Dr Andrew Wakefield in His Own Words - Full interview

In 2007 Dr Andrew Wakefield And Professors Simon Murch and John Walker Smith were called to the General medical council to face charges of professional misconduct In His Own Words Dr Andrew WakeField and the GMC Why Have you Been Called to the GMC? Why is this hearing being held at all in front of the medical regulatory body of the united kingdom and who bought the case and what is the case? The case, it seems, on the face of it, was brought by a single complaint by a freelance journalist who had been working for the Sunday Times, and others, had been trying trying to uncover some misdemeanor on our behalf at the royal free in the investigation of children with regressive autism with bowel problems, many of the parents of whom said their children regressed after the measles mumps rubella vaccine and i will just take you back because when I began this work in 1995 parents approached me and said my child was developing perfectly normally they had their MMR vaccine, I wasn't anti-vaccine, I took them along, they had their vaccine according to the routine schedule and then the lights went out their eyes glazed over, they lost speech, they lost interaction, they stopped playing with their siblings they never smiled, they were grizzly, and eventually having lost skills and become mute and self injurious, they were diagnosed with autism or atypical autism. And I said, I am terribly sorry, I know nothing about autism, how can I possibly help, and they said, well, my child has terrible bowel problems, diarrhoea, pain, I know they are in pain, they can't tell me they are in pain because they have lost the ability to speak, but I know they are in pain, my instinct as a mother tells me my child is in pain, they are screaming, they are drawing their knees up to their chest, particularly bad when they have to have their bowel opened. Losing weight, failing to thrive and the doctor says your child is autistic, that is just the way it is. Well that is not just the way it is, that is not what autism is these are children who are sick, who are clearly unwell. So we put the autism to one side and we said how do we manage these children if they had these symptoms and they were developmentally normal and we would investigate? And so we decided we would and over the course of many months we put together a protocol a clinical protocol for the investigation of these children. What investigations do these children need in order for us to unearth the origin of their problem for example do we do a colonoscopy to investigate their bowel problems, are the bowel problems linked to the behaviour? Because the parents were reporting when my child's bowel is bad when they are in pain, their behaviour is terrible, they can't concentrate, they are at their worst autistically and their all their autistic mannerisms get worse when their intestine is bad and gets better when their intestine improves and this was intriguing to us as gastroenterologists because we had seen this before in other gastrointestinal diseases there are Gastrointestinal inflammatory diseases like Celiac disease or bacterial overgrowth when you lose a lot of your small intestinal, and you are just left with a little bit behind where bowel bacteria overgrowth leads to to deterioration in behaviour what is called encephalopathy and often even progressing to coma and the way you treat that is to treat the bowel get rid of the bugs in the bowel and the behaviour improves. So we had seen it before, this gut brain link, something in the bowel affecting the brain and treating the bowel helping the brain, so why was this different? Was this a similar process was for example some form of intoxication some bacterial by-product coming from the intestine and injuring the brain, rather like drinking alcohol you drink alcohol it gets throught the gut it injures the brain or affects the brain, affects behaviour so this was no different, it is not difficult, it is not rocket science, very very straightforward. was Something going on in the gut primarily, and injures the brain, so this was an entirely reasonable idea to look at The other thing is these children had regressed in the face of a viral insult they had been given a live viral vaccine, they had been given viruses which were known to be able to infect the brain and cause inflammation in the brain and to cause for example autism So it was entirely appropriate that they would undergo a series of investigations and we combine that in a single protocol with some experimental investigations in other words could we find in a laboratory setting evidence of measles virus in the inflamed intestine Research So combining as we should do in an academic institution like the royal free clinical investigation with research and as we progress through the process thereby refining the clinical investigation. This is necessary, that isn't, this is telling us something, this isn't, out that goes and then refining the process, so we were getting the maximum amount of information from investing in these children for the minimum inconvenience and risk to the child, and that is just good medicine So during this process I was approached by some lawyers who were acting on behalf of these children investigating the parental claim that their child had regressed, disappeared, become autistic after a vaccine and they said to me, would you help us? You have an interest in Crohn's disease and measles virus, measles vaccine We are now seeing these new children what do you think, can you help us in this process and i thought about it I thought long and hard about it and I decided that I would and I later wrote to my colleagues explaining my reason for doing so and my feeling was this, it