Speaker 1: Mmmm. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the show where we
Speaker 1: tell you everything you don't know about the very worst
Speaker 1: people in all the history. I'm Robert Evans. Sophie does
Speaker 1: not like me using my my accent, which I consider
Speaker 1: a type of racism, because I am a Southern man
Speaker 1: and I have to hide the reality of who I am.
Speaker 1: Is that your natural voice, that's my natural no affectation,
Speaker 1: that's me. That's deep South, deep South man. I I'm
Speaker 1: a Southern gentleman. I don't know. I feel like you
Speaker 1: went from Southern farmer to uh, Southern lawyer in a
Speaker 1: white linen suit. Well, now that one was not my honor.
Speaker 1: There's no there's nothing classy about my background. H yeah.
Speaker 1: Now Anna Selina's back comics by Anna Comics artist Uh.
Speaker 1: Uh street fighter uh. President of the Anti Vaccination Society
Speaker 1: of America. Unfortunately, that is why you brought me on here,
Speaker 1: not because of my comics or Twitter hot takes, but
Speaker 1: because I am the president of the anti vaxers. That
Speaker 1: was me to me and you're not. But we are
Speaker 1: talking about the anti vaccine movement still we are, and
Speaker 1: I feel weirdly conflicted about it so far because we
Speaker 1: spent an episode talking about how both sides had points
Speaker 1: and we're also racist. Yeah, I mean everybody's racist. In
Speaker 1: the nineties, you're not going to find a lot of
Speaker 1: not racist people. Even like the not racist people still
Speaker 1: use terms that are like, oh, guys, you are. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's like watching Blazing Saddles where it's like, oh my god, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I could see like revolutionary for its time, but also
Speaker 1: like my old bosses were like, it's the best movie.
Speaker 1: That's your that's your homework. You need to go watch
Speaker 1: that movie. It's so funny. And I watched it and look,
Speaker 1: that movie is racist and sexist. And the first time
Speaker 1: it was a huge step forward. I understand nobody and
Speaker 1: say you'll never like it was everything that's great on
Speaker 1: a scale when we talk about history, yes, for itst
Speaker 1: time it was, but watching it now, it's just like,
Speaker 1: this is not least. You go to a lot of abolitionists,
Speaker 1: like people who are like fighting to end slavery in
Speaker 1: the eighteen fifties, and they would be like, well, of course,
Speaker 1: you know, black people earned as intelligent as white people,
Speaker 1: but they shouldn't be slaves. And it's like, okay, well
Speaker 1: you're racist, but you're not in favorite slavery. So I
Speaker 1: guess we're greating on a curve here. That's true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's just it's complicated. I can't wait for twenty
Speaker 1: years from now when people look over at my tweets,
Speaker 1: because you know, Twitter will be here in twenty years. Oh. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: this one all collapsed like the house of cards that
Speaker 1: people look at my tweets and be like, oh problematic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like that might be just bite owning pets
Speaker 1: and stuff. You think, No, I wonder if that's the
Speaker 1: next frontier. Who knows. I know that future generalation generations
Speaker 1: will judge me for all of the meat that I yeah,
Speaker 1: no arguments there. I hope. I hope we get there.
Speaker 1: We will, I mean, because the planet will die, that's true.
Speaker 1: That's like with these vaccines. It's like people will get it,
Speaker 1: people will get it, but tens of thousands of people
Speaker 1: will die first. The human totally nightmarish. That's what convinces people.
Speaker 1: That's what convinces people. I love. I guess one of
Speaker 1: my favorite kinds of stories is like terrible people who
Speaker 1: we're heroes. Still, Like there's this great story of like
Speaker 1: during the Japanese invasion. I think it was not Shanghai. Um,
Speaker 1: it might have been Shanghai. Was the Japanese invasion of
Speaker 1: this one Chinese city where like a massacred tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of civilians, and like the guy who protected a
Speaker 1: huge number of them by like creating this international quarter
Speaker 1: in the city to like protect all of these civilians
Speaker 1: from being murdered by the Japanese was a Nazi Like
Speaker 1: this literal knots are you saving thousands of women and
Speaker 1: children from like the Japanese murder? So why did he
Speaker 1: Well because he was just like everyone was a member
Speaker 1: of the and this was like before the Holocaust really
Speaker 1: got started. So he was like racist and anti Semitic,
Speaker 1: but he wasn't pro murder. He was just like a
Speaker 1: businessman who joined the Nazi party. But like once he
Speaker 1: saw people getting killed in the streets, was like, I
Speaker 1: don't want this happening. It's a it's a mess. Like
Speaker 1: that is a mess. That's a mess. I I'm always
Speaker 1: interested in stories like that of like people who are
Speaker 1: objectively flawed bad people. You still did a good thing. Well.
Speaker 1: I think we are all objectively flawed bad people doing
Speaker 1: what we think is right or ignoring our moral compass altogether.
Speaker 1: And those people are not always the worst people. I
Speaker 1: ignore my moral compass all the time, all the time.
Speaker 1: And uh, I'm not the worst person. And that's that's
Speaker 1: what I always shoot for, is not the worst, not
Speaker 1: the worst, My the worst person today. Note Roger Stone
Speaker 1: is still alive. Fantastic good. I'm doing nailing it. The
Speaker 1: bar is low boy. This has been a long and
Speaker 1: meandering introduction. We're talking about Andrew Wakefield today. Yes, any Wakefield? Okay?
Speaker 1: So uh. The current ongoing measles outbreak of two thousand, nineteen,
Speaker 1: centering around Portland, Oregon, is the largest such outbreak in
Speaker 1: twenty years. Clark County, Washington, where the outbreak began, had
Speaker 1: a measles vaccination rate of just seventy eight percent, not
Speaker 1: high enough for her community to protect the immuno compromised.
Speaker 1: Clark County just happens to be a recognized hotspot of
Speaker 1: anti vaccine sentiment. In December two thousan fourteen, a trip
Speaker 1: to Disneyland led to a hundred and forty seven confirmed
Speaker 1: cases of measles. A hundred and ten of those people
Speaker 1: lived in California, and half of that group had not
Speaker 1: taken the MMR vaccine, so this is not purely a
Speaker 1: coastal phenomenon. Over the last five years, the number of
Speaker 1: children who go unvaccinated each year, or in Texas each year,
Speaker 1: has doubled to more than fifty seven thousand. Of course
Speaker 1: it's Texas. Of course it's Texas. The direct cause here
Speaker 1: is the existence of non medical exemptions, essentially a descendant
Speaker 1: of the old British exemptions for conscientious objectors. But the
Speaker 1: real true cause of these outbreaks of diseases that by
Speaker 1: all right, should be long dead by now is a
Speaker 1: single man. His name is Andrew Wakefield, who's his name
Speaker 1: should be more well known. I feel like Jenny McCarthy
Speaker 1: really gets the blame for this movement, and what she's
Speaker 1: doing is bad, But this guy's why. Oh yeah, bring
Speaker 1: it on. Andrew was born in nineteen fifty seven. We
Speaker 1: don't know an awful lot about his early life, or
Speaker 1: at least I was not able to find an awful lot.
