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March 20, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

23:35

Interview with Dr Andrew Wakefield about the British Medical Journal, science and vaccines

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	Welcome, everyone.
	This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger with NaturalNews.com.
	Today, I'm sitting down with Dr.
	Andrew Wakefield, who you, of course, are familiar with in the ongoing controversy surrounding vaccinations, autism, gastrointestinal disorders in children, and, of course, what's going on with the medical journals and science in general.
	Here to talk about that is Dr.
	Andrew Wakefield.
	Thank you, Dr.
	Wakefield.
	It's a pleasure to be here.
	First of all, call me Andy.
	My mother calls me Andrew when she's angry with me.
	It makes me really nervous.
	Call me Andy.
	Andy, can you update us on where things stand right now?
	These accusations were leveled against you.
	You were able to put out some documents that really Show that those accusations are unfounded and unjustified.
	Can you give us a brief update?
	Sure.
	As your listeners and your viewers will know, back in 1998 we published a paper linking a novel bowel disease to developmental regression into autism in a group of children, a cohort of 12 children, and in eight, in fact it turned out to be nine of the parents, they linked that To MMR vaccine, their child was developing normally, they had the vaccine, they then started to develop behavioural problems and regressed into autism.
	So that was the context of a case series that was reported in The Lancet.
	It made no claims.
	It was a hypothesis generating study, if anything.
	It merely told the story, as told to us by the parents, and it described the findings in the children.
	This is an important point, if I could interrupt just for a second, that that original paper in the Lancet did not claim or conclude that vaccines cause autism.
	In fact, there was a very cautious statement in your conclusions in that paper, if I recall.
	It did not make that association at all.
	No, absolutely right.
	What it was is a description of a novel syndrome, that is a set of signs, symptoms and findings in a group of patients that are so similar, so coherent, that they merit publication in their own right.
	It cannot, by virtue of its design, test a hypothesis that vaccines cause autism, and certainly can't make that claim.
	And so, as you say, we explicitly said this study does not prove an association, let alone a causal association, even an association.
	It is merely a reiteration of the parent's story.
	Now, if those children had regressed after natural chickenpox, The story would have been told.
	No censorship.
	No one would have questioned why we put in chickenpox.
	But because it happened after a vaccine, then it can't be spoken about.
	It is verboten.
	You know, it is forbidden.
	No, that is not the way science works.
	Science will not be censored in that way.
	And it most certainly wasn't our job as scientists to censor the parent's story.
	It's interesting because I think in 2004, if I recall, there was an effort to partially retract some of that paper by the Lancet.
	And those who were attempting to do so, they leaped to the conclusion that your paper was talking about autism, even though it wasn't.
	Is that accurate?
	Well, the story was that when it was disclosed by Brian Deere to the Lancet editor that I had been involved in MMR litigation, a fact that was known to the public in the British national newspapers a year before, and was known to the Lancet editor himself, although he forgot that, that my colleagues were urged to retract an interpretation.
	This was a partial retraction.
	I see.
	It was an interpretation that MMR It was causally associated with autism.
	But the paper never made that link.
	It did not draw that conclusion.
	How can you retract something that was not in the paper?
	How can you retract a possibility?
	A possibility stands.
	You can't retract a possibility.
	There's no logic to that.
	This was just political shenanigan, and I refused to get involved, I refused to sign up to it, and so did two of my colleagues.
	And as you know, it's been reported in the media since that time, oh, ten of your colleagues retracted, ten of your colleagues denied the findings.
	No, they didn't.
	They never did.
	No one has ever denied the findings among those people who wrote that paper.
	The findings stand, and we can certainly go into that in some detail.
	But there was never a retraction of the findings of the paper, merely an interpretation that was not made in the paper.
	I see.
	Getting to those findings, I think it's also important for people to know the correct context here that your role in that original paper was to be the aggregator of the research data.
	In that original study, you were not, for example, performing clinical procedures on the children.
	Am I correct?
	That's right.
	That's something that I've been accused of time and time again.
	I was described the other day as the thinker behind this, which I quite like.
	What happened is that parents first came to me, and they came to me because I had an interest in measles and Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, so established inflammatory bowel disease and a possible link with measles, and we've been working on that.
	It was published in The Lancet.
	And so parents called and said, look, this is what happened to my child.
	So I was the first point of contact.
	And at that stage, I was working no longer as a clinician, but as a researcher.
	I was running a big research team.
