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.

--

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.

--

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

--

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

Dear Readers, did you know that Andy Wakefield has produced a full length feature film about a vaccine whistleblower? It's called Protocol 7. As the saying goes, "Truth is stranger than fiction." And after years of documentaries covering a wide range of autism and vaccine topics, we now have a fictional tale plucked from what SHOULD have been the headlines, but was buried.  Our Anne Dachel interviewed Andy in May (see our post including the video interview below.)  You can host a screening in your local theatre.  And the site runs a list of all of the showings.

BEST OF ALL - the Protocol 7 website has an "at a glance" Know The Risks page that you can forward to friends and family with a succinct, graphic synopsis of the pediatric vaccination schedule. As a rule, we are an - ahem - overly wordy group. So the graphic presentation is fabulous. Share!

###

Age of Autism, May 23, 2024

Protocol 7 Movie Bring Things That Go MUMPS In The Night To The Theatre

"Merck has not essentially denied committing (mumps vaccine) fraud."

So excited to share a new FEATURE length movie from Andy Wakefield. Protocol 7 is a plucked from real life thriller about a whistleblower who exposes problems with the mumps component of the Merck MMR vaccine. The truth is still unfolding in a Pennsylvania court.

Vaccine injury and pharma malfeasance are no longer rated "X" as a topic for public interest. Audiences are aware of the grip pharma has on our government, public health and medical community, because of the Covid lockdown and vaccine mandates that touched everyone.  Moviegoers are READY for Protocol 7. Click HOST A PROTOCOL 7 SCREENING to learn how you can get involved and help promote the movie too. Anne Dachel sat down with the director, one Andrew J. Wakefield, to talk about this film, so many years in the making.

###

By Anne Dachel

I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Andrew Wakefield about his latest project, the full length movie, Protocol 7.

Protocol 7 reveals more of the nefarious history of the vaccine industry in America, this time involving the mumps component in Merck’s MMR vaccine.

Here is how Dr. Wakefield explained it.

https://rumble.com/v4w5j4h-wakefield-1.html 

The movie itself, Protocol 7, this is my first venture into a full length narrative feature film, unlike documentaries in the past. So it’s a whistleblower story in the genre Erin Brockovich or the Insider.

It’s very exciting. People love an insider story.

It tells the story based on truths of a whistleblower, two whistleblowers in a vaccine lab with reports that they were asked to participate in a fraud, what they considered to be a fraud.

It centered around the efficacy, the protective ability of the mumps vaccine which has been failing for many years. They knew this as early as the late 90s. They still persisted. They had an option either to scrap it, do a recall and make a safer vaccine, BUT potentially lose the American market, lose the market worldwide OR to fake the data. That’s what the whistleblowers reported to me.

So it’s been there for a long time. The story’s been there for a long time. It’s in federal court in Pennsylvania at the moment on appeal.

"Merck has not essentially denied committing (mumps vaccine) fraud."

So excited to share a new FEATURE length movie from Andy Wakefield. Protocol 7 is a plucked from real life thriller about a whistleblower who exposes problems with the mumps component of the Merck MMR vaccine. The truth is still unfolding in a Pennsylvania court.

Vaccine injury and pharma malfeasance are no longer rated "X" as a topic for public interest. Audiences are aware of the grip pharma has on our government, public health and medical community, because of the Covid lockdown and vaccine mandates that touched everyone.  Moviegoers are READY for Protocol 7. Click HOST A PROTOCOL 7 SCREENING to learn how you can get involved and help promote the movie too. Anne Dachel sat down with the director, one Andrew J. Wakefield, to talk about this film, so many years in the making.

###

By Anne Dachel

I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Andrew Wakefield about his latest project, the full length movie, Protocol 7.

Protocol 7 reveals more of the nefarious history of the vaccine industry in America, this time involving the mumps component in Merck’s MMR vaccine.

Here is how Dr. Wakefield explained it.

https://rumble.com/v4w5j4h-wakefield-1.html 

The movie itself, Protocol 7, this is my first venture into a full length narrative feature film, unlike documentaries in the past. So it’s a whistleblower story in the genre Erin Brockovich or the Insider.

It’s very exciting. People love an insider story.

It tells the story based on truths of a whistleblower, two whistleblowers in a vaccine lab with reports that they were asked to participate in a fraud, what they considered to be a fraud.

It centered around the efficacy, the protective ability of the mumps vaccine which has been failing for many years. They knew this as early as the late 90s. They still persisted. They had an option either to scrap it, do a recall and make a safer vaccine, BUT potentially lose the American market, lose the market worldwide OR to fake the data. That’s what the whistleblowers reported to me.

So it’s been there for a long time. The story’s been there for a long time. It’s in federal court in Pennsylvania at the moment on appeal.

Anne Dachel interviewed Dr. Andy Wakefield about his new feature film Protocol 7 - a story of a vaccine whistleblower starring Rachel Whittle, Matthew Marsden and Eric Roberts (I haven't looked yet, but I'm guessing he plays "the bad guy!")  You can learn more and even sign up to host a screening here. We'll be sharing Anne's interview in the coming days. 

But who could talk to Dr. Wakefield and not ask him about the huge increase in autism and its impact on families? We have an AofA category with posts we've written about Dr. Wakefield's journey from boy wonder British pediatric gastroenterologist to worldwide whipping boy for the protection of vaccine programs, governments and the pharmaceutical industry. Few men could have withstood the lashing in the court of public opinion and the British GMC (see photo) and yet stood by our children. We will always be grateful of his support and in awe of his continued work.  Note, the videos are on Rumble. I'm hoping they embed properly. Here are the two links with this interview, in case. Part 1 Anne Dachel Interviews Andy Wakefield About Autism in 2024 and Part 2 Anne Dachel Interviews Andy Wakefield About Autism in 2024  KIM

###

Dr. Wakefield on the ever-increasing rates of autism around the world

Click HERE if the Rumble video does not embed.

During our talk, I asked Dr. Wakefield about the current situation with autism and the universal acceptance of these disabled children as simply part of human neurodiversity. Those in charge preach that autism has always existed, with no recognition that the stunning rates are real increases. 

Am I surprised that the rates of autism that are now being reported, for example, Scotland, Northern Ireland, England and indeed in the U.S.?

The answer is, sadly, no. 

I mean the graph, if one looks at the trend in autism numbers, incidence and prevalence; you see that they’re a dramatic and sustained increase. 

It’s been predicted to reach one in two by 2032. Whether that holds up or not, I don’t know. Whatever, there is a huge epidemic of these neurodevelopmental disorders. 

The notion that this is due to better diagnosis is utter nonsense. 

This has been shown in the New Jersey numbers. We have the same people using the same diagnostic criteria over time. So using the same diagnostic instrument showing that there is a dramatic increase and saying this is nothing to do with better diagnosis.

That may account for a tiny percentage of it, but we’re having to meet the market demand, the sheer volume of these children coming through.  

So originally, it was a reasonable hypothesis to say among the things that may account for this rise is better diagnosis. But it’s a testable hypothesis. It’s been tested, and it’s been found wanting. It does not explain what’s going on. 

When I was first confronted with autism at the Royal Free Hospital in 1995, I didn’t even know what autism was. We weren’t taught about it as medical students because it was so rare. 

Now the other thing, and this is something that’s rarely pointed out, is that medicine now does not encourage in the same way that medicine did historically, the diagnostic skills that are necessary to be a doctor.  

We’ve got tests, we’ve got scans, blood tests, this, that and the other. 

Back in the day, the best diagnostician, those who were the best observers and describers of human disease, they weren’t of this century, they weren’t even of the last century. They were of the century before. 

They were people like Jean-Martin Charcot from the Salpêtrièrein, Paris.

People like Babinski who worked with him.  

People like Freud who attended his lectures. 

People like Gilles de la Tourette who described Tourette syndrome. 

These physicians were outstanding at eliciting physical signs and symptoms, describing human disease, many of them they couldn’t do anything about.

They didn’t have antibiotics or other things at the time, but they were outstanding at describing diseases. 

So if autism, if something as fascinating, dare I say it and idiosyncratic as autism had existed, it would have been described by these people.  

It did not exist in anything like, anything like the numbers it does now.

If they had seen a case, they would have jumped, and they would have described it meticulously. 

It didn’t happen. Why? Because it wasn’t there.

These are new. These are new kids on the block, terrifying in their frequency and their severity and the consequences for society as a whole, let alone the poor families who have to deal with it.  

Dr. Wakefield had this to say about the future.



RUMBLE VIDEO link in case embed fails

What does the future hold in terms of developmental disorders, autism?

It’s fairly dark at the moment, isn’t it?

It’s going to go on increasing until people more broadly in government, in the regulatory authorities, academia acknowledge that vaccines are a major part, a major part of causing this problem.

They cannot bring themselves to terms with that possibility at the moment. They can’t do it. It’s beyond their wildest imagination to admit that there is something that they believed in so firmly, so wholeheartedly for so long, that actually, they’re wrong.

Some people have invested their entire careers in being wrong. They just have yet to realize it. 

And so we have a while to go. 

However, there are two things in my experience, my recent experience as well, that have changed the dynamic, changed the perception of the public, and this is where, I think, the biggest change will come, is coming. 

That is film. Film has had a profound effect.

Films like VAXXED and Plandemic and others have really woken a lot of people up, and the other is COVID itself.

A new movie is coming soon from Andy Wakefield. See the trailer below. Visit protocol7.movieprotocol7.movie to subscribe to updates.

Based on real-life events, comes the corporate thriller, Protocol 7. Alexis Koprowski, a devoted mother and small-town family lawyer, Adrian Jay, a renegade doctor exiled from the medical profession, and Steve Schilling, a virologist at a prominent vaccine laboratory turned corporate whistleblower, work together to hold a large pharmaceutical corporation accountable for allegedly fraudulent test results behind a failing mumps vaccine. Protocol 7 takes us behind the corporate curtain, exposing a chain of command that devolves responsibility, prioritizes profits over people, and fosters an amoral mindset of “just following orders.”

Dear AofA readers. For many years, one of our main focuses was the excoriation of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, author of Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and
pervasive developmental disorder in children. You can read John Stone's first AofA piece from November 20, 2008 titled,  A Political Trial in London.  In early 2004 the media campaign against Andrew Wakefield was gathering pace. In particular, the London Times and Guardian newspapers were increasingly peppered with sarcastic comments  about Wakefield and the MMR-autism theory, mostly coming from people with no direct knowledge of the science  – but who nevertheless felt the spontaneous need to offer an opinion. 

