• Author: Kev
• Comments: 163

• Autism
• Brian Deer
• Jane Bryant
• MMR
• Oneclickgroup
• Polly Tommey
• Wakefield

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<a href="http://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/2009/02/one-click-hacks-and-homophobes/">One Click Hacks and Homophobes</a>

Comments

163 Responses to “One Click Hacks and Homophobes”

1. 
   Socrates
   February 22nd, 2009
   22:58:43

   They just don’t get it.

   It’s Evidenced Based Ranting.

   But just leave the hyperbole and hype to the professionals…

2. 
   Brainduck
   February 22nd, 2009
   23:48:45

   Reminds me of the Jeni Barnett stuff about her being an ‘old lady’.
   Why do they assume that being female somehow disqualifies you from engaging in robust debate?

3. 
   Joseph
   February 22nd, 2009
   23:51:38

   I will leave One Click readers to surmise just who the perpetrator might be, who had the access and the motive.

   Paraphrasing; never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

4. 
   Brian Deer
   February 23rd, 2009
   00:06:08

   The true account of what happened was that this short woman in heavy boots stamped into the press room while a group of journalists were talking about the case. I was saying that the central issue was one of “intent”: was the intent at the Royal Free to do research, with clinical elements, or was the intent to provide clinical care, with research elements? The prosecution says the former, and the defence says the latter. Leftbrainrightbrain, to my knowledge, is the first place this has ever been discussed re the Wakefield case.

   There is a mass of ethical stuff on this, but you will find a summary here:

   http://briandeer.com/wakefield/research-intent.htm

   This is almost the whole of the case against Walker-Smith and Murch, in a nutshell. It’s an interesting question, of great importance in protecting patients (especially children, who cannot give consent), about which I could talk for hours, and about which parents of autistic children genuinely following the case would have found instructive to hear about. Not least because, as an extreme instance, a parent cannot give lawful consent for another person to assault their child. And if research was done without ethical approval, or valid clinical grounds, a charge of assault might theoretically follow (although this area of law is governed by very few precedents).

   But nobody has been told about all this. All that has come out on the cranksites has been bile, ignorance and deceit.

   Wakefield is in a particularly problematic position on this one, not least because he was contractually forbidden any involvement in clinical care (he has never had legal care of a patient in his life). There is also a mass of correspondence, and formal statements, up till five years ago, in which the three talk about their research programme. Murch said that he only realised that he wasn’t doing research after the GMC case began.

   One fascinating question is whether you can retrospectively re-evaluate your historical intent. This is what, in my judgment, the defendants are attempting. They have sought to retrospectively justify what they did in purely clinical terms, after having previously explicitly said that what they were doing was research. For example, here is a statement that Murch now repudiates as wrong:

   http://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-murch.htm

   and this from the medical school, also now said to be wrong:

   http://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-hodgson.htm

   Will it work? For two of them, dunno. Probably not. A more complex question lies in a line in the charges concerning the project being contrary to children’s best clinical interests. That’s a tough one for the panel. This is part of why the thing has taken so long: going into each of the children’s cases in excruciating detail.

   However, back to the event considered really important on the cranksites: as we journos were talking, the booted woman started shrieking: “Who’s paying you? Who’s paying you?”

   In fact, I was being paid by Channel 4 television, who kindly coughed up my fees for the GMC. The Sunday Times, Channel 4 and Dr Wakefield (through his lawyers) are the only people who have paid me any money in connection with my MMR investigation. So I told her who was paying me, but she continued shrieking anyway. She was evidently distraught. Later, she started shrieking “I’ve got my story, I’ve got my story”, which, as you can understand, I thought was hilarious.

   I suggested to this woman that we leave the press room as she was disturbing working journalists trying to cover the hearing. So I moved to the door and invited her to leave with me.

   She then carried on with her abuse, and came right up to me as I was standing by the door.

   I then asked a GMC press officer to call their security man, who turned up a while later.

   Folk may think that, if this is the best the cranks can do, then they are pretty desperate. The other attempts to smear me concern the fact that I joined the queue for the coffee machine, but seeing that they had no herbal tea, went home. Oh, and there’s the claim that I’m working with “Big Pharma”, “New Labour”, “vaccine manufacturers”, “the CIA”, “Men from Mars” etc.

   The idea that a reporter with 25 years experience of contentious national newspaper journalism might feel that, if proven, faking a link between MMR and autism might be a good story, in the public interest, is (for obvious reasons) not part of their worldview.

   They also sometimes raise some stuff about things I’ve said outside the GMC, where, when they have been staging protests, I’ve always stopped and talked with anyone who approaches me. Not all of them are cranks, and I live in hope of an intelligent conversation. Almost all of it has been videotaped (and some audio broadcast on Radio 4). It catches me as I am: willing to listen and discuss. Not frightened of debate.

   Indeed, in one such discussion (certainly videotaped), I talked with a Mr David Thrower, who for years has bombarded the world with huge reports on “autistic enterocolitis”, with thousands of references and footnotes, and god knows what else, allegedly showing how Wakefield is right. I mean, hundreds of pages of the stuff. He has convinced a lot of people that he is the expert. He has even had a letter in the Lancet.

   I asked him: “What is enterocolitis?”

   He didn’t know. On videotape. I asked him several times, and talked with him, just to be sure that he didn’t know the meaning of the word. There can be no doubt about this. He didn’t deny that he didn’t know, or say that he knew but wasn’t saying, or anything like that. He just didn’t know. And I told him what a disgrace I thought it was that evidently all he had done, for all these years, is parrot medical words. I told him to go home and look it up on Google.

   Essentially, he fooled god knows how many people that he was giving them science. And he didn’t even know the meaning of the words in the title of his magnum opus, and at the heart of what Wakefield claimed. I thought it was shocking. But I wasn’t surprised.

   Anyhow, fascinating stuff.

5. 
   chaoticidealism
   February 23rd, 2009
   00:55:18

   It totally confuses me why homosexuality would have anything to do with vaccine safety. They’re both political (and very emotionally charged) issues. That’s all the similarity I can see.

6. 
   K
   February 23rd, 2009
   02:16:18

   Is JABS the UK equivalent of the US’ Generation Rescue?

7. 
   alyric
   February 23rd, 2009
   02:24:20

   So she’s invented the lot seemingly. But there may be a reason. Do you recall Kev, Brian mentioning having to call security to the Press Room when some woman in boots appeared and started ranting. Maybe Bryant is the lady in boots and this is her form of damage control.

8. 
   Dedj
   February 23rd, 2009
   13:57:26

   I does seem strange that even supporters of Murch, including someone called ‘A dribbling idiot’, by Deer should report that it was Bryant that “harried” Deer, and should fail to report any aggression from Deer.

   When even the people who have reasons to back you up say the opposite of what you claim, then it’s a no brainer to think you’ve either made it up or misremembered.

9. 
   Another Voice
   February 23rd, 2009
   17:01:58

   Brian Deer stated “Wakefield is in a particularly problematic position on this one, not least because he was contractually forbidden any involvement in clinical care (he has never had legal care of a patient in his life).”

   I am not familiar with how things work in the U.K. but this sounds like Dr. Wakefield is not licensed to practice medicine. What does the above statement really mean?

10. 
    laurentius-rex
    February 23rd, 2009
    21:53:38

    This is why these folk are on a hiding to nothing, dressing rank prejudice up behind there campaigns. They have lost and they have nothing left but the nastiness that gave them birth.

    They are like the BNP.

    In the meantime even autism speaks is moving towards the centre isolating them even more.

    I am no friend to Brain Deer and his style of journalism, it is journalism and not subject to peer review so much as editorial review and populist appeal, but Mr Deer’s sexuality has nothing to do with my disagreement with his style and presentation which I can disagree with even when I agree with his conclusions.

    It is just he is a representative of the media, and I do not trust the media because I can never be sure whose side they are on.

11. 
    Matrk
    February 23rd, 2009
    23:04:19

    I can’t wait to see this tape and the Judge Eady letter.

12. 
    John Stone
    February 24th, 2009
    01:27:32

    Another Voice

    Andrew Wakefield was employed as a research scientist at the Royal Free: any clinical decisions regarding patients were taken by John Walker-Smith, Simon Murch and others, but it is also not possible as a qualified doctor and surgeon that he has never had the care of a patient.

13. 
    Another Voice
    February 24th, 2009
    03:47:22

    John Stone

    Thank you for the input. I had not expected his being employed as a scientist at the hospital, but that would explain part of the non-treatment statement.

14. 
    alyric
    February 24th, 2009
    04:34:51

    Another voice

    You don’t thank John Stone for input. His input thus far as been highly inaccurate, not to say dishonest deliberately. Why are you placing any credence on what he’s said here? You have no way of knowing at all.

15. 
    John Stone
    February 24th, 2009
    09:47:41

    alyric

    I think Another Voice has to contend with whether what Brian Deer has said here can possibly be true.

    Of course, there are people who have practiced medicine with bogus qualification but this has not previously been claimed about Andrew Wakefield – indeed, if he wasn’t a registered medical doctor he couldn’t be before the GMC.

16. 
    Matrk
    February 24th, 2009
    10:58:37

    One has to question your recollection of events Brian, wasn’t your question “whats Autistic enterocolitis?” When furnished with a reasonable answer you resorted to the kind of tactics my RE teacher use to use on a child who had forgot his home work.

17. 
    Hospital doctor's spouse
    February 24th, 2009
    16:29:48

    Wakefield has a medical degree, and is a licenced medical practitioner in the UK (though this may change after the GMC rules).
    Wakefield passed the exams for membership of the College of Surgeons (MRCS) and later the College of Pathologists (MRCPath).

    However… though Wakefield probably trained for some time – and we don’t know how long exactly, so it might only have been a year or two at best – in surgery programmes (“residency” as it would be termed in the US), he never completed residency training and thus never became, or was eligible to become, a consultant (“attending” in US parlance), either medical (physician), or as a surgeon, or even as a consultant pathologist. Anyway, the key point is that Wakefield chose fairly early on to go into research and give up caring for patients as a clinician.

    Another US analogy for this would be that Wakefield was medically qualified (had a legitimate medical degree and basic registration as a medical practitioner), but was NOT formally “board-certified” as an attending in ANY specialty – again, a researcher who had originally trained as a doctor, rather than a practising physician.

    Patients in UK hospitals are admitted “under” (under the care of) a named consultant (attending) and their team of junior doctors. It is the consultant that carries formal responsibility for the patient’s care.

    Since Wakefield left surgical training to specialise in research, probably in his late 20s or at latest early 30s, he would have had care of patients only as a very junior doctor early in his career, and explicitly under the supervision and supervisory responsibility of more senior doctors. [Note that by the time of the Royal Free work in the mid 1990s, Wakefield was in his late 30s and his early patient-care experience would have been many years behind him.] So Wakefield would thus never have carried formal legal, and full clinical, responsibility for a patient – hence, I think, Brian Deer’s statement.

    Finally, Wakefield was employed by the Royal Free as a “Reader in Histopathology and Medicine”, i.e. as an academic researcher and teacher. He would not have been part of a consultant’s team of doctors in the hospital, so would not have (officially) been a doctor treating patients.

    Some doctors in research DO work as clinicians as well for part of the time. However, not all do, and some specialise 100% in research (no patient care) – like Wakefield. The precise details would be laid out in the contract the doctor has with their employer. If Wakefield had a contract explicitly excluding clinical work, then this again emphasises that he had chosen NOT to be a doctor who treated patients. In fact, he seems to have made this decision early in his career, when he left surgery to go full-time into research / “experimental pathology”. The pathology interest again chimes with someone who wanted to do research and not patient care, since pathologists do not have patients…

18. 
    Brian Deer
    February 24th, 2009
    16:40:21

    Hi Another Voice,

    Yeah, Wakefield quit clinical medicine more than 20 years ago, when he was still a trainee, and so he has never had care of a patient in his life. Ironic really, since he’s always made a big deal about listening to his patients.

    At least, he has not had a patient legally. I see The Times went after him the other day, fishing somewhat to see if he is practising without a license. I know nothing about that, but given what happened in the UK when his considerable charm wore off on some of the people around him, there may be a reckoning over those kind of things, since Americans are so extraordinarily litigious.

19. 
    Another Voice
    February 24th, 2009
    17:06:59

    alyric,

    Yes, I had a question; John Stone offered an answer that sounds plausible. I say thank you.

    If you believe I have been misinformed and that Dr. Wakefield was not employed as a research scientist at the hospital then I would appreciate knowing what the arrangement happened to be.

20. 
    alyric
    February 24th, 2009
    17:19:49

    Another voice

    When you accepted Stone’s plausibility you also accepted this:

    “but it is also not possible as a qualified doctor and surgeon that he has never had the care of a patient.”

    In effect you were calling Brian Deer a liar.

21. 
    michael lord-boult
    February 24th, 2009
    17:39:58

    Dear Mr Deer,Iam astounded at your persistant and
    attempted destruction of Andrew Wakefields
    reputation and character,together with his equally qualified associates.As a parent of
    a vaccine damaged daughter whom we have spent 14 years bringing back to us,she is now within reason quite able,unlike many of my friends children who cannot even communicate and suffer after receiving an mmr vaccine.As you have no medical background whatsoever and from what I understand will not be having any children
    in the foreseeable future I find you a person who lacks compassion to such an extent that your parents would or should be ashamed of you! I could of course be very rude but that would be playing your dangerous game,however a good friend of mine
    is looking into your antics a certain mr cowell the ‘older one’and believe he has some clout!and he owes me big time.regards mike.

22. 
    michael lord-boult
    February 24th, 2009
    17:39:58

    Dear Mr Deer,Iam astounded at your persistant and
    attempted destruction of Andrew Wakefields
    reputation and character,together with his equally qualified associates.As a parent of
    a vaccine damaged daughter whom we have spent 14 years bringing back to us,she is now within reason quite able,unlike many of my friends children who cannot even communicate and suffer after receiving an mmr vaccine.As you have no medical background whatsoever and from what I understand will not be having any children
    in the foreseeable future I find you a person who lacks compassion to such an extent that your parents would or should be ashamed of you! I could of course be very rude but that would be playing your dangerous game,however a good friend of mine
    is looking into your antics a certain mr cowell the ‘older one’and believe he has some clout!and he owes me big time.regards mike.

23. 
    michael lord-boult
    February 24th, 2009
    17:40:02

    Dear Mr Deer,Iam astounded at your persistant and
    attempted destruction of Andrew Wakefields
    reputation and character,together with his equally qualified associates.As a parent of
    a vaccine damaged daughter whom we have spent 14 years bringing back to us,she is now within reason quite able,unlike many of my friends children who cannot even communicate and suffer after receiving an mmr vaccine.As you have no medical background whatsoever and from what I understand will not be having any children
    in the foreseeable future I find you a person who lacks compassion to such an extent that your parents would or should be ashamed of you! I could of course be very rude but that would be playing your dangerous game,however a good friend of mine
    is looking into your antics a certain mr cowell the ‘older one’and believe he has some clout!and he owes me big time.regards mike.

24. 
    Dedj
    February 24th, 2009
    18:08:40

    It’s possible that Wakefield has never been the responsible clinician for a patient, that is, he may have always worked under the direction of a senior.

    Given that Wakefield took less than four years to go into surgery, and went into research only a few years after, it’s possible (although highly unlikely) that he has never been the primary physician.

