Speaker 1: Good morning to all of you. My name is George Hastings,
Speaker 1: and I'm a Special Master of the United States Court
Speaker 1: of Federal claim It's June two thousand seven and Special
Speaker 1: Master George Hastings is just kicking off new proceedings. Special
Speaker 1: Masters are sort of like judges. Hastings is overseen a
Speaker 1: case that involves a twelve year old girl with autism
Speaker 1: named Michelle Sadillo. He says, there are two reasons why
Speaker 1: everyone has gathered here in a nondescript room of the
Speaker 1: National Courts Building in Washington, d c. The purpose first
Speaker 1: purpose of this hearing is to determine whether Michelle's own
Speaker 1: autism and your other conditions were vaccine cause. But the
Speaker 1: second reason they're here is much bigger than this one
Speaker 1: individual case. Nearly five thousand other claims like Michelle's have
Speaker 1: also been filed. Each one alleges a child has developed
Speaker 1: autism or a similar disability after being given their routine measles,
Speaker 1: mumps and rebella vaccine, the MMR shot. In this hearing
Speaker 1: today and over the next three weeks, we will hear
Speaker 1: not only about Michelle's own condition, but also extensive expert
Speaker 1: testimony concerning the petitioner's first general causation theory, That is,
Speaker 1: the general theory that MMR vaccines and bimerisol containing vaccines
Speaker 1: can combine to cause autism. These proceedings will not actually
Speaker 1: take place in a courtroom, but in front of a
Speaker 1: trio of judicial officials called special Masters. Their job is
Speaker 1: to resolve complaints filed with what's known as the National
Speaker 1: Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. This little known program is where
Speaker 1: people who believe they were injured by routine shots in
Speaker 1: the US go to make their case. It exists as
Speaker 1: an alternative to suing drug makers. Instead, vaccine injury can
Speaker 1: planes are heard by the US Court of Federal Claims.
Speaker 1: In other words, this is vaccine Court. Public anxiety about
Speaker 1: autism and vaccines had been simmering for years. Now the
Speaker 1: court would hear the evidence. It would rule on whether
Speaker 1: there was a possible link between the two. Michelle Sadillo's
Speaker 1: complaint was just one of six test cases. It had
Speaker 1: taken five years to get to this day. A lot
Speaker 1: had been building to this moment. Both sides would present
Speaker 1: a parade of expert witnesses, among them psychiatrists, toxicologists, and neurologists.
Speaker 1: But one name in particular, kept coming up. As one
Speaker 1: of the attorneys for the US government frames it, the
Speaker 1: root of this controversy could be traced back to just
Speaker 1: one man, and that one man's theories. The attorney says,
Speaker 1: we're fake. It's a contrivals. It's a contrivance that's been
Speaker 1: developed and are articulated and promoted by its chief proponent,
Speaker 1: and that's Andrew Wakefield. Andrew Wakefield was the spark that
Speaker 1: turned to modern skepticism about vaccines into a movement, and
Speaker 1: now his movement is having its day in court. Wakefield
Speaker 1: had spent roughly a decade trying to sell the public
Speaker 1: on the idea that childhood vaccines were unsafe. If the
Speaker 1: government sides with the Sadio's case, it could legitimize that campaign.
Speaker 1: Wakefield was not a party in this hearing, but this
Speaker 1: pivotal moment probably would not be possible without him. In
Speaker 1: this episode, we're going to tell you the story of
Speaker 1: Andrew Wakefield. Will trace the path of the former gut
Speaker 1: surgeon as he became the world's most well known critic
Speaker 1: of vaccines. Will show how it's decades long misinformation campaign
Speaker 1: gained recognition from concerned parents, lawmakers, and celebrities and how
Speaker 1: the groundwork Wakefield late decades ago helped seed the mistrust
Speaker 1: we're seeing in the age of the coronavirus. But this
Speaker 1: isn't just a story about Andrew Wakefield. It's also a
Speaker 1: story about the forces that propelled him into the spotlight
Speaker 1: and then kept his myth alive. I'm Bloomberg News health
Speaker 1: reporter Kristin B. Brown from the Prognosis podcast. This is
Speaker 1: doubt the story of Andrew Wakefield's quest to undermine the
Speaker 1: safety of vaccines doesn't actually begin with vaccines. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: didn't start from M and R at all, Although that's
Speaker 1: the sort of public perception. That's not where the story starts.
Speaker 1: This is David Salisbury. For a long time he ran
Speaker 1: the UK's National Immunization program. I used to be the
Speaker 1: Director of Immunization at the Department of Health in London, UK,
Speaker 1: where I was responsible for the National Immunization Program. So
Speaker 1: that was for bringing it into use new vaccines, managing
Speaker 1: the use of existing vaccines, looking at the impact of
Speaker 1: our vaccines and heading up the national policy. David says
Speaker 1: Andrew Wakefield first reached out to him in September. It
Speaker 1: was an odd call. It was a long lines. You
Speaker 1: need to take very seriously what I'm telling you, and
Speaker 1: if you don't take seriously what I'm telling you, it
Speaker 1: may be to the detriment of the immunization program. And
Speaker 1: by the way, I want to talk about funding my research.