was very straightforward Vaccination is designed for the greater good to protect the majority and it does so at the expense of a minority and that minority of children are those who are damaged by the vaccine and that we don't know the size of that number because it has never been investigated properly, but nonetheless, even if you accept that is a permissible ethical approach that we can protect majority of the expense of the minority, then that minority are a group of children who have paid the price for protecting the rest of society and therefore society has an absolute moral and ethical obligation to care for those children for the rest of their lives, period. That is it there is no escaping that moral imperative and yet to acknowledge those children in a public health setting is to raise doubts about the safety of vaccines and therefore it is much better to put them in a corner and forget about them to pretend they simply don't exist That is what had happened to these children The studies that had been designed to look at safety had been designed in such a way as they would never capture these children, nor did anyone want to capture them, nor was anyone interested in the parents story when they said my child has regressed after a vaccine. They were just put in a corner, told it couldn't happen and never investigated and that was absolutely unacceptable So So, the other thing that happened, around the same time, is a parent called me, she is the mother of two autistic children from the Midlands, and she was an older parent, and she had a husband who was older than she was He was infirm and she herself had arthritis. And she called me one day and she said doctor Wakefield. Please don't be judgmental don't judge me harshly she said, but when I die I am taking my children with me and I thought long and hard about that, and I wasn't in any way judgemental, in fact quite the opposite I was struck. She said to me, Dr Wakefield, no one else cares about my children i'm the only person who loves them and when I die or become infirm to the extent that I can no longer care for them they are going to be lost, they are going to be on the street and they are going to die on the street because the world doesn't care. And she was right she was absolutely right there's nothing for these children then you'll know that in the Thatcher era all the long stay institutions, the old asylums were closed down and turned into luxury apartments and there is nothing left It is care in the community, what does that mean? It just means shoving people with long term mental disabilities out into the community where they can injure themselves or injure other people or whatever. Who knows? who follows them? who cares? And that was a future for these children so, I decided at that point that I would help the lawyers because if nothing else I was in a position to look at this scientifically objectively and provide an answer that would, or would not take this story forward but would nonetheless give these children access to the due process of justice and that is what they had been denied and so it was about access to justice and surely that cannot be denied anyone you would think, in a civilised society. So So the lawyers asked me what we should do how would you go about in a scientific context taking this to the next step determining whether this temporal association that the mother has made between child's exposure to this vaccine and regression, how would you then further link that if possible to the virus and I said the bowel disease that we have seen in these children and in Crohn's disease looks like an infectious disease and you would look for evidence of the virus in sites of infection or obvious swelling of the lymph glands, there is one site in the intestine like swelling of the tonsils when you get a sore throat, you would look in the tonsil for the organism that was causing it, so So if you have got swelling of the lymph glands in the intestine look in there for evidence of the virus and measles was a virus that was known to cause this kind of swelling of the intestinal lymph glands So it made logical sense to look in those those areas and so we set up a study i was asked to design a study that would take this to that level that we would get funding from the legal aid board hypothetically and then we would look for evidence of the virus in the intestine and after a series of exchanges, and a protocol was prepared we received acknowledgement of funding from the Legal aid board to conduct that study. It is was negative it was negative, if it was positive it was positive, either way it got published It was not designed to produce a particular answer it was just designed to produce an answer, is the virus there, or not? It didn't make it causation but it was a piece, a crucial piece of the jigsaw that took it to the next level. Interestingly the dean made contact with me, the Dean of the medical school Professor Ari Zuckerman world-renowned virologist an expert in Hepatitis B worked very closely with the world health organization was deeply involved with hepatitis B vaccination a great advocate of hepatitis B vaccination different story, but nonetheless, there he was in the general apparatchik of the vaccine advocates and he said to me that he had been contacted by the Department of Health and a certain members of the Royal College of Child Health who had made him aware of this funding, and I said yes, this is a grant we got from them and it is perfectly respectable and we are conducting the science he said there is a conflict of interest there is a clear conflict of interest and i couldn't understand why? Why was there a conflict of interest? I had no conflict of interest I was asked to take this grant