by Brian Deer
In the absence of remorse, there could be no insight. Therefore, no comeback was possible. But, despite a now sometimes bedraggled appearance, with bloodshot eyes and hobo haircuts, the ex-doctor wasn’t quite down and out. There was severance income from his various jobs, probably some residue of the deal with Richard Barr, and the benefit of a land deal—including the building of a five-bedroom house in west London—which he’d pursued as a sideline to medicine.
Plus, of course, he retained that famous “charisma,” enhanced as an Englishman in America.
First up in the wilderness came a big idea that took him to the state of Minnesota. For some reason, it boasted the United States’ biggest community with origins in Somalia, and anti-vaccine groups hoped to gain a toehold. At several appearances in a Minneapolis restaurant—with attendances estimated at around one hundred—he was reported as explaining that, while the incidence of autism was rocketing in the US Somali community, their old country had no known cases.
“It is solvable, it has a cause, it had a beginning and it must have an end,” he told his new audience, in December 2010, as captured by Minnesota Public Radio. “We cannot accept the damage that is being done to all of these children. It is completely unacceptable.”
The hint he brought was of an environmental exposure. But he punched beyond his reach. What he didn’t know—or didn’t think mattered—was that the Somali language had no word for “autism,” and so it couldn’t be reported in Somalia. Even in developed countries, it was only a construct (rescued from “brain damage,” “mental handicap,” and “retardation” by pick ‘n’ mix menus of late twentieth-century psychiatry). No surprise, the Horn of Africa lacked the lingo.
“We have ‘schizophrenia,’ ‘crazy,’ or ‘not crazy,’ ” explains Marian Ahmed, cofounder of Somali Parents Autism Network, in a YouTube video. “That’s it. Every Somali will tell you that. We don’t have ‘autism.’ There’s no name, no word, for us. We need to create one.”
He couldn’t help with that. And, crazy or not crazy, he was a herald of misfortune in Minnesota. Just six weeks after his first event, a US-born boy of Somali descent returned from Kenya, incubating measles, and triggered a small outbreak in Minneapolis. He was thirty months old, and hadn’t received MMR. Twenty-one cases were identified in the community, and linked through PCR sequencing.
Historically, immunization had been trusted by Somali families. In 2004, 91 percent of children of that descent in Minnesota received MMR as recommended. But, as Wakefield’s claims had crossed the Atlantic, with Dan Burton’s hearings, Lenny Schafer’s newsletters, and lawyers’ recruiting for the vaccine court fiasco, the proportion had slumped to just 54 percent by the time he appeared in person.
Nobody died. But here was a warning of what was coming—and his next expedition wasn’t so lucky. Following his trajectory, on which everything gets weirder, he’d started a relationship during the medical council hearing with an autism entrepreneur. Her name was Polly Tommey, who followed him to Texas, bringing her family (including her husband), where with Wakefield she launched a media enterprise—the Autism Media Channel—which became ensnared in a horrifying incident.
Tommey—blonde and lithe—was ten years his junior. She’d worked as a body double in movies. The parent of a boy, Billy, with developmental issues, she mixed for-profit businesses with charitable ventures, allowing her to make a living from campaigning. Departing England, she left a memory of her upper body on roadside billboards, gazing full-face from above low-cut, black lingerie, with the slogan: “Hello Boys . . .”
Husband, Jonathan, was a fitness instructor, who set up as a “clinical nutritionist.” And, together, they’d hit it big on British TV, promoting the pig hormone “secretin” (later reported in manufacturers’ trials to be useless). They scored two appearances in a tabloid current affairs show, called Trevor McDonald Tonight, where their first slot was sixteen minutes, and the second twenty-five, with the presenter reading aloud full-screen captions advertising the couple’s website. From this they spun a glossy magazine and were on their way to making a living off of autism.
