The Peter Attia Drive - #158 - Brian Deer： A tale of scientific fraud—exposing Andrew Wakefield and the origin of the belief that vaccines cause autism

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

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00:00:41.320 now, head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay,

00:00:47.740 here's today's episode. My guest this week is Brian Deer. Brian is a multi award-winning

00:00:55.060 investigative journalist, perhaps best known for his inquiries into drug companies and the drug

00:01:00.800 industry in general. But we talk this week about work that he did initially for the Sunday Times

00:01:07.640 of London that ultimately led to a book, The Doctor Who Fooled the World, Science, Deception,

00:01:13.300 and the War on Vaccines. And as much as it sounds like this is going to be a podcast about vaccines,

00:01:19.980 while it certainly is, it's much more a discussion about fraud in science using this particular

00:01:27.360 example as a case. I read the book as soon as it came out, I believe in the fall of last year,

00:01:34.080 read it again, and then reached out to Brian requesting an interview. Brian was willing to speak,

00:01:40.360 but on the condition that we spoke very briefly, I think he was only willing to speak for maybe 40

00:01:44.760 minutes, which I said, that's short, but let's take it. And I suppose to the credit of the fact

00:01:50.160 that he enjoyed the discussion, this discussion obviously goes on much longer than 40 minutes.

00:01:53.780 So what I guess I would say here is I know this is a very polarizing topic and it's polarizing

00:01:57.940 for many reasons, but what I want to accomplish in this episode is actually get to the heart of the

00:02:05.460 story. So unfortunately I believe too many people enjoy the convenience of opinion without the

00:02:15.380 inconvenience of thought. And I know that sounds like a really harsh thing to say, but if I had a

00:02:20.500 dollar for every time I spoke with a person who had a point of view on something, but didn't fully

00:02:25.840 understand the Genesis or ideology of that, I would have a lot of dollars. And I think frankly,

00:02:32.380 I'm probably guilty of that myself in a number of areas, though I try to be mindful of this.

00:02:37.500 So in this episode, what we really do is go to the heart of the issue, which is where is it that

00:02:44.000 the belief that vaccines cause autism comes from? And to do that, you actually have to really

00:02:49.120 understand the work of one guy named Andrew Wakefield and his collaborators. And we go into

00:02:54.960 that story in great detail. I will not suggest that this podcast is a substitute for actually reading

00:03:01.200 the book and reading other books on this topic, but nevertheless, it's a very good primer on the

00:03:07.780 subject matter. And I would recommend after listening to it, if you find this subject interesting,

00:03:12.980 reading the book as it is both disturbing and riveting at the same time. So without further

00:03:18.560 delay, please enjoy my conversation with Brian Deere.

00:03:21.500 Brian, thanks so much for staying up somewhat later, I guess in the afternoon, evening,

00:03:31.360 your time. It's really an honor to be able to speak with you here today about such an important

00:03:34.900 topic. I think as I told you, when I reached out to you, this is certainly a subject matter I've paid

00:03:39.780 very close attention to for a number of years, but I was still somewhat surprised by some of the

00:03:45.920 revelations in your book. When I first read it, I actually had to read it a second time

00:03:50.200 to fully assimilate all of it, at which point I reached out to you and said, look, I'd really

00:03:55.220 love to speak with you. So I'm grateful for the time you've made. I'm sure this is a tale you tell

00:03:59.660 often. Well, thank you, Peter. Good to be here. Let's just get right to the chase. Obviously,

00:04:04.960 surveys of people around the world, certainly I can speak in the United States and the UK,

00:04:09.280 a sizable portion of the population believe that autism is likely or probably caused by

00:04:16.180 vaccines. Is that a fair statement today? It's a very well-known opinion. I don't know what the

00:04:21.600 precise polling is at the moment, but yes, there's tended to be quite a strong view about that,

00:04:27.120 particularly I think in North America, not so much in the UK at the moment. But yeah,

00:04:31.040 I think that's true. A lot of people have this idea. This is not something that you were paying

00:04:36.200 enormous attention to initially. You were, I don't want to say a latecomer to this, but

00:04:41.600 you weren't, I gather, paying close attention to this in the early 1990s or even earlier because

00:04:47.260 the idea itself that a vaccine could cause harm has certainly been around for probably more than

00:04:53.240 a hundred years, correct? Sure. Sure. Yeah. Different vaccines. Yes. But the idea that it might

00:04:58.420 cause autism arose in the late 1990s. Let's just talk about the story because there's a character that is

00:05:05.380 at the center of this story, a character by the name of Andrew Wakefield, a former physician who,

00:05:11.100 I have to be honest with you, I think prior to reading your book, the impression I had was that

00:05:16.280 he was a misguided and not particularly competent physician. But I don't think I was aware of some of

00:05:25.620 the other, shall we say, behaviors that would, I think, go beyond a lack of competence or scientific

00:05:32.560 rigor. Yeah. On that point, it's an interesting point because when I started researching the book,

00:05:38.840 I'm reasonably experienced in the nature of storytelling for one reason or another. I've

00:05:43.640 gone into it a little bit in my life. I really wanted to try and have some kind of arc of development

00:05:49.820 in this character. So I was looking to give him the benefit of the doubt in his early years.

00:05:56.460 This is a guy who, as you say, he's a physician, or in fact, he trained as a surgeon. He went off from

00:06:03.360 the UK to Canada in the late 1980s, where he studied at Toronto General Hospital. Originally,

00:06:10.680 he was observing doctors there who were trying to do the world's first whole bowel transplant. That was

00:06:18.200 the idea they had at the time. And he was a trainee there, but he moved very quickly away from surgery.

00:06:24.620 We've never entirely found out the reason why he did that. Very unusual thing to do because his

00:06:32.220 mother told me that he'd always wanted to be a surgeon, nothing else but to be a surgeon. He moved

00:06:37.720 away into research. And when I went back into those years, I really wanted to make him look believable,

00:06:46.020 credible, almost heroic, because it's a better story. If you're trying to draw people in,

00:06:52.340 they want something to latch onto. They want to get the idea that this was a good guy who, as you say,

00:06:59.300 was misguided, was perhaps incompetent, perhaps moved away from the things that he really understood.

00:07:05.520 But I never really was able to find anything that evidenced that. At a very early stage,

00:07:13.300 he demonstrated a fanatical obsession with proving that a particular infectious agent caused a particular

00:07:24.780 issue. And nothing would shake him from the idea he latched onto. And the way he latched onto it was

00:07:32.000 so extraordinary and so absurd that it was really very difficult to give him a good, positive, heroic,

00:07:41.040 sympathetic start in the story.

00:07:44.940 Let's talk about his eureka moment, which, if I recall, was, oh, I don't know, it was on Yonge Street

00:07:50.140 or Bathurst Street or something like that. It was in a pub drinking a Guinness. What was the amazing

00:07:55.960 insight that he had in that pub in Toronto in the late 80s?

00:08:00.200 Well, what happened was, the story which he told to another journalist, it's a remarkable piece of history

00:08:06.080 because it never surfaced anywhere else other than an interview he did with another journalist,

00:08:11.500 was that he was, as I say, working at the Toronto General Hospital, where they were looking into the

00:08:17.760 possibilities of whole bowel transplants. The reason one might want to do that is in order to deal with Crohn's

00:08:23.640 disease. Most people, I think, have an idea of what Crohn's disease is. It's an appalling, ulcerating,

00:08:29.800 blistering, burning disease of the bowels. And nobody knows what causes it. Even today,

00:08:36.420 nobody knows what causes it. People have got ideas and there's been a lot of epidemiology, but

00:08:41.060 I don't know if you've ever looked at it yourself, but the epidemiology of Crohn's disease is just

00:08:45.440 totally baffling and bizarre. And no matter how many books you stack up on a table to try and

00:08:51.640 understand it, you just realise it's just better to walk away and just believe it. He was in this pub,

00:08:57.800 is the way he tells it, and he wanted to find out what the cause of Crohn's disease was. And the

00:09:04.920 mythology or the legend that he has sought to create is that he didn't want to spend his life chopping

00:09:11.180 out bits of gut, which is normally what happens if you get Crohn's disease. In addition to heavy

00:09:16.640 duty, very heavy duty drug therapy, usually you end up having pieces of your gut chopped out.

00:09:23.700 So he wanted to find out the cause as being a much more credible course in life. And I give him that

00:09:31.040 credit at the start and I set it up like that. He was trying to discover the cause of Crohn's disease.

00:09:36.480 And he's looking into this pint of Guinness and he says, well, thinks to himself, well,

00:09:41.520 the conventional wisdom is that Crohn's disease was caused by bacteria, food, some kind of allergic

00:09:47.480 reaction inside the gut. And he came to the idea, well, maybe it isn't that. Maybe it was a disease of

00:09:54.740 the blood supply to the gut wall and an infectious agent. Now, this was in the late 1980s. This was when

00:10:03.180 AIDS was really big in the news and really an intractable problem. Obviously, in the case of AIDS,

00:10:10.460 they found an infectious agent. So he thought, well, what could the infectious agent be?

00:10:17.080 And he came back to London and got a job at a really, to be fair at that time, a third rate

00:10:22.860 London medical school, the Royal Free in Hampstead, North London. He was still on the budget of the

00:10:29.340 Wellcome Trust, which at the time, today, the Wellcome Trust is a preeminent medicine and health

00:10:35.900 related charity. Absolutely blue chip gives out enormous sums of money and really is in many ways

00:10:42.020 financial engine behind the United Kingdom's extraordinary success or apparent success

00:10:47.960 dealing with the coronavirus outbreak because of the sequencing, which is being carried out here

00:10:54.120 on a massive scale, largely with funding that was originally given by the Wellcome Trust. But at the

00:11:00.100 time, it was the, if you like, the grant giving arm of a pharmaceutical company. He was on their budget

00:11:06.700 and he came back to London and he would be on their budget for a couple of years at this hospital and

00:11:11.920 medical school, but he was going to inevitably be moved off their budget onto the budget of the

00:11:17.240 medical school. He's there, the clock's ticking. He's got this idea about Crohn's disease. He goes to

00:11:24.100 the library, goes to the hospital library and takes out, or at least reads there, a two-volume

00:11:31.580 encyclopedia of viruses called Fields Virology. Big thing is, a couple of bricks thick in its two volumes

00:11:37.920 and starts going through it until he eventually comes to measles virus. And there he sees a paragraph

00:11:46.600 which says that in acute measles infection, the measles virus can be found in the gut, in the colon

00:11:54.580 and the intestines generally. And he thinks, ah, in Crohn's disease, this blistering that you get

00:12:01.240 produces little ulcers. Measles, acute measles infection, characteristically, in fact, it's pathognomic,

00:12:08.640 I think, of the disease. In measles, you get things called coplic spots, which are little spots,

00:12:14.420 mostly in the mouth. He came to the conclusion that these coplic spots were essentially the same

00:12:21.140 thing as was seen in the bowels when somebody has measles, usually a child. So he thinks, ah,

00:12:28.400 I found it. This is my eureka moment. Measles virus is the cause of Crohn's disease. Now, just as a

00:12:36.720 little aside, the thing about fulminant measles is you can find it everywhere in the body. I mean,

00:12:43.000 you wouldn't just find it in the gut. You wouldn't just find it in the mouth. You find it everywhere.

00:12:46.620 I mean, for the period of acute infection, you can find measles all over. So nothing surprising.

00:12:52.720 But that's where he started off. And he then set about trying to prove that measles virus was the

00:13:00.480 cause of Crohn's disease. Now, if the measles virus is, in fact, the cause of Crohn's disease,

00:13:06.520 and the measles virus is waning because of vaccination, is it safe to say then that the

00:13:12.720 next leap is a vaccine that introduces a small amount of measles could still be causing a

00:13:19.480 problem? Is that the next step? The thing about Wakefield was because he wasn't a scientist,

00:13:24.460 he wasn't trained in science. He trained as a surgeon, as a particular psychology, I think.

00:13:30.880 And I think, as I say in the book, in science, courage isn't about proving yourself right.

