by Brian Deer
A government safety watchdog denounced Wakefield and Montgomery in a fifteen-page press-released analysis. But “Glass, Darkly” could be tackled with a more telling method, which I would bring to bear long after. The paper was dominated by a table, filling a page, purporting to summarize six studies. And, after ordering a stack of musty volumes to be trucked to London by the library, I find none were accurately reported.
In a two-thousand-word email to Montgomery, I point this out, with a line-by-line comparison, for example:
(b) With regard to the second paper (Stokes, 1971) you say in the table that 228 cases, including 77 from the United States, were compared with 106 unvaccinated controls, and that the length of follow-up was 28 days. This is wrong. The paper reported on 685 children, including 228 in the United States, compared with 281 controls, and the length of follow-up was six to nine weeks.
Another:
(d) With regard to the fourth paper (Schwarz et al., 1975), you say in the table that the study had no relevant outcome. This is wrong. The study had the very relevant outcome that MMR was found to have a similar adverse event profile to monovalent measles vaccine.
Montgomery replied from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, where he’d worked since leaving Hampstead. He addressed other issues but, despite being named as an author on both, declined to comment on the “Glass, Darkly” paper or the doctored caption from California. “It would be inappropriate for me to speculate or comment on specific aspects of the work that I was not involved in and were not my responsibility,” he wrote.
It seemed that Wakefield believed rules didn’t apply to him: in research, or anything else. As health agencies raged against damage from “Glass, Darkly,” professors at Hampstead complained of his unexplained absences, of him making job offers without authority, and of his registering patents in the Royal Free’s name without managers’ knowledge or permission.
For his part, in the war of words during that bitter year of conflict, Wakefield threatened to report Pepys to the UK doctors’ regulator, the General Medical Council, and took advice on suing a professor for libel. Then, in a curt email to Brant in July 2001, he revealed a persona behind the charisma:
Under no circumstances delete my name from the payroll or I will take legal action immediately. I hope I make myself clear.
A brief moment of pause came in September 2001, when, on Tuesday the eleventh, London’s sky fell silent, and it would be weeks before attention broke away from New York and the attack on the World Trade Center. But the skirmishes with Wakefield then resumed with a “Settlement Agreement,” under which he would resign from the school. In exchange for £10, he’d be assigned his patents for tests, treatments, and vaccines—a sum Pepys thought was excessive.
Wakefield signed the document—twenty-five pages, witnessed by his wife—on November 14, ending his career in academia. After tax and deductions, his payoff was £109,625 (about £178,000 or US $223,000 at the time I write this) plus a bloodless reference from the school. “As a team leader, he has shown the ability to engage the enthusiasm of his co-workers,” this said, in part. “He has published work in journals such as Gastroenterology and the Lancet and has been in demand as a speaker.”
The school agreed to say nothing about the reason for his departure: his refusal to set up the study. But straightway he fed the journalist Fraser, donning an identity that was to serve him well, as he set out to make his fortune in America.
Andrew Wakefield, a consultant gastroenterologist whose research has linked the vaccine to autism and bowel disease in children, said last night that he had been asked to resign because of his work.
She quoted him saying, “I have been asked to go because my research results are unpopular.”
SIXTEEN
The Bridge
It was a wet afternoon back in Washington, DC, from which the first public appearance of a renewed Andrew Wakefield was reported by people who were there. This was five months after he cleared his office in Hampstead, and now, with no employer except Richard Barr, he was at last free to speak his mind.
“We are in the midst of an international epidemic,” he was quoted as saying at a rally on the grass of the National Mall, on a rainy, windy, and unseasonably cold Sunday toward the end of April 2002. “Those responsible for investigating and dealing with this epidemic have failed. Among the reasons for this failure is the fact that they are faced with the prospect that they themselves may be responsible.”
That was some allegation. His epidemic was vaccine damage. And he was making the case that the people who should tackle it didn’t because they thought they might have caused it.