Before long, Polly Tommey was shifting forty thousand copies of the monthly Autism File. And, stateside, this became the base for ambitions with Wakefield for a reality TV show. For the pilot, they filmed children sent for scoping in New York City by the former Thoughtful House endoscopist, Arthur Krigsman. He was the doctor who’d mentioned the family videos in the Cedillo affair (and who fled Lenox Hill Hospital, in Midtown Manhattan, after management inquiries into his practice).
The show wasn’t picked up. But, as destiny beckoned, they got footage to shape their future. They filmed a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy, Alex Spourdalakis, who was profoundly developmentally challenged. On camera, he was rushed to Krigsman for ileocolonoscopy, and later filmed in a hospital, restrained naked to the waist, with Wakefield speaking from his bedside.
Twelve days later, the boy was dead, at the hands of his mother and godmother. Stressed beyond coping (and I’ve seen that filming), they’d first tried to poison him with sleeping pills. Then they stabbed him four times in the chest with a kitchen knife, almost severed his hand while trying to slit his wrist, killed the cat, and tried to take their own lives.
More bad luck. But now the ex-doctor had found a new vocation. It was to serve him well in his next career move: to extend his reach from the United States to everywhere that people had screens. “If you want to beat the media, you become the media,” he’d declare. “I am now a filmmaker.”
But he’d hit rock bottom. His speaking schedule became strange—appearing with climate change denialists; “truthers” who said the World Trade Center attack was an inside job; and a man who claimed that aircraft trailed toxins to control the masses. Then he turned up on a “Conspira-Sea Cruise.” It set sail for a week from San Pedro, California, with one hundred eccentrics paying three thousand bucks, and a fellow speaker who was arrested upon landing.
“Brian Deer—and please, you can write this—is a psychopath,” Wakefield told journalists, who joined the cruise for cheap laughs. “I say that not in a pejorative way, I say that is what Brian Deer is. He’s a psychopath. He manifests all the characteristics of a psychopath.”
Could it get any worse? Well, yes, it could. Crazy or not crazy, a yet greater humiliation had been steaming quietly forward in London.
As the work of a tribunal set up by Parliament, the medical council’s findings of professional misconduct were subject to review by the courts. Wakefield’s lawyers didn’t support any appeal on his behalf, but the Australian professor’s were rightly optimistic of overturning their client’s conviction. In John Walker-Smith’s case, the panel had committed a procedural error in the way it set out its findings.
Because he changed his story—from arguing that the scopings were ethically approved research to claiming that they were solely for patient care—he wrong-footed the panel, which didn’t appreciate how profoundly this impacted their task. The flopping of binders was great for me. But it meant that each child’s case would need to be evaluated separately—essentially a dozen hearings, just on them, back to back—with the reasoning for each conclusion set out.
That wasn’t the burden of the charges facing Wakefield. His research was unarguably research. “My case was related to entirely different issues to those that concerned Dr. Wakefield,” the Australian pointed out in a statement. “Every investigative procedure I ordered was to find out what was wrong with the children.”
If that wasn’t true, and he was really doing research, then he wouldn’t just be wrong. He’d be lying. “The panel had no alternative,” explained Mr. Justice Mitting, the judge who heard the appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice, “but to decide whether Professor Walker-Smith had told the truth.”
And yet it didn’t. Overwhelmed by the scale of the three doctors’ indictments, the panel skipped this foundational decision. Like in the
trial of Best v. Wellcome—in which the drug company submitted that the mother was “confused”—the panel hadn’t grasped the nettle.
Wakefield, of course, pounced on his accomplice’s acquittal: telling his supporters that, by implication—if only his own—he was acquitted too. But that wasn’t the judge’s view. Nor the professor’s, who as a result of the hearing, and no doubt my journalism, had gotten a new view of the man who persuaded him to leave Barts Hospital for Hampstead. And, now aged seventy-five, he would have his say in the most devastating, silent critique.
In his autobiography, Enduring Memories—published a few weeks before I interviewed Ms. Two—he’d simpered like a teenager with a crush on his teacher. “Shades of Princess Diana,” he’d gushed.