Speaker 1: It had an undertone of threat about it that unless
Speaker 1: I we the Department of Health, the government funded his research,
Speaker 1: then there could be threats to the vaccine program. At
Speaker 1: the time, Wakefield was a little known researcher at Royal
Speaker 1: Free Hospital School of Medicine in London. He had trained
Speaker 1: as a gut surgeon, but now he was on the
Speaker 1: hunt for the root cause of Crohn's disease. The UK
Speaker 1: introduced the new MMR vaccine, a shot that combined vaccines
Speaker 1: for three viruses into one. Then in ninety two the
Speaker 1: government discontinued use of two brands of the shot. Occasionally
Speaker 1: it seemed to cause meningitis instead of prevented. This was
Speaker 1: wakefield opening his research. Hadn't even looked at vaccines yet,
Speaker 1: but it seemed that he was already plotting to cash
Speaker 1: in on the concern surrounding them. He was researching that
Speaker 1: measles disease, not the vaccine that measles disease was in
Speaker 1: some way related causally to inflammatory bowel disease, and his
Speaker 1: theory was that measles virus caused a vasculitis and inflammation
Speaker 1: of the blood vessels within the bowel, and that that
Speaker 1: was a trigger for Crohn's disease and alsative colitis, so
Speaker 1: inflammatory bowel disease. Wakefield thought that the measles might actually
Speaker 1: be causing inflammatory bowel conditions like Crohn's disease. If at
Speaker 1: this point you were confused as to why Wakefield thought
Speaker 1: the government should fund research into vaccines because of research
Speaker 1: that had nothing to do with vaccines, you should be
Speaker 1: David didn't think wakefield hypothesis made a whole lot of sense,
Speaker 1: but he heard him out anyway. Remember, there were concerns
Speaker 1: about the MMR already brewing in the zeitgeist. Those two
Speaker 1: brands of the shot had just been pulled from market
Speaker 1: after it appeared they increased the risk of miningitis. And
Speaker 1: even with rigorous and extensive safety testing, sometimes vaccines do
Speaker 1: have problems. Any medical intervention can. It led to eventually
Speaker 1: the Department of Health agreeing to set up a scientific
Speaker 1: meeting for him to present his work along with another
Speaker 1: researcher who had got a different theory, nothing to do
Speaker 1: with measles, but who've got a different theory about the
Speaker 1: origins of inflammatory bow disease. And we brought together a
Speaker 1: number of experts only inflammatory bow disease on measles virus
Speaker 1: together and the two presented their work, and we gave
Speaker 1: them careful consideration. So you know, we didn't ignore his letter.
Speaker 1: But right off the bat in that meeting with Wakefield,
Speaker 1: some of the experts there were able to poke some
Speaker 1: holes in his theory. He seemed to be using some
Speaker 1: of the lab equipment in a way that differed from
Speaker 1: the manufacturers instructions. One of the measles experts for whom
Speaker 1: I have always had the highest respect, was clearly a
Speaker 1: long away from persuaded when Wakefield explained how many PCR
Speaker 1: polymerase chain reaction cycles he was doing to try to
Speaker 1: get a positive signal. They were basically running samples to
Speaker 1: the machine way more times than recommended. The particular measles
Speaker 1: experts said, if measles was there, you would not be
Speaker 1: doing thirty five PCR cycles. You would have found it
Speaker 1: very very much earlier. This risk producing a false positive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think The analogy was that if you have a
Speaker 1: stereo and you've got nothing playing through it, but you
Speaker 1: keep on turning the volume up, you'll start to hear
Speaker 1: something what you're not hearing. His bet open. This is
Speaker 1: probably a good place to point out that since then,
Speaker 1: nearly three decades ago, Andrew Wakefield's work has been dismissed
Speaker 1: over and over again by the scientific establishment. Eventually British
Speaker 1: authorities would ban him from medical practice and his work
Speaker 1: would be revealed as fraudulent, but this would take years.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of reasons why Wakefield was already
Speaker 1: thinking about a potential link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Speaker 1: The first factor was that in the nineties, awareness of
Speaker 1: autism was increasing as researchers expanded the diagnosis to include
Speaker 1: a wide spectrum of conditions, and so what the public
Speaker 1: saw was an increase of autism cases without any context.
Speaker 1: The second factor was that the meninginist had kicked up
Speaker 1: fears about the MMR vaccine. Even before Wakefield hit the scene,
Speaker 1: people were starting to mobilize against vaccines. A British mother
Speaker 1: named Jackie Fletcher launched an anti vaccine group called JABS.
Speaker 1: Fletcher started the organization because she believed the MMR caused
Speaker 1: brain damage in her infant son, and a British lawyer
Speaker 1: named Richard Barr was working with other attorneys to put
Speaker 1: together a class action lawsuit over the MMR. Around this time,
Speaker 1: David says Wakefield's theories changed too. He then moved on
Speaker 1: and said, ah, it's not wild virus, it's not the
Speaker 1: natural measles virus, it's the vaccine. Those initial raised eyebrows
Speaker 1: did not deter Wakefield from his quest. He went on
Speaker 1: to publish work that suggested Crohn's disease was more common
Speaker 1: in people who were vaccinated against the measles but he
Speaker 1: made his argument by comparing two previous studies that were
Speaker 1: unrelated in the same journal that published the study. Other
Speaker 1: scientists pointed out that comparing these two studies didn't make
Speaker 1: a whole lot of sense. It didn't matter. Wakefield was
Speaker 1: convinced it wasn't the wild measles virus causing the bowel issues,
Speaker 1: it was the measles vaccine. Wakefield's research got the attention
Speaker 1: of moms who were already concerned that MMR vaccines had
Speaker 1: hurt their kids, but that was nothing compared to what
Speaker 1: would come next. In February, Andrew Wakefield published a study
Speaker 1: in The Lancet. The Lancet is one of the world's
Speaker 1: most prestigious medical journals. It's a big deal if your
Speaker 1: work is published there. The study made Wakefield famous. The
Speaker 1: study itself falsely linked the MMR vaccine to developmental issues
Speaker 1: and stomach problems by looking at just twelve children. Wakefield
Speaker 1: was an opportunist. He had seen the conversations bubbling about
Speaker 1: the MMR vaccine and autism and found a way to
Speaker 1: fit them into his initial theory. Wakefield didn't just quietly
Speaker 1: put out his study, though he held a press conference,
Speaker 1: a big one. There was credibility from the places in
Speaker 1: which his work was being published. There was a sort
Speaker 1: of credibility because he was saying it in the public
Speaker 1: domain in a way that doctors didn't often do. It
Speaker 1: was very unusual for a doctor to be going so public,
Speaker 1: and I think that as a person he is persuaded.