“Therefore,” he continued, “in their efforts to exonerate themselves, they are an impediment to progress.”
Printed and read aloud, his words had a cadence that invoked a stentorian oratory. Maybe a speech by the war leader Sir Winston Churchill, transposed to the United States in some feature film fantasy as an artistically licensed crowd pleaser. The great man standing proud, within sight of a monument, with a ring of stars and stripes, crackling on a hill, under a gusting drizzle of rain.
“I believe that public health officials know there is a problem. They are, however, willing to deny the problem and accept the loss of an unknown number of children on the basis that the success of public health policy—mandatory vaccination—by necessity involves sacrifice.”
It was a noxious charge: of conspiracy and cover-up by those he felt had slighted him. They were people like David Salisbury, the civil servant and pediatrician, whom he asked for money ten years before. And although Wakefield never submitted a written proposal for any funding, he’d never forgotten that insult. He accused Salisbury of slander, in a letter copied to Barr, and would still rail against him decades later.
Now he didn’t just assume MMR caused autism (a claim he made squarely in his patent applications), but went way beyond even the newsletters and fact sheets from Barr and Kirsten Limb. The law firm couple’s output was salted with insinuation, but their chief expert (whose deal remained undisclosed) now summoned visions of evil.
“Neither I, nor my colleagues, subscribe to the belief that any child is expendable,” he declaimed, in a transcript ascribed to the Washington event. “History has encountered and dealt with such beliefs.”
This wasn’t bombast. This was a state of mind. But that miserable afternoon, when a few score parents had gathered near Fourth Street to listen to speeches and a Louisiana rock band, it wasn’t clear if they got much benefit. The weather was appalling: 51.8°F, with rain, at 4:00 p.m. And even hot gumbo and a boy with Asperger’s singing “America the Beautiful” couldn’t lift a desultory mood.
Mobilized by a campaign group called Autism Unlocked, they’d mostly come to the capital for another congressional hearing. And, to be frank, I’m not convinced that Wakefield was even there, and that his words weren’t delivered as a message. Yet his accusations rang out, echoed to hundreds of thousands—via another man, listed to speak.
His name was Lenny Schafer, from Sacramento, California, and it was he who built the bridge that Wakefield would cross, trafficking his epidemics of fear, guilt, and disease, from Britain to America, and then the world.
It had happened before with vaccine scares: made in England, marketed in the United States, and from there to everywhere on the globe. That was the story with John Wilson’s DTP panic. And even he wasn’t the first on the path. In October 1879, an English businessman-crusader named William Tebb had crossed the Atlantic to give the keynote address to the inaugural meeting, on New York City’s East Side, of the Anti-Vaccination League of America.
“The statistics showed that 25,000 children were slaughtered every year by being vaccinated,” Tebb declared, urging a campaign against smallpox immunization, as reported next day in the New York Times.
Already in his fifties, Schafer wasn’t an orator, or even much of a campaigner. Bu
t he’d got what it took for his role. As an angry young man in Detroit, Michigan, he’d been a left-wing activist, dabbling as a publisher in the “alternative press,” and later, in middle age, he faced up to autism: through an adopted son named Izak. That led him to a community: a local parents’ group called Families for Early Autism Treatment, or FEAT.
Densely mustached and with a quirky sense of fun, Schafer pooled his assets in 1997 in a pioneering internet bulletin. Just six years after the World Wide Web went live, he began culling reports on autism issues, which he forwarded to a mailing list of parents. In the first six months, that list grew to one hundred. Then, as the web became part of daily life, by the time of the National Mall rally he claimed ten thousand subscribers to what he named the FEAT Daily Newsletter.
Alongside Izak, here was his pride, reaching out into America from a cramped condominium on Sacramento’s Old Placerville Road. “Every parent who takes on this cause brings with them their light of hope to the rest of us,” he wrote, referring to the struggle of supporting children with developmental issues. “This is my little light, and I’m going to let it shine.”
