One of the Lancet 12 children on a doctor visit not long after the
BMJ articles were published in January.
By Dan
Olmsted
On January 5, 2011, the British Medical Journal accused Dr.
Andrew Wakefield of committing “an elaborate fraud” in the controversial
1998 Lancet report about 12 children who developed bowel
disease and regressed after receiving the MMR shot. The cover
article by journalist Brian Deer focused on “the bogus data behind
claims that launched a worldwide scare over the measles, mumps, and
rubella vaccine.”
Deer identified and interviewed parents of some of the children in
the anonymous Lancet case series, describing what he said were
significant disparities. “I traveled to the family home, 80 miles
northeast of London, to hear about child 2 from his mother,” Deer wrote
of one interview. The child had severe autism and gut problems that she
blamed on the MMR.
What Deer did not say in the BMJ article is that he had lied
to the mother about his identity, claiming to be someone named “Brian
Lawrence” (his middle name). Deer had written a number of critical
articles about parents’ claims of vaccine injury, and if he gave his
real name, he doubtless feared, Child 2’s mother would not agree to talk
to him. Once she checked his blog, she would be more likely to kick him
out of the family home than sit still for what turned into a six-hour
inquisition.
He even created a fake e-mail address for his fake identity, and he
used it to communicate with her:
lawrence_b_st@yahoo.com.
Why did the highly respected British Medical Journal
sanction such deceit involving the mother of a child who, whatever the
cause, was severely disabled? When the interview took place in November
2003, more than seven years before the BMJ article, Deer was
not working for the journal. He was on assignment for The Sunday
Times of London.
The Sunday Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch, part of the
News International division that has come under a Watergate-size cloud
in England for its newsgathering tactics – fraudulently obtaining
confidential information, bribing police, hacking 9,000 phone numbers,
gaining access to bank accounts, and using large financial settlements
to keep some victims quiet.
The BMJ article, titled “How the Case Against the MMR
Vaccine Was Fixed,” has its roots in the Sunday Times. It is
remarkably similar to one Deer wrote for the Sunday Times two
years earlier, in February 2009. That article was titled MMR
Doctor Andrew Wakefield Fixed Data on Autism and it cited much the
same data and mentioned many of the same people featured in the BMJ
article.
The BMJ imprimatur gave Deer – as well as the British
Medical Association, which publishes the journal -- a “peer-reviewed”
platform from which the story was broadcast far and wide, as conclusive
proof of fraud. The BMJ dressed up its presentation with
footnotes, charts, editorials, commentary and what it called “editorial
checking.”
But clearly, the crux of the article came from reporting Deer did
while affiliated with the Sunday Times. Along with evidence
presented at a General Medical Council hearing, Deer wrote in the
Sunday Times, he relied on “unprecedented access to medical
records, a mass of confidential documents and cooperation from parents
during an investigation by this newspaper.” His work, he said, exposed
the “selective reporting and changes to findings that allowed a link
between MMR and autism to be asserted.”
Deer did not identify Child 2 or his mother in either the Sunday
Times or the BMJ – he didn’t need to. He had posted their
names on his blog (subsequently removed); what’s more, the names were
known because the mother had spoken out on the researchers’ behalf and
was a claimant in a failed legal case over the vaccine. (Deer has said
any allegation he “placed confidential information on my website” is
false.)
False pretenses and confidentiality aside, the BMJ’s ethics code bars
the use of anyone’s medical information without written permission --
even when the subject is anonymous.
“Any article that contains personal medical
information about an identifiable living
individual requires the patient’s explicit consent before we can
publish it,” according to the policy (italics in original). “We will
need the patient to sign our
consent form, which requires the patient to have read the article.”
If she had done so, the journal would have gotten an earful about
“Brian Lawrence,” Brian Deer and her subsequent dealings with the
Sunday Times. That is the subject of our next article.
--
Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism, and co-author, with Mark
Blaxill, of The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made
Epidemic, to be published in paperback in September by Thomas Dunne
Books.
As she sat down to write the
Sunday Times of London on Saturday,
November 29, 2003, Rosemary Kessick was beside herself. The day before, a
reporter for the paper named Brian Lawrence had come to her home to
interview her – and kept at it, relentlessly, for
six straight hours.
It was more like an inquisition than an interview. Everything she said about
the regression of her severely autistic son – what happened, when it
happened, why she thought it was connected to the measles-mumps-rubella shot
he had received -- was questioned as though she were a defendant in a
courtroom.
Her son’s autism had manifested 13 years earlier, in 1990, and
it still “traumatized and blighted” the family, but Brian Lawrence expected
her to remember it like it were yesterday and describe it all with clarity;
any uncertainty or hesitation seemed to immediately become a
discrepancy. She had no confidence in what the reporter was going to
write. She thought he might suggest she was, at best, an unreliable witness
to her own child’s mental and physical disintegration, or, at worst, that
she wasn’t telling the truth.
