Can a journalist ever be too good at their job? “Yes,” says Dr David L Lewis, during a bizarre attack on Brian Deer, who recounts this adventure below.
In January 2011 David Lewis – a retired commentator on sewage sludge and dental equipment hygiene – attended an anti-vaccine conference in Montego Bay, Jamaica, as a guest of the organizers, and struck up a collaboration over canapes and coconuts with disgraced “MMR ex-doctor” Andrew Wakefield.
Within months of meeting Wakefield, Lewis – who has no qualifications in medicine or pathology – began hawking abuse of me, in conspiracy theory terms, along the lines he sets out in the recordings on this page.
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Quite simply, he claims that the content of my journalism exposing Wakefield’s now-notorious vaccine research fraud is so technically awesome that Lewis deduced, “as a scientist,” it could not have been accomplished by me. My knowledge of my subject wasn’t a credential to respect but proof of some dastardly plot.
As he explains in the top video above:
“It doesn’t make sense. These are well-written articles by someone who has considerable expertise in medical practise.”
He later elaborated in an internet interview with an anti-vaccine campaigner (see second video):
“It struck me right off, that a reporter who has no training in science or medicine, which is the case of Brian Deer, would not be capable of writing such articles. They’re too articulate in medical terminology and other things.”
And, as he had previously argued in a bizarre 167-page complaint in December 2011:
“The scientific and medical content of his articles are well beyond what any individual with no formal training in science or medicine would normally be able to write.”
I’m thinking this would have to be a journalistic first: accuracy as evidence of malfeasance.
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READ HOW DEER’S WAKEFIELD
INVESTIGATION WAS CHECKED
