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May 16, 2025 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:33:07

"The Lights Went Out In Their Eyes" Michael & The Vaccine Dissident | Dr. Andy Wakefield

Is there a link between vaccines and autism—or is it all a conspiracy? In this explosive episode of Michael &, Michael Knowles sits down with one of the most controversial figures in modern medicine: Dr. Andy Wakefield. Wakefield, often labeled the father of the anti-vaccine movement, shares his side of the story, from the scientific claims that got him banned to the questions no one in the medical establishment wants to ask. Together, they explore the politics of Big Pharma, the suppression of dissent, and what happens when science collides with power. - - - Today’s Sponsor: Balance of Nature - Go to https://balanceofnature.com and use promo code KNOWLES for 35% off your first order PLUS get a free bottle of Fiber and Spice.

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	I started getting calls from parents saying my child was perfectly normal.
	They stopped sleeping at night.
	They were screaming.
	They were in pain.
	The lights went out in their eyes.
	It was a very common description.
	Doctors say, this is just part of autism.
	Get over it.
	Put your child in a home.
	Have another child and forget about it.
	What were they thinking?
	This is their quote.
	We are not going to be left with an orphan drug.
	And so it was decided to avoid that.
	they would put it into one day old inputs.
	Do vaccines cause autism?
	When I was a boy, it was the left that was skeptical of vaccines, thought that there might be a link between vaccines and autism.
	It was the left-wing shows that promoted this idea.
	Now, politics has flipped upside down.
	It's people on the right who suspect that vaccines might cause autism or other adverse health effects.
	It's the people on the left who are defending big pharma.
	You've now got Bobby Kennedy, who was a Democrat.
	He's a Kennedy, for goodness sakes.
	He's now the Secretary of Health and Human Services for Donald Trump, who previously had been kind of a Democrat.
	Now he's the Republican president.
	And here I am, still totally ignorant of vaccines.
	So I figured I'd call in a man who is at the center of this controversy.
	And that is Dr. Andy Wakefield.
	Dr. Wakefield, thank you for coming on the show.
	It's nice to be here.
	Thank you very much.
	For the people who don't know who you are, you published the study in the 1990s that suggested adverse health effects from the MMR vaccine.
	And you have also been the chief target of everyone who wants to defend.
	All vaccines, really, and especially the MMR vaccine.
	According to, I think it was David Weldon, former congressman who was nominated for CDC under Trump, you are the most unfairly vilified man on planet Earth.
	And I said, well, is that true?
	Let me look up a little bit about Andy Wakefield.
	And I know you certainly have the best Wikipedia page I've ever seen.
	Some of my friends have been unfairly maligned on Wikipedia's conspiracy theorists, hoaxsters, bigots, whatever.
	The first line of your biography on there is, Andrew Wakefield is a fraudster and a former medical doctor and a this and a that and a this and a that.
	Take me back to the beginning.
	Before you were one of the most politically controversial figures on the planet, you're a doctor.
	Well, there I was.
	It was 1981.
	I graduated in medicine from St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London.
	I was one of...
	Five generations now, six generations of my family to graduate from that medical school.
	Medicine was really in our blood, I suppose you could say.
	And I was entirely mainstream, whatever that means.
	And I had a specific interest in inflammatory bowel disease.
	I got my fellowship with the Royal College of Surgeons, my fellowship with the Royal College of Pathologists, and I was running a research team.
	At the Royal Free, which was part of the university teaching hospitals at the University of London.
	And it was a very exciting time.
	We were making great progress.
	And we had started to examine the cause of inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's, colitis, and had made some very interesting observations in the context of natural measles infection and unusual exposures to natural measles leading to these diseases.
	And in 1995, I started getting calls from parents, highly articulate, intelligent parents, saying, my child was perfectly normal.
	They had speech-language interaction with their siblings.
	They were sleeping well, eating well, growing well.
	And then they had their MMR vaccine.
	I wasn't anti-vaccine doctor.
	I took them to be vaccinated on time.
	Within a very short space of time after the vaccine, they'd lost all their skills.
	Speech language gone.
	Their eyes glazed over.
	The lights went out in their eyes.
	It was a very common description.
	They stopped sleeping at night.
	They were screaming.
	They were in pain.
	I knew they were in pain, even though they'd lost the ability to communicate.
	As their mother, I knew they were suffering.
	And I said, you know, how can I help?
	They said, well, they were eventually diagnosed with autism.
	And I said, I know nothing about autism.
	You must have got the wrong number.
	Because even this part of the story is pretty shocking.
	It's not as though you started out investigating autism.
	You say you were investigating gut issues.
	Absolutely, yeah.
	So how do you go from investigating measles and vaccines and gut issues to autism?
	Well, that's exactly the question I asked them.
	I said, you know, when I was at medical school, autism was so rare, we weren't even taught about it.
	There was no class on autism.
	One in 10,000 children.
	Yes, whatever statistic I saw, it said in 1966 it was one in 2,500.
	And then in 2000 it was one in 150.
	And then today it's one in 36 kids that's getting diagnosed with autism.
	Even more, one in 31. One in 20 boys.
	It's more common in boys than girls.
	How do you explain that?
	Well, that's a very good question.
	So this is what the parents brought to my attention.
	They said, Doctor, my child has...
	Intractable gastrointestinal problems.
	Diarrhea, alternating constipation and diarrhea, bloating, abdominal pain, failure to thrive, all the cardinal features of an underlying inflammatory bowel disease.
	But the doctors and nurses I've been to see doctors say, this is just part of autism.
	Get over it.
	Put your child in a home.
	Have another child and forget about it.
	I thought, I mean, this is extraordinary.
	I've never heard medicine respond in this way at all.
	Now, they said, the other thing, doctor, is there is an epidemic of this problem, of developmentally normal children suddenly losing their skills and becoming autistic.
	And so I said, okay, now the fundamental rule of clinical medicine, okay, let's go right back to the beginning, is to listen to the parents.
	No one knows children like their parents, particularly the mother.
	There is a connection there that no pediatrician can usurp.
	Okay, so it is the golden rule is you put all of your biases aside and you listen to the parents.
	What are they telling me?
	Is there a consistency to this story?
	Is there a coherence?
	Is it possible that an underlying inflammatory bowel disease can interact with the brain and damage it?
	We don't know, but certainly in diseases like celiac disease, where there is an allergic sensitivity to gluten in wheat.
	Then the presenting features can be dementia or seizures or developmental regression or autism.
	So, yes, there is a link.
	We don't know what the nature of that link is, but yes, there is a plausible link.
	I said to the Department of Health once, you know, if I take you for a pint of beer, you may begin to understand what I'm talking about.
	They thought I was trying to offer them to go out for a beer and enjoy their company.
	Nothing could be further from the truth.
	What I was saying is if you drink a pint of beer within a very few...
	In a short period of time, you will feel the cerebral effects of that kind of beer on your brain.
	There is a gut-brain connection.
	This isn't difficult.
	Even simply, if you take alcohol out of it, some women in my life, if they are a little late to lunch, they get a bit hangry.
	You see emotional and psychological connections.
	We are one entity.
	This is not separate from this.
	I thought, right, we need to look at this.
	Put all of our biases aside, whether my children were vaccinated or not, nothing to do with it.
	They're telling us a story that we have to act upon.
	And this is serious.
	It's clearly serious because until proven otherwise, these children have an intestinal disease.
	And if it's correctable, can we make their lives at least bearable, if not reverse some element of what's going on?
	So I put together a large team of some of the best people in the world.
	The leading pediatric gastroenterologist in the world, Professor John Walker-Smith, and his team from St. Bartholomew's Hospital, psychiatrists, neurologists, and people.
	And we came together and we investigated these children according to their clinical need.
	It wasn't research, according to their clinical need.
	John Walker-Smith, the leader of the clinical team, made the decision that these children merited investigation.
	And lo and behold...
	When we scoped them, we biopsied, we looked at the biopsies under the microscope, there was inflammation.
	The parents were right.
	And when we treated that inflammation with the kind of medication that we would use for Crohn's or colitis, anti-inflammatories, dietary intervention, removal of gluten and cow's milk products from the diet, there was a dramatic improvement.
	Again, these insights had come from parents.
	We followed up on those insights, and they were true.
	There was a dramatic improvement.
	It was incredible.
	In the symptoms of autism.
	Not just the bowel symptoms, but the cognitive symptoms as well.
	People say, well, they were just out of pain.
	They were feeling better.
	They were asleep.
	No, this was children who were using words that they had not used for five years.
	Words that, you know, you would have disappeared from their vocabulary were all in there.
	They came back.
	Because your critics say, well, sure, maybe...
	The autism symptoms set in around the time that kids are vaccinated.
	However, that's just the time.
	It's just coincidental.
	The time that you get the vaccines is around the time that autism symptoms manifest.
	But what you're saying is, yeah, but hold up.