Speaker 1: Wakefield went even further in his claims at the press
Speaker 1: conference than he had in the paper. He also suggested
Speaker 1: that individual vaccines could be safer than the triple MMR,
Speaker 1: measles maps and rebella given together, maybe too much for
Speaker 1: the immune system of some children to handle. It was
Speaker 1: the launch of an all out war against the MMR vaccine.
Speaker 1: That was really the start of a series of publications
Speaker 1: and statements that Wakefield made on a public footing that
Speaker 1: left us always having to chase to find evidence to
Speaker 1: show that he was wrong, and that put us, being
Speaker 1: the scientific community us response for the humanization program, in
Speaker 1: a very very difficult position because each time that he
Speaker 1: produced what he said was new evidence, we were having
Speaker 1: to chase that to show that it wasn't right. Still,
Speaker 1: Wakefield kept trying to convince the scientific community that this
Speaker 1: work was credible. In March, Wakefield presented his work and
Speaker 1: a meeting at the Royal College of Surgeons. David was
Speaker 1: there again. David says, other scientists poked holes in wakefield
Speaker 1: theories and I don't believe that at the end of
Speaker 1: that meeting the audience was persuaded by his presentations. David
Speaker 1: says the UK's Independent Advisory Committee on Vaccines had also
Speaker 1: reviewed the research and found it unconvincing. So all of
Speaker 1: the relevant bodies that could look at the data at
Speaker 1: the science as the policy implications were not persuaded that
Speaker 1: we needed to be making any changes, and indeed we
Speaker 1: were not being asked by way it feel to make
Speaker 1: any changes until the press conference on the day of
Speaker 1: the release of the Lancet paper. None of that mattered, though.
Speaker 1: The public was much more receptive to the controversial and
Speaker 1: shocking idea that vaccines might cause autism. News organizations ran
Speaker 1: with the debate, but there has been growing concern among
Speaker 1: parents and advocacy groups about the safety of many of
Speaker 1: these vaccines. In fact, some groups now believe there's a
Speaker 1: connection between autism and vaccines. The U S Department of Education.
Speaker 1: Doubts about this safety of the MMR vaccine had been seated,
Speaker 1: and they would just keep growing. By the end of
Speaker 1: the nineties, Andrew Wakefield had gone from a little known
Speaker 1: researcher to a rock star scientist. But as his profile grew,
Speaker 1: his work also invited more scrutiny, and it caught the
Speaker 1: attention of one man who would make it his mission
Speaker 1: to expose the truth of Wakefield's fictions. My name is
Speaker 1: Brian Dear. I'm the author of the book The Doctor
Speaker 1: Who Fooled the World, An investigation into the origins of
Speaker 1: modern anti vaccine campaigning. Brian Deer has written about vaccines
Speaker 1: for more than two decades, and when he first heard
Speaker 1: about the Lancet study, he thought it seemed fishy. There
Speaker 1: were some odd coincidences between and a debunked whooping calf
Speaker 1: vaccine study. I saw that both of the papers had
Speaker 1: this time link of fourteen days written into them, and
Speaker 1: I thought, how could that be when the vaccines were
Speaker 1: in fact two very different technologies. One was based on
Speaker 1: killing a bacterium with the formally preservative, the other was
Speaker 1: based on live viruses. That's They're very different technologies, And
Speaker 1: I thought, well, how could they have that time link?
Speaker 1: But Brian let it go. I could see no way
Speaker 1: of ever being able to get to the bottom of that,
Speaker 1: so I put the thing to one side for five years.
Speaker 1: I never got involved in the story for five years
Speaker 1: after that paper was published. Then in two thousand three,
Speaker 1: Brian was doing a routine assignment on the MMR vaccine.
Speaker 1: Very quickly, I think within within the first week of
Speaker 1: me actually see reously doing some work on it. I
Speaker 1: interviewed one of the mothers who had enrolled a child
Speaker 1: in Wakefield research. That is, he interviewed the mother of
Speaker 1: one of the twelve children in the Lancet study. The
Speaker 1: names of patients involved in studies are usually anonymised. This
Speaker 1: made it tough for anyone to go about fact checking
Speaker 1: many aspects of Wakefield's work. And the story she told
Speaker 1: me could not be reconciled with the paper. And from
Speaker 1: that I could see that there was at least some
Speaker 1: kind of mismatch, some kind of irregularity in this paper,
Speaker 1: some kind of peculiarity going on. Brian kept digging. Remember
Speaker 1: Richard Barr, that lawyer who was trying to get a
Speaker 1: class action suit together over the MMR vaccine. Wakefield had
Speaker 1: actually been approached by a firm of lawyers two years
Speaker 1: before the paper was published, and had taken employment with
Speaker 1: them to make a case for them for this firm
Speaker 1: of lawyers against the MMR vaccine in order that they
Speaker 1: could get a class action lawsuit going. Bryan says, Bar
Speaker 1: first guy interested in vaccines, sort of by chance, he
Speaker 1: had a client who after he did the conveyancing on
Speaker 1: her house, she'd said to him later that her child
Speaker 1: had received the MMR vaccine and had developed meningitis. And
Speaker 1: as soon as the government withdrew two brands of the
Speaker 1: MMR vaccine, he was on the phone to this This
Speaker 1: mother got her into the newspapers, and once he got
Speaker 1: in the newspapers, he was the person to go to
Speaker 1: if you wanted to make a complaint about the MMR vaccine.
Speaker 1: Bryan discovered that before the lance that study, bar Heard
Speaker 1: hired Wakefield to help prove their claims and send them
Speaker 1: patients for the research. Neither wake Builds hospital nor his
Speaker 1: study co authors knew anything about the connection. The children
Speaker 1: who had come to the hospital weren't just children off
Speaker 1: the street, if you like, or routine patients. They had
Speaker 1: actually been sent to Wakefield by an anti vaccine group.
