Thank You, Winston Churchill
“A lie gets halfway around the world before
the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
Winston Churchill
When the Universe tips back to balance, there will be a special place in a prolonged Purgatory for Andrew Wakefield.
British author and investigative journalist Brian Deer, who exposed Wakefield’s deceptions in The Sunday Times in 2004, explains:
To understand where we are now with Covid, you need to know the past – to see how that anti-vaccine movement developed. If we don’t learn from the past, and understand who the anti-vaxxers are and where they’ve come from, then we’re not well placed to evaluate their messages. This is how we got here: through this man and what he did.”
Wakefield began his road to infamy with a never-confirmed claim that the measles virus might causes Crohn’s Disease. In 1998, the now disgraced British gastroenterologist and “researcher” [We have chosen not to call him a “physician” or “doctor.”] fabricated evidence published in the medical journal The Lancet to make a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism in young children, triggering a worldwide panic about the safety of vaccinations that persists today.
In 2010, a General Medical Council inquiry concluded the Wakefield had been dishonest; the following year the British Medical Journal denounced his report as an “elaborate fraud,” and the hoaxer moved to the U.S., where he styled himself a “martyr,” claiming he was silenced by the medical establishment for exposing the “truth.”
In his autism “research,” Wakefield infamously claimed that twelve unrelated sets of parents had independently brought their children to him with the same story: within 14 days – sometimes within hours – of receiving the MMR vaccine, their children began displaying symptoms of severe autism.
Unhappily for Medicine and History, Wakefield and his colleagues did not disclose that these parents had been referred to him by a personal-injury lawyer with whom he was secretly working – running a litigation factory and fabricating evidence for a class-action suit against the vaccine manufacturers and that he stood to profit from his conclusion that separate jabs for measles, mumps and rubella were safer than the combined MMR. He also failed to disclose that he was patenting his own single-shot measles vaccine.
Journalist Deer discovered that Wakefield had falsified medical records and doctored parents’ accounts of symptoms to conceal the fact that some of the children involved displayed signs of autism long before receiving the inoculation.
Among those who bought into the Wakefield sham was the man who would become the 45th president of the United States. In 2012, Donald Trump baselessly tweeted “Massive combined inoculations to small children is the cause for big increase in autism.” In 2014, he continued “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes – ASUTISM. Many such cases.” The following year he asserted that he was in favor of “smaller doses of vaccines over a longer period of time.”
Unfortunately, these medical untruths led to a greater worldwide tragedy. In 2000, the United States declared the nationwide elimination of measles. In April 2019, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 626 confirmed cases of measles in 22 states; days later, a CNN study reported 681 cases across 22 states.
An early 2019 measles outbreaking in Clark County, Washington infected 71 people – mostly children younger than 10 who had not received the MMR vaccine. At the time of the outbreak, in the county 81% of 1- to 5-year-olds had received one MMR dose, and 78% of older children had received both doses – in contrast to the nationwide average of 94% of kindergarteners. According to the CDC, about 20% of Americans who contract measles end up in the hospital, while one to three in every 1,000 dies. CDC researcher Jamison Pike reported that each of the 71 Clark County cases cost the county more than $47,000, the public health response cost about $2.3 million and productivity losses added up to just over $1 million. The outbreak was also linked to additional cases in Oregon and Georgia and 849 people went into quarantine – with three weeks being the recommended duration.
Despite his lies and lack of scientific rigor, Wakefield’s anti-vaccine influence has spread internationally, resulting in measles outbreaks from Minnesota to Samoa. In the first three months of 2019 measles cases globally saw a 200% increase over the previous year
Whether it’s Wakefield or Trump or COVD-19 vaccine conspiracy mongers with tales of octopi-like creatures in the vaccines or DNA changes and corporeal magnetism, like one of Canada’s most infamous COVID-19 deniers, anti-vaxxers refuse to recognize the ever-developing nature of Science.
One denier died while on trial in British Columbia’s Supreme Court on three counts of violating federal quarantine legislation. In October, he posted a video in which he said he was experiencing “so called ‘Convid’ (sic) symptoms,” claiming he did not have “CONVID” (sic) because “CONVID (sic) does not exist.” In his final video, he appears wearing a “Flat Earth Gang” sweatshirt, ranting about “tyranny,” “control” and “the system” and mocking people who accept the scientific community’s position on COVID. He reported using Ivermectin, a parasitic drug, to treat his illness.
He was on trial for repeatedly refusing to follow quarantine regulations after returning from a 2020 Flat Earth conference in South Carolina. Following his arrest, he blithely observed, “People die all the time” but they’re not dying of COVID because “COVID doesn’t exist.”
