WEBVTT - Doubt, Part Two: The Man Behind The Myth 0:00:01.800 --> 0:00:05.439 Good morning to all of you. My name is George Hastings, 0:00:05.600 --> 0:00:08.320 and I'm a Special Master of the United States Court 0:00:08.320 --> 0:00:12.200 of Federal claim It's June two thousand seven and Special 0:00:12.240 --> 0:00:16.680 Master George Hastings is just kicking off new proceedings. Special 0:00:16.680 --> 0:00:20.520 Masters are sort of like judges. Hastings is overseen a 0:00:20.560 --> 0:00:23.160 case that involves a twelve year old girl with autism 0:00:23.520 --> 0:00:27.680 named Michelle Sadillo. He says, there are two reasons why 0:00:27.720 --> 0:00:30.960 everyone has gathered here in a nondescript room of the 0:00:31.040 --> 0:00:35.000 National Courts Building in Washington, d c. The purpose first 0:00:35.000 --> 0:00:38.400 purpose of this hearing is to determine whether Michelle's own 0:00:38.440 --> 0:00:43.600 autism and your other conditions were vaccine cause. But the 0:00:43.680 --> 0:00:47.000 second reason they're here is much bigger than this one 0:00:47.200 --> 0:00:51.839 individual case. Nearly five thousand other claims like Michelle's have 0:00:52.000 --> 0:00:55.520 also been filed. Each one alleges a child has developed 0:00:55.520 --> 0:01:00.680 autism or a similar disability after being given their routine measles, 0:01:00.880 --> 0:01:05.920 mumps and rebella vaccine, the MMR shot. In this hearing 0:01:06.400 --> 0:01:09.080 today and over the next three weeks, we will hear 0:01:09.120 --> 0:01:13.440 not only about Michelle's own condition, but also extensive expert 0:01:13.480 --> 0:01:18.760 testimony concerning the petitioner's first general causation theory, That is, 0:01:18.840 --> 0:01:24.600 the general theory that MMR vaccines and bimerisol containing vaccines 0:01:25.040 --> 0:01:29.319 can combine to cause autism. These proceedings will not actually 0:01:29.319 --> 0:01:31.600 take place in a courtroom, but in front of a 0:01:31.640 --> 0:01:36.039 trio of judicial officials called special Masters. Their job is 0:01:36.040 --> 0:01:39.240 to resolve complaints filed with what's known as the National 0:01:39.400 --> 0:01:47.080 Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. This little known program is where 0:01:47.120 --> 0:01:50.120 people who believe they were injured by routine shots in 0:01:50.160 --> 0:01:54.720 the US go to make their case. It exists as 0:01:54.720 --> 0:01:59.920 an alternative to suing drug makers. Instead, vaccine injury can 0:02:00.040 --> 0:02:03.240 planes are heard by the US Court of Federal Claims. 0:02:04.200 --> 0:02:10.760 In other words, this is vaccine Court. Public anxiety about 0:02:10.800 --> 0:02:15.760 autism and vaccines had been simmering for years. Now the 0:02:15.840 --> 0:02:19.520 court would hear the evidence. It would rule on whether 0:02:19.560 --> 0:02:23.720 there was a possible link between the two. Michelle Sadillo's 0:02:23.760 --> 0:02:28.079 complaint was just one of six test cases. It had 0:02:28.120 --> 0:02:32.560 taken five years to get to this day. A lot 0:02:32.840 --> 0:02:37.360 had been building to this moment. Both sides would present 0:02:37.400 --> 0:02:44.080 a parade of expert witnesses, among them psychiatrists, toxicologists, and neurologists. 0:02:45.040 --> 0:02:49.920 But one name in particular, kept coming up. As one 0:02:49.960 --> 0:02:53.160 of the attorneys for the US government frames it, the 0:02:53.280 --> 0:02:56.919 root of this controversy could be traced back to just 0:02:57.160 --> 0:03:01.240 one man, and that one man's theories. The attorney says, 0:03:02.120 --> 0:03:07.160 we're fake. It's a contrivals. It's a contrivance that's been 0:03:07.520 --> 0:03:11.799 developed and are articulated and promoted by its chief proponent, 0:03:11.880 --> 0:03:16.040 and that's Andrew Wakefield. Andrew Wakefield was the spark that 0:03:16.120 --> 0:03:21.679 turned to modern skepticism about vaccines into a movement, and 0:03:21.800 --> 0:03:26.919 now his movement is having its day in court. Wakefield 0:03:26.960 --> 0:03:29.520 had spent roughly a decade trying to sell the public 0:03:29.600 --> 0:03:33.440 on the idea that childhood vaccines were unsafe. If the 0:03:33.440 --> 0:03:37.920 government sides with the Sadio's case, it could legitimize that campaign. 