Speaker 1: His parents were both doctors, and his father was a neurologist,
Speaker 1: which is about the doctor is kind of doctor that exists? Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He enrolled in St. Mary's Hospital Medical School as a
Speaker 1: young adult, focusing on gastro Inturology. He seems to have
Speaker 1: been popular throughout this period. He was the captain of
Speaker 1: his medical school's rugby team and generally looked to be
Speaker 1: on a winning path in life when he graduated. And
Speaker 1: I'm just going to say this, I played female rugby
Speaker 1: and frougby as it's known, and male rugby players can't
Speaker 1: be a little much they can, they get a little brilli,
Speaker 1: they can. It would have been a red flag for
Speaker 1: this guy. It's basically war without guns or paths or paths,
Speaker 1: and when women do it, it's pretty cool and feminist.
Speaker 1: But women do it, they get fraddy. Yeah well yeah, well,
Speaker 1: are making a blanket statement. I hope male rugby players.
Speaker 1: There's only one sport that I'm going to attack blanket
Speaker 1: all of the players of on this podcast, and that's
Speaker 1: high ally. Yes. Yeah, well that's a correct take. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: funk that sport. Fuck you for doing it. Yes, strong stance. Now.
Speaker 1: For more than a decade, Andrew Wakefield seems to have
Speaker 1: been a perfectly fine doctor and medical researcher. From nine
Speaker 1: to nineteen and nine, he worked at the University of
Speaker 1: Toronto as part of a team studying tissue rejection from
Speaker 1: transplanted intestines. From the early nineteen nineties. Back in the UK,
Speaker 1: he started doing research at the Royal Free College of London.
Speaker 1: In nineteen three, he published an article suggesting that the
Speaker 1: measles virus might cause Crone's disease. This drew a lot
Speaker 1: of ice his wife, and two years later, when he
Speaker 1: published research suggesting that the measles vaccine might cause Crone's disease,
Speaker 1: even more people's started talking about this brash young doctor
Speaker 1: who was turning the system on his head. Now a
Speaker 1: lot of evidence suggests that there is a link between
Speaker 1: measles exposure and childhood and Crown's disease. There is, however,
Speaker 1: no evidence of a link between vaccination and Crown's disease.
Speaker 1: At the time when he started the research and made
Speaker 1: sense to look into, made sense to look into. But
Speaker 1: did he have any bias pushing him toward. That's going
Speaker 1: to be a big focus of the episodes. So, and
Speaker 1: one thing I should point out is that if you
Speaker 1: know a lot of people with autism, kids with autism
Speaker 1: in particular, a lot of them have weird bowel issues,
Speaker 1: gastrointestinal issues and stuff like that. It's very common. So
Speaker 1: this is something that like people and trying to explain
Speaker 1: for a while, and why why do these kids with
Speaker 1: autism also have all of these weird like gastrointestinal issues.
Speaker 1: So that's why he sort of gets into the study
Speaker 1: of autism as a gastroenturologist because there's some stuff there
Speaker 1: that that needs explaining. Okay, So it seems like maybe
Speaker 1: Andrew Wakefield was starting from an honest place. It's not
Speaker 1: clear at what point that changed, but the evidence suggests
Speaker 1: that Andrew Wakefield instantly saw financial opportunity in this purported
Speaker 1: connection between the MEAs vaccine and Crown's disease. In March,
Speaker 1: Wakefield filed for a patent for a test that would
Speaker 1: detect Crown's disease or ulcerative colitis by finding measles virus
Speaker 1: in the battel tissue product or fluids. Two years later,
Speaker 1: Andrew Wakefield drew up a business scheme to present to investors.
Speaker 1: In it, he suggested using his patented tests to create
Speaker 1: a company that would make enormous profits from running these tests.
Speaker 1: The anticipated annual income top seventy two million pounds per year.
Speaker 1: The perspectives he put together trying to Interact investors noted
Speaker 1: in view of the unique services offered by the company
Speaker 1: and its technology, particularly for the molecular diagnostic the essays
Speaker 1: can command premium prices. It sounds like he's just a scammer.
Speaker 1: It sounds like he's just a scam artist already. You
Speaker 1: don't even so it's so scammy like there's like so
Speaker 1: many levels that a scam artist could be a scammer.
Speaker 1: And Andrew Wakefield is a scammer on twice as many
Speaker 1: levels as that. But it's going to take some unpacking
Speaker 1: to get through. So during all this time, Wakefield was
Speaker 1: conducting a study at the Royal Free College. This study
Speaker 1: of tw children suggested that the MMR vaccine, which bundled measles, mumps,
Speaker 1: and rubella vaccinations together, could cause the measles virus to
Speaker 1: infect a child's intestines. Now, this study was an attempt
Speaker 1: to explain something that yeah parents with autistic children reported
Speaker 1: for years. Wigfield's research, published in nine seemed to suggest
Speaker 1: that the MMR vaccine harmed not just the child's intestines,
Speaker 1: but the neurons and its brain. So this is the
Speaker 1: beginning of the idea that like, maybe this vaccine is
Speaker 1: what's causing the auticis and what year is this? This
Speaker 1: is when he publishes his research. Okay, so this is
Speaker 1: pretty recent, pretty recent, and again twelve kids, so not
Speaker 1: a huge study, not what you would want to make
Speaker 1: sweeping claims about a vaccine. I feel like technically that
Speaker 1: would be rejected, right, that's the smallest sample. Flight Well,
Speaker 1: that is how you start, you know, you would be
Speaker 1: an anecdotal at that point. It seems like it would
Speaker 1: be anecdotal. It is almost It's one of those things
Speaker 1: where if if he had immediately gone from that to
Speaker 1: doing a two and fifty person study or something like that,
Speaker 1: that would be how a normal scientists have preceded. But
Speaker 1: that was not what Wakefield did. Wakefield did not immediately
Speaker 1: start telling people to not vaccinate, like he wasn't starting
Speaker 1: from anti vaccine, but he did start by saying, like,
Speaker 1: because of this research, I found we should stop bundling
Speaker 1: all these vaccinations together, and right at that same time,
Speaker 1: eight months before releasing his paper, actually he patented a
Speaker 1: single measles vaccine, which is what he claimed after releasing
Speaker 1: his paper was the safest way to vaccinate your kids.
Speaker 1: Separate all the vaccinations so when they released this study
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety eight. Andrew Wakefield in the Royal Free
Speaker 1: Medical School released the paper via a twenty three minute
Speaker 1: long video news conference, which is not how scientific studies
Speaker 1: involving twelve people are usually. You wanted people to see
Speaker 1: his face. Wanted people to see his face. In this
Speaker 1: press conference. He made a very direct plea for people
Speaker 1: to start using the exact kind of single use vaccine
Speaker 1: he just patented eight months before. Oh god, quote, this
Speaker 1: is Wakefield. There is fishent anxiety in my own mind
Speaker 1: for the long term safety of the polyvalent vaccine that
Speaker 1: is the MMR vaccination and combination that I think it
Speaker 1: should be suspended in favor of the single vaccines. Now.
Speaker 1: The journal he published in The Lancet is an old
Speaker 1: and extremely authoritative publication. They and his hospital, the Royal
Speaker 1: Free Hospital, knew about Wakefield's ambitions to profit off of
Speaker 1: this work. They threw resources into helping him launch his
Speaker 1: study with the press conference, which you know, again is
Speaker 1: not the norm. They knew he was trying to raise
Speaker 1: money to start a company, and they knew he'd patented
Speaker 1: a form of medicine that he was advising everyone to take.