Wakefield was a brilliant, caring, young British Gastroenterologist. His medical career and reputation were sacked more times than Zappe in the Patriot's game last Sunday for putting forth a hypothesis (the bedrock of science) that involved the MMR vaccine. It's critical that what happened to him is never forgotten in the current narrative regarding vaccination. Dr. Wakefield NEVER gave up trying to help children with autism and GI problems. We will never forget his courage.

There is a new Substack called "Euripides," whose author we know well. This Substack will document the Wakefield case for a new generation. We invite you to check it out:

The series documents the deliberate elaborate intentional and systematic fabrications perpetrated by three editors of the British Medical Journal in 2011. These editors publicly accused a doctor, Andrew Wakefield, of committing fraud in a scientific paper published in the Lancet medical journal which implicated the MMR vaccine in causing autism in children.

Five short introductory videos give a comprehensive overview free of charge without a paid subscription.

The full video series available to subscribers provides a detailed account of the history and background and what was done in each of the eight steps. You will also get detailed evidence with quotes from the medical records of the children concerned. The anonymised medical records were read out in public in legal proceedings in England.

IMPORTANT: To allow time for you, your family, friends and associates to subscribe, the first free to view/listen video and audio will be released in a few weeks. Take a free subscription to receive an email alert when content is released.  VISIT THE SUBSTACK HERE.

We are so pleased to share this Substack article from Dr. Tess Lawrie.  Dr. Andrew Wakefield has been a friend of Age of Autism since our inception. His work, mentioned in Mothering Magazine more than 20 years ago, started many of us thinking, worrying, and learning.  He has never turned his back on our kids. The Johnnie Come latelys (and we do appreciate them) can thank Andrew J. Wakefield for paving the road OUT of hell.

Thank you to Laura Hayes for sharing this article with me.

###

By Tess Lawrie

Dr Andrew Wakefield was right all along

His research on vaccine harms was "just the beginning". Was an "ethically challenged man" recruited to keep him quiet?

Do you believe in coincidences?

Last month I received an email from Mrs Bridget Wakefield, Dr Andrew Wakefield’s mother. It turned out she lives in Bath, my hometown, birthplace of a Better Way and just a stone’s throw from the World Council for Health offices! She asked whether we could meet.

There were all sorts of things going round in my head as I set off on foot to find Mrs Wakefield. Who was she? What did she want from me? How had she weathered the longstanding and relentless demonisation of her son I wondered?

A spritely though frail Mrs Wakefield greeted me with a warm smile. We fell into easy conversation right away and I learned that she is now 93 years old, a former doctor, a mother of five, and a grandmother. In her working years, Bridget used her maiden name and was know as Dr Bridget Matthews when she was practicing as a general practitioner in Bath and the surrounding county of Gloucestershire. Bath was Bridget’s hometown and she felt lucky to be appointed to a single handed practice at the Royal Crescent as a young GP. With her wealth of medical experience, we discussed what being a GP meant in the “old days”. Very hands on, Bridget had especially enjoyed doing home visits and home deliveries, which was commonplace not so long ago.

By Anne Dachel

Every once in a while it is my great pleasure to talk about a book on autism that is really well-designed to inform and help parents and other people involved with autism. Autism Essentials, as the cover tells us, is about “prevention, causes, remediation, education, vocation, and legal aspects and parental advice” regarding autism.

Autism Essentials is a collection of articles by over 30 writers, edited by Dr. Andy McCabe, a psychologist who has worked for years in special education and who has an extensive background in autism.

This book has so much good information on the real world of autism that I hardly know where to begin. A number of the writers are people I’ve known and respected for years and others who are new to me. All of them have something vital to say about autism.

Since the topics are so varied, I decided to review this book in several separate pieces. Here goes the first.

I like to say my qualifications for any of the writing I do is that I read. I have spent twenty years studying everything about autism. That’s not to say I know everything there is out there, but I’ve amassed a good deal of knowledge. I’ve been writing for Age of Autism since 2007, mostly about the controversy over vaccines and autism and the exponential increases in the rate.

I wrote a book about all this published in 2014 called, The Big Autism Cover-Up-How and Why the Media is Lying to the American Public.

As you can tell from title, it covered the lies and corruption surrounding the link between autism and vaccines.

In that book I devoted a whole chapter to the Dr. Andrew Wakefield story because of his leading role in the whole debate over a vaccine link.

I felt honored that Dr. McCabe asked me to write the preface in Autism Essentials, focusing on the Andy Wakefield story—the real story about this doctor.

The preface, entitled, Dr. Andy Wakefield: The Story You Haven’t Heard, is where I say once again what I said about Dr. Wakefield in The Big Autism Cover-Up, namely that he was made the fall guy to cover up the collusion and corruption on the part of the British government.

Don’t get the idea that Autism Essentials is just about how vaccines can cause autism, because it isn’t. The link is clearly talked about because there are just too many parents out there who watched their normally developing children lose learned skills and regress into autism following routine childhood vaccinations.

So what is the real story about Dr. Wakefield?

Dr. Andy Wakefield discusses the mRNA vaccines - m =  messenger.

From Brittanica (remember the encyclopedia folks?)

Messenger RNA (mRNA), molecule in cells that carries codes from the DNA in the nucleus to the sites of protein synthesis in the cytoplasm (the ribosomes). The molecule that would eventually become known as mRNA was first described in 1956 by scientists Elliot Volkin and Lazarus Astrachan. In addition to mRNA, there are two other major types of RNA: ribosomal RNA (rRNA) and transfer RNA (tRNA).

We are happy to share this great news from Andy Wakefield and his crew:


DVD PRE-SALE UPDATE

We are so excited to announce our DVDs finished manufacturing TODAY!
This week they will be on the road to us, and promptly mailed out to everyone who purchased a pre-sale DVD.

_________

HOW TO WATCH
_________

1986: THE ACT
Watch Trailer

Renting (7 days)
Click HERE
Click on: "Watch Now"
Follow purchase prompts.

Digital Download
(not suitable for tablets & cells)
Click HERE

DVD + Digital Download
(USA Only)
Click HERE

DVD
(USA Only)
Click HERE

DVDs & merch will be available internationally soon!

Please join us in wishing Dr. Andy Wakefield a very happy (1 day belated) birthday. Andy has never given up on the health of children around the world, no matter the crushing cost to him personally. In a world where one's word can mean so little, where money talks and the shortcut is the well worn path, Andy stands almost alone. If his colleagues had a smidgen of his courage, the autism epidemic may have been halted years ago.

Please visit his new movie's site at 1986 The Act  and 1986 the Act's Facebook page. 

Man and microbe, from Polio to COVID19... a never more relevant forensic examination of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and its consequences.

What happens when an ancient wisdom – a mother’s intuition - is pitted against powerful interests in a race against time?

1986: The Act JULY 2020 

Now, more than ever, as several COVID-19 vaccines are being created, every American needs to know about "The Act," which was when makers of pediatric vaccines were life-flighted out of the liability litigation system and given blanket immunity. From that date forward, the consumer pays a fee on every vaccine, that pays out for vaccine court awards.  Pay to pray.... pray your child isn't injured and thrust into a court that is as winnable as your average traveling carnival game. Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Step right up and roll up your sleeve.

You'll see in this YouTube clip that "Wiki" has marked the trailer as vaccine controversy. 

July 8, 2020
www.1986TheAct.com

“When you remove liability for injuries caused by a product and you mandate that product, all you can do is profit...as vaccine makers have.” 

-Andy J. Wakefield 

#HealthFreedom #1986TheAct

www.1986TheAct.com

by John Stone

This is part of evidence I presented to  the United Kingdom House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Research Integrity in 2017. It was never published by the Committee but after much argument they were forced to amend their discussion document, known as POSTnote 544, so that it did not directly allege that Andrew Wakefield committed fraud by only attributing the claim to British Medical Journal. It is dismaying that we are still having to rebut so many false claims so many years after the events. The publication of Brian Deer's book is now only a couple of months away, but it has also been sad to see distinguished Danish scientist, Peter Gøtzsche, recycling these allegations in a book of his own. Prof Gøtzsche is in many respects a hero because of his stand against SSRI antidepressants (which are also implicated in autism) and on the safety HPV vaccines, but when he sides with Deer on the subject of Andrew Wakefield we wonder whether he has on this occasion done due diligence.

Brian Deer

An Extract From Evidence to House of Commons Science and Technology Inquiry into Research Integrity 2017 by John Stone on Behalf of Age of Autism

I am grateful to the committee for the invitation to submit evidence on behalf of Age of Autism. This evidence has been shaped by statements made in the Committee’s prior publication POSTnote 544 singling out the Wakefield “Lancet paper” as an example of fraud, and particularly in relation to the defence of a public health programme and policy [1]. If these statements had not been made I might have presented somewhat different evidence, but in the circumstances it is necessary to address these claims and their underlying assumptions.  It becomes particularly relevant in the light the latest campaign, led by Times Newspapers, to further discredit Andrew Wakefield.

This submission is not motivated by indifference to the control of infectious disease. What I am saying is that even though the control of disease is important it is not a good enough reason to stand the rules of research integrity or public discussion on their head. For this reason I have things to say not only about the Wakefield paper but the problematic nature of vaccine science, and also the general exclusion of the subject from contemporary mainstream public debate. Even the reasons for going to war at times of national peril are debated, but here it is as if everything has been conceded in advance to an industry and its public advocates. In these circumstances reasonable comment is driven to the margins with unreasonable, even to the extent of being buried by search engines such as google.

It is also problematic that virtually every public defence of the vaccine programme begins with an attack on the integrity of Dr Andrew Wakefield, as if the public humiliation of one man could provide scientific justification in perpetuity for an entire class of products. Wakefield has been globally transformed into the Emmanuel Goldstein of public health (to reference Orwell’s 1984) but we should not mistake that this is actually occurring at the level of propaganda and not of scientific (or historic) fact: indeed when people cite Wakefield as an example few have the remotest idea what body of facts they are citing, and this has reduced to zero the quality of informed public discussion. Meanwhile Wakefield’s fate serves as a warning to anyone else who might professionally step out of line. In this context I pose the question in what other field of human activity would this means of controlling public discussion and opinion be considered politically tolerable? I also pose the question how we can possibly know the vaccine programme is safe if we control opinion in this way?

