Hardly original, I know. But kudos to Martin for his entrepreneurial spirit in finding a way to charge £15 for the privilege of reading him repeat what his target audience already believe to be true.

The unique selling point of DMTH is, as one reviewer put it,

It names the players, the committees, the organizations, the networks, the back room people and the front men and women who provide a distraction and tie up resources while the bricks are put in the wall.

OK, the second half of that sentence is gibberish but you get the idea. It names names and Martin’s target readers have bought into his notion that knowing who their enemies are will help them in their endeavours to continue conning us into buying their soothing chit-chat and worthless cult therapies.

Apart from a heavy dose of the tired old ‘science as rival ideology’ line trotted by anyone whose faith in anything from quackery to creationism is undermined by a wealth of scientific evidence, DMTH is a book of many delights. Here’s an early example but similar can found on virtually every page. From page 15:

Those described in the pages of this handbook are often undemocratic, antisocial elements, greedy, culturally ignorant individuals who put their abstract scientific ideology, their own careers and the profits of corporations they defend ahead of the citizen’s needs or health care; many of them are members of disguised pharmaceutical lobby groups. At the centre of this operation, in Britain at least, is Dick Taverne…

It may strike readers that he already sounds more than a little insane. The best is yet to come but first, let me give an illustration of just how thorough Martin’s research was:

Of Zeno, who advertises his blog as  ‘the random thoughts of a skeptical activist’,  Martin writes,

Should read virtual sceptical activist. Why would a scientific Skeptic be proud of writing about random thoughts?

Of Alan Henness, Director of the Nightingale Collaboration, he writes,

Active organising skeptic and humanist campaigns, such as the one concerned with ending religious beliefs.

If you don’t know about the campaign that is “concerned with ending religious beliefs”, that would be because it doesn’t exist outside of Martin’s imagination. More to the point, it seems Martin hasn’t managed to work out that Alan Henness and Zeno are the same person even though this is stated this clearly on Zeno’s blog. Furthermore, even though Zeno has blogged the story extensively, Martin says nothing of Alan’s 500+ complaints about chiropractors, which resulted in hundreds of chiro websites removing the false and misleading claims that used to be on them and which was the inspiration for setting up the Nightingale Collaboration which, by the way, is described by Martin as “a group of maggots”.

There are several similar examples of Martin failing to reveal what his readers might think is worth knowing. All things considered, if Martin’s readers really want to know anything useful about their detractors, they’d probably be better off doing their own research.

Quackademic

I’d wager that the only place Martin J Walker’s body of work on his favourite topic is mentioned in the same sentence as the phrase “academic writing”, is in a book written by Martin himself. Et voila! From the preface of DMTH:

 One of the reasons my work stands out from much academic writing is that, until relatively recently, I was one of the only writers in the field who discussed named individuals.

One might infer that his work is, in fact, rather better than academic writing because he “discusses” named individuals. In DMTH, for example, he discusses Tracey Brown, director of Sense About Science, thus:

 Another amateur magician, she metamorphosed before our very eyes from a revolutionary communist to a close colleague of Dick Taverne, the great PR artist – now there’s a trick and a half!

That was one of the more benign of Martin’s “discussions” of a named individual and I think we can agree that it does indeed stand out from academic writing. In fairness, Martin doesn’t actually discuss people; he just writes stuff about them or, in the case of bloggers, about their blogs. Imagine reading my quackolades column (see lower left) in book form. That’s pretty much what reading DMTH is like.

Other examples of  Martin’s great exposé of quackbusters that stands out from academic writing  include:

Andy Lewis’ Quackometer “brings to mind the old feminist adage, many men are like children but without the wisdom”.

Crispian Jago is a “laddish pharma agent” who “has an imagination by-pass”.

Martin Robbins’ Guardian column is “yet another aspect of the illiberal Guardian and its fascistic war against freedom of choice in health care”.

“So what’s to say about this obsessed and bigoted old bloke Colquhoun — not much”.