	When we started treating the gastrointestinal issues...
	The vaccine symptoms started to subside.
	So it's not just, it can't just be a mere coincidence here, because we did something, we intervened, and that had an effect on the autism symptoms.
	Yes, you had an exposure and a withdrawal effect, just as you say.
	They were fine, they weren't fine, they improved.
	And those time points were punctuated by their exposure to the vaccine and then their removal of these...
	Potential toxins from the diet.
	And the historical teaching of the experts in autism was that symptoms manifest from birth.
	Autism is genetic and it starts from birth.
	Suddenly it was, oh no, the symptoms manifest at 15, 18 months.
	That's not what you said.
	That's not what it says in the textbooks.
	You say regression.
	So here's the key is that where do you go from here?
	Because the parents had said...
	My child was fine.
	They regressed.
	They regressed in many cases after a vaccine.
	They have a bowel disease until proven otherwise.
	The diet works, and they can improve.
	The expert opinion at that time is, my dear boy, children are autistic from birth.
	It's genetic.
	There is no regression, no developmental or behavioral regression.
	There is no link.
	bowel disease.
	That's just incidental.
	There is no improvement.
	The diet has no effect at all.
	The medical experts, God save us from medical experts, were wrong on every single count.
	You could take that library of textbooks written by experts and burn it to the ground for the value of the story from one parent telling you what actually happened.
	It is an extraordinary iteration, reiteration of That fundamental rule of medicine and something that we've largely forgotten in our arrogance in medicine to listen to the parents because they were right on every count.
	Now, when they say, I believe my child regressed after a vaccine, with that knowledge, do we dismiss their story?
	Do we say, actually, you know, you may be right, but this isn't going to be good for my career, so would you take your child and...
	Leave this room and shut the door behind you.
	That's what happened.
	That is what was happening.
	And that's not what I signed up for.
	That's not what I went into medicine.
	I didn't have a bias one way or the other about whether the vaccine was involved, but there was a moral and professional obligation to investigate, to answer their questions.
	Because if it were true that there is an epidemic of this particular problem, Then we need to know this.
	We need to know it.
	And my pediatric colleague said to me at the time, Andy, we as pediatricians cannot be seen to question the safety of MMR.
	I said, what does that mean?
	Is your priority not to your patients, rather than to your reputation amongst your careers at the Royal Society?
	I mean, who are you answerable to?
	But that was the position.
	We cannot be seen to do this.
	And I went to see the dean of the medical school.
	I was called into his office.
	He said, Andy, if you continue this vaccine safety research, it will not be good for your career.
	There was an overt threat.
	He was absolutely right.
	It wasn't good for my career.
	But, you know, I was a sort of headstrong, somewhat idealistic young doctor.
	And I was raised in a particular way, and I thought, it just made me angry.
	It made me determined to work twice as hard because it was such a tragedy.
	And it seemed to me that if it were avoidable or treatable, then we should know that.
	And that was the course I pursued.
	I was entirely open about it with my colleagues at every stage.
	But that was the moral and professional obligation that I felt I had.
	So what year was this?
	This was from 1995 onwards.
	And in 1998, you published the famous study in The Lancet.
	So the study comes out, and I actually have trouble, in the popular reporting on this, even determining what the study said, because they seem to accuse the study of saying things that it didn't necessarily say.
	So what did the study say?
	The study was a case series, so this is the way in which human disease syndromes are described.
	You have a...
	A small group of people who have a consistent pattern of signs and symptoms that merit investigation in their own right.
	That leads to hypothesis testing studies.
	Is this different from something we've seen before?
	Is it new?
	What's causing it?
	Those are downstream.
	This was a case series just reporting what the parents had told us, what the doctors had told us who referred them, and what we found on clinical investigation.
	We could not leave out...
	The parents' reference to the MMR.
	But we said, at the conclusion of the study, this study does not prove an association, let alone a causal association, with the MMR vaccine.
	So, hold on, hold on.
	This is the part that's the craziest in the story to me.
	You are blamed.
	For creating vaccine skepticism.
	You are blamed with measles outbreaks.
	You are blamed and called a terrible fraudster and a horrible practitioner of medicine because you said in your 1998 study that the MMR vaccine causes autism.
	Except you didn't say that.
	Quite the opposite.
	And we said what we do need is further research into this matter.
	And that was it.
	And the study was really a report of the...
	Bowel disease in combination with this regressive developmental disorder.
	Okay, now, but I read, again, just in popular reporting, this was more than a few years ago now, that that study, even with its modest conclusion, was retracted by the authors of the study.
	But I'm sitting across from one of the authors of the study.
	You didn't retract it.
	So what was that?
	Was the study retracted?
	No, it wasn't.
	And this is another myth that's been perpetrated by the media.
	I went into this interview thinking, I don't really know anything about this.
	And now I'm convinced I actually know less about this than I thought I did going in.
	Yes.
	The study made no claim of causation.
	Okay, this was the important thing.
	And that's what I was accused of, of labeling MMR as the cause of autism.
	No, we faithfully reported the facts of what we found on clinical investigation.
	The clinical findings from Professor John Walker-Smith and his team, the pathologist's findings down the microscope from a highly experienced expert pathologist, the psychiatric findings, the neurological findings.
	That's what we reported.
	And we urged further research.
	It was a great opportunity to understand what was going on and take what was historically an irreversible condition and To be able to reverse it, to be able to treat it, to ameliorate the symptoms in these children and make their lives at least better.
	So it should have been an exciting time.
	But we defended the pharmaceutical industry.
	We defended government policy and the World Health Organization and UNICEF and the major pharmaceutical companies that make the vaccines, the American government.
	We defended a lot of people.
	And at that time...
	Sorry, just to...
	Because I speak American English and not your more beautifully accented English.
	You're saying...
	You're not saying we defended.
	You're saying we had offended.
	We had offended.
	Yes.
	Okay, yes.
	So those are big interests to offend.
	Oh, yes.
	The big, huge interests.
	Now, this is really interesting in a historical context because now we're all familiar with cancel culture.
	If you are a doctor, however eminent, you stand up and you criticize, say, COVID vaccine policy.
	That's the end of your job.
	Doesn't matter how many papers you publish, doesn't matter how eminent you are, you are finished.
	The way in which the system historically now deals with this kind of problem is to simply cut the person's head off.
	Except just on the COVID example, we were told by the eminent public health experts and by the politicians who employed them that the COVID vaccine was totally safe.
	It turned out it was not.
	People died.
	That it was totally effective in preventing you from contracting COVID.
	Those very same public health experts shortly thereafter admitted actually it doesn't stop you from receiving the infection.
	However, it'll stop you from transmitting it.
	Shortly after that, those very same health experts told us it actually doesn't stop you from transmitting the virus, but it'll ameliorate the conditions.
	It'll reduce the danger of hospitalization or whatever.
	My only point on that is those same public health experts Admitted that the things they had just previously said as gospel truth were not true.
	So already there's a major credibility issue for the public health experts in recent memory.
	And so people know that now.
	They're familiar with it.
	And the people who, the doctors who stood up against them, were bankrupted by legal fees, were removed from their positions, had their licenses taken away.
	These were some outstanding clinicians, outstanding academics.
	And they were just...
	Trashed.
	Wasted for all time because they took a moral and professional stand on something.
	But then it was unheard of.
	So at the time, it was me and them.
	And this isn't a sort of feel sorry for Andy Wakefield.
	It's just an historical fact of life.
	I do feel a little sorry for you.
	I mean, you did have your career taken from you.
	But I was a consenting adult.
	I knew what I was getting into.
	And I just felt that I had to...
	Pursue this to its natural conclusion.
	There was nothing terribly grandiose about it.
	That was just the way I felt.
	And so I started to get labeled.
	Obviously, these labels perpetuated in the media.
	Conspiracy theorists.
	And all kinds of things.
	And so that's fine.
	We continued the work until they made it impossible to go any further.
	And they leveled all kinds of allegations against me and against my colleagues of research misconduct.
	The worst being the allegation ultimately that it was all fraud.
	It was all made up.
	And when you control the media, when you are in charge of the media and your target is one individual with limited resources, that's kind of easy thing to do.
	They're an easy target.
	You take them out and you hope that by doing that you will silence them and you will provide an example.
	To everybody else.
	So they accused you of misconduct in the methods of the study.
	They accused you of taking money from other interests.
	They had this whole litany of accusations in the popular media.
	Was there any truth to the allegations?
	So there was an element of truth, and the truth is, for example, the lawyers had come to me at some point during the conduct of this work, not the research, not the Lancet paper.
	And I had agreed, this is very common practice, to undertake a study to determine whether there was a link between the vaccine.
	Could we identify remnants of the virus in the diseased tissue?
	That would have been a strong indicator that there was a causal link.
	It wouldn't have been proof, but it would have been a strong indicator.
	It was part of that hypothesis testing process.
