by Brian Deer
GET THIS OUT!!!!!
SENIOR GOVERNMENT SCIENTIST BREAKS 13 YEARS OF SILENCE ON CDC’S VACCINE-AUTISM FRAUD
AFRICAN AMERICAN BOYS WILLFULLY EXPOSED TO HIGH RISK OF AUTISM FROM MMR VACCINE
Now I’m thrown back onto my earlier investigation into “the world’s first AIDS vaccine,” AidsVax. After that surefire flop, in February 2003, the ex-CDC staffers behind the company VaxGen had likewise rooted among subgroups. “There were 78% fewer HIV infections among black volunteers,” they breathlessly reported to financial markets on the day their trial was unblinded. “The results are statistically significant.”
Most likely the complaint against the Pediatrics paper was another such dredging from subgroup analyses, and the data the result of a mistake. The CDC study had long been recognized as defectively designed and, three years before, had been excluded from a review of vaccine safety carried out by the prestigious US Institute of Medicine on grounds of “very serious methodological limitations.”
But, within hours of Wakefield’s post, it was rippling online as an “OMG! Must Watch.”
Whistleblower admits CDC fraud, lies and deceit. They knew MMR was causing autism.
Even the future president, Donald Trump, leapt in. “The doctors lied,” he posted on Twitter.
The video would later be revamped as a feature-length movie, where the impact of its claims would be explosive. But even for the environment of social media—among the sayings of Einstein, and dogs playing piano—Wakefield went so heavy on the crazy in his script that he nearly strangled his creation at birth. Two minutes were devoted to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-twentieth century, in which African American men were left untreated for the disease. And he likened Thompson’s coauthors, most of them women, to that century’s most brutal mass killers.
“You see,” Wakefield snarls, over images including children in Auschwitz camp stripes, “vile as the crimes of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hitler were, these men were not hypocrites, their motives ambiguous, or their rhetoric glazed with apparent care and compassion.”
The only snag was: his story wasn’t true. The allegations of fraud were his own. Thompson himself—who’d not known that his musings were being secretly recorded—issued clarification soon after. His concerns, he said, in a four-hundred-word statement, were that, apart from omitting significant data, he felt the original study plan wasn’t stuck to.
“Reasonable scientists can and do differ in their interpretation of information,” he said, in words that any competent and honest journalist, but not Wakefield, would be obliged to quote in any reporting. And, “I want to be absolutely clear that I believe vaccines have saved and continue to save countless lives. I would never suggest that any parent avoid vaccinating children of any race.”
Remarkably, given the mischief that was to follow the video, apart from Thompson hand-wringing, ripped out of context, all Wakefield and Hooker had of substance from the scientist was a five-word phrase, used at 03:46 and 05:37, upon which they’d hung their own meanings.
We didn’t report significant findings.
Obviously, that wasn’t a claim of fraud. Things may be wrong for all kinds of reasons. Indeed, the recordings of the psychologist (which I obtain soon after) show not only that Hooker had sought to provoke such a claim, but that he failed, three times in a row.
Hooker’s billing as a “vaccine safety researcher” didn’t do justice to his status. For twelve years, he’d been suing through the vaccine court system on behalf of his autistic son, Stephen. Hooker worked with a campaign called Generation Rescue, fronted by the actor Jenny McCarthy, which (at the time) blamed autism on thimerosal. And the day before the phone call, from which all but one of the clips was harvested, he’d been presented by Wakefield, at a conference of mostly mothers, with the Andrew J. Wakefield Award for Courage in Medicine.
Thompson—with cropped gray hair and wire-framed glasses—hadn’t made Hooker his “priest.” Like me, he was garrulous and made the same mistake that tripped me on Euston Road. Just like I’d interacted with a litigant father (he of the massive “note,” which he didn’t understand), the scientist had engaged with another such parent whose behavior should have raised a red flag.
Using the US’s powerful, but slow, freedom of information laws, Hooker had filed more than one hundred applications with the CDC, many of which were passed to Thompson for processing. Since joining the agency in 1998, his most acclaimed work had been on vaccine safety, including not only the 2004 Pediatrics paper, but also a twelve-pager in September 2007 on thimerosal, in the New England Journal of Medicine. But, as study after study dismissed any autism link, Thompson’s managers had lost interest in his area of achievement, and he longed to regain their attention.
“I want to be a resource,” he told Hooker, hoping to renew public pressure. “I want to be valuable to you. I want you to have someone in the system that can give you feedback.”
If he’d been half as cautious as he proposed for his studies, he would likely have been better off. He was captured in the recordings laughing inappropriately, bad-mouthing colleagues (a veteran epidemiologist was “like a used car salesman,” a female researcher “a twenty-five-year-old bimbo”), and discussing his personal health. Self-describing as “mentally ill,” and “blowing up and stuff like that,” he spoke of human resources issues and a “delusional episode,” using “delusional” in its clinical meaning.
“But I am settling down,” he tells Hooker. “The good news is I am settling down.”
His new bestie replies, “I need you sane.”
