by Brian Deer
But journalism hadn’t slept through the hearing on Euston Road. I’d got the changed pathology; the altered diagnoses; the kids with symptoms starting before, or months after; the secret contract with the Legal Aid Board; plus a mass of material from my investigations: the deal, the business schemes, and all of that. And one Wednesday in April—his eighteenth day in the witness chair—I’d observed an admission, wrung from his mouth like a molar without anesthetic.
“What I now want to ask you is where you make it clear that the children had come to the Royal Free in the first place, at least in the majority of cases,” he was asked about his paper by counsel for the prosecution, the black-dressed Sally Smith QC, “because their parents, or in some cases their doctor through their parents, thought that MMR might have caused the damage?”
By this time, we’d heard the evidence, over and over. There was nowhere left to hide. “That is implicit to anyone reading this paper,” he responded. “The group is self-referred because of the symptoms manifest by the children, including the history of a possible exposure to a vaccine, or an infection that has led to the problem.”
Smith’s question was dry. But it was, nonetheless, a killer. She wasn’t a breakfast show anchor. If the parents had gone to the hospital to finger the vaccine, then the paper’s first finding was invalid. The connection between the shot and autism wasn’t found by vigilant doctors, as Lancet readers thought. It was an artifact of selection. It was rigged.
She put it to him twice. He’d once sued me for saying it. But, at last, he said it himself. “The patients, children, are self-referred based on their symptoms and their history,” he told the GMC panel, itemizing his study’s true inclusion criteria, and with me now emphasizing the news. “That contains the three key elements of an environmental exposure, gastrointestinal problems, and developmental regression.”
One version for the hearing, painfully extracted. Another for America, and the world.
The medical council’s findings vindicated my own. And now I received an unexpected request to set out details for a professional audience. My PowerPoint slides would now be augmented by a commission from The BMJ—The Lancet’s main competitor in the United Kingdom.
I’d already written a four-pager on the pathology: “Wakefield’s ‘Autistic Enterocolitis’ Under the Microscope.” Then, following the council’s verdicts, and his appearance with Lauer, The BMJ’s chief editor, Fiona Godlee, a doctor, suggested a three-part series. Born in San Francisco and educated at one of England’s more eccentric private schools, she was a mischievous intellectual mother figure of medical evidence, who’d fearlessly taken on drug companies and other interests with take-no-prisoner investigations.
So I did it—a series titled “Secrets of the MMR Scare”—which, including references and summary tables, totaled twenty-four thousand words, across nineteen pages, including an elegant front cover. They took six months to write, check, and check again. Six or seven editors went over the copy. Godlee’s deputy examined the medical hearing record. A pediatrician and a pathologist carried out peer review. A lawyer billed for sixty hours of work.
I met with Godlee many times over those months. And one afternoon, she uttered an F-word I suspect was rarely heard at the journal. We’d been going through my copy with the lawyer, Godwin Busuttil, when the editor-in-chief made an observation.
“It’s fraud,” she said. “You need to say that clearly.”
This wasn’t wholly news, since the GMC found the same in the dishonesty rulings on the paper. I stated it on my website, and in the Sunday Times. There could be no doubt of the facts.
“Well,” I responded to Godlee’s judgment, “if you think that, it’s you who should say it.”
So, emerging on the first Thursday of January 2011, a press notice went out from The BMJ’s London offices to provoke more than breakfast-time banter. Announcing publication of my first installment (which kicked off with the Californian Mr. Eleven’s reaction to the Lancet paper), it quoted from an accompanying BMJ editorial: denouncing Wakefield’s study as what the journal’s editors judged to be “an elaborate fraud.”
Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children’s cases accurately? No. A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was gross.
First to pick up was CNN. The reporter: Anderson Cooper. This was no schmooze job. This was America’s news bloodhound, on the scent of drama. And he got it. “Just hours ago,” this media prizefighter, youthful beyond his age, spoke into the camera, face stern, eyes narrowed, “the British Medical Journal, BMJ, did something extremely rare for a scientific journal. It accused a researcher, Andrew Wakefield, of outright fraud.”
Cooper explained how this wasn’t just “any” researcher; that the 1998 study had “literally changed the way many parents think about vaccines”; and how it was based on just twelve children. “Many parents, desperate for answers around the world, embraced Wakefield’s claims,” he said.
Clips showed the actors Jenny McCarthy and her then boyfriend, the zany Jim Carrey. Another followed: of the congressional committee chair, Dan Burton. And then—Cooper’s coup—came a live interview with his subject, from an anti-vaccine conference in Jamaica.
Blinking out of darkness via Skype, split-screen, this time Wakefield wasn’t in control. “Well, you know, I’ve had to put up with this man’s false allegations for many, many years,” he said of me, speaking uncommonly fast, for him. “I’ve written a book . . .”
“But this is not just one man,” Cooper interrupted. “This is published in the British Medical Journal.”
“And I have not as yet had a chance to read that. But I have read his multiple allegations, on many occasions. He is a hit man. He has been brought in to take me down because they are very concerned about the adverse reactions to vaccines that are occurring in children.”
