by Brian Deer
That wasn’t true. But I settle for less. “What’s enterocolitis?”
Thrower doesn’t know. Above his beard, his face furrows. He burbles like a sinking ship.
I keep up the pressure. “You don’t know, do you?”
“You tell me, you tell me,” he flusters, gripping his placard. “I’ve never set myself up as a medical expert.”
But he had. Oh, he had. He’d done just that. You could pick countless passages from his note. “Examination of children has identified a novel form of inflammatory bowel disease, ileal-lymphoid nodular hyperplasia,” he’d lectured, incorrectly, in both versions of his document. “This condition is very rare in non-autistic children.” Wrong.
Having confirmed my suspicion, I turn to go inside. But a circle of angry women close in. A few call out, “It’s a bowel disease, a bowel disease.” One waves a poster showing an x-ray of constipation. And then, foolishly, I double down on my error.
“They didn’t have bowel disease,” I reply to one of the shouters. “Have you been in the hearing?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Those children,” I repeat, “didn’t have bowel disease.”
All captured in video clips.
Abuse levels rose. One woman lifts a sign: “End the Witch Hunt, Time for a Deer Hunt.” So I step inside the building where, at the rectangle of tables, Wakefield has twisted the witness chair slightly (forty-five degrees toward the panel), which I guess he felt made him look more honest. The events on the street soon fade from my thoughts as—sitting by the door—I take notes.
Then sometime later—I guess a year or two—that day came back to bite me. A man named Alan Golding, an amateur filmmaker, spliced the clips together with a bunch of parent interviews, in a confection of targeted untruth. He claimed, wrongly, that I wasn’t being paid to attend the hearing (therefore, I was probably funded by drug companies). And his party piece of smear was my remarks about bowel disease: purported proof that I was a fool, or a liar.
He’d got two special interviews with which to harm me. And in those there’s no doubt he succeeded. One was with a high-haired woman named Heather Edwards, who’d apparently been present on Euston Road. And she’d produced for him a picture of her fifteen-year-old son, Josh, whose large intestine had been surgically removed.
“Within ten days of being seen at the Royal Free they had him in and found that, yes, he had exactly what they were finding in other autistic children,” she said. “It was so badly diseased that he would be better off without his colon.”
In Golding’s video (viewed 150,000 times when I last checked YouTube), he intercut this interview with my al fresco comments: “They didn’t have bowel disease” and “Have you been in the hearing?” I should simply have kept my lips zipped.
The glory days of readers’ letters to newspapers had waned. Haters lambasted me online. “One Lancet 12 child (now an adult) had to have his entire damaged bowel removed,” one campaigner crowed—saying what anyone who saw the video would think.
Golding’s other triumph was with the irrepressible Ms. Two, who read aloud a letter from Lancet parents, organized by herself and Ms. Six. With short-cut gray hair, circular glasses, and chunky bangles, the sentinel mother had gained a little weight since our interview. And she was nothing if not convincing.
“All our children were referred to Professor Walker-Smith in the proper way, in order that their severe, longstanding, and distressing gastrointestinal symptoms could be fully investigated,” she read for the camera. “All of the investigations were carried out without distress to our children. . . . We are appalled that the doctors have been the subject of this protracted inquiry.”
Game, set, and match to Golding’s video. But his creation wasn’t as it appeared. Unencumbered by editorial, or legal, supervision—which weigh heavily on journalists and program-makers like me—he’d exploited the trusted vocabulary of television to market a misleading account. Most notably, Josh Edwards wasn’t among the Lancet twelve. He’d nothing to do with the hearing. And, according to a report in Britain’s top-selling newspaper, The Sun, his colectomy was performed at a different London hospital, after a likely food intolerance was diagnosed.
Thanks to that video, I’d endure years of abuse. But some knew the truth when they saw it. One was Ms. Four, listed as a signatory to the letter, who was shocked that her name had been used. Not only was she adamant that her son didn’t have bowel disease, and insisted that he’d suffered horribly on Malcolm Ward, but she resolved to come to my aid.