0:03:39.120 --> 0:03:41.960 Wakefield was not a party in this hearing, but this 0:03:42.000 --> 0:03:48.880 pivotal moment probably would not be possible without him. In 0:03:48.920 --> 0:03:52.000 this episode, we're going to tell you the story of 0:03:52.160 --> 0:03:56.400 Andrew Wakefield. Will trace the path of the former gut 0:03:56.440 --> 0:04:00.360 surgeon as he became the world's most well known critic 0:04:00.480 --> 0:04:06.080 of vaccines. Will show how it's decades long misinformation campaign 0:04:06.640 --> 0:04:13.600 gained recognition from concerned parents, lawmakers, and celebrities and how 0:04:13.640 --> 0:04:18.120 the groundwork Wakefield late decades ago helped seed the mistrust 0:04:18.720 --> 0:04:22.920 we're seeing in the age of the coronavirus. But this 0:04:23.200 --> 0:04:27.159 isn't just a story about Andrew Wakefield. It's also a 0:04:27.240 --> 0:04:30.800 story about the forces that propelled him into the spotlight 0:04:31.520 --> 0:04:35.880 and then kept his myth alive. I'm Bloomberg News health 0:04:35.880 --> 0:04:41.560 reporter Kristin B. Brown from the Prognosis podcast. This is 0:04:41.600 --> 0:04:58.240 doubt the story of Andrew Wakefield's quest to undermine the 0:04:58.279 --> 0:05:03.560 safety of vaccines doesn't actually begin with vaccines. Yeah, it 0:05:03.600 --> 0:05:06.840 didn't start from M and R at all, Although that's 0:05:06.920 --> 0:05:11.000 the sort of public perception. That's not where the story starts. 0:05:11.839 --> 0:05:15.600 This is David Salisbury. For a long time he ran 0:05:15.680 --> 0:05:20.920 the UK's National Immunization program. I used to be the 0:05:21.000 --> 0:05:25.240 Director of Immunization at the Department of Health in London, UK, 0:05:25.880 --> 0:05:31.000 where I was responsible for the National Immunization Program. So 0:05:31.080 --> 0:05:36.200 that was for bringing it into use new vaccines, managing 0:05:36.240 --> 0:05:39.760 the use of existing vaccines, looking at the impact of 0:05:39.760 --> 0:05:45.680 our vaccines and heading up the national policy. David says 0:05:45.760 --> 0:05:51.120 Andrew Wakefield first reached out to him in September. It 0:05:51.279 --> 0:05:54.520 was an odd call. It was a long lines. You 0:05:54.640 --> 0:05:57.960 need to take very seriously what I'm telling you, and 0:05:58.080 --> 0:06:00.599 if you don't take seriously what I'm telling you, it 0:06:00.680 --> 0:06:04.640 may be to the detriment of the immunization program. And 0:06:04.720 --> 0:06:07.480 by the way, I want to talk about funding my research. 0:06:08.080 --> 0:06:13.320 It had an undertone of threat about it that unless 0:06:14.839 --> 0:06:20.359 I we the Department of Health, the government funded his research, 0:06:21.440 --> 0:06:27.680 then there could be threats to the vaccine program. At 0:06:27.680 --> 0:06:31.640 the time, Wakefield was a little known researcher at Royal 0:06:31.720 --> 0:06:35.880 Free Hospital School of Medicine in London. He had trained 0:06:35.920 --> 0:06:38.760 as a gut surgeon, but now he was on the 0:06:38.839 --> 0:06:44.120 hunt for the root cause of Crohn's disease. The UK 0:06:44.279 --> 0:06:48.960 introduced the new MMR vaccine, a shot that combined vaccines 0:06:49.000 --> 0:06:53.919 for three viruses into one. Then in ninety two the 0:06:53.960 --> 0:06:58.640 government discontinued use of two brands of the shot. Occasionally 0:06:59.000 --> 0:07:03.840 it seemed to cause meningitis instead of prevented. This was 0:07:03.880 --> 0:07:08.239 wakefield opening his research. Hadn't even looked at vaccines yet, 0:07:09.000 --> 0:07:12.000 but it seemed that he was already plotting to cash 0:07:12.080 --> 0:07:19.680 in on the concern surrounding them. He was researching that 0:07:19.920 --> 0:07:26.120 measles disease, not the vaccine that measles disease was in 0:07:26.200 --> 0:07:34.480 some way related causally to inflammatory bowel disease, and his 0:07:34.920 --> 0:07:42.640 theory was that measles virus caused a vasculitis and inflammation 0:07:42.680 --> 0:07:47.520 of the blood vessels within the bowel, and that that 0:07:47.680 --> 0:07:52.680 was a trigger for Crohn's disease and alsative colitis, so 0:07:52.920 --> 0:07:57.760 