	And this is very common.
	People work for both defendants and for plaintiffs in medical litigation.
	But I was singled out as, oh, Wakefield's doing this to undermine the MMR vaccine and launch his own vaccine onto the market and make a fortune.
	Yes, they accused you of having desired a patent for a rival vaccine.
	So you're not saying that isn't true.
	You're saying this is common practice.
	You're going after me as though I'm doing something different or unethical.
	And the allegation was I never told anyone.
	Well, a year or two before the paper came out, I wrote to the dean, the medical school officials, to my line manager, Professor Roy Pounder, and I said, I have been asked to undertake this duty on behalf of these children to answer the question, is there not a link with the vaccine?
	Or evidence for a link?
	And I feel morally obliged to do it, and I'm going to do it, so they knew.
	I then told, it was in the national newspapers a year before the paper came out, then Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet that published the paper, who subsequently denied it before the General Medical Council, our licensing body, was told one year before that I was working on behalf of these children in the litigation.
	There was no attempt to cover it up whatsoever.
	It was totally transparent, but the allegation...
	Was that it was a cover-up.
	I meant no one knew about it.
	It was all a big secret.
	No, it wasn't.
	No, it wasn't.
	But what do you do about that?
	When you don't control the editorial, they can say what they like.
	And then you've got to unpick that mess afterwards.
	Do what?
	Sue them.
	Sue them because someone costs $3 million.
	Where are you going to get $3 million from?
	They know that.
	These people have limitless resources.
	Well, the purpose of lawfare is not necessarily to win in a court, though that sometimes happens.
	It's just to pressure the other guy who doesn't have pockets that are as deep as the...
	That's right.
	Justice, it seems to me, belongs to those who can afford it.
	And that was the circumstance here.
	So then where does the headline that the study was retracted come from?
	Is it just out of thin air or was it from the Lancet?
	Let's come back to that.
	So I think eight or nine of my colleagues were persuaded to sign the retraction of an interpretation.
	The interpretation being that MMR vaccine causes autism.
	I said, guys, When they asked me to sign the retraction, I said, we never made that claim.
	You were asking me to retract something I didn't say.
	How can you retract something that doesn't exist?
	But for political reasons, they were under pressure.
	I don't judge them, but they fell in line and did that.
	Me and two other colleagues just refused to do that.
	We said, no, we did not make that that could be retracted in that way.
	It wasn't the retraction of the bowel disease or the link with MMR, the regression or the diagnosis in these children.
	It was a retraction of an interpretation that was never made.
	And that's the truth behind it.
	Can I ask you what might be a stupid question?
	Not at all.
	Because you're mentioning a rival vaccine, potentially, that could have been patented.
	Why is it?
	I mean, I think of this as a parent.
	I've got three young kids.
	Why is it?
	That all the doctors are pressuring me to get the MMR vaccine when there's a measles outbreak.
	So I say, well, can my kid just get the measles vaccine?
	Why does he have to get measles, mumps, and rubella all at the same time?
	The vaccine schedule today is so much more intense than it was even when I was a kid and certainly decades prior.
	Why can't I just go get the M and then the other M?
	And then the R. Why do I have to get them all at the same time?
	Is there some medical advantage to getting them all at the same time?
	I don't mean to sound obsequious, but that's an outstanding question.
	It was a question I asked.
	I said, what I did is I went away and I researched this.
	I was an academic.
	That's what you do before you're going to get embroiled in this.
	You go away and you read every paper you can get your hands on that looks at the pre-licensing studies of these vaccines and you say, is there any merit?
	Have the safety studies been done?
	And I went through it.
	I wrote a 250-page report.
	I thought, I must be missing something.
	I'm not doing these scientists' credit who did the safety study.
	There must be something I'm missing.
	No, I wasn't.
	The safety studies on the vaccine were undertaken in small populations.
	They were not controlled trials.
	They were nothing that would have passed a drug trial for the FDA.
	And they were done on children in mental institutions.
	Because they were expendable.
	I was staggered by this when I found out, like Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York.
	Children whose lives were at the time deemed to be, they were up for experimentation.
	And this is where a lot of the vaccine safety trials were done.
	In children who were severely mentally and physically debilitated.
	And I thought, I can't believe this.
	This is staggeringly unethical.
	On every level, there was no mention of fully informed consent whatsoever.
	These children were just used as experimental subjects.
	Now, there's a moral issue to that, an ethical issue.
	There's also a practical issue in that.
	It's one of the concerns about measles vaccines is that they cause brain injury.
	And measles causes brain injury.
	So if you're looking for evidence of brain injury in already brain-injured children, are you going to find it?
	Right.
	Can you extrapolate from those brain injured children to a normal population of healthy children?
	No, you can't.
	But this is where the safety studies were done.
	And when I finished that, I became more convinced than ever that I needed to pursue this to its natural conclusion.
	Not that MMR causes autism.
	Now, why MMR?
	Because when they put the three together, did they conduct the safety studies to determine whether one And three were equal in terms of their safety profile or something quite different.
	No, they didn't.
	Again, I was surprised because if I gave you three antihypertensive drugs, three blood pressure drugs at once, it would kill you.
	And it would kill everybody it's been put into.
	So why is it okay when you're taking three live viruses and putting them together in combination in a way that nature has never seen them before?
	Right.
	Why is that okay?
	And so I did the research, and I found precisely that there was interference between the viruses in the combined vaccine.
	But people are just, okay, moved on.
	Interference meaning what?
	Interference is that the immune response induced by the single vaccine was different from that produced by the combination, the mumps in particular, interfering with the measles.
	I said to the Department of Health, because I said parents might want to opt for the single vaccine at the time they were available in the UK and the US.
	I would be much more likely, really, on any vaccine to say, OK, we'll give them the single one first, and then maybe in eight months we'll give them the other one, and then six months out.
	I don't know.
	It seems more prudent to me, more cautious.
	And I said to my colleagues, if asked by the media, this is the position I take.
	Vigorously support the continued use of the single vaccine.
	Because that's what I believed at the time.
	But I can't continue to endorse this vaccine that's never been tested independently for safety.
	What happened is in the UK, the government stopped the importation license of the MMR vaccine, the main one we used.
	So you could no longer get it.
	It was our way or the highway.
	And so the option for parents was taken away, even if they wanted to protect their child against measles.
	But you're saying they'd stop the importation of the single vaccine?
	Of the M. So the solution to your perfectly reasonable question was, well, now the parents won't even have the option.
	They have to get the triple dose if they want any vaccine at all for measles, mumps, or rubella.
	That's right.
	And what happened in the U.S. is Merck unilaterally made the policy decision that they were going to stop making the singles.
	Or marketing the singles.
	It was only going to be the combination.
	I hate to ask you to engage in psychobabble, but I don't hate it that much because I want to know.
	What were they thinking?
	I don't know.
	I asked them.
	I said to the head of vaccination in the UK, why, if your objective is to protect children against measles, principally against measles, why would you take away the option of parents being able to do it?
	With a single vaccine.
	Yeah.
	And she said, because if we did that, it would destroy our MMR program.
	So the concern was for the program and not for the well-being of children.
	And I was absolutely astonished.
	One, that she said it.
	She actually admitted to it.
	And two, that you would do that.
	And I said to David Salisbury, who was head of the government side of the vaccine, did you not...
	Do the safety studies to compare the single measles with the triple vaccine?
	And he said, no, we assumed that there would be no difference.
	You don't make assumptions on behalf of every child in your country.
	You do not do it.
	They assumed that the COVID vaccine was going to be safe and made a decision on behalf of 9 billion, 8 million billion people in the world.
	When they said it can be injected, it'll stay at the vaccination site.
	That was an assumption.
	They then found it went everywhere in the body, in particular got into the brain and the ovaries and wherever else.
	That assumption was entirely wrong.
	You don't make assumptions about safety on behalf of anyone, let alone 8 billion people.
	At this point, what year is this that the UK decides, all right, we're going to ban the importation of the single dose?
	When did that happen?
	This is towards the end of the 1980s.
	Sorry, the 1990s.
	The paper came out in 1998, so we're talking about the subsequent two years.
	Okay.
	So they say, all right, no more.
	You have to get the MMR.
	At this point, this is the time, late 90s, early 2000s, that people are really starting to speak about the link.
	Bobby Kennedy, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, is suggesting this link between vaccines and autism.
	As you say, your paper invited further research.
	It would seem to me, I guess in my innocence, that this would be a great opportunity for a scientist.
	Wow, this is great.
	I could make my bones, proving something really important in medicine.
	Does any further research happen?
	We started to do a lot of research.
	And we published, before I left the Royal Free, it wasn't just that Lancet paper.
	We published 17, 15 papers on this subject, pursuing it to its natural conclusion.
	But it was sabotaged and that came to an end.
	But I had the opportunity to go and present to the CDC in 2001.
