Silencing the Dissenters original article

The standard response of the Medical Establishment to any criticism of vaccination is to silence the dissenters. If the critic is a health professional he or she is invariably subjected to ridicule, censure, ostracism, loss of current employment and possibly the complete loss of his or her career.

In 1970, Dr J Anthony Morris made claims that the federal government was failing to protect the public by not recalling vaccines contaminated by a virus that caused cancer in test animals.¹ At that time Dr Morris was a respected research virologist, working for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In 1976, having been in charge of the testing of the swine flu vaccine, and having his written concerns ignored by his superiors, Dr Morris held seminars on the National Institutes of Health campus. He sent letters to newspaper, talked to reporters, and warned that the shots could trigger a range of serious illnesses. On July 12, 1976, after his persistent seven-week attack on the swine flu program, he was fired for "inefficiency and insubordination." Weeks later, after many deaths and thousands of serious injuries, the vaccination campaign was aborted, proving that Dr Morris's warning were correct. Dr Morris hired a lawyer who, after a seven year battle, managed to prove that everything said by the FDA about Morris was untrue.

In 1994 Dr Guylaine Lanctot (MD), published The Medical Mafia, a book which, among other controversial statements, said that vaccinations fail to protect against disease, undermine the immune system and provoke illness in children; in short, that vaccinations provide almost no benefit. The Quebec College of Physicians, of which Dr Lanctot was a member, asked her to resign for publicly airing views which did not correspond with views generally held by the medical community. Dr Lanctot was advised that her resignation would make her a "free physician" - able to express her views - but warned that if she refused they would file a complaint with the College's Disciplinary Committee seeking to have her licence to practice medicine revoked. Dr Lanctot refused to resign so the College tried her before the Medical Board Tribunal. Although she resigned partway through the trial the College continued the hearings without her, found her guilty on all counts and after six months of deliberations announced that she was barred from practicing medicine for life.²

In New Zealand, in June of 2002, Dr Colin Tukuitonga, the Director of Public Health, made thinly veiled threats against the job security of midwives who disseminated what he described as "biased and misleading" anti-immunisation literature, suggesting that they were in breach of their contracts and stating that he was seeking legal advice on the matter.³

Campbell Murdoch, Professor of General Practice at the Otago Medical School in Dunedin between 1983 and 1992 wrote:

"It is a brave or foolish medical person who dares to question the wisdom of this wonderful scientific advance, for to do so is to challenge one of the sacred cows of modern medicine... ...espoused uncritically by the medical profession. Any other artificially produced therapeutic agent would be assumed to have some side-effects but immunisation has been elevated to a position in therapeutics which cannot be challenged. Any doctor who dares to suggest that there might be a dark side to this wonderful miracle is pilloried by the medical establishment and subjected to threat and ridicule."

"For most [public health specialists], belief in the beneficence of immunisation is absolute and to question this has become the professional equivalent of mortal sin. Thus any opposition is dismissed as myth… …adverse reactions are denied and opponents are classified as cranks. The worry about this is that science implies refuting the status quo and that, if there were to be any future problem with immunisation, it would never be detected, at least by these groups."

Against a background of censure and ostracism which the above paragraphs illustrate Dr Andrew Wakefield has become one of the most recent victims of the campaign to silence the dissenters.

Up until December 2001, Dr Andrew Wakefield was a consultant gastroenterologist at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He trained at St Mary's Hospital medical school in London⁴ and worked at the University of Toronto studying small intestine transplant techniques before continuing his research at the Royal Free Hospital in London. His research in the early 1990s into the cause of two devastating inflammatory bowel diseases, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, was supported by grants worth millions from pharmaceutical companies and charities⁵. In an interview with Spectrum Radio, Wakefield joked that that was when his moderately promising career went seriously off the rails⁶.

Dawn Richardson, from Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education, writes that when he realised that "the lives of children depended upon his having the courage to refuse to remain silent about the association he found between MMR vaccine and autism, he chose to do what was right instead of doing what was safe."⁷

In February 1998, Wakefield and his colleagues at the Royal Free Hospital published the results of some research on inflammatory bowel disease in the esteemed medical journal The Lancet. The paper - "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children"⁸ - described a pattern of bowel inflammation, that the authors labelled autistic enterocolitis, in 12 children. The paper reported that parents of eight of the children said that their behaviour began to deteriorate after their MMR vaccinations. While there was no direct evidence of a link, Dr. Wakefield said it must be properly investigated. He stressed he was not anti-vaccine, and only wanted safe vaccination programmes for children.^{6, 8}

After publication Wakefield was contacted by numerous parents of children with autism. They told him that their children also had chronic bowel problems and asked if it could be possible that the autism and bowel disease the children suffered were caused by the measles virus?⁶ "Everything I know about autism, I know from listening to parents," Wakefield says. "I was told by my mentor to listen to the patient, or the patient's parents... the answers you are looking for they have."

