With
revelations spread over more than
seven years, between late 2003 and
early 2011 Brian Deer pursued a
landmark public interest
investigation for The Sunday
Times of London, the United
Kingdom's Channel 4
Television network and BMJ, the British
Medical Journal, into allegations
linking the three-in-one measles,
mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) with
claims of a terrifying new syndrome
of bowel and brain damage in
children. These allegations led to a
decade-long health crisis in the UK,
and sparked epidemics of fear, guilt
and infectious disease, which would be exported to the United States
and other developed countries,
spawning every kind of concern over
vaccinations.
Almost
incredibly, the trigger for what
became a worldwide controversy over
vaccine safety was a single
scientific research
paper published in a medical
journal - the Lancet - in February
1998. Written by a then-41-year-old
academic researcher, Andrew
Wakefield, and co-authored by a dozen
associates, it reported on the cases
of 12 anonymous children with
apparent brain disorders who had been admitted to a paediatric bowel unit
at the Royal Free hospital in
Hampstead, north London, between July
1996 and February 1997.
Backed
by an extraordinary video
news-release and press
conference, the
five-page paper’s claims provoked
substantial media interest, and were
followed by a sustained onslaught against the vaccine. This
included further publications
by Wakefield criticising MMR, and led to an
unprecedented collapse in public
confidence in the shot, which, since
the late 1980s in the UK and the
early 1970s in the US, for examples,
has been routinely given to children
soon after they are one year old,
almost eradicating measles and
rubella from developed countries.
The
prime cause of the alarm was findings
in the paper claiming that the
parents of two thirds of the 12
children blamed MMR for the sudden
onset of what was described as a
combination of both an inflammatory
bowel disease and what Wakefield
called "regressive autism",
in which language and basic skills
were said to have been lost. Most
disturbingly, the first behavioural
symptoms were reported to have
appeared within only 14 days of the
shot.
Although
the research involved only a dozen
children, and its results have never
been replicated, many medical
breakthroughs have begun with
small-scale observations, and, if
true, Wakefield's findings might have
been the first snapshot of a hidden
epidemic of devastating injuries.
"It's a moral issue for
me," he announced at the 1998
press conference, where he called for
a boycott of the triple MMR in favour
of breaking it up into single
measles, mumps and rubella shots, to
be given at yearly intervals. "I
can't support the continued use of
these three vaccines, given in
combination until this issue has been
resolved."
As
the doctor campaigned, UK vaccination
rates slumped: below the level needed
to keep measles at bay. Even Tony
Blair became embroiled in the
controversy when Wakefield supporters
suggested - the Blairs say wrongly -
that the prime minister’s
youngest son was not vaccinated with
MMR. Meanwhile in America, a
ferocious anti-vaccine movement took
off after Wakefield toured US autism conferences and, in
November 2000, appeared on the
CBS network's 60 Minutes programme linking MMR with what he called an
"epidemic of autism". This
was followed by campaigners' claims
that all vaccines are suspect: either
due to their content, or because of
the number given to children.
"In
1983 the shot schedule was ten.
That's when autism was one in 10,000.
Now there's 36, and autism is one in
150," argued American actress
Jenny McCarthy, who blamed MMR for
her own son’s autism, and gained
the highest profile in the US
movement. "All arrows point to
one direction."
Andrew
Wakefield's role unmasked
But
as journalists queued to report on
parents' fears, Brian Deer was
assigned to investigate the crisis,
and unearthed a scandal of astounding
proportions. He discovered that, far
from being based on any findings, the
public alarm had no scientific basis
whatsoever. Rather, Wakefield had
been secretly payrolled to create
evidence against the shot and, while
planning extraordinary business
schemes meant to profit from the
scare, he had concealed, misreported
and changed information about the
children to rig the results published
in the journal.
Before
Deer’s inquiries, Wakefield had
appeared to all the world to be an
independent, if controversial,
researcher. Tall and square-headed,
with hooded eyes and a booming voice,
he was the son of doctors (a
neurologist and a family
practitioner), had grown up in Bath,
a prosperous west-of-England spa
town, and joined the Royal Free in
November 1988 after training in
Toronto, Canada. His demeanour was
languid - he was privately educated -
and, born in 1956, he was a lingering
example of the presumed honour of the
upper middle class.