to conduct a piece of science and give an answer That wasn't a conflict of interest The funding would be disclosed in the paper that wrote up the science, the funding came from the Legal Aid Board but beyond that where was the conflict anyway I wrote back to him and said your suggestion that there is a conflict of interest has exercised my mind greatly over the last several months and I cannot see where it lies, and i laid out for him the context of my discussions with the lawyers and the work that was to be done and he wrote back to me and couldn't precisely define what the conflict was, but talked about if a legal action was anticipated, and preliminary discussions had already taken place then there was a conflict, and it didn't really make a lot of sense to me. I wrote back to him again and reiterated that we've been asked to undertake a piece of science to wasn't seeking a particular answer I wouldn't have got involved in the first place if there was any effort of coercion or demanding that we own the data, the lawyers didn't own it. We would do what we felt was scientifically appropriate with it and I had every faith in the lawyers, they seemed very concerned, genuinely concerned about these children they weren't in any way ambulance chasers but nonetheless there was some clear problem for the Dean in this, and he ultimately refused to take this money, and I said send it back to the legal aid board send it back we don't want it if you are not going to let us do this, we won't do it. Anyway, one of my colleagues said we will put it into an account at the hospital, a charitable account hospital where grants were run and let's see if that's okay, so we did now, interestingly the Dean has just appeared as a witness on behalf of the prosecution at the GMC Professor Ari Zuckerman, now 7 years retired and clearly deeply frustrated that he should be dragged out of retirement to have to give his evidence in this case, but nonetheless his first foray was to say, yes, when this money was transferred by the accountant of the Royal Free Medical School it was too late I didn't know about it, it had already happened, I couldn't stop it It is interesting that he actually signed the cheque for the transfer, Surprising that, given the fact that it had already happened by the time he knew about it nonetheless an interval of 11 years can cloud ones mind memory of things There we are But that was the first error he made What he disclosed, interestingly to me during that period was that he had written to the ethics committee of the British Medial Association (BMA), to take their advice how to deal with this perplexing issue that was clearly causing him concern about a conflict of interest that has was really unable to articulate to me So he wrote to Dr Armstrong at the BMA ethics committee to ask their opinion and in it unbeknown to me at the time he has said that he had been contacted by the department of health who said to him that the government stood to be sued by the parents by the parents of children affected by MMR or apparently affected by MMR vaccine and that this to him was a conflict of interest That the government was going to be sued now you have to understand i came into this with the lawyers believing the case was against the vaccine manufacturers the government didn't even come into it but he was clearly under the impression that the government were going to be sued He also said that this may be embarrassing for the medical school Now, we were never party to the ultimate response of Dr Armstrong from the BMA We were never told about it All he did when he wrote back to me is to say you will know that I have taken advice on this matter from the british medical association and leave it that, as though the BMA had ruled completely against it When in fact we got the documents, as we did do as part of the disclosure for the GMC, there it was, the letter from Dr Armstrong not only endorsing the fact this study could and should be done because it was morally and ethically proper that it should be done but that not to do it because it was embarrassing to an institution or because it meant the government might be sued was not a sound moral argument his words So in other words the BMA ethics committee had said this is fine It said actions of this kind or research of this kind is often funded by a group with a particular interest Of course they are, the Multiple Sclerosis Society funds research for MS in the hope that it can make patients better so here we have another group of people with a vested interest funding a piece of research As long as it is ethical, and as long as it is conducted in a way that it is published, whether it is positive or negative then that is fine nonetheless Prof Zuckerman did not get the answer that he wanted He never disclosed that to us he just kept beating us over the head with the certain knowledge that he contacted the BMA and they had given him an opinion sometime later i was working with the lawyers on that faded into my distant memory i was called by Richard Barr one of the lawyers and asked if I would attend a meeting on Newcastle Train station with a dr calling himself a man calling himself George junior nothing more. They had previous meetings with george at newcastle station and the bottom line is on a sunday we got on a train went up Newcastle station there we met with george and george would be wearing a red carnation and indeed george was wearing a red carnation and we met with george and george turned out to be the name of his son who was an actor and george was Dr. Alexander Torres who was from the Scottish department of health and Dr Torres had be seconded into joint committee on vaccination and immunization and effectively from canada and he had