Under pressure within himself, Thompson was vulnerable. And, behind Hooker, was no stranger to treachery. Fifteen years before, a British government doctor hiding behind a pseudonym—“George” he called himself—had secretly met Wakefield and Richard Barr (at the same railway station where I met Ms. Four) to allege foot-dragging over the two brands of MMR whose recall first launched this saga. But out of concern for his family, George wouldn’t go public.
So Wakefield first threatened then betrayed him. “As this broadcast is going out on the internet, I hope ‘George’ gets to see this,” the then doctor without patients told a delighted conference crowd, before revealing the man’s identity on YouTube. “Because I was very tempted to disclose his name and address, and contact details to this audience [laughter]. And I will do that, if he feels he can’t come forward spontaneously [applause].”
That was the voice of the doctor who fooled the world. He reveled in his power to terrorize. And he saw in Thompson the opportunity that it was: to mirror the complaints found proven against himself, by accusing the government of fraud. “They say this, I say that.” Here was a chance to reclaim familiar territory—and in the months that followed, he did.
“So I said to Brian, ‘Brian, are you recording these conversations?’ ” he boasted later of his advice to Hooker. “ ‘Whistle-blowers can disappear as easily as they came. They are like a fish on a hook. And your job is to get them into the boat.’ ”
And how they tried. After the call in the video, Hooker phoned Thompson again. All they’d got so far was loose talk. No fraud. So, three weeks later, the teacher had another go—sounding to me like he was working from notes.
Within barely one minute of Thompson picking up, Hooker got down to business. “I want to talk to you about the MMR study,” he said.
The psychologist’s response was, “Yep.”
Then a little back-and-forth. A bit of “right . . . yep . . . yep.” Then Hooker tossed a barbed, leading, question. “And then you basically deviated from that particular plan in order to reduce the statistical significance that you saw in the African American cohort?”
In order to reduce. An admission of intent. All Thompson had to say was, “Yep.”
But Thompson didn’t. The interpretation was Hooker’s. He hadn’t got his fish on the hook. “Well, we, we um,
we didn’t report findings that, um, all I will tell you is we didn’t report those findings,” the CDC man replied. “And I can tell you what other—I can tell you what the other—coauthors will say.”
The next question for a journalist would be, “What will they say?” But Hooker merely responded, “Uh-huh.”
“They will say that they didn’t think the race variable was reliable,” Thompson continued, “is what they’re gonna say.”
Hooker moved on. Briefly argumentative, he spoke of spreadsheets, and stuff like that, before closing in on the topic of thimerosal. “I mean I’ve got all the records,” he said. “I see that on the New England Journal of Medicine paper you were pressured to downplay the relationship between thimerosal and tics.”
Pressured to downplay. Again, intent. But, again, the fish didn’t bite. “Well, er, let me just say this,” Thompson replied, referring to a minor paper he’d published with a student. “I did a follow-up study, ’cause I wanted my opinion on the record.”
How Wakefield’s heart must have sunk with these responses. Then his associate tried for a third time. “So, did you feel in the 2007 paper that you were pressured to downplay significant results?”
“No,” replied Thompson.
Damn.
In fact, during that same follow-up call, on June 12, 2014, they even stumbled toward a possible reason why the autism rates among some vaccinated black kids had appeared to be significantly different. African American children tended to get worse health care, and when they eventually turned up with developmental issues, they were offered the shots they’d missed.
It likely wasn’t vaccination causing their autism, but their autism causing vaccination.
In short, the study was badly designed (using data collected for quite different reasons). Its results could never have been solid. “So, in fact, you could argue the [Pediatrics] paper is like a bunch of crap because the better educated moms get their kids vaccinated earlier,” Thompson said, laughing. “We had a crap study because we weren’t even adjusting for the appropriate variable.”
“Right, right,” Hooker replied.
“I never even thought of that.”
Yep.
Wakefield and Hooker must have known they were struggling. But cold as revenge is reputedly best served, for the ex-doctor even the smell was delicious. For not only had the Pediatrics report targeted his Lancet paper, but another man in this stew, if that’s what it was, had been on Wakefield’s menu for years.
Thompson was first author of the New England Journal paper. But not of the Pediatrics report. In pride of place on that was an epidemiologist: Frank DeStefano, whom I interview within days of the video. And he was one of the two senior CDC experts who in 1998 had been invited by The Lancet to contribute a response to the twelve-child paper, in which they dumped on the Royal Free research.
DeStefano et al.—the Pediatrics paper—was “the worst fraud in the history of medicine,” Wakefield claimed later, and “the greatest medical fraud in the history of the world.”
Now, that was some projection. Investigations found nothing. But the entrapment of Thompson was a triumph. Forget controversies over any individual shot: DTP, HPV, even MMR. Those clipped and spliced snippets of the “CDC whistleblower” would now be leveraged for an unprecedented crusade: to persuade the world that all vaccines were suspect.
THIRTY
Vaxxed
The voice is female. And relatively young. Maybe thirty, or thirty-five. It rises from a crowd gathered in Santa Monica, California. As soft as a mother’s kiss. “We love you.”
Up four stone steps outside the entrance to City Hall, Wakefield calls back, “I love you too.”
A second woman shouts, “We’re sticking up for our children.”