Note: How fitting that one day after California Democrats defiled the doctor patient relationship through SB276, that we should have this paper from the doctor whose scientific question about measles vaccine launched an industry against rational vaccination discussion. While others have retreated into the shadows rather than face the fallout of standing up for children, Andy has stood taller and stronger than a California giant redwood tree.

###

By Andrew J. Wakefield in Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Volume Number 24, Number 3, Fall 2019

Read the full paper in pdf form here.

For more than 25 years, I have been, as a gastroenterologist, interested in inflammatory bowel disease—Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis—and the gut-brain connection, particularly in childhood autism. In addition, I am concerned with the environmental factors that are driving the current epidemics of both autism and inflammatory bowel disease. The issue is contentious, and one’s view depends greatly on perspective. This article provides one perspective on the delicate and often misunderstood ecological balance between man and microbe, a misunderstanding fraught with assumptions and wishful thinking.

I start with an historical perspective from a time when mortality and serious morbidity from infectious disease were commonplace. In 1878 Louis Pasteur stated: “If it is a terrifying thought that life is at the mercy of the multiplication of these minute bodies, it is a consoling hope that Science will not always remain powerless before such enemies." In his perception, mankind was at war with microbes. Bacteria, viruses, and fungi were enemies.

Our current perspective is somewhat different. We now live in the era of the microbiome. We realize that we would not be here on this planet were it not for a healthy microbiome. We have to look after our gut bacteria in particular because they are exquisitely important, not only to the development of our gut and our immune system, but beyond this to our mood, our behavior, and perhaps even our brain development in the womb.

Between Pasteur and the microbiome came the antibiotic era. Sir Alexander Fleming, returning from his vacation on Sept 3, 1928, to his laboratory at St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, London, discovered a mold growing in some of the Petri dishes containing cultures of Staphylococcus aureus. Pasteur said, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind,” and it was the prepared mind of Sir Alexander Fleming that made an observation that led to the antibiotic era. His “mold juice,” he found, was capable of killing a wide range of harmful bacteria. Some years later Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain, working at Oxford University, turned this laboratory curiosity into a life-saving drug—penicillin. The era of antibiotics began in the 1940s, and it was a turning point in what was perceived to be the war on infectious disease—a “medical miracle.” And there is no doubt that the outcome from diseases like syphilis, battlefield gangrene, and scarlet fever was completely rewritten by this discovery. However, in less than a century, that dream was to turn to nightmare, the miracle to apocalypse, with the development of bacterial resistance...

By John Stone

Below is the text of my recent letter to Dame Sally Davies (pictured), Chief Medical Officer since 2010 to the British government. Davies has now replied twice to my original challenge to substantiate her comment on the BBC regarding the MMR: ""It's a safe vaccination - we know that". My original reply was published last November. It is evident that if she had a strong reply to make she ought to have made it the first time around, and the second reply was only an amplification of the first, to which I have in turn responded in more comprehensive detail. I believe it demonstrates how a government department had come to justify its choices made originally on weak evidence, and how as the decades went by the resulting decisions got worse and more desperate: and as the problems got more drastic the denial - even if believed - got more implausible.

It is interesting and likely significant that when I asked about MMR safety it was Davies who brought up the issue of autism (which I had not mentioned). This mirrors the situation two decades ago when I tried to raise the subject with the department of the rising autism numbers and they brought up Andrew Wakefield (though I had mentioned neither Wakefield or vaccines). The message is that they make the connection as a reflex, the safety of MMR and the claimed stability of the autism figures are inextricably entwined and in both instances the department are making a “leap of faith”.

My title refers to “the Department of Health", but to clarify at the beginning of this period when the original decisions were being made it was part of the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS), and since January last year it has been called the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), but for the three decades during which most of this happened it was the DoH or DH.

Dear Dame Sally,

Re: MMR Safety and Autism Numbers

Thank you for your further courteous reply (20 December), however I must point to a host of anomalies (apologies for the length and detail of my reply). The MMR programme was introduced to the UK in 1988 but the earliest of the autism safety studies included in the Cochrane review 2005 [1] was published only 11 years after this (and apparently based on illegally obtained children’s records, which cannot be cross checked [2]), while the first listed in the review by Luke Taylor (2014), which you cited, comes from 14 years after the introduction of the products [3]. Indeed, in 1988 the DH recklessly favoured SKB’s Pluserix MMR vaccine although it was already withdrawn in Canada [4] and contrary to your first letter it never made an attempt to withdraw the product until the decision was made to do so unilaterally by the manufacturers in 1992 [5].

The safety of the products had not been established at the time of introduction (quite the reverse as the main one in use was known to be hazardous), and the featured studies only began when, following the intervention of Andrew Wakefield, health officials came under pressure to justify the policy. The picture became further complicated in 1999 when the problem of mercury in other vaccine products, previously unacknowledged, came to light in the US. The problem of the Cochrane paper of 2005 is that the bland reassurance it gave regarding MMR and autism is in stark contrast to the cool to scathing comments about the six autism related studies it reviewed (three of which overlap with the Luke Taylor review of 2014 which you previously gave as your evidence for MMR safety and MMR not causing autism) [6]. The manifest contradiction in the review should in itself raise red flags.

By John Stone

I recently wrote to Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer of England and to the British government, asking her for the basis of her statement to the BBC regarding MMR: "It's a safe vaccination - we know that", and was a lucky enough to receive a reply (letter of 12 November, from which I extract):

Specifically in relation to whether MMR vaccines may be a cause of autism, a substantial body of population-based research has found no evidence to suggest a causal association. This evidence (not just for MMR, but other types of vaccine) is available for review in the published medical literature, and was summarised in a meta-analysis in 2014 which is free to download (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X14006367?via%3Dihub).

In relation to vaccine safety monitoring more generally, I can assure you that systems are in place to keep safety under review. This includes continual review of suspected adverse reaction reports (such as those submitted through the Yellow Card Scheme), evaluation of GP and hospital-based health records linked to immunisations, review of worldwide data and close collaboration with international health authorities.

It is noteworthy that the "meta-analysis" by Luke E Taylor is identical to the one cited by Thomas Insel to a US Congressional committee in 2014, but it constitutes no more than a bureaucratic fig-leaf. Dame Sally - who is the UK's leading government adviser on medical matters - ought to be able to do a lot better than this if every child is to be subjected to these products. It is, if anything, a rather naive response citing a shallow collection of studies which were published under political pressure decades after the policy was introduced. I have since attempted a conscientious and detailed reply:

21 November 2018

Dear Dame Sally,

Thank you for your letter of 12 November. I would point out that though you are quite right I am concerned about the rise in autism I specifically asked about the evidence base for MMR safety. That said it is reasonable to point out autism for a whole host of reasons is a much more serious problem in modern Britain (and elsewhere) than measles. When the DHSC last surveyed this problem in 2004-5 the overall ASD rate among school children was ~1% which was 5 times higher than the rate for those young people born between 1984-8 mostly before MMR was introduced, as reported in the equivalent 1999 survey. Since then your department has neglected to look at the issue (apart from a couple of failed adult autism surveys) as everything manifestly got worse, year on year [1,2].

As it is, a recent survey carried out by the Department of Health in Northern Ireland showed that the rate had risen from 1.2% in 2009 to 2.9%, while in Belfast it was as high as 4.7%. Moreover, 60% are educational Stage 5 [3], ie the most severe level of disability, so these are not cases that could previously have been missed because somehow subliminal. Educational data from across the nation and reports of collapse in educational services in the media testify that Northern Ireland is not an isolated case, but just better documented [4].

Regarding the meta-review by Taylor 'Vaccines are not associated with autism' [5] which you cited I note that there are just six MMR related studies included all of which have major problems. Three of the studies show apparent protective effect of MMR vaccines against autism (Madsen 8% [6], Smeeth 14% or 22% [7] and Mrozek-Budzyn 83%!!! [8]) which suggests bias. Of the Madsen paper Cochrane 2005 warned [9]:

"The follow up of diagnostic records ends one year (31 Dec 1999) after the last day of admission to the cohort. Because of the length of time from birth to diagnosis, it becomes increasingly unlikely that those born later in the cohort could have a diagnosis"

It remains troubling that as with a number of studies from this Danish group the co-ordinator on behalf of US Centers for Diseases Control, Poul Thorsen, is wanted for financial fraud from the CDC, though not extradited to the US now after nearly 8 years [10].

Of the De Stefano paper Cochrane commented [9]:

“The conclusion, however, implied bias in the enrollment of cases which may not be representative of the rest of the autistic population of the city of Atlanta, USA where the study was set.”

And indeed in 2014 the paper was repudiated by one of the leading authors, William Thompson [11]:

“I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.”

The study by Smeeth [7] is compromised by its patchy data source, the General Practice Research Database where the autism rate represented is perhaps only one tenth of cases diagnosed [12]. Cochrane commented [9]:

“In the GPRD - based studies (Black 2003; Smeeth 2004) the precise nature of controlled unexposed to MMR and their generalisability was impossible to determine…”

It remains problematic whether the unvaccinated in this study were genuinely unvaccinated.

Of the Uchiyama study [13] Cochrane commented [14]:

“The cohort study of Uchiyama 2007 was potentially affected by a different type of bias, considering that the participants were from a private clinic and that definitions of applied Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) diagnosis and of methods used for ASD regression ascertainment were not clearly reported.”

And the Uno study [15] will suffer from similar issues since the cases came from the same clinic. Moreover, in both instances the studies were far too small (904 persons and 413) to necessarily provide any clear result even if they had been better controlled.

Nor can the Taylor meta-analysis [5] cover up the entire absence of pre-marketing studies. In 1988-9 when the British government was persuaded to introduce Pluserix, MMR2 and Imravax there were no safety studies at all, and successive governments have been forced into the defence of a policy which they had embarked on without safety evidence.