been brought in at least in part to advise on the introduction of MMR vaccine the experience in canada was that they introduced a vaccine which contained a Mumps component made up of a strain of the vaccine called Urabe that was originally generated in japan and they have run into problems with this vaccine, it had produce meningitis in children the mumps virus was identified in the spinal fluid around the brain of the children and the vaccine was pulled in canada it was pulled it was stopped in 1997 nonetheless this was the vaccine that was intended to be introduced in the UK a year later 1988 did I say 1997, i mean 1987 It was the vaccine that was to be introduced in the UK in 1988 they changed the name the vaccine that was identical so it had gone from Trivirix to Pluserix in the UK, an identical vaccine that had already been withdrawn for safety reasons in canada Now Torres advised the JCVI not to introduce this vaccine because it was not safe. he was overruled He said if you are going to introduce it then you should have active surveillance That is doctors or people going out and asking have you seen and cases of the following in the past month not waiting for doctors to spontaneously report. Spontaneous reporting picks up one to two percent of the true adverse reactions and these are data from the the food and drug administration in america It is inadequate totally inadequateand they were overruled, no active surveillance So they were going to intro a vaccine that has been withdrawn in other countries, known to be unsafe and they were going to have no active surveillance for possible adverse events for that vaccine in this country now this was done he said for competitive pricing reasons The strain of the vaccine that contained the dangerous mumps component was one quarter approximately the price of the american vaccine MMRII made by Merck there had been no reports of meningitis using the Merck vaccine which contained a strain of mumps called Jeryl Lynn derived from the daughter of the guy who actually isolated it the first place Maurice Hilleman So what we had was a cheaper vaccine that was known to be dangerous so when the vaccine was licensed or there was the proposal to licence this vaccine in the country the joint committee or members of that committee went to SmithKline Beecham and said we want your vaccine SmithKline Beecham said we are not happy about this because this has already been withdrawn in Canada It has got this mumps component in it which is dodgy they said if we're going to do it then we want an indemnity we want indemnity from prosecution for damage to children on the basis of the receipt of the vaccine and it appears that indemnity was granted, and Torres told us about this, and he said that at the meeting the girl there from smithkline beecham said we are immunising the children and the government are immunising us so they entered into this relationship the vaccine was produced, the vaccine was licensed, the vaccine was given and cases of meningitis started to appear they were recorded and documented in the minutes of the JCVI which are now available on line and have been obtained by us as part of this litigation more and more of these cases started to be reported the scottish department withdrew this vaccine didn't want to give it in certain health areas rejected the Urabe containing vaccine but still the JCVI continued with it There was no withdrawal of this vaccine until finally a study was grudgingly done in Nottingham where they found that that was a much higher risk of this meningitis with this vaccine than had previously been predicted by passive surveillance, and the vaccine was withdrawn overnight and it was only withdrawn overnight because it was leaked to the press It appeared in a newspaper and suddenly the vaccine was pulled So a dangerous vaccine, a knowingly dangerous vaccine was introduced and ultimately proven to be dangerous and had to be withdrawn in 1992. So two of the three vaccine brands that were introduced in 1988 had to be withdrawn for safety reasons and yet Dr Salisbury in his statement to the general medical council sums up by saying this is a vaccine legs entry safety record with an exemplary safety record Well, if that is his idea of an excellent safety record then we have a very different perception he and I of vaccine safety and so we come full circle now because it turns out that that dean was right Ari Zuckerman was right based upon the information that he got he says probably from Dr Salisbury way back when these parents that are coming to us in 1996 97 that it was the government who's going to be sued i thought it was going to be the drug companies, but it wasn't Why was it the government? Because the government have given the drug company an indemnity against harm and so this is why we're here this is what this is all about this whole GMC affair an effort to discredit doctors question the safety of the MMR vaccine has come about because of an indemnity given to the drug companies all those years ago for the introduction of an unsafe vaccine by perhaps just a few members of the department of health or recommend by the department of health to the government such that a vaccine was introduced and when you ask now and people have asked, was there an indemnity is there any indemnity, no the answer is absolutely categorically from David Salisbury, time and time again, there was no indemnity, no letter of comfort nothing at all by the government or the department of health or national health service for the vaccine manufacturers and yet in the minutes of the JCVI as late on in this story as 1997 there is an entry that says, it talks about the various brands of vaccine that are available and it says smithkline beecham continue