The consequences of Dr Wakefield’s trials

Vaccine damage in Great Britain: The consequences of Dr Wakefield’s trials







More and more evidence is coming to light that Dr. Wakefield was on
the right track when he researched the connection between the MMR
vaccine and intestinal inflammation in the vaccinated children.


Was Dr. Andrew Wakefield Right After All?


Wakefield’s Lancet Paper Vindicated


New Published Study Verifies Andrew Wakefield’s Research on Autism





But how did Dr. Wakefield first get into the sights of the UK vaccine industry and how was the campaign against him mounted?


Martin Walker, the author of "Dirty Medicine" and a number of other
books on health, closely followed the case that eventually resulted in
Dr. Wakefield's exile from the UK. He describes how it all happened and
how the vaccine manufacturers were able to bring down the full weight of
government and the courts against both Wakefield and the many parents
who were suing for recognition of the damage vaccines had done to their
children.


"As a campaigner of 40 years, I think that what surprises me most
about Dr Wakefield’s case, is how easily and how completely we were
defeated by the pharmaceutical companies, how over a thousand parents
and children were written out of history together with their adverse
drug reactions. Part of this defeat for the parents, the children and
the doctors concerned was grounded in an unfortunate understanding that
pharmaceutical company executives were decent people and humanitarians.
In fact the pharmaceutical companies, their corporate structure and
their relentless pursuit of profit, their fraudulent practices represent
one of the last remaining shibboleths, in our society which need to be
completely reformed, democratised, divested of vested interests and
made public from top to bottom."


We do learn from experience. That is why we should pay attention to
how this case went so wrong and why the campaign to ruin those
researchers and to leave the damaged children by the wayside was mounted
in the first place. So it won't happen again.


Here is Martin Walker's essay.



The Consequences of Dr Wakefield’s Trials


I am not a doctor or a medical scientist, my research and writing is
sociological. For the past twenty years I have been investigating
pharmaceutical lobby groups and campaigns against natural medicine. I
have written 10 books and around 15 essays during this period — the
essays are especially in relation to the case of Dr Andrew Wakefield. I
attended every day of the three year General Medical Council (GMC)
Fitness to Practice Hearing, in London, that tried Dr Wakefield and his
two co-defendants, Professor Murch and Professor Walker-Smith.

* * *

The pharmaceutical companies are in turmoil. Their hold over many
previously profitable drugs has loosened, their place being taken by
generic equivalents. The industry is in a state of transition, stuck
between short term ‘cures’ and condition specific drugs, and new ideas
about how the psychology of the individual might be affected by
chemically manufactured substances. As well as this, the industry is
assaulted on all sides by a growing understanding about natural
therapies such as homeopathy and nutrition.

There is, however, one area in which the pharmaceutical industry is
making considerable profit and where their products do not discriminate
for those who have specific illnesses; vaccination. A prophylactic,
vaccination can be forced onto it’s subjects, in the name of community
responsibility. There can of course be little moral or social objection
to this, we would all want to make the small sacrifice of an hour or so,
to have an injection and help the community stay healthy — Wouldn’t we?

The success of the vaccine market, however, does not just depend upon
the subjects acceptance of herd immunity, it depends as well on selling
the history of vaccines as an effective and safe ‘treatment’ and
extolling the virtues of those who believe in it. But the matter of
adverse reactions, introduces serious complications into the issue of
vaccination. Governments buy vaccines and then prescribe them,
governments have considerable power by which they can enforce
vaccination. Whose responsibility is it to look after and care for those
damaged by vaccines? In this area, the pharmaceutical companies will
not argue responsibility, instead they claim that there are no adverse
reactions.

The traditional way in the UK of claiming for damage created by drug is
the civil action in court. Civil actions, however, are very complex and
the claimant has to do two things; show that the particular drug could
cause the specific injury — this is done by employing expert witnesses.
Secondly, show that the individual claimant was in fact injured in the
way they claim.

Since the Thalidomide cases in the 1960s — most of which were not won,
by the damaged claimants, as many people believe— the pharmaceutical
industry has worked hard to ensure that claims for damages caused by
various drugs, fail in the courts.

* * *

From 1993 onwards, parents who considered their children to have been
damaged by the MMR vaccine, began consulting with lawyers to make a
claim against three vaccine manufacturers. By the year 2,000 there were
over 1,000 claimants joined to this action.

One of the most devastating adverse reaction for both children who had
received the MMR vaccine, and their parents was inflammatory bowel
disease (IBD) which was sometimes followed by regressive autism. There
were, however, other groups of adverse reaction, which stretched from
deafness to epilepsy.

At the same time that the parents of vaccine damaged children gathered
to begin preparing their court case, those whose children had IBD
searched for a doctor who might be able to treat their children. In
1995, one of these parents found Dr Andrew Wakefield a prize winning
medical research worker who specialised in the pathways of Crohn’s
disease and treatments including bowel transplants.