Speaker 1: So both institutions took steps to protect themselves. The Lancet
Speaker 1: published a critique of wakefield study and the same issue
Speaker 1: in which it was released. This critique pointed out that
Speaker 1: the sample group was too small to draw big conclusions
Speaker 1: from and that it had not been randomly determined. The
Speaker 1: Lancet did not make any mention of this critical article
Speaker 1: in the press release, though. The Royal Free Hospital convened
Speaker 1: a panel of five doctors to present to follow up
Speaker 1: press conference, where their panel would all agree that people
Speaker 1: should keep using the MMR vaccine until more research had
Speaker 1: been done. Now, that was the plan for the press conference,
Speaker 1: but it didn't work out that way. The press conference
Speaker 1: wound up turning into a ship show. I found a
Speaker 1: recollection of it from a journalist who attended. Quote the
Speaker 1: five of them the panel that the hospital had convened.
Speaker 1: We're sitting behind a table with Andrew Wakefield on the
Speaker 1: extreme left in Ari Zuckerman on the right. The tension
Speaker 1: rose as the event progressed, and by the end Wakefield
Speaker 1: was coolly urging patients to give their children single vaccines
Speaker 1: at annual intervals, while Zuckerman was on his feet banging
Speaker 1: the lectern and frustration as he insisted that the MMR
Speaker 1: vaccine had been given to millions of children around the
Speaker 1: world and was safe. So within a year of this
Speaker 1: press conference, Andrew Wakefield had become the director of two businesses,
Speaker 1: both Carmel and Unigenetics Ltd, who were registered in early
Speaker 1: nine Right after this press conference came out, Andrew Wakefield
Speaker 1: submitted a confidential report on behalf of Unigenetics to the
Speaker 1: British Legal Aid Board and secured eight hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 1: in public funding to perform his tests on children in
Speaker 1: a public hospital. Ward Wakefield sought an additional two point
Speaker 1: one million pounds to get his venture off the ground.
Speaker 1: In a quote private and confidential prospectus that later wound
Speaker 1: up in the hands of a journalist for the British
Speaker 1: Medical Journal, Andrew Wakefield stated that he believed that within
Speaker 1: three years of launching his diagnostic testing business, it would
Speaker 1: be worth twenty eight million pounds. He's so transparent. If
Speaker 1: you're listening, I can see. I mean, it's just how
Speaker 1: people get scammed. It's just yet another grifter or era
Speaker 1: of grifters. Now Wakefield still needed that investment money and
Speaker 1: one study of twelve kids no matter how publicized, was
Speaker 1: not going to draw the kind of funding that he needed,
Speaker 1: especially since other members of the medical community had started
Speaker 1: loudly pointing out the flaws in Wakefield's research. In order
Speaker 1: to secure that extra cash, Andrew Wakefield and a pathologist
Speaker 1: he had hired for Unigenetics, prepared to present new research
Speaker 1: at a London meeting of the Pathological Society in March
Speaker 1: of two thousand. According to the British Medical Journal quote,
Speaker 1: based on alleged gut biopsy samples from Walker Smith's patients
Speaker 1: tend with autism and three with Crohn's disease tested at
Speaker 1: a Dublin laboratory, it claimed a possible causal link and
Speaker 1: given a Wakefield presentation, promised a storm like the press
Speaker 1: conference two years before. So he's done more research, but
Speaker 1: he's not doing another study. He's just going straight to
Speaker 1: press conference without actually publishing a peer of you'd study. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and did you say ten people? Ten thirteen total patients?
Speaker 1: This is not how you do research. This is not
Speaker 1: how you do research. And it's it's such bad science
Speaker 1: that I don't even have a good way to segue
Speaker 1: into this Dorito's plug. But I'm gonna I'm gonna that's
Speaker 1: a good Derito Dorito's if you're listening, sponsor this podcast now.
Speaker 1: And in deference to the fans who don't like the
Speaker 1: sound of crunching Dorito's. Really it's like the anti vaccine
Speaker 1: pro vaccine argument in the eighteen hundreds, were like, there's
Speaker 1: two sides here. There's a lot of people who say
Speaker 1: more Dorito's crunching, and a lot of people who say less.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna lean on the side of not doing as
Speaker 1: much Dorito's crunching. But every now and then, you gotta
Speaker 1: right now and then I got, you know, fifteen minute
Speaker 1: fast for our fifteen seconds past forward. That's the thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that will be the only crunch in this episode. But
Speaker 1: I just needed it. I needed to. I want to
Speaker 1: believe everyone who listens to podcast has a little love
Speaker 1: of a s mr. Oh yeah, I mean you would hope.
Speaker 1: Some people don't like the sound of eating, which is
Speaker 1: why I wolf found like a third of a bag
Speaker 1: of Derrisos like a fucking monster. Yeah, I was eating
Speaker 1: my cookies, so I was trying to be so sneaky
Speaker 1: about it. Sophie's eating dog treats right now. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: while they're next to her bag of fritos. There's no
Speaker 1: way to know which one she's eating, and she did reach. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what I thought. Now. Wakefield started talking with pharmaceutical
Speaker 1: companies right before this planned like press release um. One
Speaker 1: of them even flew him to Canada to talk. He
Speaker 1: was negotiating with Johnson and Johnson, Merk and Smith Klent
Speaker 1: Beach him. So it looked like he was about to
Speaker 1: get the funding. He wanted a couple of million dollars
Speaker 1: to start producing this single shot vaccine. Where was the
Speaker 1: oversight of this guy? Why did he lose his license?
Speaker 1: That's coming up. Thankfully he did not get to carry
Speaker 1: out all of his plans. Another doctor, Mark Peppi's, would
Speaker 1: find to put a stop to wakefield scheme. Peppies had
Speaker 1: recently been made the head of medicine at the Royal
Speaker 1: Free College and he did not like Wakefield or his research.
Speaker 1: Peppi's convinced the college to send Wakefield a letter finally
Speaker 1: admitting their concern about his involvement with these new companies
Speaker 1: he'd created in his financial interest in producing the single
Speaker 1: use measles vaccine quote. This concern arose originally because the
Speaker 1: company's business plan appears to depend on premature, scientifically unjustified
Speaker 1: publication of results which do not conform to the rigorous
Speaker 1: academic and scientific standards that are generally expected. So first study, fine,
Speaker 1: it's okay to do if you're trying to prove something
Speaker 1: new and put out a study with a small sample size.
Speaker 1: But the fact that your second press release isn't even
Speaker 1: a study and involves one more person this seems shady
Speaker 1: to us. So the college did not immediately cut his
Speaker 1: funding or fire him. They offered him a continuation of
Speaker 1: his funding if he would conduct new research and test
Speaker 1: his theories about the MMR vaccine. He was promised help
Speaker 1: with the study of a hundred and fifty children to
Speaker 1: see if his research for the lance that could be
Speaker 1: replicated with a larger group was what real scientists do.
Speaker 1: But mon, how did they not get it by this point? Well,
Speaker 1: so what might have been wishful thinking? Um, some of
Speaker 1: it might have been legitimately being like, okay, well, maybe
Speaker 1: you know, there's clearly something going on between like bow
Speaker 1: disorders and autism, so maybe something's happening here it's worth
Speaker 1: looking into. So they offered to pay him to do
Speaker 1: a study with a hundred and fifty children uh and
Speaker 1: Wakefield initially agreed to conduct the study, but he never
Speaker 1: actually did because the nine lands that study had been
Speaker 1: a total scam. None of this came out until two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven, when a journalist named Brian Deer published an
Speaker 1: investigation for the British Journal of Medicine. It was revealed
Speaker 1: for the first time that Andrew Wakefield had actually been
Speaker 1: running a second secret scam alongside his other more obvious scams.