These children were all perfectly normal developmentally and began to regress soon after receiving the MMR vaccine. Wakefield examined these children and found that the measles virus was in the guts of children with autism who had never had the measles⁶.

Wakefield and his colleagues hypothesised that in susceptible children the measles virus from the MMR vaccine causes inflammatory bowel disease, which leads to a chemical imbalance in the body and the brain, resulting in a developmental disorder - autism^{4, 6}. While they had yet to prove their theory there was sufficient evidence from their research to warrant further research.

The publication of the paper in The Lancet sparked a flurry of letters to the journal, a media circus and a vitriolic response from the Medical Establishment which included Wakefield's peers and the health authorities in the

UK. "He

's been labelled a liar, a scientific cheat, and much, much, worse. His colleagues have distanced themselves from him. His bosses told him to stop talking. The Centre for Disease Control tore a strip off his research" according to Spectrum⁶.

Most of the criticism in The Lancet centred on the loss of confidence of the British public in the MMR vaccine and the potential for reduced uptake of the vaccine⁹. He was accused of undermining the public's confidence in vaccines, and putting children's lives at risk. The journal's editors came in for harsh criticism for publishing the paper and some correspondents accused Wakefield of a conflict of interest and questioned his motives, suggesting that he had links to anti-vaccine organisations and autism support groups. His accusers gave no consideration in their letters to the suffering of families of autistic children whose lives may have been devastated by a medical intervention that those very accusers not only promote but profit from. Many of Wakefield's detractors are employed to promote vaccination, and GPs in the UK are paid a bonus for having a certain percentage of their practice fully vaccinated. Any drop in the uptake rates affect the bonuses that they receive.

The vitriol was not only to be found in the press but transcended cyberspace. In a number of emails seen by this author, various 'Consultants in Communicable Disease Control' in the

criticise and malign Andrew Wakefield (Pers. Comm.). Robert Aston, writes that Wakefield poses a serious threat and suggests that he has not taken "serious account of the weight of scientific evidence and opinion against his own theories". Peter English describes him as "a highly skilled propagandist, whose message (MMR is dangerous, don't allow your children to have it, discourage your patients from having it...) will prevent people from having a safe, effective intervention." He continues: "that such a skilled communicator should do it, and do it so effectively, is potentially immensely harmful." Dr Kevin Perrett implies that Wakefield is in the employ of anti-vaccination groups despite Wakefield having stated that he is not anti-vaccination per se.

Another email reported that one of Wakefield's senior consultant colleagues at the Royal Free Hospital described him as "...a maverick and a danger to the public health" on the programme Tonight on the 8^th of February 2001.

Wakefield has also been accused of "courting the press" and even the publishers of The Lancet have attacked him, describing his behaviour at the press conference about his 1998 study as "a huge blow to the efforts of measles eradication," and implied that his claims were not shared by his co-authors¹⁰.

Criticism of Wakefield has not been limited to health professionals and authorities in the

UK. Spectrum report that "the biggest names in the public health community, like the CDC [Centres for Disease Control] in the States, attack Wakefield's research."⁶Glib comments from the CDC, effectively humouring those parents and health professionals that are concerned about serious adverse reactions to vaccines were also published in the correspondence pages of The Lancet⁹.

These attacks on Wakefield have reduced the discussion on the issue to a cat-fight played out in both the medical and popular press. They trivialise the escalating autism 'epidemic' and the very real tragedy that has befallen many families, while ignoring the reality that measles is a relatively benign disease in healthy well-nourished children, and a disease that many medical professionals now question the need to 'eradicate'.

The UK Department of Health’s (DoH) response to his findings has been to undermine or ignore them. It has insisted that parents have no need for concern over the safety of MMR, despite the fears of not only Wakefield but increasing numbers of doctors¹¹. The DoH has undertaken an expensive (3 million pounds) campaign to persuade parents and health professionals that the vaccine is safe¹². The DoH and other critics of Wakefield claimed that his research results could not be replicated.

