by Brian Deer
But could it be a vaccine that explained his predicament? His mother didn’t doubt that it was. For the past quarter century she’d made the same case: that at the age of fourteen months, he received MMR, experienced a nosebleed immediately after the shot, then suffered a high fever within forty-eight hours, and a measles-type rash within a week. After that, he began rocking back and forth in his cot, lost speech, and became aggressive.
A neurologist, writing when Child Three was aged five, and who diagnosed him with a combination of “severe learning difficulties and autistic behaviour,” said no, the mother was wrong.
She is very sad and is looking both for somebody or something to blame and also for specific treatments for [her son], and I’m afraid I have not been able to help her on either count.
That opinion aligned with the prevailing wisdom. Developmental pediatrics 101 said that the first symptoms of autism usually surfaced, or were recognized, sometime in that second year of life. Scientists argued, meanwhile, that the viruses in the shot took days to multiply under the skin, so it was biologically implausible for measles, mumps, or rubella to have the sudden impact the mother described.
Epidemiologists, likewise, weighed in to cast doubt on parental “anecdotes” like hers. Study after study, from country after country, reported nothing to support Wakefield’s signature claim—illustrated in his report with the falsified graph—that MMR was a major cause of autism. Papers from Finland and Denmark had each looked at records of more than half a million children and rejected any association. A project from Yokohama, Japan, found that, during a spell when MMR was suspended, autism diagnoses kept climbing.
As Wakefield campaigned, the disparity grew. “Parents versus science,” was how the media framed it. From Montreal, Canada, a team found that pervasive developmental disorder diagnoses “significantly increased” when MMR uptake “significantly decreased.” And doctors in Krakow, Poland, tracking development and intelligence, reported no differences in outcomes.
But big-data studies gave results for populations. Not individual cases, like Child Three’s. Maybe they were so rare they slipped under the radar, undetectable to epidemiology. Could that boy—now a man—have a biological trait or a passing vulnerability to a vaccine-induced event? Every medicine that works hurts somebody. And reports, like his mother’s, of a fever shortly after, was the commonest recollection in anecdotes from parents who blamed the three-in-one.
That night he was so cranky and had such a high fever that he was given Tylenol . . . The next day when he woke up he couldn’t move and couldn’t crawl. He just kept punching himself in the face and ears.
Two days later he spiked a fever of 105. He was a typically developing child to that point, laughing, making lots of noise, trying to roll over. After the shot we watched him melt before our eyes.
Observations like those weren’t parents versus science. They were evidenced in solid research. A study of twins in Finland had documented symptoms, including a striking incidence of fevers after the shot. Publishing in The Lancet, back in April 1986, Helsinki pediatrician Heikki Peltola and epidemiologist Olli Heinonen devised a brilliant, placebo-controlled, double-blind study of the immediate aftermath of MMR.
Each child was randomly allocated to one of two groups, splitting the twins between each. One got the vaccine, then the placebo three weeks later; the other got the placebo, then the vaccine three weeks later. And data were analyzed from 581 pairs of twins, tabulated in columns for “days after injection”—revealing an awful lot of fevers.
In the column for days 1 to 6 (which would cover Child Three), the Finns tabulated a rate for children experiencing “mild” fevers to be 163 per thousand MMRs. They rated a “moderate” fever at eight per thousand and a “high” fever at one in a thousand. No wonder such events set so many bells jangling among parents of children with autism.
But here came the beauty of the Finnish research: the twins’ temperatures after the placebo. For mild fever, the rate was 162 per thousand: just one less than after MMR. For moderate fever, it was again one less. And for high fever there wasn’t any difference. So the likelihood of an immediate fever caused by the vaccine was negligible.
There were causal fevers later—peaking at ten days—but, overall, true side effects were rare. “The results of the present study show that adverse reactions to the widely used MMR vaccine are much less common than was previously thought,” Peltola and Heinonen commented.