	I went to present to the Oversight Committee on Government Reform under Dan Burton.
	And then I went to a meeting with the CDC and they said, Dr. Wakefield, look, every kid gets MMR vaccine, some get autism.
	How do you explain that?
	Why don't they all get it?
	Well, that's medicine.
	A lot of people smoke, some people develop lung cancer.
	We don't know why.
	There are cofactors that influence your risk, but that's the way medicine works.
	What I said to them is, my group and I am particularly interested in patterns of exposure, unusual patterns of exposure.
	For example, exposure early in life.
	Measles, when you get it under one, is associated with a much greater risk profile than if you get it after one when your immune system intuitively is more mature.
	So does the same pertain to the MMR?
	Right.
	If you get it younger, are you at greater risk of this adverse reaction being regressive autism than if you get it, say, 15, 20 months later?
	And they said, okay, we'll look at that.
	They went away, and to their credit, they did that study.
	And they found that it was exactly true.
	It was a highly significant risk of autism in those children who got the MMR vaccine on time, 12 to 18 months, 12 to 15 months, compared with getting it later.
	The hypothesis turned out to be true.
	But you mentioned earlier that you might have some of these risk factors just from getting measles, just getting the virus.
	So could one argue, well, it's better to get the MMR vaccine at a younger age because if they get measles below the age of one, they're going to be right there in the same predicament.
	Is measles a greater risk factor for developing these symptoms than the MMR vaccine?
	Is there any difference between the two?
	From the clinical perspective, I can say that Of all the children, by the time I left the Royal Free, we'd seen 183 children with this syndrome.
	And in those, there were just two who'd had the single measles vaccine.
	The rest had had MMR.
	So it seemed to be, at least at the clinical level, an idiosyncrasy of the MMR vaccine, if there were a causal association.
	The other question you have to answer is, if yes, if the prevalence of the disease had remained constant, or had even gone down with vaccination, Then it may have been that single measles, the natural measles, was more dangerous.
	But it had gone up exponentially.
	It had gone up dramatically.
	And so the opposite seemed to be true, that this combination, given early, was a risk factor, which is what the study found.
	So we knew nothing about that.
	Why?
	Because the CDC buried it.
	They buried it for 14 years.
	They put millions of American children at risk of a serious permanent neurological disease in order to protect themselves, their credibility, and the program.
	They destroyed documents, they altered the data, and they presented a paper that said, it's okay, it's fine, go back in the water, you know, the vaccine is safe.
	And this only came to light when Dr. William Thompson, the senior author on that study, the man who...
	Designed the study, collected the data, collated it, interpreted the data, called a scientist, Dr. Brian Hooker, and said, we've done a terrible thing, and I can no longer live with it.
	And I kept the original data, even though my colleagues destroyed it because I knew it was foirable, I knew that it may become part of some legal proceeding.
	Here it is.
	And he handed it over.
	And it showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the CDC had committed...
	The most outrageous fraud in the context of this vaccine.
	And that was the thing that really convinced me that it was the cause.
	It wasn't my study or even the subsequent studies.
	That strengthened my belief that there may be a cause.
	But the need for the CDC to do that really convinced me that they knew there was a problem now.
	So, ironically, you're convinced of this link between the MMR and autism.
	Not by your own research, primarily by your own research, but by the CDC, which then sought to totally undermine your credibility.
	Absolutely.
	And then Thompson said, you know, this is 14 years later with all that damage done.
	It didn't mean at this stage still that the vaccine caused the disease in scientific terms.
	What it meant was the CDC had had an obligation to do a bigger...
	Better study somewhere else to see if they could replicate it, or to at least advise parents that they may wish to delay the vaccine while this issue was being resolved.
	But they did none of those things.
	They buried it and caused terrible damage in order to protect themselves and their reputations.
	And that I found absolutely heartbreaking.
	And William Thompson, the CDC scientist, contacted my wife, sent her, and said, we could have...
	Salvaged your husband's career, if we've been honest.
	Well, it's irrelevant.
	My career doesn't matter about me because the issue isn't about me.
	It's not about me.
	It's about something much more important.
	It's about all of those children out there who were exposed unknowingly to this issue when the truth was something quite different.
	It was really sad.
	And so I can live with whatever's happened to me.
	Because as I say, I was a consenting adult.
	I knew what I was getting into, at least to some extent.
	And I could have pulled out at any stage.
	These children couldn't.
	They had no voice.
	So the CDC conducts this study, proves your point, buries the study, then comes out and says the MMR is great.
	On what basis, if any, does the CDC say, forget about that study that we're not going to tell you about, the MMR is great?
	They don't.
	And this is why when we made the movie Vaxxed, which took their recording, recordings of William Thompson admitting to this, of all the original documents, this is why when we made that, which effectively accused them of the most egregious fraud, we heard nothing more.
	There was no pushback.
	If we'd said one thing that was out of line, that was false, that was defamatory, we would have been sued to the moon and back.
	For every penny you were worth.
	Absolutely.
	And they said not a word.
	Why?
	Because they knew it was true.
	And that's where we are today.
	We took it to Congress.
	We said, you have got to have an inquiry.
	You've got to investigate this.
	They didn't want to touch it.
	They didn't want to touch it.
	Whether it was true or not didn't matter.
	They didn't want to touch it.
	As all this is going down, you're facing not only soft pressure and reprisals, but they took away your medical license.
	How did that happen?
	Where does that stand now?
	Why haven't you sued them into the ground to get your medical license back?
	Well, you could say, why would I want to be part of that villainous crowd?
	Fair enough.
	Do I really want to do that?
	Now I'm a filmmaker.
	I write and make films.
	That was in England.
	I now live in Austin, Texas.
	I could dwell on that.
	I could go back and use whatever resources I have left in the world to try and restore my credibility, my standing in the world.
	I don't care.
	It's not important.
	If I have a limited amount of time left on this planet, I'm not going to indulge it trying to exonerate Andy Wakefield or have his name...
	Have the media reverse their position.
	They're not going to do that.
	And I don't care.
	It isn't important.
	There is something far more important.
	And that, of course, is the position.
	It hasn't gone away.
	You've got to ask yourself, why is it being talked about now more than ever, particularly with Bobby Kennedy in the White House?
	Things have changed dramatically.
	And this is because of not only the truth of the parents' original story that has borne out, but because a few people have...
	Stood by those parents and continued to research this to its natural conclusion, including Bobby Kennedy.
	Now, what was the justification for not just going after you for some study, but for revoking your medical license?
	Well, for example, I'll give you some examples.
	We conducted unethical research on developmentally compromised children without the appropriate approval from an ethics committee.
	We were alleged to have conducted unethical research.
	No, we didn't.
	Firstly, it was clinical investigation.
	It was merited clinical investigation based not on my opinion, based upon the opinion of one of the world's leading pediatric gastroenterologists and his team of clinicians, who then discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease.
	So you're having a journalist, a sort of hack journalist, saying it's not ethical.
	When Professor Walker Smith, in testimony, says it absolutely was ethical, this investigation needed to be done on clinical grounds, it didn't matter.
	To the General Medical Council panel, we were guilty of experimenting on children.
	So they made their minds up before we ever went into that room.
	And there's an irony, as you mentioned earlier, that the safety studies on the vaccines conducted by the powers that be...
	Were conducted on vulnerable children.
	Seemed rather unethical to me when they were doing it.
	It would have been unethical of us not to do it.
	Absolutely unethical of us not to do it.
	We did it.
	We found that the parents were right.
	The children had a disease which we could then treat.
	But no, they held that we were experimenting on vulnerable children.
	It was beyond belief.
	When I finished that hearing, which was the longest hearing in the...
	History of the General Medical Council, our licensing body, my senior barrister said to me, based upon the evidence, there is absolutely no way that they can find you guilty of anything at all.
	They found me guilty on every single charge.
	And I just, I knew.
	I knew before that, the fix was in before we even got through the door.
	But, you know, this is the way medicine operates.
	It's the way they've dealt with Peter McCullough and other people in the wake of COVID.
	It doesn't matter whether you publish 700 and odd papers.
	You're the most published cardiologist in the history of the planet.
	It doesn't matter.
	They know better because they're going to break you.
	Now, I want to get back to Bobby Kennedy and the White House and what's maybe going to change about vaccine policy.
	But just as a very simple matter, does this vaccine cause autism?
	Are you willing to say, yes, it does, or are you saying, look, I just think this should be investigated, as I said in my 1998 study, and how concerned should parents be?
	I wouldn't change my position.
	Yes, in my personal belief, there is a very strong indication that it causes autism, but that's not good enough.
	You don't make public policy on Andy Wakefield's belief.
	It needs the science that we advocated for all those years ago.
	Because when you say that...
	You, who are being called reckless and irresponsible and unethical, what you're saying seems much more measured and scientifically grounded and ethically grounded than what the government is saying, which is, we're not going to investigate these things.
