The Doctor Who Fooled the World

by Brian Deer

  He refused to tell journalists where he’d gotten the information. But that only made the press more curious. Within minutes of him releasing a sheaf of denials that anything else was amiss with the research, Britain’s news industry pounced. A half hour later, the BBC snapped a report. The member of Parliament, Evan Harris, appeared on screens. And every editor in the business could now predict the front page of the country’s market-leading Sunday paper.

  Horton battled for control. But given the nation’s plummeting vaccination levels, even the fifty-five grand was incendiary information: revealing that the study was carried out to an agenda and wasn’t independent research. “If we had known the conflict of interest Dr. Wakefield had in this work, I think that would have strongly affected the peer reviewers about the credibility,” the editor admitted under questioning that evening. “In my judgment it would have been rejected.”

  Next morning, our rivals were running my story, albeit gutted to a fragment by Horton.

  MMR Doctor in £55,000 Fund Row

  ‘Tainted Research’ of Doc Behind MMR Alert

  Scientist’s Two Roles in Study May Conflict

  Damn, I thought. I’ve lost my scoop. But I was as wrong about that as was Horton. Tyrer and Nuki had seen such things before and knew how to handle a spoiler.

  “Full details are disclosed today,” Tyrer hammered onto his keyboard that Saturday morning, “of the four-month Sunday Times investigation that has uncovered a medical scandal at the heart of the worldwide scare.”

  With Sunday’s Independent splashing with “ ‘Misconduct’ inquiry for doctor in MMR scare,” and the Observer and Telegraph likewise going big, we hit the streets with a simple message.

  Revealed: MMR research scandal

  Plus a two-page “Focus” in narrative prose.

  MMR: THE TRUTH BEHIND THE CRISIS

  We’d only got the guy for the fifty-five grand, the deal with Barr, and the fact that children were recruited to make a case. Not the huge sums of money that I didn’t yet know of, or the secret business schemes, the patents, the measles vaccine, the Dublin lab—and things yet to come that would finish Wakefield in medicine for good. But that February weekend, Britain shared a Guinness Moment: Wakefield—lawyers—ahh!

  Right through the next week, the fire blazed on. The Daily Mail hit back, claiming their hero had been “smeared.” The prime minister backed us on breakfast TV. Wakefield threatened to sue.

  Then ten of his twelve coauthors—including Walker-Smith and Murch—stepped in with a statement, issued by the journal on the evening of Monday, May 3. Sensationally, they repudiated the paper’s conclusions, retracting its twenty-five-word “Interpretation” section: where they’d claimed that the children’s “developmental regression” was “associated in time” with the vaccine.

  Doctors disown Wakefield Study

  Research scientists retract link with autism

  Docs dramatic U-turn

  Which is where I’d have been happy to leave the story and write not another word about vaccines. Later, we’d learn that, in those frantic days, immunization rates in Britain reversed and began to climb.

  We’d gotten a result. Job done.

  But, if the “Interpretation” was wrong, I wondered, how could that happen? And it threw me back onto the logic of Ireland’s judges in the case of Best v. Wellcome. The paper was so meticulous, and so defended by Wakefield, that if the conclusions weren’t accurate (as also suggested by my interview with Ms. Two) then surely one, or more, of the authors must have known this at the time the paper was written?

  TWENTY-ONE

  Texas

  Anybody else might have said, “I’m sorry.” They might have apologized for not making the position more clear about the deal with the lawyer and the source of the children. They might have said they misunderstood The Lancet’s rules for authors. Or blame the media for confusion. Whatever. They’d regret any mistakes, but profess good faith. And my attention might then have moved on.

  But that wasn’t Wakefield. He was untroubled by regret. He raged like an indignant shoplifter. Still concealing the turkey under his coat—the enormous hourly payments he received through Richard Barr—he stormed that there was “no conflict of interest at any time”; that the fifty-five grand went to the hospital for a “quite separate study”; that my “allegations” were “grossly defamatory”; and that I “conflated” them to help his enemies.

  “My family and I have suffered many setbacks as a direct consequence of this work,” he lamented, casting himself as the aggrieved.