Speaker 1: The kids in the study were sent to the hospital
Speaker 1: because their parents already believed that they had been vaccine damaged. Basically,
Speaker 1: Wakefield had made a big assumption about what his study
Speaker 1: would find and then cherry picked research subjects in an
Speaker 1: effort to prove it. The relationship between Richard Barr and
Speaker 1: Andrew Wakefield and that paper which they which they devised together,
Speaker 1: and that is the acorn from which the modern anti
Speaker 1: vaccine movement has grown. They all began with Wakefield, and
Speaker 1: that's what the patent was all about. It was designed
Speaker 1: to be the battering ram which created the law so
Speaker 1: that they could recruit a lot of class to this lawsuit,
Speaker 1: which they ultimately did not. Long after the paper was published,
Speaker 1: Richard Barr's lawsuit had its first day in court. Richard
Speaker 1: Barr declined to be recorded for this podcast. He said
Speaker 1: in an email that at the time of his lawsuit
Speaker 1: there were genuine concerns about the MMR vaccine. He said
Speaker 1: that Wakefield was just one of many experts that he
Speaker 1: relied on to make his case in court. He wrote
Speaker 1: to me that quote, vaccine damage is real, and it
Speaker 1: was a question of whether the symptoms described by the
Speaker 1: hundreds of parents who approached us were attributable to the
Speaker 1: MMR end of story end quote. He also added that
Speaker 1: he had just gotten his own COVID nineteen vaccine and
Speaker 1: hopes that others do the same. Wakefield was not a
Speaker 1: fan of Brian's reporting on his work. He turned to
Speaker 1: the courts to try and shut Brian down. Wakefield, Brian
Speaker 1: and Britain's Channel four wound up locked in a libel battle.
Speaker 1: No one wants to get sued, but it actually turned
Speaker 1: out to be great for Brian. Brian had already figured
Speaker 1: out the identities of all of the kids in the
Speaker 1: length of study. Then he and his lawyers received medical
Speaker 1: records from Wakefield's research, and somehow, presumably accidentally, somebody had
Speaker 1: forgotten to redact some of those records. This gave Brian
Speaker 1: access to pretty detailed medical histories of the kids in
Speaker 1: the study. This led to some incredible fines over Wakefield's claims.
Speaker 1: Brain found that Wakefield had changed some of the initial
Speaker 1: diagnoses of the kids in the study to fit his theory.
Speaker 1: Brian says that's because Whakefield had other motivations besides scientific discovery. Firstly,
Speaker 1: he wanted money. Remember when Wakefield started suggesting that the
Speaker 1: triple MMR shot might not be safe together. Brian says
Speaker 1: there's a reason for that. He also had set up
Speaker 1: a network of companies that was going to sell what
Speaker 1: he claimed to be the first potential safer vaccine to
Speaker 1: the MMR. He'd filed for a patent eight months before
Speaker 1: his paper that launched the scare over the MMR vACC
Speaker 1: and he patented his own single measles vaccine, so he
Speaker 1: had that he was planning on selling diagnostic tests and
Speaker 1: what he called a potential complete cure for autism. But
Speaker 1: Brian says it also wasn't just about the money. He
Speaker 1: wanted to be a great man. He thought he was
Speaker 1: a remarkable character. He thought that he was he was
Speaker 1: a very special person, and he believed he was entitled
Speaker 1: to win the Nobel Prize. Brian's reporting found that Wakefield's
Speaker 1: university eventually insisted he do a rigorous study to replicate
Speaker 1: his findings. He refused. By this point, other researchers had
Speaker 1: already failed to duplicate his work. A lab in Ireland
Speaker 1: claimed it had independently verified the findings, but Brian found
Speaker 1: that the lab pathologist and Wakefield were actually in business together.
Speaker 1: It was a convoluted web of lies and conflicts of interest.
Speaker 1: The study that had ignited widespread panic over the MMR
Speaker 1: vaccine was pretty much anything but scientific. Bryan says that
Speaker 1: the reason Wayfield focused on the measles in the first
Speaker 1: place was even suspect. He got this idea reading an encyclopedia.
Speaker 1: He went to the hospital library and took out an
Speaker 1: encyclopedia and went as an encyclopedia of viruses, and went
Speaker 1: through this encyclopedia virus by virus until he came to
Speaker 1: one that he thought he thought, well, oh that looks
Speaker 1: that looks promising and it was measles, and he latched
Speaker 1: onto this idea. So he was unable to let go
Speaker 1: of his idea. But Brian hadn't even begun to look
Speaker 1: into Wakefield until five years after the study came out.
Speaker 1: By that point, doubt about the vaccine had spread, the
Speaker 1: damage had been done. David Salisbury had started his career
Speaker 1: not long after another crisis in vaccine confidence, this one
Speaker 1: over unfounded concerns about the whooping cough vaccine. There had
Speaker 1: been major epidemics of the disease in the late seventies
Speaker 1: and eighties, but eventually the UK managed to restore trust
Speaker 1: in the shot and get vaccine and rates back up.
Speaker 1: But David says the MMR vaccine rumors were stickier. If
Speaker 1: you put the balance and you have autism on one
Speaker 1: side of the scale and you have measles on the other,
Speaker 1: it's very easy to say, I'll take the risk of measles,
Speaker 1: but I won't take the risk of autism. It was
Speaker 1: hard to convince parents to take on even a teeny
Speaker 1: risk of artism to protect against an illness most people
Speaker 1: had never even seen in their lifetime. In the years
Speaker 1: after Wakefield study, the number of cases of measles, mumps,
Speaker 1: and rebella would take up each year to counter that.
Speaker 1: It wasn't good enough to say we don't believe it
Speaker 1: or we know better when we had nothing to put
Speaker 1: that on other than the background knowledge that we had,
Speaker 1: because nobody had been into the Island Lab until much
Speaker 1: later to be able to go through their workbooks and
Speaker 1: look at what they were actually doing and try to
Speaker 1: make sense of the positive responses that we later learned
Speaker 1: were coming from empty wells in the PCR machines that
Speaker 1: themselves had not been serviced according to the manufacturer's specifications.