“A few times I had a strong urge to contact you,” she explained, turning over to me more than one hundred pages of documents, diaries, letters, emails, and minutes of phone calls that evidenced the case against the doctor without patients, no matter what the hearing might decide.
She wasn’t alone in changing sides, moreover. After studying my reporting, parents phoned our news desk, offering Wakefield’s flight numbers for his trips from the United States. I got complaints about his lack of “family values” at conference hotels. And above all, one person, whom I call my “special source,” turned double agent to betray him.
“I had a situation where there were two men,” this source explains of a thinking process before he or she began a decade-long collaboration with me: leaking documents, reports, and plots meant to damage me, from the foxholes of Wakefield’s network. “One was a doctor and one was a journalist. One of them was saying ‘white’ and the other ‘black.’ They can’t both be right. One of them was an honorable man. And one of them was a shyster.”
I’d long known that Wakefield’s people were out to get me. Not least because one wrote to say so. At 3:54 on a Wednesday morning, just four months after my first report, my laptop chimed for an incoming email from a woman that I’d then never heard of. Her name was Carol Stott, then aged forty-seven, with a PhD in epidemiology. Barr had hired her for his lawsuit to counter the evidence of Europe’s most eminent autism expert, Professor Sir Michael Rutter.
Her message, two lines, was headed “game on” and said:
Try me, shit head.
Beleive me, you will lose.
Five more followed, in the space of an hour. “So go fuck yourself” . . . “Got it yet shit head. Try me” . . . “Twathead” . . . “Stick that where it feels good. shit head.” Then, at 9:34 a.m., when I’d still not responded:
well, ur a bit slow on the uptake . . . twat.
She didn’t hide her malice. She wanted me to feel it. She was Wakefield’s key lieutenant. “We referred to Stott as ‘the colonel,’ ” my special source says. “She was behind everything. She was the pivotal member of his team.”
Five months later, Stott launched an attack website, and a year after began preparing for the GMC hearing, spawning the gatherings where I’d questioned Thrower. In a “confidential” email to eight collaborators, including Ms. Six, she wrote that there was a mailing going out to their people “possibly funded by Thoughtful House.”
I’m not sure if Wakefield came through with the dough on that. But Stott wasn’t short of money. According to Legal Aid Board documents, the Barr lawsuit paid her £100,000 in fees. And Wakefield (who described her as his “dear friend”) bizarrely appointed her “visiting professor” of his Texas dope ‘n’ scope shop—with accounts of his organization Visceral showing further payments to her totaling almost £200,000.
The “group,” as Stott called it, was a secret society that she ran at Wakefield’s pleasure. Named the New Autism Initiative, it was open only to those who were vouched for by a member, and it hid behind a public campaign that they called “Cry Shame,” with a website, registered two months before the hearing, by the Lancet brothers’ mother, Ms. Six.
At first, I assumed Ms. Six was the brains. For sure, I was top of her list. “I used to think the only organization she didn’t approach to put you in the shit with was the cat protection
league,” my special source recalls of hundreds of hours that this mother spent complaining to editors, judges, politicians, hospital managers, and anyone who might keep me from the facts.
But, as documents poured in from my covert collaborator, I realized who pulled the strings. In control were individuals with no developmentally challenged children. The mothers were less players than played. Behind “Cry Shame,” and the Initiative lurking behind that, were the night mailer Stott and Ms. Two’s lawyer, Clifford Miller: as poisonous as a pair of cane toads.
Where Stott was brazen, Miller was sly and more adept in the new age of information. Secretly, he operated an anonymous website, which he called “Child Health Safety,” pumping out falsehoods—I have to say lies—for others to pick up, and repeat. Claiming to provide parents with “reliable information on child health safety,” among his tributes to the man he also advised, he planted every kind of smear against me.
