Andrew Wakefield vs Stanley Plotkin: you be the judge
How will history remember each of these men? The future of our kids depends on getting it right.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair
To go to such extreme–and desperate lengths –to annihilate Dr. Wakefield (the person, note, not the science) some people must be very afraid. Afraid, presumably, that parents might actually believe something that is blatantly obvious: that is that all vaccines can cause serious adverse reactions, including autism.
— Dr. Richard Halvorsen, British doctor, author of The Truth about Vaccines
NEW HOPE, Pennsylvania—Dr. Stanley Plotkin is the godfather of the modern vaccine industry. Now 92 years old, he literally wrote the book on vaccines; called Plotkin’s Vaccines, it’s now in its seventh edition, and the textbook is recommended by Bill Gates as an “indispensable guide to the enhancement of the well-being of our world.” Even at his advanced age, in a recent, super creepy poll of the Top 50 “most influential people in vaccines,” Dr. Plotkin was voted #5 (Bill Gates was #1).
Dr. Plotkin’s intimate relationship with the vaccine industry knows no boundaries. He’s a vaccine inventor, company board member, peer reviewer, professor, and mentor of all things vaccines. The number of awards Dr. Plotkin has received for his service to vaccines is lengthy, including the French Legion of Honor, the Sabin Gold Medal, and the Maxwell Finland Award for Scientific Achievement.
Dr. Plotkin’s prize pupil, Dr. Paul Offit (ranked number six in the aforementioned poll), learned everything he knows about vaccines from Dr. Plotkin, and together they have shaped many of the talking points that govern the way vaccines are positioned to the public. They jointly shared in the riches of the development of the rotavirus vaccines, with each of them making a cool six million dollars when their invention was sold to Merck. In early January of 2018, Dr. Plotkin added another superlative to his resume: expert witness.
A custody battle in Michigan between Lori Matheson and her ex-husband Michael Schmitt included a disagreement over vaccines for their shared child. The mother didn’t want to vaccinate her daughter at all; the father did. With the case making national headlines, Dr. Offit got involved behind the scenes to support the father, along with the pharma-funded pro-vaccine nonprofit, Voices for Vaccines. Their big idea? Roll in Dr. Plotkin as the expert witness for the father. Who better to extoll the virtues of vaccination than the founder of the modern vaccine industry?
This would be a high-profile case, and Dr. Plotkin’s testimony could set precedent for how these matters are adjudicated in the future. This was the first time Dr. Plotkin had agreed to serve as an expert witness on the subject of vaccines. It was also the first time Dr. Plotkin would have to testify under oath in a wide-ranging deposition conducted by the attorney for the mother in the case, Aaron Siri. Anytime an “expert witness” is offered up in a trial, the opposing counsel has the right to depose that witness in advance of the trial, and Mr. Siri exercised his rights, deposing Dr. Plotkin on January 11, 2018, at a location near Dr. Plotkin’s megamansion in New Hope, Pennsylvania.
The deposition lasted eight hours. The next morning, January 12, Dr. Plotkin recused himself from being an expert witness in the case.
In between, Mr. Siri exposed more truth about vaccines and the vaccine industry in one document than had ever been done in the previous 100 years!
It’s Never about the Money
Vaccine industry marketers have a unique ability to rationalize away any implication that there might be a profit motive behind their behavior. Dr. Offit in particular bemoans any hint that his motivations aren’t pure:
But the part that hurts the most is the continued claim that we did this for the money. I don’t know any scientist who does it for the money (you certainly don’t make much in salary). You do it because it’s fun and because you think you can contribute. And the reward for creating a vaccine was also never financial.
Dr. Offit is discussing the six million dollars that he claims he received (other public estimates have been far higher) when a patent for the rotavirus vaccine for which he was a coinventor was sold to Merck. Unlike Dr. Offit, there are many people concerned that financial conflicts heavily impact vaccine policy making, so much so that the US Congress’s Committee on Government Reform issued a blistering report on the very topic, entitled “Conflicts of Interest in Vaccine Policy Making.” The conclusion was a stern rebuke:
The Committee’s investigation has determined that conflict of interest rules employed by the FDA and the CDC have been weak, enforcement has been lax, and committee members with substantial ties to pharmaceutical companies have been given waivers to participate in committee proceedings.
Interestingly, the report was particularly critical of a doctor who served on a decision-making committee affiliated with CDC: Dr. Paul Offit. When a predecessor rotavirus vaccine was added to the recommended vaccine schedule in the United States, Dr. Offit voted in favor of adding it (while his own vaccine was still under development), but when that same vaccine was shown to be causing a high rate of a deadly bowel affliction, Dr. Offit abstained from supporting the vaccine’s removal from the market (it was later removed). In an excellent investigation titled “Voting Himself Rich,” the late, great Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill criticized Dr. Offit’s “use of his former position on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to help create the market for rotavirus vaccine—to effectively vote himself rich.”
As you’re about to read, Dr. Plotkin equally considers himself to be above the fray, despite his gargantuan financial conflicts of interest. Sure, he takes millions of dollars from the vaccine industry, but that has nothing to do with the things he says about vaccines. Yeah, right!
The Plotkin Deposition
As a bespectacled Dr. Plotkin sat for his deposition wearing a dark suit and red tie, he had no idea his opposing counsel was one of the most informed people in the world on the topic of vaccines. A UC Berkeley School of Law honors graduate and former clerk for the Israeli Supreme Court, Mr. Siri is not your average lawyer. In 2015 Mr. Siri made headlines when he successfully defeated a flu shot mandate for children that had been imposed on citizens of New York City.
At the time Mr. Siri explained that “parents across the city who, in consultation with their doctors, made the decision that the risks outweighed the benefits for their particular child, had that right taken away from them by 11 unelected individuals sitting in the Board of Health right across the street.”
Mr. Siri’s cross-examination skills are formidable, and reading the deposition for the first time was one of the more satisfying moments in my time as an autism activist. The opposing lawyer representing Dr. Plotkin was severely outmatched, and I had to laugh that this was the brainchild of Dr. Offit. Did he not realize Dr. Plotkin would be deposed? Mr. Siri understood every trick, exaggeration, misstatement, and controversy, and he walked Dr. Plotkin into bear trap after bear trap the way Tom Cruise brought Jack Nicholson along in A Few Good Men, which is the movie I kept thinking of as I read the deposition. And watching the video of the deposition, I saw Dr. Plotkin grow more and more annoyed as the deposition progressed. I kept waiting for him to scream, “You can’t handle the truth!” At least for now, the entire 9-hour affair sits on YouTube, you can watch it right here:
Dr. Plotkin, along with Dr. Offit, has shaped many of the false narratives about vaccines that permeate our culture. From their perch at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Drs. Plotkin and Offit are the go-to resource for any mainstream journalist writing about vaccines. Vaccines rarely harm, testing is thorough, they never cause autism, every child needs them, herd immunity must be maintained. All of these false narratives and exaggerations can trace their origins to Drs. Plotkin and Offit. But none of them has ever had to endure the scrutiny of being challenged under oath.
It’s as close as we will ever get to deposing the vaccine industry itself, and it was a colossal blunder to allow Dr. Plotkin to be deposed, which he seemed to realize within the first hour of the deposition. It’s hard to do a four-hundred-page document justice in one blog post, particularly because in many cases Mr. Siri would lead Dr. Plotkin down a lengthy path before exposing the lies or contradictions to his testimony, but I’ll do my best. At the very least, I hope this will show you some of the ways the vaccine industry exaggerates, spins, and lies when the facts about vaccines don’t suit their needs.
Conflicts of Interest
Mr. Siri opened by reminding Dr. Plotkin that he was testifying under “penalty of perjury” for any false statements, and Dr. Plotkin stated that his last deposition had been sometime in the 1960s but that he was “willing to help in this case.” Mr. Siri then took Dr. Plotkin through his extensive travel schedule for 2017, at the end of which Dr. Plotkin confirmed that “probably about half” of the trips were sponsored by “companies developing vaccines.”