to sell the Urabe strain without liablity there it is, in black and white in their own document. I have been every which way around that statement and cannot reconcile it to anything else other the fact that there was and remains an indemnity and so i'm afraid this is really whole process and the hope that one could that my colleagues and i might be discredited before this information ever became public in an effort to protect that original decision that original flawed decision and the consequences that have flowed from it we find ourselves in this position now and that's fine but it's not going to stop the truth coming and you would think under those circumstances having withdrawn this vaccine in Australia and canada and japan and the united kingdom that would be it they would ditch it, get rid of it because it is not safe, but no they go on making it and what do they do with it they ship it out to the third world and there was a mass vaccine campaign in Brazil in the 1990's where they gave the great majority of Brazilian children a revaccination with MMR during a very short space of time with the Urabe containing vaccine, which they knew to be dangerous, and what it produced was an epidemic of meningitis a huge peak in the numbers of cases of meningitis, and there was a paper written about it afterwards, and one of the points in the discussion in the paper was perhaps it's not a good idea to do mass vaccination campaigns because it reveals the true incidence of side effects to a vaccine who wrote that? Who in God's name wrote that? So this is, if you like, the morality the integrity of the people you dealing with in this Why is that vaccine even on the shelf? Why is it being sold at cut price to third world countries? What is the thinking behind this? Because it is certainly not a moral imperative it must be a commercial one and so that's why we're here and that's where we'll remain here and that's where we'll continue to fight this kind of thing because you can't treat people as expendable You can't damage them and put them to one side. Adolph Hitler in Mein Kampf wrote the greater truth excludes the lesser and these children are the lesser truth in the world or the mind of people like Adolph Hitler and that kind of thinking failed in the 1940's and it is going to fail now, you cannot treat people in a civilized society as expendable Yes, there may be an argument for a vaccine programme that protects the greater good but that does not mean that you can render those who are damaged just consign them to the dustcart because they are an inconvenience or they their mere presence undermines public confidence, better to keep them hidden out the way and there are too many of these children now, they won't be hidden away and parents are getting very very angry, and they have every right to be angry and the truth will come out and it is going to be a very very painful truth when it does come out and the tragedy is it's going to damage public confidence in vaccine policy across-the-board because people are going to say we don't believe you anymore we don't trust you, you lied to us and when that happens all vaccination policy is compromised, the whole pillar of public health comes tumbling down and a lot of trouble is going to ensue as you are going to deal with a population who are not protected from these infections and we are going to run into big problems and that responsibility for that lays squarely at the door of the public health figures and their commercial partners who have allowed this to happen Conflicts of Interest and Dishonesty? There have been some slightly difficult moments about differences of opinion, for example with Richard Horton over conflicts of interests and it's been interesting the Lancet statement on conflict is: 'anything that would embarrass you if it were later disclosed', and my involvement with the Legal Aid Board didn't embarrass me at all and it wasn't relevant, in my opinion, to disclose it in the Lancet paper because they didn't fund any of the Lancet paper they funded a subsequent viralogical study, as was always intended but it had been misrepresented in the media that they had funded the Lancet study, and it wasn't disclosed and this was the perception Richard Horton originally had and when I was asked about this by him way back in 2004 I said, no they didn't fund this study at all they funded a separate study and he said 'well in that case it could be perceived as a potential conflict of interest', and I said where did that come from? The statement as I read it in the Lancet, the requirement is to 'disclose things that might embarrass you if they emerge later and it was interesting because within that document which was self-contained anyone writing a paper for the Lancet would just need to read that and the actual statement is the test of conflict of interest in the Lancet is an easy one anything that would embarrass you and so you don't go beyond that, it is a self contained document, why would you go any further but there is a website flagged up in there where you can go that website and there is a more broader description of conflict of interest there which does include potential or perceived conflicts of interest which no one ever went to Why would you do it? You have got it in front of you, Now there is a very big difference Anything that would embarrass you is the active move Okay, it is what would embarrass me, so I can think what would embarrass me, and I can make a decision about that what others might perceive to be a conflict of interest is myriad it goes on forever You have to put yourself in the third person and think what might someone else with their various views and biases construe to be a conflict of interest and that is massive, where