Speaker 1: Rather than being a legitimate study motivated by sheer interest
Speaker 1: in the truth, his Lancet paper had essentially been commissioned
Speaker 1: by a lawyer named Richard Barr, who represented a bunch
Speaker 1: of families who believed their kids had gotten sick through
Speaker 1: the MMR vaccine. Wakefield's research started as paid work for
Speaker 1: a lawyer trying to justify a lawsuit. He made something
Speaker 1: like four hundred fifty thou dollars for this work alone.
Speaker 1: None of this was known until Brian Deer's report came out.
Speaker 1: All of Wakefield's patients had been recruited by anti MMR
Speaker 1: vaccine campaigners, and even then, Deer's research showed that Wakefield
Speaker 1: had strayed up lied about many of their symptoms. Being
Speaker 1: a journalist, Brian Deer actually took Wakefield's research to the
Speaker 1: parents of the kids in the study to like be like,
Speaker 1: is this what happened to your kid? Is this what
Speaker 1: happened to your kid? Is this what happened to your kid?
Speaker 1: And it turns out that he had essentially misrepresented everybody's symptoms.
Speaker 1: Whoa so complete fabrica, complete fabrication. Not just a guy
Speaker 1: who came up with a study, saw that there might
Speaker 1: be a connection and they decided to try to profit
Speaker 1: on it, which is what it looked like at first,
Speaker 1: but a guy whose whole study was falsified from the
Speaker 1: beginning because a lawyer was paying him to find a connection.
Speaker 1: God damn it. Yeah, now we're going to get into
Speaker 1: just how that famous Lancet study, which by the way,
Speaker 1: is still to this day the single biggest scientific underpenning
Speaker 1: of the anti vaccine movement. Do they know it's fake? Well,
Speaker 1: everyone does, but some people don't accept it. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, Nathan Phillips and that Sandman kid confrontation on
Speaker 1: the in d C where we all have the same
Speaker 1: hour and forty five minute video of everything we read
Speaker 1: different and we all read it differently. This one is
Speaker 1: like it was fake. Truth is dead, Anna, truth is dead,
Speaker 1: but you know it's not dead. Doritos, Derito's and the
Speaker 1: wonderful sponsors that helped keep this show afloat with products
Speaker 1: and services. We're back, Anna, You're eating a derrito, I am,
Speaker 1: But I'm trying to avoid chewing into the mic because
Speaker 1: I know some people don't like it. Some people don't
Speaker 1: like it. You know what nobody likes falsified medical studies.
Speaker 1: People need to collapsing vaccination rates in the Western world.
Speaker 1: So Brian Deer put together He's got a great article
Speaker 1: for the British medic Coool Journal that goes into detail
Speaker 1: on all this, but he put together a little summary
Speaker 1: that just sort of walked through how bullshit the study us.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to read from that little bullet point summary.
Speaker 1: The Lancet paper was a case series of twelve child patients.
Speaker 1: It reported a proposed new syndrome of intero colitis and
Speaker 1: regressive autism, and associated this with MMR as an apparent
Speaker 1: precipitating event, but in fact, three of nine children reported
Speaker 1: with regressive autism did not have autism diagnosed at all.
Speaker 1: Only one child clearly had regressive autism. Despite the paper
Speaker 1: claiming that all twelve children were previously normal, five had
Speaker 1: documented pre existing developmental concerns. Some children were reported to
Speaker 1: have experienced first behavioral symptoms within days of MMR, but
Speaker 1: the records documented these as starting some months after vaccination.
Speaker 1: In nine cases, unremarkable colonic history O pathology reports noting
Speaker 1: no or minimal fluctuations and inflammatory cell populations were changed
Speaker 1: after a medical school research review to non specific colitis.
Speaker 1: The parents of eight children were reported as blaming MMR,
Speaker 1: but eleven families made this allegation at the hospital. The
Speaker 1: exclusion of three allegations, all giving times to onset of
Speaker 1: problems in months, helped to create the appearance of a
Speaker 1: fourteen day temporal link. Patients recruited through anti MMR campaigners,
Speaker 1: and the study was commissioned and funded for planned litigation.
Speaker 1: So it was false. It was all lies. It was
Speaker 1: just nonsense. He just he found some people who are
Speaker 1: willing to who are saying what he wanted the study
Speaker 1: to say, and when people reported something else, he just
Speaker 1: lied and said that they said the same thing as
Speaker 1: the other people. I mean, that's really really bad, and
Speaker 1: I understand that doctors were reporting on it, but it's
Speaker 1: almost like we need a better measure to discredit someone
Speaker 1: who is a real doctor saying lies, yeah, and that
Speaker 1: that does happen in this So there was no way
Speaker 1: Andrew Wakefield could replicate his research on a larger group
Speaker 1: of patients under the watchful eye of critical experts because
Speaker 1: his research was a sham, a cheap cash grab from
Speaker 1: the very beginning. Wakefield refused to carry out the follow
Speaker 1: up study, which the Royal Free College would have paid for,
Speaker 1: and tried to proceed on capitalizing on the controversy stirred up.
Speaker 1: In September two, he responded to the College quote, it
Speaker 1: is clear that academic freedom is essential and cannot be traded.
Speaker 1: It is the unanimous decision of my collaborators and co
Speaker 1: workers that it is only appropriate that we define our
Speaker 1: research objectives, we enact the studies is appropriately reviewed and approved,
Speaker 1: and we decide as and when we deem the work
Speaker 1: suitable for submission for peer review. This is how he said,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to carry out another study trying to
Speaker 1: prove my research works. This is so depressing, though, because
Speaker 1: once something is out in the public eye, it's a thing,
Speaker 1: and this took off like wildfire. So Wakefield's career as
Speaker 1: a legitimate doctor ends at this point. He's fired. In
Speaker 1: two thousand one. Dr Peppi's later claimed quote, we paid
Speaker 1: him to go away, giving him two years salary upfront
Speaker 1: and a statement that he was innocent of any misconduct.
Speaker 1: What it looked bad for them too. They had helped
Speaker 1: publicize a wildly fallacious study. Guys, come on. They also
Speaker 1: promised not to say anything about the fact that they
Speaker 1: knew he was a fraud. Quote. And of course one
Speaker 1: of the conditions of him going away was that I
Speaker 1: wasn't supposed to say anything critical of him to anybody
Speaker 1: forever after. Dr Peppi's is clearly kind of piste bad policy.
Speaker 1: Bad policy. In the year since, other doctors have directed
Speaker 1: plenty of ire towards Andrew Wakefield. Two thousand three paper
Speaker 1: published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine used
Speaker 1: more than a dozen epidemiological studies and concluded that there
Speaker 1: was no evidence supporting an association between autism and the
Speaker 1: MMR vaccine. Multiple other peer reviewed studies in the fifteen
Speaker 1: years since have said the same thing. In February of
Speaker 1: two ten, the editors of the lance that retracted Wakefield study.
Speaker 1: They told The Guardian that quote, it was utterly clear,
Speaker 1: without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the
Speaker 1: paper were utterly false. This prompted a review by the
Speaker 1: General Medical Council, which in May of two thousand ten
Speaker 1: stripped Andrew Wakefield of his medical license, among other things.
Speaker 1: Come on, the slowness of that is like, that's white privilege, man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and doctor prov doctor, I think protecting their own kind.
Speaker 1: And more than that, I think it's then protecting themselves.
Speaker 1: Just like they'd hoped that this would fade away and
Speaker 1: it didn't, and so they had to do something. No,
Speaker 1: you have to deal with this ship out front now, Anna,
Speaker 1: I bet you're thinking there's nothing else we could learn
Speaker 1: about how Andrew Wakefield conducted the study. That makes it shadier.