Dr. Plotkin was asked if he knows the name, the age, and the vaccination status or has reviewed the medical records of the daughter of the parents involved in the court case. “I do not know” was the answer provided to every detail. Mr. Siri walked Dr. Plotkin through the name of every vaccine recommended by the CDC and asked Dr. Plotkin if the daughter in the case should receive the vaccine. Of course, Dr. Plotkin’s answer was always yes. Mr. Siri established, with Dr. Plotkin’s help, that “every vaccine that you [Dr. Plotkin] believe [daughter] should receive is produced by either Merck, Sanofi, GSK, or Pfizer, correct?”
Mr. Siri was then able to establish that Dr. Plotkin had received payments from these four vaccine manufacturers for at least the last thirty years, and that the dollar amounts are in the millions. Dr. Plotkin explained, “I’m sure it’s a sizable amount of money.” He further explained, “I’ve consulted for essentially all of the major manufacturers. I do not know how much I received. But I have certainly received payments from Merck, from Glaxo, from Pfizer, and many other entities.”
Of course, it’s no crime to consult to vaccine makers, or become a multimillionaire from doing so—it’s Dr. Plotkin’s job. It compromises your role as an expert witness, however. Mr. Siri quickly dug down into a pattern: nondisclosure and conflict. Mr. Siri first focused on a nonprofit organization that Dr. Plotkin was a “driving force” in creating, Voices for Vaccines. Dr. Plotkin asserted that the organization, a pro-vaccine advocacy organization, “receives no funding from any of the pharmaceutical companies, and that is on order to avoid any suggestion of a conflict of interest.” It sounds like a line Dr. Plotkin has stated many times, and Mr. Siri then produced a tax return for Voices for Vaccines, showing support for the organization provided by the Task Force for Global Health, an industry-funded organization. Dr. Plotkin admitted that he “stands corrected.”
Dr. Plotkin grew annoyed at all the questions about the money he has received from vaccine makers. The exchange is very telling:
MR. SIRI: You’re here today opining that [daughter] should receive vaccines that are made by the big four pharmaceutical companies, correct?
DR. PLOTKIN: I am, yes.
MR. SIRI: Okay. And you didn’t anticipate that your financial dealings with those companies would be relevant in that issue?
DR. PLOTKIN: I guess, no, I did not perceive that that was relevant to my opinion as to whether a child should receive vaccines. Vaccines have to be made by somebody. And, of course, in this world they’re made by pharmaceutical companies who make profits on vaccines. And the fact that they make profits on vaccines has no bearing on whether those vaccines are good for a child or not.
MR. SIRI: So you think the fact that pharmaceutical companies make money on vaccines doesn’t bias how they approach the promotion of their own products?
DR. PLOTKIN: I imagine it biases them in favor of vaccines, but so does most of the scientific world.
Dr. Plotkin let Mr. Siri know that he “resent[s] very much the line of questioning that suggests that what I believe and what I’ve done have been done for financial reasons.” He repeated the mantra from Dr. Offit above that “none of the things that I’ve done have been done for financial gain,” even as Mr. Siri made it clear that Dr. Plotkin is a millionaire many times over because of his support of the vaccine industry.
In a crescendo to the conflict of interest questioning by Mr. Siri, we learned that Dr. Plotkin has a two-hundred-page resume, has been an author or coauthor of 794 published scientific studies, and is on the faculty of thirteen separate universities, his reach and influence perhaps unprecedented. But Dr. Plotkin’s resume is also missing many critical details, including the names of all the vaccine makers who are currently paying him, as Mr. Siri pointed out:
So in providing this CV to your, to defendant’s counsel, you didn’t think disclosing your affiliations with the very companies whose product you’re saying [daughter] should receive, her pediatrician purchase and provide to her, was necessary to disclose?
Later Mr. Siri highlighted a 2011 report from the Institute of Medicine in which Dr. Plotkin was listed as one of the reviewers of the published study. Mr. Siri noted that Dr. Plotkin only has “University of Pennsylvania” next to his name. “It doesn’t disclose that at that time you were working for all four of the major vaccine makers, correct?” Dr. Plotkin responded: “No.”
Mr. Siri then walked Dr. Plotkin through more than a dozen private biotech companies—all developers of vaccines—where Dr. Plotkin served as a compensated board member. None of his affiliations have been disclosed anywhere. Finally, Mr. Siri quoted the New England Journal of Medicine, which Dr. Plotkin had already affirmed is a highly credible journal:
Let me read you a different quote, again, by Dr. Angell [of the NEJM] in which she blames the issue with truths in medical publishing, on individuals that use legitimacy of academia to push pharmaceutical company agendas. Here’s what she said about those individuals. She says, “They serve as consultants to the same companies whose products they evaluate, join corporate advisory boards and speakers bureaus, enter into patent and royalty arrangements, agree to be the listed authors of articles ghostwritten by interested companies, promote drugs and devices at company-sponsored symposia, and allow themselves be plied with expensive gifts and trips to luxurious settings. Many also have equity interest in sponsoring companies.”
The whole time, Mr. Siri had been using this quote to establish Dr. Plotkin’s pattern of behavior. It was clear to everyone in the room that Dr. Plotkin can check every box on the list of an editorial written by the editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine on why it is no longer possible to believe clinical research, as pharmaceutical companies have so thoroughly co-opted experts. It’s clear that Dr. Plotkin is the poster child for this phenomenon. Painstakingly, Mr. Siri asked Dr. Plotkin questions about each of these ways that “experts” are co-opted:
“You consulted for the big four vaccine makers?”
“You’re on the corporate advisory board of numerous vaccine developers, yes?”
“You have received royalties from the sale of one or more vaccines, correct?”
“You are listed as an author on at least one or more papers where individuals authoring papers receive compensation from vaccine makers, correct?”
“And you’ve taken numerous trips over the last 30 years to various parts of the world?”
Dr. Plotkin feebly answered “yes” to each question, the steam almost visibly rising from his head. And there we see, as clearly as you ever will, how thoroughly compromised people who purport to be disinterested parties really are when it comes to vaccines. How can people reaping millions from vaccine makers be the “expert witnesses” on the product?
Gardasil, Merck, and Data Manipulation
Earlier, Mr. Siri had established clearly that none of the vaccines for children were tested with a group of children who received an “inert placebo,” making any conclusions drawn about side effects nearly impossible to corroborate. Dr. Plotkin was forced to agree. For Gardasil (the HPV vaccine), a different problem took place. There were actually three groups used during testing. One group received the vaccine. One group received a shot that only contained aluminum adjuvant, and one group received a true placebo, a shot of saline. The latter two groups (aluminum and saline), however, were combined when the data was reported, making it impossible to know if the true placebo group had a lower rate of adverse events than either Gardasil or the aluminum adjuvant.
Painstakingly, Mr. Siri took Dr. Plotkin through this extraordinary abuse of data. Overall, the Gardasil trial showed that 2.3 percent of the women who received either the vaccine or the combined aluminum/saline developed a systemic autoimmune condition within six months. Mr. Siri explained to Dr. Plotkin, and got him to confirm, that the saline group, had it been reported separately, actually had an adverse event rate of zero. “And then if we had a third column that was just the saline placebo, it would show 0 percent? . . . Wouldn’t that have been a significant finding to report?”
Dr. Plotkin had no real answer: “I don’t—you’d have to ask a statistician.”
It’s a remarkable exchange. Mr. Siri had just highlighted an extreme abuse of trust and data manipulation by Merck, Dr. Plotkin’s primary benefactor.
Double Standards in Vaccine Testing
Mr. Siri then caught Dr. Plotkin in an extreme contradiction. He asked him about a recent study done by Dr. Peter Aaby in which Dr. Aaby looked at the impact of DTP vaccine in Africa and concluded the vaccine did more harm than good. Dr. Plotkin was familiar with the study, respected Dr. Aaby, but was dismissive of the findings, because Dr. Aaby “doesn’t have randomly vaccinated or children who randomly receive pertussis vaccine or don’t receive pertussis vaccine. . . . But in the absence of random administration, you don’t know for sure whether it’s the vaccine or other factors that are operating.”