As she began typing, she did not know it was “Brian Lawrence” who was not
telling the truth – a fact that became clear a few days later, when she
found a picture online of Brian Deer, a journalist notoriously
hostile to people who claimed that vaccines had injured their children.
That was the man who sat in her living room, sneering and displaying
“no human qualities of compassion.”
On this day, the day after the inquisition, all she knew is that she
didn’t like the way she had been treated, not at all, and that is what she
began typing to Brian Deer’s boss, John Witherow (who remains editor of the
Sunday Times to this day).
It is worth reading the letter, and the subsequent correspondence, in
order and in toto (with only a few irrelevant details omitted),
because the road it leads to is ultimately not the Sunday Times,
but the British Medical Journal. The BMJ quoted from that
interview this January – seven years after “Brian Lawrence” arrived at her
door, 20 years after the devastating events it described – as proof of what
the BMJ called “an elaborate fraud” by Dr. Andrew Wakefield to link
developmental regression, bowel disease, and the MMR. Rose Kessick’s son was
one of the 12 children in the controversial Lancet study that first
raised the possibility of a connection between shot and symptoms that
warranted further study, and part of MMR litigation that had been dismissed.
This past week - on Sunday, July 17, 2011 – the trail wound back to the
Sunday Times. Editor Witherow wrote a column – subtitled “As the
storm over phone hacking rages on, the editor of The Sunday Times says
deception can sometimes be the only path to the truth” -- in which he
defended the paper’s h tactics and singled out important investigations by
the newspaper including “Brian Deer’s outstanding work on exposing the
doctor behind the false MMR scare.” He rejected any criticism of the
newspaper’s past conduct, citing the public interest.
“In other words,” he said, citing another high-profile Sunday Times
investigation, “the ends justified the means.”
The Sunday Times has denied charges made this month by former
Prime Minister Gordon Brown that the paper had “blagged” him, with Sunday
Times personnel posing as Brown to gain access to his bank account. The real
Gordon Brown referred the matter to police.
From here on, my short comments are in italic, between the
correspondence, and at the end.
--
November 29, 2003:
Dear Mr. Witherow [Editor, The Sunday Times of London],
I was visited yesterday, Friday 28th November 2003 by Brian Lawrence who
had introduced himself by telephone the previous Friday as the Sunday Times
health correspondent. He had asked for the appointment which he told me was
part of an exercise instigated by yourself in order to decide whether the
Sunday Times should support the reinstatement of legal aid in the MMR cases.
I [was] both surprised and shocked by the tone and emphasis of the
questioning which stopped little short of interrogation from the outset.
This questioning began with a launch into the exact nature of what happened
on the day my younger son had received his MMR vaccine down to questions
about where I worked, what the surgery [medical office] was like, what time
of day it would have been. …
It was curious that having asked if I didn’t mind the interview being
recorded, Mr. Lawrence kept turning the same tape over every time it ran
out.
It must not be forgotten that whatever anyone's personal opinions on the
causation, we are a family traumatised and blighted by seeing our normal,
healthy, beautiful baby son transformed into a desperately disabled child
and have been struggling to cope with everything that this entails for the
best part of fourteen years.
Mr. Lawrence displayed no human qualities of compassion and even began
the session by firmly and categorically stating his sympathy, approval and
admiration for those paediatricians and other health care workers who remain
not only detached from the plight of their young patients and families but
who display a distinct cold lack of compassion. This attitude was backed up
by the anecdote of his sitting in a room with parents grieving the death of
their child following medical negligence when he described graphically how
he was ignoring their tears to watch the television over the parents'
shoulders in order to follow the ongoing storyline of a soap.
What I expect of the Sunday Times is the highest quality journalism and
whilst I am well used to hostile questioning, sending a journalist of this
calibre to abuse my hospitality in my own home was both unnecessary and
inappropriate. The man arrived at 10.30am and left circa 4.30pm.
Despite our own personal outrage at the totally insensitive questioning,
demeanour and attitude of this journalist my deepest concerns surround the
extent to which the Sunday Times apparently intends to rely on this
individual's judgment to formulate an opinion on the legal cases.
During the meeting Mr. Lawrence repeatedly displayed arrogance in his own
perceived ability and knowledge which when probed, consistently revealed a
dangerous bigotry and clear ignorance of the many legal and scientific facts
salient to the MMR cases. He seemed to take delight in refuting many of the
facts I was putting to him and I became so frustrated at one point that I
telephoned my solicitor to check on the exact wording of one of the defence
barristers at a court hearing. My solicitor took my call despite being in a
meeting himself and responded to my request immediately. Mr. Lawrence also
appeared irritated that the solicitor would not answer his requests to set
up a meeting with him and did not accept his response that he was under
instruction from the QC not to talk to the press pending the judicial review
on the revoke of legal aid for the children in the MMR damage cases.