    This is different from having a legal obligation (which everyone – including HCA’s – have towards the client) which may be where John Stone’s confusion is coming from.

25. 
    K
    February 24th, 2009
    18:25:44

    “since Americans are so extraordinarily litigious.” Good grief, now Deer is throwing in a bit of chauvinistic jingoism. Why am I not surprised?

26. 
    One Queer Fish
    February 24th, 2009
    20:12:16

    I don’t believe my eyes,here we go again is this what this forum is about Mr Deer making more un-substantiated statements with no direction to evidence , Again I’m curious to all the rumours he raises, for instance but without direction to i.e. a Mr David Thrower and you would expect a link to You Tube where one would post such strong statements of a film (presumably with audio).Quite simply his writings ,are anomalies like the Judge Eady letters where Mr Deer cant back his pen up again, what a bore…what’s the site you try to discredit on here JABS, right I’m of to it..

27. 
    Joseph
    February 24th, 2009
    20:14:50

    As you have no medical background whatsoever and from what I understand will not be having any children in the foreseeable future I find you a person who lacks compassion to such an extent that your parents would or should be ashamed of you!

    Did michael lord-boult just say that homosexual men without children inherently lack compassion? It had to be that, or the part about the medical background.

    @michael: Other than homophobia and outrage, do you have any arguments to offer as to why the allegations might be incorrect?

28. 
    Another Voice
    February 24th, 2009
    20:34:35

    Brian Deer,

    Thank you for your response to the remaining part of my question. The hole that Dr. Wakefield is digging keeps getting deeper and deeper. I had thought for the longest time that he had been a practicing physician and only doing research part time.

    It will be interesting to see what the GMC decides in this matter. I have very little faith in the medical community taking a fellow member to task. But since ten of the people closest to his study have already removed their signatures; that speaks volumes about it’s veracity.

29. 
    John Stone
    February 24th, 2009
    20:50:16

    dedj

    You say on the one hand that it is highly unlikely that Wakefield “has never been the primary physician” – which seems to be doubting Brian Deer – and then you allege that I am confused!

30. 
    Another Voice
    February 24th, 2009
    20:50:26

    Alyric,

    This is what I said,

    “Thank you for the input. I had not expected his being employed as a scientist at the hospital, but that would explain part of the non-treatment statement.”

    It did explain part of the statement, subsequently Brian Deer has explained the rest. I accepted nothing nor did I infer that anyone was a liar.

31. 
    Dedj
    February 24th, 2009
    21:21:44

    “You say on the one hand that it is highly unlikely that Wakefield “has never been the primary physician” – which seems to be doubting Brian Deer – and then you allege that I am confused!”

    Yes.

    Umm, I’m not sure why you thought it was neccissary to rephrase and repeat my post back to me, I’m fully aware that it’s possible to doubt Brian Deer, without declaring his view ‘impossible’.

    The issue here is wheter or not Wakefield has ever had ‘legal care’ of a client – which in this context may be taken to mean the responsible clinician or primary physician.

    You claimed it was next to immposible that Wakefield has never had care of a client. All members of the treatment team have a duty of care to the client, but this is not directly equitable to being the responsible clinican, as one can work under direction without having the care of the case.

    I’m not sure why the distinction confuses you. I can only assume you mis-wrote your initial post.

32. 
    John Stone
    February 24th, 2009
    22:33:43

    dedj

    This is very peculiar logic: you are saying that though something is “highly unlikely” it must be true by virtue of the fact that it has been stated by Brian Deer (without offering any evidence). Is this some strange new religion?

    I don’t know what Mr Deer means by “a trainee”. Wakefield became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1985 (prior to branching off into research) and a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists in 2001. But there is nothing unusual about a researcher not having responsibility for clinical decision making.

33. 
    Matrk
    February 24th, 2009
    22:43:30

    Mr Fish
    are suggesting Brian has made this up? If it was made up it would surely include being thanked by the parents, given a rousing 3 chears as he was carried overhead back into the GMC after the parents saw the errors of their ways.
    you dribbing ex-cub scout

34. 
    Hospital doctor's spouse
    February 25th, 2009
    12:58:42

    I cannot work out if John Stone is being obtuse, or whether he genuinely has no idea about what a “trainee” doctor is. Given his tendency to cast himself an expert on all things autism, vaccines and Wakefield, I find his apparent lack of knowledge on this point rather a puzzle. A trainee doctor, or “Junior” doctor, fairly obviously, is a doctor who is qualified (finished Univ and got his medical licence), but who is not FULLY-TRAINED in any medical or surgical specialty (has not completed “specialist training”).

    I have already said some of this in the earlier comment

    http://leftbrainrightbrain.co......ment-57083

    – but let me spell it out again.

    After a doctor graduates from a UK medical school, they have to work for a short period (1-2 yrs) before they can get “full registration” as a medical practitioner (i.e. get on the GMC register so that they are licenced to practice as a doctor). In Wakefield’s day this was one year as what was called a “House Officer”, of which 6 months would be spent on a surgical service, and 6 months on a medical service. If you check Wakers’ GMC registration it says:

    Primary qualification (i.e. degree): MBBS London 1981
    Full registration: 1982

    – so this is exactly in accordance with the above.

    Following this, doctors are licenced, but NOT fully trained. To get from this point to consultant (fully trained) status used to take (in Wakefield’s day) anywhere from 6-12 years (roughly) in the UK. For the kind of surgical specialties Wakefield was apparently interested in (transplant surgery), I would predict nearer 10-12, with a couple of years of that to be spent doing research.

    After being registered, Wakers would have become a “Senior House Officer” or SHO, almost certainly on a surgical rotation (service). In US parlance, this would be like being a “2nd yr surgical resident”. This would have been typically 2 yrs rotating round a variety of surgical specialties, being a kind of “workhorse dogsbody junior doctor in training”. Most UK doctors who want to end up as consultants also swot for their College Exams (see below) at this stage.

    The College of Surgeons exam John Stone mentions for Wakefield emphatically does NOT mean he is, or was, a fully qualified surgeon. It is a higher ACADEMIC qualification, involving some practical skills assseed in short tests and case presentation, but NOT an “exit exam”. It is far more like a super-duper hard version (and it is hard) of the short of exams doctors take on leaving University. In the days that Saint Andy trained, this qualification was necessary simply to GET INTO a “higher training scheme” to become a consultant surgeon. It was also usually necessary to do a year or two in research before applying to get into the final training scheme.

    [BTW, the College of Pathologists exams that Wakers also probably did (FRCPath) are not specific to doctors, and are also done by Hospital Biochemists and similar. They are hard too, but they have nothing to do with hands-on patient care at all].

    Once the trainee, by now in their late 20s, was armed with 2-3 yrs as an SHO, a stint of research, and their MRCS (or MRCP for physicians), then they would apply for “higher surgical specialist training”, which would typical take about 5 more yrs. This is almost certainly the stage when Wakefield decided he would go into research full-time – so he would never have done this “higher specialist training”, which is what you need to be a consultant / attending.

    It is also worth noting that Wakefield’s early interests were seemingly NOT in GI surgery, but rather in transplantation. We don’t actually know whether he did ANY time as a junior GI surgical doctor.

    I would love to see Wakefield’s CV (resume) to check these surmises out, but given the dates I think it is reasonably clear that he did 2 or possibly 3 years as a junior doctor (SHO) in surgery, and/or possibly some academic research. Then he passed the Membership exam (MRCS) in 1985 and went to Canada on an junior academic RESEARCH Fellowship. And that was almost certainly it for him for patient care. If this is correct, and the dates fit pretty well, his last stint as a junior doc seeing patients would have been in the mid 80s, a full decade before the Royal Free farrago.

35. 
    isabella Thomas
    February 25th, 2009
    13:49:57

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....69673.html

    ANOTHER AUTISM CASE WINS IN VACCINE COURT
    By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

36. 
    Matrk
    February 25th, 2009
    16:53:21

    shhh Isabella
    kev is already writing a piece how she wasn’t autistic how her father has a COI, its not a ruling its a concession , its purely genetic , before investigating the background and branding the special masters involved ANTIVAX.
    Brian please hit me with one of your insults (i went to a scondary school if that helps.)

37. 
    Chris
    February 25th, 2009
    21:31:12

    Isabella Thomas said “ANOTHER AUTISM CASE WINS IN VACCINE COURT
    By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.”

    Good grief, his past history with chemicals must have made him very slow. That is old news:
    http://neurodiversity.com/weblog/article/148/
    ...

    Banks v. HHS (Case 02-0738V, 2007 U.S. Claims LEXIS 254, July 20, 2007)
    MMR vaccine administered in March 2000.
    The child was diagnosed with PDD secondary to acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM).
    Michael McLaren, counsel for petitioner; Richard Abell, Special Master

38. 
    alyric
    February 25th, 2009
    22:43:10

    Gee wow Isabella. Kirby and Kennedy went all the way back to 2007 to see the vaccine court pay out for a known table injury, ADEM. Now try relating this rarity to the 5000 Omnibus cases. Ain’t going to work. Now all these parents will be going for ADEM as the new ‘mito’ and parents like the Cedillos will be even more mislead since they should have stayed with their table injury case as should a parent with a provable case of ADEM. Bailey’s case was well ducumented and a physical injury. Kathleen Seidel has documented a number of cases where vaccine court has paid compensation to autistic children but only for physical injury not for autism. That doesn’t help the litigious parents at all. All they have is autism and speculative theories.

39. 
    alyric
    February 25th, 2009
    22:55:41

    Chris

    Thank you very much for the reference to Kathleen’s work:)

40. 
    Dedj
    February 25th, 2009
    23:58:08

    “This is very peculiar logic: you are saying that though something is “highly unlikely” it must be true by virtue of the fact that it has been stated by Brian Deer (without offering any evidence)”

    I said no such thing, in fact I said it was possible to doubt Brian Deer.

    The fact that you can take a clear statement and twist it round to mean the exact opposite, and have done a similar thing with a clear and concise statement from the NAS, as well as saying Deer blamed parents for autism (when he said no such thing and even explained – clearly – what he was actually saying), does make me question whether we can take any other claim or statement made by you as being truthful and honest.

41. 
    John Stone
    February 26th, 2009
    00:57:11

    Dedj

    Anyone can go back to your earlier post and decide for themselves whether I have misrepresented you:

    http://leftbrainrightbrain.co......ment-57091

    Hospital Doctor’s Spouse

    Your posts seem to have miraculously appeared long after their sequence and timing. Brian Deer seems to have conflated two issues: (1) that Wakefield was under contract not to treat patients at the Royal Free in his role as a researcher (2) he never graduated to the position of a consultant (though he has instead more than 100 listings on Pub Med), but what can anyone surmise from Brian Deer’s statement that Wakefield has never had “care of patient in his life” and “At least, he has not had a patient legally”. This is at best tortuous and ambiguous stuff. If Deer’s point was that Wakefield has never been a consultant perhaps that is what he should have said. As even you agree, Wakefield is licensed to practice medicine.

42. 
    Dedj
    February 26th, 2009
    02:00:59

    “Anyone can go back to your earlier post and decide for themselves whether I have misrepresented you:”

    You’re amazingly incompetant at this.

    I’ve expressely stated the opposite of what you claim I have, and the post you refer* to does not indicate that I believe in what Deer said ‘because Deer says it’s true’.

    Anyone who goes back through our exchange will find out that , yes , you have misrepresented me.

    You have even misrepresented, by quoting the incorrect post, which post preceeded you implying that I believe that : “it must be true by virtue of the fact that it has been stated by Brian Deer”. Nothing that I have written indicates that my statement “I’m fully aware that it’s possible to doubt Brian Deer” is equivilant to your claim.

    I will not ask for an apology as I am not of the belief that you can recognise your error, as you did not over the NAS statement, even after it was pointed out to you by multiple sources.

    *and it was lucky I checked. I foolishly believed that you’d naturally and honestly refer to the actual post in contention, rather than an earlier one. But no, you picked one that doesn’t even say remotely anything that you imply it does. Is this truly all that we can expect from you?

    HDS’ post may have been cuaught by the spam filter, as have several of mine in the past. It seems long enough to be caught.

43. 
    John Stone
    February 26th, 2009
    07:59:54

    Dedj

    “You have even misrepresented, by quoting the incorrect post, which post preceeded you implying that I believe that : “it must be true by virtue of the fact that it has been stated by Brian Deer”. Nothing that I have written indicates that my statement “I’m fully aware that it’s possible to doubt Brian Deer” is equivilant to your claim.”

    I quoted the post on which I based my remark.

    I accept that HDS’s posts may have got caught in a spam filter.

    Can anyone tell me whether Wakefield is presently licensed to practice medicine?

44. 
    HCN
    February 26th, 2009
    08:11:46

    John Stone said “Can anyone tell me whether Wakefield is presently licensed to practice medicine?”

    Not in the USA, and apparently he never qualified as a clinician in the UK*. So I would say: no.

    From: http://www.spiked-online.com/i.....icle/6283/ ...
    “Yet in the case of Dr Wakefield, the stethoscope is curiously inappropriate. After training as a surgeon, he switched to research in (adult) gastroenterology and has never had clinical responsibility for any patients (the children in his Lancet series were under the clinical care of Drs Walker Smith and Simon Murch). He is not qualified as a physician or a paediatrician and is certainly not registered to use a stethoscope on patients, adults or children in the USA.”

    By the way, Mr. Stone, this is just out of curiousity… I see your name on lots of these posts, yet I do not know what your are. What are your qualifications? What are your interests in the vaccine=autism game? (by the way I am a parent of disabled child who has been injured by an actual disease… I am a mechanical engineer)

45. 
    John Stone
    February 26th, 2009
    08:23:06

    To give a wellknown an example, Ben Goldacre would also be in the same category of a “junior doctor”.

    Or Dr Miriam Stoppard.

46. 
    David N. Andrews M. Ed. (Distinction)
    February 26th, 2009
    10:41:00

    John Stone, you are incredibly stupid.

    About Ben Goldacre BA(Hons), BM, BCh, MA, MRCPsych…

    Not exactly a ‘junior doctor’; in surgical specialties, the training times are longer. In medical specialties, such as the MRCOG (which my aunt did after graduating MB BS) the requirement requirement is for work and study of three years full-time equivalence. Generally, upon achieving the membership of one’s specialty college, one is a fully qualified practitioner and is able to work as a consultant – which is not a junior doctor rank. I’m not aware of exceptions here but there may be some; I am aware that – because of the practical intensiveness of surgical specialties – such training periods are greatly longer.

    HCN, Wakefield is, sadly, qualified as a physician. Andrew J. Wakefield MB BS, FRCS, MRCPath has a qualification that allows him to register as a qualified practitioner of clinical medicine with the GMC in London: MB BS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery). He is not, however, a paediatrician. At the Royal Free Hospital, he was not employed in a clinical post, hence he would not be covered by insurance (and therefore not allowed by the hospital) to examine, diagnose and treat patients: he was employed as a research scientist.

    Hope that helps to clarify.

47. 
    John Stone
    February 26th, 2009
    11:58:31

    David N Andrews M. Ed. (distinction)

    Apart from the ill-manners I cannot see that that there is any major dispute here. You agree that Wakefield is qualified as a practitioner of clinical medicine. I agree that he was employed as a scientist at the Royal Free and not allowed for that reason to treat patients – it being important to keep research ethics and patient ethics separate. But I am sure no one has ever claimed – least of all Wakefield himself – that he was a paediatrician.