None of the licensed vaccines for children ever receive this sort of rigorous testing, and placebos are never used, as Mr. Siri quickly established. He also had Dr. Plotkin confirm how long the observation period is for vaccine trials and showed him a number of package inserts from the vaccines themselves.
Mr. Siri started with the hepatitis B vaccine. “How long does it say that safety was monitored after each dose?” Begrudgingly, Dr. Plotkin responded, “Five days.” But, Mr. Siri wondered, is that “long enough to detect an autoimmune issue that arises after five days?” Dr. Plotkin stated the obvious: “No.” Mr. Siri then asked, “Was there any control group in this trial?” Dr. Plotkin, who had just argued how important control groups are to cause and effect, was forced to answer truthfully, “It does not mention any control group, no.”
Drilling down on the hepatitis B vaccine, Mr. Siri pulled out a different insert for a different hepatitis B vaccine that show safety testing only took place for four days after administration. Dr. Plotkin confirmed the duration but stated, “I am willing to bet that they did collect reactions after four days.” Mr. Siri pressed, since no documentation supported Dr. Plotkin’s bet, and he was forced to admit it was “speculation.” Apparently, rigorous testing is critical when finding fault with vaccines, but not when licensing them for use in millions of children.
This was such a revealing back and forth. Dr. Plotkin seemed genuinely surprised by how short the observation period was for vaccines; he was sure they must have done more monitoring later, but of course that would have been explained in the package insert, and it wasn’t. Vaccine proponents lie about the “rigorous testing” vaccines have endured, but when you press them, they often point to how “safe” vaccines are that are already in use. In reality, we are dramatically underreporting vaccine injury, as Mr. Siri explained to Dr. Plotkin next.
As a quick aside, Aaron Siri and the Informed Consent Action Network have forced our government, through many FOIA lawsuits, to admit that testing for the childhood schedule is non-existent. Check out this extraordinary chart.
Incomplete VAERS Data
MR. SIRI: Isn’t it true that VAERS only receives a tiny fraction of the reportable adverse events after vaccination?
DR. PLOTKIN: Well, I can’t give you a percentage, but all physicians are asked to report putative reactions to the VAERS system. So I don’t think the VAERS system covers a tiny portion of alleged reactions. I think, rather, probably most are reported.
Mr. Siri produced a study commissioned by HHS and run by Harvard Pilgrim. He showed Dr. Plotkin where the study says, “Fewer than 1 percent of vaccine adverse events are reported.” He asked Dr. Plotkin to read it.
MR. SIRI: Okay, so this study says that less than 1 percent of adverse events are reported to VAERS, right?
DR. PLOTKIN: Well, I have to check that, but I think that’s correct.
I probably let out my largest laugh during this exchange. Dr. Plotkin had the nerve to say that “probably most” vaccine reactions are reported. This is the mindset of a vaccine developer who believes vaccines are always “safe and effective,” no matter what the data says. It feels fanatical, really. He is one of the foremost experts on vaccines in the world, and he believes VAERS is capturing most vaccine injuries; simply unbelievable!
The Inadequate Pertussis Vaccine
The reason there are guaranteed whooping cough (pertussis) outbreaks in the United States every year is that the vaccine for pertussis is pretty ineffective. Dr. Plotkin confirmed this:
MR. SIRI: How long does the current immunity last from the current acellular pertussis vaccine?
DR. PLOTKIN: Well, it lasts for probably on the order of five years, but the efficacy diminishes after two years or so. And the result is that there have been more pertussis in adolescents than we would like.
Mr. Siri was also able to establish that the vaccine for pertussis—DTaP—doesn’t prevent people from being a carrier of whooping cough to others:
MR. SIRI: Does the cellular pertussis vaccine prevent the infection and transmission of pertussis in the person vaccinated with acellular pertussis vaccine?
DR. PLOTKIN: It appears that the acellular vaccines don’t protect the individual from carrying the organism as much as the so-called whole-cell pertussis vaccines did. . . . But there is a concern that the acellular vaccines may not protect an individual from passing the organism to another individual even if the vaccinated person doesn’t get sick himself or herself.
I think very few people understand how inadequate this vaccine really is; it was nice for Dr. Plotkin to admit it. As I’ve said before, people often have this cartoonishly simple view of a vaccine: You get the shot; now you’re immune—presto! It rarely works that way, and the explanation of DTaP’s limitations makes that clear.
Experimenting on Marginalized and Vulnerable People
Mr. Siri brought up a topic that Dr. Plotkin did his best to avoid. He asked, “Have you ever used orphans to study an experimental vaccine?” Dr. Plotkin responded, “Yes.” Mr. Siri then asked a horrifying question: “Have you ever used the mentally handicapped to study an experimental vaccine?” Dr. Plotkin does his best to evade the question:
DR. PLOTKIN: I don’t recollect ever doing studies in mentally handicapped individuals. At the time in the 1960s, it was not an uncommon practice.
MR. SIRI: So you’re saying—I’m not clear on your answer. I’m sorry. Have you ever used mentally handicapped to study an experimental vaccine?
DR. PLOTKIN: What I’m saying is I don’t recall specifically having done that, but that in the 1960s, it was not unusual to do that. And I wouldn’t deny that I may have done so.
MR. SIRI: Well, there’s an article entitled “Attenuation of RA 27/3 Rubella Virus in WI-38 Human Diploid Cells.” Are you familiar with that article?
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes.
MR. SIRI: In that article, one of the things it says is 13 seronegative mentally retarded children were given RA 27/3 vaccine?
DR. PLOTKIN: Okay. Well, then that’s, in that case that’s what I did.
MR. SIRI: Have you ever expressed that it’s better to perform experiments on those less likely to be able to contribute to society, such as children with handicap, than with children without or adults without handicaps?
DR. PLOTKIN: I don’t remember specifically, but it’s possible.
MR. SIRI: Do you remember ever writing to the editor of “Ethics on Human Experimentation”?
DR. PLOTKIN: I don’t remember specifically, but I may well have.
MR. SIRI: I’m going to hand you what’s been marked as Exhibit 43. Do you recognize this letter you wrote to the editor?
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes.
MR. SIRI: Did you write this letter?
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes.
MR. SIRI: Is one of the things you wrote: “The question is whether we are to have experiments performed on fully functioning adults and on children who are potentially contributors to society or to perform initial studies in children and adults who are human in form but not in social potential?”
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes.
MR. SIRI: Have you ever used babies of mothers in prison to study an experimental vaccine?
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes.
MR. SIRI: Have you ever used individuals under colonial rule to study an experimental vaccine?
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes.
I need to take a deep breath before I comment on this. My grandfather was adopted. My son is “mentally handicapped.” I’m going to refrain from moralizing; feel free to draw your own conclusions. I’ll just make two points: One, if you have “mentally handicapped” people as your test subjects, how will you know if the vaccine causes mental problems? Two, I think this shows you what the vaccine industry has always known: Vaccines are really dangerous. So when you test them on the populations that are the most hidden from society, and have the least power to complain, you can bury any disasters. It’s profoundly depraved thinking. I’ll just remind you that this doctor, and his medical ethics, built the modern vaccine industry.
Dismissal of Religious Objections
In the majority of states in the United States, you can object to receiving a vaccine for religious reasons. Dr. Plotkin and his protégé, Dr. Paul Offit, have spearheaded talking points to combat these religious exemptions, arguing that biblical texts were written before the invention of vaccines, and that a parent denying a child vaccination on religious grounds is flying in the face of science and medicine that are “data-based systems, not beliefs.” Of course, they rely on their interpretation of vaccine injury data to make this argument. Mr. Siri pressed Dr. Plotking on his thinking:
MR. SIRI: Do you believe that someone can have a valid religious objection to refusing a vaccine?
DR. PLOTKIN: No.
MR. SIRI: Do you take issue with religious beliefs?
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes.
