The Michael Knowles Show - "The Lights Went Out In Their Eyes" Michael & The Vaccine Dissident | Dr. Andy Wakefield
Episode Date: May 16, 2025Is there a link between vaccines and autism—or is it all a conspiracy? In this explosive episode of Michael &, Michael Knowles sits down with one of the most controversial figures in modern medicine...: Dr. Andy Wakefield. Wakefield, often labeled the father of the anti-vaccine movement, shares his side of the story, from the scientific claims that got him banned to the questions no one in the medical establishment wants to ask. Together, they explore the politics of Big Pharma, the suppression of dissent, and what happens when science collides with power. - - - Today’s Sponsor: Balance of Nature - Go to https://balanceofnature.com and use promo code KNOWLES for 35% off your first order PLUS get a free bottle of Fiber and Spice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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I started getting calls from parents saying my child was perfectly normal.
They stopped sleeping at night.
They were screaming.
They were in pain.
The lights went out in their eyes.
It was a very common description.
Doctors say, this is just part of autism.
Get over it.
Put your child in a home.
Have another child and forget about it.
What were they thinking?
This is their quote.
We are not going to be left with an orphan drug.
And so it was decided to a child.
avoid that, they would put it into one-day-old inputs. Do vaccines cause autism? When I was a boy,
it was the left that was skeptical of vaccines, thought that there might be a link between vaccines
and autism. It was the left-wing shows that promoted this idea. Now, politics has flipped
upside down. It's people on the right who suspect that vaccines might cause autism or other adverse
health effects. It's the people on the left who are defending Big Pharma. You've now got
Bobby Kennedy, who was a Democrat. He's a Kennedy, for goodness sakes. He's now the Secretary of Health
and Human Services for Donald Trump, who previously had been kind of a Democrat. Now he's the Republican
president. And here I am still totally ignorant of vaccines. So I figured I'd call in a man who
is at the center of this controversy, and that is Dr. Andy Wakefield. Dr. Wakefield, thank you for
coming on the show. Nice to be here. Thank you very much. For the people who don't know who
you are. You published the study in the 1990s that suggested adverse health effects from the
MMR vaccine. And you have also been the chief target of everyone who wants to defend all vaccines,
really, and especially the MMR vaccine. According to, I think it was David Weldon,
former congressman who was nominated for CDC under Trump, you are the most unfairly vilified
man on planet Earth.
And I said, well, is that true?
Let me look up a little bit about Andy Wakefield.
And I know you certainly
have the best Wikipedia page I've ever seen.
Some of my friends have been unfairly
maligned on Wikipedia's conspiracy
theorists, hoaxters,
bigots, whatever. The first line
of your biography
on there is Andrew Wakefield
is a fraudster
and a former medical doctor, and this and of that,
and this and of that.
Take me back to the beginning.
before you were one of the most politically controversial figures on the planet, you're a doctor.
Well, there I was. It was 1981. I graduated in medicine from St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in
London. It was one of five generations now, six generations of my family to graduate from that
medical school. Medicine was really in our blood, I suppose you could say. And I was entirely
mainstream, whatever that means. And I had a specific interest in inflammatory bowel disease. I
got my fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons, my fellowship of the Royal College of Pathologists,
and I was running a research team at the Royal Free, which was part of the university teaching
hospitals in the University of London. And it was a very exciting time. We were making great progress.
and we had started to examine the cause of inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's colitis,
and had made some very interesting observations in the context of natural measles infection
and atyp unusual exposures to natural measles leading to these diseases.
And in 1995, I started getting calls from parents,
highly articulate, intelligent parents saying,
my child was perfectly normal.
They had speech, language, interaction with their siblings.
They were sleeping well, eating well, growing well.
And then they had their MMR vaccine.
I wasn't anti-vaccine, doctor.
I took them to be vaccinated on time.
And within a very short space of time after the vaccine,
they lost all their skills, speech language gone,
their eyes glazed over.
The lights went out in their eyes.
It was a very common description.
They stopped sleeping at night.
They were screaming.
they were in pain. I knew they were in pain, even though they'd lost the ability to communicate
as their mother, I knew they were suffering. And I said, you know, how can I help? They said,
well, they were eventually diagnosed with autism. And I said, I know nothing about autism. You must
have got the wrong number. Because even this part of the story is pretty shocking. It's not as
though you started out investigating autism, as you say, you were investigating gut issues.
Absolutely, yeah. So how do you go from investigating measles and vaccines and gut issues to autism?
Well, that's exactly the question I asked them. I said, you know, when I was at medical school,
autism was so rare, we weren't even taught about it. There was no class from autism.
I think, one in 10,000 children. Yes, whatever statistic I saw, it said in 1966, it was one in 2,500.
And then in 2000, it was one in 150.
And then today, it's one in 36 kids is getting diagnosed with autism.
Even more, one in 31.
One in 20 boys.
It's more common in boys than girls.
How do you explain that?
Well, that's a very good question.
So this is what the parents brought to my attention.
They said, doctor, my child has intractable gastrointestinal problems.
Dyer, alternating constipation and diarrhea, bloating, abdominal pain, failure to thrive,
all the cardinal features of an underlying inflammatory bowel disease.
But the doctors and nurses, I've been to see doctors, say,
this is just part of autism, get over it, put your child in a home,
have another child and forget about it.
I thought, I mean, this is extraordinary.
I've never heard medicine respond in this way at all.
Now, they said, the other thing, doctor,
is there is an epidemic of this problem,
of developmentally normal children,
suddenly losing their skills and becoming autistic.
And so I said, okay, now the fundamental rule of clinical medicine,
okay, let's go right back to the beginning,
is to listen to the parents.
No one knows children like their parents,
particularly the mother.
There is a connection there that no pediatrician can usurp.
Okay, so it is the golden rule is you put all of your biases aside
and you listen to the parents.
What are they telling me?
Is there a consistency to this story?
Is there a coherence?
Is it possible that an underlying inflammatory bowel disease
can interact with the brain and damage it?
We don't know.
But certainly in diseases like celiac disease
where there is an allergic sensitivity to gluten in wheat,
then the presenting features can be dementia or seizures
or developmental regression or autism.
So, yes, there is a link.
We don't know what the nature of that link is, but yes, there is a plausible link.
And I said to the Department of Health once, you know, if I take you for a pint of beer,
you may begin to understand what I'm talking about.
They thought I was trying to offer them to go out for a beer and enjoy their company.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
What I was saying is if you drink a pint of beer within a very short period of time,
you will feel the cerebral effects of that pint of beer on your brain.
There is a gut-brain connection.
This isn't difficult.
Even simply, if you take alcohol out of it, you know, some women in my life, if they are a little
late to lunch, they get a bit hangary, okay? You see emotional and psychological connections.
We are one entity. This is not separate from this, you know. So I thought, right, we need to
look at this. Put all of our biases aside, whether my children were vaccinated or not,
nothing to do with it. They're telling us a story that we have to act upon. And this is serious.
it's clearly serious because until proven otherwise, these children have an intestinal disease.
And if it's correctable, can we make their lives at least bearable, if not reverse some element of what's going on?
So I put together a large team of some of the best people in the world.
The leading pediatric gastroenterologist in the world, Professor John Walker Smith and his team from St. Bartholomew's Hospital,
psychiatrists, neurologists, and people.
And we came together and we investigated these children
according to their clinical need.
It wasn't research, according to their clinical need.
John Walker Smith, the leader of the clinical team,
made the decision that these children merited investigation.
And lo and behold, when we scope them, we biopsied,
we looked at the biopsis under the microscope,
there was inflammation.
The parents were right.
And when we treated that inflammation
with the kind of medication that we would use,
for Crohn's or colitis, anti-inflammatories, dietary intervention, removal of gluten, and
cows' milk products from the diet. There was a dramatic improvement. Again, these insights had come
from parents. We'd followed up on those insights, and they were true. There was a dramatic
improvement in the symptoms of autism. Not just the bowel symptoms, but the cognitive symptoms
as well. People say, well, they were just out of pain. They were feeling better. They were sleep.
No, this was children who were using words that they had not used for five years.
Words that, you know, you would have disappeared from their vocabulary were all in there.
They came back.
Because your critics say, well, sure, maybe the autism symptoms set in around the time that kids are vaccinated.
However, that's just the time, it's just coincidental.
The time that you get the vaccines is around the time that autism symptoms manifest.
But what you're saying is, yeah, but hold up, when we started treating the gastrointestinal issues,
the vaccine symptoms started to subside.
So it's not just, it can't just be a mere coincidence here because we did something, we intervened,
and that had an effect on the autism symptoms.