	And so I said, look, I can't help you clinically, but I do know someone who can.
	And that's the best person in the world, Professor John Walker Smith, who has an unparalleled experience of bowel disease in children and so the children were referred on to Professor Walker-Smith for his clinical opinion to be seen clinically and investigated for the symptoms from which they were clearly suffering and so what happened was I We spent from May 1995,
	about a year and a half, just formulating ideas about how this disease process, if that's what it was, was operating.
	How did the gut symptoms in these children, the diarrhea, the abdominal pain, the bloating, the failure to thrive, how was that going to be possibly linked to their cognitive deterioration, their autism?
	Was there a link between the gut and the brain?
	Was there a link between the immune system?
	And the brain.
	Was the immune system the interface between what was happening in the gut and the brain?
	Was there an abnormality of vitamin B12? Which had been postulated again by parents.
	The insights had come from the parents.
	Was there a link, a plausible link, between the vaccine and autism?
	And if so, how would one go about looking at that?
	So I put together a team and we put together a clinical and research protocol together and that's why I was the first author on the paper, but as you say, no, I performed no investigations.
	I didn't do any colonoscopies.
	I did not decide in any way whether children should have colonoscopies.
	I didn't do lumbar punctures, spinal taps.
	I did not decide who should have them.
	That was decided by the clinicians, and this was a very, very eminent team of clinicians in a tertiary referral center, a top center in the world.
	Well, it seems then that one of the outlandish accusations that has been made against you was that somehow you fabricated the data.
	I mean, you had a whole team.
	There was a team of clinicians who were assessing the health symptoms of the children and gathering data.
	And so, doesn't it mean logically that if this accusation is to be leveled against you, that actually it should be leveled against all the other researchers?
	Even though it's a false accusation, we know that, but how can they pin it on you, the one who is aggregating this data and writing the conclusions, when you weren't even gathering the data?
	Well, this is the most extraordinary thing of all, and these allegations come from a freelance journalist called Brian Deer.
	And it's worth characterizing Brian Deer for your listeners so that you know something about him.
	And you can judge what happened subsequently in the context of that knowledge.
	Brian Deer's first foray, his first entree into autism, at least as far as I'm aware, was an interview with a parent, the mother of one of the children in the Lancet paper, many years before I'd ever heard of him.
	And Brian Deer got into her home using a false name.
	Now, this is extraordinary journalistic practice.
	He did so, and he discloses this on his website, in order to mislead her, in order to deliberately deceive her, so that she did not know his past track record.
	And what information was he trying to solicit?
	Clearly, he was not there with the intention that he...
	He described himself as a health correspondent from the Sunday Times.
	He was not even on the staff of the Sunday Times.
	And these exchanges come from correspondence between this mother and the head of the Sunday Times saying, who is this man?
	This is how he's representing himself.
	And even at that stage, she was using his false name because she didn't know his real name.
	So he gets into the home of a distraught mother, a bereaved mother, grieving for her desperately sick child under a pretext with the deliberate aim of deceiving her.
	That is Brian Deere.
	Well, speaking of deceit, isn't there also the issue of that somehow he was able to get his hands on confidential health data and the names of the original children and he posted that publicly, which is in violation of medical ethics and journalistic ethics.
	Do we know yet how he was able to attain these private protected health records of these children?
	We don't.
	We do not fully know, although there is evidence emerging that it may have been supplied to him by one of the experts in the MMR vaccine litigation.
	Now, clearly, if that is the case, that would be extremely serious.
	There are other ways in which he might have come by them, but his use of them subsequently...
	Is completely unscrupulous.
	Posting children's details on a website, a public website.
	I mean, clearly this man's motive is not compassion for the children.
	I understand that he posted their full names as well as their appointment times of when they would appear at the clinic.
	I mean...
	Ethics seem to operate on one side of this equation only.
	And violations of ethics similarly, but the violations of ethics on the other side of this equation, things that are rarely heard about, are absolutely extraordinary.
	Absolutely extraordinary.
	and there is no will, no political will whatsoever to investigate those violations.
	Now, the investigation will be forced upon them.
	But coming back to your question about the allegations against me and the fact that I did not generate these data.
	Now, there's a story that goes around in British legal circles, a sort of anecdote that serves as a warning to people, and that is that there's a prosecution of a man for assault.
	And his lawyer, the defendant's lawyer, is cross-examining a witness.
	And he says to him, I put it to you that you did not see my client assault Mr.
	Smith.