The newsletter—which he later renamed after himself—was as crude as it proved to be effective. Aided from the living rooms of a handful of parents, he searched for and collected media stories on autism, copying them into plain text files. Overruling formalities of copyright law, he republished these squirrelings for free, to subscribers, in what he called a “news clipping service.”
In the early years, he was guided by FEAT’s core interests, passing along reports on, say, restraints in residential homes and surveys on mental illness. But as Wakefield’s campaign took hold in Britain—the world’s most competitive newspaper market—Schafer harvested the ever more strident coverage and, by the logic of his process, delivered it to the most susceptible: mothers and fathers like himself.
Study Links Measles Virus to New Form of Bowel Disease
Scientists: MMR Vaccine Should Not Have Been Licensed
Were All Of These Children Killed By The Triple MMR?
Just think of that drumbeat, banging around your inbox, from a trusted, not-for-profit source. “It is important to point out that we do not write this news, we only deliver it,” he assured his subscribers. “And this editorial policy gives us as much room for partisan spin as your newspaper route delivery person.”
He republished results from the defective Kawashima paper. He scooped endorsements of the much-covered but wrong “Glass, Darkly.” And story after story—ignored by US media—was imported and relayed to families touched by autism, until the noise from across the Atlantic grew so loud that, ten weeks before the Washington rally, he proclaimed a “Wakefield Fest.”
“We are having so much coverage over the MMR issue,” Schafer explained, “because currently the British public is obsessed.”
The Fest was triggered by a paper from John O’Leary in a short-lived journal, Molecular Pathology. Using his ABI Prism 7700 machine for gene amplification, the Dublin professor, who’d appeared in Washington two years before, claimed what sounded like more proof over measles. The guts of seventy-five of ninety-one children—diagnosed with a combination of autistic disorders, enterocolitis, and the swellings in the ileum—were positive for the virus, he reported. That compared with only five of seventy control patients. His data “confirm an association,” he said.
This was bound to attract big coverage in Britain. The “MMR debate” was now a national recreation. Everyone from the prime minister to celebrity chefs were stroking their oars in the controversy.
Wakefield—a coauthor of O’Leary’s paper—had an extra advantage with media. His entity, Visceral, that he’d set up to fundraise, had a chair whose sister-in-law (a woman named Sarah Barclay) was a BBC television reporter. And, though she assures me that her managers knew of her relationship, she presented an hour-long fest of her own for the BBC-1 channel’s investigative Panorama.
“We have found measles virus,” the Irishman told her on camera. “And the next thing people want to know is, you know, what’s the sequence strain?”
With American media, O’Leary’s paper went nowhere. But Schafer published a link to a BBC webstream, allowing him to focus the output from London to where it might most hit home. He’d a hard-core audience of mothers and fathers, many of whom must have wondered, while skimming his clippings, “Is this saying we injured our own child?”
Likewise, the newsletter ran Wakefield’s Mall epistle: with its grandiose phrasing picked up as a meme and republished at countless websites. “You, the parents and children, are the source of the inspiration and strength for our endeavors,” his tones rang out online. “Our quest for truth through science—a science that is compassionate, uncompromising, and uncompromised.”
Nothing would compare with Schafer’s little light for building Wakefield’s bridge into America. But he wasn’t alone. There was also the Republican congressman Dan Burton, with his hearings on Capitol Hill. Certain as he was that his grandson was vaccine damaged, he ran a string of show trials, year after year, at which Wakefield—“All the way from merry old England”—was feted like Shakespeare on wheels.
After his 2000 appearance, with O’Leary at his side, he’d returned a year later to the witness tables—with him dressed this time in a loose cream suit—and said much the same as before. The syndrome. The bowel disease. The persistent measles virus (which he said had been sequenced to the vaccine strain). “Bear in mind that we are dealing with regressive autism,” he stressed, “not of classical autism, where the child is not right from the beginning.”