Speaker 1: None of that was known. Study after study had failed
Speaker 1: to reproduce Wakefield's findings. The scientific consensus was still that
Speaker 1: the MMR vaccine was safe and had no link to
Speaker 1: artism or any other similar condition, but the public was
Speaker 1: becoming increasingly hesitant. Saying to people, measles can kill. Actually
Speaker 1: confronts credibility when they've never heard of anyone dying of measles.
Speaker 1: These are not quick to turn around. These are supertankers,
Speaker 1: These stories that really are difficult to turn around. By
Speaker 1: this point, Wakefield was hardly scientist. He had become something else,
Speaker 1: a guru. Wakefield had used his time in the limelight
Speaker 1: to push his false message, not just across the UK,
Speaker 1: but across the globe. He played the victim, the outsider
Speaker 1: to the medical establishment, speaking the hard truths about government
Speaker 1: and big pharma. And by this point Wakefield was done
Speaker 1: with the UK anyway. His conspiracies had found a warm
Speaker 1: reception across the Atlantic. In the United States, It's April
Speaker 1: two thousand and Andrew Wakefield is about to testify, but
Speaker 1: for cong Us we will now will now welcome our
Speaker 1: second panel to the witness table, Dr Andrew Wakefield, who
Speaker 1: came all the way from Merry Old, England. We appreciate
Speaker 1: him being here. The topic is the potential link between
Speaker 1: vaccines and autism in kids. The chair of the committee
Speaker 1: is Republican Representative Dan Burton of Indiana. This is his investigation.
Speaker 1: It's personal for him. He believes his own grandson got
Speaker 1: autism because of a vaccine. But unfortunately, after receiving nine
Speaker 1: shots in one day, the MMR and the d p
Speaker 1: A T shot and the hepatitis B within a very
Speaker 1: very short period time, he quit speaking, ran around, banging
Speaker 1: his head against the wall, screaming and hollering, waving his
Speaker 1: hands and became totally a different child. By this time,
Speaker 1: Wakefield had become a full blown media darling. And now
Speaker 1: he's speaking directly with American lawmakers. Yes, thank you, Mr German,
Speaker 1: members of the committee. It's a great privilege to be here.
Speaker 1: The purpose of my destiny is to report the results
Speaker 1: of the clinical and scientific investigation of a series of
Speaker 1: children with autism. Now, nothing in this testimony should be
Speaker 1: construed as anti vaccine. Rather, I advocate the safest vaccination
Speaker 1: strategies for the protection of children. Wakefield speaks matter of factly,
Speaker 1: citing papers and using dense medical language as he rips
Speaker 1: through his presentation. What about vaccines? This is a paper
Speaker 1: from the Vaccine Damage Compensation Board in the United States
Speaker 1: Acute en cephalopathy followed by permanent brain injury or death
Speaker 1: associated with further attenuated measles vaccine? What was intriguing in
Speaker 1: this cohort? During the hearing, others question his research, like
Speaker 1: British scientist Dr Brent Taylor, which, of course is the
Speaker 1: problem much of Mr Wakefield's research that it has never
Speaker 1: been independently verified. Most no one anywhere in the world
Speaker 1: hasn't been able to reproduce any of his studies, and
Speaker 1: it seems possible, but Wakefield seems unfazed. He keeps us
Speaker 1: cool even when asked if his research is biased. We
Speaker 1: are funded to test hypothesis and we present the data
Speaker 1: whether the hypothesis was correct or not. And we have
Speaker 1: done that. We've got on records doing it. We've published
Speaker 1: negative studies in association with measles and Crow's disease. That
Speaker 1: doesn't mean it's not there. It means that our hypothesis
Speaker 1: was wrong in terms that we could not find it
Speaker 1: using the technology. So we have gone on record as
Speaker 1: publishing both positive and negative data. Wakefield is affable and charming.
Speaker 1: He is a good listener, and he knows how to
Speaker 1: target his audience effectively. He knows how to get his
Speaker 1: message heard. I reached out many times to Wakefield during
Speaker 1: a system. At first he agreed to speak with me
Speaker 1: off record under one condition. I had to watch several
Speaker 1: of the movies he's produced about vaccines, and so I did,
Speaker 1: and after I told his people I had watched them,
Speaker 1: he declined to be interviewed for this podcast. His assistant
Speaker 1: told me he's just tired of being demonized by the
Speaker 1: mainstream press. Wakefield has continued to stand by his research
Speaker 1: and deny allegations against him. Parents around the world rallied
Speaker 1: around Wakefield in the early two thousands, but in the
Speaker 1: US he found an especially big support network. His fans
Speaker 1: claimed the truth was being buried by scientists in the government.
Speaker 1: We were in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry. In the US,
Speaker 1: his ideas would merge with another already percolating fear about
Speaker 1: the marisol and vaccines. The marisol is a mercury based
Speaker 1: preservative that had been added to vaccines for decades. It
Speaker 1: helps prevent bacterial growth in vials with multiple doses. So
Speaker 1: bear with me for a minute, because I have to
Speaker 1: talk about mercury in detail. There are two types of mercury.
Speaker 1: One is very bad. It is the reason why you're
Speaker 1: not supposed to be fish when you're pregnant. That is
Speaker 1: methyl mercury, and it's toxic, and in the ninety nineties
Speaker 1: there were all these confusing public health messages warning people
Speaker 1: to stay away from it. But there is also another
Speaker 1: kind of mercury. Its name ethyl mercury sounds almost exactly
Speaker 1: the same, but the body clears it quickly and so
Speaker 1: it's unlikely to do harm. This is the mercury and vaccines.
Speaker 1: And at the same time that there was growing concern
Speaker 1: over the bad mercury, the number of vaccines given to
Speaker 1: infants grew, and some of those shots had the okay
Speaker 1: mercury in them. You see why this might be confusing.