A recurring theme of the meeting was Mr. Lawrence's besmirching of the
integrity and competence of everyone concerned with the MMR cases spanning
Richard Barr and his team, our barristers, Dr. Wakefield, me, my family and
the expert witnesses. … This all went way beyond what could be considered a
reasonable assessment of humanity in general and was exceptionally
insulting.
A further theme was the suggestion that we the families are naïve to the
fact that everyone in life has their own agenda and we were merely being
used by all concerned to further their own aims and objectives.
Following yesterday’s complete waste of my time I can only assume that
Mr. Lawrence’s agenda was totally at odds from that which he used to gain
access. His methods seemed more akin to the gutter press than what may be
reasonably expected of responsible journalism. In addition, his whole
appearance was shoddy and shifty with a clear lack of respect for me, my
family or my house. …
I remain deeply shocked that such a journalist who, in my opinion is
neither well informed nor particularly intelligent, should be let loose as a
representative of a newspaper with the reputation of the Sunday Times.
Whilst writing this I have just received an email from him which I will
forward together with this, I have no intention of responding to Mr.
Lawrence’s comments. I will also put both in the post to you and await your
response.
Yours sincerely,
Rosemary C. T. Kessick
--
Kessick remembers being surprised at the change from the day before
that Deer’s e-mail represented, and noting that it arrived in the middle of
typing her letter to the editor about his conduct. She did not read it until
after she sent her letter to the Sunday Times.
-----Original Message-----
From: brian lawrence [mailto:lawrence_b_st@yahoo.com]
Sent: 29 November 2003 11:09 …
Dear Rosemary,
I hope you don't feel that I was too rude yesterday. I was mainly
thinking aloud - trying to get an answer to a question that has been put to
me - which is why not try to get the hearing when all the research is in and
published. It may be that there are procedural reasons why that can't
happen, and I'm only trying to suggest that maybe those aren't just things
you leave to lawyers, because they might want the thing over and done with
to get on with something else. In my experience, it's those people who are
actually affected by the issue who are best placed to decide. I wasn't
saying I didn't support your case or didn't think you were doing the right
thing. Autism and MMR is a big issue and any trial is surely going to make a
huge difference one way or another.
Anyhow, if you have any questions, let me know. I'll come back when
those with more influence over these things than I have let me know how the
paper proposes to fall on this.
Best wishes,
Brian
--
Later the same day, Rosemary Kessick received a response to her
letter, from Sunday Times Managing Editor Richard Caseby.
-----Original Message-----
From: Caseby, Richard [mailto:richard.caseby@sunday-times.co.uk]
Sent: 29 November 2003 19:53 …
Subject: sunday times
Dear Ms Kessick,
Your email to the editor has been passed to me as managing editor so that
I may investigate it. Once I have spoken to those involved I will be in
contact next week.
Yours sincerely,
Richard Caseby, managing editor, The Sunday Times
--
The next day, Rosemary Kessick responded to Caseby.
Many thanks indeed, I look forward to your reply. In the meantime I have
been trying to find reference to this man on the internet and have found
nothing under the name lawrence.
However, … I think that the man who came here was in fact someone else.
We found a four year old picture of a Brian Deer (link attached) and feel
that although he has aged and was quite dishevelled it is the same man.
Regards,
Rosemary Kessick
--
Two weeks later, Rosemary Kessick follows up with the Sunday Times
Managing Editor.
Dear Mr. Caseby,
Following our subsequent telephone conversation I was wondering when you
would be getting back to me on this matter?
--
This was followed by a further reminder a month later.
Dear Mr. Caseby,
Following our correspondence and discussion I await your comments on Mr.
Brian Deer’s behaviour during his visit to my house in December last.
When I spoke to you on the telephone before Christmas I discussed my
concern at hearing about an internal memo at the Sunday Times which, amongst
other things, apparently accused me of providing an ‘unsatisfactory’ account
of events surrounding my own son’s vaccination history to Mr. Deer.