inflammatory bowel disease. Wakefield thought that the measles might actually 0:07:57.800 --> 0:08:03.880 be causing inflammatory bowel conditions like Crohn's disease. If at 0:08:03.920 --> 0:08:06.800 this point you were confused as to why Wakefield thought 0:08:06.800 --> 0:08:10.680 the government should fund research into vaccines because of research 0:08:11.040 --> 0:08:14.840 that had nothing to do with vaccines, you should be 0:08:21.120 --> 0:08:24.400 David didn't think wakefield hypothesis made a whole lot of sense, 0:08:25.000 --> 0:08:29.840 but he heard him out anyway. Remember, there were concerns 0:08:29.840 --> 0:08:33.679 about the MMR already brewing in the zeitgeist. Those two 0:08:33.760 --> 0:08:36.400 brands of the shot had just been pulled from market 0:08:36.800 --> 0:08:40.200 after it appeared they increased the risk of miningitis. And 0:08:40.320 --> 0:08:44.680 even with rigorous and extensive safety testing, sometimes vaccines do 0:08:44.880 --> 0:08:51.679 have problems. Any medical intervention can. It led to eventually 0:08:52.120 --> 0:08:56.040 the Department of Health agreeing to set up a scientific 0:08:56.280 --> 0:09:02.880 meeting for him to present his work along with another 0:09:03.200 --> 0:09:06.680 researcher who had got a different theory, nothing to do 0:09:06.720 --> 0:09:10.520 with measles, but who've got a different theory about the 0:09:10.559 --> 0:09:14.720 origins of inflammatory bow disease. And we brought together a 0:09:14.800 --> 0:09:19.880 number of experts only inflammatory bow disease on measles virus 0:09:21.200 --> 0:09:25.839 together and the two presented their work, and we gave 0:09:25.880 --> 0:09:32.760 them careful consideration. So you know, we didn't ignore his letter. 0:09:37.559 --> 0:09:40.200 But right off the bat in that meeting with Wakefield, 0:09:40.520 --> 0:09:42.440 some of the experts there were able to poke some 0:09:42.520 --> 0:09:45.520 holes in his theory. He seemed to be using some 0:09:45.600 --> 0:09:48.160 of the lab equipment in a way that differed from 0:09:48.160 --> 0:09:53.960 the manufacturers instructions. One of the measles experts for whom 0:09:54.000 --> 0:09:59.560 I have always had the highest respect, was clearly a 0:09:59.679 --> 0:10:08.960 long away from persuaded when Wakefield explained how many PCR 0:10:09.520 --> 0:10:16.080 polymerase chain reaction cycles he was doing to try to 0:10:16.240 --> 0:10:21.360 get a positive signal. They were basically running samples to 0:10:21.480 --> 0:10:27.080 the machine way more times than recommended. The particular measles 0:10:27.160 --> 0:10:30.880 experts said, if measles was there, you would not be 0:10:30.960 --> 0:10:35.199 doing thirty five PCR cycles. You would have found it 0:10:35.760 --> 0:10:41.320 very very much earlier. This risk producing a false positive. Yeah, 0:10:41.360 --> 0:10:44.079 I think The analogy was that if you have a 0:10:45.040 --> 0:10:48.320 stereo and you've got nothing playing through it, but you 0:10:48.400 --> 0:10:51.120 keep on turning the volume up, you'll start to hear 0:10:51.200 --> 0:11:05.200 something what you're not hearing. His bet open. This is 0:11:05.280 --> 0:11:08.080 probably a good place to point out that since then, 0:11:08.800 --> 0:11:13.520 nearly three decades ago, Andrew Wakefield's work has been dismissed 0:11:13.760 --> 0:11:19.680 over and over again by the scientific establishment. Eventually British 0:11:19.720 --> 0:11:23.280 authorities would ban him from medical practice and his work 0:11:23.280 --> 0:11:27.840 would be revealed as fraudulent, but this would take years. 0:11:29.040 --> 0:11:32.280 There were a lot of reasons why Wakefield was already 0:11:32.360 --> 0:11:37.319 thinking about a potential link between the MMR vaccine and autism. 0:11:37.360 --> 0:11:40.720 The first factor was that in the nineties, awareness of 0:11:40.760 --> 0:11:45.880 autism was increasing as researchers expanded the diagnosis to include 0:11:45.920 --> 0:11:50.520 a wide spectrum of conditions, and so what the public 0:11:50.559 --> 0:11:55.839 saw was an increase of autism cases without any context. 