However, in the last twelve months a number of researchers have published the results of separate studies which confirm Wakefield's findings. Professor John O'Leary, chair of pathology at Trinity College, Dublin, found the vaccine strain of measles virus in the guts of 12 children with autism and gut disease.¹³ In his testimony to the

Congressional hearings on autism, Dr Arthur Krigsman, a paediatric gastroenterologist from the New York University School of Medicine, stated that he had found an identical pattern of inflammatory bowel disease in 90 per cent of his 43 young autistic patients.¹⁴ In the July-August 2002 issue of the Journal of Biomedical Sciences, Singh et al. reported that they had found an unusual MMR antibody in 75 out 125 (60%) autistic children but not in any of the 92 non-autistic control children. They concluded that an inappropriate antibody response to the measles component of the MMR vaccine might be related to development of autism.¹⁵

Further support for Wakefield comes from a Medical Research Council Review Group report. This report was said by The Telegraph to "raise new questions as to why the doctor [Wakefield] has been ostracised by the medical establishment." They say that while the report doesn't support Wakefield's theory linking MMR with autism it makes clear "that more research is needed before the hypothesis can be either confirmed or refuted."¹¹

The publication of "Measles, Mumps, Rubella Vaccine: Through a Glass, Darkly" in the journal Adverse Drug Reactions and Toxicological Review (Volume 19, (4), pages 265-283) by Dr Andrew Wakefield and Dr Scott Montgomery analysing the safety studies carried out on the MMR vaccine, resulted in deepening the controversy. The paper concluded that the MMR vaccine should never have been licensed. This was supported by a number of referees which include the former chair of the medicines commission, a former member of the Committee on the Safety of Medicines, and a former principal medical officer in the Medicines Division - now the Medicines Control Agency - of the Department of Health who served as medical assessor to the Committee on the Safety of Medicines.

The editor of the journal, Dr John Griffin came under some pressure not to publish and the paper drew a detailed response from the DoH refuting the authors' findings. In The Telegraph Wakefield stated that he had sent an advance copy of the paper to the government's Chief Medical Officer prior to publication. The DoH declared it "bad science", however, Professor Dame Rosalind Hurley, a former chairwoman of the Medicines Commission, describes the paper as a "welcome contribution to the on-going scientific debate".⁴

In the same article in The Telegraph, Wakefield said that "The Department of Health's contention that MMR has been proven to be safe by study after study after study just doesn't hold up. Frankly, it is not an honest appraisal of the science and it relegates the scientific issues to the bottom of the barrel in favour of winning a propaganda war. The official reaction to this debate is a great shame."

"If you are mandated to check on vaccine safety and maintain public confidence you don't just dismiss the idea as a coincidence. That is not good enough, it is not good medicine."⁴

In November 2001 Andrew Wakefield was forced to resign from his position at the Royal Free London Hospital⁵. Dr Wakefield acknowledged that the hostility towards him from the hospital and medical school had made his position there untenable. He said: "I realise now that everything that has happened to me was inevitable from the beginning. If you offend the system, then the system will take its revenge."

He left his 50,000 Pound position of 14 years having been told that his ideas were "unwelcome" at University College, London, which controls the Royal Free Hospital, only a month after he was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists in recognition of his research work¹⁷. Subsequently the Royal Free Hospital Medical School issued a statement saying: "Dr Wakefield's research was no longer in line with the Department of Medicine's research strategy and he left the university by mutual agreement."

His departure devastated the parents of the 200 children he had been involved with and they sought reassurance that their children would continue to be cared for by the unit. A further 150 children were on a waiting list for treatment⁵.

Rosemary Kessick, whose 13-year-old autistic son, William, was one of the first Dr Wakefield examined, said: "What people fail to realise is that Andrew Wakefield did not go looking for us. We parents went looking for him because we were convinced, and we were right, that our children had bowel problems and these were somehow related to their autism. He has stood by us and as a result he has been treated very shabbily."⁵

Ann Hewitt, from north London, whose son Thomas, eight, is severely affected and needs frequent hospital attention, said: "Irrespective of the causes of their problems these children are entitled to the best treatment and to the care and respect they deserve. They can shoot the messenger but these children are going to keep coming and it is essential that they continue to be looked after."

Dawn Richardson says in her commentary on Wakefield's resignation "whenever ignorance, envy, greed and suppression dominate the business of a state (or a profession), there will always be heroes who step forward to challenge the status quo. They are usually individuals who lead ordinary lives until, one day, they are faced with an extraordinary situation and make a conscious decision to do the right thing no matter what price they have to pay."⁷

The measles virus is no longer seen by the Medical Establishment to be the "problem" - the measles vaccine or combined MMR vaccine "solved" the problem. Therefore, the problem is now perceived to be those who are not vaccinated against measles¹⁸. The Medical Establishment sees people who choose not to vaccinate as deviant and a social problem that needs to be fixed. They demonise anyone who's actions may adversely influence vaccination uptake rates. Dr Andrew Wakefield is the latest demon upon whom they focus their attention.

Silencing the Dissenters

History is littered with people who were pilloried for questioning the firmly held "scientific" beliefs of the time. Galileo Galilei and Ignaz Semmelweis are only two examples.