“Sir, let me stop you right there. You say he’s a ‘hit man,’ and he’d been ‘brought in’ by ‘they.’ Who is ‘they’? Who is he a hit man for? This is an independent journalist who’s won many awards.”
Wakefield snorted. “And he’s, you know, who’s brought this man in? Who’s paying this man? I don’t know. But I do know for sure that he’s not a journalist like you are.”
“Well, he’s actually signed a document guaranteeing he has no financial interest in any of this, or no financial connections to anyone who has an interest in this.”
Now for the smear. Where else could Wakefield go? The “pharma shill gambit,” as some call it. “Well, that’s interesting he should say that because he was supported in his investigation by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, which is funded directly and exclusively by the pharmaceutical industry.”
I’d last dealt with this trade group in 1993—about sending me its compendium of product data sheets—and I’d interviewed one doctor who did consultancy work for a related company, regarding the European Clinical Trials Directive. But either Wakefield repeated this absurd fabrication, cooked up on the network that my special source betrayed, or he’d no explanation for his predicament. By this stage of his unmasking, one thing was clear: that one of us was fooling the world.
But could it be me? Could I—a man who has never bought a car—have tricked the editors and lawyers of a world-ranking newspaper for which I’d worked on staff, contract, shifts, and freelance for almost thirty years? Could I have bamboozled the executives, producers, and lawyers of the UK’s Channel 4 network, a five-member panel of the General Medical Council, Mr. Justice Eady, sitting in the High Court, and the editors, lawyers, and peer reviewers of one of the world’s top five medical journals? Could documents publis
hed on my website be faked? Could I have perjured myself in a Texas legal deposition? Could my investigations of Big Pharma be a charade?
Cooper’s report struck the spot like a crossbow arrow, shuddering as it thumped into the bulls-eye. And, for the next three days, Godlee and I taxied around the London bureaus of the North American networks, and Al Jazeera, while the press roared the story around the planet.
Backing the coverage came a slew of punchy editorials: from the Wall Street Journal to the New Zealand Herald; from the Toronto Star to The Australian.
The New York Times was among many who honored me with a namecheck from the editorial board:
Now the British Medical Journal has taken the extraordinary step of publishing a lengthy report by Brian Deer, the British investigative journalist who first brought the paper’s flaws to light, and has put its own reputation on the line by endorsing his findings.
That was some pick-up, with its impact calibrated in a survey two weeks later. According to the Harris polling organization, 47 percent of Americans—almost 145 million people—were aware of the BMJ verdict. “Forty-seven percent is a huge number,” commented the pollster’s chair, “and this is a relatively new thing, so it’s remarkable that they have heard of it.”
A result, I’d say, for old-fashioned journalism. And, in the months that followed, I went on the road, after a flurry of speaking invitations.
The first was with the Canadian Journalism Foundation, which, in February of that year, asked me to spend a week in Toronto: the city of Wakefield’s founding epiphany. On top of my talks, there was a college dinner, a chat show, a meeting with the board of the Globe & Mail, and another with the national broadcaster.
“I shook hands with Brian Deer,” tweeted a perceptive young man at Ryerson University, from a vast, crowded lecture on investigative reporting. “This is to me what meeting Madonna is to idiots.”
And yet, in the glow of a job well done, I felt more melancholy than satisfied. It was right that my investigation had spoken truth to power. But, as my career-defining story, I would have been happier to have proved that vaccines cause autism. That would have been something: a much bigger splash. And, for all of the benefit that would have accrued to children in unraveling some part of the mysteries of autism, to my kind of reporter, the story was the name of the game.
Is it new? Is it true? Do we have it to ourselves? Read all about it. Exclusive.
And there and then, in Canada’s metropolitan heart, with the February sidewalks piled with snow, I skipped a dinner, planning to nurse my jet lag with a movie at the Holiday Inn. Then for maybe twenty minutes, I blew steam along Bloor Street, contemplating Wakefield’s thoughts, a quarter century before, as he pondered the cause of Crohn’s disease. If I bought a pint of Guinness, I amused myself, and gazed hard enough for where my life would go next, maybe in the froth of Ireland’s famous black beverage, I too might find a big idea.
As a teenaged student at the University of Warwick, I used to drink Guinness, in a bar called Frank’s Bar. It cost fifteen and a half pence a pint. But as I’d grown older, I found it gave me indigestion, and my alcohol of choice switched to bourbon. Nothing seems impossible if you drink enough of that. And should any inspiration settle upon your aspirations, you have to hope you only hurt yourself.
Alone with a pint of Guinness on a freezing Toronto night?
Nah. I went to bed.
AVENGED
TWENTY-EIGHT
Rock Bottom
The British are a famously apologetic people. “Sorry” seems to be the easiest word. A polling organization found, for instance, that if you bump into a Brit, and it’s not their fault, they are 50 percent more likely to voice self-blame than would a similarly innocent American. The exclamation in Her Majesty’s United Kingdom, moreover, is rarely “Excuse me.” It’s: “Sorry.”