Yes, you had an exposure and a withdrawal effect, just as you say, they were fine,
they weren't fine, they improved.
And those time points were punctuated by their exposure to the vaccine and then their removal
of these potential toxins from the diet.
And the historical teaching of the experts in autism
was that symptoms manifest from birth.
Autism is genetic and it starts from birth.
Suddenly it was, oh, no, the symptoms manifest at 15, 18 months.
That's not what you said.
That's not what it says in the textbooks.
You say regression.
So here's the key is that where do you go from here?
Because the parents had said,
my child was fine, they regressed. They regressed in many cases after a vaccine. They have a bowel
disease until proven otherwise. The diet works and they can improve. The expert opinion at that
time is, my dear boy, children are autistic from birth, it's genetic. There is no regression,
no developmental or behavioral aggression. There is no link with any kind of underlying bowel
disease. That's just incidental. There is no improvement. The diet has no effect at all. The medical
experts, God save us from medical experts, were wrong on every single count. You could take
that library of textbooks written by experts and burn it to the ground for the value of the story
from one parent telling you what actually happened. It is an extraordinary iteration,
reiteration of that fundamental rule of medicine
and something that we've largely forgotten
in our arrogance in medicine
to listen to the parents
because they were right on every count.
Now, when they say,
I believe my child regressed after a vaccine,
with that knowledge,
do we dismiss their story?
Do we say, actually, you know,
you may be right,
but this isn't going to be good for my career?
So would you take your child and leave that this room and shut the door behind you?
Thank you. That's what happened.
That is what was happening.
And I, that's not what I signed up for.
That's not what I went into medicine.
I didn't have a bias one way or the other about whether the vaccine was involved,
but there was a moral and professional obligation to investigate,
to answer their questions.
Because if it was true, if it were true that there is an epidemic of this particular
problem, then we need to know this. We need to know it. And my pediatric colleague said to me at the time,
Andy, we as pediatricians cannot be seen to question the safety of MMR. I said, what does that mean?
Is your priority not to your patients rather than to your reputation amongst your careers at the Royal Society?
I mean, who are you answerable to? But that was the position. We cannot be seen. We cannot be.
scene to do this. And I went to see the dean of the medical school. I was called into his office.
He said, Andy, if you continue this vaccine safety research, it will not be good for your career.
There was an overt threat. He was absolutely right. It wasn't good for my career. But, you know,
I was a sort of headstrong, somewhat idealistic young doctor. And I was raised in a particular way.
And I thought, it just made me angry. It made me determined to work.
twice as hard because it was such a tragedy.
And it seemed to me that if it were avoidable or treatable,
then we should know that.
And that was the course I pursued.
I was entirely open about it with my colleagues at every stage.
But that was the moral and professional obligation
that I felt I had.
So what year was this?
This was from 1995 onwards.
And in 1998, you published it.
the famous study in the Lancet.
So the study comes out
and I actually have trouble in
the popular reporting on this, even
determining what the study said, because
they seem to accuse the study of
saying things that it didn't necessarily
say. So what did the study say?
Sully was a
case series. So this is the way in which
human disease syndromes are described.
You have a group,
a small group of people who
have a consistent pattern
of signs and symptoms that merit investigation in their own right. That leads to hypothesis testing
studies. Is this different from something we've seen before? Is it new? What's causing it? Those are
downstream. This was a case series just reporting what the parents had told us, what the doctors
have told us who referred them, and what we found on clinical investigation. We could not leave
out the parents' reference to the MR. But we said at the conclusion of the study,
This study does not prove an association, let alone a causal association with the MMR vaccine.
So, hold on, hold on. This is the part that's the craziest in the story to me.
You are blamed for creating vaccine skepticism. You are blamed with measles outbreaks.
You are blamed and called a terrible fraudster and a horrible practitioner of medicine.
because you said in your 1998 study that the MMR vaccine causes autism,
except you didn't say that.
Quite the opposite.
And we said what we do need is further research into this matter, and that was it.
And the study was really a report of the bowel disease in combination with this regressive developmental disorder.
Okay, now, but I read, again, just in popular reporting, this was a few years, more than a few years ago now,
that that study, even with its modest conclusion, was retracted by the authors of the study.
But I'm sitting across from one of the authors of the study.
You didn't retract it.
So what was that?
Was the study retracted?
No, it wasn't.
And this was another myth that's been perpetrated by the media.
I went into this interview thinking, I don't really know anything about this.
And now I'm convinced I actually know less about this than I thought I did going in.
Yes. The study had made no claim of causation. Okay, this was the important thing. And that's what I was
accused of, of labelling MMR as the cause of autism. No, we faithfully reported the facts of what we found
on clinical investigation. The clinical findings from Professor John Walker Smith and his team,
the pathologist's findings down the microscope from a highly experienced expert pathologist,
the psychiatric findings, the neurological findings.
That's what we reported.
And we urged further research.
It was a great opportunity to understand what was going on
and take what was historically an irreversible condition
and be able to reverse it, be able to treat it,
to ameliorate the symptoms in these children
and make their lives at least better.
So it should have been an exciting time.
But we defended the pharmaceutical industry.
We defended government policy and the World Health Organization and UNICEF and the major pharmaceutical companies that make the vaccines, the American government.
We defended a lot of people.
And at that time...
You said, sorry, just to... Because I speak American English and not your more beautifully accented English.
You're saying...
You're not saying we defended.
You're saying we had offended.
We had offended.
Yes.
Okay.
Those are big interests to offend.
Oh, yes.
The big, huge interest.
Now, this is really interesting in an historical context, because now we're all familiar
with cancel culture.
If you are a doctor, however eminent, you stand up and you criticize, say, COVID vaccine
policy, that's the end of your job.
Doesn't matter how many papers you publish, doesn't matter how eminent you are, you are finished.
The way in which the system historically now deals with this kind of problem is to simply
cut the person's head off.
Except just on the COVID example, we were told by the eminent public health experts and by the politicians who employed them that the COVID vaccine was totally safe. It turned out it was not. People died. That it was totally effective in preventing you from contracting COVID. Those very same public health experts, shortly thereafter admitted, actually it doesn't stop you from receiving the infection. However, it'll stop you from transmitting it. Shortly after that, those very same health experts told us it actually doesn't.
stop you from transmitting the virus, but it'll ameliorate the conditions. It'll reduce the danger
of hospitalization or whatever. My only point on that is those same public health experts
admitted that the things they had just previously said as gospel truth were not true. So already
there's a major credibility issue for the public health experts in recent memory.
And so people know that now. They're familiar with it. And the people who, the doctors who
stood up against them, were bankrupted by legal fees, were removed from their positions,
had their licenses taken away. These were some outstanding clinicians, outstanding academics,
and they were just trashed, wasted for all time because they took a moral and professional
stand on something. But then it was unheard of. So at the time, it was me and them. And this isn't a
sort of feel sorry for Andy Wakefield. He was just.
just an historical fact of life.
I do feel a little sorry for you.
I mean, you did have your career taken from you.
But I was a consenting adult.
I knew what I was getting into.
And I just felt that I had to pursue this to its natural conclusion.
There was nothing terribly grandiose about it.
That was just the way I felt.
And so I started to get labeled.
Obviously, these labels became, they perpetuated in the media.
Conspiracy theorists.
And all kinds of things.
And so that's fine.
continued the work until they made it impossible to go any further. And they leveled all kinds
of allegations against me and against my colleagues of research, misconduct, the worst being the
allegation ultimately, that it was all fraud, it was all made up. And when you control the media,
when you were in charge of the media, and your target is one individual with limited resources,
That's kind of easy thing to do.
They're an easy target.
You take them out.
And you hope that by doing that you will silence them
and you will provide an example to everybody else.
So they accused you of misconduct
in the methods of the study.
They accused you of taking money from other interests.
They accused you...
They had this whole litany of accusations in the popular media.
Was there any truth to the allegations?
So there was an element of truth.
And the truth is, for example,
The lawyers had come to me at some point during this, the conduct of this work, not the research, not the Lancet paper.
And I had agreed, this is very common practice, to undertake a study to determine whether there was a link between the vaccine.
Could we identify remnants of the virus in the diseased tissue?
That would have been a strong indicator that there was a causal link.
It wouldn't have been proof that it would have been a strong indicator.
It was part of that hypothesis testing process.
And this is very common.
People work for both defendants and for plaintiffs in medical litigation.
But I was singled out as, oh, Wakefield's doing this to undermine the MMR vaccine
and launch his own vaccine onto the market and make a fortune.
Yes, they accused you of having desired a patent for a rival vaccine.