But
Deer's investigation - nominated in
February 2011 for two British Press
Awards - discovered that,
while Wakefield held himself out to
be a dispassionate scientist, two years before the
Lancet paper was published - and
before any of the 12 children were
even referred to the hospital - he
had been hired to attack MMR by a
lawyer, Richard
Barr: a jobbing solicitor
in the small eastern English town of
King's Lynn, who hoped to raise a
speculative class action lawsuit
against drug companies which
manufactured the triple shot.
Unlike
expert witnesses, who give
professional advice and opinions,
Wakefield had negotiated an
unprecedented contract with Barr,
then aged 48, to conduct clinical and
scientific research. The goal was to
find evidence of what the two men
claimed to be a "new syndrome",
intended to be the centrepiece of
(later failed) litigation on behalf
of an eventual 1,600 British families, recruited through media stories.
This publicly undisclosed role for
Wakefield created the grossest
conflict of interest, and the
exposure of it by Deer, in February
2004, led to public uproar in
Britain, the retraction of the Lancet
report's conclusions section, and,
from July 2007 to May 2010, the
longest-ever professional
misconduct hearing by
the UK's General Medical Council
(GMC).
Barr
[audio] paid the doctor
with money from the UK legal aid
fund: run by the government to give
poorer people access to justice.
Wakefield charged at the
extraordinary rate of £150 an hour -
billed through a company of his
wife's - eventually totalling, for
generic work alone, what the UK Legal
Services Commission, pressed by Deer
under the freedom of information act,
said was £435,643 (then about
$750,000 US), plus expenses. These
hourly fees - revealed in The Sunday
Times in December 2006 - gave the
doctor a direct personal, but
undeclared, financial interest in his
research claims: totalling more than
eight times his reported annual
salary and creating an incentive not
only for him to launch the alarm, but
to keep it going for as long as
possible.
In
addition to the personal payments,
Wakefield was awarded an initial
£55,000, which he had applied for in
June 1996, but which, like the
hourly fees, he never declared to the
Lancet as he should have done, for
the express purpose of conducting the research later
submitted to the journal. This
start-up funding was part of a
staggering £26.2m of taxpayers' money
(more than $56m US at 2014 prices) eventually shared among a small group of doctors and lawyers,
working under Barr's and Wakefield's
direction, trying to prove that MMR
caused the previously unheard-of
"syndrome". Yet more
surprising, Wakefield had asserted the existence
of such a syndrome - which allegedly included what he would dub "autistic
enterocolitis" - before he performed the
research which purportedly discovered it.
This
Barr-Wakefield deal was the
foundation of the vaccine crisis,
both in Britain and throughout the
world. "I have mentioned to you
before that the prime objective is to
produce unassailable evidence in
court so as to convince a court that
these vaccines are dangerous,"
the lawyer reminded the doctor in a
confidential letter, six months
before the Lancet report.
And,
if this was not enough to cast doubt
on the research's objectivity, The
Sunday Times investigation unearthed
another shocking conflict of
interest. In June 1997 - nearly nine
months before the press conference at
which Wakefield called for single
vaccines - he had filed a patent on
products, including his own
supposedly "safer" single
measles vaccine, which only
stood any prospect of success if
confidence in MMR was damaged.
Although Wakefield denied any such
plans, his proposed
shot, and a network of
companies intended to raise venture
capital for purported inventions -
including "a replacement for attenuated viral vaccines", commercial testing kits
and what he claimed to be a possible "complete cure"
for autism - were set out in
confidential documents.
One
Wakefield business was awarded
£800,000 from the legal aid fund on
the strength of (later discredited) data
which he had co-authored. And, even as
the Lancet paper was being prepared,
behind the scenes he was negotiating
extraordinary plans to exploit the public alarm with
secret schemes that would line his
pockets. "Disgraced doctor
Andrew Wakefield plotted to make £28
million a year from the MMR jab panic
he triggered," was how the
British tabloid newspaper The Sun,
for example, reported in January 2011 on this late
disclosure from Deer.
