--

Later the same day, Rosemary Kessick received a response to her letter, from Sunday Times Managing Editor Richard Caseby.

-----Original Message-----

From: Caseby, Richard [mailto:[email protected]]

Sent: 29 November 2003 19:53 …

Subject: sunday times

 

Dear Ms Kessick,

Your email to the editor has been passed to me as managing editor so that I may investigate it. Once I have spoken to those involved I will be in contact next week.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Caseby, managing editor, The Sunday Times

--

The next day, Rosemary Kessick responded to Caseby.

Many thanks indeed, I look forward to your reply. In the meantime I have been trying to find reference to this man on the internet and have found nothing under the name lawrence.

 However, … I think that the man who came here was in fact someone else. We found a four year old picture of a Brian Deer (link attached) and feel that although he has aged and was quite dishevelled it is the same man.

Regards,

Rosemary Kessick

--

Two weeks later, Rosemary Kessick follows up with the Sunday Times Managing Editor.

Dear Mr. Caseby,

Following our subsequent telephone conversation I was wondering when you would be getting back to me on this matter?

--

This was followed by a further reminder a month later.

Dear Mr. Caseby,

Following our correspondence and discussion I await your comments on Mr. Brian Deer’s behaviour during his visit to my house in December last.

When I spoke to you on the telephone before Christmas I discussed my concern at hearing about an internal memo at the Sunday Times which, amongst other things, apparently accused me of providing an ‘unsatisfactory’ account of events surrounding my own son’s vaccination history to Mr. Deer. 

Whilst I never saw that memo I was horrified to gain sight of an email recently which has been forwarded to me I presume because of its contents and myself being discussed with someone whom I have never met. A number of areas concern me, in particular the references to my character and the word ‘campaign’ which is frankly ridiculous. I spoke with Mr. Deer as a concerned parent and to have these allegations being circulated against me causes great distress. The main body of that email [by Brian Deer] follows:

“… I'm still very much on the case and have pretty much reviewed the science, which you will know stands at something like 99.999 per cent recurring in favour of there being no link between MMR and autism. Indeed, I am not aware of any authority in a plausibly relevant specialty who says otherwise. This strikes me as surprising. During a previous vaccine scare, over DTP, many senior specialists, including paediatric neurologists and epidemiologists of the highest distinction advanced the theory that pertussis shots caused neurological injury. And they were found, on the balance of probability, to be wrong. …

MMR is a serious matter, touching on grave issues of public safety. You will know that, on this basis, I interviewed Mrs Rosemary Kessick of your campaign and, in four hours of recorded material, found her account of events surrounding her son's vaccination and history to be unsatisfactory.

It is my belief that a great deal of material placed before the public is also of a misleading nature. Having studied the media coverage of MMR, I appreciate that Dr Wakefield and the others have for the most part exposed themselves to journalists they might take to be sympathetic to the crusade against the vaccine. I have no such sympathy. If on that basis they do not wish to speak with me - which is certainly the impression I get - that must be a matter for them.

With best wishes, and happy new year

Brian Deer ”

…

{Here Kessick finishes her letter:] Mr. Caseby, as the mother of a seriously disabled child, fighting for his rights, I am scandalised at being discussed in this manner by a journalist representing a newspaper which I have always held in the highest regard and I sincerely hope that Mr. Deer does not intend casting further aspersions on my reputation in public print in the Sunday Times.

Awaiting your reply,

Yours sincerely,

Rosemary C.T. Kessick

cc Press Complaints Commission

     John Witherow

     Lois Rogers

 

--

On February 19, 2004, Rosemary Kessick sent Caseby a final follow-up:

Dear Mr. Caseby,

I still await a satisfactory written response with regard my correspondence, the last of which was by email dated 15th January.

Yours sincerely,

Rosemary C.T. Kessick

 

--

After that, Kessick reached out to the Sunday Times Legal Department’s Alastair Brett.

 

Dear Mr. Brett,

I write with regards the Sunday Times' imminent intent to publish an article about the MMR legal cases. It was with some surprise and distress that I learned of this as I still await a satisfactory response following my correspondence with Richard Caseby.

I believe that considering the odd, deceptive manner in which Brian Deer went about interviewing me, there is a very real possibility that I might be misrepresented.

I am not at all happy at the way in which my complaint has been handled.  I also learn that Mr Deer has been accusing me of lying and am at a loss to know what he is talking about. The mother of a severely disabled son, I willingly shared the story of events with Mr. Deer, as I have done with other journalists.

Everything I have experienced so far leaves me personally affronted, upset for my family and shocked that the Sunday Times should indulge such tactics though on form I believe that there is every intention to publish this Sunday, come what may.

I do not want any reference to me, my family, my disabled son or the work I do to help families of autistic children specific or veiled to appear.

Unless the matter is resolved entirely to my satisfaction I propose to take my complaint to the highest possible authority.

In the meantime I would appreciate an email response from you indicating that you have received this correspondence. My original letter to John Witherow is attached as are subsequent emails with Richard Caseby. My last contact with  Mr Caseby was in a telephone call I made to him several weeks ago when he told me that he was working on a response and  I could be assured  by the fact that no article had been published.

I remain unconvinced.

Yours sincerely,

Rosemary Kessick

--

The Sunday Times lawyer responded to her on February 18, 2004

Dear Ms. Kessick,

I have not seen any finalized copy yet but understand that, as at the present time, there is no intention to include you in anything we decide to publish on MMR.  Apart from what I have said above, and I hope it comes as some consolation, I do not think it would be appropriate for me to comment on your letters to the Editor or the Managing Editor. 

It is my job to make sure that whatever is published is within the law and in accordance with the highest standards of investigative journalism.  I will contain to try to maintain those standards and I hope Abel Hadden will confirm this.

Please do not hesitate to call me on 020 7782 5858 if you would like to discuss anything further but as I have said I really do not want to take over matters which have gone to the Editor or his Managing Editor. 

Yours sincerely,

Alastair Brett

Legal Manager 

--

That was the end of the correspondence. Kessick was not quoted in the 2004 Times story. But the interview was mentioned by Deer in a 2009 Sunday Times article that claimed Dr. Wakefield “fixed data” in the study in which Rose Kessick’s child participated; he said he had received “cooperation from parents” in his investigations.

Direct quotes from the interview were used seven years later, in January 2011, in the British Medical Journal Article titled, “How the Case Against the MMR Vaccine was Fixed.”