	And the witness said, no, I didn't.
	He said, I put it to you that you did not see my client bite Mr.
	Smith's ear off.
	He said, no, I didn't.
	He said, I put it to you, sir.
	You saw nothing at all.
	He said, yes, I saw him spit it out again.
	Now, the point of that story is that you can go just too far.
	You can ask one too many questions.
	You can be too greedy and you can blow your case completely.
	And that's exactly what they've done here.
	So Brian Deere, knowing full well that I was not involved in the analysis of the tissues, as they were described in The Lancet, knowing precisely how those tissues were analysed meticulously, by the clinical team to arrive at the final diagnosis of colitis that was reported in the Lancet says that I manually altered the records to change not just the clinical histories of the children but the diagnosis in order to manufacture a disease That
	he, Brian Deer, does not believe exists.
	Who is this?
	Brian Deer, the pathologist?
	Brian Deer, the psychiatrist?
	Brian Deer, the neurologist?
	Brian Deer, the gastroenterologist?
	Who is this man?
	Anyway, and we're talking now, and again, I don't mean to stand unseated, but you're talking about some of the best people in the world in their field, particularly Professor John Walker-Smith and his team.
	So what happened, and I'll give you an example, what would happen is that the pathology samples, the biopsies from the children's intestines, are routinely taken for the investigation of possible inflammatory bowel disease.
	That is what it was thought these children had.
	And they are examined by a routine pathologist.
	Now this is the duty pathologist on call that day who may have a special interest in breast cancer or neurological disease, but not a gastrointestinal specialist.
	Every week, Professor Walker-Smith with his team...
	And once again he has an unparalleled experience in the world of bowel disease in children, would sit and review the pathological findings, the microscopic findings.
	And what they found in this routine review is that the duty pathologist was missing disease in these children.
	He was missing inflammation or she was missing inflammation.
	And so in order to arbitrate, in order to resolve this discordance between the routine findings and his team's expert findings, he asked the senior pathologist in the hospital Dr.
	Paul Dillon, who was the senior expert in bowel disease, to analyse the tissues independently and to do so without any knowledge of the child's diagnosis or their symptoms.
	In other words, to the highest degree of rigour.
	To say in a blinded review, please could you look at these biopsies and without any preconditions tell me what you find.
	He documented those findings, and it's those findings, made completely independently of me, that were put into the Lancet paper.
	And they were colitis, colitis, colitis, colitis, colitis, and so on.
	So they were faithfully reproduced in the Lancet paper, and they were made in the most scrupulous, meticulous way.
	And those are the facts.
	Now, Brian Deere knew those facts.
	When he made his allegations to the British Medical Journal, he knew those facts.
	Did he disclose them to the British Medical Journal?
	More importantly, the British Medical Journal, as a peer-reviewed scientific journal, did they check the facts?
	Because the facts were fully available to them in the book, Callous Disregard.
	In fact, you made most of this material available directly to the British Medical Journal via email.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	They have been told about this.
	Now, they have got themselves into a real mess.
	Indeed.
	They have been hijacked by a freelance journalist who is not expert in any of these fields.
	They have handed over their journal to this man and allowed him to publish false allegations, knowingly false allegations, and they have gone along with it.
	Do you think the British Medical Journal will be forced eventually to retract this?
	Well, it's going to be a very interesting situation.
	They've been sent now a series of nine questions that they have to answer.
	Nine questions based upon their articles and the facts that they are going to have to answer.
	Well, it seems that they either have to exist in the realm of evidence and logic and science and reason, and that's where they claim they exist.
	And if they do that, they must answer these nine questions, they must look into the evidence, or the BMJ can become the blogger's medical journal, the tabloid medical journal that really has no scientific credibility.
	I mean, they have to make a decision of what's their character, it seems.
	Yes.
	In my opinion, they have blown their scientific credibility.
	In their desperation, in their urgency, in their sort of cognitive dissonance, there's fundamental belief that vaccines must be safe.
	They must be safe.
	Please don't tell me they're not.
	Please don't tell me that this disease, this terrible disease, is something that's iatrogenic, that's been caused by the physician.
	Don't tell me that.
	Tell me anything but that.
	And we will take any information, even information from Brian Deer, That will convince us that it's safe and we will publish that because that conforms with our belief system.
	That makes us feel more comfortable.
	That makes us feel that we as a profession are not culpable in this extraordinary disorder.
	So that's the situation in which they're operating.