	We're going to shut this down.
	Everyone just needs to take these vaccines.
	Forget about dubious studies.
	I was just sitting down with Secretary Kennedy a few weeks ago at the White House.
	We got onto the topic of vaccines.
	I said, is anything going to change?
	He said, everything's going to change because we're going to base this on the science now.
	And he brought up one of the objections, which is, people point out, there is an adverse reaction database for vaccines, VAERS.
	And people, if...
	They think their kid has had an adverse reaction.
	They can file a claim.
	There have been payouts.
	There have been laws passed by Congress.
	And yet, what the CDC says is, well, the database is not reliable.
	And what do I know?
	I don't know if it's reliable or not.
	But I asked this to Secretary Kennedy, and Kennedy said, well, don't you think after so many decades we should have a reliable database?
	Why don't we have a reliable database?
	It was inherently designed to be unreliable so that it couldn't be used to do studies.
	Of causation.
	It ascertains 1% of true adverse reactions.
	And so it has no meaning.
	It has very little meaning at all.
	And it was designed with that intention.
	Let me, if I may, let me just read you something that puts this in context.
	This is a government document.
	It's very brief.
	This is the playing field upon which we're working on, where Bobby Kennedy is now.
	The Federal Register, government document, rules and regulations, 1984.
	It says, and this is from the officials, any possible doubts whether or not well-founded about the safety of the vaccine cannot be allowed to exist in view of the need for the vaccination to continue to be used to the maximum extent consistent with nation's public health objectives.
	Now, this is fascinating, and it just tells you where we are.
	Possible doubt.
	This parent reports, for example.
	Whether or not well-founded, as in other words, good science or bad science, about the safety of vaccines cannot be allowed to exist.
	That is a staggering statement.
	But that's where we are.
	It just tells you then...
	These reporting mechanisms are bogus from the outset because they're saying the purpose is not to ascertain whether or not there are real adverse events or to investigate the cause or to fix them.
	It's to protect the vaccine regime.
	Absolutely.
	And anything that gets in the way of that will be crushed.
	So why do they want to do it?
	Is it just money?
	Is it agency capture by the pharmaceutical companies?
	It's so difficult for me to believe that they...
	People are willing to compromise the health of America's children for generations just to make a buck.
	But is that it?
	Is that just what it's all about?
	I think there are very, very powerful financial interests that have a profound influence upon the regulators, the FDA and the CDC, the vaccine manufacturers.
	This is a huge market.
	Why?
	Because they have a mandatory market and no liability for any damage done.
	You have the perfect business model.
	And this was something that really was enshrined in the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, is that they took liability away from the manufacturers for death and injury caused by their vaccines that were on the CDC's recommended schedule.
	It was a goldmine.
	A goldmine, a mandatory market.
	Kids had to have the vaccines to go to school and no liability.
	I mean, can you?
	You're just going to clean up, and that's what they did, and so the vaccine schedule expanded dramatically from that point forward.
	The other elements of that National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act were that safety science should be conducted.
	They set up the VAERS, which was totally useless, so they couldn't use it for safety science, and children should be compensated if they are the victims on the battlefield of our war, the public health war against infectious disease, and that has been a catastrophe.
	For the families.
	They've had to prove that the vaccine injured their child.
	How do you do that?
	How do you do that?
	You're a parent.
	You don't have laboratories.
	You don't have finance.
	You don't have resources.
	But the bonus, the burden of proof is on the parents.
	Absolutely staggering.
	But if they can prove it, with all the difficulty that that entails, then they will be paid.
	Though not by the pharmaceutical companies.
	They'll be paid by the government.
	Do I have that right?
	Paid by the people.
	Paid by the taxpayers.
	Paid by the people.
	Paid by the taxpayers.
	So it's not the drug companies.
	They're off the hook.
	It comes from a sort of tax levied on every vaccine that's sold.
	And that always, you know, trickles down to the taxpayers.
	But how can they, on the one hand, say, the vaccines are safe, if you have any question about vaccine safety, you're a total kook, you should be run out of society, you can't go to school, can't go to a doctor's office a lot of the time.
	But...
	If the thing happens to your kid that we're telling you can't happen, don't worry, we'll pay you to shut you up.
	How do you hold those are contradictory statements?
	And the statement that you alluded to that vaccines are safe and effective.
	They're not.
	They're not safe.
	The determinants for safety, I mean, the government itself has said vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.
	That's what they've said.
	So how can they hold these two conflicting opinions?
	I mean, this isn't me.
	This is them saying vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.
	For a vaccine to be safe, firstly, the golden rules are that it is unsafe until proven otherwise, until the studies have been done.
	And those studies have to involve long-term placebo-controlled, randomized, in susceptible populations against, you know, a truly inert placebo.
	Those have never been done.
	For any vaccine on the childhood schedule, except the latest, the COVID vaccine.
	It's never been done for any of them.
	And so you simply cannot say, as a matter of scientific fact, that they're safe.
	No, they're not.
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	I want to be clear here because Bobby Kennedy just announced that now there will be Controlled studies with placebos to test the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.
	You're telling me before now, though, there have never been studies with placebos.
	When Bobby Kennedy met with Fauci and Collins in the White House, they said, oh, yes, they have.
	We've got a stack of papers here.
	He said, show me, please.
	Show me one of these studies.
	Oh, we haven't got it here.
	We'll send it to you.
	Never got sent.
	Several years later, they admitted that Bobby Kennedy was absolutely right.
	It had never been done.
	Now, I've heard that the explanation, when they're saying, if they're admitting that there are not placebo-controlled studies, they'll say, well, the reason is it would be unethical not to give the vaccine to some kids.
	In other words, just to conduct the study with placebos means we're depriving certain children of the vaccines, and that in itself would be unethical.
	How's that argument?
	What a circular argument that is.
	I mean, what a get-out-of-jail card that is.
	They should have been done.
	There's no excuse for them not being done.
	Again, if I gave you a new antihypertensive drug with that argument in mind saying, there it is.
	It's off the shelf.
	We just made it.
	What do you think?
	Take it.
	And the FDA would laugh you out of town.
	And yet here we are with these vaccines.
	They're doing just that.
	So I'm sorry.
	But safety comes first.
	But then, Bobby Kennedy right now is being blamed for the same thing that you've been blamed for for decades, for this outbreak of measles.
	And I see it.
	I read it in the news all the time, and people ask me about it.
	Oh, you saw measles is breaking out in Texas.
	Measles is breaking out in Tennessee.
	And even for me, and I'm pretty chill about these things.
	I don't stay up at night worried about the next great fear-mongering campaign in the media.
	But even I think, Will...
	I don't want my kids to get measles, so is there anything to worry about?
	Let me show you something I think you'll find absolutely fascinating.
	I'd love to be able to put this on camera, but this is a graph of measles mortality over the last 150 years.
	This is the UK, but the US is exactly the same.
	What you can see, these are the deaths per million children affected, okay?
	And what you can see is that measles, up until the 1920s, was a major killer.
	120 per million children getting measles.
	After 1920, it plummeted dramatically till it approached zero deaths.
	Measles were still prevalent, but it was becoming a dramatically milder and milder disease.
	They will never show you this.
	Now, the source for this is Thomas McCowan's modern rise of population, if anyone wants to look that up.
	Now, the question here is, what would have happened if we'd never intervened with vaccination?
	You can see that vaccines had nothing to do with this.
	Right, because there's a little dot here.
	Immunization began, so it's already collapsed.
	By 99.96%.
	What would have happened, here's the first scientific question, if we had never intervened with a vaccine?
	We don't know, because of course we did, but it would likely have continued to zero.
	It was becoming a dramatically milder disease.
	Now, there are many reasons for this.
	Virus-related factors, human-related factors, better sanitation, better nutrition, decline in other infectious diseases that cause secondary pneumonias, for example.
	But the fact is, this is natural herd immunity.
	In operation.
	And it is extraordinarily effective.
	Sir Graham Wilson, when they first entertained the idea of universal measles vaccination, was invited from the UK to talk at the NIH about whether they should do it or not.
	And he said, don't.
	Don't do it.
	You do not know what you're doing.
	You may alter the age of measles by pushing it out to the older age groups, younger age groups, when it may be more dangerous.
	One child per million, per 100,000 in the UK, may die during an epidemic.
	The same is true, perhaps, in America.
	He said, the question you should be asking is, what's different about that one child?
	What can we do to prevent the disease, the death in that one child, rather than giving every child a measles vaccine about which you know nothing in terms of the long-term consequences?
	There seemed to be a lot of parallels here to COVID, which was, COVID comes out.
	Very quickly, it's clear COVID does not really pose much of a risk to little babies, actually, or to healthy young people.
	Maybe there's a risk to older people or people who have immune system conditions.
	But the vast majority of people did not face a major risk from COVID.