does that end? So that is a huge conceptual leap in terms as to what you would disclose and there was no formal way for doing it at the time. Now you have a document where you fill in the the the boxes saying no shares, no this, no that that's very straightforward but in those days it wasn't it was highly ambiguous and it was always my intention, and always was disclosed when there was a direct funding for a study, a grant giving body, or in this case the Legal Aid Board and so in the viral study it was disclosed this study was supported in part by the Legal Aid Board and Dr Wakefield is acting expert in the MMR litigation that is an easy one as it goes but in the Lancet study I felt no need to disclose it at all, and neither did any of my colleagues who knew that I was involved with the Legal aid Board on behalf of some of these children. So that was a difficult moment but it was a difference of opinion he thought I should have disclosed it, I felt at the time that I didn't, now in retrospect having seen this new document about perceived conflict I can see that it should have been disclosed but there was no dishonesty, and he was good enough to say there was no intent to deceive when Dr Wakefield was asked about it he was entirely open, he said yes there was this grant We got into an argument and debate about what was or wasn't a conflict of interest, but there was absolutely no intent to deceive and the charge is dishonesty so he was extremely helpful in this as much he said, no this was not dishonest this was a genuine difference of opinion and so that then largely resolved Where does it leave the GMC if you are not guilty? That is a very good question on a very broad front because they've got some tough decisions to make One on the level of the case itself and have they misinstructed their experts, are they going to have to retrench in a different set of charges. They have to take time to structure those charges and get a response from their experts Are they going to be allowed to do that, I don't know, must be becoming obvious to them now that much of the original information they were given have been misconstrued and basing their charges on that information has been in error at another level they are under big pressure from the Department of Health and David Salisbury in particular has been calling them on a regular basis urging them to prosecute this case more vigorously against me be nastier, be meaner throw more in and I know this because we get sent the unused material and so I took the opportunity, he didn't know this, I mean you get all the telephone conversations, all the conversation between people, all the draft reports which is an interesting advantage to us so I was able to write to David Salisbury and was able to say I am now in a position to have read the unused material from the GMC, and I note your entreaties to them about this case he wrote he was furious, he contacted the GMC and said "I didn't know they were going to get the unused material you never told me, this is a disgrace" And the wonderful thing about that is that we get the documents of that telephone conversation as well So, you can see they are under a great deal of political pressure to prosecute this case and it is interesting in the public domain Dr Salisbury has said we don't want this to be seen as a vendetta on behalf of the Department of Health. So mixed messages one for the GMC one for the public and then The other dilemma they have is who do they represent in the end? Because the GMC have historically stood for the patient, the patients rights, the patients welfare, the patients protection from for example, medical malpractice. Well, who do they stand for now because we stand for the patients. Everything we have done is in the best interests of the children What they are representing and prosecuting is not on behalf of the children no parent ahs complained agaisnt us, but on behalf of the Department of Health on behalf of public health on behalf of this new kid on the block, the greater good. So here we have a body who has traditionally represented the patient, the victim, if you like against the medical profession or againts medical malpractice, now they're defending the diktat of public health against the rights of the individual so they're in a real quandary or if they're not they should be about quite who they represent because i know who i represent represent, the individual patient Were you responsible for the children's Lumbarpuncture? The charge of causing children to undergo lumbar puncture is because of the position of an asterisk in the timetable of the tests for the children and I undertook because it was an increased burden of work for the Department of Pediatric Gastroenterology. I undertook to just book the tests for the MRI imaging of the brain and the electrical recordings of the brain and the looks cool electrical recordings of the brain the EEG so I would just book it with the Department, I wasn't ordering the tests, that was done by the clinicians, I was merely functioning as a clerk, if you like, just taking the form down, signing it and booking the appointment nothing more than that the asterisk for an MRI on Monday underneath the MRI also on a Monday is a lumbar puncture, and therefore they have assumed that the asterisk applies to the lumbar puncture as wel and that I am causing that child to undergo a lumbar puncture. So there is this whole string of charges about me causing these children to undergo lumbar puncture which was a clinically indicated procedure advocated by the clinicians only because the asterisk is in the same box That is the basis of the charge or at least as far as we can see The lumbar puncture was in fact due to continue directly after the