A cynical pastiche of smear & trickery
The text below is an excerpt from a statement by Brian Deer of June 2020 for lawyers retained by Johns Hopkins University after Andrew Wakefield and his business partner James Moody unsucessfully sought to suppress Deer’s book, The Doctor Who Fooled the World
86. My investigation of Wakefield caught him in what Dr. Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet called, “the most appalling catalog and litany of some of the most terrible behaviour in any research.” After defending it for years, in February 2010 Horton said of Wakefield’s now-retracted study, published in 1998, “It was utterly clear, without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the paper were utterly false.” But rather than apologize for his misconduct Wakefield launched a campaign of retaliatory, deceitful, abuse of me, and frank lying to his followers. Here’s the first of three specimen examples from recent years of his continuing dishonest conduct.
‘Deer’s word’
87. This is a segment of a public lecture he gave in Wisconsin in December 2015, extensively viewed online. The three-and-a-half-minute segment begins with a false claim that his research accomplice John Walker-Smith was found guilty of serious professional misconduct over the research published in the Lancet merely on “the word” of myself. Wakefield said:
“And this was according to Brian Deer, a journalist working for Rupert Murdoch… And it was his opinion that this was unethical, not indicated, and it was his opinion pitted against that of this man [Walker-Smith]. And the medical profession, and the media, and physicians, and scientists chose to believe the word of Brian Deer.”
88. Nothing depended on my “word.” As Wakefield knew, the case was brought by the UK General Medical Council and determined by a five-member fitness to practice panel of three doctors and two lay members. Apart from allowing inspection of my files, I had no role in preparing the case, wasn’t notified of the charges, and the hearing followed two-and-a-half years of reinvestigation and case preparation by the GMC’s lawyers, including a full advance opportunity provided to Wakefield to respond. At a 217-day public hearing, the GMC presented numerous witnesses, including professors of pediatric gastroenterology and developmental pediatrics, and many others. This was the forum that handed down the rulings on Walker-Smith and Wakefield. Not me.
89. Wakefield then cherry-picks fragments of phrase – the most serious of which (“distortion of evidence”) he makes up himself – with which he leads his audience to believe were the grounds upon which Mr. Justice Mitting quashed the GMC’s decision in respect, only, of Walker-Smith. Wakefield’s purpose was to suggest that Walker-Smith’s appeal success somehow covered his own situation and that Wakefield was himself therefore acquitted (The true position is set out above, and at Fooled pp. 312-14).
Rats nests of complexity
90. Next, in the same three-and-a-half-minute segment, he puts up a slide, “Deer on himself,” while he tells his audience the following, doubling down on the deception:
“So the whole case was thrown out. The whole case put forward by Brian Deer was made a mockery of when it came before a proper judiciary.”
91. Then he reads another slide, also headed, “Brian Deer on himself,” which continues:
“I freely admit to being semi notorious for packing into a single highly readable and apparently bland sentences, a rat’s nest of complexity and implication.”
92. So as to represent this as me admitting to some kind of wrongdoing or unethical behavior (and hence purportedly tainting the case against Walker-Smith and himself), he explains:
“This is the kind of objectivity that the British Medical Journal – a major medical journal – is looking for in its writers. This is the kind of objectivity they brought to the equation.”
93. In fact, as Wakefield knew, the sentence he put up was taken from an entirely proper and responsible warning from me to the editor of the BMJ about the importance of fact-checking my material. In other words, accuracy. She’d proposed that my articles on Wakefield’s research be processed by a group meeting – a collective in-house review. At the stage this was proposed (after much discussion) it troubled me. So, I wrote to her [my underlining added]:
“A group meeting of three editors, a lawyer and myself would seem to me more appropriate for a project in development. It seems to me, the most important thing now is that I receive any comments as notes on the texts, so that I can, if necessary, find relevant documents, or make appropriate amendments. Then, it seems to me, the next step would be for me to meet with Godwin [a lawyer], taking with me a cart of my documents, so that he can go through it with me, asking to see any evidence, as it suits his disposition. I can’t honestly see how he will be able to satisfy himself, so as to properly advise you and negotiate with me, in a group setting. My whole experience of these things is sitting with lawyers reading portions of my texts aloud in a cartoon voice, and I’m not sure there is any other way of safely doing it. I freely admit to being semi-notorious for packing into single highly-readable and apparently bland sentences, rats’ nests of complexity and implication.”
94. So, as Wakefield must have realized in his desperation, this was a responsible initiative by a reporter urging that his material be forensically checked, rather than merely debated by a group, on grounds that it was exceptionally complex and his journalistic training quite properly taught him to render complex matters as simple as possible, and with a mind to any knock-on implications. Obviously, “rats’ nest” is simply a colorful, conversational expression (often used in the US South) meaning very complex. In the end, the BMJ’s lawyer spent sixty hours on my stories, including studying documents, which I brought on a cart to the BMJ offices, and going through the text with me, word-by-word. My email had worked.
