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.

• that he published inadequately founded research
• that he failed to obtain ethical committee approval for the work
• that he obtained funding for it improperly
• that he subjected children to “unnecessary and invasive investigations”

Source.

In this post I’ll look at the latest allegations.

On 8 February 2009 the Sunday Times printed the third part of an investigation by Brian Deer into the activities of Wakefield. According to Deer, “Wakefield changed and misreported results in his research”. The notorious paper, which was published in the Lancet in 1998, involved twelve children. According to the paper’s Table 1, eleven of these children had chronic non-specific colitis and most of these also had something called reactive ileal lymphoid hyperplasia. Only one of the twelve children had no such problems.

Table 2 shows the neuropsychiatric diagnosis for each child. Eight children have the word ‘autism’ as the only diagnosis. The same table shows that in eight children (including six of those diagnosed as having autism) the first manifestation of behavioural symptoms occurred soon — no more than a fortnight — after they had the MMR vaccine, according to their parents or doctor.  Says 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’s right to respond

The first bone of contention, it seems, is whether Wakefield was given sufficient opportunity to respond to these very serious allegations before the Sunday Times went to press. Deer’s main article quotes Wakefield’s lawyers as saying that, because the case is still before the GMC, it would be

inappropriate for Dr Wakefield to give a detailed response to you. He has denied the allegations and gave a detailed response over many days to the GMC panel.

The lawyers’ letter is on Deer’s website here.

Interestingly, Wakefield is now saying something rather different. In spite of his lawyers saying it would be “inappropriate”, Wakefield has since produced a 58-page response to Deer and dressed it up as a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission. On page 2 he claims he was given less than 24 hours to respond and that this was insufficient time to consult his lawyers and get the papers needed to “formulate a proper and thorough response.”

That sounds fair enough — but Wakefield isn’t naive. He knows the Sunday Times is a newspaper not a tribunal and there wasn’t a dog in hell’s chance that it was going to include a “proper and thorough response” in the same issue. The best he could hope for was the inclusion of a couple of quotes from him denying it. We are not told whether Wakefield demanded the right to make a proper and thorough response or, indeed, any kind of response in a subsequent issue of the paper. Did he even write a letter for publication? I’ll hazard a guess that he didn’t because if he had made such a request and it was refused, we would have heard about it. It’s not as if he and his supporters will miss any trick to help maintain his martyr status.

The uselessness of the Press Complaints Commission

A complaint to the Press Complaints Commission sounds all official and important but, as most people in the UK know, it isn’t. The PCC has no legal powers. It has no power to impose financial penalties or award compensation. Complainants have to be satisfied with factual corrections and apologies. I’m not suggesting these aren’t important but, from the newspapers’ perspective, it’s just a slap on the wrist. They don’t lose much, if anything, by it.

According Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News, over the last 10 years, the PCC has received 28,227 complaints from the public. Of these, the PCC refused to consider ruling on 25,457 of these, rejecting just over 90% of them on technical grounds without them ever investigating the substance of the complaint.

Of the ones that were rejected, nearly 1,000 were rejected because they were not made quickly enough, nearly 2,000 were rejected because they were made by third parties and nearly 7,000 were rejected because they didn’t fit within the PCC’s code. Many others were rejected because they were not ‘formalised’ by the complainants.

Only 2,770 were accepted for investigation (less than 10% of those made). Most of these (2,322) were miraculously resolved by the newspapers (by issuing an apology or clarification) when the PCC accepted the complaint. This leaves just 448, 1.6% of the total that the PCC were forced to adjudicate on.

The PCC rejected over half (251) of these, leaving just 197 of the 28,227 complaints made that were upheld by the PCC — that’s 0.69% of the total.

Anyway, 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.

That Wakefield has put his complaint on his website for all the world to read is clearly intended to divert attention away from the allegations by smearing the person making them. Rather ironic coming from the martyr himself.

Deer’s ‘conflict of interest‘

Wakefield and his supporters make much of what Wakefield describes on page 2 of his complaint as Deer’s “undeclared interest” in the outcome of the GMC hearings. This allegation is pathetic and brings to mind what the judge said in Wakefield’s abortive libel action against Deer that I drew attention to in my previous post. Here’s the court report and this is what the judge said,

(Wakefield) chose to issue these proceedings and to use them, as I have described above, as a weapon in his attempts to close down discussion and debate over an important public issue.

Wakefield’s argument, if I understand it correctly, goes 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.

“Failure to have disclosed this conflict to readers of the Sunday Times is misleading,” whines Wakefield.

A bit like failing to disclose you’re being funded by lawyers or failure to disclose that some children in your study were included because their parents are involved in litigation, right?

This ‘reasoning’ — for want of a better word — is being repeated all over the web by Wakefield’s supporters and was also promulgated in The Spectator by that spectacularly biased and as mad-as-a-box-of-frogs hack, Melanie Phillips.

Unfortunately, this one’s a non-starter as a far as the PCC is concerned. The PCC Code of Ethics upholds the right of journalists to be partisan.

