Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Andrew Wakefield: The Worst Doctor Alive

Episode Date: February 20, 2019

In part two on the Anti-Vaccine Movement, Robert is joined again by Anna Salinas and they discuss corrupt doctor, Andrew Wakefield. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all the history. I'm Robert Evans. Sophie does not like me using my accent, which I consider a type of racism, because I'm a southern man. And I have to hide the reality of who I am. Is that your natural voice?

That's my natural voice. With no affectation? No affectation. That's me. Okay. That's deep south. Deep south. I'm a southern gentleman.

I don't know. I feel like you went from southern farmer to southern lawyer in a white linen suit. Well, no, that one was not my honor. There's nothing classy about my background. I see. Yeah, no. Anna Salinas, Bad Comics by Anna. Anna, comics artist, street fighter, president of the Anti-Vaccination Society of America.

Unfortunately. Yeah. That is why you brought me on here, and not because of my comics or Twitter hot takes, but because I am the president of the anti-vaxxers. Yeah. That was mean of me, and you're not. Thank you. But we are talking about the anti-vaccine movement still.

We are, and I feel weirdly conflicted about it so far because we spent an episode talking about how both sides had points, and we're all so racist. Yeah. I mean, everybody's racist in the 1890s. You're not going to find a lot of not racist people. Even the not racist people still use terms that are like, ooh, guys. Yeah. Guys.

It's so true. You are. Yeah. Yeah, it's like watching Blazing Saddles where it's like. Oh my God, yes. Yeah, I could see, like, revolutionary for its time, but also like, ooh. Mild bosses were like, it's the best movie. That's your homework.

You need to go watch that movie. It's so funny, and I watched it, and look, that movie is racist and sexist and rough. For its time, it was a huge step forward. I understand that. Yeah, and so you'll never, like it was, everything, we grade on a scale when we talk about history. We do, yes, for its time it was, but watching it now is just like, this is not pleasant. You go to a lot of abolitionists, like people who are like fighting to end slavery in the 1850s, and they would be like, well, of course, black people aren't as intelligent as white

people, but they shouldn't be slaves. And it's like, okay, well, you're racist, but you're not in favor of slavery, so I guess we're grading on a curve here. That's true, that's true. Yeah, it's complicated. I can't wait for 20 years from now when people look over at my tweets, because you know Twitter will be here in 20 years. Oh, absolutely.

This won't all collapse like the House of Cards that it is. No way. People will look at my tweets and be like, oh, problematic. Yeah, I feel like that might be just by owning pets and stuff. You think? No. I wonder if that's the next frontier. I know that future generations will judge me for all of the meat that I eat.

Oh, 100%. This is terrible. Yeah. No arguments there. It's awful. I hope we get there. We will. I mean, because the planet will die.

That's true. That's like with these vaccines. It's like, yeah, people will get it. People will get it. But tens of thousands of people will die first. The human toll will be nightmarish. Right. That's what convinces people.

That's what convinces people. I guess one of my favorite kinds of stories is terrible people who were heroes still. There's this great story of during the Japanese invasion. I think it was not Shanghai. It might have been Shanghai. It was the Japanese invasion of this one Chinese city where they massacred tens of thousands of civilians. The guy who protected a huge number of them by creating this international corridor in the city to protect all of these civilians from being murdered by the Japanese was a Nazi.

What? It's like this literal Nazi saving thousands of women and children from the Japanese murder squads. Wait, why did he? Well, because he was just like everyone who was a member of the... And this was before the Holocaust really got started. So he was like racist and anti-Semitic, but he wasn't pro-murder. Oh. He was just like a businessman who joined the Nazi party.

But once he saw people getting killed in the streets, he was like, I don't want this happening. Wow. It's a mess. That is a mess. That's a mess. I'm always interested in stories like that of people who are objectively flawed bad people. You still did a good thing. Well, I think we are all objectively flawed bad people doing what we think is right

or ignoring our moral compass altogether. And those people are not always the worst people. I ignore my moral compass all the time. All the time. And I'm not the worst person. And that's what I always shoot for is not the worst. Not the worst. Am I the worst person today?

No, Roger Stone's still alive. Fantastic. Oh, good. I'm doing great. Nailing it. The youth. Oh, the bar is low. It is.

Boy, this has been a long and meandering introduction. We're talking about Andrew Wakefield today. Yes. Wakefield. Okay. So the current ongoing measles outbreak of 2019, centered around Portland, Oregon, is the largest such outbreak in 20 years. Clark County, Washington, where the outbreak began, had a measles vaccination rate of just

78%, not high enough for herd immunity to protect the immunocompromised. Clark County just happens to be a recognized hotspot of anti-vaccine sentiment. In December, 2014, a trip to Disneyland led to 147 confirmed cases of measles. 110 of those people lived in California, and half of that group had not taken the MMR vaccine. So this is not purely a coastal phenomenon. Over the last five years, the number of children who go unvaccinated in Texas each year has doubled to more than 57,000.

Of course it's Texas. Of course it's Texas. No, it's Texas. The direct cause here is the existence of non-medical exemptions, essentially a descendant of the old British exemptions for conscientious objectors. But the real true cause of these outbreaks of diseases that by all right should be long dead by now is a single man. His name is Andrew Wakefield.

Oh. His name should be more well known. I feel like Jenny McCarthy really gets the blame for this movement. And what she's doing is bad, but this guy's why. Oh yeah, bring it on. Andrew was born in 1957. We don't know an awful lot about his early life, or at least I was not able to find an awful lot.