0:11:57.040 --> 0:12:00.760 The second factor was that the meninginist had kicked up 0:12:00.840 --> 0:12:06.040 fears about the MMR vaccine. Even before Wakefield hit the scene, 0:12:06.679 --> 0:12:13.240 people were starting to mobilize against vaccines. A British mother 0:12:13.360 --> 0:12:16.880 named Jackie Fletcher launched an anti vaccine group called JABS. 0:12:17.920 --> 0:12:22.320 Fletcher started the organization because she believed the MMR caused 0:12:22.360 --> 0:12:26.240 brain damage in her infant son, and a British lawyer 0:12:26.320 --> 0:12:29.839 named Richard Barr was working with other attorneys to put 0:12:29.880 --> 0:12:34.319 together a class action lawsuit over the MMR. Around this time, 0:12:34.880 --> 0:12:38.880 David says Wakefield's theories changed too. He then moved on 0:12:39.720 --> 0:12:44.080 and said, ah, it's not wild virus, it's not the 0:12:44.240 --> 0:12:49.280 natural measles virus, it's the vaccine. Those initial raised eyebrows 0:12:49.600 --> 0:12:53.280 did not deter Wakefield from his quest. He went on 0:12:53.400 --> 0:12:57.280 to publish work that suggested Crohn's disease was more common 0:12:57.440 --> 0:13:01.000 in people who were vaccinated against the measles but he 0:13:01.080 --> 0:13:05.040 made his argument by comparing two previous studies that were 0:13:05.160 --> 0:13:09.440 unrelated in the same journal that published the study. Other 0:13:09.520 --> 0:13:13.400 scientists pointed out that comparing these two studies didn't make 0:13:13.440 --> 0:13:17.720 a whole lot of sense. It didn't matter. Wakefield was 0:13:18.040 --> 0:13:22.640 convinced it wasn't the wild measles virus causing the bowel issues, 0:13:23.280 --> 0:13:28.480 it was the measles vaccine. Wakefield's research got the attention 0:13:28.520 --> 0:13:32.880 of moms who were already concerned that MMR vaccines had 0:13:32.960 --> 0:13:37.760 hurt their kids, but that was nothing compared to what 0:13:37.800 --> 0:13:45.680 would come next. In February, Andrew Wakefield published a study 0:13:45.800 --> 0:13:49.280 in The Lancet. The Lancet is one of the world's 0:13:49.280 --> 0:13:54.040 most prestigious medical journals. It's a big deal if your 0:13:54.040 --> 0:13:59.800 work is published there. The study made Wakefield famous. The 0:14:00.000 --> 0:14:05.080 study itself falsely linked the MMR vaccine to developmental issues 0:14:05.200 --> 0:14:10.000 and stomach problems by looking at just twelve children. Wakefield 0:14:10.360 --> 0:14:15.079 was an opportunist. He had seen the conversations bubbling about 0:14:15.120 --> 0:14:18.760 the MMR vaccine and autism and found a way to 0:14:18.760 --> 0:14:23.440 fit them into his initial theory. Wakefield didn't just quietly 0:14:23.480 --> 0:14:26.640 put out his study, though he held a press conference, 0:14:27.200 --> 0:14:32.920 a big one. There was credibility from the places in 0:14:33.000 --> 0:14:39.880 which his work was being published. There was a sort 0:14:39.920 --> 0:14:42.800 of credibility because he was saying it in the public 0:14:42.840 --> 0:14:46.280 domain in a way that doctors didn't often do. It 0:14:46.400 --> 0:14:52.000 was very unusual for a doctor to be going so public, 0:14:53.520 --> 0:14:57.600 and I think that as a person he is persuaded. 0:15:07.360 --> 0:15:10.000 Wakefield went even further in his claims at the press 0:15:10.000 --> 0:15:14.240 conference than he had in the paper. He also suggested 0:15:14.480 --> 0:15:18.960 that individual vaccines could be safer than the triple MMR, 0:15:19.680 --> 0:15:23.120 measles maps and rebella given together, maybe too much for 0:15:23.120 --> 0:15:25.640 the immune system of some children to handle. It was 0:15:25.680 --> 0:15:29.880 the launch of an all out war against the MMR vaccine. 