Whilst I never saw that memo I was horrified to gain sight of an email
recently which has been forwarded to me I presume because of its contents
and myself being discussed with someone whom I have never met. A number of
areas concern me, in particular the references to my character and the word
‘campaign’ which is frankly ridiculous. I spoke with Mr. Deer as a concerned
parent and to have these allegations being circulated against me causes
great distress. The main body of that email [by Brian Deer] follows:
“… I'm still very much on the case and have pretty much reviewed the
science, which you will know stands at something like 99.999 per cent
recurring in favour of there being no link between MMR and autism. Indeed, I
am not aware of any authority in a plausibly relevant specialty who says
otherwise. This strikes me as surprising. During a previous vaccine scare,
over DTP, many senior specialists, including paediatric neurologists and
epidemiologists of the highest distinction advanced the theory that
pertussis shots caused neurological injury. And they were found, on the
balance of probability, to be wrong. …
MMR is a serious matter, touching on grave issues of public safety. You
will know that, on this basis, I interviewed Mrs Rosemary Kessick of your
campaign and, in four hours of recorded material, found her account of
events surrounding her son's vaccination and history to be unsatisfactory.
It is my belief that a great deal of material placed before the public is
also of a misleading nature. Having studied the media coverage of MMR, I
appreciate that Dr Wakefield and the others have for the most part exposed
themselves to journalists they might take to be sympathetic to the crusade
against the vaccine. I have no such sympathy. If on that basis they do not
wish to speak with me - which is certainly the impression I get - that must
be a matter for them.
With best wishes, and happy new year
Brian Deer ”
…
{Here Kessick finishes her letter:] Mr. Caseby, as the mother of
a seriously disabled child, fighting for his rights, I am scandalised at
being discussed in this manner by a journalist representing a newspaper
which I have always held in the highest regard and I sincerely hope that Mr.
Deer does not intend casting further aspersions on my reputation in public
print in the Sunday Times.
Awaiting your reply,
Yours sincerely,
Rosemary C.T. Kessick
cc Press Complaints Commission
John Witherow
Lois Rogers
--
On February 19, 2004, Rosemary Kessick sent Caseby a final follow-up:
Dear Mr. Caseby,
I still await a satisfactory written response with regard my
correspondence, the last of which was by email dated 15th January.
Yours sincerely,
Rosemary C.T. Kessick
--
After that, Kessick reached out to the Sunday Times Legal
Department’s Alastair Brett.
Dear Mr. Brett,
I write with regards the Sunday Times' imminent intent to publish an
article about the MMR legal cases. It was with some surprise and distress
that I learned of this as I still await a satisfactory response following my
correspondence with Richard Caseby.
I believe that considering the odd, deceptive manner in which Brian Deer
went about interviewing me, there is a very real possibility that I might be
misrepresented.
I am not at all happy at the way in which my complaint has been handled.
I also learn that Mr Deer has been accusing me of lying and am at a loss to
know what he is talking about. The mother of a severely disabled son, I
willingly shared the story of events with Mr. Deer, as I have done with
other journalists.
Everything I have experienced so far leaves me personally affronted,
upset for my family and shocked that the Sunday Times should indulge such
tactics though on form I believe that there is every intention to publish
this Sunday, come what may.
I do not want any reference to me, my family, my disabled son or the work
I do to help families of autistic children specific or veiled to appear.
Unless the matter is resolved entirely to my satisfaction I propose to
take my complaint to the highest possible authority.
In the meantime I would appreciate an email response from you indicating
that you have received this correspondence. My original letter to John
Witherow is attached as are subsequent emails with Richard Caseby. My last
contact with Mr Caseby was in a telephone call I made to him several weeks
ago when he told me that he was working on a response and I could be
assured by the fact that no article had been published.
I remain unconvinced.
Yours sincerely,
Rosemary Kessick
--
The Sunday Times lawyer responded to her on February 18,
2004
Dear Ms. Kessick,
I have not seen any finalized copy yet but understand that, as at the
present time, there is no intention to include you in anything we decide to
publish on MMR. Apart from what I have said above, and I hope it comes as
some consolation, I do not think it would be appropriate for me to comment
on your letters to the Editor or the Managing Editor.
It is my job to make sure that whatever is published is within the law
and in accordance with the highest standards of investigative journalism. I
will contain to try to maintain those standards and I hope Abel Hadden will
confirm this.
Please do not hesitate to call me on 020 7782 5858 if you would like to
discuss anything further but as I have said I really do not want to take
over matters which have gone to the Editor or his Managing Editor.
Yours sincerely,
Alastair Brett
Legal Manager
--
That was the end of the correspondence. Kessick was not quoted in the
2004 Times story. But the interview was mentioned by Deer in a 2009
Sunday Times article that claimed Dr. Wakefield “fixed data” in the
study in which Rose Kessick’s child participated; he said he had received
“cooperation from parents” in his investigations.
Direct quotes from the interview were used seven years later, in
January 2011, in the British Medical Journal Article titled, “How the Case
Against the MMR Vaccine was Fixed.”
--
Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism. He is the co-author, with Mark
Blaxill, of The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made
Epidemic, to be published in paperback in September by Thomas Dunne
Books.