	And yet, rather than the government going out and saying, OK, the people who maybe are at risk, maybe they should take the vaccine, even if it's experimental, even if it's really recent.
	Every single person, all these young, healthy people were mandated to get it.
	Yes, I think COVID, the whole COVID experience was the biggest mistake they ever made because it caused people like yourself and others to say, hang on a minute, we've been lied to.
	The experts told us this, none of what they said was sustainable, and yet we've been compromised both economically, our jobs, financially.
	Health-wise, by this draconian policy.
	Politically.
	I mean, just socially, you couldn't hug your loved ones as they were dying of old age.
	You couldn't go to Christmas.
	You had to postpone your wedding.
	You couldn't go to school.
	They just destroyed our lives for years with apparently no medical basis for it.
	Yes, and that's what turns out.
	There is a realization globally.
	I mean, when I first got involved in this, there were perhaps a handful of people worldwide who were prepared to discuss the thorny issue of vaccine safety.
	Now it's more than half the adult population of the world.
	And that is because of their mistakes.
	Not because of me.
	It's no good blaming me or you having, you know, you because you had me on the show.
	This is at their door.
	This is their mistake.
	They have done this and they only have themselves to blame.
	And they will attract public confidence in public health policy makers by everything that they've done.
	As the truth emerges, as Bobby Kennedy gets to the root cause of these problems.
	And there'll be a lot of pushback, a lot of politicizing, a lot of money changing hands.
	But I'm afraid that the inevitable will turn out to be true.
	What is that?
	that the parents'original story was faithful and correct and merely sought to say, "This is what happened to my child." I'm glad you presented in this way because I think to myself, I don't think I'm an anti-vaxxer.
	I don't know much about the issue.
	I'm not anti-institutions.
	I'm not anti-expertise per se.
	Practically speaking now, though, I'm really skeptical of a lot of the powerful institutions and of the experts.
	It really isn't me.
	I really wish that the experts had not beclowned themselves and lied to us and deceived us for years.
	It's really irritating to me now that I can't trust the public health experts and the politicians and the big institutions.
	But what am I to do when I can prove with certainty, at least in the case of COVID, they lied to me.
	They said one thing out of one side of their mouth privately and another thing to the public.
	And then they contradicted the thing they said to the public, to the public again, six months later.
	If I am even remotely a reasonable person, what am I supposed to do with that?
	I cannot have faith in those people anymore.
	And don't blame me for that.
	I wish they hadn't squandered their credibility.
	I wish I could trust them.
	But I have to react in a reasonable way to their bad behavior.
	There are some good people in the system, and this is when everything else was taken away from me.
	I thought, how can I continue to serve this cause?
	How can I continue to move this forward?
	And so I loved screenwriting, and I became a filmmaker, and that's what I do, because I'd become people from industry and from the federal agencies who were good.
	Who had a moral conviction came to me and said, you know, we've done this terrible thing.
	Here is the evidence.
	And I had all this extraordinary insider story sort of evidence, and I thought, you know what, these would make amazing films.
	And so since I was sort of disenfranchised in the arena of medicine and science...
	Then I had to be a pain in their ass some other way.
	And you obviously have an expertise.
	I seem to refine the art.
	And an expertise in that skill too.
	I should hold seminars on it.
	Anyway, that's what I did.
	I started making documentaries initially and then moved into feature films.
	I was never going to make a COVID film at all.
	No, please don't make me do that.
	Because where do you even begin?
	It's so big.
	It's the war and peace.
	It's enormous.
	Where do you begin?
	It's the lies, the cover-up, the lab leak, the whole thing.
	And I thought there are 2,000 unemployed screenwriters in Hollywood doing exactly that right now.
	I don't want to get involved in that.
	And then a story came along which was fascinating.
	And if we can talk about this just very briefly.
	Sound of Freedom.
	The value of Sound of Freedom, the skill of it as a film, was that it didn't take on...
	Every child who'd ever been trafficked as an issue, it took on the rescue of two children.
	And an audience needs to engage.
	An audience needs to fall in love with its protagonist.
	An audience needs to want the salvation of those two children.
	And when that happens, and when they've bought into that, they can then extrapolate to every child who's ever been trafficked.
	But you can't do it the other way around.
	So you start with the individual story and you then bring in the global catastrophe.
	And so we had this story in Thailand, which did just that.
	So we took the life and death of one character and then bought in all these other elements.
	And so we ended up making that COVID film I was never going to make.
	So that's in post-production at the moment.
	And now we're looking to make the next.
	Well, this is also what's piqued my interest a bit in the vaccine issue.
	Well, it's the notion that one death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic.
	When I just hear about...
	Was it Stalin?
	Stalin, yeah, yeah.
	A real public health expert, maybe that has resonances to our own time.
	But when they say, well, look, yes, one in however many kids will have an adverse reaction, I say, okay, well, those are just numbers.
	And, okay, that's fine.
	It doesn't do anything.
	It doesn't tug at my heartstrings.
	But then when I started to hear from people...
	Who had relatives.
	Who made persuasive arguments that they had been vaccine injured.
	Now, well, hold on.
	I know this person.
	And I might even know the relative.
	And maybe I've seen it.
	Oh, well, that's actually a real person.
	That's a real living, breathing person there.
	And if they were materially harmed...
	Because of public policy.
	Now I really care.
	Now I've got a face to this bland, clinical kind of scientific jargon.
	We've been talking about MMR specifically.
	But I wonder about other vaccines.
	Because when my wife gave birth to our first son, the doctors and nurses come into the room.
	They say, okay, we want to give your kid, who at this point is about three hours old, we want to give your kid a hepatitis vaccine.
	And I say, excuse me?
	Why do you want to give my kid a hepatitis vaccine?
	I said, well, you know, just to be safe.
	I said, last I checked, you get hepatitis from sharing needles on Skid Row and going to whorehouses.
	I don't think my baby's gone to either of those in the past five hours.
	They said, well, no, and they dance around it.
	My wife really pressed the issue.
	They said, well, it's in case maybe your husband has cheated on you.
	I'm standing...
	You know, I'm here, guys.
	I can assure you, we're good, okay?
	And I thought, this is offensive, personally.
	And I know that we're fine.
	Why are you pushing this vaccine?
	I said, no, get out of the room.
	I'm not doing that.
	But it's not an isolated incident.
	They push all of these vaccines.
	I presume in part it's because they've got a captive audience here, they can stick the kid, most people are probably going to say yes, even if it's totally unnecessary, totally ridiculous.
	So then I have to ask, beyond MMR, what is the risk from other vaccines?
	Well, I hear that again, a great question, because, right, hepatitis B vaccination in infants as a policy, first 24 hours of life, firstly, there is no logic behind it, as you pointed out.
	And it's offensive.
	The vast, vast majority.
	Mothers can be tested for hepatitis B exposure in advance and then, you know, maybe offered the vaccine.
	But how long has that safety study been before it becomes policy, a hospital policy to put it into every one-day-old child?
	What would you want to know as a parent, fully informed consent?
	About the length of the safety study and how it was done.
	How long would you want that safety study to have been before you were willing to put it into your child?
	Do you have any thoughts on that?
	I would like that safety study to have been conducted years and years ago.
	I would like it to have been rigorous with a lot of people.
	And I want to be...
	I frankly still probably wouldn't do it because that hepatitis vaccine seems so useless at that age.
	But, I don't know, at least established for...
	Ten years?
	Five years?
	Ten years.
	Five days.
	Five days.
	No placebo, no comparison vaccine.
	What studies were done were done in a small group of totally age-inappropriate people, nothing to do with infants one day old.
	You could not infer anything about safety from that other than the studies hadn't been done.
	Five days, and yet it becomes hospital policy.
	So what happened?
	Is that when the advisory committee on vaccination practices had their meeting about it, they could not.
	Merck came to them and said, we cannot get people to take this vaccine.
	The prostitutes and the drug addicts are not compliant.
	They're not coming forward.
	They're not doing it.
	And so we have no market.
	We put all this money into creating this.
	We are not going, this is their quote, we are not going to be left with an orphan drug.
	And so it was decided to avoid that, they would put it into one-day-old infants.
	This is the thinking behind it.
	So you have someone from the industry going to the advisory committee on vaccination practices and essentially dictating what their market will be in five days.
	Are you told that?
	Is there fully informed consent?
	Absolutely not.
	Why?
	Because the doctors don't know themselves.
	No one has bothered to do the research.
	And yet you're suddenly how somehow to blame or, you know, you may have been cheating on you.
	All that nonsense.
	Please, it's a contrivance.
	Because I'm crotchety and contrarian.
	And even I said, do I have to trust the doctors?
	I said, no, get out of the room.
	It's ridiculous.
	How many people just go along with it because the doctor said so.
	The doctor knows best.
	So, in your estimation, if you have an opinion on it at all.