00:13:37.480 It's in your efforts to prove yourself wrong, your efforts at a very early stage to try and

00:13:42.600 refute your own hypothesis. So a hypothesis, which is nothing more than a guess. So you start off with

00:13:48.600 a guess, and then you try and prove it wrong, rather than try and prove it right. Obviously,

00:13:53.000 you're collecting data that supports it. In order to work in a rational way, you try to prove yourself

00:13:58.520 wrong. And he never got to that second stage. At any time in his life, he never got to the stage

00:14:04.840 of trying to question his own ideas, to doubt himself. And this, I think many people came to

00:14:12.040 regard as an extraordinary flaw of character, possibly for anybody, but certainly for scientists.

00:14:17.920 I'll just interject, Brian, with one of my favorite scientists who you can probably see behind me,

00:14:22.100 Richard Feynman, very famous for having said, and I'm paraphrasing, that the first principle in science

00:14:28.000 is not to fool yourself effectively. You're absolutely right. When one comes up with a

00:14:33.520 hypothesis, the goal is to do everything you can to demonstrate it is incorrect. And even the word

00:14:40.960 proof in science is a loaded word, isn't it? Because unlike mathematics, we really don't have proofs in

00:14:47.580 science. Everything is probabilistic, which I want to get to later. And you look at a body of literature,

00:14:55.720 a body of experiments. You try to ascertain, perhaps just as a court would, what does the

00:15:03.360 mountain of evidence suggest in one direction or another versus say in science, relying on an

00:15:09.280 anecdote or something like that. So I couldn't agree with you more. And I think you're right,

00:15:13.320 by the way, I trained as a surgeon. I would go one step further and say, this is not just about

00:15:18.280 surgery. I just don't think medicine, the actual discipline of medicine does a lot in the way of

00:15:24.300 scientific training. So it is true that many people who train in medicine also go on to receive

00:15:29.780 scientific training. But in speaking for myself, none of the scientific training I learned came

00:15:36.040 from medical school. Medical school was really geared towards getting as many facts as possible

00:15:41.560 into your head. You certainly learned a bit about the history of science. You were fortunate to put in

00:15:46.240 context what other people had done and how we were able to utilize that information. But in terms of

00:15:52.480 the scientific method, this idea that you generate a hypothesis, you figure out what the right questions

00:15:59.320 are to test it, you design experiments, you critically look for all the ways you could be

00:16:04.300 fooled. That is very difficult to learn unless you spend time in a laboratory and you're well mentored.

00:16:10.460 I actually never take offense to the idea when people say doctors don't understand science,

00:16:15.100 which is usually something that someone with real scientific chops would level as a criticism.

00:16:18.840 I think that's right. So there he is with this attempt to prove himself right. As you say about

00:16:26.760 medicine, medicine, I sometimes liken to like learning Chinese. The method essentially is that

00:16:32.080 you read books and you sit in lecture halls and you see things. And if you ask a question, why is that

00:16:37.320 so? Then the person who's teaching you will essentially say, because I say so. That's what it is. You just have

00:16:42.700 to learn this stuff like a European learning Chinese. This is this symbol. This is this. This is this.

00:16:48.900 Don't question it. Just learn it. But the scientific method obviously is different now. But what Wakefield

00:16:53.780 would do, and it's all over his work, it's everywhere. You find a particular word. It's almost his favorite

00:16:59.440 word. And his favorite word was consistent. So he would say this particular finding or this piece of

00:17:08.360 data or whatever is consistent with his hypothesis. But of course, the thing about consistence, I mean,

00:17:16.180 it is consistent that the orbit of mercury is related to, I don't know, inflammatory bowel disease.

00:17:24.480 It's consistent that mercury rose this morning. You could link any things together and say they're

00:17:30.260 consistent. It's consistent with me talking to you.

00:17:33.400 It's an even sillier word than associated with, which means nothing, right? 0.91

00:17:37.880 Yeah. It means it's not a refutation. But he used this word consistent all the time and never 0.65

00:17:43.760 stopped. And he never stopped to question at any stage or carry out any kind of experiment or

00:17:51.320 research or anything that would conflict with that commitment to the idea that this stage, that

00:17:58.520 measles virus was the cause of Crohn's disease. When anybody else came up with contrary information,

00:18:06.640 so for example, he would say, I don't have a background in medicine or science. I had to learn

00:18:11.320 it all from nothing to do this work. He would use, for example, a technology called, well,

00:18:18.140 immunohistochemistry. It's essentially a chemical staining, a microscopic staining technique. And so you

00:18:24.800 take bits of tissue out the gut and you prepare it and you stain it and with certain things and use

00:18:31.620 certain antibodies and what have you. And you look down a microscope and if the thing that you're

00:18:36.020 looking for, in this case, it would be measles, you'll see a stain, a change in the colour in the

00:18:41.020 stain. It's usually brown. So this is a microscopic technique. But then other centres around the world,

00:18:47.560 other universities in Japan and in the United States and in the UK, people used what is now,

00:18:54.700 probably everybody knows what it is now, PCR, the polymerase chain reaction, which is now big news all

00:19:00.300 over because of efforts to tackle the coronavirus. When people use this molecular method, they couldn't

00:19:07.500 find the measles virus. Well, anyway, I won't go into the whole detail. They couldn't find the measles

00:19:12.660 virus. Now, I once was giving a talk. I can't remember where it was. It was somewhere in the States.

00:19:17.320 I can't remember. It was a lab meeting with biology students. So they were like about 18 or something

00:19:23.400 like that. And I said that he'd found measles virus using immunohistochemistry. Other people used the

00:19:31.120 polymerase chain reaction. And Wakeford's answer to that was that the PCR wasn't sensitive enough,

00:19:38.420 at which point, to my initial surprise, my audience laughed. I didn't realise it was that funny.

00:19:46.660 I mean, I realised it was rather paradoxical to suggest you could find something under a microscope

00:19:51.120 that you cannot find at a molecular level. But that was the lengths that Wakefield would go to

00:19:57.000 to stick with his hypothesis that measles virus was the cause of Crohn's disease.

00:20:03.680 And let's put that in context, Brian. So in 1993, I believe, is when he first published that paper

00:20:10.960 in the Journal of Virology. Is that correct? Using his immunohistochemistry.

00:20:15.380 Journal of Medical Virology. Yeah.

00:20:17.180 Yeah. J-Med Viral. Right. And he published in there saying, we've identified this using

00:20:22.500 immunohistochemistry. As you said, it was two years later that a Japanese group using PCR

00:20:28.420 said, we cannot replicate these results under any circumstance.

00:20:32.680 Do you have a sense what the scientific community thought at that time? First of all, it's not

00:20:40.020 impossible for scientific results to conflict. But was it just sort of dismissed as, well,

00:20:47.440 maybe there was an artifact. Maybe there was a contamination. Maybe this person didn't understand

00:20:53.440 how to do the assay correctly. Maybe their controls weren't right. Because remember, I'm saying just for

00:20:59.020 the listener, science is about advancing knowledge. It's about being at the edge of what is known and

00:21:04.260 unknown and trying to advance that. And this is a potentially interesting hypothesis. Let's

00:21:09.660 acknowledge that if measles is the cause of Crohn's disease, this would be a very important thing to

00:21:13.320 know. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just sort of curious in hindsight or retrospect, in the mid-90s, when PCR,

00:21:22.080 which at that point was becoming the way that you would do this type of assay. So now the gold standard for

00:21:28.020 the reasons that I think we'll get into later on, because I want to get into O'Leary's lab

00:21:32.360 and really understand how one can be fooled. I think that's the most interesting part of the

00:21:37.100 whole thing for me. But anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So did you get a sense of how the scientific

00:21:42.160 community viewed Wakefield's work at that time prior to 1998? Because when we get to 98, it's a

00:21:48.220 whole other ball of wax. Well, when you say the scientific community, first, you've got to remember that

00:21:52.040 this is a fairly specialist field. So there wouldn't be a lot of people watching this thing too

00:21:57.460 carefully. Even outside of gastroenterology? Within gastroenterology, I mean, I'm sorry.

00:22:01.960 Yeah, within gastroenterology, people would pay a little bit of attention to it. But it's a very

00:22:05.740 small community of scientists who work in this area. And I just think they mostly all know each

00:22:09.960 other. They all go to the same drug industry sponsored conferences. But within that, there were

00:22:15.760 people who thought that he was incompetent because it appeared that he'd been using inappropriate

00:22:22.560 controls in his work. His microscopic work, looking at stains under a microscope, involved controls.

00:22:32.880 So people were saying, well, how is he getting these results with controls? Because you would

00:22:38.680 expect to see if he was using the technique wrongly, you would expect it to show up in not

00:22:44.320 only in the specimens, but also the controls, if it was contamination or something like that.

00:22:48.780 He was claiming to use controls. And some people thought he was incompetent. But there were other

00:22:53.620 people. And I could name, and I don't think he would mind me naming it, a professor in London

00:22:59.020 called Tom MacDonald, now the Dean of Research, in fact, at a medical centre where the Queen's husband

00:23:07.100 is currently resident, as we speak. He was of the view, even then, that Wakefield's work was fraudulent,

00:23:14.440 that he was concocting results, even then. And that created a problem for me, as I was saying

00:23:19.960 earlier, because I wanted to like paint Wakefield in the best possible light. So I never really in

00:23:25.000 the book went too much into that, I suppose, to be authorial about it. I didn't want to piss on my

00:23:31.940 own bonfire. I mean, I didn't want to lead people from the get go to suspect that he was doing what

00:23:40.040 he came to be shown to be doing elsewhere. So I kind of glossed over that a little bit. But there

00:23:45.180 were people even then who said that his work was fraudulent. And in fact, Professor MacDonald

00:23:50.040 declined to go when he was part of a team at another London hospital, who moved to where Wakefield was

00:23:56.940 going to work, or was working in Hampstead, North London. And he refused to go, he took a much less

00:24:02.960 interesting and I don't know whether it was a better paid or worse paid job, way away from 100 miles or so

00:24:08.400 away from London, rather than go and work in a place where Wakefield was. So there was no clear

00:24:12.540 consensus as what explained how it could be that Wakefield would find these things by microscopic

00:24:18.580 techniques. In fact, he said that he'd seen the virus under a microscope. I think it's important

00:24:24.100 to explain to people that that's not possible. That was the claim in the paper. That was the claim.

00:24:29.260 Was this an electron? I thought you meant light microscopy. When we get to him seeing it,

00:24:33.340 it was an electron. And ultimately, that came apart. The wheels came off that one as well.

00:24:37.900 But that was the idea. But so there was this confusion. And medicine, as I certainly found,

00:24:44.120 I certainly found this as I went on through my inquiries. Doctors, I think, and perhaps

00:24:50.040 professionals generally, are very reluctant to come to the conclusion that somebody is dishonest,

00:24:56.980 as opposed to wrong. But dishonesty inevitably requires the intent to deceive or intent to mislead.

00:25:05.120 People are very reluctant to come to that conclusion. That's understandable. You want to give people the

00:25:11.320 benefit of the doubt. So the world just kind of moved on and accepted that there was this doctor

00:25:16.460 with a little team of people he was trying to gather together in London, who maintained that measles

00:25:22.760 virus was the cause of Crohn's disease in the face of really very compelling evidence from multiple

00:25:29.500 centers that in Crohn's disease, measles was not a causal factor. Wakefield just dismissed these other

00:25:37.320 centers and said they didn't know what they were doing. But he did. They were looking in the wrong

00:25:41.500 place or the virus was present in levels below the threshold of detection by PCR, but not below the

00:25:49.580 level of detection by microscopic immunohistochemistry techniques, which in itself...

00:25:54.500 I'm trying to think of an analogy because obviously I've done both of these techniques

00:25:59.200 personally. And there are people listening to this who have spent time in a laboratory that

00:26:03.220 will understand how ridiculous and absurd that statement is. But I appreciate that most people

00:26:07.100 don't. And I'm trying to think of an analogy. It's sort of like saying, I can see the details on the

00:26:14.980 moon with my naked eye, but I can't see them with the most high powered telescope because the resolution

00:26:23.880 isn't good enough. It's not a good telescope or you don't know how to use it properly.

