From the March 2009 Idaho Observer:


Unethical British "repeater" at the root of Wakefield persecution, global MMR/autism coverup

British gastroenterologist Dr. Andrew Wakefield shocked the world in 1998 when his studies into the relationship between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, "leaky gut" syndrome and the development of neurological diseases such as autism were published in The Lancet. Since that time, Dr. Wakefield has been the object of a campaign intended to discredit his work, destroy his career and go on vaccinating children as if the MMR jab is not linked to past, present and future cases of neurodevelopmental illnesses. The investigation into Dr. Wakefield’s ongoing persecution has revealed some very interesting and undeniably conflicted relationships that are not limited to the UK.


UK "health writer" Brian Deer is the sole anonymous complainant in a case from 2004 charging Dr. Andrew Wakefield with fraud regarding studies proving the MMR vaccine link to "leaky gut syndrome" and neurological problems in children. Deer then became the "crusading journalist" defaming Dr. Wakefield without revealing his connection to the "investigation." The discovery of Deer’s role in covertly lying to investigators and then reporting the "story" he created as a crusading reporter for the London Sunday Times has sparked an international controversy that proves how governments, big pharma and the media are willing to counter scientific proof with lies and intimidation for the ability to continue poisoning children for political gain and corporate profit.


By Child Health Safety

Sunday Times’ MMR Lies nailed at last; Editor Witherow should resign

LONDON—False stories published since 2003 by [London] Sunday Times reporter Brian Deer, which have caused untold damage to the legal and medical cases of vaccine damaged children worldwide, are being nailed now for the first time.

The target of Deer’s false stories is eminent former Royal Free Hospital (London) gastroenterologist Dr. Andrew Wakefield who first drew worldwide attention to a possible link between MMR vaccinations and autism in 1998. Since that time, Dr. Wakefield, revered by the parents of vaccine-damaged children worldwide, has been unjustly castigated by his peers for a decade and subjected to an ongoing UK General Medical Council (GMC) investigation since 2004.

Tired of being the object of political coverup and supported by his peer-reviewed studies and legions of vaccine damaged children linking the MMR jab to autism, Dr. Wakefield took the offensive this year.

The Huffington Post recently reported on the unprecedented move by Dr. Wakefield who, on March 12, 2009, lodged a complaint with the UK Press Complaints Commission (PCC) which was simultaneously published to the media with a news release: "UK Autism Doctor Launches Formal Complaint Against London Sunday Times Reporter."

Deer, it turns out, was the chief instigator and secret complainant who opened the GMC investigation and then reported the developing story without ever divulging his involvement. Whilst unethically reporting the investigation of Dr. Wakefield’s scientific ethics, Deer has been reportedly profiting from news stories and TV documentaries that have been generated from his "work."

The PCC complaint contains extraordinary and never-before-published verbatim evidence and documentary text from the UK’s GMC proceedings.

Wakefield was forced to abandon libel proceedings against Deer in 2005 because of the "Reynolds defence," under which the English supreme court, the House of Lords, decided "newspapers could print untrue and defamatory information if they could prove it was in the public interest to publish it and that it was the product of responsible journalism." [See "‘Reynolds defence’ in new libel law test" by Julia Day, Media Guardian, February 3, 2005).

The Sunday Times/Glaxo Axis

James Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of The News Corporation, which owns The Sunday Times, was appointed to the GlaxoSmithKline board of directors last year and will assume his post in May, 2009. The British and world public should now also be given answers about why The Sunday Times’ owners James Murdoch and, by corporate extension, his billionnaire father Rupert Murdoch, have become directly and openly involved in British politics by publicly taking up the role of protectors of the name, reputation and business interests of drug company GlaxoSmithKline plc, as recently reported in the Financial Times on February 2, 2009.

The Glaxo/Murdoch axis has been made public at the same time as the UK’s New Labor government under Minister Dawn Primarolo has misled the British Parliament by sneaking in a new law favorable to GlaxoSmithKline which could introduce compulsory childhood vaccination, putting British children unnecessarily at risk of adverse vaccine reactions.

Adverse reactions from a host of new and clinically unnecessary childhood vaccinations, include childhood multiple sclerosis from the known toxic Hepatitis B vaccine [the subject of a current French judicial criminal investigation], as well as unneeded chickenpox vaccine, flu vaccine, HPV vaccines Cervarix and Gardasil and many others. While adverse reactions are on the rise, parents are also discovering that vaccines are not only dangerous but unnecessary. [See "Vaccines Did Not Save Us - 2 Centuries of Official Statistics" at ChildHealthSafety.wordpress.com]

Witherow should resign

The Sunday Times’ editor-in-chief John Witherow should be required to explain:

• why he has been publishing false stories and how can that be responsible journalism

• the business and financial interests of The Sunday Times owners James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch, News International and News Corporation in the pharmaceutical industry

• how any experienced international newspaper editor could believe and then publish false stories over a 5- year period

• why he has not resigned before now

Some wags have now dubbed the newspaper "The Sunday Glaxo".