So you're not saying that isn't true.
You're saying this is common.
in practice, you're going after me as though I'm doing something different or unethical.
And the allegation was I never told anyone.
Yeah.
Well, a year or two before the paper came out, I wrote to the dean, the medical school officials,
to my line manager, Professor Roy Pounder, and I said, I have been asked to undertake this
duty on behalf of these children to answer the question, is there not a link with the vaccine
or evidence for a link.
And I feel morally obliged to do it, and I'm going to do it.
they knew. I then told it was in the national newspapers a year before the paper came out.
Then Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet that published the paper, who subsequently denied
it before the General Medical Council, our licensing body, was told one year before that I was
working on behalf of these children in the litigation. There was no attempt to cover it up
whatsoever. It was totally transparent, but the allegation was that it was the cover-up. I meant
No one knew about it.
It was all the big secret.
No, it wasn't.
No, it wasn't.
But what do you do about that?
When you don't control the editorial, they can say what they like.
And then you've got to unpick that mess afterwards.
Do what?
Sue them.
Suing someone costs $3 million.
Where are you going to get $3 million from?
They know that.
These people have limitless resources.
Well, this is the purpose of lawfare is not necessarily to win in a court, though that sometimes happens.
It's just to pressure the other guy who doesn't have pockets that are as deep as the litigant.
That's right.
Justice, it seems to me, belongs to those who can afford it.
And that was the circumstance here.
So then where does the headline that the study was retracted come from?
Is it just out of thin air?
Or was it from the Lancet?
Let's come back to that.
So I think eight or nine of my colleagues, nine of my colleagues, were persuaded to sign the retraction of an interpretation.
The interpretation being that MMR vaccine causes autism.
I said, guys, when they asked me to sign the retraction, I said, we never made that claim.
You're asking me to retract something I didn't say.
How can you retract something that doesn't exist?
But for political reasons, for, you know, they were under pressure.
I don't judge them, but they fell in line and did that.
Three of my, me and two other colleagues just refused to do that.
And we said, no, we did not make that that could be retracted in that way.
So it wasn't the retraction of the bowel disease or the link with MMR, the regression, or the diagnosis in these children.
It was a retraction of an interpretation that was never made.
And that's the truth behind it.
Can I ask you what might be a stupid question?
Not at all.
Because you're mentioning a rival vaccine, potentially, that could have been patented.
Why is it? I mean, I think of this as a parent. I got three young kids. Why is it that all the doctors are pressuring me to get the MMR vaccine when there's a measles outbreak? So I say, well, can my kid just get the measles vaccine? Why does he have to get measles, mumps, and rebella all at the same time? You know, the vaccine schedule today is so much more intense than it was, even when I was a kid, and certainly decades prior. Why can't I just go get the M and then the other M and then the R? Why do I have to get them all at the same time? Is there some
medical advantage to getting them all at the same time?
You know, I don't mean to stand obsequious, but that's an outstanding question.
Oh, good.
It was the question I asked.
I said, what I did is I went away and I researched this.
I was an academic.
That's what you do.
Before you're going to get embroiled in this, you go away and you read every paper you can
get your hands on that looks at the pre-licensing studies of these vaccines, and you say,
is there any merit?
Are that the safety study's been done?
And I went through it.
I wrote a 250-page report.
I thought, I must be, I must be missing something.
I'm not doing these scientists credit who did the safety study.
There must be something I'm missing.
No, I wasn't.
The safety studies on the vaccine were undertaken in small populations.
They were not controlled trials.
They were nothing that would have passed a drug trial for the FDA.
And they were done on children in mental institutions because they were expendable.
I was staggered by this when I found out,
like Willowbrook State School in Manhattan,
in Staten Island, New York,
children whose lives were at the time deemed to be,
they were up for experimentation.
And this is where a lot of the vaccine safety trials were done.
In children who were severely, mentally, and physically debilitated,
and I thought, I can't believe this.
This is staggeringly unethical on every level.
There was no mention of fully informed consent whatsoever.
These children were just used as experimental subjects.
Now, there's a moral issue to that, an ethical issue.
There's also a practical issue, and that is one of the concerns about measles vaccines
is that they cause brain injury.
And measles causes brain injury.
So if you'll find looking for evidence of brain injury and already brain injured children,
are you going to find it?
Right.
Can you extrapolate from those brain-injured children to a normal population of healthy children?
No, you can't.
But this is where the safety studies were done.
And when I finished that, I became more convinced than ever that I needed to pursue this to its natural conclusion.
Not that MMR causes autism.
Now, why MMR?
Because when they put the three together, did they conduct the safety studies to determine whether one and three were equal in terms of
of their safety profile or something quite different.
Right.
No, they didn't.
Again, I was surprised because if I gave you three anti-hypertensive drugs,
three blood pressure drugs at once, it would kill you.
Yeah.
And it would kill everybody that's been put into.
So why is it okay when you're taking three live viruses
and putting them together in combination in a way that nature has never seen them before?
Right.
Why is that okay?
And so I did the research, and I found precisely that there was interference between the viruses
in the combined vaccine.
But people are just, okay, moved on.
Interference meaning what?
Interference is that the immune response
induced by the single vaccine was different
from that produced by the combination,
the mumps in particular interfering with the measles.
So I said to the Department of Health
because I said parents might want to opt for the single vaccine
at the time they were available,
in the UK and the US.
I would be much more likely
really on any vaccine to say,
okay, we'll give them the single one first
and then maybe in eight months,
we'll give them the other one
and six months out.
I don't know.
It seems more prudent to me, more cautious.
And I said to my colleagues,
if asked by the media,
this is the position I take.
Vigorously support the continued use
of the single vaccine
because that's what I believed at the time.
But I can't continue to endorse
this vaccine that's never been tested
independently for safety.
Yeah.
What happened is in the UK, the government stopped the importation license of the MMR vaccine,
the main one were used.
So you could no longer get it.
It was our way or the highway.
And so the option for parents was taken away, even if they wanted to protect their child against measles.
But you're saying they stopped the importation of the single vaccine or of the M?
Just the, okay, yeah, yeah.
So the solution.
To your perfectly reasonable question was, well, now the parents won't even have the option.
The only, they have to get the triple dose if they want any vaccine at all for measles, mumps, or rebelled.
That's right.
And what happened in the U.S. is Merck, unilaterally made the policy decision that they were going to stop making the singles or marketing the singles.
It was going to be the combination.
I hate to ask you to engage in psychobabble.
But I don't hate it that much because I want to know.
What were they thinking?
I don't know.
I asked them, I said, I said to the head of vaccination in the UK, why, if your objective is to protect children against measles, principally against measles, why would you take away the option of parents being able to do it with a single vaccine?
Yeah.
And she said, because if we did that, it would destroy our MMR program.
So the concern was for the program and not for the well-being of children.
And I was absolutely astonished.
One that she said it, she actually admitted to it, and two, that you would do that.
And I said to David Saldry, who was head of the government side of the vaccine,
did you not do the safety studies to compare the single measles with the triple vaccine?
And he said, no, we assumed that there would be no difference.
You don't make assumptions on behalf of every child in your country.
You do not do it.
They assume that the COVID vaccine was going to be safe
and made a decision on behalf of 9 billion, 8 million,
B billion people in the world.
Without, you know, when they said it can be injected,
it'll stay at the vaccination site.
That was an assumption.
They then found it went everywhere in the body,
in particular, got into the brain and the ovaries and wherever else.
that assumption was entirely wrong.
You don't make assumptions about safety on behalf of anyone,
let alone 8 billion people.
So at this point, what year is this that the UK decides,
all right, we're going to ban the importation of the single dose?
When did that happen?
This is towards the end of the 1980s, sorry, the 1990s.
1990s.
Paper came out in 98, so we're talking about the subsequent two years.
Okay.
So they say, all right, no more.
you have to get the MMR.
At this point, I guess, this is the time, late 90s, early 2000s,
that people are really starting to speak about the link,
Bobby Kennedy.
Now, the Secretary of Health and Human Services
is suggesting this link between vaccines and autism.
As you say, your paper invited further research,
it would seem to me, I guess, in my innocence,
that this would be great opportunity for a scientist.
Wow, this is great.
You know, we could, I could make my bones
proving something really important in medicine.
Does any further research happen?
We started to do a lot of research, and we published, before I left the Royal Free,
it wasn't just that Lancet paper.
We published 15 papers on this subject, pursuing it to its natural conclusion.
But it was sabotaged, and that came to an end.
But I had the opportunity to go and present to the CDC in 2001.
I went to present to the Oversight Committee on Government Reform under Dan Burton.