Speaker 1: What there's more So, he already lied about what their
Speaker 1: autism was and what they were saying it was caused by,
Speaker 1: and when it started, lied about who he was working
Speaker 1: for when he started doing the fact that he was
Speaker 1: being paid by a lawyer to prove something, the fact
Speaker 1: that he patented a medicine specifically to try to sell it.
Speaker 1: After releasing this right he'd lied about all that, but
Speaker 1: it gets shadier. Okay. Yeah, So that investigation that stripped
Speaker 1: him of his medical license found that, among other things,
Speaker 1: Andrew Wakefield had bribed children at his son's tenth birthday
Speaker 1: party to let him use their blood for research. Do
Speaker 1: we know how heed, Oh boy, we do. Yeah. Now
Speaker 1: there's actual video of him describing this. I found a
Speaker 1: report about that video in a New York Times article.
Speaker 1: The video showed him at a conference in telling the
Speaker 1: audience about the time he lined up kids to give
Speaker 1: blood samples at the birthday party of one of his children.
Speaker 1: He needed a control group of children who did not
Speaker 1: have autism, and this was convenient. Two children fainted, he said,
Speaker 1: another threw up over his mother. For their service, they
Speaker 1: were rewarded with five pounds. People said to me, Andrew,
Speaker 1: you know you can't do this to people. Children won't
Speaker 1: come back, he recounted. I said, you're wrong. Listen, we
Speaker 1: live in a free market economy. Next year they'll want
Speaker 1: ten pounds. Whoa First of all, that poor kid whose
Speaker 1: birthday it was like rough birthday, rough birthday. He got bullied.
Speaker 1: After that. They were all like, I don't want to
Speaker 1: go to your birthday. You guys want to come over
Speaker 1: to my house. No, your dad's gonna take our blood again.
Speaker 1: But what's even crazier is not only did he take
Speaker 1: their blood, they fainted and threw up, Like kids don't
Speaker 1: like blood drawn at a birthday. I mean he was
Speaker 1: taking a sizeable amount for that to happen, I have
Speaker 1: to imagine, but also at a birthday party when they
Speaker 1: were like filled with cake and excited. And I don't know,
Speaker 1: Andrew Wakefield, We've all had blood drawn as kids. There's
Speaker 1: some nurses and doctors that are really good at it,
Speaker 1: that are good at like interfacing with the kid and
Speaker 1: making it comforting. And there's some doctors that's like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm just going to do this and it sucks. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna guess he was one of the bad. He wasn't
Speaker 1: good at Everyone is complicit. This is my lesson from
Speaker 1: all of this. The people at that birthday party, but
Speaker 1: the adults besides him should have been like, I wonder
Speaker 1: what the conversations were you just like sitting at the
Speaker 1: side of the room. Is he taking my son's blood?
Speaker 1: Should probably have some scammy argument where he was like,
Speaker 1: I'm doing a test and to advance Medical science, DOBE.
Speaker 1: That is how he sounded. That was how he sounded,
Speaker 1: and everyone was stupid. Gotten a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of accent play out of these episodes now uh. The
Speaker 1: General Medical Council concluded that Wakefield had acted with quote
Speaker 1: callous disregard for the distress and pain the children would suffer,
Speaker 1: which is a good summary of his career. None of this,
Speaker 1: and none of Brian Deer's fantastic reporting, has been enough
Speaker 1: to kill rumors of a correlation between vaccination and autism.
Speaker 1: By two thousand and eight, the British national vaccination rates
Speaker 1: against MMR went from above nine to below Every measle's
Speaker 1: outbreak we've had since can be traced to Andrew Wakefield's research,
Speaker 1: and the movement had helped reignite. In the years since
Speaker 1: all this broke, Andrew Wakefield has continued to be a
Speaker 1: shady con man. In two thousand four, before his license
Speaker 1: was taken away, he fled Britain for Austin, Texas, figuring
Speaker 1: that it would be an easier place to continue to
Speaker 1: be a greasy disease grifter. If Alex Jones has taught
Speaker 1: us anything, he was probably wise to do that. The
Speaker 1: next New York Times article on Wakefield was titled The
Speaker 1: Crash and Burn of an Autism Guru. It's author, Susan Dominus,
Speaker 1: caught up with Wakefield about a year after he was
Speaker 1: stripped of his licen The picture he paints of him
Speaker 1: is of a bitter con man quote. For Wakefield, the
Speaker 1: attacks had become a kind of affirmation. The more he
Speaker 1: must defend his research, the more important he seems to
Speaker 1: consider it, so important that powerful forces have conspired and
Speaker 1: aligned against him. He said he believes that they public
Speaker 1: health officials pharmaceutical companies pay bloggers to plant vicious comments
Speaker 1: about him on the web because it's always the same,
Speaker 1: he says, discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield. Discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield.
Speaker 1: He also wouldn't be surprised if public health officials were
Speaker 1: inflating the number of measles mortalities, just as he thinks
Speaker 1: they inflate the risk of the flu to increase the
Speaker 1: uptake of that vaccine. Having been rejected by mainstream medicine, Wakefield,
Speaker 1: the son of wore regarded doctors in Britain, has apparently
Speaker 1: rejected the integrity of mainstream medicine. In return, I hope
Speaker 1: he dies of a disease. Yeah, I mean to say,
Speaker 1: come on a podcast now, where we can be a
Speaker 1: little dark, where we can wish death on people. Fine
Speaker 1: to call out doctors for inflating fear around the flu
Speaker 1: while he literally created a crisis, created a fear to
Speaker 1: sell his measles vaccine. Yeah, what you know, it's the
Speaker 1: pot calling the kettle of vaccine denialist agitator. I'm deeply
Speaker 1: lost in the metaphor. I didn't know, but yeah, he sucks.
Speaker 1: So that article that noted that Wakefield still enjoyed a
Speaker 1: healthy fan base and was able to pack two fifty
Speaker 1: paying customers into a church near Austin to hear Wakefield
Speaker 1: talk about his research for a subset of desperate parents,
Speaker 1: most of whom were struggling with children who suffer from
Speaker 1: severe complications due to autism. Andrew has become something of
Speaker 1: a cult leader. Here's the New York Times. Many complied
Speaker 1: with lavish thanks. We stand by you, and thank you
Speaker 1: for the many sacrifices you have made for the cause.
