BRIAN DEER:
THE VANISHING VICTIMS Page 4
Like
Stuart-Smith, I had started my inquiry with the
conventional assumption that the vaccine sometimes
injured children. But as I saw how beliefs had
generated facts, an emotion from my own childhood
surfaced. It was the strange frustration of being
left empty-handed when I brought snowballs into the
house. There was no doubt that the parents in these
cases were sincere. Margaret Best was especially
decent. And yet victims vanished, again and again. It
was quite some lesson in life.
As
for the experts: they spoke for themselves, and
sometimes they spoke under oath. Even Professor
Behan, whose testimony was described as
"paramount" in Dublin, was later crushed in
a London trial. After his evidence was undermined
last year in a case about organophosphates, he was
investigated by Glasgow University, which later said:
"there had been no intention to deceive".
Professor
Miller, of the NCES, refused to comment, despite the
seriousness of the vaccine-damage question to
parents. Professor Stewart stuck to his story.
"Any vaccine can be damaging, in different
ways," he said. "Whooping cough vaccine is
not very effective and sometimes in some children is
very unsafe."
Rosemary
Fox was co-operative, and agreed to an interview at
her home in Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire. She is a
big-framed woman of 70, full of energy, with the
manner of a top civil servant. She was a farmer's
daughter from County Tipperary: another determined
Irish mother. Her daughter, Helen, had become
handicapped in 1963 after a polio vaccination.
She
had 600 families on her association's list, 300 of
which, she said, were "active". They were
currently preparing for a new offensive to increase
the scale of government compensation payments. Some
argued that payments should be increased to more than
£1m for each child. Fox was preparing to send 150
MPs a briefing with which to lobby ministers.
We
sat in her conservatory. She made a ham salad and
produced a plastic bag full of yellowing cuttings,
parliamentary debates, science papers and letters.
She put it by her chair like a less active
70-year-old might settle down with a bundle of
knitting.
We
quickly passed over the usual contradiction between
the written word and a parent's recollection.
According to a Birmingham Post cutting in the bag
from 1973, her daughter Helen had a polio jab at 7
months and "within a few days" began
vomiting. But Fox told me the problem started as a
coma "the day after the vaccination".
By
this time, expert after expert was lining up around
the world to say that they used to believe in DTP
damage, but now they thought it a myth. Textbooks
were being rewritten, questioning NCES, and new
surveys were finding no risk.
"So
how do you feel about it, 25 years later," I
asked her. "You've still not been able to show a
case."
"I
know," she said, gloomily. "I don't know
where the weakness is." She admitted that the
science suggesting a link was "hopeless",
but she thought that the compensation scheme showed
that the link must exist. The government would not
give money away if the vaccine did no harm. Since
1978, 891 awards had been made (mostly £10,000) and
she had just got a letter saying that ministers were
reviewing the size of future grants. That was 891 of
the quarter-million British children who, for various
reasons, were brain damaged in the last 25 years.
"At
the end of the day," I suggested, "your
belief that the vaccine causes damage is an article
of faith, really."
"Maybe
so," she said. "But it would be very
difficult for me, after starting it off and believing
it and establishing it by reference to other parents
as to what their experiences are..." Her words
petered out.
I
said that technologies in brain scanning,
biochemistry, DNA and so forth had leapt forward
since her daughter was diagnosed as vaccine-damaged.
Would she consider having Helen reassessed?
Fox
said that she would not. "She's what 35, 36
years old. Her condition is established, if you like,
how she is. I wouldn't want to know."
"But
in 30 years, science has - "
"It's
not worth it to go back and think: 'did you realises
that such and such'."
"Right,"
I said.
"Then
I'd start thinking: should I give back the money to
the government? Why did I do this? Was I wrong? Are
all these 891 people...? Do you want to have me in a
mental hospital?" She laughed. "Go
away."
Wilson,
now 67, was not so cheerful, and after agreeing to
meet me at a Great Ormond Street address, later
called back and cancelled. "I really think I
have nothing useful to contribute," he said.
When
I phoned him at home he argued that his 36 cases
delivered to the Royal Society of Medicine were only
"hypothesis-generating". He said:
"They were raising the issue, and I think
certain things transpired from that which have been
beneficial. But I'm very ready to accept that there's
a downside to this whole exercise which one obviously
regrets."
Although
he omitted an explanation for his vanishing victims,
he defended his campaign. To understand his position,
he said, you would have to imagine yourself as a
doctor faced by "this recurring story from
parents" of children who were ill after jabs.
"You are puzzled by this," he said.
"You look back at some of the things that have
been written. And, yes, there is evidence in the
literature, case reports of children who have been
very severely damaged, especially when the child
seemed to be unwell at the time the immunisation was
given. What do you do? Do you think 'Ah, this might
rock the boat and stop the immunisations; it may
cause public alarm'? What do you do?"
He
acknowledged mistakes, but said it was through
mistakes that scientific knowledge advanced. What
came to his mind was the cliché about a teacher at
the front of a lecture theatre. "There was a
very wise doctor who made the introductory
observations to a new batch of medical
students," he said. "That in 20 years' time
half of what you now learn will be proved to be
wrong. But the problem is: we don't know which
half."
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