Speaker 1: At the same time, like I mentioned earlier, awareness of
Speaker 1: autism had grown as the diagnosis for it expanded. Some
Speaker 1: parents were concerned that there was a growing autism epidemic,
Speaker 1: and then all this mercury and childhood shots was to blame,
Speaker 1: adding fuel to this theory. Out of an abundance of caution,
Speaker 1: the CDC asked vaccine makers to remove the marisol from
Speaker 1: routine shots. When Wakefield's ideas crossed the pond, they found
Speaker 1: fertile ground. The media had started to throw some shade
Speaker 1: on Wakefield's claims, but he was still grabbing a lot
Speaker 1: of headlines. On those headlines kept the debate alive, when
Speaker 1: in reality, there was nothing to debate if you turned
Speaker 1: on NPR in two two, four years after Wakefield's paper
Speaker 1: came out, an article in Yesterday's New York Times magazine
Speaker 1: is getting a lot of attention from parents who worried
Speaker 1: that vaccines may be causing autism. These parents long have
Speaker 1: felt that their fears have been dismissed by mainstream scientists,
Speaker 1: but this article is or c span in two thousand five,
Speaker 1: seven years after the paper came out, Did you come
Speaker 1: to the conclusion that the parents are right? That's an
Speaker 1: excellent question. I can comfortably say that I'm becoming more
Speaker 1: convinced that there is a connection when you look at
Speaker 1: the biological evidence, when you look at the children with
Speaker 1: autism themselves and you notice that they have higher levels
Speaker 1: of mercury in the system. It seems like Wakefield was
Speaker 1: simply able to deflect any criticism of his research. In
Speaker 1: two thousand four, ten of Wakefield's Lancet co authors published
Speaker 1: a statement saying that the paper did not show the
Speaker 1: MMR vaccine caused autism. That didn't seem to make much
Speaker 1: of a difference. The Lancet also looked into accusations of
Speaker 1: ethical misconduct in Wakefield's research. This included claims that he
Speaker 1: had recruited patients that would prove his theory. I found
Speaker 1: only that Wakefield should have been clearer in disclosing sources
Speaker 1: of his funding, said the evidence did not support other
Speaker 1: claims They also published a response from Wakefield refuting most
Speaker 1: of the allegations. His theory remained untarnished in the eyes
Speaker 1: of much of the public. All of these ideas were
Speaker 1: still circulating when Michelle Saddio's family took their case to
Speaker 1: vaccine courts in two thousand seven. Thousands of parents now
Speaker 1: believed their children had become autistic after receiving either vaccines
Speaker 1: with the mirrossole or their MMR shop or a combination
Speaker 1: of both. The two theories had merged into one mega
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory, and now it was up to the Saddio's
Speaker 1: attorneys to prove all of this to the court. The summarise,
Speaker 1: very very briefly is straight for that you have a
Speaker 1: case here that is a test case for the theory.
Speaker 1: The general theory that the combination of exposure to fimarosl
Speaker 1: containing vaccines with a significant dose of ethyl mercury early
Speaker 1: in a child's life, combined them with MMR can result
Speaker 1: in a complex system response that presents symptoms that get
Speaker 1: diagnosed as autism and in particular are suppressive use system
Speaker 1: from the fimarosol in the vaccines. I'm guessing that most
Speaker 1: people listening to this have probably never heard of the
Speaker 1: National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program a k A. Vaccine Court.
Speaker 1: The roots of vaccine Court go back to the nineties.
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier that there were unfounded concerns about the
Speaker 1: whooping cough vaccine. At this time, the whooping cough vaccine
Speaker 1: was part of a combo shot called the DPT. In
Speaker 1: the US, parents had begun bringing lawsuits against doctors and
Speaker 1: vaccine manufacturers alleging to the shot harmed kids, and one
Speaker 1: of the lawsuits to succeed. For example, the parents of
Speaker 1: a three month old who received the shot said it
Speaker 1: had paralyzed him. A jury awarded them more than a
Speaker 1: million dollars. Between the late seventies and mid eighties, cases
Speaker 1: like this became more frequent, and the amount of money
Speaker 1: parents sought from drug manufacturers grew too. It was becoming
Speaker 1: expensive to be in the business of making these vaccines.
Speaker 1: There was a shortage of DPT vaccines, and manufacturers threatened
Speaker 1: to stop making them all together. By the mid eighties,
Speaker 1: only one manufacturer was still making the DPT shot. The
Speaker 1: price of the shot went up, doctors were told to
Speaker 1: no longer give out boosters to older kids. It was
Speaker 1: a real crisis. Congress decided to address this crisis by
Speaker 1: creating Vaccine Court. If you are in the minority of
Speaker 1: people who have some kind of bad reaction to a vaccine,
Speaker 1: vaccine Court is where you go. On the surface, it
Speaker 1: really was kind of a perfect solution. We all get
Speaker 1: vaccinated as part of an effort to keep terrible diseases
Speaker 1: from circulating in our society. The tiny risk of a
Speaker 1: bad reaction is part of that social compact, and in
Speaker 1: order to compensate the people that do get hurt, we
Speaker 1: all pay a small tax on each childhood vaccine. The
Speaker 1: system protects drugmakers from lawsuits and also was designed to
Speaker 1: make it easier for victims to get compensated. The thing
Speaker 1: is drawing a direct line of cause and effect between
Speaker 1: an injury and a vaccine is not always that simple.
Speaker 1: Improving that link between the MMR shot and autism was
Speaker 1: at the heart of Michelle Citos case. And we're in
Speaker 1: a start with the opening statements by counsel for the petitioners.
Speaker 1: So which of you will be starting? Mr Powers starting,
Speaker 1: and Christiane Happer will give an el test. Okay. Mr
Speaker 1: Powers will make an opening statement on behalf of the
Speaker 1: petitioners Steering committee Mr Powers, please go ahead. Michelle's case
Speaker 1: was the first test case in the Autism proceedings. The
Speaker 1: proceedings worked basically like a class action. The Vaccine Court
Speaker 1: had received so many similar claims that asked the petitioners
Speaker 1: to get together and pick a few to represent them all.