MR. SIRI: You have said that, “Vaccination is always under attack by religious zealots who believe that the will of God includes death and disease”?
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes.
MR. SIRI: You stand by that statement?
DR. PLOTKIN: I absolutely do.
MR. SIRI: Are you an atheist?
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes.
MR. SIRI: Do you accept that some people hold religious beliefs that are inherently unprovable?
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes, I’m sure they do.
Dr. Offit, in consultation with Dr. Plotkin, has publicly been pushing this line of thinking quite a bit. Basically, they are saying, “There’s no such thing as a religious objection to a vaccine.” It’s pretty crazy; the United States is founded on the idea that people cannot be compelled to do things that violate their beliefs. Dr. Plotkin doesn’t think that way. Once again, it feels fanatical and intolerant, but that’s just my opinion.
Doublespeak
Later, Mr. Siri discussed a 2011 Institute of Medicine report on vaccine safety. He read the report to Dr. Plotkin, summarizing, “so the IOM concluded of the 135 most commonly claimed injuries for vaccination, it didn’t know whether or not the vaccines caused that.” At this point, one of the more revealing exchanges takes place between Dr. Plotkin and Mr. Siri:
MR. SIRI: You know, you earlier stated that, you stated that hepatitis B is, doesn’t cause encephalitis, right?
DR. PLOTKIN: That’s, that’s my opinion, yes.
MR. SIRI: But the IOM, after doing its review, determined it couldn’t find science to support a causal determination one way or another, correct?
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes. But that means that they don’t have evidence for the supposition.
MR. SIRI: That it either causes or doesn’t cause?
DR. PLOTKIN: Right.
MR. SIRI: They don’t know?
DR. PLOTKIN: They don’t know because there aren’t enough data.
MR. SIRI: Okay. But you have—
DR. PLOTKIN: In the absence of data, my conclusion is that there are no, there’s no proof that causation exists.
MR. SIRI: So if there’s no data to show that it causes or doesn’t cause—
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes.
MR. SIRI: —your supposition is that—am I understanding that correctly?
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes.
MR. SIRI: Is that it doesn’t cause it?
DR. PLOTKIN: That there’s no proof that it does.
MR. SIRI: Okay. That’s different than saying it doesn’t cause it, correct?
DR. PLOTKIN: Correct.
MR. SIRI: So when you were saying earlier when I asked you at the beginning of this whether certain vaccines caused certain conditions and you said, no, they don’t, did you just mean that, no, there’s not enough evidence to make a decision one way or another?
DR. PLOTKIN: I mean that there’s no knowledge known to me that they do certain things that are, that some may have alleged happen after vaccination.
MR. SIRI: Like, for example, you know, the IOM reviewed whether hepatitis B can cause lupus because of lots of reports or influenza can cause lupus. They concluded that there’s insufficient evidence one way or another to make a determination. You indicated—
DR. PLOTKIN: Right.
MR. SIRI: But you indicated earlier that those vaccines don’t cause lupus. Your testimony, you’re saying that you said no because you weren’t aware of a mechanism by which it could cause it; is that right?
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes. That’s correct.
MR. SIRI: Okay. But the science really isn’t available to make a determination on causation yet, right?
DR. PLOTKIN: The science doesn’t show that there is a relationship.
This hairsplitting by vaccine proponents drives me nuts. The Institute of Medicine report Mr. Siri is referring to makes three conclusions: Vaccines do cause certain side effects, they don’t cause certain other side effects, and for certain side effects, we don’t know whether they do because the work hasn’t been done yet to find out, despite the fact that these side effects have been reported to the VAERS database. In Dr. Plotkin’s world if the work hasn’t been done, that means the vaccine doesn’t cause it. It’s crazy thinking, and not the kind of thinking any other prescription drug could survive, but in Dr. Plotkin’s world, vaccines are innocent until proven guilty, so much so that an absence of data means the vaccines doesn’t cause it—vaccines always get the benefit of the doubt.
DTaP, Autism, and the Burden of Proof
In reviewing the 2011 study from the Institute of Medicine, Mr. Siri asked Dr. Plotkin if he recollects what the IOM’s conclusion was about whether DTaP vaccine can cause autism. Dr. Plotkin replied, “I’d have to look that up, but I feel confident that they do not cause autism.”
Mr. Siri found the IOM’s actual conclusion and had Dr. Plotkin read it: “The evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between diphtheria toxoid-, tetanus toxoid-, or the acellular pertussis-containing vaccine in autism.” Mr. Siri pressed Dr. Plotkin:
So the IOM reviewed the available evidence with regard to whether Tdap or DTaP can cause autism, and their conclusion was the evidence doesn’t exist to show whether DTaP or Tdap do or do not cause autism, correct?
At this point Mr. Siri made mincemeat of the oft-repeated claim by so many that “vaccines do not cause autism”:
MR. SIRI: But since, Dr. Plotkin, we don’t know whether DTaP or Tdap cause autism, right, it would be a bit premature to make the unequivocal, sweeping statement that vaccines do not cause autism, correct?
DR. PLOTKIN: In the absence of evidence, one should not draw any conclusions except that there’s no evidence. And so I don’t infer from the absence of evidence about a million different things that they’re necessarily true. One has to do studies to determine whether or not a phenomenon exists, and usually those studies are done because there’s some suspicion that, of a relationship. But in, we have no suspicions, at least I don’t, that autism is caused by DTaP.
MR. SIRI: Well, you may not have that suspicion, but it is one of the most commonly reported conditions, adverse events, which is why it was reviewed in this IOM report from DTaP/Tdap, which we discussed earlier. So I just, I’m not saying, I’m not asking you to say that vaccines do cause autism. I’m not asking that at all. I’m asking you, as a scientist, can you make the statement that vaccines do not cause autism if you don’t know whether DTaP or Tdap cause autism?
DR. PLOTKIN: As a scientist, I would say that I do not have evidence one way or the other.
MR. SIRI: And so for that reason, you’re okay with telling the parent that DTaP/Tdap does not cause autism even though the science isn’t there yet to support that claim?
DR. PLOTKIN: Absolutely.
This exchange was so revealing for me. In fact, I only gave you the heart of it; it actually went on for many pages. Dr. Plotkin thinks it’s okay to say, “Vaccines don’t cause autism,” even as the IOM has clearly said that with DTaP they don’t have evidence either way. Why is it okay? Because in Dr. Plotkin’s world, vaccines will never cause autism, because if they did his world as he knows it would basically end. The last exchange pushed me over the edge. Dr. Plotkin was more than happy to tell a parent DTaP doesn’t cause autism, even though the IOM said evidence was “inadequate” to make any conclusion at all.
Immune Activation Is the Objective of Vaccines
One of the many extraordinary admissions that Dr. Plotkin provided concerns the relationship between vaccines and “immune activation,” a topic I recently wrote an extensive blog post about, as new science is demonstrating that immune activation events—largely triggered by man-made aluminum adjuvant— are the primary cause of autism.
MR. SIRI: This is from California Institute [of Technology], CalTech. That institution did a number of studies regarding—that group did a number of studies relating to immune activation and neurological disorder, correct?
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes.
MR. SIRI: And they found a connection between immune activation and neurological historical disorders, correct?
DR. PLOTKIN: Yes.
MR. SIRI: Okay. And one of the study’s findings they had was that immune activation alters fetal brain development through interleukin-6, correct?
DR. PLOTKIN: As I said before, IL-6 is an important cytokine. I would point out in relation to immune activation, that immune activation occurs as a result of disease and exposure to a variety of stimuli, not just vaccines.
MR. SIRI: But it can be caused by vaccines, correct?
DR. PLOTKIN: Immune activation is the objective of vaccines.
When I first read Dr. Plotkin’s testimony above, I gasped out loud. I know, if you’re relatively new to this topic, you may be scratching your head: “What’s the big deal?”
The big deal is that science has converged, and it’s converged on autism’s causation: autism is caused by immune activation events, something vaccines are designed to trigger.
