An Elaborate Fraud, Part 1: In Which a Murdoch Reporter Deceives the Mother of a Severely Autistic Child
One of the Lancet 12 children on a doctor visit not long after the BMJ articles were published in January.
By Dan Olmsted
On January 5, 2011, the British Medical Journal accused Dr. Andrew Wakefield of committing “an elaborate fraud” in the controversial 1998 Lancet report about 12 children who developed bowel disease and regressed after receiving the MMR shot. The cover article by journalist Brian Deer focused on “the bogus data behind claims that launched a worldwide scare over the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.”
Deer identified and interviewed parents of some of the children in the anonymous Lancet case series, describing what he said were significant disparities. “I traveled to the family home, 80 miles northeast of London, to hear about child 2 from his mother,” Deer wrote of one interview. The child had severe autism and gut problems that she blamed on the MMR.
What Deer did not say in the BMJ article is that he had lied to the mother about his identity, claiming to be someone named “Brian Lawrence” (his middle name). Deer had written a number of critical articles about parents’ claims of vaccine injury, and if he gave his real name, he doubtless feared, Child 2’s mother would not agree to talk to him. Once she checked his blog, she would be more likely to kick him out of the family home than sit still for what turned into a six-hour inquisition.
He even created a fake e-mail address for his fake identity, and he used it to communicate with her: [email protected].
Why did the highly respected British Medical Journal sanction such deceit involving the mother of a child who, whatever the cause, was severely disabled? When the interview took place in November 2003, more than seven years before the BMJ article, Deer was not working for the journal. He was on assignment for The Sunday Times of London.
The Sunday Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch, part of the News International division that has come under a Watergate-size cloud in England for its newsgathering tactics – fraudulently obtaining confidential information, bribing police, hacking 9,000 phone numbers, gaining access to bank accounts, and using large financial settlements to keep some victims quiet.
The BMJ article, titled “How the Case Against the MMR Vaccine Was Fixed,” has its roots in the Sunday Times. It is remarkably similar to one Deer wrote for the Sunday Times two years earlier, in February 2009. That article was titled MMR Doctor Andrew Wakefield Fixed Data on Autism and it cited much the same data and mentioned many of the same people featured in the BMJ article.
The BMJ imprimatur gave Deer – as well as the British Medical Association, which publishes the journal -- a “peer-reviewed” platform from which the story was broadcast far and wide, as conclusive proof of fraud. The BMJ dressed up its presentation with footnotes, charts, editorials, commentary and what it called “editorial checking.”
But clearly, the crux of the article came from reporting Deer did while affiliated with the Sunday Times. Along with evidence presented at a General Medical Council hearing, Deer wrote in the Sunday Times, he relied on “unprecedented access to medical records, a mass of confidential documents and cooperation from parents during an investigation by this newspaper.” His work, he said, exposed the “selective reporting and changes to findings that allowed a link between MMR and autism to be asserted.”
Deer did not identify Child 2 or his mother in either the Sunday Times or the BMJ – he didn’t need to. He had posted their names on his blog (subsequently removed); what’s more, the names were known because the mother had spoken out on the researchers’ behalf and was a claimant in a failed legal case over the vaccine. (Deer has said any allegation he “placed confidential information on my website” is false.)
False pretenses and confidentiality aside, the BMJ’s ethics code bars the use of anyone’s medical information without written permission -- even when the subject is anonymous.
“Any article that contains personal medical information about an identifiable living individual requires the patient’s explicit consent before we can publish it,” according to the policy (italics in original). “We will need the patient to sign our consent form, which requires the patient to have read the article.”
If she had done so, the journal would have gotten an earful about “Brian Lawrence,” Brian Deer and her subsequent dealings with the Sunday Times. That is the subject of our next article.
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Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism, and co-author, with Mark Blaxill, of The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic, to be published in paperback in September by Thomas Dunne Books.