Speaker 1: They picked six, including Michelle's. If the Special Masters found
Speaker 1: these cases to be credible, it would pave the way
Speaker 1: for similar cases. If they didn't, it would make it
Speaker 1: a lot harder for other autism cases to get compensated
Speaker 1: in the court. You can hear the gravity of all
Speaker 1: of this and Special Master George Hastings opening remarks, we
Speaker 1: realize what a very important task has been assigned to
Speaker 1: us in deciding these cases, and we will give our
Speaker 1: greatest effort in carrying out that heavy responsibility. Going into
Speaker 1: the proceedings, there was actually a lot of anxiety in
Speaker 1: the public health community over how the Vaccine Court might rule.
Speaker 1: It was known for being somewhat liberal in its awards,
Speaker 1: sometimes doling out compensation where it wasn't clear that a
Speaker 1: vaccine was actually at the root of health issue. We're
Speaker 1: the Court to find in favor of Michelle's CEO. It
Speaker 1: could validate the concerns of her parents and thousands of
Speaker 1: others that falsely believed vaccines could cause autism. By this point,
Speaker 1: the public health community had spent years trying to fight
Speaker 1: that idea. Vaccination rates were dropping, cases of the measles
Speaker 1: were rising, and there were signs that it could get
Speaker 1: even worse. The year before, the UK had its first
Speaker 1: death from the measles in fourteen years. The stakes were high.
Speaker 1: My name is Sylvia chan Kaplan and I of all
Speaker 1: of my hot was Kenn Conway and one Homer represent
Speaker 1: the shells to deal. Michelle was born on Aust thirty.
Speaker 1: She weighed eight pounds, probably in In other words, she
Speaker 1: was perfectly on day one when she was born, she
Speaker 1: received hippatite fe ignization and it contained one five micrograms
Speaker 1: of her pats didn't know about it. Joe, how profession
Speaker 1: didn't know about it. The studio's attorney claimed that getting
Speaker 1: one immunization at birth with the safe kind of mercury
Speaker 1: had primed Michelle's gut for things to go horribly wrong
Speaker 1: when she received her MMR. They claimed that the combination
Speaker 1: of the vaccine with the Marisa all and the MMR
Speaker 1: had caused Michelle to develop stomach issues and regress into autism,
Speaker 1: along with the host of other very heartbreaking medical conditions. Worse,
Speaker 1: they insinuated that the government and the drug industry we're
Speaker 1: working together to hide vaccine safety evidence, conspiring to make
Speaker 1: it difficult to mount the Cidio's case. The story was compelling.
Speaker 1: More than seven people dialed in to hear testimony from
Speaker 1: the case live on the first day the press covered it.
Speaker 1: On Monday, a federal vaccine court here in Washington started
Speaker 1: to hear testimony in a trial that's expected to last
Speaker 1: for weeks. Of finding for the families could make many
Speaker 1: parents think twice about vaccinating their children, and doctors worried
Speaker 1: that could leave. The Cidio family, including Michelle, were present,
Speaker 1: and Special Master Hastings commended the family for how they
Speaker 1: had dealt with Michelle's illness. Andrew Wakefield looms over these proceedings.
Speaker 1: That's fury that Michelle's autism had been caused by the
Speaker 1: MMR was rooted in his work. Michelle's mom, Teresa Sadio,
Speaker 1: testifies that she came across the lance at paper early
Speaker 1: on when she was looking for answers to what happened
Speaker 1: to her daughter, but not only that she had actually
Speaker 1: met Wakefield at a conference, he had even examined Michelle.
Speaker 1: She testifies that they had exchanged more than a hundred emails.
Speaker 1: At the end of the first day of testimony, Teresa
Speaker 1: Sadio takes the stand. Her lawyer starts by asking about
Speaker 1: what Michelle was like as a newborn. Michelle a happy baby.
Speaker 1: I'm very hurty, a very responsive, very very normal, very happy.
Speaker 1: Then Teresa testifies, Michelle got her MMR vaccine at fifteen
Speaker 1: months old. She developed to fever six days later. She
Speaker 1: was different. She she seemed withdrawn um. She I thought
Speaker 1: her hearing had been affected. She was no longer talking um.
Speaker 1: In fact, she was completely quiet. She didn't make any sound,
Speaker 1: which is why we thought it was her hearing. We
Speaker 1: thought maybe she couldn't hear, so that's why she wasn't
Speaker 1: responding or making her own sounds. This story would evoke
Speaker 1: empathy in anyone. How scary would it be to go
Speaker 1: through that as a parent, to have your child seemingly
Speaker 1: become a different person practically overnight. The thing is as
Speaker 1: compelling as that explanation was. There was a big hole
Speaker 1: in the story. A few days into the preceding a
Speaker 1: French psychiatrist from McGill University named Eric Fomband takes the stand.
Speaker 1: Eric studies autism in the nineties. When Wakefield first first
Speaker 1: onto the scene, he had been living in London. Eric
Speaker 1: had always found Wakefield's work to be flawed. The way
Speaker 1: the studies described the onset of autism just didn't gel
Speaker 1: with what he had found in his own work. Eric
Speaker 1: had conducted studies and written papers that refuted the theory.
Speaker 1: As part of the autism proceedings, Eric told the government
Speaker 1: attorneys to subpoena sidio family home videos. Eric told me
Speaker 1: that what he found would determine the case's outcome. I
Speaker 1: had the first birthday video clip of that child, and
Speaker 1: that was all able to see because you could see
Speaker 1: she was very delayed in motor development and social development.
Speaker 1: She could barely walk, and she she barely barely stand,
Speaker 1: and she her parents were calling her and she was
Speaker 1: never like turning her head to look at them. And
Speaker 1: then so that was a very very sort of poignant,
Speaker 1: really uh scene to to see. Eric says that Michelle
Speaker 1: was already showing clear signs of autism by her first birthday.