0:15:31.040 --> 0:15:36.400 That was really the start of a series of publications 0:15:37.280 --> 0:15:44.880 and statements that Wakefield made on a public footing that 0:15:45.040 --> 0:15:50.840 left us always having to chase to find evidence to 0:15:50.920 --> 0:15:56.280 show that he was wrong, and that put us, being 0:15:56.920 --> 0:16:03.120 the scientific community us response for the humanization program, in 0:16:03.160 --> 0:16:06.400 a very very difficult position because each time that he 0:16:06.520 --> 0:16:10.440 produced what he said was new evidence, we were having 0:16:10.480 --> 0:16:15.720 to chase that to show that it wasn't right. Still, 0:16:16.280 --> 0:16:20.760 Wakefield kept trying to convince the scientific community that this 0:16:20.840 --> 0:16:26.640 work was credible. In March, Wakefield presented his work and 0:16:26.720 --> 0:16:30.520 a meeting at the Royal College of Surgeons. David was 0:16:30.560 --> 0:16:37.239 there again. David says, other scientists poked holes in wakefield 0:16:37.320 --> 0:16:41.640 theories and I don't believe that at the end of 0:16:41.680 --> 0:16:50.640 that meeting the audience was persuaded by his presentations. David 0:16:50.720 --> 0:16:55.680 says the UK's Independent Advisory Committee on Vaccines had also 0:16:55.840 --> 0:17:00.600 reviewed the research and found it unconvincing. So all of 0:17:00.680 --> 0:17:05.800 the relevant bodies that could look at the data at 0:17:05.840 --> 0:17:12.120 the science as the policy implications were not persuaded that 0:17:12.160 --> 0:17:15.800 we needed to be making any changes, and indeed we 0:17:15.800 --> 0:17:17.960 were not being asked by way it feel to make 0:17:18.000 --> 0:17:23.720 any changes until the press conference on the day of 0:17:23.960 --> 0:17:33.160 the release of the Lancet paper. None of that mattered, though. 0:17:34.000 --> 0:17:38.439 The public was much more receptive to the controversial and 0:17:38.560 --> 0:17:44.840 shocking idea that vaccines might cause autism. News organizations ran 0:17:45.000 --> 0:17:48.520 with the debate, but there has been growing concern among 0:17:48.600 --> 0:17:51.560 parents and advocacy groups about the safety of many of 0:17:51.600 --> 0:17:54.359 these vaccines. In fact, some groups now believe there's a 0:17:54.400 --> 0:17:58.800 connection between autism and vaccines. The U S Department of Education. 0:17:58.880 --> 0:18:03.160 Doubts about this safety of the MMR vaccine had been seated, 0:18:04.000 --> 0:18:07.040 and they would just keep growing. By the end of 0:18:07.080 --> 0:18:10.600 the nineties, Andrew Wakefield had gone from a little known 0:18:10.680 --> 0:18:16.200 researcher to a rock star scientist. But as his profile grew, 0:18:16.840 --> 0:18:20.439 his work also invited more scrutiny, and it caught the 0:18:20.440 --> 0:18:23.000 attention of one man who would make it his mission 0:18:23.520 --> 0:18:40.159 to expose the truth of Wakefield's fictions. My name is 0:18:40.160 --> 0:18:42.760 Brian Dear. I'm the author of the book The Doctor 0:18:42.840 --> 0:18:46.040 Who Fooled the World, An investigation into the origins of 0:18:46.080 --> 0:18:50.440 modern anti vaccine campaigning. Brian Deer has written about vaccines 0:18:50.560 --> 0:18:53.919 for more than two decades, and when he first heard 0:18:53.960 --> 0:18:57.760 about the Lancet study, he thought it seemed fishy. There 0:18:57.760 --> 0:19:01.800 were some odd coincidences between and a debunked whooping calf 0:19:01.880 --> 0:19:06.560 vaccine study. I saw that both of the papers had 0:19:06.640 --> 0:19:10.560 this time link of fourteen days written into them, and 0:19:11.960 --> 0:19:14.520 I thought, how could that be when the vaccines were 0:19:14.560 --> 0:19:18.840 in fact two very different technologies. One was based on 0:19:19.560 --> 0:19:24.080 killing a bacterium with the formally preservative, the other was 0:19:24.200 --> 0:19:29.199 based on live viruses. That's They're very different technologies, And 0:19:29.240 --> 0:19:31.840 I thought, well, how could they have that time link? 0:19:32.480 --> 0:19:36.440 But Brian let it go. I could see no way 0:19:36.640 --> 0:19:38.959 of ever being able to get to the bottom of that, 0:19:39.440 --> 0:19:42.320 so I put the thing to one side for five years. 0:19:42.359 --> 0:19:44.840 I never got involved in the story for five years 0:19:44.920 --> 0:19:49.040 after that paper was published. Then in two thousand three, 0:19:49.520 --> 0:19:53.080 Brian was doing a routine assignment on the MMR vaccine. 