  By now he was settled in Austin, Texas, ready to start all over. People didn’t know why the English lawsuit collapsed or that he’d refused to mount a definitive study to validate, or refute, his hypothesis. So instead of being greeted with anger or suspicion, thanks to Dan Burton, Lenny Schafer, and others, he was welcomed by those whose help he would need as if Lady Liberty herself ought to kneel.

  “It takes a man of great courage and integrity to stand up against overwhelming pressure from his scientific colleagues and refuse to say what is false when he knows what is true,” was the view, for example, of Barbara Fisher, founder of the confusingly named National Vaccine Information Center, based a half hour’s drive from Washington, DC.

  Fisher was the Jackie Fletcher of US activists: the anti-vaccinators’ woman in scarlet. With the startled demeanor of a Tupperware host, she’d embarked on her mission in 1982 after NBC broadcast a rehash of the DTP claims from the Great Ormond Street neurologist, John Wilson. These were screened in a feature called Vaccine Roulette (which relied on research later gutted by Lord Justice Stuart-Smith), and she deduced that her son, Chris, was vaccine damaged.

  Wakefield’s arrival stateside thrilled Fisher’s group. But he was grabbed by a yet fresher sponsor. This was a tough-dealing lawyer named Elizabeth Birt, who was to become the brains behind a string of anti-vaccine groups (Advocates for Children’s Health Affected by Mercury Poisoning, the National Autism Association, SafeMinds) and would mastermind his crusade’s migration.

  He’d caught her attention with the twelve-child paper, which she read soon after publication. Her backstory was that some time following her first son Matthew’s MMR, she’d noticed in him symptoms of autism. According to a New York journalist, David Kirby, she studied The Lancet, thinking, “My God, this sounds like Matt,” and the next day went to war on her pediatrician.

  A year later, she met Wakefield at a conference near Chicago, run by a group called Cure Autism Now. She was then forty-three (four weeks his senior), with pencil-sharp features and golden hair. And she lived with Matthew, age five, his two younger siblings, and a husband, Maurice, in one of the Windy City’s rich northern suburbs.

  I’ve seen Wakefield perform at events like that one. In those days, he fronted as a scientist and clinician, as young mothers raced to take down his words. But this time he went further than a technical talk (lymphoid hyperplasia . . . non-specific colitis . . . ) and invited Birt and Matthew to his hotel room, where he examined the boy, felt the kid’s abdomen, and told her: “I think we could help him.”

  Three months later, Matthew was at Hampstead, being trolleyed from Malcolm Ward for scoping. “I took my son to London,” Birt recalled in an online post, “and found out at the Royal Free Hospital that he was and is very sick. He had a fecal impaction the size of a melon and had colitis.”

  According to Kirby (who worked with Birt on a book), on the evening of the day after Matthew was scoped, Wakefield joined her for dinner. And judging by Illinois state records that I find, she flew home to Chicago convinced. Just three weeks later, she incorporated a foundation—Medical Interventions for Autism, she called it—which would raise for his projects, as well as him personally, many hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  Birt also fixed his US resident’s visa and toiled to plot his future. Plan A was to join an enterprise
in central Florida: the International Child Development Resource Center, founded by a physician and autistic boy’s father named James Jeffrey Bradstreet.

  “The British doctor forced out of his job because of his studies on the childhood MMR jab and autism,” crowed Lorraine Fraser in the Telegraph, back in London, “has been appointed the head of a multi-million dollar research programme in America.”

  As “research director” at Bradstreet’s operation, Wakefield was meant to head a “research campus,” leading a team of molecular pathologists, immunologists, and biochemists, in a renewed effort to prove his hypothesis.

  It sounded great. A fresh start in the sun, where he was careful to protect his interests. “All intellectual property owned personally by AJW,” he cautioned Bradstreet in a memo I obtain, “will remain property of AJW and subject to his control.”