--

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism. He is the 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 3: In Which the Mother of Two Autistic Children Demands Accountability From the British Medical Journal

Read An Elaborate Fraud Part 1: In Which a Murdoch Reporter Deceives the Mother of a Severely Autistic Child and An Elaborate Fraud, Part 2: In Which a Murdoch Newspaper’s Deceptive Tactics Infect the British Medical Journal.

By Dan Olmsted

Isabella Thomas, mother of two of the 12 children in the controversial Early Report that first linked bowel disease and developmental regression, has written to the British Medical Journal asking whether its claim that the report was “an elaborate fraud” was itself tainted by the use of confidential medical information about her sons.

“I am putting in a complaint about Brian Deer’s article in the BMJ. … Some of the article relates to my sons’ medical details,” Thomas wrote last week to the BMJ editors as well as the Press Complaints Commission that considers allegations of journalist misconduct. “Please can you investigate my complaint as a matter of urgency. I am asking what material you had from Brian Deer to [corroborate] his story. Did you have … medical records or confidential documents relating to my children?”

Thomas’s plea followed by one day the start of my series examining the BMJ’s January article by free-lance journalist Deer. Deer claimed Dr. Andrew Wakefield, lead researcher in the 1998 Early Report, had “fixed data” to create the appearance of a link between bowel disorder, developmental regression and the measles-mumps-rubella shot, or MMR.

That Early Report – which appeared in 1998 in the Lancet, Britain’s other leading medical journal – noted that in eight of the 12 children (including Thomas’s), parents linked the onset of symptoms to the MMR shot, and it called for more research to see if a link in fact existed. It said no link to the MMR was established by the simple case series report.

Despite that cautious approach, the report and its aftermath sparked a firestorm that, fueled by Deer, ultimately led to Wakefield losing his medical license and to the Lancet retracting the report. Yet thousands of parents continue to support Wakefield and describe the same sequence of shot and symptoms as parents in the original case series. Mainstream media, medical groups, public health officials and pharmaceutical companies say any link has been discredited.

All but one of the Lancet parents who have spoken out – including Thomas – have stood by Wakefield and the study results and called the efforts to discredit him unfounded.

The January BMJ article by Deer, titled “How the Case Against the MMR Vaccine was Fixed,” was one of many written by Deer over a period of seven years charging Wakefield with conflicts of interest, unethical practices and, finally, outright fraud. Most of that work was published in the Sunday Times of London. Even the BMJ’s fraud allegation was not new – it was originally published in the Sunday Times in 2009 in an article by Deer claiming Wakefield had “fixed data” to create the MMR link..

Whatever methods Deer used to gather that information for the Sunday Times, in other words, were the methods adopted by the BMJ when it published them as the basis for its claim of “an elaborate fraud” by Wakefield. In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, I described the mother of another child in the Early Report, who had been interviewed by a man claiming to be “Brian Lawrence” from the Sunday Times, who turned out to be Deer. Quotes from that six-hour “interrogation,” as she described it, ended up in the BMJ. She complained to the Sunday Times at the time, which did not apologize but also did not run any quotes from the interview.

Allegations that Deer gained access to confidential information about the children in the case series have been made for years but largely ignored by press and public officials focused on what they asserted was misconduct by Wakefield – and concerned to protect a vaccination program they said it threatened (the BMJ represents the British Medical Association and is sent to more than 100,000 doctors, many of whom have stakes in vaccine usage). However, the attention has shifted in recent days to the quality of the evidence against Wakefield and how it was obtained, as phone hacking, police bribery and other crimes have roiled the Murdoch newspaper empire – of which the Sunday Times is the crown jewel in Great Britain.

The confidentiality issue, however, had been raised even earlier and at a much higher level – in 2005, in the House of Lords, following Deer's first report on Wakefield in 2004 in the Sunday Times. Here are written answers (in italics) from the government to an inquiry from Countess Mar, a member of the House of Lords, on January 10, 2005:

Data Protection Act 1998

The Countess of Mar asked Her Majesty's Government: Whether under the Data Protection Act 1998 a hospital may release to a journalist confidential documents relating to patients, including clinical findings and descriptions of medical procedures on children who can be identified; and, if not, whether it is in the public interest for the Department of Health website "MMR the facts" to include a link to the website of the Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer. [HL364]"

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Lord Warner): "While the Data Protection Act 1998 does not prevent clinicians sharing information for necessary medical purposes, the confidential nature of health data prevents it being disclosed more widely unless: identifying information has been removed or anonymised; the individuals concerned have given their consent to disclosure; there is a statutory obligation to disclose or a court order requiring disclosure—it is in response to a court order; there is an overriding public interest (for example to protect public health).

The "MMR the facts" website has been put together by the Immunisation Information team at the Department of Health. The information team makes available a range of materials designed to provide both parents and health professionals with the latest information on immunisation. As is common practice, it provides links to other sources of information that will help inform the public interest and debate in the topic. As noted on the site, the department is not responsible for the content or reliability of linked websites, and linking should not be taken as endorsement of any kind."

--

Immediately after the BMJ article by Deer appeared this past January, Isabella Thomas wrote several times to BMJ Editor Fiona Godlee, to demand answers about its continuing use of information about her son.

“I am writing to you because of my concern regarding Brian Deer’s articles in the BMJ,” began one of the letters. “I did respond to the article asking how you came to the serious decision that it was fraud. To date you have not published my response yet again.

“I want to ask how could you compare the GP records and the hospital records of my children unless you have them in your procession? As it involves my children and you did not make contact with any of the Lancet families, I would like to know what evidence Brian Deer has shown you to make you reach this conclusion?”

Thomas also pointed out that Deer had quoted from an electronic Blackberry message sent to her by Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, at the start of a General Medical Council proceeding against Wakefield and two colleagues instigated by Deer. “My own view,” Deer quoted Horton as writing to Thomas, “is that the GMC is no place to continue this debate. But the process has started and it will be impossible to stop.”

How, she wanted to know, did Deer gain access to that?

Thomas told me that since this series of articles began she has spoken to a Member of Parliament who "is backing me on the issue of Brian Deer holding medical information on my boys who were part of the Lancet study.”

To all this, the response from the BMJ, the official house organ of Britain’s medical establishment: Silence. Even if it has assured itself that there are no ethical or legal breaches in the way the information it published was obtained, that may not be a tenable position in the long run, considering how closely its claim of fraud is linked to the reporting Deer did for Murdoch’s enterprise.