	Not is it necessary or unnecessary, but are there risks to someone getting the hepatitis vaccine, or DTaP, or any of these other slew of vaccines that we're told to stick our kids with in the first two years of their life?
	Hepatitis B vaccine, so historically it used to, for a very long time, contain a mercury preservative thimerosal.
	Mercury is highly dangerous, one of the, I think, perhaps the second most dangerous thing that you can expose someone to on the planet.
	And yet it was there in these vaccines for infants in highly toxic amounts, way in excess of the EPA guidelines on exposure.
	And the CDC were asked to do a study on this to see if thimerosal was associated causally with the vaccine.
	They held a private meeting at Simpsonwood where they revealed the results and tried and did cover it up.
	This is a link between thimerosal and autism?
	And autism.
	And they found that if a child had been exposed on the first day of life to this thimerosal-containing vaccine, then they had an excess risk of sevenfold of developing autism compared to getting it later.
	And they removed that group.
	Sorry, they removed the control group to show those who had no vaccine.
	Because there was a seven-fold increased risk over that group.
	So they removed the control group and then published the paper, completely concealing the fact that there was this dramatic increase.
	How can you remove the control group?
	Because they were in charge of the data.
	And this only, this was subsequently discovered by persistent mothers, including people like Bobby Kennedy and others.
	And now it's well known.
	The Simpsonwood experience is sort of...
	Synonymous with pharmaceutical industry or CDC fraud.
	And it was an absolute tragedy.
	So they knew.
	I mean, this is the point that I'm getting to, is they knew all along.
	As with the MMR study, here we have the thimerosal study.
	That's how they behave.
	I remember as a kid, I was watching an interview with Bobby Kennedy, actually.
	And Kennedy was alleging a link between thimerosal and autism.
	And then I remember shortly thereafter, and then...
	Subsequently, up until the present time, the media said the link between thimerosal and autism has been debunked, disproven.
	Only kooks think that it exists.
	And there you are.
	Those kooks were right.
	When you go into the original data and find out what they did, the kooks were right.
	The conspiracy theorists, once again, were right.
	The media bought and paid for.
	I think that was one of the lessons of COVID.
	Not in every case, but very often the difference between conspiracy theory and the truth is about six to nine months.
	In this case, maybe a few more years than that.
	What about the other vaccines?
	I can't even name all of them.
	Again, many of them contain thimerosal.
	That's now been phased out.
	So there was a tacit acknowledgement that there was a problem.
	And it was recommended that the manufacturers took it out.
	They knew.
	But they thought, we don't want to cause a public health stir.
	We don't want them to lose confidence in our policymaking, so we'll just phase it out.
	We'll recommend it.
	We won't stop it overnight.
	That would cause a scare.
	But phasing it out seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that there was a reason to phase it out.
	And there was.
	And it was just a strategy for minimizing the downside for them.
	Not protecting children.
	Not avoiding exposure in children.
	Protecting themselves.
	So...
	When I take my kids to a doctor's office, the vast majority of doctor's offices that we might sign up for, that we might join, insist upon a rigorous vaccine schedule, the CDC vaccine schedule.
	And as I told you, I don't consider myself an anti-vaxxer, but if I ask them, not to avoid vaccines entirely, but to say, hey, can we delay these a little bit?
	Can we spread them out?
	Some of them that seem unnecessary, can we avoid?
	I'll do some vaccines.
	Maybe I'll do all your vaccines, but can we just spread them out just a little bit?
	I say, go find another medical group.
	Why are the medical groups going along with that?
	I can't imagine they make that much money per shot.
	Maybe they do.
	Is it pressure from the pharmaceutical industry?
	Is it pressure from the agencies?
	Is it ignorance?
	Is it ideology?
	Is it fear of professional reprisal from the medical community?
	What is it?
	There was a doctor recently, a pediatrician, a couple of years ago, who testified before his state legislators on this very issue.
	And he said, I decided not to vaccinate anymore, based on my experience of what I'd seen happening to children.
	In doing that, he said, I lost $700,000 a year in bonuses from being on time with the vaccine schedule, having all of my children, my patients, vaccinated.
	I lost $700,000 a year.
	And that really says it all.
	Where did the money come from?
	From the medical group?
	It comes from pharmaceutical companies.
	It comes from the government.
	I'm not precisely sure where it comes from, but it's a bonus paid to them for fulfilling their vaccine obligations as they are seen by it.
	So I think that has some part to play in it.
	That's a lot of money.
	That's a lot of money.
	That's more a scratch than I was thinking of.
	I mean, some believe.
	But please don't get me wrong.
	Some genuinely, in good faith, believe that they're doing the right thing.
	Others?
	But when money clouds the issue, it's very difficult to separate the two.
	So, you've got the medical groups, the different medical offices.
	There's that issue.
	Then the schools.
	Obviously, the schools are run by the government most of the time, so they just follow along with whatever the schedule is.
	It seems like this is just a political problem.
	So, what is your hope?
	As Kennedy now, one of the great, most prominent vaccine skeptics of our age, ever, I guess, is the health secretary.
	Do you think things are going to change?
	Yes, I do, I think.
	He is a very, very smart guy.
	And he comes, his family legacy is one of, I mean, let's be honest, it's not, you wouldn't desire it.
	It speaks to his bravery.
	Yeah.
	To be able to stand up in the face of that family history and say, I am going to take a very unpopular view that threatens the commercial interests of many people, but I believe morally that that is my obligation, that is what I have to do.
	Because this is what I know.
	And so he's very sincere, entirely genuine.
	I'm a great fan and supporter.
	And my hope is that scientists will be allowed to do their job without the constraints placed on them by their medical schools or the pharmaceutical industry or the government.
	That they do their job.
	When I was at the Royal Free Hospital...
	The dean came in one day, got all of the academics who do the research, all of the academics together in the lecture theater, and he said, the government has just told us that there will be no further funding from them for medical research.
	They've said that what you have to do is go out and form strategic liaisons with the pharmaceutical companies to have them fund your research.
	Okay?
	So suddenly, in one move...
	It doesn't seem to be a moral hazard there.
	In one move...
	The pharmaceutical companies get to control exactly what science has done in all the medical schools in the United Kingdom, but more importantly, they get to decide what research is not done.
	They were not going to fund my research, that's for sure.
	So when that happened, I realized that I had to get out, I had to come to America, because at least, even though the...
	Argument is equally polarized in the United States.
	There is a system of benevolence here, of independent research funding, of tax-deductible benefits to give to charities that allows private research institutions to thrive.
	And it's the only way it could get done.
	But not in England, where it's really monopolized in this way.
	And I simply wasn't prepared to work for the pharmaceutical industry.
	That's not what I did.
	You know, from your description, it's so tightly controlled in the UK.
	But what's interesting is that it's not tightly controlled by the government.
	I think sometimes American conservatives, we just have this reflexive antipathy for the government and a reflexive adulation for the private industry and for the free market.
	However, there's an older strain in conservatism.
	I think Barry Goldwater made this argument in Conscience of a Conservative, which is what we dislike is monopolistic power anywhere.
	So if it's the government threatening my way of life and my flourishing, that's really bad.
	And if it's some cartel of private industry threatening my way of life and...
	My flourishing.
	That's just as bad.
	If my life is being damaged, then I don't really care who the one is that's damaging it.
	I want to attack unjustly monopolistic power anywhere.
	So then down to brass tacks.
	You have medical expertise, though Wikipedia would deny it now.
	You have been on this issue for decades.
	A parent comes to you, says, Andy, my doctor's office says I've got to vaccinate my kids.
	Should I give them all the vaccines?
	Should I give them none of the vaccines?
	Should I give them some of the vaccines?
	If I should give them some of the vaccines, when should I give it to them?
	Would you give advice to those parents?
	No.
	It is not my job to give advice about what vaccines they should and shouldn't have.
	It's my job to direct them to the science that will help them come to a decision, and they should have fully informed consent.
	What I do say is this.
	Is that I don't give that advice, but what I can say in all honesty, if I were a new father today, having a baby, then I would not vaccinate them.
	At all.
	And that's my opinion, based upon what I know, but you must go out and do your research and study this because you must come to that conclusion and live with the outcome, whatever that may be, of your decision.
	But you think that the benefit...
	Just for you, you're now a young father.
	For you, if you're doing that cost-benefit, you would say the potential benefit doesn't outweigh the risk.
	I've come to believe not only in the changing nature of the trajectory of infectious disease, it's getting far less and less and less serious and far less lethal.
	And so the cost-benefit equation has changed over time.
	I'll give you an example.
	When antibiotics came in less than 100 years ago, Antibiotics were a miracle.
	We were plagued with rheumatic fever and battlefield gangrene and syphilis, neurosyphilis, for which there was no treatment.
	Patients were dying.
	Antibiotics came along.
	They were a miracle.
	But the miracle changes.
	It's a dynamic relationship between organism and antibiotic.
	And the overuse and the misuse of antibiotics...