00:26:27.660 Yeah. It's not a good enough telescope lens. So that's why I can't see what's on the moon. That's

00:26:32.140 why you can't see what's there, but I can see it with my naked eye. That's how absurd that claim is.

00:26:37.320 That's why I say undergraduate biology students laughed when I was really interested. I used it

00:26:43.880 ever since. They laughed. Let's fast forward a few years now into a place where his thesis

00:26:50.780 undergoes a change. A new layer is added to this and it becomes effectively the main story that you are

00:27:00.600 writing about, which is a very famous paper that came out in 1998 in a very famous and highly regarded

00:27:08.280 journal called the Lancet, which would probably rank in the top five in the world scientifically.

00:27:15.460 So let's talk a little bit about that paper, which I have to admit, I don't think at the time I

00:27:22.800 realized how pathetic it was. In other words, it's a very poorly done report on the 0.65

00:27:30.600 12 patients, not recruited at random. I mean, you're going to go through all of this, but

00:27:36.120 it's outright amazing that the Lancet published it in the first place, let alone took so long

00:27:41.140 to basically pull it. But let's talk about what it is that took Wakefield down this new path to

00:27:48.940 perhaps an even bigger discovery or idea. Right. After he came up with this idea about measles

00:27:56.340 virus causing Crohn's disease, one criticism that was leveled was that, well, you say that

00:28:01.860 measles virus is causing Crohn's disease, but at the time, which is not true now, but at the time,

00:28:07.480 the incidence of Crohn's disease was rising and measles was in decline because of the advent of

00:28:13.700 vaccination. The vaccine itself, he realized, he needed an encyclopedia to tell him this,

00:28:19.660 he realized contained live measles virus. So he modified his theory, his hypothesis at that stage

00:28:27.420 to encompass vaccines causing Crohn's disease. So there he was saying that vaccines were linked

00:28:34.860 to Crohn's disease. And this drew him to the attention of somebody else, a man named Richard Barr.

00:28:41.700 And Richard Barr was an obscure lawyer, an office working lawyer, which we in the UK call a solicitor

00:28:49.840 in eastern England, a small provincial town in eastern England doing humdrum work, magistrates

00:28:57.580 courts, petty offenders, writing wills, things like that, house convincing. And he was in fact a

00:29:03.820 specialist in, written a book about it on house convincing, this man Richard Barr. As I explained in the

00:29:09.200 books, I won't go into now in massive detail, he got a contract with the British government agency to try

00:29:16.320 to show that the MMR vaccine, the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine was the cause of developmental

00:29:24.980 issues, particularly autism and how Richard Barr descended on autism, picked autism out of a whole

00:29:32.240 cluster of other things is a story in itself. This man Richard Barr was looking to find a doctor

00:29:38.960 who would help him, would agree with him that vaccines caused, ultimately, they settled on

00:29:46.600 autism. And his problem was, there weren't any in the UK who really took that position at all. It was

00:29:54.360 such a out to the left kind of idea that he couldn't find anybody of the remotest credibility to

00:30:02.080 advance that hypothesis. And without an quote-unquote expert to say, ah yes, I say that there's a probable

00:30:10.520 cause that measles in the MMR causes autism, he ended up going to this man, a bowel surgeon, trained as a

00:30:20.520 bowel surgeon, whose subject was Crohn's disease, and whose whole theory was about measles causing Crohn's

00:30:26.440 disease. This lawyer hired him. This was in early 1996, after some talks between them beforehand. So

00:30:33.820 there Wakefield was now hired by a lawyer, at very generous hourly rates, to help make a case that the

00:30:43.740 measles vaccine in MMR caused autism. Now, this was interesting, not least because Wakefield knew

00:30:51.200 nothing about autism, but he knew nothing about autism. Neither of these were any part of his

00:30:57.640 training, any part of his professional expertise, but he was the best that this man, Richard Barr,

00:31:04.460 could get. So together, they set about trying to prove that the MMR vaccine caused autism. It's a long

00:31:15.860 story as to why they picked autism, but they did. This lawyer picked autism. Long story about why that was.

00:31:23.260 Very interesting. And in many ways, I wish I'd gone into it more. But anyway.

00:31:27.620 Do you want to just give sort of a short overview of it?

00:31:30.380 It was essentially that this man, Richard Barr, latched on to another player in all this, which was a woman

00:31:38.620 called Jackie Fletcher. And Jackie Fletcher had a child who, within a couple of weeks of receiving his

00:31:47.240 MMR shot, started having seizures and went on to show serious neurological illness, transformative

00:31:56.900 lifelong damage. And she had seen media coverage of an issue to do with vaccines. And while she was in

00:32:07.140 the hospital talking to other parents, one of them, or some other of them, gave her the idea that

00:32:14.260 vaccines could cause this injury to her child. Now, a child didn't have autism. I hate using the word

00:32:20.600 retarded, but I mean, specialists use it, so I suppose I can. She had a profoundly retarded, 1.00

00:32:26.980 handicapped child. She came to believe that the cause was the vaccine. Nothing to do with autism.

00:32:34.380 But in order for her to sue in the United Kingdom, she had to get lots and lots of other people to

00:32:40.460 say the same thing. Because the only place you could ever get money to do that was a government

00:32:44.920 scheme, where they provided money for people who couldn't afford to sue and who can afford to sue

00:32:50.080 drug companies or vaccine manufacturers. She got together with this lawyer, Richard Barr,

00:32:55.300 and with Wakefield. And together, they made music over this idea that the MMR vaccine caused autism.

00:33:04.020 It was generated basically because autism, which although the phenomenon, the manifestations of what

00:33:11.600 came to be called autism have been present, you could go back to like the Victorian lunatic asylums 0.97

00:33:17.960 in the United Kingdom, and you would see autism. I've got video in from television programs long before

00:33:24.220 MMR was even licensed, which you would say, well, in that period, you would say that was autism.

00:33:30.500 Autism had come to be constructed. What a lot of people don't realise about autism is that autism is

00:33:35.080 a construct. It's not like Crohn's disease. Autism is a tick box diagnosis of different signs and

00:33:42.140 symptoms which are brought together, clustered together. And it's really been created, a bit like

00:33:47.500 schizophrenia, really. And in fact, schizophrenia went into decline with the rise of autism.

00:33:51.900 A bit like childhood schizophrenia, autism was an emerging diagnosis in the early 1990s. And in fact,

00:33:59.580 the American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, both brought out diagnostic

00:34:04.540 categories in the early 1990s, identifying a spectrum of disorders, one of which was autism,

00:34:11.040 and there were several others. So this was something which when this Jackie Fletcher, she's running this

00:34:16.880 effort to sue for her own child. She set up a group and they started doing surveys. And in those surveys,

00:34:23.420 they came up with quite a few cases of autism because it was beginning to be diagnosed. And so they

00:34:27.900 said, okay, well, that's the most common diagnosis we can cluster together. So we'll go after that. So

00:34:34.780 that's why they went after MMR and autism. Simply the artifactual situation of there being a newly

00:34:41.800 emergent diagnostic category, also the introduction in the UK of the MMR vaccine. So they went after

00:34:49.300 this idea. And Wakefield was then enlisted. So Richard Barr provided what initially was most

00:34:55.400 important was the money for Wakefield to do research. And so what they did is they made a grant

00:35:00.560 application, very similar to any scientific research who wants to look into something, you make a grant

00:35:06.400 application to somebody who's got some money. And the people who had the money with this government

00:35:10.440 agency, was actually called the Legal Aid Board, operating a thing called the Legal Aid Fund, which

00:35:15.440 funded people who couldn't afford to sue drug companies to sue the manufacturers of MMR. So Wakefield

00:35:22.400 had the job of ensuring that this lawsuit was launched. At the time, the lawsuit hadn't been launched,

00:35:29.480 it had just been collecting clients, collecting anecdotes, collecting stories, taking statements and

00:35:35.640 preparing so that this government agency would fund them to go forward and sue the drug companies.

00:35:43.160 That was Wakefield's mission. And they made the grant application to the Legal Aid Board in June of

00:35:50.100 1996. Now, the paper we're getting to that you mentioned was published in February 1998. So this scheme

00:35:57.420 between these people, and there were a couple of other people involved in it as well, was the origins

00:36:03.160 of the idea that vaccines caused autism. And ultimately, we would find this was the origins,

00:36:10.560 the acorn, if you like, from which the anti-vaccine movement, even if today, emerged to create the issues

00:36:19.300 they're creating over the coronavirus shots. So that was the explanation in very sketched out terms

00:36:27.480 of why they hired Wakefield. Richard Barr was going to get the money from the legal board.

00:36:35.080 Jackie Fletcher, this woman, she started an organisation which she gave the name of Jabs to,

00:36:40.480 she would recruit the clients. Wakefield would do the tests that were going to show that the MMR vaccine

00:36:49.540 was the cause of autism. In fact, the proposal he put to the Legal Aid Board with this solicitor,

00:36:55.360 Richard Barr, said in advance of a single child in this paper, the 12-child paper which you mentioned,

00:37:03.480 before a single one of those children had been investigated at that hospital, they had made the

00:37:11.100 proposal to the legal aid board that they would show that there was a new syndrome which included both

00:37:18.600 inflammatory bowel disease, which was what interested Wakefield, and autism, which interested the lawyer

00:37:26.120 and Jackie Fletcher, the campaigner. And they bolted it all together, made a grant application,

00:37:33.820 and a duty lawyer in the government's Legal Aid Board, a woman she was in her late 20s,

00:37:40.560 ultimately signed the document for Wakefield to be employed to do research that ultimately was what

00:37:48.820 ended up in the Lancet 18 months or so, a year and a half later, in this paper that created this

00:37:57.540 enormous furore. And what nobody knew until, well, I came along, I suppose I have to say that,

00:38:05.040 although everyone criticises me now, particularly doctors who sort of say, oh, he's self-aggrandising,

00:38:10.720 and they do things like saying, I actually did one at my publisher's university, Johns Hopkins,

00:38:15.100 the other day, and somebody said, you helped to unmask this. I said, no, I didn't help it, I did it.

00:38:20.280 And that's one of the extraordinary things about this story, that the medical establishment just kind

00:38:25.060 of sat back and let all this go on. And it appeared that only a journalist spotted the grounds to

00:38:32.920 believe there was something funny going on here. But anyway, so this was the background to this

00:38:37.100 paper. And then in February 1998, this paper was published in the Lancet, which, in terms of general

00:38:43.780 medicine, I would say was the number two journal after the New England Journal of Medicine. It's way

00:38:48.940 down the rankings from nature and science, but they're general science journals, so they carry a

00:38:53.940 lot of other stuff other than medicine. When you get into general medicine, it goes, broadly goes,

00:38:58.240 New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, which kind of has a bit of a tussle with the

00:39:02.680 Journal of the American Medical Association, Annals of Internal Medicine. Then you get to the British 0.96

00:39:06.980 Medical Journal and onward down you go. Very prestigious journal, a 12-child case series.

00:39:13.380 And you said, Peter, earlier that, I'll sharpen a moment, but you said earlier that this was a

00:39:18.160 ropey paper and so on. I don't agree with that, actually. At face value, with the knowledge of

00:39:24.780 hindsight, once you know the story, you look at that paper and you say, well, this is all a joke.

00:39:28.660 But at the time, it was very credible because it was a case series. Now, when you think about case

00:39:34.960 series, it's literally a collection of anecdotes. For example, Crohn's disease, when that was

00:39:42.240 discovered, formally characterised in the 1930s, fully described a case series of tissue samples

00:39:49.360 taken from 14 patients. Autism itself, which was first characterised and properly described,

00:39:56.760 a fact from Johns Hopkins University, published as my book, on 11 children. It was a case series of

00:40:03.600 11 children. AIDS, what came to be known as AIDS, was first described, classically described, in 1981

00:40:11.760 based on five gay men in Los Angeles. So there's nothing questionable or improper or inadequate

00:40:19.040 about a case series of 12 children.