His parents were both doctors, and his father was a neurologist, which is about the doctor's kind of doctor that exists. Oh no. Yeah, he enrolled in St. Mary's Hospital Medical School as a young adult, focusing on gastroenterology. He seems to have been popular throughout this period. He was the captain of his medical school's rugby team, and generally looked to be on a winning path in life when he graduated 1981. I'm just going to say this.

I played female rugby and... Frogby. Frogby, as it's known, and male rugby players can be a little much. They can. They get a little bro-y. They can. Could have been a red flag for this guy. It's basically war without guns.

Or pads. Or pads. And when women do it, it's pretty cool and feminist, but when men do it, they get fratty. Yeah, well, yeah. Well, I'm making a blanket statement. I hope male rugby players do it at me. There's only one sport that I'm going to attack, blanket all of the players of on this podcast, and that's Hyalai.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a correct take. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck that sport. Yep.

And fuck you for doing it. Yes. Strong stance. Now, for more than a decade, Andrew Wakefield seems to have been a perfectly fine doctor and medical researcher. From 1986 to 1989, he worked at the University of Toronto as part of a team studying tissue rejection from transplanted intestines. In the early 1990s, back in the UK, he started doing research at the Royal Free College of

London. In 1993, he published an article suggesting that the measles virus might cause Crohn's disease. This drew a lot of eyes his way, and two years later, when he published research suggesting that the measles vaccine might cause Crohn's disease, even more people started talking about this brash young doctor who was turning the system on his head. Now, a lot of evidence suggests that there is a link between measles exposure and childhood and Crohn's disease.

There is, however, no evidence of a link between vaccination and Crohn's disease. At the time when he started the research, he made sense to look into. Made sense to look into, but did he have any bias pushing him toward... That's going to be a big focus of the episode. Okay. And one thing I should point out is that if you know a lot of people with autism, kids with autism in particular, a lot of them have weird bowel issues, gastrointestinal issues, and stuff like that.

It's very common. So this is something that people have been trying to explain for a while. Why do these kids with autism also have all of these weird gastrointestinal issues? So that's why he sort of gets into the study of autism as a gastroenterologist because there's some stuff there that needs explaining. Okay. Okay. So it seems like maybe Andrew Wakefield was starting from an honest place.

It's not clear at what point that changed, but the evidence suggests that Andrew Wakefield instantly saw financial opportunity in this purported connection between the measles vaccine and Crohn's disease. In March 1995, Wakefield filed for a patent for a test that would detect Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis by finding measles virus in the bowel tissue, product, or fluids. Two years later, Andrew Wakefield drew up a business scheme to present to investors. In it, he suggested using his patented tests to create a company that would make enormous profits from running these tests.

The anticipated annual income topped 72 million pounds per year. The prospectus he put together, trying to interact, investors noted, in view of the unique services offered by the company and its technology, particularly for the molecular diagnostic, the assays can command premium prices. Sounds like he's just a scam artist. Sounds like he's just a scam artist. Oh, already? You don't even...

It's so scammy. There's so many levels that a scam artist could be a scammer, and Andrew Wakefield is a scammer on twice as many levels as that, but it's going to take some unpacking to get through. Okay. So, during all this time, Wakefield was conducting a study at the Royal Free College. This study of 12 children suggested that the MMR vaccine, which bundled measles, mumps, and rubella vaccinations together, could cause the measles virus to infect a child's intestines.

Now, this study was an attempt to explain something that, yeah, parents with autistic children reported for years. Wakefield's research published in 1998 seemed to suggest that the MMR vaccine harmed not just the child's intestines, but the neurons in its brain. So, this is the beginning of the idea that, like, maybe this vaccine's what's causing the autism. And what year is this? This is 1998 when he publishes his research.

Okay. So, this is pretty recent. Pretty recent. Again, 12 kids. So, not a huge study. Not what you would want to make sweeping claims about a vaccine. I feel like, technically, that would be rejected, right? That's the smallest sample size.

Well, that is how you start, you know, or anecdotal. At that point, it seems like it would be anecdotal. It is almost. It's one of those things where if he had immediately gone from that to doing a 250-person study or something like that, that would be how a normal scientist would have proceeded. But that was not what Wakefield did. Wakefield did not immediately start telling people to not vaccinate. Like, he wasn't starting from anti-vaccine, but he did start by saying, like, because

of this research I found, we should stop bundling all these vaccinations together. And right at that same time, eight months before releasing his paper, actually, he patented a single measles vaccine, which is what he claimed after releasing his paper was the safest way to vaccinate your kids, separate all the vaccinations. So, when they released this study in 1998, Andrew Wakefield in the Royal Free Medical School released the paper via a 23-minute-long video news conference, which is not how scientific studies involving 12 people are usually reviewed. He wanted people to see his face.

He wanted people to see his face. In this press conference, he made a very direct plea for people to start using the exact kind of single-use vaccine he'd just patented eight months before. Oh, God. Quote, this is Wakefield. There is sufficient anxiety in my own mind for the long-term safety of the polyvalent vaccine, that is, the MMR vaccination in combination, that I think it should be suspended in favor of the single vaccines.

Now, the journal he published in, The Lancet, is an old and extremely authoritative publication. They and his hospital, the Royal Free Hospital, knew about Wakefield's ambitions to profit off of this work. They threw resources into helping him launch his study with the press conference, which, you know, again, is not the norm. They knew he was trying to raise money to start a company, and they knew he'd patented a form of medicine that he was advising everyone to take, so both institutions took steps to protect themselves.