An Elaborate Fraud, Part 2: In Which a Murdoch Newspaper’s Deceptive Tactics Infect the British Medical Journal
One of the Lancet 12 children on a doctor visit not long after the BMJ articles were published in January.
By Dan Olmsted
As she sat down to write the Sunday Times of London on Saturday, November 29, 2003, Rosemary Kessick was beside herself. The day before, a reporter for the paper named Brian Lawrence had come to her home to interview her – and kept at it, relentlessly, for six straight hours. It was more like an inquisition than an interview. Everything she said about the regression of her severely autistic son – what happened, when it happened, why she thought it was connected to the measles-mumps-rubella shot he had received -- was questioned as though she were a defendant in a courtroom.
Her son’s autism had manifested 13 years earlier, in 1990, and it still “traumatized and blighted” the family, but Brian Lawrence expected her to remember it like it were yesterday and describe it all with clarity; any uncertainty or hesitation seemed to immediately become a discrepancy. She had no confidence in what the reporter was going to write. She thought he might suggest she was, at best, an unreliable witness to her own child’s mental and physical disintegration, or, at worst, that she wasn’t telling the truth.
As she began typing, she did not know it was “Brian Lawrence” who was not telling the truth – a fact that became clear a few days later, when she found a picture online of Brian Deer, a journalist notoriously hostile to people who claimed that vaccines had injured their children. That was the man who sat in her living room, sneering and displaying “no human qualities of compassion.”
On this day, the day after the inquisition, all she knew is that she didn’t like the way she had been treated, not at all, and that is what she began typing to Brian Deer’s boss, John Witherow (who remains editor of the Sunday Times to this day).
It is worth reading the letter, and the subsequent correspondence, in order and in toto (with only a few irrelevant details omitted), because the road it leads to is ultimately not the Sunday Times, but the British Medical Journal. The BMJ quoted from that interview this January – seven years after “Brian Lawrence” arrived at her door, 20 years after the devastating events it described – as proof of what the BMJ called “an elaborate fraud” by Dr. Andrew Wakefield to link developmental regression, bowel disease, and the MMR. Rose Kessick’s son was one of the 12 children in the controversial Lancet study that first raised the possibility of a connection between shot and symptoms that warranted further study, and part of MMR litigation that had been dismissed.
This past week - on Sunday, July 17, 2011 – the trail wound back to the Sunday Times. Editor Witherow wrote a column – subtitled “As the storm over phone hacking rages on, the editor of The Sunday Times says deception can sometimes be the only path to the truth” -- in which he defended the paper’s h tactics and singled out important investigations by the newspaper including “Brian Deer’s outstanding work on exposing the doctor behind the false MMR scare.” He rejected any criticism of the newspaper’s past conduct, citing the public interest.
“In other words,” he said, citing another high-profile Sunday Times investigation, “the ends justified the means.”
The Sunday Times has denied charges made this month by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown that the paper had “blagged” him, with Sunday Times personnel posing as Brown to gain access to his bank account. The real Gordon Brown referred the matter to police.
From here on, my short comments are in italic, between the correspondence, and at the end.
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November 29, 2003:
Dear Mr. Witherow [Editor, The Sunday Times of London],
I was visited yesterday, Friday 28th November 2003 by Brian Lawrence who had introduced himself by telephone the previous Friday as the Sunday Times health correspondent. He had asked for the appointment which he told me was part of an exercise instigated by yourself in order to decide whether the Sunday Times should support the reinstatement of legal aid in the MMR cases.
I [was] both surprised and shocked by the tone and emphasis of the questioning which stopped little short of interrogation from the outset. This questioning began with a launch into the exact nature of what happened on the day my younger son had received his MMR vaccine down to questions about where I worked, what the surgery [medical office] was like, what time of day it would have been. …
It was curious that having asked if I didn’t mind the interview being recorded, Mr. Lawrence kept turning the same tape over every time it ran out.
It must not be forgotten that whatever anyone's personal opinions on the causation, we are a family traumatised and blighted by seeing our normal, healthy, beautiful baby son transformed into a desperately disabled child and have been struggling to cope with everything that this entails for the best part of fourteen years.
