Nancy
Banks-Smith, The Guardian
Friday November 19, 2004
I was
taken aback recently to read that Columbo, the
dishevelled detective, was based on Razumikhin
("Good natured to the point of naivety") in
Crime and Punishment...
Detective of the
week is, however, Brian Deer, the reporter on Dispatches:
MMR: What They Didn't Tell You (Channel 4).
Six years ago Dr
Andrew Wakefield and his team at the Royal Free
hospital threw parents into a torment of indecision
by suggesting there could be a link between the
triple MMR vaccine and autism in children. What they
didn't tell you is that they had a commercial
interest in single vaccines and, according to Dr
Wakefield's research assistant at the time, no
evidence of a link.
Deer went for
Wakefield like a bull pup with a taste for trousers.
He discovered that Dr Wakefield and the Royal Free
hospital had filed patents for a supposedly safer
measles vaccine and treatments for autism. One
involving mice and pregnant goats. Apparently
indefatigable, Deer travelled to Boiling Springs,
South Carolina, to meet the co-author of the patents,
the bizarre Professor Fudenberg, who is older than
God and twice as odd. Even Fudenberg now distanced
himself from the patents, including the pregnant
goat, preferring his own cure for autism. Made in his
kitchen from his own bone marrow.
After a year of
rebuffs, Deer ran Dr Wakefield to ground at an
Indianapolis conference on autism. The camera took a
bit of a buffet and Dr Wakefield left with Deer
following, shouting: "We have very important
questions to ask you about your research and your
commercial ambitions, sir! Will you stand your ground
and answer?"
If this was
hounding, and it was, Dr Wakefield had only himself
to blame for running away.
In Britain public
distrust of MMR was closely linked to distrust of the
government. It now appears, all too ironically, that
we may have been told the truth and we did not
believe the messenger.
