating in philosophy from the University of Warwick, he became editor and press officer for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and was a member of The Leveller magazine collective. Subsequently, he joined The Times, then The Sunday Times, first as a business news subeditor and then as a staff news reporter and feature writer. In the 1980s, under then Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil, Deer was the UK's first social affairs correspondent, and between 1990 and 1992 reported from the United States. Investigations In 1986, one of Deer's early investigations exposed research by British scientist Michael Briggs at Deakin University, Australia into the safety of the contraceptive pill. Deer's reports revealed that several of Briggs's studies were fabricated so as to give a positive profile for the products' cardiovascular safety. The research was largely financed by the German drug company Schering AG. In 1994, his investigation of the Wellcome Trust led to the withdrawal in the UK of the antibiotic, Septrin (also sold under the name Bactrim) and the sale by the Wellcome Trust of its drug company subsidiary. In 2005, the withdrawal of the painkiller Vioxx was followed by an investigation by Deer into the people responsible for the drug's introduction. In 2006, Deer's Dispatches documentary, "The drug trial that went wrong", investigated the experimental monoclonal antibody TGN1412. It was nominated for a Royal Television Society journalism award. In 2008, the media psychiatrist Raj Persaud was suspended from practicing medicine and resigned his academic position after being found guilty of plagiarism following an investigation by Deer. Deer has also reported for other British newspapers, including The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and the Daily Mail. MMR vaccine controversy In a series of reports between 2004 and 2010, for The Sunday Times, Deer investigated concerns over the MMR vaccine that arose with the publication in 1998 of a research paper in the medical journal The Lancet written by Andrew Wakefield, and his colleagues. Deer revealed that Wakefield had multiple undeclared conflicts of interest, had manipulated evidence, and was responsible for what the BMJ later called "an elaborate fraud". Deer's investigation led to the longest-ever inquiry by