Behind
the veil of confidentiality
As
with the researcher, so too with his
subjects. They also were not what
they appeared to be. In the Lancet,
the 12 children (11 boys and one
girl) had been held out as merely a
routine series of kids with
developmental disorders and digestive
symptoms, needing care from the
London hospital. That so many of
their parents blamed problems on one
common vaccine, understandably,
caused public concern. But Deer
discovered that nearly all the children (aged
between 2½ and 9½) had been
pre-selected through MMR campaign
groups, and that, at the time of
their admission, most of their
parents were clients and contacts of
the lawyer, Barr. None of the 12
lived in London. Two were brothers.
Two attended the same doctor's
office, 280 miles from the Royal
Free. Three were patients at another
clinic. One was flown in from the
United States.
The
investigation revealed, moreover,
that the paper's incredible purported finding
- of a sudden onset of autism within days of vaccination - was a sham: laundering
into medical literature, as apparent
facts, the unverified, vague - and
sometimes altered - memories and
assertions of a group of unnamed
parents who, unknown to the journal
and its readers, were bound to blame
MMR when they came to the hospital
because that was why they had been
brought there. Wakefield, a former
trainee gut surgeon, denied this. But
the true number of families accusing
MMR wasn't eight, as the paper said:
it was 11 of the 12 (later all 12)
and in most cases records noted
parents' compensation claims before
the children were referred.
"Mum
taking her to Dr Wakefield, Royal
Free Hospital for CT scans/gut
biopsies," wrote one family
doctor in the north-east of England,
for example, before referring the
only little girl in the project (who did not have inflammatory bowel
disease).
"?Crohn’s—will need
ref letter—Dr W to phone me.
Funded through legal aid."
In
the light of such discoveries, the
case was overwhelming to dig deeper
into Wakefield's findings. In an
exercise never before accomplished by
a journalist, Deer was able to
exploit the GMC hearing to go behind
the face of the 1998 paper, identify
the subjects, and access patient
data. Penetrating veils of medical
and legal confidentiality, he
discovered that the hospital's
clinicians and pathology service had
found nothing to implicate MMR, but
that Wakefield had repeatedlychanged, misreported and misrepresented diagnoses,
histories and descriptions of the
children, which made it appear that
the syndrome had been discovered.
As
first revealed in The Sunday Times in
February 2009, the effect was to give
the impression of a link between MMR,
bowel disease and the sudden onset of
autism when otherwise
none was evident. Standard, but
unreported, blood tests for
inflammation in the children were
normal. And what the hospital's
clinicians and pathology service
actually found in the
children's guts was severe
constipation, with predominantly normal [table] biopsies and benign or normal features. When taken
together with developmental histories
and diagnoses, moreover, not one case
was free of critical mismatches
between the paper which launched the
vaccine crisis and the kids'
contemporaneous records. Some
children were a cause for concern
before vaccination. Some were deemed
normal months afterwards. Some did
not have autism at all.
"If
my son really is Patient 11, then the
Lancet article is simply an outright
fabrication," said the father of
the penultimate child in the series -
admitted to the Royal Free, at age 5,
from northern California and whose
history was falsely reported in the
paper.
Children's
protections sidelined
In
addition to finding that the study had been rigged, the
investigation uncovered a raft of
further issues, including
irregularities in ethical
supervision. Research on patients is
governed by national and
international standards -
particularly the Helsinki
declaration - and no
reputable hospital review board would
have endorsed the kind of fishing
expedition Wakefield embarked on for
Barr. Without that endorsement,
moreover, no reputable medical journal
would have published any resulting
paper. Against that background, to
satisfy the Lancet's
patient-protection requirements, but
without revealing to hospital
authorities what was really going on,
Wakefield falsely reported that a
gruelling five-day
battery of invasive and
distressing procedures performed on
the kids - including anaesthesia,
ileocolonoscopies, lumbar punctures,
MRI brain scans, EEGs, radioactive
drinks and x-rays - proposed for the
lawsuit, was approved by the Royal
Free's ethics committee.