Assuming, for the moment, that Brian Deer did complain directly to the GMC about Wakefield…so what? Why exactly would that then preclude him on reporting any further on this case? Evidently Wakefield’s supporters think that, no matter how well Deer can support his allegations, the public should not be allowed to know about them.

As Deer himself says,

Of course, it’s understandable that he wouldn’t want me to continue. Although journalists supplying their findings to statutory regulators is a conventional occurrence, and could never prevent them from continuing their inquiries, having developed my expertise to be able to penetrate his activities, he would wish I moved on to pastures new [as do I]. For years he had preferred columnists, celebrity chefs and music critics, who, in ignorance, just write what he says.

In my opinion, Brian Deer should have made a formal complaint to the GMC and I think that if I were in his shoes I would have done. If, Deer did make a complaint to the GMC, he did what any responsible citizen in possession of the information he held would do. Then again, as a journalist working for a top newspaper, who’d been able to reach an audience of potentially millions just by writing about what he knew, it wasn’t actually necessary for him to complain to the GMC to bring about Wakefield’s demise and their solicitors have made it pretty clear that, under GMC rules, Deer’s status can only be that of informant.

As stated in Peter Swain’s letter to you dated 16 December 2004, your role in this matter is that of ‘informant’ rather than ‘complainant’. This is due to the fact that the conduct of the practitioners in question has not affected you directly and clearly involves issues of a wider public interest.

A few days ago, Sally Smith QC, told the GMC hearing,

I should remind you that the prosecution has been brought solely on the instructions of the General Medical Council. Mr Deer is not the complainant.

In any event, it is clear that if  Deer hadn’t complained, someone else would have.  As was reported at the time, the then Health Secretary, John Reid, called for an enquiry and Wakefield responded thus:

Health Secretary John Reid has called for a public enquiry. I welcome this since I have already called for a public enquiry that addresses the whole issue in relation vaccines and autism. It has been proposed that my role in this matter should be investigated by the General Medical Council (GMC). I not only welcome this, I insist on it and I will be making contact with the GMC personally, in the forthcoming week.

The libel suit against against Deer, the ST and Channel 4

By the way, on page 2 of Wakefield’s complaint he says,

I was forced to abandon my action for libel, after an interim ruling in the High Court ordered that it had to run concurrently with the GMC case, which my lawyers advised was physically impossible.

Really? So why did he send Brian Deer a cheque and why hasn’t he sued Deer for writing this on his website?

After threatening to sue for libel over Deer’s revelations, Andrew Wakefield was ordered by the High Court in London to put up or shut up. When his legal advisers studied hundreds of vital documents, including children’s medical records, however, Wakefield took the only reasonable course: and shut up. In January 2007, he abandoned his meritless claims against Channel 4, The Sunday Times and this website, and compensated Brian Deer for his personal costs.

Time lag between the MMR and the first symptoms

This is weird. On page 3 of his complaint, Wakefield quotes Deer’s article, the bit where he says,

(The Lancet paper) claimed that the families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on within days of the jab.

Wakefield asserts that this is “factually inaccurate” and refers us to this quote, which appears on page 2 of the Lancet paper.

In eight children, the onset of behavioural problems had been linked, either by the parents or by the child’s physician, with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination. Five had had an early adverse reaction to immunisation (rash, fever, delirium; and, in three cases, convulsions). In these eight children the average interval from exposure to first behavioural symptoms was 6.3 days (range 1–14).

Um…hello? Can anyone see a difference between what is in the paper and what Deer wrote?

The new syndrome

Similarly, in response to Brian Deer’s comment that,

the team also claimed to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease underlying the children’s conditions,

Wakefield counters,

This is also factually inaccurate. Nowhere in the Lancet paper is such a claim made. (see paper)

OK, let’s look at the paper.

We have identified a chronic enterocolitis in children that may be related to neuropsychiatric dysfunction.

In what way is this materially different from what Deer wrote? I challenge anyone to put that sentence from the Lancet paper into language that makes it suitable for publication in a newspaper and to do a better job than Deer has done.

The abortive libel suit

In my previous post I drew attention to the fact that Wakefield had tried to sue Deer only to later abandon his claim. According to the court report, the judge said,

(Wakefield) chose to issue these proceedings and to use them, as I have described above, as a weapon in his attempts to close down discussion and debate over an important public issue.

In his complaint, Wakefield claims,

I was forced to abandon my action for libel, after an interim ruling in the High Court ordered that it had to run concurrently with the GMC case, which my lawyers advised was physically impossible.

Frankly, I can’t be bothered with this.

It may be that there is some truth somewhere in the 58-page complaint to the GMC. It may be that Wakefield successfully refutes Deer’s most recent allegations. But judging from the nonsense on the first couple of pages, I’m not holding my breath, much less bothering to plough through the rest of his complaint.

Unlike Wakefield’s supporters, who’d made up their minds before Wakefield even circulated his response, I am content to leave that judgement to the GMC.