BBC Documentary, Conspiracy Files: Vaccine Wars

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Laura Bono

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The BBC’s documentary Vaccine Wars (removed from YouTube but still available on Amazon) interviews the usual characters like Paul Offit and Brian Deer, yet never discloses their conflicts including Offit’s status as a vaccine inventor and patent holder while serving on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices which determines U.S. vaccine recommendations. Offit and Deer predictably spouted off their usual talking points throughout the documentary.

Despite this, the BBC provides a critical historical perspective about the vaccine safety movement that one rarely sees in the media. Parents, advocacy groups like SafeMinds and Moms Against Mercury, and news reels featuring physicians Dr. John Wilson and Dr. Andy Wakefield, early leaders in the movement, are all included in the documentary. Del Bigtree, Barbara Loe Fisher, Robert. F. Kennedy Jr. and others are interviewed. U.S. and UK Government actions to protect the pharmaceutical industry are also covered.

The documentary unfortunately excludes the alleged fraud of the Autism Omnibus proceedings and mistakenly announces George Hastings as a “judge” of some of the claims while he was only a “Special Master” of the government-run claims program. As Special Master, Mr. Hastings was an employee of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the federal agency over the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in charge of vaccine safety and uptake.

Hastings noted that the lawyers in the Omnibus didn’t explain their evidence with science. He fails to say that the “court” wouldn’t let the parents’ side use much of their science or experts in the trials! In fact, Dr. Andrew Zimmerman of Johns Hopkins, who now says that vaccines can cause autism and that he told the government so at the time (which DOJ attorneys allegedly subsequently hid from the public), was actually a government witness!

Walter Orenstein, former director of the National Immunization Program, issues a craftily-worded admission saying that if there were actually efforts to cover up vaccine safety concerns, there would never have been a Simpsonwood meeting or a Verstraeten study. The fact is that the CDC’s Verstraeten study was the reason they were all brought together for the Simpsonwood meeting. One doctor attending the conference in Norcross, GA said something similar to Orenstein, noting that if the CDC could have predicted the results of the study, it would have never been done in the first place.

Notably absent are any actual words from CDC whistleblower Dr. William Thompson yet Deer and Offit are trotted out to discredit him. And, although Andrew Wakefield’s name is used quite a lot throughout the documentary, (including having the vaccine safety movement blamed on him), an interview with him is also missing.

Deer’s and Offit’s cries that the vaccine manufacturers aren’t making money falls flat. It is a ridiculous notion that can be easily proven wrong. To their credit, BBC didn’t lend credence to these claims.

When discussing recent mandates in the U.S., Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was allowed a final thought, “The state should not be ordering people in a democracy to take an untested drug. That is something we signed off on in Nuremberg … never again.”

And regarding untested drugs, Deer, remarkably, admitted in his final words, “There is a very valid criticism of CDC in that it is both a cheerleader, the preeminent cheerleader, for immunization and it also plays a major role in safety research. I think the only way to resolve that is for vaccine safety issues to be moved to a separate entity that does nothing but, if you like, find fault with vaccines.”