He is tall, handsome, fluent, charismatic and above all a man of conviction. He is a man of utter sincerity and honesty. In reality the out of fashion term “crusader after truth” would best describe him.
Now, retired from medicine, at home in north London, John Walker-Smith reread those words: a hymn to the blight of his career. He then calmly deleted them, closed up the surrounding paragraphs, and dispatched his memories for reprinting.
TWENTY-NINE
Payback Time
In what I’ve called the golden age of ink on paper, Wakefield’s disgrace would have been the end of the matter. The crisis over vaccines would have been shut down—just like it was in the 1980s with DTP—once nothing new to excite readers remained.
Neurologist John Wilson had accepted his fate. “There was a very wise doctor who made the introductory observations to a new batch of medical students,” he tells me, when I catch up with him in the 1990s, “that, in twenty years’ time half of what you now learn will be proved to be wrong. But the problem is: we don’t know which half.”
For sure, the “MMR doctor” was finished in the press. Britain’s editors had got the message that for years they’d been duped. And even those who’d given him the most favorable coverage signaled that they’d had enough. As the Daily Mail reported in April 2013, during a measles outbreak in which one man died:
The MMR vaccine controversy was a case of scientific misconduct which triggered an unwarranted health scare.
But Wakefield wasn’t done. They couldn’t shut him down. With the emergence of epoch-changing, peer-to-peer social media, anybody could narrowcast, exploiting algorithms that lured the unwary into markets of misinformation. Thus it was that, on Monday, August 18, 2014, when (just as we thought he was all washed up) a post appeared on his Facebook page that would herald an incredible new chapter. Over the next two years, he was to achieve the biggest impact on public attitudes to vaccination that had been seen in the United States since the 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt’s legendary “March of Dimes” launched a nationwide crusade against polio.
GET THIS OUT!!!!!
With five exclamation marks! Andrew Wakefield’s fight back had begun.
Those who clicked on a link reached a video-sharing site and were hit with a dramatic countdown. To the whirring sound of a twentieth-century projector, feeding celluloid film from spool to spool, a rotating clock arm swished in one-second circles, window-wiping images in black and white, like the start of an ancient newsreel.
They went: 7—swish—a group of African American boys with President Obama; 6—swish—a New York Times report about Minneapolis Somalis with autism; 5—swish—the nameplate of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, Georgia; 4—swish—a silhouette face; and 3—swish—a needle.
“Oh, my god, I cannot believe we did what we did,” comes a disembodied male voice, in telephone quality. “But we did. It’s all there. It’s all there.”
That was for the ears. This was for the eyes, a simultaneous sensory input:
CDC Whistleblower Confesses to Vaccine-Autism Fraud
Then:
an Autism Media Channel exclusive
“This is a real story of a real fraud,” Wakefield says, now appearing full face in a pressed white shirt, with spectacles hung from a button. “Deliberate, high-level deception of the American people, with disastrous consequences for its children’s health.”
For nine and a half minutes, his “exclusive” continues with—at face value—remarkable disclosures. A scientist at the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta had turned “whistleblower,” Wakefield says, to reveal “fraud” in the execution of a ten-year-old government study of whether the MMR vaccine caused autism.
“So troubling was the fraud,” Wakefield, now aged fifty-seven, explains, “that one of the CDC researchers broke ranks.”
Now another man appears, in three-quarter-face close-up, to confirm the ex-doctor’s account. This is one Brian Hooker—not the “whistleblower” himself—but a science teacher at a Northern Californian Christian arts college, with a PhD in biochemical engineering. Wakefield announces him as the “father of a vaccine-injured child” and a “vaccine safety researcher.”
Hooker, fifty, is overweight, receding, with a craggy, mustached face and a chin sinking to his neck. The shot cuts to reveal him in a brown plaid jacket and a yellow high-collared shirt. He says that one day he’d received an unsolicited phone call and, “lo and behold,” it was “Bill Thompson,” the scientist.