Galileo had the temerity to support the theories of Copernicus who believed that the earth revolved around the sun and was not the centre of the universe. This was regarded as blasphemy against the Bible and the teachings of the Catholic Church. He was persecuted and forced to recant before the Inquisition tribunal. He lived out his last years under house arrest, forbidden from writing and publishing. Galileo believed that science should be independent from traditional, political, and ecclesiastical authorities. His attitudes were probably influenced by his father who wrote: "It appears to me that they who in proof of any assertion rely simply on the weight of any authority, without adducing any argument in support of it, act very absurdly. I, on the other hand, wish to be allowed to freely question and to freely answer without any sort of adulation, as well becomes those who are sincerely in search of truth."

Ignaz Semmelweis is regarded as the "Father of Infection Control" for his conclusion that puerpural fever, which claimed the lives of many women soon after childbirth, was a contagious disease spread by hands contaminated with necrotic material from dead bodies. He suggested that disinfection of hands could stop the transmission of disease from cadaver to pregnant women, and, indeed, when simple disinfection of the hands of the medical students was implemented the mortality rate plummeted. His theories were not accepted by his peers and he faced considerable opposition. He was forced to leave the Vienna General Hospital in 1850 and eventually died in a lunatic asylum in 1865 at the age of 47.

Dr Andrew Wakefield has been pursued with almost religious fervour and has paid a high price for publishing his theories. He has said that he did not regret his decision to get involved in the MMR controversy: "Losing a London hospital teaching job doesn't do much for my CV but there are bigger issues at stake. What matters now most of all is what happens to these children."⁵ To his credit he refuses to recant and has asserted that "I have not done anything wrong. I have no intention of stopping my investigations."

Wakefield continues his research into the link between MMR and autism as an independent investigator in collaboration with ex-colleagues at the medical school and at other research centres. He has said that his priority remains the wellbeing of children whom he believes have been affected by the vaccine. "They mustn't be put aside because they represent something uncomfortable for medicine."¹⁹

1 Collins, C. and Hanchette, J., 1984: Vaccine machine runs over whistle-blower, The Vaccine Machine, A Gannet News Service Reprint, December 1984, Page 15.

2 Schafer, Joachim, 1998: The Trial of the Medical Mafia, Here's The Key Inc., Canada

3 Angela Gregory, 2002: Midwives accused of threat to babies, The New Zealand Herald, 19 June, 2002 .

4 Fraser, L., 2001: Shame on officials who say MMR is safe, The Telegraph, 21 January 2001 .

5 Fraser, L., 2001: Parents left stunned as MMR doctor is forced out, The Daily Telegraph, 2 December, 2001

6 Spectrum Radio Interview, So What's Not to Like About Andrew Wakefield, www.autism-spectrum.com

7 Dawn Richardson, Leading British Autism Doctor Victimized, Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Information, Commentary on www.mercola.com

8 Wakefield , A.J., et al., 1998: Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children, The Lancet, Vol. 351, No. 9103 637-41.

9 Various letters in the Correspondence column of The Lancet, Vol. 351, No. 9106, 21 March 1998; Vol. 351, No. 9112 02 May 1998; Vol. 352, No.r 9121 04 July 1998; Vol. 352, No. 9123 18 July 1998; Vol. 356, No. 9224 8 July 2000.

10 Abbasi, Kamran, 2001: Man, mission, rumpus, British Medical Journal, Feb 3, 2001 .

11 Fraser, L., 2001: Studies fail to disprove autism link to MMR jab, The Telegraph 9 December 2001.

12 Steele, L., 2001: It is not about the science. It's about belief, The Guardian, 5 December, 2001 .

13 Martin, C.M., Uhlmann, V., Killalea, A., Sheils, O., O'Leary, J.J., 2002: Detection of measles virus in children with ileo-colonic lymphoid nodular hyperplasia, enterocolitis and developmental disorder, Molecular Psychiatry, 7, S47-S4.

14 Krigsman, A., 2002: Testimony before Congressional Oversight Committee on Autism and Immunization, The Status of Research into Vaccine Safety and Autism, Committee of Government Reform, Washington D.C.

15 Singh, V.K., Lin, S.X., Newell, E., Nelson, C.J., 2002: Abnormal measles-mumps-rubella antibodies and CNS autoimmunity in children with autism, J. Biomed Sci., Jul-Aug; 9 (4): 359-64.

16 Fraser, L., 2001: Anti-MMR doctor is forced out, The Daily Telegraph, 2 December, 2001 .

17 Meikle, J., 2001: Doctor who linked jab to autism quits, The Guardian, December 3, 2001 .

18 Dew, K., 1995: The Measles Vaccination Campaigns in New Zealand, 1985 and 1991: The Issues Behind the Panic, Working Papers, No. 10, 1995, Victoria University of Wellington.

19 Ramsay, S. 2001: Policy and people Controversial MMR-autism investigator resigns from research post, The Lancet, Vol. 358, No. 9297, 8 December, 2001 .