But
Deer revealed that, despite the
research being executed on the
uniquely vulnerable, developmentally
challenged children of sometimes
distraught parents hoping for money, the ethics
committee was not told the truth
about the project, and had given no such
approval. Responding to Deer in
2004, Wakefield and his key
associates, paediatricians John Walker-Smith and
Simon Murch, denied this explosive discovery and issued a formal
statement. But, after being confronted with the proof at the GMC hearing, they changed their story and -
despite clear rules - now
argued they needed no approval.
The
investigation also probed Wakefield's
basic science. The story was much the
same. He had obtained the legal money
and planned his business ventures
against a theory of his own that the
culprit for both inflammatory bowel
disease and autism was persistent
infection with measles virus, which
is found live as a normal part of
MMR. But Deer revealed on Channel 4 that sophisticated, unreported, molecular
tests carried out in
Wakefield's own lab had found no
trace of measles in the children's
guts and blood. Those tests were
among a string which found no
evidence of the virus. The Sunday
Times also disclosed critical
flaws in one apparently positive
study, which involved materials
supplied by Wakefield. This had
misled thousands of families affected
by autism, both in the UK and the US,
ensnared for years in hopeless
litigation based almost entirely on
his measles theory.
Deer
(who in April 2006 reported the first
British measles
death in 14 years) took no
view on whether vaccines may or may
not cause autism, but never found any
scientific material which repeated
the Lancet findings. Although all kinds of children, including those with autism,
suffer from digestive issues, he learnt
of a mass of authoritative research which rebutted
Wakefield's claims.
"Specifically, numerous studies
have refuted Andrew Wakefield’s
theory that MMR vaccine is linked to
bowel disorders and autism," was
how the American Academy of
Pediatrics summarised the consensus
in an August 2009 statement to NBC News
for a Dateline
programme [video]
featuring both Wakefield and Deer.
"Every aspect of Dr
Wakefield’s theory has been
disproven."
The
impact of the investigation has been
felt around the world, with media
coverage from New Zealand [audio] to Canada [video]. In
the UK, the revelations prompted a
2004 statement by the prime
minister, a collapse in the
anti-MMR campaign, and a rebound in
vaccination levels. In the US - where
the Barr-Wakefield deal was joined by
allegations marshalled by American
attorneys that a mercury-based
vaccine preservative, thimerosal, was
also at fault - findings by Deer were
presented by the Department of
Justice in federal court, followed in
February 2009 by scathing
judgments. After
hearing a test case of petitions from
some 5,000 families, one presiding
judge said:
"Therefore, it is a noteworthy
point that not only has that
'autistic enterocolitis' theory notbeen accepted into
gastroenterology textbooks, but that
theory, and Dr Wakefield’s role
in its development, have been
strongly criticized as constituting
defective or fraudulent
science."
Wakefield
campaign denies everything
In
response to Deer, Wakefield
supporters denied that he took
money for research, and, amid a
barrage of sometimes paid-for smears and crank abuse of the
journalist, lauded the doctor as a
"hero". But the
father-of-four's deceits had not only
triggered the resurgence of sometimes
fatal or brain-disabling measles
outbreaks, plunged countless parents
into the hell of believing it was
their own fault for agreeing
to vaccination that a son or daughter
had developed autism, and misled an
ethics committee over child rights
and safety, but it was discovered
that he had gone as far as to betray
a vaccine safety whistleblower whose
identity he discovered [video] and
had bought blood from children
as young as four years old, attending
a birthday party, and then joked
about them crying, fainting and
vomiting. [video]
Meanwhile,
Wakefield denied any conflicts of
interest and claimed he never
even said that MMR caused autism. But
documents - including patents - evidenced
his claims, and he published a string
of further falsified reports to
undermine the vaccine. Even when he
knew that his allegations had been
proven baseless, he was found
promoting them from a controversial
business in Austin, Texas, called Thoughtful
House, where - after being
fired from the Royal Free in October
2001, following his refusal to repeat
the Lancet study with a larger number
of children - he held a
$280,000-a-year post, spun from his
campaign.