00:40:21.600 I think what I was referring to is something we'll get to later, so it's less the size of it. And I think

00:40:28.140 if my memory serves me correctly, Brian, there was not an institutional review board that had

00:40:35.400 approved what those children went through.

00:40:38.080 Well, the paper said there was. The paper said there was.

00:40:41.580 I see. I see. But that turned out to be incorrect.

00:40:44.500 It turned out to be a lie. It was a lie.

00:40:46.480 It's kind of a brief aside. A lot of people think I'm like a pro-vaccine campaigner. And I think you

00:40:51.580 probably think this. And I'm not. And that is not what got me involved in this in the first place.

00:40:55.900 What got me involved in this in the first place was to do with the scientific method.

00:41:00.460 How did this paper work? What was going on behind it? One of the things that really bugs me

00:41:04.720 is people who believe they can judge research by a text on a piece of paper or on a screen.

00:41:13.120 And you can't. Those papers are not even the study. You're aware of this, that the people use the word

00:41:19.180 study and paper interchangeably. They believe that the paper is what it's all about. And what I was

00:41:26.220 able to do, and I still believe it, nobody's ever done it. I don't think, but certainly no journalist

00:41:30.060 has ever done it. I've been asking like since last year publicly for if anybody knows somebody who's done

00:41:35.580 anything similar, I'd like to know about it because it would be interesting and I'd incorporate it into the

00:41:39.500 story to go around the back of the paper and find out who the patients were, what was wrong with them,

00:41:45.340 what was their diagnoses, what was their histories, what were their test results, and all of that. And

00:41:50.080 I did it on these 12 children. Let's talk about it because it's so powerful. And as you said,

00:41:57.140 if this is the acorn of the movement, we have to resort to the long and arid dissertations,

00:42:03.160 as Bastia said, and really understand that. So let's start with a fundamental question of how

00:42:10.860 were these subjects recruited? Right. At face value, they appeared just to be part of the routine

00:42:18.440 caseload of this hospital's bowel clinic, a pediatric bowel clinic. Essentially, the picture was this.

00:42:25.740 Over a period of about maximum six to nine months, a series of parents turned up with their children

00:42:32.900 at this bowel clinic in the hospital, a pediatric bowel clinic. And they said, words to the effect

00:42:38.920 of, my child was developing perfectly normally, perfectly happy child. 11 of these children were

00:42:44.880 boys, one was a girl. All of them were white. My child was developing perfectly normally. We gave him, 0.97

00:42:50.920 or in one case, her, the MMR, took him to the doctor, got the MMR. And within days, specifically,

00:42:59.240 within 14 days, that was the range, that was the maximum range that they allegedly reported. Within

00:43:06.440 14 days, one of them was said to have come on immediately after the vaccine. So between immediately

00:43:13.020 and 14 days, eight out of these 12, I have to express it carefully because two of the children

00:43:19.460 were brothers. So I have to say, the parents of eight of the 12 children said the first symptoms

00:43:27.700 of their child's developmental issue, autism overwhelmingly, came on within 14 days of an

00:43:36.020 MMR shot. At face value, if that was true, then that could be potentially the first snapshot

00:43:44.560 of a hidden epidemic of catastrophic injuries to children. It may be that these doctors at this

00:43:50.720 hospital were just better doctors, more thorough, asked more questions, had more time or whatever.

00:43:57.700 And that possibly all over the world, children were experiencing this and just nobody had

00:44:03.760 noticed. So the fact that this paper said these things was extraordinary in itself. It got network

00:44:11.940 coverage right across the spectrum that night. The UK then had five national networks and they all

00:44:18.280 carried it on the evening news. Very substantial media coverage because the hospital and medical school

00:44:23.660 convened a press conference, which was chaired by the dean of the medical school. One of the people

00:44:29.720 on the platform, the table anyway, with Wakefield was a professor of gastroenterology, the man in fact

00:44:35.420 had hired Wakefield from Canada. So the media thought, well, this must be something important. And it had

00:44:40.400 been trailed in advance. There'd been leaks and promotional things have been done to attract more and more

00:44:45.760 attention to this thing. They absolutely knew what they were doing. Extra phone lines, extra landlines

00:44:51.700 were installed in the hospital. This is back in the day of mechanical answering machines. They went out

00:44:57.020 and bought mechanical answering machines to field the public alarm that they knew they were going to

00:45:01.800 create. And this hospital, this medical school, and this Andrew Wakefield announced to the world their

00:45:08.760 probable cause of autism as the MMR vaccine. And of course, the result would be obvious. And it was.

00:45:18.180 Tell people what those kids went through when they were enrolled in a study that, as we would later

00:45:24.460 learn, did not even have an IRB to approve it. What was the actual set of procedures that these

00:45:30.380 children went through? It was described in advance. This is very interesting. It was described in advance

00:45:35.900 to the legal board, to the funding agency, to which they'd made this grant application to do this work.

00:45:41.380 First, I should say, these children are children who don't like their lives being disrupted.

00:45:45.260 These are the kind of children who the slightest variation in some cases to their routine will

00:45:51.680 cause them great distress. One of the curiosities of autism. So they were brought to London. None of

00:45:58.560 them lived in London. The nearest family was 60 miles away. Some were 280 miles away.

00:46:06.680 And one was in the United States.

00:46:08.260 Yeah. One was on the island of Jersey in the English Channel near France. And one was from the

00:46:12.640 Bay Area of California. And just to hit pause for a second, that immediately speaks to the idea that

00:46:18.720 these weren't just kids being seen in this hospital as part of the routine caseload. But let's put that

00:46:24.200 aside for a moment. I mean, the idea that you would bring somebody from the Bay Area of California

00:46:28.920 to London for medical treatment, particularly that hospital, is absurd. The idea that there aren't good

00:46:35.400 hospitals in San Francisco or California generally is an absurdity.

00:46:39.500 Yes. Back to your point. We're talking about children who any disruption of routine is traumatic.

00:46:46.460 And so we're going to bring these kids here. And what was done to them?

00:46:49.620 The children were brought in on a Sunday, different Sundays. They didn't turn up at the same time,

00:46:55.320 different Sundays. Sunday afternoon, they would turn up. Doctor would take their histories from the

00:47:01.340 parents. So the parent would simply be interviewed as to what they could remember.

00:47:04.940 The child would be examined. They would then be bowel prepped for colonoscopy. In fact,

00:47:11.500 it was an ileocolonoscopy. I mean, I've had a colonoscopy, but I've never had an ileocolonoscopy.

00:47:16.540 In a colonoscopy, you go in, I don't need to tell you, but there might be a few people who

00:47:20.960 might just need the route map. You go in through the anus, you come up through the sigmoid colon, 0.58

00:47:25.840 you come up the descending colon, you cross at the splenic flexure, across the transverse colon,

00:47:33.400 which sort of sags across behind the breastbone. You turn at the hepatic flexure, you go down the

00:47:39.120 ascending colon to the cecum, which is pretty much where the appendix is. And then there's a valve

00:47:45.220 there. So that's a colonoscopy to do that. Then there's a valve, a little valve. And if you go

00:47:50.960 through that valve, that valve separates the large bowel, the colon, from the small bowel. And that 0.86

00:47:56.480 particular stretch of the small bowel is called the ileum. And the first couple of centimetres

00:48:00.560 of that is accessible to an instrument, colonoscope or endoscope, if you like. And you can get into the

00:48:08.140 first two centimetres. And the thing is, when you go past that valve into the small intestine,

00:48:12.280 the small intestine is the bit that takes nutrients out of food. It's actually prior to the colon. So

00:48:18.340 from your mouth, this is the top end rather than the bottom or the distal end. So you get into the

00:48:23.300 distal end of the small intestine. The small intestine is what takes nutrition out of food. 0.88

00:48:28.560 And the large bowel, more or less, takes water out of your feces so that we don't trail stuff around

00:48:34.340 behind us for most of our lives anyway. So this scope, this instrument would go up, round, down. And

00:48:40.720 then there was a quite a difficult manoeuvre to get into the small intestine. It's quite a significant

00:48:45.280 piece of work in itself. And in fact, later, not actually one of the 12, but later in the series,

00:48:50.280 a child had catastrophic damage caused to him by this procedure. And there was a huge financial

00:48:55.880 settlement from the hospital. That was the first thing they'd do. Some of them also had upper

00:49:00.380 endoscopies where you push a tube down the throat and look around, mostly in the duodenum and that

00:49:06.360 area. That would be the first thing that would happen the next day. And then most of the children had

00:49:12.120 lumbar punctures, spinal taps, which is a needle basically pushed into the spine to take fluid,

00:49:18.900 essentially brain fluid through the spine. They were required to undergo MRI scans, EEGs,

00:49:27.200 electroencephalograms, barium meals where you're essentially x-rayed, you drink a radioactive drink

00:49:33.540 and you're x-rayed to get an image of the gut. Blood tests, which generally required with these

00:49:40.120 kids, three people to hold them down. In fact, Andrew Wakefield sued me over some of this. Maybe

00:49:46.620 get to that at some point. One of the things he sued me over was saying that these children were being

00:49:50.720 held down by three people. In fact, yes, they were. There were children screaming. One child collapsed

00:49:56.880 three times in the corridor. One had to be admitted to another hospital after discharge from the Royal

00:50:02.060 Free for apparent side effects or consequences of lumbar puncture. Another one had an emergency

00:50:07.820 doctor calls to their home. So they had that. They had blood tests. What else did they have? I've

00:50:13.600 probably forgotten something. And some of these children were so constipated upon arrival that if I

00:50:19.140 recall, the colonoscopies were very difficult colonoscopies. They did not have easy bowel preps the way

00:50:26.760 a child might. The irony, of course, is that most of these kids were anything but having

00:50:32.000 inflammatory bowel disease or Crohn's disease, given the incredible constipation that many of

00:50:36.940 them experienced. You can have constipation with inflammatory bowel disease, but it's unusual. And

00:50:41.360 it's usually part of the differential diagnosis that the patient doesn't have inflammatory bowel

00:50:45.400 disease. And they also had blood tests. In fact, the clinicians working on this had themselves

00:50:50.840 published on a panel of blood tests, which they used to do, which determined whether or not there

00:50:58.640 was a probable cause to do colonoscopies or ileocolonoscopies in this case. And those blood

00:51:04.320 tests all came back normal. But they still went ahead and did it anyway, because Wakefield had said to

00:51:09.060 them, which is part of his contract with the legal board to help sue vaccine manufacturers, that there

00:51:14.320 might be some lesser inflammation that wasn't being picked up by the blood test, just like with

00:51:20.720 the measles virus not being detected by the PCR, because the PCR wasn't sensitive enough. So the

00:51:27.360 blood tests weren't sensitive enough to detect the bowel disease that he said these children had,

00:51:34.520 or suspected they had. In fact, he told the legal aid board that they did have it before he did the

00:51:39.140 research, which purportedly discovered it. But anyway, that's just the way things go in this story.

00:51:43.880 How does John O'Leary enter the story? Because he becomes a very important collaborator,

00:51:49.460 effectively doing the most important pathology here, correct?

00:51:52.940 Yeah. What Wakefield was trying to do, the reason why he wanted these tests done,

00:51:57.940 was that he was looking for measles virus. So if your hypothesis is that measles virus causes

00:52:04.200 Crohn's disease or causes autism or whatever, well, those two things. The thing about the last part of

00:52:12.240 the small intestine, the small intestine, the ileum, that is the most characteristic part of the bowel

00:52:19.540 where Crohn's disease is found. Crohn's disease can manifest anywhere between the mouth and the anus.