Separately, just as the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks of News International – the News Corp. division that includes the Sunday Times -- were appearing before Parliament last week, another MP Bob Stewart of Beckenham, submitted a written request: “To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will assess the adequacy of the police investigation into the activities commissioned by The Sunday Times of the freelance journalist Mr Brian Deer in relation to the acquisition of children's medical records and information from (a) the Royal Free Hospital and (b) other sources between 2003 and 2005."

James Murdoch, who oversees the British newspaper group, is now under fire after three former executives charged he lied to Parliament when he said he did not know about phone hacking at the Sunday Times’ sister paper, the now-shuttered News of the World, when he approved a large settlement to a soccer star. 

Ignorance, it seems, is no longer a convincing excuse.

--

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism. He is the 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 4: News Analysis -- The British Medical Association Is “Standing Up for Doctors” Even If It Means Attacking Patients

By Mark Blaxill

If you go to the web-site of the British Medical Association you will find the BMA’s tag line prominently displayed: “Standing up for doctors.” It’s a position most notable for what they do not stand up for: not patients, not science, not health, just the doctors who join the association. The home page elaborates what this means more directly, “We are … an independent trade union dedicated to protecting individual members and the collective interests of doctors.”

In other words, The BMA is an unabashed economic entity: a trade union. And its primary purpose is to defend the money and power of its members. It’s that simple. Who does the BMA stand against? The adversary of the day might vary a bit. But on a day to day basis, the biggest conflicts British doctors face are with patients. When patients comply with what doctors tell them to do and generate income for them, they are useful to the BMA. When they want to take control of their own families’ health, or worse, suggest that member doctors may have caused harm, well that’s a different matter. When patients' interests conflict with “standing up for doctors,” It’s pretty clear what the BMA’s job is.

The BMA attacks critical patients as if they were their enemy.

One of its instruments for defending doctors’ interests is “science,” or more accurately, propaganda masquerading as science. Notably, the BMA publishes the British Medical Journal, the journal that earlier this year disseminated Brian Deer’s accusations of fraud against Andrew Wakefield. Despite Wakefield’s lengthy and Byzantine trial on allegations surrounding his medical ethics and research design in front of the General Medical Council (GMC), allegations of scientific fraud were not part of the GMC proceedings. Until January 2011, freelance reporter Brian Deer, and Deer alone, had accused Wakefield of lying about data and falsifying evidence. That is, until the BMJ entered the mix, effectively certifying the validity of Deer’s 2009 accusations in The Sunday Times with a dramatic flourish that proved even more devastating to Wakefield’s reputation than the GMC trial. How devastating were these accusations? In a press release, BMJ editor Fiona Godlee claimed to be “struck by a comparison between researcher Andrew Wakefield’s fraud and Piltdown man, that great paleontological hoax that led people to believe for 40 years that the missing link between man and ape had been found.” Sadly, these extravagant allegations were picked up by the global media, spread like wildfire, and, despite their manifest implausibility, the charges stuck.

For any doctor or scientist who might ever have been inclined to support a critical patient the message was clear: when the BMA and its flagship journal the BMJ go after you, they will be ruthless.

Lost in the frenzy over Wakefield’s alleged scientific fraud, however, is the fact that the origin of the evidence in the 1998 Lancet article never came from Wakefield.  Rather, the Royal Free Hospital's investigation (which included many others beyond Wakefield) was launched based on the collection and reporting of observations originally made by parents. These parental observations included varying forms of regressive autism or encephalitis, inflammatory bowel disease and a temporal association between exposure to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR) and the onset of symptoms. As time has passed (and in every one of the cases reported in The Lancet paper), the parents’ continuing reports support Wakefield’s original account. In addition, many thousands of parents have subsequently reported an identical sequence of events. At kitchen tables all over the world, the MMR has become known as “the autism shot.” The heart of the matter, therefore, is the tension between the British medical establishment on one hand and the Lancet parents on the other.

So in accusing Wakefield, the BMJ is really doing something else; they are accusing the Lancet parents of committing an elaborate fraud.

Why would the BMJ condone such an aggressive attack? Sadly again, in publishing Deer’s accusations, the house organ of the BMA was advancing the interest neither of science nor the truth. Instead, they were “standing up for doctors”: for the income doctors gain from frequent visits to the doctor to receive vaccination; for doctors’ freedom to avoid costly minutes with skeptical parents during their well-child visits; and for the power of doctors to force parents to comply with the recommended vaccination schedule.

As for Deer’s reporting, while Wakefield provided the proximate target, not far under the surface lurked an aggressive attack on parents who have the temerity to question the mandates of the BMA and public health officials. It’s quite a ruthless attack: Parents who question vaccine safety are a danger to the public health; Parents who allege vaccine injury are liars; Parents who take offense to intimidation and coercion are anti-vaccine campaigners; Parents who seek resources to support a vaccine-injured child are cheating the system to get rich.

This kind of attack is not delicate work. But in making the decision to tie its reputation to Deer’s, the BMA made a risky choice.

One need not look very far to find evidence of Deer’s boorishness. It’s most plainly exemplified by his unvarnished contempt for noncompliant parents. One widely circulated example was provoked following on-line challenges to Deer’s reporting by three autism parents: Lancet 12 mother Isabella Thomas, Age of Autism Contributing Editor John Stone and a third unnamed blogger. Jumping into the fray in a Pharma-friendly blog, Deer had this to say about the critical parents (see HERE)

And they wonder why their children have problems with their brains.

Apparently not content with just this brief insult, Deer elaborated further (see HERE )

I genuinely think that the three individuals I was criticising – and I know who all three of them are – do need to question whether their personal behavioural 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 weasly, deceitful, obsessiveness, all signal pathology to me

Deer has reserved special antipathy for Isabella Thomas, the mother of two of the twelve Lancet cases. Mrs. Thomas has most publicly opposed Deer, so his public comments about her plainly demonstrate his bias: Deer’s presumption that in a dispute between BMA members and unsatisfied parents, the parents are always guilty and the doctors are always right. (see HERE)

There was the case of one mother, for instance, whose story is now in the public domain and entirely reportable, who had two children. Her GP gave evidence that he believed she obsessively sought unnecessary treatment for the children, to their detriment. He said he felt she was harming their interests. She fell out with her local hospital, and with a previous GP, who were not convinced by her...