Throughout
the investigation, Wakefield refused to
co-operate, filed baseless complaints and issued statements denying every
aspect. He also initiated, sought to stall and then abandoned with some
£1.3m ($2m) costs, a two-year "gagging" libel
lawsuit, financed by the
Medical Protection Society, which
defends doctors against their
patients. In reply, Deer and Channel
4 pressed for a speedy trial,
publicly accusing Wakefield of being
"unremittingly evasive and
dishonest". His conduct in the
litigation was also damned by a High Court
judge, who said that
Wakefield "wished to extract
whatever advantage he could from the
existence of the proceedings while
not wishing to progress them",
and that the doctor was using the lawsuit as
"a weapon in his attempts to
close down discussion and debate over
an important public issue".
Lancet
paper retracted and doctor ousted
Faced with overwhelming proof of misconduct, Wakefield would concoct a preposterous conspiracy
theory [video] to account for his
exposure, and denied rigging his results.
"The notion that any researcher
can cook such data in any fashion
that can be slipped past the medical
community for his personal benefit is
patent nonsense," he argued in
a March 2009 statement. "Scientific rigor
requires repeatability for
verification of any research and Mr
Deer's implications of fraud against
me are claims that a trained
physician and researcher of good
standing had suddenly decided he was
going to fake data for his own
enrichment."
But on 28
January 2010 -
after 197 days of evidence,
submissions and deliberations - a panel of three doctors and two lay members hearing the GMC case handed
down verdicts which wholly vindicated Deer. Branding Wakefield
"dishonest",
"unethical" and
"callous", they found him guilty (against a
criminal standard of proof) of some three dozen
charges, including four of counts of dishonesty
and 12 involving the abuse of
developmentally-challenged children.
His research was found to be
dishonest and performed without
ethical approval. Five days later,
the Lancet fully retracted the paper
from the scientific literature as "utterly false",
prompting international media interest and further retractions.
"What
is indisputable is that vaccines
protect children from dangerous
diseases," said The New York
Times, in one of a string of
editorials in leading newspapers.
"We hope that The Lancet’s
belated retraction will finally lay
this damaging myth about autism and
vaccines to rest."
Three
weeks later, on 17 February 2010,
Wakefield was ousted by the directors
of his Texas business, and on 24 May
- day 217 of the GMC hearing - he was ordered to be erased
from the UK doctors' register, ending
his career in medicine. On 21
December 2010, that erasure was
confirmed after he abandoned a court
appeal against the verdicts.
Among
hundreds of media reports worldwide
on the BMJ revelations - which were
covered by all north American
networks and reached almost half of Americans
surveyed days later in a Harris poll - The New
York Times said in a second editorial
on the affair: "Now the British
Medical Journal has taken the
extraordinary step of publishing a
lengthy report by Brian Deer, the
British investigative journalist who
first brought the paper's flaws to
light - and has put its own
reputation on the line by endorsing
his findings."
Three
months later, Deer's
personal journey found closure when
in April 2011 he was named specialist journalist of
the year in the British newspaper
industry's annual Pulitzer-style Press Awards. Judges for
the Society of Editors praised what
they called his "outstanding
perseverance, stamina and revelation
on a story of major importance".
They said of his investigation:
"It was a tremendous righting of
a wrong".
Invite Brian
Deer to speak at your event Hear the story of the
vaccine scare, and how an
investigative journalist unmasked the
elaborate scientific fraud which lay
at its heart Contact
Brian
Brian Deer's 2004 film, MMR - What they didn't tell you, is online. This was produced at an early stage of the investigation
A
selection of Brian Deer's
stories
which exposed Andrew
Wakefield
and shattered a
decade-long scare
Left & first below:
22 February 2004
Second below: 14 November
2004
Above
left: 18 June 2006
Above right: 31 December
2006
10
April 2011: The Sunday
Times announces Deer's
second Press Award
Above: Deer's
2004 TV investigation, MMR - What they didn't tell you
January
2011: BMJ special series
"Secrets of the MMR
scare"
Concluding
Deer's investigation of
Andrew Wakefield and the
MMR crisis, BMJ, the
British Medical Journal,
published a special
series of major reports
over three weeks in
January 2011.