I hear another yell simply, “Yes.”
It’s a Friday in July, 2015, at shortly after five p.m. Maybe two hundred people—overwhelmingly women—have gathered in this wealthy, west of Los Angeles beach community to vent fury over a change in the law. After an outbreak of measles at the Disneyland amusement park—forty minutes southeast on Interstate 5—the government of California has resorted to coercion against a tiny awkward squad of young parents. If their children aren’t vaccinated according to schedule, they may in future be barred from school.
The crowd began assembling, hours earlier, on Ocean Avenue, beside a twelve-foot Civil War cannon. Then they’d marched two blocks to the municipal headquarters—built in the 1930s, with the clean lines of a steamship—chanting, “The parents call the shots, the parents call the shots,” and waving Magic Marker placards at passing cars.
Health freedom
Stop forced vaccinations
Repeal SB-277
Five speakers are listed, but it’s Wakefield they love. Without him, the day would be lacking. He greets his audience with an aw shucks grin, like a naughty (fifty-eight-year-old) boy. He wears a baggy white shirt, with two buttons undone, and firm creases in the fabric that suggest, at least to me, that he might have just bought it this morning. It’s what Men’s Wearhouse would market as “regular fit,” with plenty to tuck where the mound of his belly meets his too-tight, beltless pants.
“We stand at the moment, I believe, in a defining moment in the history of this country,” he begins, glancing left and right through hooded gray eyes, as a breeze catches his hair like the fronds of nearby palm trees. He fingers a microphone stand.
A cheer goes up, with applause, cries of “Yes,” and high-pitched whoops. “Wooo-ooo.”
“And I think future generations will remember that this was the beginning of the end of the first republic of the United States of America.”
A state senate bill as the end of the republic? Now there’s an idea. But he drops it. His topic today isn’t the latest law (which bars exemptions from vaccination on any but medical grounds), but a more immediate concern to himself. Now stripped of any medical or scientific status, he’s thrown back on these women as the source of the power that he has wielded for the past twenty years.
“You have had something taken away from you as a people,” he says, looking out and down at the latest contingent, who grin at him in T-shirts and sunglasses. “And I’m not talking about your rights in SB-277. I believe your innate instinct for the well-being of your children has been usurped by pediatricians and doctors who think they know better, when they do not.”
More cheers and whoops. “Woo-oo-oo. Woo-oo-oo.”
“There is no one who knows a child better than her mother.”
So far, so good. He spoke to the mood. Many of the faces that he probes from the steps are of “health freedom” activists, “alternative practitioners,” and parents riled up over “choice.” But, while making sense to these, his targets are others: mothers of children with developmental issues.
“And I read the other day an anecdotal story of a patient who had died from exposure to measles,” he continues, stabbing the air with a ringless left hand. “An anecdote. And that anecdote made the news. But your anecdotes are irrelevant, apparently. Your hundreds, your thousands, your tens of thousands, your millions of anecdotes about what happened to your children.”
Parents’ anecdotes. Vaccine damage stories. They had long been his faithful standby. Study after study, after study, after study, had reported no link between vaccination and the numbers of children diagnosed with autism. Massive class actions had come and gone. And yet there remained these reports of injuries—recollections, assumptions, even some deceptions—much as there were when Newsnight’s woman in scarlet had sent him his sentinel case.
Back then was Child Two, and the mother, Ms. Two. But now, in the years that he’d lived in the United States, his parent followers had swelled to many thousands. And if they didn’t blink, and stuck with their stories, what doctor, scientist, judge, or journalist was equipped to prove them—or him—wrong?
&nb
sp; “Because everything I have learned about vaccine safety, and about autism in particular, comes from you,” he says from the steps. “It does not come from my profession. All they have taught me is what we don’t know. What I’ve learnt from you is what we do know, and what we should know, and what we should continue to pursue.”
Here was his creed since the start of his crusade: that (notwithstanding those who’d accused him of fraud and fabrication) the parents were always right. Even in September 1997, he’d told an anti-vaccine conference in Alexandria, Virginia, that the “first lesson” in medicine was to “listen to the patient, or the patient’s parents,” because “they will tell you the answer.”
I thought that was likely something his father had once said—a neurologist trained before the age of scanning—as a joke to a medical student son. If you don’t know what’s wrong, ask the patient to tell you (and then bill them for the diagnosis, if you can). Certainly, when I try it at a lecture to a roomful of pediatricians, those who don’t laugh look at the ceiling.
But as the years had passed, and science had let him down, he’d turned to the infallible mother. “Keep faith with your instincts,” he’d urged at a rally in Washington, DC. “Trust your instincts,” he told the group to whom he’d praised Italian opera. It was “the most powerful force in the world.” And in a blog, he went further: sourcing this knowledge to a land of impossible proof.
Such instinct operates in a realm, and according to a set of rules, that are not accessible to the physical laws of the universe.
Parents vs. science. Faith vs. facts. A religion: with him as the priest. “So my message to you, please people,” he calls from the steps, “is you must go back and you must trust your instincts. You must believe in yourselves as you have never done before, and do not let that be taken away from you.”