There is a reckoning coming, I think. Skulking behind medical confidentiality, legal privilege and hapless kids won’t do it forever. There is a public interest here, and that, I think, will eventually prevail.

Deer’s thinly veiled threats aren’t limited to Isabella Thomas. He has also criticized Lancet 12 parent Rosemary Kessick, another parent who has criticized Deer’s methods and refused to back down. Deer’s interactions with Kessick included an outright lie about his identity, an interaction my Age of Autism colleague Dan Olmsted described last week (see An Elaborate Fraud, Part 2: In Which a Murdoch Newspaper’s Deceptive Tactics Infect the British Medical Journal ). The ultimate intent of Deer’s narrative was to accuse Kessick of lying (see  HERE).

 I interviewed Mrs Rosemary Kessick… and, in four hours of recorded material, found her account of events surrounding her son's vaccination and history to be unsatisfactory. It is my belief that a great deal of material placed before the public is also of a misleading nature.

In these and other intemperate statements, Brian Deer remains unrepentant, and as long as the medical industry protects him against the consequences of his actions, he feels secure, even triumphant, in his position. Our series “An Elaborate Fraud” began last week and will continue to demonstrate that it is Deer’s account of events that is the only unsatisfactory and misleading material being placed before the public.

But as far as the BMA goes, it should be concerned about something more threatening to its long term mission of representing doctors: guilt by association with Brian Deer and his unethical methods. As we’re beginning to learn, Deer’s work was deeply enmeshed with the “anything goes,” “the ends justifies the means” culture of News International, Rupert Murdoch’s criminally corrupt British newspaper empire. As the News International saga unfolds, many more people of conscience will begin to ask the question, what did the BMA condone in their assault on patients who didn’t pay proper fealty to the sovereignty of British doctors and who needed to stand down?

There are signs that the BMA is already concerned over its accountability for the Wakefield Inquisition. A few months ago, Age of Autism’s John Stone was successful in extracting an admission of conflict of interest from the BMA. This concession was made grudgingly in an essay titled, “In response to John Stone” by BMJ editor Fiona Godlee. Godlee wrote (BMJ Content)

“we should have declared the BMJ Group's income from Merck as a competing interest to the editorial (and the two editor's choice articles) that accompanied Brian Deer's [MMR] series... We should also, as you say, have declared the group's income from GSK as a competing interest in relation to these articles....We didn't declare these competing interests because it didn't occur to us to do so.”

The formal (but as John Stone points out, merely partial) concession followed (see  Age of Autism: Farce at British Medical Journal as Double Standards Persist Over Undeclared Competing Interest)

“The BMJ should have declared competing interests in relation to this editorial by Fiona Godlee and colleagues...The BMJ Group receives advertising and sponsorship revenue from vaccine manufacturers, and specifically from Merck and GSK, which both manufacture MMR vaccines.”

In most businesses, service providers understand that going to war with their customers rarely ends well. So far, the medical industry and its partners in the public health bureaucracies have managed to sell the media the line that the controversies in autism pit “parents vs. science.” Sadly, true science is the casualty in this narrative, one in which the real battle is defined by economic and political difference between doctors and their powerful trade associations on one hand and critical, determined parents on the other. And the BMA is revealing itself as part of a long line of economically interested parties—from tobacco companies to the leaded gasoline industry—that put their own bottom line ahead of the health of children.

We’ll have more on Deer and his sponsors at the British Medical Association in the days and weeks ahead.

--

Mark Blaxill is Editor-at-Large of Age of Autism. He is the co-author, with Dan Olmsted, 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 5: In Which Brian Deer Defends His Reporting and Accuses Autism Parents of a Conspiracy

By Dan Olmsted

The journalist who claims Dr. Andrew Wakefield “fixed data” to link autism and the MMR shot says his own work contains “no ethical irregularities” – and he is accusing parents of autistic children of conspiring with Wakefield.

Brian Deer, who wrote the British Medical Journal article in January alleging that Wakefield's report was a hoax, was responding to criticism of his own methods by parents of three of the 12 children in the Wakefield report. Deer says those parents actually were “in it” with Wakefield and continue “to conspire with” him to create a false version of events.

One parent, Rosemary Kessick, said Deer had used a false name when interviewing her on the subject and was accusatory and biased; a second parent, Isabella Thomas, questioned how Deer obtained medical information about her two sons as well as other confidential data.

In the 1998 Early Report by Wakefield and 12 co-authors at London’s Royal Free Hospital, published in the Lancet, both parents had linked the onset of autistic regression and bowel disease to the mumps-measles-rubella shot. Wakefield and colleagues reported the parental associations in eight of the 12 children, but wrote that further research was needed to determine if a connection existed. Wakefield subsequently urged that the three vaccines be administered separately pending that research, triggering a huge controversy. An investigation of the Early Report sparked by Deer led the Lancet to retract it in 2010, and the General Medical Council pulled Wakefield’s license to practice medicine the same year.

This series examines the basis for the claim that Wakefield, and Wakefield alone, perpetrated “an elaborate fraud,” a claim the BMJ and subsequently mainstream media have adopted as fact. Wakefield’s research is now widely described as discredited and any link between vaccines and autism as debunked.

Regarding Kessick’s comments to me, Deer wrote on July 26: “Not only do I have no shred of doubt about interviewing Rosemary Kessick while using a pseudonymn [sic], I’m immensely proud of the encounter. … Thanks Ms Kessick.”

Deer, who was working for The Sunday Times of London at the time of the interview in 2003, said he had “discussed the intended use of a pseudonym in advance with editorial and legal staff, and the subterfuge was wholly justified by the public interest in the safety of children by means of vaccination, which Ms Kessick sought to challenge.”

In fact, the newspaper said in a note accompanying the subsequent article, three months later, that “As one of Britain’s top investigative journalists, he [Deer] has also had to work under assumed names because pharmaceutical companies have tried to block his inquiries” – not that Deer had used such tactics with the parent of a disabled child. Nor did that article use any quotes from her, although the British Medical Journal did so seven years later without explaining when or under what circumstances they had been obtained.

Simply saying, as Deer did, that The Sunday Times approved of his deceit may not carry the Good Housekeeping-like stamp of approval it once did. The newspaper is part of News International owned by Rupert Murdoch, which is the subject of several official investigations into reporting tactics during that period, including phone and computer hacking and “blagging,” the use of false identities to gain access to confidential information.