In the early 1990s Wakefield’s work began to focus on the measles virus,
both wild and incorporated in vaccinations, in Crohn’s disease. Between
1993 and 2003, he wrote 11 peer reviewed papers about the link between
measles virus and Crohn’s or IBD. Wakefield’s suspicions about the
measles virus, were, he wrote, ‘based upon the behaviour of the virus
in the gut during the acute infection and it’s ability to persist and
cause delayed disease.’ Wakefield began his collaborative studies of
measles virus with researchers in Sweden.

As a consequence of the early studies, Wakefield had moved like the best
of scientists into the social arena, setting up groups, both
observational and active. With others he set up the UK National Twin
registry of Inflammatory Bowel Disease at the Royal Free Hospital. This
was the largest such registry in the world. Wakefield also organised
two major data sets, The National Childhood Development Study and the
British cohort Study 1970. The data bases were used for various research
projects , including the effect of measles vaccination and such factors
as smoking and appendicitis.

Throughout 1995 and 1996, as a growing number of parents who suspected
that their children’s illness had been caused by vaccination, Dr
Wakefield set up The national Register of Paediatric Inflammatory Bowel
Disease. This was the first register of IBD in any country in the world.

Wakefield was so affected by the continuing stream of parents who came
to visit him at the Royal Free Hospital, that he contacted the Chief
Medical Officer and suggested a meeting to discuss what he suggested was
a possible danger to public health. It would be six years before
Wakefield was to be granted such a meeting.

In 1995, the parents court cases and the work of Dr Wakefield came
together, when he was chosen to be an expert witness for the claimants
in IBD and autism cases. The lawyer for the claimants at this point,
asked the Legal Aid Board for Legal Aid funding so that Dr Wakefield
could pursue his research upon which his expert testimony could be
based. In Britain this was common practice in the mid 1990’s, although
today the Legal Services Commission (LSC) has failed to give claimants
funding in other cases involving drug companies.

From 1996 to 2003, there seemed to be an uneasy truce between the MMR
claimants, the pharmaceutical companies and the government. The only odd
thing that occurred was that a consumer affairs journalist named Brian
Deer began a series of articles in the Murdoch owned Sunday Times
attacking expert witnesses in previous vaccine adverse reactions trials.
Deer mercilessly attacked the expert witness who had appeared for the
parents in the Whooping Cough vaccine trials in the 1970s. This doctor,
like Dr Wakefield, had written a case review paper and had been attacked
in court on his science and his personality. Parents lost the whooping
cough claims in court. However, realising that it would be politic to
stop claims coming to court for vaccine damage, the government set up a
Vaccine Damage Payment Unit (VDPU). The VDPU got the pharmaceutical
companies off the hook, with government funded awards with small amounts
of money.

In 1998, 11 doctors at the Royal Free Hospital published a case review
paper, in the Lancet, it observed the cases of 12 children who had
sequentially presented at the Royal Free. All of them had IBD of one
kind or another and some of them had developed regressive autism. The
first contact of the parents and the children was usually Dr Wakefield.

At the press briefing for the paper’s publication, called by the Royal
Free Hospital, Dr Wakefield was asked what parents should now do in
relation to their child’s vaccination, given the conclusions of the
paper that IBD and perhaps regressive autism might be connected in some
manner with the MMR? Wakefield observed that parents might be advised to
use single vaccines until their research at the Royal Free was
finished. This statement undermined vaccine industry and government
plans; for the previous decade, the vaccine industry and the government
had been working on ‘combined vaccinations’ which could, eventually,
cover all known illnesses in one vaccine!

The Lancet case review paper didn’t mention MMR except when reporting
concerns of some parents that their children’s bowel illnesses had
occurred just after their vaccination and they wondered if there was any
connection. Of course the corporate media, reported nothing of Dr
Wakefield’s previous work or even a proper analysis of this case review
paper. At this time, however, Wakefield couldn’t be openly attacked
because he was an expert witness in the upcoming trial and all matters
to do with that trial were sub judice.

Following the Lancet case review paper in 1998 which was to become the
subject of the GMC trial in 2007, Wakefield began to include in his
published papers, reports of studies and writing about the link between
gastroenterological problems and regressive autism. In the year 2000,
with Scott Montgomery, Wakefield wrote his most devastating critique of
the safety of MMR, ‘Measles, mumps, rubella vaccine: through a glass
darkly’, in the Adverse Drug Reactions and Toxiological Reviews, (2000;
19: 265-283)

In 2003, the Legal Aid Board, which is a government agency, withdrew all
the funding underpinning the parents’ decade long civil action. The
parents appealed the decision and this appeal, heard by a judge whose
brother sat on the board of GlaxoSmithKline, was turned down. The
withdrawal of legal aid a — secret governmental decision — was argued
publically on the grounds that the claimants were unable to prove that
MMR caused autism — an argument that had never been made in the first
place. When legal aid was withdrawn for the IBD/autism cases all the
other cases of adverse reactions — over a thousand — also fell.

