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’Tis the season for unwrapping scientific sin: fraud, lies, distortion and cover-up.
I thought it would be in the festive spirit, therefore, to relate what really happened in the original vaccine-autism investigations that culminated in President Donald Trump’s recent executive order.
I will describe three key events from my own experience — events that throw into sharp relief the lengths to which the “system” will go to protect vaccine policy and profit at all costs.
Before doing so and for the avoidance of doubt, here is a 1984 quote from Mark Novitch, acting commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) i 1983 and 1984, in the Federal Register (Vol. 49, No. 107, 1984. Rules and Regulations).
The quote refers specifically to the safety of the polio vaccine, but the mindset is readily extrapolated to all vaccines on the recommended childhood schedule and beyond:
“… any possible doubts, whether or not well founded, about the safety of the vaccine cannot be allowed to exist in view of the need to assure that the vaccine will continue to be used to the maximum extent consistent with the nation’s public health objectives.”
This is official policy.
Justifiably, George Orwell would feel vindicated. Apparently, it does not matter the harm done or the number of children killed or injured. The priority is government policy — a policy that must prevail at all costs.
While I doubt that anyone outside those groups responsible for defining “the nation’s public health objectives” shares this view, it does shape much of the propaganda that influences the wider perspective.
Many physicians, news networks and politicians receive substantial pharma dollars, and he who pays the piper calls the tune.
Before continuing and for the record, I have never committed scientific fraud, and as for our findings reported in the original 1998 Lancet paper, my co-authors and I stand firmly behind those findings as described.
Event #1: A tale of two pictures
In an interview with Professor Mark Pepys, the head of the Department of Medicine at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine and my boss, he inquired about my scientific collaborations with outside institutions.
I described a three-way collaboration between my group, Professor John O’Leary in Dublin — an expert in molecular pathology — and Dr. Michael Oldstone at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
Oldstone had developed a model of measles in rodents that were engineered to be genetically susceptible to measles virus infection. O’Leary was an expert in virus detection. The study sought to examine the consequences of measles infection on the intestine and brain of these animals.
The protocol had been reviewed, labeled “excellent” and funded by California’s MIND Institute.
In the interview, Pepys stated that he knew Oldstone personally and would be in touch with him concerning this collaboration. This was both unusual and concerning.
The next I knew, Oldstone had written to O’Leary telling him that the virus detection methods in the Dublin laboratory were yielding false-positive results, that the test results were subject to laboratory contamination, and that the collaboration was over.
Any subsequent protests were in vain.
Extraordinarily, Oldstone’s claims were made public in front of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform under the chairmanship of Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.).
This was before either O’Leary or I knew anything of the results of our joint study and Oldstone’s alleged findings.
These “findings” were made public by Dr. Michael Gershorn, someone to whom Oldstone had disclosed the confidential results and who was not in any way involved in the study.
Gershorn should have had no access to the findings, and making them public in this way was an extraordinary breach of protocol.
This entire episode was clearly engineered to cause maximum public humiliation to O’Leary and me.
When O’Leary’s team later scrutinized their results, cross-matched to Oldstone’s samples, they realized that because of how the virus genetic sequences were detected, any contamination would have to have occurred in Oldstone’s laboratory.
O’Leary’s staff made strenuous efforts to inform Oldstone of this fact, but they appear to have been largely ignored.
Many years later, when appealing the decision of the General Medical Council to revoke my license, I was given discovery of Pepys’ files because he had been a witness against me in the disciplinary proceedings.
The files revealed an episode that would bring shame on the medical school in perpetuity.
It turned out that Pepys’ mother, an artist of some renown, had produced two sketches of nudes that Oldstone had long coveted. Whatever it was that Pepys had requested of him in the context of my scientific collaboration, in setting the terms, Oldstone had emailed Pepys, “Dear Mark … this is going to cost you two pictures.”
After the collaboration had apparently been deliberately sabotaged and Oldstone’s collaborators publicly humiliated, Pepys wrote to Oldstone, “Michael, when are you coming to London? Your two pictures await you.”
A deal had been struck, executed and rewarded.
As a postscript to this disgraceful episode, sometime later I was contacted by the provost of the University of London.
He informed me that there was going to be an investigation of all my research undertaken while at the Royal Free and that the review panel would be chaired by none other than Pepys.
My reply to the provost was later published in my second book, “Waging War on the Autistic Child: The Arizona 5 and the Legacy of Baron von Munchausen.”
Here it is:
Dear Sir John,
A book is due to be published later this year covering Professor Pepy’s activities in relation to my work. It will allege, supported by documentary evidence, conspiracy to execute a bribe with a senior academic from another institution in order to destroy peer-reviewed grant-awarded research looking at vaccine safety. This book will unfortunately be a source of major embarrassment for University College London, and The Royal Free. May I suggest that you ask Professor Pepys to provide you with his email traffic from the relevant period October 1999 to 2002. This traffic has already been examined by third parties.