The Lancet published a critique of Wakefield's study in the same issue in which it was released. This critique pointed out that the sample group was too small to draw big conclusions from and that it had not been randomly determined. The Lancet did not make any mention of this critical article in the press release, though. The Royal Free Hospital convened a panel of five doctors to present a follow-up press conference where their panel would all agree that people should keep using the MMR vaccine until more research had been done. That was the plan for the press conference, but it didn't work out that way.

The press conference wound up turning into a shit show. I found a recollection of it from a journalist who attended. Quote, The five of them, the panel that the hospital had convened, were sitting behind a table with Andrew Wakefield on the extreme left and Ari Zuckerman on the right. The tension rose as the event progressed, and by the end Wakefield was coolly urging patients to give their children single vaccines at annual intervals. While Zuckerman was on his feet, banging the lectern in frustration as he insisted that

the MMR vaccine had been given to millions of children around the world and was safe. So within a year of this press conference, Andrew Wakefield had become the director of two businesses, both Carmel and Unigenetics LTD, who were registered in early 1999, right after this press conference came out. Andrew Wakefield submitted a confidential report on behalf of Unigenetics to the British Legal Aid Board and secured $800,000 in public funding to perform his tests on children in a public hospital ward. Wakefield sought an additional 2.1 million pounds to get his venture off the ground.

In a quote, private and confidential prospectus that later wound up in the hands of a journalist for the British Medical Journal, Andrew Wakefield stated that he believed that within three years of launching his diagnostic testing business, it would be worth 28 million pounds. He's so transparent, but if you're listening, I can see, I mean, it's just how people get scammed. It's just yet another grifter in our era of grifters. Now, Wakefield still needed that investment money, and one study of 12 kids, no matter how publicized, was not going to draw the kind of funding that he needed, especially

since other members of the medical community had started loudly pointing out the flaws in Wakefield's research. In order to secure that extra cash, Andrew Wakefield and a pathologist he'd hired for Unigenetics prepared to present new research at a London meeting of the Pathological Society in March of 2000, according to the British Medical Journal, quote, based on alleged gut biopsy samples from Walker Smith's patients, 10 with autism and 3 with Crohn's disease tested at a Dublin laboratory, it claimed a possible causal link and, given a Wakefield presentation, promised a storm like the press conference two years before.

So he's done more research, but he's not doing another study. He's just going straight to press conference without actually publishing a peer-reviewed study. And did you say 10 people? 13 total patients. This is not how you do research. This is not how you do research, and it's such bad science that I don't even have a good way to segue into this Doritos plug, but I'm going to.

That's a good Doritos. Doritos, if you're listening, sponsor this podcast. Now, in deference to the fans who don't like the sound of crunching Doritos, really it's like the anti-vaccine, pro-vaccine argument in the 1800s, where like there's two sides here. There's more Doritos crunching, and a lot of people who say less, I'm going to lean on the side of not doing as much Doritos crunching. But every now and then.

You got to do a little. Every now and then I got to do it. You know, 15 minute fast forward, 15 second fast forward, that's a thing. Yeah. That'll be the only crunch in this episode, but I just needed it. I needed to cleanse my palate. I want to believe everyone who listens to podcasts has a little love of ASMR. Oh, yeah.

I mean, you would hope. Some people don't like the sound of eating, which is why I wolf down like a third of a bag of Doritos, like a fucking monster before this episode started. Yeah. I was eating my cookies, so I was trying to be so sneaky about it. Sophie's eating dog treats right now. Yeah. I mean.

Well, they're next to her bag of Fritos. There's no way to know which one she's eating. And she did breach. Yeah. That's what I thought. Now, Wakefield started talking with pharmaceutical companies right before this planned press release. One of them even flew him to Canada to talk. He was negotiating with Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Smith Klein beach him.

So it looked like he was about to get the funding. He wanted a couple of million dollars to start producing this single shot vaccine. Where was the oversight of this guy? Why didn't he lose his license? That's coming up. Now, thankfully, he did not get to carry out all of his plans. Another doctor, Mark Peppes, would finally put a stop to Wakefield's scheme. Peppes had recently been made the head of medicine at the Royal Free College, and he

did not like Wakefield or his research. Peppes convinced the college to send Wakefield a letter, finally admitting their concern about his involvement with these new companies he'd created and his financial interest in producing the single-use measles vaccine. Quote, This concern arose originally because the company's business plan appears to depend on premature, scientifically unjustified publication of results which do not conform to the rigorous academic and scientific standards that are generally expected.

So first study, fine, it's okay to do if you're trying to prove something new and put out a study with a small sample size, but the fact that your second press release isn't even a study and involves one more person, this seems shady to us. So the college did not immediately cut his funding or fire him. They offered him a continuation of his funding if he would conduct new research and test his theories about the MMR vaccine. He was promised help with the study of 150 children to see if his research for the Lancet could be replicated with a larger group, as would real scientists do.

Yeah, but come on, how did they not get it by this point? Well, some of it might have been wishful thinking, some of it might have been legitimately being like, okay, well maybe, you know, there's clearly something going on between like bowel disorders and autism, so maybe something's happening here, it's worth looking into. So they offered to pay him to do a study with 150 children and Wakefield initially agreed to conduct the study, but he never actually did because the 1998 Lancet study had been a total scam. Now, none of this came out until 2011 when a journalist named Brian Deere published

an investigation for the British Journal of Medicine. It was revealed for the first time that Andrew Wakefield had actually been running a second secret scam alongside his other more obvious scams. Rather than being a legitimate study motivated by sheer interest in the truth, his Lancet paper had essentially been commissioned by a lawyer named Richard Barr, who represented a bunch of families who believed their kids had gotten sick through the MMR vaccine. Wakefield's research started as paid work for a lawyer trying to justify a lawsuit. He made something like $450,000 for this work alone.

None of this was known until Brian Deere's report came out. All of Wakefield's patients had been recruited by anti-MMR vaccine campaigners. And even then, Deere's research showed that Wakefield had straight up lied about many of their symptoms. Wow. Being a journalist, Brian Deere actually took Wakefield's research to the parents of the kids in the study to like be like, is this what happened to your kid? Is this what happened to your kid?

Is this what happened to your kid? And it turns out that he had essentially misrepresented everybody's symptoms. Whoa. So, complete fabrication. Complete fabrication. Not just a guy who came up with a study, saw that there might be a connection and then decided to try to profit on it, which is what it looked like at first, but a guy whose whole study was falsified from the beginning because a lawyer was paying him to find a connection.

God damn it. Yeah. Now, we're going to get into just how that famous Lancet study, which by the way is still to this day, the single biggest scientific underpinning of the anti-vaccine movement. Do they know it's fake? Well, everyone does, but some people don't accept it. It's like Nathan Phillips and that Sandman kid confrontation in DC, where we all have the same hour and 45 minute video of everything that happened.

And we all read it differently. And we all read it differently. This one is like, it was fake, guys. Truth is dead, Anna. Ah. Truth is dead, but you know it's not dead. Doritos? Doritos and the wonderful sponsors that help keep this show afloat with products and services.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

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Some people don't like it. You know what nobody likes? Falsified medical studies that lead to collapsing vaccination rates in the Western world. So, Brian Deere, put together, he's got a great article for the British Medical Journal that goes into detail on all this, but he put together a little summary that just sort of walked through how bullshit the study was, so I'm gonna read from that little bullet point summary. The Lancet paper was a case series of 12 child patients.

It reported a proposed new syndrome of enterocolitis and regressive autism and associated this with MMR as an apparent precipitating event. But, in fact, three of nine children reported with regressive autism did not have autism diagnosed at all. Only one child clearly had regressive autism. Despite the paper claiming that all 12 children were previously normal, five had documented pre-existing developmental concerns. Some children were reported to have experienced first behavioral symptoms within days of MMR,

but the records documented these as starting some months after vaccination. In nine cases, unremarkable colonic histiopathology reports noting no or minimal fluctuations in inflammatory cell populations were changed after a medical school research review to non-specific colitis. The parents of eight children were reported as blaming MMR, but 11 families made this allegation at the hospital. The exclusion of three allegations, all giving times to onset of problems and months, helped to create the appearance of a 14-day temporal link.

Patients were recruited through anti-MMR campaigners, and the study was commissioned and funded for planned litigation. So. It was false. It was all lies. It was just nonsense. He found some people who were willing to say what he wanted the study to say, and when people reported something else, he just lied and said that they said the same thing as

the other people. I mean, that's really, really bad, and I understand that doctors were reporting on it, but it's almost like we need a better measure to discredit someone who is a real doctor saying lies. And that does happen in this. So there was no way Andrew Wakefield could replicate his research on a larger group of patients under the watchful eye of critical experts because his research was a sham, a cheap cash grab from the very beginning. Wakefield refused to carry out the follow-up study, which the Royal Free College would

have paid for and tried to proceed on capitalizing on the controversy he'd stirred up. In September 2000, he responded to the college, quote, It is clear that academic freedom is essential and cannot be traded. It is the unanimous decision of my collaborators and coworkers that it is only appropriate that we define our research objectives, we enact the studies as appropriately reviewed and approved, and we decide as and when we deem the work suitable for submission for peer review. This is how he said, I'm not going to carry out another study trying to prove my research

works. This is so depressing though, because once something is out in the public eye, it's a thing. And this took off like wildfire. So Wakefield's career as a legitimate doctor ends at this point. He's fired in 2001. Dr. Pepe's later claimed, quote, We paid him to go away, giving him two-year salary upfront and a statement that he was innocent of any misconduct.

What? It looked bad for them too. They'd helped publicize a wildly fallacious study. Guys, come on. They also promised not to say anything about the fact that they knew he was a fraud, quote. And of course, one of the conditions of him going away was that I wasn't supposed to say anything critical of him to anybody forever after. Dr. Pepe's is clearly kind of pissed.

Bad policy. Bad policy. In the years since, other doctors have directed plenty of ire towards Andrew Wakefield. In 2003, a paper published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine used more than a dozen epidemiological studies and concluded that there was no evidence supporting an association between autism and the MMR vaccine. Multiple other peer reviewed studies in the 15 years since have said the same thing. In February of 2010, the editors of the Lancet retracted Wakefield's study.

They told The Guardian that, quote, it was utterly clear, without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the paper were utterly false. This prompted a review by the General Medical Council, which, in May of 2010, stripped Andrew Wakefield of his medical license. Among other things- It's about time. Come on. The slowness of that is like, that's white privilege, man.

Yeah. And doctor privilege. And doctor privilege. Protecting their own kind. More than that, I think it's them protecting themselves, just being like, they'd hoped that this would fade away, and it didn't, and so they had to do something. No, you have to deal with this shit out front. Now, Anna, I bet you're thinking, there's nothing else we could learn about how Andrew

Wakefield conducted this study that makes it shadier. What? There's more? So he already lied about what their autism was and what they were saying it was caused by and when it started. Lied about who he was working for when he started doing the study. Right, the fact that he was being paid by a lawyer to prove something. And the fact that he patented a medicine specifically to try to sell it after releasing

this right. He lied about all that, but it gets shadier. Okay. Yeah. So, that investigation that stripped him of his medical license found that, among other things, Andrew Wakefield had bribed children at his son's 10th birthday party to let him use their blood for research. What?

Bribed children, do we know how he bribed them? Oh boy, we do. Yeah. Now, there's actual video of him describing this. I found a report about that video in a New York Times article. Quote, the video showed him at a conference in 1999 telling the audience about the time he lined up kids to give blood samples at the birthday party of one of his children. He needed a control group of children who did not have autism and this was convenient.

Two children fainted, he said. Another threw up over his mother. For their service, they were rewarded with five pounds. People said to me, Andrew, you know you can't do this to people. Children won't come back. He recounted. I said, you're wrong. Listen, we live in a free market economy.

Next year, they'll want 10 pounds. Whoa. Pranked children? First of all, that poor kid whose birthday it was, like. Rough birthday. Rough birthday. He got bullied after that. They were all like, I don't want to go to your birthday.

You guys want to come over to my house? No, your dad's going to take our blood again. Yeah. But what's even crazier is not only did he take their blood, they fainted and threw up. Yeah. Kids don't like having blood drawn at the best of times. I know.

A little bit of birthday party. Yeah. I mean, he was taking a sizable amount for that to happen. I have to imagine so. But also at a birthday party when they were like filled with cake and excited. I don't know, Andrew Wakefield, we've all had blood drawn as kids. There's some nurses and doctors that are really good at it that are good at like interfacing with the kid and making it comforting.

There's some doctors that are like, no, I'm just going to do this and it sucks. I'm going to guess he was one of the bad ones. I guess he wasn't good at that. Everyone is complicit. This is my lesson from all of this. The people at that birthday party, the adults besides him should have been like, no. I wonder what the conversations were. You just like sitting at the side of the room, is he taking my son's blood?

Should we let him do this? He probably had some scammy argument where he was like, I'm doing a test and. You want to advance medical science, don't you? Yes. That is how he sounded. That was how he sounded. And everyone was stupid. It's gotten a lot of accent play out of these episodes.

Oh yeah. Now, the general medical council concluded that Wakefield had acted with quote, callous disregard for the distress and pain the children would suffer, which is a good summary of his career. None of this and none of Brian Deere's fantastic reporting has been enough to kill rumors of a correlation between vaccination and autism. By 2008, the British national vaccination rates against MMR went from above 90% to below 80%.

Every measles outbreak we've had since can be traced to Andrew Wakefield's research and the movement had helped reignite. In the years since all this broke, Andrew Wakefield has continued to be a shady conman. In 2004, before his license was taken away, he fled Britain for Austin, Texas, figuring that it would be an easier place to continue to be a greasy disease grifter. If Alex Jones has taught us anything, he was probably wise to do that. The next New York Times article on Wakefield was titled, The Crash and Burn of an Autism Guru.

Its author, Susan Dominus, caught up with Wakefield about a year after he was stripped of his license. The picture he paints of him is of a bitter conman. For Wakefield, the attacks had become a kind of affirmation. The more he must defend his research, the more important he seems to consider it. So important that powerful forces have conspired and aligned against him. He said he believes that they, public health officials, pharmaceutical companies, pay bloggers to plant vicious comments about him on the web.

Because it's always the same, he says, discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield, discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield. He also wouldn't be surprised if public health officials were inflating the number of measles mortalities, just as he thinks they inflate the risk of the flu to increase the uptake of that vaccine. Having been rejected by mainstream medicine, Wakefield, the son of well-regarded doctors in Britain, has apparently rejected the integrity of mainstream medicine in return. I hope he dies of a disease.

Yeah, I mean- Is that horrible to say? No. No. Come on. Also, to call them out- This is a podcast where- Yeah.

Where we can be a little dark. Where we can wish death on people. Yeah, fine. Yeah, to call out doctors for inflating fear around the flu while he literally created a crisis, created a fear to sell his measles vaccine. Yeah. What? You know, it's the pot calling the kettle, a vaccine denialist agitated.

I'm deeply lost in the metaphor. I didn't know which one he was. Yeah, I got lost in the metaphor too. But yeah. Yeah. He sucks. So, that article that noted that Wakefield still enjoyed a healthy fan base and was able to pack 250 paying customers into a church near Austin to hear Wakefield talk about

his research. For a subset of desperate parents, most of whom are struggling with children who suffer from severe complications due to autism. True has become something of a cult leader. Here's the New York Times. Many complied with lavish thanks. We stand by you, and thank you for the many sacrifices you have made for the cause. When he finally took the podium, the audience members, mostly parents of autistic children,

stood and applauded wildly. Some of Wakefield's cult status is surely because of his personal charisma, and he spoke with a great rhetorical flair. He took off his glasses and put them back on like a gifted actor maximizing a prop. What happens to me doesn't matter, he said at one point, what happens to these children does matter. Why do all con men sound the same? Because it works.

Like, as you're describing him, I'm like, well, that sounds like Trump. Yeah. Yeah. They're all more alike than they are different. They would all get together at the same sort of parties where they would probably all bribe children for their blood. Pretending they're not self-interested when they're literally just conning scared people out of their money.

Yeah. Yeah. And for some reference, actual heroic people never talk like that because they're too busy doing good things. Yeah. Saving the world and such. It's so true. Now, since moving to America in 2004, Wakefield has tried repeatedly to cash in on his hero

status among the Abti vaccine crowd. In 2013, the Guardian caught up with him at a convention for the reality TV industry. He'd paid $1,600 for a chance to pitch his idea for a new TV show to executives from Discovery, National Geographic, and TLC. Now, the pilot for this new business venture was a TV show called Autism Team. Oh, no. Not a great title. I've watched an excerpt from this, and I think it would be most accurately described

as sickness porn. It includes a lot of long lingering shots of suffering children. It received a lot of criticism from autism sufferers because it doesn't really focus at all on the humanity of these people. It's just sort of seeing a kid suffer and then a doctor will come in and diagnose the kid with autism-associated endocolitis, the syndrome Andrew Wakefield invented. And then, yeah. It feels like resistance against him and his conning has to come a little from people

with autism and people connected to autism being like, no, you don't stop preying on this. Yeah. Stop making a dollar off of something that is like, really, I have a pretty wide view because the kids I worked with were very low functioning for the most part. So these were kids who their parents had to live with the knowledge that, like, number one, their kid was never going to live independently, was never going to be able to work a job or hold normal relationships, and was going to have to go to a home when they died.

And in some cases before, because these parents would know that when I get too old to sort of, like, sometimes these kids could be violent, they'd need to be physically restrained. When I got too old to deal with that, my son or my daughter is going to live in a home without me. And that's a horrifying thing to have to deal with. And so, yeah, it just, it infuriates me thinking about turning that into a reality TV show to talk about how great a doctor you are. Yeah.

I mean, it's really gross. It's such a, certainly in 2019, I would hope, like, public opinion would turn against a show like that, being like, no. And it didn't get picked up because it, like, the reason I'm not playing it for you is that it's really not, it's boring, too. Yeah. It's a good preview clip or whatever, but I am going to read a summary of an episode from The Guardian.

Okay. John's mother, John is one of the suffering kids, says, Krigsman's diagnosis is the answer to everything. And Krigsman is the doctor that they had to bring in because Andrew Wakefield's not a doctor anymore. Oh, okay. That part is a little funny. That's funny.

Yeah. John's father tells us the subsequent change in his son has been absolutely dramatic. Finally, the short teaser wraps. The narrator says that groundbreaking work by the autism team means that children can be treated effectively, so join us and follow their journey. So yeah, Wakefield did not find a buyer for that totally awesome show, but he did wind up directing a feature film a little bit later. No.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Vaxt is the name of the documentary. Oh God. Yeah. It built itself as, quote, an investigation into the CDC's destruction of a study linking autism to the MMR vaccine.

Was it? No, of course not. I'm shaking my head there. And yes, you'd better believe he showed up on InfoWars to promote it. In this clip, he starts... At least he embraces. He's been on InfoWars a lot, by the way. Where he's at.

Yeah. He is a frequent guest of Alex Jones's. Okay. Now it's starting to make sense. These terrible people are all friends. I've been one of the bad Andrew Wakefields partied with Steven Seagal, like they all know each other. Oh my gosh.

Yeah. So in this clip, he starts by claiming to Alex Jones that he found a CDC whistleblower who was willing on record to say that he designed a study which proved a connection between autism and the MMR vaccine and then watched the CDC cover it up. That's the claim he's making in InfoWars is the claim that's being made in the documentary. So Wakefield presents this CDC whistleblower as it being overwhelmed by his conscience and needing to come clean. Alex declares not a doctor, Andrew Wakefield, to be an American hero.

I'm going to play a little clip of Andrew Wakefield talking on InfoWars. Oh God. Well, you're admirable because every time I have you in here, you're at the cutting edge of working with families, trying to put the truth out. You name it, lawsuits. You've just been proven vindicated in spades, a true trailblazer. I know you don't like that, but a true hero, Andrew Wakefield. You never want to talk about yourself being vindicated.

It's always, we have a top whistleblower, the head of the program, hired to cover it up, did all the studies. He's now gone public. The media won't cover it. You're just still worried about the millions of kids getting brain damaged. Alex, it's not about me. It's not about me at all. I'm just a guy trying to do a job and trying to, and being prevented.

So I'm a really just obstinate, but I'm not going to go away. I'm not going to duck for this issue. It's far too important. It's going to be from the estimates in the movie, one in two children born in 2032 are going to have autism. That is absolutely unacceptable. So whatever the media say about me, whatever the politicians say, I mean, it doesn't matter because I don't matter.

It is, what matters is the future of this country and the future of this country is its children. So I do want to hit a little bit on the conspiracy theorist vaccine people will often say that like by 2030 or wherever, one out of every two children will have autism to believe that it's something being spread by these vaccines. That's nonsense. The number of people with autism has shotgun up massively in the last couple of decades because they didn't used to know it was a thing.

Right. And they used to think that like all these different syndromes that we now know are different kind of expressions of autism were totally different illnesses and stuff. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, the even bigger part of it is that it used to basically just be white kids who got diagnosed with autism because you had to have some money to be able to go to a doctor for this. Right.

And if you were a black kid or a Hispanic kid who came from a poor area, they'd just be like, ah, you're just bad at learning. Yes. Or yeah. And they wouldn't get to go to the doctor over. Yeah, you're just different. And now that medicine is less racist, we're realizing that it's more common than we'd thought and we're getting better at recognizing it and we're, like now they recognize that

it's a spectrum. And all these people who would never have been diagnosed as having anything or being like, well, no, you're on some level of the spectrum. Right. Spectrum has totally changed the way it's been diagnosed. It's just the fact that we didn't get this shit and it's not new. Autism's existed as long as there's been human beings. We just didn't, like it just used to be that like, oh, this person, wow, the way that their

mind works is really different. Absolutely. Like, of course they didn't have like fucking tons of Greek philosophers and scientists probably had some kind of autism. Yeah. And does he acknowledge spectrum and... You know, I don't know enough about what he says about autism because he's not an autism expert.

Right. He's a gastroenterologist who lost his medical license. Exactly. And it feels pretty fear-mongering to say one in two people will have autism as if it evokes like low functioning autism, which is not inherently bad. I feel like there's this like, it's fear-mongering and I don't think it helps people see the humanity and people with autism. It is that like suffering porn.

It is that suffering porn. I do want to state, you know, I just talked about working with the really low functioning kids. I also want to like my jobs when I was teaching in special ed was to work with this kid who had pretty severe Asperger syndrome but was very smart and was like, he was an expert. We would go on walks and I would try to get like, trying to socialize and get him used to like having conversations. And his thing was pumps, like fountain pumps.

And anytime we walked past like a pump in an apartment complex, he would explain how the whole thing was assembled underground just by looking at the top. And he would design them for fun. And the president of a company that designed pumps for like Las Vegas and stuff like the Bellagio flew out to Dallas to like meet with this kid and like talk to them and be like, when you graduate, send us a resume because like you're like, it's, it's, I don't know, like the idea, like both the making it out to be this horrible doomed thing and the suffering porn, like it's all really gross to me.

It oversimplifies something that's very complicated. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So. But that's just the tip of the iceberg on how infuriating that clip was. Yeah. It's really bad.

I, I, I'm glad I hadn't even read that he'd been on Info Wars. I just thought, oh, he's in Austin. I bet he's been on Alex Jones' show. What a, what a good assumption. Oh, Alex Jones loves how that he has a British accent probably because it sounds so legitimate. Anytime he can get a British person on there. Yes. Oh my God.

You better believe it. But I love when he says, it's not about me. It's not about me. It's, it's not. It's not about me. I can't, I'm not gonna. No, that was it. I'm not gonna be doing his accent, but.

Like, no. No. You scam people. You piece of shit. Yeah. Okay. Uh, you know what it's time for. Eds.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. Now many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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My God. Those ads. I, uh, you know what I love about ads is the way it makes me aware of the products and services that I can look into purchasing for myself and my loved ones. Oh, yeah. That's what I like about them. Not too pushy, just right. Just right.

You can put in information out there. Now, Wakefield's documentary, uh, you know, in that, in that clip on Info Wars, he claims that he's got this interview with this guy from the CDC, Dr. Thompson. And the documentary basically claims that this guy, the research proved that there was a connection between MMR and autism and the CDC covered it up and this guy's blowing the whistle on it. That's not what happened. Dr. William Thompson was in fact critical of a single 2004 study that did fail to find

a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. He had issues with the way the study was conducted that he believed needed to be fixed, but he never requested that his name be removed from the paper, which would have been the first step a scientist who wanted to disavow a piece of research would take Wakefield's documentary includes interviews with Dr. Thompson that have been carefully edited to give the impression that he is alleging a coverup rather than just angry about several very specific issues with the study. I'll put a link on our website behind the bastards.com to an article that breaks down

exactly what Wakefield did. But the short version is that he just chopped up a long complex interview in order to put lies in someone else's mouth. Actual published transcripts of the full interview paint a very different picture. I checked out the website for Vaxx because I wanted to get an idea for how Andrew Wakefield presents himself to a sympathetic audience, what I found was pretty cringe worthy. Here's an excerpt from a section of the website called, Who is Andrew Wakefield? If you heard Andrew Wakefield's name and you probably have, you've heard two tales.

You've heard that Dr. Wakefield is a charlatan, an unethical researcher and a huckster who was erased from the British Medical Registry and whose 1998 article on autism and gastrointestinal disease was retracted by a leading medical journal. You've also heard a very different story. That Dr. Wakefield is a brilliant and courageous scientist, a compassionate physician beloved by his patients and a champion for families with autism and vaccine injury. What's the truth? Anyone who writes that about themselves is not courageous and brilliant.

Speaking of the last episode you were on, it sounds more than a little bit like Keith Ranieri's own biography of himself. It does. That's the part I don't understand why. I get how scam artists work. I get how you listen to mumbo jumbo and it's in a soothing voice and you're like, well, maybe. But once they start bragging about themselves and how great they are, that's like the alarm

sounds for me. No, especially just as a journalist, whenever somebody starts bragging about themselves in that way, you kind of like, no, okay, I probably shouldn't be listening to anything you have to say. Exactly. Because you're probably a con artist trying to sell something. Yeah. Well, that's not how it works though.

Yeah. Well, okay. The truth is that thanks in large part to no longer a Dr. Andrew Wakefield, vaccination rates have fallen in numerous Western countries. It took 20 years for rates in Great Britain to return to their pre-Wakefield levels. Time magazine claims that, quote, by the end, the UK families had experienced more than 12,000 cases of measles and hundreds of hospitalizations, many with serious complications and at least three deaths.

That's some careful wording because he's saying vaccinations are falling. Vaccination rates fell and then there were disease outbreaks. But like he's taking credit for vaccination rates falling? This is Time magazine. Oh, that's Time magazine. Being like immediately after like, vaccination rates started falling. Yes, I thought he was bragging about making the vaccination rates fall. No, he thinks they're lying about how many measles cases there are because all of the

evidence suggests that, oh, right after you published the study, people started getting vaccinated less and then there were multiple death and measles outbreaks. Maybe those two are connected. Maybe you caused them. Yeah. Now, it's probably impossible to put together an accurate count of the number of deaths and hospitalizations due to Andrew Wakefield. In 2010, there was a whooping cough outbreak in California, the worst in 50 years.

It was spread by a kid whose parents had non-medical exemptions for school vaccination requirements. Later research showed that most whooping cough cases occurred in clusters of unvaccinated children, causing 9,120 infections and 10 deaths. A 2018 study published by the National Institute of Health drew a direct line between Wakefield's research and a worldwide epidemic, saying that as a result of the movement he ignited, quote, multiple breakouts of measles have occurred throughout different parts of the Western world, infecting dozens of patients and even causing deaths. In the UK in 1998, 56 people contracted measles.

In 2006, this number increased to 449 in the first five months of the year, with the first death since 1992. In 2008, measles was declared endemic in the UK for the first time in 14 years. In Ireland, an outbreak occurred in 2000, and 1,500 cases and three deaths were reported. The outbreak was reported to have occurred as a direct result of a drop in vaccination rates following the MMR controversy. In France, more than 22,000 cases of measles were reported from 2008 to 2011. The United States has not been an exception, with outbreaks occurring most recently in

2008, 2011, and 2013. As I write this, several dozen people have been hospitalized with measles in the Pacific Northwest, more are likely to have fallen sick by the time you hear this episode. Every one of those people can thank Dr. Andrew Wakefield for what they're about to endure and only hopefully survive. Wow. That's my episode on Andrew Wakefield! He's so bad.

He's real bad. It's so crazy that that one study did so much damage. It is kind of like people always talk about you could change the world, one person can change the world. They can. They sure can. They can. That's not always a good thing.

Yeah. Wow. That's why I'm always really cagey about using language like that around kids, shoot for the stars, you could do anything. It's like, well, that's true in good cases, but Hitler believed that too. Yeah. Look at Jeff Bezos. Yeah, he was just a poor kid who wanted to achieve things.

Yeah, ambition on its own is not good. Maybe don't encourage ambition. Maybe just encourage people to be happy. Yeah. Yeah. Or to do things for other people. Yeah. The ambition to, because it's complicated, because a lot of these, like Jonah Salk, the

polio vaccine guy, was a guy who just grew up seeing everybody die of polio and was like, fuck polio. I'm going to fuck this disease up. So that's a good ambition. Yeah. So I guess I wonder, what's our defense against this stuff, because it's like Alex Jones, some of his stuff is like whatever. People don't actually believe in gay frogs.

Yeah. Word, all that stuff. You've seen the video where he dresses like a frog and hops around. No. Oh, it's the hoot. Oh, that sounds delightful. Yeah. But this is so weirdly mainstream.

It's like you were saying, like people on the left and the right at a certain point believe it. Yeah. But I don't know what to tell you. I think that the only, I honestly think that if we're drawing a connection, all the major problems of our current era, like anti-vaccine, like vaccine denial, the apologists for people like Bashar al-Assad who think that he's a socialist hero who's been maligned by the media, like the rise of Nazism in the Western world, I think this all has the same connection,

which is that our schools are shitty and people aren't taught critical thinking and taught how to evaluate and know when someone's lying to them. Right. Well, it's the same reason why Cutco got so many young people to go out to try to trick them into believing they had a job when they were just like joining an MLM to sell shitty knives. Yeah. Exactly.

We just need to be better at teaching people to recognize when they're being scammed. Yeah. Better at critical thinking. We need a vaccine for scams and that's what an education should be. Yes. Like people should, there should be classes in every school about like, I don't know if someone's trying to scam you. Yeah.

Here's how to recognize grifters. These are the words they use. It sounds like the vaccine against scamming could be this podcast. Sounds like the vaccine against scamming could be this podcast. So play this podcast to your children. Play it to strange children on the street. Abduct children who live near you and force them to listen to it. Then take their blood.

And then take their blood. Take any kid's blood you want because that's fine. This is Sophie's. You think they might get us in some legal trouble? All right. If you abduct a child, tell them Joe Rogan's podcast told you to do it. Yes. Yeah.

Joe Rogan. And if you take their blood, double down. Double down on Joe Rogan. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like we're safe now. All right. Buy a t-shirt.

Tea public behind the bastards. You can use the t-shirts to bind to the arms of a child in order to make them listen to this show. Mm-hmm. Oh, boy. I'm in some... Anna, you want to plug some stuff? Yeah.

You can find me on Instagram, Bad Comics with an X by Anna. I make web comics about anxiety and depression and stuff. And that's also my handle on Twitter. Hit me up if you have thoughts about anything. I feel like I said some things on this podcast that were blanket statements and I am afraid that I will be fact-checked. All blanket statements are accurate. Yeah.

I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can find this podcast on the interwebs at BehindTheBastards.com. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter at AtBastardsPod. Anna, we have one more episode to get through about an even guy, just another terrible doctor. It gets worse. Buckle up. Oh, boy.

It's going to be a fun... Yeah, it'll be a short one. But you can all get to listen to that tomorrow. We're going to be talking about Dr. Bob Sears. Ooh. So, strap in boys and girls and people who don't identify as either gender and whoever. I don't care. Just strap in.

Yeah. Anyone can strap in. Anyone can strap in, especially if you abducted a child. All right. That's the end of the episode. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. It's our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become

the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.