And then I went to a meeting with the CDC, and they said, Dr. Wakefield, look, every kid gets MMR vaccine, some get autism.
How do you explain that? Why don't they all get it?
Well, that's medicine. A lot of people smoke, some people develop lung cancer.
We don't know why. There are co-factors that influence your risk, but that's the way medicine works.
What I said to them is my group, and I am particularly interested in patterns of exposure, unusual patterns of exposure.
For example, exposure early in life.
Measles, when you get it under one, is associated with a much greater risk profile than if you get it after one when your immune system intuitively is more mature.
So does the same pertain to the MMR?
If you get it younger, are you at greater risk of this adverse risk?
reaction being regressive autism than if you get it, say, 15, 20 months later. And they said,
okay, we'll look at that. They went away, and to their credit, they did that study.
And they found that it was exactly true. It was a highly significant risk of autism in those
children who got the measles vaccine, the MMR vaccine on time, 12 to 18 months, 12 to 15 months,
compared with getting it later.
the hypothesis turned out to be true.
But you mentioned earlier that you might have some of these risk factors just from getting measles, just getting the virus.
So could one argue, well, it's better to get the MMR vaccine at a younger age because if they get measles below the age of one, they're going to be right there in the same predicament.
Is measles a greater risk factor for developing these symptoms than the MMR vaccine?
Is there any difference between the two?
From the clinical perspective, I can say that of all the children, by the time I left the Royal Three,
we'd seen 183 children with this syndrome.
And in those, there were just two who had the single measles vaccine.
The rest have had MMR.
So it seemed to be, at least at the clinical level, an idiosyncrasy of the MMR vaccine,
if there were a causal association.
The other question you have to answer is, if yes,
if the prevalence of the disease had remained constant or had even gone down with vaccination,
then it may have been that single measles, the natural measles, is more dangerous.
But it had gone up exponentially. It had gone up dramatically.
And so the opposite seemed to be true, that this combination, given early, was a risk factor,
which is what the study found. So, we knew nothing about that. Why? Because the CDC buried.
It buried it for 14 years.
They put millions of American children at risk of a serious permanent neurological disease
in order to protect themselves, their credibility, and the program.
They destroyed documents.
They altered the data, and they presented a paper that said, it's okay, it's fine,
go back in the water, you know, the vaccine is safe.
And this only came to light when Dr. William Thompson,
and the senior author on that study,
the man who'd designed the study,
collected the data, collated it, interpreted the data,
called a scientist, Dr. Brian Hooker,
and said, we've done a terrible thing,
and I can no longer live with it.
And I kept the original data,
even though my colleagues destroyed it,
because I knew it was forerable,
I knew that it may become part of some legal proceeding.
Here it is, and he handed it over.
And it showed beyond a shabler.
of a doubt that the CDC had committed the most outrageous fraud in the context of this vaccine.
And that was the thing that really convinced me that it was the cause.
It wasn't my study, or even the subsequent studies, that strengthened my belief that there
may be a cause, but the need for the CDC to do that really convinced me that they knew
there was a problem now.
So ironically, you're convinced of this link between the...
MMR and autism, not by your own research, primarily by your own research, but by the CDC,
which then sought to totally undermine your credibility. Absolutely. And then Thompson said,
you know, this is 14 years later with all that damage done, it didn't mean at this stage
still that the vaccine caused the disease in scientific terms. What it meant was the CDC had
had an obligation to do a bigger, better study somewhere else to see if they could replicate it,
or to at least advise parents that they may wish to delay the vaccine while this issue was being
resolved. But they did none of those things. They buried it and caused terrible damage in order
to protect themselves and their reputations. And that I found absolutely heartbreaking. And William Thompson,
and the CDC scientist contacted my wife, sent her, and said,
we could have salvaged your husband's career if we'd been honest.
Well, it's irrelevant.
My career is a bit.
It doesn't matter about me because the issue isn't about me.
It's not about me.
It's about something much more important.
It's about all of those children out there who were exposed unknowingly to this issue
when the truth was something quite different.
It was really sad.
And so I can live with whatever's happened to me.
Because as I say, I was a consenting adult.
I knew what I was getting into, at least to some extent.
And I could have pulled that at any stage.
These children couldn't.
They had no voice.
So the CDC conducts this study, proves your point,
buries the study, then comes out and says the MMR is great.
On what basis, if any, does the CDC say,
Forget about that study that we're not going to tell you about the MMR is great.
They don't.
And this is why when we made the movie vaxed,
which took their recordings of William Thompson admitting to this,
of all the original documents,
this is why when we made that,
which effectively accused them of the most egregious fraud,
we heard nothing more.
There was no pushback.
If we'd said one thing that was out of line that was false,
that was defamatory, we would have been sued to the moon and back.
For every penny you were worth it.
Absolutely.
And they said not a word.
Why?
Because they knew it was true.
And that's where we are today.
We took it to Congress.
We said, you have got to have an inquiry.
You've got to investigate this.
They didn't want to touch it.
They didn't want to touch it.
Whether it was true or not didn't matter.
They didn't want to touch it.
So as all this is going down,
you're facing not only soft pressure and reprisals,
but they took away your medical license.
How did that happen?
Where does that stand now?
Why haven't you sued them into the ground
to get your medical license back?
Well, you could say,
why would I want to be part of that villainous crowd?
Fair enough.
I really want to do that.
Now I'm a filmmaker.
I write and make films.
That was in England.
I now live in Austin, Texas,
and it was, I could dwell on that, I could go back and use whatever resources I have left in the world
to try and restore my, my credibility, my standing in the world, I don't care.
I really, it's not important.
If I have a limited amount of time left on this planet,
I'm not going to indulge it trying to exonerate Andy Wakefield or have his name,
have the media reverse there, because they're not going to do that.
And I don't care.
It isn't important.
There is something far more important.
And that, of course, is the position, it hasn't gone away.
You've got to ask yourself, why is it being talked about now more than ever, particularly
with Bobby Kennedy in the White House?
Things have changed dramatically.
And this is because of not only the truth of the parents' original story that has borne out,
but because a few people have stood by those parents and continue to research this to its
natural conclusion, including Bobby Kennedy.
Now, what was the justification for not just going after you for some study, but for revoking
your medical license?
Well, for example, I'll give you some examples.
We conducted unethical research on developmentally compromised children without the appropriate
approval from an ethics committee.
So we were alleged to have conducted unethical research.
No, we didn't.
Firstly, it was clinical investigation.
It was merited clinical investigation based not on my opinion, based upon the opinion of one of the world's leading pediatric gastroenterologists and his team of clinicians, who then discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease.
Okay?
So you're having a journalist, a sort of hack journalist, saying it's not ethical when Professor Walker Smith, in testimony, says it absolutely,
was ethical, this investigation needed to be done on clinical grounds.
Didn't matter.
To the General Medical Council panel, we were guilty of experimenting on children.
So they'd made their minds up before we ever went into that room.
And there's an irony, as you mentioned earlier,
the safety studies on the vaccines conducted by the powers that be were conducted on vulnerable
children.
It seemed rather unethical to me when they were doing it.
It would have been unethical of us not to do it.
Absolutely unethical of us not to do it.
We did it.
We found that the parents are right,
and the children had a disease,
which we could then treat.
But no, they held that we were experimenting on vulnerable children.
It was beyond belief.
When I finished that hearing,
which was the longest hearing
and the history of the General Medical Council,
our licensing body,
my senior barrister said to me,
based upon the evidence, there's absolutely no way
that they can find you guilty of anything at all.
They found me guilty on every single charge.
And I just, I knew.
I knew before that, the fix was in
before we even got through the door.
But it'd be, you know, this is the way medicine operates.
It's the way they've dealt with Peter McCullough
and other people in the wake of COVID.
It doesn't matter whether you publish 700 odd papers.
You're the most published cardiologist
in the history of the planet.
It doesn't matter.
They know better because they're going to break you.
Now, I want to get back to Bobby Kennedy and the White House
and what's maybe going to change about vaccine policy.
But just as a very simple matter,
does this vaccine cause autism?
Are you willing to say, yes, it does?
Or you say, look, I just think this should be investigated,
as I said in my 1998 study.
How concerned should parents be?
I wouldn't change my position.
Yes, it needs, in my personal belief, there is a very strong indication that it causes autism,
but that's not good enough.
You don't make public policy on Andy Wakefield's belief.
It needs the science that we advocated for all those years ago.
Because when you say that, you who are being called reckless and irresponsible and unethical,
what you are saying seems much more measured and scientifically grounded and ethically grounded
than what the government is saying, which is we're not going to,
investigate these things. We're going to shut this down. Everyone just needs to take these vaccines.