  But, like so many of his dreams and schemes over the years since that now-distant night in the Toronto bar, his latest cried out for scrutiny. So, within weeks of his denials of what I knew to be true, I made a few further inquiries. After rooting among records at the London Patent Office, searching for Nick Chadwick (who was named on virology papers) and retrieving Hugh Fudenberg’s Spartanburg study, I trawl the web for the Florida center.

  Welcome to a place where you and your family can find answers and hope for your child. . . . A place where the most advanced research in developmental disorders is a daily event.

  By now, I’d more resources to support my reporting through a contract for a TV film. So after interviewing Fudenberg in South Carolina, I drive south with my producer and crew to Florida, where we find Bradstreet’s international center. It was a humdrum doctors’ office in a suburban shopping mall, in the sleepy town of Melbourne on the state’s east coast, with a reception crammed with racks of quack remedies.

  There were pricey pots of products to “enhance cognitive abilities,” such as “Learner’s Edge®,” “ChildEssence®,” and “ImmunoKids®,”—all formulated by Bradstreet (who later shot himself dead, after a raid by federal agents). There was secretin, “a natural body hormone” (usually from pigs), and “Sea Buddies© Concentrate!© Focus Formula” to provision travelers on the desperate quest.

  Bradstreet’s website, meanwhile, splashed promotions for events—some touting Ms. Two as one of the “world’s leading specialists”—charging hundreds of dollars to attend.

  Be among the first to hear about this comprehensive integrated new treatment program from Drs. Bradstreet, Kartzinel & Wakefield.

  At the Melbourne office, I ask to speak with the latter. But, if he’d ever been there, he was gone. And while personal embarrassment wasn’t part of his repertoire, he seemed anxious to put this chapter behind him. His lawyers write to me that his connection was purely “honorary,” and from which, they say, he “never derived income.”

  Florida flopped. But Birt wasn’t discouraged—even when her husband filed for divorce. According to Kirby, he accused his wife of “harboring more love and affection for Andy Wakefield.” And, according to a source who emailed me later, she “basically turned her life over to him.” Apparently, one day he phoned her in her car, said that measles virus had been found in her son’s spinal fluid, and she was never the same again.

  “She began a long spiral down after that,” my source tells me, “into some terrible things and some really dark places.”

  Texas followed. The show moved on to a business in Austin, the state capital. Plying his famed charisma and a new identity as a martyr, Wakefield inspired other parents to help Birt fund a clinic and a proposed “hub” for a “virtual university.” Leasing a basement suite in a three-story brick office building, he was thus installed as executive director of the Thoughtful House Center for Children.

  The name was borrowed from a tiny stone cottage on the property of his latest benefactor: a woman named Troylyn Ball. She was a real estate agent, wealthy, owning horses, and who, like Birt, would do anything for answers.

  “It just seemed like, ‘You know what? Here’s a smart doctor who knows, who’s got a vision,’ ” Ball said, years later on YouTube. “I couldn’t solve the problem, but I could pull together a bunch of people who could try to solve the problem.”

  For Troylyn and her husband, Charlie Ball (also a realtor), that “problem” touched two of their sons. Marshall, seventeen, and Colton, two years younger, were affected by profound developmental issues, which first manifested as seizure disorders. The original Thoughtful House was Marshall’s retreat on his parents’ seven-acre ranch.

  Both boys had strengths. But Marshall was a celebrity, having three times been featured on the talk show Oprah as an author and spiritual guide. Although he never spoke, and was severely challenged, it was said he relayed messages from God. With his right elbow cupped by a relative or family friend, it was reported that he channeled divinely inspired poetry by erratically stabbing letters on a board.

  Even though my individuality finds sweet

  Knowing perfection I listen for the

  Answers to wishes from above. I listen to

  Good thoughts like something cloudy over

  mountain tops . . .

  His mother was proud of his communication skills. “If you held up two objects and asked ‘where’s the cup?’ ” she’d say, “he would lean forward and touch it with his forehead.”

  According to a writer for the Dallas Observer, Brad Tyer, Troylyn (who was three years younger than Wakefield) was “an attractive blonde with an open smile and the look and bearing of a woman long familiar with horses.”