As to the robustness of the yellow card reporting system I note the recent correspondence in the columns of BMJ On-Line regarding monitoring of Pandemrix vaccine from Wendy E Stephen and Clifford G Miller [16], which has serious implications for how the MHRA monitor all products. The MHRA has, of course, the ultimate conflict of being entirely funded by the manufacturers. It may be mentioned that in 1992 the Pluserix and Imravax vaccines were withdrawn not apparently by the British Government concerned about patient safety but by the manufacturers catching the government on the hop [17].

We are confronting a catastrophic situation among our young people with chronic illness replacing infectious illness as the main issue and cost to the state, and laying the emphasis on infectious diseases (with endless hate campaigns in the media against critics labelled “anti-vaxxers”) is a distraction, and a distortion of policy. It would be unfortunate if ministers were being advised about the safety of the programme on such a threadbare and inadequate basis. Re-examining the policy is both essential and urgent.

[1] John Stone,  ‘Response to David Oliver I (The Indisputable Rise in Autism)’, BMJ Rapid Responses 28 August 2018, https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3596/rr-12

[2] John Stone, ‘What about autism?’ BMJ Rapid Responses, 21 August 2018, https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3596/rr-0

[3] Information Analysis Directorate 'The Prevalence of Autism (including Asperger Syndrome) in School Age Children in Northern Ireland 2018', published 10 May 2018, https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/sites/default/files/publications/health/asd-children-ni-2018.pdf

[4] Responses to Viner RM, 'NHS must prioritise health of children and young people', https://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k1116/rapid-responses

[5] Luke E Taylor et al, ‘Vaccines are not associated with autism: An evidence-based meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies’, Vaccine 2014, https://autismoevaccini.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/vaccines-are-not-associated-with-autism.pdf

[6] Madsen et al, ‘A Population-Based Study of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Autism’, NEMJ 2002, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa021134

[7] Smeeth et al, ‘MMR vaccination and pervasive developmental disorders: a case-control study.’ Lance 2004, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15364187

[8] Mrozek-Budzyn et al, ‘Lack of association between measles-mumps-rubella vaccination and autism in children: a case-control study.’ Pediatric Infectious Diseases Journal 2010, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19952979

[9] Demicheli et al, ‘Vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella in children.’, Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2005 Oct 19;(4):CD004407.

[10]  Office of Inspector General, US Department of Health and Human Services, Fugitive Profiles, https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/fugitives/profiles.asp

[11] https://legislature.vermont.gov/assets/Documents/2016/WorkGroups/House%20Health%20Care/Bills/H.98/Witness%20Testimony/H.98~Jennifer%20Stella~William%20Thompson%20Statement~5-6-2015.pdf

[12] John Stone, ‘An old story: the GPRD does not provide credible autism data’ 11 February 2014 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/10/e003219.responses

[13] Uchiyama et al, ‘MMR-vaccine and regression in autism spectrum disorders: negative results presented from Japan.’ J Autism Dev Disord. 2007 Feb;37(2):210-7.

[14] Demicheli et al, ‘Vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella in children.’, Cochrane Systematic Review - Intervention Version published: 15 February 2012, https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD004407.pub3/full

[15] Uno et al, ‘The combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines and the total number of vaccines are not associated with development of autism spectrum disorder: the first case-control study in Asia’, Vaccine. 2012 Jun 13;30(28):4292-8. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2012.01.093. Epub 2012 Apr 20.

[16] Responses to Godlee, ‘A tale of two vaccines’ BMJ 2018, https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4152/rapid-responses

[17] Report, BMJ 26 September 1992, https://www.bmj.com/content/305/6856/777

When your government, the BBC or the mainstream media tell you that MMR is safe,  this the best that the British government can do. After three decades of pure bluster they need to go back to the drawing board.

By John Stone

David Aaronovitch, recent chair of Index on Censorship, Orwell prize winner and Murdoch poodle (or possibly running dog) writing in the London Times wants to stop people saying things he does not like - so perhaps he will not like this article.

The problem with vaccines, is the more you are not allowed to talk about them the more dangerous they will certainly get. You can be fed lots of reassuring information by the surrogates of the people who manufacture them (the health agencies and mainstream journalists) but until ordinary citizens are listened to you will simply be engaged in an ugly strategy of social repression. It is not good enough to tell people when they have been hurt - or worse when their beloved children have been - that the agencies who did the hurting deny it. But for Aaronovitch the products are not mere fallible industrial products, they are simply beyond public criticism. 

If anybody is expressing unreasonable faith it is he. If he thinks they are safe, what body of science is he citing, and where are the independent agencies? In the UK the licensing agencies are funded by the industry (the MHRA 100%, the EMA 89%), the chair of the vaccine recommendation committee (the JCVI) is director Oxford Vaccine Group which is commercially involved in developing many of the vaccines the committee recommends. These are all perfectly acceptable arrangements to a mainstream media in advanced decline, and no doubt to our lion of free speech.

In his latest article ‘Conspiracy theorists make monkeys of us all’ (The Times 5 July 2018)  Aaronovitch employs all the old bad songs: people who doubt vaccine safety are unscientific and equivalent to those who doubt the theory of evolution; people who doubt vaccine safety are unpleasant right-wing types; people who opposed vaccine mandates in Italy (which incidentally we do not have in the United Kingdom) have caused measles to rise – when he might have focussed on government-pharmaceutical sleaze as the prime cause of their mistrust: the meeting at which Obama put Italian Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin in charge of global vaccine strategy, the secret deals she signed with GlaxoSmithKline. They probably also knew that she had made up fairy stories about 270 measles deaths among children in London. This was what last year the tens of thousands of people who filled the streets in Italy knew about, unreported by the Italian and global mainstream media, unreported almost certainly in the London Times – just to make them look like idiots. In these circumstances conspiracy was scarcely a theory. Oh yes, and to cap it all they are all “conspiracy theorists”.

By Anne Dachel

Mark [Blaxill] stated ‘You can’t make America great with all these sick children and more coming’. Trump shook his head and agreed.”

Andrew Wakefield: [Talking about his conversation with Donald Trump] "We went on to discuss the issue of the autism crisis in this country which is set to affect one in two children by 2032 according to the CDC's own data if nothing is done, if nothing changes. That's 80 percent of the boys in this country. There is a national crisis.”

Andrew Buncombe reports for the British newspaper, The Independent, and he is out to discredit Andrew Wakefield because Wakefield has refused to back down from his claim of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism and bowel disease in children.

Buncombe isn’t interested in Wakefield’s research. I’m sure he’s never bothered to read Callous Disregard,   the book in which Wakefield explained how he became involved in the most heated issue in pediatric medicine and what he learned about the MMR vaccine.

Buncombe’s real interest is discrediting ANYONE who dares to question the ever-expanding, unchecked vaccine schedule. He couldn’t care less about what autism is doing to millions of children around the world, in fact, autism is barely mentioned in his reporting. 

(On a personal note, having spent a summer in the hospital in Rugby, England after a car accident, I am aware that a surgeon in Britain is addressed as “Mr.” Dr. Wakefield in these stories is referred to as “Mr. Wakefield,” but I suspect that it’s done more to discredit him than to acknowledge his prominence as a surgeon in gastroenterology. No one in the media is interested in his findings as a GI doctor.)

Here are some of Buncombe’s latest reports. Judge for yourself what his real agenda is.

May 6, 2018, UK Independent: How a Muslim community overcame disinformation linking vaccines to autism

…When health officials in Minnesota were confronted by the biggest outbreak of measles in decades, they knew that earning the community’s trust would be crucial.

The section of the community most affected by the outbreak that eventually infected 79 people, the same as for the whole of the US in any average year, were Somali Americans. The vast majority were children under 10 who had not been vaccinated.

The state’s Somali Americans used to vaccinate their children more than other Minnesotans, but the rate fell, between 2004 and 2014, from 92 per cent to 40 per cent. Officials have linked this to visits paid to the community by anti-vaccine activist Andrew Wakefield and other campaigners, whose influence still reverberates.….

“I think that before Andrew visited the Two Cities, Somali parents vaccinated their kids at around 90 per cent. But right now it’s 40, and that shows the fear’s impact and because of that you see a measles outbreak in the state of Minnesota.”

May 5, 2018, UK Independent: Trump claims vaccines and autism are linked but his own experts vehemently disagree

Join Age of Autism's Mark Blaxill and Kim Rossi at this event in Framingham, Massachusetts on Thursday, January 11.   You can attend the screening and Q&A or opt to attend the meet and greet before the movie as well.  Buy your tickets here.

Age of Autism links to Alliance for Human Resesearch Protection for Vera Sharav's damning indictment of the British Medical Journal's intervention in the Wakefield affair. She traces its history from the beginning but focuses on the journal's allegations of  fraud in 2011 and its sinister repercussions.

By Vera Sharav

L’affaire Wakefield: Shades of Dreyfus & BMJ’s Descent into Tabloid Science

Introduction: I have undertaken this review of the case against Dr. Andrew Wakefield because the issues involved are far more consequential than the vilification of one doctor. The issues, as I see them, involve (a) collusion of public health officials to deceive the public by concealing scientific evidence that confirms empirical evidence of serious harm linked to vaccines – in particular polyvalent vaccines; (b) the “willful blindness” by the medical community as it uncritically fell in line with a government dictated vaccination policy driven by corporate business interests.

Public health officials and the medical profession have abrogated their professional, public, and human responsibility, by failing to honestly examine the iatrogenic harm caused by expansive, indiscriminate, and increasingly aggressive vaccination policies. On a human level, the documented evidence shows a callous disregard for the plight of thousands of children who suffer irreversible harm, as if they were unavoidable “collateral damage”.

All of the documented evidence and testimonies submitted to the General Medical Council, upon which GMC issued its guilty verdicts against Dr. Wakefield and his two co-defendants in 2010, were subsequently forensically assessed by the UK High Court in March 2012, in the appeal of Professor John Walker-Smith, the senior clinician and senior author of the Lancet case series. The High Court determined that the verdicts of professional misconduct and ethics violations were unsupported by the evidence.

Indeed, the adjudicated evidence refutes the case against Dr. Wakefield; the documents and testimonies demonstrate that there is no evidence whatsoever, to support the charges of professional misconduct, much less the accusation of fraud. The accusation of fraud was hurled by the Editor-in-Chief of the BMJ, a medical journal whose corporate ownership is intertwined with the vaccine manufacturing Behemoths, Merck – with whom BMJ signed a partnership agreement in 2008 – and GlaxoSmithKline which provides additional financial support to BMJ. Among their numerous vaccine products, Merck and GSK manufacture the MMR vaccine.