"Not only are there no ethical irregularities in my work, but my stories on MMR are now widely-regarded as the textbook public interest investigation in the field of medicine," Deer said in his July post in response to my articles. "Hence, my second British Press Award, which, as every British journalist will know, are immensely difficult to win."

Deer went on to accuse Kessick of serious impropriety. “The pair of them were in it together,” he wrote of Kessick and Wakefield. Deer offered no evidence to support the allegation.

Deer has a long history of lambasting Wakefield, calling him a “charlatan” and “slippery as condom lube.” More recently, perhaps fortified by the journalism award in Britain, he has gone after journalists (he called me a “clown” in his recent post, a mild slight in the Deer lexicon), and parents who have challenged his critique of the Lancet study.

He described the letter Kessick wrote to the editor of the London Times about him as “a torrent of false abuse.” I quoted most of the letter in this series, but Deer said I “lied” when I wrote that I left out only a few irrelevant details. Deer said the omissions “would tend to undermine Ms. Kessick’s credibility,” although my recollection is they mostly had to do with his strangely frequent use of the bathroom.

In addition to his attack on Kessick, he called Isabella Thomas “a spiteful, vexatious lady, who apparently continues to conspire on behalf of Dr Andrew Wakefield in false allegations that evidence exists to suggest that the MMR vaccine causes autism.”

That comment by Deer was contained in an October 23, 2006, letter from Deer to Norman Baker, Thomas’s member of Parliament who had enquired on her behalf about Deer’s reporting.

“I don’t believe that Ms. Thomas has any genuine concern about confidentiality,” Deer added. “In my view, she wants to cause me harm, and to obstruct further inquiry into what happened at the Royal Free Hospital [where the study was conducted] in the late 1990s.”

A number of parents who support Wakefield’s research findings told me they are afraid to speak out for fear of being attacked by Deer as dishonest, or having their words twisted to conform to his viewpoint. In the past Deer has said that he would be the judge of whether a family was entitled to medical confidentiality based on his own assessment of their statements and actions.

He also wrote in his July post that I am “presently grappling with how to leave out a direct allegation of fraud against Wakefield made in another letter by a Lancet 12 parent.”

That is what a literature major might call an idiosyncratic reading of the text. It will be discussed in due course – although Deer, who received the letter in March as a result of my inquiries, is free to bring it up at his convenience, which he has now done twice without describing the content. The BMJ also has a copy, supplied by me in June, and so far has failed to acknowledge its receipt or publish the major correction plainly envisioned by its own editorial policy.

--

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism. He is the 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 6: In Which “Blagging” is Discredited as a Journalistic Tactic, Unless the British Medical Journal Publishes It

By Dan Olmsted

Memo to Brian Lawrence: You’re fired!

The deceptive tactic of “blagging” – which includes using a false identity to gain information – has been banned by The Sunday Times of London, the newspaper Brian Deer was working for when he passed himself off as “Brian Lawrence” to get interviews with parents of severely disabled children.

“The Sunday Times has quietly banned its reporters from employing subterfuge in the pursuit of stories,” the Guardian reported August 5.

Deer, who in response to earlier articles in this series recently described himself as “immensely proud of the subterfuge,” said the interviews were crucial to making the case that Dr. Andrew Wakefield committed fraud in the controversial Early Report about developmental regression and bowel disease after the MMR shot. The British Medical Journal made use of information Deer obtained by masquerading as “Lawrence” – complete with a bogus Sunday Times e-mail address in that name -- to allege in January that Wakefield committed fraud.

The parents Deer tricked have stood by Wakefield and the integrity of the Early Report about a dozen children, including theirs, prompting Deer to claim they are “conspiring” with Wakefield to make money. But now even the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times has forbidden the tactic Deer employed, leaving the British Medical Journal holding the blag, so to speak.

In the 1998 Early Report by Wakefield and 12 co-authors at London’s Royal Free Hospital, published in the Lancet, parents of eight of the 12 children linked their children’s symptoms to the MMR, but the authors wrote that further research was needed to determine if a connection existed. Wakefield subsequently urged that the three vaccines be administered separately pending that research, triggering a huge controversy. An investigation of the Early Report sparked by Deer led the Lancet to retract it in 2010, and the General Medical Council pulled Wakefield’s license to practice medicine the same year.

This series of articles examines the basis for the BMJ’s claim that Wakefield, and Wakefield alone, perpetrated “an elaborate fraud,” a claim the BMJ and subsequently mainstream media have adopted as fact. Even though all but one of the parents has stood by Wakefield’s research – and that one parent’s comments were grossly mischaracterized in the BMJ -- Wakefield is now widely described as discredited and any link between vaccines and autism as debunked.

“Blagging” is a “shadowy technique,” in the words of the BBC, expressly prohibited by Britain’s Data Protection Act of 1996. The act forbids “knowingly or recklessly obtaining or disclosing personal data or information without the consent of the data controller.” The Act makes an exception for information clearly in the public interest, but that would appear to apply to criminals, wayward public officials and corrupt corporate executives, not parents of the disabled. The Sunday Times did acknowledge Deer’s use of a pseudonym, but said it was because pharmaceutical companies sought to block his inquiries. Drugmakers would presumably have been delighted with Deer’s crusade against parents who claimed their products permanently disabled their children.

Regardless, the Sunday Times appears to have washed its hands of the practice altogether, although they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the soap and water.

“The ban is understood is understood to have ‘come from the very top’ of News International according to insiders,” the Guardian reported, “and to have been ordered in the past month following the outcry over revelations that the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler was hacked and messages deleted.

“As a result, it is understood that the paper's editor, John Witherow, told his reporting staff not to use pseudonyms or alter egos despite the fact that such practices are allowed under law and in the Press Complaints Commission editors' code of practice for stories that are in the public interest. ‘We have been forced to do it,’ a source said.”

Ironically, the ban followed by three weeks a defense of the practice – and of Deer in particular – by Witherow. He 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 hardball 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 in reference to 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 “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 and said those who gathered the data are “known criminals” tied to the “criminal underworld.”

As I’ve reported, regardless of whether the Sunday Times approved of Deer’s methods at the time – he says they did – the publication of quotes from parents who didn’t give their approval would seem to violate the British Medical Journal’s standards, which require written consent from anyone whose medical information is disclosed. No such consent was asked for in this case.