He claimed I “made up” stories in the Sunday Times; that the editor, John Witherow’s position was “looking untenable”; and that I’d admitted my reports were “speculation.”
Among the tricks he played to amplify his impact was to post comments around the web in his own name, Clifford Miller, touting material that he anonymously published, as if offering independent endorsement. On websites ranging from Eco Child’s Play to Advances in the History of Psychology he posted, “It turns out journalist Brian Deer made it up,” followed with links to his own online creation. “The ‘Child Health Safety’ website has become widely recognised as a reliable source,” he claimed.
Schafer, in Sacramento, lapped up this stuff, inflaming his readers across America. And Miller, fifty-three, went further with the group: not only spreading the lie that I was working with the drug industry, but that “it can be proved” it paid for my stories.
Documents from my source also identified others. In addition to Stott and Miller, and Ms. Two and Ms. Six, there was a man named Stone, a woman called Stephen, and Wakefield chipping in as he pleased. Then, within that circle was a yet tighter ring, including Stott, Miller, and Wakefield. And as the giant medical council hearing staggered toward its climax, they pressed their troops into action.
For years, Wakefield had retained PR specialists to maximize his campaign’s impact. Now, with money from Americans, he hired a man named Max Clifford—a silver-haired millionaire and Britain’s top celebrity publicist—to circulate ruinous smears. To whet Max’s appetite, Stott brought him to the hearing and later briefed a freelance tabloid reporter (who tells me he met Wakefield at Max Clifford’s offices) to prepare an exposé—of me.
“A media outcry will force action,” Wakefield promised Stott and Miller, in an email green-lighting the offensive.
Among their weapons were three letters they created, making outrageous allegations against me. Headed “Confidential—Final Text” they were to be issued to parents (but only those deemed “sound”) for them to mail to various bodies (including my employers and the Metropolitan Police) in a bid to end my career.
Each letter began, “I am the parent of a child,” and accused me (in Miller’s comedy legalese) of various “criminal” acts, including that I “aided and abetted counselled or procured or conspired” in “criminally illegal” and “clandestine” activities, such as the obtaining of medical records.
“I was told that there were vast sums of money from pharmaceutical companies involved,” their celebrity publicist told me later when we talk on the phone—before Max Clifford was arrested for sex offenses and sentenced to eight years in prison.
But the plot backfired. No newspaper would touch it. Nor would the police, of course. And its betrayal to me revealed a nest of Russian dolls at the heart of the campaign against vaccines. Here was the manipulation of vulnerable parents, as complaints written by Miller, and approved by Wakefield, were filed (without a comma changed) by Josh Edwards’s mother, Heather, and others on Euston Road.
TWENTY-SEVEN
An Elaborate Fraud
On the day that his career as a doctor ended, he looked like he couldn’t give a damn. Leaving his seat vacant at the hearing in London, he instead took a chair in New York City, at NBC’s Midtown studios. With no prosecuting counsel, or investigative journalist rooting through the evidence, at 7:43 he settled for six minutes with “the face of the Today show,” Matt Lauer.
“It may sound like a strange way to start the interview,” Lauer began, like he was quizzing an old friend about a favorite breakfast cereal, “but do I still refer to you as ‘doctor’?”
Wakefield grinned. Easy peasy. “Yes,” he replied. “They can’t take away the fact that I have a medical degree.”
This was Monday, May 24, 2010. At the rectangle of tables, five hours ahead in London, the hearing panel’s chair, Surendra Kumar, had just wrapped up day 217. He’d read aloud his panel’s “determinations” and “sanctions”: discharging as “misguided” the endoscopist, Simon Murch, while ruling that Wakefield and Walker-Smith’s misconduct meant they should be “erased from the medical register.”
The lists of offenses found proven—against a criminal standard of sureness—just went on and on. Among much else, Wakefield was found to have carried out research without ethical approval or safeguards; caused kids who’d had no reported history of bowel symptoms to undergo invasive procedures; and to have dishonestly misled the Legal Aid Board (including one charge his own counsel described as “fraud”) by diverting money from the purpose for which he’d gotten it.