00:52:26.780 In fact, it can. But where it most characteristically manifests is exactly where they went to. And this

00:52:35.700 got Wakefield really excited. So what he wanted to do was to get into the small intestines of these

00:52:43.660 children in order to find the measles virus. Because if you found measles virus alive long after

00:52:51.980 vaccination, we're talking about it persisting years after vaccination. These were some of these kids

00:52:56.980 were aged nine. The youngest was three. The oldest was nine and a half. You're talking about children

00:53:03.300 who would have been vaccinated years previously. And his hypothesis was that the measles virus was

00:53:09.540 persisting in the small intestine and he was going to find it. Basically, when you do a colonoscopy,

00:53:16.140 you go all the way in without doing very much. You just try and get in. And as you say, some of these

00:53:20.720 children were so constipated they couldn't get in and actually had to abandon the thing and clean them

00:53:25.440 out again. But one child, they said they were going to, ultimately, we're going to do it three times

00:53:29.800 until the mother said, no, no more of this. He wanted to find the measles virus in the small

00:53:35.500 intestine. So when the endoscopist got as far as the small intestine, he then, a man named Simon

00:53:41.460 Murch did some of it, and another guy called Mike Thompson did some of it. They would take little

00:53:47.960 biopsy snips. They would snip off. On the end of the colonoscope, they had got little jaws and they

00:53:53.720 would snip off a bit of tissue and bring it back through the thing. There'd be a nurse standing to 1.00

00:53:59.600 one side who would like be pulling these things back through little rods down the tube. And then

00:54:05.960 the colonoscope would come back through the gut, taking little bits of tissue at each of the points

00:54:11.040 at the ascending colon, transverse colon, the descending colon, and the sigmoid colon of the rectum.

00:54:17.900 But the gold in this for Wakefield was in the small intestine. And so waiting in the endoscopy

00:54:23.860 suite where this went on, there was a scientist who was actually doing his PhD, working under

00:54:30.820 Wakefield's direction, waiting to take samples of the tissue away and freeze it in liquid nitrogen

00:54:38.420 so that it could be tested using the polymerase chain reaction for measles virus. This scientist,

00:54:46.800 his PhD was a very good piece of work. It's not like a PhD in the arts. Well, you just, I think in

00:54:52.260 the arts, sometimes you get a PhD just for turning up and writing the thing, but he actually did a bit

00:54:56.280 of science. He developed a gold standard PCR test for measles virus. Wakefield supervised that

00:55:05.460 and they published on that. And then they went on in Wakefield's own lab to use the PCR technique to

00:55:14.540 identify measles virus. And they couldn't find measles virus in any of these children. And

00:55:21.760 Wakefield's answer to that was, oh, the PCR wasn't sensitive enough.

00:55:25.380 And why had he switched to PCR here as opposed to going back to the immunohistochemistry? Because he

00:55:30.920 had already made this criticism in 95 when the Japanese group said, using PCR, we can't find it.

00:55:38.800 And he had previously in 93 said, oh no, it's here with immunohistochemistry. So why in 98 is he not

00:55:44.280 going back to immunohistochemistry? That's a good question. I like your questions. I don't normally get

00:55:49.200 doctors doing these conversations, so nobody asked that. It's a very good question. The reason why he

00:55:56.180 wanted to do PCR and had to do PCR was in the grant application to the British government's legal aid

00:56:04.100 board, he'd said up front, 18 months before the paper was written and before any of these children

00:56:10.500 had been investigating the hospital, that they would undergo PCR for strain-specific sequencing.

00:56:18.220 Everyone who's got a television set or radio these days knows what that means because it's so

00:56:23.320 part of the discussion over vaccines. He wanted to show that this virus came from a vaccine.

00:56:31.780 The measles virus could come from three possibilities. One, it's a virus that comes from nature. You've

00:56:36.940 caught it from somebody. One is that it's a laboratory strain because there are particular

00:56:41.220 strains of the virus which are kept for laboratory work. And the other is it came from a vaccine.

00:56:47.880 But in order to determine which one it was, you couldn't use immunohistochemistry because it wouldn't

00:56:52.220 get you down to the nucleotides, which is what you need to get down to in order to sequence. Classic

00:56:58.220 procedures, absolute workhorse procedures.

00:57:01.040 Maybe to just explain to people, immunohistochemistry might have the ability to recognize there's a

00:57:05.880 person there. PCR can fingerprint the person. And this is sort of like saying there are three people

00:57:11.860 and I just need to see which fingerprint it is to know if it's the lab strain, which would be a

00:57:17.560 contamination if it showed up in your sample, a naturally occurring strain. So it's a transmission

00:57:22.520 that you acquired versus a vaccine strain.

00:57:25.940 Yeah, yeah.

00:57:26.780 And he was trying to demonstrate, test the hypothesis. If we're going to continue to give him the benefit

00:57:31.340 of the doubt at this point, he was testing a hypothesis.

00:57:34.340 Yeah, I'd have to take issue with your use of the word testing. He wasn't testing hypothesis.

00:57:40.560 He was advancing it and simply trying to prove that it was so. He at no stage did what a scientist

00:57:48.220 would do, which would be to test it by attempting to falsify it, try and find some reason to believe

00:57:54.060 that he was wrong. He simply wanted to prove that he was right. He'd set out what it was he was going

00:58:00.860 to find in his grant application before a single one of these children went anywhere near the hospital.

00:58:07.940 This is a totally random aside, but I remember you made the point about the relative lack of rigor

00:58:14.260 that went into his grant application. It wasn't like he was applying through the most rigorous or

00:58:20.820 applying to the most rigorous granting entity. And it actually reminds me of the first grant application

00:58:27.440 I ever wrote in my life, which was in medical school for a very small project. It was for a summer

00:58:32.280 research project. At my medical school, they had this amazing thing where you could get paid an

00:58:37.800 enormous sum of money to do research for a summer. It was basically a great way to offset your

00:58:42.380 tuition. It amounted to about a third of your tuition for the year. So I put my little application

00:58:47.500 together and I just happened to review it with a guy named Pat Brown, who's a very famous scientist

00:58:54.900 at Stanford. And I must say, I have to hand it to him. He just schooled me on what it means to write a

00:59:03.140 scientific proposal. He didn't pull any punches with how pathetic it was. And part of it was this 0.99

00:59:09.920 lack of, at the time, understanding. I was a first year medical student. I really didn't understand

00:59:15.800 what it meant to have a hypothesis, generate a series of questions and go through this process

00:59:21.680 we're describing. And I had to go back to the drawing board and start all over again. And I bet that

00:59:26.660 if someone like a Pat Brown were to take a look at the proposal put forth by Wakefield,

00:59:31.600 they would have had the same reaction, which is this is not a person who has the chops to do this

00:59:37.880 type of investigation. And again, I think it speaks to another point you made, which is the relative

00:59:42.900 lack of policing in the field. And by policing, I don't mean literal policing, but I mean self-auditing

00:59:48.300 and self-policing. The grant application he put in was received by somebody with no medical

00:59:53.180 background and no medical or scientific advice or contrary opinion or anything was sought by the

00:59:59.020 funding agency. It was literally a lawyer, a young lawyer with no background in science who simply

01:00:07.140 authorized the work. So after Wakefield and his colleague cannot find any evidence of the measles

01:00:13.040 virus, either naturally occurring or through vaccine in the distal ileum via PCR, in theory, that should be

01:00:20.180 the end of this inquiry at this point in time. But what happens next? Well, so what he did was he

01:00:26.080 using public money. He flew to New York and found an Irish professor who was then teaching in New York

01:00:32.800 and asked him if he could use his PCR equipment. This professor, a man named John O'Leary, was going

01:00:42.900 back to Ireland, back to Dublin to work at a hospital, the Coombe Women's Hospital. It was a maternity 1.00

01:00:49.040 hospital, not exactly a great centre of scientific inquiry, but he was going back there and he said

01:00:56.800 to Wakefield, yes, I can find whatever you need to find, and then proceeded to set about trying to

01:01:03.360 find measles virus in bowel tissues taken from children at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead in

01:01:12.320 North London. And he was paid an enormous amount of public money to do this. He ultimately, from his

01:01:20.000 lab, they published a paper claiming that they found measles virus in nearly all the children that

01:01:26.480 Wakefield had sent samples from. Now, I think to really explain what happened in O'Leary's lab,

01:01:33.740 one has to understand a little bit about PCR and what the number of cycles mean, what amplification

01:01:41.900 means. And ultimately, we'll even talk a little bit about the controls. And again, I don't ask this

01:01:47.480 of you lightly because I know that these are technical topics. But again, if one truly wants to

01:01:53.680 understand what took place, I think one has to understand what took place in O'Leary's lab. Because

01:01:59.360 in many ways, maybe you would interpret the facts differently. And I would respect your opinion more

01:02:04.640 than my own. But I almost view O'Leary's lab as the epicenter of the epicenter of the fraud.

01:02:10.100 I agree with you. I appreciate the point you're making, because you would not believe how difficult

01:02:15.880 it is to describe molecular amplification in a single paragraph. I think I'll use two paragraphs in

01:02:23.520 different places. To a certain extent, I repeat it slightly to get it down to its simplest level and

01:02:30.360 yet still be accurate. So maybe I'll try. I mean, I'll do it off the top of my head now. And I can't

01:02:36.260 obviously, I haven't got words in front of me to shuffle around. But essentially, this is what's

01:02:41.900 topical at the moment. All over the world, this stuff is being done on samples from members of the

01:02:47.300 public, who are being tested for evidence of infection with the coronavirus.

01:02:54.520 I mean, I've probably had 20 coronavirus tests via PCR in the last nine months. Maybe that's more than

01:03:02.380 the average person, but very few people at this point will not have had PCR touch their life. So whether

01:03:07.500 it's a coronavirus test, or a crime scene that is trying to demonstrate if that microscopic drop of

01:03:15.940 blood is from a suspect, it would go through this amazing technology for which the Nobel Prize was

01:03:22.860 awarded in the 1980s to Cary Mullis. Yeah. Something isn't in the book, I don't think,

01:03:27.940 I'm not sure it's in the book, is that partly it begins with the discovery of a polymerase in the

01:03:34.480 Yellowstone National Park. Now, you can say, what's a polymerase? Tell me what a polymerase is,

01:03:39.000 just to shorten it a bit. So it's an enzyme, basically, that catalyzes a reaction. I mean,

01:03:45.940 I can even shorten a bit of this whole thing for you, which is, when you have a double strand of

01:03:50.280 DNA, how does DNA replicate? So there are basically two reactions that you want to be able to do with

01:03:55.420 DNA. Sometimes you want to just make more of it. For when a cell is dividing to make another version

01:04:00.860 of itself, it has to break apart that double strand of DNA, and it has to make another template of each of

01:04:09.160 it. And it uses enzymes to do the breaking apart and then the building. And there's a code for DNA.

01:04:15.220 It's a very simple code because there are four letters, and each letter has a known corresponding

01:04:21.440 letter. You have this code where you basically break it apart, where you replicate it, and then

01:04:25.660 you duplicate the strand. There's another side of breaking apart DNA, which is if you want to make

01:04:30.020 protein. And here, you actually break it apart to make a single strand of something called

01:04:36.400 messenger RNA. And the RNA carries that message out to be transcribed as a protein. So it depends

01:04:44.060 on the application in which you're doing it. But these polymerase enzymes basically facilitate

01:04:49.600 different aspects of this process. Like the evening news, I'll do a little bit. Maybe on that. Yes,

01:04:57.260 so there's this ladder joined together. This is the classic double helix of DNA. We'll do the machine

01:05:04.080 version because that's what we do. These days, this is all automated. Not so long ago, not so many

01:05:08.940 decades ago, this was all done manually, very time consuming, extremely boring process, now done by

01:05:14.220 machine. And the machine heats up test tubes with your samples in and a few other things, controls and

01:05:20.440 what have you. As it heats up, the ladders split apart. So that instead of having something joined

01:05:26.520 together, you've got them separate. In the case of measles virus, you have something, a preliminary

01:05:32.160 step called reverse transcription, where because RNA is a single strand, rather than DNA, which is a

01:05:39.320 double strand, RNA, ribonucleic acid is a single strand. So for this technology to work, you need

01:05:47.160 two strands for reasons which I'm sure you'll probably get to. So what happens initially is a

01:05:52.460 second strand is created synthetically so that you then have what is called cDNA, which is kind of an

01:05:59.700 artificial construct of DNA. Once that's done, won't go into how it's done, but once that's done and

01:06:05.160 you've then got this piece of DNA, the machine heats up the material, the test tubes in it, and these two

01:06:12.060 ladders split apart. And at that point, this polymerase, this enzyme that amazingly was discovered in the

01:06:19.900 Yellowstone National Park, goes along the broken rungs of this ladder and creates a complementary

01:06:28.380 second ladder. So for each of the points, rungs on the ladder, it creates another one which joins to it.