And so it goes on and on and on. Usefully, the book does provide the urls of many skeptic blogs and websites and I’m sure there’s a good reason why Martin didn’t just put them all, together with the rest of the content of DMTH, on a website of his own, instead of asking his readers to buy it as a book. A website would have been much cheaper to fund. I mean, it’s not as if he had some reputable publisher who couldn’t wait to pay him for the book.

Ethics

An insight into Martin’s personal code of ethics and why he ­— unlike so many of his targets — has to resort to vanity publishing, is provided by a curious disclaimer included at the end of the preface. Entitled Perhaps an apology, it concedes the possibility that he may be doing someone or other an injustice in what he writes about them. It seems that in Martin’s world, it’s OK to write anything you like about people you don’t know, as long as you acknowledge somewhere that it might not be true.

The disclaimer includes this extraordinary sentence,

 While those I might have maligned, albeit slightly, can draw respite from consideration of the fact that any criticism is accepted only by the consipiracy theorist lunatic fringe. (sic)

Yes, I know it reads like an incomplete sentence but that’s just how Martin writes. Remove the word ‘while’ from the beginning and we are left with a suggestion that whatever he says about people he vilifies, they can console themselves with the knowledge that it is only going to be believed by loonies. Of course, we already know this but what a way to talk about his target readers! He goes on to suggest that the people he attacks will be proud to have been targetted by him. He’s flattering himself a bit there. Given Martin’s lack of status, I imagine most will be indifferent, though if I were Jack of Kent I’d be mortified at Martin’s description of him as a “seemingly honest blogger” when the only other people Martin is nice about are quacks and charlatans.

Here is some more from the preface:

Those described are first ‘quackbusters’ pure and simple i.e. those who attack manufacturers, users and practitioners of alternative medicines, pretending to a knowledge of science when they are actually involved in the tawdry business of enhancing corporate competitiveness.

The term ‘quackbuster’, is a term he is swift to reject, funnily enough. Several paragraphs are spent in consideration of the best epithet for, as he puts it,

the movement or the individuals so intent on untruthfully defending technological advance regardless of adverse reactions and unlooked for consequences.

‘Agents of industrial science’, ‘pharmalackeys’ (sic), ‘pharmamafia’ (sic), ‘enemies of promise’, ‘enemies of self-empowerment’ are all given an airing before he settles on the pithy ‘health corporatists’.

As someone who has never worked in science, health, pharmaceuticals or anything connected and whose only skeptic activity — apart from winding up quacks on this blog — has been to complain about some of the unconscionable claims made to my face by those who profit out of fake medicine, it comes as something of a surprise to find my own name in a chapter entitled Health Corporatists: individuals. It is accompanied by a sentence containing information about me which is irrelevant, innocuous and, as it happens, untrue. As this rather flattering nugget of misinformation can be read in Martin’s book and nowhere else — I certainly hadn’t seen or heard it before — I conclude that it’s one he fabricated himself because, well, he’s got my name and he had to write something.

But who cares? Martin obviously doesn’t know where to find the real dirt about me (phew!) nor about anyone else, judging by the drivel he writes about people I know. As I wouldn’t want anyone else to waste their money, I’d like to announce a special offer to readers:

As what he says about Ben Goldacre is a good illustration of the quality of argument in the book and another reason why it “stands out from much academic writing,” I’ll share some of it here.

Martin tells us that BG, “came from nowhere to take a prestigious columnist’s job at the Guardian” and that, “it was unclear why he had landed the job on the Guardian until it was disclosed by John Stone that he is the son of Oxford professor Michael J Goldacre”.

Apparently they thought it a secret. I wonder if they’ve discovered the much more interesting fact of who is Ben’s mother is. What does it have to do with Ben getting a Guardian column, anyway? This:

1. Michael J Goldacre once co-authored a study of a GlaxoSmithKline product (urabe-strain MMR vaccine).

Interestingly for one who claims  to “reference all [he] can and to be as academically honest as possible” (page xiv), Martin doesn’t give a reference for the study Michael Goldacre did for GSK but it’s easy enough to find and it turns out to be a study whose conclusion is unfavourable about the product and presumably the very opposite of what GSK were hoping for. Strangely, Martin doesn’t mention any of this.

2. Ben Goldacre wrote an article in the Guardian about MMR which went on to win an award sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline.

