Free Dr. Andrew Wakefield

The medical community (and Big Pharma) weaponized medical licenses and made Dr. Andrew Wakefield their prize victim

LONDON, England—If you’ve met Andy Wakefield, then you realize my headline is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because Andy Wakefield is most certainly free. Listen to my interview with him, you will meet a person who long ago found his peace with the crazy world around him, and the horrible things that were done to him. In fact, Andy is probably reading this from some far-flung locale right now, enjoying a beautiful view, making a film, and hanging out with his friends and family. He’s living his best life.

That doesn't make any of it right.

There’s a deep irony about Andy Wakefield’s role in RFK Jr’s ascension to the head of HHS. Andy recruited Del Bigtree to help make the movie Vaxxed. Del became one of our community’s most prominent voices and played a meaningful role in convincing RFK Jr. that he could run for President and make an impact, and then served in Bobby’s campaign. The rest is history. Andy—Del—Bobby. Too rich!

Andy is hardly alone. Right here in Portland, Dr. Paul Thomas had the system weaponized against him, too. His crime? As a pediatrician, he told the truth. (My interview with Dr. Thomas is one of my favorites.)

I’m looking forward to many things about Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s reign as head of HHS. Restoring the reputations, credentials, and lives of many of the brave doctors who spoke up on behalf of our children is towards the top of my list, and I’m glad we have a President who understands what it feels like to have the system try and destroy you. For those who don’t really understand the story of Andy Wakefield, let me be the first to explain it to you.

It starts with money

When the profits are big enough, corporations will do what they were formed to do: protect profits. 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. Enter the handsome, talented, and courageous British doctor, Dr. Andrew Wakefield.

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 was annihilated—they take no prisoners.

Stonewalled

CBS News 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.

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.”

this is the paragraph that caused a worldwide uproar

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.

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!

Listen to Andy

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? And while we’re doing it, restore the reputations and credentials of the doctors courageous enough to tell the truth.

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About the author

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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.

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