01:06:36.460 And these are the nucleotides, the base nucleotides, the fundamental building blocks of life.

01:06:41.380 So when you start off with these two, these split apart, the polymerase runs along from one end of the,

01:06:47.960 it's unbelievable really, runs along from one end of the ladder to the other, and then you've got two

01:06:54.980 DNA, two double-stranded samples. So then you cool it, the cooling brings these two together and they

01:07:02.540 solidify, and then you repeat the procedure, they split apart again, the TAC polymerase goes along and creates

01:07:11.300 the extra thing, and then instead of two, you've got four. And then as you cool it down, then you heat it up again,

01:07:17.480 and you keep repeating this process until two becomes four, four becomes eight, eight becomes

01:07:24.060 64, is it?

01:07:25.880 Yeah, 16. It goes exponentially. Yeah, it's just two powers, yeah. It becomes astronomical.

01:07:31.360 And then at that point, you can read it and it's read by, well, it's read by things called primers and

01:07:40.120 probes. What primers do, these are other little bits of nucleotides in a chemical solution, which

01:07:47.680 bind to very specific nucleotides. They're like bookends. You've got these primers, which take a

01:07:56.380 slice, essentially mark out a slice of this, and this other thing comes along and identifies,

01:08:03.520 it's called a probe. And if the thing that you're looking for is present, the whole thing by magic,

01:08:10.420 which is now all being monitored by laser beam, which is like taking samples, measurements by

01:08:16.280 millisecond as to while this is going on, will give a signal, which is then recorded on a computer

01:08:23.000 and generates a curve. And this curve, it starts off flat and then it rises and then it goes, what's the

01:08:32.400 word? Well, it asymptotes into a flat thing again. So it goes, it's kind of a rough S shape. Before it

01:08:38.900 asymptotes, goes flat, you take a reading. And that's usually at about 35 cycles.

01:08:46.560 To put that in perspective, that means two to the 35 copies you've potentially made. By the time I was

01:08:54.520 doing this, it had become so automated. The kit was called TACMAN, like T-A-Q because of the polymerase

01:09:02.000 you mentioned, the TAC polymerase. And so it was called real-time quantified PCR. And it was really

01:09:10.180 quite amazing because as the scientist, you only had to prepare the reagent. And it was literally

01:09:17.200 as simple as a Betty Crocker cooking exercise where you put in your primers, you put in your

01:09:22.580 probes, you put in your TAC, you put in your sample, and the machine would go through everything you just

01:09:27.840 said, the heating, cooling, heating, cooling, heating, cooling cycles. And it would spit out for you

01:09:32.340 the information of what's present and how much of it is present. Because remember, you can go up to 35

01:09:39.020 cycles. But if you start with a large amount of nuclear material, you'll see it much sooner.

01:09:45.180 And in fact, even with the coronavirus, that's an important feature. So when a patient tests positive

01:09:51.220 via PCR, you have to remember these tests are really geared for their negative predictive value

01:09:56.100 more than their positive predictive value. You would like it if a lab would report how many cycles

01:10:00.760 were necessary to demonstrate a positive test. And in a clinical assay, we're going to come to why

01:10:06.740 all of this is relevant. In a clinical assay, you need to be able to report the number of cycles

01:10:12.840 because it matters if it was positive after 20 cycles versus 30 cycles. That's a very big

01:10:19.820 resolution difference in something being present. So I think you did a fantastic job, by the way,

01:10:25.040 explaining PCR. Let's now go back to O'Leary's lab. So I mean, the way you describe it, it's like

01:10:30.920 he was basically paid to find something. Yeah. Yeah. So O'Leary has now sent the samples,

01:10:36.800 the ileocecal biopsies of these children. He has what at the time is a state-of-the-art machine,

01:10:42.520 right? The ABI Prism 7700? Yeah, I guess at the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And as you said,

01:10:48.180 this is a machine that is not rated for a clinical diagnosis, correct? Right. Yeah. It does not have a

01:10:55.860 CLIA certification. One cannot make clinical diagnoses with it. It is a research tool only.

01:11:01.280 And the company that makes it says, what? If you go more than 35 cycles, what is the inference of what

01:11:09.160 you're looking at? And in fact, Tony Fauci said the same thing. He did a video just a couple of

01:11:13.860 months ago where he was talking about cycles and he came up with 35 as well. Basically, once you go

01:11:19.400 past 35, where the rising line asymptotes basically goes flat, at that point, if you haven't found what

01:11:26.580 you're looking for, then you either conclude it's not there or you've done something wrong and you

01:11:33.220 need to start again. I mean, you said how simple this thing appears to be. And it's interesting that

01:11:38.120 you would say it that way. In fact, the apparent simplicity is beguiling and misleading.

01:11:44.620 It wasn't this simple in 1998.

01:11:46.760 No.

01:11:47.300 And furthermore, you can still be fooled by the machine an awful lot.

01:11:52.300 Yeah. The technology is so sensitive. We're probably into 2001 or something now. One of

01:11:58.160 the reasons why it's a research tool and not a clinical instrument was because so much goes

01:12:02.420 wrong. And the technology is so sensitive that just anything will create contamination.

01:12:09.360 If you're getting signals after 35 and you think they're positive signals, it's probably

01:12:14.560 contamination or some kind of error you've made in the thing.

01:12:18.220 And even with the coronavirus, so now we're dealing with a couple of things that are different. One,

01:12:23.500 you're dealing with a clinical grade PCR assay. That means it is under far greater regulatory

01:12:28.840 scrutiny and it is far more standardized than anything that someone like O'Leary was using.

01:12:33.640 Secondly, even under those conditions, the test is far better at demonstrating something is negative

01:12:40.120 than positive. So we say it has much greater negative predictive value. So when the test comes back

01:12:44.980 negative, you can almost with certainty, 99, more than 99% certainty say it's truly negative.

01:12:51.460 When it comes back positive, you really don't know that it's positive. You have to repeat the test.

01:12:55.420 And any physician listening to this or patient listening to this, who's had either themselves

01:13:00.360 or a patient with a positive PCR for COVID realizes the first thing you do if they're not symptomatic

01:13:06.280 is test again. And even in my practice, we've seen three false positives on PCR that were later found

01:13:11.680 to not be positive. And that's just the nature of using a test that is so sensitive.

01:13:16.560 This man, John O'Leary, was hired on Wakefield's recommendation. He was actually hired by Richard

01:13:22.960 Barr, the lawyer that was working with Wakefield, to test these samples on these children, these

01:13:28.560 children with developmental issues, mostly autism from the Royal Free Hospital. And O'Leary found,

01:13:34.420 or at least, this is again, where you get use of words is very important. I won't say he found,

01:13:39.480 he reported measles virus in pretty much, I don't know, nine out of 10 children. This

01:13:47.140 created huge interest. They published a paper. This was apparently the evidence that the measles

01:13:55.280 virus was there in the guts of these children. But then you get to the question of, well, if

01:14:01.880 they really did find measles, where was it from? Was it from one of these three things I was

01:14:07.440 talking earlier on? Was it from nature? Was it from a natural viral infection picked up

01:14:12.660 from somebody? Was it from the MMR vaccine? Or was it a laboratory strain? Because laboratories

01:14:20.940 who work in these areas usually have a special room where these materials are prepared, called

01:14:27.280 the plasmid room, where they prepare samples of laboratory strain virus in the case of measles.

01:14:35.380 So there would be within this laboratory situation of O'Leary's, there would be laboratory strain

01:14:42.420 virus being used and manipulated on the premises. So then the question would be, OK, he says he's found

01:14:52.260 measles virus. Well, you sequence it. So in addition to this particular PCR machine that does this process,

01:15:00.260 and you can say, well, OK, there's an element of identifying a sequence there because your

01:15:05.100 primers and probes, these things that bookend and then lock onto the samples, nucleotides,

01:15:12.280 would do so more effectively if what you were looking for was there. But nevertheless, there's a second

01:15:17.120 machine, a sequencer. These days, they're called capillary sequencers, and they literally run the

01:15:24.920 individual nucleotides, these minisculely tiny things which are contained, coiled up in the

01:15:31.700 DNA of every cell in your body. And they string it all out and run them past laser beams, and they

01:15:37.900 will identify each and every one of those nucleotides and mark out for you what it is, the four

01:15:44.480 nucleotides. Do you want to do the four bases? I think we can spare people, but A, T, C, and G

01:15:50.340 would be their acronyms. Yeah. It's slightly different with RNA. With RNA, you substitute in U, but yeah.

01:15:56.680 Yeah. So there's a machine, and O'Leary had one of these machines in his lab. And in fact, he was

01:16:03.420 invited to give evidence. With Wakefield sitting next to him, O'Leary represented himself as being an

01:16:09.360 independent researcher. And in fact, he was in a business deal with the guy sitting next to him, Andrew

01:16:14.240 Wakefield. They had actually got a whole raft of business plans and joint ventures and money go

01:16:19.860 around and directors of each other's companies and all this kind of stuff. He actually said in a

01:16:25.620 congressional committee that he had one of these sequences. He identified it, gave the make and what

01:16:31.680 have you in his lab. And so did O'Leary's lab produce the sequences to answer that question? Was it a virus

01:16:42.540 from nature? Was it a virus from the MMR or was it a virus from the laboratory? And he never, ever produced

01:16:53.400 any sequence data from those children at all. This is why the book has this process described in it

01:17:03.020 and why we're talking about it in such detail now, because it's important that people understand

01:17:08.540 what that means to not ultimately sequence your samples, to read that code that can definitively

01:17:18.360 fingerprint the virus, where it's from. And if it was from a vaccine, then which vaccine? Was it from

01:17:25.340 a vaccine from this company or that company or whatever? And he never produced any sequences.

01:17:32.100 And when it ultimately came to the lawsuit that was launched in the United Kingdom,

01:17:37.800 Andrew Wakeford's paper was published in February. The lawsuit was approved to go and was the first

01:17:42.980 writs were served, the first legal papers were served on the defendant drug companies the following

01:17:47.940 October. Finally, when it came to the crunch and a lawsuit which consumed in today's money,

01:17:56.180 roughly 100 million US dollars between the two parties by which this lawyer Richard Barr in a duel

01:18:05.960 with the drug companies fought out in preliminary papers and what have you. The case never came to

01:18:11.780 trial because it collapsed. They never, ever produced any sequence data from these children, notwithstanding

01:18:20.260 the fact that by this time, thousands upon thousands of families in Britain, the United States and

01:18:26.900 increasingly around the world had been told that the measles virus had been found in these children and

01:18:33.540 it was from the MMR vaccine. And that data has never been produced. And that to me is the most extraordinary

01:18:42.180 indictment of these people. Not only the fact that these children in the Wakefield 1998 paper were a

01:18:50.640 preselected group of children from parents who'd come to the hospital to make the allegation that their

01:18:58.860 child had been injured by the vaccine and hence to join the lawsuit that Richard Barr was preparing and

01:19:05.060 Andrew Wakefield was working on. None of this was known. None of this was reported until a Sunday Times

01:19:11.300 investigation by yours truly went into it at enormous cost in terms of my time. And then we had a big

01:19:19.540 medical board hearing that disclosed information and disclosed children's records or what have you.

