Big story of
Crohn's disease: how attack on
broadcasters revealed baseless claims
This page
is material generated during a libel
lawsuit brought, and withdrawn, by Dr Andrew Wakefield, against Channel
4 Television Corporation, Twenty Twenty
Productions Ltd and Brian Deer, arising from
Deer's 2004 programme MMR: What they
didn't tell you
Below is
a commentary drafted by Brian Deer in
2006 for Channel 4's lawyers, concerning
a complaint lodged in 1996 on behalf of
Andrew Wakefield, "the
claimant", against
an earlier programme by Twenty Twenty,
"the second
defendant", which
investigated the former gut surgeon's
[abandoned] claim that vaccines against
measles caused the inflammatory bowel
disorder Crohn's disease. The material in
maroon is from
Wakefield's reply to a defence of justification filed in the case
Andrew Wakefield v
Channel 4 & Ors
"3.2.
Further, the Second Defendant made a
television programme in 1996 titled
“The Big
Story”
which was broadcast by Carlton
Television. The Claimant agreed to
participate in this programme,
although ultimately he was extremely
disappointed when it misrepresented
him and his work on broadcast. The
Claimant subsequently came to
understand that the programme had
been edited deliberately so as to
attack him. This led to a complaint
to the Broadcasting Standards
Commission about unjust and unfair
treatment of the Claimant and another
participant in the programme,
Professor Anders Ekbom. The BSC
upheld the complaint in part, in
particular in relation to the editing
of answers given by Professor Ekbom
in interview which had the effect of
making them appear detrimental to the
Claimant and his work. As well as
having its production company (i.e.
the current Second Defendant) in
common with “The
Big Story”,
the Dispatches programme
now under complaint shared the same
executive producer, Ms Claudia
Milne."
A programme maker’s
past experience in any field of inquiry
is not - as the claimant implies at 3.2 -
a disqualification to further work in
that field. On the contrary: the public
interest would be poorly served if
programme makers and journalists
restricted themselves to subjects of
which they had no experience.
The second defendant, Twenty
Twenty Productions, produced a 30-minute
ITV-1 “Big Story” series
programme, titled “A Difficult
Decision”, broadcast on October 3
1996. Unknown to the producers, this was
only a month after William Kessick’s
in-patient admission to the Royal Free,
as the first in the claimant’s
cohort of children, recruited through Ms
Fletcher, Mr Barr and Ms Kessick, and
published in The Lancet in
February 1998.
The programme was introduced
by its presenter in the following terms:
“Tonight we
investigate claims that a new
campaign to vaccinate more than a
million children against measles
could lead many to develop an
incurable disease.”
The programme ventilated the
claimant’s claim that measles
vaccine was the cause of Crohn’s
disease. The producers’ decision to
produce a programme on this topic
followed extensive newspaper coverage of
this alarming claim, and the broadcast
was timed to coincide with a Department
of Health campaign to revaccinate
children with a second dose of MMR. The
claimant was featured in the programme,
stating, among other things (with
reference to the government’s
November 1994 MR revaccination
campaign):
“I’m
very concerned. We have seen a very
large number of cases of Crohn’s
disease in children presenting since
the ’94 campaign, and my anxiety
is if we start re-exposing
4-year-olds to measles vaccine
without any follow-up, without any
indication of how safe that’s
going to be, then we as
gastroenterologists are going to see
a greater increase in the number of
these children presenting with this
extremely unpleasant disease.”
“The
longest trial of measles vaccine
safety set up prospectively in this
country or the States, for example,
is three weeks. And three weeks is
wholly inadequate. Wholly inadequate
for a live, potentially hazardous
biological agent about which nothing
is known.”
The programme also featured
Ms Fletcher of Jabs, who was then
launching a campaign against the
government’s 1996 vaccination plans,
and who was shown stuffing envelopes. She
stated that she blamed MMR for the
problems of her neurologically disordered
son Robert (who is not autistic). Ms
Fletcher commented:
“Dr
Wakefield produced a major report
linking the measles vaccine
categorically with inflammatory bowel
disease. The Department of Health saw
fit to poo-poo that, instead of
investigating it.”
Other featured parents
blaming measles vaccines included Ms
Kessick, Ms Susan Hamlyn, and Ms Ruth
Tilley.
The programme’s
producers were impressed by the
parents’ anecdotal evidence, and had
originally anticipated that “A
Difficult Decision” would sound a
clear warning note about the unknown
risks of measles vaccination, which the
claimant, Ms Fletcher and the others were
criticising. However, in the course of
routine research, the second
defendant’s production staff were
unable to find any specialist in the UK
who would endorse the claimant’s
allegation that measles vaccine was the
cause of Crohn’s disease. On the
contrary, the response encountered among
specialists was (entirely unexpectedly,
given the newspaper coverage) critical of
the claimant’s opinions. In this
light, the programme makers were under a
clear obligation to adopt a balanced
“for-and-against” tone, in
which the claimant’s frightening
allegations were both advanced and
questioned.
Although the claimant was at
the time only a senior lecturer at a
north London medical school, he evidently
believed himself to be of such stature
and accomplishment that the second
defendant should have accorded him an
uncritical thirty-minute infomercial for
his highly contentious and poorly
substantiated claim that measles vaccine
caused Crohn’s disease (and on
which, unknown to the programme-makers,
he had filed patent applications,
including for his own vaccine). After the
broadcast, he instructed Mr Robert
Sawyer, a property developer who was at
the time his publicist, and who now
operates the registered charity Visceral
on the claimant’s behalf, to make a
complaint to the Broadcasting Standards
Commission (whose responsibilities are
now absorbed into Ofcom).