The push for vaccination is commercially driven

The financial markets have long been aware that the pharmaceutical industry "blockbuster" patented drug business model has been failing. The drug industry has been adopting other business models since the 1980s and:

• with vaccines they see the same business model as Bill Gates—everyone must have Windows software on their computer—everyone must be vaccinated

• over the past 20 years (and more) they have built up a network of influence with government, health officials and the medical professions

• they have promulgated the belief that vaccines are magic bullets and must not be criticized in any way by anyone

• adverse vaccine reactions appear taboo, are rarely discussed, researched or reported

• have brought about the situation where the medical evidence base of published journals can no longer be trusted as reliable [See "Doctors Without Borders: Why you can’t trust medical journals anymore" by Shannon Brownlee, Washington Monthly, April 2004]

• covert lobbying organizations are influencing public health policy without the public or journalists’ knowledge

Why do we vaccinate children against diseases like mumps when even the British Medical Association and Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain stated in the British National Formulary (1985 and 1986), "Since mumps and its complications are very rarely serious, there is little indication for the routine use of mumps vaccine."

At the same time, monitoring of vaccination risks is at best inadequate and in reality practically non-existent. If a child suffers a serious adverse reaction, the child and parents are "dumped" by the government and UK National Health Service.

GSK and the English Judiciary

The role of the English judiciary in the MMR debacle is of concern. The judge who made the decision which effectively ended the UK MMR litigation, Judge Nigel Davis, is the brother of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) board director Sir Crispin Davis. Pluserix MMR was made and supplied by a GlaxoSmithKline company. It was given to many of the children in the ultimately unsuccessful UK litigation prompted by Dr. Wakefield’s 1998 findings as published in The Lancet. Davis was brought onto the Glaxo Board only two months before The Sunday Times hired Brian Deer to write the articles attacking Wakefield. Davis was also the CEO of the owners of The Lancet. When challenged a statement was issued on Judge Davis’ behalf to The Telegraph newspaper’s legal correspondent Joshua Rosenberg that stated "The possibility of any conflict of interest arising from his brother’s position did not occur to him."

The outcome of an investigation by the Office for Judicial Complaints found no impropriety and resulted in no action taken regarding the relationship between Judge Davis and his brother Crispin Davis’ GSK board position.

After English Judge David Eady refused in 2006 to stay Wakefield’s libel proceedings pending the outcome of the GMC proceedings, Wakefield was put "between a rock and a hard place." If a Reynolds defense succeeded, then Wakefield would lose the libel proceedings even though Deer’s Sunday Times’ stories were and remain false and would have to fight simultaneously two draining sets of legal proceedings. The current UK GMC proceedings are unprecedented in length and complexity spanning five years since Brian Deer’s first of many complaints were lodged with the GMC. The Medical Protection Society would also have been faced with the prospect of a pyrrhic victory in the libel proceedings, had a Reynolds defense succeeded, winning on the substantive issues but having to pay out five sets of legal costs: those of Brian Deer; The Sunday Times; Channel 4 Television; Wakefield’s libel case legal costs and; Wakefield’s GMC legal costs.

UK PCC is a "Waste of Space." The PCC is, according to its website, "an independent body which deals with complaints from members of the public about the editorial content of newspapers and magazines." Nothing could in fact be further from the truth, so it is not likely that Dr. Wakefield has made his PCC complaint in the expectation of any great outcome from the PCC. The PCC is made up in large part of editors of newspapers and others involved in the media. In effect, the PCC acts as a judge in its own cause, which fundamentally undermines its position and credibility. In 2007 the commission ruled on only 32 out of more than 3,400 complaints it had received. "All those which were critical of a newspaper were published in full and with due prominence by the publication concerned," the PCC says.

The PCC exists solely to pre-empt the British government introducing statutory regulation of the UK press. Instead of being an effective control of media abuse of power, it is a substantially ineffective mechanism to compel voluntary regulation of the print media.

Cambridge University study figures show that one in 48 British boys has an autistic condition, which is already costing the UK £28 billion per annum. The new study’s authors advise government services

planners to revise calculations of child service provision on a rate of 1 in 60

British children; 4 in 5 autism cases are diagnosed in boys.