Forget about dubious studies. I was just sitting down with Secretary Kennedy a few weeks ago at the
White House. And we got onto the topic of vaccines. I said, is anything going to change? He said,
everything's going to change because we're going to base this on the science now. And he brought up one of
the objections, which is, people point out, there is an adverse reaction database for vaccines,
Vairs. And people, if they think their kid has had an adverse reaction, they can file a claim,
there have been payouts, there have been laws passed by Congress. And yet, what the CDC says is,
well, the database is not reliable. And what do I know? I don't know if it's reliable or not,
but I asked this to Secretary Kennedy, and Kennedy said, well, don't you think after so many
decades we should have a reliable data? Why don't we have a reliable database?
It was inherently designed to be unreliable so that it couldn't be used to do studies of causation.
It ascertains 1% of true adverse reactions.
And so it has no meaning.
It has very little meaning at all.
And it was designed with that intention.
Let me, if I may, let me just read you something that puts this in context.
This is a government document.
It's very brief.
This is the playing field upon which.
which we're working on, and where Bobby Kennedy is now.
And this is the Federal Register, government document, rules and regulations, 1984.
It says, and this is from the officials, any possible doubts,
whether or not well-founded about the safety of the vaccine cannot be allowed to exist,
in view of the need for the vaccination to continue to be used
to the maximum extent consistent with nation's public health objectives.
Now, this is fascinating, and it just tells you where we are.
Any possible doubt, as parent reports, for example, whether or not well-founded,
as a matter where it's good science or bad science, about the safety of vaccines cannot be allowed to exist.
That is a staggering statement, but that's where we are.
It just tells you, then, these reporting mechanisms are bogus from the outset, because they're saying,
the purpose is not to ascertain whether or not there are real adverse events or to investigate the cause
or to fix them. It's to protect the vaccine regime. Absolutely. And anything that gets in the way of
that will be crushed. So why do they want to do it? Is it just money? Is it agency capture by
the pharmaceutical companies? It's so difficult for me to believe that people are willing to
compromise the health of America's children for generations just to make a buck. But is that it?
Is that just what it's all about? I think there are very, very powerful financial interests that have
a profound influence upon the regulators, the FDA and the CDC, the vaccine manufacturers. This is a
huge market. Why? Because they have a mandatory market and no liability for any damage done. You have
the perfect business model. And this was something that really was enshrined in the 1986 National
Childhood Vaccine Injury Act is that they took liability away from the manufacturers for death
and injury caused by their vaccines that were on the CDC's recommended schedule. It was a goldmine.
A goldmite, a mandatory market. Kids had to have the vaccines to go to school and no liability.
I mean, you're just going to clean up, and that's what they did. And so the vaccine schedule
expanded dramatically from that point forward. The other elements of that National Childhood Vaccine
Injury Act were that safety science should be conducted. They set up the VERS, which was totally
useless, so they couldn't use it for safety science. And children should be compensated if they are
the victims on the battlefield of our war, the public health war against infectious disease.
And that has been a catastrophe for the families. They've had to prove that the vaccine injured
their child. How do you do that? You're a parent. Do you have laboratories? You don't have
financing resources, but the bonus, the burden of proof is on the parents.
So, absolutely staggering.
But if they can prove it with all the difficulty that that entails, then they will be paid,
though not by the pharmaceutical companies.
They'll be paid by the government.
Do I have that right?
Paid by the people.
Paid by the taxpayers.
Paid by the taxpayers.
It's paid by the taxpayers.
So it's not the drug companies.
They're off the hook.
It comes from a sort of tax levied on every vaccine that's sold.
and that always, you know, trickles down to the taxpayer.
But doesn't, how can they, in the one hand, say the vaccines are safe, if you have any question
about vaccine safety, you're a total cuck, you should be run out of society, you can't go to
school, can't go to a doctor's office a lot of the time. But if your kid, if the thing
happens to your kid that we're telling you can't happen, don't worry, we'll pay you to
shut you up. How do you hold, those are contradictory statements?
Well, and the statement that you alluded to that vaccines are safe and effective.
they're not. They're not safe. The determinants for safety, I mean, the government itself has said
vaccines are unavoidably unsafe. That's what they've said. So how can they hold these two
conflicting opinions? I mean, this isn't me. This is them saying vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.
For a vaccine to be safe, firstly, the golden rules are that it is unsafe until proven otherwise,
still the studies have been done.
And those studies have to involve long-term placebo control,
randomized in susceptible populations against a truly inert placebo.
Those have never been done for any vaccine on the childhood schedule,
except the latest, the COVID vaccine.
It's never been done for any of them.
And so you simply cannot say, as a matter of scientific fact,
that they're safe.
No, they're not.
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I want to be clear here because Bobby Kennedy just announced
that now there will be controlled studies with placebos
to test the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.
You're telling me before now, though,
there have never been studies with placebo.
So when Bobby Kennedy met with Fauci and Collins in the White House,
they said, oh, yes, they have.
We've got a stack of papers here.
He said, show me, please.
Show me one of these studies.
Oh, we haven't got it here.
We'll send it to you.
never got sent. Several years later, they admitted that Bobby Kennedy was absolutely right. It had never been
done. Now, I've heard that the explanation, when they're saying, if they're admitting that
there are not placebo-controlled studies, they'll say, well, the reason is it would be unethical
not to give the vaccine to some kids. In other words, just to conduct the study with placebo's
means we're depriving certain children of the vaccines, and that in itself would be unethical.
How's that argument about that? What a circular argument.
That is. I mean, what a get out of jail card, that is. They should have been done. There's no excuse for not them not being done. Again, if I gave you a new anti-hypertensive drug with that argument in mind saying, there it is, you know, it's off the shelf a week. We just made it. What do you think? Take it and it wouldn't, it would, the FDA would laugh you out of town. And yet here we have with these vaccines. They're doing just that. So I'm sorry, but safety comes first.
Bobby Kennedy right now is being blamed for the same thing that you've been blamed for for decades
for this outbreak of measles. And I see it. I read it in the news all the time and people ask me about,
oh, you saw measles is breaking out in Texas. Measles is breaking out in Tennessee. And even for me,
and I'm pretty chill about these things, I don't stay up at night worried about the next great
fear-mongering campaign in the media. But even I think, well, I don't want my kids to get measles.
So is there anything to worry about?
Let me show you something.
I think you'll find absolutely fascinating.
I don't know whether we, I'd love to be able to put this on camera.
But this is a graph of measles mortality
over the last 150 years.
This is the UK, but the US is exactly the same.
So what you can see, these are deaths per million children.
affected, okay? And what you can see is that measles up until the 1920s was a major killer.
120 per million children getting the measles. After 1920, it plummeted dramatically
till it approached zero deaths. Measles were still prevalent, but it was becoming a dramatically
milder and milder disease. They will never show you this. Now, the source for this is Thomas
McCowan's modern rise of population, if anyone wants to look that up. Now, the question here is,
what would have happened if we'd never intervened with vaccination? You can see that vaccines
had nothing to do with this. Right. Because there's a little... Yeah, that's where the vaccine...
Immunization we got, so it's already collapsed. By 99.96%. What would have happened,
here's the first scientific question, if we had never intervened with a vaccine? We don't know,
because, of course, we did, but it would likely have continued to zero.
It was becoming a dramatically milder disease.
Now, there are many reasons for this.
Virus-related factors, human-related factors, better sanitation, better nutrition,
decline in other infectious diseases that cause secondary pneumonia, for example.
But the fact is, this is natural herd immunity in operation,
and it is extraordinarily effective.
Sir Graham Wilson, when they first entertained the idea,
of universal measles vaccination,
was invited from the UK to talk at the NIH
about whether they should do it or not.
And he said, don't.
Don't do it.
You do not know what you're doing.
You may alter the age of measles
by pushing it out to the older age groups,
younger age groups when it may be more dangerous.
One child per million,
a hundred thousand in the UK may die
during an epidemic,
one in the same is true, perhaps in America.