colonoscopy because the child was already sedated for the colonoscopy so rather than give them two sedatives for two different procedures give them one and allow it to continue over so they were sedated when they had the lumbar puncture so there's no need to arrange it it was already going to be done I did not cause the children to undergo lumbar puncture But that is the that is the, that is the 'forensic evidence' that they have for making a charge uh... that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny What Happened at the birthday party? The Birhday Party There are 2 mistakes about the birthday party. One was taking blood from children at a birthday party or having blood taken at a birthday party and the other was telling the story about it in a way that was designed to and tell people an audience of parents of children with autism and professionals about my children's contribution to these investigations. I was proud of them, but I also wanted to temper that by illustrating the the mercenary nature of children so the story itself was a gross exaggeration There were actually 7, 8, 9 children at the birthday party who gave blood with fully informed consent There was absolutely no problem, In the story that I tell, the children were fainting and all that sort of thing It was a stupid story Humour is in the moment. I thought it was funny at the time, it wasn't funny then, it isn't funny now but nonetheless there it was the children were absolutely fine. Yes, I paid them 5 pounds each or rewarded them 5 pounds each for their altruism, for their willingness to participate in this It was done in a perfectly respectable way, and there were no problems and they were all entirely willing and all their parents had given fully informed consent children are often altruistic and will help out and my children who were some of those children involved in that knew the autistic children, they knew what it was all about. These children came to stay with us or have lunch with us when they had come up over from America. For example and they were more than willing to help My son Sam has just come back from teaching in an autism camp in Aspen Colorado My children have a tremendous sense of duty and caring, and they had no problem, or their friends at the time about getting a sample of blood for this test so it was a grossly exaggerated story and that is a shame, but it should never have been told in that setting, and you could reasonably argue it would bring the reputation into disrepute, and that is what they have argued the ethical side of doing it, or at least the lack of ethics committee approval there was no approval to do it and nor did I think approval was necessary because it was done away from the Royal Free, it was done off site it was done in a domestic setting That was naive and nowadays you would definitely need ethical committee approval, and you probably did then I didn't know about that and I wouldn't have told the story obviously, if I had been aware that t was a problem or had been a problem at the time so a combination of naivety and a bad sense of humour but there was no, absolutely, abuse of the children and they were all very very happy and would do it again any time, not that they did, so it is just one of those things and ultimately that's what they find me guilty of that is a small charge in my mind compared to the much graver charge of having conducted dishonest and inappropriate research on children with autism How would you say the media have handled the story? I am dismayed by the way in which the media continuously, despite whatever you tell them reiterate the same errors, the same mistakes but of course the major problem is with the way it was handled by the Sunday Times and Brian Deer and and that to my mind was just a big error from start to finish it's like having five percent of the documents and making the story out of those five percent when you haven't got the remaining ninety five percent to that tell the actual story making it up fixing that idea in mind, staying with that idea irrespective of what anyone might say in mitigation and that's what happens. Why did it take so long for the charges to be brought against you? I think that is really a question for the prosecuting counsel i don't know and i suspect it may get to quality of the charges themselves the reliability of the charges. How do you construe a charge out of you caused this child to have a lumbar puncture? What does that mean you didn't do it you didn't order it you didn't assess the child in advance to determine whether they needed it. You were part of none of those things, yet you caused the child to have a lumbar puncture Well, it is an interesting form of words I don't know but i suspect they wanted to get as much together as they could to throw everything in there in the hope that something would stick What do you think is the GMC's role in the hearing? The General Medical Council has become an instrument of the public health apparatchik for persecuting doctors discrediting doctors in an effort to prevent them dissenting about vaccines and vaccine safety and and who knows what will happen next to Richard Halvison will he be the next? This is extraordinary to Americans, absolutely extraordinary because in America you have the first amendment you have freedom of speech if you want to say something you say it in this country no way The idea of prosecuting a doctor because he has said something, given his opinion offered his advice, said what he truly believes, it is absolute anathema to Americans. They can't understand how this could possibly happen in a civilised world, and yet here we have it But I thought we were supposed to be living in a democracy So did I we are so far from living