~from "One child in 60 ’suffers from a form of autism" by Sue Reid,

Daily Mail, UK

(March 20, 2009)

 

Autism epidemic among British children worsening; government, industry conspire to deflect blame, deny compensation, to vaccine damaged children

Proof that the MMR vaccine was solidly linked to epidemic autism worldwide was established in 1998 by British gastroenterologist Dr. Andrew Wakefield. His original work, published in the British Medical journal "The Lancet" has since been duplicated by other, corporate-neutral researchers. The numbers of children adversely-affected by the MMR vaccine since the 60s is in the millions. The liabilities for vaccine mandating governments and MMR vaccine-producing companies, considering the magnitude of the damages involved, are nearly apocalyptic in scale. Damages proved publicly in one country would cause a domino effect of governments and pharmaceutical companies being exposed and subsequently prosecuted for their roles in destroying the minds and bodies of generations of innocent children. With regard to MMR and autism in particular—and all vaccines and the entire spectrum of damages they have caused in general—government and industry are in full-time global damage control mode because their very survival depends on the public remaining ignorant of what their policies and practices have done to their progeny. Ladies and gentlemen, the tables have turned: Science and decency have politics and larceny on the run with regard to global vaccine policy.

A brief history of the MMR/autism coverup in the UK

Legal Aid-funded claims by the parents of MMRvaccine-damaged children started as early as 1991, years before Dr. Andrew Wakefield warned the British public about the vaccine. His efforts were met with the full force of the British establishment to discredit him and proceedings before the General Medical Council (GMC) have been ongoing for over four years. The main false accusation leveled at Dr. Wakefield in February, 2004, was that he made his disclosures in a medical paper published in The Lancet medical journal because he wanted to make money as an expert witness in court. But few people know the following facts.

Sir Crispin Davis, the chief executive of the Reed Elsevier Group which owns The Lancet, had been brought onto the Board of Directors of MMR litigation defendants’ parent company GlaxoSmithKline in July, 2003. Brian Deer, a freelance journalist was commissioned by The Sunday Times two months later (September, 2003) to write the stories attacking Wakefield. This was about two weeks before the Legal Services Commission’s final decision was due on withdrawal of Legal Aid from the MMR children’s UK litigation—which it did. The person who commissioned Deer was Sunday Times’ Head of Newsroom investigations and "Focus" editor Paul Nuki. Nuki is the son of Professor George Nuki. Professor Nuki, in 1987, sat on the Committee on Safety of Medicines (CSM) when it was considering Glaxo company Smith Kline & French Laboratories’ Pluserix MMR vaccine for safety approval. The CSM-approved Pluserix MMR but it caused very high levels of adverse reactions and was withdrawn by the manufacturers on very little notice in late 1992 leaving the Department of Health in an embarrassing position.

Large numbers of British children were injured and legal aid claims had already started from as early as 1990, six years before Wakefield became involved and contrary to The Sunday Times’ false claims that this was all a scam set up by Wakefield and solicitor Richard Barr.

Sitting on the CSM with Professor Nuki was Professor Sir Roy Meadow and Professor Sir David Hull. Professor Meadow is now notorious for falsely condemning mothers around the world for killing their children by shaking them to death. This includes the Sally Clark case where vaccines are directly implicated in the cause of her baby’s death, as revealed by Neville Hodgkinson in The Spectator ("What killed Sally Clark’s child?" May 16, 2007). Such implications have been summarily dismissed by Professor Meadow though he must be aware of the implications because he sat on the joint CSM/JCVI vaccine safety sub-committee with Professor David Salisbury and others when the MMR vaccine was approved.

It was Professor Sir David Hull in 1998 who, as chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), started the attacks on Wakefield’s work. The JCVI advises the Department of Health on vaccination issues and the childhood vaccination program. As Chairman of the JCVI, Professor Sir David Hull could have taken action to deal with the issues over the MMR and protect British children. Despite his attacks on Wakefield’s work, alleging unethical research on children for no clinical benefit, two years later, in 2000, it was Professor Sir David Hull who rewrote the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health ethical guidelines to permit research on children where there was no clinical benefit (albeit in The Royal Free Hospital’s case all the investigations were clinically justified).

The Sunday Times’ freelancer was assisted in his efforts with free advice and assistance from the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industry’s funded and controlled company Medico Legal Investigations Limited. Medico Legal Investigations Limited’s speciality was in getting medical doctors on charges before the General Medical Council. So we know that before a single word was published by The Sunday Times, it was already being planned with the involvement of interested parties that Wakefield and colleagues were to be taken before the GMC.

Another free-of-charge helper to Sunday Times’ journalist Deer was Glaxo-Wellcome-funded fellow and active British Medical Association member Dr. Evan Harris, MP [member of parliament]. Harris has advised and assisted Deer up to the present, including attending the Wakefield GMC hearings with Deer.

Sunday Times’ journalist Deer was also assisted by The Royal Free’s Strategic Health Authority (SHA) which passed Deer’s confidential documents (including documents relating to the confidential medical treatment of the MMR child litigants) "in the spirit of openness." The SHA at first denied providing documents until it was pointed out the fact was disclosed by Dr. Harris MP, in Parliament on March 15, 2004.

See full story at ChildHealthSafety.wordpress.com