48. 
    John Stone
    February 26th, 2009
    12:29:18

    As regards Goldacre, he is also neither registered as a GP or a consultant so he also falls under the loose category of junior doctor, not that I mean that in any way disparagingly.

    Incidentally, he is described on IoP website as a “Research Fellow” but he only has two papers listed on Pub Med, one of which dates back to 1997 long before he was there; this, originally published in the Lancet Nov 2007:

    http://www.badscience.net/2007.....moeopathy/

    and 5 pieces of journalism for the BMJ. Not a great haul compared with Wakefield’s 110 listings.

    It is likely that as research fellow Goldacre is also not allowed to treat patients. I suppose there is a question what Goldacre is paid to do. Anyhow, I offer this most of all as point of comparison.

49. 
    WMP
    February 26th, 2009
    14:55:50

    John Stone is incorrect in his assertion that no one has ever referred to Andrew Wakefield as a paediatrician. Litigants in the MMR litigation were introduced to Dr Wakefield as a “paediatric gastroenterologist” in a letter distributed by the lead solicitors in 2000.
    Although now acknowledged to be an error on the part of the solicitors, it does highlight how in 2000 at least, the solicitors representing the children were perfectly content to refer to Dr Wakefield as a paediatric gastroenterologist, and equally content to distribute that information to the litigants. It follows that even the solicitors who commissioned him didn’t seem to grasp what qualifications Dr Wakefield held, so there’s little hope for the rest of us.

50. 
    Hospital doctor's spouse
    February 26th, 2009
    15:51:11

    Ben Goldacre is, as John Stone states, formally a junior doctor / doctor-in-training, and has never said any different. The difference from Wakefield is that Goldacre is training as both a clinician AND a researcher. He certainly does see patients, or was doing less than a year ago. The likelihood is that Goldacre is ON a higher training scheme for psychiatrists (technically this would make him a “Registrar in Psychiatry”, but an academic “sub-scheme” that requires you to spend time in research. What someone doing this would expect to end up as is a fully-qualified psychiatrist (completed full specialist training) but ALSO an academic researcher; the typical job at the end might be “Clinical Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry”.

    Most people in such Clinical Senior Lecturer posts DO do clinical work, since having trained for so long to do it they want to keep their hand in. They might well also enjoy it.Some also feel it keeps them grounded in the real world. Provided they completed the specialist clinical training, they can be an “Honorary Consultant” and do consultant-level clinical work part time, typically 1 or 1.5 days / wk.

    The converse point about Wakefield is that he specifically chose to leave clinical work completely, and NEVER did the specialist clinical training for ANY specialty. And certainly not in gastroenterology or paediatrics.

51. 
    Dedj
    February 26th, 2009
    16:27:32

    “I quoted the post on which I based my remark.”

    And by doing so, misrepresented our exchange, as I had later stated the exact opposite to you claim.

    It’s a trick known as a ‘qoute mine’, something we’re very used to dealing with around here.

    I fail to see any point continuing this aspect of the discussion, as my comments are easily viewable, allowing people to view them in the proper context.

52. 
    John Stone
    February 26th, 2009
    18:16:16

    Dedj

    Ah “quote mining” – that must have been what it was!

53. 
    Matrk
    February 26th, 2009
    18:28:14

    Dedj
    why not dissect Brian Deers comments from the other day or perhaps his qualifications in science or medicine. that should not take you long.

54. 
    Dedj
    February 26th, 2009
    18:59:01

    Matrk – why? I’m not aware of anywhere Deer has claimed to be a medical authourity on the basis of qualifications or experience. He claims to have read the records, and found that the content is not compatible with the Wakefieldian version.

    Arguement over content is not arguement over conclusion.

55. 
    John Stone
    February 26th, 2009
    19:52:11

    Matrk

    It is all irrelevant because Deer can’t back up his claims with documentation any more than he can back up his claim not to be the complainant with the GMC document. But you are right that the Sunday Glaxo’s dependence on his medical expertise is extraordinary.

    http://childhealthsafety.wordp.....ine-cases/

56. 
    John Stone
    February 26th, 2009
    20:19:33

    Not to forget Dr Ben Goldacre receiving his 2003 Glaxo award:

    http://tinyurl.com/cxwg5r

    for his article ‘Never mind the facts’ (and he didn’t):

    http://www.bmj.com/cgi/eletter.....480#176662

57. 
    One Queer Fish
    February 26th, 2009
    20:39:03

    thanks for that Mr John Stone …they haven’t got that one , on JABS ,interesting stuff on the Child Health Safety site as well .
    . Quite simply if Mr Deer cant back up his “tell tales” with paper evidence what does it say for the so called “medical establishments ” and medical courts world wide when on Mr Deer’s tales copied from his fairy tale web site they make a verdict such as in America recently, and he doesn’t even have a first aid course under his belt never mind an academic qualification. ..Baldric is stand amazed!

58. 
    alyric
    February 26th, 2009
    20:59:27

    Ah dedj you are the first to reply to this Matrk or whoever. He’s a troll and amazingly unsuccessful or he was until you chimed in. Let him go back under his rock.

59. 
    A Scientist
    February 26th, 2009
    21:21:19

    I don’t find the fact that Wakefield has dozens of cited articles on PubMed desperately impressive. So have I, and so have most people who have been in the research business for 20-odd years. I note that Wakefield’s papers include:

    (i) multiple short letters trying (without much success) to rebut peoples’ rebuttals of his various dodgy claims;
    (ii) a significant number of rather poor review articles pimping said dodgy claims;
    (iii) a bunch of papers with > 10 authors, including several where he is somewhere in the middle.

    [for the uninitiated, a guide to scientific author order etiquette: first author: did most of the work or was prime mover; last author; was the lab boss and grant-holder. The nearer the middle, the less you probably did.]

    Anyway, as a testament to his eminence, it is hardly convincing.

    The other point is that one’s sheer prolific-ness as a researcher is secondary to whether your work is any good or not. In Wakefield’s case, several of his most “high profile” papers have been shown to be incorrect, massively flawed, riddled with spin and inaccuracies or simply invented.

    I will leave you to guess what the scientific community thinks about the likely worth of his other published works. The general verdict on him would be “con artist”.

60. 
    Matrk
    February 26th, 2009
    21:41:46

    baldric
    thanks for the compliment,
    I actually have a CSE in human biology and health. which as far as I can see Trumps Brian nicely. (I’m not proud of this exam but it did stop me having to do rugby in the freezing rain).
    what qualifies you to speak. i bet you haven’t even met the festering ex-philosophy student (how was that brain?)

61. 
    Socrates
    February 26th, 2009
    21:50:31

    The general verdict on him would be “con artist”.

    Ca Plain Pour Moi :-)

62. 
    One Queer Fish
    February 26th, 2009
    23:33:48

    a scientist

    Quite simply Dr Wakefield`s papers all still stand not even the Lancet has withdrawn his article that kicked the MMR /Autism debate on down the hill gathering pace as it snowballs .Becoming more out stretched and harder to believe UNBACKED BY EVIDENCE are Mr Deer’s fairy tales.Every time a new Deer In Wonderland tale materialises certain segments on the web ask for proof and he cant provide..its a fact witnessed on here . So where do we go from here Mr Deer could back half his rumours with evidence simply Dr Wakefield is going free and straight back to the Royal Free where he left of when the GMC hearing finishes. Mr dreamer Deer will have to get real sometime..unless of course he can provide The Judge Eady letters and more..

63. 
    John Stone
    February 26th, 2009
    23:35:34

    Matrk

    One of the oddest questions here is why if Wakefield’s science was that bad was it left to someone who manifestly knows nothing about science to dismember it – what special talents did he have for the job? Actually the allegations in the original Deer article were very limited and revolved round the substantially discredited allegation of Richard Horton:

    http://www.ageofautism.com/200.....ffair.html

    This, of course, Deer has never managed to report despite his evident hostility to Horton. And it looks as if a key strategy for launching the other allegations may have been the complaint to the GMC. Anyhow, what always gets reported is the allegations not the evidence, so it is absolutely essential that we see what was in the letters.

64. 
    One Queer Fish
    February 26th, 2009
    23:43:01

    a scientist

    Quite simply Dr Wakefield`s papers all still stand not even the Lancet has withdrawn his article that kicked the MMR /Autism debate on down the hill gathering pace as it snowballs .Becoming more out stretched and harder to believe UNBACKED BY EVIDENCE are Mr Deer’s fairy tales.Every time a new Deer In Wonderland tale materialises certain segments on the web ask for proof and he cant provide..its a fact witnessed on here . So where do we go from here Mr Deer could back half his rumours with evidence simply Dr Wakefield is going free and straight back to the Royal Free where he left of when the GMC hearing finishes. Mr dreamer Deer will have to get real sometime..he could publish the Judge Eady letters for a start or a link to some where other than make believe ..

65. 
    HCN
    February 27th, 2009
    03:23:41

    Mr. Stone, I am still wondering what your medical training is. What is your area of expertise?

66. 
    Rpger
    February 27th, 2009
    05:13:14

    More guilt by association:

    MMR vaccine manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline has appointed to its Board the head of News International James Murdoch. Murdoch is also boss of The Sunday Times, London, England publisher of stories by freelance journalist Brian Deer to discredit research into the link between MMR vaccine and autism in the US and UK [James Murdoch joins Glaxo board – Andrew Jack and Ben Fenton Financial Times 2 February 2009].

    http://childhealthsafety.wordp.....ine-cases/

67. 
    brian
    February 27th, 2009
    05:31:28

    “One of the oddest questions here is why if Wakefield’s science was that bad was it left to someone who manifestly knows nothing about science to dismember it. . . . “

    Surely you give Brian Deer too much credit, John; Deer didn’t “dismember” Wakefield’s work—that years-long task was only recently completed by independent researchers in various laboratories.

    Although Deer raised for lay readers the possible ethical shortcomings of Wakefield’s work, interested scientists may have noticed that as early as 2 May 1998 the pages of The Lancet included the suggestion that Wakefield may have misrepresented information in his February 1998 article: specifically, that far from being a conventional series of “consecutively referred” admissions (a routine measure that is used to avoid bias), many of the 12 cases reported in Wakefield’s article appeared to be associated with Dawborns, a firm of solicitors in King’s Lynn. I gather from posts here and elsewhere that Deer brought Wakefield’s alleged ethical lapses to the attention of the editors of The Lancet, the public, and, perhaps, to the GMC?but Deer didn’t invent them.

    However, Deer may be responsible for widely disseminating but not for generating the information that showed that whether or not, as Deer has suggested, Wakefield misrepresented evidence or strayed outside conventional bioethical boundaries, Wakefield was just … wrong. The commentary from Chen and DeStafano that accompanied Wakefield’s article began the thorough demolition of the paper that was finally completed only in recent months: Those authors noted 11 years ago that Wakefield’s case series was subject to both selection and recall bias, the pathological findings were nonspecific, the then-claimed virological studies had not been well developed much less completed (although, unknown to Chen and DeStafano, apparently work by Wakefield’s own student indicated that the biopsy samples collected from the children did not contain measles virus); the 1998 commentary also noted that although Wakefield had previously reported measles virus in inflammatory bowel disease [he also suggested that MMR was associated with Crohn’s disease], his work was not accepted (and, in fact, that same issue of The Lancet included another study that failed to find measles virus in IBD although it used a very sensitive assay). Now, over a decade later, many studies from a substantial cohort of respected scientists have conclusively demonstrated that Wakefield was wrong: MMR vaccination is not temporally associated with GI episodes or with the onset of autism. In short, Deer didn’t “dismember [Wakefield’s] science”; it simply unraveled.

    That said, I have some sympathy for Wakefield. PCR was and is still not completely straightforward, and possible infectious triggers for diseases such as Crohn’s (which clearly shaped Wakefield’s perception of “autistic enterocolitis”) are still somewhat controversial. In fact, I think I can follow some of Wakefield’s thought processes, and I may be able to understand why he may have preferred to believe the now-discredited results from Kawashima and Uhlmann and to disbelieve his own student. At this point, though, I don’t understand why he doesn’t move on.

    However, if, for example (as Deer suggests), 2 of the 3 children who were noted in Wakefield’s 1998 paper as having seizures associated with MMR had in fact prior to MMR vaccination experienced seizures that were not mentioned by Wakefield, then perhaps Deer is on to something more serious than what he has previously reported. I hope not: I’d rather believe that Wakefield was merely (though emphatically) wrong.

68. 
    John Stone
    February 27th, 2009
    08:07:36

    brian

    Yes, but you are still going round in circles citing Deer as the source for much of what you believe on this. For example, have you seen any evidence that the families were involved in the litigation at the time the study took place. It was certainly denied early on by Wakefield (Lancet 6 March 2004). Did this thing happen or has it only been made to look like it did? We have not seen the evidence, we have only heard the allegation, which is why Deer needs to publish his GMC correspondence.

    As to the death of Wakefield’s hypothesis, reports of it death are exaggerated. Leaving aside unpublished evidence I must point out the ambiguity of the recent Hornig study, going beyond it’s headline conclusion we read:

    *Our results differ with reports noting MV RNA in ileal biopsies of 75% of ASD vs. 6% of control children [10], [41]. Discrepancies are unlikely to represent differences in experimental technique because similar primer and probe sequences, cycling conditions and instruments were employed in this and earlier reports; furthermore, one of the three laboratories participating in this study performed the assays described in earlier reports. Other factors to consider include differences in patient age, sex, origin (Europe vs. North America), GI disease, recency of MMR vaccine administration at time of biopsy, and methods for confirming neuropsychiatric status in cases and controls. Participation in the current study required confirmation in cases of the presence of an AUT diagnosis and exclusion in controls of AUT or other developmental disturbances.”

    http://www.plosone.org/article.....0003140#s3

    The reference is to the Uhlmann study. So, they are saying that if they had studied a similar group to Uhlmann (O’Leary) they would likely have had similar results. And, in fact, Hornig enhanced the plausibility of this because despite the admitted very different selection (with cases included preponderently that had a history of autism and bowel disease prior to vaccination), it nevertheless confirmed two cases of persistent measles virus in the ileum of two cases (one non-autistic but both with a history of gut pathology and MMR vaccination) across 3 leading laboratories.

    My understanding is that although this evidence was only made available at a very late stage it was submitted by the claimants at the Cedillo hearing, but was excluded without mention by Special Master Hastings. The Hornig study leaves as a real possibility that Michele Cedillo had persistent measles virus in her gut.

    It isn’t very clear that the hypothesis has been disproved, but very clear that it is being made institutionally difficult to research. Meanwhile, the flying accusations have not aided science, or allowed the proponents of one view to defend it properly.

69. 
    John Stone
    February 27th, 2009
    09:30:36

    Rpger

    There is obviously a conflict here. While a huge amount has been made of Wakefield’s alleged conflicts all others are airily waived aside. For instance, we had an article in The Times following the recent Deer article pointing out that Wakefield makes money. Where was the main article pointing out that the proprietor of the newspaper had just been made a director of one of the defendant companies?

    We are just getting used to the idea in the field of banking that web of appointments is newsworthy and critical to the public interest (although always thought to have been rather a yawn). Something which only gets printed in a small column on a back page of newspaper or not at all may actually be the really significant news.