in a democracy this is a very very important case in so many ways. I know that may sound very pompous to say that actually orthodox medicine is on trial here. We, my colleagues and I, practice orthodox medicine based implicitly on the history of the patient, the physical examination of the patient. The correct clinical evaluation of the patient, making a diagnosis, treating the disease within the patient, That is what we do, and that is the kind of medicine that should be practiced that is really being challenged by when that comes into conflict with with the beliefs, the diktat of public health it is no longer someway permissible to do that medicine is on trial and if we lose and the position of the Department of Health is endorsed then their ability to persecute doctors in this way is upheld then what happens in the future? What happens when there's a drug related injury to a patient? What happens when a new complication emerges from a treatment or a vaccine? are going to say sorry thats's to bad I'm not going to get involved because you've got a big pharmaceutical industry there with their friends in government, that are going to come down on me and make my life a misery. It happened with Thalidomide and it has happened time and time again. Every time a doctor puts his head up above the parapet and said this vaccine or this drug is not safe his world has been turned upside down That is not a reason to walk away from it in fact is every reason to fight it because otherwise we just hand over, just give up just hand over the world to the drug companies and walk away Do you think that parents voices are being heard in the MMR story? Is the story of the parents being heard in all of this either in the media or in the GMC or anywhere? Is it being listened to by doctors? No. Is it being heard in the media? Not to the extent that represents as to what is actually going on, no, and the reason is these parents are dealing with a catastrophe, they are dealing with a child who can't go out the house, won't go out the house screaming, having tantrums, beating their head against the wall who has got terrible diarrhoea, it is 15 years old and in nappies they don't have time to talk to the media, it is just a select handful of parents who are actually so determined and with a particular mindset that they can do that, the rest of them are just coping with the catastrophe that's their world Some think it is MMR, some don't think it is MMR the problem is that parents with children with autism are not being heard and yet the numbers are growing through the roof In AIDs it was a different story AIDS is a very interesting analogy of an epidemic disease that has occurred in our lifetime and AIDS started in the homosexual community in san francisco and los angeles and and in the radical right wing politics of Reagan and Thatcher it was it a Gay Plague it was an act of god anything but a transmissible disease a virus so what happened was with aids is that people were stigmatized that is your problem like leprosy get away from me. People went underground they continued their *** practices they didn't seek medical help the virus it spread like wild fire and then ten years later when people of acknowledged the virus it was to late to late for thousands and thousands of people it's too late for three-quarters of sub-saharan Africa it's to late there was no imperative to produce vaccines or drugs or anything during that time because it wasn't perceived to be our problem then suddenly it appeared in blood transfusion recipients and hemophiliacs and heterosexuals and suddenly it was a major problem and what happened was the aids activists went and threw infected blood on officials and the cameras came out, this is great infected blood being thrown take a picture suddenly politicians were embarrassed a money started to flow and things changed so it was the pressure on the politicians and the change in perception that the media bought about because the activist did that that really forced the pace of change but these parents aren't like that they're not aids activists these are just ordinary folk trying to deal with a catastrophe in their lifetimes, they are not people who go out and throw infected blood maybe they should be they certainly getting angry enough that something's going to happen something's going to break and you just get a sense of it at the hearing the beginning of the hearing something has to changed because there's so many of these kids and so few resources so little true care available for them and you hear it again at this hearing, time and again his is just a psychological problem, a psychiatric problem behavioral problem put them in a corner, sedate them, put them in a home, lock them up No, it's not, it is a medical problem, it is a medical disease, it is treatable, it is understandable, you can investigate it, you can research it and you can find out what is causing it if you want to Nobody really wants to do that apart from a few of us So AIDS is an interesting parallel, there was a tipping point in AIDS, it was around the time people threw infected blood How do you feel about the lack of support shown by fellow doctors generally? I get Letters from GPs and psychiatrists, and others saying this is what happened to this child and we are right with you . Where are you? I don't see you but thats okay I don't feel any antipathy towards them It is just human nature Maybe they are not sufficiently persuaded to come all the way out maybe many of the doctors I deal with are parents of affected children themselves. They know what happened sometimes they are still frightened to say That I find a little difficlult to swallow Their own children have been damaged and yet they still keep quiet about it