After reading a transcript of the deposition, and then watching the 9 hour video, I was struck with the following thoughts:
Dr. Plotkin appears sociopathic. The definition of the word is “lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.” I’m not sure what else to call someone who runs vaccine trials on orphans, the mentally disabled, and babies of moms in prison and then pens an op-ed justifying using the mentally ill for medical trials. It’s deeply disturbing thinking, and this is the man who has guided the vaccine industry’s ideology for fifty years. He’s also intolerant of anyone who may have a genuine religious objection to vaccines.
Dr. Plotkin employs scientific standards only when convenient. The DTP study in Africa doesn’t meet his standards of science for having placebo controls, but vaccine safety trials do, despite having no controls and only monitoring adverse reactions for a few days. The Gardasil trial that hid its placebo numbers? You’ll have to ask the statistician. I’ve seen this from so many pro-vaccine spokespeople—they will criticize any studies that question vaccine safety but never acknowledge the paucity of safety studies.
Dr. Plotkin is blind to the scale of vaccine injury. The exchange in which Dr. Plotkin figured the deeply flawed VAERS system captures most vaccine injury was revealing. He doesn’t care about vaccine injury—the ends always justify the means. He’s wrong about vaccine injury by at least a factor of one hundred times (because only 1 percent of vaccine injury is captured by VAERS). How could he not know that? A study by CDC authors who Dr. Plotkin knows well identified that perhaps 1% of most adverse events are reported. Because knowing that is inconsistent with his worldview: Vaccines are safe, no matter what the data says.
Dr. Plotkin will never cross the autism line. It’s clear from how long Dr. Plotkin spends fighting Mr. Siri about the fact that the IOM stated that the data can neither prove nor deny a relationship between DTaP vaccine and autism that there is no world where Dr. Plotkin will acknowledge something that has become obvious to many. The mainstream has been denying the vaccine-autism link for so long—spearheaded by Drs. Plotkin and Offit—that admitting the connection at this point would probably be too much to bear.
Dr. Plotkin’s flawed thinking is the vaccine industry’s flawed thinking: Don’t acknowledge vaccine injury. Don’t acknowledge the weakness of safety studies. Employ scientific standards only when convenient. Never admit autism is connected to vaccines. Vaccines are always “safe and effective,” no matter what the data says.
The Tobacco Playbook
In November 1998 a Master Settlement Agreement was reached between tobacco companies and attorneys general from forty-six states. Tobacco companies were finally accountable for at least some of the damage cigarettes had caused. But the first science implicating tobacco was a mouse study published in 1953 in which scientists demonstrated, clearly and unequivocally, that cigarette tar caused cancer. The penalty of the settlement was $206 billion.
What did US District Judge Gladys E. Kessler find the tobacco companies guilty of? “Conspiracy.” Ever heard that word before used against autism parents?
It took forty-five years for a reckoning because right after the mice study, to actively muddy the waters, tobacco companies formed the “Tobacco Industry Research Committee” so they could challenge all scientific evidence implicating tobacco. The organization provided hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for research at many of the leading institutions in the country that could sow doubt about the tobacco-cancer link. Producing “distracting research” that would sow endless doubt about a fast-emerging certainty became their primary goal. Committee members met with the leadership of every major newspaper, magazine, and television network, explaining their intent to fund a “research program devoted primarily to the public interest,” which was really a euphemism for research that would exonerate tobacco, or at least muddy the scientific waters and generate as much doubt as possible about the link between smoking and lung cancer.
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, in their best-selling book Merchants of Doubt, explained how Big Tobacco exploited the vulnerabilities of science to their advantage, creating doubt at every turn in the road and effectively extending the industry’s reckoning by four decades:
By the late 1950s, mounting experimental and epidemiological data linked tobacco with cancer—which is why the industry took action to oppose it. In private, executives acknowledged this evidence. In hindsight it is fair to say—and science historians have said—that the link was already established beyond a reasonable doubt. Certainly no one could honestly say that science showed that smoking was safe. But science involves many details, many of which remained unclear, such as why some smokers get lung cancer and others do not.
What if I told you that the only “Big” bigger than Big Tobacco was back in their heyday is today’s Big Pharma, the very industry that makes all these vaccines? Big Pharma, one of the largest purchasers of advertisements in mainstream media, and Big Pharma, the industry that spends the most on lobbying, is the reason this fight about autism is taking so long. Don’t believe me? From 1998 to 2009 the CDC was run by Dr. Julie Gerberding, where she presided over a massive expansion in the number of vaccines given to children and a massive explosion in the number of autism cases in the United States. Where did Dr. Gerberding go after resigning from the CDC? To serve as president of the vaccine division of Merck, the largest “Big Pharma” company in the world and the market leader in vaccines. This is not an easy battle.
Let me remind you that the market for vaccines is expected to be worth $88 billion in 2025, up from $170 million in the early 1980s. Let me say that again. In the 1980s, with no childhood epidemics to speak of, the market for vaccinations was worth $170 million. Fast forward, and the market for vaccines has grown 400 times larger! In the 1960s the vaccine schedule in the United States called for three vaccines for childhood; today, it’s thirty-eight (that’s not a typo)—a more than twelvefold increase in the number of vaccines given to children.
Autism is Tobacco 2.0, with manufactured doubt cast on every new discovery from determined parents, doctors, and scientists. Just like tobacco, we even have mice studies that show precisely how a vaccine can cause autism in the brain of a newborn. This evidence of “biological plausibility,” now appearing in multiple scientific studies published since 2010, represents a tipping point for truth. History may not repeat, but it certainly rhymes.
People are fond of characterizing autism as “complex,” but that obscures the simple explanation for what has happened to so many children, and why. In the 1970s the rate of autism was documented to be just under one in ten thousand children. Today one in thirty-six kids has autism—that’s roughly 1.8 million school-age (four to seventeen) American children.
This also means there are 277 times more kids with autism today than there were thirty years ago. That’s a gain of almost 30,000 percent! An epidemic this severe has to have a simple explanation, just as the lung cancer epidemic had a simple explanation, too.
The Tobacco Playbook is being expertly utilized by Big Pharma and their paid supporters—it almost seems like the very same PR firms and law firms that helped Big Tobacco are now helping Big Pharma . . . because they are. Literally. At the same time, it’s astonishing how many people already know the truth about the autism epidemic and what’s happening to our kids. Hundreds of scientists, thousands of doctors, and tens of thousands of parents, all saying the same thing. Heck, there’s the camera man on Larry King Live, the makeup person on the set of The Doctors, the wife of the famous radio host, the Time Magazine reporter who just can’t tell the truth for fear of reprisal, or the board member at Autism Speaks, so many people know the truth (all these examples are people who directly confided in me, as if I’m some sort of high priest of autism confessionals!) In fact, surveys show fully one-third of Americans today feel vaccines and autism are linked.
Attempts to dismiss people who “believe” vaccines cause autism as some sort of minuscule movement are not supported by the facts; hundreds of millions share my view and that of my wife.
In retrospect, it seems unbelievable that it took people more than forty years to convincingly prove that inhaling hot tar multiple times a day would trigger lung cancer, but that’s exactly what happened. The CEOs of all seven Big Tobacco companies stood before Congress, swearing to tell the truth, and then said (with a straight face, no less) that cigarettes were not addictive, nor was it clear that they were causing lung cancer. I remember the TV broadcast. It’s an image I have never been able to shake. That congressional hearing took place in 1994, a full four years before the Master Settlement Agreement.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the very same strategies used to keep the tobacco debate alive have been employed in the debates about links between DDT and the loss of ecosystems, lead paint and children’s IQs, coal and acid rain, asbestos and mesothelioma, CFCs and the ozone hole, Vioxx and heart attacks, and fossil fuels and global warming (to name just a tiny fraction of examples). This movie has been shown so many times before that I suppose it’s harder to see it clearly in the moment. But the patterns are clearly established. Here’s what we know about how corporations will behave in the face of mounting scientific evidence proving their product is causing harm:
1. Science will be utilized to manufacture doubt and manipulate the media and the public. This includes funding new science and paying experts to support the safety of a product causing harm. This strategy was created and mastered by Big Tobacco and now, as I’ve mentioned, even has a name: The Tobacco Playbook.