0:19:53.880 --> 0:19:58.760 Very quickly, I think within within the first week of 0:19:58.800 --> 0:20:02.080 me actually see reously doing some work on it. I 0:20:02.160 --> 0:20:05.639 interviewed one of the mothers who had enrolled a child 0:20:05.760 --> 0:20:10.199 in Wakefield research. That is, he interviewed the mother of 0:20:10.240 --> 0:20:14.040 one of the twelve children in the Lancet study. The 0:20:14.160 --> 0:20:18.000 names of patients involved in studies are usually anonymised. This 0:20:18.160 --> 0:20:21.000 made it tough for anyone to go about fact checking 0:20:21.200 --> 0:20:25.240 many aspects of Wakefield's work. And the story she told 0:20:25.240 --> 0:20:29.720 me could not be reconciled with the paper. And from 0:20:29.760 --> 0:20:33.240 that I could see that there was at least some 0:20:33.320 --> 0:20:37.200 kind of mismatch, some kind of irregularity in this paper, 0:20:37.600 --> 0:20:48.880 some kind of peculiarity going on. Brian kept digging. Remember 0:20:49.000 --> 0:20:51.720 Richard Barr, that lawyer who was trying to get a 0:20:51.720 --> 0:20:56.680 class action suit together over the MMR vaccine. Wakefield had 0:20:56.720 --> 0:21:00.000 actually been approached by a firm of lawyers two years 0:21:00.160 --> 0:21:04.040 before the paper was published, and had taken employment with 0:21:04.119 --> 0:21:07.920 them to make a case for them for this firm 0:21:07.960 --> 0:21:12.000 of lawyers against the MMR vaccine in order that they 0:21:12.040 --> 0:21:15.959 could get a class action lawsuit going. Bryan says, Bar 0:21:16.119 --> 0:21:20.600 first guy interested in vaccines, sort of by chance, he 0:21:20.880 --> 0:21:24.919 had a client who after he did the conveyancing on 0:21:25.040 --> 0:21:29.840 her house, she'd said to him later that her child 0:21:29.960 --> 0:21:33.560 had received the MMR vaccine and had developed meningitis. And 0:21:34.040 --> 0:21:37.720 as soon as the government withdrew two brands of the 0:21:37.840 --> 0:21:40.399 MMR vaccine, he was on the phone to this This 0:21:40.720 --> 0:21:43.840 mother got her into the newspapers, and once he got 0:21:43.840 --> 0:21:46.760 in the newspapers, he was the person to go to 0:21:47.000 --> 0:21:55.120 if you wanted to make a complaint about the MMR vaccine. 0:21:56.000 --> 0:21:59.840 Bryan discovered that before the lance that study, bar Heard 0:22:00.080 --> 0:22:03.920 hired Wakefield to help prove their claims and send them 0:22:03.920 --> 0:22:08.439 patients for the research. Neither wake Builds hospital nor his 0:22:08.520 --> 0:22:14.439 study co authors knew anything about the connection. The children 0:22:14.440 --> 0:22:17.760 who had come to the hospital weren't just children off 0:22:17.800 --> 0:22:21.040 the street, if you like, or routine patients. They had 0:22:21.040 --> 0:22:25.560 actually been sent to Wakefield by an anti vaccine group. 0:22:29.600 --> 0:22:31.920 The kids in the study were sent to the hospital 0:22:31.960 --> 0:22:37.040 because their parents already believed that they had been vaccine damaged. Basically, 0:22:37.680 --> 0:22:41.040 Wakefield had made a big assumption about what his study 0:22:41.040 --> 0:22:44.840 would find and then cherry picked research subjects in an 0:22:44.840 --> 0:22:48.840 effort to prove it. The relationship between Richard Barr and 0:22:48.840 --> 0:22:53.960 Andrew Wakefield and that paper which they which they devised together, 0:22:54.520 --> 0:22:57.200 and that is the acorn from which the modern anti 0:22:57.280 --> 0:23:01.320 vaccine movement has grown. They all began with Wakefield, and 0:23:02.200 --> 0:23:04.520 that's what the patent was all about. It was designed 0:23:04.640 --> 0:23:10.199 to be the battering ram which created the law so 0:23:10.320 --> 0:23:12.560 that they could recruit a lot of class to this lawsuit, 0:23:12.640 --> 0:23:18.600 which they ultimately did not. Long after the paper was published, 0:23:18.920 --> 0:23:22.920 Richard Barr's lawsuit had its first day in court. Richard 0:23:22.960 --> 0:23:26.960 Barr declined to be recorded for this podcast. He said 0:23:27.040 --> 0:23:29.840 in an email that at the time of his lawsuit 0:23:30.240 --> 0:23:34.400 there were genuine concerns about the MMR vaccine. He said 0:23:34.400 --> 0:23:36.840 that Wakefield was just one of many experts that he 0:23:36.880 --> 0:23:39.960 relied on to make his case in court. He wrote 0:23:40.000 --> 0:23:44.000 to me that quote, vaccine damage is real, and it 0:23:44.080 --> 0:23:46.919 was a question of whether the symptoms described by the 0:23:47.000 --> 0:23:49.879 hundreds of parents who approached us were attributable to the 0:23:50.000 --> 0:23:56.719 MMR end of story end quote. He also added that 0:23:56.760 --> 0:23:59.760 he had just gotten his own COVID nineteen vaccine and 0:24:00.040 --> 0:24:20.119 hopes that others do the same. Wakefield was not a 0:24:20.160 --> 0:24:23.119 fan of Brian's reporting on his work. He turned to 0:24:23.160 --> 0:24:27.640 the courts to try and shut Brian down. Wakefield, Brian 0:24:28.080 --> 0:24:31.320 and Britain's Channel four wound up locked in a libel battle. 