Kathryn
Flett, The Observer
Sunday November 21, 2004
Channel
4's Dispatches returned on Thursday with reporter
Brian Deer's skilfully crafted hatchet-job on Andrew
Wakefield, the British doctor who was the architect
of the MMR scare. Wakefield has since decamped to
Florida, where Deer attempted to catch up with him at
his grandly titled International Child Development
Resource Centre but on the way we were introduced to
numerous people who made mincemeat of Wakefield's
original controversial 'research' while at London's
Royal Free Hospital.
There was some
compelling testimony that Wakefield was not merely
wrong in claiming a connection between MMR and,
specifically, the measles virus, inflammation of the
gut and the subsequent development of autistic
spectrum disorders, but actually went out of his way
to discount the evidence that there was no link - at
least if one gave credence to one of his
whistleblowing former researchers, Dr Nicholas
Chadwick. And if this weren't bad enough, Wakefield
had patented a bizarre-sounding autism 'cure' which
called to mind a scene from C4's Crazy Rulers of the
World.
'But what about the
pregnant goat technology? Where does that come from?'
mused Brian Deer as he morphed into Jon Ronson and
went off to the US to interview a wheelchair-bound
septuagenarian Professor Fedenberg who looked like
Hunter S Thompson's dad and was described by Deer as
'the grandfather of the MMR scare'. Needless to say,
Fedenberg's claim that children could be cured of
autism by taking supplements containing his own
bone-marrow didn't inspire confidence, nor did Deer's
eventual confrontation with Wakefield at an autism
conference in Indianapolis.
This film was
designed to make anybody who has chosen single
vaccines for their children feel like complete bloody
fools (next thing we know they'll be force-feeding
toddlers with EPA-rich marine fish oils in a bid to
turn them into chess grandmasters. So I've, ahem,
heard), but what it didn't do was attempt to explain
why, given that Wakefield is obviously so wrong,
there has been such a sharp rise in the diagnosis of
autism. But I guess that wouldn't have been quite so
much fun.