	They are so keen to prove me wrong, to prove the parents wrong and to exonerate The medical profession, their political friends, their pharmaceutical friends, whoever it is, that they have gone ahead in this reckless way and done this.
	And now, based upon the clear, unambiguous, historical, factual records, then I can come out and talk to you like this and say this without any fear.
	Of retribution from the British Medical Journal because they've got themselves into this mess.
	The facts are the facts.
	Well, it seems like you would welcome a deeper investigation and everything going on to the record.
	And as you hinted at earlier, it seems that the British Medical Journal and people like Brian Deer have inadvertently now turned the eye of scrutiny upon themselves because their accusations against you were so outrageous And so serious and so fundamentally flawed that they've now attracted essentially the attention of the entire alternative medicine community,
	of physicians who weren't even paying attention to the vaccine issue that closely until now, and now they're looking at it more closely, and they are becoming aware of concerns.
	Now you have the alternative media that's running with this story all over the place.
	I mean, you're appearing in many, many places, many interviews.
	Now the BMJ is facing the kind of scrutiny that they had intended for you alone to face.
	It's backfired.
	Well, it may.
	It may.
	And here's the dilemma.
	The dilemma at the moment is mainstream media.
	Sure.
	Anderson Cooper being one example, Good Morning America being another, Fox and Friends being another, has brought into this story.
	They love it.
	Physician makes up vaccine, parents needn't worry, go away, everything's fine.
	No, it's not.
	And the problem is that will the mainstream media now take this real story, the real facts, and actually do their job as journalists and report the facts?
	Will they report the truth?
	I doubt it.
	Why?
	Because they're owned.
	They're owned.
	Their salaries are paid, albeit indirectly, in large part by pharmaceutical advertising revenues.
	And the first thing that will happen when they go out there and try and do a story which deconstructs Deer's arguments, the BMJ's arguments, and actually reconstructs them in light of the truth, Will be a call from their advertisers saying, uh-uh.
	So what will the mainstream media do?
	Will it live up to its job, its responsibility, its duty to the people to report the truth, or will it show complete disinterest?
	So, Anderson Cooper has been presented with the same nine questions.
	What was your story based upon?
	Show us the facts.
	Did you do your homework?
	Now, are you going to pay similar attention to these documented historical facts?
	Yes.
	And we shall see.
	We shall.
	And I think this is really an opportunity for independent journalists and alternative media to really show how important it is to have competing points of view in the media.
	To have points of view that are not funded by pharmaceutical advertising, for example, and big corporate sponsors who do set the editorial agenda in many cases.
	But we're about out of time with this segment.
	Let me ask you one additional question.
	If your research had, for example, concluded that this colitis, these symptoms that you were observing in these children, let's say theoretically that it had concluded that this was being caused by a vitamin and not vaccines.
	Vaccines weren't even part of this story.
	It was being caused by a vitamin.
	You found, let's just say, let's pretend that your researchers found that vitamin A, for example, supplements were causing this.
	I believe that you would have been treated as a hero in the conventional medical community for that finding, whereas now you're being treated in the opposite way.
	Do you agree with that assessment, or how do you think you might have been treated differently if you had found a different cause associated, or possibly associated, with the symptoms you were observing?
	I think you're absolutely right.
	I think if we'd found that it was caused by Rocky Mountain spotted fever, they would say, wow, that's horrible.
	Let's make a vaccine against that.
	And they'd have seen the market opportunity and they'd have rushed out there and we'd have a vaccine on the market already.
	So, absolutely.
	It's the simple fact that this is a vaccine.
	That may be causing this, that is anathema, that is unacceptable, and in violation of the sort of religious belief that this is the best thing we've ever done, so it cannot be bad.
	Now I don't know the answer, but I do know that the question is entirely valid, and we, my colleagues and I, will not be deterred from trying to answer that question.
	We are happy to hear that, and we wish you the best in pursuing the continued facts of this matter and hopefully moving towards a possible retraction by the British Medical Journal, if they're even open to such an idea.
	We shall see.
	We shall see.
	All right, folks, you've been listening to an interview here with Dr.
	Andrew Wakefield.
	He's the author of Callous Disregard, which you can find in bookstores everywhere.
	And the website where you can learn more from Dr.
	Wakefield is, of course, VaccineSafetyFirst.com, correct?
	And there are many other vaccine information websites that you can find online.
	Check out NaturalNews.com for a complete list of those references.
	Thank you, Andy, for joining me today.
	Pleasure.

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