Now the court case was out of the way, the government and the
pharmaceutical companies were able to turn their full attention on Dr
Wakefield. A short time after the appeal against the withdrawal of legal
aid, a long article by Brian Deer attacking Dr Wakefield, appeared in
the Sunday Times. The article accused Wakefield of unethical research on
autistic children, of using invasive procedures for research, a series
of offences of dishonesty and obtaining a patent on a vaccine competing
with MMR. When Deer’s article appeared, a number of Government and
National Health Service personalities, including the Prime Minister Tony
Bliar, commented publically on the guilt of Dr Wakefield. The following
week, a complaint apparently written by Deer was presented to the
General Medical Council (GMC).

The GMC is awash with conflicts of interest. The central and most
important one of these is that since 1996 the GMC, which investigates
and hears cases of malpractice against doctors, has accepted cases put
to them and prepared by the pharmaceutical industry. These are cases
which involve issues important to the pharmaceutical industry. Through a
private enquiry agency which they own, the Association of British
Pharmaceutical Industries (ABPI) helped Brian Deer prepare this case
against Dr Wakefield.

It took the GMC four years to develop the case against Wakefield,
Professor Murch and Professor Walker-Smith. When the Fitness to Practice
Hearing began in 2007, it was said by the prosecution that it would
last three months; it lasted three years.

At it’s end, all three defendants were found guilty of the majority of
the charges, Professor Murch was admonished by the hearing but allowed
to keep his registration as a doctor, Professor Walker-Smith was not
found guilty of any offences of dishonesty and the hearing decided that
any ‘sentence’ should await his appeal in the high court. At this
appeal, Walker-Smith was completely exonerated. The hearing found Dr
Wakefield guilty on all charges including ones of dishonesty and his
name was ‘erased’ from the medical register. In the days following the
hearing a number of his peer reviewed papers were also ‘erased’ from the
medical literature.

Immediately following the hearing, Brian Deer wrote articles in the
British Medical Journal (BMJ), which built on the hearing but drew more
far -reaching conclusions. Deer claimed that none of the children whose
cases had been recorded in the 1998 case review study, had Inflammatory
Bowel Disease. That the data on the children’s condition had been
manipulated by Wakefield. According to Brian Deer, there was no such
thing as an adverse reaction to the MMR vaccination.

These articles are presently the subject of a suit for defamation taken
by Dr Wakefield against the BMJ, its editor Fiona Godlee and Brian Deer.
The first part of this suit was heard in the US where the Wakefield’s
now live. It was turned down by the court on jurisdicational issues and
will now go to the UK.

* * *

What were the consequences of the attack on Dr Wakefield. The consequences are both public and personal.

On the personal side:

The majority of the British people are now convinced that Dr Wakefield
was an unethical crook who manipulated his research in order to enrich
himself.
Yet another scentist has been made into a dissident in the UK.
No further work ever undertaken by Dr Wakefield will be taken seriously.
Dr Wakefield and his family, having sought exile in the US are now without gainful employment.

4. Three generations of doctors in a British family have ended in dishonour.

On the Public side:

1. There will be no more research in Britain into the
environmental causes of autism, especially measles generated IBD which
might result in regressive autism.

2. There will be no research into the adverse reactions to vaccines in Britain in the near future.

3. Pharmaceutical manufacturers are now seemingly exempt from over 100 years of civil actions and claims for damages.

4. While pharmaceutically damaged claimants are no longer able
to bring cases to court, the government and the medical establishment
have given pharmaceutical industry the right to try doctors who they
believe are acting against the interests of the pharmaceutical industry
in the General Medical Council.

5. Legal Aid, a traditional financial aid to poorer sections of
the community, will no longer be available to claimants wanting to bring
cases against pharmaceutical companies.

6. The pharmaceutical company lobby groups and individual
hucksters, have used Wakefield’s case to broaden their campaign to
tighten up ‘ethical standards’ in research and more highly regulate
research which affects the pharmaceutical companies.

As a campaigner of 40 years, I think that what surprises me most about
Dr Wakefield’s case, is how easily and how completely we were defeated
by the pharmaceutical companies, how over a thousand parents and
children were written out of history together with their adverse drug
reactions. Part of this defeat for the parents, the children and the
doctors concerned was grounded in an unfortunate understanding that
pharmaceutical company executives were decent people and humanitarians.
In fact the pharmaceutical companies, their corporate structure and
their relentless pursuit of profit, their fraudulent practices represent
one of the last remaining shibboleths, in our society which need to be
completely reformed, democratised, divested of vested interests and
made public from top to bottom.


Source:-
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2013/03/19/vaccine_damage_in_great_britain_the_consequences_of_dr_wakefields_trials.htm