But even this doesn’t prove Ms. Three was wrong: only that anecdotes aren’t sufficient. And it was in anecdotes that Wakefield, Tommey, Bigtree, and other campaigners now took refuge against doctors and scientists: graphically presenting horror stories, and claiming parents’ rights to self-certify victims on the principle that mothers just knew.
“If ten thousand people say the same thing—ten thousand mothers—anecdotes ultimately become science,” was how the lawyer Robert Kennedy presented this argument at an anti-vaccine rally in Atlanta. “These women know what happened to their children. They know what happened to their children.”
Which was, I suppose, where I entered the controversy: by now so many years before. Did Ms. Two know in September 1996, when she told Royal Free pediatricians that her son’s head-banging began two weeks after MMR? Or did she know in November 2003, when she told me that the time elapsed was “about six months”? Or did she really know in November 2001, when she filed a statement of her case in court.
She sued a drug company. Her lawyers hoped to win a settlement. But Big Pharma rarely came quietly. In legal papers, given me by another parent in the action, Ms. Two, whose phone call alerted Wakefield to autism, accepted a submission from the defendants, SmithKline Beecham. There were no symptoms in the boy’s medical records associated with autism, or any purported sign of any “new syndrome,” for nine months after the shot.
Facing that fact, any “temporal link” went out the window. She was left with John O’Leary’s measles tests. And, through her lawyers, she made another concession in the lawsuit that would make any sound mind wonder. “The Claimant’s case,” she submitted at England’s Royal Courts of Justice, “is that symptoms of autistic spectrum disorder and bowel disorder do not necessarily present themselves within days or weeks of the vaccination.”
It is the Claimant’s case that the significant feature is that the symptoms occur after and not before the vaccination.
That was about the strength of the sentinel case: “clearly vaccine-damaged,” Wakefield said. And Ms. Two wasn’t alone in her mirages of memory as the anecdotes of Ms. Six unraveled. This was the mother (she of the “high-pitched scream”) who enrolled two of her children in the Royal Free research and also recruited another. Thus (unknown publicly until my investigation), she was responsible for one-quarter of the dozen in The Lancet, and one-third of those tabulated with “autism.”
Behind the awesome veil of medical confidentiality, Ms. Six had caused concern from the start. Professionals were so worried over the veracity of her assertions that the pediatrician Simon Murch traveled sixty miles from London to meet with local clinicians. Social workers considered putting the two boys on an “at risk” register. And an independent panel of lawyers, reviewing the termination of Barr’s class action, opined that neither child appeared to have any established medical condition to give grounds for their mother to sue anyone.
“She was a very confusing person,” her family doctor told the General Medical Council panel, “and the story would vary between consultations.”
Both Ms. Two and Ms. Six were close Wakefield retainers: working with him, campaigning for him, and doing their best to thwart my investigation of his research. And Ms. Six was also a confidante of another in his network: Ms. X, a flamboyant liar. Although she wasn’t among the parents of the original twelve, she’d taken her son for scoping at the Royal Free bowel clinic, joined Barr’s lawsuit as a frequent court-attender, and turned up on E
uston Road.
“He saved our children,” she yelled above the traffic. “Dr. Wakefield saved our children. Dr. Wakefield, and his colleagues, saved our children. Dr. Wakefield saved our children.”
The only snag was those pesky medical records, as many mothers would learn, to their dismay. Ms. X’s anecdote began with her eighteen-month-old son spiking a fever after MMR, then losing speech and eye contact “immediately.” The shot was followed by six hours of seizures and vomiting, she said, then six months in a “persistent vegetative state.”
But after scrutiny of records, a judge wouldn’t have it, and used an F-word disliked by lawyers. “The critical facts established in this case can be summarized,” he ruled. “[Child X] has autistic spectrum disorder. There is no evidence that his autism was caused by the MMR vaccination. His parents’ account of an adverse reaction to that vaccination is fabricated.”