	Has led to the emergence of highly resistant, very dangerous strains of bacteria.
	And now the British government calls that the post-antibiotic apocalypse.
	They're words.
	Theatrical word, but they are their words.
	And it is because we have a situation where the pharmaceutical company are now saying, guys, we're pulling out of antibiotic research because by the time we bring an expensive antibiotic to market, the bugs have already become resistant, so it's a waste of time.
	And that is a situation that man has created.
	So the miracle, as it genuinely was for so many people, has now become this post-antibiotic apocalypse.
	And we need to deal with that, and we need to understand that nature will not be deceived.
	Nature will not be deceived.
	It will find a way.
	And we need to respect nature, to anticipate its moves, and not to assume that we...
	Can outwit nature.
	This is the whole basis of Jurassic Park.
	You know, there's a wonderful theatrical example of how nature will come back to haunt you if you think you can interfere with it.
	You think you can exploit and manipulate it.
	You can't.
	I can already see the headline now in the left-wing media, which is, Wakefield, not satisfied attacking vaccines, now attacks antibiotics.
	But what you're describing is not that antibiotics...
	You're just observing how antibiotics have worked over time.
	You're observing how medicine works over time.
	It's Hegelian almost.
	There's a synthesis and an antithesis.
	What has actually happened?
	Let's not get emotionally involved in this.
	Let's just ask the pragmatic question.
	What has really happened?
	And that's what's happened.
	And it's not that they were a bad thing at all.
	No, no, no.
	They weren't.
	But...
	Nature reacts.
	Nature reacts.
	Nature finds a way around the problem.
	And there can be unintended consequences.
	And there's no be-all, end-all solution that ends history.
	So then on...
	So we looked at that curve, or that collapse for measles, long predating the introduction of the measles vaccine.
	But then what about now?
	We are where we are.
	We did introduce the measles vaccine decades ago.
	And as people become more skeptical, I think with good reason, post-COVID, of vaccines and of public health experts, will there be a huge upsurge in measles?
	Should people be concerned about that?
	Yes, they should.
	Yes, they should, for various reasons.
	Is that strains of measles that are now evolving, just in the same way as antibiotic and bacteria, strains of declades, what are called declades of measles, a particular genetic variant of measles, has emerged in highly vaccinated populations, which is resistant to the immunity induced by the vaccine.
	So we've created this kind of resistance now in viruses, just as we did in a different way, but similarly to bacteria.
	So we've got the emergence of resistant strains.
	What do we do about that?
	Because we can't go on using the live attenuated vaccine that's now decades old.
	So people are saying, oh, I know what we'll do.
	We'll make an mRNA-based vaccine for measles and mumps and rubella and all these other things.
	That.
	From our experience with COVID would be an utter catastrophe.
	But that, if you and I are talking about it, they've already done it.
	These vaccines have been generated.
	Calling them vaccines is a misnomer.
	These genetic modification tools are what they are, are now anticipated and will be their answer to increasing.
	What they don't tell you in a lot of these measles cases, for example, is that in the year that we had the Disneyland outbreak, there were something like 180 cases across America that 43% of those cases were caused by the vaccine.
	They sequenced the strains and found that 43% were vaccine-related measles cases and didn't tell us for four years because that would have been a public relations nightmare.
	We do have a problem.
	We have a real problem.
	And berating people and belittling them in the media isn't going to help that problem.
	It's not going to solve it.
	There's an analogy there sometimes on a different medical issue, on the abortion issue.
	The pro-abortion side will say that before Roe v.
	Wade...
	Women were dying by the thousands from illegal abortions, which is completely made up.
	As the man who invented that statistic, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, formerly the head of NARAL, pro-abortion, then became pro-life, he admitted he just made it out of thin air.
	But you can look.
	You can look at the government records to see how many women died from illegal abortions the year before Roe v.
	Wade, and the number's 39. You can also see how many women died from legal abortions, numbers 24. Not 3,900, not 39,000, 39 and 24. Then you can look at the number of states where abortion was legal and illegal, and you realize the likelihood of a woman dying from an illegal abortion in those years was almost exactly the same as a woman dying from a legal abortion.
	So putting the abortion issue aside for a moment, it just totally undercuts the credibility of the polemicists and the partisans who are arguing for one side of the issue.
	43 percent.
	You'd think so.
	And I think that's why it was left out.
	And all I'm arguing for is the conduct of excellent science that answers the questions that vex the public most to be done with integrity and dispassionately to get the right answers to protect the children.
	And in the meantime, well, forever.
	Fully informed parental consent in vaccinations for their children.
	Fully informed voluntary consent.
	That is the basis, one of the tenets of clinical medicine.
	But that doesn't happen here.
	Be parents of force, coerced, frightened, all of those things, pressures brought to bear, that your child won't be allowed in school, we're going to throw them out of the practice.
	This is unforgivable.
	This isn't what medicine's meant to be.
	Now, you mentioned the mRNA vaccines, which you point out aren't exactly even vaccines.
	I'm going to confess a little bit more ignorance.
	Even five years now after the outbreak of COVID, the advent in a popular way of the mRNA vaccines, I really don't fully understand the distinction between an mRNA vaccine and a regular old vaccine.
	What is the difference?
	OK, now, as a filmmaker now, because I've been a filmmaker for the last 20 years, the measles vaccine, for example, is made the same way it was made way back in the 60s.
	So it's a, you have a culture of chick embryos, you know, eggs, or other substrates, cell substrates, because the virus requires a cell to grow in.
	And that's what it does.
	And you make a live virus.
	And it doesn't, when you put it into individuals who are susceptible to measles, this is the one.
	Oh, that child's rash is much less than all those other rashes.
	His fever didn't go up.
	That's the one we'll select as the vaccine strain.
	People call it weakening the virus.
	You're not weakening it.
	You're modifying its disease profile.
	You might be doing something else in addition that you don't know about.
	It just doesn't manifest in outward symptoms.
	That's the live attenuated vaccine.
	That's the one that's commonly available, universally available now in doctors' offices.
	The mRNA vaccine is a genetically created vaccine where you take a sequence of the target agent, like COVID, the spike protein, and you integrate that into a...
	Plasmid, a piece of circular DNA, and then you use that as the substitute.
	Now, I'm not an expert on mRNA-based vaccines, but it's a very, very different approach.
	This isn't live.
	This is a very different thing.
	But when you give it, the intention is that it then integrates into human cells and turns them into a factory for producing the viral protein.
	Well, that's not a good idea.
	Because you're then causing, you're asking the body to turn on its own cells, which is the very basis of autoimmune disease.
	So it seems to me intuitive that you're wreaking havoc on people by encouraging the immune system to attack its host.
	But it seems like all of the enthusiasm in the pharmaceutical industry is for these new mRNA vaccines.
	In many of them, yes.
	I think that I'd be interested to see where it's all going.
	I think that many of the venture capital companies are now pulling back on vaccines, particularly shots of this particular type, because they've come with so many unknown hazards that are becoming known.
	I think that...
	Yeah, it was, like I said, I think it was the biggest mistake they made.
	Because not only does it undermine credibility in what they're saying now, but everything they've said before.
	Do you see under the new health regime, under Kennedy's leadership and President Trump's leadership, do you see a turn away from the mRNA vaccines in particular?
	Yes, I do.
	I think the inevitability is the science will get done.
	The right conclusions will be reached.
	I think there'll be huge pressure, particularly from those pharmaceutical companies that have invested a lot into this thing.
	You'll have people hired by the pharmaceutical industry to write stories saying how wonderful they are and how bad people like Bobby Kennedy are.
	It's happening all the time now.
	That's inevitable.
	It can happen.
	But you know what?
	I've been in this 35 years and I'm not going away, so...
	I'll keep doing what I do, and Bobby will keep doing what he does, and we'll come to the right answer somehow.
	Well, they've taken just about everything they can from you, so...
	As you say, they haven't killed you yet, and a man who's had everything taken from him is one of the most dangerous men in the world, because you really only have an incentive to pursue your line of inquiry and to pursue the truth.
	That's right.
	They haven't killed me.
	I think part of it is because I'm a sort of useful person to have around.
	They can always say, "He's the guy!
	He's the one who did it!" They blame him!
	Yeah, he'd blame him.
	If I'm gone, they can't blame him.
	He's gone.
	Anyway, putting all of this to one side, there is a much more important issue at stake, and that is the well-being of the children of this country and the world.
	Many of those have lost their voice, or had no voice, and it's up to it.
	Those of us who care about these issues to speak for them.
	It's amazing how speaking to you for an hour and a half or however long we've been here, you don't seem like the guy in the Wikipedia page.
	I don't know.
	You don't seem like the guy that's been written about in the establishment media.
	It's almost like you can't believe everything that's written in the newspapers or maybe everything that comes out of the official sources of the government.
	Andy, thank you so much for being here.
	My pleasure.

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