The series, titled
"Secrets of the MMR
scare", led to
intense worldwide media
reporting and discussion
as the editors of the
journal dubbed the
origins of the vaccine
scare to be "an
elaborate fraud".
5
April 2011: Deer
is named specialist
journalist of the year in
the British Press Awards.
He is presented with the
award by Sky News anchor
Anna Botting at the Savoy
Hotel, London. The judges
commended "a tremendous
righting of a wrong". More
details
Nailed: Upon publication of
Deer's first report in
the BMJ series
"Secrets of the MMR
scare", on 5 January
2011, CNN's Anderson
Cooper leads the US media
in the biggest-ever story
about the vaccine.
Tracked to a $550-a-night
villa resort in
Montego Bay, Jamaica,
Wakefield skulks behind a
barrage of extraordinary
lies.
Reply: The following night,
Cooper, in New York,
interviews Deer in
London. Deer rebuts
Wakefield's fictions,
explains how the
investigation came about
and reveals his anxiety:
the harm Wakefield caused
to families of children
with autism.
CNN
worldwide: On 6
January 2011, Deer is
interviewed by Zain
Verjee for the US news
network's international
audience, rebutting an
extraordinary campaign of
deceit launched by
Wakefield.
The
fraud exposed: selected
press comment in January
2011
Autism
Fraud
"Now the
British Medical Journal
has taken the
extraordinary step of
publishing a lengthy
report by Brian Deer, the
British investigative
journalist who first
brought the paper’s
flaws to light — and
has put its own
reputation on the line by
endorsing his findings.
"After
seven years of studying
medical records and
interviewing parents and
doctors, Mr. Deer
concluded that the
medical histories of all
12 children had been
misrepresented to make
the vaccine look
culpable. Time lines, for
example, were fudged to
make it seem as though
autismlike symptoms
developed shortly after
vaccination, while in
some cases problems
developed before
vaccination and in others
months after vaccination.
"Dr.
Wakefield has accused Mr.
Deer of being a hit man.
But the medical journal
compared the claims with
evidence compiled in the
voluminous transcript of
official hearings and
declared that flaws in
the paper were not honest
mistakes but rather an
'elaborate fraud.'” [Excerpt]
Online: January 12 2011.
Print: January 13 2011
(Page A22)
The
Autism Vaccine Hoax
A tragic
scare campaign is exposed
as 'fraud'.
"Twelve
years late, the media and
medical community may
finally be digging a
grave for one of the more
damaging medical scares
in history. We're
speaking of the
vaccines-cause-autism
panic, the burial of
which cannot come too
soon...
"It took
the Lancet until last
year to offer a full
retraction of the 1998
study, and that came only
after Britain's medical
regulator had ruled that
Mr. Wakefield had acted
"dishonestly and
irresponsibly." The
British Medical Journal's
article is the first
in-depth look at Mr.
Wakefield's abuses. By
journalist Brian
Deer—who has
investigated Mr.
Wakefield for
years—the article
reports that the doctor
grossly misrepresented
the cases of 12 children
to support his theory,
and that he worked with
plaintiffs attorneys to
exploit the panic for
financial gain.
"This is a
start, but the health
community and media have
a long way to go to
restore public trust in
immunizations. They also
bear some responsibility
for the dollars that have
been diverted from
research into finding the
real causes of the
terrible affliction that
is autism. Let's hope
they now broadcast the
vaccine truth as much as
they encouraged the
vaccine panic." [Excerpt]
8 January 2011
CTV
interview: On 6
January, Deer talks live
from London to Dan
Matheson at the Canadian
commercial network's news
studios in Toronto.
Fighting
fraud: In a 6
January discussion on
MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan
Show, Deer debates the
issue of scientific fraud
with Grant Steen, a
doctor who firmly
believes the Wakefield
case to be extraordinary
and not a sign of a
deeper malaise.