    Anyway, perhaps, BD - the bold investigative journalist – can help us on this?

70. 
    A scientist
    February 27th, 2009
    16:19:07

    Wakefield’s papers only “still stand” in the sense that they have not yet been retracted, withdrawn, or shown definitively and beyond all reasonable doubt to be the result of deliberate fraud. But that is NOT what happens with bad science, unless there is a formal enquiry by the Medical School or University, which is very rare.

    What DOES happen with poor science is that people repeat the work, do related experiments, test the consequent hypotheses, check the methods, examine whether the results might have been false positives etc etc. These studies are then published, casting retrospective light on the quality of the earlier work.

    As repeatedly restated, no credible science or scientist has supported Wakefield’s MMR work. Meanwhile, a positive avalanche of credible science has disproved it, shown why the methods were flawed, tested and dismissed the consequent hypotheses etc.

    So the work is still “in the literature”. It is just that everyone in science and medicine thinks it is wrong – and quite possibly fraudulent.

    For a scientist to be wrong as regularly and flamboyantly as Wakefield inevitably raises questions about HOW they could have got it so wrong. Brian Deer has provided an explanation that every scientist I know finds highly plausible (at least) or completely convincing (at best) – namely that Wakefield overstated, fiddled and fixed the data at every turn. The small print of the Autism Proceedings ruling make clear that many of the scientists and doctors who had looked closely at his work earlier on had reached the same sort of conclusions as Deer, though they had not said it quite as trenchantly.

    Anyway “all still stand” as in “are still in the literature” – yes. “All still stand” as in “have NOT been discredited and disproved” – emphatically no.

71. 
    John Stone
    February 27th, 2009
    16:31:41

    A scientist

    This is self-important, ad hominem balderdash from someone who won’t even put their name to it. What has been marked in this instance is the number of studies which look superficially as if they test Wakefield’s hypothesis but which patently don’t.

    The only study which did touch it was Hornig and Hornig found evidence of persistent measle virus in the ileum of two cases of children with gut pathology, who had had MMR. And Special Master Hastings couldn’t bring himself to examine the fact.

72. 
    A scientist
    February 27th, 2009
    18:45:40

    One only has to see the kind of relentless ad hom attacks that you and others have directed at (e.g.) Ben Goldacre, Brian Deer and Anthony Cox to see why many commenters prefer to remain anonymous, John. I will happily admit that I prefer not to be “doorstepped” across the blogosphere by you, Fryer, Cybertiger et al.

    Of course, it is a defining tactic of denalist movements to loudly denounce the other side as making ad hom attacks while launching them yourself, in spades.

    Talking of which, I don’t see the ad hom in:

    “It is just that everyone in science and medicine thinks [Wakefield’s work] is wrong – and quite possibly fraudulent.”

    That is an accurate representation of the opinions I have heard expressed, over the last few years, each and every time MMR and Wakefield have come up in discussion – opinions voiced by all kinds of scientists and doctors, including a research gastroenterologist or two.

73. 
    Dedj
    February 27th, 2009
    18:57:42

    It’s ridiculous to assert that not putting your name to something somehow invalidates the central point. That social rule is a left over from the days when you could put your name to something and know that you wouldn’t have someone turning up on your doorstep in a really altered state (as has happened even to people who have you pseudonym’s)

    Mind you asserting that ‘something somehow is going to mean something somewhere someday to somebody, therefore I’m right’ has been the best these people have offered.

    I’m traceable through my name and a obvious key word. Someone with a grudge could make my life annoying, cut my earnings, and potentially threaten my career, with little cost to themselves.

    Given how utterly relentless and fanatic some people have demonstrated themselves to be, you’d have to be mad or brave to identify yourself.

74. 
    Kev
    February 27th, 2009
    20:10:35

    John Stone – on this blog no one cares what name is used, we care about what is said. So far you’re not doing very well.

75. 
    Kev
    February 27th, 2009
    20:11:54

    John – by the way – which lab did Mady use?

76. 
    Kev
    February 27th, 2009
    20:17:25

    Matrk – consider yourself on your last warning. Add something of value or get hit with the ban hammer.

77. 
    John Stone
    February 27th, 2009
    20:21:50

    Kev

    “John Stone – on this blog no one cares what name is used, we care about what is said. So far you’re not doing very well.”

    I am certainly not pleasing the usual clientele, but then that was not the purpose. I couldn’t see much content in “a scientists” post beyond “I’m the king of the castle, and Wakefield’s the dirty rascal”, and now you are doing it again (except I’m the dirty rascal), but you have nothing of substance to say.

78. 
    John Stone
    February 27th, 2009
    20:39:05

    Kev

    Didn’t Mady send you a copy of the paper (since you are on first name terms)?

79. 
    alyric
    February 27th, 2009
    20:46:42

    Brian

    you give Sone too much credit for honesty7. Well you couldn’t know exactly but trying to shanghai the Horning study as support for Wakefield is ludicrous and that should be a very big clue.

    The Hornig study was pretty definitive, which is why we have Stone dancing the lie fantastic. Of course he’s not the only one. All the usual suspects have tried to overturn the findings. What I find interesting is that they must know they’re fudging right and left and that doesn’t to bother them. I’d be squirming under my collar having to be half so misrepresentative.

80. 
    Kev
    February 27th, 2009
    21:12:03

    John, forget pleasing the clientele. I don’t care about that either. What I care about is people having something of substance to say. So far you are lacking.

    Now, can you tell me what lab Mady used?

81. 
    A Scientist
    February 27th, 2009
    21:16:58

    “I’m the king of the castle, and Wakefield’s the dirty rascal”

    A rather odd paraphrase of what I said. While the second might be close – it is a widely-held opinion in the business – I can’t for the life of me see where I said I was “the king of the castle”. I am a professional researcher and teacher. So are lots of other people. All I said was that Wakefield’s publication record, which John incessantly reminds as of as a way of “validating” Wakefield, is/was not particularly unusual in terms of its volume.

    I will say, though, that that last bit is something which I could make a professional judgement on – since that is sometimes part of my job – while John Stone would not have the faintest clue.

82. 
    John Stone
    February 27th, 2009
    21:35:41

    Kev

    “Three laboratory sites participated in MV RNA analyses: 1) Coombe Women’s Hospital, Trinity College; 2) Center for Infection and Immunity, CU, New York; 3) Measles, Mumps, Rubella, and Herpesvirus Laboratory Branch, CDC, Atlanta.”

    So, the results of O’Leary’s lab were consistent with the other two (including the two positive readings).

83. 
    Isabella Thomas
    February 27th, 2009
    21:36:58

    February 27, 2009 at 1:34 pm

    http://www.sciencedirect.com/s.....6e98bdad6d

    Measles vaccine is widely used, most often in association with mumps and rubella vaccines. We report here the case of a child presenting with fever 8 days after vaccination with a measles–mumps–rubella vaccine. Measles virus was isolated in a throat swab taken 4 days after fever onset. This virus was then further genetically characterised as a vaccine-type virus. Fever occurring subsequent to measles vaccination is related to the replication of the live attenuated vaccine virus. In the case presented here, the vaccine virus was isolated in the throat, showing that subcutaneous injection of an attenuated measles strain can result in respiratory excretion of this virus.

84. 
    Isabella Thomas
    February 27th, 2009
    21:38:13

    February 27, 2009 at 1:32 pm

    http://www.journals.uchicago.e.....086/520449

    We report a case of measles inclusion-body encephalitis (MIBE) occurring in an apparently
    healthy 21-month-old boy 8.5 months after measles-mumps-rubella vaccination. He had no prior
    evidence of immune deficiency and no history of measles exposure or clinical disease. During
    hospitalization, a primary immunodeficiency characterized by a profoundly depressed CD8 cell
    count and dysgammaglobulinemia was demonstrated. A brain biopsy revealed histopathologic
    features consistent with MIBE, and measles antigens were detected by immunohistochemical
    staining. Electron microscopy revealed inclusions characteristic of paramyxovirus nucleocapsids
    within neurons, oligodendroglia, and astrocytes. The presence of measles virus in the brain tissue was
    confirmed by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. The nucleotide sequence in the
    nucleoprotein and fusion gene regions was identical to that of the Moraten and Schwarz vaccine
    strains; the fusion gene differed from known genotype A wild-type viruses.

85. 
    Isabella Thomas
    February 27th, 2009
    21:39:34

    http://www.vaccinationnews.com.....inated.htm

86. 
    Kev
    February 27th, 2009
    21:52:06

    I thought that was the study you were referring to. Lets quote again from its conclusions:

    ....This study provides strong evidence against association of autism with persistent MV RNA in the GI tract or MMR exposure. Autism with GI disturbances is associated with elevated rates of regression in language or other skills and may represent an endophenotype distinct from other ASD.

    You, John, wouldn’t know the point of a study if it came up and introduced itself to you. So just in case you still don’t get it, let me go through it slowly.

    They looked, they found no association. They couldn’t replicate Wakefield. Nobody has, other than the man himself and various cronies.

    Do you know why?

    Because its junk science. I’m sorry John, I know that grates but aside from you and the rest of your troop nobody would trust Wakefield to clean the Bunsen burners out at the local high school. Holding hands and singing kum-by-ya outside the GMC won’t alter a goddamn thing you poor boob.

87. 
    Matrk
    February 27th, 2009
    22:27:05

    Kev
    I truly hope that some one filmed brian outside the GMC what I saw. I think even you would be disgusted.
    I listened to your 2006 podcast ,, where has that kev gone? all i see now it someone who has transfered his blame and guilt on to parents those whos kids may have suffered vaccine reactions.
    do you self a favour and go to a paediatric gastro unit and count the kids with autism.

    i’m off

88. 
    John Stone
    February 27th, 2009
    22:33:28

    Kev

    Well, actually they couldn’t state “no association” so they opted for “lack of association”. But they only had 5 out of 25 cases that were even possibly Wakefield type (the sample was weighted with cases that had developed symptoms before vaccination). They don’t mention whether in the two positve cases (one non-autistic but with GI symptoms) the symptoms devloped before after vaccination (an odd omission).

    So, in fact, aspects of the study are contradictary and given the very high levels of political hostility towards a positive result I think I know why.

    But there is another aspect of the Hornig study which is detrimental to the Deer case. It emphasises there are occasions when biopsies are clinically indicated. So we are left with the conundrum that John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch allegedly ordered biopsies on cases where it was not indicated, when there are probably many where it is. Why would they do that?

89. 
    Kev
    February 27th, 2009
    23:47:27

    Matkr, still no substance to the debate at hand? Is that your Grand Trampling Exit?

    John, I think its pretty obvious now that a sample that includes ‘cases that had developed symptoms before vaccination’ is exactly a Wakefield type.

    Look John, I have no idea why a seemingly intelligent man is so desperate to hang on to what my old friend MJ would refer to as semantics. I mean ‘no association’ vs ‘lack of association’. If you find enough green grass between those two positions to set up camp in then good luck. Seriously. You are going to need it. Out here in the real world we’re fully aware that no decent scientist is ever going to rule anything completely 100% out. Thats just not the way scientists work.

    I’m pretty sure if you want to ask Lipkin about the two kids he’d answer your questions. I’ve not come across any researchers yet who’ve totally blanked me when I’ve asked for more background.

    But please realise John that banking your hopes on two kids with GI symptoms is so far away from any kind of science that its going to do you no good.

    There’s only so many times you can split a hair before it disappears totally John.

90. 
    Sullivan
    February 27th, 2009
    23:56:19

    the sample was weighted with cases that had developed symptoms before vaccination

    .

    That spin works at Age of Autism, it doesn’t work here.

    The Hornig study did what Wakefield did not—look at patients who were consecutively referred to the clinic. Also, they looked at patients who has a clear need for colonoscopy—another detail that Wakefield claimed but didn’t actually have in his patients.

    So, the fact that there are a large number of patients who had onset of autistic symptoms prior to MMR is a RESULT.

    Again, it works with some. It is a good smokescreen. It doesn’t work with those who really look at the study critically.

    The fact that Wakefield tries this smokescreen is just another reason why I question his motives.

91. 
    Dedj
    February 28th, 2009
    00:04:32

    Surely if we looked at people with GI and autism where the autism was pre-MMR, and then looked at another group with the same dignosis, but with autism post-MMR – and then found no discernable difference – wouldn’t that – by lack of clear correllation – indicate another cause?

    I can’t even work out what’s being implied here.

92. 
    brian
    February 28th, 2009
    00:49:42

    John,

    I relied on the correspondence in the Lancet published in the months following the appearance of the 1998 Wakefield paper, not on Brian Deer, when I indicated that very early (years before Deer published on the MMR congtroversy) on it was clear that many of the children discussed in that paper were clients of one firm of solicitors.

    Dr. Hornig was unlikely to mention the testimony given in UK and US court proceedings in a scientific article. If you have difficulty understanding the PCR data, you should simply review Dr. Bustin’s testimony in Omnibus hearings. I cannot believe that anyone who both understands PCR and has read that testimony could support Uhlmann’s conclusions.

93. 
    John Stone
    February 28th, 2009
    00:58:48

    No, I guess in the end you cannot have a debate with people who repeat unsubstantiated allegations uncritically. You can only point to some of the fissures – like the improbability that Wakefield’s 12 co-authors allowed him to fiddle the data.
    In all probability Deer’s attempt to refloat his allegations the other week is a sign that the hearing which he has never reported on is failing to make the accusations stick.

94. 
    Sullivan
    February 28th, 2009
    01:39:28

    Do you ever read what you write critically?

    No, I guess in the end you cannot have a debate with people who repeat unsubstantiated allegations uncritically. You can only point to some of the fissures – like the improbability that Wakefield’s 12 co-authors allowed him to fiddle the data.

    Then you move directly into an unsubstantiated allegation!

    In all probability Deer’s attempt to refloat his allegations the other week is a sign that the hearing which he has never reported on is failing to make the accusations stick.

95. 
    John Stone
    February 28th, 2009
    01:48:02

    brian

    Wakefield states that none of the children in the study were in the litigation at the time it took place. I can find no counter statement, although Horton was concerned about an overlap it isn’t clear that he is challenging Wakefield’s word on this.

    http://image.thelancet.com/ext.....004web.pdf

96. 
    John Stone
    February 28th, 2009
    01:55:43

    Sullivan

    That’s not an allegation, it’s a speculation. I am trying to make sense of events – about the only thing Deer has reported from more than 100 days of testimony is a single sentence of Susan Davies. I suppose you could call that “quote mining”.

97. 
    brian
    February 28th, 2009
    02:45:27

    Wakefield states that none of the children in the study were in the litigation at the time it took place.

    John, I trained in medicine and molecular biology, so I’m rather ignorant of the difference between being “in litigation” and being clients of a firm of solicitors. I assume that the latter means that a suit has not yet been filed. However, I note that Dawborns MMR Newsletter for Spring 1997 (which I happened to find with a few moments effort when Goggle directed me to—you guessed it—Brian Deer’s site) includes this information: “The pilot study (being coordinated by Dr. Andrew Wakefield of the Royal Free Hospital) has already started and a number of children have already been tested.” As you may suggest, that may not mean that they were “in litigation”, but it does not mean that they were not clients of the firm, nor does it provide any support for the notion that Wakefield correctly indicated that his 12 subjects were “consecutively referred” to avoid bias.