My commentary is buttressed with details from the High Court decision (2012); transcripts of testimony before the General Medical Council (2007- 2010); documents and testimony that have been judicially adjudicated; the sworn deposition of the Deputy Editor of the BMJ with internal BMJ emails(2012); internal correspondence by CDC officials and CDC-commissioned scientists (2000-2009, some uncovered in 2011; new documents obtained in July 2017); the suppressed finding of CDC’s first large-scale epidemiological study (1999) and a transcript of the closed door meeting of the Epidemic Intelligence Service at Simpsonwood (2000); a transcript of the closed meeting of the US Institute of Medicine Committee on Immunization Safety Review (2001); the U.S. Grand Jury criminal indictment of Dr. Poul Thorsen (2011); transcripts of the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (1988); a confidential report Re: Infanrix hexa submitted by GlaxoSmithKline to the European Medicines Agency (2012) documenting sudden infant deaths; Cochrane Collaboration MMR reviews (2003, 2005, 2012); HHS Inspector General investigation report – CDC advisory panel corruption (2009); CDC scientists letter of complaint about “rogue interests” “questionable and unethical practices” (2016)...    Read more at AHRP.org here.

By John Stone

Dear Ms Viner,

I am writing to you somewhat retrospectively to ask for some explanation of the Guardian’s unsigned editorial last month The Guardian view on vaccinations: a matter of public health [1] which was both an attempt to jockey opinion and a blatant attempt to mislead. The issue as presented was that compulsory vaccination was a necessary step, because certain bad people labelled collectively “anti-vaxxers” were gaining too much influence. This in effect bundled together all critics of the programme and the vaccine lobby as bad people (frequently apparently wealthy people like Gwyneth Paltrow) and allegedly all free-loaders on the system, rather than as many are people who vaccinated their children and rue the day. Moreover, the cited authority on this was not scientific literature but the comedian TV presenter, John Oliver. This is scarcely the material of respectable argument.

Even the illustration of protesters in Italy demonstrates the distortion of the issue. In Italy – unreported by your newspaper as far as I know – tens of thousands of citizens have been turning out weekly on the streets not to demand the banning of vaccines, which you might suppose would be what an “anti-vaxxer” wanted, but the right to have some choice over what their children were vaccinated with and when. This had been provoked by legislation following an agreement between the Italian government and GlaxoSmithKline in which investment in Italy was made contingent on the government creating a captive market. The CEO of GSK Italy, Daniel Finnochiaro, is reported on an industry website as saying [2]:

“…I also met with Minister Lorenzin and other members of the government who reiterated the sensitivity of the government towards those who invest, create jobs and opportunities for young people. In short, we started on the right foot.

“Such sensitivity in the Roman palaces is not to be dismissed. As for us, Andrew Witty has asked for a few things: clear rules and stability in return for strong investment in advanced research and production equipment. We were of one intent.”

It may be remarked that without the prospect of forced vaccination there would have been no demonstrators at all, and what actually seems to be happening is that the vaccine industry is picking fights with citizens using such proxies as the Italian government and the Guardian newspaper. It is evident that whatever the arguments are for compulsory vaccination that a competent newspaper, informing its readership, should report that it is actually the industry - the people selling the products - making the running.

Although we should not take the events surrounding the career eclipse of Andrew Wakefield at face value [3], it is a shoddy argument that if one line of research about one product has been discredited that all the products can be supposed safe. That such an argument could be deployed by a “serious” newspaper again beggars belief (although it has become a cynical and lazy resort of the vaccine lobby). It should also be noted that British health officials have repeatedly deployed false arguments about the safety of the expanded schedule citing the flawed and fraudulent ‘spare capacity’ arguments of Paul Offit [4].

By John Stone

This is the text of my third submission on behalf of Age of Autism to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Research Integrity last April, which has gained extra urgency because of the debate about compulsory vaccination. Though two earlier submissions could have been excluded because of submission criteria, there were no obvious grounds for excluding this one, except that like the others it tackled the core claims of their discussion document head on - that the 1998 Wakefield Lancet paper was an example of research fraud, or that it should be considered inherently reprehensible on the grounds that it subverted policy. The one thing that became apparent in my brief discussions with the secretary to the committee, Mr Fiander, was that the committee would stand by its claim of fraud simply because the claim had been made in a British Medical Journal editorial in January 2011 which had never been retracted (despite overwhelming evidence against it claims). The committee itself was dissolved without the inquiry proceeding at the time of the General Election and has not yet been re-formed.

This evidence has been shaped by statements made in the Committee’s prior publication POSTnote 544 singling out the Wakefield “Lancet paper” as an example of fraud, and particularly in relation to the defence of a public health programme and policy [1]. It becomes particularly relevant in the light the latest campaign in February 2017, led by Times Newspapers, to further discredit Andrew Wakefield [2,3].

This submission is not motivated by indifference to the control of infectious disease. While the control of disease is important it is not a good enough reason to stand the rules of research integrity or public discussion on their head. This is not only about the Wakefield paper but the problematic nature of vaccine science, and also the general exclusion of the subject from contemporary mainstream public debate. Even the reasons for going to war at times of national peril are debated, but here it is as if everything has been conceded in advance to an industry and its public advocates. In these circumstances reasonable comment is driven to the margins with unreasonable, even to the extent of being buried by search engines such as google.

It is also problematic that virtually every public defence of the vaccine programme begins with an attack on the integrity of Dr Andrew Wakefield, as if the public humiliation of one man could provide scientific justification in perpetuity for an entire class of products. Wakefield has been globally transformed into the Emmanuel Goldstein of public health (to reference Orwell’s 1984) but we should not mistake that this is actually occurring at the level of propaganda and not of scientific (or historic) fact: indeed when people cite Wakefield as an example few have the remotest idea what body of facts they are citing, and this has reduced to zero the quality of informed public discussion.

By Anne Dachel

I talked to Andy Wakefield recently on Skype. I recorded his answers to seven questions regarding what’s happening to schools both here and in the UK.

I wanted to share this one because the topic is so current: the explosion in autism/sped in schools everywhere.

What Andy talked about was chilling, mostly because it wasn't opinion or theory, it's the state of things in education today. When I started looking into how kids are doing in school, I never thought I'd uncover the massive impact special needs students are having. (Finding a school district in the U.S. where 20-25 percent of students are sped is not an isolated phenomenon anymore.)

(And of course it's going beyond school, just as the story I wrote recently about the disappearance of men in the workforce.) 

Andy talked about the subtle impact of neurotoxins on children, a steady lessening of intelligence. So if we continue to "dumb down the children of a country," what will the world look like in 5, 10 or 20 more years? When are we going to wake up?

Here was my question: Do you feel that we’ve focused too narrowly on a link between vaccines and autism while ignoring other damaging effects of vaccination?

Andy:

“…The answer lies in the way in which medicine naturally takes place, the way in which diseases present to doctors. Medicine gives you the sharp end first.”

By John Stone

A comment posted by Brian Deer earlier this month on the Orac blog about the 2012 appeal of Prof John Walker-Smith – Andrew Wakefield’s senior colleague - against the GMC findings two years earlier has been forwarded to me and can be read beneath my comments.

The most fundamental flaw in the General Medical Council  (GMC) case – thrown out in the instance of Prof Walker-Smith who unlike Wakefield received funding to appeal – originated with the incompetence or malice of Deer himself. It was the claim that the Wakefield Lancet 1998 paper rather than being an early report of cases seen and investigated of the basis of clinical need as it stated, was conducted under a protocol for a study to be funded by the United Kingdom Legal Aid Board (sometimes referred to as Project 172-96). Once the GMC accepted this false and absurd claim – which originated in Deer’s hidden complaints to the body - it was destined to unravel under any careful judicial scrutiny, and what was untrue for Walker-Smith was also untrue Wakefield, not to mention the Prof Simon Murch, the third doctor to fall under this GMC prosecution. The crux lies with Mr Justice Mitting’s observation:

Its conclusion that Professor Walker-Smith was guilty of serious professional misconduct in relation to the Lancet children was in part founded upon its conclusion that the investigations into them were carried out pursuant to Project 172-96. The only explanation given for that conclusion is that it was reached “in the light of all the available evidence”. On any view, that was an inadequate explanation of the finding.

At the Walker-Smith hearing the GMC counsel, Joanna Glynn QC, came under pressure from the judge to provide an explanation, and she was unable to do so. After two and half years of the hearing the GMC were unable to offer an explanation, and two years further on they were unable to do so again before a High Court judge. The GMC would have had ample warning of the substance of the Walker-Smith appeal and yet they could not, when the chips were down, provide arguments to counter it.

By John Stone

Below is my correspondence with the United Kingdom House of Commons Science and Technology Committee from January, which I am publishing now partly in response to further malicious attacks on the reputation of Andrew Wakefield in the London Times.  The committee – presently dissolved due to the General Election – naturally failed to deal with the matter. The chairman of the committee, Stephen Metcalfe (in photo) –an elected politician – handed on my complaint to the clerk, Simon Fiander, who defended their claim that Wakefield had committed fraud by citing a British Medical Journal editorial of January in 2011 as if nothing had happened the interim. In essence they were claiming that because something had been said six years before it could be idly repeated. Although Fiander extended a specific invitation to submit evidence to the committee’s inquiry into research integrity three attempts were rejected. The reality is that when it comes to vaccination the British establishment cannot deal with the truth in any shape or form:

To the Hon Stephen Metcalfe MP, Chair of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee

14 January 2017

Dear Mr Metcalfe,

It is my intention to submit evidence to the committee about research integrity but after consideration I decided to write to you about statements made in the committee’s recent publication Integrity in Research (Postnote 544) [1], which singles out the Wakefield 1998 Lancet paper as an example of fraud citing the editorial in the British Medical Journal by Godlee et al from January 2011[2]. While the committee may have done this in good faith it should not be in the position of knowingly committing errors of its own and therefore I suggest that the pamphlet is urgently withdrawn. Subsequent, to the publication of the Godlee editorial (and the accompanying articles by journalist Brian Deer) the position of the BMJ began to crumble.