And why not, indeed? Ask yourself the question: if you could swindle yourself to millionaire status by stealing from the government, or a pharmaceutical company—and be sure that, if you fail, you won’t even face criticism, let alone go to jail—would you maybe give it a go? Well, would you? And now, if you don’t have a developmentally challenged child—with all that turmoil, worry, and expense on your mind—if you did, would that impact your moral calculation, if it meant misrecalling a few facts?
Here was grim accountancy on the human condition. Didn’t people stamp on the brakes to get their cars rear-ended, fake gastric disease after ocean cruise meals, and pretend to have been present during terrorist attacks—to get their hands on compensation? And would it even be a crime in the balance of injustice if Wakefield had convinced them that on the other side was a conspiracy: by drug companies, corrupt doctors, lying scientists, and “shill” journalists?
Surely, here was a morality wild card.
But such sad reckoning was light years from Ms. Three’s. I never thought for a second that she lied. Wouldn’t any parent believe in the link after what they’d seen, and couldn’t explain about their child, and heard from the charming Dr. Wakefield? Decent as she was—as with countless, countless others—it didn’t mean she was right, or wrong.
Over the years, I noticed how, with the passage of time, parents’ stories so often morphed. Memories faded, events became telescoped, and recollections scrambled, like lab DNA when amplified with too many cycles. Then, there were cases where information surfaced that provoked more questions than answers.
Take the account of Wakefield’s special friend, Polly Tommey, who said that her son, Billy, was damaged by MMR, and who toured the United States in 2016 with talk about doctors killing babies. In Vaxxed, she and her husband, Jonathan, explained that on the day of the boy’s shot, at thirteen months, he’d begun “uncontrollable shaking,” had a feverish seizure, and “didn’t really ever wake up” to himself.
Maybe so. But seventeen years earlier, when they pitched a pig hormone for autism on British television, the account broadcast was appreciably different. Everything was “fantastic” up to the age of nine months, when Billy’s development appeared to falter. “We thought his speech delay was purely because he couldn’t hear,” his father told the program (which made no mention of vaccines or seizures). “And everybody kept saying, ‘Oh, he’s not talking because he’s had glue ear, and how can you talk if you can’t hear?’ ”
Can’t hear? A classic first confusion in the early recognition of autism. And there’s more between the dates of the Tommey’s two accounts that cause me to press the pause button. In February 2010, I received a phone call from a close friend of the Tommey family, who approached me through the Sunday Times news desk.
“Has she ever really sat down,” I ask this source, in a recorded conversation, “and looked at her son’s medical records?”
“Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah,” the friend replies.
“And she remains convinced it was the MMR?”
“No, no, no. Never actually was.”
I was past surprise over such responses. So often I found that time impacted narratives: as another Wakefield admirer—the actor Jenny McCarthy—may have experienced with regard to her son. She’d long held him out—in books and on TV—as an MMR-injured child. But the boy’s paternal grandmother came forward later and told a Milwaukee-based writer, Ken Reibel, that she noted classic early autistic behaviors before.
She said before. So what about without? I may have stumbled on a case of that, too. It was of the JABS campaigner, Jackie Fletcher. She, who first put Wakefield and Ms. Two together, who was among the first to sign up to Barr’s nascent class action, and who referred most of the Lancet twelve. For years, her son had been the UK’s poster child for MMR vaccine damage.
Again it was records: this time court papers plus an entry with the US government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which another mother drew to my attention. Fletcher had linked a febrile seizure to MMR, and even evidenced her anecdote with a vaccine batch number, G0839, which she submitted had done the damage. But doctors attributed the boy’s seizure as secondary to a chest infection; the manufacturer disclosed the batch as a tetanus vaccine; and tests noted that her son’s immune system had produced no antibodies to measles, mumps, or rubella virus, but had, weakly, to tetanus toxin.