Speaker 1: This includes specific types of hand gestures. That was several
Speaker 1: months before her MMR shot. This is a very typical
Speaker 1: hand finger mannerisms that you see in kids with autism,
Speaker 1: well somewhat affected, So they were so unambiguous autistic symptoms.
Speaker 1: On the sixth day of the hearing, the defense attorneys
Speaker 1: showed the home videos. Then Eric testifies, good morning dr
Speaker 1: from me and do you please introduceduced yourself to your book.
Speaker 1: Granted with you a video taking a Michelle at nine
Speaker 1: months two thirds she's at Jane Toney five. Yes, just
Speaker 1: looking at the video, you could see that it was abnormal,
Speaker 1: because you don't make that up. And so it was
Speaker 1: very It was very terrible for the City of Family
Speaker 1: and I was I didn't feel it well for for them.
Speaker 1: But but my duty was to the coortom, to the
Speaker 1: to the science and to the tool of the defense.
Speaker 1: Dismantles other parts of the city's case, like how the
Speaker 1: data is applied by Andrew Wakefield's business partner in the
Speaker 1: Irish lab was contaminated. Which you've been offered is a
Speaker 1: series of fanciful notions that are backed up only by
Speaker 1: the fact that someone who's offered them has a couple
Speaker 1: of letters after their name. M d or pH d.
Speaker 1: That does not make a good science. I'm going to
Speaker 1: be as charitable as I can be about the petitioner's
Speaker 1: case here at the PSC case, it's at best speculation.
Speaker 1: I had a speculation now at worst, at worst, it's
Speaker 1: a contrivance. It's a contrivance that's been developed and are
Speaker 1: articulated and promoted by its chief proponent, and that's Andrew Wakefield.
Speaker 1: The Special Masters listened to the evidence, and eventually they
Speaker 1: gave their verdict. Two years later, after other test cases
Speaker 1: were heard and both parties filed lots of post hearing briefs,
Speaker 1: Special Master Hastings issued a ruling. He wrote that the
Speaker 1: city of Family had been quote misled by physicians who
Speaker 1: are guilty in my view of gross medical misjudgment. The
Speaker 1: other test cases were defeated as well. Vaccine Court would
Speaker 1: not be awarding compensation to any parent that claimed their
Speaker 1: child became autistic after vaccination. But the ruling did not
Speaker 1: convince vaccine skeptics. If anything, it fueled their concerns. Now
Speaker 1: they felt even the Vaccine Court wouldn't listen to them.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just the vaccines that were a problem, it
Speaker 1: was the whole system. The year after this ruling, the
Speaker 1: Lancet finally tried to correct the record. In two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: twelve years after the study came out, the Lancet retracted
Speaker 1: Wakefield's paper an issued a statement that said several elements
Speaker 1: of the paper seemed to be incorrect. This was only
Speaker 1: after Britain's General Medical Council ruled that Wakefield had acted unethically.
Speaker 1: A few months later, the council also suspended his license
Speaker 1: to practice. Wakefield supporters did not abandon him, though they
Speaker 1: doubled down. You can hear it in the news reports
Speaker 1: when Wakefield shows up outside the Medical Council. Andrew Wakefield
Speaker 1: arrived at the GMC this afternoon to face the cameras,
Speaker 1: but not the music. He simply wasn't there when the
Speaker 1: disciplinary panel found him guilty on almost every charge. They
Speaker 1: hold signs saying scapegoat and Dr Wakefield cares. Vaccine safety
Speaker 1: scares are nothing new. They've been around for as long
Speaker 1: as vaccines have, but usually they went away. By this point,
Speaker 1: it was clear that concerns over vaccines and autism we're
Speaker 1: not going anywhere anytime soon. It had been more than
Speaker 1: a decade since wakefielder he had been announced, his paper
Speaker 1: had been retracted countless times, new research had debunked his ideas.
Speaker 1: But instead of quietly and shamefully retreating into the shadows,
Speaker 1: he gained followers, and not just parents of potentially vaccine
Speaker 1: injured kids, celebrities like Robert de Niro would go on
Speaker 1: to join us cause Wakefield would eventually date a supermodel
Speaker 1: and be invited to one of Donald Trump's inaugural balls.
Speaker 1: We're in a different media landscape, but that, I think
Speaker 1: is why the the scare over MMR isn't going away,
Speaker 1: because it's constantly being regenerated and refueled and repackaged by
Speaker 1: anti vaccine campaigners using their own me media, their own
Speaker 1: Facebook channels, on YouTube, and so on. Sufl. What's different
Speaker 1: is the Internet, specifically social media. Andrew Wakefield had said
Speaker 1: things in motion in the nineties, and now the vaccine
Speaker 1: hesitancy movement was seemingly unstoppable. It didn't matter if the press,
Speaker 1: or the scientific establishment or even vaccine court turned against it.
Speaker 1: The vaccine skeptics now had a megaphone allowed them to
Speaker 1: reach like minded people in any corner of the world.
Speaker 1: Social media was their sword, and they would learn to
Speaker 1: wield it deftly. That's next time on Doubt. Doubt is
Speaker 1: written and reported by me Kristin V. Brown Top Foreheads
Speaker 1: is our senior producer, Molly Nugent as our associate producer.
Speaker 1: Our theme was composed and performed by Hannis Brown. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to Bloomberg editors Tim Anette and Rick Shine. If
Speaker 1: you'd like to know more about Andrew Wakefield, check out
Speaker 1: Brian Dear's book, The Doctor Who Fooled the World. Francesco
Speaker 1: Levy is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Be sure to
Speaker 1: subscribe to Prognosis if you haven't already. And if you
Speaker 1: like our show, please leave us a review. It helps
Speaker 1: others find out about the show. Thanks for listening, See
Speaker 1: you next time.