2. Public relations firms will make a fortune from these deep-pocketed clients, and their job will be to meet with and alert members of the media on their client’s sponsored science while refuting any science from the opposing side. This job is always easier if the industry causing harm is a large buyer of television, print, and other paid media. (The Tobacco Industry Research Committee was actually run by a PR firm, Hill & Knowlton.) From TobaccoTactics, here’s some more about Hill & Knowlton:
Hill and Knowlton were commissioned by the major tobacco companies of the time in 1953 to regain public confidence in the tobacco industry following the revelation by the medical profession that smoking was damaging to health.
John W, Hill, Hill and Knowlton’s president at the time, said that denying the facts would not be enough as this would clearly be borne from self-interest. Instead, demanding more science was a better tactic. He suggested that the goal of the tobacco industry should be to build and broadcast a major scientific controversy which would convey the message that the health effects of smoking were not conclusively known. One way to achieve this end was to commission more research into the causes of illness. Hill proposed the creation of a research group which would serve a public relations purpose demonstrating the tobacco industry’s collective concern for the public. The Tobacco Industry Research Committee was founded. In an advert published in more than 400 newspapers across the United States, tobacco companies promised to explore the science of tobacco and to ensure consumer well-being.
Brandt claims in his paper that it was at this time that Doubt and Uncertainty became ‘the industry’s collective new mantra’. This is now a well-rehearsed tactic that persists to the present day.
3. Aggressive, expensive paid lobbying of politicians at the state and federal level. Donations to politicians supporting industry views will rise. Where possible, lobbyists will write and promote laws supportive of the product, dismissive of health concerns, and protective of future liability. Their paid politicians will present and pass these laws, like Dr. Richard Pan, a California state senator who has created many laws to eliminate vaccine choice in children.
4. Finally, real science will prevail. The truth will come out. And consumers will learn that the product in question causes harm, like the aforementioned mice study. This science will usually be hard to fund, condemned, and ruthlessly attacked, until enough courageous scientists publish the same information over and over again. Regulatory agencies will grudgingly respond. Few will see jail time, if any.
When the profits are big enough, corporations will do what they were formed to do: protect profits. This ruthless strategy continues today. Autism is arguably the most vicious, cruel, and dismissive battle yet. With so much at stake—money, careers, reputations—what happens when an inconvenient truth emerges? What happens when someone, somewhere speaks up and challenges the house of cards? Well, they need to be made an example of. Read on.
Getting Wakefielded
I’ve heard many researchers say, when considering whether or not to embark on studies or publish scientific results that may reflect poorly on vaccines, that they fear getting “Wakefielded.” British doctor Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s name has actually become a verb, and getting Wakefielded is something you most certainly want to avoid, as it spells a high probability of your career going up in flames.
Who do these researchers fear retribution from? It shouldn’t be that hard to guess: the pharmaceutical industry, arguably the most financially powerful and ruthless commercial opponent the world has ever seen. I know that sounds dramatic, but consider the revelation that pharmaceutical executives knowingly conspired to create an opioid addiction epidemic. In their compelling critique, “The Opioid Epidemic: Fixing a Broken Pharmaceutical Market,” Harvard medical scholars Ameet Sarpatwari, Michael S. Sinha, and Aaron S. Kesselheim put the behavior of pharmaceutical companies in painful relief:
Finally, to boost profits, pharmaceutical companies have often engaged in false or misleading marketing. Over the past twenty-five years, the industry has paid $35.7 billion to settle claims of illegal marketing, including making false or misleading claims or failing to disclose known risks. In 2012, for example, GlaxoSmithKline paid three billion dollars to settle civil claims and criminal charges that it downplayed the risk of the antidepressant paroxetine (Paxil) in adolescents, promoted the antidepressant bupropion (Wellbutrin) for unapproved uses, and hid data showing the increased risk of heart attacks from the diabetes drug rosiglitazone (Avandia). Although the then-largest healthcare fraud settlement in US history, the total penalty was “only a portion of the drug maker’s profits from the drugs involved.” Almost every major pharmaceutical company has been caught in similar marketing scandals. However, the industry remains highly profitable, supporting criticism that monetary penalties generally represent “a quite small percentage of . . . global revenue and often a manageable percentage of the revenue received from the product under scrutiny.”
Vioxx, the pain reliever manufactured by Merck, caused five hundred thousand heart attacks. This is the same Merck that is the largest vaccine maker in the world. During a class action lawsuit about Vioxx injury in Australia, internal Merck documents made the light of day, and they weren’t pretty. Apparently, Merck had a “doctor hit list” of any doctors who were speaking poorly of Vioxx to their patients, and an internal email offered up that
“we may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live.”
In the Federal Court in Melbourne, documents were produced showing that Merck would also “stop funding to institutions” and “interfere with academic appointments” if any academic institutions produced research questioning Vioxx’s safety. And this is for a product that Merck already knew, based on their own research, was causing heart attacks.
If all parents believed they had a one in thirty-six chance of their child’s developing autism from vaccines, the vaccination rates would plummet.
And, if the pharmaceutical industry were proven to have created an epidemic of autism of several million children worldwide, the economic liability would be astronomical. Just doing some basic math, the average cost of lifetime care for a person with autism is estimated to be $2.4 million dollars. If every parent received that amount of money to care for just the 1.8 million American children with autism today (which is a low estimate of the total), the cost would be $4.32 trillion dollars. It would bankrupt the entire industry.
This is not a fight the pharmaceutical industry wants to lose, and in the press—where Dr. Wakefield’s reputation has been annihilated—they take no prisoners.
Stonewalled
In the last four years, according to STAT News, advertising dollar spending by pharmaceutical companies in the United States has gone up 60 percent, to $5.2 billion, making the drug industry the second largest buyer of advertising, behind only the automotive industry. CBS News recently reported that “nine out of 10 of the biggest pharmaceutical companies actually spend more on advertising than on R&D” and that “the U.S. spends more of its GDP on health care than 12 other developed countries.” Only two countries in the world allow drug advertising on TV—the United States and New Zealand—and the United States spends the most money per capita on prescription drugs in the world. In fact, a 2017 study noted, “Prescription drug spending per capita is far higher in the United States than in the nine other high-income countries considered.”
Sharyl Attkisson is a former investigative journalist with CBS News, and she’s well known for hard-hitting, brave journalism that often challenges people and institutions in positions of power. In 2008 Ms. Attkisson produced a story about vaccine spokespeople, with a special focus on the aforementioned Dr. Paul Offit. The story opened ominously:
They’re some of the most trusted voices in the defense of vaccine safety: the American Academy of Pediatrics, Every Child By Two, and pediatrician Dr. Paul Offit. But CBS News has found these three have something more in common—strong financial ties to the industry whose products they promote and defend.
Ms. Attkisson’s story exposed Dr. Offit’s “$1.5 million-dollar research chair at Children’s Hospital, funded by Merck,” and his “patent on an anti-diarrhea vaccine he developed with Merck,” and that he was a “vaccine industry insider.”
Today her story on vaccine spokespeople corruption would never be able to run in a mainstream news outlet, as the corporate interests have perfected the art of the pushback. The general decline in advertising revenues available to mainstream print and electronic media has made media outlets extremely sensitive to alienating major advertisers. Pharmaceutical companies, and therefore vaccine makers, must be handled with kid gloves, at the expense of real reporting.
Ms. Attkisson has won five Emmy awards and the Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting. She resigned from CBS in 2014, citing “an outsize influence by the network’s corporate partners and a lack of dedication to investigative reporting.”After she left CBS, Ms. Attkisson penned a best-selling book, Stonewalled, which provided insights into how exactly pharmaceutical companies keep the media from reporting on the vaccine-autism issue. Here she is, discussing the first time she reported for CBS on the vaccine-autism conflict:
Minutes before one of my stories about childhood vaccinations and autism is to air, a spokesman for a nonprofit group called “Every Child By Two” calls the network in New York. The spokesperson evokes the name of former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who co-founded the group. . . . Resisting the pushback, we air the story as planned. . . . When we do, hired guns for pharmaceutical interests flood me and CBS News with emails, phone calls, and requests for meetings. They write letters to CBS attorneys. The spokesman for Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson calls the CBS News Washington bureau chief to exert pressure to discredit our stories. Pharmaceutical company lawyers set up secretive meetings with CBS officials in New York. Pharmaceutical interests contact CBS executives to complain.
