In today’s Hampstead and Highgate Express there’s an interesting little piece on Andrew Wakefield’s ongoing legal altercation with the GMC.
A ROYAL Free doctor accused of serious professional misconduct during controversial MMR research admitted that short cuts were made in the quest for fame.
…..
Asked whether Dr Wakefield had pushed him into it, Prof Walker-Smith said: “I think that’s true. If we had not had any urgency to get on with it, we would not be in the muddle we are in now because we would have done it in the usual way by getting a referral. Dr Wakefield was a man in a hurry and in full-time research.
Damn. You know things aren’t going well for you when your co-accused is willing to push you under a bus.
Walker-Smith performed completely unnecessary (in my opinion) lumbar punctures on these kids and lo and behold:
Ms Smith said out of the 12 children, complications materialised in two. “I’m not suggesting that the complications were serious, but you would accept that having a child admitted to hospital overnight with a fever and feeling unwell is worrying for parents,” she said.
Performing lumbar punctures and consequently hospitalising 17% of your case load is not great. Neither is it great to perform blood draws at birthday parties and make children pass out and vomit.
But, we know Dr Wakefield is an impatient man. Remember this testimony given by Dr Nick Chadwick?
Q Okay. Did you personally test the gut biopsy samples for measles RNA?
A Yes.
Q What tests did you perform?
A A PCR test, a polymerase chain reaction.
Q What results did you receive from the gut biopsy materials for measles RNA?
A They were all negative.
Q They were always negative?
A Yes. There were a few cases of false positive results, which I used a method to see whether they were real positive results or false positive, and in every case they turned out to be false positive results. Essentially all the samples tested were negative.
…….
Q So you personally tested while you were in Dr. Wakefield’s lab gut biopsy material, CSF and PBMCs?
A Yes, that’s right.
Q And all the results were either negative, or if they were positive it always turned out that they were false positives?
A Yes, that’s correct.
Q Did you inform Dr. Wakefield of the negative results?
A Yes. Yes.
This was the test to ‘prove’ that measles virus was in autistic kids guts and hence cause their autism. Seems Dr Wakefield was too impatient to listen to his own team.
We expect Doctors to have our primary care interests at heart. We should not expect for them to sacrifice scientific integrity and our children’s wellbeing in order to make themselves famous.
Left Brain Right Brain 
Kev,
I thought you weren’t planning to comment on the GMC hearings until you could read the full transcripts yourself instead of relying on a second source? Did you change your policy because you found something you liked?
What is taking the GMC so long in even addressing this man’s behavior? No wonder the legal profession is doing so much in medical malpractice, the medical profession refuses to police itself.
Ben Goldacre said this afternoon that most of the MMR hoax is really to be blamed on the media, rather than on Andrew Wakefield. They are already starting to nail him to the cross now, but who is going to hold the Daily Mail etc resposible for playing the strange ideas of one doctor up to a National health crisis. And if no one analyses their role and holds them responsible, similar media-made health hoaxes are going to happen again and again.
I found that an interesting perspective.
_”Did you change your policy because you found something you liked?”_
Yes 🙂
Another Voice – you’re right, its taking a ridiculously long time to finish the hearing. I suspect that (as Catherina and Ben imply) the GMC realise they made an utter balls up of dealing with Wakefield the first time around and are going as slowly as possibly to make sure the press don’t turn on them and accuse them of persecution.
Good stuff. The Chadwick testimony was worth repeating here – it certainly does no harm to remind people that Wakefield never actually found what he thought/claimed to have found and that Chadwick told him so. I also found Catherina’s comment of interest:
I think the media have done an excellent job of pretending the MMR scare was nothing to do with them. I don’t suppose they will ever (any of them) apologise for the major role they played in what should perhaps be known as the Media’s MMR Scare. They may not have actually been the ‘first cause’ of the scare, but they perpetuated it until very recently – it seems to me that they only applied the brakes on their bandwagon once it became clear that measles was on the rise (of course, it is now endemic).
Cheers,
jdc.
What ever happened to the monkey study that Wakefield was involved with, that as a poster claimed to support his theory? It seems not to have made it past peer-review.