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Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism. He is the 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 Series Part 7: In Which the BMJ’s Prime Example of Wakefield’s Alleged Misconduct Proves Flagrantly False

One of the 12 children on a doctor visit not long after the BMJ articles were published in January.

By Dan Olmsted

In January, The British Medical Journal began its attack on Dr. Andrew Wakefield by claiming he altered every single one of 12 children's case histories to create a phony link between the MMR vaccine and autism. In five cases, it said, signs of autism actually began before the shot was even given.

As the strongest case in point, author Brian Deer described how  Child 11's symptoms appeared “too soon” -- a full two months before the measles-mumps-rubella shot. Deer said the father himself spotted the "anomaly" and was deeply upset about Wakefield's deception.

But none of that is true.

Child 11’s measles-mumps-rubella shot came first, and the symptoms of physical illness and regression followed, just as Wakefield reported. No one but Deer claims otherwise. Multiple records by independent medical experts establish the facts, the child’s father confirms them, and BMJ Editor Fiona Godlee and Deer have known it for months – because I told them about it and showed them the evidence, and so did the father.

Yet Godlee has refused to correct that error and numerous others of similar significance, continuing to publicly insist there were none.

This is the strange counter-factual universe into which the British medical establishment has plunged the controversy over autism and vaccines. The BMJ’s Wakefield investigation – despite peer-review and supposedly rigorous fact-checking – is replete with the kind of misrepresentations, elisions and outright falsehoods it charges Wakefield with committing.

To date, installments in our series have examined the BMJ’s failure to adhere to its own standards of confidentiality and fairness, as well as tactics employed by Deer, whom it commissioned to investigate Wakefield – tactics that included “blagging,” or using a false identity, to interview parents of vaccine-damaged children for The Sunday Times of London, where most of the material later reported in the BMJ first appeared. (In the wake of the News International scandal, the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times has now banned blagging, although Deer said he remains “immensely proud” of his reporting techniques.)

We now turn to the elements of fraud alleged by Deer and the BMJ. We begin, as the journal did, with Child 11. None of the children were named in the original 1998 Lancet article written by Wakefield and 12 co-authors. Like Deer, I was able to determine the families’ identities but – unlike Deer, whose reporting was limited and selective – I reached out to every one I could find, and in every case heard a very different account from the one Deer reported.

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I met Father 11 at a Peet’s Coffee shop in an affluent, picture-perfect Southern California enclave, and we sat outside in the mid-60s sunshine he jokingly called “a little frosty.” A wealthy businessman who lives in a gated community nearby, he wore a light jacket emblazoned with “Cal,” for the University of California at Berkeley where he got an engineering degree. He carried a thin file folder and a spiral notebook.

In this laid-back setting, it was hard to grasp the role he and his family have played in one of the major medical controversies of our time, one that unfolded in a foggy city 6,000 miles to the east.

This father is Deer’s best witness among the parents of the 12 children described in the Lancet paper – in fact, his only one, the lone parent who is hostile to Wakefield, not just a little frosty, but coldly angry. His anonymous comments to Deer in the BMJ seemed to fully support the January 5, 2011, cover story: “Secrets of the MMR Scare: How the Case Against the MMR Was Fixed.”

“The father need not have worried,” Deer continued. “My investigation of the MMR issue exposed the frauds behind Wakefield’s research.”

Child 11, in fact, was Deer’s opening.

He was among those “whose parents apparently blamed MMR,” but Deer commented acidly that “Child 11’s case must have been a disappointment. Records show his behavioural symptoms began too soon.” [Italics in original] Deer quoted from a Royal Free Hospital discharge summary: “His developmental milestones were normal until 13 months of age. In the period 13-18 months he developed slow speech patterns and repetitive hand movements. Over this period his parents remarked on his slow gradual deterioration.”

Deer summarized: “That put the symptom two months earlier than reported in the Lancet, and a month before the boy had MMR. And this was not the only anomaly to catch the father’s eye. …” (Note that it is Deer, not the discharge paper, saying the symptoms came “a month before the boy had MMR.”)

The BMJ report was the coup de grace for serious consideration of a link between vaccines and autism. Wakefield was “convicted of fraud,” wrote Time magazine in an article titled “The Dangers of the Antivaccine Movement.” An editorial in The New York Times, titled Autism Fraud, noted Britain’s General Medical Council had already stripped Wakefield of his medical license, and the Lancet retracted the paper: “Now the British Medical Journal has taken the extraordinary step of publishing a lengthy report by Brian Deer, the British investigative journalist who first brought the paper’s flaws to light — and has put its own reputation on the line by endorsing his findings.”

Indeed it did.

“Clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare,” Editor in Chief Fiona Godlee wrote. She said “there is no doubt it was Wakefield” who was responsible for the “elaborate fraud,” despite having 12 co-authors.

Hold the door, please. I was about to learn that Deer’s explosive claim about Child 11 – Exhibit A in this alleged hoax -- was false. And that was just the first step of my journey into a world where things were not at all as they seemed.

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The father opened the file folder – guarding the papers against a fickle coastal breeze -- and showed me a letter he had written on January 1, 1997, to “Dr. Andrew Wakefield, Royal Free Hospital, London, England.”

"My son [name deleted] at age 15 months, was immunized with the Merck MMR vaccine and became ill for the next several months,” the letter began.

“As his pediatric records indicate he came down with a viral infection, and shortly thereafter viral pneumonia. His condition slowly deteriorated over time, and was diagnosed as being autistic on his birthday at age 3. The onset of his autistic behavior began around 18 months. … He was diagnosed as moderate to severe, with no speech, no eye contact, and cognitive function at 6 months overall.”

Multiple specialists in the United States confirmed the autism diagnosis, the letter added, as well as their suspicions of the MMR vaccine as the cause. Further workups in California also revealed “indeterminant inflammatory bowel disease” -- the dual syndrome Wakefield was then investigating at the Royal Free. That was why the father wanted the hospital’s pediatric gastroenterologists to evaluate his child.

So – first came the shot, then the symptoms. The father’s account, and medical records created before he got anywhere near Wakefield, could not be clearer. But didn’t he tell Brian Deer exactly the opposite, as recounted in the opening of the BMJ cover story? And didn’t a hospital record confirm that?

No. And no.