98. 
    John Stone
    February 28th, 2009
    07:27:39

    brian

    I doubt whether John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch were influenced by litigation bias when making any clinical decisions, though they would certainly aware of Wakefield’s position, and were cautious about it. By this stage, also, Richard Horton had twice had his atttention directed to the situation – once privately by an MCA official and once by Richard Barr of Dawbarns, so it wasn’t any secret:

    http://www.ageofautism.com/200.....ffair.html

    I would point out that Brian Deer has been completely reticent about this dramatic new evidence since it was presented at the GMC by Wakefield last April.

    I do not have to hand the date when the paper was submitted to the Lancet. The Dawbarns spring newsletter was dated May 1997. If Dawbarns knew about it this still did not necessarily entail any of the subjects being clients at the time. I think it is obvious that while a legal firm in any litigation takes sides (irrespective of which) any retained experts have a different obligation.

    If we begin on this game we can also raise eyebrows at the £225,000 paid to Stephen Bustin by the defendant companies through a solicitor. What’s the difference?

99. 
    brian
    March 1st, 2009
    02:33:40

    This is a scientific question, John, not as you and others have frequently framed it a game of “who to trust”, and the evidence is clearly against Wakefield.

100. 
     John Stone
     March 1st, 2009
     11:06:29

     Brian

     Any genuinely trustworthy science would have paid heed to the parents and the condition of the children, as the Royal Free doctors did. But official hostility was there from the beginning, and the evidence base and the culture of this “science” has always been “Go, away and shut up”. That is not really the foundation of knowledge: it is just bureacratic and legal expedience. This does not in itself make the Wakefield hypothesis scientifically right but it does place the attack on him in a certain context which has little to do with how respectable science should be conducted.

101. 
     A Scientist
     March 1st, 2009
     11:39:20

     The “context” may have contributed to the detailed attention which Wakefield’s published work got. But that is as it should be with a question of significant public health importance. And the context IN NO WAY invalidates all the actual SCIENCE that consequently got done to check out Wakefield’s claims, all of which is against him.

     In fact, the early debate that the work produced (see Brian’s posts earlier) and the mass of later research that re-checked Wakefield’s methods, endoscopy findings, epidemiology etc etc. shows that the possibility of an MMR-autism link WAS considered and looked into very seriously. John and his friends at JABS just persist, year after year, in viewing this medical and scientific “process” as a conspiracy – the reason being that it shows that the man they placed their faith in got the science wrong, and possibly much worse.

     As Brian just said, it is a scientific question and the science is comprehensively against Wakefield – regardless of whether you believe he twiddled the data.

102. 
     John Stone
     March 1st, 2009
     12:44:03

     Well, I note that people are now some what keener to move the debate away from the claims of Brian Deer.

     Personally, I doubt whether the scientific case against the Wakefield hypothesis is really shut, but then I agree I am not an expert. But even if it was it does not answer what happened to a group or sub-group of children following MMR vaccination: it only eliminates that hypothesis.

     The question is, once the possibility is conceded that a vaccine (or combination of vaccines) can have catastrophic consquences – such as in the Poling or Banks cases (or many more) – I am not sure how you come to a scientific view that it necessarily doesn’t happen very often. But I think also if you treat parents with disdain and contempt if they step out of line it prejudices the outcome.

103. 
     John Stone
     March 1st, 2009
     12:48:10

     “But I think also if you treat parents with disdain and contempt if they step out of line it prejudices the outcome.”

     It worries me that I keep on coming across people who proclaim theselves to be scientists who seem indifferent to this problem.

104. 
     One Queer Fish
     March 1st, 2009
     14:27:09

     The so called scientists seem to be absent with critical science data as in the Judge Eady letters, the falsified Dr Wakefield data .. symptoms of Mr Deer . yet again!!

105. 
     A Scientist
     March 1st, 2009
     16:47:20

     We are not trying to move away from Brian Deer’s actions, John.

     It is quite a simple thought-process, really, despite all your bluster and distraction tactics. Namely:

     (i) The science has overwhelmingly shown – to the satisfaction of all scientists and doctors apart from a very few fringe nutters – that Wakefield was completely wrong, on all counts.

     (ii) The question inevitably arises of just HOW he could have got it so wrong, and done his research so technically poorly – especially given the trenchant nature of all his public statements.

     (iii) Brian Deer has given us, in his programmes, a plausible explanation for how and why Wakefield’s research was so dramatically in error – i.e. that it was a fix, and the result of cherry-picking data (at the very least) to a preconceived agenda. Deer has backed up this explanation with lots and lots of evidence. In doing this, he has done an entirely legitimate journalistic enquiry into what were pervasive suspicions about Wakefield in the trade.

     Personally, I wish that the RFH (or UCL as then was) had announced a full academic enquiry, led by an independent expert, into the allegations of (in effect) research misconduct against Wakefield and co. The RFH could have done this much earlier – since the suspicions were widespread in the trade, as the small print of the Autism Omnibus rulings reveal – and certainly should have done once Deer’s story broke in early 2004. However, the RFH have throughout been stunningly silent, and one can only really conclude that they just wanted to forget the whole episode. Since the RFH never seemed to want to get to the bottom of things, Deer ploughed on – that is what investigative journalists do.

     Again, the overwhelming majority opinion among the doctors and scientists I know is that Deer has done everyone involved, and the cause of scientific truth, a favour. If Wakefield is a data fabricator of the kind alleged, then that is the worst kind of scientific fraudster. People who commit the kind of scientific fraud of which he is accused deserve to be exposed until there is not the slightest smidgeon of doubt left.

106. 
     John Stone
     March 1st, 2009
     18:02:35

     It is evident that the Royal Free reviewed all this material in 2004 (in conjunction with Lancet) and didn’t come up with anything apart from the failing contention that the Lancet did not know about the litigation, although there were probably all sorts of people on hand who might have liked to:

     http://image.thelancet.com/ext.....004web.pdf

     But so far from Deer’s latest allegation being new, let alone plausible the prosecution at the GMC have sought relentlessly to suggest that the three doctors fabricated the symptoms (in the case of John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch without the slightest motive): that is exactly how the case has been constructed. Apart from that – as it has been pointed our over and over – if Wakefield fabricated the data behind everyone else’s back, how did they all come to sign the paper? These are incredible allegations.

     I don’t know who you are “a scientist” or what your claims to be a scientist are, but you do not impress with your highly prejudicial assessment of the case, for which so little documentation has been provided. Indeed, I might be less sceptical of the claim that Wakefield is/was simply mistaken if it did not come with all the other junk (notably the sick pretence that the children were not ill).

     Anyhow, Mr Deer could certainly clarify what the evidence is, if any, by publishing his GMC correspondence – which thanks to Judge Eady we know took the form of at least 3 complaints.

107. 
     Isabella Thomas
     March 1st, 2009
     20:30:49

     This story should be everywhere in the news.
     http://www.news12.com/NewCDA/a.....;id=214694

     The Poling case proved mitochondrial disorder could result in autism.

108. 
     Sullivan
     March 1st, 2009
     22:57:34

     Isabella Thomas,

     why the tangent?

     Court cases don’t prove science. They demonstrate that one has a reasonable enough argument to win a legal settlement.

     The Omnibus doesn’t prove anything other than the fact that the “science” behind MMR causing autism is painfully weak. Oddly enough, even those who promote MMR causation have been admitting that. Too bad they aren’t honest enough to toss Dr. Wakefield’s study onto the bonfire of bad ideas.

     This is not to take away from the possible link between autism and mitochondrial disorders. There have been reasonable scientists looking at this for some time. They have published a few papers. Unfortunately, few people have read them. They clearly demonstrate that a key piece is missing in the assumptions everyone makes: few of those studied with mitochondrial disorders and autism show regression. The number jumped up significantly with the recent paper, and it will be interesting to see how that is accepted in by the research community as there are some features of that work that are not generally accepted.

109. 
     Isabella Thomas
     March 1st, 2009
     23:35:39

     MMR vaccine manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline has appointed to its Board the head of News International James Murdoch and the boss of The Sunday Times freelance journalist who has been campaigning to discredit research into the link between MMR vaccine and autism in the US and UK [James Murdoch joins Glaxo board – Andrew Jack and Ben Fenton Financial Times 2 February 2009].
     James Murdoch took up his appointment alongside Sir Crispin Davis the CEO of The Lancet medical journals owners. Sir Crispin is brother of Judge Nigel Davis whose English High Court judgement in February 2004 saw the end of British childrens MMR vaccine injury claims [MMR Judge Faces Probe Over Brother’s Links to Vaccine Firm – Evening Standard, London 9 May 2007].

     http://childhealthsafety.wordp.....ine-cases/

110. 
     alyric
     March 1st, 2009
     23:53:20

     John is so fixated on Deer’s journalistic efforts that he quite forgets the mountain of adverse evidence that piled up against Wakefield during the Omnibus or just how far back the stench associated with his methodologies went. Here’s the Vowell Snyder decision at the time when Wakers was all set to make his name through Crohn’s disease not autism.

     “Doctor Wakefield published other papers, in 1995241 and 1997,242 stating that
     measles virus causes Crohn’s disease. Concerns developed about Dr. Wakefield’s
     claims when a French researcher noted that the antibody Dr. Wakefield used to identify
     measles virus reacted with all tissues, not just inflamed bowel tissue. A Japanese
     research group used PCR techniques on tissue samples from Crohn’s disease patients,
     and was also unable to detect the virus.243 A Japanese research group also examined
     the second antibody Dr. Wakefield used to detect measles virus, and the researchers determined that it was reacting with a human protein.”

     Nice going Wakers. Fast forward to the ‘Autistic Enterocolitis’ hypothesis and the 1998 Lancet paper.

     “Doctor MacDonald characterized this paper as
     “probably the worst paper that’s ever been published in the history of [Lancet].”
     Hazlehurst Tr. at 633A-34A. Ten of the paper’s 12 authors later filed a “Retraction of an Interpretation” of the paper.”

     And then there was Chadwick’s work on the Lancet kids supposed measles vaccine virus in the gut:

     “Doctor Chadwick testified
     that he began working for Dr. Wakefield in 1994. He began testing tissue and blood samples from autistic
     children in 1996 for the presence of measles virus RNA. Nine of the samples initially tested positive for
     the presence of measles virus, but confirmatory gene sequencing at another laboratory demonstrated
     that all of these results were false positives. Cedillo Tr. at 2283-89A. He informed Dr. Wakefield of these
     negative results. Cedillo Tr. at 2286-87. Doctor Chadwick’s declaration, filed as Cedillo Res. Ex. QQ,
     contained more detail regarding this conversation. He stated that he had earlier informed Dr. Wakefield of
     the negative PCR tests for measles virus, and specifically asked not to be included on the list of authors
     for publication because of the negative results.”

     No mention of this anywhere in the paper eh Wakers?

     There were other experts who were not at all impressed by either Wakers or his work and not forgetting that Wakers managed to get his work investigated by the Medical Research Council, which together with the GMC must be something of a record.

     “Respondent’s witnesses were highly critical of Dr. Wakefield’s hypothesis, and of
     Dr. Wakefield personally. Doctors MacDonald and Fombonne were both part of a U.K.
     Medical Research Council investigation into Dr. Wakefield’s claims. Doctor MacDonald
     found evidence suggesting fraud. Doctor Rima examined some of the evidence Dr.
     Wakefield relied upon and found that it was not what Dr. Wakefield claimed it to be. Doctors Ward and Griffin both had personal experiences with Dr. Wakefield that left
     them highly skeptical of his claims.”

     Dr MacDonald:

     “Doctor MacDonald criticized the 1998 Wakefield paper for its lack of proper
     controls, but focused much of his criticism on the misleading statements it contained….
     Doctor MacDonald characterized Dr. Wakefield’s theory as “incredible,” “fantastic,” “improbable,” and “not based on any data.”

     Doctor MacDonald was even more critical of the Wakefield 2002 paper.253 At
     the Hazlehurst hearing, he characterized the Wakefield 2002 paper as scientific
     deception.

     During his testimony in Hazlehurst, Dr. MacDonald used four endoscopy
     photographs that appeared in Dr. Wakefield’s 2002 paper as examples. Although the
     four photographs purportedly show ileum, Dr. MacDonald explained that the time
     stamps that appear on them indicated that Panel A was cecum, not ileum. He
     characterized this as “something of a deception.” He also noted that the control
     children in this study did not have chronic constipation, which was the primary
     presenting symptom of the autistic children, and, thus, any comparison with the control
     children was misleading.”

     Dr Rima:

     “He met Dr. Wakefield at a conference in 1992, where a number of measles
     virologists looked at the material Dr. Wakefield had produced. Doctor Rima attended
     two meetings, and concluded that the material produced in support of Dr. Wakefield’s claims was highly selective, and that Dr. Wakefield was not responsive to criticisms of his findings. The cellular material that Dr. Wakefield claimed was measles virus was not measles virus.

     In 1995, one of Dr. Wakefield’s students approached Dr. Rima about coauthoring
     a paper. After examining the data supplied by the student, Dr. Rima
     concluded that the findings of measles virus were based on contamination from a
     measles virus clone he had previously supplied to Dr. Wakefield as a positive control
     for his research. When an abstract concerning positive results for the presence of
     measles virus was not retracted after Dr. Rima informed them of the contamination, Dr. Rima formally withdrew from his collaboration with Dr. Wakefield.”

     Dr Griffin

     “When Dr. Wakefield first began to implicate MMR as a cause of autism, he
     invited Dr. Griffin to the U.K. as a consultant, presumably based on her expertise with
     measles virology. Cedillo Tr. at 2832A. She spoke with people from his laboratory at
     an open scientific meeting where they indicated they were having problems getting their
     PCR testing to work. Cedillo Tr. at 2861A-62. It was quickly apparent to Dr. Griffin that
     Dr. Wakefield’s laboratory personnel did not know how to perform PCR testing and
     analysis. Based on her personal interactions with Dr. Wakefield, she was suspicious of
     the research he did, and she declined the consultation offer.”

     Dr Ward

     “Doctor Ward testified that Dr. Wakefield presented data from an abstract of work
     done by Dr. Ward’s laboratory as supportive of Dr. Wakefield’s MMR-autism hypothesis. Doctor Ward personally cautioned Dr. Wakefield against relying on this
     data because what was presented initially in the abstract turned out to be wrong.”

     That’s a sizeable selection of the world’s experts in this area who appear to be very well acquainted with and apparently revolted by the research efforts of Wakefield. Deer’s findings will always stand but Wakers has to try to overcome what looks to be a really bad reputation in scientific circles. The GMC will have noted all of this testimony.

111. 
     Isabella Thomas
     March 2nd, 2009
     00:57:47

     “What looked like Crohn’s disease turned out to be Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, seen also sometimes with non-specific colitis and pervasive developmental disorder. All as reported in a now famous paper published in The Lancet in 1998 and which still stands today and has been replicated in other studies.

     10 of the authors retracted one sentence in March 2004 and three did not and it was done to take the heat off from Government and others who complained about the effect the finding might have on childhood vaccination programmes. The one sentence is the “interpretation” and states “Interpretation We identified associated gastrointestinal disease and developmental regression in a group of previously normal children, which was generally associated in time with possible environmental triggers.”.

     The paper stands today despite Brian Deer’s best efforts. And he still has not published his complaint letters to substantiate his claims he is not the GMC complainant.