Later Ms. Attkisson reported on the Hannah Poling case where a child with autism had won a large award from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program’s vaccine court. She explained that the pharmaceutical industry PR machine went into overdrive because of how damaging the story was, and their strategy “included a full-forced attack on me and my ongoing reporting.”
After she ran her story, Ms. Attkisson learned that “PR Officials and a top attorney for vaccine maker Wyeth have managed to get a private meeting to spin two Evening News senior producers in New York about my reports.” Ms. Attkisson’s opinion was that meetings like this violate the code of investigative journalism, noting it’s “unethical to offer the powerful corporate interest—who are also advertisers—special access, while those on the other side aren’t given an audience to be heard.”
In the 1950s tobacco companies were doing the same thing to the press that pharmaceutical companies did to Ms. Attkisson. One of the primary PR firms working closely today with pharmaceutical companies is Hill & Knowlton, the same firm that helped Big Tobacco delay their day of reckoning by several decades. Early on, Hill & Knowlton spearheaded a position that “there was ‘no proof’ that tobacco was bad” and they took their findings and concerns on a road show, meeting “men and women at the top of the American media industry.”
They made it clear that they expected the “debate” about tobacco to be covered fairly, and their ad dollars bought them influence, balanced coverage, and several decades without accountability for all the death and disability their products were causing. Tobacco companies didn’t leave it to the media to find all the facts; “they made sure they got them.” This “balance campaign” included “aggressive dissemination and promotion to editors and publishers of ‘information’ that supported the industry’s position.”
The Lancet Study
Which brings us back to Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Perhaps no lies are easier to disprove or easier for any reader to independently verify than the ones that have been manufactured about British gastroenterologist Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a doctor stripped of his medical license in Britain for a paper he copublished with twelve other doctors linking the MMR vaccine to autism. If you’ve only followed the vaccine-autism debate casually, you may have read in the media that Dr. Wakefield is a disgraced scientist who published fraudulent data linking the MMR vaccine to autism. And since Dr. Wakefield made everything up, you have nothing to worry about. Vaccines are perfectly safe and effective.
Dr. Andrew Wakefield was a highly respected gastroenterologist working at the Royal Free Hospital in London. In the mid-1990s he and his colleagues were surprised by a novel bowel condition they were finding in children with autism. It was unlike anything they had ever seen before. In 1998 Dr. Wakefield and twelve other colleagues published a single paper, only five pages in length, in the highly respected medical journal The Lancet announcing the discovery of this new bowel condition: Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia.
If you’d like to hear from Dr. Wakefield himself, please consider listening to my interview with him, right here:
The paper explored the gastrointestinal health issues of twelve children with autism, as the authors made clear: “We investigated a consecutive series of children with chronic enterocolitis and regressive developmental disorder.” The thirteen-member (that’s 13 doctors, not just the one you’ve heard of!!!) team of doctors who wrote the paper felt they had discovered a condition that may be unique to autism and that the condition merited further study, concluding: “We have identified a chronic enterocolitis in children that may be related to neuropsychiatric dysfunction.”
The paper was a seminal work, the first time that gastrointestinal symptoms and autism had been tied together, something that today is treated as medical fact. This paper is viewed as the pioneer of the gut-brain connection in autism and has been cited in more than two hundred other studies. The conclusions of the paper, from the standpoint of gastroenterology, have been replicated on dozens of occasions.
The paper’s other conclusion, which was really more commentary than science, was what created all the controversy, and ultimately the witch hunt against Dr. Wakefield. Of the twelve children in the study, the parents of eight of the children had noted that the regression into autism happened after their child had received the MMR vaccine. The study authors debated these parental reports and decided to include that information in the study. That’s all. As the thirteen coauthors stated in the conclusion of the paper:
In most cases, onset of symptoms was after measles, mumps, and rubella immunisation. Further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome and its possible relation to this vaccine.
Most people don’t believe me when I explain to them how minor the mention of vaccines was in the infamous, five-page-long “Lancet study.” Moreover, they have no idea that Dr. Wakefield had twelve other coauthors or that there never was any data about vaccines and autism in the paper itself. One of the many false narratives is that Dr. Wakefield “faked the data” about vaccines and autism, but that would be impossible. There was no data! The scientists reported parental reports of a relationship between vaccines and autism, nothing more, and were very clear that they felt more study was needed. You’ll likely be shocked that they also said this in the paper: “We did not prove an association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described.”
How can a paper that dutifully reported the feedback of the parents of eight children, that clearly stated they had not found an association between the MMR vaccine and autism, and that encouraged more study of this issue cause such a scandal? Moreover, Dr. Wakefield’s recommendations concerning vaccines at a press conference to discuss the paper seemed very reasonable, if not downright conservative. As Dr. Wakefield recounts:
The important thing to say is that back in 1996–1997 I was made aware of children developing autism, regressive autism, following exposure in many cases to the measles mumps rubella vaccine. Such was my concern about the safety of that vaccine that I went back and reviewed every safety study, every pre-licensing study of the MMR vaccine and other measles containing vaccines before they were put into children and after. And I was appalled with the quality of that science. It really was totally below par and that has been reiterated by other authoritative sources since. I compiled my observations into a 200-page report which I am seeking to put online once I get permission from my lawyers. And that report was the basis of my impression that the MMR vaccine was inadequately tested for safety certainly compared with the single vaccines and therefore that was the basis of my recommendation in 1998 at the press conference that parents should have the option of the single vaccines.
Dr. Wakefield recommended that parents in England, rather than getting the combination MMR vaccine, consider getting three separate vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella. That’s it.
I just want to pause for a moment. If you really don’t think that the pharmaceutical industry will mobilize forces to seek and destroy a doctor who says unflattering things about one of their products, I hope Dr. Wakefield’s experience will give you pause. How can reporting the parental feedback of eight children constitute the “elaborate fraud” that Dr. Wakefield was later accused of?
In 2004 facing extreme pressure and the threat of losing their careers, ten of the original coauthors of The Lancet paper issued a statement, published in The Lancet, titled “Retraction of an Interpretation.” The coauthors wrote:
We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient.
Of course, to anyone who actually read the original paper, this is a statement of the obvious since no one, including Dr. Wakefield, ever represented that the “data” in the paper was sufficient to draw a vaccine-autism link, since there wasn’t any data. This short statement by the coauthors was used to further isolate Dr. Wakefield and one of his coauthors, Dr. John Walker-Smith, who were both unwilling to sign their names to what they viewed as a retraction they were being coerced to do, and that violated their professional ethics. Accordingly, Drs. Wakefield and Walker-Smith were put on “trial.”
Dr. Wakefield’s “trial” in the United Kingdom was not in front of a court but rather in front of the General Medical Council, the governing body in the UK for the licensing of doctors. It’s here that Drs. Wakefield and Walker-Smith were stripped of their medical licenses. What’s never reported is that soon after the GMC’s ruling, Dr. Walker-Smith chose to take his case to a real court, the UK’s High Court, and had all charges reversed:
The judge quashed a GMC finding of professional misconduct. Mr Justice Mitting called for changes in the way General Medical Council fitness to practise panel hearings are conducted in the future saying: “It would be a misfortune if this were to happen again.” Prof Walker-Smith, who retired in 2001, said: “I am extremely pleased with the outcome of my appeal.”