0:24:32.280 --> 0:24:34.640 No one wants to get sued, but it actually turned 0:24:34.680 --> 0:24:38.159 out to be great for Brian. Brian had already figured 0:24:38.160 --> 0:24:40.320 out the identities of all of the kids in the 0:24:40.400 --> 0:24:44.560 length of study. Then he and his lawyers received medical 0:24:44.600 --> 0:24:51.560 records from Wakefield's research, and somehow, presumably accidentally, somebody had 0:24:51.600 --> 0:24:55.320 forgotten to redact some of those records. This gave Brian 0:24:55.400 --> 0:24:58.480 access to pretty detailed medical histories of the kids in 0:24:58.520 --> 0:25:05.280 the study. This led to some incredible fines over Wakefield's claims. 0:25:06.320 --> 0:25:09.360 Brain found that Wakefield had changed some of the initial 0:25:09.400 --> 0:25:12.920 diagnoses of the kids in the study to fit his theory. 0:25:13.400 --> 0:25:20.199 Brian says that's because Whakefield had other motivations besides scientific discovery. Firstly, 0:25:20.200 --> 0:25:23.879 he wanted money. Remember when Wakefield started suggesting that the 0:25:23.920 --> 0:25:30.520 triple MMR shot might not be safe together. Brian says 0:25:30.560 --> 0:25:33.600 there's a reason for that. He also had set up 0:25:33.600 --> 0:25:38.360 a network of companies that was going to sell what 0:25:38.440 --> 0:25:43.000 he claimed to be the first potential safer vaccine to 0:25:43.160 --> 0:25:45.919 the MMR. He'd filed for a patent eight months before 0:25:46.000 --> 0:25:49.560 his paper that launched the scare over the MMR vACC 0:25:49.600 --> 0:25:53.320 and he patented his own single measles vaccine, so he 0:25:53.400 --> 0:25:57.080 had that he was planning on selling diagnostic tests and 0:25:57.200 --> 0:26:01.800 what he called a potential complete cure for autism. But 0:26:01.920 --> 0:26:06.199 Brian says it also wasn't just about the money. He 0:26:06.320 --> 0:26:08.719 wanted to be a great man. He thought he was 0:26:09.240 --> 0:26:13.439 a remarkable character. He thought that he was he was 0:26:13.960 --> 0:26:17.080 a very special person, and he believed he was entitled 0:26:17.080 --> 0:26:20.840 to win the Nobel Prize. Brian's reporting found that Wakefield's 0:26:20.920 --> 0:26:25.320 university eventually insisted he do a rigorous study to replicate 0:26:25.359 --> 0:26:30.520 his findings. He refused. By this point, other researchers had 0:26:30.520 --> 0:26:34.200 already failed to duplicate his work. A lab in Ireland 0:26:34.240 --> 0:26:38.440 claimed it had independently verified the findings, but Brian found 0:26:38.600 --> 0:26:43.600 that the lab pathologist and Wakefield were actually in business together. 0:26:44.400 --> 0:26:47.920 It was a convoluted web of lies and conflicts of interest. 0:26:48.640 --> 0:26:51.879 The study that had ignited widespread panic over the MMR 0:26:52.000 --> 0:26:57.560 vaccine was pretty much anything but scientific. Bryan says that 0:26:57.600 --> 0:27:00.399 the reason Wayfield focused on the measles in the first 0:27:00.440 --> 0:27:06.160 place was even suspect. He got this idea reading an encyclopedia. 