But, as he learned from the Royal Free’s head of medicine, Mark Pepys, charisma wouldn’t smooth all paths. Further down the table, and crowned with frizzy hair, sat America’s top expert on gut-brain interactions: the “father of neurogastroenterology,” he’d been called. His name was Michael Gershon, chairman of the department of anatomy and cell biology at Columbia University, New York.
Gershon told Burton that if measles made the gut wall leaky, as proposed, it should be leaky in both directions. And it wasn’t. If opioid peptides escaped from the gut into the bloodstream, so would many similar-sized peptides. And they didn’t. For the components of foodstuffs to do the harm Wakefield said, they would need to evade the liver—and Gershon believed that they couldn’t—and would then require a “miracle” to occur: the protective blood-brain barrier opening, “like the Red Sea did for Moses.”
Wakefield never responded to these big-picture points: then or, to my knowledge, ever after. But what he did take up at his next appointment with Burton were things Gershon had said about O’Leary. These would rankle and fester until the hearings resumed, two months after the rally on the National Mall. And then, revealing a less beguiling nature, the fugitive from Britain lashed out with a venom that made the words reported from him in Schafer’s newsletter read like a Buddhist meditation.
After Gershon’s Moses miracle simile, the professor had recounted information he’d picked up from a preeminent scientist. His name was Michael Oldstone, the world’s go-to guru on measles virus, at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, the world’s top-ranked research institution. Wakefield had hoped to collaborate with Oldstone, until Pepys found out and suggested to the Scripps man that he check O’Leary’s lab. So blind, coded specimens were dispatched to Ireland and, as Gershon relayed it in his testimony to Burton, the results came back crawling with anomalies. Some samples sent twice, with deliberately different codes, he said, were reported as both positive and negative.
The most likely explanation was lab contamination. The fragile, light-as-air, will-o’-the-wisp RNA virus could hang in a room for hours, attach to coat sleeves, or be blown by a door, to turn up where it shouldn’t in a lab. Or, the 7700 might be wrongly configured, or run without a required raft of safeguards. Another possibility was some form of misconduct by a person, or perso
ns, with access. But, in any event, the Scripps institute scientist opted for no further involvement with the Irishman.
“Oldstone has concluded that the record of performance would not be acceptable for certifying a clinical laboratory,” Gershon told Burton’s committee.
Wakefield was outraged. He was planning more papers, and the tests from Dublin were vital to Barr’s lawsuit, now edging toward show time in London. The virus had been sequenced as vaccine strain, he insisted, and, if there was contamination, it had occurred at Scripps, not O’Leary’s lab at the Coombe.
“I would like to put the record straight,” Wakefield declared from the table in the Rayburn committee room. “Dr Gershon’s behavior was a disgrace.”
Here surely were matters for scientific debate. But Wakefield also lashed out, in a five-page letter, with all the grace of his departure from Hampstead. Gershon, he informed Burton, wasn’t just guilty of “obvious errors” but of “unprofessional behaviour,” “false testimony,” “demonstrably false assertions,” “shoddy science,” “lack of integrity,” “what amounts to perjury,” and “malicious disinformation” that may add up to what he called “defamation.”
For Oldstone’s part, Wakefield wrote that the measles expert was culpable of “obvious errors,” “sloppy practice,” and, if he was aware of the “substance” of Gershon’s testimony, he “may be considered to have perjured himself.”
No more Mr. Nice Guy from merry old England. And he hadn’t yet finished his rejoinders. Now back at the table in June 2002, he filed a dramatic statement for the congressional record that hinted at what was crossing the bridge. Had the Columbia scientist appeared for a second time, he wrote, “I am sure he would have enlightened the committee, somewhat belatedly, as to any proprietary rights his wife might have in the Merck chickenpox vaccine.”
His wife’s rights in a vaccine? Inquiries found none. But here, unspotted by the listening lawmakers, lurked a disturbing, mirroring phenomenon. It was Wakefield who had rights—in his proposed measles vaccine—not only as the purported inventor of the product, but with all entitlements handed over by University College London, five months before Burton’s hearing.