01:19:24.900 So there was that. And then there was O'Leary paper where, again, there was nothing that revealed

01:19:31.720 that this whole project had basically gone after something that was a complete illusion. I would describe it

01:19:40.040 as a scam. And I would say that the only reason these people aren't under arrest is because they

01:19:48.280 say and can say, oh, I believed the MMR vaccine caused autism, which to me, in my opinion, I'm giving

01:19:57.060 you my opinion now. In my opinion, that's just like the mafia saying, we're the good people. We're the good

01:20:05.320 people. We think that we're protecting our clients. These people refused to sequence the samples in the

01:20:14.240 PCR. They did not disclose who these parents were and why they'd come to the hospital to make these

01:20:20.800 allegations. And by the interplay between these two events, the Wakefield paper and the O'Leary work,

01:20:29.300 they were able to manufacture the belief that the MMR vaccine causes autism. And the consequence of

01:20:38.580 that is there are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of families around the world

01:20:45.440 today who've been led to believe that their child with developmentally challenged kids, that their

01:20:52.940 child was injured as a result of the parents' own decision to vaccinate them. And these people,

01:21:01.060 why this is so important, these people provide much of the backbone for the anti-vaccine movement

01:21:07.940 today, which is running the websites and the Facebook pages and the YouTube channels, pumping out all this

01:21:15.580 stuff now about the coronavirus up until December of 2019 and January and February of 2020. That was all

01:21:24.360 about vaccines and autism and the MMR and all that kind of stuff. When the great switch came over to the

01:21:31.120 pandemic we see today, that network, that infrastructure of parents who are torturing themselves with this

01:21:39.800 idea that it might be their own fault for vaccinating their child, that their child has some kind of

01:21:44.960 developmental issue, have become mobilised in the belief they need to identify an alternative culprit

01:21:54.220 to themselves. Now I don't believe for a minute that these parents are in any way culpable for their

01:22:01.000 children's autism, but these parents have learned to deflect and project onto others, the drug industry,

01:22:08.520 me, governments, whoever, who they say are involved in this conspiracy to, well, what they now call the

01:22:16.400 pandemic, this conspiracy to promote vaccines and so on and so forth. Before we get to that, there are a few

01:22:22.880 other things I want to go back to that I also think are technically important to understand. Can you talk a

01:22:28.300 little bit about the formalin-stained samples in O'Leary's lab? Because I think that in addition to the

01:22:33.860 failure to do strain-specific sequencing, which was the absolute mandate of this research, this was the

01:22:41.720 purpose of the study. So in addition to failing to do this one thing you set out to do, when you look

01:22:48.960 at the formalin-staining, it to me is one of the most revealing parts of how contaminated this work was.

01:22:57.400 Do you want to give people a sense of what that found? Yeah. Well, okay. So if we go back to the

01:23:04.020 Royal Free Endoscopy Suite, and these children being scoped, as they call it, when they go into the

01:23:10.320 small intestine, they would bring out these samples, these pieces of tissue, and they were divided and

01:23:17.440 went in two directions. One direction went to Wakefield's own researcher, scientific researcher,

01:23:24.000 this guy called Nick Chadwick. He's actually left science now, because I think in part because he

01:23:28.700 became so disillusioned after this whole Farrago. He went off and froze his tissues in liquid nitrogen.

01:23:34.900 They were frozen, just like frozen peas, which preserves the DNA of the sample and the RNA of the

01:23:42.140 virus, were there to be any there, but there wasn't. But anyway, would have preserved the virus,

01:23:46.960 but in pristine, deep frozen form. There was another set of samples, split from this set,

01:23:56.220 that went to the hospital's pathology unit, and for what is a routine process, it's called

01:24:04.480 histopathology, in hospitals where pathologists look down a microscope at samples, which they stain

01:24:11.020 with chemicals and you get various reactions that they're looking for. So this second set of samples

01:24:18.960 is fixed in formalin, and I think everybody knows what formalin is, it's a preservative.

01:24:24.420 The thing about when you preserve things in formalin is it tends to slightly scramble, or at least make

01:24:32.280 less accessible the nucleic acid in the samples. So when you come to run a PCR test, you have to run

01:24:42.540 more cycles to get to the same results. If you split a biopsy, and you froze this sample, and you

01:24:51.280 used the other sample, and you preserved it in the other sample in formalin, and ran the machine,

01:24:57.660 you would find the virus much quicker in the frozen one than you would in the formalin fixed one.

01:25:05.080 Just to go back to what we were talking about, that means if you take the exact same piece of

01:25:09.240 tissue, you cut it in half, one goes in formalin, one goes in nitrogen. Let's say the nitrogen one

01:25:13.700 hits its PCR threshold in 20 cycles, you might expect the formalin one to require 30 cycles to reach

01:25:21.300 the same amount of genetic material, because you functionally started with so much less because

01:25:26.960 the formalin had degraded it.

01:25:29.020 Yes, thank you.

01:25:30.240 So what happened in O'Leary's lab?

01:25:32.100 We should have a show on CNN, and we could like bat it.

01:25:34.660 That was... Yes, so the only reason this ever came out, and you see, that's another thing I have

01:25:39.760 to say about my work, is it's less to do with vaccines and promoting vaccines or anything like

01:25:45.200 that, which is not really part of my agenda. It's the scientific questions going on behind all of

01:25:51.280 that, which are applicable to all sorts of... It's much bigger than just vaccines. So what happened

01:25:57.020 was they came up against, because of the particular importance of the vaccine programme, and they

01:26:03.220 were suing vaccine manufacturers, they came up against the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical

01:26:07.800 industry, effectively unlimited money. They can pay for anything, any kind of legal, scientific test

01:26:13.800 whatsoever. Came up against the pharmaceutical industry, who hired Britain's top expert on the

01:26:21.180 PCR technology. So they hired him, and he produced reports which made the comparisons, among many,

01:26:30.080 many other things, made the comparisons between the number of cycles on the fresh frozen biopsies and

01:26:37.380 the formalin-fixed biopsies, and found they were compared with a, I guess very complicated, they were

01:26:43.060 compared with another gene. And essentially, what he found was that it took the same number of cycles

01:26:50.040 on both samples, on both the formalin-fixed and the fresh frozen samples. To which there's only one

01:26:57.340 explanation. To which there's only one explanation, which is that the virus got into the samples after

01:27:04.220 they were fixed informally. In other words, they could not have come out of the children. So the

01:27:10.200 most gracious explanation is that this was purely a laboratory contamination. A less gracious

01:27:18.960 interpretation is that it was deliberately falsified. Well, this PCR expert, he went a stage

01:27:25.200 further, a man named Steve Bustin, he went a stage further because he was paid an enormous amount of

01:27:31.300 money to do this. I'm not saying he paid too much money, because get what you pay for. He then went

01:27:37.240 further and started looking at the individual wells, because this machine would have a whole rack of

01:27:44.340 wells. I think there are, from the top of my memory, I think there are 96. They're 96, yes. So you have 96

01:27:50.180 wells in a tray which goes into the machine, and some of these wells would have the samples you're testing

01:27:56.040 for. Some would have positive measles controls taken using a laboratory strain of measles would

01:28:02.860 be in some other ones. Some would have distilled water, and some would be empty. These wells are

01:28:09.260 being monitored second by second by second by second by the machine, and all this data that's spewing

01:28:15.980 out of the machine, I think hundreds of data points for each well, if not thousands, I can't remember off

01:28:22.060 the top of my head. All this material was gathered. And O'Leary was very keen to avoid it being disclosed

01:28:29.780 to the drug companies who were demanding. In fact, ultimately, the drug company's lawyers had to go to

01:28:36.380 the High Court in London, who then made an application to the Irish High Court to order O'Leary to produce

01:28:45.080 the data, to produce the outputs from this machine. And he came up with all kinds of reasons why he couldn't.

01:28:50.740 He was in Australia. The machine broke down. The dog ate his homework, and on it went. But ultimately, this guy

01:28:58.120 Bustin did get data, and he found that wells that had been reported by the machine to be positive for measles

01:29:08.280 virus were, in fact, submitted in legal papers as being an empty well, as having nothing there, as though somebody

01:29:16.060 had taken an eraser and rubbed out the results. In other cases, he found that wells that were

01:29:23.160 then themselves empty were reported positive and rubbed out. In his analysis, there had been manual

01:29:33.180 human intervention to adjust the results coming out of those machines, that machine, in fact, well,

01:29:40.580 there were two, actually, but out of that machine, in order to make the results consistent with what

01:29:48.480 Wakefield wanted to find. So the interpretation of that by many people, and I've just simply observe

01:29:56.900 it, was you would have to assume that a person or persons unknown had deliberately cleaned up the output

01:30:06.500 of that machine. Yeah, let's reflect on that for a second, right? So let's pretend we were talking

01:30:12.680 about a company, say Enron, who had deliberately, with its accounting firm, manipulated its books in

01:30:23.320 such a way that it could deceive shareholders. What would be the consequences of that? Well, in that

01:30:29.820 example, the consequence is jail. Part of the Volkswagen group did precisely that with fuel emissions from

01:30:36.320 their cars where they rigged the results. I don't actually know how that one's played out yet. I

01:30:40.880 don't know if anyone's gone to jail on that one, but you would think, yeah. So it's interesting when

01:30:45.420 you look at this case, if you just viewed it through the lens of the behavior, not the consequence,

01:30:52.220 but the behavior, it's as nefarious as the most nefarious thing, the stories of corporate greed and

01:30:59.100 things like that. And certainly more than even the corporate incompetence that sometimes masquerades as

01:31:05.720 greed. Again, I don't want to just dwell on this beyond anything, but again, it's worth noting,

01:31:10.180 when you finally got a hold of the medical records of those 12 kids, or at least a subset of them,

01:31:15.980 which again, if you were looking at medical records of children that went back to when the events

01:31:20.540 actually occurred, meaning when they were actually vaccinated, when their symptoms truly showed up,

01:31:25.780 so before they were recruited into the study, how consistent were the true findings with what were

01:31:33.000 ultimately reported? My recollection is they were not entirely congruent in that regard.

01:31:37.080 Oh, that was all bullshit. We kind of skipped that one. What happened was that when I first broke the 0.98

01:31:42.080 story in the Sunday Times, a series of pieces, and then I was invited to make a television documentary

01:31:47.420 an hour long in the dispatches strand in the UK. And in the course of that, Wakefield then sued us,

01:31:54.320 using actually the medical profession's money at the time. He was still a doctor at the time.

01:31:58.100 He sued us, but then he wanted to have his lawsuit frozen so that he didn't actually have to go ahead

01:32:04.840 with it. So he was going around telling people he was suing us, but in fact, he had his suit stayed,

01:32:10.120 as the legal word to freeze these things. So we, me and the television company, Channel 4 Television,

01:32:16.560 which is a national network with statutory duties for fairness and balance and accuracy,

01:32:21.420 we took him to court and forced him to sue us. So he'd either have to put up or shut up. And in the

01:32:28.120 course of that, I was able to read these children's medical records and get other documents disclosed to

01:32:33.900 me, which are evidence to me that these children did not have what he said they had. There was not a

01:32:42.480 single one of those 12 children whose cases were accurately reported in that paper in the Lancet in

01:32:49.280 February 1998. Not one of them. There were children whose developmental issues preceded their

01:32:56.760 vaccination. There were children whose issues were not 14 days or less after vaccination, but months,

01:33:03.920 in some cases, many months later. In fact, what he called his sentinel case, the first parent who came

01:33:10.480 to him, who phoned him at the suggestion of the Jackie Fletcher who'd set up the campaign group,

01:33:16.440 the first patient, she ultimately admitted in court papers that her child had shown no issues

01:33:24.540 associated with inflammatory bowel disease or autism or anything like that for nine months after

01:33:30.460 vaccination. And yet when she went to the hospital, she said 14 days was actually nothing before nine

01:33:37.640 months later. And then there were children who were reported in the paper as having a diagnosis,

01:33:42.760 a behavioural diagnosis of autism who didn't have autism at all. Well, didn't have an autism diagnosis

01:33:50.720 at all. I can't say what people did or didn't have. I can't bring them back and can only say what the

01:33:56.900 reporting said. They did not have autism diagnosis. So what Wakeford had done was to change the times to

01:34:04.340 onset, change the diagnoses. He was a non-clinical academic gastroenterologist, wasn't a clinician,

01:34:11.440 had no patients, as it's called him in the book, a doctor without patients. Although some other

01:34:15.940 doctors who don't have patients have taken issue with that. He changed diagnoses. He represented as

01:34:22.420 an inflammatory bowel disease, normal pathology findings. And there was nothing in that paper

01:34:29.180 that could be reconciled with the actual children's diagnosis, records, histories, laboratory and blood

01:34:36.580 tests at all. Not one of them. That really, I suppose, is what I was able to do. I mean,

01:34:42.140 interestingly, because he sued us in the UK and then abandoned that. He actually abandoned it on

01:34:49.100 the day I was sitting reading the medical records of the children at my lawyer's offices. I couldn't

01:34:54.200 use that material because it was sealed material. I was seeing it as pursuant to court order. I was

01:34:58.980 reading the children's medical records pursuant to a court order, which allowed me to do it. In fact,

01:35:03.060 one of the parents turned up to court and challenged and said, they shouldn't be allowed to read my

01:35:08.540 child's medical records. It's confidential. And the judge said, well, I'm not having these parents

01:35:11.980 saying who can have what documents and gave an order for me to read the children's medical records.