Vancouver Is Awesome opinion writer Robert Kronbauer, observed:
“In the two weeks leading up to his death, the ‘flat earther’ was displaying classic COVID-19 symptoms, yet continued running errands while live-streaming his thoughts to the internet. Some of those thoughts were that "CONvid" (his word for COVID-19) is not real, so he couldn't possibly have it.
“What people don't know - or perhaps don't care to know - is that this man had a family, and was father to a young daughter… his child will now live her life without a dad. The grief that child is now feeling, and the pain they'll have to endure their entire life, could have been avoided if [he] were to have simply believed in science, then got treatment for what ailed him.
“If he did in fact die from COVID-19, while denying he even had it and trying to treat himself with horse de-wormer, [he] died like he lived - senselessly.
“The misinformation that he believed, and that he worked to spread on the internet and at rallies, may have ultimately cost him his life.”
Before COVID-19 there was the “2012 Doomsday” apocalypse that didn’t happen – even though the 5,125 years beginning in 3114 B.C. of the Mayan calendar ran out on December 21.
And who can forget the infamous 1997 Heaven’s Gate folks who believed in UFOs and impending doom for which the only escape was to “turn against the next level” by committing suicide. HG leaders Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles had an “evacuation” plan in which a fast-approaching UFO would transport them and their followers to “beyond.” Thirty-nine members of the group spent $10,000 on alien abduction insurance and committed suicide wearing “Heaven’s Gate Away Team” arm patches.
It is not possible to definitively determine whether today’s high rates of autism are due to increasing diagnosis and reporting, changing definitions of the disorder, or an actual increase in development of ASD.
Over the past half-century, the ratio of autism diagnoses per thousand or hundred-thousand has continued to grow because the diagnosis is no longer restricted to the most severely affected individuals. Beginning in the 1990s, the understanding of the nature of autism expanded and individuals who would previously not have been thought of as having autism may now be classified with one of a variety of Autism Spectrum Disorders.
In contrast to Wakefield’s phony “research,” the great majority of scientists, physicians and public health researchers have determined that there is no association between vaccines and autism. Though Wakefield and his twelve co-authors conceded they could not demonstrate a causal relationship between the MMR vaccination and autism, he released a video claiming “… the risk of this particular syndrome [he called it “autistic enterocolitis”] developing is related to the combined vaccine, the MMR, rather than the single vaccines.” He recommended the combined vaccine be suspended in favor of single-antigen vaccinations given separately over time. Wakefield stood to benefit financially from his report and video – in 1997 he filed a patent for a single-antigen measles vaccine.
Despite exhaustive well-designed studies over the next twelve years, no link between MMR and bowel disease or MMR and autism was found. In 2004, Lancet editor Dr. Richard Horton revealed that Wakefield had been paid by attorneys seeking to file lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers and declared his research “fatally flawed.” The co-authors retracted Wakefield’s original study and, in 20100, The Lancet formally retracted the paper.
In 2011, investigative reporter Deer revealed that only two children – not the eight of twelve reported by Wakefield - experienced gastrointestinal or autism-like symptoms in Wakefield’s timeframe and two had developmental delays that were noted in their records before the vaccination. Deer found that, contrary to Wakefield’s claim, not a single child displayed regressive autism or non-specific colitis or showed symptoms within days of receiving the MMR vaccine. Wakefield had claimed that six of the twelve subjects showed all three.
With Wakefield discredited, vaccine skeptics turned their attention to thimerosal and posited that autism could be the outcome of exposure to mercury in vaccines. However, a 2004 Institute of Medicine summary of extensive research rejected the hypothesis that mercury in vaccines was associated with neurodevelopmental disorders and, today, only some forms of influenza vaccines available in multi-dose vials contain the preservative. The problem with this anti-vaxxer argument is that thimerosal had never been used in MMR vaccines. The Institute of Medicine reported that its study committee did not find enough evidence to support or reject a causal relationship between mercury and vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Significantly for those who would throw the blame for autism on vaccines, after thimerosal was removed from vaccines, there was no drop in reported rates; they continue to increase. In addition, there has been no evidence of an association between autism and the increasing number of vaccines children receive after 1980.
We are told “a house built on sand cannot long endure.” (Matthew 7:26) Sinfully political anti-vax campaigns built on Wakefield’s lies should not be allowed to endure.
Wakefield and those whom he has suckered are, in part, responsible for the COVID-19 deaths of more than 760,000 Americans and more than 5,120,000 men, women and children worldwide.
What will become of anti-vaxxers and their allies remains to be seen. Nonetheless, we must begin with the understanding that Wakefield lied repeatedly and the antivax movement of today is built on those lies.