Note the common words that appear in 1. and 2. above: Goldacre and GlaxoSmithKline.  If you still don’t see how perfectly this explains how Ben got his prestigious column, then you’re probably not a member of the alternative therapy/anti-vax cult. If you were, the mere mention of GSK in the same sentence as each of the Goldacres would be all you needed.

This is typical of the standard of “argument” throughout the book. The only people who might be persuaded of whatever message Martin is giving — which, in this example, seems to be that there is something sinister and big pharma-related about Ben getting a column in a newspaper — are those who will believe anything they like the sound of. That’s how they become quacks in the first place, remember.

Martin also makes the claim that Ben Goldacre accepted payment for the use of his name “to help to sell processed food.” Seriously, it’s on page 29. You may be wondering what kind of evidence is produced to support this outlandish allegation. The answer is none. It is, like so much in this book, something that Martin seems to have pulled out of his arse.

Libel

Which brings me neatly to the only other thing worth highlighting in the book. From the preface, again:

In England particularly, [discussing named individuals] causes many problems. The other side know that they have the funds, experience and lawyers to begin legal actions that can tie up writers, researchers and practitioners for years, while WE are always strapped for cash and most lawyers will run miles, unsuitably dressed, rather than shake my hand.

Don’t bother billing me for a new irony meter. Instead, let’s take a moment to remind ourselves of the libel actions taken by quackbusters against quacks, anti-vaxers, vitamin-pill pushers and suchlike. Um…anyone got a list? Because Martin hasn’t.

OK. Now, how about libel actions taken by those people against quackbusters? Here are a few recent ones that spring to mind:

1. Matthias Rath, vitamin entrepreneur and, in my opinion, probably one of the most evil people alive, sued Ben Goldacre for libel but, after a year, dropped the suit and was ordered to pay costs. Unfortunately, due to the litigation, the chapter on Matthias Rath was omitted from the first edition of Ben’s book but he made it available for free on his website,  so there is no excuse for not reading it and finding out just how evil Rath is.

Given Martin’s spirited support of the food supplement industry’s right to con people into buying supplements that they don’t need on the grounds of allowing “individual freedom of choice in health matters” (page 241), Rath is the kind of person Martin presumably sees as a good guy.

2. The disgraced Andrew Wakefield sued Brian Deer for libel, only to abandon his claim and end up paying Deer compensation. The court report reveals that, having filed a suit against Deer, Wakefield then sought a stay of execution of the suit and, while it was on hold, used it as a way of threatening others with similar action.

Wakefield — the man whose fraudulent paper resulted in anti-MMR hysteria, falling take-up rates and made measles endemic again in the U.K — is, of course, one of Martin J Walker’s heroes. Brian Deer, who earlier this year received a British Press Award  in recognition of his Sunday Times investigation into the Andrew Wakefield MMR-autism fraud, is Martin J Walker’s nemesis.

3. Edited 15.11.11 to draw attention to Andy Lewis’ latest blog post on this very topic. Three threats of legal action from three different quacks in attempt to gag this blogger because he told the truth about them. Shame on you Society of Homeopaths, Joseph Obi and Robert Delgado. You’re no better than crooks.

4. The BCA sued Simon Singh but eventually dropped their case when it became obvious they were going to lose.

Now read this from DMTH page 18:

The corporate science lobby ran a campaign to change the libel laws headed up by Singh. The campaign was started after Singh wrote a deprecating article in the Guardian about chiropractors. This campaign was important to the science lobby because they needed to be free of the constraints of libel law so as to be able to attack in the most outrageous manner anyone who has different beliefs from them.

When I first opened DMTH, I imagined I would be reading the sincerely-held views of someone delusional. Reading the above paragraph disabused me of that notion. Nobody can be that delusional. Brian Deer says Martin is a liar for hire. I agree. From Brian’s article (but do read the whole of it, it’s well worth it):

 The most startling array of particularly nauseating falsehoods were authored by a now-64-year-old failed graphic artist who calls himself “Martin J Walker”. He lives penniless in Spain, but in July 2007 surfaced in London at mammoth hearings, triggered by my investigation, of a GMC “fitness to practise” disciplinary panel. He claims to be some kind of “health activist” and “writer”, but although generally of no consequence, is a relentless peddler of smear and denigration, with a track record of latching onto the vulnerable. These he beguiles, like he’s their new best friend, and then he tries to sell them self-published junk books, or better-still, have them give him money.