He said,
the question you should be asking is what's different about that one child? What can we do to prevent
the disease, the death in that one child, rather than giving every child a measles vaccine about
which you know nothing in terms of the long-term consequences? There seem to be a lot of parallels
here to COVID, which was, COVID comes out. Very quickly, it's clear, COVID does not really
pose much of a risk to little babies, actually, or to healthy young people. Maybe there's a risk
to older people or people who have immune system conditions. But the vast majority of people
did not face a major risk from COVID. And yet, rather than the government going out and saying,
okay, the people who maybe are at risk, maybe they should take the vaccine, even if it's experimental,
even if it's really recent, instead, every single person, all these young healthy people
were mandated to get it. Yes, I think COVID, the whole COVID experience was the biggest
mistake they ever made because it caused people like yourself and others to say, hang on a minute,
we've been lied to. The experts told of this, none of what they said was sustainable,
and yet we've been compromised, both economically, our jobs financially, health-wise,
by this draconian policy. Politically, I mean, just socially, you couldn't hug your loved ones
as they were dying of old age.
You couldn't go to Christmas.
You had to postpone your wedding.
You couldn't go to school.
They just destroyed our lives for years
with apparently no medical basis for it.
Yes, and that's what turns out.
And there is a realization globally.
I mean, when I first got involved in this,
there were perhaps a handful of people worldwide
who were prepared to discuss the thorny issue
of vaccine safety.
Now it's more than half the adult population of the world.
And that is because of their mistakes.
Not because of me.
It's no good blaming me or you having, you know, you because you had me on the show.
This is at their door.
This is their mistake.
They have done this and they only have themselves to blame.
And they will attract public confidence in public health policy makers
by everything that they've done.
As the truth emerges, as Bobby Kennedy gets to the...
root cause of these problems.
And there'll be a lot of pushback,
a lot of politicizing,
a lot of money changing hands.
But I'm afraid that the inevitable
will turn out to be true.
What is that?
That the parents' original story
was faithful and correct
and merely sought to say
this is what happened to my child.
I'm glad you presented in this way
because I think to myself,
I don't think I'm an anti-vaxxer.
I don't know much about the issue.
I'm not anti-institutions.
I'm not anti-expertise per se.
Practically speaking now, though,
I'm really skeptical of a lot of the powerful institutions
and of the experts.
And I think it really isn't me.
I really wish that the experts
had not be clowns themselves
and lied to us and deceived us for years.
It's really irritating to me now
that I can't trust the,
public health experts and the politicians and the big institutions. But what am I to do? When I can
prove with certainty, at least in the case of COVID, they lied to me. They said one thing out of
one side of their mouth privately and another thing to the public. And then they contradicted the
thing they said to the public. To the public again, six months later, if I am even remotely a
reasonable person, what am I supposed to do with that? I cannot have faith in those people anymore
and don't blame me for it.
I wish they hadn't squandered their credibility.
I wish I could trust them.
But I have to react in a reasonable way
to their bad behavior.
And there are some good people in the system,
and this is when everything else was taken away from me,
I thought, how can I continue to serve this cause?
How can I continue to move this forward?
And so I loved screenwriting, and I became a filmmaker,
and that's what I do, because I'd become a...
People from industry and from the federal agencies who were good, who had a moral conviction, came to me and said, you know, we've done this terrible thing. Here is the evidence. And I had all this extraordinary insider story sort of evidence. And I thought, you know what, these would make amazing films. And so since I was sort of disenfranchised in the arena of medicine and science, then I had to be a pain in their ass some other way.
And you obviously have an expertise.
I seem to refine the art.
And expertise in that, that's he'll do.
Seminars on it. Anyway, that's what I did.
I started making documentaries
initially and then moved into feature films.
I was never going to make a COVID film at all.
I just, no, please don't make me do that.
Because where do you even begin?
It's so big.
It's the war in peace.
It's enormous. Where do you begin?
It's the lies, the cover up, the lab leak,
the whole thing.
And I thought there are 2,000,
unemployed screenwriters in Hollywood doing exactly that right now. I don't want to get involved in that.
And then a story came along, which was fascinating. And just in, you know, if we can talk about this just
very briefly. Yeah. Sound of freedom. Yeah. The value of sound of freedom, the skill of it as a
film, was that it didn't take on every child had ever been trafficked as an issue. It took on the
rescue of two children. And an audience needs to engage. And an audience needs to engage. And all
audience needs to fall in love with its protagonist.
An audience needs to want the salvation of those two children.
And when that happens, and when they board into that,
they can then extrapolate to every child who's ever been trafficked.
But you can't do it the other way around.
So you start with the individual story and you then bring in the global catastrophe.
And so we had this story in Thailand, which did just that.
So we took the life and death of one character
and then bored in all these other elements
and so we ended up making that COVID film
I was never going to make
so that's in post-production at the moment
and now we're looking
to make the next movie.
Well this is also what's piqued my interest a bit
in the vaccine issue is
well it's the notion that
one death is a tragedy
and million deaths is a statistic.
When I just hear about...
Joseph Stalin.
Stalin, yeah, yeah, a real public health expert, maybe that has residences to our own time.
But they, when they say, well, look, yes, one in however many kids will have an adverse reaction,
I say, okay, well, those are just numbers, and okay, that's fine, doesn't do anything,
doesn't tug on my heartstrings. But then when I started to hear from people who had relatives,
who made persuasive arguments that they had been vaccine injured, now, well, hold on, I know this person.
And I might even know the relative, and maybe I've seen it.
Oh, well, that's actually a real person.
That's a real living, breathing person there.
And if they were materially harmed because of public policy, now I really care.
Now I've got a face to this bland, clinical kind of scientific jargon.
We've been talking about MMR specifically.
But I wonder about other vaccines, because when my wife gave birth to our first son,
the doctors and nurses come into the room, they say, okay.
We want to give your kid, who at this point is about three hours old, we want to give your kid a hepatitis vaccine.
And I say, excuse me, why do you want to give my kid a hepatitis vaccine?
I said, well, you know, just to be safe.
I said, last I checked, you get hepatitis from sharing needles on skid row and going to whorehouses.
I don't think my baby's gone to either of those in the past five hours.
They say, well, no, and they dance around it.
My wife really pressed the issue.
They said, well, it's, you know, in case maybe your husband has cheated on you.
I'm standing, you know, I'm here, guys.
I can assure you we're good, okay?
And I thought this is a, it's offensive personally, and I know that we're fine.
Why are you pushing this vaccine?
I said, no, I'm not, get out of the room.
I'm not doing that.
But it's not an isolated incident.
They push all of these vaccines.
And I presume in part it's because they've got a captive audience here.
They can stick the kid.
Most people are probably going to say yes, even if it's totally unnecessary, totally ridiculous.
So then I have to ask, beyond MMR, what is the risk from other vaccines?
Well, I hear this again.
Great question.
Because, right, hepatitis B vaccination in infants as a policy, first 24 hours of life.
Firstly, there is no logic behind it, as you pointed out.
And it's offensive.
It's a vast majority.
mothers can be tested for hepatitis B exposure in advance
and then maybe offered the vaccine.
But how long has that safety study been
before it becomes policy,
a hospital policy to put it into every one day old child?
What would you want to know as a parent,
fully informed consent,
about the length of the safety study and how it was done?
How long would you want that safety study
to have been before you were willing to put it into your child.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
I would like that safety study to have been conducted years and years ago.
I would like it to have been rigorous with a lot of people.
And I want to be, I frankly still probably wouldn't do it
because that hepatitis vaccine seems so useless at that age.
But I don't know, at least established for 10 years, 5 years?
10 years.
Five days.
Five days.
no placebo, no comparison vaccine.
What studies were done were done in a small group of totally age and appropriate people,
nothing to do with infants one day old.
You could not infer anything about safety from that other than the studies hadn't been done.
Five days, and yet it becomes hospital policy.
So what happened is that when the advisory committee on vaccination practices had their meeting about it,
they could not. Mirk came to them and said, we cannot get people to take this vaccine. The prostitutes
and the drug addicts are not compliant. They're not coming forward. Okay, they're not doing it. And so
we have no market. We put all this money into creating this. We are not going, this is their quote,
we are not going to be left with an organ, an orphan drug. And so it was decided to avoid that.
They would put it into one day old infants. This is the thinking behind it. So,
have someone from the industry going to the advisory committee on vaccination practices
and essentially dictating what their market will be five days.
Are you told that?
Is there fully informed consent?
Absolutely not.
Why?
Because the doctors don't know themselves.
No one has bothered to do the research.
And yet you're suddenly how someone are to blame or, you know, you may have been cheating on you, all that nonsense.
Please, it's a contrivance.
Because I'm crotchety and contrarian.
So I, and even I said, do I have to trust the doctors?
I say, no, get out of the room.
That's ridiculous.
How many people just go along with it because the doctor said so?
Doctor knows best.
So in your estimation, if you have an opinion on it at all, not is it necessary or unnecessary,
but are there risks to someone getting the hepatitis vaccine or detap or any of these
other slew of vaccines that were told to stick our kids with in the first two years of their life?