Canadian
chat: During a
trip by Deer to Toronto,
sponsored by the Canadian
Journalism Foundation,
he's interviewed by
George Stroumboulopoulos
on CBC's Tonight Show. 14
March 2011.
Retraction:
selected press comment in
February 2010
Hippocrates
would puke - Doctor
hoaxed
parents into denying kids
vaccine
"It was
Wakefield's article,
published in 1998 in the
premier British medical
journal, The Lancet, that
gave authority to the
proposition that combined
inoculations for measles,
mumps and rubella were
connected to childhood
autism. Now, though, the
United Kingdom's General
Medical Council, which
licenses doctors, has
concluded that Wakefield
cherry-picked the
children who became his
study subjects, including
paying kids at his son's
birthday party to give
blood. The council also
found that he subjected
children to unnecessary
procedures, such as
colonoscopies, for
experimental purposes
without getting ethical
approval. Oh, and
Wakefield was secretly
bankrolled by lawyers who
hoped to sue vaccine
makers. Oh, and he owned
a patent on a competing measles vaccine...
Steadfastly defending
both his integrity and
his science - and backed
by supporters who mutter
about "show
trials" and
"witch hunts" -
Wakefield has been shamed
before the world. He
deserves far worse." [Excerpt] February 6
2010
Dodgy
science is bad medicine
"It's a sad
fact that the retraction
this week of a
controversial research
paper on the effects of a
common childhood
vaccination will not have
anything like the impact
on public opinion of the
paper's original
publication... The
Lancet's online
announcement that
"we fully retract
this paper from the
published record"
followed a finding by the
General Medical Council,
the statutory regulatory
authority of doctors in
the UK, that Wakefield
had acted
"dishonestly and
irresponsibly" in
reporting his research.
The evidence, of conflict
of interest, data-fixing
and ethical breaches,
makes grim reading. But
grimmer still are the
effects of the needless
anxiety his
"findings"
caused." [Excerpt]
February 7 2010
Debunking
the link between autism
and vaccination
"The real
villain here, of course,
is Dr Andrew
Wakefield.... Meanwhile,
science chugged along, as
it does. The autism claim
was always suspect,
because autism 'presents'
naturally at around the
same age that children
get their vaccine jabs.
As any logician will tell
you, Correlation Does Not
Imply Causation. It's
only our natural instinct
to see patterns that gets
in the way of this
obvious sense... In the
US, Hollywood got on
board. Comedic actor Jim
Carrey and Playboy
bunny-turned-actress
Jenny McCarthy were
convinced vaccination
caused her son Evan's
autism, and they were
welcomed with open arms
to spruik their views on
chat shows across the
country. But at the same
time, some serious
questions were starting
to arise about Wakefield's original
research. UK
investigative journalist
Brian Deer produced some
excellent, scathing
articles... Those who
care about science and
reason should not sit
back and say ''Wakefield
guilty, study retracted,
case closed''. Processes
have failed here that
need serious, ongoing
thought." [Excerpt] February 4 2010
What
others say 1: Matt Lauer talks to NBC
chief medical editor Dr
Nancy Snyderman on the
Today Show.
What
others say 2: Gary
Schwitzer is interviewed
on Fox News. He argues
that the story shows how
a journalist can make a
difference.