01:35:16.260 But I couldn't use it until what happened then was there was a huge medical board hearing went on for

01:35:21.940 217 days, longer than the trial of OJ Simpson, at which these medical records were studied and read

01:35:29.980 aloud over and over and over by lawyers in London. And at the end of it, Wakefield lost his license to

01:35:37.040 practice medicine and the Lancet retracted the paper. So that medical board hearing, which was a

01:35:42.680 reinvestigation of my findings in the Sunday Times, and really as a newspaper, we forced them to do it.

01:35:47.960 They had, and it cost, I think the ultimate figure was about 10 million pounds to have this hearing.

01:35:53.220 But I couldn't use that material until it was ventilated at that hearing. And other documents I

01:35:58.400 couldn't use until Wakefield then sued me again in Texas, when I did some reports for the British

01:36:04.680 Medical Journal, because they asked me to do a series of reports for a medically qualified readership.

01:36:10.620 So we did that. And then Wakefield sued on that. He was funded by a New York financier called Bernard

01:36:16.320 Seltz and his wife, Lisa, who put up the money, who ponied up the money for him to sue me and the

01:36:22.120 British Medical Journal. And that was thrown out too. But in the course of that, the documents that

01:36:28.240 were disclosed behind seal in the UK litigation was unsealed in the American litigation. And I was

01:36:38.060 able to use it in my book, The Doctor Who Fooled the World. That tells the story of all of this and

01:36:44.340 indeed a lot more. There's one piece of the story, Brian, that I think I'd love for you to also tell,

01:36:50.720 because it still comes up a lot to this day. And it's the story of, quote unquote,

01:36:54.500 the CDC whistleblower. Yeah, to be honest, Peter, I mean, I think I'm getting a bit tired now. I mean,

01:37:01.640 we've been talking for more than two hours. And that is, I mean, I think people- That's a record

01:37:08.120 for you. I know that's a record. People want to know about the CDC whistleblower and this movie

01:37:14.100 Vax that Wakefield came out of and the rebirth of the anti-vaccine move. Because by the time I'd

01:37:19.040 finished this aspect of the investigation, Wakefield was finished. I mean, he had haircuts worse than mine.

01:37:23.780 This is a COVID lockdown London haircut. I haven't had my hair cut for like, I don't know,

01:37:28.800 two months or something, three months, God knows what. He was walking around looking like me now.

01:37:34.440 Yeah. He was finished. He was written off. None of his colleagues would speak to him. He was done.

01:37:41.400 But then came the return of Andrew Wakefield on the scene. That's the fourth part. The book is in

01:37:48.480 four parts. The first part is big ideas. The second part is secret schemes. The third part is exposed.

01:37:56.260 And the fourth part is avenged. And you then come to avenged. Wakefield's, what I would characterize

01:38:03.160 as a vindictive riposte to his personal ruin, where he started to do what he's always done,

01:38:12.860 which is to mirror his own behavior onto others and accuse or claim, falsely claim, that a researcher at

01:38:21.880 the CDC had accused his colleagues of fraud and that Wakefield had discovered with this fraud through

01:38:30.040 this alleged whistleblower. And that wasn't true either. Let's give people a chance. They'll read

01:38:35.880 the book. You do a very good job describing this with full transcripts. And again, I think it's

01:38:41.520 important for people to understand this. Do you think that Andrew Wakefield would ever sit down

01:38:46.140 with me for an interview? No. No. No. He will only sit down for an interview with somebody he knows

01:38:52.740 will not ask him questions that are difficult. That's the first thing. And secondly, you would not be

01:38:59.360 able to field his replies. So, for example, he will say, and he does say, I never got involved in the

01:39:08.840 lawsuit until after the children were seen at the hospital, which is just a most flagrant lie. I mean,

01:39:18.140 I've got the paperwork. I've got the contract. Right. He was involved two years before.

01:39:23.980 Yeah. But he would just lie to you. I'm just giving you a really obvious one.

01:39:27.060 I see. So you're talking, the degree of pathologic lying is so great. You're in a fact-free zone.

01:39:33.240 I want to end on two things. The first is I want to read you something from

01:39:36.500 the New England Journal of Medicine, which in 2011 wrote an article or published an article rather

01:39:42.420 titled, The Age-Old Struggle Against Anti-Vaccinationists. I'm going to read you a quote

01:39:47.860 from it. And I want you to tell me if you think this is accurate or if you think this is too harsh.

01:39:51.980 So it states that this has been an issue that's existed since the 19th century, but now the

01:39:57.480 anti-vaccinationist media of choice are typically television and the internet, including social

01:40:02.000 media outlets, which are used to sway public opinion and distract attention from scientific

01:40:08.060 evidence. The editorial goes on to characterize such people as they tend toward complete mistrust of

01:40:15.080 government and manufacturers, conspiratorial thinking, denialism, low cognitive complexity

01:40:21.460 in thinking patterns, reasoning flaws, and a habit of substituting emotional anecdotes for data,

01:40:28.560 including people who range from those unable to understand and incorporate the concepts of risk

01:40:33.100 and probability into science-grounded decision-making, and those who use, presumably on the other side,

01:40:38.820 deliberate mistruths, intimidation, falsified data, and even the threats of violence.

01:40:44.200 Do you think that's too harsh?

01:40:46.200 I think that's absolutely right. What I would say about it, that is static prose exposition.

01:40:52.180 Now, that's one way where somebody could say, well, I don't know who wrote that, but whoever it is,

01:40:57.120 is probably a very learned person with enormous experience. I'm telling you this. That's what he's

01:41:01.560 doing. I'm telling you this in the New England Journal of Medicine. What I've tried to do is to take a

01:41:07.580 different approach to it, which is to tell the story and to show people, which is why we got into all

01:41:14.120 that stuff about cycles of PCR and things like that, is to show people the real characters behind this

01:41:21.020 and the specific facts of how they did it. And that's what I've tried to do in The Doctor Who

01:41:27.000 Fooled the World, is to tell the story as a narrative. Who did what? And the closing point

01:41:34.360 from me would be a quote from my own book, I suppose, if I can remember it, is, and this is

01:41:39.260 just before the pandemic began. I wrote this. To me, the importance of it was not just about vaccines

01:41:46.100 and vaccine safety and the issues that you deal with in your clinical practice, but it's this.

01:41:51.000 If he could do what he did, and I'll show you what he did, who else is doing what in the hospitals and

01:42:00.160 laboratories that we may one day look to for our lives. Now we are looking to those hospitals and

01:42:07.240 laboratories for our lives. And that's really the message behind the whole thing. I had no message to

01:42:14.240 convince people to vaccinate their children. I don't advise people to vaccinate their children.

01:42:18.560 I don't accept endorsements of my book from vaccine manufacturers or the usual suspects whose

01:42:25.240 names we all know. I was interested in that question. If he could do what he did, who else is

01:42:31.600 doing what in the hospitals and laboratories that we may one day look to for our lives. And that's the

01:42:37.480 importance of it. Because the reason Wakefield got caught was because he took something as high

01:42:43.640 profile as vaccination, affecting everybody's children, subject of primary concern to almost

01:42:52.180 everybody. And he chose to do what he did within that. So therefore, I was able to, for my very first

01:42:57.840 story, I got four months to investigate before we published a single story. And the television

01:43:03.620 programme that I think we're about eight months or nine months preparing that. The BMJ series,

01:43:08.960 which took six months to prepare for publication, the book, and all of this is subject to the scrutiny

01:43:16.440 of lawyers, other journalists. My contract with Johns Hopkins University, my North American publishers

01:43:22.680 requires that I've told the truth. And if I hadn't told the truth, my publishers would be in a position

01:43:29.320 to pulp the book and send me the bill. That is the contractual position I'm in. The book has been

01:43:36.440 reviewed, peer-reviewed, two different libel lawyers, one in New York and one in London,

01:43:42.000 have looked at it. And two members of staff at the Johns Hopkins University Press went through all my

01:43:47.940 documents against a 2,000 footnoted references in the manuscript of this book to be sure that what

01:43:56.960 I've been saying is backed by the evidence. It's not just me saying it. So while I appreciate those

01:44:03.300 words from handed down by somebody who knows about these things and summarises it based on their

01:44:11.420 expertise and their life story themselves, what I've tried to do is to tell the story of the real people

01:44:17.960 and the specific facts as to how we got the anti-vaccine movement that is today causing all this

01:44:25.980 mischief over SARS-CoV-2 shots. So that's my pitch and that's why I wrote the book and I hope somebody

01:44:34.880 might go out and buy it. I think people absolutely will. And I think that people should not assume

01:44:39.160 that because they've heard this podcast, they know all that's in the book. The book is incredibly rich

01:44:43.160 with detail. As I said at the outset, I read the book twice because it's a book that you can easily

01:44:48.240 miss parts the first time through. My closing thought, Brian, will be this. First, I guess I have two.

01:44:54.120 One, I really appreciate the point you just made, which is this is really less a book about vaccines

01:45:01.260 and it's more a book about how science can go wrong and how science can be corrupted by bad people.

01:45:09.600 And I think we can say that. I think for me, a very sad footnote to this story, which you've alluded

01:45:15.660 to, begins with the kernel of those 12 children who were summarily tortured in a hospital some 20 years

01:45:24.040 ago. And if anybody listening to this has a six or seven year old child, and especially if any parent

01:45:30.060 listening to this has a child with autism, they will understand what you said, which is these are

01:45:35.560 children in whom any deviation from a normal routine is devastating. That means bedtime being at a

01:45:43.840 slightly different time. Nevermind going to a hospital, sleeping in a foreign place, being tortured 0.93

01:45:49.960 through a bowel preparation when you're constipated, having a colonoscope rammed into your colon, one

01:45:55.700 child having 12 perforations, if my memory serves me correctly, having a lumbar puncture, multiple venous

01:46:02.520 punctures, to then realize all of this was done without even a modicum of investigational review board

01:46:11.160 oversight. In other words, this was not even deemed an ethical thing to do. To think that that's the kernel

01:46:17.860 of evil that then went on to produce so much angst for so many parents who now are left wondering,

01:46:25.840 have I done something to cause harm to my child? I think that is the absolute saddest legacy of this.

01:46:35.480 And effective tomorrow, if this story vanished, which it won't, there would be no undoing what I

01:46:41.960 consider that unspeakable harm. So I thank you for doing what you've done. I wish we could end

01:46:47.840 on a happier note. And I thank you for staying up so late. I know it's very late there in London,

01:46:52.280 but I'm greatly appreciative for this time, Brian.

01:46:55.820 No problem. Thanks, Peter. Thanks for your interest.

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The Peter Attia Drive - April 19, 2021

#158 - Brian Deer： A tale of scientific fraud—exposing Andrew Wakefield and the origin of the belief that vaccines cause autism

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