At the hearing that canceled his medical license, Wakefield was sorry as hell. “Sorry, could you take me to the page?” he’d ask. Or, “I am sorry, I cannot remember.” On the April Wednesday when he, finally, admitted that MMR concern was an inclusion criterion—and therefore not a finding, as he claimed in The Lancet—he used the word fourteen times.
But he still wouldn’t regret any matter of substance. He didn’t do guilt, or shame. Even when confronted with a letter he wrote, for instance, stating that his research for the twelve-child study was commissioned from him by the Legal Aid Board, he said it wasn’t true, and the reason he gave was that he was “only communicating to an accountant.” He called no witnesses. No parent, coauthor, colleague, or admirer. And after a parent, Ms. Twelve, gave evidence for the prosecution (as with the vaccine chief, David Salisbury), his leading counsel, Kieran Coonan, rose to say, “No questions.”
He did make a concession when the paper was published. Readers spotted that “abnormal laboratory tests” he’d listed in Table 1 were actually normal (“These errors do not affect the conclusions,” he replied). But the only thing—the only thing—he conceded to my findings was that the man in the video, laughing about buying blood at a children’s birthday party, was, indeed, himself.
“Mr. Deer’s implications of fraud against me are claims that a trained physician and researcher of good standing had suddenly decided he was going to fake data for his own enrichment,” he said in a fifty-eight page complaint about my Sunday Times reporting, which he abandoned after I pressed for adjudication. “The notion that any researcher can cook such data in any fashion that can be slipped past the medical community for his personal benefit is patent nonsense.”
In response to my “Secrets of the MMR Scare” series, he mirrored the allegation, much as he’d done with his conflict of interest charges against government doctors and scientists. “There was fraud,” he’d say. “And the fraud was not on the part of me, or my colleagues, but on the part of Brian Deer, and the British Medical Journal, who concocted a story of fraud, in order to discredit me.”
The traditional British way might have served him better. There was nothing at the hearing about whether vaccines caused autism. Nor was that the focus of my investigation. He could have appeared on Euston Road, or the Brooklyn Bridge, and acknowledged “misunderstandings,” “confusions,” or “slipups.” He could have taken a course on ethics, or professed new insight. And then the GMC, after a doctor-friendly interval, might well have restored his license.
But he just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t in his nature. So, instead, he told supporters, with no evidence I know of, that he was “framed by the pharmaceutical industry.” He blamed the media, especially the mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose family controlled the group whose UK subsidiary published the Sunday Times (and also Fox News, who platformed Wakefield a lot). He besmirched judges, including “someone very high up” in Texas. He even insulted the GMC panel (including two senior professionals from outside medicine), claiming it aimed to “discredit” doctors investigating vaccine safety.
In short, he sought comfort in the status of victim. A victim of the sinister they. “There was this very incestuous cabal involving government, media, and the industry, that all wanted this outcome,” he announced online. “Against them there was me. Now, accuse a researcher of fraud in thirty seconds, and it takes a lifetime to turn that around. And they know that.”
They would be the government that, through its legal aid scheme, paid him to manufacture a case against MMR; the media (including Murdoch’s) that championed him for years; and the drug industry that funded him, and flew him, for a decade. And thirty seconds? More like seven years. But, instead of saying “sorry,” came this pity-me narrative: repackaging his unmasking as proof of conspiracy, and his ruin as evidence of integrity.
It worked, too. After he toured the conferences, where for years he’d drawn the confused and vulnerable under his influence, abuse poured into my inbox.
I believe one day soon the truth will come out regarding dr Wakefield and his resear
ch. You know what you have done and it’s possibly on par with hitler. Evil beyond belief!
And:
You are one of the most evil, lying awful men that has ever lived. So many children are sick or have died because of you. You will answer to God one day.
And:
You are pure scum. You ruined a persons life. You are complicit in furthering the harm done to millions of children around the world.
The establishment, in which he’d once longed for prominence, wasn’t as easily impressed. The Royal College of Pathologists, where he gained a fellowship by the submission of papers, stripped him of its letters after his name. The Royal College of Surgeons would have done the same, if he hadn’t already resigned, years before, by not paying his fees. In the United States, he was asked to quit Thoughtful House. And the American Journal of Gastroenterology retracted the data he presented on Capitol Hill.
Even gastroenterologists working with autism piled in at the time he was weakest. In the same month that the medical council announced its findings, twenty-seven specialists from across the United States published an eighteen-page “consensus statement” on bowel disorders in autism, in which they shredded his purported syndrome. Pointing out, among other things, that lymphoid hyperplasia was found in “children with typical development,” they ruled:
The existence of a gastrointestinal disturbance specific to persons with ASDs (eg, “autistic enterocolitis”) has not been established.
Here was disgrace—and with a big red stamp applied to the research at its heart. From bottom left to top right, on each online page, a single word, in uppercase:
RETRACTED
“It was utterly clear, without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the paper were utterly false,” Richard Horton, The Lancet’s chief editor, told The Guardian. “I feel I was deceived.”