Speaker 1: When he finally took the podium, the audience members, mostly
Speaker 1: parents of autistic children, stood and applauded wildly. Some of
Speaker 1: Wakefield's cult status is surely because of his person charisma,
Speaker 1: and he spoke with a great rhetorical flare. He took
Speaker 1: off his glasses and put them back on, like a
Speaker 1: gifted actor maximizing a prop. What happens to me doesn't matter,
Speaker 1: he said at one point, what happens to these children
Speaker 1: does matter. Why do all conments down the same because
Speaker 1: it works like as you're describing him, I'm like, well
Speaker 1: that sounds like Trump. Yeah. Yeah, they're they're all more
Speaker 1: alike than they are different. They would all get together
Speaker 1: at the same sort of parties where they would probably
Speaker 1: all bribe children for their blood, pretending they're not self
Speaker 1: interested when they're literally just conning scared people out of
Speaker 1: their money. Yeah, yea, yea yeah yeah. And for some reference,
Speaker 1: actual heroic people never talk like that because they're too
Speaker 1: busy doing good things, saving the world and such. Since
Speaker 1: moving to America in two thousand and four, Wakefield has
Speaker 1: tried repeatedly to cash in on his hero status among
Speaker 1: the AMT vaccine crowd. In two thousand and thirteen, The
Speaker 1: Guardian caught up with him at a convention for the
Speaker 1: reality TV industry. He'd paid six dollars for a chance
Speaker 1: to pitch his idea for a new TV show to
Speaker 1: executives from Discovery, National Geographic and TLC. Now. The pilot
Speaker 1: for this new business venture was a TV show called
Speaker 1: Autism Team. Oh No, not a great title. I've watched
Speaker 1: an excerpt from this uh, and I think it would
Speaker 1: be most accurately described as sickness porn. It includes a
Speaker 1: lot of long, lingering shots of suffering children. Received a
Speaker 1: lot of criticism from autism sufferers because it doesn't really
Speaker 1: focus at all in the humanity of these people. It's
Speaker 1: just sort of seeing a kids suffer and then a
Speaker 1: doctor will come in and diagnose the kid with autism
Speaker 1: associated indoclitis, the syndrome Andrew Wakefield invented, and then yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it feels like resistance against him and his conning
Speaker 1: has to come a little from like people without autism
Speaker 1: and people like connected to autism being like, no, don't
Speaker 1: stop praying on this, Yeah, stop making a dollar off
Speaker 1: of something that is like, really, I have a pretty
Speaker 1: white view because the kids I worked with UM were
Speaker 1: very low functioning for the most part. UM So these
Speaker 1: were kids who their parents had to live with the
Speaker 1: knowledge that, like number one, their kid was never going
Speaker 1: to live independently, was never going to be able to
Speaker 1: work a job or hold like normal relationships. And I
Speaker 1: was going to have to go to a home when
Speaker 1: they died um and in some cases before because like
Speaker 1: these parents would know that when I get too old
Speaker 1: to sort of like sometimes these kids could be violent.
Speaker 1: They need to be physically restrained. When I got too
Speaker 1: old to deal with that, my son or my daughter
Speaker 1: is going to live in a home without me, And
Speaker 1: that's horrifying and to have to deal with um. And
Speaker 1: so yeah, it just it infuriates me thinking about turning
Speaker 1: that into a reality TV show to talk about how
Speaker 1: great a doctor you are. Yeah, I mean it's really
Speaker 1: gross such a certainly in nineteen I would hope like
Speaker 1: public opinion would turn against a show like that, being
Speaker 1: like no, And it didn't get picked up because it
Speaker 1: was like, I like, the reason I'm not playing it
Speaker 1: for you is that it's really not it's boring too.
Speaker 1: It wasn't not a good preview clip or whatever. But
Speaker 1: I am going to read a summary of an episode
Speaker 1: from the Guardian. John's mother, John is one of the
Speaker 1: suffering kids, says Kriggsman's diagnosis is the answer to everything,
Speaker 1: and Krigsman is the doctor that they had to bring
Speaker 1: in cause Andrew Wakefield is not a doctor anymore. John's
Speaker 1: father tells us the subsequent change in his son has
Speaker 1: been absolutely dramatic. Finally, the short teaser wraps. The narrator
Speaker 1: says that groundbreaking work by the Autism team means that
Speaker 1: children can be treated effectively. So join us and follow
Speaker 1: their journey. So, yeah, Wakefield did not find a buyer
Speaker 1: for that totally awesome show, but he did wind up
Speaker 1: directing a feature film a little bit later. Yeah, Vaxed
Speaker 1: is the name of the documentary. Yeah, it built itself
Speaker 1: as quote an investigation into the CDC's destruction of a
Speaker 1: study linking autism to the MMR vaccine. Was it, of
Speaker 1: course not. I'm shaking my head there. Uh, and yes,
Speaker 1: you'd better believe he showed up on Info Wars to
Speaker 1: promote it. In this clip, he starts, he's been on
Speaker 1: inf Wars a lot. By the way, Yeah, he's a
Speaker 1: frequent guest of Alex Jones's. Okay, now starting to make sense.
Speaker 1: These terrible people are all friends. I'd be one about
Speaker 1: Andrew Wakefield's party with Steven Seagal, like they all know
Speaker 1: each other. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So in this clip,
Speaker 1: he starts by claiming to Alex Jones that he found
Speaker 1: a CDC whistle blower who was willing on record to
Speaker 1: say that he designed a study which proved a connection
Speaker 1: between autism and the MMR vaccine and then watched the
Speaker 1: CDC cover it up. That's the claim he's making an
Speaker 1: Info Wars is the claim it's being made in the documentary.
Speaker 1: So Wakefield presents this CDC whistle blower as being overwhelmed
Speaker 1: by his conscience and needing to come clean. Alex declares,
Speaker 1: not a doctor Andrew Wakefield to be an American hero.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna play a little clip of Andrew Wakefield talking
Speaker 1: on inf Wars. Well, you're admirable because every time I
Speaker 1: have you in here, here at the cutting edge of
Speaker 1: working with family is trying to put the truth out
Speaker 1: you name it, lawsuits. You've just been proven vindicated in
Speaker 1: the Spade's a true trailblazer. I know you don't like that,
Speaker 1: the true hero, Andrew Weggfield. You every wanna talk about
Speaker 1: yourself being vindicated. It's always we have a top whistle blower,
Speaker 1: the head of the program. You know, hired to cover
Speaker 1: it up, did all the studies. He's now gone public.
Speaker 1: The media won't cover it. You're just still worried about
Speaker 1: the millions of kids getting brain damaged. Alex. It's not
Speaker 1: about me. It's not about me at tool. I'm just
Speaker 1: a guy trying to do a job and trying to
Speaker 1: and being prevented. So I'm really just obstinate. But I'm
Speaker 1: not going to go away. I'm not going to duck
Speaker 1: for this issue. It's far too important. It's going to
Speaker 1: be from the estimates in the movie one and two,
Speaker 1: children born in T two are going to have autism.