Memories, understandably, fray with time. But often I found it was parents who made the most noise whose stories, when probed, underwhelmed. And I think lawyers, too, must have felt something similar when they found their test cases as tragically threadbare as Child Two’s and Michelle Cedillo’s.
Ms. Three didn’t campaign over causality issues. I don’t think I ever saw her in the media. But while she didn’t rage on Facebook, or shout in the street, she was an unstoppable crusader for her son. She would fight to have his medication adjusted and reassessed, protest when his clothes were stolen from his room, and battle to close the shittiest care homes. Without her, who knows where he’d be?
By the time of my third visit, we focused on that: the life of Child Three as a man. But at an earlier meeting, we’d talked more of MMR, as we sat in her living room with her partner, Mr. Three, who once worked as forklift driver.
“Do you really believe,” I asked them, with my mind on Wakefield’s most toxic allegation, “that there are doctors, and people working in the government, who know that MMR is causing problems like your son’s, and are covering it up?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I don’t,” he said. “I don’t.”
“I do,” she repeated. And she did.
The moment passed. But the father said something else that hinted at a difference of opinion. “Actually, I think, we were just vulnerable,” he said. “We were looking for answers.”
And who wouldn’t?
Ms. Three, however, never lost faith, as she makes clear when we meet for the last time. She “didn’t trust the MMR.” She “still wouldn’t trust it.” And she also believed what Wakefield had said, decades before, when he spoke at the press conference in the Royal Free’s Atrium to set loose his epidemics on the world.
“I honestly believe,” she says, echoing his advice about the triple vaccination, “that giving it separately would have been the better answer.”
But even she doesn’t swallow the whole Wakefield hog. She doubts his biggest idea. The way she sees it, the ultimate culprit for her son’s situation wasn’t the measles virus in the three-in-one.
“I always thought it was the rubella,” she says.
EPILOGUE
A Wonderful Doctor
The last I heard of him, he was shacked up in Miami, Florida, with a supermodel, divorced wife of a billionaire. Which only goes to show that, once you’ve fooled all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, your next big idea had better be good.
The lady was Elle Macpherson (a.k.a. “the Body”), a fifty-five-year-old mother of two from Sydney, A
ustralia, and patron of numerous good causes. Best known for a record-breaking five appearances on the cover of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues, she reportedly bagged $53 million in cash and a $26 million home after a four-year marriage to her last husband.
Wakefield, sixty-two, was first sighted in her company in November 2017. The occasion was an anti-vaccine event in Orlando, Florida, where they met in what appeared to be a calculated introduction, having been seated together for dinner. Just two months later, they were spotted for a second time, at a similar kind of gathering in Red Bank, New Jersey. Then, once more, in May 2019, at another in Chicago, Illinois.
Few who weren’t rock stars were showcased in circumstances as were lavished on Wakefield at such events. Thronged by women, mostly the mothers, who clapped and hooted and jostled for selfies, he was their Nelson Mandela (to whom he’d taken to comparing himself) returning from the grave to pass among them. In New Jersey, they gorged on a ninety-minute video, lauding their champion as a family man (chopping wood, cracking eggs, and browsing the internet) at the Texas home he soon abandoned for Macpherson.
I didn’t care. To be frank, I never did. I’d never asked for the assignment. It had given me little pleasure. What I’d long most hoped for was an exit. If the things that we dwell on become the shape of our minds, who’d want to spend years on this? But, once he’d begun suing and sliming to cover his tracks, I’d no choice but to stay on his trail.
Is it new? Is it true? Do we have it to ourselves?
The rest of it: not my problem.
Medicine was for doctors; science for scientists. My responsibility was to question. And if that meant digging till his house fell down, then, corny as it sounds, better journalists than me have lost their lives for untold truths. All I’d risked was forfeiting my home to legal bills (since I republished my stories at briandeer.com) if the facts didn’t check out. Which they did.