0:27:06.200 --> 0:27:08.800 He went to the hospital library and took out an 0:27:08.880 --> 0:27:13.720 encyclopedia and went as an encyclopedia of viruses, and went 0:27:13.760 --> 0:27:17.119 through this encyclopedia virus by virus until he came to 0:27:17.160 --> 0:27:20.000 one that he thought he thought, well, oh that looks 0:27:20.119 --> 0:27:22.959 that looks promising and it was measles, and he latched 0:27:23.000 --> 0:27:25.520 onto this idea. So he was unable to let go 0:27:26.400 --> 0:27:29.760 of his idea. But Brian hadn't even begun to look 0:27:29.800 --> 0:27:33.040 into Wakefield until five years after the study came out. 0:27:33.840 --> 0:27:38.399 By that point, doubt about the vaccine had spread, the 0:27:38.520 --> 0:27:42.879 damage had been done. David Salisbury had started his career 0:27:42.960 --> 0:27:47.080 not long after another crisis in vaccine confidence, this one 0:27:47.119 --> 0:27:51.199 over unfounded concerns about the whooping cough vaccine. There had 0:27:51.240 --> 0:27:54.199 been major epidemics of the disease in the late seventies 0:27:54.240 --> 0:27:58.119 and eighties, but eventually the UK managed to restore trust 0:27:58.119 --> 0:28:00.840 in the shot and get vaccine and rates back up. 0:28:01.640 --> 0:28:06.920 But David says the MMR vaccine rumors were stickier. If 0:28:06.920 --> 0:28:10.640 you put the balance and you have autism on one 0:28:10.640 --> 0:28:12.960 side of the scale and you have measles on the other, 0:28:13.920 --> 0:28:17.240 it's very easy to say, I'll take the risk of measles, 0:28:17.240 --> 0:28:19.800 but I won't take the risk of autism. It was 0:28:19.880 --> 0:28:22.800 hard to convince parents to take on even a teeny 0:28:22.880 --> 0:28:26.400 risk of artism to protect against an illness most people 0:28:26.440 --> 0:28:29.800 had never even seen in their lifetime. In the years 0:28:30.040 --> 0:28:35.479 after Wakefield study, the number of cases of measles, mumps, 0:28:35.640 --> 0:28:40.000 and rebella would take up each year to counter that. 0:28:40.680 --> 0:28:44.160 It wasn't good enough to say we don't believe it 0:28:45.400 --> 0:28:50.520 or we know better when we had nothing to put 0:28:50.600 --> 0:28:54.920 that on other than the background knowledge that we had, 0:28:55.480 --> 0:29:00.720 because nobody had been into the Island Lab until much 0:29:00.840 --> 0:29:05.080 later to be able to go through their workbooks and 0:29:05.240 --> 0:29:09.000 look at what they were actually doing and try to 0:29:09.120 --> 0:29:14.240 make sense of the positive responses that we later learned 0:29:14.240 --> 0:29:19.200 were coming from empty wells in the PCR machines that 0:29:19.280 --> 0:29:23.880 themselves had not been serviced according to the manufacturer's specifications. 0:29:24.080 --> 0:29:29.080 None of that was known. Study after study had failed 0:29:29.280 --> 0:29:35.080 to reproduce Wakefield's findings. The scientific consensus was still that 0:29:35.160 --> 0:29:39.680 the MMR vaccine was safe and had no link to 0:29:39.800 --> 0:29:45.280 artism or any other similar condition, but the public was 0:29:45.360 --> 0:29:53.640 becoming increasingly hesitant. Saying to people, measles can kill. Actually 0:29:55.320 --> 0:29:59.920 confronts credibility when they've never heard of anyone dying of measles. 0:30:00.560 --> 0:30:03.959 These are not quick to turn around. These are supertankers, 0:30:04.840 --> 0:30:09.479 These stories that really are difficult to turn around. By 0:30:09.560 --> 0:30:16.080 this point, Wakefield was hardly scientist. He had become something else, 0:30:16.880 --> 0:30:21.240 a guru. Wakefield had used his time in the limelight 0:30:21.320 --> 0:30:24.560 to push his false message, not just across the UK, 0:30:25.360 --> 0:30:29.920 but across the globe. He played the victim, the outsider 0:30:30.000 --> 0:30:33.880 to the medical establishment, speaking the hard truths about government 0:30:33.960 --> 0:30:38.320 and big pharma. And by this point Wakefield was done 0:30:38.360 --> 0:30:42.400 with the UK anyway. His conspiracies had found a warm 0:30:42.480 --> 0:30:56.520 reception across the Atlantic. In the United States, It's April 0:30:56.560 --> 0:30:59.440 two thousand and Andrew Wakefield is about to testify, but 0:30:59.520 --> 0:31:02.760 for cong Us we will now will now welcome our 0:31:02.840 --> 0:31:06.960 second panel to the witness table, Dr Andrew Wakefield, who 0:31:07.000 --> 0:31:10.240 came all the way from Merry Old, England. We appreciate 0:31:10.320 --> 0:31:15.000 him being here. The topic is the potential link between 0:31:15.080 --> 0:31:19.640 vaccines and autism in kids. The chair of the committee 0:31:19.960 --> 0:31:25.560 is Republican Representative Dan Burton of Indiana. This is his investigation. 0:31:26.120 --> 0:31:29.720 It's personal for him. He believes his own grandson got 0:31:29.760 --> 0:31:34.720