He is deeply conflicted due to his [financial] relationship with vaccine manufacturers GlaxoSmithKline. He is totally unsuited to leading any investigation of my research.
I never heard another word on this matter.
Accountability? None.
Event #2: The whistleblower
Early in the 21st century, when still at the Royal Free medical school and still heading up a highly productive research program, I was invited to meet with regulators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and FDA at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories on Long Island, New York.
They put it to me that while many children receive the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine, relatively few have autism. How could this be explained?
I shared my belief that cofactors such as younger age of exposure might be important. Perhaps a relatively immature immune system handles the viruses differently than one that is more mature, more educated by experience.
Any study that simply lumped all MMR vaccine recipients together as one group might obscure such an effect.
Representatives of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office, including Frank DeStefano and Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsopp, went back to Atlanta with the aim of examining this hypothesis.
To their surprise, the data convincingly supported my hypothesis. It did not matter how they cut up these data, how they pushed and pulled them, they could not remove the link between early exposure and autism risk.
The world was not to learn of these findings for another 14 years.
Why? Through the award-winning documentary “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe,” the world was to learn via intermediary Brian Hooker, Ph.D., Children’s Health Defense chief scientific officer, that Dr. William Thompson, the chief architect of the CDC’s MMR-autism study, confessed that they had found a causal association between younger age at MMR and autism risk.
Thompson said they had buried this, destroying the incriminating documents, altering the data, and publishing a fraudulent study that exonerated the MMR vaccine.
The deception went to the highest levels of the agency.
Fourteen years later, Thompson could no longer live with the knowledge of what he had been part of and blew the whistle.
At the very least, their preliminary findings required urgent further study. In the interim, millions of U.S. children had potentially been put at risk of serious, permanent neurological injury.
Compared with this, the destruction of my career is but a footnote, although Thompson later wrote an apology to my family stating that if the CDC had told the truth, my career might have been saved.
For those who doubt the veracity of our documentary’s claims, please know that if anything we said had been in any way defamatory of the CDC scientists, we would have been sued every which way.
That has not happened. There has been barely a whisper.
Accountability? None.
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Event #3: The deposition
Following false and grossly defamatory allegations against me published in The BMJ by its editor, Fiona Godlee, deputy editor Jane Smith, and journalist Brian Deer, in 2014, I filed defamation proceedings in Travis County District Court in Texas.
Smith was among those deposed.
In preparing the original paper that carried these allegations, Smith was tasked with fact-checking Deer’s claims against the transcript of the General Medical Council proceedings against me.
The BMJ claimed that its allegations had been rigorously cross-checked against the 6-million-word transcript of the proceedings.
During her cross-examination, some of Smith’s responses suggested this might not be the case.
My lawyer therefore asked her if she was aware that the proceedings had been adversarial. That is, that each side had the opportunity to present its case and rebut the other’s evidence.
She confirmed that she was aware.
He then asked if she was aware that I had testified in the General Medical Council proceedings. In fact, I had delivered one of the longest testimonies in the council’s history.
She was not aware.
She was then asked if she was aware that my colleague and co-defendant, John Walker-Smith, had testified.
Walker-Smith had given the longest deposition in the history of the General Medical Council.
She was uncertain.
At this point, The BMJ’s case collapsed. It became clear that rather than being thorough, The BMJ’s “fact-checking” had missed almost the entire rebuttal evidence of the expert defendants and had relied exclusively on the scientifically and medically unqualified claims of a journalist.
The deposition room went silent. Abruptly, their lawyer stood and walked out. Never lie to your lawyer!
The three defendants’ legal team must have read them the riot act because within days, their original affidavit was abandoned and a hastily cobbled-together “amended” affidavit was filed.
This amended affidavit contained barely a mention of the General Medical Council proceedings upon which their original case had relied.
The authors had published under false pretenses — they had lied.
I suggest that these authors — Deer, Godlee and Smith — are the ones who had committed the fraud.
The case never went to court.
Sadly, and in the face of all relevant legal precedent, we were denied jurisdiction over the defendants by the Texas Court of Appeals, 3rd District and the case was never heard on its merits.
This was despite the fact that the defendants, themselves, had invoked the intercession of the Texas state court in a related matter. The defendants had recognized the jurisdiction of the court.
We can only speculate as to why the judges made their adverse ruling despite all relevant precedent.
There was no funding with which to pursue alternative litigation and, sadly, the defendants escaped justice.
Accountability? None.
It is only when you have leaders as committed as Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that accountability becomes a reality and consequences follow.
If any of those mentioned in this article feel they have been defamed and wish to pursue litigation, please do. I have retained all the documents and would be happy to share them with the courts.