     And look at Deer’s articles – unlike professional journalists the world over where are all the experts making the claims he is supposed to be reporting in his stories – they are not there – on Deer’s own admission the world is asked to take Brian Deer’s word for it – from Brian Deer the expert gastroenterologist, Brian Deer the expert neurologist, Brian Deer the autism expert, Brian Deer the expert psychologist, Brian Deer the expert psychiatrist, Brian Deer the expert histopathologist, Brian Deer the patent expert etc etc etc.”

112. 
     John Stone
     March 2nd, 2009
     01:38:36

     alyric

     For the last 5 years Andrew Wakefield has only been able to answer his critics in a limited way because of attacks against his integrity, and quite obviously the pace of his research has been slowed as well.

     I would, however, point out that Hornig study identified measles virus RNA in the ileum of two patients confirmed in three laboratories, which presumably ought not to have happened according to the experts cited.

     But I don’t think we should forget the flawed reporting of Brian Deer. I note that he has not answered any of my criticisms, though I sense him hovering about somewhere.

113. 
     Ringside Seat
     March 2nd, 2009
     01:43:34

     Calm down dear…

     One would not expect the rest of the paper to go where it belongs less than three weeks after Mr Deer’s report.

     I’m not sure he claims to be any of these things. He’s a newspaper reporter, I believe, and as such would gather documents, do interviews, that sort of thing. If a medical report says “Aspergers – not previously normal” and the Lancet says “regressive autism – previously normal”, for the same child, that would be fraud, and presumably Mr Deer would know that.

     I see he says on his website that he supports calls for an investigation into his work.

     http://briandeer.com/solved/solved.htm

114. 
     One Queer Fish
     March 2nd, 2009
     01:56:09

     I’m very confused. Just because one person or several Chadwick et-al proposes a hypothesis, that does not preclude other people working or advancing it.Quite simply discrediting the original proponent of an idea(some 10 years ago), does not invalidate the idea, especially if others are advancing the theory and studying it or it’s components.

     As for Chadwick et-al and study flaws, quite simply these can take many forms: methodology, data capture, etc. In science, a hypothesis always exists independently of a study. Several studies can be created around a single hypothesis to either prove or disprove it. To discredit the data capture, and/or person, does not automatically invalidate the hypothesis. Only studies can do that. The above so called Drs Chadwick et-al have done no studies to my knowledge that disprove the hypothesis—even the extensive vaunted Cochrane report stated as much (despite extreme conflicts of interests in that review).And as Mr Stone states the Hornig as well.

     . And despite the high emotions on here and opinions, this debate /forum is supposed to be about science, not belief as stated above by the Drs . It is pointless and has nothing to do with beliefs if they the expert Drs cannot back it up with studies and hard evidence such as Mr Deer with his Judge Eady complaint letters quite simply lacking as the Drs beliefs are above –NO EVIDENCE

115. 
     John Stone
     March 2nd, 2009
     02:04:20

     Ringside Seat

     Perhaps, Mr Deer can save everyone the time, expense and tedium of such enquiry by simply publishing his correspondence with the GMC and its lawyers.

116. 
     Sullivan
     March 2nd, 2009
     02:28:16

     Mr Stone,

     you avoid the subject and try to pretend that those letters are the actual subject.

     Will those letters make it clear whether Dr. Wakefield’s reported data on his patients matches what is actually in their records? No.

     You can’t face that question head on, so you dodge it and throw up chaff.

     If the information presented in Mr. Deer’s report is accurate (if even some of it is accurate), Dr. Wakefield’s Lancet paper will be complete nonsense. I, for one, will call on the editors to print a retraction and I suspect others will as well. Frankly, Dr. Wakefield should be calling to see the raw data itself, and, if Mr. Deer’s account is accurate, Dr. Wakefield should call for a retraction himself. Even if he doesn’t, at that point you should be calling for a retraction and you should admit that the paper is wrong. Somehow I don’t suspect that either you or Dr. Wakefield have that level of integrity. Sorry to put it so bluntly, but your tactics on the discussions here show that to be the most likely case.

     You may now ignore everything I wrote and ask for those letters to be made public, as though that affects the subject at hand in the slightest. Perhaps I could just write your response for you? It has become that formulaic.

117. 
     Roger
     March 2nd, 2009
     06:34:51

     Dedj on February 28th, 2009 00:04:32

     Surely if we looked at people with GI and autism where the autism was pre-MMR, and then looked at another group with the same dignosis, but with autism post-MMR – and then found no discernable difference – wouldn’t that – by lack of clear correllation – indicate another cause?

     There are those of us,myself included,who have autism,bowel disease,and mitochondrial disease,who are too old to have gotten the MMR shot.The David Kirbys,Age of Autisms, JABS,et al simply ignore us,and want to pretend we don’t exist.When you try to contact them by email,they simply do not answer you.

     They simply have so much invested in this disproven theory to acknowledge someone like me.This includes the lucrative business they have selling chelation,and other dangerous “cures” for autism.To do so,would jeopardize all this,so don’t hold your breath waiting for this to happen.

118. 
     John Stone
     March 2nd, 2009
     07:31:33

     Sullivan

     Your response is based on a somewhat large “if” but I am certainly not against reviewing the evidence. But it all so far depends on the global competence one journalist (with never a hint of bias?)

     And I would point out also that this evidence is being extensively reviewed at the GMC.

     Roger

     No, there could be different causes or environmental triggers in different cases – the gut brain issue would remain anyway. However, we do not know anything about the selection that I can see in the Hornig study – it just says the subjects were recruited.

119. 
     Isabella Thomas
     March 2nd, 2009
     10:00:16

     Roger,

     I am so very sorry that you are suffering in such a way and there are adults like you who should be investigated especially with your bowel problems. Do you have any help from the Department of Health? I wonder how many more like you are suffering?
     It is so important to do the research and find out what causes these problems. Is it environmental? What other vaccines did you have? My older sister was such a happy girl with many friends at school. We used to be so close and I went everywhere with her.
     At the age of seven she had a smallpox vaccine and suffered very badly. She is now in a home as she cannot look after herself. It was such a shock for me especially seeing her so ill and not knowing what was wrong. I had the vaccine at the same time and remember every bone in my body in pain.I was not told about this until my children were older and my Dad felt guilty when my boys reacted to the MMR vaccine.
     I do strongly believe there is a predisposition in some families and their immune systems are not normal. Again we need urgent research to find which families are affected so they can choose what to do.The rise is too sharp in children with so many problems and it must be stopped. If there is anything I can do to help let me know.

120. 
     One Queer Fish
     March 2nd, 2009
     11:39:38

     Sulliavan

     “Will those letters make it clear whether Dr. Wakefield’s reported data on his patients matches what is actually in their records? No.”

     Quite simply how do we know if we haven’t seen the papers ?it might add weight to Mr Deers beliefs? It seems by your comment you have seen the letters of complaint ,so maybe you could be so kind to disclose a bit more of your observations, if you don’t mind please.

121. 
     John Stone
     March 2nd, 2009
     12:17:29

     One Queer Fish

     This is a nice point: Sullivan would seem to have an advantage over us.

122. 
     Janet Rossington
     March 2nd, 2009
     19:15:43

     Alyric (March 1st, 2009 23:53:20) shows an ability to scrutinise masses of data in the Omnibus hearing not dissimilar to Brian Deer’s. But look at the authorities Alyric cites. They are nearly all expert witnesses previously acting for the MMR manufacturers in the (unheard) UK MMR action of the early 2000s: McDonald, Rima, Griffin, Fombonne. Whilst the US hearing has given an outlet for these views, in the UK secrecy wraps were placed around the MMR claimants’ expert witness reports and their analysis of the manufacturers research findings. The omnibus hearing has given a free license to the anti Wakefield scientists whilst benefiting from the secrecy that continues to surround the evidence of the UK claimants. Only the full release of all the evidence in the UK case will allow a balanced judgment to be reached. But would the manufacturers ever allow this?

123. 
     Sullivan
     March 2nd, 2009
     21:41:23

     Janet Rossington,

     you are working from bad assumptions. The expert reports from the MMR action might have been available for the Omnibus petitioners—they just didn’t ask for them.

     You are invited to look through this document, Section D.

     Representatives of the 7 PSC informed the special masters and respondent during an unrecorded OAP status conference held on June 27, 2008 that counsel acting on behalf of the PSC in the United Kingdom had informed the PSC that, without consent from the experts of interest, there was little likelihood of obtaining the release of the desired reports from the court in the United Kingdom. Accordingly, more than one year after the conduct of the hearing in the Cedillo case, the PSC decided not to file an application with the court in the United Kingdom.

     So, the reason why the reports weren’t provided (or even ask for) by the petitioners is the fact that the experts wouldn’t give permission.

     Before you assume that this is a block by the vaccine manufacturers, note this document which has a letter from the Special Masters to the UK court lending support to the PSC request for the expert reports.

     The letter makes it clear that the PSC was asking for reports from the claimants in the UK litigation.

     Read that again—the experts working for the claimants in the UK litigation didn’t give permission for their reports to be provided to the PSC.

124. 
     Sullivan
     March 2nd, 2009
     21:51:18

     OQF, Mr. Stone,

     you are soo reaching on that one as to be funny.

     It appears to this reader that this discussion is no longer fruitful.

     I hope that someone checks the medical records that Mr. Deer has reported on. The correspondence—well, you can fish for that red herring all you like. What will make a difference in the end is the medical records.

     If Mr. Deer’s reporting is correct, Dr. Wakefield’s papers need to be retracted in total.

125. 
     Dedj
     March 2nd, 2009
     22:27:39

     ..........and these guys are still going to get paid at the end of it all?

     Wow, if I didn’t do the obvious like these guys didn’t (note how it was Kathleen Siedal who had to find previous cases for them) I’d be lucky to be looking at the wrong end of a reprimand, much less a fitness to practice hearing.

126. 
     A Scientist
     March 2nd, 2009
     22:32:36

     I now I shouldn’t bother, but… with respect to John Stone’s last “response” to me:

     Clinical research studies with a dozen authors often mean that many of the people involved actually did rather little, and only really “owned” one piece of the jigsaw. For instance, it used to be quite common for surgeons to “co-author” studies simply on the basis of providing surgical tissue specimens for experimental studies. In general, pathologists will often simply have assessed pathological specimens; lab folk will have done PCR amplifications, assays or immunohistochemistry; specialists from other disciplines will have done their specialist thing (like a neurological assessment of a patient) but again may have had little sense of the overall picture.

     The published acknowledgement at the end of the 1998 Lancet paper, and the various indications in the text about who did what bit(s) of the work, bear this out. I expect all the authors saw one or more drafts of the paper at some stage, but it is more than feasible that only Wakefield, as the prime mover and orchestrator of the whole project, and perhaps Walker-Smith as the senior clinician, saw all the data. One could contest the scientific ethics of a lot of people authoring a paper where most of them probably didn’t know the ins and outs of all of what was in it – but it was common then, and I suspect it remains so now.

     Your sniping at me in the 3rd para:

     “I don’t know who you are… or what your claims to be a scientist are, but you do not impress…”

     – are par for the course, again, for you and your friends when dealing with anyone that contests your view of “Saint Andy” and his work. For the record, I graduated with in Chemistry (major) and Biochemistry (minor); did a PhD in physiology; and have been a tenured faculty member in a basic science Department in a medical school for the last 20-odd years. I teach medical students, do cell biological research, and have published between forty and fifty papers. These are mostly in science journals, but on occasion in more medical journals when the work is a result of collaboration with my colleagues in clinical research departments (who include cardiologists and gastroenterologists).

     And before you add your next predictable jibe, I have never been funded by the drug companies – or by a lawyer – but only by peer-reviewed research grants from government research funding organisations and charities.

     As to the last remark in your 3rd paragraph; no-one has contended that the children referred to the RFH had problems. What has been resoundingly disproved is the idea that persistent measles virus in the gut was the cause. I find it difficult to believe that the fruitless fifteen-year pursuit of the illusory MMR causation theory has helped ANYONE involved.

     Finally, feel free to have the last word, as I do not have your indefatigability and I have other stuff to do. I only hope there are some readers here who, if they are “undecided”, can see through your harangues, nit-pickings and evasions to the scientific facts.

127. 
     John Stone
     March 2nd, 2009
     22:35:15

     Don’t be a child John. You’re about one stupid action away from getting this thread closed as well. – Kev.

128. 
     John Stone
     March 2nd, 2009
     23:41:34

     A Scientist

     Just to mention that my snores were directed at the preceding posts, not yours which was not up at the time – and which perhaps deserves a little better. What I would point out is that what you are saying about the lesser authors would put them in a much easier position to dissociate themselves completely, but actually in 2004 the 10 only did in a very limited way, and I should imagine under very considerable pressure. So, I don’t know about that as an explanation.

     I don’t agree with you about the nature of the prosecution. They have been trying to make out that John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch were not making decisions on clinical need (in which the measles hypothesis was just a single issue), and I think that is a mischievous imputation. When there are plenty of children with autism and complex bowel problems, why would they be ordering biopsies on children who didn’t?

129. 
     One Queer Fish
     March 2nd, 2009
     23:59:27

     Sully my friend

     “Still Waters Run Deep”

130. 
     brian
     March 3rd, 2009
     03:19:55

     It’s interesting to see repeated protests that a Wakefield paper “stands” simply because it has not been completely retracted, as if it’s reasonable to believe that the earth rests on an elephant that stands on a turtle simply because the original suggestion was not retracted by the authors. One Queer Fish and Isabella Thomas suggested that Wakefield’s work ‘stands’, and John Stone has again echoed the unbiased science mavens at Thoughtful House by suggesting that the recent Hornig study somehow validates the thoroughly-discredited work done years earlier by Uhlmann et al. Science doesn’t work that way, as “a scientist” indicated in an earlier post: The problems must be clearly egregious before a paper is retracted?usually, we just move on.

     However, here’s a comment from someone who actually understands the science related to one of the main pillars of the MMR-autism idea, an expert who clearly thinks that the quality of the work in this area merits special attention: “Astonishingly, there is no attempt to retract the original report [Uhlmann et al.], and the admission [by Hornig et al. that [their] results are in direct contradiction of the previously reported ones are thoroughly disingenuous…”

     That’s from Stephen. Bustin, who reviewed the PCR-related aspects of Wakefield’s work in an article (http://www.badscience.net/wp-c.....p_mmr.pdf)) in which he clearly explained: “The purpose of this communication is to highlight the two key lines of reasoning that prove with the highest degree of certainty that Prof O’Leary’s laboratory was detecting contaminants, and that these contaminants were DNA. This is a decisive finding, since MV does not exist in DNA form. Hence the assay cannot be detecting MV and, in the absence of this bedrock evidence, any proposed link between measles virus, MMR and autism is demonstrably unsustainable.”

     Of course, John Stone, One Queer Fish, or Isabella might be able to explain how the reasoning of an internationally-recognized authority on the polymerase chain reaction is so flawed that the Uhlmann paper still ‘stands’ or Hornig confirms the Uhlmann work—but I doubt that’s possible. But before you reply, let me ask a question: I think I can understand Dr Bustin’s objections to the Wakefield PCR work since 18 years after I began using the reaction in my laboratory my research still involves using PCR to determine clinical endpoints, and Bustin’s objections seem reasonable to me—what experience do you have in this area that can allow you to conclude that Bustin is wrong? I readily acknowledge that you, like many people, may know more about this area of science than I do, but do you think that you really understand PCR better than Dr Bustin does?

