Former doctor and founder of the modern anti-vaccination movement Andrew Wakefield is dating Australian supermodel and businesswoman Elle Macpherson, according to reports.
Macpherson, 54, was spotted kissing Berkshire-born Wakefield, 61, at an organic farmers’ market in Miami on Friday.
The mother-of-two recently finalised her divorce from billionaire Jeffrey Soffer, in which she was granted a $53m (£40m) cash settlement and a $26m (£19.7m) property, according to the Daily Mail.
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Neverthless, her new relationship is “raising eyebrows”, according to Sydney-based news site News.com.au.
In 1998 Wakefield published a paper in British medical journal The Lancet in which he claimed that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism in children. Over the next five years, vaccinations dropped from 90% to 70% in the UK, The Independent reports.
The study was retracted from The Lancet in 2010, following allegations of misconduct by Wakefield and the other authors. Three months later Wakefield was stripped of his licence by the UK’s General Medical Council, for “ethical violations and failure to disclose potentially competing financial interests”.
However, some parents still refuse to allow their children to have the vaccine amid fears that Wakefield’s theory was incorrectly dismissed by the wider scientific community.
The disgraced former doctor can no longer practice medicine in the UK and and now spends much of his time promoting his heavily criticised anti-vaccination views across the US.
Twitter users, unsurprisingly, were taken aback by the news that he may also be enjoying a new romance across the pond: