The Highwire with Del Bigtree - Episode 405: ANDREW WAKEFIELD: THE REAL STORY

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

It’s one of the longest running news stories in history: the controversy surrounding Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his 1998 Lancet study, which suggested a potential link between the MMR vaccine, gastrointestinal issues, and autism. Host Del Bigtree uncovers details about Wakefield’s research and the allegations of fraud and ethical misconduct against him, presenting evidence that challenges the mainstream narrative. This in-depth examination sheds new light on the story of this controversial figure and may change your mind about his role in the vaccine safety debate, and the role that childhood vaccines play in the autism debate.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

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All right, everyone, we ready? Yeah. Action. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are out there in the world. Happy New Year! I hope your year is getting off to a really amazing start. We have just been, you know, excited and celebrating. What an incredible year we just had.

So can you imagine what we're about to do this year? The possibilities are literally endless. I've been trying to wrap my head around everything that we could possibly do because frankly, I think last year we went beyond our wildest dreams. We got into a space, you know, watching HHS being transformed by people that have been our heroes like Robert Kennedy Jr. and others about to transform our health department. But as that looming moment, the confirmation of Robert Kennedy, Jr. is happening. The news is going back to the tried and true, the fear mongering of one great monster that once walked this earth and put us all in harm's way on the vaccine issue. Who am I talking about? This guy. Over the past couple of decades, there has been a small but growing vocal minority pushing back against vaccines because of perceived harms, including the debunked claim that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine causes autism. That linkage was put forward in a late 1990s paper in the British Medical Journal, The Lancet. It was later retracted and has since been repeatedly disproven.

The doctor behind that study, Andrew Wakefield, was stripped of his medical license. But over that period, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who trained as an environmental lawyer, has become a principal player in this movement, along with Wakefield. He is a voice machine that continues to put out dis and misinformation in such a way that it sounds believable to the public. In 2005, Kennedy wrote an article for Rolling Stone magazine and Salon that asserted a connection between autism and a mercury-containing vaccine additive called thymarisol. Thymarisol was removed from childhood vaccines in 2001, and it was never used in the MMR vaccine.

After that piece ran, the two publications discovered multiple errors in his work, and they retracted it. A decade later, Kennedy joined a group called the World Mercury Project, which, a few years later, became the Children's Health Defense, which is a nonprofit that has been a principal promoter of misinformation about vaccines. That's when it seems that he really got embedded in the anti-vax world. Derek Barris has long tracked Kennedy's influence for his podcast, Conspiratuality, which is about the interstate the intersection of the wellness industry and online conspiracies. You have Robert Kennedy, you have Del Bigtree.

You have a number of people have been doing that work for a long time, but COVID gave them the opportunity to have an even larger platform than they ever had. Well, you know they're really getting scared when they bring back Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Now, of course, for decades, they have been trying to convince you that there's only one doctor on this planet that's questioned the childhood vaccine program, and whether somehow that vaccine program is contributing to this autism epidemic that is still continue to skyrocket far worse than it was than Andrew Wakefield first started having questions about it.

But I thought because I know this is in the news cycle and because they're using it to fearmonger, because so many of you are now watching us, because we're in the news and because of the great work we're doing in the incredible series that's just started, Jeffrey Jackson and Bexigates with the polio story, I thought this would be a great time to reflect back to the first interview I ever did with Dr. Andrew Wakefield right after we had just toured the nation really with the film Vax that I made with him. That's right. My career in this space, in the informed consent action network and the high wire and the investigations and our mission statement dedicated to eradicating man-made disease, all of it came out of the

documentary Vaxed, which I executive produced and Dr. Andrew Wakefield was the director, writer, and chief investigator of that film. So I did an interview and got into all the details, all of the things, all of the, when they say, you know, misinformation or liar or fraud. In fact, I think I've heard that there's textbooks out there in the world where when it talks about medical fraud, Dr. Andrew Wakefield is on that page. So why would I read it? risk everything to work with this guy? Why did I make a movie with him? I get into all of those details and all the accusations that were made and where the reality really is. I think this is an important story and to revisit. And one of my favorite interviews of all times because it really

is at the core of this entire vaccine conversation. So this is my original first interview on the early set of the High Wire in 2018 with Dr. Andrew Wakefield. I think you can enjoy it. Take a look. This is a show like we have never done before. I'm only going to talk about one topic, and I'm only going to talk to one man. You see, on High Wire, for over a year,

we've laid out all the evidence and issues that surround our vaccine program, and the people that want to promote the use of vaccines by every single human being on the plant, keep changing their argument because we keep knocking their arguments down. We are officially in the offensive position because you have been sharing our show high wire. You have been talking to your friends on Facebook and Twitter, and we are making a difference. And now I believe they are down to one last argument.

Dr. Andy Wakefield is a fraud and therefore vaccines are great. You see, this all really comes down to two men. Dr. Andy Wakefield and a reporter named Brian Deere. You see, Andy Wakefield believed he was seeing an issue with the MMR vaccine in studies that he was doing. And the journalist Brian Deere said, we shouldn't listen to this man. He's a fraud. We shouldn't listen to the hundreds of thousands of parents around the world all claiming that the vaccine caused an injury to their child. They are all lying.

They are all frauds. I am right. This vaccine program should stand. as it is. See in this moment back in 2004 when all of this started happening we had a choice. We had to trust one of these two men, Dr. Andy Wakefield or Brian Deere. One of them was going to alter the course of history. We chose Brian Deere. But today I'm going to interview Dr. Andy Wakefield in a way that's never been done before. I'm going to provide you with real documents and proof that you have never seen. And I believe today we quash the last remaining argument

that tries to tell the world there is no debate about vaccines. Today you will recognize the debate is reopened. And we must now all journey together to, the truth because that's what we do on high wire. We examine the truth and I'm going to take it to Dr. Andy Wakefield. Here he's been in the news. You've seen it. Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Disgraced and discredited, the doctor who convinced thousands of parents to skip vital vaccinations for their children. A 1998 study that linked the vaccine to autism and bowel disease gained enormous credibility from its publication. in the British Medical Journal, The Lancet.

Dr. Wakefield has been shown, used absolutely fraudulent data. Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the study's main author, behaved unethically, with callous disregard for the children involved. Andrew Wakefield is considered a hero to anti-vaccine supporters. The allegations against me and against my colleagues are both unfounded and unjust. I repeat, unfounded and unjust. This era will be marked as a time in history. This has been a dispute with real impact on society.

So many parents that really want to know more about vaccine safety. It's remarkable how much damage one man can do. All right, Andy, I want to thank you for coming in. I mean, I called you last week because we've been doing stories on the fact that in the news, we keep seeing your name pop up. Chelsea Clinton sees a measles outbreak in Missouri, and she's saying I'll never forgive me. Andy Wakefield. There was another video that came out this week. It was all about Andy Wakefield.

For some reason, there seems to be a surge of Andy Wakefield, sort of, I call it, it's propaganda really, against you. Have you been seeing any of this? It's irrelevant, and so I don't tend to let it impact me at all. I mean, I've been living this for a very long time, so it's no. I know you've done this ad naus. You have done this interview and dealt with all the allegations against you from Anderson Cooper, you name it all around the world. reporters. The reason I want to talk to you about this is really for me. To be honest, you know, a lot of people know that you and I made this movie back from cover up to catastrophe, the documentary

about Dr. William Thompson. We did that together. There were times when we were working on that film that I honestly thought, I wish anybody else in the world had done the research on Thompson's story. I would have rather made that film with anybody in the world because of the baggage that comes with this story of the Lancet and this whole thing. And at night I would sit and think, do I bail on this? Do I make this movie? This teaming up with Andy Wakefield will be totally devastating to my own career. And what kept me moving forward really was Thompson. All of those documents, the 10,000 documents, that story was ironclad. And so I came to the conclusion,

if this is the biggest medical story that I've seen in my lifetime, which I still believe to this day it is. And I think I'm the one that's supposed to be helping tell that story. Then my partner is going to be Andy Wakefield. So today, I want to talk about all the things I've looked into about you. I've had you under investigation, whether you know it or not, because I want to know that your story is ironclad as the one that we did on Thompson. And so now I want to get to the bottom of what happened. But to start out with, how the hell did you find yourself in the middle of this mess to begin with? I mean, you were a gastroenterologist in, you know, at the Royal Free Hospital in UK.

You were the lead researcher. What was the title you had? Yeah, I was, I was an academic gastroenterologist. I ran a research team of about 19 people. And you're absolutely right. Just let me back up, Dell. I mean, you're absolutely right. first of all, I am all they've gone.

So if that story doesn't hold up, they've got nothing. And you'll also know that William Thompson himself said, if we hadn't lied, Andy Wakefield would still have a career. That is true. Because what they did was confirm exactly what we were saying. And that couldn't be allowed to stand, so they had to lie and they had to fake it. So, you know, it's a pleasure to be here,

and I hope you don't regret it after we've had this conversation. Anything could happen. What happened? I trained as a surgeon. I did some research in Toronto. I made some interesting observations and went back. And my interests were Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, inflammatory bowel disease, epidemic diseases that we didn't have an explanation for. And we did some work, prompted by that work in Canada, that suggested that there was a primary vascular injury in Crohn's disease. In other words, that it wasn't primarily a disease of the bowel, per se, but of those tiny blood vessels that supply the bowel.

Okay. And damage to those vessels, cut off the blood supply, and led to death of the tissue and inflammation of the tissue. And so the question became, because at the time, the prevailing hypothesis was that it was some bug coming across from the gut that was causing this disease. But this would change everything. It would mean that it was some bug coming in through the blood vessels and lodging in the blood vessels and causing some sort of damage there that might try. trigger the inflammation. So it's not something that's in your body or... It's something that an infection maybe that you got and then it had a propensity

to go to the intestine via the blood vessels and damage those. So I sat down and I read Fields virology and I thought, well, what virus would it be? Field virology is a huge thing and I sat there read it from beginning to end. So that's a list of all the different viruses and how they work and what they do? That's it. And I got to Measel Forest and it was like reading a chapter on Crohn's disease. So I put together a team of people and I said, this is a lot. and we don't know, we were going to look at this.

So we looked at it, and lo and behold, that's what came out. And my group's interest was atypical patterns of exposure. This is really important. Unusual patterns of infectious exposure. So everybody gets in measles. Why doesn't everybody get a disease, like Crohn's, for example, and the answer might be that some people get it very early in life, or they get it at very high dose,

or they get it when they've got another infection, or in some cases they get it when they're in utero. And so we did some work with the Swedes, which showed that mothers who'd experienced measles during pregnancy, which was very rare because mothers had experienced natural measles as children and therefore were immune. So having measles during pregnancy was extremely rare. There were four cases in central Sweden in the period we looked at, and three of the offspring developed severe Crohn's disease. The odds were a million, 16 million to one published in the Lancet. Fascinating observation. and others didn't find the same thing in different cohorts.

That didn't mean that that was wrong. It just meant there was something about that group that meant that measles at that time in pregnancy was a high risk. So on the back of that, we said, okay, why has Crohn's appeared in children? We never saw it in children before. The mean age of onset was 30 years, and it was unheard of, unheard of in children. Now we see it in kids as young as 18 months.

Could it possibly be related to the unusual, the atypical exposure? of vaccination versus natural infection. So we looked at that and lo and behold, there was a highly significant increased risk of inflammatory bowel disease in those who had the vaccine compared to those who hadn't. And we posed it as a question,

sent it to the Lancet and it was published. And on the back of that, parents started contacting him. I think that was published in 94, 95 parents started contacting me saying, my child was perfectly fine, developing normally. They then had the MMR vaccine. vaccine. They had a high fever, a seizure, whatever it was, and they then regressed into what is now a diagnosis of autism. Now, were you looking at MMR vaccine when you said a vaccine could cause it, or was it? No, we were looking at the single measles vaccine in the context of pregnancy.

So the MMR was not involved in the Crohn's disease study. That's correct. Okay. So then what did you do? In May 1995, first parent contacted me and said, extremely articulate woman, very bright, not anti-vaccine, to have taken her child to be vaccinated on time, and this is what happened. She was just simply telling me, as a mother would do, what had happened to her child. And she said, he got the vaccine, he was clearly unwelled for several days, went to sleep, woke up, was never the same child again, eventually was diagnosed as autistic. And I said, as I've said many times before, I know nothing about autism. How can I possibly help?

And she said, my child has terrible gastrointestinal problems, and the doctors have a said that's just autism. No, it wasn't. And this is a fundamental rule of medicine. You take the patient's symptoms very, very seriously, and you do not ascribe them to being due to some, for example, psychological or behavioral problem before you've excluded them being due to an organic problem like information. Right, but I mean, did something click? Did something say something about this woman's story I want to look into? I mean, because I'm sure you're contacted all the time. You're a leading researcher. Why? story.

Oh, interestingly, I wasn't contacted that much. This was very unusual to have a direct contact from a parent like this. She said there's an epidemic of this problem, and she was absolutely right because that was followed by a host of communications from parents with similar problems. But I was trained in medicine to listen and to act upon what I hear, and that was my duty. And so here was a mother with a compelling story desperately seeking help for her child. I was in a position potentially to do something to help and to walk away from her and say, no, I'm not going to do it.

Or this story about the vaccine is very interesting, but it's not good for my career. So could you just, you know, find someone else? It's not the way I was trained to practice medicine. So it was as simple as that. So what's the procedure once you say, okay, I guess bring your child in, let me see what's going on? Or, you know, do you immediately in that moment as a research, which you were, say, I'm going to start a study.

Right, it's really, very simple. So there were a group of these parents. I received many calls and letters. And I called, the first thing I did was to call John Walker Smith, who's one of the world's leading pediatric gastroenterologists, who was due to move to the Royal Free Hospital with his team. And I said, John, look, this is the story that I'm hearing. What do you think?

And that evolved into a plan to investigate the clinical symptoms in these children. And he said this is a compelling story. These children need investigation. They've got inflammatory bowel disease of some sort until proven otherwise. So we need to look at them. Let us go about this very carefully. We'll involve psychiatrists.

We'll involve neurologists. We'll try and tease out exactly what is going on in these children. But until proven otherwise, their clinical symptoms merit further investigation. Now, is Royal Free known for gastrointestinal work? And is that something? I mean, because they have you. you have the world's leading pediatric gastroenterol.

Why are all these bowel intestal doctors collecting at the Royal Free? It has a very good track record in particular in the liver aspects of gastroenterology, liver disease, started by Dame Sheila Sherlock and a liver transplant program there. And so it had a very good reputation. It was part of the University of London. It was a major teaching hospital. So it was a very good place for this to take place. So it ends up being 12 patients in this study.

How did that selection process work? It required that, one, the parents wanted their child to be investigated by Professor Walker Smith. And it required that the general practitioner for that child referred the patient to Professor Walker Smith. So that's how it happened. So the general doctor that oversees this child had to submit them? Yeah, had to write to Professor Walker Smith. I would like you to see this child and sort out their symptoms. How do they know what was going on?

Did you put it in a newspaper? I mean, is there a call to all, you know, parents with autistic children who have... Not at all, no. It was the parents spontaneously contacting us. Somehow they hear about it though. Was there a group? They're a network, yeah. These people talk to each other.

So mothers of affected children will meet at autism groups or within schools for autistic children. They will talk about their child's symptoms. And then when they have a certain, a sympathetic ear, which they did at the Royal Free, then word spreads very quickly. How many, like if you came up with 12, how many people sort of wanted to be a part of it? Like, by the end of my time at the Royal Free, we'd actually seen about 183 children or something like that. But it happened very quickly.

There was a cascade of referrals, not only from the UK, but from abroad, from America as well. Was the Lancet designed to prove that MMR causes autism, or was it, you know, What was the focus of the study from your view? So the Lancet paper, let me just sort of characterize how human disease syndromes are discovered. They're usually reported first in what is called a case series where there are a handful of patients who have a constellation of signs and symptoms and clinical findings that are so unique, so unusual and so idiosyncratic that they merit publication in their own right. So this would be the same for the description of autism or Crohn's disease or multiple sclerosis or AIDS or any of these things. And so this was a paper in that same mold.

This was a case series. It didn't test a hypothesis. It could not do that. It generates hypotheses of what's going on. But what it said is what is accounting for the features of gastrointestinal disease in these children? And what we found was an inflammatory bowel disease. And the features of that looked unusual. certainly not like anything that we'd seen before, typically in children. And it was accompanied

by the parental history in the majority of children of regression following an MMR vaccine. Now, we didn't make any claims about causation. We simply said, this is the parent's story. This merits further investigation. You weren't just looking at any kid with a gastrointestinal problem or some version of Crohn's disease. You were specifically looking at something that was looked to be just happening to autistic kids, is that correct? That's right. They had a developmental disorder which was on the autism spectrum, and they had gastrointestinal symptoms that were clinically sufficient to merit clinical investigation. How many scientists were involved in this study, actually, that were like a part of it,

and how were they selected? There were 13 authors on the paper, so they were really the scientists and physicians involved. They were either the clinicians, particularly from the department of pediatric gastroenterology who were examining the children, who were performing the colonoscopies, for example, or the spinal taps. Then they were the pathologists who were looking at the tissues under the microscope. And then they were the lab technicians and others who were involved in assimilating the tissues and examining them. How does the hierarchy work in a study like this? The names I hear about, I think, are Andy Wakefield, is a big one, obviously,

Professor John Walker Smith. And then I've recently, in some looking at, there's this merch, Dr. Merch guy. And then there's obviously another 10 more. Were you the lead? Was Professor John Walker Smith the lead? Like, how is that looked at in this type of process? Okay. The two key positions are the first and last authors.

So the last author, in this case, John Walker Smith, was the senior clinician on the team. He was responsible for the clinical care and well-being of the children. And I was the person who had not only generated the hypothesis, but assimilated all of the information from these various doctors and put it into a paper. How long did this case study take? It probably took about, to put the whole thing together, took about three to four months. Three to four months. So you see the first patient in 1995, and then three to four months later you're publishing the... I heard from the first

patient in 95, Walker Smith had not yet come to the Royal Free, and it was only when he came to the Royal Free in 96 that we started examining them. Got it. And then the paper publishes in what year? Doesn't publish until the beginning of 98. Okay. But you were finished before then? We were finished before then.

So then as you're finishing and you're writing up, what is the process if you have 12 other co-authors, what is the process? What is the process for them? Do they just assume Andy's got this, he's in charge, I'm not allowed to say anything, or are they involved in the process of looking through it to make sure the data is correct? No, they involve. They can have it. at it. So I prepare a draft, I send it out to them, they come back and it's covered in red ink, it gets revised, it goes out again, it gets revised again, and so on and so forth.

So everybody has to feel happy with that paper as it is submitted and sign up to it before it goes off. So what types of things like in your first draft goes out, what type of thing would come back with a red line through it? Yeah, no, it's usually, for example, when you're off base, a things you don't know anything about. The gastroenterology was straightforward. But for example the description of the developmental disorder was not so straightforward because it started off with our psychiatrist saying well this

sounds like childhood disintegrative disorder to me and then us reconciling that to the being the same thing as autism and therefore describing the ultimate diagnosis in the context of an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. I see. So there were sort of semantic discussions back and forth. But beyond that, no, it was a very straightforward process. Okay. So all 12 of your co-authors sign off on this final version. I mean, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think this is a world groundbreaking, world-changing paper? Is this the biggest thing you've done yet? What is sort of your feeling as you're getting close to this

moment of the world getting to see this Lancet? Okay. Well, in anticipation of the publication, we did several things. We felt it was only right and responsible to, send the Department of Health a draft and say, look, we've made this finding. This is what the parents say, and this is clearly going to cause some anxiety. It's only right that we should let you know in anticipation because this may receive a lot of attention worldwide. So we let the Department of Health, the vaccinologists know there what was happening. Meaning the parents had said my child, Aida, had said, my child's autism. started after the MMR vaccine.

That was sort of a side note in a way to this issue, but also one that you had to include because it was what the parents were saying. Yeah, you can't exclude that. You can't censor it because it's uncomfortable, because the answer would be if it were natural chicken pox that they'd called it a party, would you exclude that? No. So you can't censor the story. Once you start censoring the story because it may be uncomfortable

for public health for the pharmaceutical industry, then you're in a hiding to nothing. hiding to nothing, but what we did do, Walker Smith, for example, wrote to the head of vaccines at the Department of Health and said it's difficult to see how in these children, there could be any other explanation for why they have this sudden onset of developmental regression. So he was fully on board with the notion that in some way, MMR was involved, but that was all between us at the time. The other thing that happened was the dean decided he wanted to have a press briefing.

So he was going to call a press briefing. He was very keen to promote the medical school and attract research funding. And so I wrote to all my colleagues and I said, look, in advance of this press briefing, I have to let you know my position. I have researched this. I've produced a 250-page report

on the safety studies of this vaccine, the prospective pre-licensing safety studies, they are universally appalling, and therefore I can no longer support the use of MMR vaccine. Now, when did you do that? When did you do this? Was this because of the Lancet and the work you were doing? You're like, well, let me look at this MMR vaccine closer and see what's going on? Yeah, I had a duty. I had a responsibility in advance of publication to know that, you know, had the safety studies been adequate, had they been up to snuff, then that would have been perfectly fine. And then my position would have been very different. But having looked at the safety studies, I had serious concerns.

So I wrote to the dean of the medical school and I wrote to all of my senior colleagues saying, this is going to attract public attention. If there's going to be a press briefing, when that takes place, someone is going to ask what happens next. What do we tell parents to do? And I can no longer support the use of the combined MMR. Single vaccines were freely available. Therefore, I will continue to vigorously. support the use of the single vaccines.

But I cannot endorse the MMR. Well, this question remains out there until safety has been proven. I mean, you and I have spoken all over the country and you, the world, and I've pointed out you never made an anti-vaccine statement. You simply made a choice between two vaccines saying, I believe the single measles vaccine is far safer by itself, at least until we do more studies in MMR because we never heard of autism. You didn't have parents coming in saying,

my child got the single measles vaccine and showed signs of autism. I think in all of the cases, I had one child who'd received a single vaccine at the age of six months, and then another one at the age of one year, and he had suffered a similar problem. But that was of all the children that I, the many, many, many children whose data I scrutinized while at the Royal Free. And since you're not selecting them, they're coming to you, you have to, as a scientist, say, there's something about this MMR because I've heard from one patient that had the measles vaccine and the other hundred and something it's always the MMR.

Yeah. Okay. Do you feel like you developed an agenda at that point? Do you start to think this MMR could be dangerous and I need to do something about that? The question you put to yourself as a, there are two things. One is how do we logically, coherently go through the iterative process of science to now test rigorous hypothesis of causation.

How do we determine whether there is genuinely a bowel disease, whether it's novel or something we've seen before, and is it in some way related to the vaccine? And the obvious way to answer that question for measles was because we know measles can persist in the body and reactivate and cause long-term inflammation in the brain, albeit rarely, was the same situation taking place in the intestine? So the first thing to do is to find or exclude the presence of measles virus in the intestinal tissues. And to do that, we recruited a professor, John O'Leary from Trinity College, Dublin, who was one

of the world's leading experts in molecular detection of viruses at the time. And so to ask him to collaborate with us in a way that he was unbiased, we would send him samples, they would have a number, he would not know whether they came from a child without autism or with autism. he would analyze them and give us his results accordingly. And that's what we did. And that's the objective way to go about the scientific process. All right, I just want to jump in here really quickly to say that, you know, all the work

that the High Wire did in 2024 was made possible by those of you that donate and sponsor this program. As I said before, we don't work for Pfizer, we don't work for Exxon, we don't get any advertising, we don't even work for vitamin companies, we just work for you. we, you know, need your help and we're going to continue to need that help because there's so much work that needs to be done. At the end of the year, we had the $2 million match. We're so excited. We're still counting and going through the Christmas cards that are coming in with the checks that are in there. But right now at this moment, I would love it if you would donate. And,

you know, they've said that we can continue that $2 million match and match everybody that's donating right now. So take this opportunity right now to give to ICAN so that we can double those numbers. It really makes a difference. Everything that you are seeing happening in the world right now, everything that you're seeing happening in the government of the United States of America, I don't think we're here. I don't think we are living in this incredible moment that we're in if it wasn't for you. Those of you that have donated to the High Wire and the informed consent action network, we have achieved things that no one dreamed was possible. Now, of course, there's all sorts of other players and Robert Kennedy Jr. and his work with his not profit, all of those things. But we played

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that cannot be stopped no matter who they decide to elect the next time around. So what I want to say to you is your donations matter. They change the world. I hope you'll donate today. And once again, happy new year. Here's the rest of my conversation with Dr. Andrew Wakefield. For the most of the part, we know where this story goes. You put out the Lancet, 1998 is published.

It's not until 2004, all of a sudden, all these problems come up. I thought that in investigating you, that I would find, you know, real scientists and doctors that had information against you. But what I recognize when looking into this, that really all of those statements, even if they were made by scientists, are really just repeating what one person had said about you. And that's Brian Deere, the journalist, that was... that was working for Rupert Murdoch. And so in looking at this, I think there's two documents there I really want to reference.

And I want to sort of keep this as casual so we could sort of go through some of these things. I got my computer here. All right. Now, the first document that I think is really important is this one. This is what starts the whole thing. The Sunday Times, Rupert Murdoch's paper, publishes this MMR research scandal paper. And then three days later, Deere, right here, has a letter reaching out to the general Medical Council. Now right here it says following extensive inquiry for the Sunday Times into the

origins of the public panic over MMR. So he's concerned about this public panic. I write to ask you permission to lay before you an outline of evidence that you may consider worthy of evaluation with respect to the possibility of serious professional misconduct on the part of the above named registered medical practitioners. This idea, serious professional misconduct. I'm I've heard that statement before. I've heard about this case against you. I thought doctors had made that statement. And here the first time it's ever mentioned, we see that it's coming from Brian Deere.

Now, had you ever met Brian Deere prior to this moment, or what was your understanding of who this guy was? No. What was interesting, and just to back up slightly, is to put this in context, there was pending litigation against the manufacturers of MMR, principally, Glaxo Smith-Kline in the UK. At that time, the son of Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch, was appointed to the board of Glaxo-Smith-Kline as a non-executive director to protect that company's reputation in their news media, news international, including the Sunday Times. Brian Deere was recruited and told that they needed something big on MMR. So that's how things evolved, all right? And Brian Deer was then bought in to find something big.

And in Brian's own typical way, if he couldn't find it, he was going to create it. And that's exactly what he did. But I want to sort of get into some of the details he lays out here. He says, I'm not a doctor, but my research leaves me to think that some of these investigations, particularly the intubations and lumbar punctures,

are highly invasive procedures which pose potential risk to children and which may be carried out only on the following grounds. In a doctor's reasonable judgment, they are likely to be of clinical benefit to the child, and or they are properly authorized by a competent ethics committee. So he's already laying out what we end up reading about you all the time, which is Andy Wakefield did invasive, highly risky procedures on handicapped children,

as though you were abusing handicapped children. And so that is the one point. And so I just want to lay out to people that this is actually all coming from Brian Deere. But here's what I want to get into. I believe there are grounds to ask whether the motive for these investigations may have been, in the case of Mr. Wakefield, Professor Walker Smith and Dr. Merce, to find what they believe to be a distinctively, distinctive gut pathology in some development of disorder children in association with evidence of measles virus in the central nervous system.

They thought that these together might be evidence of an unrecognized medical condition. But then he singles you out. B, in the case of Mr. Wakefield, to advance litigation against drug companies by finding children, pre-screened by solicitors, and claimant groups with a particular constellation of symptoms that might accord with theories of his own, which he hoped to place before a court. So here's my first question. Did you, were you involved in litigation against the MMR vaccine?

From beyond January 1996, I became aware of the litigation. And at some point beyond that, soon beyond that, I agreed to do. to partake as an expert witness. Now that's our job as physicians, either on the side of the plaintiff or on the side of the defendant, but my duty was in this case to fairly represent our findings as an expert. But not, as Deere has said, was this the motive for doing it?

In fact, we started this work six months before I even knew there was litigation. The children had been identified those who were going to come to the Royal Free before that. When they came to the Royal Free, when they were referred to the Royal Free, free for clinical investigation of their symptoms. Not one child was a litigant. They weren't a litigant. The litigation hadn't started. What Brian Deer is trying to do is put the cart before the horse and

saying the litigation drove the whole thing. No, it does not. No, it did not. And he knows that as a matter of fact. But you do admit that some time along the way you did offer to be a witness to describe what you were seeing in these studies of these children. Absolutely. All right. And you've never said that you didn't do that. No, and I told all of my colleagues I was going to do it as well. I said, these children deserve their case to be represented fairly, not to come down on the side of saying it definitely is or definitely isn't, but to represent their case fairly in a court of law. Because who else is going to do it? Yeah, someone has got to do it. Now, you see people lining up in droves to be representatives for the pharmaceutical companies or the government because

they're going to be paid a great deal of money. But it's a big risk taking the part, taking the side of the plaintiffs of the children in this case, because clearly it's not acceptable to question vaccination safety. And there's a very high price to pay for it, as has been exemplified in my case. Right. Okay. So you didn't, the legal team wasn't soliciting and choosing these patients and bringing them to you. Absolutely not. You say that didn't happen. Okay. So the next question is, is Brian Deere makes the accusation that somehow there was funding coming to this study. by this legal team that was going to be suing Glaxo Smith-Klein.

Did the Lancet paper receive money from the lawyer? The lawyer who was pressing this suit or multiple suits, did he ever fund any part of the Lancet study? Not a single part of it, no. What happened was that he asked me, as a scientist, how would you go about investigating the next stage of this to determine whether or not measles virus is the cause. And I said, well, the next is to look for evidence of the virus

in the disease tissues by molecular technology. That's what we would propose to do. And he said, well, will you design a study to do that because we might get funding for it? That was the study that was ultimately funded by the legal aid board. And indeed, the funding for that subsequent study was not even available to be spent until after the Lancet paper was long finished. There's one thing to take your word for it. As a journalist, I want to I want to, you know, I have to look for sources. And so we actually sent an email to Richard Barr. And what we asked him was, did Andy Wakefield start the Lancet study before or after you got involved with him on the MMR cases?

And did you fund the Lancet study? And this is the full response by Richard. I don't know when Andy started work on the Lancet paper. What I can say is that the Lancet paper was nothing to do with our claim. It was a Royal Free Study and was quite separate. from any investigation that he was to carry out on our behalf. It certainly was not funded by legal aid and not any part of the litigation.

There was never any conflict despite what the media have said since. Besides, Andy did disclose his involvement with the MMR cases long before the issue had been raised by anyone. You can find that in the Lancet May 2, 1998. If you have not got a copy, I can send it to you. Andy had been concerned about the link between measles and inflammatory bowel disease long before any of us had heard of him.

For instance, he co-authored a paper in the Lancet in 1994 on perinatal measles infection and Crohn's disease. So many untruths have been told. It is difficult to even begin to address them. But I hope this helps Richard. First of all, I want to thank Richard for responding to us. Obviously, this is a hot button issue anyway. So what I would say is this. Brian Deere will then have to say that he is lying and prove some sort of receipt of funding coming from Richard Barr.

I'm pretty sure since this man still practices law. that he's not going to risk that at this point to stand up for you, because what difference does it make if he could be called out on it? So I'm going to take this as the proof that what you're actually saying is true. So my question to you is, was it really the Lancet study then? I mean, now that you've talked about it, you went on and you were going to start looking at more studies. Was it the Lancet study that got you in all the trouble? Or what do you think was the fact that you didn't just stop there?

I think they were genuinely terrified that we had for the first. time found a discrete novel pathology in the face of a vaccine that they knew had not been adequately tested. And they had a terrible fear that they were going to face massive litigation not only in the UK, but around the world, in the United States in particular, where this same story was being told by parents. It wasn't that they were hearing about me and just making it up. They were telling their own story and had been for several years. So I think they faced massive damages, I think that they, you know, if this had gone before a jury, it could have been very harmful for the pharmaceutical industry and the government's reputation. It could have

undermined vaccine policy across the board because it requires the public to have confidence in the policy makers. And if suddenly they find that it's causing this permanent lifelong neurological injury to children, that's terrifying. And so they had somehow, anyhow, to crush it. And this is how they attempted to do it. This was sort of on the back of a mistake that already happened with the health department, right, based on a bad. And they had a problematic vaccine that they put out previously? Yeah, and this is why parents were terrified of MMR. It didn't start with me. What they'd done is they'd introduced an MMR, which they knew had a reputation for causing meningitis, the Mumps component of that. They introduced that vaccine in the UK, and it caused

meningitis. It had already been withdrawn in Canada and around the world, but they introduced it. Why? Because it was made by the home team, GlaxoSmithKline, and it was cheaper. And what they did, without telling anyone, was give Glaxo Smith-Kline an indemnity against litigation, which at the time in the UK was not legal to do that, because Glaxo-SmithKline were concerned that they faced liability from this knowingly dangerous vaccine. What year was that? That was, it started, I mean, it had to be withdrawn in 94. It was introduced at the end of the 80s. And so it lasted four years. in the UK cause meningitis had to be withdrawn. So people are already panicked by them.

Absolutely. So now they go, don't worry everybody. We've now got a better MMR. And now comes Andy Wakefield with a study saying, hold on a second. This one hasn't been tested for safety the way you think it should have been either. Correct. And now we've got a problem. If this MMR fails again, you're going to have it.

I mean, not only is MMR at stake, but you are going to have a serious confidence problem with your health department that keeps putting out faulty vaccines. vaccines. Exactly. Really, this seems to me to be a battle between two people. This is Andy Wakefield versus Brian Deere. And we're either going to believe your story or we're going to believe Brian Deere's story. In this case, the world took Brian Deere's story. And Brian Deer's accusation against you is that there are falsification as an anomalies in the work that you have done that call into question the stability of the work you've done. He's gone. It goes as far as fraud, ultimately. My thing is, shouldn't we be holding him to the same standard? Since,

either you were going to change the course of scientific history or he was going to. Either we were going to start investigating MMR, this gut disease and autism, or we were going to say Andy Wakefield is wrong, Brian Deere is right, and therefore never again go in that direction. And the world went with Brian Deere. So what I think is important here is that Brian Deere's statements should hold up and be held to a standard as high as the one he says he held against you. So right here we have proof that he's his accusations to the GMC are incorrect.

The lawyer right here is saying the Lancet had nothing to do with it. The Lancet, by the way, was never used for litigation. I mean, if it was a product, if you were designing a product to litigate against the pharmaceutical industry, why wasn't it used? Am I right? This couldn't be used. It was a case series.

It didn't test a hypothesis. To represent a case in court, you're going to have to have a hypothesis testing study, which comes to a definitive conclusion, with a statistical number attached to that, of whether something is the cause or not? Let's go back to that line. Might accord with the theories of his own which he hoped to place before a court. You're saying it couldn't be placed before a court.

So these legal allegations are incorrect. I want to talk about the next allegation, which ultimately is that you were creating a vaccine for measles. He said that M.M.R. Scare doctor planned rival vaccine. They said that you created a rival measles vaccine and that the idea was if you could have the Lancet study, you know, be smirms. the MMR vaccine, then it would create this need for your product. So my question is, were you creating a measles vaccine?

So the allegation, the key to the allegation here is a rival vaccine. Okay, there was a pattern that I wrote and issued written by a patent lawyer on behalf of the Royal Free Hospital. What it was is we had a group of children who we believe for some reason had a persistent measles infection that their body could not clear because their immune system was not working properly in order to get rid of the disease. that from the body. And there is a product that's part of breast milk, the first breast milk that a mother produces, which is called colostrum. And a product within that that boosts the immune

system. And there was evidence that it could do it in a viral specific way. So it was targeting measles or it was targeting chicken pox. And there was some very good literature on there. It's called transfer factor. And there was the potential to give children transfer factor in the presence of a persistent measles virus infection and boost their immune. system to help them get rid of it and thereby be a potential treatment for children with autism and this condition. That was the aim. Now, was it a vaccine? There are a group of children in whom it might be useful to prevent measles causing serious infection. And that is children who cannot get live measles vaccine. They can't have MMR because it would kill them. And those are children

who are immunodeficient. They have AIDS or they're on treatment for leukemia. And these are children who, because they can't have a live viral vaccine because it would potentially kill them, are very, very susceptible. So could we take that group of children and give them this extract of breast milk that might boost their immune system, not prevent them from getting infected like a vaccine does, but help their body naturally get rid of the infection once they got it? So to limit the infection to make it mild. That was the aim.

It was never a rival to MMR, nor could it ever be. Why? Because transfer factor does not produce antibodies. The way we understood the success of vaccines to work using live viral vaccines is they produce antibodies in people who are vaccinated. And that protects them from infection. Transfer factor does not produce antibodies. It could never be used at a population level as a rival to MMR to take over as MMR. So he took no notice. whatsoever. He didn't care. He had his own truth embedded in his mind. And in the end, we never got to do a trial in children to see if there was clinical benefit or not, because it all ended at the Royal Free. But that's what the patent was for. It was never, nor could it ever have been a rival to MMR. I looked up the patent we're talking about here. And what I find interesting is the applicant is the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, not Andy Wakefield. Wherever you're working, it funds your work, they're the ones going to make all the money. Correct.

Was the Royal Free against this work at all? Did they see a future in it? What was their thought on this product? They were happy to go along with it. If it worked, it was fine. There was a huge imperative at the time for us to raise the funds to fund our own research. Margaret Thatcher had cut virtually all funding from government to medical research. We were told to go and find our own money.

Most people went to the industry to find money, the pharmaceutical industry. Others of us tried to do it through innovation, and this was more. one of those attempts at innovation to generate further research funds. Here's what I think is amazing about Brian Deere. He makes this entire accusation against you about the fact that you were doing the Lancet in order to work on promoting a vaccine product you were making. But he goes on to say this, although he, meaning you, never produced a vaccine, the fact that he was planning a rival to MMR while casting down on its safety has raised concern.

If you never went on to do anything with this, then obviously why would you even make this comment? This isn't happening. By the way, he's not writing this stuff one day after the Lancet comes out. This is six years later. If he knows that for six years you've done nothing with this patent, yet he is going to make this a part of the general medical counsel's argument against you. And to me, it sort of shows a guy that sort of spins things up. If you had another vaccine, you would have made it, right? If you were going to make billion, we're talking billions of dollars if this thing was a rival vaccine. And the whole diabolical plan was to make room for my new vaccine. Why did you drop making the vaccine?

Exactly. You know, he's got his headline. That's what he wanted. He got his headline and the rest, the fact, the truth, that gets kind of buried way down. Because we hear about this all the time. When your name comes up, it's the legal cases and it's the vaccine. That's one of the big things.

Those are really, those aren't criminal offenses. In the one hand, as you pointed out, we have people that have children in lawsuits right now who have washed your children injured by vaccines. One of the complaints I make is health and human services is supposed to be doing the safety studies that these parents can reference. But if your own health departments aren't doing the proper safety studies, you've got to find a scientist that does or will or has. To think that it would be somehow wrong for you, a guy that's the only man in the world investigating right now an issue of gastrointestinal disease from MMR vaccine, that you're the one that shouldn't go and represent these parents? Who does?

I mean, I don't even see how these are arguments. But what they are is their motives. What Brian Deere has put out is two huge motives for a crime, essentially. The motive of he wanted to win in court, he was going to make money in court, and he wanted to make billions of dollars on a new vaccine. None of that, those are totally speculative, and they're total hyperbole, you know, unless we prove that there's a crime. And then if you have a crime, then maybe we can start looking to motive, correct?

So I want to get to the crime. All right. The issue now becomes, what is the crime? crime of Andy Wakefield. And now we have to go back to the General Medical Council. Brian Deere does. He sends this letter to General Medical Council. When did you find out that they were investigating and sort of having a case against you, John Walker Smith and Dr. Merge? It's a very good question. I don't remember precisely, but it will have been within a year of that submission. So 2004, 2005-ish, somewhere like that. You're told, now what did you first think?

I wrote to the GMC and I said, I understand. that this is I welcome this investigation. Really? Yeah. Why did you welcome it? Because if there was going to be any ambiguity, any doubt, then it needed to be clarified. And what was the case ultimately? What were you told was the case against you?

I mean it was huge. It went on for pages and pages, which is the way, as you've seen, Brian Deere operates. Every little piece of it was in there thrown in. The main case was, for example, this issue of ethical, committee approval. His claim is that there was no approval by an ethics committee for the conduct of the Lancet study. So let me make it absolutely clear. For the clinical investigation of patients and the reporting of those clinical investigations, no ethical committee approval is necessary. It's a clinician's determination of whether that patient merits that investigation for those symptoms. That's it. It does not require an ethical committee approval.

How would it require an ethical community approval? If you were conducting a study, an actual hypothesis testing study, where you are comparing, for example, cases with autism against non-autistic children, and you're anonymizing them, and you're going to use those results in the form of a publication. So there was one element of the Lancet paper that was research. and it was the fact that we had this unusual bowel disease that were seen down the microscope. And in order to characterize that precisely, what we did was to get biopsies from non-autistic children undergoing colonoscopy and compare them in a blinded fashion with the biopsies from the children with autism. To see what, if any, were the differences. Now, by blinded, I mean that the person making that deterrentice,

by looking down the microscope did not know whether what he was looking at came from a child with autism or a child without autism. So he was giving an objective opinion on whether or not there was inflammation. And that's exactly what we did. And that aspect of the Lancet paper was covered by an ethical approval. And that ethical approval had been awarded to Professor Walker Smith the year before. And that ethical approval was in Brian Deere's possession. He knew it existed. and he did not disclose it to the General Medical Council.

And that is an obstruction of justice. Why didn't you supply it? I didn't have any of these documents at the time. I was actually in America. All of these documents were retained by Professor Walker Smith. During the General Medical Council hearing, we did adduce it. Professor Walker Smith bought this out and said, actually, this is the ethical approval under which this was conducted.

And in every child's medical records, there is a consent form signed by, the parents from this ethical approval. And the GMC decided to completely ignore that evidence. So two of the 13 scientists lose their licenses, you and Professor John Walker Smith. Now the General Medical Council is not a judicial system. You didn't have a judge, right? Did you have a jury? Like how did that work for the law?

No, it's an administrative body. It's lay people and doctors sitting in judgment. Professor John Walker Smith moves this to a real courtroom. Walker Smith Appeals, this is an 85-page document by judgmenting. This is what I think is so interesting, since the whole argument is that, you know, ultimately, you're doing biopsies and colonoscopy's on these poor handicapped children is sort of how it's been presented by Brian Deere without ethical approval. He said, Undisputed Facts, he writes. From 85 until September 95, he was professor of pediatric gastroenterology at St. Bartholomew's.

In September 95, he and his team, including his senior lecturer, Dr. Merch, transferred to the Royal Free, just as you said, transferred to the Royal Free Hospital. Before he did so, he sought and received permission from the Ethics Committee of the Royal Free Hospital to continue his and his team's practice of taking two extra mucosal biopsies for research purposes in addition to the four to six biopsies taken for diagnostic purposes during colonoscopy.

This was one of the big things, that you're taking these biopsies and you needed ethical approval, and this judge points out, he carried an ethical approval into that school which was accepted. Do you refute any part of that? No, that's absolutely true. That's absolutely true.

So then the question of the study comes up, and they say Project 17296 was approved for registration by Dr. Pegg, chairman of the Ethics Committee on 13th September 96. On 15th of October 96, Dr. Pegg wrote to Professor Walker Smith telling him that Project 17296 would be discussed at the next meeting of the Ethics Committee. He sent out his reservations and invited comments. He categorized some of the investigations as high risk in the categorization adopted by the British pediatric association

and guidance published in August 1992, which advised that it would be unethical to submit child subjects to more than minimal risk when the procedure offers no or a slight or very uncertain benefit to them. Accordingly, he saw confirmation that the child would undergo this regimen, even if it was not in a trial. He also raised a query about the consent form, parents would be required to sign before the investigations required by the study were

performing their child. This elicited a reply from Professor Walker Smith. One child has already had a significant response to enteral feeding. Certainly there is a measurable benefit to the child. And John Walker Smith receives his license back. He gets his license back because what the judge says is he had all the ethical approval he needed. So I want to read the final ruling from the judge on that case.

The end result is that the finding of serious professional misconduct and the sanction of erasure are both quashed. The panel's determination cannot stand. Professor John Walker-Smith got his license back because he proved that the children he was doing the work on, doing these tests and studies on. He had all the ethical approval he needed. What I want to ask you is what about the children you were working on and the biopsies and things that you were doing? These were the same children. I didn't perform any invasive procedures whatsoever on any child at the Royal Free. I did no colonoscopies, I did no spinal taps.

I was not the responsible pathologist looking down the microscope, making a determination of whether they had inflammation or not. My job was to collate all of the information that came from the investigations initiated by John Walker Smith. They were one and the same children. The man who did all these studies is now, free to practice medicine if he wants to. But you, the man holding a clipboard and a pen, reporting what he was finding, you still have not received your license back. The problem was we both appealed. John Walker Smith was funded in his appeal. I was told by my

lawyers that I wasn't funded, so it would have been impossible for me to undertake that. I couldn't, I hadn't the money to do it. So I had to withdraw my appeal. Then, of course, Professor Walker Smith won in this resounding victory which destroyed Brian Deere's case completely. The Lancet paper should at that point have been reinstated. And I had no mechanism. There is no mechanism in English law to reinstate an appeal once it's been withdrawn. And so, for me, that was it. After the Lancet, you know, ultimately is withdrawn.

and the GMC comes out against you, Brian Deere doesn't stop there. He writes this whole article published in the British Medical Journal. So now he's not publishing the Sun Times. He goes to a medical journal and publishes this hit piece saying, you are a fraudulent doctor. Wasn't good enough that your license had been polled one year later, and before we find out that Walker Smith is going to be exonerated,

he's going to go one step further. You both lost your license, and now he has to prove fraud. He said, and the whole third, four, you know, one fourth to third of this article is about one particular child, child number 11. But child 11's case must have been proved the disappointment. Records show his behavioral symptoms started too soon. His developmental milestones were normal until 13 months of age, he quotes. Notes the discharge summary in the period 13 to 18 months, he developed slow speech patterns

or repetitive hand movements. Over this period, his parents remarked on his slow gradual deterioration. He essentially claims that you manipulated data. This is the claim that was made against you. You manipulated data to suit what you were trying to get the study to say, and that child 11 of the 12 actually had autism symptoms prior to vaccination. Is that true? No, it is not.

The child was developmentally normal until after his MMR vaccination. What had the father said to you? So what happened is, and this comes down to the way Brian Deere manipulates the language and creates fraud himself. So Brian Deere goes to the father, and he said that the Lancetian Wakefield claimed that the onset of your child's autism was in within a month of MMR. And the father said, no, it wasn't. I told them it wasn't. That's a lie.

That is not what we said. We were very clear, we were explicit. What we were interested in is not the first symptom of autism, but the first behavioral symptom. This is the cornerstone of his argument of fraud. He mentions other little things with some of the other of the 12, but the body of his evidence of your fraud is child 11. I want to point out that another journalist got involved in this and actually took on and did a 10-part series that can be found by anybody at age of autism by a journalist named Dan Olmsted who went and found the same father and pointed out to that father that you know that Brian Deere said your child had autism prior to the vaccine and the father said that's not true. That is not true. Now here's the problem. I wanted to reach out to Dan Olmsted to verify what this father had said to him, but there was that's not possible because Dan Olmsted is no longer with us.

But I did two days ago start going through the archives. And what I found is I think one of the most important documents, maybe a few people have seen it, but I was shocked to find it. And what it is is an email from the father of Patient 11 to both Brian Deere and Dan Olmsted. And I want to read through this because I think ultimately this ends up being devastating to this entire story. because this whole thing crumbles right here. Writing to Dan Olmsted and Brian Deere, I've spoken with both of you regarding my son,

who may be one of the subjects in the Royal Free Hospitals Research Study on autism, summarizing in the 1998 Lancet article. The main reason I'm contacting you basically says, I don't want my name in any of this. We are private people. We never agreed to have our names out there. That's the first paragraph.

I'm not going to need that. My second purpose is in contacting both of you is to clear up some confusions, albeit generating additional questions, which, as I explained below, I do not think, are worth pursuing. Mr. Olmsted informed me that he believes that my son is patient 11 in the Lancet article. Mr. Deere's article appears to assume that my son is patient 11 as well, describing conversations with the father of patient 11, that appears to be during the Royal Freeze investigations, which we were told he was patient 13. Only 12 patients are reported in the Lancet article.

I have no way of knowing how many subjects were excluded from the final report. or whether my son was one of them. My first question to you is, is the American child patient 11? Yes, absolutely. We are talking about the same child. We're talking about exactly the same child. Let's go on and rest of this.

One of the incorrect statements in my son's discharge report was that autistic symptoms were seen from 13 to 18 months while the vaccination was at 15 months. This is clearly inaccurate as his symptoms began several months after the MMR, as reflected in my initial correspondence to the Royal Free Request of my son be included in the research study. Mr. Deere's article makes me appear irrational for continuing to believe that the MMR caused difficulties

which predated its administration. While the inaccuracies in the Royal Free Discharge summary may be chalked up to sloppy record keeping, if my son really is patient 11, then the Lancet article is simply an outright fabrication. The father didn't like you. I mean, there's no, it's clear that 11 of the 12 parents all stood behind you as you went through this whole process. This guy didn't like you. Well, I think that the part of the problem was that he was being presented with the fact that we'd misrepresented his child. And so he was angry, but he's been told a lie. And he's angry, therefore, with a lie.

But what he's referring to is the fact that Brian Deere says you fabricated this to say that his autistic symptoms began one week after the MMR vaccine, which you're saying you did not say that. No, absolutely. The paper did not say that. It talked about the first behavioral symptom, not the first symptom of autism. I want to look at the Lancet paper very quickly. And here is what Brian Deere must be referring to.

Patient 11. Behavioral diagnosis is autism, right? Exposure identified vaccination with MMR, which the father did say and continued to say that he was under that impression that the MMR started the issues. Now, as you pointed out, it says one week. One week from what? Brian Deere's saying that you were claiming one week the autism behavioral diagnosis. But actually, if you look at the heading, it is what you said. This is what you said, right?

Interval from exposure to first behavioral symptom, one week. What were the features associated with the exposure? What was beginning one week? Current viral pneumonia for eight weeks following MMR. You do not say here autism. Correct? Correct. I mean, when you look at this pattern, how do you describe how Brian Deere has done what he's done?

I think that Brian Deere is a sociopathic liar and he's extremely good at what he does. And what he does is to take a predetermined endpoint that he wants to achieve and he will manipulate the story to achieve that end point. Exactly in the way that he presented to the father that we had said the first symptom of autism started one week after MMR when we had never, ever said that. Deere is trying to claim you took a previous diagnosis before the MMR moved it after to suit your claim. The cornerstone of the argument of fraud against you is a manipulation of the truth. But I think this line is interesting. As reflected in my initial correspondence to the Royal Free requesting my son be included in the research study. This father is not saying I was contacted by a law group that offered for me to be a part of a legal settlement.

Right there he is saying, I requested that my child be a part of this study that I heard about. To me, beyond the fact that the fraud is wrong, this goes all the way back to the statement that the lawyer's worst choosing the children to be a part of your study. This man clearly was not chosen by a lawyer. So he, this letter, I think, ultimately destroys almost any credibility that Brian Deere has on any of his statements. We've just shown that the real fraud is the manipulation of the story of child 11 by, Brian Deere. These are all factual articles. But what I think is fascinating is there was a journalist named John Stone. And he reached out the BMJ and said, you need to have come clean on the fact that you are funded by Merck and Glaccel Smith-Kline that both make an MMR vaccine. You didn't do that when you published this article. And you would think they wouldn't say anything. But we found that they actually responded to that. And I want to read that here. This is from the British Medical Journal. This is response to John Stone from the head of the British Medical Journal herself.

Fiona Godley writes this. We should have declared the BMJ Group's income from Merck as a competing interest to the editorial and the two editors' choice articles that accompanied Brian Deere's series on the Secrets of the MMR scare. We should also, as you say, have declared the group's income from GSK as a competing interest in relationship. to these articles, we will publish clarifications. Andy, they accused you a fraud of manipulating Child Eleven's data and write an entire article being funded by the very makers of the MMR vaccine, which is the central point of your investigation for multiple years.

It is a lie from start to finish, but here's the problem, Dell. I'm me, and they're the British Medical Journal, and they're in bed with GlaxoSmithKline and Merck. They're in bed with the government. They want a single common outcome, and that is to crush this paper and get rid of me and let me serve as an example to other doctors. And therefore, the outcome is predetermined.

There's never going to be any recourse to justice in this. I mean, that's just the way the world is. It's not going to stop me doing the work on behalf of these children. That's why I'm still here 20 years later. I'm not going to quit. Why? Because we're winning. We're winning because the truth is coming out. It's coming out because of vaxed.

and what you do and a lot of people around the world telling the truth and deciding enough is enough. So this is not the time to walk away or be concerned. We are going to win. And a measure of how much we're winning and how well we're winning is how angry they are and how they're forced to pass laws to mandate vaccination here in California in order to ram their belief systems and they're profiteering down the throats of parents because they can't persuade them through the process of confidence based on the science, that what they're saying is true.

It's a lie. And in the meantime, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of children being damaged as a consequence of this policy. And that's got to stop. And that's why I'm going to continue, and that's why I've no doubt you're going to continue as well. Clearly, your science, as far as I can tell, still stands up. This Lancet paper should be being reinstated.

There is no ethical charge any longer against the only people practicing. I think the guy holding the clipboard should be exonerated if the man that was doing the actual biopsies and thing has been exonerated. I also think that the fraud claimed clearly in Child 11 and we could go through the other minute details, which you have done time and time again. But I think that that letter from the father proves unequivocally

that the real lie is Brian Deere saying you moved that data and you stood up. You showed us how you presented it in the study, and that stands up true. You did not say autism started one week after. So no part of this claim about Child 11 is incorrect, the way I look at it. I want to ask you this. If Brian Deere says he wants to debate you, will you sit on my show and have the rest of this dialogue with him?

It's a very good question. I would. I would. Even though I said I would never go back to this again, I did it for you, and here we are. And I don't need to. Why? Because we're on the offensive now. We're not on the defense anymore.

But, yeah, if that was an opportunity, I would do that. And I hope that this moment, that this, that we've revealed here, can write the course of science because it was taken off course by one journalist hired by Rupert Murdoch and his son involved with the very board to try and protect the company that you were investigating, essentially, and their vaccine. I hope we can write the course of science and get back to these hundreds of thousands of parents that are suffering with their children from autism, that all have eyewitness accounts watching the vaccine do it. I hope we can get and stop this crisis, which is now at one in

59 children as of just a week ago, based on the CDC's records up from 1 in 10,000. Andy, I hope you get to see the historical moment that we all recognize. More and more papers, UC Davis, we pointed out, coming to the same conclusions now about a gut and brain disease. We talked about that in the show. I believe you're a pioneer in this issue. I will always stand by you, especially, Since I have done the investigation, I think is necessary to always be proud of the work I've done with you. Thank you, John. I've told you before that here at Highwire, I'm not interested in headlines. I'm not interested in selling things in short bites.

I'm trying to bring you the truth as we find it, which is why we got into all the details, at least the details we could cover in any sort of respectable time. But one of the things that I wanted to run by Andy, I want to run. run by you. We have heard from Brian Deere and multiple people that 10 of the other co-authors on this study retracted and walked away from Andy Weekfield leaving him all alone. I want to read you that exact retraction. The main thrust of this paper was the first description of an unexpected intestinal lesion in the children reported. Further evidence has been forthcoming in studies from the Royal Free Center for Pediatric Gastroenterology and other.

groups to support and extend these findings. While much uncertainty remains about the nature of these changes, we believe it important that such work continues as autistic children can potentially be helped by recognition and treatment of gastrointestinal problems. We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient. However, the population The possibility of such a link was raised and consequent events have had major implications for public health. In view of this, we consider now is the appropriate time that we should together formally retract the interpretation placed upon these findings in the paper according to precedent.

There it is. That's the entire retraction. Ten men saying we stand by the gastrointestinal issues with the case. intestinal issues we found. We believe that other studies are finding this same conclusion, even though Brian Deere claims it has never been repeated. We also, as 10 scientists, believe that treating these gastrointestinal issues could help these autistic children. But because Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta and reporters around the world all just stuck with the bumper sticker statement that these 10 doctors walked away, medicine has stopped treating. the gastrointestinal issues of these children,

even though that was the dream of the scientists that worked with Andy on this study. Luckily, papers from UC Davis and other studies are now getting back to the work that was done here. And if you think this is any form of an actual retraction, you can tell clearly the climate of people not being vaccinated, and these scientists being blamed by the pharmaceutical industry and journalists was pressuring them to why

walk away. Look what their final statement is. We wish to make it clear that in this paper, no causal link was established between MMR vaccine. Oh, huge revelation there. That's the revelation written in the Lancet study itself. Do you see what happened here, folks? They simply repeated what the study already said. And I quote from the study, we did not prove an association between measles, mumps, and rebella vaccine in the syndrome described. Virological studies are underway that may help resolve this issue. That's what Andy Wakefield wrote. It's exactly what the retracted doctors say, also saying we pray essentially that this work

does not stop here, but it continues because that is what is important. But Brian Deere stopped that work. The world stopped that work. This subject is now officially up for debate. They can no longer say there is no debate. This case is closed. Let me remind you what we have shown you today. That the case of lawyers paying for the study of the Lancet does not exist.

The case that there was a vaccine to compete with the MMR was never pursued or made and amounted to nothing. Therefore, it is not a story. That losing licenses because of ethical decisions and the general medical counsel, the only man that worked with these children has been exonerated. Only the man with a clipboard in a pen that wrote down what the scientists had discovered still remains without a license. And lastly, the fraud, brought forward by Brian Deere,

a journalist working for Rupert Murdoch, published in a British medical journal that his manipulation of the facts, his misrecording or interpretations, or bad journalism, if that's all it is, led to saying that in Child 11, specifically, as we touched on today, he was not diagnosed with autism before the vaccine,

as Brian Deere claims that Andy Wakefield moved it after, the father's letter tells us otherwise, that Brian Deere is, in fact, the one who is incorrect. And then the father goes on to point out that he subjected his child to this study across the ocean, the UK, not some legal group. This entire story by Brian Deere is a manipulation of the truth based on everything we've reported today

and the fact that the British Medical Journal has admitted itself it was taking funds from Merck and GlaxoSmith Klein, both makers of the MMR vaccine, which is at the central point of this entire discussion, a journal funded by the makers of the vaccine that Andy Wakefield was investigating, publishes a story of fraud against him that is wrought with issues and misrepresentations. Today is the beginning of a new day. Even I'm tripping out watching that all over again, you know, so many years ago back in 2018, just to watch that, to see the courage that Andy had had up until that moment and talking about, you know, this dream of, you know, we're winning, boy Andy, are we ever?

I mean, we've got the White House. the investigations that you and I have been dreaming about, at least me for about a decade and you for obviously a much longer period of time, I believe we're finally going to happen. We have President Trump saying, we're going to do the biggest studies, the best studies that you've ever seen, looking at the autism issue, looking at all the reasons it might be being caused. Well, if you take a look at autism, go back 25 years. Autism was almost non-existent.

It was, you know, one out of 100,000. and now it's close to one out of a hundred. I mean, what's happening? We're putting it all on the table, all the PFS, all the chemicals, all the plastic, all the things have been approved to be safe by the CDC, the FDA, HHS, the NIH. These regulatory agencies have let something

into our environment and into our bodies that has clearly caused a rise. We're even higher in the autism rate from the moment we just had that interview. This is truly an episode. epidemic of serious proportions and is destroying the lives of children, I think we're going to finally have an administration that's going to allow the science to be done to get to the bottom of it. For those of you that evolve, maybe just watch this for the first time or

brand new to this conversation, that is one of the most important discussions around vaccinations. And no, when they tell you we've done the science has been looked at extensively, nothing can be further from the truth. The only science has been done is some of the most manipulated worst science you've ever seen done by biased scientists that were trying to prove that their vaccine worked instead of what a real true study does is we're going to prove to you that we think it's not working and it is destroying lives no skeptic has ever been allowed to do a study that's how science is supposed to work by the way that is the scientific method not the believers they don't get to do their trials it's the disbelievers that do can we prove that there's a problem

with this i think that that's what science should be that's what we're what crash tests are. Nobody goes into Ford and says, hey, I love my Ford car. Look how good we did in the crash test. You have an independent agency looking at and saying, no, we're going to hit that thing with everything we've got, and we'll tell you if we think it's safe. So we've lived in a world where the pharmaceutical industry has gotten to manipulate all their science and they own our regulatory agencies. All of that is about to change right, you know, just a couple days away. Now we're going to see this big transformation. So looking forward to that.

I do want to say that because of the media, the attack on Andy Wakefield, the concerns of measles and all the things they're bringing up around the confirmation of Robert Kennedy Jr. Also, polio is a big conversation. We have had just this amazing response to Jeffrey Jackson's new documentary series Jackson Investigates. We led out with the first episode of the polio. documentary that he's working on. So many people have seen it. If you haven't, it's because you are not a, you know, contributing recurring donor. It only takes $5 a month or $60 for the year. This is our gift to you as a recurring donor. We really love all that we can do because of you helping us out by becoming a recurring donor. You were going to be a part of watching us do

programming like you've never seen. I mean, this documentary series, Jeffrey Jackson Investigates, is going to blow your mind on so many different topics. But this polio one, it blew my mind. And I've done all this research. I read Suzanne Humphrey's book, which is like this thick. But if you want this reduced down into, you know, an understandable documentary that everyone in your family is going to understand that you can finally explain to your friends why they don't know the whole story, this is what this is all about.

This is game changing right now. This is why we made Highwater Plus. We did it for you. And we did it for amazing documentaries like this. Polio is a highly, highly effective vaccine. And historic victory over a dread disease. You meet people today. Right.

In their 80s who were limping from childhood polio. It's good that we don't have that. And vaccines play a major role in that. I'm grateful that we have the opportunity to have polio vaccine, but I also want the truth. We're doing a deeper dive into the historic story of polio. Polio is a virus. It's something that's always been in human intestines.

No matter how remote you go out into the country. countryside or to remote Indian villages, it's been there not causing any disease at all. What was this childhood disease? Where did it come from? And how can it be treated? Rockefeller Labs was studying polio. There's documented gain a function that was going on at Rockefeller Labs. At this point, we have the rise of the chemist class. They figured out a new pesticide called lead arsenic. They're spraying everything with DDT. There was zero concern at the time for toxicity. What we thought was polio sounds like it was actually. in environmental toxin.

Parents lived in fear of polio's sudden attack. Thousands upon thousands of children and adults fell prey to the crippler. Would you say this disease had the best PR campaign to date of any disease known a man? Mass media never existed before this disease reached its peak. And there would be the March of Dimes. Give every dime and dollar that you can spare to the 1954 March of Dimes. The entire nation was mobilized against Polio. The medical system has this great invention and it's an iron lung.

There's that picture that you see with all the iron lungs and the gymnasium. That was actually a movie set. They now start looking for a vaccine. It was so daunting creating a vaccine for a virus. They couldn't even see. There was something called the Cutter incident. They weren't careful about their manufacturing standards. They weren't careful about the testing.

The fact that they were making vaccines with monkey kidney cells, they discovered the presence of SV40, which is a major thing. which is a mutation that can cause cancers in animals and humans. Polio was caused by both, the injected and the oral polio vaccine. And if you think that they stopped polio, you should realize that the total cases from the year 2000 to 2017 of acute placid paralysis in India is 653,000. Polio will exist, whether we like it or not, forever. Failed regulatory oversight, contaminated vaccines, causing massive harm and even death.

Imagine if the American people were, were told the truth. Would we have had better regulatory guardrails going into the COVID response? Everybody will say, well, what about polio? And even parents that don't want to vaccinate their kids. The one vaccine they gave, polio. So let's talk about polio. I want to thank everybody once again for an incredible

2024. The New Year's upon us. There is so much potential that is out there in front of us. I hope you have hope. I hope that you're having the same feeling that I was sharing with all of my friends. and relatives throughout the holidays, do you realize what's possible? Do you realize what we've done? We've overcome insurmountable odds. We've overcome what was an authoritarian government that was

promising to censor all of us that selected their candidate versus having a vote. All of that is now behind us. We're moving into a new world where the people still have a voice in the United States of America, where their vote still counts, and where science is finally going to be transparent again and where we will have choice and the decisions that we're making with our bodies and our children's bodies. These were just dreams back in SB 277 when I started with this back in California for all of those that stood with me. Can you imagine we never even dreamed we would make it this far, this fast? Can you imagine what we can do now? I cannot wait for this year. I cannot wait to have you along for this incredible ride. This is the high wire reporting live to you,

bringing you the truth as we find it every single week and I'll see you next week and every week beyond that in 2025 here we go