131. 
     alyric
     March 3rd, 2009
     03:27:15

     What a load of crock this entire post is.

     “What looked like Crohn’s disease turned out to be Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, seen also sometimes with non-specific colitis and pervasive developmental disorder. All as reported in a now famous paper published in The Lancet in 1998 and which still stands today and has been replicated in other studies.”

     Get real – Crohn’s disease can be mistaken fir INL, which isn’t pathological anyway, no matter what Wakers liked to believe?

     “10 of the authors retracted one sentence in March 2004 and three did not and it was done to take the heat off from Government and others who complained about the effect the finding might have on childhood vaccination programmes. The one sentence is the “interpretation” and states “Interpretation We identified associated gastrointestinal disease and developmental regression in a group of previously normal children, which was generally associated in time with possible environmental triggers.”.

     Conspiracy time again. Couldn’t come up with a more believable explanation?

     “The paper stands today despite Brian Deer’s best efforts. And he still has not published his complaint letters to substantiate his claims he is not the GMC complainant.”

     He’s not the complainant and never has been. You’ve been told that a few dozen times and have never come up with a refutation – not mind you that you’ve demonstrated any capacity for such.

     “And look at Deer’s articles – unlike professional journalists the world over where are all the experts making the claims he is supposed to be reporting in his stories – they are not there – on Deer’s own admission the world is asked to take Brian Deer’s word for it – from Brian Deer the expert gastroenterologist, Brian Deer the expert neurologist, Brian Deer the autism expert, Brian Deer the expert psychologist, Brian Deer the expert psychiatrist, Brian Deer the expert histopathologist, Brian Deer the patent expert etc etc etc.”

     This is just plain silly. According to yuor ill managed brain a journalist can’t report on anything that he is not academically qualified for.

     An entire post full of tripe.

132. 
     John Stone
     March 3rd, 2009
     08:02:49

     “alyric”

     You say Brian Deer is not the complainant but how do you know? A High Court judge said he was the complainant in a ruling and Deer has been completely unwilling to publish the documents, so surely we must assume until further notice that the judge was right.

133. 
     John Stone
     March 3rd, 2009
     10:02:08

     Brian

     Bustin was, of course, handsomely recompensed (£225,000 even before his appearance at the vaccine court):

     http://www.jabs.org.uk/pages/yazbak-expert.asp

     I am not sure what he is saying about Hornig et al – it sounds like some form of accusation. Certainly, the evidence of Hornig problematises the issue (as I have pointed out, to everyone’s fury), and keeps the Wakefield hypothesis alive (in spite of the headline conclusions). The study verified across 3 labs the presence of persistent measles virus in the ileum of two patients with bowel disease (and one with autism) – so, oh dear, the story is not over.

134. 
     Isabella Thomas
     March 3rd, 2009
     10:19:03

     A scientist,

     Common observations.

     The purpose of this communication is to set out in simple terms the present status of the vaccine/autism problem.

     There is no evidence available to support the views held by a cabal of so-called medicinal product regulators and health care professionals that the observed increase in a regressive developmental behavioural condition having similarities to “autism” is not a real increase but is due to “better diagnosing” or “diagnostic redefining”.

     Since there is, after a decade of experience, no such evidence, the reality of an increase has to be accepted as fact.

     What follows has nothing to do with science, just common observation.

     Starting somewhere about 1995 reports began to appear concerning a hitherto unrecognised clinical condition in young children characterised by inflammatory bowel disease and a regressive behavioural disorder classified as autism. Since that time parental accounts have added numerous other abnormalities, all or some of which are present in affected children.

     The following is a list of reported characteristics-

     1.A period of normal development
     2.Loss of previously learnt capabilities particularly speech, eye contact and, mistakenly, hearing.
     3.Appearance of worsening bowel problems – diarrhoea/constipation/incontinence/passage of undigested food
     4.Abdominal pain often severe and disabling
     5.Abnormal thirst
     6.Body temperature dysregulation and loss of thermal sensitivity
     7.Prolonged periods of hyperpyrexia in the absence of identifiable infection
     8.Sleep disturbance, frequently very distressing
     9.Repetitive muscular activity, apparently uncontrollable – bizarre posturing possibly due to pain
     10.Temper tantrums and prolonged screaming, convulsions
     11.Violent behaviour
     12.Even in the absence of speech the child may communicate distressing insight into their own disablilities
     13.Lack of appreciation of danger
     14.Dietary intolerance, often severe
     15.Failure to thrive
     16.Precocious sexual development
     17.Various biochemical abnormalities
     18.Endoscopic and biopsy evidence of serious bowel disease.
     19.Variable improvements with dietary restrictions
     20.Gait disturbance, unsteadiness and tip-toe walking
     21.Skin rashes in the absence of obvious cause
     22.Raised urinary uracil and thymine levels
     23.Dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase deficiency

     This new syndrome has arisen within certain particular circumstances. The simple observational facts are as follows –

     1.There were no reports of any affected children prior to the end of the 1980’s. Almost all have arisen in the past 10 to 15 years.
     2.There have been no reports of children suffering the initiation of this syndrome of abnormalities over the age of about five years and almost all have been at a still earlier age. There are no reports of the syndrome first appearing in adolescence or adulthood.
     3.This most unusual clinical picture has arisen simultaneously in the USA, the UK, Canada, Japan and most developed countries. That is, between about 1990 (probably later) and 2008.

     Whatever the cause of the syndrome may be it has to be consistent with these three incontrovertible facts.

     Any causative agent therefore must have been either absent or inactive prior to the late 1980’s, it must have been either inaccessible or inactive to individuals over the age of about five years and to have become active at precisely the same time over most of planet earth. This is not science, they are simply the requirements arising from common observation.

     It hardly needs to be said that causal possibilities are considerably restricted. A number of suggestions have been made which include pollutants, dietary factors, infectious agents and various toxic materials. None of these are compatible with the observed constraints which require, firstly, that they would have been absent or inactive prior to the end of the 1980’s, secondly, they would have to have been specifically and exclusively active in young children and, thirdly, they would have had to become available in widely separated countries at exactly the same time.

     Someone I know in the past has been a United Kingdom representative on the OECD Chemicals Programme, the EU toxicology programme, a medical advisor to the UK Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food, the UK Health and Safety Executive and the Consumer Protection Unit of the Department of Trade and Industry and has known of no material or agent that would meet these requirements.

     The expansion of childhood vaccination programmes is a possible and plausible causative factor. This is not science, it is a fact which is consistent with the constraints. I fully agree that this is not proof of causality it is just the best possibility until someone comes up with a better one. Until that time we have to accept vaccination as the primary suspect.

     The list of characteristics and clinical disorders above strongly support the view that some or all are basically autoimmune conditions which are well known and accepted adverse reactions to most childhood vaccines. This raises yet another non-scientific question – if we accept that certain autoimmune conditions, Guillain-Barre syndrome, juvenile arthritis and type 1 diabetes mellitus for example, are vaccine related then why do we not accept these other autoimmune disorders in the same way?

     Finally, there are a number of children who, having suffered some or all of the listed disorders following a vaccination, undergo a modest improvement until the administration of a booster vaccination. Following a short period of time the child suffers an exacerbation of the original adverse effects – this is called positive rechallenge. In the absence of any other explanation the effect has to be accepted as causal.

     Isabella

135. 
     Janet Rossington
     March 3rd, 2009
     14:09:47

     Sullivan on March 2nd, 2009 21:41:23

     Thank you for your prompt reply. Fulltime work and caring responsibilities have delayed my reply. I will read the judicial summary you refer to (para numbers referring to PSC action you refer to would help).

     For the time being, in the UK Justice Keith (on 6 June 07; No: IHQ/07/0412) decided in favour of the US government’s application to the High Court in London for release of reports by Profs Bustin (two), Rima and Simmonds, when acting as expert witnesses on behalf of MMR manufactures in the UK MMR litigation. The child claimants were unable to contest this application because legal aid had been withdrawn in 2003. However, one surviving group of parents (of 10 children) unsuccessfully opposed the release of the data. The manufacturer defendants did not oppose the application.

136. 
     brian
     March 3rd, 2009
     19:29:53

     Bustin’s careful examination of the Unigenetics PCR work revealed that Unigenetics could produce a positive result even if the absolutely crucial step of copying the RNA to DNA for amplification was not performed. Bustin testified, “So I have little doubt that what they are detecting is a DNA contaminant and not measles virus….” However, even if you prefer to believe that Bustin is no more credible that Bustin believes Unigenetics to be, there is a way to test this that does not rely on assessing an individual’s motives: This is a scientific issue.

     The gold standard is to determine the sequence of the PCR DNA amplification product. Wakefield clearly understood the importance of this step: that is why he sent putative positive reaction products from his own lab out for sequencing (according to his student Nick Chadwick, these turned out to be false positives). Uhlmann didn’t do this. Uhlmann reported that the majority of his samples were positive.

     D’Souza et al. did perform the definitive tests. Like Uhlmann, D’Souza found that the Uhlmann primer set produced apparently positive results in the majority of the samples that contained human DNA: D’Souza reported that “almost all” of the samples (39 of 42 samples from children with ASD and samples from 18 of 18 unaffected controls) seemed positive—until he went a step farther than Uhlmann had gone. D’Souza demonstrated that putative positives that were not shown to be false positives by careful examination of the amplicon sizes or the melting curves (something that Bustin testified was rather badly done at Unigenetics) were definitively shown to be false positives by sequencing the amplification products. Note that the difference in the sample types—blood cells or gut biopsies is irrelevant here, since both contain human DNA, and it is obviously either DNA contaminants or human DNA from the samples that is being amplified in these reactions; however, D’Souza later assayed gut biopsy samples. Dr Ward testified: “[D’Souza] demonstrate[d] quite clearly that the Uhlmann primers amplify human genes in the gut, and that means that application of those primers in gut tissue would be expected to amplify human genes. Therefore, sequencing is critical. Therefore, the lack of sequencing [by Uhlmann] is a fatal flaw.”

     Again unlike Uhlmann, Hornig et al. also used DNA sequencing to detect false positives. Hornig reported a large discrepancy between these results and those reported by Uhlmann. In particular, Hornig noted that there were no differences between the affected group and the unaffected control group in detection of measles virus RNA extracted from ileal or cecal biopsies.

     As part of the Hornig study, even O’Leary, following his public humiliation for the astonishingly poor performance at Unigenetics, undoubtedly cleaned up his act and so failed to find the huge preponderance of positive results it is now clear were due to contamination, laboratory error, and failure to follow through by sequencing the amplicons. Your suggestion that the O’Leary’s results in the Hornig paper support the discredited Uhlmann work is laughable: It makes no sense whatsover unless you contend that, following the clear demonstration of the points discussed above, O’Leary continued to use out-of-spec equipment, to inappropriately change reaction conditions (time and temperature) that should be be consistent from assay to assay, to invite contamination, and to repeatedly ignore his own laboratory SOPs so as to perform the later experiments precisely as the much-criticized earlier work had been done.

     There’s just no reason to believe the Uhlmann study, and there’s no reason at all to believe the illogical spin from Thoughtful House.

137. 
     Rebecca Fisher
     March 3rd, 2009
     19:49:10

     Following John Stone’s logic, I attest that he’s a complete cock, and until he can provide documentary evidence to the contrary, we must take my comments as fact.

     Kind regards,

     Becky.

138. 
     Dedj
     March 3rd, 2009
     20:03:51

     ” so surely we must assume until further notice that the judge was right.”

     Deer has published ‘further notice’ already.

     But you already knew this, you just won’t accept it.

     “Bustin was, of course, handsomely recompensed (£225,000 even before his appearance at the vaccine court):”

     Someone got paid for work?

     Absolutely shocking.

     Janet – by your logic , you are alluding to a conspiracy of secrecy because the respondents expert reports were released and the petitioners expert reports weren’t because…......... people asked for the respondents expert reports and a group of petitioners failed to silence them.

     That’s the wierdest conspiracy ever.

139. 
     John Stone
     March 3rd, 2009
     23:03:24

     Brian

     “Again unlike Uhlmann, Hornig et al. also used DNA sequencing to detect false positives. Hornig reported a large discrepancy between these results and those reported by Uhlmann.”

     Hornig states that the differences in result were not due to methodology but the different group studied (as you know):

     “Our results differ with reports noting MV RNA in ileal biopsies of 75% of ASD vs. 6% of control children [10], [41]. Discrepancies are unlikely to represent differences in experimental technique because similar primer and probe sequences, cycling conditions and instruments were employed in this and earlier reports; furthermore, one of the three laboratories participating in this study performed the assays described in earlier reports. Other factors to consider include differences in patient age, sex, origin (Europe vs. North America), GI disease, recency of MMR vaccine administration at time of biopsy, and methods for confirming neuropsychiatric status in cases and controls.”

     “In particular, Hornig noted that there were no differences between the affected group and the unaffected control group in detection of measles virus RNA extracted from ileal or cecal biopsies.”

     The control group was not unaffected – it didn’t have autism but it did have gut pathology.

140. 
     Janet Rossington
     March 3rd, 2009
     23:31:30

     Dedj

     Sullivan points out above that when in March 2008 the petitioners in the OAP sought access to the UK claimants’ expert reports in the UK MMR litigation, they were unsuccessful. To my knowledge there were no claimants in the UK case as it had ended and they had been unrepresented for 4 years. The refusal to release the claimants’ reports lay elsewhere and not with the UK claimants. Their case was never heard. There were several expert reports supporting the reliability of O’Leary’s Unigenetics lab, which have never seen the light of day. All the running has been made by the MMR manufacturers’ expert Bustin, Rima & Simmonds because the claimants reports were kept under wraps.

     I don’t call this a conspiracy, just a massive imbalance of power and resources in favour of the US government with the cooperation of the manufacturers who were only too happy to oblige the US gov with their expert reports in a combined effort to protect their commercial interests.

141. 
     One Queer Fish
     March 4th, 2009
     00:01:16

     .Good points John and Janet I have myself called Bustinism the Enron of The Autism/ MMR Safety Issue- for a reason. I’m told that Enron accounted for its operating expenses as capital assets. In the same way such as on here, whenever Bustinists encounter a check to their Bustinism theory, they declare how great a theory Bustinism must be, to overcome so much contrary evidence provided by Dr Wakefield`s hypothesis ,quite simply did any impartial body review Bustin’s work before he testified in court? night follows day guys, surely?? ?
     Here is your friend Mr Deer’s problem in a nutshell, Kev: Mr Deer and the Deerorites want the approval of the parents of autistic children based on Deerism beliefs and Mr Deer is willing to act in such a way by supplying beliefs as evidence unlike Dr Wakefield who has the parents as evidence but cannot show them.
     Forgive me I am sorry for saying that but since I found your forum a few weeks back I have been kept awake at night just thinking how I’d love to join your side but in order to do it I need some solid evidence and then we can fight these “dangerous menaces from JABS ” together., how about Mr Deer providing the Complaint letters for a start?
     I wish you luck Kev et-al; defending Mr Bustin (to be soon stripped of Prof). If you succeed, Mr Deer and a few other people should look you up… the PCR chain events above by Brain ..! are “laughable”.SOP SOP , just drying my eyes from laughing..