“I am 60 next year and I have been and am now, utterly broke and also in debt to various people for relatively large amounts of money,” he explained in a private email not long before he spotted in the Wakefield case what he thought was a financial opportunity. “I am not a writer to whom agents and publishers have ever paid the slightest attention.”

So, Martin J Walker has no reputation as a writer to live up to. His self-published books are funded by donations from people who want to read what he writes, regardless of whether it accurately reflects reality, because it fits in with the standard quack fantasy about anyone who challenges the claims made by quacks, anti-vaxers and vitamin pill pushers. As such, Martin has no power to influence anyone who matters, which is why — in spite of the many malicious falsehoods contained in the book — he’s unlikely to find himself on the receiving end of legal action. My understanding is that for a libel suit to have a chance of success, the libel has to be likely to be damaging. Who’s going to be damaged by anything written in a self-published book by an under-achiever?

Which is why I’m happy to give Martin’s book a bit of publicity. I hope it helps him pay a few bills.

Back in February, the Sunday Times published an article by Brian Deer alleging that Wakefield had “changed and misreported results in his research” for his notorious Lancet paper, which linked MMR to autism. Wakefield is currently being investigated by the General Medical Council on charges of professional misconduct in connection with this paper.

Said Deer,

In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.

Wakefield promptly complained to the PCC. As I said at the time,

…it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the PCC need do nothing with Wakefield’s complaint until the GMC have ruled and that won’t be for several months yet. The PCC are not even qualified to consider much of the information in Wakefield’s complaint and he damn well knows this. If they accept the complaint for investigation, they surely will be guided by the GMC. And if the GMC rules in Wakefield’s favour, then Wakefield will be vindicated, regardless of any complaint to the PCC.

The “interim order”, as Wakefield’s press release calls it, has delighted the anti-vax sycophants, as is evident from their comments on anti-vax blogs such as this one:

“A tiny bit of justice for Dr. Wakefield… I hope it’s a sign of brighter days ahead for him.”

“Brian Deer is a nasty piece of work and it’s about time he got his comeuppance.”

“Deer is a parasite. He will fall for lack of merit.”

etc, etc, etc ….

Unfortunately for them, no such ‘order’ was made. Until a complaint has been resolved one way or the other, how can the PCC “order” that an article be removed? It can’t and that’s another thing Wakefield damn well knows. His press release is just another bare-faced lie, one of a catalogue from him.

The latest post on LBRB includes the text of an email received from the PCC on this topic:

The PCC has considered the matter initially and has elected to stay its investigation until the conclusion of the GMC inquiry. It has reached no formal decision on the substance of the complaint and there is no published ruling on our website.

The Commission has asked that the paper remove the articles temporarily until the conclusion of the PCC investigation. This is without any admission of liability on the paper’s part.

So all that’s happened is that the PCC requested that the articles be temporarily removed. This is hardly surprising, given the seriousness of the allegations contained in them. No “order” has been made and there is no suggestion that the paper or Deer himself has behaved improperly.

How does Wakefield sleep at night?

Update: 6.7.09

It seems the Sunday Times is a bit pissed off with the lying toerag, Dr Wakefield. Having removed Brian Deer’s article of 8 February from its website presumably in response to the PCC request, they have now put it back up. Seems it’s not even a “tiny bit of justice” for Andy, after all.

For further information, including the full text of a letter from Brian Deer to Wakefield’s attorney, see Orac’s blog.