READ HOW DEER’S WAKEFIELD
INVESTIGATION WAS CHECKED
Problems with brains
95. Wakefield isn’t finished in his talk. Using material I’ve seen him deploy on numerous occasions, he’s not satisfied with misrepresenting what I say by removing it from an inconvenient context. Rather, in Wisconsin he uses manually doctored and rearranged material that allows fabricated meanings to be attributed to me. Plainly, such activity goes beyond protected free speech and rhetorical hyperbole.
96. Wakefield tells his audience that I am a “classic sociopath” and puts up another slide [see above], introducing its content thus [my underlining added]:
“And if you think that Brian Deer acted out of altruism for parents – next slide please – this is what he wrote about parents of autistic children on the Internet: ‘The festering nastiness, the creepy repetitiveness, the weasly, deceitful obsessiveness, all signal pathology to me, and they wonder why their children have problems with their brains’.”
97. Squarely, he tells his audience (as James A. Moody does in his forty-six-page letter) that this is my opinion of the parents of autistic children. But the material has been culled from two different places, brought together, reversed in sequence, and sentences joined up so as to fabricate a false meaning and place it in my mouth. I’ve watched presentations where his audiences gasp.
98. What happened was this: eleven years ago, in February 2009, I participated in a conversation at a website, Leftbrain-Rightbrain, in a thread discussing stories by me published in the Sunday Times a few days before. During the discussion, a post was made by someone calling themselves on this occasion “One Queer Fish”:
“I suppose this is why Dr Wakefield feels that the case against him is a fraud and a deception,. So far nobody is party to the evidence of Mr Deers reports except it seems the GMC whom it seems, have the quote ‘chain of custody’, the trail to Judge Eady it would seem today , has been subject to fraudulent mis- information and uncontested by Mr Deer , which if transpired to be true, one would suppose that even if Dr Wakefield was found guilty it would compromise the prosecution case against him and towards acquittal or overturn a guilty verdict on appeal because it would seem the trail going to Judge Eady was not correct .
“Seems a few twists of the cats’ tail still to materialise.”
99. I had no idea what any of this meant. It appeared to be gibberish. Moreover, I couldn’t even tell the gender of the person who’d adopted in this thread what I took to be a homophobic slur as his or her handle. And I casually responded in the plural, as people often do as an alternative to “he or she” in conversational English. I wrote a single sentence:
“And they wonder why their children have problems with their brains.”
100. (In fact, to give a better idea of what I have to deal with, within hours of posting I learnt from a source that “One Queer Fish” was a man: Angus Files, a member of the secret Wakefield support group called the New Autism Initiative, run on Wakefield’s behalf by Martin Walker, Clifford Miller, and Carol Stott (see Fooled pp. 289-90). Files – who I’ve never knowingly met and have had no dealings with – also wrote to a High Court judge making false and disgusting sexual allegations against me.)
101. Among others who took part in this conversation were John Stone (see elsewhere in this affidavit) and Isabella Thomas, who were also part of the “New Autism Initiative” conspiracy. Like Files, these are among the individuals I would personally characterize as “malignant cranks”: people who behave in ways such that right-thinking people would regard them as disturbed individuals whose contact with Wakefield has likely done them and their families harm. Such people have always been out there. Modern technologies now allow them to join forces and get into the heads of people from whom they were once excluded. Riled by their relentless wheedling, smears, and abuse, I lost a more appropriate sense of compassion and a day later wrote, addressing other matters, in what was a very long thread:
“Well, actually Joseph, I didn’t intend that observation as an insult. I made it as a shorthand way of raising an issue that I believe may reasonably be raised.
“I genuinely think that the three individuals I was criticizing – and I know who all three of them are – do need to question whether their personal behavioral issues are indicative of a better explanation for their children’s issues. Certainly a lot better explanation than MMR.“The festering nastiness, the creepy repetitiveness, the weasely, deceitful, obsessiveness, all signal pathology to me.”
102. Although I wrote in offensive terms about Files, Thomas, and Stone, I believe, based on years of journalism in this area, that personal client group issues are an important factor in the tone adopted by some anti-vaccine activists. Something similar was evident in an earlier phenomenon around stridently held false claims that AIDS isn’t an infectious disease caused by HIV. In that, many advocates sought to deny the relevance of their own HIV-positive status when, at the time, that status meant they would likely die, relatively soon, in unpleasant circumstances.
103. So… in Wakefield’s talk, he uses the last sentence cut from the latter post (actually, some fifty posts in the thread later, with intervening comments by me and various others), moved and pasted to the front of the single sentence of my first post, and reads them together, as if this fabricated composite is my view of the parents of autistic children in general. And, so, in a three-and-a-half minute segment in his Wisconsin talk, that’s his most effective hit on me, after nearly two decades: a cynical pastiche of smear and trickery.
Two further specimen videos of Wakefield’s ruthless lying to his supporters – often vulnerable parents – were set out by Deer in his document for the lawyers.
READ HOW DEER’S WAKEFIELD
INVESTIGATION WAS CHECKED
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