142. 
     PLR
     March 4th, 2009
     00:19:30

     Janet – You are not correct. Isabella Thomas, Jackie Fletcher of JABS and others came to the High Court on various occasions to oppose the release of claimant expert reports to the US. Also Prof O’Leary objected to the release of his own report, and declined to give evidence in the US cases which finished recently. So did his associate Dr Shiels. This was why no reports were introduced in the US, and you can see this in the judgments.

     There were no reports supporting Prof O’Leary’s lab. I would know, as I have all the expert reports. It was after the exchange of these reports that counsel for the claimants told the Legal Services Commission (for the third time) that they could make no case that MMR causes autism.

     I’m sorry if you have been misinformed, or misled, but if you were a claimant, you should take this matter up with your former solicitors. They should at least have made it clear to you why the UK case failed.

143. 
     brian
     March 4th, 2009
     00:39:30

     John,

     Since you and One Queer Fish don’t seem to be following the technical aspects of the PCR-related discussion, I don’t think it will be fruitful to continue it. Perhaps since you seem to have instead focused on conspiracy theories, you might ask if the fact that the Hornig et al. authors very obviously soft-peddled the differences between their recent study and the Uhlmann debacle in a manner that Bustin very generously calls “disingenuous” might in some way reflect their previous histories.

144. 
     Sullivan
     March 4th, 2009
     00:56:01

     Wow,

     you guys are trying to smear Bustin now? It shows a level of desperation that is quite unbecoming.

     Do a search for papers by Bustin. Check out how many times they are cited. The guy is an expert in the real sense of the term, not like Vera (I use the library and go to parties at UCSF, therefore I am faculty) Byers.

145. 
     Sullivan
     March 4th, 2009
     01:22:11

     . There were several expert reports supporting the reliability of O’Leary’s Unigenetics lab, which have never seen the light of day. All the running has been made by the MMR manufacturers’ expert Bustin, Rima & Simmonds because the claimants reports were kept under wraps.

     I don’t call this a conspiracy, just a massive imbalance of power and resources in favour of the US government with the cooperation of the manufacturers who were only too happy to oblige the US gov with their expert reports in a combined effort to protect their commercial interests.

     This is so far off of the reality to be blatant spin.

     The reports weren’t provided because the experts who wrote them didn’t give permission.

     I.e. the experts in support of the claimants in the UK litigation refused to give permission.

     No US government conspiracy. No imbalance of power. All that was needed was for the UK experts to approve of the reports being made public.

146. 
     Dedj
     March 4th, 2009
     01:22:45

     “because the claimants reports were kept under wraps.”

     From what has been presented, the people who keep the reports ‘under wraps’ – a usage of terms which implies a deliberate action to keep the reports secret – appear to have been the authours of the reports.

     Although, from reading what Sullivan has provided the petitioners did not make an application because of what they were told in march. As Sullivan has stated, no refusal was made, because no request was made. It’s odd that they went all the way through the process, yet never actually filed the application, despite being offered support by the Special Masters.

     The only people who appear to have made any attempt to stymie the release of reports appear to be a group of parents on the side of the claimants.

147. 
     alyric
     March 4th, 2009
     02:28:10

     Sullivan

     No smearing of Bustin or not really – the Fish is trying for humour. She’s done it before – with ghastly results – very unedifying – but this isn’t the brightest bulb in the box. Somehow we aren’t attracting the right clientele here I think:) Take a look at John the droner – can’t seem to take it in that the GMC have said that Deer isn’t the complainant. Come to think of it he doesn’t seem to know what one is. Otherwise He’d know Deer couldn’t be one no matter what. He’d rather carry on endlessly about things he knows little about while ignoring every blatant contradiction.

148. 
     HCN
     March 4th, 2009
     06:08:23

     alyric said “He’d rather carry on endlessly about things he knows little about while ignoring every blatant contradiction.”

     I asked at:
     http://leftbrainrightbrain.co......ment-57130 … what Mr. Stone’s qualifications and interests in the vaccines=autism game were. But I have not received an answer. Does anyone know?

     And why should we entertain his clueless blathering? If he does not understand the science, and cannot comprehend that Deer is not a complainant, and that real science has shown that Wakefield did not conduct real science… why entertain him?

     He has an agenda, and he will not let facts get in the way of his agenda. By definition that makes him a crank. A crank is just a rung up from being a troll. Like one should not feed a troll, one should also not encourage and feed a crank.

149. 
     WMP
     March 4th, 2009
     10:14:25

     The MMR litigation in the UK was to deteremine whether or not there was a causal link between the vaccine and , ASD /IBD. By far the biggest proportion of claimants suffered from autism. It may come as something as a shock to Janet Rossington who notes that there were “several expert reports supporting the reliability of O’Leary’s Unigenetics lab” to learn that professor O’ Leary conceded in a letter to Brian Deer that reports provided by Unigenetics to both the solicitors and the Court, right up until late 2003, “did not support the MMR/autism hypothesis”

     http://briandeer.com/mmr/oleary-statement.htm

     Given that the litigation swallowed up some £15-£18m of public funding (a considerable amount of money by anyone’s standards) and hundreds of hours of court time only to have it admitted that the lab work, crucial to support the claimants claims, simply wasn’t there, it’s hardly surprising that the experts reports (I am not aware of any ) supporting the reliability of O Leary’s work “never saw the light of day”. It follows that any experts reports in existence supporting O’Leary’s work must also support the fact that that his findings did not support the MMR/autism hypothesis. This is not the type of stuff the claimants would have shouted from the rooftops and may go some way to explaining why according to Janet the “complainants reports were kept under wraps”

     A logical outcome of this lack of lab work was that the three QC’s representing the children in the litigation admitted that as things stood , they could not make a case to support the claim of a causal link between MMR and autism.It is little wonder given the absence of a laboratory evidenced link between MMR and Autism and the admission by the children’s own representatives that they could not bring a case, that the Legal Services Commission withdrew funding for the litigation. The LSC were hardly likely to keep adding to the millions already spent over a period of years when the claimants own team were telling them that they could not, as things stood, bring the case. Perhaps a more relevant question the claimants should have been asking instead of scrutising the family members of the appeal judge was ‘how after all these years and millions of pounds of incvestment have we ended up with our legal team advising that they cannot make a case’?

150. 
     JABS-watcher
     March 4th, 2009
     11:51:23

     Re. HCN’s question:

     For any that don’t know, John Stone, also known on the net as “The Pope of JABS”, is chief spokesman and ubiquitous Internet presence for the “leading” UK Anti-vaccine pressure group JABS. JABS has been intimately associated with the anti-MMR campaign since at least the mid 90s. JABS started life as a “support group for vaccine-damaged children” – or, if you prefer, for parents convinced that vaccines had injured their children. John is one of the parents. Isabella Thomas is another of the JABS insiders.

151. 
     Janet Rossington
     March 4th, 2009
     14:05:33

     Sullivan on March 4th, 2009 01:22:11

     “The reports weren’t provided because the experts who wrote them didn’t give permission.”

     Dedj on March 4th, 2009 01:22:45
     “the people who keep the reports ‘under wraps’ – a usage of terms which implies a deliberate action to keep the reports secret – appear to have been the authors’ of the reports.”

     Sullivan has a quick and legalistic grasp of the massive OAP paper work. Is the claim that the UK claimants refused permission to release their expert reports an assumption or fact? If fact, would you please cite documentary sources. I checked the sources you gave me earlier, but couldn’t see any reference to the UK claimants refusing access. But happy to be corrected.

     Justice Keith placed the expert reports from both sides under wraps when the case was wound up. In June 2007 he released the expert reports listed above following the defendants’ request but would not allow other reports to be released. If the petitioners did not request UK claimants’ reports presumablythey assumed J Keith would refuse – possibly because of his decision in 2007. This decision can’t be laid at the claimants door as there were no claimants in 2008: the case had ended.

     I’m not aware of any factual basis for the claim that the UK claimants refused access to the US petitioners.

152. 
     One Queer Fish
     March 4th, 2009
     14:11:34

     Quite simply if your all so cock sure of your Deerism and Bustinism as with Sir Roy Meadowism ,simply why be bothered about a support group run by parents. Obviously Mr Deer seeks approval from the parents on JABS based on his Deerism beliefs which hasn’t happened. Observation is a great thing especially when you listen to the parents and autistic kids (AKA the evidence )and tie that in with clinical studies which Bustin and Deerism does not do….but Dr Wakefields studies do ,do the science or lack of it is just part of the story..

153. 
     JABS-watcher
     March 4th, 2009
     14:55:24

     Anecdotes and observations are often wrong. They are not verifiable and are subject to all kinds of biases – including, inter alia, the human need to try and find some external causation for tragic events, and also the peer pressure of “support groups” that offer cult-belief-like certainties.

     Scientific claims are verifiable, as they can be CHECKED by other people.

     Much of the history of science consists in identifying, exploring, and trying to avoid, the human biases in anecdote and observation.

154. 
     John Stone
     March 4th, 2009
     16:39:49

     Jabs-Watcher

     Or it could be that there are very good systems for denying damage. Even severe adverse reactions are unlikely in my experience to be recorded or monitored. NHS advice is to ignore such events. Of course, it is very easy for an unbiased scientist, or even Brian Deer, to go back over records and find no mention of an event – but this does not mean a parent’s memory is an error or that they are lying.

     I have cited this many times and even tried to persuade the NHS to take this ghastly skeleton down:

     http://tinyurl.com/6mpucs

     but there it still is! So they urge parents to bring their children back for the second dose when they have had severe reaction to the first. What would Brian Deer advise (after all he is the expert now)?

155. 
     Dedj
     March 4th, 2009
     17:35:24

     “But happy to be corrected”

     Quite simply, you’re looking for the wrong thing, and have been told what to look for a total of three times now. There is no excuse, or evidence, to continue insisting that a refusal was made.

     The March document that you have already read indicates that the PSC’s own representative states that the reports needed the authours permission to be released, which was unlikely to be obtained. The July document indicates that the PSC decided not to make an application, on the basis of the March advice.

     No one has claimed that the UK claimants ‘refused permission’ for their expert reports to be released – no request was made – but it is claimed that some groups sympathetic to them tried to stop the release at court.

     I hope this will end your confusion, and you will stop interchanging ‘expert’ and ‘claimant’.

156. 
     PLR
     March 4th, 2009
     19:01:18

     Janet – I’ve managed to find one judgement for you. There was also another case where the claimants came and opposed, when Merck applied for Prof O’Leary’s report for a case in Pennsylvania.

     I hope this helps

     http://briandeer.com/wakefield/keith-oleary.doc

157. 
     Janet Rossington
     March 5th, 2009
     00:30:39

     Dedj on March 4th, 2009 17:35:24
     “but it is claimed that some groups sympathetic to them tried to stop the release at court.”

     It is not claims that interest me, but documentary evidence. The case you do give is where Justice Keith’s assented in June 2007 to the US Government’s request for the four manufacturer experts’ reports. Here a claimant’s friend sought unsuccessfully to bar the US Government’s application. But the above discussion thread is about the US petitioners’ attempt to obtain the UK claimant’s expert reports in 2008. The petitioners didn’t pursue the matter because of the secrecy J. Keith insisted on in June 2007 (apart from his releasing the 4 reports to the US gov). To repeat, in 2008 there were no claimants around to object to the US petitioners’ requests, had they been made.

     PLR on March 4th, 2009 19:01:18
     “There was also another case where the claimants came and opposed, when Merck applied for Prof O’Leary’s report for a case in Pennsylvania.”

     It’s true the claimants opposed this on the grounds that this would allow the manufacturers to cherry pick, whist the claimants couldn’t. At the end of the day both sides agreed to secrecy; but for different reasons. The defendants so that no one got hold of their MMR safety studies; the claimants to preserve their evidence for when they had the resources to resurrect their case. Of course in June 2007 this secrecy was breached in favour of the manufacturers.

     I can’t help reverting to what some of you may object to: there is a blatant imbalance in the power and resources wielded by the manufacturer defendants compared to the claimants/petitioners in both the UK and US. Of course this leads in a different direction about the politics of science and litigation. But for now we’ll leave it there.

158. 
     Dedj
     March 5th, 2009
     00:53:57

     “The petitioners didn’t pursue the matter because of the secrecy J. Keith insisted on in June 2007”

     Which seems nonsensical, given that the wrap order was well in place before they began their application, which was to obtain the reports from the sealed file.

     As far as I’m aware, they didn’t make the application because (as mentioned in the documents above) their own representative said that they would need to get the experts permission, which was unlikely to be given.

     The issue of jutice Keith not giving permission appears to have originated with – and only been mentioned by – you.

     There appears to have been no attempt by the PSC to obtain the reports, thus it seems rather unfair to talk about ‘breaching’ if both sides had access to the same process of obtaining the documents. It also seems unfair to talk about an imbalance of power when one side exercised their power and the other side chose not to.

     Sullivan may have read Jst Keiths original wrap order. I will wait until they have spoken before assessing whether or not your interpretation of it is correct. Going on all available evidence that is unlikely.

159. 
     WMP
     March 5th, 2009
     13:53:21

     Sullivan on March 4th, 2009 01:22:11

     “The reports weren’t provided because the experts who wrote them didn’t give permission.”

     The shocking difference in this case is that it was an exlitigant who was trying to obtain a copy of an expert report by Dr Wakefield. (section 15)

     http://www.informationtribunal.....earch.aspx

     Wendy Stephen v IC
     Additional Party The Legal Services Commission
     EA/2008/0057

160. 
     vaccine believer
     March 14th, 2009
     22:55:12

     it is unfortunate that in the main the people on this blog , do not have children who are vaccine damaged , i saw my son regress into Autism after the MMR Vaccine and he has a bowel condition , what you people are failing to hear is that we are not anti-vaccine we had our children vaccinated so how prey tell are we anti vaccine

161. 
     Dedj
     March 15th, 2009
     00:17:03

     If you believe in vaccine induced autism, then yes, there are several people – including the ‘owner’ of this blog – who may have ‘vaccine damaged’ children or a ‘vaccine induced’ condition themselves – myself included.

     We hear “We are not anti-vaccine” all the time , yet the actual behaviour observed is either openly anti-vaccine or the people make unvalidated demands that vaccines have some ill-defined ‘standard of safety’ , all of this backed up by arguements from unproven personal experience or clearly biased reading of the literature.

     There are several ways of making vaccines safer, which – coincidence I’m sure – the “We’re not anti-vaccine” people appear to overlook, instead preffering to act suspiciously like anti-vaccine people would.

162. 
     Kev
     March 15th, 2009
     00:46:10

     vaccine believer – two questions:

     1) Are you aware there is no valid science connecting vaccines with autism?

     2) Would you recommend to friends and neighbours to get their kids vaccinated?

163. 
     Journal Checker
     May 27th, 2010
     21:17:07

     Oh my goodness, coming back to this after more than a year. Lancet article retracted. And the homophobic attacks on Brian Deer too. What drives these people? Is it some sort of fear of their own possible partial genetic guilt, though of course unwarranted because how could they have influenced it. Except by not allowing vaccination.

     By the way read what John Stone said in the BMJ Instant Responses on 13 February 2002.

     “I am a parent of an autistic child, who has been seen at the Royal Free hospital paediatric gastro-enterology department but who has not been diagnosed as suffering suspected MMR vaccine damage. I view the MMR debate from a disinterested position although I have a deep “interested” concern in the cause(s) of the rise in autism generally.”

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