“Dr. Thompson had appointed me his priest,” Hooker says. “And when he appointed me his priest, then he started confessing. And we have had many, many phone exchanges. We’ve exchanged dozens of emails. And he has released quite compelling information regarding fraud and malfeasance in the CDC.”
Thompson, also fifty, and a psychologist by training, had coauthored the study in question. It was published, with little fanfare, in February 2004 in the high-rank journal Pediatrics. Using painfully convoluted methods, it had sought to investigate Wakefield’s proposed link by comparing the age of vaccination among Atlanta children with autism against those who were developmentally typical. More than six hundred records from the first group were studied, plus three times that number from the second.
“The assumption,” the eight-page paper explained, “is that if the MMR vaccine increases the risk of autism, which usually develops before 24 months of age, then children who are vaccinated at younger ages would have a higher risk.”
Wakefield’s nine and a half minutes don’t address such detail. They focus on snippets from Thompson. On the ex-doctor’s advice, Hooker had surreptitiously recorded four conversations, in which the scientist had talked about his government research and life at the public health agency.
“It’s the lowest point in my career that I went along with that paper,” he’s heard telling Hooker, in one of ten brief clips sprinkled through the video. “I’m completely ashamed of what I did,” he says in another. And, “I’m not going to lie. I basically have stopped lying.”
For an internet video of the mid-2010s, Wakefield’s was uncommonly slick. With his business partner and special friend, Polly Tommey, he’d hired a Canadian editor who’d worked on commercials and who knew a thing or two about pace. And with somber tone and sinister music, those nine and a half minutes would evolve into a project that would erupt across America and around the world.
Documents are screened, including one marked “restricted access.” But the meat is a string of abrupt clipped-and-spliced phrases, sometimes repeated for impact. “It’s the lowest point in my career that I went along with that paper [00:25] . . . It’s the lowest point in my career that I went along with that paper [03:41] . . . It’s the lowest point in my career that I went along with that paper [08:36].”
On analysis, it’s really that obvious.
The gist of Thompson’s concerns—barely mentioned in the video—was that the paper had left out statistically significant data that he felt should have been included. In raw figures on the kids, an excess of autism had shown up in a subgroup: African American boys vaccinated with MMR within certain specified age
bands.
His fellow authors, however, thought the finding was implausible, and that a smaller sample, predefined in the protocol, gave a more valid comparison. These were children on whom additional information was available (from birth certificates) but among whom any “race effect” was weaker.
I read Thompson’s documents, and study Pediatrics. To me, what he’d gotten was terrific. In the paper’s Table 3, the CDC researchers had left out two lines of data that, had they been favorable to the vaccine’s safety profile, I’m pretty sure they would have included. I’m also pretty sure that, if the scientist had taken his worries to the Washington Post, the New York Times, or even to me, any of us would have written up the story.
It touched so perfectly on a longstanding debate about the nature of the Atlanta agency. Many observers had argued that the CDC’s immunization role was strategically conflicted: tasked not only with researching vaccine safety, but also for promoting the shots. Here was an opportunity to reopen that debate with an example of how this might work.
“The question would have to be, is the reason why that data is not given in that table,” I ask a former senior CDC manager, who supervised Thompson’s project, “because the team working on it had an eye to public opinion, and public concern? Because journalists might pounce on that and say, ‘Look, there’s a “race effect”?’ ”
“I think that’s a good question,” my source agrees.
To any half-decent journalist with a front-of-the-paper beat, even that concession was explosive. At the time, the agency was weathering controversy, after a researcher, Poul Thorsen, who worked on MMR studies, was indicted for allegedly stealing CDC grants worth a million dollars, and spending them on everything from a Harley Davidson to a house.
The way I saw it was that, if Thompson was right and CDC staff had sanitized Table 3, what else might they sanitize in any other table that didn’t suit institutional goals? But Thompson told Hooker, Hooker told Wakefield, and Wakefield seemed to see the matter as less about the challenges of conflicts of interest, and more about his own situation.