After a hearing, the BSC
said in an adjudication dated September
17 1997:
“The
Commission considers this edition of
The Big Story to have been a
responsible investigation into a
matter of considerable public
interest at a time when the
Government’s programme of mass
vaccinations against measles was
being extensively publicised by its
supporters and criticised by its
opponents.”
With regard to a complaint
made by Mr Sawyer on behalf of the
Swedish doctor, Prof Ekbom (who, the BSC
recorded, did not, in fact, endorse the
claimant’s theory), the BCC
acknowledged in its adjudication
“the difficulties the
programme-makers faced in editing an
interview with a Swedish expert who was
discussing technical and often complex
points in a language foreign to
him”. The producers confirmed that
part of a sentence which was
incomprehensible had been edited out, and
that, in retrospect, it would have been
better to interview him in Swedish, with
his contribution subtitled. However, the
adjudication said that the
programme-makers failed to make clear
that the doctor “did hold the view
that on balance there was likely to be a
connection between the measles virus and
Crohn’s disease, and that measles
was a ‘suspect agent’ in the
development of Crohn’s.” This
criticism in the adjudication related to
the doctor’s views about measles
virus, not vaccine, and was
therefore tangential to the
programme’s main issue. But the BSC
said with regard to this aspect of the
representation of Prof Ekbom (who the
second defendant did not think played
much part in making the complaint):
“In this one respect the Commission
finds unfairness”.
With regard to the claimant,
the BSC considered his allegations in
detail, and rejected them. The
adjudication stated:
“Therefore
the Commission does not find any
significant unfairness to Dr
Wakefield.”
Thus, not only was the
second defendant’s reportage of the
claimant fair, it was found to be fair by
the BSC, which was a tribunal worthy of a
court’s respect.
Given the seriousness with
which the claimant took his claim that
measles vaccine caused Crohn’s
disease, the defendants in this
litigation have been surprised to see
that he subsequently abandoned this
allegation, notwithstanding it being his
central charge in “A Difficult
Decision”. At paragraph 2.56 of his
reply, for instance, he states:
"...
monovalent measles vaccine is at
least as effective as the measles
component of MMR in vaccinating
against measles, and comes with the
advantage over MMR of well
established safety."
Similarly, the defendants
were surprised upon reading the
transcript of the Medical Research
Council meeting of March 1998 - held not
18 months after “A Difficult
Decision” was broadcast, and only
six months after the BSC adjudication -
at which, the transcript shows, both the
claimant and Dr Montgomery (who
co-authored the falsified “Through a
Glass Darkly” review) admitted that
they had abandoned their
measles-vaccine-causes-Crohn’s
theory in the light of evidence to the
contrary. This contrary evidence included
that from the BCS70 survey [considered in
detail in the commentary under 2.36.3 of
the reply], which found no association
between measles vaccination and
Crohn’s disease.
At page 59 of the
transcript, Dr Montgomery is reported
saying:
“Our work
and other people’s work does not
support that monovalent measles
vaccination at a typical age is a
risk.”
At page 63:
DR MONTGOMERY:
[Regarding his research with the
claimant] It does not suggest that
monovalent vaccination is a risk,
from the evidence we have so far.
PROFESSOR
TOMKINS: So you withdraw that
hypothesis?
DR MONTGOMERY:
As I say, the evidence that is there
does not support that as far as I can
see.
At page 64, the claimant
himself chimes in, with regard to
Crohn’s disease:
“If we were
born all-knowing we would not be
sitting round this table at the
moment. Clearly hypotheses evolve...
When we looked at the second cohort,
the BCS70, the monovalent vaccine
appears to be, if anything, slightly
protective.”
Evidently, despite giving
the claimant a substantial, fair,
opportunity to ventilate his
speculations, the second defendant was
right to avoid presenting the public with
a wholly credulous account in “A
Difficult Decision”. Moreover, with
the benefit of hindsight, the second
defendant now recognises that, during the
production of the 1996 programme, it had
not been told the whole story. The
producers had no idea, for instance, that
nine months before the broadcast, the
claimant had taken lucrative employment
with a solicitor to prove that vaccines
featured in the programme were dangerous,
or that only four months before the
broadcast the claimant and Mr Barr had
submitted a “proposed protocol and
costing proposals” to the Legal Aid
Board, and had been awarded a £55,000
contract to attempt to find fault with MR
and MMR. Although the second
defendant’s production team came to
realize that the claimant’s views
were controversial, it had been led to
believe that he was an objective,
independent scientist, and, in good
faith, they presented him as such to
viewers.
Additionally, the second
defendant and its employees did not
realize that the parents (Ms Fletcher, Ms
Kessick, Ms Hamlyn, and Ms Tilley)
featured in the programme were all
clients of Mr Barr, hoping to gain
financially from a lawsuit against
manufacturers of the vaccines they had
been given a platform to criticise. The
second defendant is adamant that, had it
known, it would have incorporated this
important information, since it is wrong
for a television programme to be
exploited to create unwarranted public
anxiety, or to fish for solicitors’
clients, without at least the true
position being made clear. The potential
to mislead, however, was mitigated by the
balanced tone adopted in the broadcast.
Finally, the second
defendant also did not know that the
claimant’s statement in the
programme that the longest trial of
measles vaccine safety was three weeks
was, in fact, false. Had it known this,
it would not have produced that statement
for broadcast, or the claimant’s
untrue and irresponsible characterisation
of measles vaccine as a “potentially
hazardous biological agent about which
nothing is known.” The claimant,
however, knew, or should have known, that
what he told a substantial ITV-1 audience
was in these respects false.
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