A fundamental error in the Deer/BMJ case to swiftly emerge was that Mr Deer (who had no competence to interpret medical records) was making use of GP notes which were not available to the authors of the paper, and could not be used as a guide to what they knew.

Early on Dr Godlee was forced into a covering statement [3]:

"The case we presented against Andrew Wakefield that the1998 Lancet paper was intended to mislead was not critically reliant on GP records. It is primarily based on Royal Free hospital records, including histories taken by clinicians, and letters and other documents received at the Royal Free from GPs and consultants."

This sidesteps rather than addresses the problem.

Another issue that Godlee was forced to respond to was that the BMJ had failed to acknowledge its own conflicts, with its commercial relationships with MMR manufacturers Merck and GSK.  In the end the BMJ put up a notice with a partial admission of the problem over the on-line editorial but not over the Mr Deer’s articles (which left readers none the wiser). Even so, the published notice only mentioned advertising revenue from the two companies and not the fact that the BMJ learning division received unlimited grants from Merck through its non-profit arm Univadis. And none of this, of course, received any of the publicity of the original publication [4, 5].

By John Stone

Update: The Times this morning are putting pressure on Amazon and Apple Itunes to withdraw VaXxed - but The Times is mightily conflicted: they have told falsehood after falsehood. It is to be hoped that they will be ignored but if anyone has not yet seen the film do not delay in downloading it, just in case.

I did not suspect when I posted my article about the London premiere of VaXxed yesterday morning that a hate report was also appearing on the front page of the London Times “Disgraced fraud doctor back in the UK” but let us be clear to start of there have never been any fraud findings against Wakefield. Why should Wakefield, who has not committed fraud, has never committed any crime, not set foot as a British citizen in his own country? So, why is this a news story for the front page of a once serious newspaper?

When the High Court reviewed the General Medical Council (GMC) case against the senior author of the Wakefield Lancet paper, Prof John Walker-Smith (Wakefield having been denied funding to appeal) he was completely exonerated. If any of the central charges against Walker-Smith had been upheld he could not have been cleared. If the paper – as alleged by Times newspapers – had been based on a protocol submitted by Wakefield to the Legal Aid Board Walker-Smith could not have been exonerated, if there had been misreporting, if there had been unauthorised or unethical procedures, Walker-Smith could not have been exonerated. The Times got it wrong and the GMC got it wrong (and between them they had arranged to hide the fact that the principle reporter, Brian Deer, was the only author of complaints against Wakefield   ).

The Times does not have a very credible expert, Dr David Robert Grimes, a physicist associated with the lobby agency Sense About Science . Grimes, the mouth, says “We should never forget that he (Wakefield) falsified data and engaged in unethical conduct and that this lie killed and maimed innocent people”. Well, it is interesting that Grimes has no expertise which would make him professionally accountable for his statements. As it happens approximately 10 million people have died in the UK since the publication of the controversial paper and only three of them from measles (in one case involving extreme medical negligence and all three involving otherwise very sick people ).

That Wakefield had not falsified data was shown once again in 2011 when the British Medical Journal alleged fraud based on re-cycling of material by Brian Deer first seen  in the Sunday Times in 2009, just after the Times’s proprietor James Murdoch had been made a director of GSK with a brief to protect the group’s reputation. The BMJ case crumbled: Deer had been working from and misinterpreting data Wakefield and the authors of the paper did not have. Print outs of the lost pathology slides came to light (produced by whistleblowing scientist Dr David Lewis) which supported the paper’s findings. Deer and the BMJ editor Fiona Godlee were forced to eat humble pie in a Nature news report. BMJ were embarrassed by their undisclosed commercial conflicts as partners of the manufacturers, and it turned out that their “external peer reviewer” was Harvey Marcovitch, an associate editor who had signed the editorial denouncing Wakefield and was also head of GMC panels.

We're happy to share the new paperback release of Waging War on the Autistic Child by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, and published by Skyhorse Publishing.  We know our children face sanctioned discrimination and segregation in school, public places and elsewhere.  Did you know that parents are often sent to Child Services for providing a basic level of competent care for their own offspring?  Read about "The Arizona 5" and how one family was destroyed.  Dr. Wakefield continues to be a champion for autism families.

We invite you to buy this book - and please leave a review on Amazon. That's so important to an author and an easy way

From Amazon:

As the number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders grows each year, new discoveries and controversies arise. Andrew Wakefield explores many of these in his thorough investigation of the recent trial case of the “Arizona 5,” which destroyed an Arizona family. Two parents, with five children on the spectrum, were accused of Munchausen syndrome by proxy—a rare form of child abuse—and were ganged up on by physicians, child protective services, and the courts, who alleged that the parents fabricated medical symptoms in all five children. However, Wakefield now presents ample evidence that was disregarded and that would have proven the parents’ innocence.

Families affected by autism suffer great hardship and prejudice, particularly as they navigate the uncertain waters of diagnosis, treatment, and education. The shocking story of the Arizona 5 family delves into the tremendous challenges some parents have to face, especially if their views on how to treat the syndrome don’t align with the medical world’s standards. Wakefield also includes numerous studies and research trials that support the controversial yet significant roles that vaccines and diet play in autism, factors many medical professionals wrongfully dismiss.

Awkward moment alert. A women at a Vaxxed showing does not recognize Andrew Wakefield at the Q&A and then proceeds to insult him.  You have to watch this to believe it.  Andy responds with courtesy and aplomb to a woman who is as rude as can be - despite her quiet Looooosiana voice. "Where I come from...." ma'am, maybe go back.

Editor's note -- Is Del Bigtree the best thing to happen to the vaccine injury awareness movement in a long time? I vote yes. Thanks to John Stone for pointing out this powerful speech -- one of the finest I've heard in 11 years on this beat -- by Del in Santa Monica on July 1. As John put it: "A colossal speech which particularly focuses on our bought-out media, and the news black-out on the William Thompson affair." Del compares the Thompson revelations to new evidence that might exonerate a death row inmate but is dismissed because the case is supposedly "proven." That would never fly. Similarly, he shouts, "The science is never settled!." Tell it, Brother! Let the fireworks continue! And check it out, everyone. -- Dan Olmsted

By Andrew Wakefield

Neil Miller’s analysis of the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) provides two red flags for vaccine injury that have long been suspected by vaccine safety advocates—associations between first, the number of vaccines administered at the same visit and the risk of hospitalization and death, and second, younger age at the time of the vaccine adverse reaction and a higher risk of hospitalization and death.

Miller’s first real-world finding belies the entirely theoretical proposition—dangerously interpreted as carte blanche to give multiple shots simultaneously—that a child can receive ten to one hundred thousand vaccine antigens at the same time.  

His second finding on younger age at vaccination and risk of injury are entirely consistent with the true findings of the CDC’s study that looked at age of first MMR and autism risk.[1] African American boys and children of all races who were developmentally normal to age 12 months (‘isolated’ autism) had a highly significantly increased risk of autism following MMR on schedule (12-18 months) compared with those receiving it later. These facts were deliberately concealed for 14 years by the CDC authors and their superiors.

The second finding is also consistent with the observation that it was younger children who were at greater risk of meningitis with SmithKline Beecham’s dangerous MMR vaccine containing the Urabe AM/9 strain of mumps.[2] The implications for this finding were completely ignored by the authorities.  

Miller provides an informative history of the value of the VAERS system in picking up adverse reactions signals, reminding us at the same time of the huge under reporting of adverse reactions by medical personnel and the apparent reluctance by government investigators to link serious adverse reactions to vaccines. The value of VAERS is the red flags that it throws up. It should be used to generate hypotheses that lead to definitive studies and answers that we can believe in. We now know from Dr. William Thompson, the CDC whistleblower, that his agency cannot be trusted to do such studies. Congress has an obligation to act immediately to create an independent vaccine safety agency, completely outside of Health and Human Services and firewalled from pharmaceutical company influence.

Andrew Wakefield

Director VAXXED: From Cover-up to Catastrophe

[1] DeStefano F et al. Pediatrics 2004;113:259-266

[2] Dourado I et al, Am J Epidemiol. 2000;151:524-530

For those readers of a certain age, this photo is likely to make you swoon and re-up your subscription to Tiger Beat.  Donny Osmond watched VaXxed and met Dr. Andy Wakefield in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Look at this photo. Not sure the pharma shills will be able tell us to "Go away little girl" much longer....  The Salt Lake City Tribune called VaXxed "reprehensible." Imagine their angst when SLC's favorite son had a clearly emotional moment with Dr. Wakefield?" More salt in their tears than the Great Lake itself, likely!

Enjoy this blast from the past. And let's hope for the future.  I watched my oldest "graduate" out of school yesterday. When Donny and Marie were on TV the rate was fewer than 1 in 10,000. KIM

By F. Edward Yazbak MD 

Introduction: 

On May 26, 2016, Rohde and Conte published their 4th report on the movie “VAXXED”. 

The report was titled “Did the CDC Censor Vaxxed? Or Did the CDC’s Proxies Do It for them? Columbia University’s Dilemma.” 

The report and related comments were most informative and readers should review them in order to appreciate the role Professor Ian Lipkin of Columbia University played recently.   

Dr. Lipkin's dislike of Dr. Andrew Wakefield is not new. In 2008, Dr. Lipkin co-authored a CDC- AAP sponsored report that I carefully reviewed and critiqued on September 12, 2008. My critique was to be published on Monday September 15, 2008 on the Vaccine Autoimmunity Project (VAP) web site but … it never was, because some time during the weekend, the web site was hacked and destroyed.   

Two British vaccine information sites published my review but it was never widely distributed in the United States until today.   

As you share information about vaccine safety and the connection to autism, your friends and family will likely recite what they have heard over and over in the media, "but, THAT doctor's study was "debunked."  Here is a bolus dose of clarification about who is Dr. Andrew Wakfield from the VaXXed The Movie website :

Find a showing here.

###

Since the release of the 1998 paper in The Lancet, which suggested the possibility of a link between a novel form of bowel disease, autism, and the MMR vaccine, one of the report’s co-authors, Dr. Andrew Wakefield has been the subject of great controversy and defamation. Here, Wakefield addresses the allegations of fraud, conflict of interest, and medical misconduct that have been leveled against him.



Visit the VaXxed site to see the following video clips:

1. Dr. Wakefield's Medical Background

Wakefield shares his medical background as a gastroenterologist and how he became involved in research related to autism.