“The panel is profoundly concerned that Dr. Wakefield repeatedly breached fundamental principles of research medicine,” Kumar read from the five members’ determination. “It concluded that his actions in this area alone were sufficient to amount to serious professional misconduct.”
But that wasn’t the end of it. He’d failed to ensure that the Lancet paper was “true and accurate.” He’d dishonestly published “a misleading description of the patient population,” dishonestly claimed that children came through the “normal channels,” dishonestly failed to disclose the conflict of interest in his funding through Richard Barr, and didn’t reveal his measles shot patents.
The panel, Kumar said, had made “findings of dishonesty in regard to his writing of a scientific paper that had major implications for public health.” And it agreed that his “continued lack of insight” meant that his medical registration must end.
Today show viewers were told none of this. Lauer pitched kindergarten softball. Facing his guest, in lightwood armchairs on a translucent blue set (with a few flowers and books arranged on a side table), he then introduced clips from a half-hour Dateline show on the early phase of my investigation. Here was Wakefield, lecturing at a conference. Here was me in the Sunday Times newsroom. Forensic inquiry was there none.
LAUER: “So you’ll look me in the eye and say that, at the time you were doing your research, you were guilty of no conflict of interest whatsoever?”
WAKEFIELD: “No, not at all. And had I been, it would have been disclosed.”
That answer was preposterous. But Lauer—at the time, every American’s handsome uncle—moved on swiftly against the clock. I’d given the GMC a videotape I obtained in which Wakefield enthralled mothers at a lecture in California with how he bought blood from kids (some as young as four) at his eldest son’s birthday party.
Dateline had screened a segment of this event, in which, to Wakefield’s audience’s laughter, he’d joked about kids crying, fainting, and vomiting. Hilarious. Ha ha. Go, Andy.
“Were they paid for the samples?” Lauer asked in the Dateline excerpts.
“They were rewarded; they weren’t paid,” came the response.
“How were they rewarded?”
“At the end of the party they were given five pounds.”
“Why isn’t that paying them?”
“Well, it’s not saying up-front, by coercing them
, ‘You do this and we’re going to give you money,’ ” Wakefield replied. “It’s saying, at the end of it, ‘Here’s a reward for helping.’ It’s a different thing, in ethical terms.”
There had never been a market for blood in Britain. But Today made it look as if the campaigner had lost his license merely for this bizarre lack of ethics. Notwithstanding Lauer voicing that his guest had been found to have acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly,” he moved on to argue about this and that, leaving Wakefield safe in his chair.
“Your study involved twelve children,” Lauer said. “I’ve seen studies that involved hundreds of thousands of children that do not replicate your findings. And so, today, will you sit across from me and tell me that you believe there is a possible link between that particular vaccine—the MMR vaccine—and autism in children?”
A duel of studies? Wakefield’s specialty. All he’d ever needed was to split the difference—they say this; I say that—and he’d win more adherents to his war. “Not only do I think it, but the American government has conceded that it exists,” he said, in flat contradiction to that government’s statements. “The point is, despite denying it in the public relations campaigns that they waged against me, and against the parents, they are conceding these cases in vaccine court.”
The court, again, would expressly deny this. No case had ever been conceded over autism. And, with regard to his own views, he couldn’t keep the story straight, even for twenty-four hours. While telling America one thing, he told Britain something else, as reported that day in the press. “I never made the claim at the time,” he was quoted by both The Guardian and The Telegraph newspapers, “nor do I still make the claim that MMR is a cause of autism.”
Later, he would tell a BBC radio network, “I have never said that vaccines cause autism.”
His performance was as confident as a cat swatting flies. He knew he could handle any TV presenter, bypassing both media and medicine. He spoke to his base—confused, wounded mothers—to whom he’d looked for his living and meaning in life since refusing to replicate his research.