Speaker 1: That is absolutely unacceptable. So whatever the media say about me,
Speaker 1: whatever the politicians, sam I mean, it doesn't matter, because
Speaker 1: I don't matter. It isn't. What matters is the future
Speaker 1: of this country, and the future of this country is
Speaker 1: its children. So I do want to hit a little
Speaker 1: bit on the conspiracy theorist vaccine people will often say
Speaker 1: that like my twenty thirty or ever, one out of
Speaker 1: every two children will have autism, to believe that it's
Speaker 1: something being spread by these vaccines, that's nonsense. The number
Speaker 1: of people with autism has shot up massively in the
Speaker 1: last couple of decades because they didn't used to know
Speaker 1: it was a thing, and they used to think that,
Speaker 1: like all these different syndromes that we now know are
Speaker 1: different kind of expressions of autism were totally different illnesses
Speaker 1: and stuff of sense. And the even bigger part of
Speaker 1: it is that it used to basically just be white
Speaker 1: kids who got diagnosed with autism, because you had to
Speaker 1: have some money to be able to go to a
Speaker 1: doctor for this, and if you were a black kid
Speaker 1: or a Hispanic kid it came from a poor area,
Speaker 1: they'd just be like, oh, you're just bad at learning,
Speaker 1: like yeah or yeah, and they wouldn't get to go
Speaker 1: to the doctor over yeah, you're you're just different. And
Speaker 1: now that medicine is less racist, we're realizing that it's
Speaker 1: more common than we thought, and we're be getting better
Speaker 1: at recognizing and we like, now they recognize that it's
Speaker 1: a spectrum, and so all these people who would never
Speaker 1: have been diagnosed as having anything everything like, well, no,
Speaker 1: you're on some level of the spectrum. Right. Spectrum has
Speaker 1: totally changed the way. It's just the fact that we
Speaker 1: didn't get this ship and it's not new. Autisms exist
Speaker 1: as long as there's been human beings we just didn't
Speaker 1: like it just used to be that like, oh this person, Wow,
Speaker 1: the way that their mind works is really different, which
Speaker 1: they didn't have, Like fucking tons of Greek philosophers and
Speaker 1: scientists probably had some kind of autism, Like yeah, and
Speaker 1: does he acknowledge spectrum? And uh, you know, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't know enough about what he says about autism
Speaker 1: because it's not an autism expert and gastro and urologist
Speaker 1: who lost his medical exactly. And it feels pretty fearmongry
Speaker 1: to say one and two people will have autism, as
Speaker 1: if it evokes like low functioning autism, which is not
Speaker 1: inherently bad. I feel like there's no there's this like
Speaker 1: it's fearmongering, and I don't think it helps people see
Speaker 1: the humanity and people with autism. It's it is that
Speaker 1: like suffering porn. It is that suffering porn. And I
Speaker 1: do want to state, you know, I just talked about
Speaker 1: working with the really low functioning kids. I also want
Speaker 1: to like my jobs when I was teaching in special
Speaker 1: ed was to work with this kid who had pretty
Speaker 1: severe aspert or cinder, but was very smart and was
Speaker 1: like he was an expert. We would go on walks
Speaker 1: and I would try to get like trying to socialize
Speaker 1: and getting used to like having conversations. And his thing
Speaker 1: was pumps, like like fountain pumps, And anytime we walked
Speaker 1: past like a pump in an apartment complex, he would
Speaker 1: explain how the whole thing was assembled underground, just looking
Speaker 1: at the top and he would he'd like would design
Speaker 1: them for fun. And the president of a company that
Speaker 1: designed pumps for like Las Vegas and stuff like like
Speaker 1: the Bellagio flew out to Dallas to like meet with
Speaker 1: this kid and like talking them and be like, when
Speaker 1: you graduate, send us a resume because like you're like
Speaker 1: the it's it's I don't know, like the idea, like
Speaker 1: both the making it out to be this horrible, doomed
Speaker 1: thing um and the suffering porn. Like it's all really
Speaker 1: gross to me. It oversimplifies something that's very complicated. Absolutely, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's just the tip of how infuriating that clip. What, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really bad. I I I'm glad. I hadn't even
Speaker 1: read that he'd been on info Wars. I just thought, Oh,
Speaker 1: he's in Austin. I bet he's been on aug What
Speaker 1: a good assumption. Oh, Alex Jones loves that he is
Speaker 1: a British accent. Probably sounds so legitimate anytime he can
Speaker 1: get a British person on that. Oh my god, you
Speaker 1: better believe it. I love when he says it's not
Speaker 1: about me, it's not about me. It's it's not about me.
Speaker 1: I can't I'm not going to know that was doing
Speaker 1: his accent, but like, no, no, you scamp people. Okay,
Speaker 1: you know what it's time for and we're back. My god,
Speaker 1: those ads. I you know what I love about ads
Speaker 1: is the way it makes me aware of the products
Speaker 1: and services that I can look into purchasing for myself
Speaker 1: and my loved ones. Oh yeah, that's what I like
Speaker 1: about them. Not to pushy, just just right, just just
Speaker 1: putting information out there. Now. Wakefield's documentary, you know, in
Speaker 1: that in that clip on info Wars, he claims that
Speaker 1: he's got this interview with this guy from the CDC,
Speaker 1: Dr Thompson, and the documentary basically claims that this guy
Speaker 1: the research proved that there was a connection between MMR
Speaker 1: and autism, and the CDC covered it up, and this
Speaker 1: guy's blowing the whistle on it. That's not what happened.
Speaker 1: Dr William Thompson was in fact critical of a single
Speaker 1: two thousand and four study that did fail to find
Speaker 1: a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. He had
Speaker 1: issues with the way the study was conducted that he
Speaker 1: believed needed to be fixed, but he never requested that
Speaker 1: his name be removed from the paper, which would have
Speaker 1: been the first step of scientist who wanted to disavow
Speaker 1: a piece of research would take. Wakefield's documentary includes interviews
Speaker 1: with Dr Thompson that have been carefully edited to give
Speaker 1: the impression that he is alleging to cover up rather
Speaker 1: than just angry about several very specific issues with the study.
Speaker 1: I'll put a link on our website behind the Bastard's
Speaker 1: dot com to an article that breaks down exactly what
Speaker 1: Wakefield did. But the short version is that he just
Speaker 1: chopped up a long, complex interview in order to put
Speaker 1: lies in someone else's mouth. Actual public published transcript up
Speaker 1: the full interview painted very different picture. I checked out
Speaker 1: the website for VACT because I wanted to get an
Speaker 1: idea for how Andrew Wakefield presents himself to a sympathetic audience.
Speaker 1: But I found was pretty cringe worthy. Here's an exerpt
Speaker 1: from a section of the website called who is Andrew Wakefield?
Speaker 1: If you heard Andrew Wakefield's name, and you probably have,
Speaker 1: you've heard two tales. You've heard that Dr Wakefield is
Speaker 1: a charlatan, an unethical researcher, and a huckster who was
Speaker 1: erased from the British Medical Registry in whose nine article
Speaker 1: on autism and gastro intestinal disease was retracted by a
Speaker 1: leading medical journal. You've also heard a very different story
Speaker 1: that Dr Wakefield is a brilliant and courageous scientist, a
Speaker 1: compassionate physician, beloved by his patients, and a champion for
Speaker 1: families with autism and vaccine injury. What's the truth? Anyone
Speaker 1: who writes that about themselves is not courageous and brilliant.
Speaker 1: And speaking of the last episode you were on, sounds
Speaker 1: more than a little bit like Keith Renieries biography of himself.
Speaker 1: I don't understand why I get how scam artists work.
Speaker 1: I get out you listen to like Mumbo Jumbo and
Speaker 1: it's in a soothing voice, and you're like, well, maybe,
Speaker 1: but once they start bragging about themselves and how great
Speaker 1: they are that's like the alarm sounds for me. No,
Speaker 1: especially like just as a journalist, whenever somebody starts bragging
Speaker 1: about themselves in that way, you kind of like, no, Okay,
Speaker 1: I probably shouldn't be listening to anything you have to say.
Speaker 1: You're probably a connorst trying to sell something. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: that's not how it works though, So yeah, well, okay.
Speaker 1: The truth is that thanks in large Part two no
Speaker 1: longer a Dr Andrew Wakefield, vaccination rates have fallen in
Speaker 1: numerous Western countries. It took twenty years for rates in
Speaker 1: Great Britain to return to their pre Wakefield levels. Time
Speaker 1: Magazine claims that quote, by the end the UK families
Speaker 1: had experienced more than twelve tho cases of measles and
Speaker 1: hundreds of hospitalizations, many with serious complications, and at least
Speaker 1: three deaths. That's some careful wording, because he's saying vaccinations
Speaker 1: are falling. Vaccination rates fell and then there were disease outbreaks.