2. The Link Between Autism and The MMR Vaccine - 1:24

The link between the MMR and inflammatory bowel disease was first brought to the attention of Dr. Wakefield and his colleagues by the parents of sick children. Wakefield explains how human disease syndromes are normally identified and then studied and how that related to their study on MMR and the age of exposure. Jump to section.


3. MMR Vaccine Safety - 3:28

Wakefield explains how safety studies on vaccines including the MMR, were largely inadequate. Testing for single vaccines was better. Jump to section.

Read Part 3,   Part 2 and Part 1 here.

By Louis Conte and Wayne Rohde. 

A continued series.  Please read Reports 1, 2 and 3 here

President Richard M. Nixon speaking to his aide, Charles Colson:

“We’ve got a counter-government here and we’ve got to fight it. I don’t give a damn how it’s done. Do whatever has to be done to stop those leaks.… I don’t want to be told why it can’t be done.”

Our pursuit of the identities of mysterious members of the Immunization Action Coalition Listserv continues.
From: Wayne Rohde

Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2016 11:27 AM
To: Admin (At the Immunization Action Coalition)
Subject: IAC List Serv in The Guardian article

Dr. Wexler,

After reading in The Guardian from March 29, 2016, I am very intrigued about the existence of the below mentioned IAC coordinated List Serv. Alison Singer, of the Autism Science Foundation, and a close associate of yours, stated the following in an interview with the Guardian:

“At the center of the network was a listserv group email list of more than 100 prominent individuals and science research bodies run out of the Immunization Action Coalition (IAC) based in St Paul, Minnesota. The listserv acts as an early warning system that sounds the alarm whenever the potent conspiracy theory that autism can be caused by vaccination surfaces. Through the listserv, conference calls were quickly organized among top scientists across the country to discuss how to respond to the news that what was seen as a scurrilous and misleading film was to be given a high-profile airing. Leading figures in the documentary world were also enlisted to add their objections to the showing of Vaxxed, the film directed by the disgraced former British doctor Andrew Wakefield, who was struck off from medical practice in 2010 for serious professional misconduct.

From the UK's DailyMail - rather a shocker!  But a delight to read.  It's a lot more difficult to disparage and embarrass and discount Robert DeNiro than a beautiful blonde female.  He throws a real monkeywrench into the misogynistic media plan.  KS


Why De Niro is backing the MMR doctor hounded out of Britain: Actor believes triple jab risks are being covered up by pharmaceutical giants after his son 'developed autism overnight' when he had vaccination 

• Robert De Niro's 18-year-old son Elliot suffers from autism disorder
• His Tribeca Film Festival in New York provoked controversy by featuring a new 'anti-vaccination' documentary called Vaxxed
• Film star revealed that he and his wife believe their son developed autism overnight after receiving an unidentified vaccination jab 
• British doctor Andrew Wakefield claimed he had found evidence the MMR triple vaccine caused irritable bowel syndrome and autism in children 

Love 'em or not, Fox News has done what other media outlets fear - presented an open conversation about VaXed The Movie with Dr. Andrew Wakefield.

By Phillipe Diaz

When the call came from the heads of the Tribeca Film Festival, specifically Jane Rosenthal and Paula Weinstein, to let my head of distribution, Rich Castro, and me know that they had decided to “de-select” our film Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe, I didn’t want to believe it.

I couldn’t understand how it could even be possible—when the selection had been confirmed publicly by Tribeca co-founder Robert De Niro himself the day before.

Being the distributor of the film and having received all the paperwork confirming the selection, I was in total disbelief, as I had personally advised the filmmakers to submit the film to Tribeca.

The conversation became very heated when I asked the festival executives for the reasons. The answer I received was that they had “issues” with the content of the film. I said, “Fine—let us know what issues you are having and we will give you all the back-up documentation and set you up with the filmmakers so that you can get any clarification you need.” But I got no specific answers.

It was clear that the actual content of the film (a documentary by Andrew Wakefield about Dr. William Thompson, a senior scientist at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who believes that crucial information was omitted in a 2004 report on the Measles-Mumps-Rubella [MMR] vaccine and its link to autism) was not the full cause of the festival’s change of heart. They had already indicated in a previous conversation that their sponsor had issues with the film—specifically, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It became even more heated when I asked Rosenthal and Weinstein, both highly accomplished professionals, if they realized the responsibility they were assuming and the message it would send to the filmmaking world at large. They were effectively telling the festival’s sponsors that it was perfectly OK to censor a film they didn’t like. They were also telling filmmakers around the world that they should only make movies that corporate powers and sponsors alike will approve of, otherwise they will have little chance to ever have their movies seen. I told them they were setting a huge precedent, but it was clear that they could not have cared less.

Read the full Op-ED HERE.

By Louis Conte and Wayne Rohde

Has the CDC censored VaXxed at another film festival? The Houston Worldfest Film Festival has announced that they too have been forced to remove VaXxed from their festival’s line up.

To answer this question, we must review what we reported earlier this week.

On Tuesday, we asked if the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention – an agency of the United States Government – directed the Immunization Action Coalition (IAC), a not-for-profit organization to activate a panel of scientists, known as the Listserv, to pressure Robert De Niro and the Tribeca Film Festival to remove VaXxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe from the film festival’s 2016 line up.

We asked if the CDC sought to have VaXxed censored because the film detailed research fraud within the CDC Vaccine Safety Division on the 2004 MMR study published in Pediatrics. This study by Frank DeStefano, Tanya Karapurkar Bhasin, William W. Thompson, Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsopp and Coleen Boyle is the vital research that the government claims shows no link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

On 3/25/16, Robert De Niro indicated that he and the Tribeca Film Festival team decided to pull VaXxed because of pressure from the scientific community.

“My intent in screening this film was to provide an opportunity for conversation around an issue that is deeply personal to me and my family. But after reviewing it over the past few days with the Tribeca Film Festival team and others from the scientific community, we do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for.”

Statements made by Alison Singer in a 3/29/16 article in the Guardian are absolutely clear that the IAC supplied the pressure De Niro was feeling:

“Four or five years ago we weren’t as well organized and people didn’t realize the importance of responding quickly and strongly,” said Alison Singer, the president of the Autism Science Foundation and a member of the IAC listserv.

“Today, we know that we have to respond to every incident however large or small, because if you leave any of these discredited theories unchallenged, it allows people to think that there’s something still to be discussed,” she said.

At the center of the network was a listserv group of more than 100 prominent individuals and science research bodies run out of the Immunization Action Coalition (IAC) based in St Paul, Minnesota. According to the Guardian article, the “listserv acts as an early warning system that sounds the alarm whenever the potent conspiracy theory that autism can be caused by vaccination surfaces.”

The Guardian states “Through the listserv, conference calls were quickly organized among top scientists across the country to discuss how to respond to the news that what was seen as a scurrilous and misleading film was to be given a high-profile airing. Leading figures in the documentary world were also enlisted to add their objections to the showing of Vaxxed, the film directed by the disgraced former British doctor Andrew Wakefield.”

While Wakefield directed it, VaXxed is not about the retraction of his 1998 Lancet article. VaXxed is about the disclosures of CDC scientist Dr. William Thompson – one of the co-authors of the 2004 Pediatrics MMR article - alleging that the agency manipulated and destroyed data which showed that the MMR vaccine is linked to autism in African-American male children and another subset of children that the authors described as Isolated Autism (autism without other co-morbid conditions).

While Wakefield’s controversial 1998 Lancet paper on gastrointestinal illness in several children with autism was a factor in the CDC decision to study the MMR vaccine, the pressing issue for the CDC was not the Wakefield controversy.

The pressing issue was that their boss was being sued.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services was facing billions of dollars in compensation claims from families filing thousands of petitions in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) in the Omnibus Autism Proceedings (OAP) alleging MMR vaccine induced autism.

The 2004 research that Thompson says was fraudulent was critical to the families with claims in the OAP. VaXxed makes the point that the CDC’s fraud amounted to obstruction of justice of federal judicial proceedings.

William Thompson issued this statement through his attorney Rick Morgan on 8/27/14 about the 2004 MMR study:. Morgan-Verkamp is a well-regarded legal firm specializing in Whistleblower litigation.

“I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.”

Omitting statistically significant information and altering the design of the study to bury the elevated risk of autism for African-American boys and those with “isolated autism” due to the MMR vaccine is research fraud.

VaXxed details information Thompson gave to Dr. Brian Hooker, a scientist and father of a child with autism. VaXxed is constructed around excerpts of legally taped conversations between the two men where other serious allegations of misconduct within the CDC are disclosed.

In our first report we noted that Alison Singer, the Director of the Autism Science Foundation (ASF) and the apparent spokesperson for the IAC Listserv, is the mother of a child with autism and not a scientist. She held a leadership position at Autism Speaks before starting the ASF.

Dr. Paul Offit, who often acts a spokesman for vaccines, is on the ASF board. In other words, Offit is Singer’s boss.

If you aren't able to see the movie VAXXED just yet, you can learn about the MMR autism question that rocked the world by reading Callous Disregard by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, published by Skyhorse Publishing. 

Andrew Wakefield reveals the the inside story of the vaccine-autism connection, and his controversial research.

As Andrew Wakefield states in his prologue, “If autism does not affect your family now, it will. If something does not change—and change soon—this is almost a mathematical certainty. This book affects you also. It is not a parochial look at a trivial medical spat in the United Kingdom, but dispatches from the battlefront in a major confrontation—a struggle against compromise in medicine, corruption of science, and a real and present threat to children in the interests of policy and profit. It is a story of how ‘the system’ deals with dissent among its doctors and scientists.”

Decide for yourself - visit the VAXXED site to learn more about the movie and to purchase tickets.

By Louis Conte and Wayne Rohde

Did the Centers For Disease Control – an agency of the United States Government – direct the Immunization Action Coalition (IAC), a not-for-profit organization to activate a panel of scientists, known as the Listserv, to pressure Robert Di Niro and the Tribeca Film Festival to remove VaXxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe from the film festival’s 2016 line up?

Did the CDC seek to have VaXxed censored because the film details research fraud within the CDC Vaccine Safety Division to alter results of the foundational research used by the government to deny the link between the MMR Vaccine and autism?