Mr. Lawrence displayed no human qualities of compassion and even began the session by firmly and categorically stating his sympathy, approval and admiration for those paediatricians and other health care workers who remain not only detached from the plight of their young patients and families but who display a distinct cold lack of compassion. This attitude was backed up by the anecdote of his sitting in a room with parents grieving the death of their child following medical negligence when he described graphically how he was ignoring their tears to watch the television over the parents' shoulders in order to follow the ongoing storyline of a soap.
What I expect of the Sunday Times is the highest quality journalism and whilst I am well used to hostile questioning, sending a journalist of this calibre to abuse my hospitality in my own home was both unnecessary and inappropriate. The man arrived at 10.30am and left circa 4.30pm.
Despite our own personal outrage at the totally insensitive questioning, demeanour and attitude of this journalist my deepest concerns surround the extent to which the Sunday Times apparently intends to rely on this individual's judgment to formulate an opinion on the legal cases.
During the meeting Mr. Lawrence repeatedly displayed arrogance in his own perceived ability and knowledge which when probed, consistently revealed a dangerous bigotry and clear ignorance of the many legal and scientific facts salient to the MMR cases. He seemed to take delight in refuting many of the facts I was putting to him and I became so frustrated at one point that I telephoned my solicitor to check on the exact wording of one of the defence barristers at a court hearing. My solicitor took my call despite being in a meeting himself and responded to my request immediately. Mr. Lawrence also appeared irritated that the solicitor would not answer his requests to set up a meeting with him and did not accept his response that he was under instruction from the QC not to talk to the press pending the judicial review on the revoke of legal aid for the children in the MMR damage cases.
A recurring theme of the meeting was Mr. Lawrence's besmirching of the integrity and competence of everyone concerned with the MMR cases spanning Richard Barr and his team, our barristers, Dr. Wakefield, me, my family and the expert witnesses. … This all went way beyond what could be considered a reasonable assessment of humanity in general and was exceptionally insulting.
A further theme was the suggestion that we the families are naïve to the fact that everyone in life has their own agenda and we were merely being used by all concerned to further their own aims and objectives.
Following yesterday’s complete waste of my time I can only assume that Mr. Lawrence’s agenda was totally at odds from that which he used to gain access. His methods seemed more akin to the gutter press than what may be reasonably expected of responsible journalism. In addition, his whole appearance was shoddy and shifty with a clear lack of respect for me, my family or my house. …
I remain deeply shocked that such a journalist who, in my opinion is neither well informed nor particularly intelligent, should be let loose as a representative of a newspaper with the reputation of the Sunday Times.
Whilst writing this I have just received an email from him which I will forward together with this, I have no intention of responding to Mr. Lawrence’s comments. I will also put both in the post to you and await your response.
Yours sincerely,
Rosemary C. T. Kessick
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Kessick remembers being surprised at the change from the day before that Deer’s e-mail represented, and noting that it arrived in the middle of typing her letter to the editor about his conduct. She did not read it until after she sent her letter to the Sunday Times.
-----Original Message-----
From: brian lawrence [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 29 November 2003 11:09 …
Dear Rosemary,
I hope you don't feel that I was too rude yesterday. I was mainly thinking aloud - trying to get an answer to a question that has been put to me - which is why not try to get the hearing when all the research is in and published. It may be that there are procedural reasons why that can't happen, and I'm only trying to suggest that maybe those aren't just things you leave to lawyers, because they might want the thing over and done with to get on with something else. In my experience, it's those people who are actually affected by the issue who are best placed to decide. I wasn't saying I didn't support your case or didn't think you were doing the right thing. Autism and MMR is a big issue and any trial is surely going to make a huge difference one way or another.
Anyhow, if you have any questions, let me know. I'll come back when those with more influence over these things than I have let me know how the paper proposes to fall on this.
Best wishes,
Brian
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