Comes to that. Hepatitis B vaccine. So historically, it used to, for a very long time, contained a mercury preservative cymerosan. Mercury is highly dangerous. I think perhaps the second most dangerous thing that you can expose someone to on the planet. And yet it was there in these vaccines for infants in highly toxic amounts, way in excess of the EPA guidelines on exposure. And the CDC were asked to do a study on this.
to see if thimerosol was associated causally with the vaccine.
They held a private meeting at Simpsonwood where they revealed the results and tried and did,
cover it up.
This is a link between thymarosol and autism?
And they found that if a child had been exposed on the first day of life to this thimerosol
containing vaccine, then they had an excess risk of sevenfold of developing autism compared
to getting it later.
And they removed that group.
They removed the control group to show those who had no vaccine
because there was a sevenfold increased risk over that group.
So they removed the control group and then published the paper,
completely concealing the fact that there was this dramatic increase.
How can you remove the control group?
Because they were in charge of the data.
And this only was subsequently discovered by persistent mothers,
including people like Bobby Kennedy and others.
And now it's well known.
The Simpsonwood experience is sort of synonymous
with pharmaceutical industrial CDC fraud.
And it was an absolute tragedy.
So they knew.
I mean, this is the point that I'm getting to
is they knew all along.
As with the MMR study,
here we have the thimerosol study.
That's how they behave.
I remember as a kid,
I was watching an interview with Bobby Kennedy, actually.
And Kennedy was alleging a link between thimerosol and autism.
And then I remember shortly thereafter,
and then subsequently up until the present time,
the media said the link between thimerosol and autism
has been debunked, disproven, only cooks think that it exists.
And there you are.
Those cooks were right.
When you go into the original data and find out what they did,
the cooks were right.
the conspiracy theorists once again were right.
The media bought and paid for.
I think that was one of the lessons of COVID was not in every case,
but very often the difference between conspiracy theory
and the truth is about six to nine months.
In this case, maybe a few more years than that.
What about the other vaccines?
What about, I can't even name all of them.
Again, many of them contain thermosol.
That's now been phased out.
So there was a tacit acknowledgement that there was a problem, and it was recommended that the manufacturers took it out.
They knew, but they thought we don't want to cause a public health still.
We don't want them to lose confidence in our policymaking, so we'll just phase it out.
We'll recommend it.
We won't stop it overnight.
That would cause a scare.
But phasing it out seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that there was a reason to phase it.
And there was.
And it was just a strategy for minimizing the downside for them, not protecting.
children, not avoiding exposure in children protecting themselves.
So when I take my kids to a doctor's office, the vast majority of doctors' offices that we might
sign up for, that we might join, insist upon a rigorous vaccine schedule, the CDC vaccine
schedule. And as I told you, I don't consider myself an anti-vaxxer, but if I ask them,
not to avoid vaccines entirely, but to say, hey, can we delay these a little bit?
Can we spread them out?
Some of them that seem unnecessary, can we avoids?
But I'll do some vaccines.
And maybe I'll do all your vaccines, but can we just spread them out just a little bit?
They say, go find another medical group.
Why are the medical groups going along with that?
I can't imagine they make that much money per shot.
Maybe they do.
Is it pressure from the pharmaceutical industry?
Is it pressure from the agencies?
Is it ignorance?
Is it ideology?
Is it fear of professional reprisal from the medical community?
What is it?
There was a doctor recently, a pediatrician a couple of years ago,
who testified before his state legislators on this very issue.
And he said, I decided not to vaccinate anymore,
from based on my experience of what I'd seen.
How many children?
In doing that, he said,
I lost $700,000 a year in bonuses from being on time with the vaccine schedule,
having all of my children, my patients vaccinated.
I lost $700,000 a year.
And that really says it all.
Where did the money come from?
From the medical group?
It comes from pharmaceutical companies.
It comes from the government.
I'm not precisely sure where it comes from,
but it's a bonus paid to them
for fulfilling their vaccine obligations,
as they are seen by it.
So I think that has some part to play in it.
That's a lot of money.
It's a lot of money.
That's more scratch than I was thinking of.
I mean, some believe, and please don't know me wrong.
It was not all of, some genuinely, in good faith, believe that they're doing the right thing.
Others, but when, you know, money clouds the issue, it's very difficult to separate the two.
So, you've got the medical groups, the different medical offices.
There's that issue.
Then the schools, obviously the schools are.
run by the government most of the time, so they just follow along with whatever the schedule is.
It seems like this is just a political problem.
So what is your hope, as Kennedy now, one of the great most prominent vaccine skeptics of our age, ever, I guess, is the health secretary.
Do you think things are going to change?
Yes, I do, I think. He is a very, very smart guy.
and he comes, his family legacy is one of, I mean, let's be honest, it's not, you wouldn't be a,
if you were a life insurance home.
It speaks to his bravery.
Yeah.
To be able to stand up in the face of that family history and say, I am going to take a very
unpopular view that threatens the commercial interests of many people, but I believe morally that
that is my obligation.
That is what I have to do.
because this is what I know.
And so he's very sincere, entirely genuine.
I'm a great fan and supporter.
And my hope is that scientists will be allowed to do their job
without the constraints placed on them
by their medical schools or the pharmaceutical industry
or the government.
But they do their job.
When I was at the Royal Free Hospital,
the dean came in one day.
He got all of the academics who do the research,
all of the academics together in the lecture theater,
and he said,
the government has just told us
that there will be no further funding from them
for medical research.
They've said that what you have to do
is go out and form strategic liaisons
with the pharmaceutical companies
to have them fund your research.
Okay?
So suddenly, in one move...
It doesn't seem to be a moral hazard there.
In one move,
the pharmaceutical companies get to control
exactly what science is done
in all the medical services.
schools in the United Kingdom, but more importantly, they get to decide what research is not done.
They were not going to fund my research. That's for sure. So when that happened, I realized that
I had to get out, I had to come to America, because at least even though the argument is
equally polarized in the United States, there is a system of benevolence here, of independent
research funding of tax-deductible benefits to give to charities that allows private research
institutions to thrive. And it's the only way it could get done, but not in England, where it's
really monopolized in this way. And I simply wasn't prepared to work for the pharmaceutical
industry. That's not what I did. You know, it's from your description, it's so tightly controlled
in the UK. But what's interesting is that it's not tightly controlled by the government. I think
sometimes American conservatives, we just have this reflexive antipathy for the government and a
reflexive adulation for the private industry and the free market. However, there's an older strain
in conservatism. I think Barry Goldwater made this argument in conscience of a conservative,
which is what we dislike is monopolistic power anywhere. So if it's the government threatening
my way of life and my flourishing, that's really bad.
And if it's some cartel of private industry, threatening my way of life and my flourishing,
that's just as bad. If my life is being damaged, then I don't really care who the one is that's
damaging it. I want to attack unjustly monopolistic power anywhere. So then down to brass tax,
you have medical expertise, though Wikipedia would deny it now. You have been on this issue for
decades, a parent comes to you, says, Andy, my doctor's office says I got to vaccinate my kids.
Should I give them all the vaccines? Should I give them none of the vaccines? Should I give them
some of the vaccines? If I should give them some of the vaccines, when should I give it to them?
Would you give advice to those parents? No. It is not my job to give advice about what vaccines they
should and shouldn't have. It's my job to direct them to the science that will help them
come to a decision, and they should have fully informed consent. What I do say is this,
is that I don't give that advice, but what I can say, in all honesty, if I were a new father
today, having a baby, then I would not vaccinate them. At all. And that's my opinion,
based upon what I know, but you must go out and do your research and study this, because
because you must come to that conclusion and live with the outcome, whatever that may be, of your decision.
But you think that the benefit, just for you, you're now a young father, for you, if you're doing that cost benefit, you would say the potential benefit doesn't outweigh the risk.
I've come to believe not only in the changing nature of the trajectory of infectious disease, it's getting far less and less and less serious and far less lethal.
And so the cost-benefit equation has changed over time.
I'll give you an example.
When antibiotics came in less than 100 years ago,
antibiotics were a miracle.
We were plagued with rheumatic fever and battlefield gangrene and syphilis,
neurocifilis, for which there was no treatment.
Patients were dying.
Antibiotics came along.
They were a miracle.
But the miracle changes.
It's a dynamic relationship between organism and antibiotic.
and the overuse and the misuse of antibiotics
has led to the emergence of highly resistant,
very dangerous strains of bacteria.
And now the British government calls that
the post-antibiotic apocalypse.
Their words.
Theatrical word, but they are their words.