On 3/25/16, Robert Di Niro indicated that he and the Tribeca Film Festival team decided to pull VaXxed because of pressure from the scientific community.

“My intent in screening this film was to provide an opportunity for conversation around an issue that is deeply personal to me and my family. But after reviewing it over the past few days with the Tribeca Film Festival team and others from the scientific community, we do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for.”

Statements made by Alison Singer in a 3/29/16 article in the Guardian are absolutely clear that the IAC supplied the pressure Di Niro was feeling:

“Four or five years ago we weren’t as well organized and people didn’t realize the importance of responding quickly and strongly,” said Alison Singer, the president of the Autism Science Foundation and a member of the IAC listserv.

“Today, we know that we have to respond to every incident however large or small, because if you leave any of these discredited theories unchallenged, it allows people to think that there’s something still to be discussed,” she said.

At the center of the network was a listserv group email list of more than 100 prominent individuals and science research bodies run out of the Immunization Action Coalition (IAC) based in St Paul, Minnesota. According to the Guardian article, the “listserv acts as an early warning system that sounds the alarm whenever the potent conspiracy theory that autism can be caused by vaccination surfaces.”

The Guardian states “Through the listserv, conference calls were quickly organized among top scientists across the country to discuss how to respond to the news that what was seen as a scurrilous and misleading film was to be given a high-profile airing. Leading figures in the documentary world were also enlisted to add their objections to the showing of Vaxxed, the film directed by the disgraced former British doctor Andrew Wakefield.”

Having viewed VaXxed, the film is not about Andrew Wakefield or the retraction of his 1998 Lancet article describing a bowel syndrome in children with autism. While Wakefield directed it, VaXxed is about the disclosures of CDC scientist, Dr. William Thompson, alleging that the agency manipulated and destroyed data in the seminal research cited by the US government as proof that the MMR vaccine is not linked to autism. While Wakefield’s controversy was likely a factor in the CDC decision to study the MMR vaccine, a bigger factor was the filing of thousands of petitions in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) alleging MMR vaccine induced autism. In what would eventually become known as the Omnibus Autism Proceedings (OAP), the Secretary of Health and Human Services was facing billions of dollars in compensation claims.

The 2004 research that Thompson says was fraudulent, might have been critical to the families with claims in the OAP. VaXxed makes the point that the CDC’s fraud amounted to obstruction of justice.

William Thompson’s 8/27/14 statement on his concerns about his employer’s conduct in the 2004 MMR study is on the website of the attorneys he retained - Morgan-Verkamp (). Morgan-Verkamp is a well-regarded legal firm specializing in Whistleblower litigation.

“I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.”

Omitting statistically significant information and altering the design of the study to bury the elevated risk of African-American boys developing autism due to the MMR vaccine is research fraud.

VaXxed details information Thompson gave to Dr. Brian Hooker, a scientist and father of a child with autism. The film also features legally taped conversations between the two men where other serious allegations of misconduct within the CDC are disclosed.

By John Stone

For a year or two now I have more or less given up trying to comment on mainstream blogs - what with the harassment and the censorship I felt I ought to devote more of my time to other projects. But I have been back in the past few days given the disgraceful debacle over "Vaxxed". Below is an example of unacceptable comment to the UK's Guardian newspaper in 2016, made after several comments disappeared.

One of the notable features of the three year long hearing against Wakefield and colleagues was that at no point did any of the mainstream media report any of the defence - no one unless they were prepared to search wider on the internet would have any idea of what it was. It goes on. Below I put up a link to my own blog and it was deleted as infringing community rules, but there is no possible way it did that. We are having a discussion where all the counter argument is being deftly removed. If an international terrorist was on trial they would stand a much better chance of having their defence reported by the mainstream media than someone voicing mild concern about the safety of the vaccine program. The problem is that with these voices of concern systematically removed the program is destined to become ever more harmful because basic checks and balances have been eliminated.

This is something which apparently falls outside reasonable comment now.

John Stone is UK Editor for Age of Autism.

NOTE: "Banned in Boston!" was a popular phrase about censorship of movies and books in Puritanical Boston into the 20th Century.  Looks like Nixed in New York is the new version.  Fortunately, we have a solution. See below.   Congratulations to the VAXXED team.

Exclusive One Week Engagement
Friday, April 1st, 2016
Angelika Film Center
18 W. Houston St., New York, NY 10012
(212) 995-2570
Show times: Friday (4/1) thru Thursday (4/7): 11:00a, 1:15p, 3:30p, 5:45p, 8:00p, 10:30p

Online Ticket Purchases: http://www.fandango.com/angelikafilmcenter_aaeci/theaterpage

In addition, a special group ticket price is available for $8/ticket for groups of 25 or more, however tickets must be purchased in person at the box office.

There will be Q&As following the 8:00pm shows on Friday (4/1) and Saturday (4/2)

From the VAXXED website:  To our dismay, we learned on March 26 about the Tribeca Film Festival's decision to reverse the official selection of Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe.

It is important to note that this is not an anti-vaccine movie as it is has been commonly portrayed in the media. Robert De Niro's original defense of the film happened Friday after a one-hour conversation between De Niro and and Bill Posey, the congressman who has interacted directly and at length with the CDC Whistleblower (Dr. William Thompson) and whose team has scrutinized the documents that strongly indicate fraud at the CDC. That is what this film is about.

It is our understanding that persons from an organization affiliated with the festival have made unspecified allegations against the film - claims that we were given no opportunity to challenge or redress. We were denied due process.

We have just witnessed yet another example of the power of corporate interests censoring free speech, art, and truth. Tribeca's action will not succeed in denying the world access to the truth behind the film Vaxxed.

We are grateful to the many thousands of people who have already mobilized including doctors, scientists, educators and the autistic community.

We will be pressing forward and sharing our plans in the very near future.

Onward!

- Andrew Wakefield (Director) and Del Bigtree (Producer)

By Louis Conte

Grace and I have a child with autism and we believe it is critical that all of the issues surrounding the causes of autism be openly discussed and examined. In the 15 years since the Tribeca Film Festival was founded, I have never asked for a film to be screened or gotten involved in the programming. However this is very personal to me and my family and I want there to be a discussion, which is why we will be screening VAXXED. I am not personally endorsing the film, nor am I anti-vaccination; I am only providing the opportunity for a conversation around the issue.”

Robert De Niro, March 25, 2016

“My intent in screening this film was to provide an opportunity for conversation around an issue that is deeply personal to me and my family. But after reviewing it over the past few days with the Tribeca Film Festival team and others from the scientific community, we do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for.

The Festival doesn't seek to avoid or shy away from controversy. However, we have concerns with certain things in this film that we feel prevent us from presenting it in the Festival program. We have decided to remove it from our schedule.”

Robert De Niro, March 26, 2016

Dear Mr. De Niro:

It occurred to me that I should write you a note about your decision to not screen Andrew Wakefield’s documentary Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 24^th.

The media feeding frenzy you endured was typical for anyone with a certain degree of fame who ventures into questioning – or in your case – providing a venue for discussion of vaccine safety. What you experienced in the two days leading up to your decision to accept the censorship of Vaxxed is something that we in the autism community have seen and experienced for years.

Censorship and suppression of our rights to speak out about what happened to our children has been going on for a while now.

As the father of two sons with autism, I want you to know that I’ve never accepted it because I want my sons, who struggle with language, to know that you have to speak out even when finding the words isn’t easy.

Even when the words bring you criticism.

That those who oppose our views exerted enormous pressure on you and the Tribeca Film Festival team to pull Vaxxed from your line up is not shocking. That you brought in “others from the scientific community” to help you accept censorship is profoundly disturbing.

Frankly, many (but certainly not all) of the scientific community, particularly scientists with ties to the pharmaceutical industry or the Centers For Disease Control, have turned their backs on people with autism. These scientists will get up and leave the room if you talk about vaccine injuries.

Since when do we ask the scientific community about whether a film should be screened? Who were these scientists? Shouldn’t we all know which scientists were on the Tribeca Censorship Panel?

PATRICIA FINN, ESQ.,
NATIONAL VACCINE RIGHTS & INJURY ATTORNEY
 
This weekend the film Vaxxed “from Cover up to Catastrophe” was pulled from Tribeca Film festival by the festival organizers after being pressured to not show the movie because of its controversial content.  New York City's Health Commissioner Jane Zucker issued a statement in support of the film’s censorship stressing in her public announcement on Sunday that vaccines do not cause autism.  On behalf of the citizens of the City of New York represented by this firm and who disagree with Dr. Zucker, the undersigned respectfully requests the Health Commissioner provide the residents of this state with any credible studies, any evidence at all, showing autism cannot be vaccine induced.  Simply attacking the research of Andy Wakefield, and notably without more, is not a sufficient basis for the City's top health official to claim vaccines do not cause autism. 

Vaxxed supporters plan to premier the movie in New York City on April 24, 2016 as planned regardless of the censorship, and would like to put forth any evidence provided by Dr. Zucker to support the statement that vaccines are safe and do not cause autism, other than the same old establishment lame attack on Dr. Wakefield’s research findings and now his new movie.
 
 
Why is the Film Vaxed So Important and A Must See
 
In 2000, a group of doctors from Pharma and CDC got together at a conference in Simpsonwoods, a secluded retreat outside of Atlanta.  The conference was convened to discuss newly uncovered evidence showing a connection between vaccines and brain injury in children.  The transcripts of the Simpsonwoods conference shows comments being made by the CDC and Merck doctor-participants involving potential litigation that would result from their findings, and that it would be “problematic” for industry.  Those in attendance agreed before concluding the conference, not to tell the public about the evidence of vaccine induced brain injury they had uncovered at CDC and Merck, deciding to keep it to themselves and out of “less responsible hands.”
 
About the same time in 2000, the vaccine schedule for children in the United States was tripled, and also about the same time in 2000, the number of children with autism in the United States skyrocketed to 1 in 60 children.  Soon thereafter about 5000 parents filed petitions for compensation in the Vaccine Court, alleging vaccine induced autism and injuries in their children after they had been heavily vaccinated under the new schedule.  The facts of each of the 5000 cases were all highly similar.  The petitions alleged perfectly healthy children developed autism after being heavily vaccinated starting in about 2000, shortly after the CDC\Pharma doctor’s agreed to keep the evidence of harm they had uncovered a secret and out of “less responsible hands.”