Related posts by Skepticat:

The case against Andrew Wakefield:  Part 1

The case against Andrew Wakefield: Part 2

Part 3:  Wakefield’s weird addendum

The evidence is in the form of an addendum to Wakefield’s complaint and it is basically 15 pages of repetition of what Wakefield already said on pages 1-2 of that document. This is that Deer, being the initiator of the complaint against him to the General Medical Council, thereby had a ‘conflict of interest’, which should have precluded him from writing about the case for a newspaper. It’s a rather long-winded way of saying what I summed up in my previous post like this:

P1. Deer made a complaint about him to the GMC.
P2. Deer wants the GMC to uphold the complaint.
C: Therefore any report Deer makes will be biased.

In fact my summary was too charitable. I would now amend that conclusion to read:

C: Therefore Deer is obviously lying whenever he writes anything about the case.

Says Wakefield:

Whether or not Mr. Deer initiated the GMC investigation as ‘complainant’ in his letter dated Feb. 25, 2004, or acted as an ‘informant’ in an investigation already begun by the GMC, he did not disclose his own direct participation in the GMC investigation in his most recent accounts in the Sunday Times, intending to give the public the misimpression that he was acting as a neutral and disinterested reporter. By failing to disclose his dual role, Deer has breached the ethical standards of professional journalism and has no place in further reporting on Dr Wakefield in this matter. In breech of PCC rules and any ethical standard of journalistic conduct, it is alleged that Mr Deer has sought to mislead, not only by his non-disclosure of matters material to his conflict of interest, but in denying his role in these matters. Based upon the available evidence, one can reasonably conclude that these allegations are true.

Apart from the weirdness of talking about himself in the third person, the more times I read this, the more I wonder if Wakefield has been taken over and configured by some alien who comes from a place where  journalists are “neutral and disinterested”. What on earth must this alien make of desperately biased hacks like Melanie Phillips and Jeni Barnett?

Wakefield has a love-hate relationship with the media. He’s happy to court publicity whenever it suits his purpose, such as when the Lancet paper first appeared and he called a press conference to scaremonger people into rejecting the MMR in favour of single vaccines like the one he’d patented but preferred not to talk about publicly. He loved the press then. He’d love them even more now if they would just agree to a news blackout on the GMC hearing where he faces charges of professional misconduct.

What does he mean by ‘disinterested’, anyway? Does he perhaps mean that a journalist shouldn’t write an article suggesting there is a causal link between, say, a vaccine and neurological damage if that journalist happens to be payrolled by, say, a lawyer representing parents who believe their children have been damaged by that vaccine? This is an argument I respect, though my greater sympathy lies with the view that it doesn’t really matter who pays a journalist as long as the story is properly researched and based on the best available evidence. In other words, that the journalist tries to write the truth and doesn’t make stuff up. What matters in this case is whether Deer has done this and the GMC’s ruling will be crucial in helping us decide.

The funding by personal injury lawyer scenario is obviously borrowed from Wakefield’s own grubby history. Nevertheless, it isn’t a million miles away from what some of Wakefield’s supporters are — without a trace of irony — insinuating about Deer.

The news that James Murdoch had come out of the closet and publicly accepted an executive position on the Board of GlaxoSmithKline, in whose interest he now vows to use his good offices to put down community opposition to their drugs, gave some hope that The Sunday Times and Brian Deer would be seen for what they are; there was even a rumour that The Sunday Times was to be renamed The GlaxoSundayKlines.

Martin J Walker, CryShame

In the final analysis, we have to ask whether Brian Deer was acting independently when he ‘investigated’ and wrote about Andrew Wakefield.

Walker again quoted on Whale

MMR vaccine manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline has appointed to its Board the head of News International James Murdoch. Murdoch is also boss of The Sunday Times, London, England publisher of stories by freelance journalist Brian Deer to discredit research into the link between MMR vaccine and autism in the US and UK.

ChildHealthSafety

Murdoch is Chief Exec of News Corp, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates and owned by his father, Rupert Murdoch. It owns News International Ltd, which publishes several major titles owned by its subsidiary companies, one of which is Times Newspaper Ltd.