And it is because we have a situation
where the pharmaceutical company are now saying,
guys, we're pulling out of antibiotic research
because by the time we bring an expensive antibiotic to market,
the bugs have already become resistant,
so it's a waste of time.
Yeah.
And that is a situation that man has created.
So the miracle, as it genuinely was for so many people,
has now become this post-antibiotic apocalypse.
And we need to deal with that,
and we need to understand that nature will not be deceived.
Nature will not be, it will find a way.
And we need to respect nature,
to anticipate its moves,
and not to assume that we can outwit nature.
This is the whole basis of Jurassic Park.
There's a wonderful theatrical example of how nature will come back to haunt you
if you think you can interfere with it.
You can think you can exploit and manipulate it.
You can't.
I can already see the headline now in the left-wing media,
which is Wakefield, not satisfied attacking vaccines,
now attacks antibiotics.
But what you're describing is not that antibiotics are bad or were bad
or didn't have any good.
you're just observing how antibiotics have worked over time.
You're observing how medicine works over time.
It's Higalian almost.
There's a synthesis and an antithesis.
What has actually happened?
Let's not get emotionally involved in this.
It's just ask the pragmatic question.
Yeah.
What does really happen?
And that's what's happened.
And it's not that they were a bad thing at all.
Right.
No, no, no, no, they weren't.
But...
Nature reacts.
Nature reacts. Nature finds a way around the problem. And there can be unintended consequences,
and there's no be-all, end-all solution that ends history. So then on, so we looked at that
collapse for measles, long predating the introduction of the measles vaccine. But then what about
now? We are where we are. We did introduce the measles vaccine decades ago. And as people
become more skeptical, I think with good reason, post-COVID, of
of vaccines and of public health experts,
will there be a huge upsurge in measles?
Should people be concerned about that?
Yes, they should.
Yes, they should for various reasons,
is that strains of measles that are now evolving,
just in the same way as antibiotic and bacteria,
strains of declades, what are called declades of measles,
a particular genetic variant of measles,
has emerged in highly vaccinated.
populations, which is resistant to the immunity induced by the vaccine.
So we've created this kind of resistance now in viruses, just as we did in a different way,
but in similarly to bacteria.
So we've got the emergence of resistant strains.
What do we do about that?
Because we can't go on using the live attenuated vaccine that's now decades old.
So people are saying, oh, I know what we'll do.
We'll make a messenger, an MRI-based vaccine.
for measles and mumps and rebella and all these other things.
That, from our experience, the COVID would be an utter catastrophe.
But that, if you and I are talking about it, they've already done it.
These vaccines have been generated.
I'm calling them vaccines is a misnomer.
These genetic modification tools are what they are, are now anticipated,
and will be their answer to increase.
failure of the existing vaccine.
What they don't tell you in a lot of these measles cases, for example,
is that in the year that we had the Disneyland outbreak,
there were something like 180 cases across America
that 43% of those cases were caused by the vaccine.
They sequenced the strains and found that 43% were vaccine-related measles cases
and didn't tell us for four years,
because that would have been a public relations nightmare.
So we do have a problem.
We have a real problem.
And berating people and belittling them in the media isn't going to help that problem.
It's not going to solve it.
There's an analogy there sometimes on a different medical issue, on the abortion issue.
The pro-abortion side will say that before Roewe-Wade, women were dying by the thousands from illegal abortions,
which is completely made up.
As the man who invented that statistic, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, formerly the head of NARAL pro-abortion,
then became pro-life. He admitted he just made it out of thin air. But you can look. You can look at
the government records to see how many women died from illegal abortions the year before Roevy Wade,
and the number is 39. You can also see how many women died from legal abortions, numbers 24.
Not 3,900, not 39,000, 39 and 24. Then you can look at the number of states where abortion was
legal and illegal, and you realize the likelihood of a woman dying from an illegal abortion in those years
was almost exactly the same as a woman dying from a legal abortion.
So putting the abortion issue aside for a moment,
it just totally undercuts the credibility
of the polemicists and the partisans
who are arguing for one side of the issue.
43% of those cases come from the measles vaccine.
That seems like a pretty important detail, doesn't it?
You'd think so.
And I think that's why it was left out.
But all I'm arguing for is
the conduct of excellent science that answers the questions that vex the public most
to be done with integrity and dispassionately to get the right answers to protect the children
and in the meantime well forever fully informed parental consent in vaccinations for their children
fully informed voluntary consent that is the basis one of the tenets of clinical medicine
But that doesn't happen here.
Be parents of force, coerced, frightened, all of those things, pressures brought to bear
that your child won't be allowed in school.
We're going to throw them out of the practice.
This is unforgivable.
This isn't what medicine's meant to be.
Now, you mentioned the MRI vaccines, which you point out aren't exactly even vaccines.
I'm going to confess a little bit more ignorance.
Even five years now after the outbreak of COVID, the advent,
in a popular way of the MRNA vaccines.
I really don't fully understand the distinction
between an MRNA vaccine
and a regular old vaccine.
What is the difference?
Okay, now, as a filmmaker now,
because I've been a filmmaker for the last 20 years,
the measles vaccine, for example,
is made the same way it was made way back in the 60s.
So it'd say you have a culture of chick embryos,
you know, eggs,
or other substrates, cell substrates,
because the virus requires a cell to grow in.
And that's what it does.
And you make a live virus vaccine,
and it doesn't, when you put it into individuals
who are susceptible to measles,
this is the one, oh, that child's rash is much less
on all those other rashes.
His fever didn't go up.
That's the one we'll select as the vaccine strain.
People call it weakening the virus.
You're not weakening it.
you're modifying its disease profile.
You might be doing something else in addition
that you don't know about.
Anyway, it just doesn't manifest in outward symptoms.
That's the live attenuated vaccine.
That's the one that's commonly available,
universally available now in doctors' offices.
The MRI vaccine is a genetically created vaccine,
where you take a sequence of the target agent,
like COVID, the spike protein,
and you integrate that into a plasmid,
a piece of circular DNA or RNA,
and then you use that as the substance.
Now, I'm not an expert on MRI-based vaccines,
but it's a very, very different approach.
This isn't live, this is a very different thing.
But when you give it, the intention is that it then integrates into human cells
and turns them into a factory for producing the viral protein.
Well, that's not a good idea, because you're then causing, you're asking the body to turn on its own cells,
which is the very basis of autoimmune disease.
So it seems to me intuitive that you're wreaking havoc people by encouraging the immune system to attack its host.
But it seems like all of the enthusiasm in the pharmaceutical industry is for these new MRNA vaccines.
In many of them, yes.
I think that I'd be interested to see where it's all going.
I think that many of the venture capital companies are now pulling back on vaccines,
particularly of this shots of this particular type,
because they've come with so many unknown hazards that are becoming known.
I think that, you know, it was, like I said,
I think it was the biggest mistake they made,
Because not only does it undermine credibility in what they're saying now, but everything they've said before.
Do you see under the new health regime, under Kennedy's leadership and President Trump's leadership,
do you see a turn away from the mRNA vaccines in particular?
Yes, I do. I think the inevitability is the science will get done and the right conclusions will be reached.
I think there'll be huge pressure, particularly from those.
pharmaceutical companies that have invested a lot into this thing.
You'll have people hired by the pharmaceutical industry to write stories
saying how wonderful they are and how bad people like Bobby Kennedy.
It's happening all the time now.
That's inevitable.
It's going to happen.
But you know what?
I've been in this 35 years and I'm not going away.
So I'll keep doing what I do and Bobby will keep doing what he does
and we'll come to the right answer somehow.
Well, they've taken just about everything they can from you.
So as you say, they haven't killed you yet.
And a man who's had everything taken from him is one of the most dangerous men in the world,
because you really only have an incentive to pursue your line of inquiry and to pursue the truth.
That's right.
And heaven killed me, I think part of it is because I'm a sort of useful person to have around.
They can always say, he's the guy.
He's the one who did it.
Blame him.
Yeah, he blame him.
I can't blame, you know, he's gone, let's, you know, but if they can, anyway, I, putting all of this to one side, there is a much more important issue at stake, and that is the well-being of the children of this country in the world.
And many of those have lost their voice or have no voice, and it's up to those of us who care about these issues to speak for them.
It's amazing how speaking to you for an hour and a half or however long we've been here.
you don't seem like the guy in the Wikipedia page.
I don't know.
It's almost, you don't seem like the guy
that's been written about
in the establishment media.
It's almost like you can't believe
everything that's written in the newspapers
or maybe everything that comes out
of the official sources of the government.
Andy, thank you so much for being here.
My pleasure. Thanks so much.
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