Though you’d never know it, the father was actually disputing how long after the shot specific symptoms occurred. In fact, the father did directly blame the MMR for causing his son’s illnesses and autistic regression – a fact that appears to have escaped Deer’s notice, or at least acknowledgement.

Yes, the father was angry at Wakefield. Yes, he disagreed with other points, some of them unrelated to the content of the Lancet article. But no – he did not say that the symptoms came before the shot. That was not an “anomaly” in the Lancet paper that caught his eye, as Deer wrote.

And the discharge document itself? It was simply wrong, one of thousands of pieces of paper generated by many medical personnel in a complicated medical case stretching over many years; perhaps the “13-18 months” was a typo for “15-18,” since that is what the father had reported all along. Regardless, the father says he never told Deer that the symptoms came first, and there is no evidence to the contrary. Deer apparently did not bother to check that one piece of paper against the large volume of other evidence, or to confirm it with the father, or to make sure that his own claim that symptoms began “a month before the boy had MMR” coincided with any actual chronology.

As far as I can tell, no one on the planet -- no doctor, no parent, no document – has ever said Child 11 was anything but healthy and developing normally before the MMR. No one, that is, but Brian Deer in the BMJ. And here we see Deer at work: Because Wakefield was by definition a fraud – because Deer said so – any discrepancies between data in the Lancet paper and any other source was proof against Wakefield. One document says 13-18 months for the period of regression? That was evidence enough that Wakefield “used bogus data … to manufacture a link” between the MMR and autism.

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To my surprise as we sat outside in Southern California, the father told me he hadn’t read the BMJ article, and he declined my offer to quote from it or have him read it during our visit. He would rather lay out the sequence in his own words, he told me.

That turned out to be a useful approach.

His son had been completely healthy and developing normally, he said, until the MMR shot at 15 months triggered a downhill progression.

“I very much believe it,” he said about the relationship of the shot to the symptoms: The measles component of the vaccine triggered an immune deficiency that produced the cascade of devastating physical and mental problems. This, in fact, was Wakefield’s provisional hypothesis.

When I showed Father 11 what Deer had written about the shot-and-symptoms sequence, he said, emphatically, “That’s not correct.”

A few days later, after he read the BMJ piece, the father sent Deer and myself an email.

“Mr. Deer’s article makes me appear irrational for continuing to believe that the MMR caused difficulties which predated its administration, but until the incorrect dates in the discharge summary were pointed out to me this week, I failed to realize that the discharge summary was inaccurate.”

The father wrote that this was an honest mistake on Deer’s part.

“Based on the incorrect discharge summary I shared with him, Mr. Deer reasonably inferred that my son’s autistic symptoms predated his receipt of the MMR vaccination, which they did not.”

 

I’m no engineer, but neither is Father 11 a journalist. As someone familiar with the norms of my profession, I had rather a different reaction. I found it hard to see how Deer -- who interviewed the father in person twice, once in California and once in London, corresponded by email, and must have heard the same story I did — could get something so important so wrong. The number of times he used the father’s quotes to misleading effect – appearing to angrily assert that the symptoms preceded the shot – was too high; the way he did it seemed too artful.

He made the father appear irrational. Yet when I met him, Father 11 was as straightforward and precise as you might expect from a successful engineer.  By the time I finished my Peet’s, I had no doubt about the chronology or the documentation.

 Besides, the imperative to get the facts correct – and to correct them promptly and prominently if called for – is implacable. Even more than a hurried newspaper account, there were not supposed to be any mistakes in Deer’s work in the august British Medical Journal. They said so themselves.

“The BMJ stands by the article by Brian Deer and the linked editorial published on 5 January,” Godlee wrote in February in response to e-mails critical of its reporting by readers at Age of Autism. “The article, which was subjected to peer review and editorial checking, was based on enquiries carried out over some seven years, involving, among other things, interviews with parents of children enrolled in Andrew Wakefield's research. Four such parents are quoted in the article. As made clear in the article, the core data on which the findings were based were evidenced, except in the case of one child, by the transcript of a General Medical Council fitness to practise hearing which sat between July 2007 and May 2010.”

That “one child” – the exception for which no independent evidence existed -- was Child 11.

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Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism. He is the co-author, with Mark Blaxill, of The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic, published in paperback in September by Thomas Dunne Books.

An Elaborate Fraud Series: Brian Deer, BMJ, Murdoch, Dr. Andrew Wakefield

• An Elaborate Fraud, Part 1: In Which a Murdoch Reporter Deceives the Mother of a Severely Autistic Child
  
• An Elaborate Fraud, Part 2: In Which a Murdoch Newspaper’s Deceptive Tactics Infect the British Medical Journal
• An Elaborate Fraud, Part 3: In Which the Mother of Two Autistic Children Demands Accountability From the British Medical Journal
• An Elaborate Fraud, Part 4: News Analysis -- The British Medical Association Is “Standing Up for Doctors” Even If It Means Attacking Patient
• An Elaborate Fraud, Part 5: In Which Brian Deer Defends His Reporting and Accuses Autism Parents of a Conspiracy
• An Elaborate Fraud, Part 6: In Which “Blagging” is Discredited as a Journalistic Tactic, Unless the British Medical Journal Publishes It
• An Elaborate Fraud Series Part 7: In Which the BMJ’s Prime Example of Wakefield’s Alleged Misconduct Proves Flagrantly False  

An Elaborate Fraud, Part 8: In Which The British Medical Journal Tries to Debunk a Clear-Cut Case of Regressive Autism

One of the 12 children on a doctor visit not long after the BMJ articles were published in January.

By Dan Olmsted

In its attack on Dr. Andrew Wakefield in January, The British Medical Journal said he “manufactured” data to fabricate a link between the measles-mumps-rubella shot and the onset of autism in 12 children, setting off a worldwide vaccine scare.

Author Brian Deer questioned whether the children even had the disorder. If they did not, of course, that would be a devastating blow to Wakefield’s work. “First to crack was ‘regressive autism,’ the bedrock of his allegations,” wrote Deer, based on his seven-year investigation of Wakefield’s 1998 report. Just one child -- Case 2 -- clearly had regressive autism, he asserted.

But that charge is false. Take Child 11, whose circumstances we described in the last article in this series. Child 11 clearly had regressive autism – just as he clearly developed autism after the MMR shot, not before it, as Deer falsely reported in the BMJ (see HERE).

Once again, only Brian Deer claims otherwise.