A final aspect of Dr. Wakefield’s study that’s addressed in the press is the feedback from the parents of the twelve children in The Lancet study itself. I’ve personally talked with several of these parents, and they remain convinced that vaccines caused their children’s autism and that Dr. Wakefield has been vilified. Isabelle Thomas, the mother of twins in the study, has been one of the more outspoken parents, writing:
Dr. Andrew Wakefield listened to the concerns of many parents about their sick children suffering with bowel conditions and a form of Autism, a bowel condition and brain damage that was ignored by other professionals. These parents were demonstrably “black listed” for saying their children became ill after the MMR vaccine. Parents were speaking about this situation years before Dr. Wakefield came on the scene and our government also knew about these concerns years before The Lancet study yet they did nothing to investigate, leaving hundreds of other children at risk of side effects. Our government did not listen to parents but accused them of making the symptoms up and threatening to take their children away if they did not stop making a connection with MMR vaccine. As a result, these children and young adults live in a great deal of pain to this day (one doctor saying to my son “we believe you believe you are in pain”). . . . How long does it take the UK government to learn that cover-up is invariably a more serious matter than the original crime or mistake?
It’s hard to make sense of the Dr. Wakefield witch hunt when you understand the details of his paper, the actual conclusions drawn, the fact that he had twelve coauthors, the recommendations he publicly made about vaccinating, the reversal of Dr. Walker-Smith’s GMC sentencing, and the feedback from parents within the study itself. Moreover, to say that Dr. Wakefield’s paper was fraudulent and therefore vaccines are safe would fail any logic test, since Dr. Wakefield’s paper did no analysis or study whatsoever about the relationship between a single vaccine (MMR) and autism but rather simply reported parental feedback. And on every other vaccine children receive, the paper was silent. Anyone who claims that because Dr. Wakefield’s data was fraudulent and therefore the DTP, hep B, polio, Hib, flu, and varicella vaccines are all safe is hoping you never do your own research.
What’s more amazing to me is how much more incriminating science we now have, directly implicating vaccines in the epidemic of autism. We actually have very real data! In most cases it’s biological science that demonstrates exactly how a vaccine can trigger autism. And the dozens of study authors of these new studies are making declarations about vaccines far bolder than anything Dr. Wakefield ever said, and yet somehow the demonic mythology around Dr. Wakefield persists. Read the article I just wrote to explore this for yourself.
International scientists have found autism's cause. What will Americans do?
STAFFORDSHIRE, England —Dr. Chris Exley of Keele University in England and his colleagues published a paper that for the first time ever looked at the brain tissue of subjects with autism to determine the level of aluminum (note: they spell “aluminum” as “aluminium” in the United Kingdom) found within their brain tissue. For anyone trying to convince th…
Dr. Paul Thomas got Wakefielded, too
Many other doctors have been Wakefielded for speaking out. One of the more notable is Dr. Paul Thomas of Oregon, who just happens to be my son’s pediatrician. I spoke with Dr. Thomas at length before the Oregon Medical Board ginned up charges to take away his license, you decide if this is a man who deserves to treat kids.
In a wonderful act of revenge, Dr. Thomas’ book, The Vaccine Friendly Plan, remains the #1 book in Pediatrics on all of Amazon—too rich!
The Truth Can’t Be Hidden Forever
Despite the fact that tobacco took four decades to come to its day of reckoning, it happened, and I take great solace in that. In fact, it has fueled me time and again when really all I wanted to do was beat my head against the wall as the pharma-funded PR juggernaut crushed the vaccine injury story at every turn. And it happened because truth has a way of bubbling to the surface against the odds. In the case of vaccines and autism, there’s so much truth, so many affected children, so many loud and active parents, and new people brought into this fight every day. Just look at what the extraordinary Dr. Peter McCullough or the brilliant tech zillionaire Steve Kirsch are now doing to move the story along!
The drumbeat will continue and the truth will get louder. I think the real shame of Dr. Wakefield getting “Wakefielded” was best captured in a statement he made about the impact of The Lancet study, and who is really paying the price:
The damage done to my reputation and to that of my colleagues as well as the personal price for pursuing a valid scientific question while putting the patients’ interests above all others is trivial compared with the impact of these falsehoods on the children’s access to appropriate and necessary care. My experience is intended as a cynical example to discourage others. As a consequence, many physicians in the United Kingdom and United States will not risk providing the care that is due to these children. There is a pervasive and openly stated bias against funding and publication of this work, and I have been excluded from presenting at meetings on the instructions of the sponsoring pharmaceutical company. It has been an effective exercise in public relations and selling newspapers. But it will fail—it will fail because nature cannot be deceived. It has always been a privilege working with these children and their families. It is my hope that before too long the tide will turn.
The Line We Will Not Cross
As we slowly built up our forces in the late 1960s in Vietnam, a prevailing ideology in the US government was that if Vietnam fell to the Communists, there would be a domino effect throughout Asia, and we’d see more countries fall to Communism, including Japan and South Korea. This fear of a far greater problem was used to justify the time, expense, and loss of life that followed. And it turned out to be untrue.
The public health system in the United States is consumed by a similar ideology. Admitting any problem with the present vaccine schedule or, God forbid, removing a vaccine is something that must not be done, the thinking goes, because it could cause the entire vaccine program to collapse if there’s any loss of confidence on the part of the public. At the end of the day, the vaccine program does rely on a complicit public.
If most parents believed there was a nearly 3 percent chance of their child developing autism if they were vaccinated, you can imagine the impact on the vaccine program.
In 2001, during deliberations for an IOM study that would be released in 2004, the study’s leader, Dr. Kathleen Stratton, made an admission during deliberations that only came to light through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request:
The point of no return, the line we will not cross in public policy is to pull the vaccine, change the schedule.
Dr. Stratton is articulating a widely held view in public health, which I believe to be completely contrived. And she made her comment before any of the data had been reviewed—the fix was in! Trying to convince the public that vaccines are always “safe and effective” forces officials to lie, exaggerate, and cajole the public. A backlash is inevitable as more and more people discover the truth for themselves. It’s part of what has created the dynamic we have today where so many scientists and doctors know the truth, and they’re choosing to say so publicly.
On a more sickening level, I’ve heard public health officials who basically say, “Even if vaccines do cause autism, it’s a justifiable outcome for a robust vaccine program.” Really, that thinking does exist in public health. So what if we destroy the lives of 3 percent of the kids? It’s worth it to protect the other 97 percent. It’s insane. It never works, over the long term, to lie to the public, especially with medical procedures. Parents just want accurate information. They want to understand the true risk versus reward of getting their child vaccinated. Like any cover-up, the choice public health officials are making right now is just postponing the day of reckoning.
Truth always comes out in the end. Can we just get on with it?
Andrew Wakefield vs Stanley Plotkin: which one is evil?
This was the title of my blog post. I’m pretty sure you know what I think. I’d welcome your comment on how you would answer the question.
About the author
J.B. Handley is the proud father of a child with Autism. He spent his career in the private equity industry and received his undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford University. His first book, How to End the Autism Epidemic, was published in September 2018. The book has sold more than 75,000 copies, was an NPD Bookscan and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller, broke the Top 40 on Amazon, and has more than 1,000 Five-star reviews. Mr. Handley and his nonspeaking son are also the authors of Underestimated: An Autism Miracle and co-produced the film SPELLERS, available now on YouTube.
Siri did a good expose on the bad science and sloppy workmanship of the so-called experts whose last priority seems to be the safety of the people these vaccines are supposed to help.
At that time, at least Aaron Siri got a chance to cross-examine the witness. Would he have that opportunity now, in 2024, at a time when censorship and deception have become the greatest tools in suppressing any legal opposition to the roll out of even more dangerous biological agents?
Near the end of the video, Siri gives us the data on the relatively scarce incidence of tetanus before the use of the tetanus vaccines, and the resultant adverse effects in a much greater population. This is overwhelming evidence that the 'treatment' is exponentially more dangerous than the 'disease'.
Wow, J. B.! I had never before heard the story behind the deposition. I had just seen video clips from it that were quite disturbing.
As I now see it, Plotkin recused himself when he recognized his words would do the pro-vaccine side more harm than good if Aaron Siri were to question him in the courtroom.