  She also struggled with misplaced guilt. “There’s a lot of this looking at yourself and saying, ‘What did I do wrong?’ ” she’d say. “ ‘What did I do wrong that caused my child to be born this way?’ Or, ‘What did I do wrong to deserve this; did I do something wrong?’ You know? And it’s very, very hard, especially as the mother. I think it’s worse for the mother.”

  In time, Thoughtful House would boast a dozen staff—with two or three MDs leading a schedule of sessions, a therapist, nutritionist, researchers, and administrators. A fine product of a mother’s determination. Although Wakefield wasn’t licensed to practice medicine, his employment package—mostly funded through Birt—would top out at nearly twice that of a typical family doctor’s. And he was also doing a land deal in London.

  A board of directors brought advice and credibility to the business. From its first calendar year—2004—this included the chief executive of Dell Financial Services, a Venezuelan-born movie producer, a retired major general, a former Major League Baseball player, and a country singer with the Dixie Chicks band.

  Such endorsements were priceless. But a “managing co-director” was next with what Wakefield most needed. This was a Manhattan socialite, Jane Johnson, thirty-eight: supermodel slim, exquisitely styled, whose family forbears once controlled Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceuticals and healthcare colossus. Accounts kept by Birt showed that, in year one alone, Jane’s personal foundation gave a whopping million dollars toward the efforts of the doctor without patients.

  Johnson had a son with developmental issues, whose privacy she fiercely guarded. Pretty much all I know of him was from a Thoughtful House chat room, where she mentioned a gluten- and casein-free diet, nasal secretin, and an apparently failed therapy involving at least eighty “dives” in a pressurized oxygen tank.

  Her road to Wakefield began three years earlier, when her journey of discovery led her to a conference run by an organization called the Autism Research Institute, based in San Diego, California.

  The institute was founded in 1967 by a then thirty-nine-year-old psychologist named Bernard Rimland. Like Bradstreet, he had a son with autism. Challenging psychiatrists, Rimland made his mark early, helping to bury a theory of autism (almost as strange as the stoned rodent model) sometimes dubbed the “refrigerator mother.” This held that the classic constellation
of symptoms—in thinking, communication, and social interaction—was a legacy of cold, aloof parenting.

  But by the time Johnson found him, Rimland—seventy-two—had long since left the reservation. With an impressive salt ‘n’ pepper beard and wise-man eyes, he presided over a network of some four hundred fringe practitioners (marketed to parents as “Defeat Autism Now!”) whom, as a condition of him listing them on his institute’s website, he required to sign up to a creed. This embraced a catalog of unproven speculations, including that vaccines caused autism.

  To be fair, his efforts spoke to a reality for parents—as one mother captured it in a Thoughtful House chat room, with a snapshot of autism in her family:

  Constipation, severe self injurious behavior (biting himself, chewing fingernails/toenails, biting a hole out of chair and ultimately pulling out a tooth—only five years old), not sleeping well, not eating well, tantrums constantly, can’t wear shoes now due to tight heel cords from toe-walking, doing SCD—no yogurt, running out of ideas. What in the world is going on with my baby?

  PS 1 husband paralyzed (quad due to surgery for a spinal tumor), 2 other kids to care for, 1 dog, 1 cat, 2 frogs, 2 fish, bills, clean house etc . . . How are you all doing it?

  Up against all that, what mother or father wouldn’t share Rimland’s impatience? If not quick progress, then at least something. With autism as elusive to medical science as dark matter remained to gravitational physics, when the psychologist ran surveys, it seemed that, for some kids, anything, anything, worked. Vitamin A: he reported that parents told him 41 percent “got better.” Beta blockers: 33 percent, “better.” Transfer factor: 39 percent, “better.” Giving up chocolate: 49 percent, “better.”

  His list went on, column after column.

  Rimland learned of Wakefield in November 1996, more than a year before the twelve-child paper. On the twenty-ninth of that month (when only five of the dozen kids had so far been scoped), Rimland’s fax machine in San Diego spat out a thirty-six-page “fact sheet” from a lawyer. It was from Richard Barr, with Kirsten Limb, explaining, “We are also working with Dr Andrew Wakefield.”