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When I first spoke to Father 11 earlier this year, it was by phone. I had dropped off a copy of my book at the guard’s entrance to his gated enclave in Southern California, with a note on the back of my business card that I was interviewing families of the 12 children described in Wakefield’s Lancet paper, and would like to speak with him while I was in the area.

He called the next morning.

“My son was diagnosed in 1994,” he told me. Until 15 months, “my son was a healthy young baby, and after he was given the MMR he came down with otitis media (an ear infection) and later came down with pneumonia. He was just slowly regressing, after several months. It was almost unnoticeable.”

The father and I arranged to meet about an hour later at a coffee shop nearby. At this point he hadn’t read Deer’s article and wasn’t aware of its contents – he was just unguardedly describing what happened to his son. He showed me a letter he had written to Wakefield at the Royal Free Hospital in London in 1997 that confirmed what he told me.

“My son at age 15 months, was immunized with the Merck MMR vaccine and became ill for the next several months. As his pediatric records indicate he came down with a viral infection, and shortly thereafter viral pneumonia. His condition slowly deteriorated over time, and was diagnosed as being autistic at age 3. The onset of his autistic-like behaviors began around 18 months.”

This was a straightforward chronology, whatever one might think of the cause-and-effect issue: Normal development. A shot. Illnesses. Regression. Autism. And it wasn’t just the father saying so. His letter continued:

“After going to three prominent children’s hospitals for an evaluation of his condition in California, the medical community concurred that his condition was psychological and that the situation was hopeless. He was diagnosed as moderate to severe, with no speech, no eye contact, and cognitive function at 6 months overall.”

In March of 1994, he took his son to a specialist affiliated with a major American university. In this article, I’m not naming the doctor, but I know his identity, and in fact unearthed the text of comments he made a couple of years later to a national autism group.

“One of the striking feature [sic] in all autistic patients that we have studied,” he said, “is a strong association between immunization with MMR and the development of autism (regressive autism).” That parenthetical reference -- regressive autism -- is in the original.

Put aside again the issue of whether the MMR triggered autism. Here is a doctor saying publicly that all – all – the autism patients he studied were characterized by regressive autism. That included Child 11. And that's on top of diagnoses from three prominent children's hospitals. This family had the money to try to help their son, and they used it, creating an unusually detailed record on the nature and timing of his disorder. All of this occurred before the child got anywhere near the Royal Free Hospital.

How, you may ask, did Deer and the BMJ decide this child’s diagnosis was in doubt, that it was part of a questionable pattern in which Wakefield “fixed” the facts in furtherance of “a hoax”? That the children were not even autistic? Well, that requires a little further digging.

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The BMJ’s report on Wakefield is constructed like a maze; you can get lost at every turn. The first article, on January 5, starts with Father 11 and uses him to convict – not just indict – Wakefield of what Deer calls "frauds." But for a coherent bill of particulars of each “fraud,” you must read the sidebar titled “How the Link Was Fixed.” The first bullet point states that "only one child clearly had regressive autism."

And what are the details of that blockbuster charge?

Well, a chart with the BMJ article purports to compare the 12 children’s real medical records with those falsified in the Lancet paper. The Lancet reported that Child 11 had a diagnosis of regressive autism, but Deer puts a question mark there.

 

That’s as far as the printed article goes. But in fine print at the end of the article, there’s this: “The version of this article on BMJ.com contains full footnotes.”

To BMJ.com we go, still in search of evidence that Child 11’s regressive autism diagnosis is questionable. Online, you click on “Web Extra.” There you find the same chart as in the print version, this time with footnotes, including Footnote 87 next to the question mark about Child 11’s diagnosis. It reads, in full:

“Documentation is incomplete. As with other children in the series, child 11 does not appear to have been neuropsychiatrically assessed at the Royal Free, which had no department for child development and no paediatric neurologist. The hospital discharge summary refers to “autism”, and the father recalls a diagnoses [sic] in California that his son was “autistic”. According to the father, the boy never started to talk at an appropriate age. “Speech didn’t come in,” he said. “My wife thought about having another kid, and she said, ‘No I’m going to wait till he starts speaking.’ Even at age 2, no speech.” Child 11 received MMR at 14 months. [sic]

This, then, is the entire case for questioning Child 11’s diagnosis. At least four tactics here are worth noting:

*   Misdirection. Whether the Royal Free pediatric gastrointestinal unit is set up to diagnose developmental problems is irrelevant in light of the qualified professional assessments already made.

*   Omission. Writing that the father recalls that his son was diagnosed as “autistic” omits the crucial fact that multiple medical professionals said so. The dubious-sounding parental “recall” is not the issue here. The air quotes around “autistic” make it seem like some sort of West Coast diagnosis du jour rather than the confirmed clinical description of a severely disabled child.

*   Suppression. Regardless of the child’s language development – which can be quite variable in boys in infancy -- the critical fact is that he lost skills and developed autism after the MMR shot at 15 months (not 14 months.) The quote, "Even at age 2, no speech," is a complete red herring -- since any developmental problem after 15 months could implicate the MMR rather than point to a pre-existing problem.

*   Falsehood. There is no factual basis for claiming that “incomplete” records make the diagnosis questionable.

The “Web Extra” itself is unusual. It begins: “This is an author’s background document giving information additional to the peer-reviewed report ‘How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed’ by Brian Deer, published in the BMJ in January 2011.”

BMJ Editor Fiona Godlee has stated that the BMJ articles were peer-reviewed and carefully fact-checked. Does this wording mean the Web Extra fell outside those parameters? Yet it is the only basis for crucial claims made in the BMJ proper.

Regardless, we have so far shown that Child 11, contrary to assertions made by the British Medical Journal, unquestionably had n diagnosis of regressive autism before his father ever  contacted Andrew Wakefield at the Royal Free Hospital, and that those symptoms did in fact begin after the MMR shot was given. Because Child 11 was the initial and most detailed case reviewed in the BMJ article -- and because Father 11 is the only parent actually hostile to Wakefield's work, making him Deer's best and only witness -- one might reasonably inquire whether others among the Lancet children were even more vulnerable to the same pattern of misdirection, omission, suppression and falsehood.

We will dig into that, but first we need to tumble further down the rabbit hole created by the BMJ’s claims about Child 11.

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Read Parts 1 - 7 of Elaborate Fraud HERE.

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism. He is the co-author, with Mark Blaxill, of The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic, published in paperback in September by Thomas Dunne Books.