Speaker 1: But like he's taking credit for a vaccination rates. This
Speaker 1: is Time Magazine immediately after like vaccination rate, he was
Speaker 1: bragging about making the vaccination rates. No, he thinks they're
Speaker 1: lying about how many measles cases there are because all
Speaker 1: of the evidence suggests that, oh, right after you published
Speaker 1: the study, people started getting vaccinated less, and then there
Speaker 1: were multiple daily measles outbreaks. Maybe there was two are connected,
Speaker 1: Maybe you caused them. Now it's probably impossible to put
Speaker 1: together an accurate account of the number of deaths and
Speaker 1: hospitalizations due to Andrew Wakefield and two thousand ten, there
Speaker 1: was a whooping cough outbreak in California, the worst in
Speaker 1: fifty years. It was spread by a kid whose parents
Speaker 1: had non medical exemptions for school vaccination requirements. Later research
Speaker 1: showed that most whooping cough cases occurred in clusters of
Speaker 1: unvaccinated children, causing nine thousand one infections and ten deaths.
Speaker 1: Two eighteen study published by the National Institute of Health
Speaker 1: drew a direct line between Wakefield's research and a worldwide epidemic,
Speaker 1: saying that as a result of the movement he ignited
Speaker 1: quote ultiple breakouts of measles have occurred throughout different parts
Speaker 1: of the Western world, infecting dozens of the patients and
Speaker 1: even causing deaths. In the UK and nineteen fifty six
Speaker 1: people contracted measles in two thousand six, this number increased
Speaker 1: to four hundred and forty nine in the first five
Speaker 1: months of the year, with the first death since nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety two and two thousand eight, measles was declared endemic
Speaker 1: in the UK for the first time in fourteen years,
Speaker 1: and Ireland an outbreak occurred in two thousand and fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred cases and three deaths were reported. The outbreak was
Speaker 1: reported to have occurred as a direct result of a
Speaker 1: drop in vaccination rates following the MMR controversy. In France,
Speaker 1: more than twenty two thousand cases of measles were reported
Speaker 1: from two thousand eight to two thousand and eleven. The
Speaker 1: United States has not been an exception, with outbreaks occurring
Speaker 1: most recently in two thousand eight, two thousand eleven, and
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen. As I write this, several dozen people
Speaker 1: have been hospitalized with measles in the Pacific Northwest. More
Speaker 1: are likely to have fallen sick. By the time you
Speaker 1: hear this episode, every one of those people can thank
Speaker 1: Dr Andrew Wakefield for what they're about to endure and
Speaker 1: only hopefully survive. Wow, that's my episode on Andrew Wakefield.
Speaker 1: He's so bad, He's real bad. It's so crazy that
Speaker 1: that one study did so much damage It is kind
Speaker 1: of like, you know, people always talk about like you
Speaker 1: could change the world. One person can change the world.
Speaker 1: They can't. They sure can't. They can't. That's not always
Speaker 1: a good thing. Yeah. Yeah, wow, that's why I'm always
Speaker 1: really like cag about using language like that around kids,
Speaker 1: like shoot for the Stars, you could do anything. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: you know that's true in good cases, but like Hitler
Speaker 1: believed that too. Yeah. Yeah, he was just a poor
Speaker 1: kid who wanted to achieve things. Yeah, ambition on its
Speaker 1: own is not good. Maybe don't encourage ambition. Maybe just
Speaker 1: encourage people to be happy, yeah, or to do things
Speaker 1: for other people. Yeah, the ambition to because it's complicated
Speaker 1: because like a lot of these vacs, like the Jonah Salk,
Speaker 1: the polio vaccine guy was a guy who just grew
Speaker 1: up seeing everybody diapolio and was like, fuck polio. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna fuck this disease up. So that's a
Speaker 1: good ambition. Yeah. So I guess I wonder what's our
Speaker 1: defense against this stuff, because it's like Alex Jones, some
Speaker 1: of his stuff is like whatever, people don't actually believe
Speaker 1: in gay frogs words video where he dresses like a
Speaker 1: frog and hops around. That sounds delightful, But this is
Speaker 1: so weirdly mainstream, is like you were saying, like people
Speaker 1: on the left and the right at a certain point
Speaker 1: believe it. Yeah, and I uh, I don't know what
Speaker 1: to tell you, Like I think that the only I
Speaker 1: honestly think that, Like if we're drawing a connection all
Speaker 1: the major problems of our current era, like you know,
Speaker 1: anti vac like vaccine denial, the apologist for people like
Speaker 1: Buthar al Assad who think that he's a socialist hero
Speaker 1: who's been maligned by the media, like the rise of
Speaker 1: Nazism in the Western world. I think this all has
Speaker 1: the same connection, which is that like our our schools
Speaker 1: are shitty and like people aren't taught critical thinking and
Speaker 1: taught how to like you wait and know when someone's
Speaker 1: lying to them and like it all it's the same
Speaker 1: reason why cut Co like got so many young people
Speaker 1: to like go out to try to trick them into
Speaker 1: believing they had a job when they were just like
Speaker 1: joining an MLM to sell shitty knives. Like yeah, we
Speaker 1: just need to be better at teaching people to recognize
Speaker 1: when they're being scammed, better at critical thinking. We need
Speaker 1: a vaccine for scams. And that's what that's what an
Speaker 1: education should be like. People should there should be classes
Speaker 1: in every school about like here, I don't know if
Speaker 1: someone's trying to scam you, here's how to here's how
Speaker 1: to recognize grifters. These are the words they use. It
Speaker 1: sounds like the vaccine against scamming could be this podcast.
Speaker 1: Sounds like the vaccine against scamming could be this podcast.
Speaker 1: So play this podcast to your children, play it to
Speaker 1: strange children on the street, abduct children who live near
Speaker 1: you and force them to listen to it, and then
Speaker 1: take their blood, and then take their blood, take any
Speaker 1: kids blood you want, because that's fine. Uh, this is
Speaker 1: Sophie's even it might get us in some legal trouble,
Speaker 1: all right. If you abduct a child, tell them Joe
Speaker 1: Rogan's podcast told you to do it. Yes, yes, that's perfect.
Speaker 1: Laime it on Rogan. And if you take their blood,
Speaker 1: double down, double down on Joe Rogan. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: feel like we're safe now, all right? By a T
Speaker 1: shirt public behind the bastards, Uh, you can use the
Speaker 1: T shirts to bind the arms of a child in
Speaker 1: order to make them listen to the show. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: I'm in some an you want to plug some stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can find me on Instagram bad comics with an
Speaker 1: x by on. I make web comics about anxiety and
Speaker 1: depression and stuff, and that's also my handle on Twitter.
Speaker 1: Hit me up if you have thoughts about anything. I
Speaker 1: feel like I said some things on this podcast that
Speaker 1: we're blanket statements, and I am afraid that I will
Speaker 1: be fact checked. All blanket statements are accurate. Um, I'm
Speaker 1: Robert Evans. Uh. You can find me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: I right. Okay. You can find this podcast on the
Speaker 1: inner webs at behind the Bastards dot com. You can
Speaker 1: find us on Instagram and Twitter at at bastards pod. Uh. Anna,
Speaker 1: we have one more episode to get through about an
Speaker 1: even guy, just another terrible doctor. Uh. It's gonna be
Speaker 1: a fun It'll be a short one, but you can
Speaker 1: all get to listen to that. Tomorrow we're gonna be
Speaker 1: talking about Dr Bob Sears. Strap in boys and girls
Speaker 1: and people who don't identify as either gender and whoever.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't care, Like, do you just strap in? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Anyone can strap in. Anyone can strap in, especially if
Speaker 1: you've abducted a child. All right at the end of
Speaker 1: the episode,