Selected
resources from the Andrew
Wakefield investigation
Wakefield's first and second patent claims for his
vaccine/immunisation
for the
"prevention and/or
prophylaxis" of
measles virus infection -
even the very existence of
which he later dishonestly denied
Some of the many documents that prove that
Wakefield's 1998 Lancet
research was commissioned
through solicitors funded
by the UK government's
legal aid board to attack the MMR vaccine
The August 1996 legal aid certificate funding the clinical and scientific study that Wakefield performed for lawyers and submitted in papers to the Lancet. He later lied about this secret conflict of interest
Here is Wakefield's February 1996 letter to the lawyer, Richard Barr, agreeing to work for him to make a case against MMR. It was written on the letterhead of a company operated by Wakefield's wife
The agreed meanings of
Brian Deer's Channel 4 TV
documentary, pleaded in
Wakefield's
abandoned 2005 "gagging
writ" lawsuit,
Wakefield v Channel 4
& Ors, are here. Wakefield was accused of lying
An English High Court
judge, Sir David Eady,
hammered Wakefield for
using lawsuits for "public relations purposes" and in an effort to "close
down discussion and
debate over an important
public issue"
View
the cheque sent to Deer by
Wakefield's lawyers to cover the costs
of defending this
website, after the
research cheat abandoned
three baseless "gagging
writ" libel actions which he used to threaten others
See how The Washington Post in 2004 reported Deer's early interview with a Wakefield ally, Rosemary Kessick, which transformed a routine news assignment into a major public interest investigation
The UK General
Medical Council's January
2010 findings
of fact on the misconduct of
Wakefield and two
co-defendants, professors
John Walker-Smith and
Simon Murch, who both changed their stories
Here is the tabulation, obtained by Deer under the freedom of information act, revealing the enormous secret payments from lawyers to Wakefield, which began two years before the 1998 Lancet paper
The General Medical
Council panel's May 2010 conclusion
and sentencing,
summarising Wakefield's
dishonesty and misconduct, and ordering
him to be erased from the
UK medical register
Read the side-show tale
of a paid smear
campaigner, Martin
J Walker,
hired to plant among vulnerable parents the
fabricated Wakefield claim
that the drug industry
was behind the
investigation of his behaviour
As MMR became a "crank magnet", Wakefield's close collaborators included one David L Lewis - fired by the EPA - who bizarrely complained that the standard of Deer's journalism was too high
Brian Deer's tabulation of the Lancet paper
findings on the 12
children, comparing them
with the NHS records of
the same children, almost all in Wakefield's possession.
Published in a BMJ series
in January 2011
See Wakefield threaten,
belittle and betray a
vaccine safety
whistleblower who, in
strict confidence,
disclosed what he said
was evidence of UK
government bungling over
MMR
The UK Court of Protection exposes a "mother warrior" claim of vaccine damage as fabricated. This lawsuit claimant and ringleader for Wakefield theories lied for years about what happened to her child
View the histology reports which lay behind Wakefield's claim to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease linked with autism. Experts say they are almost all normal, and no child had enterocolitis
In early 2015, Wakefield supporters cheered as a measles outbreak was traced to Disneyland, California. Hear this message from the UK, as sung by Mitch Benn on the BBC radio Now Show [audio]
Wakefield associate John Walker-Smith escaped justice from the GMC by changing his story and refusing to co-operate with the regulator. But the truth about his role was to be found in his altered autobiography
Wakefield loses a fourth vexatious lawsuit as a Texas appeals court throws out his case and orders him to pay costs. Between 1996 and 2014, all courts and tribunals hearing of him would rule against him
Read Deer's legal declaration in Wakefield's fourth vexatious lawsuit, setting out how the investigation came about, and what was found. At present, this is the most detailed description of Wakefield's fraud
Selected
audio interviews with
Deer about the
investigation
Hear Brian
Deer interviewed by
Kathryn Ryan of Radio
New Zealand in a special 30 minute
conversation about the
MMR investigation and
Wakefield, broadcast on
10 February 2010
Hear Deer interviewed by Russ
Roberts about the investigation's
methods and findings in
an hour-long podcast from
the Library of Economics
and Liberty, posted 31
January 2011
In this 30-minute clip,
Deer is interviewed by Michael
Enright of the Canadian
Broadcasting
Corporation's Sunday
Edition show, heard
across North America. 20
February 2011
After a measles outbreak is traced to Disneyland, California, Deer is interviewed by John Hockenberry for The Takeaway, produced by WNYC Radio and Public Radio International. 4 February 2015
August
2009: Brian Deer
is interviewed by Matt
Lauer on the NBC News
Dateline program
concerning the first part
of the Wakefield
investigation.
Another clip includes Wakefield's
reply. He says of the
children: "Now let's
be clear. They were
admitted to the Royal
Free for investigation of
their symptoms. Nothing
to do with research,
nothing to do with class
action, nothing to do
with vaccines." Documents say otherwise.
Left: British newspapers report the response to Deer's first stories in 2004
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