See the razor-sharp reasoning going on here? The son of the bloke who owns the company that owns the company that owns the company that publishes the Sunday Times sits on the Board of Big Pharma. Therefore any journalist who writes for the ST or any other paper owned by Murdoch is linked to Big Pharma. Sure enough…

Whilst Mr James Murdoch is not reported to have involvement in editorial decisions at The Sunday Times, the recent appointment to the MMR vaccine manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline’s Board may give rise to public concern over the close links between key players in MMR litigation in the US and UK and the support at The Sunday Times for the campaigning activities of journalist Brian Deer. Similarly, there is no suggestion of any direct, indirect or other impropriety arising from the relationships noted in this article, the public is entitled to ask questions such as “what medical journal editor, newspaper editor or journalist is going to write unfavourable stories about GlaxoSmithKline and not write favourable stories when his boss in on Glaxo’s board. How will the existence of such relationships influence the thinking and actions of subordinates and others without being asked? How can this healthy and in the public interest?

ChildHealthSafety

We might also ask what this has to do with Brian Deer, seeing as his well-supported revelations about Wakefield were published a full five years before Murdoch joined the board of GSK?

In fairness to Wakefield, he himself does not appear to be casting aspersions of this sort against Deer. No, Wakefield claims that Deer fails to meet the ‘neutral and disinterested’ criteria, not because of any supposed link to Big Pharma but because Deer complained about him to the GMC and, even if hadn’t, the case against Wakefield depends heavily on information supplied by Deer. Here’s Wakefield himself:

In Deer’s case, he has not only provided source material but he is the actual complainant and this means he has an interest in the outcome of the process. How can he objectively or even fairly be expected to cover an investigation in which he plays an undisclosed but significant role for the investigating agency? How is the public to know, for example, whether he is making false statements to the GMC simply to enhance his role, his salary, or his reputation as a journalist? This is akin to an arsonist setting a fire and then rushing back to the firehouse where he works and gets paid to put out fires.

If you can’t see how this analogy is supposed to work, you are not alone. It was not Brian Deer who started the fire, it was Wakefield and his co-authors, with the help of the Lancet editor and, ultimately, the rest of the media who gave his crock of an idea about MMR and autism publicity it didn’t deserve. As a result, children have been left unprotected from potentially serious infectious disease and some have died. Deer, an experienced investigative journalist, simply did a good job in bringing to the public’s attention certain salient facts about Wakefield and his way of doing things. Undoubtedly, Brian Deer believes in what he has written. Why? Because he had a mountain of evidence to back it up (check his website). If he hadn’t, he couldn’t have written the articles he wrote and the ST wouldn’t have published them. If the GMC find against Wakefield, it will indicate that they agree with Deer’s interpretation of the evidence and that will be very nice for Deer. That, then, is Deer’s ‘interest in the outcome’.

Forgive me for not seeing this ‘interest in the outcome’ as being in quite the same league of duplicity as Wakefield’s own failure to disclose that he was being funded by the Legal Board via a lawyer representing families who believed their children had been damaged by the MMR triple vaccine and which led to ten of Wakefield’s co-authors formally retracting the relevant part of the Lancet paper and the editor of same to declare he wouldn’t have published it if he’d known. Yet to Wakefield’s closed-minded and moronic supporters, this kind of treachery is apparently absolutely fine. It takes all sorts.

What Wakefield is really trying to say, or course, is that Brian Deer’s article is a pack of lies. To repeat:

How is the public to know, for example, whether he is making false statements to the GMC simply to enhance his role, his salary, or his reputation as a journalist?

Unfortunately for him, this is how those of us who aren’t involved in any way and have no axe to grind one way or another see it:

A journalist with a nose for a good story, nosed around and found out some stuff. He wrote it up in a quality newspaper. As a result, a respected and charismatic scientist faced a disciplinary hearing. The hearing examined evidence about the scientist that was supplied to them by the journalist.

This, in the jaundiced eyes of Team Wakefield, is reason enough why the journalist should never write another word on the subject. Whatever else he may have found out about Wakefield, however serious the implications for public health, however many unvaccinated children die because of what Wakefield started, the journalist should be gagged because…well, it was his story in the first place.

Even though I have come to despise Wakefield, I feel no sense of schadenfreude at the sight of this drowning man clutching at straws. He really does seem to have no idea how unhinged he’s beginning to sound to anyone who isn’t blinded by their own anti-vaccine agenda.

It’s just sad.